In Your Memory

Notes

Will Mowat interviewed the band while recording In Your Memory for Electronic Soundmaker & Computer Music magazine, issued April 1984. Alan explains the recording process of the song. Will writes:

"I wrote this song using a Jupiter 8 and Drumulator recorded onto the Teac Portastudio. The bass riff was hand-played because sequencers waste so much time on demos. Then came the melody line and other little bits. By the time I've finished all the instrumentation I've usually got the lyrics and then the song is put to the band." Where this writing differs from perhaps more conventional writing is that chord changes are far less important than you would have thought: the use of sound changes takes their place to produce atmosphere, and the attention is on lyrics, melody and sound. This particular song was accepted as the 'B'-side to People are People, and so the next stage was the recording. Alan reprogrammed the Drumulator with the exact pattern he wanted, although they no longer use the Drumulator's sounds; the Roland MC4 microcomposer, which was the composition tool of Danny's before the Synclavier came along, was then linked to the drum computer, and the MC4's sync tone was then recorded onto the 24-track at exactly the right speed. After that, all operations were synched off tape via the MC4: first the drumulator's individual sounds triggered specific sampled drums in the Synclavier: the snare was recorded at Hansa in Berlin, their favourite recording spot; the bassdrum is a sampled composite of a metal pipe being struck followed by the natural decay of an acoustic bassdrum, and so on. Then Alan played the bass riff on the Jupiter by hand(!) into the Synclavier, in time with the drums; the computer quantised Alan's playing to pulse time, and the notes were then used to trigger that mainstay of Depeche's sound down the years, the ARP 2600. After that came triggered sequences on the ARP via the ARP analogue sequencer, hand-played Emulator choirs, random synthesised 'bells' in the Synclavier. Oh yes, and David Gahan's vocals, of course!

Lyrics

In Your Memory

Put up the barriers

Shut down your senses

Cover up with all of your pretences

See no evil

Your eyes are blunted

We are the hunters

We are the hunted

Place it in your memory

Leave it in your past

But don't forget

Taking a tumble

I'm taking a dive

Sometimes I stumble when my mind's made up

Reaction levels

Seem strangely muted

Ordinary acts of fun have been diluted

Place it in your memory

Leave it in your past

But don't forget

Songwriter: Alan Wilder
Publishing Information: ©1984 Grabbing Hands Music Ltd/EMI Music Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.

Dates where In Your Memory was played

In Your Memory has never been played live.