Up Against The Clock – In An Electroacoustic Music Studio

The latest episode of Fact‘s Up Against The Clock video series features Albert Van Abbe, creating a synth groove in an elecroacoustic music studio.

Here’s what they have to say about the video:

Albert Van Abbe has been releasing gritty, atmospheric techno for over a decade on underground labels like Semantica and his own No Comment imprint, so we figured he’d know his way around a synth well enough to make a track in 10 minutes for our Against The Clock series.

However, we were completely unprepared for what we got when we caught up with him at the Willem Twee studios in the Dutch city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch. There, he opted to make his track on a giant wall of oscilloscopes, pulse generators and filters from the 1950s and ’60s along with an ARP 2500.

Eurorack this is not.

11 thoughts on “Up Against The Clock – In An Electroacoustic Music Studio

    1. Why would you want to put limits on yourself like that, and only make ‘experimental’ music?

      Also – what most people call ‘experimental’ is really just undisciplined wankery, rather than actually testing a new approach to see if it results in something musically interesting.

      Creating an interesting groove is much more challenging than wanking around!

      I found the video fascinating on many levels. Van Abbe clearly knows his gear, because he knew exactly what to do to get the sounds he wanted and didn’t back-track.

      It was also fascinating to see this type of gear used in unexpected ways. Arguably, Van Abbe’s approach is a much more valid experiment, with more musically interesting results, than the bog-standard ‘aleatory art noise’ approach to this sort of gear.

      1. so conceptual art is now useless unless to serve some sort of nostalgic pornography in making a slight variation of a 35 year old beat? there are no limits on experimental thinking, that’s why it’s called just that. what’s wrong with forward thinking anyway?

        also, conceptual experimentation does not equate to “wanking around” but actually that’s what he was doing exactly that, no concept in just making a beat beat = wanking around.

        lets all make the same sounds ad nauseam!

        1. “there are no limits on experimental thinking”

          No. What you’re referring to is wankery.

          If you want to just want to make funny sounds with no limits, that’s fine, but it’s not experimental thinking or experimental music.

          Experimental music requires structure, a hypothesis, and analysis to determine whether your experiment resulted in something musically interesting.

          And why would you think conforming to the expectations of ‘experimental music’ is more valid than not conforming to those expectations, or conforming to the expectations of a different type of music?

          The only answer would be that you’re judging and ranking the validity of genres. In which case, you might as well just say ”This music isn’t to my taste,” instead of trying to doll up your opinion as something more.

    2. I totally agree. Using a classical EM studio to just make more formulaic disco? Sounds like music for robots. Ehhgh. Its like using a chain saw to cut butter.

      1. actually its more like building a skyscraper from grains of sand to do anything halfway pleasing with that kind of gear 😉

  1. I thought this was really cool. I rarely find myself watching the whole video form Fact. Experimental or not this is cool. I like to make weird stuff and then go back to a 4/4 beat that i have programed slightly different a million times. so judgmental in all the synth blogs instead of supportive or constructive.

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