3 Electro Knights - Sketches For Another Future (2022)

These recordings represent some of our earliest work together.

From the beginning we consciously decided not to work with sequencing and arranging programmes like Cubase when composing our music as a conscious limitation.

We wanted to explore making electronic music away from computers and take more of a rock band approach by playing together in a room at the same time, reacting to what each other was playing, and having a certain discipline to develop compositions by playing them over and over again and in doing so allowing chance and spontaneity to play a role.

We had noted that live synthesizer music, and 1970s Tangerine Dream comes to mind, was not something that had been heard often in recent times, though in the early years of synthesizer music live versions either in concert or in the studio was how this music was made.

We also noticed by close listening that many of the techno pioneers in Detroit like Derrick May seemed to have made those early dance records also by using outboard equipment and essentially recording live, and that the methods they used were part of the nature of those recordings and what made them so exciting.

One interesting aspect of synthesizers is that they to some extent play themselves. Playing live with synthesizers causes the human player to enter into a cybernetic relationship with the machine, a feedback relationship, and in doing so bring about a "third mind". In this approach we are of course indebted to Eno and the techniques he developed like the use of his Oblique Strategies cards to free the creative process of too much conscious intention, which can be inhibiting to the free flow of composing.

The majority of these recordings were made in a small back room in Walthamstow and recorded via a regular hifi amplifier into a two track stereo handheld portable Zoom recorder. Two tracks were recorded multi-track one weekend in a studio at Coventry University.

We present this selection as a raw and flawed early experiments that we however feel captures a certain excitement, fleeting chance moments that feel vital despite their flaws and have a certain essence or 'Tao' this is often absent from perfected studio recordings.