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NEW YORK - Before preset sound banks overflowed with prefab beats, electronic musicians made them from scratch with freestanding synthesisers.
Before drag and drop, remixers physically cut and spliced tape to move sonic parts. When the digital production revolution finally did come, dance producers led the charge,
emboldened by the standardisation of sounds and methods they had pioneered. Since then, nothing has sped the genre's growth (or dilution, according to some) more than the advent of increasingly cheap, easily manipulated software.
But now, less than a decade after the debut of such computer synthesisers as Propellerhead's Reason and Ableton's Live, the same early adopters who embraced digital are turning their gazes back to the future.
"People are realising what's missing from the sounds they're getting out of software," Phil Moffa of production/DJ outfit Vinyl Life says. "They're conscious of how everything is sounding the same, and digital replication is the same every time. The magic of analogue is it's never the same, depending on the weather, where you are in the world, the electricity supply."
Moffa is one of a crew of young dance producers who have dumped their neat little laptops for rooms full of hulking black boxes, scouring eBay and garage sales for vintage, amp-driven, analogue synthesisers. Their mission: to shake off the homogeny of boilerplate beats and use synthesisers as the nuanced instruments they once were.
"We get more inspiration out of the old machines," says James Ford of Simian Mobile Disco, whose addictive "Attack Decay Sustain Release" (Interscope) has fired up the dancing shoes of indie and club kids.
"You try to do something, and they'll give you something back you didn't expect," Ford says of the old-school technology. "Also, because they're physical things, it's less cerebral; there's a humanism to it. We're not big fans of pushing blocks around screens."
Acts from the Chemical Brothers to Nine Inch Nails have garnished their records with different analogue tools for years. But the new school of enthusiasts sees its preference as a sort of reactionary revolution.
Moffa dumped all his digital sounds for good in 2005, going fully analogue for Vinyl Life's "Flashlight" (Ultra) and each release since. Simian's "Attack" contains no samples, and was entirely made with hunks of such audio antiquity as the Korg MS-20 (1978), ARP Instruments ARP 2600 (1971) and Roland Juno-60 (1982). Such acts as Uberzone and U.N.K.L.E. have also expressed their displeasure with the constraints of digital.
"I hate really nostalgic records that are trying to sound like old records," Ford says. "But there's something familiar about (analogue), the way it shapes the sound and rounds out the edges and warms it up. It reminds you of the records you grew up with."
- REUTERS