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Doesn't fit!

At this year's London Electronic Music Event, we heard how Blawan and Pariah have put together the fiercest live show in techno.

Techno doesn't get much rawer than it does with Karenn. But much like a rock star's expertly crafted bed-head, a lot of care and skill goes into getting things rough around the edges. Arthur Cayzer (Pariah) and Jamie Roberts (Blawan) are both acclaimed solo producers. Before they teamed up they were known for the kind of mutated bass cuts that were everywhere at the turn of the decade. But perhaps more important than the evolution of their musical style is the way their workflow has changed: where before they were both working mostly with software, as Karenn they ditched their laptops in favor of an unruly assemblage of machines. They say they haven't looked back.

What would count as a comprehensive electronic production studio now comes on the road with them, and it's in the live space that Karenn have really set themselves apart. (They've also released a handful of EPs, primarily through their Works The Long Nights imprint.) So instead of visiting their studio, we invited them to cart their setup to this year's London Electronic Music Event and explain in front of an audience exactly what they're doing among the jumble of boxes and cables. For Karenn, a hardware-based live setup is an exercise in restraint—as much about what it can't do as what it can. After they played a brief but blistering live set, we discussed what they did and how they did it.
Take us through what we just heard.

Blawan: I'm not too sure, actually. Me and Arthur, even though we play together, we kind of—we do our own thing when we're playing. I mean, you notice I'm in this [modular setup], and Arthur's in that over there. We communicate if something's going wrong, or if we want a ride cymbal to go in, but basically we have two different setups. That's Arthur's, this is mine; mine's a little bit more compact than his. Basically we just do our own thing and feed off one another, try and communicate as much as we can. But we found, actually, that we don't really communicate that much.

I was wondering about that, because from my vantage point it really looked like you were both in your own world, but the music was fitting together really nicely.

Pariah: Practice, I think.

Blawan: Practice, definitely practice. I mean, that's kind of the main thing with this whole set—it took us a good year, year and a half to get to a point where we don't have to communicate with each other anymore. Like, I'm totally happy to let Arthur do his thing, and he knows what I'm gonna do, and if he's doing something rubbish then I'll tell him, and vice-versa. You've kind of got to have trust in each other as well.

What you're doing up here—would you say it's largely improvisational?

Pariah: Yeah, I guess when we came in to set everything up, we prepared that little intro thing, and then from then on, after about three or four minutes or so, it's totally improvised. It works better that way.

Blawan: Yeah, it does work better that way. It sounds a bit ropey in parts. I mean, some of that was a bit rubbish, but the good thing about when you're improvising is that you get those really key moments where it all just progresses and then suddenly, naturally, it gels together, you know? They're the more rewarding parts, instead of just pre-programming something that you know exactly how it's gonna sound. We learn from the mistakes, and the mistakes are a good thing, so improvising is key to that.

It sounds like preparation for you guys is really about finding a good place to begin. Tell us about how you find it.

Pariah: I'm not really sure. It's kind of—well, there's a looper here. We make a little thing to loop for the intro. Usually something, like, scary, atmospheric, something like that. Then Jamie usually figures something out on the modular, then really we just go from there. After that, anything goes, really. We do have saved sequences and patterns that we can recall whenever we want, but we don't play tracks. It's funny, sometimes after a set you have people coming up to you going, "What was that track you played?" and it's like, "Well, that's the last time we'll have ever heard that track as well."

Blawan: We've got some sequences saved on the modular, and the [Dave Smith Instruments] Tempest really is the main bass structure, because if not, you can get a bit lost. Me and Arthur kind of keep our heads down, and sometimes it's a little hard to hear everything that's going on because you're so concentrated on your little piece. So to have like a few simple drum beats to build around makes our life a lot easier, really. And there's a bit more substance to the tracks, you know, because with two people improvising purely off all these machines, it would take you a good 20 minutes to get something going that was solid.
Your set is extremely dense with sounds.

Blawan: Yeah, the sound for us is dense, and that's something that we are actually working on. This set isn't perfect at all—it's been a massive learning curve for me and Arthur. Investing what we earned from gigs into this stuff, putting every penny we had into it. Over two years we've managed to accumulate this stuff, and it's been hard work, but over that time we've gotten to know each machine. We've quickly found that yeah, as you said, [the sound we made with them] was dense. There's too much going on, so for us it's just about stripping it back as much as possible, because especially when you're in a club, and they've got, like, 110 dB going through the system, even just a 909 hi-hat feels like a punch in the face sometimes. So you've really got to be careful.

Pariah: We're kind of going through, at the moment, a complete change in the setup, and this is maybe midway through that change, I think. The first shows that we were playing this year, we decided to take a slightly different approach. I don't think we are there yet, but we're kind of getting there. I still think that we've got too much drum stuff, which we are trying to get rid of. Like, we have the 909, which is great, but at the moment the 909 is only being used for its ride cymbal pretty much, and its clap and hi-hat sounds. And to cart something that big around with us is ridiculous. But, unfortunately, it has a very, very good trigger output, which allows the kick drum from the modular to stay in time. So at the moment we need it, but it's playing next to no part in the live show.

Something I noticed is that you have the 909, which is obviously a big classic, but most of the other stuff looks like newer gear. How did you settle on these particular machines?

Blawan: Basically, me and Arthur started off very small. We even put together for a £400 sequencer, because when we started we didn't have enough to buy one individually. We gradually earned more money playing these shows, and we just invested it straight away. But the main thing we started off with were the two Tempests. That basically was enough—we could have just toured with two Tempests, really, and that would have been fine. It's more than a drum machine; it's a synth, really. So basically everything started off from the Tempest, and then we just added little bits, like all of what's over there.

Arthur's accumulated most of the little synths. And then I delved into the modular fetish, which has taken over my life a little bit. I mean, it's super complicated and ridiculously hard to get hold of. It's nice as a drum machine, but the possibilities are sort of endless. I'm persevering with it, and hopefully one day I'll have the perfect setup. I'm going a bit off-track here, but basically we started off with the Tempest, a couple of little synths like the Domino, we were using a Moog Slim Phatty for a little bit, which was rubbish, and then I can't remember. The one thing that changed for us was the 909, because originally when we got it we used it a lot, right? It was key, wasn't it?

Pariah: When we first started doing the live shows, they were quite prepared. We'd write tracks and we'd be like, "This one, then this one," and we'd do it on the Octatrack and the Tempest, you can split things into different tracks. After about five or six shows, we found we didn't have the freedom that we have when DJ'ing, it felt very restrictive, and if something went wrong there was nothing we could do about it.

We had one show where some things went wrong, or things weren't working as they should have done, and I found it very, very hard. So, we decided to get a 909, which allowed far more for quick editing of patterns and very on-the-fly drum programming. But actually you can kind of do that with the Tempest, but it's not as easy and hands on with that. As soon as we got the 909, the whole thing changed, and we stopped preparing anything. So we went from preparing everything to preparing nothing!

Blawan: The 909 was the thing that gave us the confidence to be able to tap some 16 beats on there. And it's really, really easy to get something going, to kind of sound like Jeff Mills and not have to worry about it.

This particular 909 has actually been signed by Jeff Mills.

Pariah: I bought it signed, just let me clarify that!

Blawan: Well, Arthur didn't buy it just because it was signed by Jeff Mills. It just happened to be signed by Jeff Mills.

From what you've said of the 909, I get the sense that you're choosing gear not just for the sound but also for how you can use it—how it's functional, how it opens up your workflow.

Blawan: I would actually say that the sound isn't that important, if I'm honest. Functionality is key. If it doesn't function properly in the set and isn't easy to use, then we've got to get rid of it, basically, because there's far too much stuff to bog yourself down with complicated machines. It's kind of the reason why we keep the Tempest as a base structure, because as a live drum machine it's amazing. I would suggest to anyone who's got the money to buy one—immediately go and buy one—because it'll change everything for your setup. But it's also really complicated to do live when you've got flashing lights everywhere, you've got four other synths to think about, a mixing desk and EQing and all the other various things that happen. And watching the people if they actually like the music or not. It's a little bit too much, so we keep that as the base. But everything else we got for pure functionality.

The modular, on the other hand, isn't functional at all. I mean, you've seen me at many a gig looking really frustrated with this thing, but I am determined to persevere with it, because most of the time you have these key bits and it sounds brilliant. You'll never buy a synth that sounds like one really, because it's endless what you can do with it. But functionality or not, this is a complete work in progress for me. I am getting new modules, trying new sequences.

I bought this sort of handmade Japanese sequencer called an [Orthogonal Devices] ER-101, which is basically completely open-ended. It has no sense of bar or anything—you have to input every single parameter, like how long the gate is, how long the bar is, how long the pattern is. It's super complicated, but in terms of modular things it's the most functional thing for me, and that's the reason why I am using it, even though it looks like a pocket calculator. You are trying to write melodies on a calculator screen, which is really difficult, but again this is the exception where the possibilities are far too great to not try and persevere with it.

The oscillator [in the demo] is a Braids, which is a digital oscillator by a company called Mutable Instruments, which do some wicked modules. I was using some analogue VCO oscillators, but I had a few occasions where in a club the heat and the sweat just sent them completely wild, and it just ended up sounding like little girls screaming or something most of the time. So yeah, I've kind of stuck to digital oscillators. I've got a Braids, and then there's another thing called a Morphing Terrarium by Synthesis Technology, and these both are basically wavetable synths. This one has like 256. It's completely sweepable through all the waveforms.
Arthur, have you tried your hand at all with this?

Pariah: No, too daunting for me!

Blawan: Again, like I say, this is a bit of a hobby of mine now. But yeah it's kind of completely taken over everything for me, in terms of my own solo stuff as well. I'm trying to completely reduce my studio to basically just a rack of effects, EQs and modular synths. I'm just trying to write everything purely on a modular, which is great. If you're just wallowing in the studio, just set a multi-track or a stereo recording of it going, record for a couple of hours, and if you want to edit it down on a computer, you've got endless amounts of material there to use.

How close is what you guys are using here to what you would use in the studio?

Pariah: I guess it really depends. I think when we are doing our own solo stuff, we use a mishmash of computer and gear. For a lot of my stuff, I just use the computer. But with the Karenn stuff, we tried recently to start using the computer a little bit, for arranging and mixing down.

Blawan: But it was a bad idea.

