• E-mu Emulator II sound demos: Loon Garden
• 808 State – Pacific State (Original Extended Version)
• Bootsy Collins – *-Ing The ‘Luv Gun’
“At the time of recording “Pacific State”, 808 State were three heads: Gerald Simpson, Martin Price and myself. Martin brought “The Loon” to the table. I think he heard it on a Bootsy Collins album, What’s Bootsy Doing, which had just come out. I always thought it was an Akai Library disc, Wind Chimes Birds & Streams, but it would seem it is the Emulator II Library.
There is a theory that Akai licensed that library for the S900 series. The sampler we used for Pacific was the Casio FZ 1 and it’s probable that the studio had copies of various sample libraries reformatted for the Casio. Casio had its own similar disc with thunder, rain, ocean, birds and insects. We had recorded over that particular disc thinking we would never use such new age nonsense. Floppies were expensive and not easy to buy, so we re-used them.
I’m not sure which came first, “Pacific State” or “Sueno Latino”. I can honestly say I wasn’t aware of that record until afterwards, but Martin was onto every release because he had the Eastern Bloc record shop. I remember after the event they were often played together by DJs in a mix because they shared the loon. I also remember a couple of bootleg attempts at Pacific coming from Italy. The only thing they had right was the loon, so again, the sample library was common.
The Vinyl Telegraph was fast back then, even without the internet. The record we were most aiming to fit alongside, at least in my head, was “Open Our Eyes” by Marshall Jefferson. It was a massive tune at the Warehouse Parties and Clubs in Manchester. Its mood was tropical and humid, opening up with a full sample library of waterfalls streams and shakuhachi. I remember 808 banned any use of shakuhachi, a Japanese flute that every 1980s keyboard seem to have as a preset. It always struck me as funny that the Canadian loon—a very northern temperate bird—was our jungle mascot.
A typical mix cassette in my bag at that point would have pointed to the fact that bird song and B-movie jungle music was not unusual. Anyone will tell you what an Exotica nut I was back then. Exotica is a kitsch 1950s Hollywood view of third world music; its biggest artist was Martin Denny, whose albums were littered with fake bird calls and insect impersonations by a man called August Colon. Other copyists followed such as Arthur Lyman and Eden Ahbez.
Other electronic bands such as YMO and Throbbing Gristle also referenced Martin Denny in the ’80s. I think Exotica lived on into the 1970s in the fusion genre—artists such as Santana, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock, and Airto Moreira who would use similar vocal and percussion FX, like bird whistles, duck calls and cuica drum, and lush analogue synths for imaginary other worlds. And of course the common use of soprano saxophone, which “Pacific State” features. We would have loved Mati Klarwein to do our album covers. One of the first artists we did a remix for was Jon Hassel, who must have recognized our Fourth-World bent and reached out to connect.
Our pet loon got a second wind when the KLF used the extended ambient ending of “Pacific State” as an element in the Chill Out album. Chill-out and ambient would recycle a lot of 1970s new-age-type music—music we had been familiar with, such as Rainbow Dome Music by Steve Hillage, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Tangerine Dream. ECM jazz records, such as Egberto Gismonti’s, were again full of nature sounds. We had all lit a few joss sticks and listened to double albums of echoing flutes in Egyptian burial chambers—well maybe not Gerald, who was at least 10 years younger. But the Venn diagram of our combined record collections met in a lot of places; everything became re-contextualized around the campfire of technology in 1988.” – Graham Massey
Massive Tunes 