Album Notes

the long, strange journey that would evolve into "moog opus no.1" began when melissa cusick of nonesuch records presented me with a copy of "phases" - a retrospective of musical pioneer steve reich. the boxed-set was released to coincide with the composer's 70th birthday. the anthology includes his most recent work "you are: variations", which just goes to show that if you open your heart and mind to it, inspiration will never leave you. but i digress: revisiting reich's work reminded me not only of how his music has inspired me, but how i tend to approach my own compositions with a minimalist mindset. there is a wealth of electronic, ambient, and minimalist music out there. but how many times do the genres intersect? and how fruitful are the results of such cross-pollination? this is what i set out to explore when i began to write the pieces that would emerge as "moog opus no.1". i also decided to get more ambitious in the recording studio, not in terms of utilizing tricks and gimmickry (you wont find pro-tools on this CD) but in daring to go about things differently than i usually do. for me, this meant trying such methods as combining different time-signatures within the same piece, recording digital-to-analogue instead of the other way around, and experimenting with various audio production filters in the final mastering process. while i didn't set out to "conceptualize" anything, "moog opus no.1" coalesced into what may very well be the most fully-realized concept album of my career. or should i say "thus far" - after all, who knows where my composing will take me when i become a septuagenarian?

david gerard
brattleboro, vt
summer 2007