The following article was published in Loaded magazine August 1996.

From A Bygone Ear
Grunge gets the Moog synth treatment

R emember those soft, high pitch synthesiser sounds in the background of all your favourite romantic classics? The happy electronic notes which bleeped along with silky elegance. if you didn’t already know, these melodic tones stem from Bob Moog’s brainchild, the Moog synthesiser. Bob invented the thing in 1963 and by the end of the decade the easy listening pioneers - realising how simple it was to completely re-Moog existing music - were knocking out compilation albums like Japanese calculators: Moog Plays The Beatles, Switched On Bacharach, and The Plastic Cow Goes Moog. All of them creating background muslc which kept the tune recognisable but replaced every note with old Bob's electronics. Passing phase it may have been but a couple of West Coast American space cakes, Roger Joseph Manning Junior and Brian Kehew have restarted the trend. Grunge has been their main target and The Moog Cookbook compllation is about ready to explode its cheesy influence. "The fun part was faking what were supposed to be such hard edged, masculine, testosterone tunes and sugar-coating the hell out of them," laughs Captain Manning. A grown man who wears a golden silky space suit and an extra large light bulb for a helmet.

"We wanted to make a comedy album where people can experience the excitement we felt from a lot of the compilations from the '6Os. We felt we could do a really good job and revive a portion of a bygone era!" Jamming away on the Moogs, Rog and Brian have synth'd and milked the venom from the baddest, most malevolent power chords and Marlboro ripped lyrics. Taming them into harmless, mildly psychedelic background music, with the old futurism of Bob Moog taken to the next level easy listening. Every track is there to put a smile on your face from Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' to Soundgarden's 'Black Hole Sun' Mooged into the campest, happiest, electronic contradiction which might have even put the smile back on Kurt Cobain's face. So which is your favouiite track then Captain Manning? "Probably 'Are You Gonna Go My Way' by Lennie Kravitz. It was originally like a hard Hendrix kind of song and we turned it into like soft electrical country music." Well, thank you for that Captain. So this is the future of background music. Cheesy rocking in the free world with Mr Moog. Excellent! ROWAN CHERNIN The Moog Cookbook is out now on Restless Records.

For more info visit the Restless Records page.