I love it when I buy a CD that isn’t in the Gracenote CD Database yet, even though I have to manually enter the track names when importing the songs into iTunes, it just reinforces the feeling of freshness….anyway, this is an awesome CD, so many of my favourite producers are on there, first heard on Rob Booth’s podcast, now I’ve got my grubby little digits on it. Yay!
This is the second installment of my incredibly self-indulgent project to digitally archive my old cassette recordings of homemade electronic music from the period 1993 - 1999. This tape is from a similar period to the previous one - around 1996, while I was at sixth form college - however these tracks benefit from a new piece of kit: the Oberheim Prommer, a super-retro machine (wooden end cheeks!) which was designed for burning drum sounds onto EPROM chips to be used by Oberheim drum machines. However the device could also function as a very passable monophonic, MIDI-enabled sampler, and although in terms of usability it never really did much to disguise the fact that you were working with raw bits in a single contiguous block of memory with arbitrary offset points assigned to MIDI note values, it had pretty good 12-bit resolution, low latency, and a usable low-pass filter. In other words, a massive improvement on the sample capabilities of the Atari STE, even if it only had one channel. I mainly used it for breakbeats.
Untitled hiphop/jungle track feat. Volley
Volley was a guy at college who was really into hiphop. He was popular with everyone (especially the ladies), was stoned most of the time, had a permanent smile, and despite being one of the coolest guys in college he put in lots of time hanging out with the geeks as well as his own crowd. Universally liked, in other words. He had a sideline in MCing and asked me to put together a track with him, so we stayed late after college and recorded this in the music department’s 8 track studio. I brought my sampler in, and he brought a tape with a breakbeat on he wanted to use. About halfway through writing the track, we went out for a spliff break. When we came back in to carry on, some kind of MIDI fuckup resulted in a double time beat with this weird “bip-bip-bip-bipbipbip-bip-bipbipbip” thing going on, which in our befuddled state we decided to keep, with the result that Volley ends up chatting over a rather odd 210bpm jungle tune.
Organ Track
An example of what seemed to be a personal trademark, a song which changed into a totally different (and usually much better) song around halfway through. I think this is to do with the “one-take” nature of the process - once you’ve powered down all the gear and disconnected the cables, you can never go back and do more work on the track. So after a couple of minutes of standard breakbeat / trip-hoppy fare, this turns into a psychadelic organ-driven thing which I was pretty pleased with at the time. I leaned heavily on a guitar FX processor in this, using reverb, delay, distortion and pitch-shifting (listen out for the pitch-shifted drums at the end, to me they seem to form a kind of melody.)
Untitled jump-up jungle tune
The third and final tune which used the Volley drum loop, before I presumably wiped the Prommer’s memory to make room for something else. Lots of distortion here to beef up the b-line, and the high-pitched p-funk melody was played live on the MS-10. Really just a sketch, I left lots of parts unquantised.
This Is The Future (competition entry)
Up in my home town, there used to be a music competition between the various schools and colleges, I forget the name, so let’s call it A Song For Lincolnshire. In schools which took this seriously, this was an opportunity for the music department to bring out their warbling Georginas and clarinet playing Wilfreds to write and perform something populist yet also musical enough that they didn’t feel they were debasing themselves. Franklin College however clearly did not really give a fuck about the competition, so I got to submit this bad boy. This shit was laid down in the recording studio of Barry Whitfield, the legendary producer behind Jive Bunny and also Black Lace (of Aggadoo fame, for which he got a gold disc). Barry was my music technology lecturer and also a great guy. I knew he had an Akai S-950 in his studio so on the allotted day, my whole plan went like this:
I am going to use the timestretch function on Barry’s S-950
The result was a half-finished amen workout (which starts out in 3/4). Barry promised I could come back another day to finish it, to be honest I think the song was doing his head in, of course I never went back. Although I’m told my song did make it onto that year’s competition showcase album, I never got invited to any award ceremony or anything. Fuck you, Georgina and Wilfred!
This work by Jon Rowett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
As promised, here is the first installment of my project to digitally archive and publish the electronic music I wrote as a teenager. I started digitising my tapes a few weeks ago, but the recent activity from Gutterbreakz in this area has spurred me into activity, so I’m finally getting around to posting the first tape.
