Pete Namlook & Klaus Schulze

The Evolution of the Dark Side of the Moog
Ambient World (Germany)



Not only is this, the compendium of this long running series, my first listen to any of them, but I also got it just days prior to hearing about Robert Moog falling ill due to a brain tumor. His eventual passing compelled me to give it a listen again, and his spoken introduction makes me both sad and yet also introspective at the music revolution he launched, as is apparent from this album, which samples a track from each of the previous eight (of ten total!) albums. Namlook and Schulze lay down big fat Moog lines in a giant, cosmic reverb-y void. All the song titles reference a Pink Floyd song, albeit in a cheeky, rearranged manner (Phantom Heart Brother, Careful With That AKS Peter, etc.) but it's not very Floydian.
A friend told me that this sounds like a long lost Jean-Michel Jarre album, and I'd have to agree. It's very deliberately old-school - save for the occasional not-too-ancient sounding drum machine. Maybe that's why I enjoy it so. One could imagine futuristic (by late seventies reckoning) spaceships careening around the room, Carl Sagan in his dandelion-seed spaceship or recall a lysergic memory or two from the pre-Reagan era.
Folks who stopped listening to music after Tomita, Vangelis, and Tangerine Dream peaked can have a reason to rejoice and lament no more that the future ain't what it used to be.

Evolution of the Dark Side of the Moog pt. 1
Evolution of the Dark Side of the Moog pt. 2