There were three things that I think mainly created the sound of drum & bass. The first thing was MIDI, which enabled you to lock together a lot of instruments so that they all marched precisely in step. The second was computer mixing, which enabled you to finesse mixes by polishing very tiny details of the mixes. It was a deadly process and produced some of the worst music ever heard. And the third thing was the mass availability of quite cheap preprogrammed synthesizers. So, suddenly there was available to everyone a library of relatively exotic electronic sounds. And I think it’s those three things that made drum & bass.
I enjoyed that sound in its time, but I just got completely fed up with how easy it had all become and how you switched the radio on and you’d hear another tightly locked piece of music: Clock-clock-clock. And you could just hear all the clocks ticking in it, you know.
And then, as always, I was listening to a lot of ’50s and ’60s music, R&B and old pop songs. What impressed me so much about them was how unclocked they were, how loose and frail and organic. You’d hear a song where instead of every single moment and part of the space being filled with some bloody cheap synthesizer sound or other, there were sometimes real spaces, where people didn’t play anything in particular. The track would just groove along.
If you listen to early Al Green records or something like that, there’s really nothing happening a lot of the time. Sometimes, there’s just the guy singing in the studio, and you can hear feet tapping and the musicians are just playing in a quite relaxed way. This gentleness and this lack of the desire to fill every moment with some kind of special, little event started to become more and more attractive to me.
I started to find jazz more and more attractive as well. It seemed to me to be music on the verge of a nervous breakdown the whole time. It always seemed like it was going to fall apart, as opposed to drum & bass, which seemed so invulnerable and so totally rock solid, tightly bolted together. And I started to think that drum & bass was actually very un-modern. It was very “industrial revolution” in a way. It was filled with musical rivets everywhere. There was no biology to it. It will die.
Actually…I edited that slightly. It’s not Brian Eno talking about drum & bass, but about 80s music in this interview.
Sounded familiar to me though, especially with reference to what I’ve written about the type of sounds we use and why we use them.
