CLASSIC ALBUM
Blue Room Released, 1997
Trance and techno pioneers Juno Reactor began life as a loose and lively art collective. Head honcho, Ben Watkins, fondly remembers the time he and his wife drove a surface-to-air missile past Big Ben as an anti Gulf War protest.
As the ’90s soldiered on, he and his ever-evolving lineup focused more on the music, turning out three albums that pushed the envelope for the electronic music genre, before work began on their masterpiece – Bible Of Dreams.
The album was pieced together in Watkins’ Dickensian warehouse over by Shoreditch, a studio space made sonically perfect thanks to a recently installed system that was hand-crafted by sound expert (and now Watkins’ label boss) Robert Trunz.
“That changed it all,” Watkins says. “He put in a really big Raindirk Symphony desk, which is really quite specialised.
Robert actually first started making desks for Deep Purple, and what he built rattled the whole building.
“That desk was amazing. It had this really beautiful EQ. And when you pushed the bass end, it just purred at you. That made a massive impact on the music we could make, because suddenly we had a three-dimensional sound in the studio.”
Watkins began to create bass-heavy, 360° soundscapes, pulling live African percussion, Middle Eastern influences, live vocalists, rock guitars, and analogue drums into the mix.
Developing themes across the album’s tracks were inspired by the concepts of dreams, death, religion and sharks, all while finding space for sampling actual Formula 1 racing cars, alongside dialogue snippets from movies including Ed Wood (1994) and The Ten Commandments (1956).
It would be deep-dive dance music, out on the fringes of the underground, with a shattering sense of tribal rhythm and an emotional depth unlike anything else on the scene at the time.
“It was around that time everyone started saying things like ‘Goa trance’,” says Watkins. “But, we didn’t really like those sort of pigeonholes. And we didn’t like the idea of being labelled.
“Me, [and band members] Mike [Maguire] and Stephen [Holweck] just didn’t want to have a blueprint. We just tried to make the music that we wanted to hear.”
Track by track with Ben Watkins
“I’ve got this sort of imaginary musical cooker where I put ideas in when they’re just sounding a bit dodgy. I just chuck them in there and leave them until they’re ready for pulling out again and working on. This was one of those.
“I originally started the track with a guy called Xavier [Morel], who’s a DJ. And it was a pretty… well, it wasn’t that good.
“I think Xavier got taken to prison for six months, which sort of allowed him a bit of respite. And, in that time, I came across the story of this 18
