2011 | ARCart

“Bliss Within Agony” was the fourth release on ARC, coming out in July 2001. The title refers to the concept of deriving pleasure from pain. I should point out that I have an extremely low tolerance of physical pain, so this isn’t about being bound and whipped for fun. It’s more to do with the idea that the music was meant to stimulate sensations, thoughts and feelings in a dark, loud environment that weren’t necessarily “nice” but were nevertheless enjoyable.

The release starts with “Sticky Fingers”. A very basic track recorded in October 2000, it remains one of my favourites. It leads in with a kick drum that’s quite heavily limited on the attack so it has a nice sustain. The vocal sample that filters and echoes once per bar caused some issues in the cutting room, I seem to remember, and on some decks can cause the needle to jump if not weighted correctly. All that really happens in this track is an off kilter synth line fades up and gradually gets more aggressive. It feels like it’s constantly getting higher and higher but I’m sure that’s an illusion, as the range on the EMU Audity synth probably wasn’t great enough for me to be able to keep increasing the cut-off frequency for four minutes. The synth was sequenced using the Latronic Notron, hence the odd pattern, and an LFO causes the pitch to waver up and down giving that seasick feeling that I tried to create with many of my tracks. I love this one. It has a relentless, single-minded vibe.

Next up is “Eastern Rumble”. Some might recognise that this track contains elements of the remix I did for Takaaki Itoh. The rumble referred to is a sample taken from his track “Step To Makin'”. I recorded this track in September 2000, immediately after finishing the remix that made it onto the Electracom 12″, while the sample was still loaded in the Roland S-760.

This track has a disorientating, chaotic feeling, created in part by the pitch LFO I constantly used on the Audity and also the pitch shift sequence used for the cowbell sound on the Boss DR-660 drum machine. Also, it fades in rather than starting from a set point. I can’t remember exactly why I did it that way. It’s not the “DJ friendly” method of starting a track, but perhaps it sounded rubbish starting any other way. After the event, I liked the idea that – although an audience on a dancefloor would probably never be aware of it – the fade in signified that the track was coming “from” somewhere; that it didn’t start at a specific moment, and when it fades out at the end it went back to where it came from. Or perhaps the listener did, after a brief glimpse into the maelstrom; a place / feeling / memory of something… heavy. OK, that’s all a bit mystical, but a lot of what I was always trying to do with music was to induce in others feelings that I had personally experienced at one stage or another, often while listening and/or dancing to techno. As the record title suggests, these were not always “happy” or “nice” feelings, but intense, powerful feelings that afterwards one understands as valuable, even if one is doubtful as to whether a repeat experience is desirable.

First track on side-B was “Backlash Boy”, recorded way back in December 1997. The title is an adaptation of the name of the band from which the main sample was taken. I’ll leave you to work that one out…shouldn’t be too hard. I would sometimes stick the input lead of the sampler into the output of a radio and just sample whatever was coming out at the time, and this was one of those occasions. I’m not fond of this track. To me, it feels like a track that was made on a day when things weren’t really working, but I felt like I should push myself to record something anyway. Similarly, I suspect I included it on this release because it seemed like there was something about it I didn’t understand, but that perhaps others may appreciate. And maybe they did…perhaps it’s your favourite of the bunch. I don’t want to spoil a track that others may like with my negativity about it, but I can’t recall ever wanting to play this after it was pressed, and I don’t think I would play it now either.

The last track on the release is “Home Is Where The Hate Is”. This was made in March 1998. Like the noise track on “Walking Wounded”, I made this track some years before I really understood that there was a lot of dark, nightmarish music which already existed and formed part of a long tradition of alternative music making. Much of the electronic music I was familiar with at the time which was not aimed at the dancefloor (I consider this track just right for the dancefloor, depending on the circumstances!) fell under the “ambient” banner. It was more of the “nice” variety, and this track is definitely more inclined towards the “nasty”. It grinds, whines and wheezes its way over six nauseating minutes. Great fun.

