A short-lived dance outfit existed in 1995, called Mr. Clean (after the cleaning product, not the Millencolin song). My friend Anders and I made three tracks, put them on a demotape and sold them, and also had a live performance at the Flestival that year.
We started out when Moby announced a remix competition for his next single “Everytime You Touch Me”. We sat down with his Roland Juno 6 and an Amiga for sampling, but got absolutely nowhere. Later Anders started a few new tracks, which we finished together. These modules now only exist on an Amiga disk somewhere – possibly.
Mr. Clean – Fatal-E
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Mr. Clean – History Hysteria
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Mr. Clean – Constructor
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My first foray into real hardcore techno – or gabber – was a track named after its INSANE tempo of 208 BPM. Yeah, I know it’s not that fast anymore, Moby was in the Guinness Book of World Records, blah blah. In 1993 though, 208 BPM was madness. Anyway, it goes bang bang bang a lot, and then Jan made a remix which featured some other samples. Later he came through with the best version, fusing a million styles into one track called 104 BPM.
BPA – 208 BPM
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BPA – 208 BPM (Save Your Ears Remix)
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BPA – 104 BPM (208 BPM Half-Speed Remix)
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At one point Jans sampler broke. It moved the DC offset quite a bit, resulting in a small but weird distortion. At the same time, Jan made lots and lots of really odd samples from records and TV and put together some of the weirdest tunes. Here are two of them, transferred from really bad tapes, but I’ve done my best to make them sound all right.
Hyperthesis I is.. umm, yeah. It’s got a little of everything. Thrown into a blender.
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Making It Tough has a very appropriate title. This is batshit insane. It goes all over the fucking place.
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Back when the internet was so new that we hadn’t even ever used a browser, we did have emailadresses thanks to a local BBS (look it up) which provided that service. We found an ambient music mailing list, I believe through a magazine of some sort, through which we got in contact with a guy in England called Gavin Norman, using the artist name Synaptic Flow. We posted each other diskettes with modules – transferring files via the internet wasn’t really that easy back then – and even tapes.
The first disk I received I brought home in the pocket of my jacket. As I arrived home, I realized that I had had candy in there recently, and sugar had found its way into the disk. Most of it read correctly in the computer, except for this one sample. We later got a proper version of that track sent to us, but of course we used the damaged version for our remix.
Synaptic Flow – Menthea (Creme De Menthea)
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Later we got a tape from him, as he had been in a studio to properly record his tunes. It had some fantastic tunes on it, unfortunately it was a 592th generation tape with a lot of hiss. This is one of those tunes recorded from that tape, run through some noise reduction.
Synaptic Flow – Unknown
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Shortly after this, we never heard from him again. Gavin, where did you go?
Not many things I’ve done have spawned any reviews worth mentioning. Mostly there were some concert reviews back when I was in a hiphop group (about which I will talk in a later post) but a few other mentions as well. Let’s have a look.
Bad Taste was the name of the hiphop group which was active between about 1992 and 1996. We did a grand total of 13 public shows, and a few small things with punkrockband Millencolin. Our performances and musical recordings were rated from “meh” to “yay” thusly:
On our first demo:
“…heavy and well made, but not too original hiphop.”
On our second demo:
“The four Örebro-youths that make up Bad Taste also manages to create lyrics that follow in the traditional paths of rap without growing to stale clichés. More of that, please.”
Live:
“They rapped their songs to pre-recorded music on diskette (or whatever it’s called). They explained that as a rule they would do a cover on every show. I guess they were good, since I couldn’t hear a difference between that and their own songs. [Later, Millencolin goes on stage.] Suddenly the ensemble was expanded, and Bad Taste was on stage. I have to admit, that with real instruments even I thought they were good.”
On Bad Taste Millencolin:
“It’s always positive with bands that break the mould, and with their hip-hop-hardcore song it was just that kind of successful break that Bad Taste Millencolin gave the audience.”
On Bad Taste Millencolin next performance:
“No, this wasn’t very good. A lot of people on the stage – yet Bad Taste didn’t sound like much. Some sort of hip-hop – but more hopping than hip, you could say.
But that was a long time ago. How have I progressed since then? Not much, it would seem. The first two hardcore tracks that I had released, under the name Terata, were reviewed in some Dutch magazine, and here are some well chosen bits of them:
“A little too simple. The kick does sound nice, but that’s also all there is.”
