my first electronic music excursions were way back in 1983, i was in an experimental band called Acid, and we were messing around with roland gear, 303, 606, 101, and 501 space echo. i was heavily into electrofunk, and running a breakdance club. i was basically using electro beats, and layering weird sound effects and delays with the space echo. so while the grooves were totally unoriginal, the overall effect was really trippy, and different to what was coming out of New York. eventually the band morphed away from using drum machines, but kept the synth angle alive. i'd gotten a bit dissillusioned with the robotic grooves, and we got into playing real instruments.
it wasnt until 1989 -90 when i heard my first techno record, (orbital) that i fell in love with the drum machine again. this time it was a big beefy 4/4 909 kick in a club that seduced me into a life of electronica. i got into techno big style, loving it in all its forms, detroit, acid, belgian, you name it. so my style, while heavy on the 303's, also had the tribal polyrhythms of detroit in there.
back then trance wasnt a dirty word, most forms of techno/trance intermingled, so it wasnt too difficult to come up with some sort of original sound. when acid techno took off in the mid 1990's, i almost instantly got sick of hearing 303's, and knew i had to move forward, thats when i started to go more minimal and funky, but i was still playing at a blistering pace, 143 bpm, and it didnt take me long to realise that you just couldnt get the funk at that speed. so i kept on slowing down over the next few years, and got more and more shuffle and funk into the grooves.
my technique was developing into my own style, before that i'd been too heavily influenced by what was going on around me, but now i was beginning to hear cliches all over the place, and wanted none of it.
i was also getting sick of the 4/4 kick, and began experimenting more and more with broken beats, polyrhythms, etc, but keeping the essence and soul of techno, and getting more and more minimal.
micro-house interested me for a while, but again it quickly became cliched, so i absorbed it and moved on.
now i'm pretty much obsessed with rhythm, especially polyrhythms, theres so much that hasnt been tried with them, most music follows the traditional and proven mathematical patterns, and i feel ive used them all up now, and that polyrhythms are the only area left that hasnt been properly explored. sure lots of music like say latin-american music is based on them, but not so much in a minimal way, and not very experimentally.
when i first started writing tunes, i would start with a kick then a hihat, and build things up from there, but now thats the last thing i would do.
i work on rhythmic patterns without any obvious elements, like a 4/4 kick or a hihat, and add whatever kick works later, that may be 4/4 or broken beat, 2 step whatever.
i dont allow any one time signature to dominate the tune and stamp its authority on it, i like to let the grooves breath. i almost never use the tradition snare or clap on the back beat, or obvious off-beat hi-hats, thats a sad left over from rock-drumming for me, i think techno should be more adventurous than that, you can put those sounds anywhere you want, there's infinite possibilities, thats why i started with techno in the first place. if i reach for the hi-hats, i stop and think -why ?? so i need something metronomic to hold it all together, why ?? can it not hold itself together with its own integrity ??
so i suppose theres a conscious effort on my part to re-invent techno all the time, but i work in a live way and thats when the subconscious comes through, so i start with a basic conscious idea, but the tunes just seem to grow out of that seed. like the tunes are already out there in the universe as mathematical possibilities, and its up to me to delineate them and bring them to life, and to do that you have to be tapping the subconscious.
its not clear to me now where the border between conscious and subconscious lies.
when i started out i knew exactly what i wanted to sound like, now i'm constantly searching for a new sound, i suppose thats natural for most musicians, so now i'm very rarely influenced by other musicians.
sorry this is way too long
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