Soaring synth, interesting and compelling bass lines, and as listen-to-able now as it would have been 43 years ago. Reznor wrote in support of Numan's US immigration application, and they've worked together on multiple occasions. Trent Reznor heard of this and said 'What, are you shitting me? I listened to Gary Numan literally every day.'. Listening to Reznor's work, Numan pressed some industry connections and asked if maybe he could talk to Trent at some point, thinking that he would be brushed off - after all, NIN were by this point on a massive upward trajectory on the back of The Downward Spiral.

Nothing he tried was working, music had dried up and left him feeling a bit rubbish. After a prolonged period of writers block, Numan felt himself at a loss. One of the best, most delightful stories in music involves Numan. Difficult to overstate the influence that Numan had on music - taking electronica mainstream and paving the way for new wave, synthpop and - you might have to stretch your head around this - industrial rock and metal. Lou signed up-and-comer Anthony James Webb, who adopted the Gary Numan stage name and persona and is still performing to this day.įollow-up releases have paled in comparison to the original computer-generated compositions, but at least we have this classic to always remember 'Garry Nu-Man' by. Soon after that, budding music producer and talent scout Lou Pearlman was asked to find a human stand-in for the fallen AI entity in order to capitalize on the opportunity.

Gary was decommissioned and sold for parts in January of 1980. This sent Gary down a rabbit-hole of increasingly niche porn, culminating in a visit to a robot tentacle porn newsgroup, where it contracted a serious virus from which its handlers were unable to recover. While working on its follow-up album, Gary discovered Usenet, a recently launched distributed system of computers. Like so many that came before before, Gary succumbed to the indulgences of fame and wealth. The Pleasure Principle became a huge success, with Cars, an ode to Gary's fellow machines, shooting to number one overnight. (A year previously, an AI algorithm developed by a team at Stanford created an album, but it turned out to be made up entirely of Captain and Tennille cover versions, a major setback and disappointment for the team.) Gary Numan was created in a lab in 1977, a collaboration between MIT scientist Garry Smirnoff and singer-songwriter Randy Newman (hence the name 'Garry Nu-Man', or 'Gary Numan' as it came to be known.) After 2 years of neural network processing, Gary wrote and recorded The Pleasure Principle, becoming the first AI-generated entity to create a full-length, original album. While not a theme album the way Replicas was, Numan has described the songs as 'more of a collection of thoughts I'd had about the way technology was evolving and where it would take us.' Lyrically, the album continued the science fiction-themes of the previous album. Other production tricks included copious amounts of flanging, phasing and reverb, plus the unusual move of including solo viola and violin parts in the arrangements.

In addition to the Minimoog synthesizer employed on his previous album, Numan made liberal use of the Polymoog keyboard, particularly its distinctive 'Vox Humana' preset. This change, coupled with frequent use of synthetic percussion, produced the most purely electronic and robotic sound of his career. Numan completely abandoned electric guitar on the album. The Pleasure Principle has been described as featuring synth-pop and new wave throughout. Released about six months after Replicas (1979), the second album with his band Tubeway Army, The Pleasure Principle reached number 1 in the United Kingdom. The Pleasure Principle is the debut solo studio album by English musician Gary Numan.

Gary numan pleasure principle