12/7/2023 0 Comments Mnml ssgs![]() This is not just some guy dropping loops and tweaking plugin presets on Ableton: Babicz carefully shepherds his signal through an intricate process that he’s been developing and refining since the early 90s. This isn’t just one for the geeks: in order to understand Babicz’ music, you have to understand the extent to which the man is the studio and the studio is the instrument. If you’ve got a connected device by you, stop reading now, google ‘Robert Babicz interview’, and click on the top link, which should take you to a video on Vimeo where Robert talks in detail about his studio, equipment and mastering work. It’s reached the point where I don’t know if I’m more like a collector, a scientist, a producer or an artist.” “I’ve been searching and doing research all through the history of recorded music, looking for techniques, processes and equipment. “I have very strong and personal ideas about how gear should sound, how it should react,” Babicz explains. When I received them a few days later, again, the thing I noticed straight away was that they all had this same ‘sound’: they managed to be entertaining and ‘upfront’, but listen to them intently on a pair of headphones and it was also clear that you were hearing the works of a person with highly developed and particular ideas about sound, creating an approach to production that was as personal as it was effective. ‘Mr Head’ was so good I ordered it and three other Babicz EPs on the spot, without even a second thought. Precise, rich, and also very emotive, it managed the emotional build of a trance record without recourse to the kind of rhythmic clichés, melodic sentimentality and vocal puke-worthiness that blight that genre’s stereotypes. Each sound had a presence that announced itself with undeniable immediacy and personal colour. The kick drum (all the percussion, in fact) was really amazingly precisely tuned. ![]() ‘Mr Head’ was different, a definite new style. ![]() But this was a far cry from the music that had filled my Rob Acid flashback loungeroom. It sounded vaguely familiar, so I did a quick check on discogs, and sure enough – Robert Babicz was Rob Acid, the dude who stole my head, doing funny things to it all over again with a track that, this time at least, clearly warned me what I was in for. I was previewing some tracks online, and, because Kompakt was still in my ‘listen on sight’ category, I was cuing up a track called ‘Mister Head’ by one Robert Babicz. Hint: it’s not inside the bassbin.įlash forward to 2005. I would have screamed but (being headless) I couldn’t, so I gave chase, pursuing acid techno into the night, frantically dancing my way through anywhere I thought my lost noggin might be hiding. I didn’t know what a 303 was, I’d never heard of DJ Pierre, but what I was hearing knocked my block off. Then, he played me a Rob Acid record, and I felt a subtle but certain ‘click’ inside me. Shizor album on Digital Hardcore Records, which was variously acid, breakcore, jungle, and commonly as hard as fuck. First of all, he played me some tracks from the Shizuo vs. It as ’98, and I was sitting in a friend’s skanky sharehouse living room, listening while a friend of a friend gave me a lesson in acid techno. Permit me, if you will, a Rob Acid flashback. he's really on his own trip, what can you say? Here's looking forward to the new ambient album. Parts of this interview have also appeared separately over at RA for the feature on mastering I did, but here for the first time is a re-print of the interview in full. The opportunities are much more circumscribed, there are much harder limits on what it is possible for you to do.In December 2008 I (PC) had the opportunity to interview Robert Babicz for Inpress on the eve of his tour of Australia. ![]() So to get to the final question, I guess it is a bit better time than before, but bluntly put, it is never a good time to be an ambient DJ. But it is also frustrating that this often ends up as a ‘bonus’, with little budget for it, and often dancefloor artists doing a second set, where they just revert to Aphex SAW clichés. Sometimes this works well, and it is definitely positive people are trying. This has led to some more events trying to organise chill out rooms or including space for ambient artists. In the last couple of years there has been a bit of hype with ambient moving out of its little niche and getting more attention, which has partly been fueled by techno and house artists dabbling in the genre (and mostly quite poorly too, it is worth noting). There has always been a very strong scene surrounding ambient music, but most of the time this exists online and in people’s headphones.
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