A Christmas Yuleblog

Several weeks ago, I posted a yuleblog entry about electronic music, the theremin, and the Moog. To quote from that entry: " Any other Christmas Moog albums out there that I missed? I know of one which I found sealed in a Chicago record store that I'm planning on sharing next month... " Well, here it is. My final offering for my Christmas in July celebration. Guess I saved the best for last. There's not much out there on Douglas Leedy. According to a rather meandering Wikipedia entry, he was born in 1938, studied many varied styles of music all over the world, and has been composing and conducting music for most of his life. He eventually ended up in Brentwood, California at UCLA. It was here that he founded UCLA's electronic music studio and specialized in the Moog and Buchla synthesizers and an electronic gizmo named the Ognob Generator: (Click on image to enlarge) Being so close to Hollywood, the good folks at Capitol Records soon came ca...

A funny thing happened on the way to the yuleblog this morning... a local power outage wiped out a majority of what I had previously saved in a first draft. So... starting from scratch... Here's another great Christmas album courtesy of Mr. Ernie from Ernie (Not Bert) . He first offered this album back in 2005 which I gobbled up and quickly added to my collection. But last year, Ernie decided to revisit the Moog Machine yet again. In his words: "The sound should be better on this one than what I gave you last year, anyway. I know the cover of this one is in much better shape than the one I scanned last year. Also, I'm sharing stuff at a slightly higher bit rate this year, so even if the vinyl weren't cleaner (and it is), it will sound better." Where do I start this review? How about Russia? Back in 1919, a Russian inventor named Leon Theremin was fiddling around in his workshop with two radio frequency oscillators, two radio antennae, and a louds...