Room Full of Empty People EP


Ed Devane - Squib by takeover recordings
Ed Devane - 2Cme by takeover recordings

Here's a couple of tracks of my forthcoming 4 track EP on Takeover Recordings, displaying two opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of how the result is achieved. Squib is a live recording essentially: the "white hot" version of my Squib series (a squib being an explosive device). The Squib project / way of playing / sample set has gone through a few different versions, and here's a couple of them. This is the first version I recorded:

Squib (first version) by Ed Devane


The drum sounds are all derived from putting a bass drum sample I'd made previously through the image-audio-image process and editing the result. The sounds that result are gritty and biting. By using a crossfader to cut between versions of a sequence I can create a lot of variation while keeping within the groove. This one is from my Molten Membrane launch liveset, which favours a more zigzagged hip hop sound (you can hear the techno tendency creeping in towards the end though):

Squib live version by Ed Devane


2C-me started life as a stripped-back banger made for an A4 Sounds gig in a skate park in Belfast. The intention was, and usually is, to give the audience the fear: to make them think the walls were melting and that they would wear a hole in the dancefloor...it actually works sometimes if the conditions are right...

2C-me (live version 26-05-09) by Ed Devane


The title "Room Full of Empty People" comes from a mini-rave some friends put on to celebrate a couple of birthdays, in a remote part of Waterford. Floodlights cast shadows of giants dancing in the rain; I was nearly deafened by my own music on my own soundsystem thanks to some ill-advised multiband compression on the master channel, and the title was uttered by me late in the night to someone. I meant to say the room (in actual fact a tent) was empty even though music blared from it, but got it wrong. The phrase stuck though, and is an apt one for this release....