terrible news. robert moog has an inoperable brain tumor:


As many of you know by now I am currently bed ridden with a brain tumor. My condition changes from day to day. Ileana and I want to answer your questions about my condition. Ileana will be using this web site to update everyone.

he's doing chemo. i hope he pulls through this.

speaking of robert moog, i watched the dvd for the documentary on him a few days ago. i'd heard very mixed things about the film on the exotica list. initially i thought some of them may have just been overreacting, but as the film progressed and the more i thought about it - i started to see their point.

in some ways it's a missed opportunity. it's not that the film is bad, it's just that it could have been much better.

for me there seems to lack a clear structure, and a lot of footage feels like "let's get bob moog together with some old friends and see what they say!" so sometimes we get bob with someone chatting. sometimes this works, other times it doesn't. i would have liked to have seen more interviews with people away from bob moog. there's a scene where bob is in japan giving some sort of speech, but they never show him giving the speech - just bits of him talking about it. why not show part of that speech? couldn't they film there? it just seems odd. or when someone mentions that one of the old moog synths is in the smithsonian there isn't a shot of it or anything. hearing about something is one thing, but to see it is another thing. it's a film not a book - why not show us some of the stuff that is being talked about?

there's a scene of jean jacques perrey performing live with luke vibert which is cool, but it's a bit odd that they never bothered to interview luke. one of my favourite things in the film was this old footage of gershon kingsley introducing the moog to an audience. sadly there is nothing in the extras containing the rest of this footage. the extras are mainly just interviews that didn't make it into the film, but i would have liked to have seen more vintage performance footage make it into the extras.

i don't recall them mentioning raymond scott in the doc. either, which seems odd. how can you talk about early electronic music and not mention raymond scott or leon theremin?

i haven't watched the production notes, so maybe some of these criticisms are discussed there. of the music related docs i've seen lately, this is probably my least favourite. i probably sound a lot more negative than i mean to. i still think it's worth seeing, but as a doc it's not nearly as good as it could have been.