Bite the lemon, suck the sugar
Smooth your sticky village thighs
Salute la señora
With long, bloodthirsty cries

The glory days of the 12" single were in the eighties, now separated from us by a full decade during which the CD became the primary vehicle for music distribution. Singles haven’t gone away, but they’re now primarily loss-leading promotional items for mass-market albums. In the clubs, vinyl records are still king, since it’s easier to manipulate in the DJ booth, but manufacturing is very expensive in comparison with CDs. And they’re a lot heavier.

The downloadable MP3 is the new single in the year 2000. Since the Stereo Society is both studio and online record company (among other things), we can create a piece of music and make it available the day it is finished. The deadline is not as final as when you have to master and manufacture, which can make you lazy about meeting it, but it’s satisfying to get the music out there immediately. We decided to do two club mixes ourselves, one derived from the original track by James Rosenthal, and the other by me. Being greedy, I asked Alyson, the main writer of the song, whether she had any spare lyrics.

Characteristically, there were reams, with a poetic feel often very different from that of the original song on Carnival. James was doing a club mix using the original rhythm material as a basis. It seemed as if a radical change might be entertaining, so I proposed a techno-oriented rebuild at the energetic 142 beats per minute, compared with the 115 of the original (which still rocks along nicely). The whole instrumental section would be rebuilt with synthesizers, and Alyson would deliver her words in a close, intimate rap over the top.

Thanks to relatively new technology, using samples of vocal material originating at a different tempo is not a problem. Ten years ago, if you shortened a sample to fit with a higher tempo, you could not avoid raising the pitch also, giving the very non-jungular Mickey Mouse vocal effect. You could take it back down by using a pitch shifter, but the quality wasn’t satisfactory. We took a small number of original vocal licks and decreased their length in the ratio 115:142 so that they would fit with the new frantic tempo. This contraction is at about the present limit of such computer processing, after which you start to hear scratches and glitches.

The kick drum in techno is pretty easy. It goes thump, thump, thump etc etc. Every four or eight bars you might get an extra thump just before the end of the phrase, which is not wildly exciting. But there is something about this four-on-the-floor that gets you going, and has done since seventies disco and before. Arrangement skill is needed in assembling the rhythmic superstructure.

Monkeys scream in the trees
High on the wine of killer bees
Silver birds shriek through the sky
Listen to the jungle lullaby

Amazon night: alright
Amazon night: take a bite

Dance the jungle lullaby
Trance the jungle lullaby

Since we’re in the jungle, the obvious thing was to use samples of African-derived drums, and our Synclavier sample library (collected here over 18 years and presently containing over 9000 sounds instantly accessible in the control room) provided bata drums and congas, including one nice little fill from an old Carmel recording. I wish Johnny Folarin, the originally-Nigerian player, lived closer to my studio than London. Congas have always been a magic bullet for me in drum machine-based music. Other conga, talking drum and tambourine sounds came from the Alesis drum sound module, the ubiquitous D4. With a little fiddling around, a passable Afro-techno groove was established. It’s not a widely-known club genre. Fortunately for the cultural exercise, African music often uses four-on-the-floor or a relative of it on another deep drum, emphasizing the downbeat rather than the backbeat. Since the tempo is very high, there’s less room for rhythmic subtlety (that’s my excuse, anyway). Funk and techno are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

A little keyboard pad stated the chord changes, which are slightly different from the original but compatible with the vocal samples, and then the bass was added. We used a venerable synthesizer, the 20-year old Roland Super Jupiter which continues, like many older analog synths, to have a deeper, richer sound than most contemporary models. The Bass Station, playing the same line, added a buzzy edge to the sound.

Alyson arrived and delivered her lyrics over a track with just these elements. With the higher tempo, they came out very differently from expected, sometimes hilariously. Later, these words were sliced and diced into a structure completely different from her original recording. This is a useful computer technique. At the simplest level, if you have a boring bit you can take it out in the computer. If a new idea intrudes, you can insert additional time. Never hesitate to repeat a good thing. Structure is always fluid. Dance music is on a longer scale than pop singles, and you may be working with a track up to 10 minutes long. It’s hard to plan structure right. To treat a club track as a piece of music as well as a groove to enjoy means that editing is crucial. Computer sound storage gives us a flexibility we could only dream about in the eighties.

