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no one deserves to have had a life so full of tragedy. you were so brilliant, so sweet. if only we’d loved you better. i do believe i failed you. you were my brother and i took our love for granted. i’m so sorry. i hope you’re at peace now. Some of my favourite ppl are writing here. But where’s the RSS? A discussion of the history of Lanfranchis/EBoM over at Focusing Incidents has me feeling all nostalgic about my stint with Clan Analogue. I think the next few podcasts will be of tracks that I produced in the mid to late 1990s, annotated with a bit of personal history, and culminating in an mp3 rerelease on Alias Frequencies of my album from that period, Minimal/Liminal. I was an active member of Clan Analogue from late 1994 until early ‘98, and the experience was very important in my development as an artist. I don’t remember exactly how I got involved in Clan – I think Brendan Palmer (one of Clan’s founders) sought me out, although I don’t remember why. I guess my radio show/band WUAL was fairly prominent in the Sydney electronic/experimental underground at the time (which was much smaller then than it is today) having played at What is Music, and gained a reputation for our live-to-air radio experiments. Some of my local electronic music heroes, such as Garry Bradbury and Ian Andrews were involved with Clan at this time, as well as some people I’d gone to high school with (Kazumichi Grime, Seb Chan, Thom McIntyre) and so I decided to join, bringing WUAL with me (Adrian was more skeptical about Clan than I was). One of the things that swayed me was a great gig at the Goethe Institut (in late-94?) that included Clan acts, such as Size (Garry Bradbury and Jason Gee) as well as non-Clan acts, such as my friend Rik Rue. Size’s video of Tommy Cooper moving in slow motion to the beautiful bleeps and buzzes of their track Stability is still clearly etched in my mind It was an exciting time – it felt like a renaissance for electronic music in Sydney after several years in the wilderness, following the golden era of the 1980s and bands such as Severed Heads, SPK and Scattered Order, and I enjoyed getting to know both elder statesmen and some very bright young things. But there were also internal tensions, and within a couple of years it would be a very different organisation from the one I’d joined. The main thing I brought to Clan was my experience with live experimental music and radio. I featured several Clan artists on my radio shows, and eventually gave Clan the time slot of my show Alias Frequencies on 2MBS-FM, which became Cognitive Dissonance, produced by Gordon Finlayson. Throughout 1995 I helped run Clan’s weekly club night Electronic with Garry and Brendan, which was a great way to get to know other Clan members and their music. I remember an awesome performance by Convulse (a duo, before Richard Fox went solo, changing the name to Flux, and then Fluxx). Their track Skindustry is a lost classic of Australian industrial/EBM… With Scot Art (formerly of the band Now Zero, and one of Clan’s leading figures – he ran the System-X server with Jason Gee) I organised the Sydney performances of Jon Rose’s Technointerrupt (aka Techno mit Storungen) in March ‘96. I still have the promo email:
And I remember performing at the Basement in May ‘96 in a ’supergroup’ with Scot Art and Kazumichi Grime at a Clan showcase gig that was presented by the Sydney Morning Herald (following a feature in their Metro section). There was an opportunity to play with Scot & Kazumichi again at The Metro (Sydney venue) for ‘Itchee & Scratchee’s farewell gig’ but I was also playing at the event with WUAL so declined, which was a pity in retrospect, as their excellent performance appeared (under the name Noosphere (live), by Nerve Agent) on the CD I’m about to tell you about. One of the things Clan was most motivated to do was release recordings. By the time I’d joined they’d already produced four 12″s, some cassettes and a double CD, and there was much discussion about what should be done next. This was all very new to me. To be honest, up until that point I’d had no interest in releasing music. I was very idealistic about my music being live and improvised, and I thought the ephemerality of the airwaves was vastly superior to recordings. (I had made a couple of cassettes of WUAL radio excerpts, but they were mainly for the enjoyment of myself, Adrian and our friends). But I’d also started using a sampling keyboard as my main instrument, and was becoming increasingly interested in its sequencing capabilities – mainly layers of samples looping around which could be built up and sculpted into compositions, as well as used in more improvised, open-ended ways. I was also studying at film school and making short films and soundtracks, so was getting used to the idea of making ‘finished’ works. Scot Art wanted to compile a CD of ambient/experimental music, reflecting the interests of a number of members (including myself) who were doing stuff that wasn’t dance music. That was the background for Vaguely Familial, which would become my first piece of music released on CD, in 1996, on Clan Analogue CA011 – Aphelion One – A gathering of slow beats and experimental soundscapes. Vaguely Familial was originally called Lamb Chop, after the sample of a sheep being castrated (taken from the Vincent Ward film Vigil) which appears in the middle of the track, but I changed the title after finding out there was an American band by that name (and Vaguely Familial is much better anyway, don’tcha think?). It was actually an exercise in using some of the cheesiest sounds available to me. Most of the sounds are from the demo floppy disks that came with the sampler. The wind is the classic ‘eerie wind’ sound effect from the Sound Ideas library – one of the most overused wind sounds ever (but still one of my favourites). I was very interested in layered polyrhythms (I still am, but now it’s more subtle, or complex, or abstract, or something) – in this case 3/4 over 4/4. I don’t really know how to describe the style of this track – I guess it reflected my interest in ambient dub (especially the band Scorn, and Kevin Martin’s Isolationism and Macro Dub Infection compilations) as well as trip hop, industrial music, electro pop, and of course film sound design. At the launch party someone compared it New Order, which I don’t really get (but I’m no expert on New Order). It was made with an Ensoniq ASR10 sampler and a Juno 106 synth and nothing else, not even a mixer. The Juno was controlled by MIDI from the ASR and the Juno’s audio output was fed back into the ASR’s inputs. The only effects used were the onboard effects of the ASR. It was recorded at Section 8 (my home studio) directly to a portable DAT recorder that I’d borrowed (either from 2MBS or film school, I can’t remember). The wind sound and fades were added later at film school, on a SADiE system. Anyway, that was a long-winded introduction, but it’s interesting for me to revisit my past (even if it isn’t for anyone else! So, after all that, here is Vaguely Familial (mp3 128kpbs, 5.36MB). The rest of the album is also well worth a listen although some tracks hold up better than others. My favourites include the ‘additional’ short tracks by Io (Kazumichi) and Dread King (Scot) which act as breaks and transitions between the longer tracks – a technique that would be repeated on Jaunt. Along with the aforementioned Noosphere (live) by Nerve Agent, Kazumichi Grime’s Inside:out is one of the standout ‘proper’ tracks – a gorgeous mindfuck of mutant analogue sounds. Toby (Kazumichi) is one of my favourite local sound artists. He co-founded Clan with Brendan (and they collaborated for several years as Telharmoneom). He’s also one of Clan’s top graphic designers, and did the cover design for both Aphelion One and Jaunt. I’ve always felt that there’s a strong connection between his audio and visual work – a similar sense of texture. Although we went to the same high school, Toby’s a couple of years older than me and so it wasn’t until I joined Clan that we got to know each other and discovered that we had a lot in common, including a shared love of that Sydney ’80s experimental sound, as well as other artists such as Zoviet France and Oval. It’s a shame that we haven’t collaborated more. I remember giving him a cassette of my cutups to play with, in the hope that it might lead to further collaboration. It didn’t happen, but I’m pretty sure that cassette (or maybe a similar WUAL cassette) was where he got the Jimmy Swaggart sample “I have sinned against you” which appears on his Io track callisto on Aphelion One. Anyway… for our next podcast, Dry Dub and the story of Jaunt. |
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). I’ll continue the story soon when I talk about my contributions to the following Clan CD, Jaunt.