Russell Davies

March 2021

Bright bands of rhythm in space

There was an excellent interview with Beatrice Dillon a few issues of The Wire ago:

People say you embrace empty space in your music, where other producers might fill it with lots of stuff like effects and whatnot, that sound pleasant. Were you consciously giving yourself barriers for "Workaround"?

"Well, I've never really been into synth pads, for example, which might sound like, "So what, why are you mentioning that?" But actually that's such a massive part of electronic music is this layer of synth pads. I don't mean like chords guiding songs, necessarily.

I mean this kind of middle ground thing in the mix. it's often filled with synth pads of one type or another. And I've never really liked that. l'd either like to be listening to a song that's led by a keyboard part or a rhythm - Talking Heads is a really good example actually. I mean, if you think of, you know, the kind of "Remain in Light" era, there are some synth pads, but generally it's all very percussive and like rhythm section-kind of music with melodies and vocals on top, but there's not this middle ground thing of these synth pads. And because I don't use that, people say, "Oh, it's so empty, your music." [Laughs] And I'm like, well, it's just no synth pads.

And, you know, that's not necessarily negative, it's just that I find that when you really start to listen to contemporary music, there's this massive amount of the mix that's being filled by these synth pads. And if you take that away, then suddenly there's all this air for everything to breathe and rhythms, you hear them in a much more skeletal way because there's nothing almost pacifying the rhythms, they're just like bright bands of rhythm in space, you know?

I just wanted to make music where I was fully conscious of all the elements going into it and l wasn't just filling in layers just because, "Oh, that's what you do." You put like a reverb on something just to make it glued together. I just wanted to make music that was really bare bones and really focusing on what's happening and taking things out. And I mean, to me it's the dub approach. Things have got space around them to breathe. lt probably comes from that really~ Space for the groove and space for sound, really."

I love things like that. Where some apparently significant artistic statement just springs from arbitrary preference. From just not liking something.

It reminded me of Peter Gabriel not wanting any cymbals on his album from 1980. He told his drummers Phil Collins and Jerry Marotta they couldn't use them.

From wikipedia: "Artists given complete freedom die a horrible death...So, when you tell them what they can't do, they get creative and say, 'Oh yes I can,' which is why I banned cymbals. Phil was cool about it. [Marotta] did object and it took him a while to settle in. It's like being right-handed and having to learn to write with your left."

To make up for the missing sizzling on the record they invented "gated reverb" which became one of the most influential drum sounds ever.

I do not yet have the confidence to do that. I find it very hard not to fill everything up with sound.

 

Less electric objects

 

I first saw an Electric Objects screen in Kevin Slavin's apartment in Brooklyn at some point at the turn of the century. It was a prototype, discretely leaning against a wall. My memory is that it was showing something like Murakami flowers, but Kevin might well be outraged by that suggestion.

That apartment was a wonderful place. Kevin was kind enough to host us a few times and it was always an adventure. I explored New York from there, made friends, panic-bought board games, stole street signs. But seeing the EO1 was also part of the mystique. It was very New York. Tasteful, discrete, black-framed, exclusive, more expensive than you could imagine. It was like a Supreme drop but technology.

It was of course, also just a tiny Android computer inside a screen. But what isn't? It was packaged imaginatively. Someone had thought hard about creating an art experience around a screen.

So, eventually, they went on sale and I bought one at great expense and it was shipped to the UK.

It's sat on our shelves at home for many years. I would add images to it every now and then. The rest of the family regarded it with the same amused tolerance they keep for everything else I do. Pointlessly connected technology is a hobby for me. I collect things that eventually, inevitably won't work in the same way other people collect pottery owls.

But the EO1 just kept going. Nabaztags failed. Little Printers failed. The EO1 ploughed on. Partly because, what could go wrong? It was a tiny computer, a screen, an internet connection.

Turned out what could go wrong was the business model. There weren't enough people like me out there. Electric Objects got bought by Giphy with promises to keep it alive. And yes, it lived. Though 'keeping it alive' felt more like 'not killing it'.

But still, I could add images and display them. That's all I really wanted. It came a little into its own during Lockdown One. It was amusing to create ever-changing backdrops for Zoom calls.

And then it died. The screen just puttered for a while and then wouldn't come back on. There is no easily-googlable source for getting an EO1 repaired. For time being I've chucked it into storage. It felt too wasteful to throw it away.

What to do? I liked the thing. Being an idiot I set up an ebay alert to see if people were selling off their old ones. And, the other week an EO2 showed up. Exciting! All still in the original packaging. Not too much money.

And then I discovered that the app you need to get the thing onto your wifi is no longer in the App Store. And there's, apparently, no other way to connect it. Various reddit users have found various workarounds but none of them worked for me. So I bought a cheap Android phone because, also apparently, the old android app is still in the store. And it was! But then that didn't work because the way that Android phones connect to bluetooth devices is now different than it was.

So now I have two EO screens that don't work.

Ah well.

Now I just have to wait until an artisanal repair culture for connected devices emerges. I imagine the first clue will be someone showing up at The Repair Shop with a Nabaztag.

(Is that a YouTube channel yet? The Gen X Repair Shop? It will be soon. Lots of old Nokias and Minidisc players.)