Gleaming beasts creep down
The steaming asphalt pond
Shimmering like the tar pit memory
Of big daddy mastodon

The track structure had been defined, the chorus samples stitched in, and the new rap arranged. A moody marimba solo helped, taking poetic license again with what you might find up the Amazon or the great, green greasy Limpopo. Unfortunately, Alyson’s words aside, the whole track felt dead in the water. This familiar feeling is like that of a writer staring at a blank sheet of paper in the typewriter. Digging the garden is a lot easier. This is when artists and record producers get bad tempered.

Rescue came from an even more antique synthesizer, the Serge Modular. It doesn’t look like a synthesizer, more like a wall panel 5’ by 3’ covered with knobs and sockets. The best analog sounds in the room hide in its battered metal case. You might start Serge up with a particular idea in mind, but it often comes out totally different. But good and different, almost inevitably. You will know the sounds when you hear them in the mix, such as the trombone/bass wobbles in the beginning and the harsh screeching sound a little later. In the middle there are some dripping percussive bloops.

Analog synthesizers never quite deliver the same sound the same way twice, their circuits varying a little each time and giving a distinctly human touch, unlike the identically-sounding rhythm samples you hear. Serge musses up the hair of the track just a bit. A back beat on a snare drum (always identical) was the last thing added, in the bits where the listeners seemed as if they might prefer to be talking among themselves. Not very authentic, but it’s an old, cheap trick and usually works.

Finally, you can tap your foot, sort of. It’s over seven minutes long, so it’s a longer than the typical download and certainly something to leave cooking while you walk the dog if you don’t have a cable or DSL modem, but it’s on the site immediately and it’s free. After mixing and arranging spread over days, the MP3 is there in a matter of minutes for all to download free. The sound isn’t quite as good as a CD, but it’s pretty close and sufficient to move the bowels pleasantly (many people can’t tell the difference, and the music’s the thing anyway, as they say). The delivery speed from production completion to customer stereo is something we’re still not quite used to. And at just over seven megabytes, it can arrive in your ears in perhaps half an hour even down a phone line, and in minutes if you have broad band internet access.

Confusing, this fancy modern stuff. And the track may end up on vinyl after all that.

Baila, mi hernama
In my coconut cabana
We’ll wind frangipani blossoms
In the tangles of our hair
Celebrating La Señora
With the fragrance of her flora
Til the pound, pound, pounding temple drums
Drown all earthly care

My time has come to rise

Señor, por favor, la cuenta

- MT, April 22 2000

Complete Thorne production commentaries:
Marc Almond: Fantastic Star
Laurie Anderson: Strange Angels
BETTY: Hello BETTY!
BETTY: Carnival
BETTY: Jungle Jane remixes
Bronski Beat: Age Of Consent
Bronski Beat: Smalltown Boy
Bronski Beat: Why?
Bronski Beat: Hundreds And Thousands
John Cale: Honi Soit
Carmel: Bad Day
Carmel: The Drum Is Everything
Carmel: It's All In The Game
Communards
Deep Purple: Fireball air conditioning
Flowerpot Men: Walk On Gilded Splinters
Ives/Reinhard: Universe Symphony
Johnny Reinhard: Ravening remix
Sex Pistols: Anarchy In The UK
Sex Pistols: Jubilee boxed set
Siouxsie and the Banshees: Song From The Edge Of The World
Soft Cell: Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing
Soft Cell: Non Stop Erotic Cabaret
Soft Cell: Tainted Love
Soft Cell: The Art Of Falling Apart
Soft Cell: Torch
Soft Machine: Alive And Well In Paris
Symphony Of Saxes: White Cliffs Of Dover
Telephone: Anna
The Roxy London WC2 (Jan-Apr 77)
The Shirts
The Shirts: Streetlight Shine
The The: Uncertain Smile
Til Tuesday: Voices Carry
Wire: Pink Flag
Wire: I Am The Fly
Wire: Chairs Missing
Wire: Outdoor Miner
Wire: 154

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