Am I Barry Pyramid?

Firepower

That decision, to make new tracks instead of improving 'Tek Theme' was made at a time when Lee was living in Sharston, Wythenshawe.  He had a spare room that he used for the storage and use of various computing devices which now seem primitive but at the time seemed to crackle with occult energy and the promise of a technological utopia that might be just around the next corner. He called this room The Lab and invited Gareth round for a Lab session to work on the album.

Gareth explained that he had made the Tek Theme entirely in Sound Forge which is a WAV editor with loads of built in effects but no sequencing or any of the beat matching and tempo stretching shortcuts provided by ACID. Sound Forge is notable for being the software used by Burial years later to make two immensely popular, critically acclaimed award winning albums. For now Lee Cabinet considered it beneath him and started to recommend various superior programs, most of which he had never used or seen or even heard of before that morning.

So Lee and Gareth settled down on a Monday evening to look at ACID and make a new track, Gareth had always had a fascination with Knight Rider, and Street Hawk, and Airwolf and particularly with the Knight Rider theme music. Together they set about making a track called Knight Rider Vs Street Hawk which was intended to fuse the two theme tunes and tell the story of a tense encounter between the two crime fighters having a disagreement about which turf was which. For all the usual reasons (incompetence, laziness, confusion etc.) the track did not turn out as intended. Instead it features only the Street Hawk theme music and only samples from Street Hawk. There is absolutely no relevance to Knight Rider whatsoever apart from Knight Rider being in the title. The track was made in ACID probably ten times quicker than Gareth had made Tek Theme. Buoyed by a wave of enthusiasm the duo met again the next night and made another track. By now they had downloaded Hammerhead and Fruity Loops which were both free at the time. Lee had read that Hammerhead was the drum machine that everyone was using to make Drum And Bass at the time and Fruity Loops was the first thing they found when they searched for "free music software". They joked that it was all too easy, that it felt like cheating, that it felt illegal (which it was a bit due to uncleared samples and the use of pirated versions of ACID and Sound Forge). The record industry who had fought to ban home recording and audio file sharing would surely soon attempt to ban this tech, after all you won't buy records to listen to if you are busy making your own in your lab with your illegal samples and your pirated software. Later others would make the observation that this tech should have been banned. "None of this would have happened... ", they would say, "... if it wasn't for the advances in cheap or free music making software available for use in the homes of inexperienced non professionals".

There was a site at the time called Dancetech where Lee and Gareth read some advice, and uploaded the odd track but they received little or no feedback so they soon lost interest in that area.

To the handful of samples used on these first two tracks the members added drum loops generated in Hammerhead or Fruity Loops before fusing it all together in ACID. This was a primitive workflow which gave primitive results. Exploring the Fruity Loops piano roll and arpeggiator was the next step, generating melodic and harmonic loops to recklessly collide with the samples and drum loops they already had for their next batch of tracks.

Quite soon into the project the differences in approach between the two members that they would become renowned for first started to make an appearance. Lee became obsessed with following music theory in order to select the right notes and to put them in the right place in order to make "proper" music. Gareth became obsessed with avoiding all rules in order to make something original. The irony was that Lee's contributions sounded like a cacophony of audio violence and Gareth produced proper songs that sounded much more like real music than Lee's wildest dreams.