PRESS RELEASE: Mark Barrott’s Future Loop Foundation is just about to release one of the most extraordinary albums of the year, Memories From A Fading Room. Its production involved a very diverse set of software instruments meaning there really was only one hardware controller for the job...
Mark Barrott’s Future Loop Foundation is just about to release one of the most extraordinary albums of the year, Memories From A Fading Room. Its production involved a very diverse set of software instruments meaning there really was only one hardware controller for the job: the Novation ZeRO SL.
Mark Barrott’s latest Future Loop Foundation release, Memories From A Fading Room, is an amazing project: a highly personal album that mixes nostalgic family recordings with the most cutting edge sounds to result in what many are already calling 'the chillout album of 2007’.
“As you get older you tend to look back more at the happy memories of your childhood,” says Barrott. “I was lucky in that many of mine were documented on tape and film so I was able to take snippets of my memories in recorded form and mix them with today’s cutting-edge synths to produce what I hope is the ultimate chilled experience.”
And it certainly is that. With software plug-ins as diverse as Native Instruments’ Reaktor and G-Force’s M-Tron there are enough sounds interweaving and layering along with those spoken word snippets from Barrot’s family archives to produce a mesmerizing recording that some have already put up there, in terms of quality and direction, with the likes of Sigor Ros and Boards Of Canada.
Barrot’s studio is now almost completely software based; very different to the hardware set-up he started out with in the 80s. So in order to bring back some of that tactility and control across the array of software instruments, Mark bought a Novation ReMOTE Zero SL.
“Using software almost entirely for the new album was great and its benefits far outweigh its disadvantages,” says Barrott. “I remember the days of hugely expensive mixers, sampler, effects boxes and synths so it’s obviously great to run their equivalent on a laptop. However, I do miss their tactility and control which is something the SL has brought back for me.”
“The benefit and excitement of using the SL,” continues Barrott, “is that someone has finally got it right in terms of tactility, the Automap technology and the controller surface, It’s absolutely a joy to use. With Logic, Ableton Live and all the plug-ins I now use you can Automap stuff very quickly and get tweaking. It takes me back to 15 years ago when everything was hardware which is great.”