David Linton - projects

By late 83-84 i had pretty much burned off whatever desire I might have had to play drums in bands - either my own collaborative projects or other people's units... thou it may have seemed extreme to some (who let me know at the time) for a drummer to just up and "go solo"... but to me it just seemed like the next step in a natural progression. I had already begun to experiment with electronics (such as they were at the time) in the course of making tape scores for choreographic friends... and YES at the time i was thinking it might be preferable to deal with machines rather than humanoids as my primary collaborators in matters so intimately intertwined as paying the rent (such as IT was at the time).
So out i went with: 1) my 4 channel noise gate which employed drum hits to open short temporal windows on prerecorded background cassette tapes containing all manner of self generated sound... and 2) a proto-sampler loop box from Electro-Harmonix which could hold a single 17 second sample in volatile memory to be 'triggered' via piezzo elements affixed to the head of a given drum... let's not forget 3) a full acoustic drumkit and 4) a voice primed to 'deliver' if not exactly 'sing' topical/surrealist lyrics of my own devising...
All this adds up to quite a sonic mashup for a solo drummer on the threshold of
godknowswaht in the early spring of 1984. I would go on to do more of this sort of thing over the next few years although i would soon leave the vocal aspect behind (for which the world can be grateful i know)... In listening back to this now i console myself with the notion that i was perhaps a better lyricist than vocalist...