Shiny Synths, Buttons + LCDs

Click here to see a few piccies I shot tonight of my beloved glowing friends. And yes, they are electric.

Synth Macros

Earlier on, I took some synth porn macros. Mmmm... knobtastic!

Click here for the piccies!

Jyoti's Panty Pads

You may remember that I've fallen in love with the wee beastie above: the Elektron Monomachine.

I had a mess around making some pads with this not-really-very-monophonic-at-all synthbeatbox. And, as I'm lovely, I've decided to share my labours with you. So if you're a lucky tyke with a Monomachine, download the sysex file and get padding!

Notes:

I saved the pattern from H01, dunno if that makes any difference as I've never done it before!

Now, as for the sounds:

1. Standard floaty pad. Swave Saw, lfos -> unison, filter width and panning for a wee bit of movement.

2. Liquidy Pad - Swav pulse, lfos -> UNIW and filter base. Again, not too exciting so should be backgroundy.

3. Brassy pad - lfos -> pitch, filt env, resonance. This is far more blarty and obvious, more animated. But you can back the blarty bit back by reducing the filter eg amount.

4. Kraftwerky ensemble - lfos -> vibrato. Pretty simple one-finger-chord jobby, just a bit of vib to liven it up.

5. Dpro wave - lfos -> synth WP, WP and to delay time for a delayed wacky harmoniser effect. Now this is far more intrusive, not that much use as a trad pad.

6. GND sin - lfos -> pitch vib, dist, dist. This is just me mucking about, to be honest. Probably better labelled as an 'atmosphere' or something rather than a pad. The sound does evolve for quite a long while if you hold it down.

Bear in mind that all the above were programmed to be played in poly mode. They do work in mono, of course, but even the ensemble sounds better in poly because of the note overlaps.

Have fun! :-D

Made In Sheffield

Above is one of my Christmas pressies: Made In Sheffield.

Of course, I'm going to love this DVD. It's my generation, it's the pop music that I loved as a teenager and that shaped the music I make myself. For a couple of years, music made on guitars seemed completely irrelevant and outdated. Everything exciting, everything innovative, everything that was young and now was electronic. For a few glorious months, we thought we'd killed rock music and all its moronic, leather-clad conformity.

We were wrong. But watching Made In Sheffield certainly gives you a taste of those times. The documentary interweaves interviews with gig footage, one minute we see Phil Oakey now, the next we're seeing him back in 1980, looking like a Dr. Who villain and worrying people's parents. Perfect.

Cabaret Voltaire, Vice Versa (who became ABC), The Human League, Heaven 17 - all the famous Steel City electropop pioneers are there, along with people less well known now like The Artery (Peel favourites), The Extras, Clock DVA, I'm So Hollow and Def Leppard.

This is the only 80s music documentary I've seen that doesn't go for the simple, obvious line. There's depth here and an accuracy that's often lost in these days of Channel 4 '100 Greatest Beermats' or whatever. In fact, it was just great to watch a long piece of music television without the usual D-grade celebs popping up, rehearsed unfunny anecdote at the ready.

The stories in Made In Sheffield are from the people who were actually there, playing in the bands, writing the fanzines, doing the sound or whatever else makes up a vibrant music scene. Jarvis and Saskia Cocker pop up and Jarvis gives his own view of the Sheffield scene at the time. It'd only take Pulp another 14 years before they became overnight successes.

Made In Sheffield is a joy, a treasure. It's a meaty, detailed documentary in an age of fluffy, celeb-culture nonsense. It eschews the easy "HEY IT'S THE '80s!" perspective that blunts so many other accounts of British electropop. It's sober, funny, charming and often heartbreaking.

Then, when the actual film finishes, there's the special features. Loads of DVD extras including interview footage not used in the film. There are so many great stories here about how bands got together and the trials they faced on their road to stardom / obscurity. It is, indeed, a shit business. Then, when you think you're full, there's gig footage from Vice Versa, The Artery and I'm So Hollow. So, you've bought a 52 minute documentary but you get 128 minutes to watch. Yum!

Altogether now...

"Listen to the voice of Buddha..."

Monomachine VS. Walter Benjamin

I've had my Monomachine for a while but I didn't truly start having fun with it till I used it when I gigged in Sweden recently.

