Boom Boom Satellites

Slow-motion Summer Mode is still in effect here at The KNRU. But as the Manchester sky wrings the last bit of blue out of its system and the bruised clouds of autumn roll lazily into place, normal service might soon resume.

Or it might remain somewhat sporadic, if I'm being honest.

After all, I am still trying to figure out what I'd like to do next in terms of music. 65LABS recently pressed pause on itself, which is a good thing in terms of 65daysofstatic attempting to slowly write a record. This does close off an outlet for that kind of formal experimentation with endless or deterministic music. I initially thought that might mean more of this kind of thing happening here instead, but in this exhausting, extended moment of AI-Everything, the increasingly-enthusiastic luddite in me makes it hard to summon up much, if any enthusiasm for playing about with generative music systems.

I do think that there is a vital distinction between 'generative art' and the mindless LLM-fuelled trash we're seeing elsewhere, but still, given the current climate I feel that it is a distinction that needs to be clearly articulated in the work and I'm not sure that is where I want to put my energy. The whole AI thing and my gut reaction against it has provoked a lot of thinking about intentionality in music and composition that I'm still trying to get to grips with.

Perhaps I will try to dig deeper into that existential confusion some time, but not today! After all, summer's not quite over yet.

Here instead is a small tribute to one of the most important bands of my past: Boom Boom Satellites.

For a time, 65daysofstatic enjoyed moderate success in Japan. It was back near the beginning, with our one-two combo of The Fall of Math and One Time For All Time, their releases happening in reverse over there as we somehow ended up with different record labels for each album. We went over and played Summersonic festival twice, some of the biggest crowds we have ever played to. Good times!

On one occasion, during an interview with a Japanese magazine, I mentioned that one of my biggest influences was a Japanese electronic music duo called Boom Boom Satellites. This was apparently noteworthy because although they were hugely successful in Japan, they hadn't managed to find much purchase internationally (or at least, they were not internationally successful by the metrics used by Sony Music.)

The next time 65 were in Japan, it had somehow been arranged that Joe and I were to go to a Sony Music skyscraper in Tokyo. There we would meet Boom Boom Satellites and do a joint interview about electronic music. Full of jetlag and intimidation, I was sadly only able to collect the blurriest memories of the event itself. I was such a huge fan, unable to speak Japanese, and Michiyuki Kawashima and Masayuki Nakano were sitting right there, across the table. To this day I don't really understand if they knew who 65daysofstatic were, if they were fans, or if this was just another random day of press for them, perhaps arranged by a Sony PR person who read the previous interview I had given and overestimated our cultural clout back in Europe. Regardless, they were unfailingly polite and we spent about an hour talking haltingly via the poor translator, who was being made to translate the nerdiest conversation about AKAI samplers, MIDI, and interesting ways to re-sample and cut up drum loops.

The only thing I do remember clearly is that they had a strong opinion about not using sampled drum loops. Instead they had a live drummer who they would record and process through their own various machines, ensuring their sound was unique. I remember agreeing - after all, 65daysofstatic had a drummer too and we tried to approach things the same way. But secretly I knew that we didn't have the same ideological discipline or, indeed, the material conditions to be able to only ever use our own samples. Because that would involve going into a studio to record Rob playing drums to make new loops to then write songs with. And that was well out of scope for us in terms of any budgets we ever had. All our writing had to be done in bedrooms and a concrete bunker of a rehearsal room. Studio time was minimal and far too expensive to be spent not knowing exactly what we were doing.

And so I talked the talk of Luxury Drum Production with Boom Boom Satellies, knowing that actually we had stacks of CDRs full of whatever drum loops we could scrape from the internet and Soulseek, and we were not afraid to use them.

This interview is the only time we crossed paths. I would have loved so much to have had a conversation with them in a less formal setting. (There were at least half a dozen other people in the room watching us attempt this awkwardly polite back and forth.) It was around 2006. Sadly, in 2016, Michiyuki Kawashima, the singer and guitarist, died from a brain tumour that he had been living with for several years.

Toward the latter part of their career, BBS moved into a kind of power-pop-punk-anime-TV-hyper-theme style of music. Which is great in its own way, but feels like quite a departure from their early work that had been such a huge influence on me.

Their debut release, 7 Ignitions, is gritty cut-ups, pushing toward jazz syncopations and skitters and brain-tangling polymeters but always keeping a foot in chaotic dance territory. It doesn't actually appear on the streaming services in its original form as best I can tell - that's what you get for signing to Sony I suppose. Most of the songs seem to be kicking about on various compilations and EPs, but I would encourage you to get yourself on Soulseek (have you tried it lately - it still works!) and download the original collection. Or if you want to accurately mimic the formative experience of teenage me, buy this specific 2xcd promo in a stamped cardboard pack and then pretend you found it in Vinyl Exchange Manchester in 1998 and almost exploded in excitement.

NOISY GUITARS AND GLITCHY ELECTRONICS? IN THE SAME SONG? AT THE SAME TIME??

When I started writing this post I thought I was going to be talking about Joyride which is the first song of theirs I heard, but actually, as I'm typing I'm listening to the opening track 4 A Moment of Silence and it's a perfect introduction to the way they wrestle weird rhythms into something entirely danceable. Listen:

These were the years when I had just started university. I bought an AKAI S2000 with my student loan and I would listen to albums like Orbital's Snivilisation and In Sides, Autechre's Peel Sessions, The Prodigy's Music for the Jilted Generation, daydreaming about how I would go about programming and sequencing these songs if I had access to all the equipment that I assumed these bands must have had access to, marvelling at the polyphony and number of samples and variations of patterns within a single song that these producers were able to pull off in these last days before the dawn of widespread digital audio recording.

But listening to Boom Boom Satellites, listening to those rollercoaster beats on Joyride, the balancing of live drums and re-sampled cut-ups of the same kit, I never did and still don't really understand how they did it. Glorious.