Wings on fire, wheeling on houses, touching lips and holding hands.

[reddragdiva]

I've been overplaying Severed Heads. (Josh's fault.) Liz has been requesting a change of playlist.

Tom Ellard on how it's done:

"I hate the idea of people calling up 'patch 61, strings 3' and writing a song round it. It's as important to think how sounds fit vertically into their respective frequency levels as it is to progress through the notes horizontally.

"You have to spend a certain amount of compositional time not assembling things, but just listening ... look out for bargain-bin records, listen to radio shows where you think there might be something ... If there's something on TV about the mating habits of slugs, reach for your Walkman!

"... From hours and hours of material, you'll end up with three seconds - but that three seconds will be exactly what you want."

(From Electronic Soundmaker & Computer Music, June 1985 - page 1, page 2.)

Does anyone use tape loops any more?

I am firmly convinced - as firmly as I am that the Sisters of Mercy fucked up goth music for everyone - that the drum machine was industrial music's greatest mistake. Twenty minutes of machine repetition is dull; twenty minutes of a human pounding out that beat is interesting.

"If you loved the first single but only on vinyl, if you thought 'they' went downhill after the first album, if your record collection is centred around the year you turned 16, congratulations - you're a Clifford. Time will change but your listening choice won't."

Comments

[echo-echo.livejournal.com]

Well is this not just boiling down to whether you prefer live to be 'totally live' or not? What do you mean by jam though? Playing the tune as rehearsed as accurately as possible (but still with the artifacts of a human drummer), going off on musical tangents or just moving tempo/feel/energy together?

Yes, I think you have a point there, and that good things can happen because of a band being totally live, but a lot depends on your definition of industrial. Industrial covers a lot of bases and some of those just do not suit the rock format. Some industrial is meant to be absolutely fixed, absolutely quantised. Out of that I think comes a certain sense of mechanical purity. So I think to say drum machines were a mistake is just plain wrong.