Neotropic interview on Juno
Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2016 6:57 pm
Interview with Riz Maslen. Worth a read anyway as there's not that much info out there about Riz's brilliant and totally underrated work. This section, however, will be of specific interest to most of us I think:
When her musical partner went off to University, Maslen decided to make the move to London and threw herself into the nascent rave scene. It wasn’t long, though, before she was back in the studio. “I ended up working with this producer who had a studio at Dollis Hill, in the same building as 4 Hero and Future Sound of London,” Maslen recalls. “Everyone was making music with samplers, but I had no idea what they did and how to use them.”
She was naturally curious, and when The Future Sound Of London asked her to pop into their studio and deliver some vocals, she asked for a lesson in how to sample. “They used to get me to come in and do some really stupid things – make otherworldly noises, or sound like a seagull,” Maslen says, chuckling. “They’d then take them away, add effects and manipulate them. I was so intrigued by what they were doing that I got them to show me the basics. The producer I was working with used to let me use his studio at night for free, so I spent the time learning the ropes and the ins and outs of the sampler.”
Maslen was drawn further towards the world of sample-based electronic music when she began dating The Future Sound of London’s Brian Dougans, a relationship that would eventually last six years. She appeared with Dougans and FSOL partner Brian Cobain on Top Of The Pops in 1992, providing the distinctive vocal parts for the duo’s legendary breakthrough hit “Papua New Guinea”.
“It was quite a fun thing to do,” Maslen enthuses. “We spent most of the day going round the Eastenders set, getting out picture taken in front of Frank Butcher’s motors and the Queen Vic. We thought that was more fun than doing Top Of The Pops. We certainly made great use of our five minutes of fame.”
While Maslen would continue to pop into the Future Sound Of London studio to provide vocals, her musical dreams lay elsewhere. “I didn’t want to be a singer in a band again, at that time anyway, so I got a bank loan and bought myself a sampler, an Atari with Cubase, and a quarter-inch tape machine,” she says. “I used to do lots of experimental stuff with analogue gear, feeding things back into the computer through the little mixing desk I’d bought. I was learning all the time, and Brian also taught me a lot. He encouraged me to go and do my own thing. If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t know if I’d have ended up doing what I did.”