Connecters Vol. 1: Original Recordings, 1992–1999 marks the first public release by Larrison, the recording alias of Midwestern visual artist and musician Larrison Seidle. Composing, programming, and recording entirely on a Casio CZ-5000 during the halcyon days of early ’90s homespun exploration and experimentation, Larrison inhabited a dreamworld of his invention, soundtracked by space-age pop vignettes speckled with hypnotic, ebullient layered synthesizer melodies. Unfolding across 26 tracks, all newly restored and mastered from the original sources, Connecters Vol. 1 reinvents itself song by song, transcending time and defying the fated obscurity of this brilliant, discreet music made three decades ago.
Larrison Seidle grew up in Greenwood, Indiana, a working-class suburb of Indianapolis, in the ’70s and ’80s. He did not come from a family of musicians, though his household encouraged musicality. His father bought an electric organ, envisioning Larrison and his older brother learning the instrument. “It ended up with my father sitting at the organ some nights, making up and playing over and over this one song that I can still remember the first few bars of,” recalls Larrison. It was possibly in this moment—absent of formal training but full of encouragement and exploration—that the artist’s forays into musical experimentation took root, granting a permission to dabble that would distinctly color his creative output in the years to follow.
While classic rock records were readily available in Larrison’s childhood home, his father also borrowed 35mm educational documentaries from the library to screen in the living room, each scored with whimsical instrumentals. As a teenager, Larrison recorded John Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s end theme from Escape from New York using a small tape recorder placed next to the television speaker, and he loved Tangerine Dream’s contributions to Ridley Scott’s dark fantasy Legend. His obsession with these largely lyricless, synthesizer-based compositions produced an idiosyncratic understanding of how music serves to complement not only what we see in front of us, but also what we undergo in the recesses of consciousness.
In 1985, at age thirteen, Larrison convinced his father to buy him a Casio CZ-5000 keyboard. A novelty in the Seidle household like the organ before it, the instrument wasn’t fully explored until after Larrison graduated high school in 1991 and began college at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. There, he discovered the sequencer built into the Casio and started recording his compositions to tape. “The CZ-5000 and its 8-track sequencer is the only musical instrument I used. It has a nearly unlimited new sound creation feature,” explained Seidle.
While at Herron, Larrison struck up a friendship with fellow student and sound artist Michael Northam, whom he met at a concert on campus. After introducing Larrison to the sounds of Severed Heads, Throbbing Gristle, and Roger Doyle, Northam persuaded him to move to Austin, Texas—then known for its vibrant art and music scene. The two initially stayed with Northam’s friend Daniel Plunkett, editor and publisher of ND, an influential magazine focused on DIY music and tape trading active from 1982 to 1999. At its height, ND’s readership numbered in the thousands, with issues mailed around the world.
Over a few months in late 1993 and early 1994, with limited means and boundless intuition, Larrison wrote and recorded a set of songs on his CZ-5000 in a small apartment north of downtown Austin. He hand-crafted a colorful illustrated insert—some song titles represented by lines or arrows—and submitted the cassette, titled Connecters [sic], to Plunkett for review consideration in ND. Of the roughly 1,200 tapes submitted during the magazine’s lifespan, this single cassette was among those acquired by Freedom To Spend co-founder Jed Bindeman in 2020 and almost miraculously discovered.
“I was getting major ear fatigue listening to the tapes in this collection,” Bindeman admits. “But then I put on Larrison’s Connecters and was immediately like, ‘Whoa! What am I listening to?’ Beginning to end, the tape was just fantastic.”
Featuring music from that cassette alongside other recordings from Larrison’s explorations throughout the ’90s, Connecters Vol. 1 is a survey of instrumental music illuminated by both diverse conceptual strategy and playful curiosity. Working within constraints many musicians might resist, Seidle developed technically innovative approaches to modifying the sounds and built-in effects of the CZ-5000. Through phase distortion synthesis, he altered waveforms, envelopes, and keys—essentially creating instruments in the process of making songs.
The tracks maintain a considerate impressionistic variance, sometimes sounding lo-fi and at other moments symphonic. Alongside the dissection and amplification of the CZ-5000’s capabilities lies a tasteful recourse to childlike interaction and experience of sound. It is perhaps this experiential quality that resists easy classification as ambient or electronic music alone. Larrison’s drive to transform the tools at his disposal elevates the compositions to a deeply personal level, imbuing the music with an enchanting sense of mystique.
Connecters stands as a testament to an artistic vision unfettered by limitation and unafraid of informality. These recordings—surfacing thirty years after their creation—demonstrate how personalized means of production can expand and contract time. Larrison invites listeners to engage the wonders of auditory imagination: a bridge between visual memory, emotional resonance, and the boundless possibility of making music with whatever tools we embrace.
Larrison’s Connecters Vol. 1: Original Recordings, 1992–1999 will be released April 3rd, 2026 by Freedom To Spend in vinyl and digital editions.
1. Ripples
2. Driving to Austin
3. Rewind
4. Waiting for Sleep
5. Fancy Free
6. Water Montage
7. Wake / The City / Sleep
8. On Glass II
9. In Motion
10. Fancy Finish
11. A Late Start
12. Leaving Again
13. Dazzling Showroom / Future City
14. Winter Wave
15. Swarm
16. On Glass
17. Dap
18. Ice Planet (Alt)
19. Song From a Bedroom in Podunk Indiana
20. Exiting
21. Hi and Lo
22. Sea Level
23. Sequencer Sway
24. Moonplay
25. Aquarium
