Gershon Kingsley

Gershon Kingsley, (b. October 28 1922) is a Jewish German-American composer, most famous for composing the early electronic pop song Popcorn. 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 carreer 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 less than four Moog synthesizers. Some of these compositions are in a much more experimental vein, featuring spoken word and beat poetry backed by extra-terrestrial synthetic noises and tones. Kingsley did not dwell on the Moog, and later pioneered the use of the earliest Fairlight and Synclavier digital synthesizers.

External link

• Gershon Kingsley's homepage