Welcome to MoogFest 2016 in Durham, North Carolina, and the main event of why we flew to Georgia late last week. With concerts, gigs, talks, classes, and workshops all centered around technology and electronic music, this sounded like an interesting way to spend some time on vacation, and with Caroline being up for attending with me, we took a few extra days to travel some of the Blue Ridge Parkway we’d not driven before. Last night, upon arrival in Durham, we finished up our registration process and received the wristbands that would give us access to the various venues and events that are planned for the next four days. Our first stop was at the “Pop-up Moog Factory” at the Power Plant Gallery on the American Tobacco Campus, which is a GREAT place to hold this event.

Within minutes of our arrival at this “Factory” shop, I set something in motion that was going to make a huge impact on my future. I bought a Moog Mother-32. It was only $499 and self-contained; with it, I wouldn’t need anything else. I could plug headphones into it, and it had all of the modulation and sequencing abilities of anybody who was starting out in the exploration of synthesizers. Sure, I had an old simple Moog back in 1981 or ’82, but I wasn’t serious back then like I am now. Mind you that we did NOT come to this event with any intention of buying any equipment. A year or so before, I had just started exploring the world of the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) with Bitwig and was completely satisfied. Matter of fact, if you’d talked to anyone I knew they’d have told you that I was adamantly anti-hardware and absolutely pro-software. The leak in the dyke was just blown open, but I didn’t quite know that yet.

Rick Burnett was about to play a corrupting influence on me due to his graciousness in explaining how certain modules could complement the Mother-32 I had just acquired. First up, though, was me passing Peter Edwards of Bastl Instruments who had recently joined the company over in Brno, Czech Republic. Earlier in the morning, while still at our hotel, following a link from some literature emailed by the organizer of today’s festivities, I watched a video of a hairy man in the woods introducing the Bit Ranger self-contained battery-operated mini synthesizer that looked fun. At only $159 and the fact that I’d be the first person ever to buy one, I couldn’t resist my early adopter nature and gave in to the impulse to own this thing. Turns out that they made a mistake in charging me, and upon seeing me later, asked if it was okay to cancel the payment and charge me the real price of $259, I agreed.

Now, back to Rick Burnett. He patiently took his time and repeatedly, over the course of the day, educated me about aspects of Eurorack I had no idea about. While this stuff looked interesting, it also was incredibly difficult to get my head wrapped around and so I ended up having more questions today than any more desire to purchase stuff beyond what I had bought in the first 20 minutes of MoogFest.

The people from the IBM Watson Center were featured in a talk about an introduction to cognitive technology regarding art and artificial intelligence. Great talk and precisely why I wanted to visit MoogFest. Not just this talk but many of the programs seemed interesting. One of the people talking this afternoon gave us this formula above and a link to this story: The Algorithm that Will Save Humanity… or Destroy It.

One of the classes Caroline had wanted to attend was this one for learning the Theremin; I took a pass and was off doing something else or talking or maybe looking at those Eurorack modules I shouldn’t have been looking at.

Went over to catch Gary Numan at a venue next to this one, but it was jam-packed, and there was a line a mile long to get in. That room was at capacity, and they were only letting an equal number of people enter as compared to how many were leaving. At the outdoor stage, Floating Points were performing so we caught them for a bit.

We’d gotten lucky and snagged a couple of the cherished few spots for Robert Rich’s Sleep Concert that was to start at midnight. Unfortunately, we were asked to leave because we didn’t have the intention to stay for the duration of the performance due to my sleep apnea and not being able to hook up a CPAP conveniently. To say I was pissed would be an understatement, and for a minute, I had a pretty good idea of what it’s like to be discriminated against for having a disability. Supposedly the request came directly from the artist; you might say I’m bitter about this shit treatment.

Afrikan Sciences was at the Pinhook and was off the hook, but he almost didn’t make it down from New York and barely got set up before his set was supposed to end. In that short time, he was able to bring us into his music and imagination he’d won me over. This guy was amazing.