Messing About With Vintage Synths is the Most Fun You Can Have in a Hotel Room

It's not every Friday afternoon that you find yourself in a swanky hotel room with a beer in your hand and some very, very expensive technology at your fingertips. I was lucky enough to be invited to one of Shoreditch's trendiest hotels — no, not the Premier Inn just off Old St — to spend an hour or so mucking about on the kind of musical equipment that you'd sell your house for. Richard Norris, the sound engineer and producer best known for being one half of The Grid, actually did that.

Electronic pioneers Moog had kitted the place out with a collection of the kind of synths that'd have the blokes who thumb through yellowing copies of Sound on Sound night after night lifting off the floor with excitement. This was the Soundlab they'd put together with bespoke speaker manufacturers Bowers & Wilkins. There were Taurus 3 bass pedals, a Little Phatty Stage II keyboard, a couple of seriously wonked out theremins, a diamond hard drum machine and a copy of the Moog System 55, a modular synthesizer that first emerged into the world in 1973. I had no idea how any of these worked but they looked cool, and I'm pretty certain that I looked cool as I stood scrolling through presets occasionally tapping out the odd note until anyone asked if it was me playing said note and I got embarrassed and went back to working out my scroll-finger.

Being devoid of any actual musical talent, I brought a friend down with me who actually knows how to do more to a drum machine than break it. Matthew Thomas, known to most of us as Rushmore, runs the Trax Couture label and throws the House of Trax parties. The tracky, steely club music he releases, promotes and plays might not seem like a natural fit with the equipment on display but he was like an analogue Augustus Gloop.

Before me and Thomas were taken up to the suite we'd decided to try and fashion a THUMP summer anthem in the time we had at our disposal. Despite my complete lack of rhythm and inability to play anything more complex than Frère Jacques, and Thomas' penchant for the darker end of the clubbing spectrum, I was convinced that we'd be able to get in there, start jamming, and immediately come up with the kind of super-simple banger that adds another zero to Guetta's bank account and shifts a few thousand bottles of VK Blue in provincial clubs the land over.

Surprisingly, it turned out that making a hit record isn't actually as easy as I thought it might be. The kit room was overwhelming. While I stood about like a lemon trying to take it all in — the lights! the sounds! the cables! the free doughnuts! — Thomas was all over everything. "It felt like a surreal Christmas day when we got in there," he told me afterwards. "I didn't know what to touch first, so I touched everything."

As you can hear, our initial foray wasn't the chart-ready smash we were expecting. Still, we'd only been on the knobs for a few minutes, so there was still everything to play for. Before you find out how we got on, a short history of the Moog.

Robert Moog, American electronic pioneer, was born in New York in 1934. By 1948 he'd already started producing his own theremins — pulsing wands that react to the player's near touch, with physical proximity coaxing out warped, weird, otherworldly howls and whimpers — eventually ending up designing circuits for legendary oddball Raymond Scott. By the mid-60s, Moog had graduated to designing and manufacturing his own modular synthesizers. Those defiantly non-digital displays of engineering ingenuity and experimental excellence went on to be used by everyone from Alesso to Brian Eno, Deadmau5 to Florian Fricke.

The first Moog superstar was Wendy Carlos. Carlos' Switched on Bach took the classical composer's majestic orchestral work and reimagined it as a suite of chintzy synth-saturated oddities that went on to sell over a million copies. Ever since, the monstrous Moogs have become synonymous with experimentation and ambition. They require work to work. Users — and having grappled with them myself, I think it makes sense to think of anyone dabbling with anything like the vast System 55 as that, rather than as a player of said devices — fiddle endlessly with patches, switches, and plugs. Wires trail and loop, spool and unfurl, notes hum, click, and whir. The smallest manipulations radically alter the soundscape. They are genuinely exciting machines, offering near limitless possibilities to those with the patience to absorb and understand minute intricacies. I wasn't quite there yet. Rushmore was getting somewhere though. Just about. Maybe.

The instruments had been brought over from the University of Surrey, down in Guilford, and were set to tour round the UK before returning to Shoreditch for a series of Moog-heavy events featuring the likes of World Unknown meastro Andy Blake, Steve Stapleton from the ever-terrifying Nurse with Wound, and Japanese noisenik Keiji Haino. Based on what you see below, I don't think me and Rushmore will be making a guest appearance.

As it became ever more apparent that we didn't have a "Turn Around" in us, let alone a "Music Sounds Better with You" we made an artistic decision to just jam, to let loose and forget the rigidity of structure, to be at one with the music, man, to let it ebb and flow, to throw caution to the wind and follow a righteous path to freedom. It didn't matter that the path we trodded was pretty unbearably unlistenable. From there on in, it was pure, simple, childish pleasure. This was like playing with Lego minus the potential for stabbing pains in the soles of our feet. Our only limitations were ourselves. Go on, Moog, give us a few days in there and I promise we'll come up with this year's "Lola's Theme."

Josh Baines is on Twitter