The Machinedrum

In the last physical incarnation of my studio I had, what I believe to be, the greatest drum machine ever created. Elektron's Machinedrum SPS-1. This classically designed analog modeling masterpiece takes the styling of the Roland TR series that everyone is familiar with adds modern control and jam packs it full of more features than you know what to do with!



The day I bought mine from Nova Musik here in MKE, I plugged it in and got slightly depressed...out of the box it didn't sound like a TR-909...and for the money I spent on it I could have bought a TR-909 and possibly a TB-303 off of Ebay. I mulled over it, still depressed for my rash decision in purchasing it and went to bed. At some point in my nights sleep my brain switched and I woke up excited that I went with the Machinedrum, thinking, just because it doesn't sound like the 909 out of the box doesn't mean it isn't a great machine. Just because 20 years of House music had forced the 909 into being the only choice for your drum tracks didn't mean it had to remain that way any longer.

With renewed enthusiasm I dove into learning the ins and outs of it. The control is almost limitless when it comes to tone generation and sequencing. Elektron sets you up with a number of pre-made drum tone banks to pick and choose from as well as allowing you to generate your own drum tone sets using their analog modeling models. Along with straight drum sounds there are a vast array of 'fx' tones that can be used and created for more versatility. Each tone has a range of real time controllable parameters, from basic volume and pitch control to moderately complex LFO control. On the sequencing side you use standard 16 step patterns (up to 64 steps per pattern) to build the layers of the song sequences, with a number of ways to control how those patterns play such as adding on effects.

Unfortunately for this little nod it has been around 5 or so years since I sold mine (much to my regrets) and many of the features and tricks I knew and loved have fallen into the mists of time. I remember shortly after I purchased mine I came up with the lack of being able to reverse the tones as an annoyance for me, as I had gotten used to having reversed drum tones at hand with my Korg Electribe sampler...when not 2 months later they released an updated version that had sampling capabilities!! After a quick peek on Elektrons website it seems the Machinedrum is even more powerful than previously...making me drool to get my hands on another one, even with all of my music production being based on computers. The amount of control, ease of use and general kick-ass-ness of this amazing machine makes me want to forgo drum programming on the computer, even with all of its limitless abilities.

So, if you don't have one, and still use hardware, I strongly urge you to sell all of your drum machines (after sampling from them) and pick up the Machinedrum...here's a small hint of what this thing is capable of.

Genesis P-Orridge

Not many people know that the same person credited with helping create Industrial also had a large hand in the spread Acid House, if not its complete introduction in the UK.

Genesis P-Orridge is accounted as being one of the originators of Industrial music through one of his earlier bands Throbbing Gristle. Throbbing Gristle lasted a short time period and garnered massive amounts of hatred in the British media. Upon it's demise Genesis and another member of Gristle embarked on an even more radical audio/visual experiment Psychick TV.

An Genesis' own words he recounts how he had met Derrick Carter or Derrick May (which one eludes me at the moment) spinning in the record shop he worked at and was immediately blown away by the beginnings of Acid, so much so that he and other concocted a plan to bring it to the UK and engineer a supposed massive underground scene, through the release of a few 'compilation' records featuring different Acid House artists, who were mostly a the same 4 or 5 individuals. Genesis also proclaims himself to be the one that coined to term Acid to the style that originated out of Detroit and Chicago in the end of the 80's.

Either way, me might have Genesis P-Orridge to thank for both Hardfloor and Ministry.

Over the years I have heard and read numerous accounts of his bizarre antics, some entertaining some outer limits. One of the best storied I had ever heard was of when he was living in San Francisco and had a tendency to sonically assault his neighbors at odd hours of the day.

My favorite anecdote is of he and his roommate digging up their backyard, putting together what they thought looked like a crashed space ship, with glowing lights and everything and playing some sound effect records through their amps in the middle of the night, trying to make everyone think a UFO did in fact crash in him back yard.

During the same time period they would play other records in the middle of the night to emulate police car chases and gun battles.

