THE NIN HOTLINE

Tuesday September 14, 2004

Moog: A Documentary on Dr. Robert Moog

I once had the pleasure of sitting a couple of seats across from Bob Moog at the Charlotte, NC Nine Inch Nails show. I'm not normally the type to ask for autographs, but I asked him to sign the back of my ticket stub, which he did in a most humble fashion, seeming almost confused that someone would want his signature.

Those of you who aren't synth geeks probably don't know that Bob Moog is considered by many to be the father of the modern performance synthesizer. Where you may have heard the name as a NIN fan: On the Fragility tour, Charlie Clouser made heavy use of the Big Briar Etherwave Theremin -- signed by Bob Moog. It's been said that most of the bass on Pretty Hate Machine was produced on the legendary Minimoog synth.

ZU33 has been working on a Moog documentary for some time now, titled simply moog, which is hitting select theatres over the next few months, and gets worldwide release in Spring of '05. You can watch the Quicktime trailer by clicking here.

Along with this documentary is the soundtrack to moog, which features original tracks by Charlie Clouser ("I am a Spaceman"), Meat Beat Manifesto ("Unavailable Memory"), Bernie Worrell and Bootsy Collins, Tortoise, Devo, Luke Vibert, Gary Numan, New Order, They Might be Giants, and of course, The Moog Cookbook. The soundtrack just came out today on Hollywood Records, so if you're a synth geek of any caliber, you should check it out.

Thanks to howisya for telling me about this last year.

(p.s. - Mozilla Firefox v1.0 preview release was just put out today. If you don't use Firefox by now, you really should. And when you've downloaded it, hook yourself up with new extensions for it)