Just reading about the Fairlight CMI, after our friend John Coyle sent us a link to ALL ITS SAMPLES FOR DOWNLOAD.

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.