The Gestalt Analysis Podcast: Recent Episodes
fenducci
So, we did a gig last year. First one in quite a while.
Here is the audio and visuals from the night for those of you who couldn't make it. Which, to be honest, was pretty much everybody.
Actually, while we are being honest, the audio is from a rehearsal recording so it probably sounds nothing like what we did on the night. Also, the visuals didn't get seen on the night because the projector was broken, apparently.
I have resolved to try and get back into blogging these tracks. It has been quite a hiatus but hopefully I will be able to pull my finger out and get a bit more regular.
Eh Yumm was constructed using the same bits and bobs we had used to create Stick it. We still had my brother’s sampler and were figuring out what you could do with it. The vocal “Eh Yumm” sound was taken off the TV and you can probably guess where the latin drums came from.
Um, okay, this requires a bit of explaining.
My brother and his mates started a band and they had all clubbed together to buy some gear. An Alesis QS6 if I remember correctly, microphone…
…and a shiny purple Yamaha A3000 sampler!
I was still unemployed at this point, living at my mum’s house with all our studio gear in my bedroom. By some quirk of fate, I can’t remember why exactly, all this lovely new gear had been left at our house. I don’t know why they weren’t using it themselves but here was an opportunity not to be missed.
I grabbed the first things that came to hand, a Lalo Schifrin compilation, a Jose Feliciano album I had just bought from a library sale, and the microphone and started stuffing things into the sampler.
Perhaps being unemployed and having to endure my own company for so long caused me to behave a bit daft and this was the expression of it. It’s mostly just figuring out what you can do with a sampler and having a bit of fun in the process.
The title and the “lyrics” are yet another Dirty Harry reference. It’s what you are supposed to do with a seven pointed suppository.
Gav was commuting to Perth from Carnoustie every day. On the A90 between Dundee and Perth there was a little sign that said “Carse Honey”. Quite fitting for such a sweet tune.
Recorded as a live jam, this is essential fenducci. Nice bit of melodic electro and one of my all time favourites.
We have the SH101 doing a Kraftwerk style white noise snare, strings, piano sounds and tuned percussion all wrapped up in a loose ad lib arrangement. Tasty.
Moody music with a slightly darker edge was what we wanted and we ended up with “Writer’s blqck”. That must have grated because what we came up with next was this.
Much more the thing.
Fewer notes. Fewer notes meant a much lower possibility of straying into chirpy happy melodies, our weakness.
Fuzzy borders relates to a misremembered phrase my mum was using at the time, something she had seen on TV. I think the actual phrase was fuzzy boundaries.
I remember this one. Lots of potential, lots of good ideas, completely unfinished. Hence the name. The Q in the title is probably just a consequence of naming tracks using a jog wheel on the mini disc recorder.
It was definitely going somewhere. The bass line is a peach and the hi hat patterns are lovely. I think that was the problem, it was just too lovely, too happy.
Neither of us are particularly angry. When you are creating music it tends to be a reflection of your state of mind and generally we were a couple of cheerful souls. This can be a bit frustrating when you want to create moody music with a slightly darker edge.
So, we just stopped development, recorded what we had done and broke it down into constituent parts at the end with a bit of improvisation. Again we thought we might reuse some of it when we got the sampler and again we never did.
So, as promised, here is the other version of “Standard” which appeared on the previous disc. The acid line is still there but the rest of the track has been worked and reworked into something with a lot more polish and sheen.
Is it better or just different?
It’s really difficult to decide. They both have their merits. This version, I feel, is musically more rounded and has more depth but because of this feels a little less gritty.
I guess they don’t really have to be compared in that way. Lets just look at them as an example of how we took an idea and pushed it through to it’s conclusion. Sometimes we stopped at “Standard”. Others, we elevated to something more like this.
As I said previously, this track is paired with snare sloth, both in it’s starting point and in the source of the name. I am really struggling to figure out where we were coming from with the names. “Snare” is self explanatory. Why we were talking of sloths and pies is a complete mystery.
I really like this one. It’s not the best mix-down unfortunately. It also sounds like there’s a bit of a nod to Orbital’s “The Box” in there somewhere.
