All posts by DJ Two Minute Noodle

DJ 2 Minute Noodle is a middle-aged Australian; musician by night and systems admin by day. Expect synthesisers, bassonery and sundry obscure geek jokes.

The Fairlight is the Penny Farthing of Samplers.

Look at this will you. (Go ahead, I’ll wait..)

Nostalgic Music Buffs Embrace The Return Of The Fairlight

penny farthing

I Don’t get it. Fairlight is coming back and for $20,000 you can own your very own piece of 8-bit sampling history. That’s fantastic for nostalgia buffs with more money than sense, but to imply there’s any musical value in the exercise is .. I don’t know .. stretching the point a bit. Why not just get the (equally awful) iPad app? You could get a keyboard controller and a dedicated iPad for under a tenth of the price of this re-issue and your audience won’t know the difference. Trust me, 99% of the time they won’t.

(I think Unca Tom’s already got this whole re-issuing old stuff because we have no new ideas thing pretty well nailed, so I won’t go there.)

I visited the Fairlight factory during a visit to Sydney as a spotty teenager back in 1985. I had imagined I’d just rock up to the place and there’d be a shop front and a couple of demo units on display, but it wasn’t quite like that. Luckily they took pity on me when I said I’d come from Tasmania to see the CMI, and I got a short but pants-wettingly exciting tour of their demo studio out the back. At that time, the CMI was all over just about every record I bought. Peter Gabriel IV was one of the earlier ones that I owned and I still love the distinctive, disturbing sound of that record. Jean-Michel Jarre’s Zoolook[1] was a fine comeback after what I thought was a somewhat flaccid Magnetic Fields. And of course Ms Bush’s Fairlight album is one of the all time pop classics, as is Songs From The Big Chair.

Back then in the past it really was the future.

But times change, and things – particularly technological things – move on. The thing that gave the Fairlight its distinctive sound was the awful sample resolution. A lot of people had to employ programmers to actually operate the thing because the software interface – although admittedly revolutionary at the time – was diabolical. And of course similar to today it required a mortgage or some extremely dodgy business practices to actually own one.

So now we have all this nostalgia wave and the chance to pay $20,000 for an instrument that frankly, half a dozen apps on my phone could eat for lunch.

Parked_penny_farthing

I Do Not Understand.

Money factor aside, why ride a Penny Farthing when you can get a modern bicycle with all the improvements that have been added over the years and enjoy a smoother, less ridiculous-looking ride? Your audience DOES NOT CARE. (Unless they’re hipsters in which case you all deserve each other ;)

The more I work on my latest project recreating a style of early-80s electronic music, the more I realise it doesn’t matter a jot what tools you use. What matters is whether you can raise the hairs on the back of someone’s neck by playing a particular combination of noises at them. (C minor ninths always do it for me.) Peter Gabriel’s record still sounds distinctive to this day, but the live versions of the same songs carry just as much punch, his (incredible) backing band could still keep playing if you pulled the power chord out of the CMI – and you’d still cry over Biko.

You can carp on about vintage authenticity all you like but if you’re not getting an emotional response out of the music – I’m sorry but splooging your pants over a bit of gear doesn’t count – you might as well go and play with Excel spreadsheets instead.

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Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. It says on the internet that Zoolook was released in 1984 – but I definitely bought it in ’85 from the new release bin of a record shop in regional Victoria. These days it’s hard to imagine not even knowing about an album for a whole year before it gets released in your own territory – but it happened.

Going Post

Here’s something that I think is working out OK. It started back at xmas when my bro-in-law played me a riff he’d been working on, which happens to be in a weird time signature. I’ve long been frustrated with the limitations of writing in 4/4, and this thing just grooved nice and unpredictably – I worked it out as a 3 bar riff in 4/4 3/4 and 11/8 – so I offered to have at it and see what I could ruin add.

Being a fan of the epic build, I guess it wasn’t hard to see how it was going to go. I’m not done with it yet but I thought it’d be interesting to post the intermediate mixes here, to see how it (d)evolves. So without further ado here’s version 1.0 of Gut Rub[1] in which I channel all the post-rock I’ve been listening to over the last few years. See if you can spot the bits I need to fix already.

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Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. I’m assuming that’s the name of the track, based on the name of the file I was sent.

Geniusish.

Every so often iTunes Genius throws up a really good playlist that could’ve been put together by a human person with excellent taste and a sense of flow. Here’s one such list that started when I randomly happened upon Rollins covering AckerDacker:

Henry Rollins & The Hard-Ons – Let there be Rock
Hard-Ons – Just Being With You
The Saints – Know Your Product
Sunnyboys – Tunnel of Love
Rocket Science – Being Followed
Einstürzende Neubauten – Blume (French version)
Iggy Pop – Wild America
The Damned – Smash It Up
Hard-Ons – All Set To Go
Cabaret Voltaire – Nag Nag Nag
Circle Jerks – When the Shit Hits the Fan
Motörhead – God Save The Queen
Soundgarden – Drawing Flies
Mondo Rock – Cool World… er.. hello what?