Content

Fuel Records

2022

Berlin Love Parade, late nineties: amongst the floats drive two American muscle cars with Funktion-One horns rising up on hydraulics out of the boot. A stereo speaker pair, rolling in front of Tipper’s float, his bass-fueled breaks spinning on the decks. If you missed it… well, tough, it’s gone now. Or has it? Join toby*spark as he dusts off a zip disk from back in the day, and puts your speakers through their paces.

That’s the pitch for this performance project. As that suggests, there’s history here. The blurb for a Fuel Records sampler I made twenty+ years ago is a good place to start –

fuel records should have been huge, but somehow never caught the wave, or the wave somehow didn’t pick them up… depends on how you look at it, but man they had something: the music that drum’n’bass and electro should have become, artists like tipper and si begg as buckfunk 3000, and an identity light years ahead of anyone else. i was there in a field in liverpool when they bought the trailer to tour their dragster and dual dodge challenger '70 soundsystem (like, one car for left, one car for right: the 10k rolling muscle car sound system), complete with dj booth to break out the side. and i’ll never forget that trailer costing less than my £3k laptop… some deals going on, back then.
from the flyer: prepare to be disturbed. this will be played at high volume, preferably in a residential area.

so this is a bittersweet video for me, but it was the tour that set me up solo and gave me the confidence both in myself as a vj and that you could vj with just a laptop.

— *spark - fuel records [2001]

Now, years later, if I were to tell you about Fuel, you probably wouldn’t believe me. You’d turn to the internet, and see it’s just not there. That came as quite a shock, undermining a lot of what I hold dear, from the digital revolution of the time to the sheer gumption of those involved. And that’s the genesis of this project: even if the internet might not have this stuff, I have an archive, and there’s a story to tell.

So: an experimental documentary performance? A DJ set with anecdotes? I’m not quite sure what the form is, but it’s going to be me on stage, trawling that archive, with music that’s going to give the PA a work-out.

Image Credit – Props to Vice, who do have a 2001 article archived on-line. Even more unusually, it’s one where the image isn’t a dead link. And it’s a good image, project defining even. So that’s what used here. Except that the one on the website is so low-res that you can’t read the text. But – aha! – in that archive of mine was a scan of the print article. And so the salvage starts.

Diary entries

mixing fuel

had flu, and for once managed to get something out of the liminal recovery days: finally watched the endless summer, and played around with the idea of a fuel records dj set.

the latter being noteworthy publicly; there is something in that music, the imagery, the history that could make for something. working at volta by day, it would be good to be using it by night. dog-fooding our product, and exploring the terrain.

fuel zip (disk)

replacing mp3 rips made twenty years ago with lossless ones took a trip into the loft for the cds. plus an ebay order, ‘cos one wasn’t there. but at least that was possible.

one of those albums is on streaming, but beyond that, there isn’t much. fuel records doesn’t even have a wikipedia page[1].

but i do have an archive. doing visuals for the sound off tour, and generally being part of the whole thing, i made a digital raid on the office. one of the folders is called ‘fuel zip’, which it occurred to me a minute later, was called that because it was a copy of a zip disk… which really dates this.

and what else dates this? most the files are dead media. file formats of software that no longer exists, or worse: the classic Mac OS creator metadata long stripped, now just an extension-less binary blob. i find this quite depressing, especially given this all started by typing in ‘fuel records’ into the internet and there basically just being nothing there.

but there is some good salvage. a good chunk of which is down to postscript files, now converted to pdfs. though given it was these artwork files being in plain text that let them live on, perhaps pdf isn’t quite the win i imagined. they’ll be useful for this round of production, at least.


  1. though there’s a mention on Tipper’s page ↩︎

ableton... and keynote‽

there’s a 2006 diary entry i keep on coming back to professionally – showing my live cinema piece rbn_esc, or rather, what’s on my laptop screen when i perform it. ableton live and vdmx5, side-by-side. audio and visual, although it’s not quite that simple.

i have this as my basic template for whatever this new piece around fuel records may be. ableton will certainly be sequencing. but then things get… unsure. ultimately, this is an exploration of the terrain around volta – 3D worlds, hybrid performance, artist presence. but in the meantime, there’s a lot of stuff i’ve built my visual career on that’s very 2D, and very… vdmx.

cue thoughts that get very complicated and very custom, very quickly. plus the almost existential wrangling of my happily 2D, happily framed visual style into an open, 3D one.

i may yet get back to where i was going with that, custom camera engine and all, but i had a moment of realisation. this piece is, in some way, like me giving a talk, so let’s sketch it out like that, using a deck in keynote. could i actually just perform an a/v show with ableton and keynote? start there, feed it into volta. keep it simple.

this was a good call. it’s also good for the democratisation pitch of volta: i’m still going for the *spark style of video-fused motion graphics, but there’s a decent first pass achievable with standard stuff: those motion graphics are courtesy of the deck’s builds and transitions[1][2]. oh, that and my luma-crossfading *spark mixer i smuggled into volta create the minute i was on the team.


  1. keynote’s magic move transition remains a wonder of the modern world, perhaps my favourite product feature ever. ↩︎

  2. the actual performance has the deck exported into video clips, which live inside ableton thanks to the new-to-me and well-executed videosync. i’d like syphon-out per channel, but i’ll live with going via returns. ↩︎

scratch performance recording

deadlines are good, event ones doubly so. happily, there’s a kind of electronic music open-mic night locally, so i booked a slot. and then… was ill and couldn’t do it. blurgh.

so instead of the scratch performance it was going to be, here’s a scratch… recording. well, a teaser. all very first draft, but at least now there’s a thing, and it can be iterated on.

