Thinking out loud...

[wub]

Machine Love: Peverelist and Kowton



Ryan Keeling discovers the no-nonsense working methods behind one of UK club music's best collectives.

You can build a big studio. Spend thousands on gear. Employ the best engineers. But really, when it comes to club music, nothing beats capturing a feeling. Peverelist and Kowton will be the first to admit that they're not production experts. They don't own expensive equipment, and up until recently they wrote most of their music on simple software setups. But what they do both have is a killer knack for building grooves, and an uncanny ability to distil 20 years UK dance music into a style they can call their own.

Both Peverelist (Tom Ford) and Kowton (Joe Cowton) were respected solo artists before they linked up with Craig Stennet, AKA Asusu, to form Livity Sound, their record label and live performance moniker. Ford was a key player in Bristol's early dubstep scene, releasing and producing music through his Punch Drunk label and working behind the counter at the city's Rooted Records. Cowton also built his name in Bristol, turning out twisted takes on house, grime and techno, and working at Idle Hands, the record shop that opened following Rooted's closure. When Ford and Kowton wrote Beneath Radar, Livity Sound's first release, in 2011, it's very likely they had no grand plan for the label—the pair discuss all of their work in very casual terms. But what grew from that first collaboration was one of the strongest discographies of recent times. (RA voted Livity Sound as our favourite label of 2013.)

When I met with Ford and Cowton in London recently (Cowton is now based in the city), it became clear that their simple means of production is reflected in their attitude to making music: they take a no-nonsense approach to their craft, jamming on a small array of gear until they hit on something they're feeling.

When did you first sit down in the studio together?

Kowton: What year was it?

Pev: Probably three or four years ago, something like that.

Kowton: 2010 I reckon. We talked about doing tunes for quite a while and then, being Bristol, these things take quite a while and then we eventually kind of—

Pev: Did that one tune ["Beneath Radar"]. I think we made some attempts to make some stuff and then got so far with a tune we kind of liked the vibe of and couldn't quite finish it. So we each decided to take home the bits and do our own versions of it.

So when you say things take time in Bristol, what do you mean by that?

Kowton: There's a relaxed attitude to getting things done in Bristol at times.

Leading up to getting in the studio together, was there common ground that you found you had?

Pev: I think whenever we do music together we normally spend more time talking about music than we do actually making music. But we definitely had similar ideas of what we were into and what we wanted to be musically, I think, and we just kind of build on it.

Kowton: It kind of came through the record shop, didn't it? I guess from when Tom worked in Rooted, I'd buy a lot of stuff when he was behind the counter. Then when Chris [Farrell] opened Idle Hands, Tom would come in and I'd be behind the counter, and we'd still be talking about the same things. I think it's one of those things where you end up in little pockets of music scenes, and this little pocket was maybe me and Tom and Chris.



Speaking very broadly, what would you say the overlap is in your tastes?

Kowton: I think it's a no-nonsense kind of thing. What makes UK music stand out for me is that it's always very to the point, it's minimalist without being overly considered. Maybe that's what we share, the desire to do the absolute minimum with maximum effect. You look at all the stuff that we are kind of into that crosses over, all the grime or all the early dubstep or Detroit techno or German techno, the early stuff, you know that's what kind of ties them all together.

So an attitude more than anything?

Pev: Yeah, I guess so. I'm hopeless at analysing these things. I guess it's more of a natural thing that you build up over time just through listening to music.

Kowton: Almost like the filter is a kind of a set of unwritten criteria that you just carry with you, and those criteria change...

So you're almost saying that you wouldn't need to discuss those things—they just happen, and it's something maybe you can reflect on afterwards?.

Kowton: Yeah, I think so. I think when we are working together, there are definitely moments when it's like, "Why is that bit there, what's that doing, why have you done that?" Then I'll go, "Alright yeah, that makes sense," and you don't need to explain it—"Oh that's peripheral, that's nonsense."

Pev: Or you'll have a moment when you're like, "Oh that sounds great," and it's obvious.

Kowton: Yeah, and then there can be three elements running at the same time, just a bassline, a hi-hat or whatever, we'll leave it like that—don't change it.

Do you remember what your studio setups were like when you first started working together?

Pev: I've always been computer-based. It's only been more recently I've been getting into doing hardware stuff. I've been using Ableton for two or three years, but before that I was using FL Studio, just really basic stuff. I've never really been that kind of techy or knowledgeable about these things. I always used basic equipment to get the best results I could, really.

I remember when we visited your place for the Real Scenes film— I guess it was 2011—I'm pretty sure you were just running FL Studio and a MIDI controller. Was that the case for a number of years?

Pev: Definitely, and that was very common in the UK scene. The circle that I was in, a lot of people used FL Studio or Reason for years.

Kowton: It's kind of an unspoken thing isn't it? Probably a lot of the biggest tunes in the past ten years were written on almost rudimentary software, and everyone kind of pretends, "Oh I edited it like this," and "I did it like that," but you just put a bunch of sounds in the right order and it sounds fine.





Do you remember why you started using it, Tom?

Pev: I think that was pretty much the only programme I could get hold of when I started doing it years and years ago. I remember when I first started wanting to make electronic music, it was before people really had computers and everything was hardware back then, and it was really expensive to get into, you know, really prohibitive for young people unless you knew someone with a studio. But as people started getting their own computers and that became more affordable, that's how the UK scene kind of reinvigorated with grime and dubstep in the early 2000s, because young people had computers. There was a lot of new software about that facilitated that music scene to happen and shape the sound.

So Joe, you were also using FruityLoops for quite a few years?

Kowton: Yeah, I think I switched to Cubase maybe five or six years ago, and then to Logic a couple of years after that. They're all fine, they all pretty much do the same job at the end of the day. It's just what you're used to, whatever you can use to get your ideas down quickest. There used to be all that chat about certain ones sound different and certain ones colour the sound and blah blah blah. They're all so kind of practically neutral now, I don't really think it matters that much.

So at the point you started working together were you also running quite a basic software setup?

Kowton:I just had Cubase SX 2 I think, something like that, not really exciting. I had that and an outboard EQ that I always use, and I think that's about it. I've been lucky over the years that I've known people who have bits of equipment, so I got to borrow a Moog Voyager for quite a long time.

That's decent.

Kowton: That's fucking brilliant. Or I had a [Roland] 202 for a bit, a Korg PolySix—all these things that are lovely, but I've never actually owned any of them. It's kind of nice with where Tom is at now to have things that sound like that on tap. If I work with Matt [Julio Bashmore] down at the Red Bull, studio he's got the Jupiter-8, Yamaha CS60 and all this kind of shit, and it just sounds fucking amazing.

What were the first steps you took to incorporating hardware into your setup?

Pev: I guess it was when we decided to have a go at doing a live set as Livity Sound, which is something that none of us had ever done before, so it was a new challenge. We spent about six months knocking around ideas, trying to work out how we could approach how to do it in a way that is interesting to us, and add something to the music. I think doing a live set, you have to do something more interesting—otherwise you might as well just play the records.



And with there being three of you as well.

Pev: Yeah. So we kind of devised a way where we were kind of happy presenting the music live, and it was just a case of picking up bits of kit that we could use to incorporate into that, really.

Do you remember what some of those bits of kit were?

