When New Order recorded their 1983 hit single "Blue Monday," they were on the cutting edge of technology, working with brand new instruments to create the song's pulsing new wave dance groove. Using one of the first commercially available samplers, they did what anyone in their position would do: sampled their own farts.
The sampler in question was an Emulator by E-mu Systems, which first hit the market in 1981. This sampler used floppy discs to record samples, which could only be a couple seconds long.
"We recorded farts and sneezes into it," singer Bernard Sumner told the podcast Song Exploder in a recently released episode about "Blue Monday." Drummer Stephen Morris corroborated this, saying, "It was literally the first thing that we did, was to sample a fart and go up and down the keyboard."
This isn't the first time New Order have discussed their stinky sampling experiments: last year, the band's Gillian Gilbert told Far Out about the Emulator, saying, "Bernard and Stephen had worked out how to use it by spending hours recording farts."
As far as we know, none of the toots actually ended up on the final version of "Blue Monday," since the band ended up using the sampler to create the track's droning choral voices. Still, we'll never hear the song's pulsing triplet rhythm quite the same ever again. Listen below.
The sampler in question was an Emulator by E-mu Systems, which first hit the market in 1981. This sampler used floppy discs to record samples, which could only be a couple seconds long.
"We recorded farts and sneezes into it," singer Bernard Sumner told the podcast Song Exploder in a recently released episode about "Blue Monday." Drummer Stephen Morris corroborated this, saying, "It was literally the first thing that we did, was to sample a fart and go up and down the keyboard."
This isn't the first time New Order have discussed their stinky sampling experiments: last year, the band's Gillian Gilbert told Far Out about the Emulator, saying, "Bernard and Stephen had worked out how to use it by spending hours recording farts."
As far as we know, none of the toots actually ended up on the final version of "Blue Monday," since the band ended up using the sampler to create the track's droning choral voices. Still, we'll never hear the song's pulsing triplet rhythm quite the same ever again. Listen below.