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Making
Up The Numbers
Of course, Andrew
Slegt seemed the ideal person to ask to join Kinetik's ranks for the
Burning Issue concert. It was obvious that he had a keen knowledge
of electronic music and had had previous experience of presenting it
in a live context. However, I wasn't very confident at the time that
he'd agree to help us. In the Summer I'd already asked him to join
the band and he'd kindly refused. Not feeling very hopeful, I rang
him up and explained the situation we were now in after Allen Hardy
had left us. After a moments thought, he agreed to help us out (much
to my surprise) and we arranged a time when he could come down and
visit us to familiarise himself with our live preparations. Much
later Andrew revealed to me that he’d agreed to help us out only
because we were obviously in a bit of a ‘fix’. If Allen had
never quit, Andrew would probably never have become a part of the
band ! In order to minimise the amount of crash-course learning for Andrew, we agreed that he should just control all of the bass sequences throughout the performance. Throughout the year I had been developing a piece of custom-designed equipment which I called the ‘Bass Improvizer’ which was designed to allow a person to interact with and change sequences of notes in real-time during live performances. In a very early crude form, we had actually already used it during the recording sessions of ‘Pipeline’. Now I was frantically trying to finish the development of the device in time for the forthcoming concert. I told Andrew that he would be the very first person in the world to use this new equipment in a live situation and tried to explain to him as best I could how it would operate. Thinking about the impending gig, we soon realised that Kinetik didn’t really have much of a repertoire of material to perform on the night. So far we had recorded and mastered only four tracks with a fifth (‘Dance Machine’) in a rough unfinished state. Hastily, I wrote and cobbled together a demo for a new mostly instrumental track to add to our set list which became ‘Generation’. Even so, we now only had six songs to perform on the night. We would have to think carefully how we could get the most mileage out of this material. I devised a sinister vocoded additional piece (intended to sound as if the vocalist had severe asthma/throat problems !!!!) to act as an introduction to ‘Generation’ called ‘Orimulsion’. The lyrics to this spoke at length about the potential hazards of the fuel. I played a demo of ‘Orimulsion’ to Max Fairbrother of the Orimulsion Action Coalition and he was amazed when I told him how it had been put together. Another idea was to completely re-arrange the track ‘Refined’ which would have been horrendously difficult to perform live in its original recorded form. We ended up giving it additional lyrics and extending it to provide an opportunity for each of us to perform an improvised solo before walking off stage at the end of the Kinetik set. At one of the Orimulsion Action Coalition meetings, the local representative from Friends of The Earth actually asked me if Kinetik were going to perform "an acoustic set" at the forthcoming Burning Issue event. He was then somewhat mystified as to why I was rolling around on the floor laughing my head off !!!! Once Andrew arrived for our first rehearsals, it soon became apparent that he’d been listening very hard to his cassettes of Kinetik songs. In the meantime, he’d had several ideas of his own about how we could present some of the material to a live audience. I remember one of his ideas resulting in the new extended live arrangement of ‘Net Working’ that we performed. This in turn was inspired by a totally different extended test mix of the song that I’d sent him in the post. It turned out that Andrew had fully expected to play all of his bass lines manually and learned all of them most diligently, not realising that the raw basic patterns for these were stored and played by a sequencer. At first, he was a little disappointed about this until he realised how could use the Bass Improvizer to change, develop and transpose these sequences in real-time in creative ways which would have been impossible to achieve otherwise. Max Fairbrother of the Orimulsion Action Coalition had kindly offered Kinetik the use of his barn loft for rehearsal, so one week before the date of the concert, Andrew arrived (bringing with him all of his musical equipment on the train !) and we transferred the entire contents of the Kinetik studio to our new rehearsal headquarters once we had cleared all of the old junk, settees etc. out of the way first. Max had kindly given us free reign to come and go as we pleased while we used the barn and we often spent whole days rehearsing and developing our set until the small hours of the morning. It all seemed very much like our very own “Kling Klang” with us clocking-in to work every day! Max seemed genuinely pleased just to have us around and went out of his way to help us (installing secure locks on the doors for example) and generally making us feel welcome. We all owe him a great debt of thanks for helping us out on this and many subsequent events since.