Pariah: Yeah, it was a nightmare. So recently we've gone back to recording our tracks live, but multi-track recording them so that we can give them a proper mixdown. The doublepack that we released [Sheworks 004], that was all live recordings but recorded on to one stereo channel—

Blawan: —which was kind of the purpose of that. We wanted that sort of over compressed, grainy, nasty sound. But in the studio with the Karenn stuff, we've tried a lot of different setups, basically, and sometimes, like the last couple of tracks we recorded, we just had the Tempest and the modular, and that was it, and that's kind of all you need as well. You know, there is a lot of equipment on here, but it's because we need diversity. Sometimes if we are playing for an hour or an hour and a half, you ain't got enough there to make it interesting enough, you know? And like I said, that's why the 909 now has gone a bit redundant as well, because essentially, as cool as the 909 sounds, I personally don't wanna hear it for an hour. I can hear the ride cymbal for an hour, but…

You mentioned not having much success bringing a computer into the setup, and that's one of the notable things about what you guys are doing up here: there's no computer. Does anything take its place?

Pariah: The Tempest, probably. In that you can have 16 different beats that you can switch between, and within that—within each beat—you have sixteen, but potentially up to 32 different sounds. I mean, you can pretty much make any sound with the Tempest. It's unbelievable.

Blawan: Sounds like we are really trying to sell the Tempest here. We are not being paid off by these guys! If they wanna give us some free ones, that would be nice [laughs]. But essentially, yeah, the Tempest is a computer. It's not sequencing anything, but it's the backbone.

Pariah: It's got the basslines in it. If there's more pad sounds that we don't want to play on the fly, we've got some stuff stored in there, atmospheric stuff as well. And then some percussion, just to beef things up a bit. As Jamie said, it's a good basis for everything. It leaves you a lot of room to work around it.
So it's taking the place of a dedicated sequencer—like, your Octatrack isn't doing much, is it?

Pariah: Well, I think it's—[brings the Octatrack up on the mixer] it's making this noise, and that's it. The Octratrack is great, but it's got eight channels, or eight tracks in it, yet it only has two outputs. You have to get a decent mix out of the Octatrack alone, which with all this other stuff is nigh on impossible. You can do amazing stuff with it, but I reckon that will be gone within a month or so. We were using it as our clock—I mean, that was its main function, sending the MIDI notes to everything and making sure everything kept in time. But then I recently bought a new thing that does that, and it's about five times smaller.

The centerpiece of all this is the mixer. Tell us about how you're using it.

Pariah: I guess we're not using it as much as maybe we should be. We kind of get everything mixed in the soundcheck. Something that I think we've got to work on more is EQing more on the desk. But really, we get everything ready beforehand.

Blawan: The mix is usually already there, and then the main mixing we do on the actual channel faders is basically just the kick, the bass and really important parts of the music. Any of the details like atmospherics or synths are usually controlled—the volume, anyway—and even a lot of the EQing is controlled directly on the machines themselves and not so much on the desk. Even though there are two of us, we don't split it, so one person is playing the machines and the other is on the desk—which is quite a common thing. Like, one person will usually just stand on the desk. I know quite a lot of live acts that do that.

Pariah: Like Livity Sound. I know there are three of them, but one of them just uses the desk. I think they have quite a big effects chain on the desk, which isn't something that we really have.

In terms of EQing, you said not much of that is happening on the desk but on the individual components of the setup.

Blawan: We have a standard EQ setting. Each channel, we almost instinctively EQ it to what we know the main mix will fit. But then if we do get a soundcheck, obviously we will EQ each channel quite drastically. Like for example, one important thing we've learned is that everything bar the kick and the bass, and even the kick sometimes—we put a 80-Hz cut on it, and really take the bottom off everything, because we found that you really need to be quite drastic with the low cut. Even with the smallest thing, such as a hi-hat, through a system can be really bass heavy. That took us a while to work out—that everything really needs to sit, like you would in a studio.

Pariah: With regards to bass in general, when we first started playing live, it was the one criticism that we heard back from people. So originally we were just using the kick for the bass, and they were like, "It sounds quite pounding in the club, but you're missing that kind of low, like sub-low-end." You know, like the rumble.

Blawan: It was there. But again, you've got to think of it in studio terms, as in each element has to have its own place. We were relying on one thing to cover quite a broad spectrum of the frequency range.

Pariah: So now we have a separate channel for basslines and a channel for the kick.

Blawan: That sounds like a really obvious thing, like it's quite a novice thing to say, but at the time we were just guessing.

I would imagine a lot of people have had this experience in the studio. They put a kick on and don't understand why it doesn't sound like it does on records they're familiar with.

Blawan: Yeah, it's layering. I guess when me and Arthur are writing tracks, sometimes we'll layer up two or three kick drums. When you're playing live and you're asking, "Why is it not full enough?" it's because you've not got that saturation in the bottom end. It wasn't until we started with how the set up is now. We completely overdrive everything below 100-Hz, so there are no transients there, and the dynamic range is squashed. So basically, you've just got this constant rumble. I guess a lot of mastering engineers are doing it by just compressing the low-end, and that was our way of doing it without actually using compression.
You've made the point in other interviews, Jamie, that you guys are not the first live group to be doing techno—that this idea of bringing the studio into the live space has been around for a while. I'm curious who some of your big influences are in putting all this stuff together?

Blawan: I mean, I wouldn't say big influence, but two guys who've sparked my interest really—and it was quite late on—were Octave One. Absolutely amazing live set, purely hardware. I'm not sure how they do it—I'm not sure they improvise fully—but there's definitely some sort of improvisation there. But the main sort of inspiration for me was a couple of guys that go by the name of The Analogue Cops. I started working with them about four and a half years ago now or something. And they work in exactly the same way. They just have pure hardware, record it to tape. They were recording to Betamax at one point.

If you're wanting good saturation, studio tape Betamax is the cheapest, best saturation you can get, really. It's really, really nice, and you can completely re-record over it—apparently, I'm not sure about that—but you know, you can just reuse tapes and it sounds great.

Basically, when I started working with The Analogue Cops, it was purely on hardware, and just going over to Berlin and writing like ten tracks in a day or something. 30 minutes, and you've got something done. Some of them were rubbish, some of them were brilliant.

Being sat at a computer five days a week, or four days a week, I was getting so frustrated. I was using Ableton, and I still use Ableton, but I kind of felt I hit a bit of a dead end with it. I was running out of inspiration, and working with The Analogue Cops—they're called Dom and Marieu—they really opened my eyes. Music doesn't have to be perfection, you know? It doesn't have to be about "that mixdown is sick," sort of how it is in drum & bass a bit. Drum & bass producers are completely obsessed with mixdowns, and I'm completely obsessed with mixdowns, but a good mixdown doesn't mean it has to be a clean or perfect mixdown—it's about how the sound makes you feel. I would have never been able to express myself, however you want to put it, if I hadn't have gone to the studio with these guys. It's not new, but a totally different way for me of writing music.

So for us, they were a massive inspiration. I would go as far as to say they were the main reason why we started this thing, really. They showed us that you don't have to worry about improvising live. The first bit we played today, in my opinion it was rubbish, it wasn't very good. We were a bit stressed out today, you know, so things weren't perfect. But that's fine, you know? I don't have any problems with that. Even if it was just god awful, and no one in this room thought it was any good, I'm just like, whatever, because at the end of the day, you've got an hour to basically do what you want, and that's the whole point of it—that perfection is not what we're looking for; we're looking for nasty, for rough around the edges. That's what makes the music a little bit more special, to me anyway.

When you mentioned Ableton before, I think you were hinting at the downside of the limitless possibilities software like Live offers. I'd imagine the limitations of the Karenn setup allow you to be creative in a way you couldn't be when working the other way.

Pariah: I totally agree with that. So the first record that we did, that was all on the computer. That was before we'd even decided that we wanted to do a live show. We were DJing, and one of the main motivations for doing the live show in the first place was just to separate it from what we do solo, because we both DJ on our own and didn't really see the point of just DJing together. So we started doing the live thing, and then we thought, "OK, why don't we try and convert that into our studio process?" And the speed with which we wrote that doublepack—I mean what, it was like a month or something?

Blawan: I think it was even less than that.

Pariah: We were writing, at some point, like two, three tunes a day.

Blawan: Which some people can do on a computer, but we can't.

Pariah: I can't. I take months.

Blawan: Me and Arthur are really, really slow at writing music, and that's another key point as well. But I think it's a cycle you get yourself into—you procrastinate, and you nitpick and stuff, and the main point is that this totally gets rid of all of that. You're not limited, but you know your boundaries, and if you can work in the boundaries, then you'll work a lot faster. On a computer, like I said, you can do anything.

What is your writing process like now?

Pariah: At the minute, I'll go round to Jamie's house, because he's got all his outboards, EQs and stuff like that. Usually we get the Tempest up and then—

Blawan: —and then press record! It works really in the same sense as what we just did here. Me and Arthur will just spend a couple of hours pressing buttons.

Pariah: Making noises.

Blawan: And then it gels together. Something always gels together with this stuff. Some days we walk away and can be a bit disappointed that we didn't get anything recorded. But at some point you will get something good. It's just a matter of time, and just patience, really. Again, that's completely different from working with a computer, because most of the time, with my experience—and again, probably a lot of people don't have this experience—but a lot of the time the results are not amazing, and it's frustrating.
You mentioned that a big thing for you right now is scaling back your setup. How else is it evolving?

Pariah: It's continually developing. I don't think it will ever get to a stage where we will say, "Right, this is how it is." Ever since we started it's been changing, and there's so much to learn. We're kind of scratching the surface here.

Blawan: Yeah, massively scratching the surface here. If you don't change the machines and swap them—I mean, you've got like a xOxbOx over there, for example. That's basically just a 303 clone. It just sounds like a 303, you know, and that's all you're gonna get out of it. If we don't ever get rid of that one day, then we'll always have an acid patch in the set.

Pariah: But it's our sequencer for my synthesizers at the moment.

Blawan: It's a better sequencer than it is a synth. If we want to carry on playing, having the same kind of sounds or working within these boundaries, then we'll keep everything. But we don't—we want to constantly find new sounds and work with new machines, so we'll constantly be swapping this stuff and seeing what's working. Yeah, at the moment we are trying to find the best way to scale this down, really. I mean, it looks cool and all that, and it looks like you're doing loads of stuff, but essentially what you want to be doing is as little as possible. And that sounds wrong, but it's true, you know? We're using like 20 tracks on the desk, and that's quite a lot for a live set. So yeah, we're basically just trying to make it so everything is quick and easy to use and sort of worry-free, so me and Arthur get to a point where we're not worrying or stressing out before we play.

