ArtEfficient Intelligenz

Mid 95 demo CD.

Xav playing great, counterpoint suspended support chords / fx, on his DX11 keyboard, during Blue Planet / the instrumental outro / under the moog solo.

Pictured, Alfie (Alfie Doo), the photographer's dog.

Can't remember the photographer's name though.

Before there was a scene, before the Melody Maker had a name for it all - before the Melody Maker went bust, too. ..Before the mid 90s record label frenzy, there were these tracks.

Jesus effing christ Gage's bass. She's tighter than G's drum machine here.

I always knew half the groove on my sometimes decent drumming derived directly from her bass playing, but the way Gage was always TIGHT and simultaneously MASTERFULLY playful against a simple -famously sterile, the Boss dr550- drum machine... nothing short of epic.

Must be said that whenever I recorded Gage onto DAW, I never really had to grid / quantize her playing, which basically is unheard of. Plus Gage's slides were always pure sound design. No wonder Elastica asked her in. Twice. Two years apart.

Picture by Itxaso Díaz.

One of the very early songs G brought in.

..We all 'experienced' bump notes during these recordings, but we seemed to only keep the takes with my ones, thanx guys lol.

..It's also very possible that, though odd, I was also doing 2nd backing vocals here during choruses, as per G's request, to match the vocals on what had been his original 4 track demo, but live - and I'm not an octopus lol.

Yep, that's Xav going on a vocal excursion during G's guitar solo.

I actually really like it.

Guitar solo + Eurythmics voice-off, or something.

..What's not to like.

G : guitars, vocals

Xav : vocal harmonies

Gage : bass

Evan : drum programming, keyboards, 2nd vocal harmonies

Left to right: Colin Thurston, Paul 'PK' Kendall, ..and a brilliant Australian studio assistant whose name I think was Neil / Neal. But I've been wrong before.

Roundhouse Studios, London Bridge, mid 1996.

Paul McCartney's studios back then, "yaknow".

Picture by Gage S.

This track was *very much* finalized by Paul Kendall's lone production.

He made my self-sampled, programmed drums, sound real, for starters, which is something we sometimes intensely pursued, for budget reasons.

Another song -recycled from an old synth track- mostly reworked from Gage's bassline riff, then rearranged / structured by Gage, G, and myself, drastically & overnight re-orchestrating all its sequenced stuff.

I'd never seen a song transmogrify more than this, right before my eyes.

PIctured far right, my moog prodigy, and the 3.5" data diskettes box for my [exdemo] Ensoniq EPS sampler, next & atop - that sampler sounded awesome when it worked properly, the strings on Winter and most hammond / farfisa / digital sounds originally came from it, but being exdemo -and built by Ensoniq- it always had surprises in store and was itself sometimes resampled onto the S50.

Under both of those, the Emulator 4K which then was our studio novelty, but quickly got incorporated taking care of a lot of backdrop stuff as I slowly learned the machine operandus.

Pictured far left, the display monitor for my [also bought on sale, in 1988, as 'old tech'] Roland S50, 12bit sampler. Best actual sounding sampler I probably ever had. Roland had done some clever algorithmic 'gap filling' computations on their AD/DA convertors, to compensate for the 12bit / 30Khz resolution, and the result was a truly umpthy + granular-sounding-like sampler, which handled like a multitimbral Fairlight III once I connected it to a small tv monitor with video input, pictured far left, but also had the crunchy gritty sound of the Emulator II / SP1200 12bit systems. So it became my trusty and potent sounding workhorse.

In the era of the all-in-one touchscreen coloured buttonpad digital controller, this may seem ancient, but it was the early days of the workstation. And 12bit still sounds better.

In them days, even drum machines with velocity sensitive pads were still a novelty.

The Prodigy's Liam had the W30, the model that directly replaced the S50, and he felt the same way towards his, also for the longest time - as far as I know he still uses his.

