The Band

With the new millennium hurtling toward us at light speed, The Moog Cookbook has arrived to take the transistorized tradition, pioneered by such late-'60s albums as Moog Plays The Beatles, Switched On Baccarach and The Plastic Cow Goes Moog, where no band has gone before. This dynamic duo of Roger Joseph Manning Jr. (Jellyfish, Imperial Drag) and Brian Kehew holds the top-secret recipe for the Sound Of Tomorrow: take the freshest buzz-bin staples, season with simmering sinewaves, electronic herbs and synthetic spices, nuke in the microwave on HIGH, and process through La Machine.

A drum machine that is, which is where it all began, when Brian proclaimed, "Bossa Nova!," hit the drum machine's magic button, and with the help of Roger's waveform wizardry transformed Soundgarden's mega-smash "Black Hole Sun" into digital lambada. Soon after that, they warped The Offspring's frat-boy fist-pumper "Come Out And Play" into the mutant offspring of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder. And thus The Moog Cookbook, the musical blueprint for the final frontier, was written.

"The fun part was taking what was supposed to be such a hard-edged, masculine, testosteroned tune and sugar-coating the hell out of it," Roger laughs.

"And then I figured, if we're going to do the 1976 thing, we might as well have a Star Wars laser battle at the end," his co-chef/pilot Brian adds with obvious pride. 'We would not reject any bad ideas."

"When grunge was at its peak, everybody was in heavy guitar bands and hated keyboards," says Roger as he reflects on the recent Moog revival. "You did NOT play a synthesizer because it was UNCOOL. It was like, suddenly you're in EBN-OZN. So we couldn't wait to sink our teeth into songs we wanted to destroy and make really gross. Green Day's 'Basket Case' is one of my favorites because we took what is supposed to be a punk anthem, and through the power of arranging, turned it into the most syrupy thing in the world!"

The Moog Cookbook employs a sonic smorgasbord of golden-age-of-wireless technology to whip up such psychedelicacies as the rousing robotic polkafest "Are You Gonna Go My Way," the electric boog-a-loo/Eurotrash dance club sensation "Evenflow," the bionic Speak-'n'-Spell freakout "Free Fallin'" and the cosmic Fat Albert/Sanford-&-Son boogie-rocker "The One I Love." All played entirely on Moogs and other space-age synths, all freeze-dried and vacuum-packed for instant stereophonic satisfaction.