Aliens in my Virtual Suitcase

Al DeRaan takes time out from twiddling knobs to bring us an update on his progress to techno nirvana...

Having overcome various technical difficulties, I'm now in a position where, given the time (and time is the big constraint), I should now be able to produce some fairly kickin' electronic music. In terms of wanting to be original and not duplicate anything else that's going on in the scene at the moment, I've noticed that the decline in output of Peter Namlook's Fax record label over the last few years opens up a big space for experimentation.

Namlook is not exactly a household name (unless you live in my household), so it's worth a slight history lesson. As the 1990s dawned, jazz-rock musician Peter Kulhmann was finding no particular success with his band Romantic Warrior (by bizarre coincidence, named after an album mentioned in my previous post), so he disbanded the group, reversed his surname to Namlook, started his own record label based in Frankfurt and named after the fax number of the office he had there, and began releasing dance 12 inch singles. Although Namlook could do trance with the best of them, his real passion was ambient music, and the release of the first Fax CD "Silence", a brilliant collaboration with the DJ Dr. Atmo in 1992, saw the beginning of an extraordinary electronic odyssey. Between 1993 and 1996 - the peak of his recording activity - Namlook released approximately 70 albums, some solo and some collaborations. It's a rate of output almost unmatched by any modern recording artist to my knowledge. The entire output is catalogued on the Fax review site www.2350.org, which seems to be kept more up to date than the official label site.

For someone with my meagre student resources in the mid-1990s it was impossible to keep up with this rate of releases, and many of the early CDs were very limited editions (500 or 1000) and sold out quickly (although Rising High records, the ambient/trance label, did issue some of the most well known Namlook efforts on a wider release, as well as several compilations - all now deleted, but iTunes have now issued the entire Fax back catalogue as downloads...)

One series of CDs on Fax records that was always hard to find was Namlook's solo improvisational records, titled simply "Namlook", "Namlook II" etc. I have a few of these. Undoubtedly the weirdest - and in my opinion the best - of these was Namlook III, also known as "Aliens in My Suitcase". Most people I have played this CD to think it is complete shite - that's usually the sign of a good record, in my experience. I will post an excerpt on the Dilate website to whet your appetite in due course, but briefly, the record consists of a drum machine and a synthesiser. And that's it.

Sounds most unpromising - even more so, given that the drum machine is a Roland TR-606, which isn't even one of the 'classic' models. So how come this is the best experimental electronic album ever made?

Because the synth is the EMS Synthi-AKS, that's why. (Plus the fact that Namlook is to synth programming what Heston Blumenthal is to cooking - i.e. a crazy perfectionist.)

The Synthi-AKS is one of the earliest portable synthesisers ever made - I think it came out about 1971 or thereabouts. I've never seen one in the flesh, but there's a lot of info available on the net - check Sound on Sound, for example. It's a very odd looking piece of equipment - check out the photo:



The genius of the design lies in the fact that due to a 'matrix' programming system (that's the 16x16 block of holes on the lower right of the front panel) you can create any signal path you want. There are various oscillators, filters, a spring reverb unit, and a lot of other weird stuff in there. Unfortunately (or in fact, fortunately) the original units did not stay in tune very well which made it very difficult to use this synth for Chicory Tip-style cheezy 'Moog' sounds. This meant however that people were forced to use it for some of the weirdest sound effects and general sonic destruction around at the time. The BBC Radiophonic workshop even had a f*** off BIG version which filled a whole room and was used for a lot of BBC sci-fi incidental music (including Doctor Who) in the early seventies.

Great stuff, but what's the relevance to today's electronic musicians? Well, you might be lucky enough to own one of these little critters - almost unbelievably, the original company, EMS, has a website, and are still making the things - although they cost £1600. If you see one on Ebay they are also going for that kind of silly money. So I thought the Synthi-AKS was out of my reach bar a lottery win, until I discovered Native Instruments' very fine Reaktor software. Reaktor deserves a post of its own, and I will do at some point, but basically it is a piece of software that enables you to make your own synths. Unless you've got a couple of weeks on your hands and a degree in acoustics this isn't an easy task, but fortunately when you buy the software you also get access to the entire library of instruments created by other users. And one of these, called Synth-In-A-Case, is a virtual recreation of the Synthi, with a few bells and whistles added on. The screenshot looks great:



and the thing sounds bloody amazing. Crazy, but amazing. And, at €399, cheap compared with the hardware version; plus you get all the other Reaktor synths - hundreds of them - as well! Anyway, it's solved a lot of my creative block for producing electronic music which is as out-there as they come, and, time permitting, I will be posting the first fruits of this endeavour as MP3 files to the Dilate website under the artist name "Being and Bricoleur". A name which I'd like to explain here but I've already gone on far too long so it'll have to wait... lock up yer speaker cones.