“When breaks come it’s very odd. It sounds really strange. After two minutes theres a good part. Delightfully freaky. The kick comes back in later. That sounds fat. A little later there are new breaks and again doesn’t sound that good.”
That last one is still a good review, considering that according to myself it’s just pretty pointless trash. It really didn’t take me long to make that track, and that it has strange breaks and bridges is because there really aren’t any. That bit after two minutes I do like a bit though, and had I been smart/engaged I would have restructured the entire track and concentrated on developing that part, but I’m way too restless to do that stuff.
I guess one of the best things about not being well known is that you don’t get any bad reviews. Writing in a magazine (or god forbid a blog) gives you the distance you need to tell someone how shit they are. Instead I sometimes get told in person that I’m okay, and that’s nice. I try to do the same, but sometimes people are just crap and I can’t help myself. Now, what was this post about really?
A proper band needs music videos, right? You know, for promotion and stuff. I don’t think we ever made any for that purpose. They’re probably more of a “hey, we’ve got a video camera, let’s go out and film something” situation.
Back when we were BPA (note on that band name below), we acquired a friend whose parents had a video camera (hello, David). We grabbed some props (a plush rabbit) and a tape recorder to play back music with and went out without a plan.
BPA – Technojalusi
This track is mainly a take on the 1925 hit song Tango Jalousie by Jacob Gade. You know, this one. Anyway, Jan made the first version, and true to form I went in and made a mess of everything. The first thing I did was to shift the opening riff to fit the beat better – at least I thought so but Jan has never forgiven me for it. Then I extended it and added some samples with no relation to the actual track. Anyway, we went out in the forest outside my sisters house and jumped around a bit.
BPA – That Wasn’t Nice, Nigel!
One of those tracks now lost to history (note on lost tracks below). The only recording I have of it is an old RealAudio file, which I had to use on this video because the VHS audio was even worse. The main riff is using a really weird sample which I don’t know the source for, but there are samples from Monty Python & The Holy Grail in there. The idea for the video was just that Klas finds a coin, and Jan and me has to impress him on the playground to win it.
A note on the band name BPA: Short for “Bosse På Arlanda” (Bosse (name) at Arlanda (airport)) and is a reference to the 1991 comedy radio show “P3 Megashow A-Go-Go”, where each week a boy named Bosse would get in various troubles. That he is at Arlanda airport is just because it had to fit with the abbreviation BPA, a construction company. For whatever reason.
A note on lost tracks: Somewhere around 1994 there was a misunderstanding. A lot of our tracks were stored on Klas’ Amiga hard drive, which he wanted to sell. The hard drive, not the tracks. We can’t sell them. Anyway, he asked us if we had backed everything up, which we hadn’t but apparantly we said so, so it was all wiped and destroyed and we would never see these tracks again. We’ve got recordings on tape of some of it, and there’s a text file somewhere with lots of track titles we’ve used, but I’d say there’s a good 50 tracks lost forever right there. Yay.
In the absense of a multi-track recording machine (neither tape nor computer) in 1995 (I think), we decided to do it the old-fashioned and low-tech way: Recording something on an ordinary cassette player, and then add “tracks” by playing the tape through the mixer while playing something new on top; recording the mixers output again, and then repeating the process. Umm, I’m probably describing it in a bad way. Whatever.
The result was three tracks that came out pretty weird. I don’t even have a title for one of them, and the lyrics came from Jan’s odd mind, so don’t come to me with any complaints. We used anything we had at hand, synths, pots and pans, a guitar, whatever was on TV at the moment, and a typewriter.
Caffeined – Microwave Meat
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Caffeined – Psycho
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Caffeined – Untitled
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Psycho was later remixed and rerecorded by Jan (and that remix was remixed by me) in 1997, but we’re not going to listen to that now.
As I’ve previously explained, we would use different names for different styles. Coming up with these names would sometimes be considered very important, and sometimes we’d just grab anything. It’s the same with song titles. Sometimes it’s hard and annoying and sometimes you’d grab a book and pick a title from a random word. If you have any kind of lyrics or a vocal sample, then it’s a no-brainer, but with instrumental tunes it’s a little trickier. (At some point I will release a record by the band FUCK called FUCK where every tune is called FUCK. They will all be the exact same length and each be on their separate side of a vinyl named SIDE A.)
