Moog, Moog, Moog!

I'm sure there is a perfectly rational explanation for the existence of so many 'Moog' records, but it's probably really mundane.

Instead, I prefer to think of them in the same way I did when I first started discovering them back in the late 90s bargain bins and Op-shops - inexplicably weird and goofy time capsules into a bizarre recent past.

Moog went country, classical, rock, latin and jazz. It played The Beatles, Abba, The Hair musical, and Christian (and Christmas) music.

To start with, why are there so damn many of them?! Setting aside the more 'serious' efforts from the likes of Wendy Carlos and Beaver and Krause, it seemed like there was an attempt to Moog-ify just about anything you could imagine. Moog went country, classical, rock, latin and jazz. It played The Beatles, ABBA, The Hair musical, and Christian (and Christmas) music.

They must have sold well enough. While there are some rarities in the 'genre', most are pretty common, even to this day.

And to be honest, most of them are awful.

It's hard to imagine they were all created (and then bought) as a joke. Someone must have thought they were good, or at least had some chance of selling. They couldn't all be tax write-offs, surely? I guess they were probably cheaper for them to make than your standard early-70s rock album.

The obvious answer is that the music industry loves a fad, and a bandwagon to jump on, but I prefer to think of them as labours of love by artists who thought they were making something truly futuristic.

I've owned quite a lot of these kinds of records over the years, they are a bit like catnip to me, but i've only kept a reasonably small selection. Below is a mix of a bunch of my faves. Some are well known, like the amazing EVA by Jean-Jacques Perrey (whose earlier work with Gershon Kingsley is truly remarkable), while others might be considered quite obscure.

For this mix i'm trying to stick closely to the spirit of the 'Moog plays' type albums. There are plenty of amazing examples of more 'credible' efforts from the time that include Moog or electronics - Silver Apples, United States of America, Lothar and the Hand People, to name a few - but i'm (mostly) ignoring them in favour of the more exploitative or novelty angled examples that I like.

It's worth noting that while i'm using the general title of 'Moog' here, these albums are just as likely to be using an ARP or EMS synthesizer, especially if they were produced outside of the USA.