This and the next track are a bit of a twofer. I couldn't decide whether to have them as a single track in two parts or two separate ones. I have gone for two separate tracks.
The downside of this is we lose the smooth change over between them but I think they need to be seen as individual tracks in their own right. They both started from the same source material which was the hand programmed drums but went in different directions. I am sure we tried to make them work in a single track but I think the beauty and simplicity was lost and it just didn't work anyway.
This isn't particularly representative of the rest of the disc. There are some real gems to come so lets just get this one out of the way. Quite fast and rather hard, it does the job its supposed to.
Maybe I'm being a little harsh.
We were young, energetic, and liked a good stomp back then. I think we have mellowed in our tastes somewhat and this isn't exactly coffee table music.
The title is a reference to Victorian Dad from the Viz.
This is a bit odd. It sounds like the SR-16 going through the hacked up Jen SX1000. That’s it for three minutes and seven seconds.
I think, and this is purely conjecture, by this point we had devised a scheme allowing us to purchase a sampler and a new mixing desk. If that isn’t the case, I certainly think we were at least in the process of developing a cunning plan to do so and we certainly believed we would have a sampler very soon.
It sounds like we were getting ideas together to use in the sampler. Maybe it was stuff we didn’t think we could recreate or imagined would be good to use. I don’t know.
We never did use it in the sampler.
The reality was so unlike what we supposed it would to be…
You will notice as we go through these tunes that there are rarely any remixes, re-edits, or versions of tracks. I'm not exactly sure why but we generally tended to work through an idea until we thought it was done, recorded it, then moved on to the next one. We might have had a few projects on the go and some of these might have spawned new ones but we never really revisited anything once it was finished.
There are of course exceptions and here we have one. It could be that we had a fear of overworking a track. Much of what we did we liked because of its rawness. Perhaps lingering too long on a project meant we created something that was a little too soft, too contrived.
This one, as the title suggests, developed into a pretty standard acid track. Maybe we thought the ideas deserved a bit more exploration or we just didn't want to create another "standard" tune. So we took a snapshot in this state and continued on with its development. The result is on the next disc. I'll leave it up to you to decide which you prefer.
This is the first of our collaborations with other artists. It was an off the cuff jam with our long time friend Dave Philp. Dave is a phenomenal guitarist and a true natural. He was a member of Cannon, Uncle John and Whitelock, and currently is a member of Adopted as Holograph.
There was no plan or structure and it really was just a jam session. The basic track was a work in progress, which is probably really noticeable at the start of the tune. Some of the elements are really strong though. The acid line is probably one of the best we have written and the hat patterns come into their own later on in the track. Gav and myself brought in the various parts and loops, building up the track and Dave just did his thing. It built and built. We were all picking up cues from each other in a really organic way. Nothing much was said, just a few nods and winks to signal changes but I think we knew where each other was taking it intuitively.
As I said, the start can sound a little stilted due to the unfinished nature of some of the parts. Listen past this and you will get to hear a genuine artist create something special on the fly. Later collaborations with Dave had a bit more structure to them but for this one it was just a case of us saying... "Goan yersel big man"
Woah, this is a long one. Can't imagine what we were thinking. Maybe we were trying to tease the listener. There are a lot of moments where it feels like the tune is about to really get going then we go off on one instead. I guess we were mostly experimenting with all the layers we could create because we had enough sounds to go round. Title? Your guess is as good as mine.
I can't remember much about this one I'm afraid. Sounds like another one of those new kit tracks. Lots of K1 sounds.
No idea what the title is about either.
So, here we have the appearance of the Kawai K1. As I said previously we tended to run out of synths on some of our more lavish productions but we also really desired to have something that could recreate the sound of real instruments. Strings in particular were something we felt we were missing in a number of tracks. I also have a great love of choir sounds. So we decided to try and pick up a relatively cheap sample based multitimbral digital synth. What we really desired was a Kawai K4 because it had a filter section on top of everything else. Unfortunately they were selling for nearly three times the price and clearly out of our reach. So we plumped for the K1.
886? Three words, Countdown numbers game.
Quite abrasive in parts but a well constructed little tune. I think this is another of those that pretty much wrote itself. You just know where it's going, how it should progress, where the flourishes should be, and when to break it down. They tend to develop quickly with little needing said throughout construction.
