Fairlight CMI

It

is in a way, though, quite an old argument, because I remember when John Peel was horrified by Art of Noise's inter-battle with the Art of Noise in 1983, the EP that contained, you know, it was put together using the Fairlight, which was, you know, a computer devised to sort of put together fragments of old songs into a new context.

So I suppose this is just taken to the nth degree, isn't

it? Well, yeah, you go back to what you said about choice.

Yeah,

I mean, you look at hip-hop.

records you know and an early kind of sampling and I use the Fairlight in a lot of my records too but you're putting it into a new context and you're you're making a human choice you are still having to build all of that architecture around it and the arrangement and you're still having to play the other instruments even if you don't have to play it even if you're generating it through you know midi triggered sounds or samples it's so completely different to just typing in a couple of verbal prompts and then thinking that you're you know the new Brian Wilson

So on the new album, your new album, as we once were, number one in the vinyl charts, the only chart that matters.

In 1980, Kate Bush released Never Forever.

This featured use of the Fairlight CMI synthesizer.

This art pop masterpiece made history as being the first ever album by a British female solo artist to hit number one on the UK albums chart.

It had iconic singles Babushka and Army Dreamers.

You said it was a way back in the day for you to digitally create sounds.

They didn't have memory back when the Fairlight or the PPG were coming out.

And what they did was say, can I reduce a sample? For instance, I've got one in the third wave of me saying groove synthesis.

Can I reduce that from me recording the words groove synthesis down to something that is just 64 single cycle waveforms and reproduce it? Well, if I could, oh my God, have I saved a lot of memory.

combine them.

And what's interesting about what Anthony said going into the history of this – Whereas the PPG was the first commercially available wavetable synthesizer, and those were just recordings that, as Anthony just said, usually had very similar harmonic structure as you walk through it.

The Fairlight, which was also actually a wavetable synthesizer, but they never said it, that actually was literally additive.

you would take and you would add harmonics to a given what they called a frame, and instead of having 64 single cycle waves, you would have 128 frames, and you could morph between them, like only set up two of them, or you could actually walk through them with each one defined, just like a wavetable.

taken you and we'll go back.

What is happening? Alright, did you know there are Orc hits in this song? Specifically, the Fairlight CMI Orc 5.

And did you know that original sample came from Stravinsky's Firebird Suite? Internal dance of all the subjects of Cache by the Philharmonia Orchestra.

I bring this up every time whenever I'm at a party or I'm out with friends and Nobody wants to talk about it.

Percussion by Mike Baird.

Fairlight samplers programmed by Gary Chang.

Synthesizer, Jay Graydon, Robbie Buchanan.

There you go.

And what was the writing process for that song? Did you sit with a piano or sit with a guitar, or how did that work?

To begin with, there was a guy called Ian Curnow who had a Fairlight, and he was programmer, and I sat with him.

Um, I don't, I don't know why.

There's never any, a particular format that you stick to, but in some occasions we just got the Fairlight and we liked a couple of the sounds on it.

So I got him to u- it was kind of a rosy sound, to get the basic chords down.

Yeah

The idea was to do...

the sort of giant land sequences all with very synthetic, you know, and the guy we were working with at that point had just got this Fairlight, which was like a monster.

Yeah.

And the other bits in England were all totally orchestral.

great experience.

Yeah.

The Fairlight, of course, responsible for most of the 80s output of music.

Oh, yeah.

It isn't known if the title of the song was also inspired by Miles Davis' 1957 album Birth of the Cool, but considering his interest in Davis' work, it isn't out of the question.

Using his Camille voice and a hard-rocking guitar track, Prince created an aggressive song about brand new days, laying down a blend of lin and real drums and covering it with Prophet VS and Fairlight synths as well as bass.

For a track about spiritual renewal, it contained what could be seen as insults aimed at those who were no longer on his journey.

We are here, where are you? As a possible dig at Wendy and Lisa, asking for a larger salary, he threw in the line, It ain't about the money, we just want to play.

There's this track that's there throughout the entire, uh, song, and it's this drone.

So musical engineer David Botterill, um, built this up by recording sustained tones from a Prophet 5 synth, a Fairlight, a Stratocaster, and then also, like, a little bit of Peter Gabriel's own voice.

And then he layered that up and then tuned all of them to the same key, and then that kind of, like, lives underneath all of this music.

And so that creates this, like, atmosphere-