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In this quote he is talking about switching away from his hardware approach in the nineties.. .
Ok well firstly, I have not managed to completely re-create a 100% comparable result using the same samples from and old track in a DAW, but of course I have found ways to get something that has at least as much power and tone, I just have to think in a different space from before...a Daw has way more response to very low frequencies below 40HZ, most analogue would roll off at this range and so bass was much more focussed in the 40-200Hz range for power and the 900-5k range for growl, this is expanded hugely in DAW so most of what I do now is to try to get bass sound to not eat up the whole mix, still the same principles of how to treat a bass sound remain very similar, ...Distort, Saturate, Filter, FX etc...I think Camel Phat is the closest thing I have to an analogue distortion effect.
old studio approach
metal headz documentary (lots of great bits in here, not least the bits with dillinja)
Aphex Twin SYROBONKERS! Interview Part 1 dave noyze talks to richard d james
note: this interview was conducted over the course of a couple of months, the process began around the time the blimp went up before the release of Syro and was completed on 25.10.2014, after the albums release. some questions were inserted afterwards, answered amended etc, so the whole thing isn't sequential. all music tracks, photo's & images have been supplied by richard + photo's that were taken by other people have been noted. this is part one of two parts.
thanks: Grant Bussinger at Warp Records for web assistance
dave: hi rich, first up, thanks heaps for agreeing to an interview for noyzelab! there's a MASSIVE buzz going around about your upcoming release syro[now released as this interview took so long!], the first aphex twin album since drukqs in 2001. lets start off with the album title and artwork. you've said that it was a word conjured up by one of your lads, can you elaborate on this? How did it come about & does it have a meaning?
rich: Hi man, funny being interviewed by one of yer mates
although actually I reckon its quite a good ting for all friends to do to each other, ill have to return the interview about you at some point.
thinkin bout it, quite a few mates id like to pin down on a few things!
My eldest son[8yrs] just looked at me one morning and said syrobonkus, I asked him what it meant he said he didnt know.
Artwork, this time I didnt want to just stick a 'picture' on it you know, its pretty acidmicrodot inspired in a way [cold as fuck] as was icbyd cover which happened after my girlfriend morphed into me while she was lying on top of me [scariest thing I ever saw, looked much better than the pic i painted for that, , no emotion, which is how I've felt on acid before, just experiencing so much more than normal, heightened senses, telepathy, huge increase of smell, I think I can smell my own brain now...it smells clean and grey, it's a strange smell, being aware of so much more but not feeling ANY emotion.
completely culturally deprogrammed, one very good reason why it's illegal, like the beautiful scene in John Carpenters 'they live' 'money is your god etc' but even more extreme to the point of how you behave.
I think doing acid is a bit of a brute force way of getting outside yourself, there are other easier ways but no less difficult to deal with and more intense but without the brutal chemicals in your body.
I had an astral projection the first time I did acid [after about 5/6 hours] right outside myself on the ceiling, looked down on my body making a sandwich, such a terrifying experience,
Well I don't think terrifying is the right word, I don't think there is a word, I think getting a 2nd one is harder as you have to overcome the fear.
I had a trip on a microdot once around 94ish , it went very weird, long story short, I couldn't find anything that was good or worthwhile about music, I put on some of my fave records by other people [i get into this state tripping sometimes, .. what am i supposed to do now?[deprogrammed] its pretty scary..and thought oh maybe i would play... like music.. to enjoy?]
I was in quite a desperate/seeking state and they all sounded so bad, the brutal truth, pointless and totally boring, i saw how i kind of invented/made up a fantasy about things i liked, kind of tricking and lying to myself that it was good so i could feel nice&comfy, anyway I thought there must be something good to fucking listen to... and I found it , it was turning my amp and eq up on maximum and I mean maximum and spinning the radio dial backwards and forwards, [it was a nice weighted one] , I was totally emotionless when I was doing it [ ] and I thought...hmmm yeah thats ...kind of alright, then my speakers blew up.
But in the back of my mind now, many years l8r I can choose to remember the feeling of everything anyone ever does creatively is actually terrible, the only comforting thought I can get like that is , well rocks can't make beats or something, ha , so that's kind of good, i don't knw wtf I'm going on about...jeez.
anyway
awhile after my girlfriend tried to comfort me, as i musta looked in a bit of a state, she stroked my arm and all I could think was, why is there a skeleton with a blood circulatory system moving up n down on my skeleton with another blood circulatory system! [absolute deprogrammed to fuk]
it was confusing I knew I was supposed to feel something but didn't and when I saw my girlfriend get upset, 4 a split second I 'felt bad' and said I was sorry I dunno what I'm supposed to do..like a kind of remnant of emotion just flicked back for half a second.
what a tangent..yeah its cold microdot vibe basically, ha
dave: how does it feel to have a new aphex twin album coming out after so many years? its quite incredible to have such a large gap in releases and yet maintain such a loyal following. aside from the music of course, do u think your live performance work has been integral to this ? Also been checking some of your interviews that have started coming out, really cracked me up, all your lies about having kids and wives !
rich: Well you know you gotta play with the conventions ain't ya, also though, I always kinda fantasised about what it would be like to have kids and get married etc, I know I probably will never do that, so I guess it's nice to pretend that you've done it, my russian girlfriend was flattered when I started pretending we were married, a lot of people now think we are married which is funny and we just play a long with it most of the time, we had an imaginary wedding and have imaginary kids.
I've surprised myself quite how far I can take it, inventing personas etc.
ok music career, ha, i hate the words career & successful btw.
dunno but i used to have this game on the spectrum 48k which was rock star manager or summink, it was pretty boring but kept me entertained 4 a bit and was different from the usual games and i remember you used to do better when your band toured regularly, so that was my first in depth music managerial education on't speccy, great music education, ha
It feels good because although tracks get finished thyre still kind of unfinished in yer ed, they occupy space up there as you know they not pressed up/backed up and mastered.
Backing stuff up on releases and getting it mastered whether I do it or someone else, they are the biggest reasons for me releasing stuff
id lose track of it else.
Then its like your free of them and you can concentrate so much more on other things your doing and hopefully it earns you a living int process.
dave: theres been a lot of speculation in the media & reports of you playing out unreleased stuff from the album live. so have u been testing this stuff & future releases out during your live gigs to see peoples reactions?
rich: yeah i spose.. but firstly its always lush 2 ear what your tunes sound like on a massive p.a
Also was fully aware that usually with my releases, they are quite impenetrable for a lot of folk for a while until they work out whats going on, so having some people partly familiar with some of the tracks b4 release makes a nice way in for dem.
Im addicted [a bit too much] to listenin to my tracks on as many different kinds of speakers and headphones when making them, its like listening with a slightly different personality/set of ears, you hear different things and learn how it translates.
I gotta stop doing it so much actually as it kind of doesn't matter, ur better off just makin sumink else but these things happen4 a reason u have to go with them sometimes.
With Syro, some of it sounds best on cans as i made most of it with phonz which I love doing [sony 7510's, tracks 6,7,8,9,11 to be precise], to be properly inside the music but is kinda shit/disjointed sounding then for listening on speakers/monitors coz ur not feeling it in your body when your making it, its just resonating ur ed
With the phoney7510's, they do translate extremely well, they're not the best pair of headphones for listening to music but to write/mix on, ive never heard anything as good as those yet, and I've heard a lot of em, not all but a lot, most, so mabe better ones out there.
also ive recorded breaks and certain sounds ive made over the pa in sound checks and used that in tracks or then played it out over the pa again at the gig alvin lucier style but more epic scale.
eres a quik exmple of a break i made on the <hat> computer controlled robot system built for me by logos foundation
, then played it over a 100k soundsytem at soundcheck and recorded it again[not very well]
its not a great example really, just only 1 i got on this laptop , its better when you try and distort them etc and record that
reamping on huge scale, can get lots of different types of distortions that you won't get running thru hard/software, i like the fact your releasing something from the inside to the outside 'real' world and then back again or like having 2 modular synths running in different parts of the world, linked by phoneline.
Getting some cheap speaker cones, running things through them until they blow up can sound pretty satisfying, probably some of the frst things i recorded were like that.
Going on nudder tangent bit ere but had stupid idea once to record set very well in every place i played then each time i played there again id just play the last recording, ha eventually it would be like im sitting in a room, and just be a set of resonating bell tones
Almost everything I do , there has to be an angle of making tunage to it, bit tiring, like oh if i go and see so and so I can try out my new klobberbox on't train and be forced with that bit of kit only etc otherwise id never leave me ouse.
dave: is there anything particular u wanna say to your fans about this album that u haven;t said in other interviews?
rich: i didnt really feel like i said anyfink of note in recent interviews I've just done as was still in a bit of a regretamin hole, no sleep...also like we were saying before, journo's tend to write their articles before they have even talked to you and you get the impression with a lot of them that you don't need to be there at all.
hopefully this will b diff though
be good if people could wake up quicker and realise what is actually going on in the world, how people are being controlled, well nobody is actually in total control nobody ever will be , life is too chaotic but there are lot's of people trying and doing pretty well at the moment and the majority of people are falling for it.
I keep forgetting that most people are totally friggin oblivious to how they are being programmed& controlled from birth upwards from your name, being a 'citizen' which basically enters you into a contract, it goes on from there.
Recently when some journo's were saying 'so you actually believe 9/11 was an inside job' , attempting to paint picture of me bein a crackpot , [yawn] I was totally shocked, they were intelligent people but still they didnt get it, just popularist, pandering to what they think will be popular, instead of thinking for themselves and expressing their own opinions.
Im really, really sorry to all folks who might be reading this but if you believe the ridiculous story that is being pedaled about 9/11 from the mainstream media then you are absolutely gullible, some very clever people are also very naive and very gullible, they are not nasty people but very trusting and theyre good nature is being taken advantage of. Not believing the mainstream media is very hard for some folk who have put their trust and faith in the state and press, breaking that faith will not be an easy process for many.
Some people just see through bullshit very effortlessly and can easily tell when people are lying, others it seems can't , that in itself is an area im interested in.
When I first watched footage of 9/11, I was around this geezers house in London , he is a real geezer n all , I was buying old jungle records , he had this massive widescreen tv in his flat which was too big for the room, classic and as soon as we watched the twin towers being struck ,he said really matter of factly , they just did it to themselves and I was like thank fuk for that, people are not THAT gullible.
Also dark funny moment was they@gmail.com kept playing the footage over and over again of the buildings going down and then at 1point they played the film backwards by mistake and the building went back up again, we had to laugh...when things are so dark, you have to laugh sometimes, those poor people and their families...one day justice will be done.
Anyway yeah 9/11 is just the tip of the iceberg isnt it but how do you break this strangle hold on humanity, well you have to start somewhere to break the illusion and 9/11 is a pretty big weakpoint in the illusion but still so many are fooled... we live in hope.
people can be made aware of these things ,covertly with music though anyhow, so I don't need to say much more.
dave: lets get synth nerdy & talk a bit about the synth/instrument clobber u used for the album, as u have included some of this in the track titles. i remember when u told me about getting the cirklon sequencer
to replace your mc4, can u say a little about why u like the cirklon?
rich: I did sell my mc4 , thyre like making tracks on a taxi meter, top, loved the number pad entry, yeah the manual as we've discussed before is nuts, not looked at it in years, would like to again now im thinking bout it but the manual reminded me of prgamming assembly language at college on nascom computers & programmin the machine., wish circlon had a number entry pad, actually gear with a number entry pad that doesnt allow you to use it for editing should probably be sledged, theres a few.
course the timing of the thing is tighter than a gnats vaj.
The sample 'richard..yep' in the track 4 was my dad calling me, i was inside my tank sampling noises inside it, its got wicked acoustics actually, should sample some drums in there, hmm nver thought of tht until now but yeah thats why its recorded...in between whacking someting .
computers in 2014 as amazing as they are, are not made for one job and thats their massive weakness, when you just turn on a bit of equipment and its designed to do just one job, theres no fucking about. Could always do summink on raspberry pi etc...but would have to invest a lot of time designing summink or pay someone to do it for me, might do...rackmunt it etc or ask one of my lads to code it when bit older!
i ask my eldest what he's doing and he just gives me that look of aww gawd, explain to the old man face, classic.
my 6 year old has already made an album on renoise and published it on band camp wtf! [actually he took it down now but I've attached them below]
He was 5 when he did most of it n all!
+I never showed him a thing, he worked it all out himself, mind boggling, 5!
here some of his first traks!
he's done more since , vocals on one says 'alien action'
He is so advanced mainly because he is trying to keep up with his 8yr old bro who is also going way deep into computers already, dunno where they get it from, its really exciting to see them start so young.
I love music by people who dont know wtf they are doing...its the best...why i liked certain periods of jungle so much before they learned how to use machines properly.
Doesn't mean I can't enjoy music made by wise people but I think your more likely to learn something 'new' by someone who doesnt know anything as opposed to someone who has been doing it their whole life.
dave: what attracted you to dance music?
rich: well rave music, Im not sure how many people actually realised what was really going on there.
If the law hadn't stepped in, firstly in the uk, rave culture would have almost certainly lead to a revolution and the authorities were absolutely taking it very seriously.
Raves were getting bigger and bigger , like hundreds of thousands and some people were just traveling around going from rave to rave, loads of diff types were in there, people making money out of it etc of course but essentially it was groups of people partying,being together from all different backgrounds[what the authorities definitely didn't want] and having a good time, not hurting anyone.
ok thats oversimplified but it was all in there, in the music.
Thats one of the things dnce music had at the end of the 80's-early 90's , spirit of togetherness with chicago house & acid and then when it turned into ardkore in the uk it was like ok were all together now lets fucking do summink about it! smash up the dance and take to the streets!
Have to reccount likkle proud story here, around 1995ish, I was at a reclaim the streets party in London, i usually went to them on my bike and I was in the city of london with about 10,000 people shuffling about around all the banks & office blocks, quite peacefully & casually, a dreadgirl came up 2 me had a bit of a go at me for having a flash bike[ it was pretty dope have to admit, still got it] which got my feathers rustled a bit B U T then this truck which had been sitting innocently at the side of the road, right in the middle of the crowd rolled up the back to reveal large sound system and immediately proceeded to blast out caustic window 'garden of linmiri' !!!!
The whole fucking road just went totally insane! it was such an unbelievable moment for me can you imagine? probably best moment of my life actually, sweet as a nut.
its total riot music and people understood it.
...oh and then 1 hour later after the police came and said truck got abandoned my then french girlfriend nannou got in the truck and drove it off! without a word to me and then got chased through london by a load of police cars, i kid you not, she is a really good driver as well i have to say!
They finally got her at kings cross and she started at bank, not fucking bad going eh?, full respekt!
They let her go that night amazingly/thankfully, shortly after I worked out where they were holding her.
----
So funny to think people have been eating mushrooms for 100,000 years but only in last 50 its not 'allowed' anymore , so insane when you think of it that way.
'Its simply not good for the workers of the office environment don't you know!'
thats all long gone now,rave culture, its just another horrible business now but some people still pretending its about togetherness etc [as long as u pay the ticket price], its very sad...well one day it will happen again hopefully, when we get out of this strangle hold on the population and have a real awakening.Then we can properly update the anarchy rave sound!
just been reading more about how microwaves can be used to control peoples minds and give people cancer etc , stealth weapons..have you noticed how high profile people who are anti establishment quite often die of cancer related illness's?
bill hicks
robert anton wilson
terrance mckenna etc etc
The women at greenham common had microwave weapons used on them to make them go away and a lot suffered or died afterwards as a result.
dave: yea, bill hicks (rip) is one of my hero's... your use of the casio fz is well known from the early days, what new things have u done with it for this album?
rich: ha, yes the fz's, well ive got 2 running in tandem, one with hxc flop emulator being fed by the other via parallel port and floppy disk, can then transfer old floppies as i go along to the sd card+use the sd card to save the whole setup, nice, cheers keith!
its got uber weird filter architecture, dig/analog hybrid, dont really understand it, you will have to suss it out and explain it to me one time, its like clocked or summink??
dave: yaa, seems to be sorta hybrid job, see buchty bloke page:
the DCF/DCA is on one chip, it has analog in out for the signals(stereo). it comes AFTER the samplerD/A ! i reckon, it can easy do external input direct to the chip. there is also link to the
patent. very weird. his other pages on fz r v. good too. but yea, according to the blerb in the patent it is a digital filter internally, using some clever jiggery pokery in the internal gubbins. its key trick is using a coded rom for storing the filter resonance characteristics in a tiny space, which then gets decoded using a special arithmetic circuit. it uses an 8 bit data byte to specify cutoff frequency, resonance & amplitude values for the chip. from wot i can tell of the chip pins, there are additional pins which specify whether the incoming data byte is for cutoff, resonance, amplitude, and channel 1 or 2. whole ting runs off a 3.58MHz clock, which is pretty nifty...
rich: there was some talk about eurorackin fz filter, would be great, not sure it will happen though and would be a bit crap monophonic like.
Not many polyphonic things in eurorack...although I'm staring right at an analogue systems polyphonic harmonic generator which is lush.