Kowton: Was it the Jomox?

Pev: Yeah, I think we knew we wanted to get a drum machine so we picked up this Jomox, the XBase 999, and I think Craig [Asusu] had a few effects and stuff, and it was just a question of incorporating it all together.

Kowton: We had a tape delay, didn't we? But yeah, we came up with this way of pasting together what we already had as material, split into stems and drum machines, and gluing it all together with the effects. I think that was really when all the outboard effects came into play. I don't think we could have done it without them at all.

Pev: The effects is the glue that kind of brings it all together and gives it a dynamic which makes it feel exciting.

Kowton: I think you can get a kind of immersiveness: if you've got a tape echo that's repeating on itself, and all this flange, and all this reverb going, it kind of adds another element to the music. Perhaps you wouldn't want to hear it on a record, but in the live environment you get lost in the middle of all of that.

When you first started using hardware, did you find it made an immediate impact in the way you were working? Did it change the flow?

Kowton: I think it became apparent that if we were going to start playing these things live, it made sense to write with them. Immediacy is the key word: we could sit down and jam something out, and it could form the backbone to a six-minute track. That track "Jumps" that we did, do you remember that one? That was literally an hour playing around with loops and then we took it to the Dubkasm Studio. They've got this big old 20-grand desk, and we just live effected it there, and that's what it is: a kind of very primal drum track with a few effects on it, but it kind of carries itself, hopefully, for the full six minutes.

It's interesting how your relationship between live and studio has blurred. Do you tend to think about eventually performing the tracks while you're writing them?

Pev: I mean for me, I didn't make this kind of big switch to hardware. When I'm producing on my own I'm very software based, and occasionally I might use some samples, some hardware, but I prefer doing stuff in the box. When we are doing stuff together I think the hardware is more useful. When you are doing a collaboration there's nothing worse than two people sitting at a computer screen. It's not conducive to doing anything good. So we've kind of found it very useful to have—it creates a scenario where you can both be doing stuff, jamming stuff out, and work on ideas in a more immediate way, and you can create more of a vibe. (More than you can when arguing over who's controlling the mouse for the next 10 minutes.)

What is a typical starting place for you guys when you're writing?

Kowton: I guess it would be the drums, wouldn't it, Tom?

Pev: I think that's a good way of getting a vibe going quickly.

You have two drum machines, is that right?

Pev: Yeah at the moment. We've got the Jomox one and we've got the Vermona one.

Kowton: The Vermona's kind of good for the bottom-end, best for kicks. The Jomox has got a kick, but it's just so thumpy that we don't tend to use it so much, so we use that for the top-end.

So essentially we'd fire up the Vermona, get something we're happy with, then jam some percussion on top. We'd then stick it through the desk, put a couple of effects on it and see if it's got legs. I think that's the key thing: you get better at knowing what might make a tune and what might not.





Are you usually recording the entire time?

Kowton: I think probably not. I think it's literally—let's just jam it and if it sounds good, that's fine. But I think it was Public Enemy who used to jam for an hour and go, "That's the good bit." But we jam for five minutes, and if it's no good, you know, just stop and start again.

So are drums always the starting place, no matter if you are working together or solo?

Pev: Yeah, generally.

Kowton: I think if you are doing percussive music, the drums are everything. Well not everything. I guess everything else is just kind of decoration to kind of sustain that groove through the track you know? When you are in a club or anything like that, that's the bit that matters, if it's got a groove that doesn't carry then there's no point.

Do you remember what attracted you to the drum machines you were using?

Pev: Well I didn't want to get any Roland stuff. There's no point sounding like every other record for the last 30 years.

Did you notice a difference in how hard your music hit in the club?

Pev: It was more obvious in the live show. I think we were surprised, you know: "Oh that sounds great on the system."

Kowton: I think the second show at fabric Room 1, wasn't it? We did the soundcheck beforehand and yeah, hearing the drums straight through the main system was like, "Fucking hell." We just went and stood on the floor for a bit. It's kind of not often that you put on a record and think, "Oh my god, that sounds that good," whereas that drum machine unaffected sounded amazing.

Do you feel almost that inadvertently these drum machines have shaped the sound of Livity in a way?

Pev: I think yeah in parts. I still work with a lot of samples as well so it's a combination of the two. The way you use samples can sound really different from drum machines. One of the tracks we did last year was much more breakbeat-led, a track called "Aztec Chant," so that's the other side of the coin. It's definitely a combination, we've never wanted to lean too hard on the drum machine angle, but it's definitely part of the sound.

Do you tend to run the drum sounds through processing?

Pev: Well yeah, a combination. Sometimes we'll use the hardware effects, and then sometimes a bit of more post-production stuff and a bit of EQing and compression, but a lot of the time it's quite raw, isn't it? Maybe bit of reverb, a bit of EQ.



How anal are you guys about the mixing and engineering side of things?

[Both laugh]

Kowton: I think there's something to be said for just leaving things as they are. You know my approach is just to warm everything up a bit, and then as long as there isn't loads of mud in the bottom-end then it's kind of fine. When you can hear people have scooped out frequencies all the way though, every last little hit, you maybe get a louder mix, but it sounds a little over-processed. I'd rather have it warts-and-all.

I think when you play some of our tunes out, even off the records, they come in and they sound like juggernauts, really like brr-brr-brr, and I like that, you know—I'd rather that.

When you say you "warm things up," what would that entail?

Kowton: Either just through Tom's desk, or I've got this valve EQ that's really good for that. It's not the most expensive thing in the world, but if you run things through it three or four times… It's a TL Audio Ivory Series. I know people who are using Culture Vultures and things like that. I think they're like £1,400 each, and then this valve EQ is like £150—it's fine, it's almost as good, not quite as good but almost as good.

On the kit list you sent me, there were a couple of interesting outboard bits, particularly the Ekdahl Moisturizer spring reverb. Could you tell me about that one?

Pev: Yeah, that's our quirky bit of kit. It's basically a spring reverb and it's got a built-in filter and the springs on the outside. It's caused chaos at some of our gigs where some over-enthusiastic members of the audience have decided to get involved.

Kowton: We played in Malmö to about ten people, like our third gig, and there was a drunk Swedish woman in the front row just basically twanging the spring back and forth while I was trying to play. It was pretty funny.

Pev: It's got this—how do you describe the sound?

Kowton: Aquatic.

Pev: It's not subtle. Which is kind of what attracted us to it, I think.

And there was the Ibanez multi-effects one as well. Isn't that typically for guitars?

Pev: Yeah, I think it's like an early '80s guitar rack effects basically. The delay on it is OK, but we use it for the flanger—it's got a really cool flanger.

Kowton: We've found that flanging is the most crowd-pleasing effect in our arsenal. There is a lot of shouting at Craig during a live set: "More flange—we need more fucking flange!"

I think we've found that there are somethings that you can get from hardware that you can't get using software. For example the flanging or the reverb off the moisturiser... just haven't really used any software that's really sounded as good. So perhaps for, particularly kind of, say we've got something particularly minimal, using one of them will really bring the track alive. I think it's almost the difference between using the reverb as like a subtle reverb to you know, having the background of the mix or using the flange as a defining factor in the track. If it was going to be that important to the track as a whole then we'd probably use the hardware.





