Moog : A Documentary Film By Hans Fjellestad

Building rainbows – Bob Moog and the evolution of vibration.

It was the Sixties, one of history’s most unleashed, rabid, and colourful experiments/revolutions in popular music and culture was happening stateside. A black man in flamingo top-hats was biting burning Stratocasters onstage

and white kids were actually cheering, while hungry young lasses swooned with intent. Sound was being set free from the Grammars of old; was saying strange new things, and not a little loudly. Electricity was electrifying instruments that for time-trusted millennia had been content with polite, pretty enunciations… Saxophones became like pimps – spitting and swearing and strutting; drums were exorcising Time in loud, upside-down rhythms within rhythms; the guitars? They just went loco.

And while the rules of popular music were being splintered and boiled into new allowances, another development, slightly to the side, far away from the stages and happenings and bedrooms, was seeing actual paradigms crackling into new alignments.

“It isn’t natural.”

2005’s ‘Moog’ documentary introduces us to the sacred world of Robert Moog’s relationship to Sound, and, along the way, to crucial developments that would shape the birth of Electronic music decades later. Mr. Moog and other descendents of strange-eyed men in scruffy lab-coats were stumbling across aural epiphanies, inaugurating worlds of music previously unimaginable. Sounds stripped of the cosy media of strings and skins and wood, which for a small eternity had shaded it into its dialects.

Inventions like the Theremin, and later the Moog synthesizers, seemed to tap directly into raw, alien sound. So foreign and startling were these naked sounds, oscillations and wave-intersections, that for years critics accused him of perverting music. Through Moog’s eyes and ears the petty argument (tellingly still with us) that Electronic music is somehow less emotional, is cold and aloof, is turned upside-down: Through synthesizers and analogue techniques sound could be explored in an unprecedented way; and – for Moog at least – attain an intimacy far beyond the plucking of strings or tapping of skins.

Through extensive interviews we are exposed to the near spiritual dimension of Moog’s experience of music, and the delightful, hit-and-miss glitches and triumphs of a fledgling, wild technology. Joining Mr. Moog via exclusive performances and interviews are some of the first to jump onto his psychedelic dream machine – Rick Wakeman, Keith Emerson, Funk whiz Bernie Worrel and UFO-Jazz savant Sun Ra, along with postmodern devotees Luke Vibert, DJ Spooky and Stereolab. Intergalactic stuff! Lovers of sound tuck in…