Initially, there is something about Add N to (X) that is so ridiculously pretentious all you can think of is a Fast Show sketch, featuring an asexual man with a goatee beard and a cappuccino going nice ! But as a great wise man never said, balls to first impressions.
Add N to (X) were born when a certain Barry Smith, on the dole and with little prospects bar an occasional DJ gig, found a discarded MS20 synthesiser in a bin in Piccadilly Circus. Thus was begun a meeting of like minds and electronic inclinations that became London s most dysfunctional sounding, confusing, occasional brilliant and occasionally downright awful trio Add N to (X).
I never picked up a guitar, I hate guitars, Smith exclaims. They are the most boring instruments in the world and men playing guitars is the most boring thing in the world. Like, take the amount of times I ve heard Stairway to Heaven played really badly in music shops!
Music, no matter who you are or where you are, you can actually do it, he insists. You don t have to have gone to a certain school to be able to do it. It is entirely about your ideas and you can form your ideas very cheaply and very quickly through music. Music is the best way of explaining your ideas as in it is the cheapest form and can reach the largest number of people. It is like a terrorist form of communication without the actual physical harm that those people do because you can circumvent so many things like political lines, gender lines, sexual lines all those things. They can become completely irrelevant. And it s all show business as well!
So, what artiste or record inspired Add N to (X) to become self-proclaimed electronic generation terrorists?
There is not any one any one band that I would regard as inspirational, says Smith. I could say that Anthony Newley wrote the first electronic pop song, not fucking Kraftwerk, but it never got released. Everyone s got his or her own personal history of it. I m really proud of what synthesisers do and the images they can create, and for me I wouldn t want to work with anything else.
For me electronics is something that you can get deeper and deeper and deeper into it. There is no lineage. There is no past or future or answers. There is just now where everything can co-exist.
Avant Hard is out now on Novamute.