It seems that things like reverb, space and silence play a big role in your music. Would that be a fair assessment?

Pev: Yeah. Our normal process is to get loads of stuff down and then get rid of the parts that are surplus to requirements. That's kind of the process we go through. Is this sound necessary? Do we need this? Can we take that out? What we are left with is maybe some bare bones, but hopefully it works.

Kowton: I find a lot of music over-cluttered. With a lot of records that I've bought and try and play, there's just too much going on. Tom shares a similar perspective.

Were you guilty of that yourselves on your earlier productions?

Kowton: [Laughs] Yeah most definitely.

One thing that strikes me about your studio is you're not using many outboard synths, but you seem to have quite a lot of effects units. Is there a reason for that?

Pev: I don't think we've ever been that strong on melodies, particularly—it's never really been a part of our sound to be honest. I occasionally use software synths. It's more drums, isn't it? Drums and basslines, that's kind of the main feature of what we do.

So where does your melodic content come from usually?

Pev: Maybe more sample-based stuff. Pitching samples around and that kind of thing—we're not analogue synth heads or anything like that.

Kowton: There's not many synths I like the sound of, to be honest. I had that Moog for ages, [Pev] bought a Dave Smith Tetra—it sounds alright, but it's just like there's nothing quite doing it for me. When you are taking samples from things, especially taking old jungle pads—that's, like, the sound, slightly melancholic, dayglo kind of pad sound. You know it's easy just to sample that, because that sounds like you wanted it in the first place rather than having to buy all the kit.

I think the lineage of a lot of the music we are into is that most of the synth sounds in them were sampled anyway. I was chatting to Benny Ill after he played in Bristol once, and he was saying in the early '90s, what had happened for years was UK people were sampling pads they had heard from US people, who in turn sampled them back, then back and forth with the same sounds. He said you could list 20 or 30 tunes that have got the same sound in it, just because no one had the synths, everyone just had the samplers. I'm kind of quite happy sticking with that idea.



And are you tending to sift through your own record collection for sources, or do you go out of your way to dig through bits?

Pev: I've got ten years of samples on the hard drive that I've never used, and that I can kind of delve into randomly and pick stuff out.

So these days which DAWs are you using?

Pev: I just use Ableton. You use Logic don't you, Joe? I think I've tried all of them, and I find Logic and Cubase just too… they're just not easy to get to grips with. With Ableton it's a lot more obvious, and you can get started easily, whereas Logic is just a blank sheet.

Generally speaking, does your approach tend to differ when you are working solo versus working together?

Pev: Yeah, I think it's different. When you're collaborating, you bounce off other people's energy. Certainly for me when I'm working by myself things are more kind of considered and thought out.

Do you think you have a higher success rate working together?

Pev: It's hard to say.

Kowton: I think we've written some good tunes.

Pev: But in some ways you'll do stuff and it will be complete rubbish—at the end of the day you'll think that's complete rubbish. That's the process: as long as you can accept that some days it goes well and some days it doesn't then you can make it work.

Joe, what's your general approach at the moment when working solo?

Kowton: Still writing a lot of stuff travelling, just a laptop, but again, using the studios at Red Bull to record stuff in. Whatever I've got on my laptop, really, but it all comes from a good source in the first place. So it's basically doing the leg work each time I'm in the studio, so when I'm travelling I can be like, "Rearrange that, rearrange that…"

Joe, it feels to me like you've been experimenting with distortion and noise a lot more in recent years. Where does this stem from?

Kowton: I can't remember why I started doing it. I think after I bought that valve unit, I kind of found it gave things such a nice edge, it rounded off some of that digital sheen, and felt like you could get away with having even less, like just a kick drum and a beat, and that was sufficient. The sonics and the harmonics it added are enough to sustain the most simple of loops.





So it almost comes to down to fine tuning?

Kowton: Literally. Absolutely the bare bones, and anything that facilitates that.

You're living in different cities now. Do you have plans to write more music together?

Pev: Yeah. We've got a few things on the go, but it's always been quite casual how we've worked together. Obviously we both do our own stuff as well, but we don't have a business plan or a pragmatic approach to doing it, it's always been quite casual and when we find the time, and kind of being a fun thing as well—not being forced.

As you do approach it so casually, are you surprised at how popular and successful everything connected to Livity has become? Not surprised, that's a bad way of phrasing it, but you gained a lot of attention in the last year. How do you deal with that moving forward?

Kowton: I think there is a slight worry that we don't become stagnant. I think because it took so long to get it all together, and that we live in different cities and Craig is away too sometimes, it's not easy to be there week in week out developing this stuff. But the only pressure is to keep it moving forward.

Pev: To what?

Kowton: You aren't even listening are you? To keep it moving forward and to pay attention while being interviewed.

Taken from here - http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?2102

[Samuel_L_Damnson]

That was a good read ^

[wub]

This is a great post today on another forum where Hans Zimmer replies to a question on how to sound like him. Some good advice for computer-based programmers and musicians....

The link is here if you want to read the whole thread:

v.i. control forum • View topic - Hans Zimmer Sound? [ Guest ]

but the relevant post is snipped below:

"Re: Hans Zimmer Sound?
Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 3:52 am
...To answer the original question a little bit, with some random thoughts:

Start with a concept of your sonic world. Limit your palette to fit the sonic world you're trying to create - you can get lost and never write a note if you scroll through 1000 presets on average sounding synth. I got rid of most VstIs and just work with the ones who's audio engines have real depth and quality, like Zebra and Diva, or the Virus. And yes, I have a lot of great old analogue synth that I bought for next to nothing when everyone ran out to buy a DX7.

Before writing a single note, my team and I spend a lot of time programming new sounds, sampling new instruments.

If you want things to sound big, make sure you limit your upper dynamic range. All instruments - especially percussion - sound bigger when played relatively softly. You can always turn it up. When you hit drums too hard, or any instrument is played too loud, they tend to sound only bright and thin and pingy.

I write very strategically for the spaces I record in. For instance, the Hall at Air Studio has a gallery, so I put my horns up there above the orchestra in Batman. The space you have people perform in is as important as the quality of their instruments. Players respond to good accoustics and will give you a better, more committed performance. The same goes for sampling. A dead room gives an artificially surpressed performance. It's no fun playing in a dead room. Especially brass players like "using" the reverb in the room to give them time to catch their breath between notes, so they'll have the courage and strength to play the next note stronger. I like recording in churches and halls, not studios and artificial reverb. 2000 years of architects like Brunelleschi figuring out how to amplify a sound beats the 20 years we've had of fake reverb development. But if your budget is a bit tight, try a school auditorium. Or an empty warehouse. Use your imagination. You belong to the proud fraternity of poor, starving artists. People expect you to ask them for favors in the name of the great piece of art you are about to unleash upon the world

I got pretty good ears ( I just had them tested...I got the frequency response of a 20 year old. Just luck. I've been listening to music in my studio too loud every day for 30 years). But the biggest thing is to learn how to listen analytically. That takes time. I learned from really good producers and engineers. Two month with Trevor Horn on a bassdrum sound will either drive you crazy, or really make you understand the damn thing (I'm not sure which side I've ended up on...). I know how to engineer, I know what all those knobs do, but I know that Alan Meyerson has a gift and is better at it then me. But at least I can comunicate to him - very specifically - what and how I hear my piece. I think there is nothing worse for a composer to be at the mercy of technology, the players or a recording engineer. It's your piece of music. No one understands it better. (I always wonder...I grew up (?) working on Neves and Trident "A"s, Harrisons, etc. So I know why I pick a 1073 for certain sounds or a DBX 160 in my UAD plug-ins. If you never used the hardware, how do you know?).

