techno before techno / electro before electro

 

1980, from Akron

1977, from London via Minnesota / Denmark / Alabama / Tennessee / Quebec 

A Red Bull Music Academy piece by Christine Kakaire on the story behind Cat Stevens's innovation-anomaly "Was Dog a Doughnut?"

"Rolling Stone considered “Was Dog a Doughnut?” to be one of the few “weaknesses” of Izitso. The album review, from July 1977, took an otherwise positive view of Cat Stevens’ second-to-last album, prior to his conversion to Islam and the subsequent abandonment of his career. Yet Cat Stevens’ least likely and most covert crossover hit was breezily dispatched with the following: “The electronics on (it) are a bit too robot like.”...

... even in the context of this relatively progressive album “Was Dog A Doughnut?” remains conspicuous. There is no trace of Cat Stevens to be found. It is entirely instrumental, and rides on a rigid, stuttering drum loop. A square wave riff repeats itself across a spectrum of layered frequencies, with parts appearing and vanishing at will. A barking dog provides occasional punctuation....

In the space of one day that summer, Stevens, and his two key collaborators – multi-instrumentalists Jean Roussel and Bruce Lynch – joyfully veered off the beaten path of folksy balladeering, with little in the way of context to steer their unexpected results. What they found by accident – a synth effect that sounded like a barking dog, a sequencer that missed a pulse and defined a groove, a wormhole into the future of electronic funk – was the first draft of the blueprint needed for electronic music to come of age.

Bruce Lynch:

I had an ARP Sequencer, and it’d had a modification done by Roger Linn, who invented the LinnDrum. The modification was called one-shot, you could put an audio sound into it and it would turn it into a trigger. Click tracks were used more often than not in the film industry, playing in orchestras to film, but sequencing was not big in those days.

So we established that we were going to do a track with all this stuff that we had, just for fun. What I brought to that was the idea of putting that pulse on tape, and it worked. The ARP Sequencer relied on 16 steps and sliders that would do the pitch, and you had a little button that had a gate that triggered a note. We could only have a bar at the start. Of course it could do drums, but on this particular bit the drums were a real kit. Yusuf played the drums to a prepared click track. That was recorded to the 24 track and we mixed it down.

We selected a bar of the drums, might have been two bars, made the loop; we took a quarter inch piece of tape and spliced it together and ran it through the deck. We had to keep this tape running for the duration of the song to get it back onto the multi-track, which was in line with this little 16th note pulse that we had.

One of the most significant bits is that sometimes the sequencer would drop a bit of information, or not read the incoming pulse, and there’s one piece where this riff is happening but it dropped a pulse, so it’s actually kind of syncopated. It was not meant to be like that, it was like, “Oh, that sounds really nice.” So it stayed in.

It was a collaborative effort, we were all diving away at buttons, manipulating sliders and voltage control oscillators and filters. We were just so interested in the way of doing something that was not sitting down with a live band. It was almost a little bit self-indulgent.

"Perhaps spurred on by the mid-’70s chart success of synth pop oddities like Hot Buttered’s “Popcorn” and Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn,” “Was Dog a Doughnut?” became Izitso’s second (and final) 12-inch release, in November 1977. It fell short of the Top 40 success of “(Remember The Days Of) The Old Schoolyard"” only reaching #70 on Billboard’s Top 100 Chart. However the first hints about the track’s alternate life could be seen in Billboard’s R&B Chart: “Was Dog a Doughnut?” rose to #53 in January, the only track of Cat Stevens’ to ever cross that colour line.

Questlove: "It was really just him creating a filler cut, experimenting with some electronic instruments – he fucked around, man, and created a B-boy classic"  

“Was Dog A Doughnut?” [became] a signature track of John “Jellybean” Benitez’ DJ residency at seminal New York club The Funhouse in the early ’80s....he released a freestyle remix of it in 1984 under his own name

Not much information out there about Denis DeFrange

Denis DeFrange is a synthesist, keyboard player, vocalist, and songwriter from Kent Ohio. He helped to form the Progressive Rock band, Baby Sirloin, which played the rock circuit in Cleveland Ohio back in the 1970's. He also released some of his own solo electronic tracks on the Akron compilation, Bowling Balls From Hell. He now operates Synthsong Productions Studio in Hollywood Hills California

"Sector Wars" (it's a very Cybotron sort of title, isn't it?) appeared on this compilation on the Clone label - along with five other tracks by Defrange that are similarly synth-y and impressively atmospheric if not quite as techno-preemptive. 

The whole compilation 

A search for a Denis DeFrange interview turned up an archive of the Daily Kent Stater, a college newspaper,  and specifically a February 1980 issue that has a feature on local New Wave activity. Access blocked, unfortunately, so only this tantalising wisp was salvageable:

"In a recent interview, DeFrange explained that a synthesizer can practically play ..".