Title is just one of those things you shout when playing as a kid.
More acid. Bread and butter stuff really. I think we liked to make standard tracks that could be used in future live sets or just get some practice making dance floor type tunes. In general I would say we took everything we started to it's conclusion. Going through the discs there are very few unfinished tracks at all. Later, I think, we did get a bit more discerning but during this period everyday was a school day and anything we learned could be added to our toolkit.
Can't tell you where the title came from. Maybe someone had been mean to us.
This was just a bit of fun. We are both big fans of Lalo Schifrin and wanted to have a crack at doing a remake. I can't claim much credit for this one as Gavin did all of the work figuring out the notes. I think it was tough going and we gave up trying to recreate the whole tune and instead just lumped for repeating the sections we managed to work out. The drums probably could have benefitted from a breakbeat, something with a bit more of a human feel. They feel a bit too programmed. I don't think we spent too much time on it to be honest, we had to get back to work.
We are very proud of this one. We felt it conveyed so much emotion that it deserved to be dedicated to someone very special. Two years previously we had lost a very close friend to a tragic accident, the young man pictured on the cover. It was such a great loss to us and our circle of friends that we still thought of him daily. Twenty years later with so much time and life having passed, in fact more time than he was on this earth, he is in our thoughts less often. Because of that, it is good to have something to help bring back those memories and feelings even though the tune itself is not something he would necessarily have appreciated.
The title comes from a catchphrase he would say. In an Australian accent.
This is a cracker. We didn't do Drum & Bass very often, if you can call it that. It's certainly our interpretation of it anyway. Taking what we had learned on the SR16 on Instant Gratification and applying it to the Drumstation we created this monster. All without the aid of a sampler. Named after one of our best mates (It's his porn name, you know, the name of your first pet and your mother's maiden name) and probably one of our strongest critics. He always wanted us to go harder and more weird. We thought this might appease him. It probably didn't. It was a good thing to have such an aficionado of electronic music being so critical. It pushed us to keep trying.
This is the first track we would class as definitive fenducci. It is the earliest work that fits into what would become "our sound". We did have other "sounds" but always came back to doing tracks in this mould. Not quite as polished as later tracks but many of the elements are there. The Poly800 really shines in this one but I do remember it being a quite job to get it to do what we wanted. It would only make the exact sound we liked on the first notes played then drift into something not quite as nice. This required us to change the program on the synth whenever it wasn't playing and quickly change it back again. I don't think we knew how to do program changes over midi at that time or if we did it it didn't work doing it that way. We had to stand over the synth switching programs all the way through the recording. I think we had quite a few attempts at getting it down.
Akimbo? It's just a really nice word.
Hair clippers. Always loved the clunk of switching on a set of hair clippers. Very difficult to tell whats playing what here. It sounds like there are more synths than we had which makes me think we were using the DX21 in split mode. You could divide the keyboard in two one sound in the bottom half and a different one in the top half.
Named after a friend who after visiting would leave you without a lighter. Thieving bastard.
Nice bit of acid. I think that is the SH-101 playing the acid baseline only because its definitely not the Bassstation which is pretty distinctive in this tune. This is fast too, must be hitting 140 easily. All in a pretty banging go at it. Still learning the craft but putting our own little spin on it.
Starling Assembly? I'm thinking BBC birdsong CD, some mention of starlings assembling in a murmuration. Thats all I've got.
This is a lost track. As I started going through this minidisc I recognised all of the tracks apart from this one. It was quite a surprise to hear something you haven't heard for over a decade. Listening to the others through that period has kept the memories of creating them alive. Not so with this one. Listening to it now, we have another example of a whiny random synth sound from the Poly 800, auto wah on the drums and not much else of note. I can't think of why the name contains a misspelling of gremlin. The "A:" of course refers to the designation of the floppy drive, remember them?
This is a long track that doesn't do much. I recall trying to create a certain drum pattern for what reason I don't know. I can hear a triangle and the 'impact' drum sounds from the SR16. I guess we were just trying create some kind of DJ tool or something. We were still getting to grips with the new drum machine so a lot of experimentation and audio sketches.
