Passport to the future
Song by Jean Jaques Perrey
“What happens if you live in the sixties and decide to mix your funk attitude, classical music background, and interest in modern technology? ”
Moog Indigo is the answer.
French composer Jean Jaques Perrey made history, probably not even knowing it at the time, when he released his ninth studio album in 1970. Perrey met Robert Moog after moving from Paris to New York in 1959, becoming one of the first to play the Moog synthesizer when it debuted in 1964.
Moog Indigo is an album entirely built around Perrey's experiments with the Moog synthesizer.
It also happened because Robert Moog found a way to finally create a version of his legendary Synth that was more compact and didn't occupy an entire room, giving musicians and composers the chance to spend more time learning and experimenting with it.
We now live in a computer-dominated era, in which it is easy to be driven by the instrument we use while composing rather than lead it to express our original idea. If we are not in total control, the machines usually suggest a direction to take instead of the one we might have followed initially.
The approach to new instruments and gear in the early years of electronic music was, in fact, literally the opposite!
It was necessary to have an excellent knowledge of musical theory and adapt it to the machines in order to use them. There were no presets, no tutorials, no internet.
You had to be able to tell the machine what to do. This is probably why the first approach to the new invention, the Moog Synthesizer, was only to use it as an accompaniment to traditional pop arrangements.
Moog Indigo is a classical music album made with Synths, and this should be enough for anyone to listen to it at least once. The album contains adaptations of compositions by Rimsky Korsakov (Flight of the Bumblebee), Niccolò Paganini (Gossipo Perpetuo), Ludwig van Beethoven (The elephant never forgets).
“It was one of the first examples in which the Moog was used as the main instrument.”
Perrey's most popular track for contemporary electronic music audiences is probably E.V.A., the second track of Moog Indigo, which has been remixed successfully by Fatboy Slim in 2007.
The track I chose to talk about, Passport to the future, is a version of the 1967 song "Seuls au Monde" by Mireille Mathieu, with influences of the Joe Meek's hit "Telstar." It’s effortless to imagine it performed by a space orchestra somewhere on Mars.
The track is the last one on the album, and the melody reminds us of classical compositions blended with a guitar strumming and a fast hi-hat drumming. Used to keep the structure of the song together, this is a type of arrangement we will find three years later in Pink Floyd's masterpiece The Dark Side Of The Moon in the track On the run, and, as the title suggests, many other times in the electronic music of the future.