You can do some unusual stuff on fz's and they sound unique+at time of writing people are giving them away,
I think I have about 8 of em now, last one i got for £35!
inc the hohner ones which has slightly diff o.s [uber geek alert]
actually you know this thing about apologising for being, like i just did a geek, it fucking pisses me off.
I basically think if your not being a geek i.e. not talking about intricate details of something or not about to say something of interest then you should warn people, I'm sorry but I'm about to say something really boring,pointless, normal tnuc shallow vacuum brain person alert shite!!!
I realised when I was about 15 that there was this huge anti intellectual prejudice going on in the UK , just like in Orwell's animal farm, he wrote the bloody manual for dictators didn't he!
for instance imagine on radio 1 [a popular national radio station] that someone would start talking about the interesting details of a subject they would be herded off with sheep noise, boring, boring, bah bah
its actually really scary when you realise how deep people are programmed to not be interested in things, it is done on purpose but the people doing it don't realise why they are doing it.
its all part of how the masses are controlled, I do think things are getting better though.
dave: yea our sound guy for wired lab, marty, he gave me my fz1 few years bak , although is currently covered in a foamy grunge
+ i got an fz10m languishing in the uk tht i must get my mate dave harkett to post over (along with one of my other tx802's) ... hint... hint... dave h !! ! + all fully intense, detailed, extensive nattering & klobbery discussion is very welcome ere... carry on...!
rich: casio fz20m for the scsi though but i no longer use that, i used to use it with an obscure bernouli drive, only thing that would work with it.
pitfa!
But I think what the engineers were planning was a wavetable synth/sampler[no mention in manuals], im guessing but having 10 loops per sample, I cant think of why else you would do that, either way you can do so much with those 10 loops per sample+crossfades x8 voices!
lots of button pushing though, all the xtra software that was written for it is essential though to get the most out of it, esp some of the utilities and of course the wave drawing/extracting, sine synthesis etc
There are some new editors on the horizon that people are working on for it, vexciting, I want to be able to have full sysex control over mine in the future and be able to edit the floppy sound data...that could be absolutely lush
chek:
great start, looks really promising.
Maybe I can pay someone out there to write a new o.s then we can all have fm on it etc etc.. there is some app out there that can get you started with that, forgot the name of it ..need to have a butchers at that again sometime.
i used to do this trick on them when i was a kid, turn it off/on really quickly, once in a while it will not quite erase the contents of memory and you get mental corrupted data sounds .
the beat in this was done exactly like this:
and at that time there was no glitchy type sounds in existence which is funny to think about now with the world awash with bloody bit shifters etc, they all sound shit btw compared2 real thing, sorry.
although i quite like pseudo sample rate reduction using analog s/h's
used fz's on many things ,like the kik & snare drum on isopropophlex!
Which got used in some yamaha gear like the rs7000!
i was so chuffed when i heard it, i was like yeah yamaha got one of me sounds!
they even have a description of it in the manual, rs7000's are dope btw
yamaha please release the source code for that ffs you bastards!
tht kik sound is prob in more units, id like to know which actually , very much.
i would never sue them, just wanna know 4 chuffs sake.
also if you sample the hoover sound from the alpha juno2 into them you can get that mentasm rave sound....oh and recently found the 'aaah' sound from unique3's the theme in a sample library...im mad for this stuff.
-an old mate emailed me today prob coz he been reading recent interviews , asked me if i knew where some string and choir underground resistance samples come from, ha top, sample consultant, i didn't know though although I know they used a prophet600 for the super juicy sound at the beginning of this track
Hardwax -- HW 002
its a preset, i almost shat myself when i first pressed the keys on that preset, could never have guessed that sound was gunna come out!
sorry ur/jeff , cat is out the bag, full respect to you lot and your amazing tracks over the years!
you saved us so many times. )))))
play that after most edm stuff and it will pummel it so pissing hard into the ground....sorry
oh heres one of the first few tracks i ever did on the fz10m
notes about this track below somewhere, 1987/88ish]
dave: wow, top! tell me bit about it + with a name like that i'm already wondering if there is a connection with window licker???
rich: ha, never thought of that, I don't think that is the original name actually..would have to look it up in one me books..got plenty of those..think it got renamed by luke ha or maybe when I transferred it into computer, ive got at least 3 names for most of my tracks, not inc the released titles most of the time. it gets pretty confusing.
first I recorded to cassette, then DAT [[usually on "long play" sean booth said to me once, do you record all your tracks on long play?] ha, apart from him nobody ever said that to me before, good ears that he noticed,I was quite impressed he worked that out, used to do it to fit more tracks on the dats!, wasnt bothered it was loads shitter quality.]
sean said I was mad..but I could see tht it kinda confused him/made him laff at the time.
funny coz when my recording equip was crap, I used to try and make it even crapper , like use the worst rusty leads, crap cassettes etc etc everything on worst or lo sampling rates, now I use a lot of nicer spec equip, opposite vibe but then I do mix and match, like the idea of loads of layers of recording rates, live instruments, software, hardware, quantised, live etc etc, more depth, keeps me more alert, diff qual equipmnt.
And putting so much detail into traks, I think ive read a few times, people think I make my tracks so detailed to be 'arty' or coz im trying really hard, ha, makes me smile, I used to do it originally because id get bored of my tracks so quickly, so I try to put sooo many layers and details into it so that I can never remember in my head when listening, EXACTLY everything that is going to happen, funny thing is I still can remember pretty much everything but decide to listen only to certain layers, so get more from it depending on mood.
Although I think even from my very 1st tracks I had a desire 2 get really into the machines, to make a different world inside one of the boxes , live inside there instead
still do it, create worlds tht u can almost live inside...ok I fink I need to stop now and go and make something...all the time im doing this interview im constantly stopping and twiddling then comin bak..
Another thing I read on ytube about 1 of my traks was ' this is art not music' ! Ha they meant to be nice but I think this reflects how a lot of people see music these days as some kind of utility that just does expected things, its very, very sad, sad shit., spiritually lowest point of humanity vibes..
But it doesnt mean we all have to think like that...thing is in a better world reality, creative acts would be considered the most important, not who makes the most money or who is good looking.
Its why we are here imo, I often say to people who get depressed as I never do,
you need to be either loving/caring, creating or learning, then you will be fine.
[Window peeper,]
made around 1987/1988 with a fucking qx21 sequencer&fz10m,101+quadraverb +home made mixer on breadboards, was a pretty cool mixer ,got some pics somewhere.. looked well techno it was 2 big breadboards slotted together and did some odd phasey stuff., before that i used to just twist all the wires together as a mixer! not many have tried that i don't reckon, its actually a pretty unique way to get the cheapest compressor!
that was my orig name b4 aphex
pbod, phonic boy on dope ))
I did use a RAM music machine for the spectrum before the FZ which is just totally dope, ive bought a load of them recently and started using them again,
love the sound qual its 9khz sampling rate , 8-bit and you could get just over a second in memory, so i used to speed sounds up on tape then sample them into that and slow them down, so even more gritty!
heres something i did when i was around 15/16 on on one.
I did have a tape phlanged version of this, cant find right now, i recommend btw to anyone who has never tried it, try proper tape flanging, cheapest way to do it, buy a double tape boombox/ghetto blaster]
record whatever you want to flange onto two cassettes or one and then use high speed dubbing to other tape !-)
then just play both tapes at the same time using the pause buttons to cue em up and then, you might have to take the tape cover off to slow down either cassette to change the flange sound.
This is where the flange sound from fx units or plugins originates from!
the younger kids who might read this prob dont know that.
the effect is surprisingly amazin, it sounds so much richer than a plug in..
especially when the 2 signals cancel each other out and the sounds goes really think, amazing, try it.
actually you get flanging in nature, due to sound hitting your ears at slightly different times, you notice it sometimes when you walk up to a big wall and there is a constant noise around like a fan or something, when you go closer or further away from the wall you can change the flange effect.
also while tripping many times , all sound has had an extreme flanged sound to me, so it goes back b4 tape.
Im guessing its because sound is flanging to us all the time, because of sound hitting our 2 ears at slightly different times, but out brain deals with it in a way which makes you not realise the flange effect, tripping can expose that mechanism, fascinating!
although ive never started seeing upside down!
qx21 was my first sequencer, worked a whole summer in wimpy burger for that damn thing, it changed my world but it has to be one of the worst sequencers I've ever used, i kind of feel bad saying it, sorry mr qx21, i get a top feeling when i look at it still but never felt inclined to switch it back on, hmm maybe...no..
I always wanted to stack about 20 tx7,qx21's etc with their sloping panels ha , would look good [from the front no?]
talking of breadboards, REALLY looking forward to getting one of these
havnt built any circuits in 10 years and really want to get back into it and do some more designs again+finish some old ones off and this thing just looks so nice to have in the rack, beckoning you to poke it with components.
I did make and modify a lot of my own equipment, not very well I might add but was proud of a few things, best thing I made was a sampler for a college project, funniest part was that my lecturer didnt know what a sampler was!
It didnt really work properly as I joined all the boards together with loads of hand soldered wires and it just generated too much noise, but it made some super lush odd sounds, I could change the sample rate in real time in record and playback, that was main reason why I wanted to make it.
Also circuit bent a logic analyser+calculators when I was a teen and got some mad fings out of those, reminds me I used to like tuning my scanner into my equipment and picking up odd stuff, its still a top thing not to forget to do ...easier than circuit bending and dont have to take any thing apart,..shit ireally need to get back into scanners, they r so mental these days..internet on shortwave etc
ok one more fz story, once i was doin a trak into the early hours,in kingston halls of residence[next to sewge farm] i think it was dodeccahedron and i accidentally pressed the off switch but it doesn't cut out till you let go , so i was holding on to it with my life like dutch boy&dike!
trying with my foot to get to a floppy disk off a shelf but couldn't reach it, so i was screaming with twitching finger until someone came to my room to rescue/ pass me a floppy!
dave: thts a funny story! oh yea, we talked bout that spectrum tape sampling trik a while bak. tht sampler trik i know as well, sorta like resampling before resampling. i also used a similar-ish technique tht i werked out... i used to do me resamping this way , but only works with samples u can get in ram memory first tho, but can be done with normal tape recorder with no speed change, coz manipulation is done in the sampler -->
clear memory
select sample rate
sample sound
play sampled sound back out at highest or very high pitch to normal tape recorder
change sampler to decent or required sample rate
play tape and sample
pitch bak down
repeat as necessary...
getz v. tedious quik tho me very first pooter samplin tho was using my dragon64 , there was a machine code listing in some old mag or book, can;t rem which. well strange the way it did the sampling, coz it used the tape load input port, which is for very bandlimited fsk input for the encoded tape tones, and then u could play it out using using the tape save pin. coor, the things we used to have to do to squeeeezzze those sounds into them machines ... oh yea => that place you have in Scotland is very nice, do you spend much time there & russia?
rich: Awesome, i love it, starting to get a nice little group of ravers&neighbours on the go there + I share it with a few friends, like a little community, I still go back to Cornwall a lot but mostly been living in a suburb outside Moscow recently, where my bird is from, I really like it, i get into some strange conversations with locals here, thyre not used to english speaking people and want to know all about you, not like in the centre of Moscow, also people really chilled here, again not like the centre but its SO different from scottish yard.
Moscow is a banging city though, my fave thing about it is how it makes you realise how shit the class system in the uk is, which is just total bullshit, in moscow, it seems like to me that they have this attitude of were all in this together vibe, unless you are uber rich or something, everyone is a taxi etc, u just stik ur hand out anywhere and within a few mins someone will pick u up and take u to the door of wherever it is u want to go 4 totally reasonable price, dope.
Russian food is prob my favourite food now, okroshka is so top in the summer, summers are way hotter than the uk, a fact most people in the uk don't realise,they think its frozen all the time.
Houses are too fucking hot in russia though in winter, its actually much more of a problem for me than when it gets freezing but people freak out when you open windows, when its -30 outside.
I like draughty cold uk houses much more,can think better, all that central heating shrivels up yer brain.
I think my brain froze walking thru moscow once as i hate wearing hats...eek was bit fkin scary..
dave:what's all this about ice sculpture?
rich: Something ive gotten into recently, Ive made some pretty neat things in russia wid girlfriend, very satisfying, will send pics if can find.
dave: yes pls send if u get time... for s950tx16wasr10 (earth portal mix) what did you find special about those machines to make a track with them?
rich: s950 unknown to most has analogue filters+12bit, no rezonance though unless u mod it, was used briefly by ardkore massive before they all got pure digital 16 bit s1000's
so a lot of jungle tracks, 93/94 used them.
they r bit of a bitch to use unless you just using a few breaks but u get used to them, only got one recently, of course like everything else with floppies i got hxc on that as well, its best sampler for amen imo, makes it gritty .
not sure id recommend to anyone sane , solid bit of kit though, akai made stuff really well, I really like the akai vx600, used that on a lot of tuss stuff, beautiful little compact logpolysynth with a few unique triks up its sleeve, they used to come up well cheap for yonks, prob not now ...
tx16w is is my fave sampler&ensoniq mirage, tx has to have typhoon o.s though. love the workflow, sep processor for the filters
its like a dx7 but with a sampler, in terms of the envelopes, uberultra snappy, can make kicks from sine waves etc,
has so many good functions, i can use mine so quickly now, that typhoon is a work of art.
esp using midi keyboard/controllers to operate it e.g. using midi note numbers for entering alpha character names,modulation wheel 4 data entry etc etc, hardly anyone does that..such an oversight..
mirage=just wowsers.
[important note to reader from prichard]
have to say to anyone reading this at this point you dont need any hardware to make electronic music apart from a computer, thats it, you have to be slightly mad to want to use hardware these days, its just what ive always loved for many reasons, so i keep doin it, its what buzzes me up.
the more equipment u have the harder it gets, its that simple, i think no equipment is actually the best situation because then you have to sort something else out and its totally open, as soon as u add ONE piece of equipment it adds constraints to wot ur about to do ..so bear tht in mind.
I battle this by either putting things out of sight & mind or going to a different place without anything from time to time.
dave: any additional c0mment re asr10?
rich: don't know it well enough to comment yet, recent acquisition fraid
i think ae used em but thats not why i got it, the ui looked orrible to me at first but u can really zip around it once u get the hang of it.
does sound vey punchy, forget timestretching on it though unless u like writing novels in between operations.
dave: is minipops 67 (source field mix) done on a korg minipops? any other instruments used in this track?
rich: yep midi'd and sep outs, so many sounds in tht thing ..
shedload of other equip..inc 3 korg ps3300's!..ive tried to list everything on album notes,[attached]
[pic of 3x ps3300's]
good story [long though]with the Korg ps3300's
so going back to about 93/94 ish there were 3 for sale in loot newspaper london for £10k for bloody ages, like 6 months or something, nobody was buying them! I mean i remember thinking that was a shit load of cash then even.
so i went too see them, I had about £2k to my name then to live on and i would've dropped the lot on one of those bad boys so thought id go and see if i could get one of them at least.
Went around with my friend vic, it turned out it was owned by Dave simmons of simmons drum fame! and his wife!
was so cool to find that out but was REALLY bad atmosphere because they were SO SO nice to us, very welcoming showed us the synths , played us their music even , they didn't know who the fuk i was, even if id told them they wouldn't have known who i was..
but it became pretty apparent to me they were very in need of the money prob coz his business had gone down tubes, bought 3 korg ps3300's in better times for god knows how much...they even made us dinner thinking I was going to buy all 3 , it became really horrible atmos..then i was like ill buy one of you ...silence...tumbleweed..., here I've got 2k in cash now!
they were so sad and didn't sell it to me , so i went home also sad..
then ffwd about 6 years and better money times for me and I was buying up loads of cheap analog on ebay and i thought i wonder what happened to those 3 korgs, id heard a rumour cold cut had bought them, pulled some strings and realised matt black lived literally 5 mins away from me! so i thought ok, its destiny.
went to see him, they were all fucked, but working AND midi'd, he'd midi'd them
Matt, really lovely guy, was very friendly and lushly agreed to sell me one,
it was unusable, used it on fenix funk for the mental spectral sounds at the beginning with pitch bend applied to it oh and dissonant sounds at end.
rich: Yes , actually its TWO synton fenix's patched together making that vocal baseline riff, using all the bandpass filters on both machines....
it sounded a bit more vocal on an earlier pass
, thats the thing with complex analogue patches in the context of a 'song' and not just fucking about with them in experiments, they just change all the time and its pretty imposs/extremely hard to keep them sounding the same throughout the whole process of making a big track , i like the challenge though, like i say you have to be slightly mad to even attempt it, i have quite a few tricks I've invented to keep things in tune over the years though.
