Manual Box

I have made a high resolution scan of the Buchla 100 Music Box user manual, as I realised that the only one available online was a copy of a xerox of a copy of a dog-eared copy. Enjoy!

pdf document: Buchla 100 User Manual 2017.pdf

Pamphlets

Look what arrived in the post today - some beautiful original Buchla pamphlets! They came in a really nicely designed envelope thing and inside was an original 100 series user manual (I only scanned the cover here because it is already online somewhere - though not scanned very well, so I might scan mine at some point), and a pamphlet about electronic music written by Hubert S. Howe. Also inside were some typed documents explaining all the modules, and these are what the info on the Buchla historical website is taken from. I have scanned in the price list from 1969 which is quite an interesting read. Finally there are two A3 size patch sheets with a big brown stain on them

Evidently

Yay! Our new album is out today. Get your copy here

Peace and Love

Here is a new piece of music we made for a recent presentation at Tate Modern. The amazing video is by Dancon1 (thanks Dan!). Track is all Moog Modular, Mal's vocal treated with Roland VP330, Eventide H3000 and ChaosPad

Polysynthi Manual

Don't you just hate it when you're sitting in front of your favourite EMS poly synth trying to work out why all the knobs have been put on backwards and you can't find the user manual because it has slipped down behind a radiator about six months ago? Well this might help

Polysynthi Manual PDF

Shattered

Check out my video for the Wrangler remix of Shatterproof (featuring Mal from Cabaret Voltaire, see here too). Kind of low-fi I know, but what did you expect?

Earphones

During the studio refurb I found quite a few records (black plastic ones) that I had either completely forgotten about or which have been left here by random visitors. As is often the case most of them look better than they sound, but there are some that I want to put up here because I find them interesting. The first one has the rather bland title of The Percussion Album Volume One and side one is so rubbish that I nearly didn't even turn it over and give side two a spin. But I was glad I did because theres something pretty ace about its minimalist meanderings...

I've Got One

I've got one, in my house. Its over there. Its mine.

Wasting Electricity

Emerson Lake and Palmer were once famously described by John Peel as 'a waste of electricity'. However, that was one thing I didn't agree with him about because when I was 11 years old they were my favorite band. I still know every word, keyboard part and drum fill on every album off by heart. So I was watching a short film about their first ever gig at the IOW festival in 1970 today on Sky Arts, and there was this new clip of Keithy-boy that I had not seen before. So I recorded it on my iphone (sorry for rubbish quality)

The Electric Tunesmiths 1971

As promised in this post, I have uploaded another mp3 from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's RECORDED PROGRAMMES PERMANENT LIBRARY. The picture below is of Malcolm clarke and the EMS Synthi 100 around the time of the recording

Coast to Coast

Last month me and my friend Hugo went on a road trip from LA to NY, where he lives, in his new [old] 1987 Porsche 911 Carrera, which he just bought. We drove all the way in one go, only stopping to sleep, and eat at drive-ins. Super-size us!

The music here is made on a 1975 Paia Modular system that I managed to buy on the last day I was in America. I will tell you about that later, in the mean time you can see a very condensed version of our trip, which is a bit low-res due to trying to stuff 2 hours of video into 5 mins by using Quicktime






UPDATE: While I was away Joe and co kept a track of our route and marked it on the map. That looks a very long way!

Math-o-matic

Here are some pictures Joe took of me and John mixing the last few bits of the album. As you can see, we used 3 generations of mixing console on the record; an MCI 416 from the early 70s, a Studer 900 from the early 80s and a DXB from the mid 00s

Mixing With The Stars

This week me and John Foxx have started to mix The Maths album, and it will continue through next week too. So its very hectic down here at the moment, either mixing or fixing things [like noisy mixer channels, with the help of Big Al]. Up till now we have had provisional mixes which were done on the DXB digital console, as it has instant recall, but now the proper mixes are being done on either the 1973 MCI 416 or the 1980 Studer 902, depending on what suits the song. And they sound a ton better. Go over to my other blog to find out more about analog mixers if you have nothing better to do

Future Music Feature

There's a feature on us (John Foxx & The Maths) in this months FM magazine. It was done during our concert at the Roundhouse last June. There's a great spread in the mag and as usual John Foxx talks about everything in a really interesting way. He's good at that. And on the DVD is the following video, filmed by those lovely FM people, which features Foxxy, Steve D'Agostino and yours truly talking about vintage synths

The Sound Makers of 1963

These amazing BBC archive records found their way in to my studio today. I can't explain how this happened due to the Official Electronic Secrets Act of 1957. I have 3 records which I will put up here over the next few days, and as far as I know these are not online anywhere else

The first is titled "The Sound Makers" and is a documentary about synthesis and sound manipulation at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop from 1963. It was part of the BBC's RECORDED PROGRAMMES PERMANENT LIBRARY which is an archive on vinyl, I believe limited to only a few copies of each

I have always felt that it is a shame the BBC don't make their archives available, think how much amazing stuff they have just sitting there in a vault somewhere - and that includes thousands of amazing TV programmes and documentaries

Below are some pictures from this gallery of Radiophonic Workshop images, chosen because they are from the period covered by the Sound Makers documentary

Download Side A
Download Side B