A lot of the time when we play, we play sort of big festivals, and there's a few thousand people in front of you and you don't have any chance of any soundcheck when you're setting up. A good example is we played in Belgium a couple of weeks ago, and Robert Hood was playing while we were setting up. Arthur's sequencer broke, and we didn't have anything else to sequence with. So Arthur had to quickly try and write some patches on the Octatrack. It's stuff like that. So we are trying to refine it down so we've got a solid sequencer, or a solid synth, that we know is going to be reliable every time. We haven't got to that point yet.

But if you're into gear, there's always something else, right? I mean, it's hard not to lust after something.

Pariah: You know what? For me, I have no idea. I bought this little thing, the Shruthi, the other day, and it's amazing. It cost me 120 quid or something like that. It has quite an uninteresting sound, but it has—

Blawan: Well it's a digital synth with analogue filters in it, basically. And you can get a similar sound with a modular and stuff, because obviously it's a digital synth, but yeah, again, it's—what was the point again?

Everybody: [Laughter]

Blawan: I'm sorry, just a million things streaming through my head at the minute. Like, what machines are we lusting for? I think we've got everything that we wanted to get right now, because everything that we thought that might work perfectly, we went and got it. Same with me with the modular—there's hundreds of modules that I would love to get hold of and try and stuff.

[Looks at Pariah] You've gotta make sure this guy gets out every now and then.

Blawan: I seriously need some sunshine, man! I'm a bit pale and that. It's one of the downsides to doing this stuff.

I actually feel a bit bad—we've spoke a lot about how we play, and I would really love to talk a bit more technical about this stuff. But essentially, what I would like to say is that me and Arthur are not actually experts at all. We've learned this stuff over here by basically—

Pariah: —guessing.

Blawan: Throwing ourselves in the bloody deep end, like massively throwing ourselves in the deep end. And it's actually worked, you know? So I think if anyone is ever tempted to do this or something similar, don't worry about it. The best option is to really give yourself a challenge and just chuck yourself into it, and that's when the best stuff comes out. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work—no one gives a crap, really, at the end of the day. It's music.
http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?2074

Nevalo wrote:

fragments wrote:

Nevalo wrote:i really wanna buy one of those tascam tape thingys.

A four track?

yea man. but some buttholes over here are decided they're vintage (eg trying to sell them for 200squid +)

i would just love to be able to throw a synth through a cassette or even the drums, see what kindve sound id get.

Well, itll be noisy...youll get tape hiss and machine noise ;p I used to fuck with cassette. These days if I do I record something to a cassette and let it sit in the hot car on the dash for an afternoon (assuming its summer).

Also...fucking Blawan hardware interview? FUCK...terrible for my GAS

That is one of the best RA Machine Love articles in a minute...much more about process, creativity and the like than just being a gear porn interview.

Ed Rush, Optical & Matrix funk (Virus 90's)

I'm talking Wormhole and Sleepwalk etc era. These tunes are by far some of the rawest funkiest DnB tunes ever. I know these guys were massively influenced by psychedelic jazz… but lets discuss how they came up with their groove's and downright dirty funk in their productions. Everything from the drums, bassline and effects all seem to be locked in 1 swung groove. Not being to hot on musical theory, do you think these guys just randomly bashed what felt right? or do you think they followed Blues/Jazz scales to give their grooves some funk??

theyre certainly not lacking in knowledge but my guess would be more bashing on the vibe than consciously following anything theoretical. Theyre using funk breaks, most breaks are funk breaks, so the grooves inherent in the samples are funk drum fills. Tbh theres more complex theory involved in a fairly average pop song than an entire album of ed and op material, its not really that sort of music.

using really nice samples, put through emus and things like that.

then their drum programming is amazing, clever little things that make the beats basically 2 step, but not generic - a kick drum behind a snare etc on some beats.

saw one of them mention clipping the drums in sampler or audio editor - works really well, like some crunchy compression - get beats at 0db, then boost by 3db (or so) and finally normalise back to 0db.

the bass is modulated but in a really musical way - i.e. a womp sound starting half way through for a stab noise etc, rather than loads of random filster sweeps - all really tight and precise.

i'd imagine they are using nice jazzy samples and then working around them.

They had no tutorials
They had no Vengeance samplepacks
They had no 500gb of samples
They had no SoftwareVSTs

but

They had their own limitations
They had their own heads
They had their own ideas


I think this makes the difference

Didn't they also sample 4 bar loop's of released tunes and bass everything else on-top of that? removing the loop after or quite often just leaving it in there...?

- They were making this stuff before "neurofunk" was any kind of subgenre. The music was truly experimental (seriously, listen to the early Virus releases especially), and they weren't competing with other producers to "outdo" each other with modulated bass or crazy edits or making "hard" dnb. There truly was no formula, and their influences didn't sound like the music they were trying to make; their creativity was the driving force behind what made it sound like it did. Even as other people started aping their sound and making it more aggressive and macho, they decided to make an album with techno sounds and b-movie aesthetics as the driving influences.

- It was a lot slower than dnb is now, especially Matrix's stuff, which was even slow for the time. But it allowed a lot more room for groove in the beats.

- Similarly, the percussion wasn't nearly as busy as it is nowadays, and it gave the tunes a much more natural groove.

- The mixdowns weren't squashed and overcompressed and had real dynamics. This is extremely important in a genre of music based on rhythm and timbre as opposed to melody. They were also using almost exclusively funk breaks and hardware synths and effects, which are going to naturally lead you to a rawer, warmer, and looser feel than an in-the-box software approach.

Thinking about it, their tunes are alot more simpler in terms of layers and arrangements, thus giving you that sparser funkier sound. This is where I think some modern tunes loose some of that magic, with most trying to fill the spectrum out for the sake of it...
Some of the funkiest DnB, Jungle, Hip Hop & Garage tunes have been nothing but a few layers of drums, bass, instruments and fx. Stripping it right back can do wonders for groove.

I think often people now days are pushed to fill the soundscape more because the gear they are using doesnt give the same sort of unifying distortion to all the sounds. If they dont keep adding stuff the music sounds empty, the individual elements are too clinical/toyish to stand alone. People can still do it on their pc, its just not inherent in the process in the way that coming off a certain sampler into a desk. That set of videos with Data someone just posted shows him putting almost everything through some sort of amp distortion (maybe, I forget what exactly) in order to give a unifying tone to the parts, and his music sounds great, its very minimal at points but it never feels empty and separated.

that people like Rockwell or more notably Alix Perez in that production vid of his, have a much more inclined stance on sample quality than I would imagine a lot of people had back then. Its not entirely in reverse now, but I would define it as, before it was more about the sound of whatever going through a machine and changing it up(dillinja, BC, optical etc.) where now its more like genuine recording and correct representation.

This is where adding the same distortion/saturation plugging on everything, even busses and the mater all adding a tiny bit each can really bring it all together.

Yep he was using Antares Tube on every channel to add a bit of saturation to everything. I think Kryptic Minds said the same thing in their Q&A. Your point is very true...essentially the process of re-creating what would happen through an old desk / tape set up without actually having to use one.

Interesting discussion. I think if you are looking to what influenced these guys, who were truly innovative artists at the time of Sleepwalk, Wormhole and The Creeps, not to mention the multitude of singles and EPs they released and/or contributed to, you need to look no further than the 70s and artists like Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter (The Weather Report).

In recent years they've moved on to a much more solidly rock/metal sounds which I'm not very fond of, but perhaps it mimics the trajectory of artists like Davis, whose work near the end of his career could very well be considered proto rock.

When it comes to their bass, and particularly their mid range sounds, it's easy to see the connection between the distortion of the rhodes on records like Bitches Brew. Of course, Optical has sampled that record to bits as well as a lot of Herbie Hancock tunes. He even did a remix of Rockit with Grooverider that was only released in Germany (it's an amazing tune, someone has a clip of it on Soundcloud).

As to how they achieved their sound at the time? Pure talent and a style that was born out of sampling, fiddling with knobs on hardware synths and a detailed knowledge of the full process of creating music, from creative sparks through to engineering.

they had no sample banks, they had no softsynths, they only had analog gear and a sampler as well as artistic energy and a scene that was giving them love in the form of actual money from record sales. They also knew how to do things in order to make it sound as fat as possible when the tune was cut to vinyl.

If you look at their more recent productions, it's pretty clear they're not sampling as much as they used to. Everything is distorted crunched mid range so that they can play their tunes in the same sets as stuff like Audio, Optiv/BTK, Noisia et al. It's a bit disappointing, my feeling was always that they were so far ahead of this style, musically and artistically. Their tunes didn't need to be "wall of sound" hard, because they had this rolling, funky, dark energy that no one else could grasp.

If you're looking to recreate their vibes from the late 90s and early 2000s, my advice would be to start with the highest quality samples you can get your hands on in terms of drums. In terms of synths on the computer, don't pick anything that sounds tinny or thin, always try to gravitate to more organic, warm sounds that are rich in the mid range. Also lower the speed you write at, start at 170BPM and never go above 172BPM.

The techy mid range sounds are what's hardest. I think that the art of what they were doing was truly lost when everyone made the move to software. Since that happened I haven't heard a growl or a stab that's even close to sounding as good to what Matrix and Optical were doing back in the day even from these guys themselves.

Even if someone managed to do this, you wouldn't be able to play the tunes alongside current 'hard' drum and bass as it just wouldn't be loud enough. Maybe with the right kind of mastering, it could hold up though.

Take from here.

Related # 1 - viewtopic.php?f=8&t=239766&p=3569864&hi ... l#p3569864
Related # 2 - viewtopic.php?f=8&t=239766&p=3584756&hi ... l#p3584756

you are a beast mr.wub always giving us something cool to read : ) this is the music that grabbed me by the balls and made me listen to dance music and made me understand it wasnt just "that repetative techno stuff" as my secondary school peers all believed...

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Squarepusher

One of the most influential British artists of the last two decades, Tom Jenkinson has pushed electronic music to its limits. In a rare interview, he pinpoints key moments in his career, and explains why musicianship still matters.
Rewind to the early '80s, a time when compact cassette, vinyl, and analogue ruled. Now imagine giving a kid a portable compact cassette recorder. You would most likely put him or her under the strictest instructions to read the manual, only use the machine for its intended purpose, and avoid any actions that would risk damaging it. But one particular seven‑year‑old, growing up in 1982 in Chelmsford, had other ideas. Nearly 30 years on, he recalls:

"I was given this really cheap hand‑held cassette recorder made by some unknown brand that existed for a year or so, and that came with a small microphone. I was captivated by being able to record with it, but I also noticed a number of other things: if I walked around with the tape deck, the pitch would modulate, creating this almost drunken effect. If I put my fingers on the rollers while the cassette was playing, it would speed up the recording, and if I waved the microphone around, it altered the pitch of the recorded sound. I realised that what you're supposed to do with a piece of equipment was only a small subset of what you can actually do with it. And so the initial intention of the recorder, to capture speech and music, went completely out of the window. This is still one way of summarising my approach to things.”

