Count Zero

The decades-long history of techno/punk group Count Zero includes almost 20 former members, many of whom were at the band’s 30th-anniversary show in April 2026, but at its core are two performers who’ve been on a musical journey together for over 40 years: Will Ragano and Peter Moore. The Boston transplants embody the city’s artistic fertility and attraction for musicians, many of whom wind up putting down roots and sprouting all manner of musical hybrids. While Count Zero’s recorded only five albums over three decades, their sonic experimentations have received widespread critical acclaim and their regular gigs in and around their adoptive hometown have made them a longstanding influence on the local scene.

Florida native Ragano’s father was a lawyer who represented mob figures including Jimmy Hoffa, but music, not the law, called to him and he started playing guitar in elementary school. He joined his first band at 13 and, though he claims to have been a terrible player, he went on to study at the Southwest Guitar Conservatory in San Antonio, Texas. He moved north to Massachusetts in the early ‘80s and, after studying graphic design at Worcester Art Museum School, enrolled at Berklee College of Music. There he met Moore, who’d arrived at Berklee from Nebraska in 1984 and played electronic instruments including the Moog synthesizer. 

PSYCHO TEC, THINK TREE, BONGO FURY

Sharing an interest in eclectic artists ranging from Bowie to Zappa, the pair joined several other Berklee students, among them keyboardist Krishna Venkatesh and lead vocalist Kerwin Cain, in 1985 to form Psycho Tec which, according to CZ’s website, had a “chaotic, funk sound” that “combined elements of the Sex Pistols and George Clinton.” They were an all-electronic band at first but, as Ragano told Anngelle Wood on the podcast Boston Emissions, “We were hanging out, and I heard they had this band, and it was all electronic, and I said, ‘You guys need a guitar. Nobody wants to see a bunch of electronic music, and so I convinced them they needed [that]. So I’ve always been the punk ‘edge’ to the band in some ways.”

By 1987, the band had morphed into Think Tree, a “funk-punk” band, as Ragano and Moore refer to it, in which Moore sang lead. “We got rid of the lead singer, or he got rid of us, I can’t remember,” Moore said on Boston Emissions. One interesting element of that band was that Moore would take on the persona of characters in the songs, whether it be “a redneck or a Cambodian woman who got murdered…or a Martian.” That was taken to extremes in their later band Bongo Fury (named after a Zappa and Captain Beefheart collaboration) and then met its culmination when Moore was working in Blue Man Group (as a keyboardist, not a blue man).

Think Tree gained local fame through heavy airplay of their first single, “Hire a Bird,” on WFNX, which included the track in its list of “Top 500 Songs of All Time.” Though mainly an electronic band, Moore emphasized to the Harvard Crimson in 1992 that “electronic” didn’t mean preprogrammed samples and sounds. “To us,” he said, “that is the abuse of that technology; that is exactly what music shouldn’t be. Electronics…means a whole new palette of sounds, that if you use them creatively, can be the antithesis of slick, can be raw as hell.”

Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor was a fan, which led to Think Tree opening for the group, and “Hire a Bird” went on to become a hit in Holland. They toured Europe twice on the strength of the song and a Dutch TV station produced a documentary about them. Another band, Bongo Fury, which included Psycho Tec and Think Tree drummer Jeff Briegart, was a short-lived incarnation of Ragano and Moore’s musical expression; they recorded only one album, Lord Mongrel is Dying, released by the SineAppleSap label in 1994.

COUNT ZERO FORMATION, LINEUP, DEBUT ALBUM, ROBOTS ANONYMOUS

In 1993, by which time Ragano and Moore had further evolved in their sound and performance style, they formed Count Zero with drummer Jeff Biegert; named for a William Gibson cyberpunk novel, the band performed live for the first time in 1997 and SineAppleSap released their first album, Affluenza, the same year. By the time their second LP, Robots Anonymous, came out in 2001, Biegert had left the band and various new members had joined, among them Bernard Georges who’d played bass in Throwing Muses. Other newcomers were fans who eventually came to perform, such as Brian Martin, who stepped right in to the extensive drum parts. While both albums received positive reviews, it was difficult to market their hybrid sound, which “straddled that line between experimental and catchy,” Moore says.

The current lineup includes Ragano, Moore, Shawn Marquis on drums, Mike Corbett on bass, and Jude Heichelbech on keyboards. While still electronic-heavy, CZ’s sound is more improvisational (though Ragano and Moore bristled at the term “jam band” on Boston Emissions). He and Ragano want people to enjoy the music at least on a superficial level, Moore explained on Boston Emissions, but also, if they want to listen more carefully, there are a lot of “hidden details that make it much more difficult to play the songs, but you don’t even notice.”

CZ gained a strong local following, and some well-known Boston-based artists became big fans, including Amanda Palmer of The Dresden Dolls. On her blog, she called Count Zero “Boston music heroes helmed by my teenage idol Peter Moore” and she was a CZ member briefly in 2002, playing keyboards. Later, when the Dolls went on tour in the fall of 2004, they invited Count Zero along. “They didn’t have to do that,” Moore told Boston Emissions. “We didn’t help their ticket sales,” he joked.

NOTABLE APPEARANCES, LITTLE MINDS, NEVER BE YOURSELF, THOUGHT SO

But CZ has sold plenty of tickets on their own over the years, playing energetic, funky sets at such storied venues as Somerville Theatre, Great Scott, The Middle East, T.T. The Bear’s Place and Lizard Lounge. With two band members living outside of the Boston area, however, their appearances were sometimes limited to only a handful per year. Other obligations and projects have also gotten in the way: besides performing with Blue Man Group, Moore, for example, also can be heard on the Spiderman motion picture soundtrack, Bleu’s Redhead, and with the all-star cover band The Handymen, who take the stage regularly at The Plough and Stars in Cambridge.

Six years passed between their third album, 2005’s Little Minds and their fourth LP, 2011’s Never Be Yourself. That album included the single “Radium Eyes,” which was featured on Guitar Hero II. Another 13 years passed before SineAppleSap issued the band’s fifth and most recent studio outing, 2024’s Thought So. Among the 10 tracks on that album are “Bigwig,” which is based on samples from a 1950s instructional video and is ostensibly about a trucker who can’t handle his rig, but with more than a few hints about current politics and someone unable to do his job. “Girl on a Corner” addresses homelessness, while “Riding a Wave” tackles relapsing addictions. In this way, CZ slides in punk-like social commentary amid the electronics, similar to the way the much slicker British techno-pop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark did in the ’80s.

Count Zero continues to evolve, perform and record. In 2024, they played a 30-year anniversary show at Deep Cuts in the Boston suburb of Medford with many of their “alumni” band members in addition to the five-member current lineup. Meanwhile, Ragano and Moore are exploring other vistas through such bands as Elk, which is more improvisational than their other incarnations, and an experimental extension of Think Tree called Placebo Group. They post new and vintage recordings online periodically and are working on a new CZ album, according to Moore. “I can’t let it be another 13 years to another,” he says.

(by John Radosta)

Lifelong Boston resident John Radosta is the co-author (with Keith Naimby) of Bob Dylan in Performance: Song, Stage, and Screen (Lexington, 2019) and has written numerous articles about Dylan and Woody Guthrie for a variety of publications.