Dryden Hawkins and his curiously named collaborator Zeb Yek are serious about their music. Which is just as well, since if they don't take it seriously no-one else will. This is not meant to be a put down, it's just that the music they make under the collective title of The Loved One exacts the same sort of response from the average music listener that the 'loony left' exacts from a 'Sun-Reader.'

In this age of philistine cynicism, The Loved One could equally be described as avant gardiners or as nostalgia buffs. Yes, they deal in plinks, plonks, whines and groans, drawn in the main from their ageing collection of synthesizer modules, a Les Paul guitar, a gong, a koto, voices, radio interference, and from the sound emitting sculpture creations of Peter Appleton. In fact the only evidence of the modern world amongst their equipment is a Tascam Porta One.

Among the band's recent activities have been a performance at the first Oxford World Music Festival, and the release of an LP, Locate and Cement, on their own Metaphon label (through The Cartel.) The LP was recorded entirely in their own studio using for all but three tracks a TEAC 144, and after the demise of that machine, the Porta One. Whether you like this kind of music or not, it's quite hard not to be impressed by the quality Dryden and Zeb have achieved, since the sounds, especially the 'real' sounds, have an uncanny clarity, and there is a remarkable lack of tape noise and signal deterioration that would often occur in recordings that have been through a lot of bouncing down.

But first a quick word about what the studio actually contains. About the oldest instrument in the collection is an EMS Synthi, the suitcase style modular synth which is patched by inserting pins into a small, square board on the front of the panel.

"What it is," explains Dryden, "is a handy little box with lots of units and putting these pins in just makes the connections. They're really nice because their sound is far superior to these Japanese things; all the oscillators and the circuitry are valve as opposed transistor."

The rest of the equipment is made up of two Wasp monosynths, and a Spider sequencer, a Korg monosynth and the modular version of the same, all of which can be connected together via the CV inputs and outputs so as to get the maximum amount of oscillators employed on a sound. It's all a long way from the squeaky clean DXs and JXs of today, but neither Zeb nor Dryden are making any apologies for the antiquity of their musical resources.

Dryden: "As far as our music is concerned, the fact that you can actually put signals into as well as out of these machines is an advantage. On the Korg you can feed a microphone or guitar signal into the audio input and it minces the envelope of the sound, and also we use the ring modulator in the Synthi on Zeb's guitar, both of which give us a great variety of sounds."

Also used in the group's recordings are the sound sculptures, pictured here. The flowerlike cones are actually resonators which act like loudspeakers amplifying the vibrations of the string. The string itself is driven by an electro magnet fed from a synth unit, and the sounds are changed using another electro magnet held in the hand.

The rig is completed by an Akai cassette deck, a Trio hi-fi amp and a pair of unidentifiable hi-fi speakers, (circa 1975). Quite a modest little set up really considering it has produced master standard recordings.

On the band's press release they described Locate and Cement as 'a miracle of four track recording!' Certainly the quality of the final product makes the TEAC 144 seem like a very desirable piece of equipment, but in actual fact is more the result of a careful approach to recording than of the application of equipment.

Zeb: "It's all in the eq. You've got to spend a lot of time trying each thing out to see how much noise there is, knowing that you've got to bounce down. You've got to spend a lot of time eq-ing to filter out the noise. We did knock a lot of treble off, but in doing that you're getting a sound that wouldn't normally be heard on a record."

Dryden: "When I record a sound it's eq'd before it goes to tape and that helps. But also in bouncing down the trick is to do a few takes to see what needs doing, then go away from it and come back — like you do with a mix."

Because of the way Zeb and Dryden work it's not always possible for them to plan out which tracks should be recorded last in order to preserve their freshness. A large part of their output is composed while recording, building up the textures and sounds panoramically.

Dryden: "Our pieces usually start with a rhythmical thing, a drum device or something, or a vocal track. On Down The Pollen Path for instance, Angela Widdowson (a highly regarded avant garde vocalist) came here and recorded 20 minutes of vocals unaccompanied. Then we went through it to see what we wanted, scored it up, edited it and spun it off onto cassette. Then we composed the piece by listening to the voice and adding things from there."

Zeb: "But we're at an advantage having open ended synthesizers where things can be run back through, so that if you're bouncing down you can take an out from the machine and put it through a synth so you're bouncing down in a different way. You can stick it through a filter or a reverb to give it a bit of life so that you're renewing the signal every time you bounce down."

Dryden: "Also we use another technique called spinning off which we use when you've used up all your available tracks and you want to go further. On the third section of Phoenix Hairpins there's a sound which is made up of a load of bounces, then that sound is run off onto cassette and run back on when more sounds have been added. We also use it to add a lot of drone sounds and the radio sounds, when we've used up all the other tracks on detailed stuff. The drones are punched in by hand."

Zeb: "When you're bouncing down it's also better to add tracks live at the same time, and also when you're doing that you can boost the eq on the tracks that you're bouncing to make them a bit more up-front than the sound you're adding live."

Another aspect of The Loved One's music which would place them firmly in the Sun reader's 'file under loony' category, is their use of weird sound techniques; sounds which are intended to destroy your furniture, rattle your windows and scare the cat. In producing these sounds Zeb and Dryden have been influenced by the soundtrack of Seventies disaster movies like Earthquake.

Dryden: "In the film Earthquake they used sensaround sound, which was just four 70 watt speakers placed around the cinema which emitted a low frequency sound, making the auditorium seem to shake. We use what we call combinational tones where we mix sounds together so that they are so low and so dense that the room begins to get hot and things start to vibrate. It would depend on the fidelity of your system and the volume you play it at. But when you're recording, once you've got something to vibrate using sound you can do it again."

Dryden and Zeb's promise of initiating me into the mysteries of 'smoking sound' was, though, something of a disappointment. I had hoped to witness speakers disintegrating into piles of ash, and guitars bursting into flames. Unfortunately my childish whims were frustrated since 'smoking' is the description they give to notes and sounds which mingle and float like smoke in the air.

Dryden: "Smoking sound works especially well on the sculptures, where you hold a note and the physics of the resonance make the harmonics of the resonance move in and out. It's sound that isn't static. You can also do it by combining a tone with a subtle amount of white noise. We do that for wash kinds of sound, drones which start off with one type of sound and have changed by the end of the piece into a totally new tonal experience."

Thankfully it's all a long way from Baltimore and the Steve Wright fodder that makes up most of today's music, and it's not half bad either; especially good for soothing alcohol-blasted brain cells. It's something to do with the lack of appreciable logic and the clarity of the concrete sounds. All in all a surprising result from a four track.

Dryden: "I think we're quite amazed at how things have come out. All I've done is read the manual and used my ears. But if you're prepared to give it the time and use your ears I think anyone can come up with a full sounding record."