Jack Dan­gers

It’s now been 30+ years that Jack Dan­gers is an es­sen­tial fig­ure in mod­ern Elec­tronic music. At the end of the 80s, he orig­i­nated Meat Beat Man­i­festo and started to cre­ate a uni­verse and a new sound, made up of breaks, psy­che­delia strewn with sam­ples, in an in­dus­trial, dub and hip hop fu­sion…
In­hab­it­ing San Fran­cisco, Jack has played a cen­tral role in the ex­plo­sion of gen­res such as big beat, trip hop, break­beat and dub­step and has col­lab­o­rated with David Bowie, De­peche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, The Orb, Pub­lic Enemy, David Byrne, DJ Shadow, Aphex Twin while re­leas­ing solo works and play­ing his vin­tage synths…
For us he con­cen­trated on the EMS Syn­thi 100, Moog mod­u­lar and Buchla syn­the­siz­ers sit­ting in his renowned Tape Lab stu­dio…
Most re­cently he worked with Trent Reznor, a new MBM LP, a ret­ro­spec­tive CD of 40 years of noise tracks and sev­eral remix projects for Mark Stew­art and Eric Ran­dom w/ Stephen Mallinder, plus some remixes for Con­sol­i­dated, dgoHn, Mr. Echoes, Adi New­ton and a Allen Gins­berg project.

How were you first ac­quainted to Mod­u­lar Syn­the­sis? When did that hap­pen and what did you think of it at the time?
How does it marry with your other « com­po­si­tional tricks »?
When did you buy your first sys­tem?
What was your first mod­ule or sys­tem?

The first syn­the­sizer I worked on was a EDP Wasp back in 1981, later on in the same year I was lucky enough to start work­ing in a stu­dio in Swin­don U.K where XTC would re­hearse and record and I man­aged to get some time using their Se­quen­tial Cir­cuits Prophet 5 and the stu­dio also had a Se­quen­tial Cir­cuits Pro One and a Roland Pro­mars. The first mod­u­lar I picked up was a Roland 100M sys­tem in 1989 which I bought from Ian Craig Marsh from The Human League and Heaven 17, he used this on the early Human League al­bums Re­pro­duc­tion and Trav­el­ogue. The first time I heard mod­u­lar syn­the­siz­ers was in 1978, when I began lis­ten­ing to artists like Kraftwerk, Tan­ger­ine Dream and Tomita. I liked hear­ing sounds I had never heard be­fore and the prac­tice of mod­u­lar syn­the­sis be­cause you have to start from scratch. These days it’s too easy to pull down the fac­tory pre­sets in a com­puter, I think you get more out of the cre­ative process if you have to work for it.

How long did it take for you to be­come ac­cus­tomed to patch­ing your own syn­the­sizer to­gether out of its com­po­nent parts?

I’m still learn­ing… It’s an on­go­ing process of dis­cov­ery which never be­comes bor­ing.
For in­stance there are so many per­mu­ta­tions with the ma­trix patch­ing boards on the Syn­thi 100 that it’s in­ex­haustible.

What was the ef­fect of that dis­cov­ery on your com­po­si­tional process?
On your ex­is­tence?

Uti­liz­ing mod­u­lar syn­the­sis is com­pletely ex­per­i­men­tal when you start from scratch as it can take you any­where, it’s a credo for life ! You could say the stu­dio is like an artist’s palette and that you are paint­ing with sound.

Quite often mod­u­lar­ists are in need for more, their hunger for new mod­ules is never sat­is­fied? How do you ex­plain that?

It’s like a ad­dic­tion, es­pe­cially if you suf­fer from ob­ses­sive com­pul­sive dis­or­der (OCD), how can you ever be sat­is­fied? Now there are hun­dreds of com­pa­nies mak­ing syn­the­siz­ers and music soft­ware, there are new things com­ing out daily, just when you thought it was safe to go back into a music store, I end up spend­ing even more money I don’t have!

In­stru­ment build­ing may ac­tu­ally be quite com­po­si­tional, defin­ing your sonic palette, each new mod­ule en­rich­ing your vo­cab­u­lary. Would you say that their choice and the way you build your sys­tems can be an in­te­gral part of your com­po­si­tional process? Or is this the other way round and you go after a new mod­ule be­cause you want to be able to sound-​design some of your ideas?
Do you pre­fer single-​maker sys­tems (for ex­am­ple, Buchla, Make Noise, Erica Synths, Roland, etc) or mak­ing your own mod­u­lar syn­the­sizer out of in­di­vid­ual com­po­nents form what­ever man­u­fac­turer that match your needs.