These tracks and experiments were recorded in 1996 (and possibly early 1997) against a typical teenage backdrop of dope smoke, poverty, unrequited hormonal urges and academic fecklessness. Most were produced in my bedroom using a mixture of my own equipment, and bits borrowed from the music department at Franklin College, Grimsby, where I was busy failing ‘A’ levels in Music Technology and a few other subjects. One or two were recorded at the college. The kit list varied depending on what was available, and what I had bought/sold from the back pages of Future Music magazine, but these are the various things used at different times (asterisks denote equipment on loan from college):
- Atari 1040 STE running the Breakthru MIDI sequencer
- Korg MS-10 analogue monosynth
- Casio CZ-3000 digital synth that wanted to be analogue but so wasn’t
- A generic Casio home keyboard
- Realistic (Tandy own-brand) DJ mixer
- Oberheim Prommer (EPROM microchip programmer usable as a pretty nifty monophonic sampler)
- Boss DS-330 “Dr. Synth” General Midi sound module *
- Boss DR-660 drum machine *
- Roland CM-32 sound module *
- A Yamaha guitar multi-FX processor *
- Hi-fi tape deck and amp
At no point was all this kit used together in one go! That would’ve been sweet though…
Listening back now, it’s obvious to me that my attempts to imitate the big techno/jungle/trance sounds were almost always the weakest pieces of work, and the best stuff was written when I wasn’t trying to follow a style and just let myself have unselfconscious fun. “Happy accidents” also played a large part. Although I often felt restricted and frustrated at the time, I am now glad that I didn’t lay my hands on a JV-1080, TB303, TR909 and S-950 and make those polished dance tracks I thought I wanted to make.
Now for the songs! I’m going to post the ones I like best first, rather than posting in the order they were recorded:
- You need to excuse the jazzy noodling at the start. After that, things get going a bit.
- The drums on this track sound loose because my sequencer didn’t support swing, so I played them in with some human swing and used very minimal quantising.
- The wobbly bass and the sine wave melody came about from a complete accident which resulted in some corrupted pitchbend data.
- The vocal sample is Kryten from Red Dwarf, saying Now I remember you: you’re a computer virus. Travelling from machine to machine, overwriting the core program.
- The acid line was played live because I didn’t have a MIDI-CV convertor for the MS-10.
- The distorted melody nearer the end was the CZ-3000, which normally sounded pretty weedy, with the signal fed through the phono inputs on the mixer so as to create an overdriven sound. I used this effect a lot to add “meatyness” to my synth patches.
- All the other sounds (drums and synths) were off the DS330 General Midi module.
Virus Version
This is basically a completely different track to Virus 123, but I copy and pasted one of the melodies from that track. The pads were played live on a Casio home keyboard of the bossa nova preset variety. This keyboard was later sold to pay for party supplies when my parents went away for the weekend, and they still mutter darkly about this incident to this day.
Untitled ragga jungle attempt using Audio Sculpture
Before getting into MIDI, me and a mate were really into trackers (four channels on the Atari, no Octamed for us!). I’d used NoiseTracker, Digicomposer, TCB Tracker and some other obscure ones, but finally forked over actual cash for Audio Sculpture, which was excellent. Even with all this music gear in my bedroom, sometimes I just wanted to mess about with some samples so I’d break out Audio Sculpture.
This is a really simple jungle track, I’ve no idea what the vocal says, I sampled it off the TV. It’s unremarkable except for about halfway through when the beat gets reversed and the strings come in, I love that bit!
Geotropolis
A kind of lightweight trancey thing, slight overtones of Selected Ambient Works, for some reason this sounds a lot more “complete” than most of my stuff.
Spacehopper intro
The intro for a demo tape I recorded under the (rubbish) moniker, “Spacehopper”. Like my other “demo” tapes, only one copy ever existed and it never got duplicated or sent anywhere. This is a kind of sci-fi strings workout with some echoey samples thrown in. It’s pretty cheesey.
Attempt to combine acid bassline with jungle
Long before Dillinja released Acid Track, I had the idea to put 303 bass over jungle breaks. Unfortunately I had no 303 and no grasp of how to write jungle. This is shit.
Ultraspace
I fell into the orbit of a techno DJ who was into his Plus8, Stay Up Forever etc, he oversaw this unremarkable and flaccid techno effort. That gnarly synth sound is some Yamaha FM obscurity I found in a cupboard at college, I can’t remember what it was.
Accidental Orange Theme
Using the phono input overdrive trick again. This is crap until halfway through where it sounds like a half-decent psy-trance tune. Unfortunately it also sounds a lot like a wholly decent psy-trance tune, Cygnus X’s Orange Theme. Honestly, this was not intentional.