My friend had an argument with luke vibert who likes that fenix funk track, i think he said it was his fave track of all time to me once which is just a huge massive complement coming from him, thanks luke!
but anyway luke was telling my mate it was a vocal sample and you couldn't get a sound like that out of a synth , another top indirect complement, cheers mate!
ok so back 2the korgs, matt agreed to sell me one, he did say i could have all 3 for £10k , the same price from all those years ago! which was actually very reasonable of him as thats what he paid for them so he wasnt looking to profit, [top karma that]
anyway even though I wanted them all I thought it was too greedy and they were all fucked anyhow so a lot of work to take on...so just got one
He also has an ems vcs4!!! which I begged and begged to buy but he stood firm
its a prototype but still it looks extremely cool, was kinda working i seem to remember.
then when i left with it , i think some ninja kids there were like aphex is stripping us kinda vibe, talked some sense into mat...
coz when i got it home i was like oh my fucking god this machines is the beast of beasts! i want all 3 now!
but when i asked him he changed his mind....but i didn't give up, i emailed him every 6 months or so 'hi mate, fancy selling those other korgs?' kind of thing, then one day about another 2 or 3 years! later he was like yeah ok if you come down and get em like today or tomorrow!
yay!
Anyway the other 2 were in a bit of a sad state , but GWC kindly agreed to drive me up to Tony allgoods from oakley fame to bring em back to life,
I tried myself but they were way beyond what I can do and even if i did it would be nothing like what Tony can do, as he with Keith from Lucidsound are the synth repair masters of the universe!
Anyway since Tony worked his magic, keith has had to go in there and fix them some more, leaking caps...fucker..there is so much inside them though, last time i turned them on they were all working!
There were litterally 00's &00's of connections to be remade as some of the pcbs had cracked.
You think tuning an oberheim 8 voice is a chore, try micro tuning 3 ps3300's! an afternoons work
Mad thing about those synths is that as complex and epic as they are they were designed to work in threes!
Because this rare Korg junction box that they made connects 3 of them to one keyboard! with these weird large slimey cables made by Honda!
They definitely DONT make them like this anymore.
like the ms20's they are actually designed to simulate acoustic instruments and they do it very well, the resonators are i think supposed to emulate acoustic instrument bodies and with 9 of em, u can get very un synth like sounds from them, they are very special synths.
even the ms20/50's, i mean you can do some tuff acid on them but they are designed to do oboes and shit, I reckon, ha
but they do actually do that very well, very pure sound.
If anyone out there is lusting after one, then my advice is to get a korg pe1000 not pe2000,they actually sound better than a ps3300! in a raw sound kind of way but obviously lack a lot of the features of the 3300 but to me it sounds like a fatter 3300 AND every key can be tuned if you remove the secret panel below the kybd!!! unlike the 3300 which can only tune 1 octave to microtones, which is actuallly my fave thing about the 3300, its microtonal capabilities and why i wanted one so badly..no other analogue polysynths had knobs for microtuning! So shit, been looking at ways to mod existing poly's
but i also got 3 pe1000's currently being midi'd, they r bloody great beasts n all.
dave:top version mon! wicked! oh yea, its funny u sent me tht, coz theres been a burning question in my head about tht trak i been meaning to ask fer ages, an totally keep forgetin to ask u. i rem the room at the bank where u had the korgs and the synton's et al,... wot synth does the bassline tht comes in at 1.54 ... ?? actually while am it, theres also a modulated digital noise bit in it, now my old dopefer euro noise module made sounds similar to tht when using external clock rate modulation, is tht wot tht was done on ??? + wot is drum machine / percussion on tht trak made from?? oh + tell me bout the harpsichord like sounds at the end and wot they were done with
rich: the shift register noise?
thats a digital noise gen built into the fenix, lush it is, there r more now ilke the harvestman zorlon ones, more flexible but not as smooth as the synton.
that 1.54 is a conventional europatch but dual path , so like 2 mono synths, so 2 filters,2 osc's 2, vcas etc i rek it was mostly doepfer modules, there wasnt many other eurorack modules out then anyhow, you can make the doeper modules sound much smoother/delux like that, 2 of everything and pan it
theres a lot of ensoniq mirage in that tune as well and a z1 doing the karplus sounds
seem 2 remember several 31 band graphics in there, i was well into them for a while but not really noticable on that track, subtle.
Some 100m on the percusiion.
I had like 10 or more 31 band graphics setup for a while and funnily enough just set a load up again recently, mostly different makes, you can get some real cheap like this one
court acoustics graphic eq, amazing inductor based graphic, awesome, people dont like graphic eqs right now for some reason!
but ive been doing things like getting one output and using a modular matrix switcher to send the sound to all these graphic eqs, sounds super nice, controlled with velocity or another cc
had a funny kind of argument with george massenburg once, was telling him he should make a 32 band graphic eq which was also a vocoder/sequencer/midi controller, with presets and motorised faders !
he was having none of it, boooring..
dave: tell me bout the equipment list on the cover
rich: i was pretty wary of doing it coz i absolutely dont want to be showin off, one of the reasons i not done it b4 'look at that tnuc with xxx£ of equip etc' i guarantee someone will get their calculator out in about 2 mins after readings it, add it all up post it on a forum, the tnuc has £ this much stuff etc'
but the equip list was so extensive i thought it just had to b noted.. that is only a small part of it as well even on the tracks never mind the rest of the stash.
I mean on the first 3 tracks on syro , there was probably a ton more outboard but I just couldn't remem what was used, too many things..neve 1081's dbx's etc, ext eq's,
oh and a friggin moog modular for bass on mini pops, forgot bout that , ha, looking at the gear list!
i wish i could do it on all future releases , i might but it just takes so much time, i was even going to record every patchbay connection on each track to show how everything was connected together and even include all data from the circlon but then slapped myself around the face got a grip.
coz it has all costs i wanted to take it to absolute maximum extreme of info...shame im not that mental ...yet..if i didnt have kids i prob would have.
dave: syro u473t8+e (piezoluminescence mix) hints at the use of piezo contact mics, is this a process used in this track & did u develop any new techniques?
rich: nah its to do with crystals in the pineal gland giving off light and being able to generate imagery of remote locations in yer mind...ok [skin up tnuc] soz new terrible expression..you asked
dave: [scrattling... scrattle... :]::> aaaaaahhhh... , .... shulda looked it up, now i get it! hmmm, so does this and PAPAT4(pineal mix) have some kind of link?
rich: yep thats where u will find it happening, not that I've dissected a pineal gland or anything.
although I'm getting an electron microscope soon!
dave: apart from the cirklon, the track titles hint at retro/vintage gear, but what new/current equipment have u been playing with & why?
rich: tons of eurocrack and new custom adt mixer..ummm eventide h8000 is newest thing i got, intense machine...
and of course the logos snr2 ! which is fullybonkers
some old stuff with new mods
you cant see the 12 internal beaters from the outside, unless u get right underneath it with a light.
dave: do u have a favourite synth & synthesis technique of all time?
rich: yeah u know im gunna say fm, so fm
it was first thing i got into, i bought a dx100 when i was 15 something like that[see attached receipt i found recently],
dave: is that my eyes or does it say "Penance Road"?? + have u still got that same dx?
rich: penance rd , yeah, where i grew up, lannerlog studios [in the bedroom] nah it broke unfort, trying to bend it for nth time, didnt have kybd or case by the time it died..was in a cardboard box
should have buried it next to my dog in the garden
saved up a whole year for it by saving my diinner and bus fare money, was nightmare but did it, i then made a business called lannerlog sounds [age15]and i used to sell sounds i made for it via mail order, i advertised in the back of e & mm , dont think any of the forensic fans even worked that out..i wish i could find the ad though, was in back pages of e &mm, maybe someone can find it, would be top nostalgy buzz to see that again.
bank wouldn't let me have a business account ,was too young but they let me use my mums account for free, explaining to the bank woman, i remember still her reaction, ...yeah i got this dx100 right and I'm saving the sounds as sysexdata not audio to cassette and selling them...
[ah stop press, been rummaging around at my mums house recently and dusted off a load of random things that ill bung in here, old flyer from back in the day, school trip certificate, letter from london records and lannerlog sounds! still wanna find the ad though and most of all the sounds!]
i might have the letter and sound listings somewhere..would love to see that again and would love even more to have the sounds back! not got it anymore...ahh be incredible if someone still had one of those tapes, rare!
also before that had a yamaha mk100 which was pretty advanced for a home keyboard type thing, that was the machine that got me into synthesis.
I used to always tinkle on keyboard in dixons for years when id be in town then when i saw this mk100 i thought woah wot is this, having never heard or seen synthesisers b4.
its got an unusual/unique mechanical rotating menu thingy+programmable drums+seq& sort of fm emulation, not sure whats going on inside them, would like to know, never opened that one up funnily enough.
dave: yea chekd tht mk100 on the net jus now, table hooters got a page on it =>
rich: fm goals left:
Ive just got this genetic algorithm based fm resynthesis app written for me by a very clever chinese computer student girl,
its VERY promising but needs more work,
it was originally on the kyma system and they wouldnt give the code to me, I wanted to run it natively as i sold my kyma system or was it chucked out window..not sure.., eventually would like to control banks of tx816's with it to reconstruct the sounds,ha, we'll see.
I love coding but its not my strongest point, im better at ideas so makes sense to pay someone else to code while I provide the rest.
I did some pretty far out stuff with supercollider1 , very mental ui's, mental patches with faders that crossed through each other , ha, I never followed it beyond version 1 in much detail, u can get it on raspberry pi now, might try it.
there r bits of supercollider all over my stuff like the fm bit at end of izus is supercollider fm.
I've got loads of old patches files somewhere , that i should make safer somewhere in the datamaze..ahh
just looked for summink to attach but on a drive somewhere??
dave: its been interesting to see the massive surge of popularity in modular synths over the last few years, which i think has also been helped lots by the eurorack scene and the availability of cheaper gear. as an artist u've been using modular synths since the beginning. what did u find interesting about modulars, and what are your thoughts on current modular gear available?
rich: The freedom to patch whatever you want, getting out of the chair to plug something, its like a quest/journey when you start patching,making connections in that way seems very natural to way me brain works, the community of eurorack is so good and getting better, everyone contributing to a common purpose...oh shit , not this common purpose
shit ytube keep reducing the views on this..they do that. oh stick in next to common purpose link
views [7,245] at time of writing out of interest.
shame it was not banana plugs that caught on as they are so much better, like betamax/vhs .
looking forward to when a robot arm that you attach to the modular watches/records all your actions and then you can recall presets and watch it patch it up super fast,if it runs out of patch cables, have option to make new ones from any wires in house..
dave:So when can we expect more music released?
rich: Its kind of a bit depressing really as warp just told me if i give them something completed by the end of this week it will be out in january!
fuck me, thats a long wait, it this kind of thing that stops me wanting to release anything, its like ok were on a roll now lets get something out next week, then couple weeks after that, a few weeks after that etc.
It just doesn't fill me with excitement to want to put anything out.
I don't wanna knock them as they are a lovely bunch but they got their stuff to put out first which they obviously think is worth releasing so ..and i suppose they can't employ an office full of people to sit around waiting for me to do some music,suppose
dave: its clear u use sequencers in your music, but is manual playing (either on keyboard or other devices) something u enjoy?
rich: yes, i play for hours most days, not recording anything, i usually can tell a synth or module etc has a good sound if I've been playing it all day
dave: tell me about some of the gear u've sledgehammered coz it woz so crap.
rich: ha, i did take a sledge to a video recorder once when it chewed up one of me tapes, was a good machine with varispeed bought from notty ash.
ended up outside the house, still hitting it, then chucked it in a tree and it sat there for years.
i used to get REALLY physically angry when i was younger when machines wouldnt work properly...i calmed down since..'autistic trait?' i remember a few times literally screaming at the highest possible level 1mm away from gear calling them every name possible like this guy
,..ah fuk...those were the days..
i think we get used to being the boss telling all these machines what to do and when they dont listen its quite a shock..control freaks
dave: do u have anything you'd like to say to the synth/instrument manufacturers that u think they ought to hear?
rich: really chuffed someone finally made a shortwave module, although i think I'm gunna have to get a bigger aerial as i can't pik up sod all where i live in middle of nowhere prob even worse where u live!
[oh cheers 4 update, they do a better aerial! now]
now all we need is a transmitter module, then we can patch to different rooms etc
but that was a big one for about 15 years,
intuitive micro tuning is the real biggy, should be legal to have it on all synths, sequencers.
dave: + anything else u wanna say to the synth manufacturers? ?
rich: yeah ill design a mega portable all in 1synth/seq/samplerworkstation for ya, get in touch!
I aksed ae if theyd collab on a piece of equip , sean said no.
ok free giveaway idea no.1
was thinking yesterday a really awesome thing that say korg or someone could make is this:
USB all in one mechanical drum kitkits!
so
USB to modular HUB with up to 16 i/o's
Say you get 4 to start with and you can buy more to expand it to 16.
So you plug in your solenoid beaters which on the same cable have a contact mic which takes audio back to the USB port of the thing its hitting, cable to be at least 4m long,would need a really nicely designed flexible clamp to fix solenoid to hit whatever you like, drums, saucepans, children&pets heads , windows etc.
Then sell additional 1 cable/contact mic combo cables to plug into your hub, could have large and small solenoids for smaller or larger objects.
would be fuckng amazing, could be so compact , just take your laptop anywhere and start sequencing rhythms out of everything and anything and be able to record it easily and in good quality.
, when u see all these things peeps make these days , they always record It so badly , like they forgot the most important bit, peeps seem so happy these days just proving things work, annoys me.
[also see idea proposed to George massenburg, somewhere else in this interview, oh i can't find it now, musta deleted that bit, ok again, i was saying to him he should make a graphic eq, which was also]
I think all my other ideas would never make it to market, too obscure,weird/specific...
I'm sure designers start off with amazing designs but then after boardroom financial meetings, all the good stuff gets chopped off.
dave: did u record&mix the album at home, or did u go to a recording studio, or was it some combination of both?
rich: lots of diff setups in couple of different houses over quite a long time,
this is just a selection from quite a big pile
i love diff setups and love looking at pics of peoples studios/workspaces although most are pretty boring standard.
u get the occasional diff one.
one of mine that im using the most now is like a giant cray computer/hexagon , c shape with tiny walkway in and 8ft towers of stuff wrapped around me, i can walk around it on the outside which is totally dope to re-patch things, its constantly growing like a virus, my setups always get out of control pretty quickly.
everything programmable is within arms reach, if you put something in a rack out of arms reach you will never get REALLY into it, unless you have already mastered it and even then its bit rubbish.
dave: what year was the earliest track on the album made & which one is it?
rich: think its 180db, made in my old bank, made on quite big serge modular.
It doesnt fit really and on purpose, its deffo one to play on a big rig.
dave: u've mentioned to me many times u are really into alternative & unusual ways of making sounds, what was the most unusual process u used for this album? wot is the most unusual process u've ever used?
rich: ha theres a question
well i think the first thing i remember doing was when i was at a scouts camp about age 11 , I got a radio cassette player and put a track on it, then attached it to a long piece of rope and starting swinging it in a circle around me, to also kind of show off to other camp people I suppose,...but slowly letting the rope out so the player is in a really big circle, like 10m in diameter, you get an AMAZING doppler effect, people should try this, its so good, you can re amp like this also!
So I was doing this kind of thing from very early age, and had fascination with doppler fx and other acoustic phenomenon since being a kid...oh and should also mention that i got kicked out of scouts that same day for putting a hangmans noose off the main flagpole, well you know its a knot..thy didnt like that....oops.
2nd thing that comes to mind is putting a bank of ldr's and a few thermistors over the oscilloscope of the synth 100,
its 20 ldr's and 3 or 4 thermistors, so you get a nice visual feedback thing going on, sounded insane, got to record it next time! pitch transition were so nice..also got to record synthi100 with all oscillators synced,..that IS a sound...all oscs on that thing have sync
remind me to send pics
but like that you are going from electricity to light waves then back to electricity and then finally to sound waves in air, top...oh and then electrochemical in yer hed and then.......______
s100 with ldr's+thermistors
ive got a cv in control on the lights of the synthi 100 so can also use those to operate the ldr's, also putting the bank of ldr's behind a fish tank with light on other side, fish modulation
also probably remote orchestra [below]
dave: wow, defo send me sounds and pix of that!
rich: ive been writing down for years installation/invention ideas which im thinking of releasing either as a book or with an LP or something, coz i now know im never going to get around to building/doing them all
its in 2 categories, fantasy ideas and realistic ideas, fantasy ideas are things like attaching stuff to planets and comets etc and the other category is stuff which could actually be made without help from other entities.
I dont want to say yet what they are as i really want to make some of them in next few years and you know its really bad to talk about things before you do them?
