environment, but he still needed an instrument. “The big turning point was when a synthesiser turned up in a Sheffield music shop. It was a Korg 700S — monophonic, noMIDI of course,” he says. “It was £250, which was a lot of money in those days. But I’d just started a computer operating job, so I bought it on HP.”
DRUM MACHINES With more electronic instruments entering the second- hand market, the era saw pioneering bands respond to the cheaper hardware. Amongst them were New Order, OMD, Japan and Depeche Mode. Electronic music had given life to one of the most successful periods of British music since the 1960s. The period saw huge technical advances. Drum machines, for example, had existed for decades, but had been unconvincing and limited. Leee John, of early Eighties electronic disco outfit Imagination, recalls the long-winded process of manually tapping in beats: “In the late '70s, I worked with producer Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes [the team behind Art of Noise and Buggles]. I remember the small drum box that we used to tap in the beats, standing around the microphone, overdubbing thousands of handclaps. It all took time — not like today.” In 1980 Roland released the TR-808, one of the first fully programmable drum boxes. Roland’s new machines ushered in a new era and would soon gain notoriety with Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing’ and Afrika Bambaataa and Arthur Baker’s ‘Planet Rock’. “Drum machines kind of put drummers out of work in the '80s,” recalls Leee.
CUT AND PASTE Coldcut’s Matt Black had been inspired to take up DJing by Grandmaster Flash’s scratch mixing and the DMC school of beat matching. But he’d also been making synthesizers since he was at school and had been in university bands, and he was aware of the basics he needed to record. “I knew what a drum box, echo chamber and a four-track was, so I invested in some cheap bits of equipment, so I could do more with DJing than just playing records,” he says. Using this home set-up, Matt recorded a mix, inspired by Double Dee & Steinski’s cult cut 'n' paste releases. He played the result to an established DJ called Jonathan More, and they started collaborating as Coldcut, releasing Matt’s mix as their first record: 'Say Kids What Time Is It?'. “We were recording using turntables, a four-track cassette and a cassette-deck with push button controls, on which we’d developed a method of editing using the pause button — which is how “Say Kids...” was done, literally recorded on cassette,” says Matt. “It was also a time when electronic equipment was getting cheaper,” he adds. “Our first bit of equipment was a Casio drum machine. It had 0.8 seconds of sampling time; just enough to get the kick-drum and two snares off 'Funky Drummer'. And then we bought an Atari to sequence on. These things that had cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, became available for a few hundred pounds. That was at the same time that house music and ecstasy was kicking off, and these factors produced an amazing cocktail.”
Matt Black
One old technique used by Coldcut came through an engineer they’d been recording with called Raine Shine, who showed them a trick borrowed from musique concrete. “Raine showed us how to make a seven-foot tape loop that ran off the tape machine onto a broom handle and back again,” says Matt.
SAMPLERS The game changer in samplers was the Akai S900 and the MPC sampling drum machine. From here onwards, a new generation of producers were able to use the combination of a new industry standard, MIDI, Atari sequencers and ever more powerful samplers, to create records in their bedrooms. The second-hand market was also benefitting small- scale producers. Young creatives used this recycled gear in ways never imagined by their creators. DJ Pierre recalls buying a second-hand Roland TB303 and switching it on to hear acid house bubbling out. House music was already established, but the explosion of acid and the media furore that followed turned it into the UK’s biggest youth cult of the last 30 years. Acid house led to raves, which led to drum & bass, trip-hop, UK techno, nu disco, big beat, dubstep and many more sub-genres still evolving today.
Recent technological innovations have primarily moved into the virtual world, with
Ninja Jamm
software development, such as Reason, Ableton and Traktor, although a new generation of performance- based hardware devices, such as Korg’s Volca series, is currently re-invigorating interest in hardware. Bartos argues that both hardware and software will flourish side by side in the future, much as paper and pen have survived into the computer age. Matt Black takes a different view: “I’d everything we were doing in hardware could be done in software by the mid-'90s, so we started developing our own software and we’ve just released Ninja Jamm, our first audio app for iPhone, which takes ideas from electronic music and wraps them into a package anyone can use.” Whether the future lies in hardware or software, or both, it’s certain the next chapter of Russolo’s 100- year-old legacy is already in the production process. Which isn’t bad going for a story that began with a riot.
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