Nick Edwards, aka Bristol's Ekoplekz, explains how analogue technologies can still take music to intriguing new places
Sometime in the late 1980s I made the fateful decision to begin recording my own electronic music. Not easy for a teenager with no money, no equipment, and no ability. These days, I can download a free app on my phone to get me started, but back then it was much more difficult.
My first instrument was a Casio SK-100 keyboard. It had a few terrible preset sounds and only allowed for two seconds of sampling time. Even by the standards of the day, it was little more than a musical toy. My recording equipment, meanwhile, consisted of a cheap music centre I got for Christmas in 1983 and a semi-functional ghetto-blaster I'd bought secondhand.
But in my youthful exuberance, I believed I could coax some serious musical statements out of this peculiar set-up. I would record sounds on to the music centre's tape deck through its microphone input, then play them back through the speakers, while playing more sounds on the keyboard through its own inbuilt speaker. I captured the results as they pushed the air around in my bedroom via the inbuilt microphone of the ghetto-blaster. This, I called "overdubbing". Needless to say, the results were crude and of little musical merit, but to my young mind I was being edgy and experimental. I actually felt superior to my friends who were playing in real "live" bands.
As the 1990s progessed, the analogue recording medium was gradually superseded by digital, and I followed the trend. I bought a DAT recorder, then a digital eight-track, then fooled around with software. But somewhere along the line I began to realise that the quest for recorded perfection was not where my heart lay. The cold vacuum of pristine digital sound lacked the character, imperfection and murky depth of analogue home recording. Not only was I finding my own pre-digital efforts more attractive, I was also being drawn back to other analogue recordings of the late 20th century, the more rough and homespun the better. The crepuscular world of DIY post-punk and industrial, the nebulous echoes of vintage dub-reggae, and the shoestring experiments of early radiophonics, in particular, formed a base of inspiration.
I continue to adhere to the cassette tape as my primary recording format. The smooth, chocolatey warmth of high-end reel-to-reel tape recording is as much anethema to me as Pro Tools. Instead, I encourage tape hiss and electrical hum like a research chemist encourages mould cultures. Exploring the aesthetics of imperfection, those things that were once unavoidable and unsatisfactory, now creates pathways to the unexpected and the uncanny. Neither lo-fi nor hi-fi, it exists in some sideways dimension. What else could I call this type of sound reproduction?
Unfidelity is out in the UK on Planet Mu on Monday
by via Music: Electronic music | theguardian.com
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