"I've always been recording things, but it didn't start with sound — as an adult, it started with visual materials. I've always been using collage in the way that I work. When I started using time-based media, I was using video. When I was in college, I was doing video collage. When I left college, I couldn't use an edit suite anymore because it's too expensive, so I resorted to sound recording as an art form, because it's the only thing I could do. But it's not just that. At the same time I was also getting into doing radio in Brighton. I was given the opportunity to have a radio show, just at the right time, which kind of gave me enthusiasm because I knew I had a public outlet for what I was doing. So basically it was a combination of DJ'ing and then realizing also that it could go beyond the public entertainment and actually making it into an art form in itself."
She started creating her collages with turntables, a DJ mixer, and a reverb unit. "Then I started borrowing someone's 4-track, just a cassette 4-track, Fostex thing. I started thinking about things more in terms of a soundscape. That was still while I was DJ'ing. And then in '91, I bought my friend's Amiga 500 computer. I bought it with the intention of bumping up the graphics and doing video editing, which I didn't actually manage to do for another 8 1/2 years, because he was using it for music. This bloke is actually on my double remix CD, he's Katy Brown [Kevin Browning], and this is who I bought my computer off of 8 1/2 years ago."
"I basically carried on using sound because it was too expensive in the end to actually bump it up to doing video. I was using this tracker program which everyone used to use, which is basically this program which runs vertically on a computer screen. You can improvise live with your samples, and keep changing the rhythms of the samples being triggered. It's very easy and you don't have to use MIDI or anything — it's all internal. And then I bought this sampler that you plug in the back of your computer, called Techno Sound Turbo. It's an 8-bit sampler, cost me 26 pounds. I basically did my first two albums on that: 'Another Kind of Humor Another Kind of Murder,' a split album with Abraxas on Serpent, and the second 'Lowest Common Dominator.' They were both done on 8-bit samplers, not because I was being romantic, but because it was a financial constraint that I had."
"The Amiga 500 started off about 1/2 a Meg, and it got upgraded to one Meg [of] hard disk. It's a games computer. So all the samples were within this 1 Meg of sound, all the samples I was using were already in there. This program [was] called Med, and then there was this upgrade called Octamed. Med was a 4-track, tracker program. There were loads of different programs called trackers, which ran vertically on a screen, not horizontally like programs now. You would be able to assign certain points running down the screen, where you could actually write in what samples you wanted triggered as it rolls past you."
"It rolled like a will, so you would punch in sample numbers that you wanted by bringing them up on the screen. You'd select your samples as it was playing, and you'd punch them in by pressing your computer keyboard. It would assign the number or you would assign the number, and you would use your computer keyboard as a 2 1/2 octave key range, and you would stick tape on to the first and third keys of your computer, and use it like a piano."
"You could manipulate the samples, by going into another bit of the program. It was a great program. I wish you could get it in 16-bit, I'd still be using it! You'd be able to boost the sample, echo the sample, filter the sample. It was all in 8-bit, and so it had this kind of weird sound to it. I bought this reverb unit, and once you put things through that, it wasn't quite as dreadful. It was good enough to use."She would run her finished mixes through the reverb.
"I didn't improvise them, but it would contain bits that were improvised in the Amiga, which was being recorded. At that point I got hold of a Teac 4-track, which was a really nice thing." She describes the Teac 234 as "a big rack thing. I actually got it off of Coil, and they recorded bits of their first album, 'Scatology,' on this 4-track. I had their 4-track, which had some of my bips and bops from the Amiga in there. And then I'd have this really old cassette deck on pause, it was on pause/record. I could do things channeling through that for another point, because I only had the DJ mixer."
"I tried a few times to make an album on the Teac, [layering] as a 4-track, and I felt that it didn't have the live element, I felt it didn't have the magic to it, and it felt really stale." Instead, she used the Teac "to compose pieces I had done on my Amiga where I didn't have enough memory in the Amiga to do everything I wanted to do. That 1 Meg only goes so far." For mixing, "it's output into a cassette deck for my master, or if I managed to borrow a DAT recorder, my master would be on DAT."
"If I was using my 4-track, there would be a certain amount of mixing going on with the volumes of things, bringing channels in and out on my cassette, in the 4-track as well. If you listen to 'Beware the Whim Reaper,' the last third of it is a big soundscape of 4-track on Amiga and 4-track on the Tascam. It would be partly on the Amiga and it would be partly on the cassette, and then going through the DJ mixer, and I'd be waiting with a cassette, inside the cassette recorder, for the next track that was going to play. The whole thing that would be the nightmare would be switching from track to track. It's kind of worth watching in a way. 'Lassie House' was [also] done live."
