just chiselled stones

Yesterday I spent a small amount of time watching Einstürzende Neubauten's Liebeslieder DVD, which made me realise two things:

1. When I was a kid (I still am) I was fascinated by the noises made by ordinary things - the fridge, wind, rocks, water, cutlery, lego, corduroy trousers etc. My favourite was the noise made by an enormous green oil tank outside our house in Scotland - a meaty slab of metallic thuddery followed by almost endless reverb. I could have sat there slapping it for hours and listening. Anyway- on the DVD there's a clip of Alexander Hacke climbing into a spherical (and empty) water tower in Berlin and stamping on its floor. The infant joy on his face as he listens to the slow slow decay of this great cavernous sound was exactly how I felt on slapping the oil tank. Which got me thinking.

Back in 1983, Neubauten's second album featured some interesting guest instruments: "N.U. played the wardrobe. It features our longest tape loop (30 seconds), Alex's dog Lola, singing chainsaws, a rank of 3m high airducts arranged like dominoes, snapping wood and water dripping on a hot stove." Now fast forward nearly 20 years to 2002 and Boards of Canada's Geogaddi, containing, among other things, what Marcus Eoin describes as a beat "that sounds like someone stretching a rope over the surface of a wooden ship".

In 1983 Neubauten couldn't sit down on a big comfy cushion and mash all their found sounds up on a laptop, or even create them electronically to any great quality. BoC (and pretty much anyone else) can do this to their heart's content. Again, as a kid I was equally fascinated by the electronic sounds made by tinny Casios and Bontempis - mainly whooshes and zaps that don't often occur naturally. Having made various attempts at electronic music in the past 20 years (the Spectrum's unforgiving AY chip notwithstanding), I became tremendously excited about finally having access to some reasonably good software - and the samples to go with it.

Now I have thousands and thousands of samples garnered from CDs and the internet on my hard drive, of all sorts of interesting things - from Japanese dial tones to mountains of 808/909/727 samples, nesting songbirds to F-16 afterburners. But it's all become very boring. The sheer choice is hindering what passes for my creative process. Of the 30,000+ samples I have on this computer, I only use about 50. I spend more time going through them thinking 'naah' than I do on the actual tunes.

BoC's Mike Sandison : "We began to use more computer technology with the wrong intention of accelerating our composing process. But computers always end up bothering the possibilities that technical production offers, that has the unpleasant effect of drying up progressively all your inspiration. So we react against that and now we’re back in a more simple way of doing things, just like we worked in the beginning."

So this is where I'm going this year - out goes the bolus of synthetic mush on my hard drive, and in come all sorts of different microphones and my trusty MD recorder. After all, it's always been the best fun finding these lovely odd sounds things make. I don't want to copy it off CDs and the net, I want to do it myself.

2 (no, I haven't forgotten). My German is so poor that I understood about 25% of it. The irony of this is that when I was studying German for A Level, 50% of my vocabulary was supplied by Neubauten lyrics.

Meanwhile, I will suggest that anyone with a working set of ears promptly diverts them to the emissions of weirdo prog-punk band Deerhoof.

NB. The list below is my top listening for the past week, apparently.