Echoes of Necessity

"Oh, I started making my own music in 1988 – just with a little Casio keyboard and a domestic tape player. I was so into it, but the problem was getting the technology, it’s almost impossible when you’re a young guy with no money. Nowadays, you get an app and you’re going, but then it was ridiculous: first working out what did you buy, and then how did you afford to buy it. So it was slow progress. It was all good experience though. Some of the things that I learned how to do, like overdubbing: I’d record stuff onto cassette on a normal music centre tape recorder, then pressing play, playing that through the music centre speakers and playing more stuff on the Casio keyboard, and while all that’s floating around through the air I’d be recording that through the inbuilt mic on a little ghetto blaster. You’re getting this really basic kind of overdubbing, literally catching a field recording, the ambience of my own bedroom being captured as it’s bouncing off the walls. Then maybe take that, put it back in the other tape player and repeat the process. By the end of it you’ve got this really weird, warped, muddy sound… BUT I read this interview with Boards Of Canada where they said they’d done exactly the same thing, and that their sound was influenced by doing exactly what I had."- Nick Edwards aka Ekoplekz in this great new interview at Fact

Hey, I did this too!  One day I'll fish out those old recordings.  The problem is that most of them have vocals, which weren't sung through anything, but directly into the built-in boombox speaker.  So it creates this effect of really cool, lo-fi, ambient field record sound with bedroom/basement acoustics undercut by some crystal-clear untreated pubescent voice yodeling on top of it. Maybe I can drown that out with reverb.  I doubt I still have just the backing tracks. 

Oh, and if you haven't checked out Ekoplekz's Unfidelity, I highly recommend it.  It may be his most cohesive (read: finest) recording yet.