When I was programming songs into it for Sweden, something happened. Although I was using simple, stripped-down arrangements, the Monomachine was making them sound fantastic. It was playing them with a rock-solid feel that I lost when I moved over to totally computer-based sequencing. Of course, the Monomachine is actually a computer in a box itself, with a keyboard stuck on it. But something happened in that integration: the Monomachine has the timing of my ancient analogue gear. There is no computer-based sequencer I've tried that can match it for musical feel or immediacy of twiddling.

Look at those encoders on the top panel. You can grab them and twiddle away, mid-pattern. You can twiddle them while you're recording and thus get all manner of craziness that hours of mousing around couldn't replicate. The Monomachine is an instrument, you have to play it to get the best out of it. As if that wasn't enough, it plays a sequence like nothing else invented after 1990.

So what do I do now?

Since coming back from Sweden, I've been trying to convince myself that the Monomachine is no better than a computer for sequencing. I've programmed countless patterns on each, going out of the room as they're switching to give some form of blind (deaf?) testing. I've tried to be as rational and scientific as possible.

But every time, even though all the technical specs say it shouldn't be happening, I prefer the Monomachine to the computer.

One night, convinced I was on the edge of sanity, I emailed my friend Paul to see if he could help my brain. He came up with some good observations:

1. Even if we accept that a computer can be programmed to perform any task, it would be foolish to assume that a computer will always be the best tool to perform every task.

2. We are encouraged to think that computers provide the ideal level playing field; that they are the ultimate transparent medium, and the perfect blank page. This is completely, utterly wrong. In fact, the reverse is true.

3. 'Fidelity' is a red herring in sound recording. A recording medium only ever works tolerably well within certain parameters. You never get back exactly what you put in. This applies to digital and analogue recording alike.

4a. To talk in terms of 'better' or 'worse' sound quality entails a category mistake. The clue is in the question: there are qualitative *differences* between sounds. There is no objective measure of sound quality. (The efficiency of a recording device can be measured, in terms of frequency response, dynamic range and so on, but that's not the same thing.)

4b. While there are some interesting differences between analogue and digital recording media, these are not all that significant. A much more striking difference is between a standalone digital recorder and a computer-based DAW.

5. A process that requires three decisions to be made will be completed more quickly than a process that requires thirty decisions to be made. A process that requires three hundred decisions to be made may never be completed. Limiting the number of decisions that has to be made can therefore be an effective strategy for increasing productivity (which is defined as the frequency with which one finishes things).

6. Computer software is designed according to what successive programmers have assumed is a reasonable or rational way of working.
Their assumptions may have been wrong.

7. Computers are a powerful force for rationalisation. Sometimes (e.g. when editing recordings) this is useful. In other circumstances, it may not be. Historically, interesting artistic results have been produced by people who were using technology The Wrong Way. People working exclusively with computers have relatively little opportunity to do this.
(Source: Aural Spells)

I think Paul raises points that every producer, engineer and recording musician needs to consider very carefully. I'm a gadget freak: if it's shiny and new and perhaps bleeps a bit, I'll start salivating until I can get my fat paws on it. I often dream about synthesizers I want to buy. Yep.

But how much new musical tech actually helps us to make music?

I don't write sitting at the computer, I write songs with my acoustic guitar or perhaps one of my old synths. I've written a lot of songs just singing to myself on buses or trains. I think I've avoided writing at the computer because it engages the wrong parts of my brain. When I'm songwriting, I don't want to think about bars and beats or parameter values. I don't want to be staring at a virtual piano roll as it scrolls along, looking at my song rather than listening to it. And, yep, I can turn the screen off. For the five seconds until I need to access or change something.

On the other hand, I do write with the Monomachine. It's fun, quick and it sounds really, really good. I can bash a lumpy idea into a highly arranged track very quickly and simply. So, it's not tech that I'm against, the Monomachine is as tech as it gets. I'm just against the use of inappropriate technology.

In our lust for the new computer, the new plugin, the latest software upgrade we can easily lose sight of the reason for all this stuff: to make music. And, as Paul says above, the bigger your palette, the more time you'll spend choosing which colour to use. I do believe that art thrives on limits. If you can't write a great pop song on a four track cassette recorder, having 128 tracks of 96KHz, 24-bit audio + a gazillion softsynths won't get you any closer.

But there's another trap musicians fall into, especially those under thirty. They simply invert hi-tech lust into lo-fi lust. For these lost souls, nothing can be good unless it's got a valve in it, analogue circuitry or was made out of Soviet spaceship spare parts. This is just as much of a musical cul-de-sac as worshipping everything new. It's the old story of the Golden Age Myth: some people put it in the past (curved mixer faders, glowing tubes), some people (especially ex-Marxists like me) put it in the future. I grew up using a lot of that "vintage" gear when it was brand-new. Trust me, most of it was hopeless, noisy shit we were glad to see the back of. Both the hi-tech and the lo-fi approaches fetishise the production of music, they displace making music with buying musical gear.

