80s Softcore Foley Artist Spills The Beans On His Unusual Profession

80s porn was dominated by Wakka Chooka music, pizza delivery boys, mustaches, and dozens of other stereotypes the industry has yet to shake. The sounds of the 80s porn world remain prevalent in the minds of many thanks to their ubiquity, and one of the men responsible for those sounds is speaking out in a new interview with Motherboard (link below).

Now granted, "Bob" here worked in soft core, but there was a ton of crossover in those days as far as themes, sounds, and music are concerned. "Bob" was just a regular old studio bassist when he got an offer to remix the theme song to the British softcore classic Electric Blue. His contributions to the soundtrack for the show's producer led to him working on the series for several years, adding in those familiar sounds that have become synonymous with porn.

"For some reason I will never understand," Bob told me, "she had fully edited soft core porn episodes with no sound."

So, Bob got to work. His challenge was to bring "Electric Blue" to life in post production.. To make the show sing, or rather moan. With the first multitrack audio sweetening studio in the state of Connecticut at his disposal, Bob, who asked that I give him a pseudonym, flung himself into the Foley tradition of recreating ambient and natural noise that match a film's visuals, recording the sounds of everything from gun shots to running water, crickets, birds, and cars, and of course "groans, moans, and anything else you might hear when having sex."

Right, but what about that signature sound? What was it that really drove that?

​"80s music relied on very heavy drum sounds so we were always trying make the coolest drum sounds. We had a huge stairwell in our building. We used to place a mic on one end of the stairs, and a huge speaker on the other where we would pump the snare or tom-toms through to track the biggest reverb sound you can imagine."

You can read the full interview over at Motherboard