Moog’s Labyrinth marks a bold new treaty between east and west coasts: “This feels like a new type of Moog”£599/$599, moogmusic.com
Our recent Moog Spectravox review opened with a recap on how difficult a year it’s seemingly been for the iconic synth company, with job cuts, store closures, a headquarter move and more. Thankfully we didn’t have much difficulty getting to grips with the Spectravox’s fabulous all-analogue filter bank and vocoder, and gave it a MusicTech Choice award. Perhaps, we thought, things aren’t all as bad in North Carolina as they might appear — at least on the part of the products.
In other areas though, Moog’s headaches just won’t go away. Spectravox was received a warm reception at this year’s Superbooth show in Berlin; but alongside this release, another, unannounced Moog synth called Labyrinth was being leaked, and was even made available for sale for a short time.

READ MORE: Moog’s Spectravox: A slice of classic Moog for its semi-modular line

Bemusement ensued, orders were placed, units were actually shipped and videos were soon uploaded. The listing was promptly removed. That’s not even the only Moog product to have leaked recently: Muse is slated by numerous outlets to become Moog’s new flagship polysynth, only you won’t find that information anywhere on official channels.
Despite what was clearly supposed to be a more unexpected and impactful announcement, Moog has now officially announced Labyrinth. It’s a ‘parallel generative’ synthesizer combining two very different approaches to synthesis synonymous with the so-called East Coast and West Coast schools. It sports two sequencers, two oscillators and two envelope generators, along with a wavefolder and a novel (for Moog at least) dual-mode filter. While not exactly reinventing the wheel with its discrete components, Labyrinth’s design ensures all work together in a unique way.
Labyrinth feeds its two fixed-wave oscillators, outputting sine and triangle waves respectively, into a mixer section offering the addition of noise and a ring modulator. The mixer output is then faced with a voltage-controlled wavefolder (VCW) on one hand and a filter on the other. These two circuits can be placed in parallel or in series, in either order, and between them provide enormous scope for sound sculpting.
Moog Labyrinth
In case it wasn’t clear, the VCW is the headline circuit here: 2022’s Moog Mavis represented the first time a wavefolder had ever appeared on a Moog instrument, and an expanded version of that same wavefolder appears in thre Labyrinth. It features a Bias knob to add either a positive or negative DC offset, as well as normalled routing for movement via Envelope Generator 1 or Sequencer 1.
The filter, on the other hand, has a Filter Mode knob for a lovely, smooth transition from low-pass to band-pass. Like Spectravox, this section leaves us wanting more. It has all the silkiness one could hope for from a Moog-designed filter, though its resonance never quite gets high enough to really throw out those whistling sweeps we all love. In this sense, it doesn’t quite feel like the full ‘Moog filter experience’, but fair to say that’s not quite its function in this context.
The two sequencers, in turn, almost come across as a design response to the fact that with two such different facets of Labyrinth at play, it makes for the most creative fun to try sequencing them separately. This, in many ways, is where the magic happens. Spiky, chiming wavefolder modulations intersect with gritty and wet-sounding filter sweeps and pings. Timbral polyrhythms emerge from quasi-melodic patterns. Aggression can morph into gentleness in an instant— and vice versa. You can, of course, patch either sequencer to a multitude of destinations but, by default, sequencer 1 is normalled to the primary oscillator (simply labelled ‘VCO’), as well as the wavefolder, while sequencer 2 is normalled to the secondary oscillator (the ‘Mod VCO’— so named because it can slow right down to low frequency oscillator territory), as well as the filter cutoff.
Moog Labyrinth
This means that in some ways, Labyrinth can default to feeling like it has two ‘channels’, which in turn can become confused with, for instance, the unrelated fact that it has two envelope generators. Things become exponentially more fun when signals are patched to converge and diverge around Labyrinth’s, well, Labyrinth of potential routing. Using the same envelope generator to sweep the frequency of an oscillator and inverse control wave folding, for example.
On the subject of those envelope generators, their one-stage (decay) design, like Spectravox, is effective and space-efficient, but we think a two-stage AD envelope would have opened up even more room to work with slower, evolving soundscapes as well as the more plucky and percussive sounds encouraged by Labyrinth’s design.
Our review of the Spectravox commended its revival of a classic Moog circuit, the filter bank. Labyrinth, by stark contrast, might just be Moog’s most original design for years.
And it appears, to show it off, Moog has thrown a Labyrinth at any YouTube ‘synthfluencer’ who can sit still long enough to catch it, but this is not without sound reason. Labyrinth is so flexible and varied that no two users, it seems, have so far made it sound the same. “You have to always be recording when you’re using it,” gushes Andrew Huang, “because you’re able to transform sounds and sequences so quickly, you can never fully predict where you’re going to end up with it.”
Moog Labyrinth
Huang is absolutely right. Labyrinth is a synth with an open mind. As the (highly in-depth) manual declares early on:
The chance operations at [Labyrinth’s] core mean that fully reproducing a sound or pattern from one Labyrinth to the next is not just difficult, but impossible […]. We encourage you to view this through a liberatory lens and to experience the sounds of Labyrinth as they emerge.
This feels like a new type of Moog. Don’t forget that this type of generative, spontaneous and unrepeatable patching is not typical of the company founded by Dr Robert Moog. He was keener to appeal to the dignified, creative minds of pre-existing musicians than he was to create a new kind of instrumentalist entirely — that was the lot of Don Buchla over in California.
There really isn’t much out there to compare Labyrinth to, which is impressive. If there is an equivalent to consider, it’s probably Make Noise’s 0-Coast, named for its comparable blend of coastal synthesis techniques, whose 2016 release date cast it more as an opposite number to Moog’s Mother 32. But one function where Labyrinth beats the 0-Coast is its sequencers.
Labyrinth’s dual eight-step sequencers are fascinating. They are not programmable like you might expect; instead they generate random pitch values that can be quantised to one of a number of scales, and can independently self-renew with varying levels of randomness according to the neighbouring Corrupt knob position.
Moog Labyrinth (side view)
Steps are named ‘bits’ and can be moved wholesale or ‘flipped’ on or off, each time snapping to a new random value within a given voltage and quantisation range. It’s a brilliant balance between complexity and simplicity, though there are a few button combos to get to grips with.
After all, if precise sequencing is needed, it’s a cinch to patch an external sequencer into Labyrinth via the patch bay. A well-designed EG Trig Mix knob to the right works ostensibly as a mixer between the velocities of the two sequences, which creates brilliant rhythmic expression, particularly when working with polyrhythms.
The cat may have gotten out of the bag early, but Moog Music should take the positives from that. Labyrinth has generated a huge amount of intrigue, and rightly so. It’s open and confident, embracing the element of chance with an effusiveness we haven’t seen from a Moog instrument in a long time — possibly ever. All we need now is a figurine of David Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King to go with it.
Key features

2 oscillators
Diode-transistor hybrid wavefolder
Ring modulator
State-variable filter (low-pass or band-pass)
Dual onboard sequencers
2 single-stage decay envelopes
32-point patch bay

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