A Timeless Wavelength

The Future – 4jg

Before Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh formed The Human League and started writing songs for Swiffer commercials, they were known as The Future, and wrote Kraftwerk-inspired songs that helped usher in the era of synth pop.  One of these early songs was “4jg,” an instrumental ode to dystopian science fiction writer J. G. Ballard.  Ware and Marsh were not the only Ballard fans in the burgeoning synth and industrial movements; it seems everyone from Daniel Miller to Gary Numan were influenced by Ballard’s disturbing fiction.

I’ve recently begun making my way through a collection of Ballard’s short stories, and it’s like reading a season of The Twilight Zone. So far I’ve read stories about genetically engineered singing plants, people becoming stuck in time loops, and a mega-city so vast and dense its inhabitants don’t believe anything outside the city exists.  And I’ve barely scratched the surface.  I haven’t even gotten to his famous novel Crash, about a world where automobile accidents have become the latest form of sexual fetish.  But so far I’m fairly impressed by what I’ve read, and anxious to read more.

Commodore Amiga featuring Aegis Sonix – Jay’s Song

Sorry for the weeks-long blog hiatus.  I could quite legitimately claim to have been busy, it being the end of the semester and all.  But in reality, I just haven’t quite felt like blogging.  I had no idea when I started this thing just how tedious it could get, going through one’s music collection every day and finding something meaningful to say about a song.  I’ve even given thought to diversifying this blog, giving myself something to talk about besides just songs.  Good idea?  Or should I just stick with the present format?

That being said, it’s not like I could ever really run out of songs to talk about.  One of the non-blog activities that’s been occupying me the past couple of weeks has been playing around with an Amiga emulator.  As I’ve mentioned before, back in the late ’80s I had an Amiga 2000 and a copy of Aegis Sonix, which gave me my first exposure to creating computer music.  The software wasn’t all that feature-laden, but to this day I haven’t found a program that matches it for ease of use.  The built-in sound had the unavoidably tinny quality of 8-bit audio, but the Amiga managed to get as much performance as possible out of those 8 bits.  With the addition of a MIDI interface and a good tone generator (such as my trusty Yamaha TG-55), you could make professional-quality music with a pretty simple setup.

Sadly, my original Amiga was a casualty of Hurricane Katrina,  and I haven’t yet managed to get MIDI output working with the emulator.  But I can still get the original 8-bit-tastic sounds!  This is “Jay’s Song”, the demo song that came with Sonix, which was often used to showcase the Amiga’s then-extraordinary sound capabilities.

(As much as I liked my Amiga, I was always kind of jealous of Atari ST owners.  Said machine had built-in MIDI, and a better selection of music software.  The ST version of Cubase is prized by many even today over the bloated, feature-rich Cubase VST.  There’s a pretty good ST emulator out there, with MIDI capability… I’ll have to see if I can get it to cooperate with some external controllers and synthesizers.)

DJ Sucks (featuring Susanne Vega) – Tom’s Diner (Criminally Vulgar remix)

Here’s a little number that’s been taking up space on my hard drive for about five years now.  DJ Sucks is none other than yours truly, and this track was the first substantial thing I produced with Apple’s GarageBand software.  I had been dabbling in electronic music production since the late 1980s, when I first encountered the dangerous combination of a Commodore Amiga 2000 and a Yamaha TG55 synthesizer.  From there I moved on to painstakingly splicing and resampling audio clips with the shareware GoldWave application, which is sort of the modern equivalent of those early experimental electronic compositions that were made by literally cutting and pasting bits of tape together.  (Incidentally, there’s a record at Wuxtry’s that has one of these experimental tape compositions on it, and maybe some day I’ll actually get around to buying it and reviewing it here.)

So I’ve done a lot of fiddling with some pretty low-grade hardware and software.  GarageBand may be no Logic or ProTools, but it was an order of magnitude more professional than anything I’d used before.  It was certainly more than I deserved, because the first thing I did was slap together some built-in clips and put one of the more famous a capella tracks of the ’80s over it.  It’s kind of Depeche Mode meets the Smiths meets the least original idea for a remix ever, but I’m still proud of it.