Moogfest Day 4 – It’s a Wrap

The final day of Moogfest is always interesting. Seeing which artists will do talks on Sunday morning, and what media will be presented in the afternoon. This year, there did not have a movie, but they did have LightBeam playing a really laid back ambient set with visualizations from plant biometric visualizations.

The highlight for me was a talk that Patrick Gleeson did at the Full Frame Theater. His talk was about the history of synth music and the various projects he worked on over the last fifty (yes!!! 50) years. He also played a ton of music off of YouTube including a 1950s song from a researcher at RCA Labs named Vladimir UssacheVsky. Three people influenced by the revolution of this kind of music were Don Buchla, Alan R. Pearlman, and Robert Moog. We now have the thread of bringing the modern synthesizers to market.

In 2016, I had the opportunity to hear Silver Apples play at Moogfest and he was a big user of the Buchla Box synth devices. In 2017 and 2018, I heard Suzanne Ciani at MoogFest, another user of Buchla. These are very different from the Moog synths as they don’t use a keyboard, it was felt that why should this new instrument be tied to the input of an old idea (the keyboard).

The other cool part of the discussion was how we get from the experimental sounds from the 50’s and 60’s to the popular music of today. Patrick believed I was driven by two key artists – Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk. I can’t find fault in that logic as I love both of them. The other album that was instrumental in this shift was the Fat Albert Rotunda from Herbie Hancock. This one surprised me. While I remember Herbie Hancock for his music in the 80s, and I knew he was a long time Jazz musician, I hadn’t realized his early experimental synth work with Patrick Gleeson.

The other session on Sunday I went to was pretty much an add for a former kickstarter called Sensory Percussion. They had Madame Gandhi (from MoogFest in 2018) there to show how a drummer can use their tech to do an entire electronic performance. Very cool, and I really like Madame Gandhi’s music. Go check out her music over at https://www.madamegandhi.com.