Living in England, Moose was bombarded
with the late '70s / early '80s synthetic music
explosion which opened his ears to a whole new
palette of sound. This new technology relied
heavily on his other passion of computers being
used for digital control.
It started small,
but building on more and more complex setups, he
eventually created a fully-functional private
studio which rivaled commercial midi-based
programming facilities of the time. This meant that
programming could be a 24/7 process, most of which
he did alone...
But after a major
change of writing styles in the late '90s, and a
move from London to Los Angeles in 2001, Moose
joined forces with a neighbour to release a
darkwave / synthpop album on an indie label in
Chicago, comprising music & vocals totally
produced in his home, under the name
'alaskahighway'.
When the eventual
evolution meant the band amicably split in late
2006 after recording their second album, Moose was
invited to join Rose's project primarily as the
programmer, but this quickly turned into a
fully-fledged writing partnership which saw a whole
new raft of songs created in the heavier style he
had been unable to produce in the previous
project.
With 'Among the
Weeds' there is no compromise. This is
revolution...
Moose conceived & built an
electronic drum kit played standing up, and for
obvious reasons was dubbed 'the drum
tree'.
Pintech
Dingbat trigger pads mounted on an Ultimate
Support
speaker stand, firing sounds from a Roland V-Drum
module
using Xcel
Drumsticks,
the drum
tree
strikes an interesting visual on stage...
Moose : "I
basically taught myself to play drums whilst
sitting in London traffic listening to bands like
Depeche Mode, Simple Minds & The Cult. Driving
a vehicle is not the most obvious choice for drum
lessons but this meant that my brain associated
hitting 2 pads for the hihat & no bass drum
pedal, so when it came to actually play a real drum
kit I couldn't co-ordinate my actions so, out of
necessity, I invented the drum tree..."
"The original
concept used an angled tube to space out the drum
triggers but this new evolution works much better.
Stage set-up & tear-down takes only a few
minutes as no microphones are used, just a
pre-wired Roland drum trigger / brain combination
firing sounds in to my stage mixer. Both simple
& effective... ".
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