Storm the Studio: Meat Beat Manifesto альбомының тарихы

the album

Storm the Studio is the debut album by English electronic music group Meat Beat Manifesto, released on 20 February 1989 by Sweatbox Records in the United Kingdom and later that year by Wax Trax! in the United States. Recorded in three recording studios, the album contains four compositions, each split into separate parts, that mostly originated as twelve inch singles the band released in 1988. The record's inventive musical style features elements of industrial music, electro, dub, noise rock and hip hop music, and incorporates breakbeats, noise and sporadic rap vocals. The group also incorporated heavy usage of sampling in a fashion they compared to pop art. Television was a further influence on the record, and numerous items of television dialogue appear throughout Storm the Studio as samples. Named for a William S. Burroughs quote sampled on the album, Storm the Studio was greeted with critical acclaim upon release, and its dark tone helped distance Meat Beat Manifesto from the hedonistic dance music of the time. It has gone on to be considered a groundbreaking and innovative album, and has influenced numerous artists in the industrial, breakbeat, drum and bass and trip hop genres. It was re released by TVT Records in 1993, Mute Records in 1994 and Run Recordings in 2003. A remix album, containing new remixes of the Storm the Studio by artists such as DJ Spooky and Jonah Sharp, was released by Tino Corp as Storm the Studio RMXS in 2003.

Swindon based Meat Beat Manifesto began in 1987 when Jack Dangers and Jonny Stephens of the pop group Perennial Divide – who they had formed in 1986 and recorded the album Purge (1986) with – began releasing electronic side project twelve inch singles under the Meat Beat Manifesto name on Perennial Divide's label Sweatbox Records, the first of which was "Suck Hard" (1987). These were followed by the singles which later formed the basis of Storm the Studio, namely "I Got the Fear", "Strap Down" and "God O. D." After Perennial Divide's dissolution, the newly prioritised Meat Beat Manifesto began recording their debut album soon after, naming the projected album Armed Audio Warfare and scheduling its release for May 1988, but the tapes were destroyed in a studio fire before the album could be released. The band recorded Storm the Studio, their replacement debut album, at The Slaughterhouse in South Yorkshire, F2 Studios in London and at Drive Studios. It was mixed and mastered at London's Townhouse Studios. The Sound Defence Policy, presumably a pseudonym for Dangers, is credited for the album's production. although the band recreated what their debut album was supposed to have been like on their second album Armed Audio Warfare (1990), which takes its name from the proposed debut album and among its tracks includes alternate versions of several of the songs on Storm the Studio, some in the form of remixes and others in the form of unreleased original versions.

Storm the Studio makes heavy usage of sampling, with samples being collected onto a Casio DA1 DAT machine and then moved to a fully expanded Akai S1000. Band member Marcus Adams explained that unlike contemporaneous artists who use sampling, who Adams felt were doing it "because it's hip [ ] because Public Enemy do it," Meat Beat Manifesto used sampling "because it's a magpie thing [ ] it's like pop art. The pop artists used to take other peoples' work and make it into their own, and we see sampling as doing that, we don't see it as 'we'll use that because it's a hip sound at the moment'." According to Adams, the band would occasionally "get a track ready on the sampler so that we can sync that with the timecode, then the sampler is cued in so that when you play a record or tune in the television and as the track is running on, we can make samples which immediately go in time with the track." This allowed the band to capture certain television dialogue samples and edit them unit they were in sync with the track. The group enjoyed experimenting with different sounds to see which would be worth incorporating into the final product. Adams recorded the squeak of his sneaker on the ground, then sampled it and slowed it down, but he felt it "sounded really stupid" so did not use it on the album. Each of the four pieces are intended to fill one side of the double vinyl. Trouser Press wrote that the album stretches "the concept of the remix further than most," finding few of the tracks on the album to sound similar to any of the record's other tracks,

[[File:Burroughs1983 crop b. jpg|thumb|180px|The album is named for a sample of William S. Burroughs saying "Storm the studio" which appears at the start of the album. Similarly, Ron Nachmann of SF Weekly said the album disregarded "the genre rules of the time" in its combination of hip hop breakbeats, scratch edits, bulky samples, electro tone, dub techniques and "industrial attitude." John Bush of AllMusic felt the album combined the styles of noise rock, hip hop and "high energy dub," while Robert Christgau made note of the "industrial strength samples", "annihilating rhythm" and occasional detours into electro dance. Matthew Jeanes of Brainwashed said the album "runs the gamut from funky breaks to outright noise." Although a thread runs through all four parts of the record's opening track "God O. D.", the piece changes drastically throughout, with the ending of Part 4 bearing no resemblance to Part 1. a label who signed the group after they presented them with some demo recordings. Storm the Studio features artwork designed by the agency Accident, "Strap Down (Part 3)" was only made available on the vinyl editions and later the digital edition, with the song being removed from CD and cassette releases. Regardless, American CD releases have incorrectly listed Part 3 on the sleeve. The album had become out of print after several years, leading to the album's CD re release in the United States by TVT Records in 1993 and by Mute Records in 1994, the latter time with different artwork, designed by Rich Borge. Storm the Studio and Armed Audio Warfare were re released again by Run Recordings on 22 July 2003, newly remastered by Jack Dangers and again with redesigned album sleeves by Rich Borge."

Upon release, Storm the Studio received acclaim from music critics and was praised for its distinctive style. Among retrospective reviews, Matthew Jeanes of Brainwashed noted that although Storm the Studio was "released on the cusp of the DJ record/remix fetish of the 1990s," when maxi singles containing numerous remixes of the A side were commonplace, Storm the Studio was "about as far from a remix 12" as possible" despite only listing four songs, citing this as one of several enigmatic qualities to the album. Dutch magazine OOR ranked the album at number 25 in their list of the 50 best albums of 1989, while in 1994, Nieuwe Revu ranked the album at number 62 in its list of the "Top 100 Albums of All Time." In 2006, VPRO named the album as one of the 299 greatest albums of all time, and in 2014, Rockdelux named the album as one of the 500 greatest albums released between 1984–2004. The album is also celebrated in a brief blurb included in the liner notes of the compilation box set Black Box – Wax Trax! Records: The First 13 Years (1994).

Storm the Studio has been hailed as groundbreaking and innovative by music critics. Nix Lowrey of The Quietus noted the album's influence on the Chemical Brothers' debut album Exit Planet Dust (1995). A remix album of newly commissioned remixes of the Storm the Studio material, Storm the Studio RMXS, was released by Tino Corp on 23 September 2003. Those remixing the material on the album include Eight Frozen Modules, Merzbow and Frank Bretschneider, English producers Scanner and Jonah Sharp, and American producers DJ Spooky, DJ Swamp and The Opus. Meat Beat Manifesto have continued playing material live from the album; for their 2008 tour, which included accompanying visuals, Dangers tracked down the television clips that were used on the Storm the Studio material on the set list. During the band's sets, the accompanying visuals to the samples were displayed on screen. The band would continue to use the visuals in later performances of the material. In 2008, Dangers described Storm the Studio as "a part of me," despite admitting he rarely plays the album.