As I was saying previously this is the best example of the drop down technique we used to come up with different ideas. It came from what we called a 'happy accident'. We were probably just moving midi parts about and put them in the wrong place. The midi parts are played by the sequencer on tracks that are assigned to midi channels; 16 for the drum machine, 1 the dx21, 2 the poly800 etc. Drums would be at the top, something to do with midi being serial rather than parallel. You wanted the rhythm section to come first to avoid timing issues. The drums would be separated into multiple tracks all assigned to 16. What we would do is take all the midi parts and move them down one track. In effect each instrument was playing the notes of the preceding instrument. You could get some really interesting stuff from this that could be used in breakdowns and such. Where the drums became synths could really throw things in a new direction. For this track I think we just took the whole of Root to Root except the kick and moved it down. That's it, I don't think we even bothered doing a new mix down going by the brutal volume of those hi hats. We didn't do that to a whole track again but you can see how useful it was in producing new sounds and layers that we might not have thought of. Happy accidents, while not being essential, were a useful and sometimes direction changing tool in our production process. There are a few more to come.
Not much to say about this one. It's probably most notable as the progenitor of 2Root which will be up next.
Title is a reference to "Beavis and Butt-head do America". It's actually a misheard quote:
"Agent Hurly, I want you to give this scumbag a cavity search. I'm talking Roto-Rooter. Don't stop until you reach the back of his teeth."
I think there a few more of those to follow.
We need to stop and go back a few months. About halfway through The other one with the picture and certainly before we got the Drumstation, we landed ourselves a couple of gigs. The first was at the 1997 Glastonbelly Festival in Carnoustie. I can’t put a date on that. Maybe someone else can. In fact, I have so little recollection of that night I’m not even sure we did play. I know we played the previous year but I just don’t remember performing at this one. We were chatting with David “Moe” Morris and he offered us a gig. He also needed a name. Calvin and Hobbes had been a staple of ours at that time so we went with Spaceman Spiff. I have a memory of having to rush and create something for the live set. I don’t think we had much material to work with or recreate so we just wrote a whole batch of new stuff. The timelines are fuzzy and I am struggling to remember what happened when.
Meanwhile, in a tunnel in Paris…
Perhaps the mood of the nation that day helped soften opinions on the quality of the music. It's rough and lacks punch but somehow we got away with it. We learned some lessons that night. We do get much much better.
Thanks to Mitch for the recording.
Last track of the disc. Yet another "Dirty Harry" reference in the title. We must have been watching the films. It can be quite difficult thinking of names for instrumental tracks. A name might pop into your head from the emotion or memory invoked by the tune. Sometimes it is just a cryptic description of the track or how it was created. Maybe, its a reference to a joke or catchphrase that we had used during the making of the tune. Sometimes, it is words grabbed from evenings of watching films, listening to music, and talking crap. Good times.
Yes, it was an auto wah, thats the TR-606 going through it in this track.
Every so often we would create something that soaked up our ideas then draw even more from us. They tend to be anthemic tracks that build, adding more and more layers interspersed with complex breaks until they climax into some kind of wall of sound. The track would get longer and longer as we jostled for our turn at the helm, adding breaks, twirls and flourishes. We would encourage the other when it was their turn, suggesting tweaks and variations. "Ooh yeah", "Do that!", "Do it again", "How about this?", "Mmmmm", "Oh aye" plus any number of other grunts, whoops, and squeaks could all be heard by anyone at the door. This one isn't the longest but I think it certainly has the complexity of one of these tunes so is likely to be one of the first. We will meet another one of these called "Divide by 3" which really demonstrates what I am talking about. There may also be a few others before we get there.
Oh, and the title is another "Dirty Harry " reference.
Love this one. We were trying to get Gavin's old Amiga back online and playing some samples for us. It was on the Amiga we started writing tunes together using breakbeats, the DX21, and some "2001: A Space Odyssey" samples. Pretty sure there was a crowd cheer in there too. Anyway, we couldn't get it to playback properly and I think it only played a sample on every second note. So we gave up and just set it to loop the Albert Popwell sample at its own speed and filtered it through the Jen. Probably doesn't add much to the track but we liked to stick stuff on the start and end of tracks just for the hell of it. Some of them had meaning, some were a reference to the inspiration behind the track, and some were just daft. Watch out for Gavin's awesome ad-libs on this track. One of our favoured techniques was to set the tune on a really long loop and let him tinkle away, recording everything. We could then pick the best stuff, tweak it and add it to the mix.
