lara durback

They Meet.


Learning to play the Moog.

Something I absolutely needed to do.

One of the reasons I came here. To make music on a synthesizer, to try something completely new, based only on a love of electronic music and a frustration with words. Trying to tell you what the Moog is when I don’t understand myself. Difficult enough in words: “analog synthesizer,” “voltage- controlled electronic music modules”… Perhaps I will get better at describing it in the process.

It is a large, important-looking, and confusing-looking set of boxes, with knobs and holes, switches, and tiny lights. It is the recently-antiquated form of futuristic. There’s a keyboard in front of it. You must walk around the small room to approach it entirely, and 10 feet across the room the mixer and tape deck and speakers loom. You will have to move around a lot to get some sound to finally emerge, not to mention make sure all the “pots are up,” i.e. the volume knobs are turned clockwise in various different locations.

There is a circuit that you must understand. This is the only prerequisite for making sounds of some sort. There are “patch cords” that must be plugged into the little holes. Once you understand the basic order of connecting, you can proceed:

Connect an oscillator (waveform) to a mixer.

Connect a positive output to patch 1.

AND

Connect Monitor 1 & 2 to Tape Out L & R

Connect Master 1& 2 to Tape In L & R

(One thankfully learns them quickly.)

Once you have the circuit you can create a sound, then you learn theories for what you can do with the sound.


Let it be my gnarled/bumpy tree,

useless and unwieldy but very much alive.

Why do it at all? “The heart begins the motion/ Then mind and will join in and drive it on/ Until it reaches all the body and limbs.” Secret motions, internal whirring. A need to learn. To become adept at things I know nothing about. But. Measurement sneaks in with knowledge: quality, quantity, a constant daunting. There is “no end to the weighing of things.” There is, alongside, a desire to love something without judging and a need to be loved without being judged.

[...]

I will be almost ready to make the sound I want to hear.

* * *

Lara Durback loves Oakland, Philly, and San Francisco so much. She: an artist/poet working with text, letterpress printing, sound (analog synthesizers and field recording), as well as the book form, and any other medium that can be combined and smashed together. Currently contemplating humans awash in electromagnetic fields: both those from the earth and those emitted by powerlines and electronic devices, and how difficult it is to match a field to a source.