Speaking is Tom Jenkinson, aka Squarepusher, whose gear‑ and ear‑warping methods have contributed to him becoming one of the UK's foremost electronic musicians and bass players. Jenkinson's work integrates elements of drum & bass, acid, breakcore, hip‑hop, jazz‑rock, musique concrète and others into a wild cocktail. He's touched all these bases, and more, over the course of 14 full‑length albums, plus countless EPs and other shorter releases. These include seminal discs such as Big Loada (EP, 1997), Feed Me Weird Things (1996), Hard Normal Daddy (1997), Go Plastic (2001), Ultravisitor (2004), Hello Everything (2006) and his most recent project, d'Demonstrator (2010), under the name Shobaleader One. All Squarepusher's albums were created by Jenkinson on his own, with only Shobaleader One purportedly being made by a band, and almost all have been released by the UK's most famous electronic music label, Warp — also home to fellow big‑name electronic music acts like Aphex Twin and Autechre.

Home Spun

"The seeds of what has become my career were sown extremely early on, before I even bought a guitar,” continues Jenkinson. "Discovering recording technology was a big moment for me in my childhood. Then, when I was eight or nine, I developed an interest in radios and electronics, and discovered, for example, that by putting capacitors in series with parts of a circuit, I could filter the sound. At age 10, I bought an acoustic guitar, strummed some chords and had a couple of lessons, but a year later I decided that I wanted to play the bass guitar. That was such a cool instrument; it had a mystique about it. I couldn't quite work out what it did, but it seemed very important. At the time I found it hard to analyse music in its constituent elements, but looking back I think that I liked the idea of a foundational instrument that forms the link between the rhythmic and harmonic elements in music.
"To me, the bass is the instrument with the most scope, because if you play it sufficiently creatively, you can make it sound as if it's a lot of instruments at the same time. I practised my bass quite obsessively. It helped that, being aged 11, I didn't have a social life; there was nothing else to do. Sitting at home with my bass guitar and electronic gear was it. I had started collecting things and built my own radio, and soon afterwards also became interested in computer programming. Throughout my teenage years I developed a hobby of making my own recordings with whatever gear I could lay my hands on, often borrowed, including basses and effect pedals and tape recorders and electronic pieces of kit. I made lots of home‑spun experimental recordings that combined all these different elements. I never thought that something that I considered a little bit of fun in my spare time, albeit something I was entirely committed to, would end up being my career.”
Jenkinson's obsessive approach to playing the bass guitar has led him to become one of the world's most technically able bass players, his jazz‑influenced phrasing and choice of notes often in stark juxtaposition with the futuristic electronic music elements and hyper‑modern rhythms in his music. A distinguishing feature of Jenkinson's music is its blend of electronica with virtuouso electric bass playing. His bass guitar virtuosity also threw him a challenge, because the possession of serious chops is not always admired in the British music scene. Hence the widely circulated but quite untrue story that his father was a jazz drummer, which Jenkinson now admits that he "made that up when I was 20. I wanted to back myself up so that my commitment to instrumental prowess had some background and sense of tradition. It's a challenge to combat the attitudes prevalent in the media against people who have taken a long time to develop their instrumental skill, and I felt that it was handy to have some kind of justification and say that I was following a tradition. Many people in the British media are petrified of instrumental skill.

There's some justification, because it's part of rejecting the sins of before 1976, and virtuosity continues to have its pitfalls, for example in the Berklee School of Music mentality, which is really just about technique. From my end, I've tried to subtly make a case for virtuosity, without falling into the traps. It's hard to have a nuanced approach when people have such an antagonistic approach against one particular way of making music, but that's what I've tried to do. I was aware of the dangers, and it's a critical point for me. But today I'm a lot more comfortable and don't really care what people say anymore. And I do think that what I'm doing is simply continuing a lineage of music, like, for example, the electric music of Miles Davis.”

The inner contradiction in Jenkinson's claim to be part of a musical tradition is that he developed his musical outlook in relative isolation. He's self‑taught in all aspects of his creativity — playing bass, electronics, composition, recording — and outside influences didn't affect him much until he started playing in local bands in his mid‑teens. "When I started playing the bass, in 1986, the world of virtuoso musicians was unknown to me. I didn't start playing bass because I wanted to be like Jaco Pastorius, or any of the great UK bass players of the day, like Percy Jones, John Giblin, Mick Karn or Pino Palladino. Although I was developing quite a wide range of musical knowledge, I didn't know anything about the biographical information of the bands and the players in it. They were just names on cassettes. It's still the way I approach music. I've only ever read three biographies of musicians in my life, yours [Miles Beyond, about the electric music of Miles Davis, PT], being one of them.

"The mentality behind playing in bands and doing my experiments at home was distinctly different. Making music at home was for fun and to educate myself, without having an aim in mind. Being in a band was always to do with getting signed, wanting girls to like us, wanting to do gigs, and so on. Even the good bands I was in were dominated by extra‑musical concerns. Another challenge for me was that the best local musicians I grew up with and that I looked up to as my idols had a very negative view of electronic music and drum machines. They saw them as the antithesis of the virtuoso, master instrument player. I was swept along with this for a while, thinking that having bad‑ass chops was the only worthwhile thing, but thankfully I was not permanently diverted away from my interest in electronics and music technology. I heard electronic pieces of music that really moved me — the LFO track 'LFO' stands out as a landmark — and the incongruity with people around me saying that electronic music was bullshit led me to really reassess some of the views I had inherited from them.

"By the late 1980s, there was a hell of a lot of interesting electronic music around, and not just academic stuff, but also dance music, whether it was electro or acid house. In the end I thought, 'Fuck it, being a good musician is its own reward, and if you're lucky enough to have good taste, that helps.' A lot of great players don't know what to do with their chops and sometimes they don't even like music. Their virtuosity is purely for self‑promotion, and it becomes a scholastic affair, with the only people listening to them being other musicians. I played with some very good drummers, which gave me a privileged insight into how rhythms can be put together. But in the end there's no necessary relationship between quality of music and quality of musicianship, and I began to see that having chops, yet at the same time being able to be in touch with the bigger musical sphere was and remains a really interesting juxtaposition. It's a really interesting zone that I still like to inhabit.”

During Jenkinson's teenage years, these dialogues took place mainly inside his head. But the release of his first EP, Crot, in 1994, when he was 19, and particularly the success of the rave track 'Road To Reedham', from his Big Loada EP, brought a wider audience into the equation. The bass player elaborates: "When I was a teenager, I was in a process of continual reassessment. I did not want to be manufacturing a simulacrum of things that I already knew, I wanted to challenge myself, I wanted to see if I could change my own perceptions. This was a purely internal process until I had the opportunity to release records, and there was some degree of — often hard to interpret — feedback coming back. But I continued to challenge myself to remain interested in the possibilities that are available. At the same time, it was critical for me to not just be preaching to the converted. Something that nauseates me is when people just repeat their moments of glory to be able to continue their career and calculate how they can get the biggest audience. They become a frozen copy of the things they have done in the past and conservatism creeps in. It actually makes me feel physically sick. It is something I wouldn't be able to do. I feel like I'm rotting inside if I am not learning. It is like poison.”

Return To Melody

The above are strong words from the former Chelmsford man, and he's the first to admit that it doesn't necessarily make for the most stable and financially lucrative career path. With almost every album release, Jenkinson has defied expectations and come up with something that has stretched his own imagination and that of his audience, whether it was the breakbeat of Big Loada, the one man jazz‑concrète of Music Is Rotted One Note, the drum & bass and signal processing of Go Plastic, the aural dreamscapes of Just A Souvenir (2008) or the bizarre, left‑field R&B of d'Demonstrator, complete with heavily processed vocals. In recent years his early tendency for very confrontational, non‑melodic experiments has given way to a more prominent role for relatively traditional melody and harmony. Jenkinson shares some of the ins and outs of the 17‑year obstacle course that led him to this point, beginning with the first obstacle he had to surmount, which was how to marry the man, ie. his bass and occasional guitar playing, with his machines.

"Playing bass alongside those really fast, totally quantised, really digital sound sources — and I mean digital in an aesthetic sense, rather than literally referring to digital audio — was quite unpleasant in the beginning. It was horrible, because when you play with a drummer or a band the tempos will modulate, and unless you program that ebb and flow or set up an algorithm to emulate it, the electronics will just plough ahead, and won't listen to you. It's a one‑way collaboration. It was so hideous, so alien that I was asking myself why I was doing it, but eventually I found that when I could pull it off, it was really compelling. I set about different ways of combining the two, and would often play something quite harmonious on the bass and create electronic parts that would combat and almost try to contradict this. In my mind I was setting up a dialogue in which each instrument would question the other to the point of being a danger, perhaps even an enemy of the other. You can do that in a very token way, and people have sometimes turned this juxtaposition into an incongruity, to the point of musical comedy. Most of these manifestations are tacky and pretty unfunny and therefore many people rule the juxtaposition approach out as a basis for composition. But I think that if that kind of juxtaposition is done intelligently, it can be incredibly informative and lead one to reassess one's instruments.”

As a result of, paradoxically, one very successful early track with a strong melodic hook that appeared on Big Loada, Jenkinson embarked on a challenging, counter‑intuitive journey with regards to melody. He recalls: "I made 'Journey To Reedham' in 1996, and I remember the first time I played it during a rave: the crowd went bananas! I concluded from that kind of experience that if you have a knack for writing catchy melodies you can immediately appeal to people. I appear to have that knack, and I could go into the studio now and take an hour to create another barnstorming rave track that everyone will love. But certainly at the time I felt that that was too easy. I really did not want to become a one‑trick pony. It appeared that an overtly catchy melody line allows a piece of music to communicate with people, and I started to experiment to see whether, if I took that melody line away, I could get the other instrument to make up for the lack of overt melody. I tried to create quasi‑melodies in the interactions between the rhythm section and the other instruments, for example.

