I’m perhaps unusually reticent to do any kind of public-facing proselytizing on behalf of the various Musical Instrument Manufacturing concerns, despite a multi-decade side-career/hustle working in beta-testing; always glad to be of service behind the scenes, but almost never out in front of the camera (with increasingly rare exception, the “Dog-Eat-Dog” aspects of YouTube™ culture have all but ruined this, especially so in the armchair expertry aspects of Electronic Music’s population growth coupled with its ever-narrowing revenue stream; no shade, things are definitely dire out there & everyone’s trying to figure out how to make a life in music make sense ca. now, with often lopsided results).
That said; last summer, Moog’s Max Ravitz approached me with a proposal around an instrument in the early/development stages that just so happened to hinge on several of the compositional tenets that I’d been mining since the mid-late 200s. After several conversations around the ways this was to break cleanly from the hard East/West coastal divide (Moog of course being the most commonly aligned brand w/ the former) I was more than happy to be brought on board, after which I spent several months working on music with a prototype of Labyrinth.
In October, in lieu of a technical walk-through (or anything intended as bait for the endless like/subscribe ouroboros) the Moog crew & I spent a day in the studio upstairs filming & recording the creation of a series of pieces using only a simple setup of Labyrinth, Mavis, and a Meris LXV pedal; that’s it. No plugins, no Ableton, no sidechaining (LOL); nothing “In The Box” about it so to speak… just two synths & a pedal, recorded to a Sony PCM-A10 recorder. As with most of what I’ve been interested in recently, it felt right to focus on the instrument’s generative engines, especially as I can (already) see them getting misunderstood in fundamental ways (in truth Moog have done an incredible job allocating so much creative control to only a few knobs, each of which are essentially “Macros” of various interrelated functionalities, and there’s even a way to get the two voices to “chase” each other ala a Shift Register). Considering that this is as close to a commercial product along the lines of the “Generator” series as feels viable in a mass-market way, in the end I’m thrilled in exactly how the Moog team reined in the mission creep & stayed loyal to the core concepts, tethering the fairly conceptual note & event -generation systems to a proper analog instrument that is unlike anything that they’ve produced thus far.
Labyrinth has finally reached its commercial stage & is available now from all of the usual suspects (for those interested I recommend Control here in Brooklyn, which is where Max worked for years before moving down to Asheville, or Zzounds over in NJ, who have an insanely lenient payment-plan structure in place that I take advantage of way, way too often). If anyone wants to chat around the ideas at play here (or if you’re similarly baffled by the litany of outrage & confusion this particular launch seems to have engendered, despite being a relatively covetable music-thing for those of us interested in Experimental Music) feel free to get in touch via the “Contact” tab above.
