More music, this time an electro jam. One of my favourite albums from when I was young was Lifestyles of the Laptop Cafe, by The Other People Place, which was one of many side-projects of Drexciya's James Stinson.
What drew me to Lifestyles? I'd like to say that Richard Dorfmeister of Kruder and Dorfmeister fame (he was Dorfmeister) pressed a white label promo copy into my hands while I was dancing at Click in Hamburg, but in fact I bought it because I liked the cover. It has a picture of a PowerBook G3 sitting in a forest. A couple of years ago I copied the basic idea, but with a PowerBook G4, although in my defence I did so subliminally, as it has been many years since I last listened to Cafe.
Drexciya had a varied sound - their earliest releases were full-on banging techno - but I've always liked their slicker, electro side. Particularly the fizzy, hypnotic 808 snare sound. The band had a complex mythology involving a genetically-modified subaquatic society. I've always wondered if they were inspired by XCOM: Terror from the Deep, but their first records came out slightly before that game so it must have been coincidence.
Laptop Cafe is smoother, more laid-back than Drexciya. To use a cliché, it's perfect Sunday morning music. I wanted to be a bit more frantic however. How did I make "Poseidon"? It's all sequenced with the Arturia BeatStep Pro pictured above, with multiple patterns layered on top of each other with an ancient copy of Logic Express 9. The basslines are performed with a mixture of a Behringer Model D MiniMoog clone and a Behringer 112 dual-VCO, running through a Doepfer A-103 TB-303-style filter. The drums are Logic's default 808 sample kit - my original plan was to replace them with something else, but in the end they had the right amount of fizz, so I kept them.
Throughout the track there's a gated pad sound. This is, off the top of my head, one of the Yamaha DX7's default strings or organs, played with Dexed. It's being run through my modular synth's filter, which is gated by the BeatStep. Throughout the track I sweep the filter of each of the parts so that it doesn't become aurally monotonous. The computer? A 2009 Mac Mini.
Laptop Cafe was released at a time when it was just becoming practical to make music live with a laptop computer, although I've always associated the first wave of laptop musicians with titanium G4s instead. I have no idea if James Stinson recorded the album with the G3 on the cover. It would have been underpowered for multiple VSTs and effects but as a live mixing desk, plugged into a FireWire audio interface, it might have worked.
The idea of turning up to a gig with a bunch of tiny boxes and a laptop, and playing a whole set with them, has always been powerfully appealing - I suspect that James Stinson would have loved the compact Korg Volcas and Moog Mother-32s that are available today. Sadly we will never know because he died a few months after Laptop Cafe was released, at the shockingly early age of 33, apparently of a heart condition, although details are sketchy because Drexciya only had a cult following at the time. It's a shame he's no longer with us.
