Interview with: AMONGST MYSELVES
by Bert Strolenberg
Date: Oct 18 2010

Dweller through cinematic ambient landscapes and cosmic territories: an interview with Steve Roberts, aka Amongst Myselves

Steve, first of all domsketch a bit of a background on yourself as a person and as an electronic composer, as I only know your artist name originated from the Future Sound of London’s cd "Lifeforms"..

When I was very young, about 10 years old, my eldest brother had made a sound / noise generator as a project for college where he was studying to be a electronic technician. I think my father called this thing a "Beep Barp" which is the sound it spent most of it's time producing. It was a printed circuit board with a few transistors, resistors, capacitors with a few knobs. I loved this thing. I had no idea how it worked and eventually it stopped working and probably got thrown out . Maybe this was my first indicator that somewhere down the years I would come to see this as something that I'd like to investigate. My first keyboard was a little Yamaha keyboard. The sort with various dance (I mean old style) rhythms built in. The first thing I did was put my guitar chorus pedal on the output to give me something "spacey". Once I'd explored my interest in keyboards I had enough money to buy a Yamaha CS-15D which was a duo-phonic synthesiser that had a pile of pre-sets but also a basic analogue synthesiser section. It was the greatest thing as far as I was concerned. It allowed me to create sounds from scratch. Admittedly it was a simple synthesiser and had limited sound options. It sounded great until one day I decided to pull the back off and have a fiddle with some of the potentiometers and thus it never sounded the same again. They call this "hacking" these days but I wasn't really interested in noise based sounds. There isn't much that I own to this day that I haven't "pulled the back off" to have a look at how things work.

So what happened next?

Well, after leaving High School I spent 18 months at the School of Audio Engineering studying audio engineering which showed me that I didn't want to become an audio engineer but helped me learn more about composition in the sense that I would compose with the final audio mix in mind. I learnt the technical things that a creator of final music needs to get what they are after. With my interest in synthesisers growing I again "upgraded" to a Roland SH-5. This was the real deal. I still think it was a great synthesiser as I alas no longer own it. At the same time I bought a new Roland SH-101. Another great synthesiser which had a basic sequencer.