Guitar Scratch
An exercise in learning how to use the music department’s 8 track studio. My fellow students were all guitarists who wanted to be either Sepultura, Nirvana, or Hendrix. The whale-like noises in this are a bassist scratching his strings, put through loads of reverb. The synths were live, the drums programmed directly into the drum machine. I also mic’d up a room for some “ambient noise” which is why during a quiet bit you can hear a voice say the words “juicy buttocks”.
Pianoey jungle tune
Parts of this were a blatant rip of a better pianoey jungle tune written by a classically trained and massively talented friend / part time collaborator. I actually went into our local dance music record shop to get them to listen to this and give me their opinion, and they were really kind, this put me on a massive high for the day…although I cringe to think of it now.
Digital
Absolute wank, a pointless nihilistic tracker effort. I think I’d been listening to Aphex Twin’s Classics a lot but it’s really no excuse.
Digital (alternative version)
Why the hell did I make two versions of this?
Drum machine and Korg MS-10 with LFO and didjeridoo sample.
First track I made with my MS-10. Very boring.
There you go! I have more tapes so expect more installments. The styles, era, equipment and techniques vary quite a bit from tape to tape, so the next batch should be quite different…
This work by Jon Rowett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
23 May
Recent choonage
I really didn’t mean to go this long without an update! Moving house, setting up a business, yadda yadda. I won’t bore you. I have been archiving some of the tunes I wrote back when I was a teenager with very chaotic MIDI setup at home, digitising various dusty cassette tapes, and I hope to post some of those sounds soon. Serendipitously, Gutterbreakz is starting a netabel devoted to unheard, ramshackle homemade electronica, so I’ll be watching this project with interest!
Anyway, before all that, these are a few of the records which are currently doing it for me:
Breakage: Clarendon
Not really dubstep this, Breakage seems to be a drum & bass producer and this is certainly the right tempo, but it’s not like much other DnB I’ve heard. Lovely sort of spring-reverby sound to it, a bit like Squarepusher’s Budakhan Mindfone EP, quite dubby too.
Ramadanman: Blimey
Ramadanman is my producer of the moment, every track on here (and on the other record of his I’ve got, Carla) is pure gold. Really crisp and punchy drum work, lots of sub, quality production, and (what seems to be a trademark) really really quiet and quite scary background pads and muffled voices. I’m not doing it justice here. Anyway, I stayed up late to listen to Blimey the other night on my own and I was shitting myself by about halfway through. I think this record might be haunted.
Cluekid: Hovercraft
Affecianados of the more Bristolian dubstep sound like to poo-poo the more ravey dubstep tunes (the Boomkat reviews barely disguise their contempt: the word “wobble” is code for “we think this is shit but it sells”, and to be fair, much of it is shit) but I’m still going out of my way to pick up some of these supposedly less cerebral records when I go shopping. The A-side on here is by-numbers, but I think Hovercraft is ace. Also I really like hovercrafts.
Fennesz / Jeck / Matthews: Amoroso
A recording of the organ in York Minster, all distorted and phased and fed back and shit, an utterly gorgeous record. I’m gonna pick up the new Philip Jeck album pretty soon I think.
Rhythm & Sound: No Partial
I fucking love Rhythm & Sound! I’m mentally compiling a list at the moment called "reggae tunes to play at a barbecue on my new patio, once we’ve unpacked all our shit" and this is on it.
Bar 9: Murda Sound
Another rave tune, if you don’t like this sound you’ll probably throw it in the Spongebob bin (I liked Spongebob!) but this record stands out to me by the sheer force of its total dementia. It reminds me a lot of one of Aphex Twin’s AFX releases on Rephlex from a few years back that I don’t know the name of. My wife hates this even more than my other records (which she mostly hates).
In addition, I’ve also picked up a couple of drum & bass records in the last week, something I thought I’d never do (I stopped buying DnB on vinyl in around 1999, and on CD in around 2002). I honestly felt that the form was totally bankrupt, just noisy stress music for spazzed-out 22 year old German web geeks with white spit in the corners of their mouths to take loads of speed to and generally be annoying. Anyhoo, I bought this without really listening to it and assuming it was dubstep, turns out it’s DnB on some kind of boutique label, and it’s pretty good. Also Drum Tools, the B-side of the recent Bukem release (I know! Bukem! Can you believe it?) is an ace amen workout, probably gonna be very satisfying in the mix, so I grabbed that this lunchtime. I don’t know if this is DnB thing is going anywhere though.