I always have my monitors set to the same level. It's the only way I know I'm not kidding myself. I don't use very expensive speakers, I just use what I really know - and can get replaced easily.

Yes, we build our own sampler, because I can hear the difference, but the comercial stuff is getting better. And my career was just fine when I was only using Akai S 1000s with 8 megs of ram.

I'm a bad player, but a good programmer. I'm forever trying to explain to great players that want to become composers that they need to treat learning and practicing the computer as seriously as they practised their guitar or piano. The computer is a musical instrument and the more virtuouistic you get on that, the better you can express your ideas.

The moment I start writing, I start mixing. Since I don't write on paper, I spend a long time making each note and sound convey the right emotion. It helps later with the live musicians. I can be very specific in my language (and I use English, not Italian) to convey to them why I want a note or phrase played a certain way. I don't make changes on the scoring stage, I don't let directors make changes with the musicians there. The recording is about getting a performance, not re-writing the cue. Nothing sounds worse then a bunch of bored musicians that had to wait while someone's changed an arrangement.

Most of the stuff I use on a daily basis is off the shelf software - and not the really expensive stuff, either. The best DAW is the one you're used to.

I don't understand why people don't sample their own stuff. I've been (more then once) asked to judge "young composer" competitions. After a while you can't hear the music for the sameness of the sample libraries. I wonder how directors or producers can tell the difference.

And no, you can't sound like me. You are not me, you are you. Just like I can't sound like any other composer. Not with any degree of authenticity.

I hardly ever get a temp in the movies I work on (Chris Nolan will not temp with anything that's not written for the movie. That whole Francis Lai thing is bull. I'm a fan, but I had never heard that score before. And if the rude ignoramus who was trying to hide behind a question mark when he called me a thief had actually analysed the score a bit, he'd have noticed that the whole thing was based on the notes C and D. Not just that riff. It's a fairly straight forward musical tension device. Seconds, anyone? And the rhythmic figure was - on purpose - a cliche. People can take large chunks of dissonance if you put a groove with it...)

I can get obsessively lost in sound design and just spend 4 days making one pathetic little sound...But it helps me think the whole piece through...

...And i procrastinate from writing by answering this question...

Hz "


Taken from here - https://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-p ... e-him.html

[wolf89]

Or if you want to sound like Hans Zimmer you steal melodies off the same people he does.

[nowaysj]

[wub]

I recently saw Alessandro Cortini's interview on Sonicstate's Youtube channel and was so inspired by his set up that I had to create this video.

Original Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMXEvNUjgCg

[nowaysj]

Thanks wub, that gives me an idea.

[wub]

Dntel Shares Five Essential Pieces from His Home Studio

Jimmy Tamborello has been involved in numerous projects over the last 15-plus years—many of which we revisited in a 'Rewind' feature back in 2012—and although several of his various monikers and bands have had a real impact, we'd like to think that it's his work as Dntel that will ultimately stand the test of time. (Admittedly, legions of Postal Service fans might disagree with that notion.) Next week, the LA-based producer and Dublab regular will be issuing a new album, 'Human Voice,' via Leaving Records/Stones Throw, and the LP's impending release got us wondering about what tools Tamborello is using to craft his tunes these days. As such, we hit him up for a list of the five most essential items from his studio.


Kilpatrick Audio K4815 Pattern Generator
One of my favorite Eurorack Modules. I love gear that can be unpredictable, and I depend on accidents to provide a lot of my favorite song moments, so this gets used a lot. As the name suggests, it generates melodic patterns based on a few parameter knobs and switches. Once I have a song going, I'll sit with this and slowly turn knobs and flick switches until it starts playing something that fits with the song. With some patience, it'll usually come up with something that I would have never come up with on my own. A lot of the melodies on Human Voice originated here.


Analogue Solutions Vostok Matrixsynth
This was my first modular gear. I think half the reason I bought it was because I thought it was cool that it had a pin matrix and it closed up like a suitcase. For the first few years, it was pretty frustrating—I'd usually spend a long time trying to remember how to get it to make sound, do one (usually noisy) overdub, and then put it away for a few months. It's embarrassing how long it took me to start getting my head around the way the modular stuff works, but this was a great introductory piece to learn on. It's got all the basic modules you need built into one unit: three oscillators, two LFOs, two envelopes, a filter, sequencer, VCA, ring modulator… I've since expanded my modular set-up quite a bit, but the Vostok still integrates in really well and gets used regularly.


Critter & Guitari Kaleidoloop
Like their Pocket Piano before it, Critter & Guitari's Kaleidoloop seems simple and toy-like, but ends up being really inspiring and useful in the studio and for live performance. It works kind of like a tape machine—you just record audio into it with one button, then it starts playing back in a loop and you have a knob that adjusts the speed and direction of the audio. It has a decent amount of memory, so you can record long segments if you want. It's another good machine for generating happy accidents. Sometimes if I'm stuck on a song, I'll run an element of the track through this and then just start messing with the speed and direction until I stumble on a new way it can fit into the song. It's a good tool for getting out of the grid mindset the DAWs can put you in.


Eventide Space
I use this reverb pedal a lot. You can get really giant reverbs from it, and also a lot of the modes have FREEZE and INFINITE settings, which are really fun when you want to drone.


Elektron Analog Rytm
I've been a fan of the Elektron machines for years. Anything I've made since 2005 probably has some Elektron sounds in it. I really like the way you interact with them, how the sequencer works. The Rytm is its newest drum machine and I've used it on practically everything I've made since I got it. The sounds are really good and flexible, and it has the usual Elektron-style sequencer. It's also got a grid of performance pads, which is nice when you're messing around, trying to figure out what kind of beat will fit a song.

Taken from here - http://www.xlr8r.com/gear/2014/09/dntel ... ntial-piec

[therapist]

Zimmer is kind of a parody of himself at this point, but he's done some brilliant stuff and the Zimmer-bashing that's popular at the moment is a bit cringe-worthy. Not many of the tracks I've seen suggested that he has ripped off actually sound that similar, aside from his own ones.

[wub]

For some professional advice, I tracked down some of the UK's leading dubstep DJs and producers, including Birmingham dubstep DJ/producer Emalkay, creator of dancefloor smashes 'When I Look At You' and 'Mecha'; Cooly G, DJ and producer of Narst/Love Dub (Hyperdub); Ikonika, DJ and producer on Hyperdub who has recently released her debut LP Contact, Love, Want, Have; and dubstep production trio LV.

When you start making a track, are there any elements you naturally work on first?

Emalkay: "If I've already got a good idea in mind like a bass line or catchy riff, I'll lay that down first. Otherwise I tend to start with the beats.”

Ikonika: "I usually start with the melodies, record and write them all out. The chords are usually next, then everything else after.”

LV: "Things tend to come together in clumps. Say, a bass lick and a drum idea that go well together, or a couple of chords and some notes.”

