"we decided to make our own record"

says Hans Valentin of Mass Reaction. "We'd been working together for nearly three years and done all the usual things like sending out demos to record companies. We found ourselves getting nowhere, so we decided to do it ourselves."

The record in question, a happy blend of House and Euro-disco called 'Can You Feel The Beat?', was recorded for £35 in Hans' South London living room. The decision to go ahead with an independent single was sparked by a feature in PHAZE 1's sister magazine 'Music Technology' last August. That detailed all the processes and costs involved, and coincided with a Musicians' Union seminar on exactly the same subject. Hungry for information, Hans Valentin went along and, as in all the best fairytales, bumped into somebody important - the chairman of Immaculate Records, one of the evening's speakers.

"At the of the meeting I approached him, and said we were doing a track, and asked him if he would be interested in releasing it", Hans recalls. "A week later he phoned us up and invited us down to see him. He took the demo tape down to Midem in January and got a very good reaction. One German company actually wanted to license it directly from the demo tape, and altogether three countries were interested. That encouraged Immaculate enough to put it out in the English market."

Valentin's partner, a 26-year-old Welshman by the name of Dewi Evans, is the main "musician" in the band. Valentin, a German by birth, had written songs and worked with A-ha's producer Tony Mansfield. With Evans as the keyboard player and Valentin as the producer, all Mass Reaction needed was a singer and they could begin. In the end they opted to a hire a vocoder (a strange machine which makes the human voice sound like a Dalek) for £10. A further £25 secured the hire of a DAT (digital audio tape) player to master the track on, and that was that; no further external equipment was required. Or at least, that's what the record's advance publicity claimed...

"We've actually amassed quite a bit of our own equipment over the last three years, and that's what kept the cost of the single down", Evans explains.

Hans takes up the story: "Our setup is very simple — it's a Tascam eight-track machine and an Allen & Heath 16:8 mixer, with a Yamaha REV7 reverb, a little Drumtraks drum machine and a Roland MSQ sequencer."

Evans: "A Roland D50 is the main keboard, with an Emax sampler and Casio CZ3000, which surprisingly was used quite a lot. People don't think of it as a hip keyboard these days, but a lot of the sounds on the record were produced by it."

The original version of 'Can You Feel The Beat?' obtained only a lukewarm reception when it was originally played to the Immaculate A&R department. The stripped-down version on the B-side earned a much more favourable response, but lacked a real hook. But Valentin is impressed by the attitude of his record company - a sentiment that's all too rare among composers. He took their advice, remixed the B-side with the 'Can You Feel The Beat?' hookline, and a new A-side was born. Both members of Mass Reaction look forward to extending their links with Immaculate, and another single is already in the pipeline.

"We've been working on a new song for the last month and we're on the third version of it already", explains Dewi Evans. "They like the basic song, but they're not too sure about the approach as yet."

"They've been playing our demo to promotion people to get an initial reaction, and then they feed the reaction back to us", continues Valentin. "Hopefully we finished the backing track yesterday. It's going to be a hip-house record, with lots of vocals, and a rap as well. We've got a fantastic rapper and a fantastic soul singer from Tottenham, neither of whom have done any recording before."

You could say that Mass Reaction are going too far out of their way to make a record that'll please people. Then again, you could argue that their attitude is healthier than that exhibited bv a lot of "struggling artists". Hans Valentin gives his side of the story.

"There are a lot of people who sit at home with their four-track or eight-track equipment, and it's quite easy to get disappointed when you send off tapes and don't get positive replies. But if you can't get through the front door, try the back door. There is always a way, and if you put enough positive energy into a project you can see it through."

Evans: "We were a little bit lucky to find a company as helpful as Immaculate, but at the same time if you really want to put out a record on your own terms it is possible — as long as you've got the time and the energy. We've worked to save up to buy our equipment which anybody is capable of doing, and if you do that you can come up with results that are worthy of release."

Hans is just as positive when it comes to Mass Reaction's chosen genre — dance music. Nobody needs telling that the general well-being of all types of dance music has now reached levels not enjoyed since the 70s, while at the same time, mainstream pop has been suffering at the hands of the imagemakers...

"Personally I can't listen to daytime radio at the moment because it's so boring and clichéd", says Hans. "Something new had to happen and dance is the obvious thing. It's healthy in that it's more down to earth. The image and presentation are all very important for a pop band, but most dance singles go out with plain sleeves, and the image which the band portrays is not very important — it's just the music that speaks to you. If you go out to a club in London, out of 100 records you might only recognise four or five. It's the music that's important, not the artist behind the music."

It all sounds reminiscent of the days before video, when every song was the soundtrack to a different picture in the mind of the listener. With their grass-roots approach and their gritty dedication, Mass Reaction are a logical reaction — a rebellion against an industry that was once revolutionary, but is now horribly set in its ways.