The key is appropriate tech, not in the exact sense that Schumacher used the phrase but slightly related, I guess. I'm now in a process where I'm examining what I use to make music from both rational and emotional perspectives. It took the shock of using the Monomachine to spark this realisation, a piece of new hi-tech that plays and feels like old-tech. In some ways, I wish I could just carry on using computers for everything. After all, it's easy to do everything in the one program, use only softsynths, plugins, mix and master in one package.

I'm just not sure any more if it sounds good, that's all. Actually, scratch that. I think I should say:

If it sounds wrong, it is wrong.

Time to start listening with my ears again and give my eyes (and mouse) a rest.

Daniel Miller Interview

Daniel Miller has been a personal hero of mine since 1981, when I first bought 'Speak & Spell.' Mute Records was the first independent record label I loved, before I even understood the difference between majors and indies. When I look through my record collection it's filled with bands either on Mute or one of the sub-labels, bands like Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Erasure, Sonic Youth, Big Black, Dinosaur Jr., Labradford, Jon Spencer, Christian Vogel, Goldfrapp, Add N To X... well, you get my point.

I got to meet Daniel after I asked him to remix a track of mine in the brief time I was on EMI. At the end of 2000, I twisted his arm to let me interview him. This interview also appeared in the May 2001 issue of synthpop magazine Lexicon.