Do you have advice for programming beats and creating swing/groove?

Emalkay: "I've been into swing and syncopation big time lately. The way I go about it is to make it sound as natural as possible if I'm using sampled instruments, so I'll throw a bit of randomisation in there, and make sure I nudge the notes between the eights manually so it doesn't sound wooden.”

Ikonika: "I try not to clutter my beats with too many sounds and hits. To get the right groove I just play them out on my keyboard and quantise when I need to. I like adding distortion and delays to my hi‑hats to get them swinging right.”

LV: "Trust your ears and try not to get bogged down in endless OCD hyper‑editing, quantising, fiddling.”

What's your number one tip for making great bass lines?

Emalkay: "I love tube distortion and clipping on any sort of bass line, even the sub if I have to.”

Ikonika: "Add some modulation — maybe a little flanger — that just gives your bass lines a silky movement. Keep it simple.”

How do you create space and depth in your mixes?

Emalkay: "A good amount of space between the frequencies works well (ie. rolling off muddy low frequencies on some things) and going easy on the reverb works well for me too.”

Cooly G: "When I mix it's all by ear and has got to sound right, which then has that space and depth naturally.”

[pulsewaves4stopsines]

Wub, I may be fairly buzzed from knocking some brews back, but you're the man.
This thread has included some of the most inspiration I've had all month. Tons of stuff worth reading and re-reading. I'm glad I took the time to read through all of it, and thank you for sharing so much gold.

I'm going to try something I've never done before and grab a stack of old cd's, head to a park somewhere with my laptop, rinse them looking for anything sample-worthy and dedicate myself to making a tune, no matter how terrible it is tomorrow

Since I don't own a sampler, have any way to play vinyl records, or live anywhere near a record shop that isn't complete shit, I just never knew why I never thought to sample cd's, or really anything beyond random percussion I found on the internet, but all this reading about what people have done with samplers in hip hop, dnb, techno, [insert genre/whatever] is making me reeeallly wanna try it for myself and see if I can stretch my creative boundaries to territory I haven't yet seriously explored.

Well, more walk and less talk. I'm off now. Gonna make some food and get to it.

[nowaysj]

Don't forget there used to be sampling in dubstep too.

And, you don't need a good record shop. You just need one that sells vinyl for cheap. In my opinion, the hh heads have snatched up all the quality soul records, all across the land, like a plague of locusts. But there is still vinyl out there. You might have to work harder to get something out of it. What you do get may be more fractured, disjointed /weird, but that's okay. It's actually a gift, imo.

NEWAYS

[Lucifa]

Emalkay - wow completely forgot him

[3za]

Emalkay - wow completely forgot him

Same

When I look at you was pretty good tune fwiw.

[wub]

UK pair Simian Mobile Disco goes into detail about the gear used to create its recent Whorl LP and current live show in a new video. Appearing as the first edition of FACT TV's ARTEFACT series, the clip sees SMD explaining the role of each piece of gear in its set-up, which is anchored by a Cirklon sequencer which controls a number of modular components. The video also features a discussion with the artists who have designed the visual components of the live Whorl experience, which in many ways attempt to mirror the concepts that drive the musical side of the project.

Whorl has previously been mentioned here;

Recording - viewtopic.php?f=8&t=239766&p=3590440&#p3590440
SMD studio setup - viewtopic.php?f=8&t=239766&p=3629466&#p3629466

[fragments]

^Nice one wub.

[cyclopian]

Found this to be a really great read:

http://shadowboxing.org/2014/09/qa-dub- ... -heatwave/

[wub]

Level up: an insider’s guide to making video game soundtracks in 2014



First off, fuck chiptune.

OK, OK. I like the saturated sadness of the 8 and 16-bit chip as much as anyone who grew up nudging pixels around a screen in the 1980s or 1990s. But isn’t it a bit depressing that pretty much every time the media has something to say on the subject of the video game soundtrack, it’s concerned with waxing nostalgic over past sounds? Retromania, it’s clear, isn’t confined to your record collection.

This is particularly strange because, going on figures alone, video gaming is the pre-eminent entertainment mode of the day. In 2009, The Guardian reported that the video game industry officially outstripped both the cinema and recorded music industries, with combined software and hardware sales in excess of £4 billion. Consequently, it should be no surprise that video games scores are starting to attract heavy hitters. Cliff Martinez, composer of Drive, Only God Forgives and Solaris, is heavily rumoured to be working on the score to Ubisoft’s upcoming Far Cry 4. Brian Reitzell, a long-term Sofia Coppola collaborator currently winning plaudits for his peerlessly sinister score for NBC’s Hannibal, has also made extensive inroads in video game scoring, composing for 2011’s Red Faction: Armageddon and Ubisoft’s hacker-themed 2014 hit Watch Dogs. And let’s not forget Rockstar Games’ record-breaking Grand Theft Auto V, which wheeled out Edgar Froese of German kosmische wizards Tangerine Dream for a score very much in the spirit of TD’s boundary pushing ‘80s synth scores for films like Sorcerer and Firestarter.



Meanwhile, a new generation of indie games are out to push the envelope in fascinating ways. The interactive possibilities of the video game have given rise to figures like the Oakland-based composer David Kanaga, whose pioneering generative scores for the likes of Proteus and Dyad are woven deeply into the game’s mechanics (a frozen-to-CD version of Kanaga’s OGST for the synesthetic tube racer Dyad saw release on Daniel ‘Oneohtrix Point Never’ Lopatin’s Software Recording Co late last year). Other indie game soundtracks, meanwhile, have made waves just because they sound really cool. Dennaton Games’ Hotline Miami, an ultraviolent 2D murderfest transparently inspired by Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive has spawned a soundtrack almost as influential as, well, that of Drive itself. Despite consisting of tracks by relatively obscure artists such as Sun Araw and El Huervo, its peerless selections have helped it to a pretty staggering two million listens on YouTube. And then there’s all these quirky little iPhone puzzlers like Monument Valley or Rymdkapsel that I find myself playing endlessly on my daily commute, each one fitted with a gorgeous new age-tinged soundtrack that you could probably half-convince yourself was some long-lost modular synth epic recorded in a cave in the late ‘70s.



Now, video game soundtracks – just like movie soundtracks before them – are drifting beyond the titles that spawned them and being released as physical documents in their own right. Invada, the Bristol-based label run by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Redg Weeks, have recently released Brian Reitzell’s score for Watch Dogs and the the Australian synth duo Power Glove’s score for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon vinyl and CD. “Neither Geoff or myself play video games – our knowledge of the gaming industry starts with Pacman and ends with Tetris,” says Weeks. “To us its just a continuation of how we’ve approached the movie soundtrack market.”

Sales-wise, says Weeks, the video games soundtrack market is a quiet phenomenon. “I go on soundtrack forums and people just seem to be genuinely hungry to collect high quality releases that have had effort and care put into them – whether that be a horror film soundtrack, or Far Cry 3. I believe that people are bored of the way music is presented, the way that it’s become so highly marketed. The media would have you believe this band are going to take over the world, headline Glastonbury this time next year, etc. With both movie and video game scores there is none of that pretence. The hype is self perpetuating, and market spend is a lot more in-tune with how much you can expect to make back on a release.”



