Heat Ray: The Archimedes Project Will Gregory Moog Ensemble

• 1 Young Archimedes (feat. BBC National Orchestra Of Wales) 03:39
• 2 Buoyancy Theory (feat. BBC National Orchestra Of Wales) 03:12
• 3 Circles, Spirals and Pi (feat. BBC National Orchestra Of Wales) 04:30
• 4 Law of the Lever (feat. BBC National Orchestra Of Wales) 03:24
• 5 The Claw (feat. BBC National Orchestra Of Wales) 04:43
• 6 Archimedes' Screw 04:53
• 7 Heat Ray (feat. BBC National Orchestra Of Wales) 04:41
• 8 The Sand Reckoner (feat. BBC National Orchestra Of Wales) 03:35
• 9 Archimedes' Legacy (feat. BBC National Orchestra Of Wales) 04:47
• Total Runtime 37:24

Info for Heat Ray: The Archimedes Project

Will Gregory Moog Ensemble announce their debut album, Heat Ray, an album inspired by the work of Archimedes, the Greek mathematician who lived and worked in the third century BC. The album - recorded by the ensemble on analogue synthesizer, alongside the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

The Will Gregory Moog Ensemble – which at times, comprises up to fourteen players – was formed by Ivor Novello winning musician, producer and co-creator of Goldfrapp, Will Gregory. Although they have been performing together since 2005, it took Archimedes to bring the ensemble together to commit these spirals of melody, circular structures, sequences, and patterns to tape. The album’s inspiration occurred during the pandemic lockdowns, when Will started digging into the mathematician’s life, after watching lectures online. “I became a bit of a YouTube fiend. Attending all these lectures I would never normally go to on subjects I had no business to be interested in. Scratch any of these maths gurus and it turned out Archimedes was their favourite mathematician. I wanted to find out why.”

The ensemble’s members – a talented bunch who have worked with the likes of Florence & the Machine and Dua Lipa - include Portishead’s Adrian Utley, a longtime collaborator of Will’s, who plays on the album and produced it. Mute’s Daniel Miller is its “kind of executive producer”, and he even played on one of the tracks. “Given he’s been into synths right from his early days, and is a genius with them, that was a good moment”, alongside John Baggott, Graham Fitkin, Simon Haram, Vyvyan Hope-Scott, Ross Hughes, Hazel Mills, Daniel Moore, Hinako Omari, Eddie Parker, Harriet Riley and Ruth Wall, their instruments include Minimoog, Moog Voyager, Korg 700s, Prophet 6 and Roland JX3P, their individual lines coming together in intricate arrangements creating a stunning superstructure of sounds.

Heat Ray takes the fertile imagination and application of those incredible times, and adds an effervescent spirit of discovery to the mix, one that often crackles and sparkles when musicians are powerfully inspired to make music together. Another legacy of Archimedes’ work rises up as a consequence – an album that brings ancient history into the modern world, pushing us towards an endlessly curious fascinating future.

Will Gregory Moog Ensemble

Will Gregory
is a muti-instrumentalist English musician and record producer from Bristol, England.

Gregory formed electronic pop group Goldfrapp in 1999 alongside bandmate Alison Goldfrapp. Together they have released seven albums, most recently ‘Silver Eye’ in 2017, and scored a string of hits including ‘Strict Machine’, ‘Ooh La La’, ‘Lovely Head’ and ‘A&E’. The multi-platinum selling band have been nominated for the Mercury Prize, multiple Grammy Awards and won an Ivor Novello for ‘Strict Machine’. Goldfrapp have also scored the soundtracks to the films My Summer of Love and Nowhere Boy, and wrote the music for Carrie Cracknell’s National Theatre acclaimed production of Medea.

Outside of Goldfrapp, Gregory has performed with artists including Tears for Fears, Peter Gabriel, The Cure, Portishead and Michael Nyman. His first opera Picard in Space premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 2011, and in 2014 he was commissioned to produce a piece for orchestra and Moog, performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra. Gregory also wrote part of the score for the National Theatre of Scotland’s James III trilogy in 2016 which was subsequently performed nationally.

Outside of pop producing and touring, Gregory has an extensive scoring credits list, with multiple documentaries (Serengeti 1 & 2, Spy in the Wild, Arcadia), Film & TV scores (BBC’s ‘Chloe’, AMC’s ‘Soulmates’), as well as operas, concert works, and music for theatre. He also writes/arranges for and performs with his own Will Gregory Moog Ensemble, a ten-piece orchestra of mono synths, which performs synth versions of new and existing works.

The Will Gregory Moog Ensemble
first performed together in 2005 as part of the Bath Festival, recreating some of the ‘Switched on Bach’ arrangements of Wendy Carlos in the Seventies. As one half of the electronic music sensation Goldfrapp, the keyboard-player and composer Will Gregory is one of the UK’s leading advocates of using synthesizers and electronic instruments to create new sounds and reinvent old ones. The band perform a mixture of specially composed music, transcriptions of classical works, and their own versions of music from popular culture and film scores.

The band have gone on to play concerts and electronic music festivals throughout the UK and Europe. They appeared with Human League’s Martyn Ware at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg in 2018, played at the Philharmonie de Paris for the Days Off festival in July 2019 and were guest artists for the BBC Concert Orchestra’s concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing at the BBC Proms 2019. They have made several broadcasts for BBC Radio 3, including an enjoyably spooky one from the Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station.

The band draws on a pool of players, and usually appears with between 6 and 10 performers, depending on the music. The current lineup comprises Will Gregory, Adrian Utley, Simon Haram, Dan Moore, Graham Fitkin, Ruth Wall, Vyv Hope-Scott, Eddie Parker, Ross Hughes and Georgie Ward.

“Deep, deep inside this substantial set I am immersed in the ceremonial … musicians and audience transcend the here and now as we journey towards the sublime.” - Louder than War / Manchester RNCM

This album contains no booklet.