Meanwhile, back in the land of the unlistenable, strange things are stirring
2008-09-05 by Hal BerstramPete Namlook – Aliens in My Suitcase (Intruder 7)
My first posting at dilate.choonz, many moons ago, was from Namlook & Hawtin’s From Within and at this juncture, I thought it would be nice to give you a slice of Namlook’s solo work from the mid-1990s.
The ‘Namlook’ series of recordings (cunningly titled Namlook I, Namlook II etc.) were mostly live sets recorded with various combinations of exotic analogue electronics. This can mean that they lack the structural definition of his studio-based work such as From Within, Air and Dark Side of the Moog (the ongoing series of collaborations with Klaus Schulze. However, it also means there is a good chance they will be totally off the wall… and the most off the wall (and IMHO best) of the Namlook solo discs (at least the dozen or so I have heard) is Namlook III – Aliens In My Suitcase.
Basically Namlook III is just Pete, an EMS Synthi-AKS (very weird synth built into a suitcase: couple of nice pictures of it here), and a Roland TR-606 drum machine. For 63 minutes of utter craziness.
This is the kind of music that really divides even the hardcore faithful who used to rush out and buy every CD Namlook produced (and at this point (1994) he was releasing about one a week, so you needed a large wallet to do that.) A cursory glance at the review site on the Fax CDs review page (link given below) will show the depth of feelings – positive and negative – produced by the album.
The CD is one continuous piece of music split into 9 parts (according to the particular type of weird noise that Pete was making at that time), numbered “Intruder 1-9”. “Intruder 7” is about as out there as this piece gets (with the possible exception of “Intruder 8”) but it’s all good.
I was reminded of the sound of this when I bought a Burford Electronics ‘Robot’ ring modulator pedal this week (again, link given below). Burford are a small UK-based company who make ‘boutique’ effects for prices around the same money as the mass-market nonsense that the likes of Boss and Digitech bombard us with. And I’ll certainly be using the Robt a lot on guitars, drums, samples – you name it! So at £65, it’s very good value as a studio tool (much cheaper than the Moog ring modulator – although that is an excellent piece of kit also). Seriously, if you are into unusual analogue gear, check ‘em out.
If you want to know what a ring modulator sounds like – if you made it through even 5 seconds of this track, you’ve already heard it. :-)
Download MP3 (0:00min / 0MB)
- For sale (usually) in discogs marketplace
- Alternatively available from iTunes (will sound cack at 128kB encoding rate though)
- Review page for this masterpiece
- e.g. "weird, freeform, law-unto-himself stuff that you definitely won't want to play more than twice in your entire lifetime"
- Burford Electronics pedals
- Get yourself a ring modulator
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