"I never ruled out melody completely, but I did go to great lengths to take away the element on which people normally hang their hats, and to see if I could recreate it in other ways. I wondered, would it be possible to create a sequence of low‑register sounds with sharp transients that would be catchy? Could I make bass lines that were catchy? Is it possible to make beats that are catchy? Are there other ways than overt melodies to make people latch onto a track in an instantaneous way? So in a way I was doing research. I was using a lot of foggy, jazz‑influenced harmony and electro‑acoustic sounds, thinking that this maybe offered a different way of doing things. On Go Plastic, I approached the question from the angle of digital processing, and wondered whether there was a way of making that so visceral, so aggressive, so exciting, of injecting so much adrenaline into the music that it was possible to do away with melody. Could the music still communicate, and if not in the same way, could it at least offer a parallel way of doing things?”

Hard Work

Eventually, Jenkinson came to the conclusion that there was no definitive answer to his question. He now regards himself as "quite naive” in his "admittedly imperfect phase of ruling out melody”, and eventually returned to using more traditional and overt melody and harmony. It's a development that echoes the development of 20th Century classical music, though Jenkinson admits that "I don't think my knowledge of Western classical music at that time was sufficient to know that I was making a parallel transition. And of course, all that difficult, austere post‑war music is now finding its way into more popular music forms, albeit in a watered‑down form. People use Stockhausen in electronic dance music, and someone like Tod Dockstader, who was totally obscure, is now a name that people in certain circles are aware of. So all that difficult music has become part of a palette that people dip into. As for my own development, at some stage I started getting the impression that my music was beginning to be seen as an academic effort and was increasingly appropriated by musical academia. That was a compliment, and it reflected my commitment to make what, at least at the time, I felt were bold experimental moves in electronic music. But at the same time I felt that it was a sign of me entering my own zone of scholasticism, of academic self‑referentiality. Basically I was beginning to stare up my own ass. Plus there was again the danger of preaching only to the converted. So I wanted to shake things up and make music in a more spontaneous, almost flippant way, and less like I was in a laboratory.”

Jenkinson's development is not quite as linear as his words here suggest. 'My Red Hot Car', from one of his supposedly more difficult and experimental albums, Go Plastic, features an early instance of the bassist singing through a vocoder, is extremely catchy, and came close to being a Top 40 hit. The more recent general direction of Jenkinson's music towards more immediacy, fun and spontaneity and away from wilful contrariness is nonetheless obvious, beginning with Ultravisitor, which swung wildly from one extreme to another, and culminating last year in Shobaleader One and d'Demonstrator, much of which sounds like a direct extension of 'My Red Hot Car'.

Jenkinson: "The track '50 Cycles' on Ultravisitor is a monster that took me a month to make. I used the Vegas software, made by Sonic Foundry at the time, to assemble literally thousands of edited pieces of audio, and it became something of monstrous complexity. I wanted cutting‑edge digital signal processing and I wanted the most awkward, difficult, angular sounds. Then the next day it was like: 'I can't stand this any more, I need something simple, something enriching.' I wanted music that immediately made me feel good. That's how the acoustic guitar track 'Andrei' came about. On that album, the dialogue between these two directions started to get really tense. Since the album after that, Hello Everything, I've been making music that's been more accessible, more joyous, and less hard work.”

Jumble Sale Studio

There certainly is a more immediately melodic thread running through Hello Everything, Just A Souvenir and d'Demonstrator, but that's not to say that there's not much on these three albums that isn't weird and pretty far out by most people's standards. All these albums, as well as Go Plastic and Do You Know Squarepusher (2002) were recorded at the Essex location Jenkinson moved to in 2001, after living in London for over a decade. Ten years on, Jenkinson is still in the same rural location, where he spends as much of his time programming his beloved Eventide Orville box in a his slightly dilapidated living room, complete with what looks like an old '80s stereo tower as his only playback system.
One result of the boundary‑pushing attitude to gear that Jenkinson developed early in his life is that he's not interested in shiny surfaces and collecting state‑of‑the‑art stuff. He likes to get under the bonnet of whatever he stumbles upon and operates with a "jumble sale mentality”, not caring whether something is unglamorous or cheap. His studio is on the ground floor, and consists of a live room, at the moment filled mostly with his regular live drummer Alex Thomas's kit, and the actual studio, where pride of place goes to a huge, almost wall‑to‑wall Euphonix CS3000 desk.. Both rooms are linked by a corridor that's full with flightcases and the computing bits for the Euphonix as well as a Lexicon 480L reverb.
The Euphonix comes as a bit of a surprise, as it is a piece of kit that ticks all the wrong boxes, from Jenkinson's point of view at least, in that it's shiny and expensive and most likely was not bought at a jumble sale. Also expensive and arguably shiny are two Eventide Orvilles and one Eventide DSP4000, arguably Jenkinson's most important boxes. The rest of the gear conforms more to his slightly Luddite, avoid‑glamorous‑kit perspective. It's a ragtag collection of stuff, and there's no discernible overall 'vintage' rationale behind the collection as a whole. The most significant pieces are a Roland TR909, TB303, SH101, V‑Synth XT and V‑Bass 99, Neve 1073 mic pre, AKG BX15 spring reverb, TC Electronics D2 delay, DBX 1066, a self‑made mechanical reverb, Axon AX100 MIDI bass module, MOTU 24I/O audio interface, Dynaudio Acoustics M1 monitors, Yamaha CS80, TX81Z and FS1R synths and QY700 sequencer. A huge amount of gear has also been and gone, like the Yamaha VSS80 8‑bit toy keyboard sampler shown in some late '90s television footage of Jenkinson.

"I made my first records using the Boss DR660, which was a bit of a non‑event in the history of drum machines. It just happened to be the one I could afford at the time and that had a reasonable range of sounds on it and that could do MIDI sequencing. But it was phenomenally limited. To this day, nobody believes that the tracks on Big Loada were a single pass of me sequencing my Akai S950 from my DR660. Yeah, at some stage I had that cheap Yamaha keyboard, which was pushing the limit. It cost 20p in a jumble sale, and it had keys and an output, so I reckoned that it should have at least one song in it. All that kind of stuff is gone now. I used to be very hard‑headed and said: 'You use your brain to make music, not your wallet, so I can make music with anything. If you're using your wallet exclusively, you're fucked!' I still love it when people realise great musical ideas on extremely limited equipment. I personally didn't make much of it in the press at the time, because I thought: 'Who cares what I make music with? If my music doesn't stand up on its own, I don't want to prop it up with talking about any technological innovation that may have occurred during the making of it.'”

Regarding the sound sources that are currently in his studio, Jenkinson remarks, "I have used the Roland VB99 on my records in the past, but it's a cheesy, idiot‑proof piece of gear, and it's hard to get into the nuts and bolts of it. These days I really object to being locked out of the key parameters of a piece of gear, but the VB99 was quite useful for a while. I did use the TB303 on the Shobaleader album, the very deep bass synth comes from that, and the drums on that album were programmed in the TR909. I unearthed the 909 and was surprised by how good the straight‑out‑of‑the‑box sounds sounded on my monitors. Their sonic muscularity reminds me of heavy metal and R&B, and those are two of the main influences that exist on the Shobaleader record.

"I've had the 101 forever, but didn't use it on the record, though it is on some of the stuff I'm currently working on. The old monosynths are very charming, but I have used them to such a degree that there's not much more in them for me. From a philosophical standpoint I'd like to say that there's no limit, but in practical terms I do get bored with things. My current synths are all stuff that I've built myself in software, augmented with the FS1R and the TX81Z, which is a rackmounted version of a lower‑spec DX7. I recently bought the Yamaha CS80, and in doing so went completely against my own principles, because it is extremely expensive and extremely limited. It's the sort of synth that collectors are into, ie. people who traffic instruments and don't play them. I never wanted to spend thousands of pounds on an analogue synth that can do stuff that I can write in a computer in a day. But I like to sometimes go against my principles, to stretch myself.”
The core instruments in Jenkinson's studios are, in addition to his basses — the most frequently used being his Zoot and Warwick six‑strings and his Westone fretless — his Yamaha QY700 sequencer and, of course, his collection of Eventide Harmonizer boxes. "I started using Eventide equipment in 1999, when I bought the DSP4000, and I'm still finding new things to do with that and with the Orville. I write my own algorithms, mostly in a PC‑based editor. The vocoder sound on my vocals on the Shobaleader record was done with the Orville, in which I programmed a 24‑band patch, which had a reasonable coherence. I also used the Orville for the bass distortion on the record. I wanted to have unified tone for the album, so I developed some specific software patches to do the processing on the bass. The bass distortion on the track 'Megazine' was done with an old‑school 110V Morley Wah pedal and an Orville distortion patch based on a curve, X/Y‑mapping module. On the track 'Abstract Lover', I created a bass effect patch doing pitch‑shifting in the Orville and then going into a frequency divider/distortion patch in [Native Instruments'] Reaktor software. The QY700 is my main sequencer. I much prefer it to using software‑based sequencers. The latter just make my brain shut down. When the graphical information is too vivid, it makes it harder to retain the information in my memory, and one critical thing about making music is to have a real‑time virtual image of the studio operating in your head, so you can make your choices very quickly. Looking at the gear all the time and every time having to work out how you're going to do something slows you down and shuts down your imagination.”
Old School

Jenkinson seems reluctant to make any recording medium indispensable to his studio, especially a DAW, and in addition to his large desk, he also still uses a tape recorder. He says, "I got the Euphonix just before starting the Shobaleader record. Before that I had a Mackie 28:8, which was getting a little worn out. The Euphonix is digitally controlled analogue, so it gives me the best of both worlds, and does add some character to the sound, in the summing and EQs. As for recording, I used tape recorders exclusively until 2001. I first had a Fostex M80 quarter‑inch eight‑track, and in the late '90s I obtained a half‑inch Tascam MSR16. I still use that, though it's being repaired at the moment. I have to say that I'm not obsessive about it. Recording to tape, or to a computer‑based multitrack, is a means to an end. I mix and match now. I've used Sonic Foundry's Vegas, and more recently Nuendo, but I don't endorse or recommend them. There's no love in it for me, they really are just tools.
"Having said that, it's still more convenient to use multitracking software, and the reality is that my tape recorder is not here. The majority of the Shobaleader record was done in Nuendo, but I try to do as little in a computer‑based multitrack as possible. I just use it to record and organise the music. '50 Cycles' was me pushing digital multitracks to the limit, but in what I'm doing of late, it's just a tape recorder with no personality. There's always the issue of latency when you record into the computer. If my signal goes through the Eventide and then into the soundcard and then into Reaktor, and back out again, I doubt that I get less than 15ms latency. So you're playing ahead, and then the software will account for latency, but it may be shifting things too much. It's endless. Another deliberate restriction is that I try to use the software with a tape‑recorder mentality. I don't do hundreds of takes and then compile. You may get something technically perfect, but it won't have any soul. I'm old school, I don't mind mistakes.”
To hear Jenkinson call himself "old school” may come as a surprise to those that view him as the epitome of 21st Century experimental music. But the whole point of Squarepusher is, of course, the creative tension that comes from the juxtaposition of old and new, of serious bass chops and musical sensibility with the latest developments in electronics and composition. Squarepusher's most recent effort, d'Demonstrator, which sounds like a delirious American R&B band pushing the boundaries so far as to be in danger of being dropped by their label's 'squares', is a point in case.

