Gershon Kingsley

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Gershon Kingsley, (born October 28, 1922) is a contemporary German-born American composer most famous for composing the early electronic pop instrumental song "Popcorn". He was born in a Jewish family which fled to Palestine in 1938, where he became a self-taught pianist and performed with local jazz bands around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He led the First Moog Quartet and was the first person to use the Moog synthesizer in live performance. His compositions are eclectic and vary erratically between the avant-Garde and pop. His career as a pop musician took off with the release of The In Sound from Way Out!, which he recorded with Jean-Jacques Perrey. The Perrey-Kingsley duo went on to record Kaleidoscopic Vibrations: Spotlight on the Moog and subsequently went their separate ways. Kingsley then recorded Music to Moog By, a classic Moog album consisting mainly of cover songs, originally by The Beatles, Beethoven, and Simon and Garfunkel. His next effort, titled First Moog Quartet, is a compilation of live recordings from his nationwide tour featuring no fewer than four Moog synthesizers. Some of these compositions are in a much more experimental vein, featuring spoken word and beat poetry backed by extraterrestrial synthetic noises and tones. Kingsley did not dwell on the Moog, and later pioneered the use of the earliest Fairlight and Synclavier digital synthesizers.

[edit] Discography

• 1969 Music to Moog By
• 2003 First Moog Quartet
• 2005 Voices from the Shadow
• 2006 God Is a Moog

[edit] External links

• www.kingsleysound.com - Gershon Kingsley's homepage