Will Gregory Moog Ensemble

Will Gregory’s love affair with the Moog began in childhood with a cherished copy of Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach. Later, in his 20s, he bought a Minimoog, and started improvising with it. “It was such an expressive instrument – I absolutely loved it,” he remembers now. “...the raw quality you could get from it, when its low frequencies could sound like an animal, or like the sound of the sea.” This was at a time when digital music was dominant, “so it felt good to have an analogue beast fighting against the tide.”

Two decades later he used it on Goldfrapp’s debut album, Felt Mountain, and while out driving, he heard some of Switched-On Bach again on the radio, and was catapulted back to his past; He was reminded about this instrument, and wondered how it could be used to play live in an ensemble of mono synths, with other synthesiser players that he had met on his travels.

Ever since, the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble, at times comprising up to fourteen players in total, have played small gigs and festivals. Heat Ray is their first original album together, made in collaboration with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

The ensemble’s members are a talented bunch: Portishead’s Adrian Utley, a longtime collaborator of Will’s, plays on the album and produced it. Mute’s Daniel Miller is its “kind of executive producer”, Will says proudly, and he even played on one of the tracks. “Given he’s been into synths right from his early days, and is a genius with them, that was a good moment”. 

Also playing are John Baggott, Graham Fitkin, Simon Haram, Vyvyan Hope-Scott, Ross Hughes, Hazel Mills, Daniel Moore, Hinako Omari, Eddie Parker, Harriet Riley and Ruth Wall. Their instruments include Minimoog, Moog Voyager, Korg 700s, Prophet 6 and Roland JX3P, their individual lines coming together in intricate arrangements creating a stunning superstructure of sounds.

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The ensemble's new debut album Heat Ray is inspired by the work of Archimedes, the Greek mathematician who lived and worked in the third century BC. Will had started digging into his life in the pandemic lockdowns, after watching mathematics lectures online. “I became a bit of a YouTube fiend during Covid, basically. Attending all these lectures I would never normally go to on subjects I had no business to be interested in. Scratch any of these maths gurus and it turned out Archimedes was their favourite mathematician. I wanted to find out why.”

Heat Ray has been a humbling, joyful project for the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble, and it continues to be – Will’s still staggered that it’s likely that Archimedes worked out calculus nearly two thousand years before Isaac Newton, “I mean, the knowledge that these people had. And also, the idea that it only takes one person to absolutely leap the whole of civilisation forward, take so many steps – it’s astonishing. And to think that libraries were burned, and so much knowledge was lost for millennia. It reminds us what we have to hold onto.”

Heat Ray takes the fertile imagination and application of those incredible times, and adds an effervescent spirit of discovery to the mix, one that often crackles and sparkles when musicians are powerfully inspired to make music together. Another legacy of Archimedes’ work rises up as a consequence – an album that brings ancient history into the modern world, pushing us towards an endlessly curious and fascinating future.