Dream Machines // Interviews

Janet Beat is one of the pioneering women of British electronic music - a genuine original. Born in 1937, she made her first musique concrète recordings back in the late 1950s and resolutely battled through years of misogynistic hostility and discrimination to forge a career in the genre. In our interview, she spoke to me about her early interest in sound metamorphosis, her parents’ disapproval of her chosen career and how her father destroyed her early tape experiments, her struggles with sexist adversaries, and how she achieved wider recognition as a composer with her first album release when she was in her eighties. You became interested in making music at a very young age - three years old? Well, yes, it just happened. I mean, I don’t know whether it was anything to do with the fact I was born prematurely. And my mother told me, she said that she went to the theatre to a musical when she was pregnant and she swears I was kicking in time to the music. So I’ve always been very se

  Peter Zinovieff is a towering figure in British electronic music history; a composer, inventor and computer music pioneer whose company EMS (Electronic Music Studios) manufactured one of the first portable synthesizers to go on the market, the VCS3, back in 1969. EMS synthesizers were used on records by Roxy Music, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and many other bands, even though Zinovieff, as a committed avant-gardist, was utterly dismissive of popular music. I spoke to him in June 2021, just a month before his death at the age of 88. He talked about learning tape-splicing from female pioneer Daphne Oram, the complex and intensive process of making computer music in the  1960s , working with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, and being one of the first people in the world to have a computer in his home. He also explained how he felt no kinship with 1960s counterculture.   You were building your own devices in the early days, before synthesizers and computer

  When I spoke to drummer and producer Keith LeBlanc in January 2023, the year before his death, he was looking for a publisher for his autobiography, which he promised would tell some of the never-before-heard inside stories of the early days of hip-hop in New York. My interview with Keith didn’t focus on his work for scene-defining hip-hop labels Sugar Hill and Tommy Boy, or on the pioneering track he made that used vocal samples instead of lyrics to drive the narrative, ‘No Sell Out’, which featured the voice of Malcolm X. As my book is about electronic music in the UK, we talked about his collaborations with Adrian Sherwood, the On-U Sound Records crew, Mark Stewart and the Maffia and the mighty Tackhead – explaining what made their sound so good, and why, after they secured a major record deal, it went wrong. You, [guitarist] Skip [McDonald] and [bassist] Doug [Wimbish] had a great career in the US – you provided the rhythms for important New York labels like Sugar Hill and To

“Creating mischief and creating magic” – this is what Adrian Sherwood says he learned from his friend, the late, great Jamaican producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. In this interview, the On-U Sound kingpin and British dub iconoclast talks about the disparate elements that went into his unconventional sound, and why reggae purists didn’t approve of it. He also discusses working with the best rhythm sections in the world, the delights of dub and reggae’s endless ‘versions’, and the awesome power of Tackhead live. Going back to when you started in the late seventies, when you started producing, how did you start to get your sound together? It came from being amongst a lot of older Jamaicans really. My dad died when I was very young and basically the biggest influence on me was a friend, Joe - Joseph Farquharson, who died a couple of years ago of cancer - and he basically shaped my life, to be honest, he wasn't a musician but he started to put me into the business and introduced me to pe