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:
Virus 123
- 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.