On the Squarepusher web site, Jenkinson states that the album's "basic premise at the outset was 'space pop' — a utopian pop music hallucination”. Jenkinson also claims that the album's "overall aim is to articulate my music through the medium of a band.” And so Shobaleader One ostensibly features two guitarists, a keyboard player and a drummer, in addition to Jenkinson on bass and vocals. The band members hide behind obscure pseudonyms such as Strobe Nazard and Sten t'Mech, and a number of commentators have inferred that it really is just all Jenkinson himself. When asked, he's not saying much, other than stating that he has indeed assembled a band and plans to tour with it in the near future. He also hints that the new smaterial he's working on at the moment will be "rather less accessible again”, thereby once again wrong‑footing any attempt to categorise or predict his musical direction.

He concludes, aptly: "I don't want people to get bogged down in one‑dimensional interpretations of my music. To me, if music has any value, it should survive various interpretations. It's one reason why I have avoided using lyrics in the past, and when I do use them, as on d'Demonstrator, I obscure their meanings. Lyrics tend to nail down the song, and I don't see that as a good place for my music to be. I want it to live beyond a time and a place.”

What's In A Name

While other electronic music acts tend to use obscure, abstract and/or unintelligible song titles, Squarepusher's titles are often evocative. Tom Jenkinson explains that "usually the titles are oblique references to associations that the music evokes in me, such as places or colours or concepts or, rarely, people”. And he gives a few examples:

• 'Greenways Trajectory' (Go Plastic): "Greenways is a walkway near Stratford in East London.”
• 'Orient Orange' (Hello Everything): "This piece evoked a strong sense of... orange.”
• 'Kronecker King' (Hello Everything): "A Kronecker delta is the name for a hypothetical infinitely short sound, approximations of which are used to generate impulse‑responses of filters and so on. The track had snare sounds cut really short by tape editing — so it's a matter of concept association, I suppose.”
• 'Andrei' (Ultravisitor): "A reference to the great Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky.”

The Amen Break

The five‑second solo that drummer Gregory C Coleman performed in 1969 on the song 'Amen, Brother' with soul band the Winstons must surely rank as the most‑used sample in the history of music. It is perhaps the only sample out of which a whole genre sprang, in this case drum & bass. Tom Jenkinson explains how he came to be a very frequent user of the Amen break: "I first heard it being used in the Mantronix track 'King Of The Beats', and I just thought: 'Fucking hell, that is heavy!' I was 15‑16. Then, the same break started getting used in the early '90s in the early rave, breakbeat stuff. Then, of course, it became the main break in jungle or drum & bass. So for me it has these maybe slightly rose‑tinted associations of happy musical times. I can loop to it for 20 minutes and feel in heaven. I'm not going to say anything stupid, like it's perfect, but the way that the drummer does the ghosting, the timing of the ghosting, the sound of his kit, the way it is recorded, the vinyl — it was only released on a vinyl seven‑inch — everything works. You can pitch it up, down, stretch it, reverse it, it does everything. The Amen break is very sonically rich, very spectrally dense. There is a lot you can pull out of it, whereas some other beats offer maybe just one or two songs, and you don't want to hear it again.

"I could be accused of laziness in having used it so often, and I have actually repeatedly said to myself: 'I'm not using it any more.' I recall saying that as far back as 1998, when I did Music Is Rotted One Note. Then later I found myself thinking: 'Mmm, mmm, I need that sound.' It is like a drum machine. The degrees of freedom are maybe not as extensive, but it has scope, it has reference points, just like a TR909 has a reference point: it was the mainstay in all the late‑'80s Chicago house and Euro techno in the '90s. The Amen break has its own references, and if you are happy to abuse them, all well and good. Nowadays I am not as happy to make those references, and since Hello Everything I officially don't use the Amen break anymore.”

Take from here - http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may11/a ... hr.htm#Top

James Lavelle’s Mo’Wax label was a colossus of the mid-90s music scene. The label’s musical policy was famously eclectic, from the sample-based instrumental hip-hop of DJ Shadow to the lounge stylings of Money Mark; from reissues of post-punkers Liquid Liquid to the jazz fusion of David Axelrod. At the Lavelle-curated Meltdown Festival in London this June, friend of Attack Tony Nwachukwu hosted a series of Meltdown Sessions in conjunction with Ableton, looking back at the label’s impact and discussing the work of some of its most innovative and influential artists.

The first video to emerge from the sessions is a panel discussion focusing on the heyday of Mo’Wax circa 1995 with Andrea Parker, Nwachukwu’s fellow Attica Blues member Charlie Dark and Kirk Degiorgio (who released on Mo’Wax under his As One alias):

The second video is an in-depth conversation with DJ Shadow, discussing his creative process, production techniques and approach to live performance:

Machine Love: Svengalisghost



Marquis Cooper became Svengalisghost after losing all his music in a computer disaster. Part technological glitch and part ritual cleansing, the experience got Cooper thinking about how he could live more in the moment with producing, and Svengalisghost has been a hybrid live/studio project ever since. The compact live setup he takes with him to club and festival gigs is the same one he make tunes with at home, and when he's making something, he's not always sure whether its for a record or his live show. Both conjure a sound that's at once harsh and inviting, abstract but insidiously funky. His performance at Sónar By Night was without question one of the program's most challenging performances, but aided by his on-stage charisma, the set got the crowd dancing regardless. Curious to see how he did it, we asked him to drop by the Sonar +D tech conference the next day. After a short live set, he explained the method behind the madness.

Tell us about what you did there.

It was basically kind of an improv jam with some of my babies. I took a random patch from the [Waldorf] Pulse 2, which is one of my newer synths, and sequenced it with the [Korg] Electribe and Elektron Octatrack, which just recently replaced my Korg ESX. It's kind of the MIDI brain for my setup. So I just basically programmed a sequence, ran it to this, kind of randomly brought this into the mix. It's kind of like the space machine, if you are familiar with the EMS synth that Hawkwind made famous. I use it for weird ethereal noises. And then this, I don't know if it was even in the mix, I kind of just was focusing on [the Electribe and Octatrack] for now, and then this I think was playing some kind of weird—

By "this" you mean the Dave Smith Evolver?

Yeah. This was actually my first synth that I bought. It was a friend of mine who was a big inspiration for me—who Ron [Morelli] knows, and the reason I'm on L.I.E.S. is because of this guy—he had this synth, and I was always amazed by it. If you are into learning synthesis, if you want to learn how to make sound, it's basically one of the most logically designed synths. People say it's intimidating, but if you like logic, you will love this synth.

It seems like you keep the gear that's been with you for a long time on the right side here—

Yeah.

And over here, these are the new bits?

Yeah, these are the two new ones. This [the Yamaha DX200]—I actually had to buy a new one, the old one died. The whole DX series that Yamaha put out at the end of 1999, they decided to, like, "Oh, we'll make a groovebox that's pretty much like a DX21, DX100, DX7." You know, if you ever mess with a DX7, you know it's—you can't program these things.

FM synthesis. It's famously tough.

What's really cool with this is basically this is a DX7 and a DX100, but it's also got ASDR, so you can treat it like a regular synth, and it still has the FM capabilities, harmonics and all that stuff. But it's really fun to program. I've had this synth for like three years, but it wasn't until I got the Octatrack that I was able to sequence it properly, because I was using the ESX. It's only got two monophonic sequence patterns, now I can actually make it do weirder stuff.





So to speak more generally about the setup, you've got a synthesizer, a groovebox that can also do synthesis, and you've also got some effects that everything's running through.

Right, right. This [the Electrix Mo-Fx] is traditionally used for my vocals, because it's a really nice delay. It's time based and it's MIDI-clocked, so it's really tight. But it weighs a ton, so I'm trying to figure out new ways to either eliminate it or teleport it to gigs or something like that. It's a really special device. They don't make them anymore—the company went under. I think they make USB keys or something like that now. They made a series of these rack effect units, like the Mo-Fx, the Mo-Fx Filter—which is like an analogue filter that's clocked to MIDI—and then there was one more that they made, but I didn't have it, so I don't really know what it is. But I also have the TC Electronic [M350] multi-effects processor. This is a recent acquisition. I'm kind of in the air with how I feel about it. Sometimes you get these things, and it's like a relationship you get into.

What don't you like about it?

I mean, it's just basically—it has two modes that you can use, and I tried to use it where I was just using the delay for one aux-in, and the reverb for the other aux-in, but when I tried to use my vocals through it, it creates a lag, and so like I'm saying hello and it's like, "[pauses] Hello." But yeah, this [the Octatrack] is another one of my—basically, I was looking for a more adequate sequencer. I found the Octatrack, right, and it's one of these things… Some gear, like I said, you get into a relationship. The Octatrack, the best way to sum it up: I'm looking for this girl all my life, I finally find her and she's wonderful, but every time she speaks to me, she spits in my face. And this is pretty much what this thing is.

So there's a learning curve with this thing.

It's not as hard to learn as I've been led to believe. It's just, if you're used to working with gear that's a little bit more intuitive—like, I feel that I can't really use this live. I think it's perfect for studio work, but this is my second show with it, and I was slightly disappointed with the results, you know? Because I'm holding the mic, and if I'm playing with the ESX, for example, you have a mode where you can hold the patterns and just play through the patterns. But with this, as you saw when I was playing just now, anytime I want to advance through a pattern, I have to hold this button, which isn't a bad thing if you are going through [steps] one through eight. But if you're doing a pattern on 16 and you have a mic, I have to dislocate my thumb or, you know, do some weird yogic shit.



And having a mic is a big part of your setup.

