Boogafoo Music

Boogafoo Music, my Moog-woogy album from 1974 is now available from itsu jitsu!

 

In 1974 while I attended St. Olaf’s Paracollege, my best friend Larry Heyl ran the Moog Studio. He taught me how to plug patch cords and fiddle knobs to wring squawks out of the Moog Modular Synthesizer. I was earning a hand-rolled degree in Creative Studies so I added torturing the Moog to my curriculum.

Moog Modular Synthesizer like the one in the St. Olaf Moog Studio

To me the Moog was a machine for making weird noises so I pushed it into uncharted territories of sonic strangeness. I didn’t emulate any musician but indulged in pure sonic experimentation. I taped a handful of tracks and called my album “Babie’s[sic] First Words” Twenty years later my daughter renamed it “Boogafoo Music”, which stuck.

Doug Sharp in ’74

I carried around this 2nd-gen tape for years before digitizing it, no charge for the tape hiss

We kept track of our Moog patchcord setups with this worksheet