A bit of Googling just made sense of a tiny Fairlight-related narrative that I thought I’d drop into the blog…

1. There’s Fairlight splattered all over Yes’s Trevor Horn-produced album 90125 (talk about guilty pleasures); it’s obvious on tracks like Owner Of A Lonely Heart  and Leave It (Spotify links).
2. Various members of Horn’s production team went on to form The Art Of Noise, who Fairlighted up some of the drums from 90125 (have a listen around 3:00 of Leave It) to produce Beat Box.
3. They remixed Beat Box, then gave it to Anne Dudley to arrange  a bit more musically, and out of that came Close (to the Edit), which made me crap myself stupid when I first heard it in 1984. The video’s bananas, too. I didn’t hear 90125 for another 18 months after that.

So there you go: chopping beats out of existing records, re-sampling, constructing tracks from chunks of noise. I don’t know how it feels, that falsetto-harmony-singing prog rockers invented most pre-computer sampling tricks half a decade before electronic dance musicians worked them out. Oh yes I do. It feels hilarious.

High-tech:

Medium tech:

Download audio file (mot_radio_-_episode_7.mp3)

Tonight at 22:30 UK / 17:30 EST / 14:30 US Pacific, the final episode in our current radio series will be broadcast on Resonance FM. It will be entitled “Karaoke.”

In this episode, the Technicians are charged with organising a night out for the Museum staff.

We discuss the impact on nightclubs, electronic music and other forms of group entertainment of communicable diseases like swine flu, and the fundamental links between the will to public performance, social satus and sexual success in various cultural contexts.

The show features the our customary guerilla sound design, including phonography from one of Croydon’s most generic pubs, and culminates in a rare live musical performance by Braidy and Cornwell – to the music of Mr David Powell.

Many thanks to everyone who’s contributed to the show, and to everyone who’s listened and given us your valuable feedback. We hope to be back soon with more over-produced yet underthought nonsense in the nearest possible future.

Oh – the show’s repeated at 15:30 UK time on Saturday, and archives are available on our Soundcloud page, http://soundcloud.com/museumoftechno.

Cheers, have a great week

Dave (Braidy)

High-tech:

Medium tech:

Download audio file (mot_radio_-_episode_6.mp3)

www.resonancefm.com/listen

Tuesdays – 22:30BST, 16:30EST, 14:30 US Pacific

Saturdays – 15:30BST, 09:30EST, 07:30 US Pacific

Now then. Now. Then. Now; then; and the future. Now and then.

Resonance FM has been off air for a week or two, while its engineering team carries out scheduled upgrades and maintenance. Therefore we have been blessed with a short break, two-thirds of the way through our radio series.

This has meant that I forgot to upload last week’s show. Which is a stupid thing, because it was actually the boom shit. So (a) steel yourself for next Tuesday’s show, which will rock hard, and (b) read on for an immediate fix of magical audio/deep wisdom.

Previously on the show

Here’s last week’s episode, Grime, in which we learn about the flow of music and energy within London’s maligned but burgeoning underground grime scene, during an amazing interview with Rinse FM DJ and Butterz blogger Elijah, and then demonstrating our knowledge of the scene in a discussion of its specialist vocabulary, the structure of its music and the best way for a producer to promote his/her music within the scene:

Nang.

www.resonancefm.com/listen

Tuesdays – 22:30BST, 16:30EST, 14:30 US Pacific

Saturdays – 15:30BST, 09:30EST, 07:30 US Pacific

We’ve been gasping to bring you some of our fiery wisdom about the cutting edge of London’s electronic youth music, and here it comes: this week, we’ll be talking to Rinse FM DJ and Butterz blogger Elijah about the trials and tribulations of trying to promote grime music in the teeth of a world recession and what might be described as less than 100% support from the local metropolitan police.

The Technicians, Cornwell and Braidy, present a linguistic analysis of grime lyrics, and discuss the mechanics of getting your tracks heard by grime MCs.

Previously on the show

Here’s last week’s episode, Valve Power:

It’s the mutt’s living nuts.

www.resonancefm.com/listen

Tuesdays – 22:30BST, 16:30EST, 14:30 US Pacific

Saturdays – 15:30BST, 09:30EST, 07:30 US Pacific

Back! Caught you looking for the same thing. And this week’s show does, admittedly, cover broadly similar topics in a not wildly inconsistent format. This week, we have a fascinating interview with North London analog electronics engineer Theo Argiriadis; we apply Theo’s advice about valves to improve the sound of our listeners’ early techno tracks, and the Museum’s toilets. Along the way, the Technicians learn some important truths about motorway service stations.

Previously on Museum of Techno Radio

Here’s last week’s episode, Hip Hop and Skin Conditions:

Our topic was an in-depth discussion in two strands, relating to hip hop and common dermatological complaints. So engrossed in the discussion were we that we forgot to interview anyone this week. Our apologies go out to anyone.

Thanks for your hotly glowing feedback about the show so far: we hear that you have been “laughing like a mentalist, ” and judging our work “amazing”. Because we are useless at self-promotion, we would encourage you to tell all your friends – and, in fact, anyone within a 1-mile radius of your current geographical location – about us.

