Turing Bits #9
Over the past two months we've been concentrating on turning our idea for a "Recital for Alan Turing" into the new Hidrogenesse LP "Un dígito binario dudoso".
When you're recording an album you spend all day making music and you stop listening to records, because by the end of the day you're fed up with noises, songs, structures, arrangements, rhymes and effects.
But as we made our Recital, certain records started coming back to us, because of some particular track, or their covers, or specific sounds or lyrics... Now that we've finished, it's time to dig them out, listen to them, and see what it is about these records that have accompanied us through this process silently, from a distance.
These are the records that we remembered most often as we worked:
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The Fall "I Am Kurious Oranj" (1988)
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Laurie Anderson "Home of the brave" (1986)
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The Durutti Column "The Guitar and Other Machines" (1987)
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Kraftwerk "Computer Welt" (1981)
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Kanye West "808s and Heartbreak" (2008)
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Matmos "For Alan Turing" (2006)
The Fall "I Am Kurious Oranj" (1988)
This record was a commission, for a dance production. A bit like ours, which also began with a commission: a contemporary art centre in Seville asked us to make some songs that mixed music and technology, and its director Jesús Alcaide suggested that we take Alan Turing as our subject matter. Then it was suddenly all cancelled. We were left with no commission, but we had a few songs in our head.
When we started to set several songs in Manchester, what we had in mind was Manchester as seen through the eyes of Mark Smith, with his accent and his odd prosody. So we sought out Joe Robinson and family, in order to give our record a Mancunian touch. "I Am Kurious Oranj" is about William of Orange?s ascension to the British throne, and it was made on the 300th anniversary of it. It?s also one of our favourite records by The Fall and, strangely enough, Leigh Bowery was in the cast of the show. It?s got it all.
Laurie Anderson "Home of the brave" (1986)
Our record was based on the idea of recording a recital. And whether or not we got to perform the recital, we wanted to make this type of album, which is somewhere between a live recording and a conceptual work.
Of all the records on this list, ?Home of the Brave? is the one that we hadn?t listened to for the longest time. Listening to it again was full-on deja vu. All the sounds of unidentifiable instruments and those strange voices echoed in our heads as though we?d just listened to it yesterday. And those unforgettable lyrics! "Qué es más macho: Pineapple or Knife?"
The Durutti Column "The Guitar and Other Machines" (1987)
More Manchester. The first technological record by guitarist Vini Reilly, produced by Stephen Street and featuring drum machines, arpeggiators and sequencers. Then came ?Vini Reilly? (1989), which was heavier on the sampler, and ?Obey the Time? (1990), which is actually the most techno one. But what made us remember this record is the title, with the word ?machine? in it, and the memory of those cold, sentimental sequences. Also, its back cover inspired us for the design for our credits.
Kraftwerk "Computer Welt" (1981)
No mystery here. We?ve created a song that incidentally juxtaposes the words ?computer? and ?love?, and another with the words ?world? and ?computers? in its title. This is a record that we have never stopped listening to, because out of all the Kraftwerk records, this one has the loveliest melodies (?Computer Love?) and also the silliest ones (?Pocket Calculator?). Our favourite combination.
Kanye West "808s and Heartbreak" (2008)
Kanye is our most recent musical discovery. It took us a while to discover him. We like his minimalism, his use of effects (in the voices and structures), his daring as a producer and the synthetic mawkishness of the drum machines and auto-tune.
We use a lot of vocal effects on our record: vocoders, hard-tune, synthetic choirs, computers that speak, guest voices? Often, as we recorded or mixed the songs we wondered how Kanye would do it. In "808s and Heartbreak" he made the most of all the voice effects on the market at the time.
Matmos "For Alan Turing" (2006)
And of course, we remembered that Matmos had already created an EP ?For Alan Turing? in 2006. It?s great, but nothing like what we wanted to do. What we like best is their sense of humour, like recording the folk song that Turing used to play on the violin. And we?re jealous that they got to record the sounds of an original Enigma machine.
For Alan Turing