Tangerine Dream spent hours a day tuning a Moog that had no memory. The drift is on the record, and it is the best thing about it.
The Echoplex was built to repeat your notes. Plenty of guitarists bought one, switched the echo off and kept the preamp, and the box that was meant to be invisible became part of the sound.
Athens, Georgia had almost no music business in the late 1970s. A record shop, a bulb-lit club and a heatless church built the scene instead.
David Mancuso, born 20 October 1944, built The Loft as an invitation-only home party with a serious sound system and no alcohol. Most of the modern club still follows his rules.
Spacemen 3 built The Perfect Prescription in Rugby as a trip with a beginning, a peak and a comedown, using almost nothing but repetition and tone.
In 1981 Yellow Magic Orchestra made a record around a sampler that existed in a single hand-built copy. The ideas it carried travelled much further than the machine.
Ten seconds of memory, twelve bits and a sample rate half that of a CD. The E-mu SP-1200 was a limited machine, and the limits became a sound.
Gilman Street opened on 31 December 1986 with a ban on alcohol and a vote for every major decision. Four decades on, the governance is the thing that survived.
Most dance scenes can be traced to a record, a machine or a room. The Balearic one is harder to pin down, because its founding document was a DJ’s running order, and the man who played it could not follow it home. Alfredo Fiorito, the Argentine who became the house selector of Amnesia in Ibiza, […]
Simon Nicol turns 76 today. He gave Fairport Convention its name, its rehearsal room and, in the end, its continuity, without ever wanting to be the lead guitarist.
