From The Times, Friday April 29 1994.
_UP TO SOMETHING IN THE BEDROOM_
They're hot in the clubs, but low in social skills. David Troop meets
techno's bores with attitude.
Just over 30 years ago, Brian Wilson and Gary Usher wrote a poignant
song for the Beach Boys entitled `in my room'. "Gary recognised that the
music room served as a sanctuary to me," Wilson wrote in his
autobiography. He never got over the fact that I slept there, right
beside the piano."
For three subsequent decades, bedroom music was a term resolved for
activities involving satin sheets, impractical night attire and the
non-verbal communication of Barry White. But running neck-and-neck with
the development of the so-called electronic cottage, the bedroom has cast
aside associations with the boudoir. With sex becoming impossible and
human interaction increasingly unnecessary, the bedroom has resumed its
rightful role as a monastic cell devoted to solitary music-making.
At the head of the queue of young obsessives who record prodigious
quantities of electronic music en route to the bathroom is the Aphex
Twin. Known on his passport as Richard James, the Twin claims that he
rarely sleeps. Bedrooms are for work and, even in rare moments of repose,
he cultivates a talent for lucid dreaming, during which he composes new
material. Not only has he taken his blatantly uncommercial music to No 11
in the national album charts; he also co-owns a record company named
Rephlex, encouraging others to expose their domestic creations to the big
wide world.
The Twin's comments about the musicians signed to Rephlex could be
construed as less than flattering. "They've all got these strange
personalities you've never seen in the pop stardom world," he says. "The
people on our label are in their bedrooms all day long. They make four
tracks a day. They are people you can't hold a conversation with, people
like me, bedroom bores, coming into the public eye. That's quite amusing."
In the Twin's view, Michael Paradinas is a particularly amusing member
of the Rephlex roster. The more active half of a techno duo known as
Mu-ziq, Paradinas has released a well-received album entitled Tango
n'Vectif. "He doesn't know the art of conversation," says the Twin. "He's
just really introverted."
This seems a fair judgement of a man whose follow-up album, Bluff
Limbo, has been leaked onto the market four months before its official
release in a limited edition vinyl package entirely lacking in helpful
information. True to form, Paradinas in person is painfully reserved.
Barely a flicker of reaction crosses his features when I tell him about
the bedroom bores. This is a technological revolution and, as with all
revolutionaries, those on the barricades are scornful of those stubborn
souls who fight to maintain the old order.
Affordable prices for digital recording and computer software have
unleashed a hungry host of musicians who might otherwise have taken to
train-spotting rather than brave the rigours of working in close
proximity to music business professionals. For Paradinas, the notion of
working in a proper recording studio is a nightmare. "You can't distort,"
he shudders. A 22-year-old former architecture student, he lives in south
London with his mother, who insists that he uses headphones. "When she
goes out to the shops, I can hear what it sounds like on loudspeakers,
which is another sad aspect," he admits.
The first sad aspect, Paradinas says, is the prospect of never leaving
the bedroom. "There's something to be said for working with other
musicians, but not in your bedroom," he says. "Playing live is good
because you can learn a lot. I think I have, probably because I've played
in bands since I was about nine."
In case this should be interpreted as faint-hearted humanism, he makes
a stronger case for the loneliness of the long-distance computer
musician. "I prefer working on my own", he says, "because I can do what I
want instead of having to say: `Do you think it sounds good?' I just put
it in, even if it sounds cheesy. I can do a track in an hour, whereas if
you're with someone else it can take four hours."
Some people might find such ruthless isolationism depressing, I
suggest. "You get more time for other things," he says. "I dont miss
Neighbours because I can do a track before it comes on."
With his combination of violently distorted drum machine sounds and
disturbingly bland melodies, Paradinas sits on the cutting edge of
techno. Further out, in the west London suburbs, even younger bedroom
bores are waiting to take his place. Daniel Pemberton is a confident
16-year-old who disguises his electronic music activities from all but
his closest of school friends.
At his home near Hampton Court, he churns out cassettes of impressively
accomplished ambient techno on equipment financed by writing reviews for
a computer games magazine. Some of it sounds the equal of music written
by Hollywood composers who win Oscars, but Pemberton is better off not
knowing that until his exam revision is finished.
Already, a minor bidding war is in progress as record companies in
Belgium, Germany and Britain fight to release his debut album, called,
appropriately enough, Bedroom. Pemberton is impressed, but adolescently
diffident enough to jeopardise his chances of closing a deal. After all,
his mother studied textile design at Winchester College of Art when Brian
Eno was president of the Students Union. "It really freaked me out,
that," he says.
Of course, he has peers who still thrash out noisy guitar music. "There
are quite a few bands at our school", he says, "but most of them are
probably knob." Too bright to be a bore, but too now to be knob,
Pemberton is simply bedroom.
[end article]
The picture included was of Michael Paradinas, aka Mu-Ziq, at work in
his bedroom.
:)
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