Robert Moog

490 pages, hardback, with 60 black and white photographs. Foreword by Francis Ford Coppola. Published by Oxford University Press. Voltage control. Two words, and everything downstream of them: the oscillator that tracks a keyboard, the envelope that shapes a note's attack and decay, the ladder filter that gives a sawtooth its wet, vocal edge. These are the grammar of the instrument, and they are almost all his. Anyone who has turned a cutoff knob has touched Bob Moog's thinking. He died in 2005 …

FIRST PRESSThis book launched the current Lounge Music Revival and has single-handedly caused the re-release of hundreds of neglected recordings (virtually every LP pictured has been brought back into print). Featured album cover art is now the hipster style imitated by rock bands. Incredibly Strange Music surveys "easy listening, " "exotica, " and "celebrity" (massive categories in themselves) as well as recordings by (singing) cops and (polka-playing) priest, undertakers, religious ventriloqui…