Member Since: 4/14/2007
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Sounds Like: Ages ago my man Dave from the ever-evolving experimental electronics outfit Ascoltare told me he was looking to get rid of his ADAT Blackface digital 8-track, and asked if it was worth £100 to me. Now, back in the day when I was in a band, we used to think that all our earthly cares would vanish if only we had access to one of these beasts, and because I’ll buy almost any old gear that passes through my field of vision, I happily told him that it was. I think the pedigree of this unit was that it came from the Cocteau Twins via Gwei-Lo. Eventually it started to behave erratically and eat tapes, and after one tape too many I purged it from my set-up and left it outside the house. These things tend to disappear fairly efficiently round here. As it happens my housemate Phil, who has a bit of a tat jones like myself brought it back in again and now it’s sitting on a box in our downstairs loo. All this is by the by of course.
I really like ADATs. They could hardly be easier to use, and I don’t find the sound too “digital†or anything. They lack the idiosyncratic qualities of tape that I have referred to elsewhere in the essay on my affection for 4 track reel-to-reel machines, but hey, you get an extra 4 tracks. Sometimes I think that 8 tracks is almost more than twice the amount that 4 constitutes, and is certainly easily enough to satisfy the needs of any solo artist, especially if that solo artist isn’t some ego-driven control freak, or is quite lazy.
Most of my ADAT music was produced in periods where the PC was broken (again, referred to at length elsewhere) or dates from the period where the Blackface was the centerpiece in my small studio round Sam’s. Generally speaking I’m known as a vocal artist, but actually the majority of the stuff I do is instrumental, and the music bit is the bit that I really enjoy doing. Sadly, these vocal-less songs are probably not up to the standard of the songs with the singing but fuckit. I read somewhere Charles Saatchi talking about Martin Kippenberger and how he had to produce something every day, and therefore some of his stuff wasn’t really all that. Well, that’s kinda like me, even if it isn’t true of Kippenberger. Also, I sometimes think that these songs that I do that nobody ever gets to hear are like sketches that keep me in trim, you know?
Anyway, I can tell I’m losing the thread here. This wasn’t meant to be a proper piece of writing, although possibly it could be said to act as a textual counterpart to the music it is meant to be describing.
I guess the most common sound sources here are the MPC 2000 and the Oberheim Matrix 1000, and maybe a shit Kay electric with only two strings.
Record Label: Unsigned