They've always been pretty integral to what I wanted the project to be. It was something I was inspired to do by my friend SSPS. I was like, "Whoa, this guy is playing a guitar, he's on stage with a mic." Even in early Chicago house, there was always a vocal aspect to it. That comes from the fact that a lot of these cats were listening to early industrial, like new beat, or any electronica that was coming from Europe: synthpop or coldwave or whatever genre you want to determine it to be. But I think that it creates a different dynamic. I'm not just going to stand up there and push buttons—it's something to kind of interact with the people, some kind of story sometimes. You know, I do have some twisted tales.

Is it all improvised?

No, I mean, it's not on the fly, but it just depends. Some songs are not set in stone. Some nights I may start off with something, but it's not the song that it was originally meant to be. Sometimes I improv lyrics, but I'm not really that good with rhyming, so I try to have everything kind of jotted down before. But you know, I smoke a lot of pot, so I always wind up forgetting a lot of lyrics anyway.

Svengalisghost was intended as a live project from the off, right?

Yeah. The basic story behind Svengalisghost was I was doing stuff as Below Underground, and I just reached a point with this project where I was really disgusted with the music that I was making. So one day I just destroyed all the files.

Like your decision—you just got rid of them?

It was a computer decision mixed with my own disgust. I couldn't retrieve the files, so I just ended up deleting the remnants of everything that I'd been making, and I decided that I wasn't going to make any more house or electronic music—I was going to start listening to fucking rock & roll. I mean, I already listened to it, but I decided I was going to dedicate myself to it listening to rock and hip-hop, and fuck dance music. And then, through this time that I was making music, I was sending stuff to my friend, so I got this idea that maybe the reason I was frustrated with the music I was making is because it was heavily edited—it was something that you spend hours and hours and hours on, just in your studio, and it's really safe. If you know the story of Svengali, he was basically a soothsayer in this novel Trilby, a French novel by George du Maurier.



One of the bestsellers of the 19th century.

Yeah, it's a wonderful book. So he had this control over [the main character] Trillby the whole time, but he realized as he was dying that he couldn't really control—you can't control reality, it's never going to work out the way you want it. So I took that as a metaphor for my death as a studio producer, and having this control in the studio, being able to edit everything, if shit goes wrong I can just erase it. I like this aspect of not really knowing what's going to happen. Like, this machine may or may not work, anything can happen. So yeah, that's pretty much like Svengali. [The project is] definitely meant to do live stuff, which I have a hard time separating when I'm in the studio—is this going to be for live, or is this actually for a release? So it's kind of confusing. I need to split my personality again and create a studio-based moniker.

Have you built some uncertainty or randomness into this setup?

Yeah. One of the first shows I had I think was in New York for Mutual Dreaming, and I was still learning how to go about setting a show up, but it was like it showed me so much because it was so disorganized. That it forced me to really become like a commando, you know—and if you are a Navy SEAL or something like this, and you can't get some kind of supplies but you still got to go detonate this bridge. So that's how I look at performing live. Even last night it was like something was off, but what am I going to do? I can't stop the show, so I have to just power through it and make it work. Sometimes the happy mistakes are what you are really looking for. I heard Pariah say this, too—sometimes the stuff that you don't plan for really amazes you, and you are like, "Fuck, this is really cool. I didn't turn the button, and this stuff sounded really good."

What you've got on stage today—how close is it to what you use in the studio?

I mean, this is it: this is the same setup. The same machines are on the road and in the studio. They don't get a break. No vacation for them.

I can see how you might sometimes be unsure whether you're making music for a 12-inch or your live show, then. Is there something that makes you gravitate toward one use or another for the music you're making?

If it seems like something that can translate to a dynamic setting, where you know, OK, I'm going to play at three o'clock in the morning, do I want to play something that is more abstract in the beginning or do I just want to go straight for the throat and heavy kick, or do I want to kind of tease the crowd a little bit? It's just in my own head, because I'm getting to the point where I just write patterns, and then, you know, I push a button. I am literally behind my shades, and I just close my eyes and hope that this shit doesn't blow up.

You said what you played here today was mostly improvised—

Basically, I wrote the drum programming last week before I left from Moscow, but this patch here was intended for another song.

The patch you're talking about is on the Pulse 2, right?

This is the Pulse 2 which is—man, it's really impressed me as far as its versatility. It's a three-oscillator synth, but you can ride it like a monosynth, or you can create really lush pads with it, so you can actually play up to four notes. It's amazing what they did with it, because I don't know any other synth that's like this—that has this range—and that's what I need in my setup. As you see, I'm into a more modular setup, anything that I can put into my luggage. So this was a big attraction for me. It's got a really nice arpeggiator, which I really don't use. Basically, the synth is maybe a month old now, and I'm deeply in love with it. I actually want to buy another one and then, you know, maybe start a little family with them, take them out on the road, maybe little trips to Disneyland and shit like this.

I'm sure they'd like that, too. How did you come across the Pulse 2?

Well I remember being on the lookout, because I was really frustrated for a long time. I was using the Dave Smith Mopho, and I was kind of feeling like a Dave Smith whore because I had all their gear. And the filters all kind of sound the same, so I was looking for a new filter and wanted something that had a really nice low-end. So I was just going across the net, and I saw this synth. I was always kind of impressed with [Waldorf]. My friend had the Waldorf Blofeld and another friend had the Microwave, and you know, Jeff Mills uses one of the older Microwaves so I was like, there's got to be something to it.

I was looking at some demos, and I just heard the pads and I'm like, this is crazy, because that's what I felt like I was missing—the ability to make really crazy pads, but at the same time have a synth that was able to go do crazy basslines. So with this thing I finally have it. So I'm still learning it every day. I wrote a couple patches on it. It's really easy to program, too, because it's the same layout just like the Evolver—it's got kind of the same grid-based layout, which is for me perfect. I don't really like diving into menus. That was the thing about the Mopho—if you are programming that, you got this little window, and you're going through each parameter, and it's like, man, I just want to turn a button. I got a really short attention span.



Apart from size and functionality, what are you looking for in gear? What sort of sounds?

I'm looking for slightly dissonant tones. I mean, as Western listeners, we have such a limited perspective as to what a scale is. If you go listening to any other music or go start experimenting with other scales, you are like, shit, there are so many weird pitches. When I hear something that is kind of bizarre to my ear, I know I'm on the right path. If it scares me a little bit, I'm like, OK, maybe. I like a balance. I like slightly dissonant tones mixed in with some slightly melodic, slightly attractive tones, but I tend to look for sounds that are beyond what's known. I don't want to get a 303, I don't want a x0xb0x because everyone has it, it's known.

I mean, the thing with acid is that when it was created it was a new tone. If you continually try to recreate acid, what's the next acid? That's my question. I want to make the next acid—I think that's the goal. Acid was cool; it was a mistake, create more mistakes, you know what I mean? I love acid, don't get me wrong. I'm from Chicago, it's something in me—I've got to play four or five acid records a day to keep my heart beating.

The other thing we haven't talked about in the setup yet is the mixer. Usually you use this Mackie?

Yes, the 1202 VLZ Pro.

But today we're rocking this Soundcraft.

I'm a freak for Soundcraft. I used to work as a lighting technician, AV tech. I mean, if you work around any audio technicians, Soundcraft is like the god.

Why is that?

The EQs, the preamps are sick. It's got a really clean sound. But so does a Mackie. It's just, like, snobbery. Some people like a Mackie, some people like Soundcraft, people love Allen & Heath. I've never used one extensively. I basically got this [Mackie] from a friend—this was another inherited piece of gear from SSPS. Basically, he gave it to me under the condition that I bring it back, but I never brought it back.

When you're playing live, how much mixing are you doing? Are you EQing on the board?

I'm still approaching it like a DJ, because I'm not smooth enough to have everything automated. I push a button, and these things start fading it. I'm still manually switching patches, and sometimes I go beyond the patch that I'm supposed to play, and I look up, and I'm like, what the fuck? And that's a happy mistake. Same thing happened today: I was supposed to be on 409, and somehow I ended up on 411 but it sounded good so I was just like, let's roll with it. And that's kind of one of those happy mistakes. If everything was just programmed, it would have been locked in the books—409—but seeing as it's human error involved, and you get these kinds of variations to it that I don't think would occur in a rigid setting.

We've spoken a lot about the tangible parts of the set, but part of what I like about your sets are the intangibles. Like stage presence is a big part of how you play. The shades always come on.

The shades are definitely on.

Let's talk a little about how you approach performance.

You know, I had to give a speech in eighth grade, and I remember it being the most terrifying thing. So now I fight it by wearing shades, because why not, if it helps me to get in my mode, you know? If I sat and paid attention to everybody, I don't think I'd be able to get as loose in my head. And that is the objective of performers: to be able to just go into their own world and pretty much make a fool of themselves on stage. It's like, life is a spectacle—we have to make fun of ourselves, so me on stage is a character.

I come from a father—my father was one of these cats. He was serious. If you look at people in the pictures in the '70s, in a lot of cinema, everyone was wearing shades at night. But now it's kind of taboo to have shades on at night, and I don't understand it. So I'm kind of carrying on his legacy, because he was one of these cats that my friends would see, and they were all like, "Man, your father is so fucking cool—he's rocking fucking Ray-Bans at night," and I'd be like, "Yeah, he's fucking stoned as shit."



It seems like your headspace is as important as any of the gear you're using.

Yeah, but I mean, that's the whole thing. That's why I'm kind of frustrated with [the Octatrack], because it really limits me. The way I'm used to jamming with the ESX, because it's, like, one button, I know I'm pushing it, I can move around and hit another button, but with this, if I had the microphone, and I want to switch a pattern in it, it kind of takes away from this action. I want to use this, but I might want to just try and keep it in the studio, because like you said, it's a big part of my stage presence. I think it's not just about getting on stage and being really academic. No, it's got to have a little rhythm, and that was my main thing when I'd see people doing live PAs—like fuck man, everyone has his own style, but you're on stage. If you want people to dance, you should be fucking moving. Like reciprocity: you give, you receive. So if I want people to fucking snap, I should be the first person snapping.

And that plays into the sort of music you're doing as well. As you said, some of it is pretty dissonant, some of it is pretty weird-sounding. But at the same time, there's always something that the crowd can connect with. Part of it is your personality, but part of it must be something going on in the music.

Oh for sure. I'm a total believer in psychoacoustics. I'm a believer in the way music affects the psyche. We are frequency, we are actually vibrations, so it's kind of figuring how to manipulate that. It's also, like, seduction. That's the whole thing for Svengali's persona—he's this great seducer, this kind of soothsayer, this hypnotist. So through these dissonant tones, at certain rates or slow LFO, changing the pitch over a certain timespan, or filtering, it creates this hypnotic effect.

