When I was growing up in the early to middle eighties, I spent a lot of time ignoring the popular music of the time, and pointedly listening to semi-obscure German electronic music. It took a lot to get me to admit to liking anything most of my school friends (or come to think of it, mostly anyone else in the country) was listening to. Yep, I must have been pretty annoying at times. (Amusingly, the other day I had an ironic mood swing and went to Amoeba Music and bought a Madness album and drove around the city with songs like “Our House” playing on the CD player….)
Back in those days, I also spent a lot of time in my room with a hot soldering iron, building circuits of various sorts. (If I had not breathed in so much soldering lead fumes and soldering flux, goodness knows what dizzying heights of intellectual achievement I could have reached. Raspy voice: “I could ‘a been a contender…”)
There is a connection between those two paragraphs. Electronic generation and modification of sound. I spent of lot of time making weird noises in my room with the aid of transistors, resistors, capacitors, inductors, and all those wonderful things you hardly see any more when you open up a modern electonic device.
Why am I telling you this? Well, Robert Moog, one of the masters, a pioneer of the field of electronic synthesizers -who without a doubt indirectly inspired what I was doing in my room, since everybody I listened to was playing his instruments or decendents of them- died on Sunday. Those hobbies of mine certainly helped me focus my interests and skills along the way to becoming a scientist, so I’d like to thank him for whatever role his work played in shaping my trajectory.
I heard the news on NPR and there is a collection of links and sounds from several NPR segments at a nice page they’ve built, which is here. I also saw some links at Swoon.
Thanks for the sounds, sir!
-cvj
August 24th, 2005 at 3:53 am
[...] This may mean very little to those who’ve never sat in a studio and watched a friend put together a piece of electronica, but the man behind the Moog has died. Cosmic Variance does some explaining, but basically this guy produced the greatest synthesiser of all time. It’s a remarkably strange piece of kit, but looks just like a rather old-fashioned electric piano. I’ll try and nab a pick for y’all. [...]
August 24th, 2005 at 8:06 am
It is quite appropriate that Robet Moog is celebrated here, as he took a degree in physics at Columbia University. Beyond that, he rocked, as only a nerd can, like a mother. Ultimately, his synthesiser let every child put to the piano, enslaved to arpeggii and five finger futility, get up and shake his/her stuff like Jimi Hendrix. And the soundtack to clockwork orange – with alex getting down with the record buying public – exceptional. Then, of course, there was emerson, lake and palmer. Swings and roundabouts.
October 9th, 2005 at 1:23 am
[...] I was simply in love with Kate Bush and her music as a teenager. It was not a sex thing (inasmuch as anything can be far removed from sex as a teenage boy); instead I was in love with just how different her music was while still remaining both interesting, tuneful, and beautiful. (And often very funny.) You see, I loved listening to things other than the standard 80’s UK pop everyone else was into at school, and I went to great lengths in pursuit of this, and the results were not always interesting and enjoyable at the same time (you may recall me writing about being into obscure German electronic music as a teenager). But Kate Bush managed to be different and all of those other things I said above at the same time. She was clearly a genius, at least to my mind back then, producing all sorts of tremendous musical ideas and sounds. [...]