Genesis has also explored the realms of gender identity with his years long effort to make he and his late 2nd wife look exactly the same. 12 years ago was the first hint of this I had during a rave culture documentary, Better Living Through Circuitry, in which he looked like a cross between Mrs. Cleaver and Jaws from The Spy Who Loved Me. While off putting, many people in the audience laughed, because they didn't realize who he was and thought he was just some schmuck. It hit me because the last picture I had seen of him he looked like John Cleese with dreadlocks.

Even though the man is special, he has done some good things for electronic music.

The Prodigy

UK group, The Prodigy has been around for 20 years but the majority of people who know of this band don't realize that or that they still have an incredibly healthy work load.

Most people are only familiar with Firestarter era Prodigy and elicit blank stares when you ask them if they have heard the latest album. Usual responses are, "I didn't know they still made music'. They seem to be on par with their contemporaries and have only 5 full length albums of original material to their discography.

The group, headed by beat and programming wizard Liam, began a career in the late 80's early 90's producing typical Hi NRG style tunes with Experienced in 1992.

Perhaps sensing the shifting winds and wanting a bit of self preservation the Hi NRG anthems almost disappeared 2 years later with Music for the Jilted Generation, which started to earn them notice outside of the UK.

By 1997 they polished their sound, emphasized more on lyrics at some points, which seems to have dulled the production in my opinion, and blazed the world with the incredibly popular Fat of the Land.

After soaking i8n the massive success the band seemed to drop off of the radar until 2004 when Liam resurfaced on the worlds stage with a grittier sound also mostly if not wholly devoid of creation support from the rest of the group (who where originally brought in to provide excitement in live shows) with Always Outnumbered, Never Out Gunned.

Another length break brought the remainder of the group back together to create what I consider a blending of all the past efforts into 2009's Invaders Must Die, which also so a level of main stream recognition, but the sound was so far from the familiar Fat of the Land many of their long ago fans must have lost interest.

While I have no love for Experienced and barely any love for Fat of the Land, I enjoy much of this interesting bands exploits and creations and hope to see more from them down the road...they just take forever to bring anything out. Though...their vast single and remix catalog contains some of their best tracks.

Drum Machines with a Pulse

Every once and a while techno songs will surface using real drumming instead of machines or human controlled machine. In many cases the results can be spectacular. What makes the use of a drum kit over a drum machine particularly interesting is when it is done with the limitless freedom of rhythm found in live drumming as opposed to the linear limitations of a programmed machine. While many machines and software reproductions offer limitless layers of tones and allow fro free form on the fly programming, nothing quite compares to the real deal. Here are a few spectacular examples of what happens when you mesh electronic music with talented drumming.

This last one may be cheating a bit as its a musical project headed and created by two drummers.

Dubstep

Dubstep is one of the biggest phenomenons in electronic music currently, it and New Rave have come to take over the youth culture of electronic music and, especially in New Raves ranks, is finding cross over mainstream success, which hasn't happen at this level since the mid-90's. Always on the look out for new artists I stumbled upon the world of Dubstep around 2008 accidentally and completely unintentionally.

it started as I expanded my collection of hardcore drum & bass producer, The Panacea, and stumbled upon an amazing remix of an unknown artists, Enduser. At that point I wanted to find out more and did some internet digging for Enduser and was incredibly impressed with what I heard. Wanting other artists, but not sure what to call the style I did some more internet digging and found Mary Ann Hobbs from BBC 1 Radio. After listening to a few streams of her show, in which I read she was showcasing Dubstep artists/dj's I found more artists like Enduser and all as well.

However, further digging and other source look up brought me to other less invigorating or interesting producers such as Benga and Skream. It didn't take long to realize that Enduser was NOT Dubstep and that Dubstep is the D&B progression from Two Step/UK Garage/Garage that took the UK by storm at the turn of the century. While the signature wobble bass was intreging it didn't carry my interest much beyond listening to a few other artists and learning how to do the wobble myself in my own 'studio'.

Scroll to a year or two later and it seems every New era cap wearing adolescent and newly adult is listening to Dubstep. The internet is flooded with Dubstep mixes and mash ups, the utter majority I tend to duck and weave beyond.

