Mainframe consists of John Molloy and Murray Munro, a duo with a penchant for applying their imagination in many directions other than the simply musical. Whilst Chris Sievey and Pete Shelley made much media space out of their respective claims of being the first rock artists to put computer programs on vinyl, Mainframe actually got there first with their single, 'Talk to me', which included graphics programs on the 'B' side for Apple II, ZX81, Spectrum, and BBC Micro. They've now released an album, Tenants of the Lattice-work, which also looks set to achieve some sort of notoriety, on account of the fact that the record includes a competition with a first prize of an 18 carat gold 'M' worth £2,500! Also worth listening out for on the album is the Apple-based digital drum machine that they've had designed for them.

How did Mainframe come about?

JM: I answered an ad in Melody Maker to join a five-piece band that Murray was playing with in London.

MM: While we were recording demos for the band, we decided to do some of our own stuff as well. At the time, we were looking for a deal for the band, but PRT said they preferred the stuff that we'd done - they just thought that the particular material was better. So we thought we'd give it a go, just the two of us. That was about 18 months ago.

JM: As soon as we left the band, we started working on the story-line of our current album and wrote songs around it. And then, almost as soon as we'd started that, we got involved with a video company, Gothic Audio Visual, in Aldershot. We originally got involved to make a 3-minute pop video, miming to the song, but they then suggested extending it to the whole story, and that's what we did do - a 40-minute video. As we were working on the album, we thought we'd possibly have to get in other musicians to play the thing live, and then we decided at short notice, because there was an opportunity to do a concert last December, of actually trying to do the whole thing with just the two of us. So we left the bass-line and the drum track on tape and performed a version of the album with sections of the video that had already been shot.

Visuals

MM: From that time on, we decided that we were going to use visuals a lot - any video that we could get our hands on, computer graphics, and slides.

JM: A friend of ours, Colin Holgate, became involved in the project in order to write some graphics for the video, but he also ended up writing some graphics routines for the show. One of the other items of software that we used in our stage show was a graphics language from Vagabondo Software called 'CEEMAC'. It's an interesting bit of software in that the program is capable of filling in with improvisation if the user makes an error in entering the insertions. The program also looks at the cassette port, so there's a certain amount of syncing of the HIRES graphics screen to an external sound input.

A poor man's answer to programming laser graphics?

JM: That's right, it looks great with big screens. And there's also a package called 'Maestro', which puts all the graphics scores into one demo that can then be manipulated from the keyboard.

Was the name Mainframe part of a conscious desire to be a computer-based rock band?

JM: Yes, as we got involved in producing the video, having got Colin involved in computer graphics, it was pretty clear that that was the direction we'd be going in.

MM: When we first started on the video, we were hoping to have a sort of animated Mainframe logo done on the Apple... This was done with Appleworld. We were hoping to fly around it, but after spending a day at it, we realised it wasn't going to work fast enough. In the end, Colin took individual pages of images, and stripped them down with compression techniques to get better animation.

You both have Apples?

JM: Yes, and so have Colin and David Green, the guy who designed our drum machine. In fact, everybody who works with the band has now got a computer of some kind. That wasn't planned; it's just that as people have got more and more involved their interest in computers has developed. Even Graham, who's our sorter-out of everything, is using a BBC Micro as a word processor.

Apple Drums

Could you tell us something about the Apple-based digital drum machine?

JM: David came up with the drum machine just as we were about to do the final recording for the album. We then had a last-minute battle getting it into a state where we could use it for recording the album.

Up until that time, we'd used the Moog Liberation for various drum sounds and overdubbed real hi-hats and things. The first time we used the drum machine it didn't have any sequencing, so I had to tap in the sounds. But it still got over the problem of having the neighbours banging on the wall! And more importantly it produced a pretty good drum sound. We're intending to take the drum machine on the road, but not necessarily as a straight drum machine. Because of the sequencing facilities, we can write songs which involve vocal sequencing facilities, we can write songs which involve vocal sequencing of, say, chants, producing Fairlight-type sounds on the Apple. We know that it works and that it will work live.

MM: We've found that using the Teac is a very easy way of reproducing the backing tracks live - but it's also a bit too safe, so instead of using the Apple simply as a drum machine, we might use it as a sound-sampling sequencer and trigger vocal and other sounds from pads. We'll certainly be making a lot of use of the Apple sound-sampling on the next record we produce. Till now, we've had to struggle away getting our drum sounds manually, but once the drum machine came along, all this changed.

What appeals to you about sound-sampling?

JM: It's being able to take a sound you hear every day and actually produce rhythm from it.

We've been doing experiments with merging different sounds together so that a sound takes on a dual identity. Also, with Dave's waveform writer, you can draw a sound into memory and then listen to that, which is a lot of fun. You can actually create a sound which didn't exist before but which sounds acoustic. Well, almost!

MM: Also, the fact that you can repeat vocal sounds indefinitely means that it's easier to take risks. Normally, you'd have to make somebody do that, or decide to do that yourself. To actually press a button to make it happen is so much easier than going into a studio with a microphone and making weird sounds.

'Stimmung' on an Apple! If someone came to you and said 'I can't afford an Apple, why should I buy one?' what would you say to convince them of its worth?

JM: The slots in the back! It's easier to build things for it, and also there's an awful lot of things available which involve sound in some way or another. Basically, because of those slots, you can do a hell of a lot with it - you're not just limited to a basic Apple, and you don't have to wait for somebody like Clive Sinclair to bring out the next piece of add-on before you have the slots.

We're going to be working on a more complex graphics machine, because the Apple, although it was fairly advanced when it came out, has now dropped way behind. Colin's experimenting with some graphics hardware, and Dave is looking at some other sound ideas. We're really aiming to push ahead with the use of micros on stage. I certainly don't know of anyone using the Apple on the stage in this way.

It's a shame that they and other micro manufacturers in this country are taking so long to see the value of what they term 'frivolous' computing applications...

JM: Well, it comes down to the fact that they can make more money selling a package like Wordstar on a basic CP/M machine than they can on music machines. That's unfortunate, but it's a fact of life. Still, there are some people doing interesting things. I think more and more bands will be using computers once they realise the potential of things like computer graphics on both live applications and on video.

Percussion

A lot of our music uses the mixing in and out of sound effects. And I think that's where we will go, having longer sound effects together with the sampling side of things. That will make that sort of thing a lot easier. But I think we tend to work along the percussion line rather than tonally, using those sorts of techniques for percussion rather than pitch.

MM: I'm interested to see how sound-sampling sequences of sounds other than drum sounds can be used in interpreting visual information. Up till now, there's been a whole range of film music, but I haven't heard much in the way of strange, new sounds trying to express visuals.

One point about using a micro is that you can use it to present, or audition, different sound combinations using some degree of machine selection - artificial intelligence, if you like - to actually design sounds that will be captivating to the ear.

JM: Well, we're working with fairly primitive machines. Compared to what's likely to come in the near future, the Apple is really very primitive.

The software on the single was a gimmick, but because we can't afford to take out four-page adverts, it seemed a good way of attracting attention. The point about our software is that it was interactive with the music, which we thought was much more important than simply displaying the lyrics. It was a piece of software we were actually using on stage and you could, in fact, turn the lights out and plug it in to your micro and see what was going on. If you like, it was a bit like going to see a Mainframe concert in your home, or, at least, the closest you could get to it.