One of my favorite Front Line Assembly songs is Predator from their 1997 album, [FLA]vour of the Weak. The song features several recognizable samples, including a line of dialog spoken by Jake Busey from the 1996 movie The Frighteners, the infamous drum intro of Led Zeppelin’s When the Levee Breaks (it was pretty much law that you had to sample this drum loop in the mid to late 90s), and an aggressive whooshing sound.
That whoosh can also be found on Trent Reznor’s soundtrack for the 1996 computer game, Quake.
I own a copy of the sample disc from which the sound came… sort of. In 1999, I worked at Guitar Center in Roseville (where I met my longtime friend and collaborator Jervon Molloy) in the pro-audio and keyboard dept. One of the highly illegal perks of the job was to use the studio room to duplicate software and sample CD-Roms to blank CD-Rs.
Unfortunately, without the forethought I so desperately wish I had at that time, I labeled the CD-R “Noise Disc” in black marker, ripped it to my sound sample collection on my computer hard drive, and have never seen the original again. Fortunately, I still have the collection on my hard drives (and now it rests comfortably in one of my cloud accounts, hopefully forever redundant).
The sound collection also has sounds I’ve heard used by Project Pitchfork and other tracks by Nine Inch Nails and Front Line Assembly (and side projects).
Finding the origin of something you need to learn the name of takes a lot of work.
A few months ago, I found an 11-year-old thread on GearSpace where Charlie Clouser (former NIN member) goes into some of the production processes of Nine Inch Nails and other projects he was working on (Prong, White Zombie).
Clouser drops the name Hildebrandt, which is actually a misspelling. Keith Hillebrandt, a musician and engineer, who worked on some of NIN’s The Fragile as a sample creator and manipulator, had previously produced a sample disc called Diffusion of Useful Noise.
I’m about as sure as I can be that this sample collection that I have a copy of is Diffusion of Useful Noise. However, the only physical copy available online is $80, or I can download a digital version for $29.99 from a website that looks like it was made when the disc came out.
If anyone has any information on this collection, please let me know.
Mystery solved. The sample collection I have is A Poke in the Ear with a Sharp Stick, Volume I.
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