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Russell Haswell: TechnoRingModnO!se Podcast
Back story and rough contextualisation: Motor City UK. Coventry, West Midlands. Summer 1987 (the year Coventry won the FA Cup) I worked in a 140 acre car plant during shut down as an industrial cleaner; floor painting, cleaning out automated spray tunnels, dumping paint clogged grates in acid baths. It was brutal. Mainly ex-cons and young offenders! Fortunately, I had saved up the previous year and purchased a Sony Professional Walkman, and so my soundtrack to this harsh labor was Carcass' 'Reek Of Putrefaction', Napalm Deaths 'Scum', Swans 'Greed', (all of these bands I had already, seen live, including Carcass' infamous gory pathalogogy collage slide shows ) ... Derrick May's 'Nude Photo', Phuture Pfantasy Club's 'Slam' and 'Spank Spank', and various Omar Santana "Super Edits", were also on my cassette compilations. A year later, in 88 I picked up a white label of 808 States 'Newbuild', 'Flow Coma' was mind boggling. By 1990 Coventry had Britain's first all night dance venue, the Eclipse [1], where in the following years I would see Shades of Rhythm, Altern 8 and A Guy Called Gerald, all perform live alongside the heavy rotation of hardcore DJs. At the same time I was trawling the histories of Experimental Film and Video, Conceptual Art and starting to explore Digital Audio and Hypermedia on Apple computers at Coventry Universities Art Faculty. I also kept a keen eye on the writings of Nick Land and the 'other' philosophical activities at Warwick University. Not long before its closure, I was at the Eclipse the night, TVs, The Hitman & Her was broadcast from inside [2] prowdly wearing my 'FUCK', the Hafler Trio t-shirt, but it didnt make the final cut! Jump to the mid 90s, London, and my favourite club, Lost [2], had exposed me to Robert Hood and Basic Channel, performing their breed of electronic music live, as well as the earlier, intenser, endurance, fast-cut DJ sets of Jeff Mills [4]. Around the same time at club Disobey, we had Panasonic, Merzbow, Gescom, Earth, John Oswald, Oval, MC Hellshit & DJ Carhouse, Claude Young, and Aphex Twins sandpaper DJ sets, not forgetting, Boyd Rice at the Hacienda. By the end of the 90s I had been to Japan and seen Hanatarashi, Masonna, Pain Jerk, Incapacitants, Fushitsusha. Combining and mixing up all these artists, something between and with a knowledge of Computer Music, Techno and Improvised Noise, is what I wanted. In 2009 the Inacpacitants released their 10x CD 'Box is Stupid' (Pica Disc), within the accompanying booklet, Incapacitants member Fumio Kosakai describes his hatered of DJs, branding them "dubious parasites", but adds that going to see Jeff Mills DJ in Tokyo in 1992, was liberating. "Watching Mills's DJ set I realised where the key to unlock my problems could be found. Not in the devices themselves, but rather in the arrangements of the sound, by controlling the frequenceies using filters and creating new balances between the various sound sources." For this experimantal podcast, I've used a ring modulator instead of a DJ mixer. Live 90s Detroit Techno DJ sets are the control input signal and Japanese Noise Live sets as the carrier signal. Intermodulation. No human input. The names have been withheld to protect the innocent. - Russell Haswell, September 2012.
[1] http://www.ravehistory.net/Coventry-Eclipse-aka-Edge.html
[2] jump to 6:20 for Armageddon! http://youtu.be/pPP8mPi4o5A
[3] http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1298
[4] http://youtu.be/HxJ2dojdPRs http://youtu.be/1cUOIloYWAE
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- TechnoRingModnO!se