Early on I developed a theory onto the meteoric rise of Dubstep and it's proliferation based upon the internet and software emulation. So, know rather easily legally or illegally, you have anyone with a computer with the ability to produce electronic music. Through the spread of social media and the blogsphere has allowed for large sub culture tribes to interact effortlessly across the entire world.

So here is the scenario I envisioned that propelled Dubstep: a kid in London hears a mix on Radio 1 and wants to make Dubstep too. He gets the needed software, looks up some Youtube videos and pounds out the best his abilities off the bat allow. He's proud of what he has done and kicks it out to the web to show off. Meanwhile another kid in London is doing the same thing, through various connections they hear each others production. Because it reminds them of what they did, they attach themselves to it, propelling each other to other individuals of like mind and bent. Eventually you get a large network through Europe and North America of people making mediocre techno in mediocre ways all self congratulating each other and self publishing through the internet. As more people latch on and stumble upon it they search for more and gravitate towards doing the same thing as well as finding the lauded producers who have record contracts and DJ jobs, hence the more polished professional tracks flooding the internet.

Dubstep is not new in terms of limited production or limited tonal range when it comes to electronic music, some of my favorite genres fall into this category. I shy away from Dubstep more because of the culture that has built up around it than for my distaste in it. I do enjoy some, but not much of what i have heard and s of yet have not wanted to invest time finding stuff I would thoroughly enjoy. I have come across some American artists who have taken some of the techniques of Dubstep and made more interesting music so I don't see the pure form as remaining strong but being filed into a quality technique for production tricks.

New Lifeforms

It came to me as I was going through Future Sound of London's vast archives of electronic goodness that I wouldn't mind putting down my thoughts and ideas on the world of electronic music to digital paper and seeing if such actions will result in the gain some amount of audience to connect with and exchange ideas with.

Many years ago I thought about my introduction to techno and from a broad definition I have always been surround by it. The older I get the more it seems I surround myself with it, ever increasing my exposure to electronic music in a variety of forms. The growth and depth of the Internet has increased my ability to find new electronic music to such a degree that it is hard for me now, listening to music on average of 10 hours a day, to keep track of it all or honestly give all of it the attention I would like to. That and my fickleness in moods/styles and flavors tends to have me dismissing some artists or songs at one point and singing their praises the next. Realizing this had put a minor hold on my culling my vast and ever pulsating collection for fear of removing something that I may actually find value in further down the road. I guess I am a music hoarder.

Through the advent of expanded connectivity and the quality and price of computer based synthesis we are seeing a massive expansion of the genre as a whole, for better or worse, to the point where one can not honestly listen to everything that is out there. But I continue to search out new artists and styles while continuing to worship the past.

Long ago I joked that Germany does not have anything other than electronic music. Every form of conventional musical style can be reflected in a form of electronic music. So the theory was that Germans, in their industrial nature, gave up conventional instruments and instead embraced technological means to recreate their feelings and urges. I know this isn't true but all of the rumors I had heard about Germany was that techno was everywhere and has been for a long time. Which makes sense if you look at what has come out of that nation in the history of sound synthesis.

I will fight anyone who says that Kraftwerk did not create electronic dance music. We are all slaves to their drum machines. Then on the other end of the spectrum you have Tangerine Dream. I rest my case, everything else is just a copy cat. So in my mind and unless someone has a better argument, Germany is the birthing grounds of electronic music and I took that to mean the German people, like the Borg, are doing everything they can to make it as natural and a part of them as possible.

While this is not the case in reality electronic music encompasses so many music styles in general that the vast majority of humanity enjoys some part of it. Around the same time and because of the German theory, I came up with a response to people when they ask me why i listen to so much techno. Simply put, I see it as the next evolution in music, one of the most basic and important human characteristics. it is merging our animistic nature with our technological ingenuity. Its a celebration and a merging of the past and future of the human experiment.

So this is the beginning of me publicly delving into this enourmous world of expression, for better or worse. To start off I leave you with this as it signals nothing other than what I am listening to at this moment.