"The Moog? C'est une machine monstreuse!" announced composer Jean Jacques Perrey when he touched down in London last October. Perrey should know. With its moonwalk bass and synthetic claps like a wall of tambourines, his 1970 anthem "EVA", though 26 years old, has come to epitomise late-'90s Moog funk, an archetypal example of what San Francisco cultural anthropologist Candi Strecker calls Space Exotica.
Until Robert Moog and Herb Deutsch's 1967 modular system, synthesisers, like computers, were room-sized monsters housed in academic engineering departments and radio research stations, attended by priestly scientist-composers. The 1970 MiniMoog changed all this, releasing electronics from their holding institutions. Its Medusa-like patchbay jungle paralleled NASA computers, promising astronautic explorations into unknown dimensions of sound, and turning the musician into an operator pilot. With the twist of a knob you, too, could generate unheard-of waveforms.
The synth race had begun, and Perrey was to become the funkiest man on the Moog. "EVA" stands for Extra Vehicular Activity, or moon-walking, and the track makes the moon landing impossibly audible. After years of austere tonalities, the rediscovery of "EVA" funkatises electronics. Its tremolo weeps and woops are birds of unknown paradise cooing to each other across a forlorn moonscape. Ascending tones roar like rocket exhaust and plume upwards in a bubblicious stream, like a drink being poured in zero-g.
Since its rediscovery around three years ago, "EVA" has opened up a zone of astro-funkativity through which tracks like concrete composer Pierre Henri's barbaric "Psyche Rock" have crash-landed onto the dancefloor. Because the Moog synthesises new but limited tones, you can never quite locate the source of what you're hearing. Noises the origins of which are unknown de-realise your perception, compel strange sensations of unrecognisable unrecognition that force you into chains of analogy and comparison, demanding that you invent new names to communicate what you're hearing. This characterisation of sounds is the first sign that you're inside the field of what I call "sonic fiction", the convergence of science fiction and sound in which the track seems to come from another world, an off-world system that the title c(l)ues you into.
In the UK, the grooviest sonic fiction comes from Stereolab. Everything from the name of their label, Duophonic UltraHigh Frequency, to track titles like "Moogie Wonderland", "Outer Accelerator" and the angelic "Space Moment" exemplifies sonic fiction. Each song title announces a new manifesto, a sonic theory. Far from nostalgic, '90s Space Exotica makes audible the futurism smothered by the snickering kitschadelia of last year's Easy Listening spree. Obscured by the regressively reverential Bacharach cult, it was impossible to hear how Easy Listening was really a new perceptual threshold, how Stereophonic Sound was the VR of the '50s - when stereo meant that sound could travel through space. The sonic fiction of Joe Meek's "Telstar" emerged, intensified in The Age of the Moog.
Today's Space Exotica also breaks with the overwhelming whiteness of Easy Listening. As soon as you tune into the Moog's myth-illogical science, it becomes impossible to ignore the composer Sun Ra and his ensemble the Solar Myth Arkestra. From the 1950s onwards, Ra synthesised jazz into stereophonic fictions such as 1967's Atlantis: An Intergalactic Space Travel In Sound. Here jazz becomes a series of overlapping universes, phonofictional cosmologies and mystifying myth systems. For Ra, the MiniMoog was a cosmic communication medium. In 1970, the same year as Perrey released "EVA", Ra's album My Brother the Wind revealed a drastically alien approach to frequency modulation.
As critic John Ephland suggests, the Moog here is "a medium at work, reporting on the Future, translating the stray signals from outer space, white noise, meteor showers, NASA test patterns." By the time of Ra's traumatising 1972 Astro Black album, the Moog isn't so much Space Exotica as Space Esoterica, light years away from the jauntiness of Perrey's Moog Indigo album. Creating not so much astro funk as astro fury, Ra uses the Moog to abduct you into a requiem for aliens.
Today's Moog fascination signals a post-Kraftwerk era in machine music. Kraftwerk's automation of rhythm held electro and techno in thrall back in the '80s. Afrika Bambataa, Grandmaster Flash and Model 500 installed Kraftwerk as the origin of pop electronics, the foundation that organised its past and directed its future. Kraftwerk's 1981 album Computer World worked for music the way that Neuromancer did for fiction. It offered a consensual audition of how the future of music would turn out. Like Warhol, or Gilbert and George, Kraftwerk radiated a mesmerising mystique of cloned, blanched-out whiteness. As the servomechanisms of the synthesiser, they incarnated its white soul. They signed themselves menschmachines, the cyborgs of the sound machine.
Today, the menschmachine has been replaced by what cyberneticist John Lilly calls the human biocomputer. Brownian and Clintonian P-Funk adapts humans into biocomputers, organic parallel processors, overriding the mind-body binary machine and installing instead a bodily intelligence. The body becomes a large mind, a big, distributed brain. Funk's interlocking groove demands new response from the sensory motor system.
In the '90s of Space Exotica and Space Esoterica, the waveform transmissions of techno and electro are bending out of shape. Music's lines of inheritance break up and go wildstyle. Now you can hear the Moog, not only in Sun Ra or Stereolab, but also in DJ Zinc's Super Sharp Shooter, in Genius' Liquid Swords album, in the supersonic sitar funk of Ananda Shankar's Dancing Drums. We can hear how the Moog is acting as a strange attractor across the communications landscape, drawing sonic fields into new and unforeheard alignments.
Space Exotica's sense of unlocatable familiarity intensifies this sensation of switchback, of forgotten pasts feeding forward into the present. With its traumatising unfamiliarity, Space Esoterica switches on the outer thought of the body. Stand by - everything is about to become stranger than you ever thought possible.
Kodwo Eshun is a concept engineer and connectionist. He is the author of the forthcoming book More Brilliant Than The Sun: New Directions In Outer Thought.