Cause a 16bit Fairlight III sounded horribly unmusical compared to a 12bit S50 - and I didn't know this at the time and I wanted one. Lol.

'The reason Fellini's movies work, when the seawaves are represented with cardboard, is cause in art the cardboard version often works better, as symbolic representation' - Jean Michel Jarre.

The reason Winter's percussive sequence came out the way it did was the S50, first time I seriously sat down with it and plugged the individual outs + midi only Cubase, with an entire winter night in front of me, learning to like its digital filters and how to use resampling to 'self-oscillate' digital filters, assigning massive gated reverbs on the 4 outputs assigned to the few tamboura library samples it brought, mapping, truncation -such an important word in sampling tech then-, pitching them in extreme, as already '12bit cardboard replicas'.

Colin also had the later top model, the S770, and often lent it to George Michael - who spent rather a lot longer alone, in the studio, semi-engineering his own records, during the days of 2" tape, than he ever did 'being decadent'.

Colin would always also talk me into Kurzweil samplers, so had he succeeded, we'd have been more techy than Kraftwerk and YMO together lol.

I did get a Kurzweil K2600X years later - brilliant, and interesting 'sampling synthesis', but not for me.

Evan : drum programming, keyboards, sequencers, claps

Gage : bass, arrangements - as always, claps

G : guitars, backing vocals, arrangements, claps

Xav : vocals, backing vocals, claps

Picture by Itxaso Díaz.

The very first demoed song we recorded as dexdexter.

An 'old' track Gage and I already had ready - G's guitars became crucial in order to decide keeping it was ok.

But it is true too that the amount of exquisiteness featured in the way Gage had this bassline nailed down by then, the way she played against / around that drum machine, could be isolated together with the 4x4 kicks, and you'd get a fantastic flamenco goth rock progressive housebeat track, right there. Not kidding.

Xav was singing, with permission, the lyrics and vocal melody we already had, as written by Monica, the guitarist Gage and I used to play with in Spain.

We used to be quite goth lol.

Pretty sure that’s me on backing vocals, quite an oddity, but I had come up with that harmony part and G wasn’t familiar with it yet. So it was just illustrative.

..It’s all just illustrative ain’t it.

Left to right: Evan, Paul 'PK' Kendall, Xav.

Roundhouse Studios, London Bridge, mid 1996.

McCartney's studios back then, donyano.

Recording G's guitars / backing vocals / harmonies.

Amidst our travels from Chipping Norton residential studios, to Protocol studios, to TownHouse studios, to Blackwing studios, through London Bridge studios, to Mute Records' studios.

..What an easy going band lol.

This track still sounded like absolutely unfinished, UN-tethered, worthless cr*p, by the time we took it to Mute records.

The fact that this track finally ended up sounding like this at all, it must be said, is down to Paul Kendall. Which wasn't easy either technically, nor due to the fact that Xav, by this time, was behaving towards everyone like a cross between Danny Kaye and Godzilla on m*th.

This song was *not* fun to finish, or be present for, let's just say.

These were the very last chords we ever played together, to start with.

Those very last ominous outro suspended chord/notes, which were very much PK's decision after he noticed Gage going haywire bending down her bass neck & note at the very end -and which Xav didn't want at all-, should give the mood of the time away.

So ALL credit to Paul Kendall - I cannot stress enough just how S*** this song otherwise sounded.

Picture by Gage S.

..Who also developed yet another inhuman bassline on this track.

That m8 section. I remember watching Gage come up with that bassline, thinking it was awesome, and when it came to recording it at Mute, having to collectively convince her to play less notes, as ended up recorded, cause it just went speed metal-like otherwise, and we were always after something more akin to INXS for that m8, as per her original idea.

..Gage, during studio time, at times transformed into somewhat of a speed metal bassplayer, almost performing orchestrally, like a fast cellist, coupled with John Taylor's or Paul Webb's sensibility for an impossibly sophisticated riff.

