Begun in the Autumn of 1908, the Moon Wiring Club were a group of notable individuals and bored aristocrats who met twice monthly (often within the Blank Workshop) to discuss their shared interests of unusual electronics and nocturnal happenings within the occult sciences.
The founder members of this earliest incarnation of the Club included eminent scientist Almond Talbot, actress Pomona Fripps, and both Paris Green and Dr. Lettow-Vorbeck, who often displayed, and performed with musical apparatus from the Blank Workshop Laboratory for the benefit and enlightenment of their fellows.
During the period of 1912-1938 the Moon Wiring Club became extremely popular, and according to the club’s record book of the time, could account for over two hundred fully paid-up members. However during the unusual summer of 1939, the organisation’s popularity seems to have dissipated almost overnight, and for the next thirty or so years almost no mention of this esoteric society can be found.
The common-held cause for this dissolution, is that the novelty value of the Club had long had its day. Many other, far grander activities and fashionable distractions were easily available to the affluent and influential members of this stilted guild. While this was almost certainly the case, there is another view held by some, that the unwelcome visitor and sinister happenings at the Club's August 14th 1938 meeting, left them with too few members to logistically carry on.
After a number of years with the Moon Wiring Club seemingly laid to rest, the name quietly made a reappearance in 1976 as a group alias for Gecophonic’s ‘in-house band’, and was responsible for reasonably notable releases, such as Lamp Lighting and The Stone Sun soundtrack album for Gelographic RadioTelevision.
Perhaps the most pertinent question that one asks about the Moon Wiring Club, is why do Mr. Paris Green and Dr Lettow-Vorbeck feel the need to permanently cloak themselves in a shroud of pompous mystery, when the name currently amounts to little more than a vanity project for two self-indulgent, vague conceptualists.
A simple answer to this question is not forthcoming from the two gentlemen in question, who reasonably prefer the anonymity of their self romanticised surroundings to a more down-to-earth, and rational environment.
However, there is another more puzzling train of thought which proposes that this incarnation of the Moon Wiring Club has in fact refined the uncertain aims and purposes of its predecessor, but now broadcasts them to a wider audience through the medium of obtainable, recorded sound.
Mr Geoff Laughton ~ Curious Effects picture weekly.
