Jon Rowett’s Soundblog

Of course, Fisher Price don’t make these lovely clockwork music box/record players any more, it’s all battery-operated ninja binge-drinking turtles and Sega Megadrives. Yours for ~£30 on Ebay.

My wife did something shocking today and bought the new Pendulum album. Bear in mind that in most of the 15+ years I’ve known her, she’s been a committed metaller / stealth goth who at various times has described dance music as “music for druggies”, “computer game music” (what’s wrong with that?) and, perplexingly, “just all about sex”. And now she’s bought the Pendulum album. I’m very confused. Is this a vindication of years of passive exposure to the best that Moving Shadow, Ram Records, Trouble On Vinyl, True Playaz, Renegade Hardware et al have to offer? Or a rebellion against it? Fucked if I know.

More shoddy electronica from my archives coming shortly, even more shoddy than the last lot, watch this space…

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. 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.

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.