Electrophotonic Timesinks

I’ve spent a lot of time raving about the wonderful Moog Minimoog, but I think this Youtube video demonstrates better than anything in writing just how neat it is.

Very impressive for a piece of equipment from 1971!

As mentioned earlier, if you have a USB keyboard and want to have a go yourself, there’s a demo of the emulated version available. I’d play around with it more myself if it wasn’t for the input lag I’m experiencing. I’ll get around to sorting that out sooner or later…

This is a game I’ve wanted to write about for a long time. Not so much for its gameplay, but for its presentation and above all music, both of which I think have stood the test of time remarkably well. Warning, opinionated author!

Music from Ridge Racer Type 4. Click to play, more further down.

In early 1999, Namco released a game called Ridge Racer Type 4, the fifth (!) installment in the Ridge Racer series on the Playstation, counting Revolution. I didn’t have a Playstation at a time, but when I saw the cover of Super PLAY magazine in I think it was April of that year, I knew I had to get one. It featured long-legged mascot girl Reiko Nagase, dressed in a white one-piece dress and white boots, in front of a sleek sports car, the rest of the cover keeping to the stark black text on yellow background seen above.

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This post is from my old Livejournal, moogcoon. It’s a bit silly reading it now, but I’m putting it up with as few edits as possible. The download links are password protected, and I only ever gave it out to close friends.

Ever wondered what it would look like if Hitler’s corpse was never torched in a shell crater in Berlin, but was instead reanimated with a diet of amphetamines and kept alive into the eighties, forced to play keyboards with a severely caffeinated girly boy in a techno pop band, and gave him just enough self-awareness to be most displeased with his predicament?

Originally I had the excellent No 1 Song in Heaven video here, but since Warner Music have gone all anal about their PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL showing up on Youtube, I have to settle for this recording from German TV

Look, a minimoog!

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This post is from my old Livejournal, moogcoon. It’s a bit silly reading it now, but I’m putting it up with as few edits as possible. The download links are password protected, and I only ever gave it out to close friends.

So what’s this Moog thing I keep mentioning then? Well, it’s not exactly obscure so you might already know something about it, but basically Robert “Bob” Moog developed one of the first practically usable electronic synthesizers back in the middle 60s.

Robert “Bob” Moog and a modern Minimoog Voyager. Photo STOLEN from the NY Times.

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This post is from my old Livejournal, moogcoon. It’s a bit silly reading it now, but I’m putting it up with as few edits as possible. The download links are password protected, and I only ever gave it out to close friends.

Let me start by introducing a friend of mine. He’s fat, italian, and sports a wonderfully thick ’stache. No, he isn’t everybody’s favorite plumber, but a certain producer you might, or might not, have heard of.

Mr. Moroder likes synths and vocoders. The control panels lining the walls are all part of a Moog Modular synthesizer, and to the left is a Minimoog, both of which I’m bound to write about later. He’s also well aware of the thinning properties of striped shirts, and has strategically put one on for this photo occasion.

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