I do remember Colin Thurston being *SO* impressed with Gage's bass playing, he used to tell me 'why on earth does she keep going on about John Taylor? I used to have to dub John's takes many times, even during the 'Rio' sessions... he couldn't have dreamed of playing what Gage does, in one take, least of all with the red light on'.

..And I still find this fascinating, cause we had both certainly grown up idealizing Duran and the bassline on the Seventh Stranger etc.

..I learnt half my bass chops by playing along to JT back when, so wtf is going on lol.

Colin had recorded 3 classic albums with Bowie too, back in Berlin days, and with Iggy, and the early Human League, and Talk Talk. ..Colin v much knew his s***. He had seen rather a lot of studio time and 'stars' through the years, and knew just who did what and who didn't - he never gave Xav much extra time of the day.

Whereas Colin chose to stay with Gage and I during recording periods, upon our invitation.

..And we kept pestering him with duran trivia requests lol.

Evan : drum programming, keyboards, sequencers, moog solo

Gage : bass, backing vocals

G : guitars, backing vocals

Xav : vocals, backing vocals

Paul Kendall : who -literally, on this one- modeled in real time the way I executed all my moog lines, giving me directing advice on the spot as I recorded that very moog solo. That moog solo was literally executed by more than one mind. And as G and Gage were there too, asking for more of this or less of that, it's also fair to include them. That was one intense so-lol.

Fully executed -as improvised- on Gary Numan's old minimoog - so also once played by Ultravox's Billy Currie, as he was Numan's keyboardist for a long while - my absolutely inspiring hero whenever it came to these sort of weird guitar-like keyboard solos. ..Once I had sampled its worth, I exchanged my fairly useless DX7 for a bunch of analogue synths, including my moog prodigy, back in '89, cause Billy Currie.

Left to right: Evan, Paul 'PK' Kendall, Xav.

Roundhouse Studios, London Bridge, mid 1996.

Paul McCartney's studios back then, "yaknow".

Recording G's guitars / backing vocals / harmonies.

Amidst our travels from Chipping Norton residential studios, to Protocol studios, to TownHouse studios, to Blackwing studios, through London Bridge studios, to Mute records studios.

..What an easy going band lol.

Picture by Gage S.

Gage's bassline on this one ain't human either.

I'd gladly say these are possibly G's best ever *recorded* guitars out of the final Mute sessions, or maybe ever. As in, up there with any guitarwork ever executed down-to-tape, by anyone, cause that's how good the guitars here are - subtly assertive, choppily pungent, self-dialogant, sophisticatedly aggressive, and imprinting as much rhythm as the percussive elements, in ways only Graham Coxon or Billy Duffy can, afaik.

Not only are they amongst the v best guitars ever, they're for free. And all of these other tracks are for free now too, and there's a lot of gossipy info also narrated for free, in here, so how about just shutting the f*** up with *stardom narratives* and being thankful for it all - we sweated these tracks out like milking a feckin stone.

Had Xav stopped telling G how to play his own choppy interventions, there'd have been an even better and more thorough guitar orchestration thing going on.

..If that's even possible.

My hands look Frankenstein massive as I was spending rather a lot of time drumming, at all of these studios, because my drumming to a click was at best awful / creative / tight but loose / rattle and hum-ish, so there were a lot of repeats during the (last) days of 2" tape, and cause one of our favorite studio pastime hobbies was complicating song structures to the point of changing studios til we finally thought only the Star Trek Enterprise would be fully suitable and sufficiently equipped to properly register our sound musings.

So we ended up at Mute's fabulous old studios, where I no longer recorded drums, and my fingers finally went back down to their original size, about a decade later.

Not kidding.

I had no real drumming technique, other than 'don't die and keep the tempo, while trying to do all / some of the crazy syncopated stuff you seem to get away with live', and taping my fingers all over with protective cushioned strips, all the way up to my chin or so - I have keyboard player fingers, I'm a delicate beast... Colin Thurston was once, at Chippin Norton studios, v impressed with my speed dialing, while calling the US from Oxfordshire, skipping through British Telecom's ability to pick -and charge for- the analogue call. As in, actual speed dialing, using fingers. Cause these fingers ain't made for drumming lol.