The contemporary video game soundtrack can encompass everything from neo-kosmische soundscaping to boundary-pushing generative composition to pulp ‘80s synth cheese. Over the next three pages, we present interviews with three different artists and acts – Brian Reitzell, David Kanaga and Power Glove – to get an insight into the breadth and scope of the modern video game score.



Soundcloud

Reitzell started his career as drummer for the Californian punk band Red Kross, but jumped ship with the hope of writing instrumental music. In 1999, his friend Sofia Coppola employed him as music supervisor on her film The Virgin Suicides – a project that marked the start of a long-running professional partnership with the group Air. Reitzell has continued to work with Coppola, receiving a BAFTA nomination alongside Kevin Shields for his work on the score of 2003’s Lost In Translation. Reitzell has, to date, composed two video games scores, for 2011’s Red Faction – Armageddon and 2014’s Watch Dogs, and released his solo debut album Auto Music earlier this year on Smalltown Supersound.

I was going to ask about your path into video game composing, but I suppose like your path into film composing, it’s been a sort of happy accident – I get the impression it was unplanned. How did the opportunity to work on Red Faction: Armageddon come about? Do you feel like industry-wise, there’s a natural bridge between film composition and games composition?

Brian Reitzell: I was feeling frustrated working on an indie film that was falling apart. That had never happened to me before. I needed to get out of the project and do something else. Hollywood was getting me down. The timing for Red Faction was perfect in that regard. I was excited to take on this new challenge. I had to learn the language, which I found to be very different from composing for film. There were all these terms for things and some things that meant one thing in a film meant something different in the video game world. It is not a natural transition from one to the other – at least not for me.

I think of scoring for games as being more along the lines of running a kitchen. TV can be a bit like that too, but video games are the most extreme. I found the whole process to be like a military operation, compared with working on a film. Everything is so secretive and coded with passwords. I enjoyed it, though. The company producing the game sent someone out to give me some ‘assets’ – the content I would work off of – and tried to explain the process. It was all very confusing at first. The delivery schedule requires very precise pieces of music. It’s like working in the Navy compared with what I had gone through with film scores. I found the whole process to be too scientific and didn’t fully understand what I was meant to be doing.My first delivery was rejected. It was deemed too intense and had to be on a precise tempo grid. I hate tempo grids. Foolishly, I thought I could work around it. I figured it out after that first delivery and every delivery since has worked out. I refined the process and found ways to work around some of the restrictions by the time I got to Watch Dogs.

Working on, say, Hannibal, you’ve said that a lot of the sounds that you’ll reach for are character-specific – using an African drum when the character of Hannibal is on screen, for instance. Does that change in a video game, when characterisation is more about a player’s actions, or the landscape he finds himself in?

Yes, it’s not quite the same. With a video game it’s all about where you are in the game, the environment. There are some opportunities to use thematic applications and create sonic identity – like, say a specific instrument for a certain character. There are what they call ‘cut scenes’, where you are scoring the scenes that happen in between the gameplay. Those are straight up film-scoring cues. The bulk of the score happens during game play where the music needs to be more ambivalent. It’s more about creating an atmosphere for the reality of the place the player is in.

Soundcloud

Watch Dogs seems to harken back to that ’80s era of synth soundtracks, the dark electronic krautrock of Tangerine Dream et al. Were any of those soundtracks a particular influence on you? What instrumentation did you draw on, and what techniques did you employ?

I’m a big fan of Krautrock and definitely early Tangerine Dream. Records like Phaedra, Rubycon, Zeit. Most people – especially here in Hollywood – don’t know that stuff and think of Tangerine Dream for Risky Business or Sorcerer. Or just as a general term for synth music in film: when the film Drive had just come out, all the industry people were talking about how it sounded like Tangerine Dream. Drive is great, but it doesn’t sound like Tangerine Dream. I wanted to do the real thing – analogue synths being triggered by analogue sequencers, no computer grid or soft synths. As time went on, though, I started incorporating real strings, woodwinds, percussion, piano and guitar. It was all played by myself and my usual crew of musicians that have played with me on my film and TV projects.

How did the theme of Watch Dogs – hyperconnectivity, hacking, espionage – influence your choices or approach?

Obviously the digital age and super computers were an influence, but not a big one. I was more interested in Chicago. I was originally trying to do something that sounded more like ‘70s electronic music but in the end it became more of it’s time, more contemporary – like that of the game itself. I still used all my old analogue synths but by playing guitars, drums and orchestral elements on top plus recording everything in super fidelity gave it more of a cinematic sound, which the game needed. It’s an open world game and it needed an open world score with lots of dimension. It couldn’t simply be ‘retro’ electronic music. Early on I did some hacking-inspired stuff – computer noise, things misfiring and such – and I learned then that that was somebody else’s department. On Hannibal, though, I get to do most all of the sound design which I love. Sound FX is so stock that it makes me want to puke most of the time. With video games, I surrender completely and just do the scoring.

How did you meet up with Invada? Was it a surprise that a label actually wanted to release this music independent of the game?

It’s funny – a friend of mine had met Geoff Barrow at a Beak> gig and wanted to connect us. She thought we would get along well. Geoff and I had emailed each other a couple times but had yet to connect when I heard Invada were going to do the release. It was just a total coincidence. Ubisoft had sent Invada the record and they liked it enough to want to put it out. I was pleased and honoured considering they had put out stuff like Solaris, Under The Skin, Drive, etc. It’s good company and feels like a natural fit. Geoff had seen me play with Air and I had seen him play with Portishead so we have that background as well as all this film and video game stuff.

What’s next? Do you have more projects in the works?

I’m taking a little time off, doing some travelling and instrument collecting. I will start another Auto Music record sometime this fall, and I have something top secret I might do before I start the third season of Hannibal in November. Next year I would like to do some concerts. I miss the stage sometimes and it would be nice to perform something like the Hannibal score live.



David Kanaga

Soundcloud

David Kanaga is a composer and improviser from Oakland, California. To date he has made music for open world exploration game Proteus – which was awarded Indiecade’s award for Best Audio and exhibited at MoMA – and Shawn McGrath’s psychedelic racing game Dyad, the score to which was released on Daniel Lopatin’s Software Recording Co last year. He is currently working on Fernando Ramallo’s music-and-landscape exploration Panoramical, and writes deep and thoughtful essays on the topic of video game composition – check his 2013 paper ‘Music And Games As Shifting Possibility Spaces’.

How did you find your way into video games composition? Can you tell me a little about your background?

David Kanaga: When I was young, I played at making music in Fruityloops and Soundforge and played Nintendo 64 games. things like Zelda and Banjo-Kazooie, mostly – single-player adventure games. A few years after that, I was playing Dungeons & Dragons with friends – long games with totally bastardised rulesets, which teach real-time game design. When I was a little older – and I think the D&D encouraged this – I started thinking analytically about what was going on structurally in games, just like I might think about some music theory as it relates to the form of a song.