I tell my friends all the time, dont tell me what your GOING to do tell me what youve done, it takes a lot of the energy away and motivation to do something if you talk about it first.
dave: we've spoken in the past about algorithmic / generative music processes, did u use any for syro, whether computer based or otherwise?
rich: umm no not on those tracks...i dont fink...its all progrmmed by hand.
ive done tons and tons of modular random weirdness which i almost released about 10 years ago but never got around to it, the current craze of modular stuff kind of put me off as i like to fill gaps and those modular gaps got very filled but it will come out one day, my faves always change so hard to compile but longer you leave it the more objective you can be, less emotional attachment.
dave: you've told me your lad is getting into python & programming self-generating systems on the raspberry pi. + u also sent me a track made by one of your boys, which was wicked! as a recent father, i'm obviously keen to get my own lad playing with computers, synths & sound making if he shows an interest (which he already is...). do u have any thoughts or tips for me & other parents about bringing kids up with all this music/technology gear?
rich: well i didnt really want them to get into it as i have visions of us all sitting in the house on laptops with rain pouring in leaking roof and nobody bothering to fix it , so was kind of hoping they would get into carpentryDIY/plumbing or something ha.
but it is absolutely awesome..m y 8 yr old is already asking for a machine controller for xmas and the 6yr old wants a 3d printer .
I never could've never imagained id be hanging out with sons making tunes together!
my youngest asked me, dad what software do you use, ha and i wasnt really listening to him and i said oh try renoise, he then got a crack, downloaded and made some tracks, i never told him anything, he created a band camp page,artist name etc all on his own! he's 6 now but would be pretty top to release and album of electronic music when your age 6! maybe ill get warp to release it.
one of the reasons he's come on so fast is he's learning from and trying to keep up with his 8 yr old brother who is well off into code world.
When im not with them i sometimes play them both on starcraft over the net + skype at the same time!
so good, we play on the same team and work together to play others or the a.i
dave: are u planning any more live dates? how was the barbican remote gig for you, what were you actually doing for the parts of that show?
rich: none planned, phew..really wanna do some more live installation type events like Barbican though.
also really wanna work more on the remote orchestra idea.
Was a miracle anything came out of that as half the software broke down 5 mins b4 gig at barbican, had so much planned for that and it just didnt work right before show..so frustrating but lucky we got anything going, learnt so much though .
We had code to take it so much further ,like analysis of live audio>translation to humans as partials , midi files, live keyboard input>players, chord memory like on a synth etc etc, shouldve kept going , if id done 10 of those type gigs in a row, would've have been insane by the end..but hopefully I will continue that, dont wanna talk about where I want to take it for above reasons but it should be dope.
Ok quick explanation of what we did/planned.
Remote orch, players have pitched saw waves in their headphones, they have to try and track pitch, i control the pitches via midi controllers and maxpatches and who gets what.
They also have visual cues that tell them how loud to play and what style of playing + other instructions like play as high as you can and as fast as possible, on the birdge of instrument etc etc, scream like a cat dying
none of these worked at barbican though they did work at the poland performance though, i did what i could with what was left working.
Poland was particularly nice as nobody spoke english and i don't speak polish so it really was remote , it became part of it as I had to devise graphical instructions that everyone understood which they pretty much did,
my fave part was rehearsals where nobody told them when to start, there was no conductor, so there was lush moment when performers were like do we start or what? and slowly they realised i had started and started to do it, was pretty magical.
I send which players recieve which cues and how loud to play them, effectively making one big fuck off human synthesiser.
All audio came from laptop with digico usb>madi box>digirack 48 i/o rack [serious bit of kit]
48 channels of audio all from a laptop, the uber clever girl who designed the maid box at digico told me you can get over a thousand channels of audio from thunderbolt, the mind boggles..
also all headphones were wireless, so the setup was pretty insane, much more complex than i originally thought.
radio signals bouncing all around the concrete room and modulating each other etc, insanity
---->>>>
Performer instructions
'play' also means sing.
Try and play as close to the pitch in your headphones as possible, the pitch will sometimes change in very small amounts, try and play it as accurately as possible, microtonal outcomes will be desirable most of the time.
Try and follow the bend of the note as it increases or decreases.
If you cant follow the pitch because it is too high or low or too fast, just play as close to it as you can or play in a different octave.
Dont worry if you make mistakes when the pitch is changing too erratically to follow.
I will be exploring the players inability to reach the pitches immediately and when its impossible to play.
For instance if the pitches are too fast to hear and respond to, just try and respond as best as you can.
Try to ONLY play for the duration you hear the tone [sawtooth wave sound] and not play when it has stopped, or in other words try and match the note length accurately.
The duration and speed will vary and it will take you a few seconds sometimes to adjust to the new speed and duration, dont worry about mistakes in this adjustment period.
When the tone is constant, try to sustain the sound as long as possible.
You might hear tiny clicks in the tone, ignore these.
There are 2 modes
1st mode:mainly rhythmic
13 channels on screen = 13 sections.
Strings are split into 9 sections/channels ,Choir 4 sections/channels
The 13 sections are :
violins [3 groups of 4 violins],
violas [2 groups of 4 ]
cellos [2 groups of 2]
double bass [2 groups of 2]
choir [4 groups of 3]
2nd mode:spectral mode, [mainly sustained notes]
5 channels on screen
Every player can recieve an individual sound [32 channels]
as opposed to 13 in mode1
------
Each section could be receiving a different pitch and rhythm, although you may all be receiving the same pitch and rhythm sometimes.
Each string and choir section looks at their part of the screen only and follows the instructions in that column on the screen, which also has its own colour
You are only looking for volume information and a playing instruction
There are other parameters represented on screen but they are mainly for eye candy, you may find them helpful or maybe best to ignore.
Instructions will flash just before they change so you can anticipate a change
and help synchronise players.
As soon as you see it change, follow the instruction
String players will be required to make vocal sounds also and stamp feet,tap bow etc
Try and concentrate on what you hear in the headphones and on your screen and what the other players in your section are doing as it will be the same as you[mode1 only] BUT not the other sections. [this might be very difficult, do your best!]
It is your choice if you are wearing both left and right headphones or just covering one ear, adjust your own volume.
Sound will be at one volume only, no volume changes.
It will be good to listen to what other players in your section are doing, try to play in sync with just them only and not the other sections IF possible, otherwise just concentrate on the tone.
if the volume is zero 'off', stop playing.
when you see the pause command pause playing.
additional instructions[ some things repeated]
Its important not to be influenced by what anyone else is doing, just try and concentrate on the sound in the headphones but note that
for the rhythmic parts and occasionally the non rhythmic parts there will others in your section receiving the same sound as you , it would be good to synchronise with these players[mode1], hopefully you will be sat in groups to help, so you will know who these others are but not sure at this stage, it might be that its just easier to block what everyone else is doing out, we will see in rehearsals.
Each part may seem like its not changing but the timing or pitch will very likely be subtly changing.
Most of the time each individual part will be very repetitive and you will probably get annoyed but please persevere as its a part of the whole, which will be pretty complex.
try and improve on each repetition,matching duration as close as possible and playing at the same time of the tone.
there may be glitches in sound ,ignore
sequences of notes are never more than 6 notes, try and remember them as best as you can.
if you hear sound in your headphones but no play signal then stop, wait til you hear sound AND a play symbol or other instruction[software bug]
Symbols/instructions
non musical instructions also follow volume
legato/play- play/sing tone
stamp feet- in time to headphone tone instead of playing
laugh at your own speed and style
scream or shout ,[any duration/speed]
heavy breathing in and out at your own speed different to others, with throat,short notes, any volume
click clock sound with mouth like horse hoofs, any volume and speed, your choice
whisper counting upwards from 1, at your own speed which is different to others
aphex logo-play random microtonal notes as fast as possible with rapid non rhythmic tremolo
nv several irregular changes of box in succession
tap the desk or chair with bow, quite fast, random rhythm
tap the upper part of soundboard with fingertips
z very rapid non rhythmicized tremolo
<<<<----
pendulum piece was extremely rewarding, i was asked to pick a steve reich piece by european culture of congress in poland to work on so i picked his pendulum piece, i loved the idea but didn't think the result steve got was very good and could be taken MUCH further.
I asked steve what determines the pitch of the feedback, he said 'physics' im still waiting for the answer to that, anyway I originally was going to put all the feedbacks through banks of frequency shifters but in the end realised you can tune the feedback signals with parametric eq! it kind of tracks the harmonic series, so i was able to get all the different pitches.
Reich loved it and said it was like i had all the different parts of the orchestra as feedback tones.
He wanted to release it on nonsuch but i never got around to sorting the masters out, still havnt, rather do another gig.
Had an amazing setup on a midas matrix monitor desk whereby i could control the gain of each of the 17 different microphones[for vari sound] via analogue faders and also group vca faders controlling groups of the seventeen mics and seventeen wedge monitors, one big fuck off mixing desk instrument.
Those matirx desks are perfect for the job and you find them quite easily live gig equipment world.
dave: yea the pendulum version, u sent me youtube link a while back, this :
got very nice tones. pls send some soundfiles! oooh, thanks!!!
rich: swinging piano, nobody would lend/hire me a disklavier for the gig, i wonder why?
so realised 2 weeks b4 show i had to use mine and transport it to london, 1 week before piano wasnt working, i realised mice had eaten through all the fibre optics inside! cost me £5k to fix it, then had to reienforce the piano frame with steel to hold it together.
the whole point apart from the spectacle was to get the dopplereffect on the strings and nobody knew if it would work, it turned out to be the most trippy amazing pitch effect ive ever heard, it couldnt really be recorded, you had to be on the stage, even in the audience you couldnt really appreciate it , would love to do it again whereby evryone can walk around the piano as its swinging.
its like you could almost see the pitches in the air all spread apart and then all come rushing together, un-fucking believable, i wrote the piece specially for my wife and didnt tell her before that i was going to use the track i made for her at this gig ))
got some other juicy cool ideas like this swinging piano, taken to next level!
heres a mockup track i did before the swingpiano to see roughly what a piano would sound like with dopplereffect, made it in maxmsp and its a diff version of avril 14th.
The crew in poland were astonishingly good but they couldn't swing my disklavier from the roof in the amazing venues they had there for different reasons, which is other reason i knocked up this little track to play there.
So huge respek to all involved at the barbican gig4 making it happen.
Its so funny when you suggest these kinds of things especially with my rep to people, they just don't know how to take it, ah man the things that could be done, i can't think too long about it...
but usually the idea is the way easy part , making it happen is the fight, you have to be so single minded to make it happen and everyone just looks at you like a tnuc UNTIL it works then its like ah yeah we knew it was going to be good all along.
But you gotta start off small and then hopefully build it up if and when it works...to get funding and trust.
here are some barbican/poland pics
i used to live nr turbine hall at the tate and have got some mega ideas for that place but u have to kinda shmooze with all the right people to make it happen, i just didnt have the stomach 4 all that, mabe another time.
dave: u told me a while back u still have a setup in your bedroom so u can work on tracks whenever u get the inspiration. how does your missus feel about having synth clobber in the bedroom? do u have synths in the bathroom??
rich: ha bathroom, funny u say that, as i rek is only room in house without equipment, of course I've used it as a reverb in the past not in this house though[scotland]
my missus is sooo understanding, she doesnt mind if i turn light on etc when she is sleeping she is the best, totally lush she is.
though she says i wake her up tapping on the circlon keys too hard!
i can go bloody fast on that thing these days!
bedroom setup is currently now a buchla 400 +two dynacord add one's+four marshall time modulators[diff models] ! yer usual kinda bedroom setup
dave: speculation abounds regarding follow up releases, the watmm forum already has a thread going about it :
are the titles accurate? what sort of new material can we expect from u in the future? do u have any hints or timeframes for other releases?
rich: no, fuk knws where they got that from, yea well loads planned hopefully i wont get sidetracked, more experimental stuff and robotic/electro mechanical stuff, its all pretty much ready to go, so just got to master it.
syro was like the friendly easiest listening selection, although it is most of my fave unreleased tunes of last 10 years, so its no cop out.
The other stuff ,got to be in right frame of mind to hear it.
dave: what's the current situtation with rephlex? are there to be any new rephlex releases by u or other artists?
rich: nope rephlex has come to an end, end of an era, all rights given back to the artists, I dont know if I will take part in another label, Im all up for suggesting things to other people to chase up and release though like , lets have a herbert eimert compilation!
dave: with all this music making its a wonder u get any time off. how do u manage to juggle a successful career and a family at the same time?
rich: its very hard but possible, its like constantly juggling, i enjoy the challenge...but sometimes its a bit like this
dave:how accurate is the gear list on syro?
rich: definitely not 100% and there are 1 or 2 mistakes, like i think it says i used a vocoder on the piano track , dot in wrong place or i prob did it wrong, it is mostly right though but misses out a shit load of outboard as i couldn't remember every eq etc in my lodge.
There were a few plugins used but hardly anything and not worth mentioning really, it is 99.9% hardware not that it matters just sayin.
Plenty more eurorack modules as well obviously but i think i put down the main ones i could remember.
Actually the whole equipment list is pretty weird choices on there actually pretty normal/odd for me i think, its definitely not showing off when u take into account what else I've got! just so happened those particular tracks used those things.
the birds on that piano track by the way were picked up by the mic's at the same time, i angled them slightly towards the doors to pick it up, the birds hear what I'm doing also !-)
Oh and its all programmed, I think I've almost got to the point now when i can think music and then program it pretty much in one go, not quite but almost, it was never an ambition actually, it just happened that way.
Most people I know who heard it think its played, which is a really nice complement, coz every little timing imperfection in that is purposefully programmed in...i find it very mediative doing such tiny little things, tempo is regular though so it could be mixed with amen break
dave: is there any country u've not performed in yet that u want to?
rich: not really, i dont really like thought of traveling that much, id rather stay local .. I've never felt the need to go anywhere that far, once im out the door its a different matter though, so id prob say antarctica or north pole.
I think I'm always just happy wherever i am.
Me and rus [russell haswell]
used to talk about doing a gig in Svalbard, id REALLY love that, check it out on a search, what a place.
Me and him played on a little lsland off the coast of norway once, was fucking intense total laff...i think that was mainly the acid though...oh god.., all they had to eat there was whale burgers or whale soup, although a mate of rus's came and brought his harpoon gun and caught a load of fish!
the hardest part was being totally off my face and then the sun comin up at 2am, [coz its so far north]..ah it was intense...[grits teeth]
everyone was drinking as if it was their last day on earth, they do that over there.
dave: its great that you've been a champion of the vinyl format. what do u think is the secret of vinyl's longevity?
rich: exactly that, its the longest lasting format and when it does deteriorate it does so in a pleasing way .
It has a sound, well it has lots of sounds, depending on who presses it etc etc but it sounds a certain way that suits some things and doesn't suit others, simple as that, like tape,
id love my own lathe so i could bounce things to vinyl and then resample, I know people who do that, I've got some other weird devices for that though anyway at the moment to keep me happy.
but if you want to archive your music for longest period of time, vinyl is the one..
so weird to think of all the cd's ,tape &and vinyl in the world today in few hundred years time, none of it will work anymore, all hard drives etc will be fucked in 10 years.
i bet usb sticks don't last long, I've no idea, not looked into it but bet its hardly anything and nowhere ask long as vinyl.
How about people who store music in a stupid sound cloud? ha what a joke, like leaving all your records around someones house you never met and expecting them to be there still when you get back,
Aphex Twin SYROBONKERS! Interview - Part 2 dave noyze talks to richard d james
note: this interview was conducted over the course of a couple of months, the process began around the time the blimp went up before the release of Syro and was completed on 25.10.2014, after the albums release. some questions were inserted afterwards, answered amended etc, so the whole thing isn't sequential. all music tracks, photo's & images have been supplied by richard + photo's that were taken by other people have been noted. this is part two of two parts. -----> part one is HERE!
thanks: Grant Bussinger & Steven Hill at Warp Records for web assistance
dave: so much for the synth nerding, would u like to briefly say anything particular about each of the other tracks/ album as a whole/track selection?
rich: dunno, too much too think about overall
but they were all pretty much done on new studio setups Id just made, so I was pretty much warming up on the setups with those, doesnt mean I wasnt really happy with them but as always with new setups, takes a while to get going before you can attempt to large it up, the fucker is i usually tear em down again before mastering them..
Saying that , when it works , I really like the vibe of trying out new bits of klob or setups, I relish pretty much all states of mind , so all good in long term.
The first 3 tracks were actually made in order 3,1,2 after taking 3 years to make that particular studio, I mean when its taken that long to put something together and you finally kneel before it , its pretty intense wot u do first.
Other setups used only took a matter of hours to put together and then grew really quickly, like most of my setups do, like bacteria.
When choosing the tracks, I went for easy listening/lushness on syro which is pretty friendly for me.
Ive been putting things out long enough to know pretty much what reactions will be.
If I go for experimental then you only make about 20% fans happy, 80% get alienated and you won't win many new listeners.
Syro I rek will be other way around, it needed to be done about now, then I can put out more challengin stuff, I really like the tracks, so absolutely not selling out or anyfing, kind of stick neck out a little bit into mainstream and then go away again, Im just not mental enough to go fully mainstream, would have to deal with so much shit that would detract from what I want to do, otherwise Id go for it, but being recognized etc makes me feel massively uncomfortable but at same time, the world is awash with commercial bullshit, so gotta try and twat some of that stuff out the way.
dave: what (if any) were your main influences (e.g. musically, philosophically, etc.) for this album or any of the traks specifically?? and anything you want to say about the production?
rich: I thought id be brave and release stuff that I thought could possibly be digested by the mainstream without any artistic compromise whatsoever.
