Maybe we should start scanning the streets for white dog turds, or the catwalks for Sta Prest-style polyester flat-fronts, given the sheer unlikeliness of the latest 1970s technology to make a comeback. Because modular analogue synthesizers are back in a big way. Later this year, Roland will start selling the System-500, its first modular synth for 25 years. Rival Korg recently started selling a remake of the 40-year-old ARP Odyssey, as used on Kraftwerk’s Autobahn. Most strikingly, following its 50th anniversary last year, Moog is remaking limited numbers of its earliest modular synths, including the System 35 and System 55, without which Giorgio Moroder would never have made I Feel Love.
You’ll soon be able to hear what makes these intimidating-looking behemoths so special: 1990s Balearic dance-popsters the Grid are preparing an album for a late-summer release, which was made entirely on a Moog System 55. And Moog is laying on a series of gigs under the Moog Concordance banner at the Barbican from 8 July, featuring Suicide, Will Gregory and Keith Emerson.
Both Grid members are bona fide synth pioneers: Dave Ball is best known as the music-making half of Soft Cell, while Richard Norris, among many other things, made the early UK acid house LP Jack The Tab. Norris explains the appeal of modulars: “I don’t want to use a mouse and laptop any more; writing something in music software has become like drawing on an Etch A Sketch. What you want is to be Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry in the Black Ark, where he’s got a spring echo unit gaffer-taped under his desk, and every time he hits it with his fist it makes a noise. That’s what the System 55 does. You’ve got to stand up because you’re always changing things.”
In other words, it’s the antithesis of the press-a-button mouse jockeys who poison the airwaves with EDM. Ball points out that you have to work hard to get any noise at all out of a modular synth. “I think it’s great that people are rediscovering what synthesizers are actually about. A lot of people get music software, think ‘that’s easy’, and end up making something that sounds like Calvin Harris. Which is nothing to be proud of.”
Moog, Roland, Korg et al would not have embarked on their remake/remodel frenzy had it not been for the emergence of the “Eurorack” scene, in which enthusiasts design and sell modules that can be assembled into full-blown modulars. Norris reckons the revival is overdue. “I feel there’s something we haven’t quite appreciated about all this old technology. It got to a point where it sounded like digital was the future, so everyone abandoned the past. But actually, we left it too early. We’ve been able to use the System 55 to make new, inhuman sounds nobody has ever heard before. It’s a step back, but it’s also a step into the future.”