Here you may listen to and even download the episode, Hip Hop and Dermatology. We hope you enjoy it. Obviously you will: it rocks the hut.

Download audio file (mot_radio_-_episode_3.mp3)

But all this adulation hasn’t yet resulted in any attention for us from those lovely lady clubbers, so we have decided to release the show in MP3 “podcast” format for your delectation and education.

The show features Museum Administrator, Diane Waymire, demonstrating our new audio tour system; the Technicians begin a major recategorisation of the Sir James Soame Collection of Booming Kickdrums; and we smash the sonic atom with Phil Durrant, who tells us about his history in piano house and hardcore rave production, and his subsequent journey into the minimal world of micro-improvisation.

It’s an awesome audio accomplishment, and we hope it rocks your world.

Kind regards

Mr Braidy
Technician, Museum of Techno

Download audio file (mot_radio_-_episode_1.mp3)

I couldn’t sleep last night, threw in the towel of attempted unconsciousness at 5:30AM, and decided to go for an early walk from Croydon to Forest Hill. I got to Crystal Palace, about two-thirds of the way there, just as cafes were starting to open, and it seemed a good point for a coffee break, just across the road from the park. So I’m sitting at a table outside in the morning sun, a grey haze of yesterday’s ozone and fox piss starting to lift from the streets.

The couple at the far table have a copy of The Sun, whose front page lists the drugs that Michael Jackson may or may not have been using in the months prior to his recent death. The headline reads:

Xanax, Prilosec, Vicodin, Paxil, Demerol, Soma, Dilaudid, Zoloft.

At the bottom of the page we’re promised “Jacko coverage: pages 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 19, 11, 12, 13, 14 & 15.”

It’s not as catchy a headline as “Wacko Jacko.” I doubt people will adopt it as an everyday phrase, verbatim, in the same way: it’s more difficult to memorise; I had to sneak a cameraphone photo in a newsagents’ to make sure I got it right. But I thought it was interesting, as it sounded a similar list, or at least a similarly long list, to that of the drugs my granny Cosgrove was taking from her mid-80s until she died in her early 90s. She was a habitual singer herself, actually – and no slouch on the dancefloors of 1930s Manchester and the Isle of Man. Although she didn’t make the mistake of committing to 50 gigs at the O2 arena when she was fifty years old.

She used to moan about how pop records just fade out at the end – something which I think influenced me to get into techno, whose tracks typically finish with some definite crash or device of percussive punctuation. She also used to moan about how late 20th century electronic music was “all bass,” a development which I never succeeded in convincing her was a marker of genuine musical progress. My mum now has, and still plays, her old upright piano. Her work colleagues used to sit her on top of filing cabinets and get her to sing whatever songs were popular at the time. She knew hundreds, she was the original human juke box, she was a 512MB MP3 player in biological form.

Put another nickel in,
in the Nickelodeon,
all I want is loving you
and music, music, music.

A Moston twang and nasality in the vowels. Light, delicate consonants. Old school Moston, when people still relied on friends and neighbours to make music. I tried to get her into Ableton Live to lighten long days in her nursing home, perhaps the occasional knees-up round the old MacBook Pro, but she’d have none of it.

The couple with the paper are talking to the woman at the next table; she’s obviously a friend. She leans across and says, “They say it was the pain relief he was taking.”

And I’m struck by how multiply redundant that observation is. What reason could she possibly have for thinking, for it even to flicker-flash across the hindmost corner of her mind, that her friends could possibly not already know what “they” think killed Michael Jackson? We’ve seen and heard precious little else, on 13 24-hour news channels, for the past 36 hours. I’ve heard that 46-character message about six hundred times now, in this newspaper on my table, on ITV, on BBC1, BBC2, BBC News 24, on Sky, on BBC Radios 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6, on VH1, on Capital Radio, on Heart FM, on CNN, on NBC, by email, by tweet, on multiple discussion fora, on Google News, on Google Video, by phone, over the fences on either side of my front and back gardens, and mysteriously, in the pattern of raisins in a fruit scone two days before he died. It’s like culture is having an epileptic fit, short-circuited, the same half-dozen words burnt stroboscopically into the occipital lobes of every language-speaking brain on the planet. We know this rumour and  the rhythms of the manifold media by which it has been delivered so well that we’d be more or less able to write the next week’s editorial content of the top-selling half-dozen broadsheets and tabloids ourselves, now, on this napkin using chocolat from this pain au chocolat if we weren’t catatonic with prurient tragedy repetition overload.

It’s about as constructive a contribution to contemporary world discourse as saying, “my thin lips are moving up and down, and a reedy sound is being emitted from my windbox as I blow air through it with my lungs.” The culturally-transmitted aspects of our human consciousness are at the point of collapse from a lack of narrative biodivesity. Human society could go down unless we start talking about a sufficient number of other things to sustain the linguistic transactions on which it depends. We don’t need to hear this message again, from her, while we’re trying to caffeine-punch through a fug of insomnia, or relax out from under a hangover with our wife at eight o’clock on a  Saturday morning in Crystal fucking Palace.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, it turns out that she was talking about her uncle Keith rather than Michael Jackson, so I am forced into an apology, and offer to buy her a new pair of spectacles, before hastening on my way towards Forest Hill.