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When I first started making music it was all pre-digital (yes, hard to tell from my picture I know – uh hmm – but we’re talking ‘the ‘80s’ here). Back then there was this horrific thing called ‘noise’; you had it coming out of every item of equipment, every cable, every damn output (and input). I even bought a 1/3U box from Alesis, an actual piece of hardware, that was supposed to cut out the noise on my system. It didn’t really work, to be honest, and all my early music was ‘blessed’ with hissy introductions. Fast forward a few years and all of that noise went out of the window as I went ‘in the box’. Around 2004 I was completely laptop only, boasting on these pages how noise-free I was and how excellent it was to make music in an airport with a hot and weighty PC laptop resting on my thighs. No tape, no external processing, just pure digital, noise-free joy. But we’re odd human beings, aren’t we? I can understand the return to analogue when it comes to synths and now we yearn for more analogue-style music productions: less digital cleanliness, more unpredictable wobble, noise, fluff and saturation.
“There was this horrific thing called ‘noise’”