Files are in lossless FLAC format, compressed from WAV files taken from the original DAT recordings.

download lossless FLAC version of Bliss Within Agony

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Speech Emphasis

I’ve decided to skip over the small collection of remixes (ARCN04) for now. I’ll come back to it later. I appear to have lost the original CDr that Hardcell sent me so would need to produce a decent copy of his track. I tried to contact him a while ago but never received a response.

So, I’m skipping on to the next in the sequence, which is ARCN05, “Speech Emphasis”, released some time in 2001. Three of the tracks on this release have vocal sounds in them, but the title isn’t an intentional reference to anything in particular. It was simply two words spoken by my friend Ed during a conversation. I thought they sounded nice next to each other and probably noted them down somewhere at the time, for later use.

This record was subtitled “Elegant Manoeuvres part II”, the second in an occasional series of loosely related records that started with the first ARC(ANE) release. As such it had – to my ears at least – a subtle difference from the sound of ARC and the sound of other ARC(ANE) records. A little bit more funky, less dark…maybe?

The first track, “Got To Get Down Again”, uses the same vocal sample that featured in a brief skittish track on ARC02 (“This Weak Flesh”). The bass line for this track is the same sequence which fades up towards the end of “Divine Confusion” on ARCN02 (“Storyteller”). I almost never saved patches or sequences across studio sessions, and all these tracks appear in sequence on the same master CDr. This suggests that all of the aforementioned tracks, which made it onto different records at different times, were started and finished on the same day in March 2000. Except for some 909 ride cymbal from the Novation DrumStation, all percussion sounds are from the Boss DR-660 drum machine, and the synth sound which pops up came from the EMU Audity 2000 rack-mount synth. I manually switched between vocal sequences somehow during recording, to produce the sections in which it repeats more frequently. I’m still very fond of it.

“Mapped” is a deliberately plodding track, recorded in September 2000. That plodding feel is largely down to the TB-303 bass line, which is just three single hits on the first, second and fourth beat of each bar. The other sounds, which seem to combine a sound reminiscent of the TR-808 toms and another spiky sound, was probably created by me randomly hitting a bunch of keys and quantising the result in the Alesis MMT-8 sequencer. I think those sounds are from a percussion bank on the Roland JD-800, but I could be mistaken. I do remember that the spiky sound with a delay on it caused concern during the cut at The Exchange, almost making the cutting stylus jump off the lacquer. The only thing which does much here is a sampled sound which shifts up and down in pitch, giving the track a bit of momentum. I wanted to make something which was unexciting and uneventful but still hypnotic and engaging. I think I may have played this track during one of the warm up slots I played at Lost some years ago (2005/2006).

“Overcome” is next. Recorded some time during summer 2000, it’s a muddled affair. It combines a 6/4 rhythm pattern, two vocal samples, a vocal waveform from the Audity 2000 synth, and a filtered sample sequenced on the Notron, to finish up with a track that doesn’t really seem to know what it’s doing or where it’s going. Perhaps that’s a good thing. I’ve nothing against confusing a dance floor, in fact that has always been one of my aims. Still, I’m not sure if this would confuse for the right reasons.

Last on the release, recorded in May 2000, is “Electric Olive ver.2”. I like olives, but the title has nothing to do with that and everything to do with the source of the stab which appears in the first beat of every bar of this track. The looped synth sound and clapping sequence was pinched from somewhere else….I’m not exactly sure where…but it was off a friend’s CD lying around at home. I guess it was an electronic music CD and as such I probably was going a bit too close to home again for sample source material. These are combined with a kick/hi-hat rhythm and looped up into a simple, repetitive sequence which changes very little throughout. Because it hardly changes at all, one notices the few moments in which something does actually happen. A few times the stab lengthens and seems to unfold deliciously into a female vocal sound, and a TR-909 ride does the “techno thing” of notching the vibe up and down every so often. Despite the slight unease I now feel about the sampling, I like this track a lot; it’s one I sometimes listen to repeatedly as I find the feel of it very comfortable, and comforting.

Files are in lossless FLAC format, compressed from WAV files taken from the original DAT recordings.

download lossless FLAC version of Speech Emphasis

Please get in touch if you have any problems downloading, unzipping, or playing the files.