All the tracks I picked from the many that I have stockpiled are my fave tunes I've been listening over the last couple of years so I absolutely know which tunes I'm selecting are the right ones, I mean I know there is no perfect selection, as soon as I made it I wanted to change it but that would happen everyday I sat down to compile it, id be in a different moodmode few hours and so the selection will always be a bit different.
But its near enough right, good enough I spent longer making most of the tracks than I ever did before, even most of the ones on drukqs, the time setting up all that analog klobber is ridiculous, keeping it working and in tune etc,
there were no analogues runnin live on druqks at all, I mostly have 2-3 backups of most of my gear so when it breaks i can replace it while the others get fixed which can sometimes take years, so its the only way if you want to use this much old analogues.
Some tracks took a year on /off to make and lots of things broke in that time inc the 3300's , 2 chroma's , 2 code8's etc etc, its a total fucking nightmare but when its finished the satisfaction is immense.
When you have 64+ channels of vintage equipment as was the case in some of the tracks especially track2, there is A LOT of noise generated, I used A LOT of noise gates, my fave being some EMT ones which are like LPF/gate hybrids, they have that lush LPF roll off rather than a volume fade, very sexual.to my eears
But I use several different types,
none of the tracks on syro were multi tracked into the computer , they were all recorded live to 2 track, which is kinda insane but the way i like it.
Its done then , you have to get it right , theres no fixing it afterwards, theres no edits on any of the tracks apart from the Marchrom , which is made from multiple takes with a load of different Eventide 3000 dse fx.
A fuck load of time was spent trying out things to see what worked with what, way too much time in fact for those particular tracks, Ive done tracks recently in hours that I like as much but in a different way, I still like spending yonks on things these days.
Ive been trying to combine recently the nrg u have when your 15 with the knowledge you gain when your 42, by having the right setups, getting there..
i think i have as much nrg now as i did when a teen but when ur a teen ur more narrowminded so your effort goes into a tighter space, as ive got older just get into so many things it spreads your concentration .But i always think i wish i knew this or that when i was 15 its dumb to think like that coz u can just fix it in the present, there is only present anyway, future/past just a mind construct, i worked tht out on shrooms when i was 19
Oh but on the noise gates, yes there are lots of them but obviously I still love hiss at the right level in the right places, even more so in these days of ultra clean linear itb recordings.
controlling it to the right degree is tricky,.
Ive been using an old 70s rack of allison research ones, 10 of the buggers,with the funny little mystical head logo at the top, i sent you some links to it, they're all discreet and each one has its own sound and distorts differently, the compressors are not as snappy as the later ones which i love [ gain brain2], one of my fave compressors that, they have a lush 70s sound though , the discreet ones, although you can tweak the trimpots on the pcb to get different responses, been doing that a lot recently.
They have weird annoyin connectors on the back, forgot the name of dem.
Oh and on trak 6, the whole track is going thru a drawmer stereo gate which is being triggered by sequenced sounds.
I really wanted to do it like that and gate the whole friggin track but disadvantage was that the whole track then sounds like the drawmer+the hedroom on dem things aint that great, you can hear it breaking up, bummer but i liked the roughness also.
Ive got a much better earlier version which sounds quite a bit nicer although i wasnt using any fancy mixers on that one so not that nice but its an earlier version so not quite as developed OR gated obviously...unfort..i would attach it but can't find it right now...
might stick it up online somewhere when/if i do though.
rich:this is not it actually as its still being gated but there u go.
some people have said to me, do you make your tracks slow and then speed them up, which is funny to me, answer is no, the vibe would be totally different if you did that, Ive tried it, doesnt work for me, it would sound sped up, I make them at the speed they are, of course I do stare at and enter data in, speed set to zero , ha but thats it, tracks like mt sain michel st micahels mount off drukqs, im surprised i didnt have a heart attack when makin those tracks, i know i was in a total rush state for the entire time of making tracks like those, especially that one!
But the idea that I have sped them up is funny because why would i want to do that? to make it seem more complex than it is? to make me feel more hectic than i was when making it?
nah , it be would be fake.
some of the syro tracks are pretty old and some are made in the last 6 months, the Japanese bonus one is the newest although that is very different from all the other ones I've been doing recently, it was a weird one off that fitted very nicely on the end of syro or anywhere where people want to insert it for that matter.
Its my wife speaking in russian , sampled into ensoniq asr10 and run thru vocoders...can't rem wot the carrier was though...oh yeah it was ps3200, sennheiser vsm
Mine and my families privacy is VERY important to me and deciding to thwart myself into the mainstream was not an easy decision, I'm not doing it for the money, ive already got enough 4us2 live on for a bit, I just wanted to put music out there in the mainstream which has been made for the right reasons, coz its definitely in short fucking supply!
The same doesn't go for underground electronic music which imo has been at an all time high for years now, theres sooo much good stuff com in out now its totally inspiring and an amazing time to be listening to stuff, i should compile a chart here or something, I'm going to be putting a/v mixes online with my mate eno[weirdcore]
soon hopefully soonish
like mix tapes but with visuals, really looking fwd, gunna be doing all different styles there from funk to musique concrete and all in between, inc loads of newshit by others.
I had been waiting for years for it to get good and now theres just sooo many good producers out there with no equipment, just puter&pair of speakers
absolutely has kicked off now and its only going to get better I reckon.
2nd answer is the whole purpose of me making music is to reorganise/rearrange/modify me into something else, everything you experience affects/changes you / adjusts your chemistry,/makes new connections in yer brain, allows you to notice new things, especially sound and music but sound or vibration is potentially the most powerful influence.
When you hear natural sounds, you can feel how it deeply affects you but apart from putting yourself into those situations you are at the mercy of whatever happens in those environments.
A good thing about travelling, although I don't really like physically travelling that much.
When you make music, or orchestrate natural phenomena you are putting together something that you know or should know is going to rearrange you and change you in a more defined way than if you just went to another country you never went to before, then when you create it and experience it you become what you wanted to be and it feeds back to what you want to become again, its the lushest spiral of creativity and it can be taken much further than music is currently doing [i personally STILL feel like I'm just warming up!], I think with sound alone, you can potentially rearrange all matter and change the way you and others think, if its sequenced correctly.
pretty much everyting is vibration.
But you have to be open to it.
if you think thats bullshit then you have a lot to learn I'm not talking to you dave.
I love how the rhythmic energy from a sequencer or 1 single frequency can actually give you nrg when you listen to it, nrg from the electrical power supply transferred to our bodies through sound, its different to a human playing a musical instrument, that is a direct nrg transfer from one to another/s, you are at the mercy then of how much nrg they have to give.
Controlling electricity which you pay for or generate from the sun or other means and transferring it to your body is
amazing, sometimes I feel so honoured that there is this massive electricity supply that we can just tap into without having to work for it. as well having enough food to eat.
I do think the world is absolutely fucked and most people on earth are under control to a large extent, the world is so fucking boring as well as obviously being evil, life could be SOOO much better, we r controlled by the most boring stnuc imaginable.
The potential of human beings is immense and that is why people are kept under such tight control because the controllers know what we are capable of.
Also like i mention below with tunings, mankind needs as much positive/trippy/awakening/next level non dark thought provoking vibes as possible right now, we are living in a mega dark spiritual age and its 2easy to channel that into our music but I think we have to try really hard to drag ourselves out of it and dream up new mind expanding music & art, thats definitely not boring nu age yawnsville.
dave: regarding electricity i'm hangin on for a couple of these 10kw nuclear cold fusion genny's , can;t wait till these are on sale, sure beats a diesel genny!
interesting about wot u say regarding re-arranging matter with music / sound. there's a c00l book by alain danielou, called music & the power of sound, he talks bout that a little bit. its heavy book, lots of interesting things about tuning in it tho, although i dont agree with everything he sez.
rich: cheers will check, I've hardly read any books on music, I'm hoping 2 change that in nr future
dave: ultra-thanks for sending thru the cover with the klobber listing, some tasty stuff there! it's a cool design as well the way the dots allocate to the tracks, reminds me of cellular automata type stuff, and player piano roll / punched tape etc. so that's jee'd me up to ask some more klob q's. there's some tasty reverb's listed, what's your favourite all time reverb box & what got you into reverb as an effect?
rich: i veer more towards the electro mechanical types, so plates, springs,pipes, spaces and gold foil etc.
They are so easy to make yourself as well, with just thin sheet metal, piezo pickups etc and can use as microphones, will sound more interesting than any mic you can buy imo.
contact mic on thin sheet metal, job done, more interesting than expensive mice, although they have their place.
My wife and me made an amazing slinky spring reverb last year, I think it was about 20 slinky springs joined together, suspended around the house, sending sounds down that, snippet attached.
My wife bowed one of the nylon threads we had suspending it afterwards, fucking dope!
i loved the idea of that fractal wire on board thing youve done, i reckon theres much more to be done in that sector .and of course your wires thingies, bloody mentil pard!
dave: yea, did those electromagnetic fractal wire thingies in 2011, i'll stick a picture here poss. mite do a blog page on those fractal things at some point. i built a little suite of about 5 or 6 of em, must rescue those from my mess of shed, needs developing a bit more. oh hang on, ere is a pic of the hilbert one :
photo: hilbert fractal wire thingy - dave noyze
+ just built some new ultralong wires this year for our wired open day, we used these massive bridge timbers from a local railway bridge that got replaced, they over 100 years old, heavy as fuk too! need to do a blogpost on them at some point as well. love the sound of the slinky stuff, +reminds me bit of some of wire sounds, did u take any pics of that setup?
rich: nah, I'm so shit at remembering to take pics of what i do.
I replaced the garden hoses inside a urei time cube with different copper tubes, its soo good, I think the original designer stipulated that but urei used garden hose to save money.
Saying that though, got some long lengthsflexi plastic tubing +hoover tubes,few months back, old headphone speaker in one end, mic at the other, awesome, sounded especially good feeding back on itself.
With the digital ones, I didnt get a lexicon 480L til a few years ago, mainly coz of price and everyone in old studios has one but they are f'kin amazing in the right hands..,& the original Quantec qrs[attached example],
and of course the Eventide H3000 d/se are absolutely mental lush devices, those ones in particular really envelop the sound rather than tack it on, special blessed bits of equipment.
Of course special mentions have to go to akg 68k [so lushlygrainy and some nice granular features],quadraverb, quadraverb is dark and muddy and has nice arrangement of subtle pitch shifting, delays into reverbs etc, can be setup very nicely if you spend the time with it, used on all tracks on SAW1.
but can be recreated with other units quite easily but thyre cheap as , so..
just did a quik test on QVerb last week here, this is just din sync dr110+quadraverb , circlon, so u can hear quadraverb in bit diff light, not got many files on this laptop.
dave: great little trk! alesis did good with tht quadraverb, they must have made millions of em! it was well popular, always quite liked the buttons on it too.
rich: Then Publison DHM 89 pitch shifter [not reverb]with KB200 blew me away, it was pretty much the first sampler and does super stereo rudimentary granular synthesis, man if id had one of those in the 80's !
I dont think many people released anything using the granular fucntions on that apart from maybe 1 electro record and Parmagiani.
So many more boxes, thyre all good in their own way.
id love to write a book on my fx boxes..
im super interested in computer emulations of springs also, thyre getting awesome now, something about springs...time warpers, <<<they are to audio what prisms are to light !>>>
LAter eventides are whatever u want them to be via visg as ur now finding out, i hope you and me are gunna be swapping ptches pretty soon.
Masive shame that vsig is not usb, please someone knock out some code for that shit!
your orville is now on the way hopefully!
Tom jerks made loads of synths n shit on his, u can do whatever like on them.
dave: yea sure lookin forward to some patch swappin! i rek a usb to rs232 converter might werk frm the pc, u can get em in little tiny versions ... give it a shot. this kind of stylee mite b the go:
my ultra-ancient pc got rs232 on board still but i do got some tings tht i usb to rs232 with and seem to werk quite well. let me know how u go.
rich: ok wow will get although i did try something like this bout 10 years ago with dsp4000 , fannied around for days with no luck. eventide you bloody slags!
oh got a lexicon delta t other week, very interesting device, cheers gwen for tip!
hardly any info on dem floating about.
dave: i used to have a synton syntovox 221 vocoder, but I flogged it to speedy j in the 90's, and I wish I still had it. I got it & bunch of other klob as payment for some secret crypto work when I was at bt research labs, which I can't go into detail on coz I signed the official secrets act in 1981 when I started as an apprentice. can u tell me a bit about how u used your pair of em? (I rem when u wrote to me telling me u had 2, and u could go realtime syntovox stereo!
rich: exactly, +an excuse to buy another, they are slightly different as well.
Apart from the patch ability which is so nice on it with pins [like ems5000] it has the computer interface, which always intrigued me, if synton did anything with that or anyone else, or you?
dave: well not at home, but we had some interesting stuff at the labs there on martlesham heath to interface to all the speech recognition / synthesis klob. but i can;t really talk bout the cloak & dagger stuff except to say tht its now been officially declassified in 2003 about MI5, MI6, GCHQ et al at least being on site. see this link & search for martlesham :
aint seen the program, but they won;t b tellin me anything new anyway i'm not endorsing those sites, but they do note the presence of MI5 et al at BT Labs as it was then... anyway, it is weird to think that there's this whole area of electronic sound/noise research that never gets published or patented and all happens in mysterious little rooms, wicked & wonderful sounds that would make u freak! all these nutty top secret processes & obscure methods, exciting stuff but also bit weird coz i can never talk about it unless they declassify it... which is unlikely. funny tho, theres been a little bit about where vocoders came from in secret speech coding.
dave: my roland system 100m came to me the same way, for doing secret work for em, sort of little bonus, they used to use it for simulating dial tone / test tones in phone testing back in the 80's! nuts...
rich: ha, really funny weird, kind of remem u saying that prob after i necked half a bottle of absinth or summink
dave: yea, have some vague memory of drinking absynth with ya... ! i also think there's prob lot more speech synthesis/recog/vocoder stuff been made by the big "music manufacturers" that gets diverted to more secret uses. so, yea that interface on the back of the synton was specially designed for hooking up to pooter for analysis/resynthesis, its do-able ... cripes, i could talk about this all day, .. anyway u were saying about synton ...
rich: yeah i thought you prob could, ok save it for when i interview you
I mean I suppose the main thing to do there is recording the cv outs from the filters of analysed audio, manipuating the voltages with a seq then chuck in it back at the vocoder, did try this a few times with a doepfer setup, theres definitly plenty of scope their for future experiments, give me a clone please someone?
also check this out on the dutch speech synthesis tip, i got it from Steim about 15 years ago, VOSIM voice simulation sound synthesis,
iits based on the idea that by employing repeating tone-burst signals of variable pulse duration and variable delay, a sound output of high linguistic and musical expressive power can be obtained
reminds me of in school as a kid when bored in lessons id make that clicking flange sound you can do with your mouth, which usually ended up in getting a detention.
"i will not make and/or incite others to make repetitive weird clicking flange sound with my voice" x200
It was made by Peter Plompen, Utrect in the 80's, got a manual but i cant read dutch very well.
I should get someone to scan it.
I need an assistant damn u , bring me my assistant and the finest weed known to humanity*
dave: yea i hear that! i could do with assitant too... yea, u on the right trk with the synton, u prob could feed it into the circlon... wow that steim vosim box looks mentox! yea i know bout the vosim o course, been into that bak in bt labs hushhush days again... got my first vosim tweak in late 80's/early 90s. i got 4 boxes here that do it, someone ought to get on that tip and make something for euro that does it! the info on vosim is cool coz it not classified, the orig 1978 paper using sin^2 pulses from institute of sonology utrecht is on the ircam server :
rich: yeah nice was just chekin that b4 i sent the pics, surprised u couldn't y smell me on the site...not had proper butchers yet though.
dave: (top pix at the end of the paper of the authors as well, they look like MI5 d00ds:). there's also a circuit in electronotes as well.
rich: ok
dave: theres other vocoder stuff on syro, u seem to have a longstanding fascination with vocoders & speech synthesis, can u tell me how u got into it & wot trax u think r some key ones for peeeps to chek out (both yours & other artists)?
rich: ers one i got into recently
doxa sinistra-no job
other traks of theirs l really like
doxa sinistra 'portable electronics' and 'the other stranger'
dave: do u have a favourite non 12tet tuning?
rich: I like em all, least like 12TET, my faves are ones ive made myself,
dave: do u mean least like 12tet ?
rich: yes
dave: yea, 12tet is the real culprit for me... how do u feel bout 1/4 tone (24tet) & 1/8 tone (48tet) for example, or come to think of it some other non12 ET's such as 17, 19, 53, oh and the 31tet fokker organ:
rich: yeah super top, 1/4 tone, 1/8 tone i used quite a bit on SAW2
well my versions of them, tweaked.
dave: what microtuning did u use on syro ??
rich: I made some of my own up on zithers,piano, scala for sysex dumps into circlon and some other h-pi software, its quite subtle on syro, i didnt choose any of the far out ones yet for release.
got quite a few microtonal keyboards like their bigger ones
peeps can prob find me on circlon list as I've been pecking Colin for ages to implement a microtune editor for analogues on there!
