Will Gregory 2024
Photo: Paul Heartfield / Mute Records

Will Gregory Moog Ensemble Goes to the Symphony

Sent back through a wormhole from the distant future by mad synth scientists, the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble, this Heat Ray is a weapon of unknowable power.

Heat Ray
Will Gregory Moog Ensemble
Mute
14 June 2024

Eureka! I have found an ancient relic from the distant future! Sent back through a wormhole by mad synth scientist Will Gregory, this so-called Heat Ray is a weapon of unknowable power.

To most earth dwellers of the present day, Will Gregory is best known as the half of the English electronic duo Goldfrapp, who isn’t Alison Goldfrapp. Complementing Alison’s breathy, deadpan soprano vocals, Gregory’s funky brilliance with synthesizers was the driving creative force behind Goldfrapp’s eccentric yet accessible sound. Their glittery synthpop, trip-hop, disco glam folktronica confabulation earned the group a principal’s ransom in award wins and nominations from notable establishments like the Grammys, Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello, and GLAAD, as well as a string of records that all sold silver, gold, and platinum in the UK.

Yet, as impressive as Goldfrapp has been, that is only a sliver of Gregory’s biography. He was the touring saxophonist for Tears for Fears in the 1980s, played with Tori Amos, the Cure, Spiritualized, and Portishead in the 1990s, and, as Goldfrapp was hitting the ground running after the millennium, he started working with Peter Gabriel. Those are major credits. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that Gregory started quietly cultivating a far less mainstream side known as the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble.

The ensemble first appeared at the Bath Festival in 2005, performing their take on the groundbreaking arrangements of Johann Sebastian Bach that Wendy Carlos created with a monophonic Moog modular synthesizer in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Switched-On Bach was a touchstone for both electronic and classical music, an instant sensation in 1968 that hinted at the future of one genre while providing a last pop gasp for the other.

Carlos’ album landed in the top ten on the Billboard 200 and eventually sold platinum. Yet, its lasting cultural impact lay not so much in convincing traditionalists to go electric but in how it introduced synthesizers to future disco legend Giorgio Moroder and prospective DIY knob-twiddlers the world over. It ushered in a slew of exploito Moog records that covered everything from country and Christmas music to the popular hits of the day, possibly blew Brian Wilson‘s mind too far out to come all the way back, and had a formative impact on a young Will Gregory.

Produced in collaboration with Robert Moog, the making of Switched-On Bach also directly influenced the development of synthesizers. Carlos met Moog in 1964 and began developing her system with him in 1966. Her home studio had an eight-track recorder set up to capture an evolving monophonic modular synth, which was the size of telephone switchboards in those days (look at TONTO to see how big of a room the first polyphonic synth required). Providing feedback and requests for custom-build modules, Carlos helped Moog to engineer increasingly expressive tools, like the touch-sensitive keyboard that allowed for the velocity of dynamic performance by hand rather than the mechanical on-or-off of punch cards (computer programs used to be written by punching chads), and portamento control to slide between notes.

Yet, for all of their noteworthy advances, it isn’t exactly a kick-ass wicked time to listen to most of Carlos’ classical recordings in 2024. Back in the late 1960s, before the prevalence of funk, disco, reggae, and other speaker-humping dance-friendly forms, they didn’t have the benefit of polyphony (the ability to play more than one note at a time), MIDI (the ability of synths, computers, controllers, etc. to talk to each other and synch up) or even, by modern standards, bass (it was common to put a stereo EQ into a smiley face back then because rock radio was mostly treble). As such, as thoughtful as its sounds were designed and layered, the feeling of mid-century monophonic Moog Bach is invariably rather stilted.

At the time, electronic music was often seen as incomprehensibly experimental, an extension of musique concrète and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s serial compositions, or camp novelty, forever cemented in the minds of cinema-goers as the spooky sound of sci-fi and horror B-movies like Forbidden Planet and Doctor Who before the comical recordings of Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley in the 1960s. Carlos struck gold in the middle ground, making something accessible yet sophisticated, often employing synthesis to replicate the timbre of real-world instruments rather than intentionally exploring the unique potential of the synthesizer itself. Through its bewildering success, Switched-On Bach would expand the general acceptance and versatility of new technologies, powering the development of disco and kosmische in the 1970s that would evolve into house, techno, and myriad other microgenres of dance music throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Cut to the mid-2020s, and the world in which the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble find themselves in is quite different. Electronic music has gone mainstream multiple times over, expanding and evolving exponentially as it became an accepted part of contemporary culture. Where Carlos sprinkled breadcrumbs to the future, Heat Ray tends to reflect the past. That can be executed wonderfully, like how Madlib Invazion has been churning out a post-pandemic library music series that captures the essence of the original era recordings while putting their own modern spin on it. Still, the overall feel of Heat Ray is a little too close to the experience of listening to Wendy Carlos now, which is rather dry.

Sure, Switched-On Bach sold a million copies by the 1970s, but it wouldn’t have done those numbers if it had been released now. Relatively few people still regularly listen to traditional European classical music, while the technical limitations of the age leave Switched-On Bach mostly sounding like a ringtone or the soundtrack to a Super Nintendo game.

