In the liner notes to 20 Sytems Benge explains his initial aim of ‘letting the instruments speak for themselves’:
The original idea for 20 systems was to set these machines running and hear what they could do with no personal input at all. But none of these machines are capable of working on their own: a certain amount of input has been necessary to create something musical with them.
The balance between setting up generative situations and interacting with them.
Each track on 20 Systems was intended as a presentation of the ‘pure sound of the individual instrument’. Benge has since embarked on a series of albums each focussed
on a single synthesizer system. I’ve been listening to two of them lately, at first enjoying the clean abstraction of Abstraxa, created using the Buchla Electronic Music Box, and now slowly coming to consider the two long Serge tracks of Forms 6 – Works on Paper to be something of a masterpiece.