FROME MOOG COOP
It's pronounced "Frome Moog Coop". Glad we could clear that up.
It's based in Frome. The music sometimes incorporates Moog synthesisers. But for the time being it's just me, so the co-op part is slightly disingenuous.
I should like, one day, to fill a cybernetic garden with players, synced ephemerally across the airwaves, combining their own personal soundscapes into a natural cacophony of sounds, organic and electronic - the perfect balance of Apollonian order and Dionysian chaos.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves...
Frome Moog Coop is my live improvised electronic music project.
This page is an archive of those performances.
I want it to grow a bit like a tree does. There's a passage in Alan Moore's Jerusalem where a character likens trees to four-dimensional objects:
"Being motionless, the only movement is that of their growth, which leaves a solid trail of wood behind in much the same way we ourselves are leaving a long stream of ghostly images."
It feels a bit like that.
These are the ghostly images.
Another Alan (the irrepressible, rascalish Mr Watts) had this to say:
"A future event can change a past event. A lot of people aren't aware of that, but it can. If I say, 'The bark of the dog and the bark of the tree,' what happens to 'bark,' the former event, is very seriously influenced by the later event 'dog' or 'tree.' Although the word sounds the same and is spelled the same, it has a different meaning according to what happens later. So, in the same way, in music. What is happening at this moment may be changed altogether by something happening later."
Alan Watts, Reality, Art and Illusion
I like the idea that these similar but distinct performances, moments in time, can recontextualise each other.
I'm also interested in the question: what does "independent music" mean in the 2020s?
For me, it feels like it should sit outside established control structures.
The notion that anyone can release anything, any time, independently has felt slightly at odds with the reality of the current environment. Whilst it is true that there is a freedom in the route to market which has never existed before, the Truth is that those routes are increasingly narrow channels, running through technological platforms that create a dependency on their whims and algorithms.
So, for now at least, the music lives in the rooms in which it's created, and on this site.
There's an incredible community of people out here, doing their own things with weird and wonderful musical equipment, at EMOMs and the like, in small rooms up and down the country, shout out to all of them for creating the spaces for these ideas to take root.
I also feel extremely indebted to the inspiring work being done by Sebastian Mullaert and his Circle of Live project, they have been profoundly helpful to me and many others in exploring these means of expression, and the deeper foundations which underpin them.
Thanks!
Rich
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