"I've always worked with long lists. In the old days when I was constructing my spoken word pieces for radio, it was very very methodical. I'd collect a 90-minute cassette of spoken word samples, and then I'd go through the cassette and write down all the words from the samples onto paper. I'd cut up the paper into all the sentences, lay them all over the floor like a jigsaw and then I'd make a story on the floor before even starting the piece. Once I've made the story, then I'd stick it all together with cello tape, and then I'd make the tape, the audiotape. That's how I did 'TV Dinner', which is on 'Guide to Broadcasting,' all the bits on 'Jumble Massive,' all the bits on 'Lassie House' — they're all done on paper. I still do that to a certain extent, but I'm a bit more freeform in the way I work now."
When she makes her albums, "my friend Simon always sits with me, because otherwise I get deranged. Simon has been with me for every album I've made, apart from the last one because he has to sit and tell me what I'm doing. Actually, I sit and say to Simon, 'OK, so I'm going to do this now, aren't I?' And he'll just look at me, and I'll go, 'Yeah I am, aren't I?' He'll sit and be my mirror. It would take me about six hours to mix down the album right and I'd get to the last five minutes and then suddenly I'd accidentally hit something and it'd all go wrong and I'd have to start again." Since her albums flow continuously, she completes the entire album as one take without interruptions, and it takes her many tries to finish a performance to her satisfaction.
For her live performances, Bennett "started off strictly as a DJ, but I've never been a normal, inverted commas, DJ. I've never been a slave to the public. In fact the thought has always disgusted me. I've played in a lot of clubs and bars, and whenever people have started to dance, or even were standing with their drink and swinging their hips, I'll immediately turn it off and put something else on. I wasn't put on this earth to entertain people in that way. I want to make people think in the way that I work, and to make people swing their hips is not thinking as far as I'm concerned. So I started up DJ'ing, but I was working with collage in a live situation. My idea of live is that you're there doing it, that's what I call live. People used to say to me, for years, they'd say, 'Do you play live, or do you DJ?' and I said 'I do both, I DJ live.' I don't sit there like a robot entertaining, slave to master, at people's request. That isn't live as far as I'm concerned."
"I mean, I'd say that I actually started to really differentiate when I started really messing with record players when I was DJ'ing, and that was in 1996. I'd say the first point at which I could truly say that I was messing with sound in a really hands-on way would be in summer, 1996. I did the Staalplaat Festival in Berlin, and I DJ'ed for 7 nights in a row, for between 3 and 6 hours each night. I got to the point of exhaustion where I would actually be going much much further, and really pushing much further with the way I was working. It was at that point that I met someone called Sniper, who was really using record players in a quite violent matter, using the needle in ways that I had not really worked with. It was at that point that I started using live video as well, where I was bringing the audio through from that, which I'd also say was a very
live element. There was the manipulation of the needle on the record, scratching as well, but in a really crude way, that made me really feel like I was working in a live way. In 1997 I bought my first Mini-Disc player, where you can basically make your own loop points. That's the point where I started thinking I'm going to move away from this thing using vinyl, because I didn't feel I was getting the respect and the attention I deserved in a live situation. I didn't want people coming up to me in the middle of my set asking me for things. I'd always feel really insulted when people would come up to me and make requests when I was obviously working very hard. I thought if I cross over and use a different kind of medium which isn't associated with the entertainer in a passive way, then people will shut up and they'll watch. It was at that point that I actually started using video in a lot more. I started using the video as the focus for people's eyes, rather than me, or their drinks, and also I stopped using other people's audio unless it was in a manipulated, looped fashion. It's the Mini- Disc that made me transfer."
"I bought this Roland DJ 17 in May of '94, which was made for DJs because it's a really really fast, keyboard-based, sampler. It's a sampler — you've got filters, LFOs, and all the other stuff like that. You can take your sample, you can record it in by just pressing a button. And then, [you can] press a button to start the sample, press a button to stop it, and it's immediately on your keyboard. You don't have to move inside the sampler and start deciding where you're going to put it. It's there for you. Once you've got that you can go into the filter section of the sampler and you can really mess with the samples. 'Beware the Whim Reaper' is the first album that I did using this sampler. And it's probably the one where I've used the manipulations within the sampler the most. And by coincidence, or not coincidence, my most ambient, inverted commas, album, because I was using all these things like LFOs that basically a lot of ambient people are using. It's a live tool as well."
