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. Without going into too much detail, I know that later in life some aspects of his life took a turn for the (much) worse, so this song is kind of sad but also evocative of happier, younger times. I don’t rate this especially as a composition, but it has history, and that’s more what this archiving project is about! So here you go, dedicated to Grimsby’s most popular rapper.
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.