Trance and techno pioneers Juno Reactor began life as a loose and lively art collective. Head honcho, Ben Watkins, fondly remembers the time he and his wife drove a surface-to-air missile past Big Ben as an anti Gulf War protest.
As the ’90s soldiered on, he and his ever-evolving lineup focused more on the music, turning out three albums that pushed the envelope for the electronic music genre, before work began on their masterpiece – Bible Of Dreams.
The album was pieced together in Watkins’ Dickensian warehouse over by Shoreditch, a studio space made sonically perfect thanks to a recently installed system that was hand-crafted by sound expert (and now Watkins’ label boss) Robert Trunz.
“That changed it all,” Watkins says. “He put in a really big Raindirk Symphony desk, which is really quite specialised.
Robert actually first started making desks for Deep Purple, and what he built rattled the whole building.
“That desk was amazing. It had this really beautiful EQ. And when you pushed the bass end, it just purred at you. That made a massive impact on the music we could make, because suddenly we had a three-dimensional sound in the studio.”
Watkins began to create bass-heavy, 360° soundscapes, pulling live African percussion, Middle Eastern influences, live vocalists, rock guitars, and analogue drums into the mix.
Developing themes across the album’s tracks were inspired by the concepts of dreams, death, religion and sharks, all while finding space for sampling actual Formula 1(1994) and (1956).