Live at the Burning Issue gig On the morning of the concert, a volunteer van driver helped us to transfer our packed equipment to the concert venue - The Queen’s Hall in Narberth, Wales. The manager, Declan Connoly had donated the use of the hall free of charge and had agreed to let us spend most of the day setting up and generally relaxing and getting everything right. We had our packed lunch sandwiches upon the monitor wedges on stage. For some strange reason, this really freaked us out a bit - WE HAD MONITOR WEDGES ! - We were going to play on a proper stage at a proper venue with a proper dressing room and proper PA system. We all had a bit of a reality-check about it all ! After most of the equipment was installed, Andrew had a little surprise present for us all in one of the cases. He opened it to reveal a customised “Kinetik Krew” T-shirt for each of us, printed in the style of our newly-designed band logo. He’d had them specially printed just for our debut live event. This was a typical gesture of Andrew’s and put us all in a good positive frame of mind for the concert ahead. While Shirleyann and I admired them, Andrew took charge of getting the sound mix right by seating himself on a chair in the middle of the hall during the soundcheck while the sound engineer adjusted the settings to everyone’s satisfaction. Once the venue’s doors opened, the hall slowly filled with paying members of the public. I noticed with surprise that some people at the bar were actually wearing Kraftwerk T-shirts! Prior to the concert, we had mailed out flyers to anyone we thought might be interested in seeing us perform. Some people had obviously turned up on the strength of this just to see us play. Talking to them afterwards, it transpired that some of them had actually travelled about 100 miles to see us. We were amazed and humbled that anyone would want to do that !!!! The first act of the evening was a folk style group by the name of Heathen Reel, a band which had been formed specially for the event by old Kinetik friend David England. I’d invited Dave to participate and most of his band had travelled to Wales from Hereford specially for the Burning Issue concert. Using Dave’s camcorder, I videoed their performance. Dave in turn agreed to video Kinetik when we took to the stage next. While a following speech was being made about the Burning Issue and the concerns over Orimulsion, we waited in the wings, preparing ourselves to finally take to the stage for Kinetik’s live debut. We all shook hands and wished each other all the best. I could feel adrenaline pumping in my body and Shirleyann was visibly nervous (as she always is to this day before Kinetik go on stage). Suddenly the speech was over and the MC was announcing the next act to perform - Kinetik. I started the sequencers by remote control and we were off ! - taking to the stage, each of us wearing dust masks to the strains of ‘Kinetik Intro’. Andrew had another surprise up his sleeve and took his position on stage sporting a pair of novelty sunglasses complete with madly flashing LED bulbs. The performance went well. It was obvious that people in the crowd were behind us and we fed on this positive “kinetik energy” as we played. Andrew was obviously concentrating very hard, remembering everything new he’d learned during the last few weeks. In the end he played faultlessly and in fact I was very pleased about the way we’d all played.  Joining Kinetik for the first time, Andrew Slegt Of course there were a few minor technical problems. I’d invested in a (relatively) cheap headset microphone for the gig, but this proved to be less than ideal for vocals, generating a lot of feedback when it was used. We immediately cut down the level to reduce the problem, but this meant that I had to practically shout to make my voice heard throughout the rest of the set. We also had to restart ‘Pipeline’ after a sequencer misfired and one of the PA speakers cut-out during the middle of our performance. Because of the amount of bands taking part in the concert, there was a lot of other equipment already on the stage and I suspect that some of this may have been causing interference. However, all of this did not seem to spoil things in any way and we left the stage feeling that the audience and Kinetik had enjoyed themselves. As soon as we’d departed the stage, Andrew came up to me beaming and exclaimed “Right, when’s the next one then ?”. It was at that moment that we all realised that Andrew’s membership of Kinetik was no longer temporary. He was now a full-time member of the band. I remember us
unwinding in our dressing room afterwards along with Dave. Out of
some of the other dressing rooms (NOT Heathen Reel’s I might add
!) came wafting the scent of various illegal substances. In our room
we were also heartily partaking in….. nothing more than Chocolate
! The drug-induced heavy rock lifestyle was not for us after all!
As well as capturing the Kinetik set on videotape, I’d asked Dave England to supervise a four-track audio recording which I’d made originally as a personal record of Kinetik’s first gig. We first listened to the recording as soon as we all arrived back at Kinetik Studios after the concert - about 3am in the morning. As soon as we heard it, we realised that it was worthy of a CD release. We realised that a CD of Kinetik’s performance would also be a nice way of raising additional funds for the Orimulsion Action Coalition. Max Fairbrother thought this was a superb idea and donated his original artwork depicting Pembroke Power Station for the CD cover, based on his original design for the Burning Issue concert poster. Therefore Kinetik’s first mass CD release became a live album in strictly limited edition of only 50 copies. In preparing the CD master however, it soon became apparent that there were some problems with the recording that would have to be overcome. Interference and microphone feedback had to be made as inconspicuous as possible (hence the low volume at the start of the CD). The recording had been made on a multi-track analogue deck, directly from my on-stage mixer. The drums were recorded onto two tracks with all remaining instruments being recorded on another stereo pair of tracks. The most serious problem was the track ‘Orimulsion / Generation’ which was actually missing around 45 seconds from its beginning. Although I’d given Dave instructions when to change the cassette tapes while recording our performance, I’d forgotten to tell him how to actually remove the previous cassette from the machine. Poor Dave had been frantically struggling for nearly a minute while we played before he’d found the correct button to eject the previous cassette! Luckily this had happened during a fairly ambient section of ‘Orimulsion’ with no drums present and I was able to patch in a section from an alternative DAT recording made by the sound engineer, matching the EQ as best as I could. Listening to the CD today, you will only notice the join if