The Reaper

When watching old Hollywood western movies, I always feel some sympathy for the Indians. They were mostly depicted as unsavoury primitive savages just waiting to be slaughtered on mass by the ‘good’ guys. But just who really were the good guys, the ‘unsavoury’ Indians who are now restricted mainly living on reservations or the invaders who wiped many of them out? You would have thought that in a continent the size of America there would have been more than plenty of room for everyone! There wasn’t of course and the Indians came off worse in the end so this is my humble tribute to them.
Track 1 starts with an electronic western theme. The twangy electric ‘guitar’ soiunds are synthetic analogue synthesiser models. The nand gate in the title, by the way if you didn’t already know, is a basic computing logic element. When 2 positive inputs are present together, the output of the element becomes negative. Seemed logical at the time. Track 2, The ‘Reaper’ is an aggressive hard-edged scythe like rhythmic track featuring another analogue model. In contrast, Track 3 is an eerie abstract electronic music sound-scape. To me, it evokes a strange world of sounds where the spirits of the slaughtered might end up. Track 4 is even stranger. I imagined a view, looking down on a white man’s church service from the viewpoint of a remote spirit world of dead Indians. A distant Bible text reading about the creation filters through occasionally into a strange sound world full of spirits and ghosts.

This was the second album to be based on use of the unique analogue modular modelling synthesiser, (see synthesiser adventures and the acoustic modelling section). Ghostly choirs, odd sounding drums, thin metallic stringed instruments, gongs, weird wind blows and plenty of other strange analogue model sounds that produce the bulk of the sound material. The recording process was also entirely analogue, using a 1/2” 4 track pro. machine and several extra pro. stereo machines controlled by a BBC micro-computer to run in various tape recorded effects. By the way, this is the same tape recorder setup I used for an Electronica Festival at Stafford.