This is Eban Crawford playing the prototype Expressiv Infinity in one of the hallways near our workshops. The city of Durham has done a great job bringing this event to their city and the support for all of the art and venues that are playing a role at MoogFest. I’d love to come back but will need to take off a few years to recover from the stress of signing up for events and workshops that fill up minutes after the schedule goes live, and even then, it turns out that your reservation doesn’t have to be respected if one of the MoogFest staff members decides to let walk-ins enter a workshop early thus bumping you because of fire code rules that only allow so many people in the room. Getting booted from the Robert Rich performance also hurt my enthusiasm. The solution next time, I suppose, would be to purchase the $350 VIP option, which allows the attendee to register their interests before the cheaper $99 general admission guest. While the organizer might think their pricing is fair, I don’t think they take into account those who are incurring greater costs due to coming from out of state and out of the country. The truth is that I don’t know how I’d organize it any differently for such a niche and eclectic event.

Building circuits at the LittleBits workshop, where we are learning to make our own optoelectronic sequencers and noisemakers, is a blast.

Our last performance was in the middle of the afternoon and it was of Suzanne Ciani performing on and demoing her Buchla synth. Suzanne is a pioneer in electronic instruments and sounds having created an iconic bottle of Coca-Cola being opened sound and a wide body of work for film and television over her career. She also holds the distinction of being the first woman to be the solo composer of a major Hollywood film. Most recently, she’s been working with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, who has been gaining attention as a Eurorack synthesizer artist.

Suzanne Ciani’s Buchla synthesizer.

Heading south out of North Carolina and traveling through South Carolina on our way back to Atlanta for the flight home tomorrow. It was a truly great adventure and learning experience.

Welcome to MoogFest 2016 in Durham, North Carolina, and the main event of why we flew to Georgia late last week. With concerts, gigs, talks, classes, and workshops all centered around technology and electronic music, this sounded like an interesting way to spend some time on vacation, and with Caroline being up for attending with me, we took a few extra days to travel some of the Blue Ridge Parkway we’d not driven before. Last night, upon arrival in Durham, we finished up our registration process and received the wristbands that would give us access to the various venues and events that are planned for the next four days. Our first stop was at the “Pop-up Moog Factory” at the Power Plant Gallery on the American Tobacco Campus, which is a GREAT place to hold this event.

Within minutes of our arrival at this “Factory” shop, I set something in motion that was going to make a huge impact on my future. I bought a Moog Mother-32. It was only $499 and self-contained; with it, I wouldn’t need anything else. I could plug headphones into it, and it had all of the modulation and sequencing abilities of anybody who was starting out in the exploration of synthesizers. Sure, I had an old simple Moog back in 1981 or ’82, but I wasn’t serious back then like I am now. Mind you that we did NOT come to this event with any intention of buying any equipment. A year or so before, I had just started exploring the world of the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) with Bitwig and was completely satisfied. Matter of fact, if you’d talked to anyone I knew they’d have told you that I was adamantly anti-hardware and absolutely pro-software. The leak in the dyke was just blown open, but I didn’t quite know that yet.

Rick Burnett was about to play a corrupting influence on me due to his graciousness in explaining how certain modules could complement the Mother-32 I had just acquired. First up, though, was me passing Peter Edwards of Bastl Instruments who had recently joined the company over in Brno, Czech Republic. Earlier in the morning, while still at our hotel, following a link from some literature emailed by the organizer of today’s festivities, I watched a video of a hairy man in the woods introducing the Bit Ranger self-contained battery-operated mini synthesizer that looked fun. At only $159 and the fact that I’d be the first person ever to buy one, I couldn’t resist my early adopter nature and gave in to the impulse to own this thing. Turns out that they made a mistake in charging me, and upon seeing me later, asked if it was okay to cancel the payment and charge me the real price of $259, I agreed.

Now, back to Rick Burnett. He patiently took his time and repeatedly, over the course of the day, educated me about aspects of Eurorack I had no idea about. While this stuff looked interesting, it also was incredibly difficult to get my head wrapped around and so I ended up having more questions today than any more desire to purchase stuff beyond what I had bought in the first 20 minutes of MoogFest.

The people from the IBM Watson Center were featured in a talk about an introduction to cognitive technology regarding art and artificial intelligence. Great talk and precisely why I wanted to visit MoogFest. Not just this talk but many of the programs seemed interesting. One of the people talking this afternoon gave us this formula above and a link to this story: The Algorithm that Will Save Humanity… or Destroy It.

One of the classes Caroline had wanted to attend was this one for learning the Theremin; I took a pass and was off doing something else or talking or maybe looking at those Eurorack modules I shouldn’t have been looking at.

Went over to catch Gary Numan at a venue next to this one, but it was jam-packed, and there was a line a mile long to get in. That room was at capacity, and they were only letting an equal number of people enter as compared to how many were leaving. At the outdoor stage, Floating Points were performing so we caught them for a bit.

We’d gotten lucky and snagged a couple of the cherished few spots for Robert Rich’s Sleep Concert that was to start at midnight. Unfortunately, we were asked to leave because we didn’t have the intention to stay for the duration of the performance due to my sleep apnea and not being able to hook up a CPAP conveniently. To say I was pissed would be an understatement, and for a minute, I had a pretty good idea of what it’s like to be discriminated against for having a disability. Supposedly the request came directly from the artist; you might say I’m bitter about this shit treatment.

Afrikan Sciences was at the Pinhook and was off the hook, but he almost didn’t make it down from New York and barely got set up before his set was supposed to end. In that short time, he was able to bring us into his music and imagination he’d won me over. This guy was amazing.