you look out for it around 45 seconds into the track. There was also a tape problem with ‘Refined’ which suffered from a severe drop-out of one of the audio tracks on the master near the start of the song. I disguised this as best I could by double-tracking the remaining audio track and reverting to Mono during the drop-out section. You might notice this if you listen carefully through headphones. Finally when I was satisfied I had mastered the recording as best as I could, we pressed the CDs with the first copies being delivered towards the end of December 1995. We had already taken advance orders for the CD from many people and we were encouraged by the generally positive response. Included with the initial copies was a Kinetik sticker, a reproduction of Max’s concert poster and another original poster featuring both artwork by David England and a review of the gig taken from the local press. Listening to the CD today, I now feel it sounds a bit “raw” in places, especially comparing some tracks to their studio versions later released on the REFINED CD and considering the technology used to record it, but there is no doubt that it certainly captures the raw “kinetik energy” present in our performance that evening and it was nice to make available to people a recording in which so many of the arrangements of our songs were altered to suit our mood on that day. Of course there is always the added nostalgia of Kinetik’s first ever live performance.  Photo-shoot for the Burning Issue CD cover - outside Pembroke Power Station Still on a high from the success of The Burning Issue concert, we spent much of the first half of the new year trying to organise Kinetik participation in several other live events. Often it looked as if Kinetik were about to hit the stage again, only to have our hopes repeatedly dashed when the event concerned was either cancelled or we were told we were not wanted after all. Over a period of time this became quite depressing and it was often difficult to find the enthusiasm and inspiration to continue with the REFINED album project. During the Autumn, as an experiment I re-arranged a version of ‘Generation’ in a totally different manner to the version performed at the Burning Issue concert and eventually released on REFINED. It was recorded directly to DAT with no multi-tracking involved - in essence a “live” studio recording. I filed this recording away in a case marked “experimental remixes” and wondered if it would ever see the light of day…. Andrew had
continued to attend Kinetik meetings and recording sessions
throughout the year and we finally recorded the studio version of
‘Generation’ in the same style as had been played live the
previous year. An improvised jam session also gradually evolved into
a track which eventually became ‘Industrial Technology’.
Initially this track had a very different character to the final
version and featured a very up-tempo busy drum rhythm. For the time
being we left the recording unfinished, not quite satisfied with the
result. Towards the end of the year we received an invitation to contribute a track for the cover-mounted CD of an electronic music magazine - “Sequences”. The magazine would also feature a biography of Kinetik and a review of the KINETIK LIVE - THE BURNING ISSUE CD. I arranged to meet the writer of the article, Carl Jenkinson in a London pub and offered him a DAT cassette with two possible Kinetik tracks for inclusion on the CD - the studio version of ‘Kinetik Energy’ and the experimental remix of ‘Generation’ which I’d filed away some months before. In the end, an edited down version of the ‘Generation (Re-Generation remix)’ was used. The full unedited version eventually surfaced in the RE-GENERATIONS 2CD set in 1999. As we talked, I explained the frustrations the band had experienced in trying to play live thoughout the year. It turned out that some people connected with “Sequences” were also involved in staging the UK EMMA (Electronic Music & Musician’s Association) concerts. Would we be interested in participating at the next event, scheduled sometime in the summer of 1997 ? I readily agreed, but due to past experiences was personally a little pessimistic that we’d ever actually play at the event. However in early 1997 we were duly contacted and told that Kinetik had been selected as one of the bands to perform on the day. This gave us the incentive to complete the REFINED album at long last. We all felt that it would be marvellous to launch the new album at the event on our very own Kinetik stall. The venue was to be The Derby Assembly Rooms. I had actually attended a Klaus Schulze concert there in the summer of 1996 so I knew the venue’s layout and location quite well. Little had I realised back then that Kinetik were going to perform on that very same stage in a year’s time! Spurred on by the deadline of the impending concert and album launch we now set to work completing the album during the early months of 1997. ‘Sounds Of Industry’ was the next track to be recorded. I had always envisioned that ‘Sounds Of Industry’ should be paired with the as-yet-uncompleted ‘Industrial Technology’ so we next set to work erasing the over-complicated drums and replacing them with a much more spacious industrial percussive arrangement. In 1996, Shirleyann and I had visited my Grandparent’s engineering works in London. While there, we had digitally sampled as many of the power tools, machine presses and pieces of metal as we could find. Some of these samples we decided to incorporate into the final mix of the track. These included an angle grinder, an arc welder and a spanner hitting a box of metal parts. However, because of the complicated nature of the song, we soon ran out of recording tracks before I was satisfied the song was complete. I had to do an unprecedented pre-mix down to DAT and re-record this stereo mix back into the multitrack machine in order to free up some new tracks for the final overdubs. The extremely complicated nature of this song is actually the chief reason why Kinetik have never performed it live, it being the only track from REFINED that has never been performed. It remains however, my personal favourite from the album and is the track I’m the most satisfied with. To close the album, Shirleyann and I recorded the instrumental ‘Haven’s Lament’ based on a theme from an instrumental piece that Shirleyann had composed some years before for the clarinet. I persuaded her that its mournful feel would be an ideal choice for a track representing the grief we all felt after the Sea Empress tanker had spilled its cargo of crude oil onto our local beaches surrounding the Milford Haven. At long last, REFINED was finally completed and mixed (and only a year and a half behind schedule !), ready to be pressed in time for release at the fourth EMMA festival. Now all we had to do was structure a new live set in order to showcase the album and its new material….
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