Photos by the author
Moogfest is not just a music festival but also an experimental music and tech convention, a gathering for synthesizer geeks and extreme music experience-seekers. It is entertainment, but it is also some seriously nerdy shit. On Sunday, for instance, I watched analog synth legend Suzanna Ciani not only play a four-hour sound installation but use the time to answer audience questions about her custom equipment from the 1970s. At one point, she mentioned a specific synthesizer module she had used called a Multiple Arbitrary Function Generator, and the crowd lost its shit. Point being: Moogfest is Nerdvana. It rules. And as you might expect when a bunch of music nerds gather, there were nerdy T-shirts everywhere. I saw so many people in Autechre T-shirts I stopped keeping track. They were flying by so fast I couldn’t always get pictures, but I always took note. In no particular order, these are some of the nerdiest T-shirts I saw:
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All-over print photo negative of his own synthesizer circuit board (above, check out dude’s company)
Aphex Twin logo
lowercase words: “moog synthesizers” (official festival merch)
“Sorry for Partying” in Comic Sans on plain white T-shirt
Nikolai Tesla as a Lego figure
Picture of space
John Bonnamassa tour merch
Stripes
Drawing of a synthesizer circuit board (official festival merch)
Drawing of a synthesizer circuit board with the word “Reverb” written under it
Drawing of a synthesizer circuit board (plain)
“DRONE NOT DRONES”
This Sunn O))) shirt that somehow explains the arcane mysteries of the doom overlords:
“Kawaii Invaders ’92” (pink T-shirt)
Two guys sitting next to each other in a church both wearing Liturgy shirts but for different albums (The Ark Work and Aesthetica, respectively)
Picture of space
Picture of pepperoni print cat in space
NASA logo
Not a shirt, but a guy wearing a gas mask
Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man shredding on guitar (above)
Pi symbol with pi formula above it and pi in numerals written out below it
More pictures of space
Throwback logo Iowa Hawkeyes shirt
“The Future Is Female” (worn by a dude)
“Radiohead” (with Radiohead logo)
Winterfell: Stark Brew Winter Ale (1759) with House Stark wolf banner logo
All-over print shirt of a photo of his own synthesizer mod (above)
Heineken logo that read “Hydrogen”
Grateful Dead logo with Black Flag logo on its forehead
1080p Collection (long sleeve)
“MongoDB” with MongoDB logo (as in the open source NoSQL relational database developer)
“Sputnik”
Kyle Kramer is browsing Etsy for some dope shit as we speak. Follow him on Twitter.
