Photek – Rings Around Saturn

Photek – Rings Around Saturn (Photek, 1996)

In my last post I wrote about Bill Riley’s ‘In At The Deep End’ and his sampling of two tracks by Pharoah Sanders. I decided I couldn’t mention the legendary free jazz saxophonist without covering Photek’s ‘Rings Around Saturn’ as it also samples one of his tracks. In fact, the tune was known as ‘Pharoah’ when it was on dubplate, and this is the name that was used when it appeared on LTJ Bukem’s seminal Logical Progression mix. It was one of the first releases by Rupert Parkes that I bought on vinyl and the sixth installment on the original Photek label. With ‘UFO’ on the A side, it’s a 12″ that sees him reach to other worlds.

Pharoah Sanders was born Ferrell Lee Sanders, but when he was starting out as a musician he was encouraged by Sun Ra to go by Pharoah. After moving to New York in 1962 he quickly came to the attention of John Coltrane, and became a member of his group. He is credited with being an influence on Coltrane’s later, more dissonant style. But he wasn’t just a sideman and has a rich catalogue of music under his own name, with the late sixties and early seventies being a particularly fertile period.

Which brings us to Thembi, his 1971 album on Impulse!, which is where Photek sourced the spacey Fender Rhodes sample on ‘Rings Around Saturn’. This was played by Sanders’ regular collaborator Lonnie Liston Smith, who revealed in a 2007 interview that this was actually the first time he’d ever played an electric keyboard, and that the track came about while he was testing it out while the rest of the band set up:

“All of a sudden I started writing a song and everybody ran over and said, ‘What is that?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, I’m just messing around.’ Pharoah said, ‘Man, we gotta record that. Whatcha gonna call it?’ I’d been studying astral projections and it sounded like we were floating through space so I said let’s call it ‘Astral Traveling’“

It’s the perfect sample for the track, the shimmering keys suggesting sunlight reflecting off Saturn’s glowing rings . One of a young Rupert Parkes’ first forays into making music was playing tenor sax in his school band and jazz, particularly 70s fusion, became central to Photek’s productions. In interviews he cited the likes of Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Roy Ayers as being influences on his work, telling Future Music in 1996 that “jazz fusion, the Herbie Hancock thing, I think is the closest form of music to jungle”.

One key thing in Photek’s productions are how samples are only used sparingly, a small segment that is then painstakingly edited and processed to achieve the sound he wants. It’s just a short phrase of Fender Rhodes that he uses for ‘Rings Around Saturn’, but it’s the break in the track that really exemplifies his approach. Talking to Keyboard in November 1997 he said:

“Like Photek #6, I don’t sample any breakbeats off records, and that’s why it takes me so long to make tunes. I’m programming like you would on an 808 drum machine by sampling, like, a couple of snare drums and a few hi-hats, and just programming them in… I’m not lifting loops off any records – I’m programming from scratch”

The main break in this track became known as “the photek break” and remained elusive to sample hunters for a number of years. This was because of how he sampled individual hits from the breakbeat and then filtered, EQed, pitch shifted and sometimes even reversed them, before re-arranging it all to create a new break, a procedure that could take weeks. He also credits the E-MU e64 sampler with making his drums sound so punchy. The combination of taking breaks from lesser known records and how he meticulously processed them made his productions unique. Eventually the source was tracked down and revealed as ‘Rock Dirge’ by Sly Stone, which appeared on a 7″ in 1971. Listening to the original, it’s hard to fathom quite how Photek achieved what he did. ‘UFO’ also uses the same break in places but I think it’s particularly appropriate here as Saturn’s rings are made up of countless tiny particles, much like his drums.

The creativity with sampling in this track doesn’t end with the drums though. Right at the start of ‘Rings Around Saturn’, alongside some skittering Plastic Jam drums and other percussive sounds, we hear the sound of rainfall. This was Photek’s own field recording from outside his house late at night, with the mic placed under wind chimes to add another layer of sound. But he doesn’t leave the sound unadorned, as he revealed to The Wire in the May 1996 issue:

“The original sample is so clean that when you’ve got headphones on it feels like there’s rain all around you… but on the record I’ve EQed it so it sounds dirty, like hiss. I’m into that old, dirty sound. My album will probably come out on a CD but sound like a 78 record”

The contrast between clinical precision and imperfection would be a running theme in Photek’s work, as shown by the version of ‘Trans 7’ that appears on Modus Operandi, his debut LP that was released in 1997 on Science, a subsidiary of Virgin. Against the wishes of label A&R Steve Brown, Parkes decided not to include the single ‘Ni-Ten-Ichi-Ryu’ on the album and replaced it with ‘Trans 7’ at the last minute. However at the mastering house he didn’t have the DAT of the track and it was mastered from his dubplate copy, complete with hiss and pops.

Someone who was clearly taking notes from Photek was Will Bevan, better known as Burial, whose records regularly feature the crackle of vinyl combined with razor sharp drum programming. Burial even sampled the rainfall from the beginning of ‘Rings Around Saturn’ on ‘Night Bus’ from his self-titled debut album. Speaking to Martin Clark’s Blackdown blog back in 2005 he said:

“I spent my whole train journey to school busting around listen (sic) to jungle. Those Photek tunes, they were like nighttime train music to me!”

The UFO / Rings Around The World 12″ was both the end of an era and the beginning of a new one for Photek. It was the last release on the Photek imprint before he signed to a major label, but it was the foundation on which his debut album was built – the same ‘Rock Dirge’ break would crop up again on ‘Smoke Rings’ for instance. He would get deeper and deeper into the process of making his own breaks and other sounds, recording drum hits and double bass notes himself rather than sampling them from records. Looking back on this era in a 2012 interview with FACT he stated:

“You know, with ‘U.F.O.’/’Rings Around Saturn’ I honestly thought, wow, I’ve just made a perfect 12?. And the thing is, they really do stand up today – even now, there’s nothing at all about them that I’d change”

Which for a perfectionist like Photek, is really saying something and I couldn’t agree more, particularly with the AA side. The way it blends hyper-edited drums with the lush rhodes sample, warm bass and other little snippets of sounds is nothing short of phenomenal. It was awarded Single of the Month in Muzik’s April 1996 issue by guest reviewer Justin Robertson who commented that “the B-side is like a jungle take on some sleazy Seventies funk track and is almost a genre in itself. This record is moving jungle onwards. It’s state of the art”.

You can find ‘Rings Around Saturn’ as well as ‘UFO’ on the Science compilation Form & Function, alongside remixes from Peshay & Decoder and J. Majik respectively. To listen to another use of that ‘Rock Dirge’ break, check out Fracture & Neptune’s ‘Dust Ball’ from 2010. To bring things full circle, you can hear ‘Astral Traveling’ sampled on Dr Who Dat?’s ‘Pharoah’s Dream’ from the excellent Beat Journey LP. Pharoah Sanders passed away in 2022 aged 81, but he left one final gift to the world with the album Promises released just the year before, a collaboration with Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra that showed his innovative streak was there till the very end – RIP.

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