Moog : A Documentary Film By Hans Fjellestad

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.

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.