FM | CLASSIC ALBUM
Warp Records, 1993
Ken Downie, Ed Handley and Andy Turner, aka Black Dog Productions, were one of the jewels in the already gem-heavy crown of the Warp label. And this captivating collection of early singles and EPs from the trio, under a variety of guises, would be quickly regarded as a seminal electronic album of the time.
Part of the first wave of “intelligent techno” to wash over us from the UK and Europe, the album helped re-plot the twists and turns of techno in the early ’90s, and redefine the boundaries of the genre, if it was to have any at all.
“I was still searching for a sound back then,” says Turner, who was learning synthesis, audio production and musical theory as he was making it. “It’s a pretty wild album, stylistically it’s all over the place, even in comparison to other similar output of that era.”
The trio would experiment with “literally anything and everything” according to Downie, who’d quit his job as a language school caretaker at the time to focus on the music.“It was a case of, chuck it in the pot, and stir it around,” he says. “Does it make you smile? Tap your toes? Chill out? Investigate it. If it didn’t work… bin it.”
Sampling was becoming more powerful, too, helping the group push the sonic envelope. As more options in audio editing and manipulation were come to the fore. “The process was getting more sophisticated,” says Turner. “And the technology was developing rapidly and becoming more affordable. I was experimenting with shorter edits and different ways to treat the samples internally.”
Their software of choice was another unsung hero. And all coo over the creative freedom Dr T’s Keyboard Control Sequencer offered the team. “It freed you from working linearly, left to right, like Cubase,” says Downie. “Song creation was much more freeform.”
Armed with this gear and more, they simply fooled around, doing whatever made them happy. “It wasn’t a difficult album to make,” says Turner. “It just felt like having fun with my friends.”
Downie agrees, thinking back. “We all loved what we were doing, making each other laugh. In that respect, I don’t think it was a ‘difficult’ album to produce, at all. It just popped out.”
Track by track with Black Dog Productions
Andy Turner: “I’m an old-school friend of Ed’s with a musical background [Handley and Turner form the duo, Plaid].
“Black Dog Productions and The Black Dog were collectives. We worked independently and in various groupings. Everyone did everything so we had no specific roles, musically. I was the only driver, though. We played Love Parade in Berlin one time; drove from London, set up and played on the same day. It was epic.
“Object Orient is a giant hug of a track due larg