Jyoti : Hiya Daniel, are you ready for your in-depth interview?
Daniel : Go on, fire away!
Jyoti : Why did you first form Mute, how and when?
Daniel : I wouldn't even use the word form cos it always sounds too grandiose to say that I 'formed' Mute but the first release came out in early 1978. And that was TVOD/Warm Leatherette.
Jyoti : And that was you!
Daniel : That was me.
Jyoti : Whatever happened to the Normal?
Daniel : Retired, hurt. Nothing since '78 but I did some touring with Robert Rental who sadly passed away recently. There was a recording issued of that collaboration by Rough Trade which is difficult to track down but we're [Mute] thinking of re-issuing it.
Jyoti : How were you involved with the Silicon Teens?
Daniel : I did it - that was me. That album was recently re-issued on Mute. I'm a huge Chuck Berry fan and I wanted to see what it would sound like doing him on synthesizers.
Jyoti : But did you move to being the Mute supremo because you were too shy to do the band stuff, as has been previously suggested?
Daniel : Not really, no. I was a frustrated musician all my life. I learnt guitar, saxophone and other stuff but I really couldn't play at all. I was in bands at school but always the worst, I gravitated to the bottom of the league! Part of the whole thing about electronic music was that I had these ideas which I could now get down without necessarily being a conventional musician or songwriter.
Jyoti : But you totally wrote Warm Leatherette and TVOD?
Daniel : Yep - it's not a Grace Jones cover version!
Jyoti : So you're saying you don't class yourself as a songwriter and yet Warm Leatherette has now been covered by quite a few people. Not bad going for someone who doesn't consider himself a songwriter.
Daniel : But I'm not a songwriter! I think if you're going to be creative in that area, you have to have the need to be involved. It's like writing a book, it's very hard to do if you haven't got a real passion for it. And I don't have that feeling. I don't want to be a songwriter - I liked doing it and I was trying to make a certain point. In 1978, I was trying to make a point that there were cheap synthesizers out there, you could become involved, trying to link that in with punk. In fact, you don't even have to learn the punk three chords, you don't have to be a musician, all you need are the ideas and you can come up with something interesting.
Jyoti : So would you call the early Mute a punk or post-punk label?
Daniel : Ah, well it was both, in a sense. It was literally, chronologically post-punk but punk was one of the inspirations behind it. It wasn't the only inspiration,
there were other factors that came together that made me do it. But the punk ethic was there, the do-it-yourself, fuck-the-establishment attitude. I had that attitude since I can remember but punk focussed it from just being angry. Another factor was my love of electronic music and the last one would be that electronic instruments became affordable to people like me, rather than only wealthy rock stars. Musically, I felt that punk ran out of steam very quickly. The energy was there but a lot of it was speeded-up pub rock, which I hated. But as a spirit, as a sense of adventure it carried on, inspiring people who weren't making punk, from Joy Division to The Human League to whoever. My primary thing was this new aesthetic, which I couldn't imagine approaching a conventional record company with. I also liked the idea of just sticking out a single on my own. It was a heady mix of the aesthetic, the economic and the political. There was a hippy element as well but then most punks are hippies.
Jyoti : In the first five years of Mute, what are personal milestones for you?
Daniel : Well, the first single, of course, cos it got the label going. It took me a year to decide to release another record. I was living in London, at my Mum's and I'd got to know the people at the Rough Trade shop. I was playing live a lot, helping out at Rough Trade. Then I met Fad Gadget and loved his music and wanted to stick it out. Between 79 and 80 there was Fad Gadget, the Silicon Teens, DAF, Non, Robert Rental.
Jyoti : A lot of those releases are now considered the birth of industrial music. You seem to have very broad tastes?
Daniel : It's my generation, maybe. I'm old enough to remember rock'n'roll (just) and to remember the British beat boom as a young teen, the Kinks, Beatles and Stones. I was just old enough to be appreciative of the underground stuff in the late 60s, leaping onto things like Can and Amon Duul. So I grew up with a lot of great pop bands and experimental music as well. There was a point that music seemed to stand still and I wanted to hear strange things that you'd never heard before. So, I've always been a big pop fan.
Jyoti : Don't you think it's strange that there's only the one Mute?
Daniel : How do you mean?
Jyoti : Well, you're an independent label and you have artists like Labradford, who I love but can't imagine in the charts. At the same time, you have great pop bands like Erasure and Depeche Mode.
Daniel : Well, I can't explain it! It's just my musical taste - it's the result of all my varied influences. If I have the opportunity to work in all those
areas, I will. I'm excited by having hit records but not for just the sake of having them. If I can get a band I believe in into the charts, have a track actually become popular then that's brilliant. But I find it equally exciting to release a record that may not chart but that is innovative or experimental that may only sell a few thousand.
Jyoti : I remember seeing you at the Add N To X gig before you signed them and you were excited about them like a kid
Daniel : Yeah, you have to feel that way. And I feel that Add N To X are a band that should be on Mute and that we, as a label, can do more for than anyone
else.
Jyoti : What are the various Mute labels.
Daniel : Well, Mute, obviously. There's the Grey Area which is specifically a re-issue imprint. If we can get hold of old stuff we like and can work with, like the Industrial Records catalog, we'll put it out. When they ceased trading, they offered the catalog to us and we were really happy to take it on. There's also Can, which was unbelievable for me as huge fan, an incredible opportunity. Other stuff on there includes early Cabaret Voltaire, Soviet France, SPK and some other things we're after. Then there's Blast First which is run by a guy called Paul Smith. I met Paul in the mid-80s. I'd been locked in the studio for a year, helping to make Black Celebration and I came home, switched on John Peel and I heard these two amazing tracks. One was by Head Of David and the other by Big Stick. So I phoned up Rough Trade and asked about them and it turned it they were both on Paul's label, Blast First. He heard that I was interested and got in touch. We had a chat and he was saying how he wanted to keep his label going but was low on money, but he'd got this exciting new band called Sonic Youth. So I went to see them and they were amazing, of course. (I'm not anti-guitar, I'm just anti the way most people play them!) But Sonic Youth were fantastic so I formed a partnership with Paul. And then, because Sonic Youth were well-respected amongst their musical peers, before we knew it, we had Big Black, Dinosaur Jr, Butthole Surfers and others who were the predecessors of grunge, I guess. All these modern, experimental guitar bands were suddenly on Blast First and it was a fantastic period for the label.
