The Quietus - A new rock music and pop culture website

Baker's Dozen

While His Synth Gently Beeps: Benge's Favourite Electronic LPs
Luke Turner , February 15th, 2017 10:50

We know you all love a bit of synth porn so here's Benge's Baker's Dozen - a sort of synth erotica reading, if you will, as he guides you through 13 electronic favourites from Morton Subotnick to Else Marie Pade and George Harrison's Moog explorations to Air and Autechre. Benge photo by Ed Fielding

George_harrison_electronic_sound_1487088553_resize_460x400

George Harrison - Electronic Sound
At exactly the same time as Buchla and Subotnick collaborated, Bob Moog was thinking the same things over on the east coast of America, and was about to launch his own huge version of the modular synth.

Check this album out for a sideways step for the Beatles guitarist. A whole record of completely abstract machine noises without reference to any kind of melodic or rhythmic idea. I think what happened in the late 1960s was that very rich pop musicians became intoxicated with the new sound-making potential of modular systems. They bought them and tried to use them before they really knew what they were doing. I think this album was mainly done by a Moog demonstration technician (Bernie Krause) who was showing George what it could do while he was running a tape recorder in the background. Luckily for us he decided to release it (with a great cover painting by a small child) before any of the other Beatles (or Bernie) found out about it. While my Synth gently beeps.