[update: ironically for a piece about reviving something forgotten, the video was subject to a rights take-down]

we all play synth » setup

four months later than planned, but finally got to this position: set up in front of an audience, ready to feel what it is to perform it… and see how it goes down.

we all play synth » perform

“thank you for that. no really, thank you. i needed that. i play si begg when friends get new speakers. it’s amazing, they love it, but they’ve never heard of it before”.
— guy in the audience, afterwards

well, there’s some unexpectedly on-point validation!

also: microphone technique / placement. i need to work on that (but that’s why you test).

horns, up and over the roof

the sound system cars are so central to the fuel records story, surely a 3D app like volta had to have a 3D model of one.

i was pretty good at 3D modelling back in the day, but that was a long time ago and even if i could remember half of it i simply don’t have the time. but the internet is a wonderful thing, and lo –

”1970 Dodge Challenger R/T" (https://skfb.ly/6C8YE) by floh is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

props for the model and thanks for sharing floh!

i gave the model a fuel paint-job, and added it to volta’s internal testing content library. that was good enough for a while, but it needed those horns rising up out of the boot and over the roof. with guidance from ari, that’s now done and the project so much better for it.

finished, ish

i’d had a version of the dj set sketched out all along, but for the longest time the full a/v work was a strong opening and then some loose ideas. no more: there’s a full set there now. finished. well, ish. it’s more the full first pass that allows you to see what the thing might be…

we all play synth, take two

i’d finished(ish) the piece in time for a friendly something that didn’t work out, and then got busy again. so hadn’t actually played it out. thinking i should fix that, i thought: we all play synth. but it was now longer than the 15min fixed slots there. well, ask, and answers sometimes present themselves. going last, there was no hard cut-off. and so, a full test.

also, microphone technique / placement. i did work on that – note now i’m using a headset mic – but it’s still so easy to get wrong (but that’s why you test, in front of a “home” crowd).

crux » four good ideas...

to crux festival, a two-day event that has come out of an ongoing series of audio-visual-ish nights in london – “a meeting space to experiment, collaborate and be entertained”.

i’d approached them looking for a scratch-space to trial my fuel performance. they said, hang on, this would suit our festival next year. so i waited, there was some confusion about whether it was a talk or a performance (understandable, it’s not a format i’ve seen around), and finally: i’m here, splitting the difference between day-time workshop and night-time performance.

Join toby*spark for a masterclass in Volta leading to an a/v performance using it – the story of Fuel Records. It’s a fun show, and will definitely put the PA through its paces.

Volta is a visual creation engine and interaction platform, the product of a London-based startup backed by Deadmau5 and Richie Hawtin among others. You’ll learn how to quickly set up 3D visuals, bring AR live cameras in, and then let the audience control it.

photo credit: guy smallman

crux » four good ideas and an iffy one

i’d imagined the 45 minutes as a masterclass, but at some point realised the greater good would be promoting some of the ideas volta is built upon. so i made a deck full of videos showing volta in action, structured around –

  • be 3D-first
  • embrace remote
  • embrace audience interaction
  • embrace yourself

why? because if you put these all together, you get

  • XR artists sustained by their fans

the iffy idea, after the volta part, was my thinking around ‘why go see live a/v’. what are the formats that might be both entertaining and fast to make? as the production behind things like rbn_esc is, nowadays, simply prohibitive.

and so: the fuel records piece

  • a classic rock album documentary for the rave generation
  • friday night on BBC4, with a club PA
  • ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

crux » fuel / two-d

finish talk, straight into performance. quite the shift, happily it was a smooth transition.

thanks to mike for the photo. this early part of the piece is a revival of my “video fused motion graphics” from back in the early noughties, a faithful recreation of the sound-off tour visuals i was making at the time. and with its big fuel logo, hard not to be the poster image for the whole piece, even if represents the old-school to now. ahem, sorry, fuel was “nu-skool” at the time =]

crux » fuel / three-d

again thanks to mike for the photo. this is from later on, a story-telling part where the ability to be in a 3D engine and quickly build-up abstracted but understandable scenes comes into its own.

on the right you can see live transcription. to think they had to cope with the words falling out of my mouth, eeek. unquestionably progress, though!

320x240 → holodeck

to rome, where live performers meeting organiser gianluca had invited me to play my fuel piece. even better, he said they had an immersive room. would i like to play that?

well, look at what i looked out at. hell yes.

to think that original fuel tour had vdmx2 running at 320x240px. to think that this contemporary revival happily runs at 11510x1080px in volta, and does so on a laptop not even breaking a sweat while pixel-mapping that onto 2x 4k outputs and running ableton.

narrator / narration

when this started i knew me talking was going to be a part of it, but didn’t really know whether it was like a dj namechecking the songs or something more. you can see here it’s something more.

part of that is my pose, but also: thinking about how my colloquial spoken english might come across, i have made italian “subtitles”. just they’re not subtitles. they’re “in-situ titles”. as you can better see later, they’re placed in the 3D scene, the letters solid objects. it’s a big thing, i think: technically, creatively, accessibly.

photo credit: elizaveta yudina

single screen start

the piece starts flat, framed, 2D. it’s part homage to my visuals of the time, and part a pacing trick, holding back the 3D to come. that’s what you can see here, and in any other gig it being the whole wall behind me would be the talking point…

photo credit: elizaveta yudina

immersive reveal

…but the immersive room meant i could hold that immersion back. and what a reveal. being surrounded by the imagery is obviously transformational, but perhaps more visceral is the spatial movement. the virtual camera moves in the 3D scene, before devices to alter the composition of a flat, framed view, now make the world flow around you, moving to the music.

painterly finish

perhaps my favourite image of the performance. admittedly a single cherry-picked frame of video, not entirely representative of the moment, but nonetheless seeing this soft, painterly look inspires me.