![]() ![]() “I’ve redone it ‘properly’ since and it just doesn’t work.” Hours of modification and additions produced an unreal soundscape of beats, electronics… and the sound of a tennis match. Without noticing they’d sampled it on the wrong beat, boom-boom-tak becoming tak-boom-boom. They threw White’s bass and snare into the Fairlight and stretched it as far as they could, looping it by ear. But they’d often wondered what would happen if, instead of trying to emulate real instruments, they used it to warp, layer and abuse sounds – any sounds – in a modern spin on musique concrète, mid-century French composer Pierre Schaefer’s technique of building music from found noises. Horn’s team had already used it to reconstruct every note that ABC played into the machined perfection of their ‘Lexicon of Love’ album. The £18,000 Fairlight “computer music instrument” could ingest any sound and play it back across the complete scale. Langan, agog, sneaked the drum tapes back to Horn’s Sarm Studios and his mate JJ Jeczalik, a non-musician who had become custodian of the studio’s latest, most expensive toy. And then we got to the end of this incredible session and they said: ‘Yeah, we’re going to scrap it’.” “We’d got Alan White’s drums up on a riser in the middle of Air Studio One and they sounded just fantastic, biggest drum sound I’d ever done. “We were on like month eleven of this thing and we’d been in every studio across London,” recalls Gary Langan, then Horn’s engineer. They are about to create the signature sound of the new decade, a crunching, stomping, boom-boom-tak that will rival ‘Funky Drummer’ and ‘When the Levee Breaks’ as the engine room of hip hop and more. Producer and former Buggle Trevor Horn and his team are trying to get the drums right for an electronically-inspired album that will relocate Yes from the muddy, organic 1970s to the fluorescent 1980s. It’s late-1982/early-1983 and one of the least likely collaborations in musical history – resurrected prog rock behemoths Yes plus Ballardian bubblegum pop act The Buggles – is about to bear strange fruit. Who’s afraid of the Art of Noise? Madonna and Sean Penn, possibly. In the early-80s an enigmatic outfit comprised of studio boffins, one real musician and a gobby cultural agitator combined mysterious philosophical meaningfulness with a lush, avant-garde and utterly artificial sound that predicted the future.
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