Adage is the name of my ambient stuff that came after I started ripping off Aphex Twins Selected Ambient Works (both of them). (For my Swedish readers, “adage” means “ordspråk”.)
In 1994, I had borrowed Jan’s Roland Juno-106, and a midi interface. I wrote and recorded four tunes really quietly because someone was sleeping in the next room, and decided to add atmospheric sounds by putting a microphone out through the window.
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Non-Interesting Swing Thing isn’t very interesting. It’s just a simple arpeggio chord progression and drums without bass on them. It goes on for far too long.
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I Spy A Chinese Guy is based on the idea of having nothing in the same beat measure. The melody, bass and drums all share the same tempo but something is in 9/8 measure and something in 13/16 or whatever. It worked out pretty well but it’s actually pretty random.
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Rain, Dear goes plip plip plip and has a completely random bass line. I like it.
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In 1997, I decided to test my theory that by using only sine waves, you could play any notes and they’d fit together somehow. I wrote Vincent Price (because the tune reminded me of an old horror movie) which is pretty much a complete rip-off of Aphex tune Curtains (SAW2, CD1, track 06).
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Using some string-patches from the Gravis Ultrasound soundcard installation I wrote a tune called Obsessive Behaviour. I never got it quite to sound the way I wanted it, and have tried numerous times since to find just the right sounds for it but have so far failed miserably. This is the original version which I’ve not managed to surpass in 12 years. How’s that for progress?
One of the fun things about the old trackers was that you could load any file as a sample or song, with varying result. Here are two examples from 1995.
EGO – Bit By Bit
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Bit By Bit was made by loading a few images and data files as samples, and spreading them out over a few patterns, turning samples on and off for a while with drums on top. The drums are in fact proper samples though, made from an old kiddie Casio keyboard which had broken somewhere internally and sounded not like it was supposed to.
Knobster – Gok
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Gok (there’s a Gok 2 as well) was made by loading some random data file as a song, as thus creating random data all over the place. This practise would not seldom crash the program – or the entire computer – because of all the weird numbers that would appear where they shouldn’t and cause memory leaks or something. Loading the same file as a song at different times would create different results as well, because it would try to play samples placed in odd memory locations so it would change depending on what files you had loaded previously. Anyway, you’d load a file, press play, and if it worked you’d put a reverb on top of it and you had created a new experimental ambient masterpiece. Of course, you’d never tell that it’s all random noises and there’s no actual work involved.
A (long) note about the band names: We would constantly change band names for various reasons. In the early days of techno, people would use different names to separate different styles. Sometimes an artist would even be too productive, and to stop himself from overflowing the market he would use different names on different records. An examples is Moby who would release early records as Voodoo Child, UHF and Barracuda among other names. We started out with BPA as a catch-all band name, but later switched to EGO for a short period until we realized it was quite a common name. We even played at a festival where we were double booked with another Ego at the same time. EGO turned into 0.63 (EGO upside down) but was used mainly for the more un-genre-able electronica (remember that word?) while numerous names was used for more specific types of tunes. Knobster was mainly Jan’s own ambient-quirkiness, although the Gok “tunes” was a joint effort (hah).
All right, it’s time to kick this site into action, and what better way to do it than with… I guess there’s a lot of better ways to do it, but here are three tunes off a really, really old tape.
BPA – Derek Strikes Again (Pre-Derek Version)
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BPA – Masturbophobia
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BPA – Levitation
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These 1992 tunes are of course nothing more than classic Amiga modules, and were probably meant to be some sort of dance techno. However, we’ve always maintained that “anything goes” and crossbreeding anything with anything else for any reason is just fine. But then I’m quite sure we didn’t even know how to make proper techno/rave if we wanted to.
Derek Strikes Again was probably named something else at this stage, but changed after we inserted the titular vocal sample from the film Bad Taste. Apart from some housy pianos, I don’t have a clue what kind of music this really is.
Levitation is some weird crossbreed all right. There are some breakbeat-ish drums, melodies with odd samples, and a small trashmetal-inspired drum break by the end.
Masturbophobia is just a fantastic title, and who knows what the tune is all about? An atmospheric intro breaks into a breakbeat/ravestab-thing, and then something which should probably have been played on an electric guitar swings by, some odd sounding flute thing drops by, rinse and repeat.
Well then, this blog has taken off. Check back regularly for sounds like these as well as sounds which are pretty different. You might like something some day. Comments are muchly welcome and appreciated.