Jyoti : So basically, in 1989, you had most of the best techno and guitar music in the world working with Mute.
Also in that period we were working with Rhythm King who had a lot of the early house acts, like S-Express and Bomb The Bass. So, all round, it was a pretty exciting time.
Jyoti : But you haven't changed that much because nowadays you have the guitar side of Mute covered with bands like Jon Spencer.
Daniel : Yeah, that's right. And again, he's one of the few guitar acts that I think is fantastic, I'm very happy to be working with him. Anyway, after we parted ways with Rhythm King, we decided to concentrate more on the dance side so we formed NovaMute, out of in-house personnel who were into this area. It ended up being up an artist-based label with people like Richie Hawtin, Luke Slater, Speedy J, Christian Vogel, 2^nd Gen. What happened with Blast First is that America woke up to its own music and bigger labels offered those bands big advances. People like Geffen who either wanted the bands in worldwide, exclusive deals or not at all. Paul got a bit deflated by this and it took a bit of time to get going again but when he heard Pansonic, he loved that and that, along with bands like Labradford, was the start of a new wave of Blast First releases. Jyoti : Here's an opportunity for a free plug: of current Mute releases, what are you most excited by?
Daniel : Well, it's a bland answer but a truthful one - I'm excited by it all or else I wouldn't release it. But of the newer acts we've started to work with over the last couple of years, I think Goldfrapp is fantastic. Alison Goldfrapp is an incredibly talented singer and Will is an outstanding arranger. Add N To X we've talked about... Echoboy is just one of these guys who's got music pouring out of every orifice. He comes from a very trad background, having been a Britpop band called the Hybirds, which I'd never heard of. They were dropped by their label soon after the release of their debut album. Richard Warren [Echoboy] split the group up, used his publishing advance to buy musical gear for his home and started experimenting in a more Krautrocky area. He's progressing all the time and he's a very accomplished musician in trad terms, which is unusual in the current are he's working in.
Jyoti : How does it feel having been such a huge influence on whole swathes of Black electro and hip hop? All those people inevitably have copies of Kraftwerk and Gary Numan but also Depeche Mode and Yazoo.
Daniel : Well, I want music to push forward and not be retro. If Mute's ever inspired people to do that, to progress, well that's the whole point of what I'm trying to do. That's what was so exciting about working with Depeche, they were great pop songwriters but they were also into experimenting with new sounds. I sit at home with my synthesizers making great noises but when you can put those experiments into the pop form, that's thrilling. I listened to Black Celebration all the way through, for the first time in ages, and I was pleasantly surprised. I think we achieved a lot with that album. We were into people like Einsturzende Neubauten and Test Dept., so those influences came through. That album seems to be the favourite of a lot of hardcore Depeche fans.
Jyoti : Don't you think that if Martin Gore was in a more trad guitar band, he'd have gained a lot more respect as a songwriter?
Daniel : Well, that may be true to a certain extent in Britain. But in the US and Germany, I think he gets that respect. Also, he did win an Ivor Novello a couple of years ago. He's a very modest guy but he was pleased by that and it was a moving thing for me to see. Sometimes you can get close to someone and forget how much they've achieved but when you see someone's history played out like that, in three minutes of videos, it's pretty amazing.
Jyoti : I like the subversion of classic Mute pop, in the charts but with edgy lyrics like Master & Servant.
Daniel : Yeah, there was a moment there in the 80s when you had Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, Heaven 17, all chart bands who were producing stuff that wouldn't be allowed in the charts nowadays. On the other hand, I do think it's good that kids are listening to pop music again now, that died a little in the 80s, but I'm glad that's back. You have to have that original thing, that hooks kids when they're young and then their tastes broaden. If they're not listening when they're twelve and thirteen, then they won't be listening later, you have to have that excitement.
Jyoti : Did you have a Mute 20^th Birthday Party?
Daniel : No. I'm not a big celebrator of the past - there was no Mute 20^th birthday party because I'd rather look to the future. Also, I'm not a very sociable, party type person.
Jyoti : Why do you think Mute have survived and so many other indie labels have gone down the tubes?
Daniel : I think we had a lot of breaks. We started working with Depeche and that was a band with two great songwriters in it, which then split into two bands. Now that's a lucky break! You can work as hard as you bloody like but you still have to have the breaks. Then with bands like the Birthday Party/Nick Cave, we gave them a place where they could grow at their own speed. The same with Moby, eight years to get to the point where we're at now, which probably wouldn't have happened on another label. But who knows? You can't ever say what would have happened.
Jyoti : Finally, Daniel, where do you see Mute in twenty years?
Daniel : In 2020? Fuck knows! I look at people who I respect in the business like Seymour Stein and Clive Davis and they still have that genuine enthusiasm, that passion for music. I hope I'll be like that. I don't think I'll get bored, sometimes I get frustrated, like during the mid-90s big Britpop explosion which I didn't like and couldn't see how Mute fitted in. I hated Britpop and if you weren't doing it, the press weren't interested, it did my head in for a while. So I don't think I'd stop from boredom but from it being so much hard work, making endless plane trips, forever chasing things. But the next few years are looking very positive, we're selling records, doing what we want to do, releasing great music.

Copyright 2001 Jyoti Mishra