It's easy enough to get to know M. Geddes Gengras, a Los Angeles-based musician whose career to date has been a super-charged blitz through myriad genre shifts and musical accomplices. (Fortunately, he has a huge amount of music streaming for free on his Bandcamp page, and the Out Door comprehensively chronicled his work in a feature from earlier this year.) It's not necessary to become fully acquainted with Gengras' output to enjoy Collected Works Vol. 1: The Moog Years, a limited vinyl and digital release of contemplative instrumental work. In fact, anyone familiar with his most popular release to date, as part of the Gengras/Sun Araw/Congos culture crash that gave us the euphoric Icon Give Thank, will find themselves stepping onto craggier land here. Gone are the sunshine and purity from Icon, with a strong sense of embrace replaced by something far more inward looking and ruminative.
Gengras' work with the Moog largely sidesteps common sounds connected to the instrument. This isn't the giddy, frothy, bubbly tone found on countless covers records in the vein of Moog Plays the Beatles. Gengras cites Stereolab as the first band he heard who used the instrument, but their avant-pop approach lies in sharp contrast to his work here. Instead, he's remarkably restrained, choosing to tease out tiny motifs, letting oscillators softly pulse in the background, barely leaving a trace of hefty bass. It's not clear which Moogs Gengras was using, but clearly he's more enamored with using them to paint fainter traces than he is with going into all-out attack mode. It's a sound with more common companions in the past than the present, at times recalling Daphne Oram's moody "Brociliande" or the processor noise of Suzanne Ciani's "Second Breath".
The strong shift in mood strung across Collected Works is to be expected from something that was recorded in different periods, but what's surprising is how well that creates a sense of journey across the record. Compilations don't often hang together well, usually forging rather awkward trails that hint at how ideas evolved. But here it's mostly seamless, with a lament punctured by noises that sound like a fried circuit board ("Resistor") segueing perfectly into a minimalist composition that resembles the work Aphex Twin was indulging in around the time of Selected Ambient Works Volume II ("Untitled #4"). Gengras can alternate between big and small in a heartbeat-- the opening "10.17.2009" has a boundless feel that positions it in a place as vast as Mountains' most recent output, while "Inductor" meshes a mix of twinkly electronics and new age yearning that aligns it with Laurie Spiegel's The Expanding Universe.
Clearly Gengras is well schooled in this stuff, but there are only a handful of too-obvious steals from the music that preceded him in this field. Mostly he's focussed on setting and mood, reaching down to a place that makes it feel like he's trying to make the electronic equivalent of an old blues record. At its best this album has a weather-worn feeling, a sense of analog circuitry entering old age, maturing gracefully from frivolous beginnings. It fits well with the idea that these synths are very personal instruments, with each having unique quirks and characteristics. It's not always successful, but Collected Works reaches moments of poignancy, usually when a bank of synth noise rolls in and provides a dark cloak to hang over the track. In those moments you can almost picture Gengras carefully stabbing at a Moog keyboard, trying to figure out where the emotional center of such a surprisingly malleable instrument could possibly lie.