Later, in my first year at college, I had been thinking about games more, and a friend told me I could volunteer to get free attendance at the GDC [Game Developer’s Conference], which got it in my mind that I could maybe get work doing music in games. Years later, I used Ableton for the first time, which sped up a lot of musical processes I wasn’t quick at or familiar with before. It allowed me to be much more playful with knobs and grids and no-grids and such – less planning, more action. All this playing with Ableton finally brought home the key notion that the games I enjoyed and the music software were not so formally different at all – that there was really no clear distinction between playing with music software and playing a videogame. They’re just different software ‘styles’, as it were. I’ve been following up on the implications of the idea since, trying to dig into the space between those categories. I made a game, Ada, with Josh Bothun, a friend from childhood who had shown me Fruityloops originally. After, I was reaching out to collaborate on work where I could do more music production, and connected with Ed Key to work on Proteus and Shawn McGrath for Dyad. Both games allowed me to develop the programmatic ideas that coding had taught me, but working more intuitively with the sound as music production, rather than being forced to get too analytical about it.

The games you have produced music for, Proteus and Dyad, employ music as a fundamental part of the gameplay experience, “woven in” to the gameplay (or as you put it in your essay ‘Music And Games As Shifting Possibility Spaces’, “music-organism shaping”). How does this process of creation differ from a more conventional music-creation or soundtracking scenario, and what problems/challenges does this present?

Scoring a movie, or cutting together a song or mix or album, everything is laid out on a rigid one-dimensional timeline. In games, the ‘line’ that the player is tracing out in play is always sort of wiggly and indeterminate, and more, it is almost always a complex of many lines being drawn simultaneously in many more dimensions than one. It’s like getting paint on all five fingers and drawing them around a surface at the same time – count it as five lines or one wiggly ‘hyper-line’. It’s more like creating a set in Ableton’s ‘scene view’ than laying a track in ‘arrange view’, but this image is too rigid still. Like an Ableton ‘scene’, a game is a ‘playspace’ to improvise in, but with the major difference that the elements available to play in a game are always contingent on what just happened. They are ‘context-sensitive’, whereas session view and other tool-spaces like it – consider Photoshop’s editor – allow for manipulation of any musical elements at any time, to appeal to our desire for total control in creative process.

In a game, there are all these buttons and levers and dials, but they’re all invisible sometimes and visible other times, and can be subjected to an essentially infinite variability if we learn how to analyse and then encode their potential morphologies. It is as if a keyboard’s keys were constantly re-arranging themselves, and were doing other strange things, like melting, growing or shrinking, shattering, and so on. So, the way I see it, scoring a game ought to sit halfway between scoring a movie and building up a musical instrument or live set or loose improvisational form. And then playing the game hopefully is likewise somewhere between watching a movie and playing a musical instrument, or improvising with friends – entering a space with other players in general. Many of these ideas are a lot more exciting than the practical implementations I’ve actually put into effect!



Are there particular techniques that you use to communicate informational or sensual qualities to players? What works? Are there hallmarks of your practice?

I have a law – ‘attempt to approach a 1:1 relation between game events and soundtrack events’. There is an idea I like to talk about, ‘music sprites’, which builds on the existing visual idea of a fixed ‘sheet’ of animation loops. For instance, when you play a Sonic game, there is a sprite or animation loop for him running, one for jumping, one for spinning, one for shooting forward, and so on. The same is basically true in any videogame, with the apparent exception of procedural animation. The environment, visually, is made up of these modular looping and triggering sprites. The idea, then, with scoring the visual environment, is to ‘read’ these sprites as if they were a notation which in some sense determines what sounds are to be made, most strictly in their duration and their proximity, size and vividness on the screen. If Sonic is built up of, say, five visual sprites, the idea is that there should be five musical sprites to accompany. There’s a strictness to this mapping, just like reading any classical notation, even while we have freedom of interpretation with those indeterminate aspects which aren’t specified in the notation. A musical sprite might be a simple loop, or it might a rule for how to modulate through a given array of sounds. And the sounds themselves can be… whatever, as long as it feels good – and this in turn is related to the global rhythms, resistances, attractions, colours, etc in the space.

And of course there is the touch experience of games. I think that what is most characteristic about visual sprites in a game is the way in which our touch-input affects which of them is used, and how, at any given instant. The transition from a run to a jump is key – a properly amplified micro-gesture of the thumb. Music sprites ought to really hug the tactile experience of whatever part of the computer the player’s body is touching, and these bodily and touch dynamics are also like elements of a ‘graphic score’ to be read.

Listening to the Dyad score, I’m reminded of all sorts of contemporary or club music – The Boredoms, jungle, rave, Rustie, free jazz. What non-soundtrack music interests you? What is influential on your practice?

Dance music and free improv have been sort of lifeblood for me. I’ve grown up with both. Cutting sounds in Soundforge and sequencing spaces in Fruityloops is a big part of why I got into house and garage music when I was young, since I could really feel my own virtual-participatory presence in these tracks – clicking in the 16-steps, I knew roughly what was entailed in making them. I started playing free improv music with friends when I was in high school, and free styles have the same appeal for me. I enjoy feeling myself ‘virtually present’, as a participant in the music. Many of the free jazz players and groups are a huge inspiration, amazing teachers – I really think some of those records are some of the best ‘games’ out there, though we’ve only got the footprints or fossils of the game, as it were, and not the immediacy itself with all of the different possible outcomes that might have occurred.

These two styles also establish together something like limits of what I feel is an important polarity, as regards videogames – from ‘mechanics’ to ‘organics’. Free improv is non-machinic, wobbly, animal, plant-like, fleshy, etc – riding on pure real-time which is not spatialised in the least. Whereas computer dance music is totally machinic, totally computable, totally spatialised, and has bodily attractions of a different sort, which feel essentially disciplining, though not necessarily in a bad way. So, I think exploring the space between these styles feels exciting. There’s a need in videogames, at the very least, to discover their organic pole, where dance music’s patterns, loops or grooves etc might function as the raw material from which a new organism can be built. Though the raw material will need to be cooked first – and its pieces won’t survive the melt.

I love dancing, too. Full body activity is great. Music in general that engages different bodily aspects is an inspiration. I much prefer physically playing, transforming and modifying music to listening to it still, and I think this is partly because of all the extra body parts and energies involved. I consider dancing to be ‘playing music’. And it is the same with feeling a musical quality entering through our eyeballs. It’s possible to ‘listen’ through sight as well, and pictures often have more novel musical qualities than do sounds. I guess sounds per se are not what interest me most about music these days. There is the body, and then there’s the patterns the body enters into, and these are not necessarily sound-patterns – except insofar as everything is sound, if ‘sound’ be allowed to mean and vibration. Tunnelling into videogame pre-history, I’ve been trying to learn more about the theory of computation, and its origins in pure math and logic, and have been enjoying a kind of ‘number-feel’… like thinking about ‘one’ thing feels very different from thinking about ‘many’ things, and I think there is a feeling of that in the whole body, maybe not just the brain. It has a ‘formal sound’ of sorts, which I understand mathematicians are able feel very deeply.

Are there any video games soundtracks that have been particularly influential on your work – on an instructive or inspirational sense?

