The Null Device

Also on the Sisters site: a page listing all the incarnations of Doktor Avalanche, in excruciating technical detail:

Roland TR808. In the early nineties, as acid house was developing a cult around this drum machine, it was suddenly very fashionable to riff along to TR808 sounds. We did that almost ten years earlier, when the cocktail drinking classes and the NME thought it was a bloody stupid idea. (One wet afternoon in the early eighties, we switched the Doktor to play the usual stuff but twice as fast. Hey presto! Drum'n'bass! This was interesting for about ten minutes. Even Cabaret Voltaire couldn't manage to make it interesting for much longer. Please don't tell us it's interesting now.)

After talking for some time to a very suspicious secretary, we managed to get through to the awfully nice people at a certain defence contractor in Leeds. Usually they make military-specification field devices for launching bad stuff at even badder people. That sounded appropriate, so once we'd discussed the possibility of razing Lancashire to the ground (which is apparently not an option right now), we asked them to put together a computer from the most primitive components currently available - which means a fast 486 motherboard - in a shock-resistant rackmounted enclosure, with auto-switching power and a plasma display. We wanted it to run DOS 3.3 and we wanted an identical spare rig, because cargo-handlers do more damage than the average military encounter, and we like to have one Doktor running while we're fixing the other.

¶ drum machines goth gothic rock music tech the sisters of mercy 0