I produced electronic music through the early 2000s after an internship at BBC Scotland got me fascinated by studio technology and recording.
I also played bass in the Ten To Five Project and went on to front the Ten Pin Ninjas.
I never made any money as a musician and was about to give up on it when I hit on the idea of connecting an electric guitar to a Tesla coil. 🙂
Some of the better electronic tracks are available as mp3s below.
Scopeboy – Way Of The Bedroom Worrier (2005)
Way Of The Bedroom Worrier was originally released as the “Pictures Of The Floating World” EP in 2002, containing the four tracks Disintegrator, Pictures of The Floating World, Triumph 2000 and Rochelle Salt. I naively thought I could get a record deal with an indie label off the back of it, and believe it or not, this didn’t happen. No, “Worrier” is not a mis-spelling of “Warrior”. It’s a pun.
Black Car Collective – Kill The Lights (1999)
This was a collaboration between me, my brother, and drummer Jeremy Love. We released it in 1999 or thereabouts. May contain some uncleared samples 🙂
Black Car Collective – Breakdown Service
This was the followup to Kill The Lights. It was never completed in its original form, since my brother and I stopped working together, and Jeremy got badly hurt in a rock climbing accident. The only track we collaborated on was “Milk”, the rest are all mine.
Live, unreleased, etc
The best of all the other stuff that was lying around my hard drives…
Colorado Springs Dub
People have asked me for this track in the past, so here it is! It was inspired by Tesla’s experiments in Colorado Springs, and somehow I got from there to a mixture of programmed breaks and fingerstyle acoustic guitar. I’ve performed it live a few times, but this is a studio version. (Sorry about the duff guitar sound, yes, it was a piezo pickup.)
Radio Teletype
To make this track, I sampled radio hams chatting on the 80 meter band, and added an ambient soundtrack that aimed to echo what they were talking about.
Cloud Engineering
This track features my own drumming rearranged in Ableton, plus croaks and bleeps from a modified Roland JX-8P, to make a heavy hypnotic groove. Thanks to John-boy for lending me his cymbals.
Hackers On Steroids
A mash-up of a Fox 11 report on computer hacking. I was messing around with some looped bass and guitar grooves, and I ran the Fox report soundtrack through Ableton’s Beat Repeat algorithm over the top of it. By sheer chance it all kind of made sense!
Time And Motion (rough mix)
This track used to be a part of my live set. The acid noises come from Richie Burnett’s home-made 303 clone, run through a Marshall Shredmaster distortion pedal.
20 Bomber (live at 13th Note)
I wrote this track specially for a gig I did with Acidfairy. I wanted to do something that banged a bit. This is a live recording from the outputs of my setup at the gig. Again I’m basically just going crazy with Richie’s 303 clone in the second half of the tune. The crowd went crazy too when I fired it up, they were all old enough to remember acid house the first time round! 🙂
Radio Friendly Booty Shifter
This is an ancient track that actually ended up getting “mastered” onto a cassette! I liked it enough that I decided to keep it. This time the acid tweaking is from a Super Bass Station.