"We are the interpreters of the rhythms of the city. We have turned the blight of urban decay into art."
B.P. Service is the vision of B.P. György Szabó. It is music that is industrial in the truest sense of the word. B.P. Service is a sound, and a man, far ahead of its time. His music is a statement of one man's radical attitude towards art.
György Szabó was born in Budapest in 1952. His father was a music teacher and as a child, György learned a variety of instruments. Though he grew up in a musical household, he was never satisfied using traditional instruments in accepted ways. In 1981, he formed The Electric Petting Band with the goal of using traditional instruments in new ways, which laid the groundwork for the formation of B.P. (Budapest) Service in 1982.
"I wanted to destroy all accepted forms of music with B.P. Service," he said. "At the time, New Wave was very popular and it was hard to gain a forum for radical musical ideas. Then someone made me this noise generator which finally gave me the musical feeling I had sought for so long."
At the time, György was finishing art school while exploring new modes of musical expression and industrial music was a new and misunderstood musical genre. The noise generator he had been given struck him as industrial art and he began making his own noise generators, vast sculptures fashioned from junk he would find in salvage yards.
"I could now manipulate these generators to get the tones I wanted and lay over samples and recorded sounds. I made dozens. Some of them lit up and I would use them for my live performances. Others would emit a drone, while still others I could manipulate the pitches and volumes. Only the drums remained in the traditional sense, and those only for rhythm. When I heard Einstürzende Neubauten, I finally felt I wasn't alone."
With B.P. Service, he captures the true sounds of sprawling urban metropolises. But far more than mere sound effects, György fashions them into intricate rhythm tracks and melodic nuances. The raw recordings for this album were done in just under two weeks in 1993 in Hungary and it was mixed in America.
György notes that his ultimate goal is to capture the sounds of the world's great cities and turn them into music and records. "I have used the sounds of Budapest for this album, but each metropolis has its own sounds and I hope to capture them and interpret them on future releases."
"The noise of the city is all around us," he observes, "We cannot escape it. For this record, I have sampled everything from factory sounds to car washes. Over these samples I have put my own sounds from these noise generators."
In 1995, György's noise generators will be shown at a huge exhibition at the Mücsarnokban, Hungary's leading art museum. "My generators serve a dual purpose in that they are art as well as functional. My music is an extension of the energy inherent in these objects."
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