The Archive

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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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.

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.