He finally put scala import on there which was a hidden feature for a while , while i was making the end of syro, actually
but we, yes we the people REALLY need colin to b able to save the goddamn tuning tables on there and be able to tweak them intuitively on the fly!!!
when he does that ill be happy for next 10 years
talking of circlon which I'm pretty much always up for doing these days,
some of my mates were freaked out I made jungle tracks on the circlon inc. trk11 on syro, I just got so deep into circlon , when i first got it , i didn't know how far i could go with it but I'm like a shorthand typist on that thing now, timing is beautiful, its really re-trained my brain, seriously, now i can hear even more accurately like within 1ms i reckon.
its so funny controlling lappy from the circlon which it can do without blinking, love it, can control the computer better than the computer can control itself!
it is the best sequencer ever made til now, in terms of analogue i/o, timing man that box...its got a long way to go but I can't endorse it enough ! I've never been into endorsing anything, I've been asked by a lot of people but i hate the idea of it, makes my skin crawl, there can be good combos for sure between artist and maker but when its too business it all goes wrong, people gotta make a living but you can tell easily when people got their priorities wrong anyhow, anyway colin is totally on it and in it for the right reasons.
i hope colin does really well out of it, he deserves to , guys a genius and he's got my gx1 still for midi -ing!
but at the mo id rather he kept o.s updates flowing:)
you have to b extra mental to have a many synth /osc setup AND try to make microtonal tracks AND still try and get them all intune, ha its insanity but it can be done, its top i love it.
dave: are there any programs in particular u find useful for microtuning e.g. scala, h-pi ? and can u tell me wot u think of them and any improvements u think they could do with ??
rich: im interested in the purely mathematical tunings yes and especially ones that I make up as opposed to ones already out there but much more interested in making my own ones up on a per session basis/per track ,intuitively, rather than with maths but I've learned a lot from listening to certain mathematical ratios, fascinating.
its easy to make your own maths ones up also, scala is a deep prog but u can get hed around it with a bit of effort.
but yeah creating them intuitively really is where its at or maybe starting off with a preset ratio/scale and tweaking it.
i like to use different scales, depending on where i want to go
in a particular trak,
things like buchla controllers, make it so easy to make your own, in a matter of seconds whereas on computer, other methods, can be like banging you ed against a brickwall, like dx7 e! as u just found out yerself, although they r not so bad if you know where u r going with them but things like the e! are totally crap for trying out new stuff, i do love tht E! board though, im like a little kid with addons like that.
i mainly now use loads of oberheim marion pro synths/msr2's as I think those 2r the only ? analogue polysynths with FULL micro tuning, idont think there were any others to have FULL micro tuning, how insane is that! its beyond belief to me..i contact new manufacturers like dave smith, p5 had a bit of microtungin buried in it but zilch after that.
theyre not the best sounding synths but they r madly flexible and the ui is pretty amazing considering how few buttons it has, its fully usable, i don't find it frustrating to use at all actually, without a sysex editor.
guitar music freaks me out , coz i look at a guitar, i bought one couple years ago, ha , coz i thought it was about only instrument i didnt have lying around the house.
and think why the fuck do people stick to 12TET, its ultra boring and guitars like most stringed instruments beg to be re-tuned, its so easy compared to most synths,
to me a synth/plug in or whatever that doesn't allow you to change the tuning scale is like only having one demo song that you have to use in every track, or painting on a canvas and having to always use the same background colour ,drives me nuts that most people have not woke up to micro tuning yet, i predict 80% of all electronic music will be microtonal in a few years., i fuckig hope so anyhow
again, Mankind is at a spiritual low point right now, possibly the lowest its ever been if you read into the great pyramid inscriptions, its not hard to see either, most people are very much asleep and being controlled.
That doesnt mean that everyone is asleep, many others are ultra awake and hopefully the numbers are going to rise, they better do anyhow and quickly before we lose all our civil liberties.
its like all these dub step/jungle tracks that are trying to sound dark but using fluffy old 12TET, just hilarious
i think its subconsciously why all the artists that dont microtune work in the bass region , sub bass like in jungle etc, the brain finds it harder to decern pitch the lower you go, so if your going to use 12TET then go for the lower frequencies, people are going lower and lower all the time due mainly to monitoring systems getting better but i also think spiritually people are going to those lower notes as they are almost non12TET sounding, once people get it , it will kik off and spread be a major revolution in electronic music, .
Ive been using microtonal stuff mainly since selected ambient works2 on /off but did use it prior to that quite a bit also.
dave: yea, I did classical piano for 10 years, up until 1981, did rsm grades and that, but by then I was already well into punk/electronic music/synths & building things. so I gave up piano and 12tet, and moved to synths + electronics and started makin me own trax & setup me studio. also i agree the utuning software needs to be more intuitive, I've started making tunings algorithmically using ca since last year, not based on any music theory, so kinda intuitive from the point of view of artificial life i still like so called "classical" music tho, if its done well, especially harpsichord coz they all get their own tunings, which are often quite weird + i always think ladies play harpsichord better than blokes, at least wot i;ve heard.
ivor darreg (i was introduced to his stuff via warren burt) also really wrote some good stuff, he was such a total d00d!!! he wrote & recorded so much microtonal stuff! well he called it xentonality, coz it covered more like the micro & macrotonality. i got tons of his stuff, used to be on the web but for some reason the whole of the site he was on has changed and none of it seems to be there any more, must be a new site somewhere... or on wayback machine, but there is a little article on him here :
he probably had the worlds most serious beard as well!
rich: Yeah seen xenharmonics crop up a lot , top word. tbh Im not very good at reading about music theory, or about learning anything in general, from anyone, I've really tried recently , its interesting but to me always seems like homework.
I was really terrible in school, I literally could never bring myself to listen to anything anyone said, I'm not much different now, in school I used to just stare at the teachers listening to every tiny characteristic of their voices , inflections etc, trying to work out what was going on in their brains which usually was not a lot but not hearing hardly a single word they said.
i think I'm a bit aurally dyslexic or something because sometimes i can't understand anything anyone is going on about..just sounds like words/pitches with no patterns/gibberish
...
partially coz most of what we were taught was so utterly pointless and designed imo to put you off the interesting stuff to do with maths etc
and how not to evaluate anything being said to you or how to think.
which should be the first lesson in all education, how to evaluate what your being told! starting with why you should you be told 'how to evaluate what your being told'
I loved being in school though, had such a laff, kind of more fun when all the teachers r fukheads, unites people.
dave: do u work out your own tunings and can u say anything about that? I notice on the cover klob it sez zither afx-scale, can u elaborate on that?
rich: its as easy as just turning your tuning screws to where it sounds right to where you want to go
I love re-working tunings like you can copy and paste prests/patches on a synth , copying and developing/refining them as the years go by.
dave: are any of those wicked unreleased trax u sent me over the years on the album? is it ok if i play any of em to my missus?
rich: ha yeah fine, not sure cant remem if they r on there prob not.
dave: some of em got similar names in my afx incoming folder over the years: ages ago u sent me a casio fz timestretch thing called "casiofz10m pseudo timestretch" has u talking, and then some drum stuff. also CIRCLONT14+4 but mite b diff version? don't seem to b any others with similar titles tho now i chkd
theres also a lot of speculation about melodies from mars, b cool if u could say anything about the making of this & any release plans.
rich: particular period around 94, made in 36 clissold crescent north london, dont think you ever lived there? im sure u went there though?
a lot of mates/mates of mates lived there
memory is a bit hazy/smodged of that decade !-)
I made ICBYD, RDJ, half of SAW2 etc etc there, amazing good times.
dave: yea top vibes, i lived at 36 clissold for a while (about 6 months, well i still had my place in suffolk, so used to flit back & forth...), but was jus after u left an got the bank, late 90's i tink prob 98 or 99! hazytimez 4 sure! I lived in the tiny room near the door over the stairs, damo got a vid of me setup in there once... there was about an inch of carpet left, rest was klob & bed. tht swearing bloke next door was funny! landlord wasn;t tho as i rem, he had a few noyze issues frm time to time
have u done any trax that use my dsp box i built 4u?
photo: [noyze's original dsp box circa 1995] dave noyze
I rem us havin brief natter bout using compressor on the front end when I first came over to oz, but we aint really nattered bout it much over the years.
rich: i wish, you know ive misplaced it, it was super good, never even got around to trying the reverbs on it,
it will turn up one day...hopefully with a bag of weed in it nxt to it.
dave: mite av to knock up another or summat. been on a full on mentox dsp frenzy tip again recently. i rek i did bit too many years windowless room time at bt labs on dsp progging, very unhealthy. now I get to look out the window while i do it or even open it...
re performing at north pole/antartica; yea, or mebbe like hitch hikers guide & do something remotely from a spacecraft or an airplane or sumink !?
rich: well u can in your sleep
dave: how was it revisiting the atari st after all these years?
rich: well if you get a modern mouse,flatscreen cable converters+midex midi expander then ur cookin on gas,+hxc! its funny i forgot on cubase on there how bloody slow it does screen redraws, i used quite a bit of software on that back in the day like dr t's
and loads of algorhytmic midi things and editors of course, which is what i still use it for, fave being a Kawai K5 editor but there are some awesome dx ones, that sort sounds via harmonicity etc
i did a ardkore tune on it recently with tx16W and also forgot the timing is affected when you move the mouse!
you can do swing by rhythmically swiping the mouse up n down the screen !
not properly check ST emulators with editors, but apparently they do work, on the 2dolist.
dave: i can vouch for steem on the pc, wish they would get one going on the mac. steem works with my midi interface, well its novation remote 25, the only thing my pc will talk to, so i never press the music keys or knobs, just use for midi i/o... bit over the top...
tell me about using the meinl water udu & how u got into that?
rich: ha, my house is full of all kinds of instruments, whatever comes to hand basically.
dave: so u've mentioned the earliest track, what woz most recent?
rich: I think japan xtra one, although apart from the production, prob sounds oldest musically, was a bit of an odd one out that one as i was doin loads of weird modular fx stuff at the time using this
ive attached some more pics of jh units that i bought from him, i kept buying his prototypes, allowed him to keep building better versions and building more new stuff , he was SO quick at making stuff , incredible dude, that ps3200 clone he made, fuk me!
the phaser in circlon14 is the arp phaser in this pic, being externally controlled,
Was super top that i got that from him as i used to have an arp quadra and indeed the phaser on those beasts is lovely but the synth is just so huge, super rich sound though..and watch them overhanging keys! never seen one midi'd
on another note , a lot of tracks on syro have more sounds than the equipment used as i utilized A LOT of program changes, each synth responds at diff speeds to pgm changes so a lot of time id have to program a pgm change on the preceding bar of something otherwise the start note would get cut off.
But on things like the korg ps3200 and cs80 you can do near instant pgm chnges, and so u can make them like wavetable synths, cs80 looks especially awesome when you sweep all the presets back & fwd knight rider style while playing all the sounds consecutively.
Trouble is when you go to a diff pgm sound, u usually want to eq that differently, so in more recent traks after syro where ive used a lot of pgm changes ive bothered to route the output into an audio matrix switcher so when i switch programs the sequencer will simultaneously route the audio to another eq!
fucking A N A L! never would have done that when i was 16.
jh storm tide, one of me fave flangers, jh's pro type
jh string filter-this thing is special very deep sound.
the desktop b/w phaser in the pics is off the the chain radio rental, not got the eg files ere to send unfort.
but that xtra japanese track fitted nicely onto syro, keeping that same kind of vibe.
dave: sad loss...
i spotted the sm pro peq505 on klob list, which i check my email sentfolder i sent u link to that & u wrote bak saying u got it and using on a trk, tht was 17 dec 2013, + u wrote me back and said "first impressions, pretty blimmin mental, each band is the most resonant eq ive tried! well found!" so maybe s950tx16wasr10 (earth portal mix) is most recent ??
rich: almost
yeah as we natted lots about, im very fond of resonant eq's most people dont even realise you can use eq's as resonators, software ones are even more resonant.
Im good mates with the DMG audio boys, who make dope plugins, super top dudes, I got them to add keyboard control to their parametric plugin so you can setup resonant chords with multiple eq bands then shift the chords around with a keyboard input , noyce.
I also asked them to put portamento on it but krystof said there would be no point, ha, wrong! i think he was not stoned enough though..next time mate, cant wait as that would be a dope feature.
really annoys me when parametric eqs hard or soft dont have completely overlapping bands, boring!
yeah that sm pro one is Vgood VFM.
other faves are cwejman, klark teknik dn410 there r other eurocrak ones on horizon swell
dave: tongue drums sound interesting, can u tell me more about it?
rich: oh yeah got loads of them, made my own as well, didn't quite get the tuning right though but close, coincidence my missuz just strted playing one while i was typing!
just thought bout this funny london? expression 'her in doors' in my case its 'him in doors' )))
dave: we've chatted about mixing desks lots over the years, on thealbum u've used quite a range e.g. ultra cheap boss bx8 to the neotek elite 64 channel custom. its interesting that u use mixers a lot in your work, and u've also said to me about how u consider them instruments, particular regarding no-input mixer type stuff. did u use mixers in unusual ways on the album & can u tell me about that? wot draws u to use such a range of mixer/pre-amp/channel strip klob?
rich: mixers are prob my fave pieces of electronic equipment, theyre like whole worlds onto themselves
ive done pretty well in not buying loads, ive been tempted and not collected them but ive got a few
the custom neotek one ive got is 128 channels and pretty epic but quite easy to use, it does have a few headscratching features on it which took me a while to get me edaround, i rem printing out and reading several old SSL manuals in a couple of days, phew before i had mine built and modified
I think neotek had the dual channel thing going on b4 ssl though.
one feature out of quite a few that i wanted which i didnt get on my neotek or ADT was to have a SiP fade feature, so you can press the special AFXSiP button , then the balance between the SiP and main mix can be controlled by a crossfader pot, shweet. but was too much hassle for them to implement.
The ADT guy Gert is amazing, anything you want, he will be like ya ya, no problem, i love germans.
their website is off the hook, get lost in that for hours.
my ADT mixer kiks major ass, so compact, its a hybrid rack mixer to fit into my cray setup ultra compact i use several additional matrix mixers with it now, its growing!
just got another midas xl88, love those, rare as rocking horse shit, cheers heck for tipoff!
ADT is a modular mixer, there are different eq's etc on pretty much every channel, so much tone variety, cv's in the patch bay, its nowhere as easy to use as the neotek though, idea was basically to have an ultra clean mixer with diff variety of tone colours on each channel, so I can have tube sound on some, gritty dirty sound on others like from the bx8 etc, love it , such a huge range of sound im getting out of it, barely scratched the surface so far.
dave: I see wildlife get a mention on the klob list, can u tell me wot sort of wildlife, & how wild woz it!?
rich: the birds in the piano track! I actually made that track a lot better technically but when i recorded it originally, it was a super spesh time in my life and those birds were part of it so i just had to go with that recording of it, straight to nagra tape, love the sound of pianos to tape.
dave: LPG on trk list is tht the Pittsburgh modular jobby?
rich: doepfer, its not as nice as the buchla ones but its what i was using at the time,
theres no buchla on syro at all actually.
dave: no ems either, yea, thts surprising , u must have some lined up! i got a little vid somewhere u sent me when i first got over to oz of u prodding one of ya buchla's, was v good, must try an find tht vid, !
is there anyone alive u aint worked with who u really want too? is there anyone dead u aint worked with who u really want too (would require time/matter/interdimensional transportation bizzo)?
rich: nice q, would love to do a track with florian schneider, gerald donald, he's got 2 first names like me, derrick may!,stockhausen, really sad i didn't work with him before he died but he told me last time i met him that we would work together so , it will be in another realm, i sort of felt that when he said it anyhow.
the stockhasuen vs aphex thing was reported very in accurately btw, I have huge, greatest respect for that man possible and I got on with him very well, the work ethic of that geezer...bloody hell.
he is from sirius by the way,
oh who else...
man i would work with everyone and anyone who i got on with , i don't have to like someones music to wanna work with them, just have to get on with them personally and be friends first, i cant do tracks like oh u email this ill email that , not into it, too business, like having a phone in a studio.
got a few things in pipeline with relatively unknown bands .
dave: how do u mum&dad feel about being on the album & did they know u were recording them?
rich: i dont think they heard it yet, ive made sample banks from my folks, need to do more actually,,
i love the formant relationship of voices from the same families, studied that quite a bit, fascinating.
i if you like someones voice its as important as their smell, it means you are a good genetic match, if you sing the same note as the opposite human sex and overlay voices on top of each other the formants should be in a harmonious pattern, but you will know that anyhow by intuition to help produce healthy children, well thats my theory.
dave: can u say something about the recording rooms listed? bank room thin?
rich: in my old bank, it was on the first floor, sometimes buses would stop outside my house and i would be staring at people through the window really close, my mate ian said he saw me once in the studio from the bus!
