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“I think Bach would have gone into orbit with these instruments,” says Will Gregory, who, over 200 years since the composer's 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 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 front of my mind.

“It's a bit embarrassing really…” says Gregory, who sits in a revolving chair and looks around at the mass of synthesisers crammed into his front room. An Oberheim Four Voice sits up against a wall; 70s synths balance precariously on mixing desks around him.


Aside from the kitchen and bathroom, every conceivable empty space in Gregory's 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 2000s redefining pop’s fabric as one half of Goldfrapp. On this drizzling Sunday afternoon, however, the Ensemble is 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 inaudible bass rumble on his Moog 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.

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Formed in 2005, the ensemble's 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 brilliant fit for synthesisers.”


It's a near-perfect blend of art and maths. 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 and music – a position shared by Bach and his baroque-era contemporaries.

German physician, composer and Bach luminary Lorenz Christoph Mizler called Bach's work "sounding mathematics", showing how he composed music through complex structures, particularly canons. A canon is a melody played with one or more musical iterations of the tune following in mathematically precise intervals, then played simultaneously, giving a regenerative effect where each line is both independent yet interdependent, as heard in Steve Reich’s ‘Clapping Music’.

These mathematical structures were intertwined with ideas and theories of musical cosmology, a notion that as celestial beings floated through space each planet omitted their own note, creating a music of the spheres that phased in harmony across the universe. Through the cosmic maths of music, Bach was seeking to find the voice of God.

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Similar, more secular ideas were adopted in the very earliest years of electronic music. Johanna Magdalena Beyer’s pivotal ‘The Music of the Spheres’, one of the earliest electronic recordings, was composed in 1938. Perhaps accidentally, it adopted a canonic structure. “It would be presumptuous to say that the music was really serial in construction, but the pitch ordering hints, at least, to a linear manner of organization,” according to composer Allen Strange.


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Later, these ideas were experimented with by artists like Terry Riley, whose 1964 LP ‘In C’, a foundation piece of minimalist composition, utilised shared traits between space and repetition to create polyrhythmic structures that ebb and flow at seemingly random but mathematically precise moments.

Riley was something of a hip-hop producer too, albeit 13 years before Kurtis Blow’s ‘The Breaks’ hit the airwaves with ‘You’re No Good’. Stretched over 20+ minutes, Riley sampled and continuously looped The Harvey Averne Dozen’s funk spectacular ‘You’re No Good’ using two reel-to-reel tape machines interlaced with delays, Moog synthesisers and ring modulators to create a phase canon effect that weaved in and out of itself.



On the other end of the spectrum (or on a different planet entirely), the same can be said for both Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, who share Riley’s ability to question and decode our understanding of time to craft their own maximalist electronica.

“It's quite difficult to listen to almost any kind of music after listening to Squarepusher or Aphex Twin,” laughs Gregory. “Both of those composers can divide time into inhuman fractions that are impossible for a human being to articulate. They’re investing great complexity into a short amount of time and that’s impossible to create without the aid of computers. How high can you make a note? What's the biggest interval you can create while it's still detected as an interval? They’re stretching the ear into territory it doesn't usually go.”

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For their Barbican performance, Gregory will be playing an electronic version of Bach’s ‘The Musical Offering’, itself a mathematical puzzle lauded both for its transfixing melodies and the complexities that went into its composition. First conceived in 1747 after Prussian King Frederick II challenged Bach to compose a six-voice fugue, it can be performed back to front (crab canon), by two performers playing the same line of music in opposite directions (table canon), or upside-down (mirror canon).

Fed through each synthesiser is a specially built box that generates clock - a signal that repeats at a set frequency, allowing a modular synthesiser to play multiple time signatures. This gives each player the ability to delay, stretch, slow and “cosmify” Bach’s offering.

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“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 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 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.

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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 says. “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 trying to produce something for 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,” says 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 high-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 ‘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. It’s notoriously difficult to program, but that’s made easier thanks to the Aphex Twin-partnered ‘midimutant’, a unit that uses AI to program and ‘grow’ new sounds from the DX7 so you don’t have to. Regardless, it still continues to provide bountiful frustration in the 21st century, thanks mostly to its use in Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.

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In part, it was the relative failure of these machines in mimicking ‘real’ instruments that 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.


Those flaws are explored by the Moog Ensemble to craft cosmic reimaginings of works first heard by antediluvian ears and, despite their name, it's not just Moogs that feature in their orchestra. 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?” says Gregory, 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.”

Will Gregory Moog Ensemble perform at LSO St Luke’s on Saturday 12 May as part of the Barbican’s marathon weekend, Sounds and Visions, curated by Max Richter and Yulia Mahr