Evan : drum programming, keyboards, sequencers

Gage : bass, backing vocals

G : guitars, backing vocals

Xav : vocals, backing vocals

The song Gage composed on bass from start to finish, which prompted the switching single from COY to ACACC.

Bridges and choruses are basically JUST bass guitar, with everyone else more or less replicating the bass riff / allowing the bass riff to come through. That's what I was doing with my moog anyway.

Evsplaining - lol.

G was instrumental with its modal and structural arranging. cause we quite cleverly recycled rather a lot of differing material in dexdexter, as only we could. ..More than the sum of its parts n all that.

This track was very much finalized by Paul Kendall's lone production, who for starters was awesomely patient with my drumming to a click track.

Featuring sampled 'rhythm-gonna-get-ya tween-screen-wipers' from our then manager's car. Raf had an awesome car, 'his office' -his actual office was located in central London in the same building George Michael had his town flat, and next to his publisher's office too, who got a politely uttered f*** off from us upon invitation to accept his publishing offer, but that's another story-, Raf loved feeling his car was good enough as an actual office so his cars had gadgets aplenty, and so we sampled the F out of it, right outside Blackwing recording studios. Indicators, every tiny little sound, the lot. And I mean SAMPLE - using Neumann & yesteryear Earthworks weird semi-mounted proper condenser-valve-hendrix stereo mics, as per Paul Kendall's suggestion.

"..Well if you're gonna start running cable outside to sample Raf's car, you might as well go proper stereo mate."

Paul Kendall, The Cockney Eno.

I didn't even know my -then sota new- sampler had actual proper stereo sampling mode.

Probably looked like a car advert to passers by. Maybe it was.

Those were the Monday mornings those were lol.

Xav can be heard 'squishing out a laugh' during the m8's 'window up' sample, cause the noises were getting hilarious as the window glass was drying up after many sampling attempts, and cause that's how good of a time we used to have in dexdexter, back when everyone seemed to remember that we are always, firstly, human, and then, perhaps, and only ever temporarily, popstars.

If I remember right, Blackwing studios somehow had walkie-talkies we used to communicate outdoors and sample accordingly.

We were scientists, we were.

Making our own beats out of window wipers and indicators.

Eat yer hart ut, Kanye.

The 'weird' bubbly sound that starts up the song was a sample taken from Xav's DX11 keyboard, cause he had one, and was really competent with it - it being FM synthesis, which ain't no joke. His sounds and sound experiments on his DX11 were second to none, aside from Xav being a proper piano player anyway - so we decided to sample this one as a 'front joke', basically.

It was a way of saying 'here, this is the first sound you get, let's see how romo this one is'.

Xav and I were both really fond of a certain documentary featuring Phil Oakey talking about 'irreverence through sound', while sounding rather a lot like Sean Connery. I think this was a/n homage to that.

Evan : drums, tambourine, keyboards, sequencers

Gage : bass, backing vocals

G : guitars, backing vocals, arrangements - moog related, bridges, choruses

Xav : vocals, backing vocals

Paul Kendall : who remodeled in real time the way I executed all my moog lines, for starters, giving me directing advice on the spot as I recorded

...Had you played the tambourine through this track, you'd have also listed it. We more or less all had a go at the tambourine at some point, cause it was the most tiring thing ever recorded lol. It may not even be all of / only my tambourine that made it to the last printout of the track, so we should perhaps get a lol-yer.

Artwork & cartoons by Mike Vegas, known for Adam & Ants and Tears For Fears album artwork.

If only people knew just how much every detail on such cartoon depiction metaphorically pre-encapsulated all actual band dynamics - down to a t, actually. Synecdoche much.

Original picture by Caroline E.

Home Stream Library (Instrumental) by ArtEfficient Intelligenz