The Moog Cookbook

(Restless)
by Nik Rainey

Okay, tunnel visionaries, chew on this: Imagine that the cheesy sci-fi prophesies of the ’70s had actually come to pass, that the future as we now live it is more Logan’s Run than Blade Runner. You come home after a hard day at the off-planet spice mines and a rousing game of Rollerball with your droogies, plop into your modular plastic chair with your orb and a tall glass of moloko plus, and click on some music to relax. If this scenario appeals to you, then The Moog Cookbook is the perfect soundtrack to your quadraphonic future-schlock dreams: Ten grunge-era standards performed as if Walter/Wendy Carlos was the main talis(wo)man of modern music rather than, say, Sabbath or the Stooges. (Or better yet, if us alt-rock hipsters had grown up listening to The Velvet Underground and Meco.)

Roger Joseph Manning Jr. (of neo-psych popsters Jellyfish) and Brian Kehew employ a battery of ancient synths and a wry smirk to craft the best kind of novelty record: A prolonged conceptual joke with enough flash and filigree to bear multiple retellings. A flick of the switch and “Buddy Holly” becomes IBM oom-pah, “Black Hole Sun” knocks back a few at the Cyborg Lounge, and even “Rockin’ In The Free World” gets Trans-mogrified. In some cases, they even improve on the original recipes: A “Shaft” guitar riff and some discoid “waah’s” turn R.E.M.’s “The One I Love,” a tired anti-love anthem, into a steamy slice of cyberfunk 2000. Every kitschy handclap, keyboard blurt and synthetic vocal (the roboticized “You gotta keep ’em separated” is sheer genius) is hilariously apt and exalts these tunes as much as trashes ’em. I dunno if androids dream of electric sheep, but I’ll bet this is what their clock radios play when they wake up.