Last updated on August 16th, 2020
Macho Johnson etc…
There’s some weord bits in this. If you need to sample then let me know. Credits where credit is due etc.
- The whole thing is about 20mins long.
- It does not go anywhere.
- It wasn’t ever intended to go anywhere.
- Where it goes is in your head.
- Even the title isn’t a title – it’s just something to say.
So what is it that it is, it?
I’ve used the first 7 minutes to fiddle with.
- Now, it sounds to me like some of the egg scenes on the planets in the Alien films.
- It also sounds like it should be in the tesselate box in the Intersellar film.
See the stills, see what you think. It can be anything though. It’s your head. It’s what’s in my mind right now.
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It’s dug from an old tape that features Strangely Perfect & Doomage Khult. The five notes, the motif if you like, are from Strangely’s head when he was 17 and played on a piano at his mam’s house. It was 21 when he first made his keyboard. The five notes came out in keyboard testing around 1977 as they have always stuck in his head, (my head actually, since it is me typing this. I have a few key motifs that were created when I was 16-20 from the piano and old acoustic guitar.)
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After the notes came out (they were two pure-ish flute tones played simultaneously, an octave apart), they went round for years, an improvement on the piano sound…!!. One day around 1982 Jeff and Rees sat down to do some sounds and finally build on the motif. THis was in “The Pits” studio.
It’s essentially two noise boxes connected with us both twiddling the knobs with me (Rees) hands on keyboards… Jeff twinked some guitar plinks through his box but mostly it was manipulating the almost white noise inherent in 741 op-amp and other circuits in subtractive filter modes along with ring modulator and various echoes. Quite often I would shout at Jeff to twiddle that or this knob 30 degrees to the left or whatever as I didn’t have any spare appendages..
I’m pretty certain that we didn’t use the synthesiser that we had available. It was all done on our original old stuff.
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For this mix down, I (Rees) have used the stereo track with two different versions of FFT noise reductions applied to two copies of the tape played simulataneously… One gave the beefier sound as it was just used to remove analogue circuits and tape noise, the other gave more plinky noises in the quiet sections yet beefier noises in the loud sections.
Normalisation was applied before the start and compression with limiting to finish along with some simple sliders on the volumes.
It’s mastered with a NY Master Glue.