5th track and the concept of naiveity.

Track: Ascension (To The 9th Level)
[soundcloud]https://soundcloud.com/hyper-on-experience/hyper-on-experience-ascension[/soundcloud]

Track: Ascension (To The 9th Level) prototype version from tape (low quality)
[soundcloud]https://soundcloud.com/hyper-on-experience/hyper-on-ascension-to-the-9th[/soundcloud]

I’ve been asked by a few people about the chances of Hyper-On returning.

Its a nice idea, but I fear I’ve learnt too many rules about making music to recapture my youthful enthusiasm.

We made those tunes at a time when UK underground dance was exploding with experimentation.

Simply put: we took Hip Hop ideas (breaks/bass and sound fx) and added the ideas of American House and European Techno (stabs/piano and synths).

We just speeded it up a bit and called it Jungle Techno.

There were very few pigeon holes to describe the music played at raves at the time. It just seemed that every track had a breakbeat and the variation came from the samples used, or synth patterns played.

It was at a moment before things settle into their respective genres of music. Before “music” entered Drum n Bass and before House entered the charts.

It’s possible that the very early 90s rave scene defined all the genres that we now have under the banner of “Dance”.

How do you recapture that?

Track 5: Ascension (To The 9th Level)
Track 5a: Ascension (To The 9th Level) from tape.

We started with the orchestral stab pattern that comes in halfway through the tune. I loved this, but had some difficulty wrapping a tune around it. The tape demo shows this.

Eventually we got a load of new sample CDs and came across the spooky intro pad and quirky synth loop.

The drums sound a bit Tod Terry and the sub is Juno 6.

There are plenty of little Hyper-On drum edits and tricky programing that we loved doing at that time.

Each one of these had to be manually entered into the hardware sequencers – a process that I enjoyed immensely! I don’t play an instrument as such, but I could program the fuck out of that MMT8!

Loads of Malcolm McLaren Buffalo Gals samples.

Every 16 bars changes. New samples come in towards the end of the tune. New riffs are introduced late in the song – Danny did a lot of these.

Love this track.

The tape version;

This one is insane.

The 1st breakdown synth was the Korg M1. I can remember playing it in.

Breaks are Mantronix.

2nd Breakdown: All Korg M1 classics

Not sure where we were going with the Queen samples.

3rd Breakdown: My favourite synth pattern and the Buffalo gals samples.

4th Breakdown: Sounds like the MC202 on bass.

5th Breakdown: Sh101 and MC202.

6th Breakdown: Korg M1 and Sh101.

7th Breakdown: 7th? Are you kidding me? And what’s with the cheesy guitar riff?

How did we name it? Just put this on full blast, grit your teeth and see if you can make it…