I'm just back from my first dose of Moogfest. I only attended two workshops by the Ableton guys. They were both very amicable. Downtown wasn't crowded as I had assumed.

The theme, if there was one, was that you can start your own synth lab for cheap. The first guy was the first synth dude I recall hearing at Moogfest who played noise in-tune. He was actually creating pleasant timbres. He spoke philosophically about how one ought not get overwhelmed by the electronics. When it starts to get scary, he said one should stop and find something fun to do. Doing fun things nurtures the creative juices. Life, after all, is not about geeking out in you mom's basement, but being creative and making something that can transform people. I liked that.

His buddy showed how you can now make as many tracks as you want, without diminution, with just one monophonic Moog Minitaur. He said he composes often riding the train to work, whereas in the old days his house started to look like the inside of a Soviet space ship. His advice was to not view devices in terms of their limitations, but to figure out how to work around the limitations.

The big thing for me, which I am only recently realizing, is that music is nothing like it used to be. Today, you compose by dragging and dropping rather than mechanically altering acoustic waveforms. I loved hearing words I haven't heard since my academic days. I was happy for awhile. It was very nice. I wish I could have stayed all day, but I had to work to back.

Do note, I am limited in what I can post because I have to cover this event for two media outlets, and I can't spill all my beans. I can only leave teasers.

Me happy.

Today in Moogland, I watched a documentary on Moog. He seemed to yearn for a connection between mind and matter. He speculated about a big something that caused musicians to feel as one with their instrument, to explain how inventions came to him, etc. He analyzed a lot of things we don't touch over here.

I can't recall if I mentioned it or not, but Keith Emerson was really incredible. I'm sorry I only caught the last bit of the show. The guy who followed was trash, so I tuned out after about three songs. It turned out, he was one of the greatest iconic acts at the festival. How was I to know?

I caught the last half of a presentation by MIT geeks. That was amazing. The first guy specialized in predictive software. I almost walked out at that, but I stuck around to see how he has tools to transform music into music people will like. One thing changed 4-4 to swing, another was called Waltzifier. He changed "Sweet Child of Mine" to swing. He also stretched songs from different periods to coincide with dancing on "Soooooooooooul Train."

The next guy dealt with robotics. He began showing 400-year-old automatons. One was a mannequin who played a harpsichord with mallets and moved her head. He commended the device on its creep factor. Then, he showed other apparatus he had made for various shows. One involved a bunch of glasses shaved to different heights that would rotate about a vertical axis and touch circular violin bows. Another installation involved pendulums. They were going to be 72' high, but nobody told him this was for a road show. He and the performer kept having nightmares, so he had to downscale. He also made a raindrop machine, discouraging playing it with real raindrops.

He went on to talk about a colleague who drags and drops some touchkey instructions into a synthesizer app, makes a throwing motion with his phone toward a robot, and then the robot plays the sample and starts improvising, sensitive to new inputs from the humans. A drummer was playing with an arm that "had a mind of its own."

The third guy spoke of modern opera. They made an opera with robots, lighting, and a chandelier that responded to impulses from techies and performers. "Death and the Powers" uses robots as a Greek chorus. They question life and in the end ask what that whole play was about where they became the extensions of a man who wanted to live forever through his computer system. Then, there was another one based on Macbeth, where people go through 4 floors of an old factory in interactive fashion. MIT rigged it so people can text into the performance as well, since the producers could only reach 400 people a night in person. Audience members have to wear masks as they go room to room, and so the MIT geeks rigged it so some masks had invisible apparatus that made it sound like the wearer had voices in their head. Most of the texters talk to robots, but the robots are trained to hand off to a human when they can't answer a question.

By 4:00, the crowds had increased from sketchy to annoying. One couldn't even get in the Moog factory to check out the scene and ask questions. The press was getting the runaround. I spent a little time at the Keith Emerson interview, but it was like a Storytellers event. I admire Emerson, but I couldn't bring myself to listen with admiration and fixation as he told the story about the prosthetic leg for the umpteenth time.

I went back to the dubspot workshops. I didn't enjoy the first one because of my arrogance. I was too sleepy during the second.

I don't know if I mentioned it, but with my word counts reduced, I couldn't get into a whole lot. I"ll say this, and then move beyond Moog.

Bob Moog was somewhat of a spiritualist. I think it would be fair to say he was in the crowd of people like me who were really into New Age stuff before it became commercialized herd mentality. We loved science and we knew there was something more. Videos of Moog have him asking questions about what that je ne sais quoi is that makes a musician feel at one with his instrument, or the violin maker know when he has just enough wood in one place. He said he felt the same thing making circuits, and I immediately lost all disdain I had for electronic music.

