RBE 40 Years Later: Ruach Demos
After a pause from 1982 to 2025, recent technology has made me interested again in the kind of electronica inspired equally by Lee Perry and the spectralism of Iancu Dumitrescu.
Toybox electronica meets spectralism OR King Tubby meets early Kraftwerk / Cluster inna Dumitrescu stylee, or what?
When I first began making electronic music, around 1979 or 1980, I wanted to make sounds that drew on the instrumentals of Lee Scratch Perry as much as the industrial electronics of Throbbing Gristle. I made a drum machine from a design in an electronics magazine, to which I added a Korg MS20 synthesiser and its SQ10 sequencer, a ring modulator, a WEM Copycat, and a CatStick set of LFOs and joystick-controlled VCAs. The results were overdubbed on the then-new TEAC 144 four-track Portastudio cassette recorder.
In a few years, I released a series of cassette compilations - there was an active tape-swapping scene going on at that time by Royal Mail - as well as the 1982 LP, Industrial Estate (rereleased in 2008). The first releases were made under my own name Later releases and the LP were credited to RBE - originally Raudive Bunker Experiment.
In 1983, I went to the Co-operative College to write a thesis about the future of electronic music, of which I predicted great things. What happened instead in the following decades was that electronic music in the mainstream was swamped by MIDI and sampler technology, and everything turned into a loop as a result. Aceeeed!!
It’s not that no reasonable music was made, but it was uphill work and you had to wrestle with the technology to make it, and I’m not into wrestling. It was boring, it sounded too clean, and I lost interest as the commercially available technology drifted further and further in that direction.
I created and took part in two projects as a kind of protest against all this - Soundraider and KSpace Infinity, as well as performing in the group Bourbonese Qualk using the SuperCollider programming language, but I gave up on the idea of the kind of clean but chaotic / stochastic electronica I’d imagined in the early 80s.
Recently, I’ve been inspired by the audio engineering work of Vlad Kreimer and Soma Laboratory, which has brought a lot of both chaos and yet control into electronic sound. I won’t go into the details (“SOMA’s vision is of a symbiotic society in which mutual benefit and benevolence foster free forms of self-expression and community.”), but the technology they produce - the Pulsar-23 drum machine, the Lyra-8 and Terra synthesisers, and the Ornament-8 ‘organismic’ sequencer - is as radical in its concepts as it is beautifully made.
Its Cosmos ‘Drifting Memory Station’ delivers in hardware what I spent years trying to program for myself in Max/MSP and Supercollider: a stereo delay line and granulator with different lengths of delay in each channel, based on prime numbers, so you never get the predictable repetition that composers like Philip Glass have made the basis of their unlistenable ( / all-too-easily-listenable) assault on music.
So, having rebuilt my studio around Soma equipment and ideas, I spent last week reading manuals and recording early versions / demos of music that will be worked on further and expanded upon in the months to come, with these being instrumental versions of tracks that will eventually have spoken parts and vocals. I’m so happy with them that I’ve collected some tracks into a list of Ruach Demos… ‘Ruach’ being the name for the wider project I’m thinking about.
Pages From the Reissued RBE Booklet (1983)