Even if Carlos hadn’t shunned the music industry and spent the decades post-millennium having her music removed from streaming services, it likely wouldn’t be played as much as what Perrey and Kingsley produced around the same time. Ultimately, tracks like “E.V.A.” and “Popcorn” ended up being closer to anticipating what the future of popular electronic music would become than The Well-Tempered Synthesizer. Arguably, Carlos’ best aging musical achievement would prove to be her electroacoustic new age field recording meditation Sonic Seasonings from 1972, which predated Brian Eno‘s foray into what would be called ambient music by a half-dozen years and still sounds powerful and otherworldly.

With all that being said, Heat Ray feels like it’s caught between worlds. It was released as a Will Gregory Moog Ensemble record, harnessing the prowess of Adrian Utley (Portishead), Hazel Mills (Florence + The Machine), Eddie Parker (Loose Tubes), Simon Clarke (Be Bop Deluxe), and Simon Haram (London Sinfonietta), among other notable knob-twiddlers and respected performers, into a concept album inspired by pivotal Greek scientist Archimedes. Yet, the presence of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales weighs heavily throughout the LP. The bombast of the brass section and searing strings often overpower the subtle intricacies of the ambient synth programming rather than complement it.

In 2005, Alarm Will Sound released an album of Aphex Twin tracks, where they vividly replicated the sound of abstract electronic music with a full orchestra. In 2011, Metropole Orkest put out an album of Basement Jaxx covers that felt strangely organic, for the most part, like chamber music for raves. More recently, French producer Arandel went deep into a vintage instrument collection and came out with a couple of InBach albums in the 2020s that thoughtfully sampled and reimagined Bach as minimal techno, industrial synthpop, and other 21st-century forms. The orchestration on Heat Ray feels like a similar attempt to bleed realities as the aforementioned successes, but it’s just too stiff and serious to be fun most of the time, evoking the feel of a John Williams score for an Oscar-winning documentary about volcanoes more so than an eccentric blend of the synthetic and ephemeral, of classical and kitsch.

“Law of the Lever” should be a prime example of this alternate dimensional crossover, but it becomes uncomfortably dissonant as the staccato string line wheezes along with sympathetic, arpeggiated bloops. The contrast of swelling orchestral tones and its disjointed, percussive synth bassline is too severe to entertain notions of bewilderment. Closer to Stockhausen than Moog Indigo, it seems unnecessarily challenging and tense when it could have just been a cool few minutes of space lab sounds from a bunch of Minimoogs and assorted Prophets and Rolands, which is kind of what you expect from something called a Moog Ensemble.

The Archimedes tracks that bookend the album give Heat Ray a wonderful sense of symmetry. “Young Archimedes” opens the LP with an elegant new-age waltz that one could imagine being part of the KPM Music library in the 1980s. It probably would have been incredible if the whole thing were more like that. That song may be one of the most pristine pieces of music ever recorded, drawing a wayward line between Wendy Carlos and Arandel’s differing Bach interpretations.

The last track, “Archimedes’ Legacy”, closes the record with a plodding, downtempo dirge dripping with drama, detuned piano sounds, and rumblings of bass-like explosions in the distance. It could have ended the album similarly to how it began, but like a micro version of the album itself, the BBC NOW blusters up and blasts out the last half of the track, obliterating the cerebral synth play that introduced it.

Named after Archimedes’ influential hydraulic invention, which is still used in irrigation to this day and may have watered the Hanging Gardens of Babylon from the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, “Archimedes’ Screw” is wonderfully evocative, one of the album’s best tracks. It playfully captures the nebulous nature of flowing water, with a few drops leading to a trickle as its elusive, pulsing arpeggios and delayed melodies ebb and flow throughout the track.

“Heat Ray” is also named after an Archimedes invention, albeit a far less useful one than the screw. Rumor has it that the mathematician designed a series of mirrors or polished metals that could have focused sun rays to set unwelcome ships ablaze as they approached a shoreline like ants under a magnifying glass. The song sounds like a heat ray warming up and then dissipating its energy slowly as its pensive strings grind away on sustained pitches toward a blast of brass and harp. Just like modern attempts to recreate the heat ray using tech that Archimedes had access to during his time, the track is not that hot, momentarily dazzling rather than permanently scorching.

On their 2015 album Undercurrents, Gregory composed a work called “English Country Dancing.” It was apparently inspired by the footwork of Tim Henman, a serve-and-volley style English tennis pro, but the feel leans more toward German tech-noir dancefloor, a pinch of kosmische atmosphere with an upbeat motorik chug. It’s one of the rare moments in their catalogue where they allow a little light and humor to creep in, raising the tempo and mood, and the sound is pure oscillator worship. Heat Ray has impressive aspects, but it really could have used some of that instrumental Goldfrapp flavor and less dissonance.

Then again, we live in a world where legendary rapper André 3000 released an album of ambient flute noodling, so perhaps the world is ready to embrace sonic experimentation and support artists who are making the music they want to make, regardless of popular trends and algorithms. Certainly, Heat Ray is not an album to bounce to, but Will Gregory deserves to be commended for producing such a bold musical project, informed by an obvious passion for the impact of Archimedes and the inspiration that one person can change the world.

RATING 6 / 10
RESOURCES AROUND THE WEB