I had several rooms mic'd up as reverbs from there and did whole tracks by just feeding rooms into other rooms via delays and frequency shifters, monitors and mic's, still to be released.
dave: basement?
rich: its where i keep my <hat> plate reverbs, synthi100 ,phillips tape echo and turntable encoding setup.
not many people would know or probably care but i used to take and still take the utmost care in encoding all my vinyl to computer for djin on the computer or just listening in the car etc.
just so they sound as good as possible over the system.
i usually clean all records to save wear on pricey stylus on sme turntable etc
i miss the basement in my old bank, amazing reinforced concrete walk in vaults, hugely reverberant, recorded many things in there, it was also haunted, vault opened itself once and the taps were left on maximum had to use a monkey wrench to turn them off, had to try hard for it not to creep me out.
how mental is that, nobody could have got in....so weird..
, it was a very creepy place, now there is a 22 storey block of flats there, on top of it, i bet they had a hard time getting those vaults out, reinforced concrete 5ft thick..
dave: thts creeptastic! actually i had a funny ting happen while we working on this interview recently. my dx7e had some screws loose in the back, one morning i got up and they were all tightened... weird day followed ... ok wot bout bedroom setup?
rich: gone now, just buchla 400 in there at the mo but was super top to have a great setup in bedroom again, doing tracks in the nude, y -fronts etc
dave: yea bedroom setups have certain vibe... big room?
rich: since these pdf's were made several mods have been made, like making
each bank of additional 4 aux'scan b linked/unlinked so in effect you have 24 more aux's which are tied to their respective input channels
each bank of 8 inputs can also be summed seperately from the main mix
I also used to use 2 shure auxpanders for even more auxes but i swapped them for 2x midas xl88 matrix mixers which gives another additional 16 aux's+use some auxes as busses, prefer em to shures by long shot.
+the awesome calrec minimxer ,12 stereo line mixer, 24 channels in 19"space, nothing else like it. had it completely overhauled and new full patchbays made for that also, has a lush narrow/wide pot on each channel which is d o p e ***
the whole thing has a massive channel count for the size and all reachable within arms length which was the main criteria. inc all the additional patch bays and i love it like that, its amazing how much more you do with equipment when its all within reach, unless you have it under extensive sysex control but still.
Toolkit is in my top5 pieces of outboard, a m a z i n g, shits on pretty much everything in terms of flexibility, sounds very clean but recently been putting things thru langs or pultecs and then putting them thru the toolkit/resampling them& put thru again.
His new units ar e really interesting also
like this one
>>> TM235 - Harmonics Generator, unique unit
the ADT mixing setup is a totally different vibe to my massive neotek, much more geeky to operate but i love the 2 different approaches and then to switch to a setup which is all itb and back again is quite a trip, i really like mixing the different disciplines, im constantly influencing myself across setups.
This current setup is Vflexibile I can make any source sound good and recently just keep using crap sound sources on purpose, like yamaha rx11 and trying to make it sound good , like turning the kik into 808 type kik with resonating eq from the toolkits etc
Something about this rx11, its shit but i just love using it..ive used the sounds in so many tracks, looking fwd to using it more as well,ha ,all the drums in the Marchromt track, originate from an rx11
just did another workout on it recently, here[]
the build quality of it is so porn, they were so expensive when they came out, i used to dream about having one and now people giving them away.
dave: oh yea, we had some fun seshs at yours when i came over in 2008. the synthi 100 woz in there + arp2500 + loada more klobbage! u not sent me a samp of the synthi100 yet tho. ok, c-shape
rich: cray setup in the big room, headphones only, although got lush little geithain monitors in there now which im well happy with, no subbass though, disklavier, more modulars,midi pipe organs, snr2[at the mo], synclav, dk synergy! dx1 etc etc defender tabletop
dave: can;t wait 2 hear some o tht! that stuff not on this album ? + really wanna chk the synclav & synergy out nex time i'm over. lodge?
rich: took me 3 years to mke this one, had to have help to solder in the patch bay as there about 4000connections, currently trying to stop super clever mice eating the cables, its in the woods.
got some hydra phonic aux sends
dave: have brief recollections of tht place, we staggered out there one day in 08, seem to remem it got dark and we had hek of job finding our way bk coz we didn;t take a torch... i'm assumin this is tht place we went ??
rich: yes! i quite often forget torch and either hold on to my german sheppard or feel my way home , no light pollution up there, I'm sure your place gets ultra dark when its cloudy?
I don't like that about cities, no proper darkness outside.
dave: yea, gets so dark ere u can;t hardly see yer hand in front of yer face, conversely when its full moon dont even need a torch! mod room?
rich: modular madness, its all there.
dave: as well as the yamaha fm stuff, u seem to have a lotta love for the sh101 + roland klobbage, can u tell me why u like this lovely little synth, how many u used & mebbe summat bout the other roland klob listed/unlisted? + also defo tell me bout the TR666.
rich: my first analogue synth, its prob the most digital sounding analogue synth there is ,as ultra stable, clean sounding, thin but i love them for their simplicity and sound
but wow intellijel atlantis, sh101 and then some and some more! ok without sequencer and mod grip , maybe they should do them in red and blue also,
4x101's for polyphinc 101 is pretty amazing also
love the square wave on the sub osc forever, could go on about them for ages...
they mod extremely well but then you lose the simplicity, its interesting.
I had a dream once about this ultra 101 with big LCD display in the middle...im that sad, actually no fuck it that was a lush dream and it had a roland 404 in it which got released in another dimension which was combo of sh101 and 909, i made a tracks on them, and they sounded so beautiful , the memory of that dream, the sound of the 404 is still with me , a big influence, i try to make sounds like it made in this dream a lot.
dave: + anyting u can say on TR666?
rich: a lush guy in london made it, i gotta attach a pic, I've seen a lot of 606's modified but not like this baby, you can do whole tracks on it , with all the cv's ins,
you can tune all the oscillators on it,8 of em for the cymbals/hihats.
dave: its quite remarkable how some manufacturers r going bak to their roots so to speak and revisiting old designs, have u chek'd any out?
rich: yeah like being a kid again, shame the corners are cut 2 the maximum though
dave: looking at the klob list I think the sound devices 722 was distributed over the most tracks (9 in all). woz tht because u recorded traks into it, or was it for field/wildlife/acoustic/on-location recordings etc?
rich: record tracks to it, its really handy for that , for all the diff setups +it records to CF and hard drive simultaneously so backed up from the start and apart from tape and stuff i do itb keeps my stuff kind of in the same place
dave:care to share any modular experiments, any buchla maybe?
rich: Yeah sure, what to attach....hmmm ok these are made from a very rare buchla"10 partial & filter generator" , i think there are only 1 or 2 in existence!
made these 2 about 12 years ago, fuk, seems like yesterday...3rd &4th are all serge,
and heres a load more completed modular trax from the archives, all about 12 years ago,new &old buchla,serge, what a fucking racket make em all downloadable please!
MODULART3 [schmoo pulse] eurocrak setup, think a lot of cwejman modules in there.
dave: wow, great stuff, thats a whole bunch of top modular racketing! hey that reminds me, ow's the System 700?! i rem u showing it me when i came over before i came to oz, first time i'd ever seen one in the flesh.
rich: ok fuk, now were really talking, I mean as far as analogue synths go, all you really need is a system700, If I had to keep only one synth it would be that, absolutely the most beautifully designed synth of all time, it's the best for all the conventional type synth sounds, you can go weird on it but it really begs you to set it up and play it like a proper instrument.
Its so inspiring to look at and use, system100m's are absolutely gorgeous but 700's sounds and look 4 times as good, and about tht many times heavier.
Ive got 2 of the sequencers for it which are just ridiculous to look at, the size of them! and are actually pretty unique.
Id take it over a fully loaded arp2500, although the arp 1047 filter is very special, evil purity or something..beats every eurorack filter so far..i think ur hinton filt might be based on it, looks kinda similar.
But the sys700 has the right balance of pre patched connections and user config, so you don't always need a ton of cables to get basic sounds going, I hadnt switched mine on for about 5 years, was in storage, set it all up and all the oscillators tracked perfectly over pretty much the entire range! its the rolls royce of modulars, They obviously looked hard at the moog modular, tidied it right up and made it a lot more usable/playable, manual is super top also.
will try and find some examples which just use it &attach, Im going to be spending a whole lot more time from now on
the expansion modules for it are just so good, and I really love the compact lab 700, synth porn at its most intense, so cute.
ok inc tracks are straight out of sys700 to tape, just a taste from 1 seshun when i 1st got it, not sure why i put em to tape on this one, i think i was going 4 human league style.
dave: nice, thanks... u even got it talkin! yea i think the hinton music lab filter (ML1502) was somehow related to the arp2500 filter, but can't rem, not wanting to speak for graham hinton of course either. i did a blogpost on the ML1502 recently :
http://noyzelab.blogspot.com.au/2014/09 ... oseup.html
he's actually got a few filter designs, i;ve seen some pix he sent me of them over the years. i really hope he starts putting some more of his designs out, top stuff + would love a hinton pinmix!
wot was the tiniest / littlest / shortest mini-snippet of sound on the album & wot klob woz it off that klob list?
rich: ha, musicmaid claptraps
dave: on a scale of 0 to ultra-rare the rmi harmonic synth is pretty ultra-rare, how did u find get hold of it, wot u rek to it & how did u use it?
rich: they r a freakout, really early digital synth in a world of its own, its unbelievably nicen crunchy, i love the stereo aspect of it as you can get the same sound in both channels but detune the harmonics in one channel, the sync is the best thing about it, its a bit of a 3 trik pony for the size but good trix, plus best buttons in universe, not got it anymore though.
dave: its amazing how the tactile aspect can really make a difference sometimes init...
she sez tht eventide wrote to her to tell her they fixed the glitch on the 910 harmonizer and she said "but the glitch is the most beautiful thing about it".
rich: ha yeah that wot i would have said.
basically you wont both, same as h949, my fave fx unit but unfortunately but understandably the most unreliable and hardest bit of klob to break/fix.
people are trying to sell them for loads but you need to go and pick them in person coz they so likely to either not work or break in the mail, only buy if you are a millionaire, I had to buy 10 to get 3 working, i wanted 3 werking simult.
ok m8 i need a breather... , we've nattered lots about me an me new syro album, now time for u to tell me few tings bout wot yer up to
i rember being at the bar with u in a club in london on a rephresh nite bk in late90's & u explaining 2 me how you worked with cellular automata , drawing grids in beer all over the bar & shuffling all the bottles & glasses around!!! peepz lookin at us well weird., tell me bit bout tht as well. i rem when yer album generative compositions came out coz u came over to mine and we had a week long synth sesh! its well wikd album + i played a bit of it out when i dj'd with hecker. then u done tht automata von neuman series of course, so wots on the horizon m8, i know u've been well bizy coz u've maxed me up with plenny of soundfiles. + where u at with that radioactive synth module, the random events thing ??
dave: thanks fer askin! i've recently setup a bandcamp page for noyzelab
mainly to start putting out some of my archive & recent recordings [a few in the pipeline but i won;t say wot just yet], but other peeps might appear on it... although bandcamp dont half take a big cut, so mite give up on them... & just put stuff on noyzelab.com , who knows... as for other labels, well on the immediate horizon are a few cassette album releases, 2 on the alku label (as david burraston) + one on the meds label (as noyzelab). the first one on alku
http://alkualkualkualkualkualkualkualkualkualku.org/
is a collaboration album with russell haswell (who u introduced me to at the bank, bak around late 90's / 2000 & is now on twitter -> https://twitter.com/RussellHaswell ). its an all modular album called 'Wired Lab CV Session #1' recorded live to 2 track. we made it when he came over to the wired lab for an artist residency in 2013. we also used a couple of my own designed synth modules => maniac cellular automata sequencer and the spacetime gravity modulator :
the second one on alku is a solo album called 'chaotic cellular drums' recorded between march & may 2014, again using maniac cellular automata sequencer (this time using midi output to control midi based synth drum modules & effects units, so sequencing effects with cellular automata as well). this album was recorded live to 2 & 4 track track, and was recorded as it happened, with some very minor editing on the odd track.
rich: c00l, wes well chuffed when i first heard u an russ were doing a collab album!
dave: the meds album is called '16 x 16 cell meditations' and is an electronic drone meditation tool, specifically written for meditation practice, but can be listened to for entertainment if u like drone stuff. meds is a new label, setup by ant (cataclyst) & tom (icasea), they at :
'16 x 16 cell meditations' was recorded using a bank of special microtonal oscillators i custom designed & built. they are digital/microprocessor based & fully temperature stable with a 0.01hz resolution, so i can setup very precise microtonal intervals with them.
i aint gunna reveal the full technique, as i;ve got a bunch of other microtonal meditation recordings using the same setup in the pipeline that i want to put out first. since i;ve been meditating & doing qigong, i've really noticed how ultracrap a lot of "meditation music " is... well i dont reckon there is anything much, but of course tho i really like eliane radigue, pauline oliveros, laurie spiegel, their music is great!! & maybe few others... actually my favourite laurie spiegel tracks of all time, AND pretty much my all time fave electronic music trax of all time are Improvisation on a "Concerto Generator" (1977) made on the Bell Labs Alles digital synth (which also got fm in it!) & Immersion (1983) done on the McLeyvier computer-controlled analog synthesis music system. everytime i hear em its like there's a super intelligent being imparting some deep wisdom with a massive smile she was totally on the case with algorithmic/generative music !! ++ i really like all the papers she wrote too. landmark inspirational stuff for me!
which woz a kinda pre-curser to my current batch of microtonal electronic drone meditation trax, one was on an sy99 & other was on the hinton music lab (with its oscillators not my ones).
basically tho, the electronic drone meditation stuff i'm doing is not a million miles from the "binaural beats" / brain entrainment type meditation stuff, but it is very different sound & process wise ... it is NOT a rehash of that stuff. u can use my meditation trax as a focus object or just as tune out listening, which i dont fink u can really do wiv binaural beats, not the stuff i;ve heard + mine dont sound like cheesy new age crap!! theres nothing else like it, well maybe next century if someone invents some doublyultra weird ting n tht.
rich: YEA! get yer drone on! keep goin!!
dave: er... oh yea, whole bunch more wired lab / installation / workshop stuff upcoming, including some more rainwire developments
& a soundart project with schoolkids (which is part of australia's national science week), using the arduino based bare conductive touchboard. the schoolkids stuff is so c00l coz they getting to play & learn about a whole heap of stuff they wouldn;t normally be getting with the school curriculum. keep checking me blog & the wired lab site as we'll be announcing the wired lab stuff soon.
rich: 4sure, ok wot else, wot bout yer dsp experiments??
dave: i've got a new dsp box on the go, been having a full on dsp frenzy this year. its pretty advanced this one compared to me old one (even tho the old one does stuff this one doesn;t), & its got a multi channel i/o + spdif + cv interface. i'm collating bunch of recordings i've been working on with my old 90's dsp box, like the one u got off me, so using that process and other tingz.
rich: still havnt found it, its here somewhere, i hope. tht bitspeak plugin i was tellin u about is Vgood, im sure loads of people will jump on that .
dave: nothing available yet tho, very much in progress... so no idea when i;ll get round to puttin tht out. i been doing some code / hardware updates to the old dsp box, so its now got an 8 bit logic buss so i can direct interface to CA modules, drive it from the cells, + this bus works all the way up to super quick at the sample clock rate, up to 44.1 & 48 khz. i checked out the bitspeak site, yea interesting, hah! they copying me!! anyway, guaranteed their software will sound a bit different to my hardware dsp box. even more definite is that mine will distort / deteriote / fuckup in a totally different way to their software.
rich: glad u keeping up the dsp action, looking 4wd to chk that stuff. i rem u sayin u had some full on ca microtuning epiphany last year!
dave: yea, my other major breakthru last year was getting cellular automata to create self organising / generative microtunings. u've heard some of the recordings already of course via email, but i;ve not published any of these yet. i've been trying to figure a way of doing this for many years, but i finally cracked it last year (actually some of the conversations u & i had over email were very useful in getting this method going, made me re-visit a few things i'd previously checked out, but not actively followed up). the CA microtuning method is not based totally on music theory tho. the way i approached it was getting the CA to create its own tuning systems, so its a lot more alien, more like artificial brains making their own freaky tunings. i'll prob b making this tuning method public at some point, because no one else has done CA based microtunings, so its quite an exciting development for my CA work, finally closing the gap from synthesis / sequencing / control.
rich: wot bout yer hermiting lifestyle mode ??