Moog also spoke of a bigger something beyond our perceptions. We all know the EM spectrum has way more than the visible, and only some of the percussive (protonic) sounds are detectable with our ears. So much more is going on. Evo (the dog) goes ballistic anytime I open an email from my stalker. She can be in the other room, and she will pick up on it. Moogfest even had these Conductar thingies that people could wear around and convert the brainwaves stimulated by sights and sounds of Moogfest into music.

And so, my Moogiest moment of all was when Charles Lindsay was talking. I had gone to listen to William Kurth, who I thought might agree with what I will show you with Cheerios (and Orbitz' permission). His presentation was in alignment surprisingly, but I haven't yet emailed him. I asked him a few questions after his presentation, but didn't have the guts to pop the big question; viz., do you agree with a Newtonian/Coulombic interpretation of light that obviates Einstein's creation of warpable space? Nah, I got cold feet.

So, anyway this Lindsay dude came on next and started talking about weird stuff like communicating with whales and making art with Morse code. He had an innate intelligence that made me stick around, but the stuff was weird. I was also a tad disturbed by the MIT presentations that simulated life and brought us to the verge of questioning what is consciousness and whether or not our automatons will one day acquire that quality and all that. Technology is, after all, way closer than I supposed it would get.

Anyhoo, if anybody reads my posts here, they probably know I play back songs in my mind, quite well as long as I don't think a whole lot about it. And so, as Lindsay spoke, the Beatles started singing, "All You Need is Love" in my wee little mind. A split second later, which has me wondering if I'm time-stretching these songs, Lindsay said the second message sent by Morse code in his installation was, "All we need is love." From there, he went on to talk about the time he saw a snake in the Amazon, and knew it was where it was before he had the visual impulse. He then referenced some study about "pre-conscious pattern recognition." He went on to talk about AI.

At first, I thought the MIT guys were doing one of their stunts. During the Q&A, I wanted to ask if anybody else had thought of that song at that moment, but there was not enough time for a Q&A, and I really needed to talk to Kurth in the lobby.

I couldn't help thinking about the horror I felt over twenty years ago as I read Tesla and his ideas about us being meat machines. Tesla was one of the most truthful and insightful authors I had read up to that time, but I didn't want to be a meat machine. I prayed to know we were more. I remember my parents were in town and I was staying in a motel with them. I was teaching at AB Tech. It was a rainy day, and driving between jobs I passed a possum with guts sprawled. I held my revulsion until I got to class, and then, in the middle of solving a huge problem, I decided to pass out.

I'd done it enough, so when I felt myself going, I just laid down on the floor and put my feet up. As my sight disappeared, I could hear the students in the class. They were saying things exactly as I had heard them in my dream the night before. The same thing happened when I passed out in health class. I heard my teacher screaming, "Are you OK?" just as she had in my dream the night before.

I knew of no mechanism by which meat machines could do that, so I took it as an answered prayer, and continued on happily believing again that we were more than meat machines.

What were we talking about?

Imagine the confusion if we were all post-cogs. The bad guys would manipulate the world to make the good guys wrong all the time, unless the good guys got so good at their post-cog they could out-manipulate the bad guys, but good guys typically aren't manipulative, so they would lose just the same - in this world.

It reminds me of what that little guy I mentioned before who couldn't pot-down the world's suffering once told me: Don't try to be ahead of your time, because the world doesn't know what to do with you. You have to be on-time.

Found this over on Krys Britton's FB

http://www.realfarmacy.com/thi.....0kYSYiq.01

It's real Ent music! It occurred to me there are probably a lot of "interpretive" steps along the way electronically, from recording tree rings to producing sounds, but it's a very cool concept IMHO. A bit like playing DNA as music.

Thought you'd all enjoy it.

I'm wondering how they will do this next tour. Someone on another group who probably knows little to nothing, asserts there will be "backing tracks" to DOFP orchestration and they will play in between. I'm wondering if instead they won't just turn those orchestrated interludes over to the keyboards and flute... you tell me, I know nothing about modern keyboards and what they can synthesize.

Amazing how far technology really has come since the first Moogs and Mellotrons. The Moodies were there mucking about in the electronics too, especially Mike and Gray. Justin knows a bit about wires too. Several of them could have made careers out of being engineers.

I'm a big fan of Mike's music, and his wife is quite a lady. I'm just not a fan of Mike's, and I'll leave it there. Mike was certainly at the center of the Moodie's sound tho.