“I think Bach would have gone into orbit with these instruments,” says Will Gregory, who after over 200 years since his death is reinventing Johann Sebastian Bach via phasers and filters. From a reclusive garage in the Wiltshire countryside the trailing black cables that connect the ten present members of Will Gregory’s MOOG Ensemble make the room more reminiscent of a 1940s telephone switchboard than a rehearsal studio. I tread carefully between equipment that costs more than my London housing deposit, the ever-present fear of knocking something over at the very front of my mind.
“It's a bit embarrassing really…” says Gregory, sat in a revolving chair as he looks around at the mass of synthesisers that cram themselves into his front room. An Oberheim Four Voice sits up against a wall, white modular panels line the walls and 70s synths balance precariously on mixing desks around him.
Aside from the kitchen and bathroom every conceivable empty space in his home is filled with rhythm machines and musical black boxes, a collection he’s accrued over the decades. Gregory spent the 80s recording with Tears For Fears, the 90s performing with Peter Gabriel and The Cure, and the 00s redefining pop’s fabric as one half of Goldfrapp. On this drizzling Sunday afternoon however the Ensemble are preparing newly conceived renditions of Bach through a cacophony of synthesisers ahead of their performance as part of the Barbican’s Sounds and Visions weekender.
The ensemble is formed of musicians from far-reaching disciplines. “Nobody here is a specialist in synthesisers,” Gregory says. “So to begin with everyone was definitely taken out of their comfort zone.” Portishead guitarist Ade Utley unearths an almost humanly inaudible bass rumble on his Minimoog at the back of the room before Eddie Parker, member of influential big band jazz group Loose Tubes, asks “is it all sounding a little too…Vangelis?” The room laughs, nods, then twist a few knobs in deep concentration.
Formed in 2005, the ensembles first aim was to interpret Bach’s ‘Brandenburg Three’, a nine part concerto, through nine monosynth playing performers. “The music of Bach is indestructible, and it’s super melodic,” says Gregory. “When you have the disparate sounds [of a synthesiser] rather than a homogenous texture from a string orchestra or an organ you can pick out those individual lines, so it's a brilliantly fit for synthesisers.”
Invented by Robert Moog in the early-60s, the modern MOOG – pronounced ˈmoʊɡ’, ‘mogue’ or ‘moo-g’ depending on which side of the fence you sit – has long inhabited a space between science, maths and music, a notion shared by Bach and his contemporaries hundreds of years before. German physician, composer and Bach luminary Lorenz Christoph Mizler called their work "sounding mathematics", composing music through complex canon structures.
This provides equal inspiration for Gregory whose new offerings rework Bach’s ‘The Musical Offering’. Itself a mathematical riddle when first conceived in 1747, ‘The Musical Offering’ can be performed in reverse (crab canon), by two performers playing the same line of music in opposite directions (table canon), or upside-down (mirror canon).
Using a box that generates clock – a signal that's a gate or trigger that repeats at a set frequency, allowing a modular synthesiser to play multiple time signatures – through electronics the ensemble are able to stretch, slow and “cosmify” this work.
“It's like Bach has been zoomed in on so closely that we’re looking at the pixels that made it,” says Gregory. “You can have a very complicated, intricate, interlocking rhythm which is absolutely solid between all the instruments. It's like having a big sequencer but instead of a machine playing every note it's a person.”
It’s not the first time Sebastian Bach has been synthesised. In 1968 Wendy Carlos released ‘Switched On Bach’, a 39-minute long reworking of Bach composed entirely on a MOOG synthesiser. Aiming to test the machine’s capabilities it redefined the instrument from being a tool used primarily by avant-gardists such as Pierre Schaeffer to one that could be appreciated by an audience beyond university music labs and self-determined gatekeepers.
Carlos recorded the album using studio multi-track techniques, looping recordings and slowing down tape to capture the complex structures, but the MOOG Ensemble were the first to perform Bach’s work as a fully-fledged orchestra.
“Once we quickly realised how eminently possible that was, we wondered why it hadn't been done it before,” Gregory thinks. “It's finding those people who have the classical training to play complicated music, but who also have a foot in the 21st century to the extent where they understand technology.”
It’s a perplexing concept, recreating music composed centuries ago, on instruments invented decades ago, while echoing pulsations we associate with the future. “We don't think of these instruments as ‘retro’ in the same way we don't think of a violin as retro even though it's 400 years old,” thinks Gregory. “This is an instrument that was invented in our lifetime and there's a blank canvas at the end of it. I can still do stuff with this instrument that nobody has done before.”
From the 1970s MOOG became the equipment of choice for hi-end studios and experimentalists alike, adopted early by stalwarts like Herbie Hancock and Michael Jackson producer Ron Temperton. Kraftwerk’s robotic ode to fun (fun, fun) on the ‘Autobahn’ was given its tectonic pulse through the Minimoog, and New Order found their industrial thump to your ‘Blue Monday’ in the MOOG Source.
Naturally, however, the equipment was far beyond the pay grade of casual players, and from the 70s Japanese companies like Yamaha and Roland quickly began filling the markets with more affordable machines. From 1983 the Yamaha DX7 became the first widespread, commercially successful synthesiser on the market, a notoriously difficult to programme instrument. The synthesiser still continuous to provide bountiful frustration in the 21st century, thanks mostly to its use in Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.
In part, it was the relative failure of these machines in mimicking ‘real’ instruments that arguably held their greater legacies. In 1980 the Roland TR-808 drum machine was first debuted, a commercial flop, but as second-hand shops became littered with the things they went on to form the instantly recognisable kicks and claps behind hip-hop and house music.
Despite their name, those flaws are explored by the MOOG Ensemble to craft cosmic reimaginings of works first heard by antediluvian ears. The Minimoog’s grumbling low-end replaces bass, the KORG 700 inhabits the higher frequency sweeping timbres and the Yamaha WX7 windsynth – an electronic wind instrument – is their baroque flute.
“Synths have always tried to emulate real instruments but we have samples that sound like real instruments and digital hard-disc recording. But this?” he asks, gesturing at a Korg MS20 that sits beside me. “The saxophone comes with a lot of baggage, and a violin takes you 12 years to make a decent sound on it. This is just an oscillator buzzing but you’re listening to an electronic circuit, and it's amazing how that can be so musical. It has something other instruments don’t.”