dave: regarding hermit mode, i always been like that + it helped with the cloak & dagger stuff in 90's lotta peeps used to call me "virtual dave" or "virtual noyze" or just "virtual" ... quite funny... i hardly used to leave me studio, except to go to labs, go for for walks, go to pub & come & contribute with the video projectin at some of the rephlex gigs, which was lot of fun! when i was a young kid they used to call me "hypothermia" coz i used to always b inside (especially in summer coz of my terrible hay fever!), and there was this public service ad on the telly which had some old age pensioner sat in a chair with a book with no heating getting hypothermia, weird how tht was how i appeared to others at tht age... so i jus been building up an archive of recordings / experiments / machines over the years tht i'm finally starting to make a bit more well known thanks to your (& bunch other peeps) badgering, and a few obliging/understanding labels + me missus (sarah last, wired lab curator) is always keen for me to get me work out & more widely accessible + we collaborate on stuff as well.
rich: yea didnt you an yer missus win some top ozzie experiMENTAL arts award for that piano drag piece?
dave: yea, well it was 2 awards wired lab won for a project sarah curated called southern encounter & piano drag was part of it. was great to finally realise that piece after many years of trying to get a train & track to do it on. we finally did it on a private track in south australia in 2012, and we were pulled by a steam train & buncha carriages. basically we attached a piano to the back of a train, and had it contact mic'd up , like about 16 contact mics i designed and built, and fed em to this big analogue mixer. so i mixed it live (no fx) at EARSPLITTING volume ! sarah said b4 hand she wanted it to be really confronting, it was... some bloke started screaming at me to stop during the performance so i jus thrashed it up even more!, they had to take him off the train when we detached the remains of the piano coz he fainted or passed out somehow, couldn;t handle it ... we projected the video of its destruction in realtime into the roofs of the carriages. it was a comment on european colonization of australia, and was bookended with the local Indigenous Ngarrindjeri Rritjarukar Choir singing in their traditional language that i recorded with them in a local church. they gave us permission to use their songs & performance for the piece. whole thing was just very raw... it was sarah's concept initially & we developed it together, very emotional piece... we been invited to show it internationally, which is very hard coz we need a train & a track to do it on! i gotta little excerpt of it on vid that the conductor took out the back of the train in south australia, chk it out! i'd love to do it with a full size concert grand piano.
rich: wow, i'd go to see that!!!!! its weird how u've led such an elusive life , always scooting off to these well out the way places... now you're way out in the hills in new south wales!
dave: i've managed to stay as a bit of an obscure outsider & mainly been distributing my music privately between friends/contacts. had a few interesting offers over the years from labels to put my recorded work out, but not really followed it up, been having too much fun in me secret soundlab & doing live / art events. u know... crazy stuff like working with garry bradbury on an artwork called 'pi scraper' which was setup on a huge 100ft railway turntable. we contact mic up and play/mix live from the turntable as it spins. proper industrial techno! we also use a couple of massive piezo styli that are attached to the turntable, which play the concrete ground, like a record player.... very grainy & harsh, but surpisingly eerily choral at the same time, weird... a mix of 'pi scraper' ended up in the wire magazine. we had the whole thing video'd as well, which still needs editing... u can get a special exclusive mix on mp3 on the wire magazine site now, this is a mixdown of 3 simultaneous recordings, one of which was recorded by chris watson ==>
be really good to put couple of mixes of that out on vinyl 12" + be great to do some more live shows with that piece as well. need a proper railway roundhouse for it tho!
things r beginning to change these last few years in terms of putting out albums, which i;m quite into doing, espesh since doing me phd, where i was basically given total freedom to do wot i wanted, which was really an amazing opportunity to work within academia tht way, i.e. not doing someone else's bidding, but really getting to develop my work & ideas. thats where the main chunk of my cellular automata research ended up. at first it was going to be about all my algorithmic/generative work and how it relates to my music, but u have to focus for a phd, so i decided to make it just about the cellular automata work, and in particular on a discovery i made about cellular automata rule space that was supposed to be impossible...
in fact it was my 2nd attempt at a phd. i did get started on a secret one for telecom in the 90's when i was at the labs, but i ended up shelving that, did get some bits declassified & published as a couple of scientific papers from it tho, which were on spatial audio/reverb for teleconferencing in virtual reality / artificial life environments.
rich: wot bout tht radioactive synth module, you're really go off on one with that !!
dave: tht radioisotope random event generator module i'm workin on is comin on well... i got 2 lab grade radioisotope disc sources buzzin away, a beta & a gamma source. i got little page ere
+ some test recordings on bandcamp + also used it on tht 'watch that sprouts watches' track on the recently released automata 52 album. the cd is sold out now, but peeps can still buy the digital version :
rich: oh yea, got them trax,i like playing them both at the same time out multiple speakers REALLY FUCKIN LOUD!!! my neighbours thought a nuclear war had started! they all got freaked out!
dave: well i need some more time on the radioactive module (well would like more time on all me modules hah!) + when i get an alpha radioisotope source it gotta b timed right coz the half life on them is really short, so need to make sure have block of time allocated. the alpha discs are made from polonium-210, which only got a 138 day half life. well actually the gamma source, cobalt-60, aint terribly long half life either at 5.27 years, so my one will b gettin to its first half life soon. here is a couple of bonus pics of it during the testing stage, bit tricky to work with coz have to hold em with tongs or pliers at arms length, i built it in an old 300baud modem case.
photo: dave noyze - experimental radioisotope random event module
+ have to make sure i got a little special place setup coz its radioactive, so can;t jus leave em lying about... i made me own special lead housing for em for shielding, u can get specially made up ones as well. funnily enuff the commercial ones are called LSD which stands for lead shielded disc. also coz i live up in the hills where there's lots of massive granite boulders i got plenty of natural background radiation to play with as well. i'm really into radioactive things, such a great source of real world "true" randomness & its around us everywhere, theres no such thing as a nuclear free zone! i reckon every synth should have a 'radioactive' nuclear hardware section, u know like there's osc, filter, noise, adsr, lfo etc.. they should just add another bit in there for fully random radioactive action! they should power em from little mini radioisotopes, like them little tiny spacecraft do, get the tek down to prosumer grade!
rich: the eurocrack bods should license some of your module designs! like ca, chaos, mudley talker, microtonal osc etc. i'd buy em!
dave: be really cool if some of the eurorack manufacturers licensed some of my module designs, had a few enquiries but nothin happening yet... i'm well into it. my modules have totally flumoxed peeps over the years, coz no-one else got anyting like em, they're not a rehash of the same old standard modular synth circuits like lotta peeps make. but that has also made things tough coz it was hard for folks to get their heads round it. people are gettin bit more sophisticated these days tho which is really good, and now lotta peeps are getting into algorithmic/generative + chaotic & complex systems in the modular/synth world. there's still a massive gap between wots possible & wot is available commercially... some interesting stuff coming out tho. the radioactive ones r bit hard tho, as anything commercial made with radioactive stuff inside needs special license, do-able tho, jus bit more red tape required. b good to do an album tht comes with a radioactive disc source, then anyone can play with em
rich: wicked! i jus spotted on automata 52 sleeve notes the 'watch that sprouts watches' trk also used your old synton syntovox 221! how did u use it?
dave: tht bit was recorded in 96, used the roland system 100m thru it, so its the main hypnotic synth riff in the trk. got a whole stack of recordings of 100m thru the synton in me archive tht were done bak then, they seemed to have a really good affinity towards each other, espesh coz the synton got its own unique sound + i rek the way can overdrive the synton has cool sound which adds even more to it, wow i soooo miss my old one... synton should start remaking that!!! one of the all time best non-classified lab vocoders for surely with top secret-twiddler rear panel interface... ok speedy j, if you're reading this, i really want to get my synton back!:)
rich: ok madman, tell me more bout how u have used the synton!!??
dave: well even tho you're still badgering me to write more, which i;d love to do, i rek i should leave it till u interview me for now (well i'll tell ya over email as well anyway:), and lets get bak to your stuff and get this interview wrapped up so we can get back to playin on synths!
rich: looking forward to chekin all tht new stuff out!!
dave: we've chatted b4 fair bit bout nutty fx/dsp units & eventide in particular, so much so u convinced me to go an get some eventide klob an i luv em! + it gave me a new take on approaching my music work. u mentioned to me b4 tht the h3000 has a special something u like, can u say summink bout tht? its prob early days, but how much of sound difference do u notice between the new eventide h8000 and the older ones (h3000 dse / dsp 4000) and wot can u say bout tht / & eventide klob generally?
rich: its a bit early for me to say but ask me again in a few months as im on all those hard at the mo
4000 i know well and made quite few of my own algos on it.
3000 has something amazing though that few things can touch, i mean just the digital filters on it are insane, engineers must have been on fire when they made that thing.
not enough midi controllable parameters on it though
dave: any piece of klob I aint mentioned tht u used on this album that u particularly would like to say somtin bout?
rich: rhodes chroma, fave polysynth, in love with this synth, id like to mate with it or one of the me expanders.
the cc+ updates r mentil good.
dave: oh yea the chroma, funnily enough i scanned a review of that from an old electronic music mag:
emailed me about that ebay listing, asking me if it was worth a punt, so i sent him a reply & also forwarded link to u at same time. little experiment to see who got it first, guess u won tht then! this wot i wrote him :
looks wicked! yea could prob b used with synths, not much info on the ebay listing tho. i'd prob buy it if i had the money. its not a million miles from this ex-RAAF telegraph crypto-data pulse/message gen, which i used on automata 49 - qbf cheksome trak (made from some experiments done with robin fox, on the floor in my back shed) :
photo: dave noyze - ex-RAAF telegraph crypto-data pulse/message generator
do you have any outtakes from your barbican or polish robot orchestra performances?
rich: Yes many, not properly mixed down though but heres a couple for starters! this was the very first rhythmic tryouts, they got better before the sofware crashed, next time i will nail the bugger! 2nd is rehearsal for orc version of a saw2 track that never got performed...backwards..I really need to mixdown the others as they friggin amazing if i dont mind saying so myself, esp krakow pendulum piece which turned out way beyond my highest expectations, i felt god or someone was helping me out there, maybe it was just my amazing crew!
dave: wow thats a great insight into how a trak gets conceived, interesting to hear wot remains & wot gets removed, good one for the musicologists out there too!
rich: didnt know u had 2600
lush
i got 2 ...correction 3 of em!
got an early normal grey , then a really early grey meanie[ bootiful!] and a pimped out cms grey 2600 in nice wood case with extra osc and filter, where the speakers go
I did have an orange one sold, deep regret, there was a lush vocal sound i could get by fming thr filter, dont happen on the moog filter ones price thru the roof now
i prefer the bloody arp filters, 2der moog ones..
really want a blue meanie, no lusk yet
dave: mine 2600 is bit knackered, although i got it on crutches.. can get
racket off it :
rich: ah ok
they r killer but yeah miss the orange one
fm on the filt , one of me faves,
oh yeah this is orng arp 2600, its a breathing/noise patch , got it well realistic
dave: i got a vague mem of being at u bank with u, mary burke & pete kember, he brought some ems patch matrix made by steve thomas, u were telling me a funny story bout going to ems with u dad in the car ... can u rephresh me mem ???
rich: synthi a story and synth shops.
First time I ever clapped eyes on an ems was a vcs3 in a music shop in edgware road london, age around 14, forgot the name, I used to go up to london to see my sister and just go to music shops, Id stay in them until I got kicked out.
Sometimes Id stay all day in them around denmark street, just playing on synths.
All the owners were such miserable fackin bastards and always kicked me out for just playing on them twats.
I got kicked out of that little one with the pedals in the window on totenham court road by the bus stop, SO many times…
Then one day when i had moved to london, when I was about 25, I went down in the basement in it and they had a roland 100m fully loaded, I think it was around £200, maybe less, I couldn’t believe it I thought it was a joke, I bought it immediately but looked as unexcited as possible, I was soooo nervous, the guy who owned that shop was the worst tnuc of the lot and he didnt remember me from when i was little kicking me out of there.,
I just couldnt belive this tight fisted bugger didnt know what it was but he didnt! hahaaha, I thought this was top karma…then when i went back in there
couple weeks later he had a go at me! even better,! he was like you knew that synth was worth more didn’t you! ha i was like tuff fucking titites mate! bye!
so thats how i got my 1st 100m...
anyway vcs3 was sitting there, id never seen anything like that before, I was afraid to touch it looked so alien and utterly amazing.,.
SO then sometime after I realised ems was in cornwall AND about an hour from my house!!! I thought ok this is destiny.
so I got my dad to drive me over there, I was there so long , my dad was getting annoyed but I spent all the money I had buying a synthi A, grey case for £800 !, what they worth now , like 7k or summink??!!
I really wanted the sequencer one but didn’t have enough money, so robin sold me the ‘a’ for £800 then the best bit i drove off with it so excited with my dad, got to end of the tiny lane he lived down realised i left the power cable at robin's [not an iec cable] so i was like dad please, we gotta go back,my dad was getting so annoy ed by now..so we were driving back and I thought I bet he comes driving after us max speed coz nobody lives down this lane and just then he came around corner and smacked into my dads car !
but the funniest bit he held his hand out the window proudly displaying the power lead ! ha so good.
my dad was not happy, was quite a prang…so embarassing.had to smile..was a good way to robin to remember..he couldn’t forget that!
Anyway so yeah I had a synthi a when i was 18/19 and nobody I knew even knew wot a synth was , none of my mates and they were like what the fuck is that thing, i used to patch it up and leave it running while we smoked it up, many a time…
I learned that synth so well, its such a good synth to get when u havnt got much else, so many tricks you can do on them…and since then I’ve played on a silver later aks one and have to say my beige one sounds WAY better, I think its pretty early, it actually says serial no1 on mine but im sure that cant b right…not checked with robin yet, so u never know!
got one of these recently but have not had time 2 go thru it yet, but it looks soooo good, steve thomas is a top dude!
dave: oh yea, thts it.. i sold my cs30, 3xtranny 2000's and a load of chips and other gubbins to steve before i came to oz. he drove over in a battered motor, i wos hazily wrecked (prob frm comin bk from yours), and we listened to the cs30 for bout half an hour, just runnin on its own... yea, synths r good at that :] & then loaded everyting into his poor motor.
tell me a bit about your experiences with krzysztof penderecki
rich: Last time i saw him , we all got quite bloody drunk...the rest is a blur.
dave: ok, thanks ever so much for this MEGA! interview, u've been really generous with your time+info. its been great going over all this stuff...anything you would like to end on, parting message?
rich: Yes well it will have to be something not to do with equipment & music, as that's enough of that for now.
I'd like for the people to put their differences aside in the coming years and unite to change the brutal system we are all currently being controlled under. I think things are going to get ruff in the next few years but i'm extremely optimistic that if people stick together we can peacefully change the terrible system that has currently got us by the balls.
Will we end up with another version of the same thing, lets make sure that doesnt happen.
The only way theruling rich elite can keep us where they want and take even more of our civil liberties away is by dividing us and keep us fighting each other.
it's wakey wakey time everyone! Don't be fooled by the mass media.
eat well, don't be afraid, stay positive, love,learn&create.
dave: ok, so finally don’t you feel a bit guilty about pretending to be richard for this interview!?
rich: nah, rich asks me or couple of his other friends to do most of his press for him , don’t think he did any this time around!
i’ve done several email interviews for him in the past, so im used to it, he always says to say whatever the fuck you like and not even sure if he reads them, he usually gives me some good freebies, I got copy 02 of the Syro limited edition this time, which should be worth a few quid!
laters!
This might be an eye opener in some ways like fx the level of details in the edits.
It's probably a bit long and the track is not his best work by a long shot but there's something to be learned from his general attitude and the precision. Underwhelming at first but then.... not
when you get the time to sit through the whole metal headz doc up there somewhere ^ i'd enjoy reading what you think about dillinja and the bit where they join him in the studio
I did start that thing, but didn't finish it in that browser session.
Totally aside on my contemporary browser usage:
I'm finding I have sessions. I'll start a browser, open my email as the base, then as I use the browser, as people are linking out topics, or as I'm researching, more and more tabs will be opened. I don't always finish the content on each tab, so it stays there, for days, I come back to it, go a little further, get interrupted, come back to it, go to the next, so on and so forth, until I've got 5 gigs of browser open, and then the browser crashes. I can restore the browser state, and I do a few times, until it is untenable. The reason I hold on so long is once, I start a new session, that mix, that web of interconnected thought is gone. And I start a new web. It seems like the web that I make is internally consistent, like a week long snapshot of what I'm thinking about. That Metal Headz doc was in my last browser session. Got lost. I'll get back in it though, on your insistence. You're doing a great job with this thread. I knew you had it in you.
And back to the topic at hand: That Slimzee doc posted in the snh was really really dope. Perhaps I'll dig it back out, and post it here.
That's certainly a very interesting way of thinking about browsing, like an extension of yourself or your thought process and ofcourse it is. Heureka and all that.
Kurzweil would get a boner.
So Hubb, I made it another 5 minutes. I don't find that documentary to be that engaging. Don't know if I'm gonna make it. What are you looking for? Is there a specific time segment that I should see?
this page is making love to my browser in a way its not yet ready for
the bit about dillinja is that they kind of set up this whole myth around the guy and it seems like their genuine opinion... and his attitude is just great and the way they show how he's obsessesed with bass is just
there's a lot of backpadding in that doc to be sure
they did work at the poland performance though, i did what i could with what was left working.
