page_title: Perverse (album)
section_title: Recording
hierarchical_section_title: Perverse (album) / Production / Recording
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: sintetizzatore Roland JD-800
context_page_description: Perverse is the third studio album by British rock band Jesus Jones, released in 1993 on Food Records. After their international success following the release of Doubt, Jesus Jones, especially band leader Mike Edwards, conceived Perverse as a darker, more contemporary album. Fusing rave and techno music into more traditional rock and pop song structures, the album is heavier than its predecessors and features lyrics that concern the future. Edwards wrote the lyrics of the album during the band's 1991 tour, using a Roland W-30 sampler to conceive songs in their earliest stages.
  According to Trouser Press, Perverse "enjoys the historical distinction of being the first album recorded entirely on computer." The band recorded the entire album onto floppy disks in Edwards' house, which were then used on his computer to turn the music into "zeroes and ones". The music, therefore, only exists as frequencies. Edwards described it as "the second rock album of the nineties," after The Young Gods' T.V. Sky, due to both albums embracing full-on computer technology. Although the band were ridiculed at the time for the recording process, it later became an influential technique.
context_section_description: Edwards' aim for recording Perverse was to take the techniques and 'attitudes' of techno, a genre he viewed as the "most progressive and creative form of popular music at the moment," but use them to create a rock album. He chose this method partially as a concept and partially as he believed creating a rock album with this method would be a success. He told one journalist, "ultimately it made things more interesting for me as a writer, mostly because of the degree of editability at every stage of what you do - notes, timing, sounds - as long as the data exists, it's all changeable."
  One of the first ever albums to be wholly recorded through a computer, the music on Perverse was recorded onto floppy disks over two and a half months from 1991–92 at Edwards' house in north London, and was produced at London's Think Studios. The album cost almost £100,000, almost five times as much as Doubt, and was produced by Warne Livesey. Edwards summed up the recording sessions: "We did it in a classic techno way. I have an Atari and Cubase. I'd write all the songs on it, and the rest of the band would come in and play all their parts into the computer, using MIDI guitars and drum pads."
  While recording the album, Edwards "turned every song into binary codes, then fiddled with them until he had achieved a suitably hi-tech noise." With the entire album being recorded into the computer, "the whole album only existed in frequencies." Jerry de Borg's guitar is presented at 300 Hz to 8 kHz. The Roland GR-50 guitar synth was used to load the album's guitar parts into the computer. Al Jarwoski's bass, meanwhile, became 20 Hz to 4 kHz, and as such, "there was no such thing as bass on the record," writers journalist Mark Reed. The rest of the band are also credited unusually on Perverse; the band's percussionist Gen for "drum type sounds," Iain Baker as "omnipresent," and Mike Edwards himself for "first generation (unsampled) vocals, and sole writer."
  The album is shaped by the prominent usage of the Roland JD-800 synthesiser, which follows each previous Jesus Jones album in that the others also used a new piece of technology which shaped the music. When Edwards first started writing the songs on Perverse, he envisioned the album as containing "these big buzzy synths, basically the equivalent of heavy metal guitars, but more exciting because less cliched", and felt the JD-800 "was perfect for manufacturing hard, unusual sounds. The sounds I made on the JD are always the ones that our sound guy has to turn down." With Edwards having sequenced the album's music on his Cubase, Livesey continued to work on "structures, editing sounds, putting in subtle wooshes and swishes," which Edwards described as "enormous attention to detail." Edwards' vocals, which were recorded after the music, are the only live element to Perverse.
  In a 1992 interview prior to release, Edwards christened the album "the second rock album of the nineties," after T.V. Sky (1992) by The Young Gods, recorded in a similar fashion. Explaining this to Graham Reid of Elsewhere, he said "That's not me blowing my own trumpet. What I'm saying is, for us to make an album that reflects the society we‘re living in we use computer technology. That’s a very natural thing to do - why isn’t everyone? Why is it the retro stuff is getting the front covers when new music is what it’s supposed to be about? I’ just trying to draw attention to the fact nothing is going on - and everybody knows it."
caption: Perverse makes prominent usage of the Roland JD-800.
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