Can't remember much about this one. The name stems from late nights sitting about with our pals talking crap. Sounds like we are using everything we had though. I think I can hear the DX21, Bassstation, SH-101 and the Poly 800. I could have sworn we had the Kawai K1 by then but it must have come later. Seems to be quite a short tune for us so perhaps we ran out of ideas for it or didn't feel we could develop it further. Guess it does what it needs to do so enough for now, some good stuff next.
Boom. We've got a Drumstation and we are going to use it. Okay, maybe a little overzealous on the classic 909 thing but we were bursting to let it out. This and the next track are good examples of what tended to happen when we got a new bit of kit. We would go all out with it creating a track or some tracks that demonstrated the features that had drawn us to it. After the initial excitement we would then create some more measured tracks where the device was incorporated in a more subtle way. Another example is when we got our first effects unit and put delay on everything. Oh, and the sampler, wait till we get the sampler...
We had both returned to Carnoustie after graduation. Gavin already had a job but I was unemployed for a year before I found something. That means I had a lot more time on my hands. I think I kicked this one off. Some tell tale signs are the almost randomly created melody and the, of course, slightly out of tune synth. It's got a bit of a melancholy feel to it which is quite appropriate as it marks the end of an era. Things were about to change.
I think this one really demonstrates our frustration with the drum sounds we had at the time. This could have been so much punchier. We could have used a synth to create a more banging kick and SH-101 was great at that. Unfortunately when you have very few synths and no means of multitracking you can't afford to lose a whole synth to a single drum sound. Everything we wrote at the time was created by mixing down live to 2 channels. There were ways to multitrack and sync to midi back then but they were very expensive. I think ADAT was kicking about and I imagine hard disk recording was in its infancy but nothing like that was on our radar. I don't think we even had a multimbral synth which could have lightened the load. One synth, one sound. So it must have been around this time we decided to get the Drumstation. The whole 909/808 thing was probably getting a bit tired by then but it was an inexpensive way to get some oomph into our tracks. Getting a sampler may have made more sense but they were not within our reach financially. A Drumstation was, and it had the potential to transform what we were making.
Here we have the SR-16 coming into its own. We were just getting to grips with Cubase and had previously used the internal sequencer on the drum machine to write tracks. You can imagine how limited that was on such a small screen. Now we had the Atari ST controlling all the parameters of it through midi we were really able use it much more expressively. This track also features the Korg Poly 800 mkII. This was our first analogue poly synth. It was a bit of a strange beast in that it was analogue but had no knobs and was programmed using multi function buttons (I hate multi function buttons but that is for another time). This made it a bit of a bugger to programme. It was also designed as a keytar and required batteries to store the patches. I think it did have an internal battery but this had died some time previously. Anyway, if you took the batteries out it would lose all the stored patches and revert to random patches across all the memory banks. The settings were all over the place and some of the parameters were set to values you couldn't set manually. Some of these new patches were absolutely wicked and the whiny synth sound in this track is one of them. Lastly this track includes the first appearance of the "drop down" method we use in a few other tracks, particularly 2 Root. More on that later.
Struggling to remember much about this one.
We had a Jen SX1000 which was a very basic mono synth. It was very broken and could only play one note or something, so we butchered it. Basically we jimmied an audio in directly to the filter section just to see what happened. Somehow it worked and we were able to send audio from our other synths into it and filter the sound. What you hear during the breakdown is our DX21 being filtered by the Jen.
We were looking to do something with a jazzy feel, something with a shuffle to it. I think we had also just picked up a phaser pedal from a guitar store on Albert Street. Although, it might have been an auto wah.
Suffice to say I think we achieved what we had set out to do. Also, I think this is an example of us trying to beef up the kick drums from the drum machines by using a synth to provide that "whump" on the first beat.