BFND001: At Home With... No.1 Astronaut

For our inaugural release, Bleepfiend is proud to present a selection of early home demos from No.1 Astronaut, aka Bob Bhamra, who is slightly better known today as one half of 'space loop' composers Data 70.

Recorded in the attic of his parents' house in Maidenhead between 1993-95, "At Home With..." exemplifies the qualities we are striving to present: character, charm and ingenuity spawned from a rudimentary, almost desperately basic recording set-up.

"I was broke and clueless", explains Bob. "I just wanted to make some tracks, but real studios were expensive and baffling and I wouldn't have known where to start with buying proper equipment. It didn't even occur to me to buy an inexpensive Portastudio. Instead I opted for a couple of ramshackle cassette recorders, one of which wobbled a lot due to not having a protective door".

Factor in a Yamaha VSS-200 'Portatone' home keyboard, borrowed from a friends' kid brother. "It was a load of old rubbish - 90% of the preset sounds were hideous, leaving a very limited palette".

But the keyboard also included a primitive sampling facility, allowing about a second and a half of sampling time. "To make a sample, you had to hold the external mic up to a speaker, so anything that sampled successfully automatically came with it's own layer of hiss. In the rare event that a sample looped in time, I'd sellotape the appropriate key down and give my fingers a rest. Occasionally, I would introduce some 'Hi-Fidelity' by adding Bonus Beats or Sound Effects LPs playing in the background".

Playing all the sounds manually, Bob contrived a method of multitracking by bouncing layers between the two cassette recorders, using a cheap Tandy mixer to adjust the levels during recording and playback. The results were completely unreleasable at the time, yet today they radiate with an almost romantic lo-fi glow, similar to the effect of listening to early tape pioneers like Raymond Scott and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, whilst inadvertently predicting the deliberately distressed engineering strategies of Boards of Canada.

Subsequently, Bob invested in a computer and spent the late '90s recording far more polished, professional dancefloor material. But in recent years, in collaboration with his childhood friend Jon Chambers as Data 70, he has returned to a more contemplative, retro-infused style which, by accident or design, seems to make a spiritual connection back to those early works.

Written & recorded by Bob Bhamra, 1993-95

Exhumed & compiled by The Bleepfiend, 2008

Cover design by Doppelganger

Audio Clip #1

Audio Clip #2

Audio Clip #3

>>DOWNLOAD FULL ALBUM<<

Useful Links