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The producers of I Dream of Wires<\/em>‘ \u201cHardcore Edition\u201d weren’t kidding when they named the film. The original film is a lovingly detailed and insightful feature-length documentary look at the analog synthesizer: its genesis, birth, evolution, demise and subsequent surprising rebirth. Drawing on history and contemporary interviews with synth fiends you’d recognize (Skinny Puppy<\/strong>‘s Cevin Key<\/strong>, Nine Inch Nails<\/strong>‘ Trent Reznor<\/strong>), I Dream of Wires<\/em> successfully explains the appeal and intimidation factor of the mighty beast that is the analog synth.<\/p>\n Though I consider myself more than a casual aficionado of the analog synthesizer (I own several, though none are the impossibly expensive switchboard-panel looking modular design), I learned quite a bit watching this film. You know those stories where two people are working concurrently, yet independent of one another, racing toward a similar end? You know, like Nikola Tesla<\/strong> and Thomas Edison<\/strong>? Well, Bob Moog<\/strong><\/a> (\u201ceast coast\u201d) and Don Buchla<\/strong> (\u201cwest coast\u201d) shared a similar story. Buchla’s approach was \u2013 his adherents would arguer \u2013 more \u201cpure,\u201d as he didn’t wish to limit\/encumber his synthesizer with anything so drearily commonplace as a keyboard. Moog, on the other hand, thought in more practical \u2013 yet equally groundbreaking) terms, so even his earliest monophonic modular synthesizers were controlled by a keyboard that would render the machine at least nominally familiar to a pianist or organist.<\/p>\n I Dream of Wires<\/em> gets into much more than that, though, as it charts the decline of the analog synth in favor of the sterile Yamama DX-7 in the 1980s. In that period, old Moogs could be picked up secondhand in pawn shops for next to nothing ( to wit: I bought a Moog Rogue in 1982 for, I think, $125). But as the 90s unfolded, select musicians began to rediscover the joys of \u201creal\u201d synthesizers (there’s<\/em> an oxymoron for ya) and things have been on a slow, gradual upswing ever since.<\/p>\n The new \u201cHardcore Edition\u201d expands on all of this, and may be more than the average viewer wants (or can handle in a single sitting). But if one views it more as a series or miniseries, the four-hour DVD makes for excellent watching.<\/p>\n Follow \u201cthe_musoscribe\u201d on <\/a> The producers of I Dream of Wires‘ \u201cHardcore Edition\u201d weren’t kidding when they named the film. The original film is a lovingly detailed and insightful feature-length documentary look at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,26,49,56,65],"tags":[1028],"class_list":["post-5779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dvd","category-electronica","category-new-release","category-prog","category-review","tag-i-dream-of-wires","cat-25-id","cat-26-id","cat-49-id","cat-56-id","cat-65-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5779\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/musoscribe.com\/images\/icon_twitter_small.jpg\"){kind=icon}
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