semihere
294 plays
3,324 views
3,324 views
A two piece band based in the north-west of England, playing electronic music designed for listening to or dancing to. We don't mind either way.
We are not DJs, we play our own original material live.
Influences: Mainly Orbital, Chemical Brothers, The Orb, Prodigy, Eat Static and Underworld.
Also some influence from such varied sources as Slayer, FSOL, The Moog CookBook, Brian Eno and Frank Zappa.
Our live shows also feature original computer generated imagery for visual entertainment.Band/artist history
It all began around '95. Introduced by a friend in common as 'this guy uses Amigas for music too'. This of course led to the usual awkward situation of 'oh... right... really? cool...', but then went on to be more along the lines of 'Octamed? Of course I know Octamed, it's all I use'.
Seeds had been sown which would lead firstly to a casual co-writing meet-up, the results of which got some encouraging responses, and ultimately saw the formation of Semihere.
Early appearances were quite thrown-together affairs with every piece of sound generation we could get our hands on making an appearance (including such gems as an old top-loading Amstrad separates cassette player, replete with the faux teak cladding of it's 70's era playing out loop-tapes of sound effects through a beautifully noisy analogue delay stomp box). A couple of analogue synths (Korg Poly800 featured large back then), a borrowed 12:8:2 desk and a mass of odd patch leads made up the ensemble, but at the heart of it all was the trusty old Amiga and with dirty 8bit samples (and full on crunchfest 4bit at 8 channels).
Early highlight gigs include : the first ever full session (all glorious 2 and a half hours of it) aka the "Sentric Alien Appearance" at the Cellar Bar in early June 95; the fund-raising "D:Portation" at the long gone New Top Club, Clayton; the world's most generally odd in a fairly normal kind of way gig which became dubbed "Live from Bingo Central" (Big up Rick's Gran!); headline sets in the alternative room for "Mayhem" at Sound in both 98 and 99 powered by Operation Sound and with visuals by lo:fi ; and not forgetting the last Amiga-powered gig heading up the "Dub n Bass Arena" at the Roots and Reggae Festival in 2000 (the night the hard drive died).
Following the loss of nearly 2 years' music in the hard drive incident, the decision was made to sidestep from the Amiga as the writing-base to the Mac which had up to that point just been used for design and visuals work. Semihere holed up in the studio for five years learning new software, writing music for independent films, improving production quality, developing new ideas and fine-tuning sounds and orchestration. The results of this extended period of writing and self-critique were previewed at Oakhill Park August 2005 with a return appearance at the Mela.Have you performed in front of an audience?We play live occasionally at the moment, and hoping to do more so in the near future.
Your musical influences
Orbital, Chemical Brothers, The Orb, Prodigy, Eat Static and Underworld.What equipment do you use?
Two Apple Powerbooks, and various MIDI eqipment.
294 plays
3,324 views
3,324 views
Admin
Rick
@rmb303
