Born in London in November 1981, Adam Jansch grew up around music, being the son of influential acoustic guitarist
Bert Jansch. Through school he performed in various bands playing keyboard, guitar or bass guitar.
In 1997, after moving to Frome in Somerset, Adam became bass player for rock band
77th Cow, headed by
Alastair O'Kane. This proved to be an excellent introduction to performance outside of the school setting and led, in 1998, to Adam forming
Bellefield with fellow Cow guitarist Matt Keen and new boy Nick Baron on drums. The trio performed from home town Frome all the way to Totnes in Devon, and recorded a five-track EP entitled
Rode.
At this time Adam had started a Music Technology course at City of Bath College and created a solo project. In 2000 the
Rev Forty project was born, and over the next two years three LPs were realised:
The Day Stars Collide (2001),
Conquering Green Mountain (2001) and
One Certain Dark (2002).
2001 saw Adam start an undergraduate degree in Music Technology at the University of Huddersfield and the introduction of previously unconsidered approaches and techniques saw him change his musical direction. The underdeveloped ideas of Rev Forty became disillusioning and Adam mothballed the project. During this time Adam collaborated with fellow student Nick Dawe on
The Flat 39 Project and had also been keeping up on the bass guitar, having performed with his father on several occasions. Also, his bass playing had made its way onto two of his father's albums:
Crimson Moon and
Edge of a Dream.
2004 was a significant year for Adam, having completed his degree, composed a new album and performed more than he ever had. For a university project Adam set himself the task of writing a 30-minute album using Cycling 74's
Max/MSP programming language as the main composing tool. Written under the name
Hydletts Zoo,
Passage Through Mysterious Forests (2004) is an ambient and minimal work whose electronic underpinnings produce a haunting and unsettling atmosphere.
On the performance side, Adam was the regular bass player for
Battered Soul, a covers band organized by Andrew Lindo. He also started up
The Nursery Crymes, managing to secure a slot at Glastonbury Festival's Avalon Café stage. Finally a performance as part of the Electric Spring Festival in Huddersfield saw Adam and fellow students Keith Forryan and Christina Lockwood perform
Three Piece Suite, an electronic music performance played out on the set of a living room.
In 2005 Adam took the opportunity to continue studying, taking up a Masters in Studio Composition at Goldsmiths College, London. Notably, perhaps his strongest piece came from this period, the menacing multi-speaker
Vortex. More significant though was the creation of
The Lost Zoyd, a replacement for the obsoleted Rev Forty, and a consolidation of old and new pieces has produced the first album of the new project:
Death/Rebirth (2007).
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