I never ac­tu­ally got into mak­ing mod­ules from scratch, I don’t pro­fess to be an ex­pert on the inner work­ings of elec­tronic mu­si­cal in­stru­ments, I’m not a crafts­man in that sense. I def­i­nitely like to use equip­ment which has al­ready been crafted and sol­dered and ready to go, I have added mod­i­fi­ca­tions to syn­the­siz­ers, but I will leave the main work to the ex­perts….I cre­ate using their in­ter­face.

How has your sys­tem been evolv­ing?

All sys­tems are dif­fer­ent, com­bined they cre­ate your stu­dio, as your set up evolves so do you. Tech­nol­ogy dic­tates in which ways you can work, you adapt to your work en­vi­ron­ment and the cre­ative process. It’s an on­go­ing never end­ing evo­lu­tion.

Do you tend to use pure mod­u­lar sys­tems, or do you bring in out­side ef­fect and de­vices when play­ing or record­ing?

I don’t have any set rules of how to cre­ate, I will use what ever is at hand, whether it’s acoustic or elec­tronic, say a bass flute going through an EMS fil­ter for ex­am­ple, bass clar­inet through a Moog mod­u­lar/EMS ring mod­u­la­tor, what­ever comes into mind to colour the palette of sound…..”un chimie du son”…no rules, just ex­per­i­ment
with the el­e­ments of music and sound.

Would you please de­scribe the sys­tem you used to cre­ate the music for us?
Can you out­line how you patched and per­formed your Mod­ulisme ses­sion?

The main com­po­nents were three reel to reel tape decks using very long tape loops stretched from the stu­dio down a hall­way and back to the first tape ma­chine then back to the mix­ing desk, mainly EMS Syn­thi 100, Moog mod­u­lar and Buchla syn­the­siz­ers mod­i­fy­ing treated sounds, EMS Barth and Sennheiser vocoders,a short wave radio and nu­mer­ous de­vices that feed into the desk and then edited using tape and dig­i­tal equip­ment. Some of it is per­formed live and spon­ta­neous while other parts were cre­ated an edited in post.

What do you think that can only be achieved by mod­u­lar syn­the­sis that other forms of elec­tronic music can­not or makes harder to do?

Orig­i­nally syn­the­siz­ers were an eas­ier way to pro­duce tape music/music con­crete, es­pe­cially Buchla’s de­vices but much like sam­plers and sam­pling it still doesn’t re­place the real thing, it just cre­ates some­thing new and then it evolves from there. Com­plex Jun­gle and DnB would have been im­pos­si­ble to do using tape ma­chines more or less, mainly be­cause you need so much con­trol over the break beats, so ad­di­tive or sub­trac­tive syn­the­sis would be a lot eas­ier to do using mod­u­lars syn­the­siz­ers than if you were using strictly drum ma­chines or vocoders for ex­am­ple.

What would be the sys­tem you are dream­ing of?

An ana­log sys­tem with the same abil­i­ties as a dig­i­tal sys­tem, where you can vir­tu­ally add as many mod­ules as you want. But of course that’s im­pos­si­ble…. Maybe in the fu­ture?

Are you feel­ing close to some other con­tem­po­rary Mod­u­lar­ists?
Which ones?
Which pi­o­neers in Mod­u­lar­ism in­flu­enced you and why?

Pierre Scha­ef­fer and John Cage! I tend to be more in­flu­enced and in­spired by the pi­o­neers of elec­tronic music rather than any con­tem­po­raries, they re­ally were the ones who could see the fu­ture, I think we all owe them our grat­i­tude and re­spect….

Any ad­vice you could share for those will­ing to start or de­velop their “Mod­ulisme” ?

In terms of music, elec­tronic music’s jour­ney has just begun, if you are in­spired by it then make some­thing of it, tech­nol­ogy will ad­vance and so will elec­tronic music, be a part of it, be part of the fu­ture!

http://meat­beat­man­i­festo.com/