A number of mainstream games – kids’ stuff like Mario Galaxy, Banjo-Kazooie. Rez was exciting, of course. And Rock Band was a useful sort of ‘nemesis’ – the way ‘wrong notes’ were replaced by mistake sounds, rather than left in place, which would have allowed for bizarre and amazing on-the-fly remixes of Beatles tunes, or whatever. I always thought that was a horrible design decision, grading mistakes rather than saying ‘yes’, welcoming them and bouncing back. That stood for everything that I wanted to push against in designing music spaces. Electroplankton isn’t so exciting for me as it once was, but its format ‘album of musical games’ continues to feel like super-fertile terrain to dig into. Ian Snyder’s UN EP is a sort of gold standard for this kind of work. And Jono Brandel and Lullatone’s Patatap got big online earlier this year, which I loved. It really nails that ‘music sprite’ formalism I mentioned above.

Where is the interesting stuff currently happening – is it all in the indie marketplace, or is there good music coming out of the mainstream studios?

One of my favorites is a game called Become A Great Artist in Just 10 Seconds, by Michael Brough and Andi McClure. It has good music, different each time. But what I like more, related to the ‘music without sound’ idea, is the musicality of its visual movement and patterning. Liz Ryerson has been making some brilliant images with it, and it’s not at all obvious how to tame this thing – though it is very easy to use, and difficult not to enjoy at least for a few minutes. Another favorite, Infinite Sketchpad by Tom Lieber, is a drawing tool that has taught me as much as any game ever has, I think, about music and pictures both. I got crazy about it last year. There may be good music coming out of the mainstream game studios – there probably is – but I haven’t been too tuned into that. There’s definitely good ‘non-sonic’ music happening there – the ‘game feel’, it’s called. It’s what gets folks obsessed with the sort of dance of battle in Dark Souls, etc. Someday I might try to get good at one of these fighting games, learn about rhythm from that.

Your Dyad soundtrack was released as a CD on Software. How/when did Dan Lopatin get in touch? Any misgivings about having obviously responsive, “liquid” music presented in this fixed way, removed from the game world? Can these soundtracks work in isolation?

While I was working on Dyad, I heard word that Daniel liked the music in the first trailer, so when the game came out, I sent him a download code. We had some email chats, and were into some similar ideas, and when I was finished cutting the album, he was keen to put it out. Yeah, I had some misgivings about the fixed album format, though I also like that format very much. I sort of got around my own worry about being unfaithful to the spirit of game-form by taking all the game’s raw materials and trying to play a new game with them, in a way. Making a continuous flow of it all, for one, and playing around with lots of transition ‘liquidation’. For me, at least, it felt like a satisfying and not dishonest process. All these ‘transition’ processes are great for structural learning, and I feel a number of the devices explored in there could function strictly in a transitions between sub-spaces in another game someday.


Power Glove

Soundcloud

A currently anonymous electronic music duo from Melbourne, Australia, Power Glove have released two EPs to date, and rose to internet fame off the back of their soundtrack to the 2013 standalone expansion to the Far Cry series, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. The score was released on double pink vinyl by Invada on Record Store Day 2014, and sold out in less than 24 hours. Due to popular demand, Invada have just released a second pressing.

So can you give a little history: who are you, where are you from, and when did Power Glove begin? You’re brothers, I gather?

Power Glove: We’re brothers. From Melbourne, Australia, grew up here and in parts in Hong Kong. Power Glove begun around five years ago as a side project.

Can you talk a little first about the musical influences behind Power Glove? It seems to be a love letter to a particular era of soundtrack fare: dramatic synthesizer-powered action movies. What was your early exposure to this stuff?

We grew up on VHS tapes and warped old synthesizers. Haven’t really been able to shake it from our system. Our upbringing was fairly musical and we had all sorts of instruments and keyboards laying around. Our first memories of making music was on our dad’s Atari Notator, recording Juno 6 arpeggios

How has the project developed over time? Have you developed the equipment that you use over time?

We’re always digging up our old synths or samples, or watching films, sampling from them, listening for ideas. In that sense not much has changed, though our studio is in chaos, the next step would be setting everything up properly and ready to go.

Looking at your Soundcloud, the response to your work has been pretty enthusiastic. Why has it struck a nerve? Do you exist as a live entity?

It’s been incredible. The fact that people even listen to our music keeps us pushing harder and harder. I guess there’s something there that sparks peoples love of that sound, searching for hidden gems and memories. We scrap ideas if they don’t fit into the world we’re trying to create. We get obsessive with that actually, getting the sound right, creating a world people can dive into. The amount of songs and ideas we give up on is maddening. We do have a gig booked down in Mexico later in the year, so that should kick our asses into gear into playing live more often. Honestly, any spare time we have we just want to be writing music, that’s our main goal right now.

When did Ubisoft get in touch, and what was their proposal?

Dean Evans, the creative director, got in contact with us. We jumped on the phone and he ran us over the idea of Blood Dragon – the cybor commando, Michael Biehn, lasers, the Cannon films influence – the look of it all. Obviously we were interested. We then sent through a demo of all these random ideas and songs we had that fit well, and from there it was a green light to get started.



Did you work a lot with in-game footage? Is much of what you make reactive to in-game action, or did you more work in the vein of a traditional movie soundtracker?

At first we approached it like a score to a real deal film, writing a suite of themes, say Rex’s theme, the Blood Dragon theme, a love theme, the villain’s theme. We wanted it to play dead serious, not a joke or homage, more as if we were in the studio 20 years ago scoring a B-grade cyberpunk movie. Once the game footage started coming in we had all the groundwork ready to go. From memory the whole soundtrack is built entirely around the Blood Dragon theme and its key – that was the idea.

Obviously there’s a long streak of nostalgia to the music that you make. Do you find ways within that to push things forward?

It’s hard. We’re obsessed with those sounds, though in no way do we want to just rest on that era or repeat ourselves. We like ideas. We like creating worlds. The idea of a song that sounds completely new, though in some way, feels like it belongs on tape or a Steven Segal soundtrack. There’s always a very particular story or feeling we’re trying to create in our music. It’s a weird kind of mash of stuff that makes sense to us and keeps us grounded, especially when we’re off on tangents and aggressively fighting to push forward.

Any more projects on the go? Game soundtracks, or otherwise?

We have a few projects that will see the light this year, notably our long delayed EP2, a handful of collaborations, plus a particular exciting scoring project, which we’re announcing shortly.

Taken from here - http://www.factmag.com/2014/10/13/level ... s-in-2014/

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Random idea to kick up activity in the production forum...Machine Love DSF edition?

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Field Recording & Soundscape - http://acloserlisten.com/category/field ... oundscape/
SOUNDS LIKE NOISE - http://soundslikenoise.org/
Sonic Terrain - http://sonic-terrain.com/
The Acoustic Ecology Institute - http://www.acousticecology.org/soundscapelinks.html
Quiet American - http://quietamerican.org/links.html
Work in progress: researching audio methods - http://www.michaelgallagher.co.uk/archi ... -recording



Drone techno introduction - http://dubmonitor.com/drone-techno-an-introduction/
Where to start with drone? - http://drownedinsound.com/community/boa ... ic/4273311
Drone ambient chords technique - http://www.idmforums.com/showthread.php?t=90424
Synths good for drone for oriented music - http://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/co ... ted_music/
How to create a generative, evolving ambient drone sound in Ableton Live - http://www.musicradar.com/tuition/tech/ ... ve-590880/
Tips for making ambient drones? Steve Roach / Drone Zone style - https://www.gearslutz.com/board/electro ... style.html