There's an almost sinister quality to it.

There's definitely a dark edge. We exist in this infinite galaxy, and we've been fooled to think that it's bright, but in actuality it's always dark out, and I just try to bring that cosmic edge, you know? Everytime I make music I just want to open my mind up for the great cosmic vibe. I just want to be a conduit—I'm just up here in a trance. Somehow it works.

Taken from - http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?2101

Searching for Tomorrow: The Story of Madlib and DOOM's Madvillainy

Following the 10th anniversary of Madlib and DOOM's telepathic mind meld of an album, Jeff Weiss traces traces the history of Madvillain and details how these two perpetually mystifying artists came together for an uncanny hip-hop classic



I. As Luck Would Have It

Dedication is dragging an iron mask to business meetings. But there’s no such thing as halfway crooks, and no legitimate supervillain can strike terror in spectacles and a kufi. You need esoteric scars and an origin myth smothered in smoke. You need resilience to battle post-9/11 Homeland Security officials wary of black British nationals with Five Percenter backgrounds. You need a metal face, preferably one with an aperture allowing you to drink beer. Otherwise, you’re just weird.

The name on the plane ticket read: Daniel Dumile. It summoned the ex-Zev Love X from Atlanta to L.A. to meet Madlib. Dumile may have officially announced his villainy around the time of Clinton’s impeachment, but “DOOM” was what the kids in Long Beach, New York, always called him—a warning woven into the syllables of his surname. It became chilling prophecy when SubRoc, his brother and partner in K.M.D., was run over and killed on the Long Island Expressway in 1993.

Shortly thereafter, Elektra dropped K.M.D., partially due to album artwork that depicted a Sambo figure hanging from a noose. A half-decade of darkness followed. All we really know about these Sinai wanderings in Strong Island is that the originator of the gas face fathered a child, wrote dozens of raps that never saw daylight, and grieved over obscene quantities of malt liquor and jazz.

He eventually re-emerged with a morbid bent, cruller-shaped physique, and a Darth Maul Halloween mask (mercifully, soon upgraded and galvanized). After a series of 12”s on underground rap Masada Fondle ‘Em Records, he released Operation: Doomsday, which became a subterranean classic among JanSport zealots.

It also lodged in the belfry of Madlib, the Oxnard-raised loop digger, who had recently hatched an album of psilocybin-rattled helium raps, inhabiting an animated alter ego named after literature’s most famous hunchback. It was a union conceived in head shop heaven.

But the idea of Madvillain was as unlikely as it was inspired. Both men exhibited reclusive, out-of-orbit tendencies usually only found in Burial, Thomas Pynchon, and Himalayan glacier beings. And this was the early 2000s, before cell phones, social media, and email became appendages. The odds of corralling the duo in the same room were grim. Especially after Madlib became estranged from hip-hop in favor of Yesterdays New Quintet, his fictional fusion jazz band where he played every instrument. It may have been creatively emancipating, but his fledgling label, Stones Throw, was on the brink—and, save for a fluke hit that became a turntablist AK-47, Madlib was the imprint’s one-man business plan since its inception in 1996. Despite the sterling merits of his jazz forays, Stones Throw’s target audience didn’t overlap enough with the chill stoner grandpa demographic to sustain itself.

“I was looking to do anything to kick start his interest in hip-hop,” remembers Eothen “Egon” Alapatt, former Stones Throw general manager, founder of Now-Again Records, and co-founder of Madlib’s Madlib Invazion label. “We had the chance to do a reunion album of [Madlib’s first group] Lootpack. I got them weed, booked studio time, and it fizzled out.”

Stones Throw had recently moved operations from San Francisco to L.A., mostly to be closer to its hermetic star, whose own family members called him The Unseen. Lacking capital for an office, a rented house in the Mount Washington hills doubled as a nerve center and crash pad for the label’s staff: founder Peanut Butter Wolf, art director Jeff Jank, and Alapatt. An Eisenhower-era bomb shelter with 18-inch concrete walls became Madlib’s studio, and an implicit symbol for the subterranean enterprise.

But it’s tough to alter music history without money for caffeine and weed. Funds were so scarce that the coffee budget came from scrounging forgotten dollars from Madlib’s dirty laundry. And without more Madlib rap music, the label seemed fated to wind up like Fondle ‘Em, which fossilized in 2001.

Destiny dilated in a darkened aquarium in Long Beach, California, where a turbaned Madlib tripped out on a tank of phosphorescent sea dragons. He was there for a feature in the LA Times. When the reporter asked Madlib for his list of dream collaborators, two names came up: J Dilla and MF DOOM.



Machinations had already begun for what became Jaylib’s Champion Sound. But DOOM was entirely off the grid. After Operation: Doomsday dropped and Fondle ‘Em folded, the villain basically disappeared for three years, hustling back and forth between Long Island and Kennesaw, Georgia, an ex-railroad suburb of Atlanta named after the Cherokee word for “burial ground”—famed for a mandate requiring every resident to own a gun. It was the ideal enclave for a metal-fingered malefactor to conceal himself in plain sight.

By chance, an old college crate-digging friend of Alapatt’s happened to live in Kennesaw and had a passing acquaintance with DOOM, who had never heard of Madlib or Stones Throw.

“I told my friend that Madlib’s been making beats and I needed to get them to DOOM to get Madlib back into rap again,” says Alapatt, who promptly shipped out a care package of Madlib’s early work. Three weeks later, the friend called back: DOOM loved it and wanted to work. Phone calls and tapes were exchanged. An offer was made. One of several quasi-managers then orbiting the DOOM solar system demanded plane tickets to L.A. and $1,500 for three songs over Madlib beats. Stones Throw immediately agreed.

“She was playing hardball: ‘DOOM needs this, DOOM needs this,’” Alapatt says. “I thought it was all pretty stupid, but I agreed to it, even though we didn’t have any money in the bank after buying him the plane tickets.”

That’s how Daniel Dumile wound up with a steel face stashed in his luggage on a spring day in 2002. When the plane touched down in L.A. and Peanut Butter Wolf arrived at the airport to pick him up, the mask rusted at arm’s length, just in case a mass conqueror needed to get a little ruthless. By the time the car reached the Stones Throw citadel in Mount Washington, the shield was strapped on, the debt ready to be collected.

“The first thing his manager did was get me in my bedroom, which was also the office, and corner me about the 1,500 bucks,” Alapatt says. “I realized that if she was in here, then DOOM was with [Madlib], and the longer I kept up this charade with her, the longer they’ll vibe and maybe it all might work out.”

It became a scene straight out of a Bond movie. The longer Alapatt distracted DOOM’s henchwoman, the more time it allowed Madlib and DOOM to escape into a different dimension—or, at the very least, smoke a blunt and bob their heads to beat tapes. If she discovered they were broke, the jig was up, DOOM would be on the next flight back to Georgia, and the universe we live in would be 73 percent less dastardly.

But as Shakespeare wrote, “I like not fair terms and a villain’s mind.” And he was no stranger to strong smoke, masks, and the idea that audiences love to hate. The union of Madlib and MF DOOM was destined through hook and crook. As the tense haggling transpired upstairs, the instrumental from “America’s Most Blunted” bumped from the bomb shelter, its psych-rap rattle bleeding through the walls of the house. If you took a deep inhale, it was impossible not to notice the dank aroma of creativity being increased.



II. Bong Rips on the Roof on the West Coast

One hundred Madlib beats materialized in a matter of weeks. A bolt of inspiration ignited most of the stash for Champion Sound and Madvillainy, along with albums from M.E.D. and Dudley Perkins. In his atomic lair, the 28-year-old skinned his wax collection like the Native Americans used buffalo: equally reverent and rapacious. A commodity to be split into a thousand parts, nothing wasted.

“Everything was spontaneous,” Madlib tells me now. “We worked with whatever we had at hand. If you think about it too much, it won’t work. But shit usually works out when you’re with the like-minded. DOOM’s like my super-smart cousin. We trade books and records: Sun Ra equations, biographies of Charlie Parker. Some people are born off that same energy.”

Stones Throw foraged enough cash to rent DOOM a hotel, but most of his time was spent at the house in Mount Washington. Mask off, writing rhymes, demoing, drinking beers, eating Thai, and hitting a bong on the terrace. In his bunker, a solitary Madlib smoked stupendous amounts and feverishly kept pace. At one point, Peanut Butter Wolf threw a Super Bowl party, where attendees were star-struck by the supervillain scarfing chicken wings and watching Tom Brady knife up the St. Louis Rams.

“I’m staying in L.A. and trying to get back to my children... working as fast I can without sacrificing the quality,” DOOM recalled in a 2011 interview at the Red Bull Academy. (He declined requests to speak for this article). “[Madlib] would give me another CD, and I’m writing… We might stop, and he’ll burn one and listen to the beat, and that’s it… We hardly spoke. It was more through telepathy. We spoke through the music."

By booking DJ gigs, delaying a few royalty payments, and banking on a vinyl advance from Fat Beats, Stones Throw scraped together the $13,000 budget. A contract between DOOM, Madlib, and the label was written and signed on a paper plate. The villain got a $1,500 advance, with subsequent installments meted out on a per-track basis. Proceeds were split 50/50, upon recouping of expenses.

“I had the romantic idea that it was protecting the artists more—and I didn’t want to be a shady record label,” Peanut Butter Wolf says. “But there are so many different aspects of releasing a record that need to be spelled out. The hand-written anti-contract was a cute joke at the time, though.”

It reflected an established anti-establishment approach. Both Wolf and DOOM spent the early 1990s in rap groups on major labels. Both got dropped shortly after the crushing deaths of their partners. Madlib loosely apprenticed under West Coast heavies King Tee and the Likwit Crew before self-releasing the first Lootpack EP after no one offered a deal.

Stones Throw’s fulcrum hinged on nothing being too eccentric or commercially toxic. They were defiantly anachronistic without being overly sentimental or nostalgic; hiss and dust were necessary to a balanced diet. Then there was Madvillain, wandering towards the future through the wax portal of the past, warping to an alternate dimension where the reigning deities descended from Saturday morning cartoons, Blaxploitation cinema, Blue Notes, and psycho-tropic visions.



At the time, the label’s central priority remained the Madlib and J Dilla collaboration. Fresh off the success of Slum Village, the Detroit soul magi had a major label deal and production credits for the Roots, Erykah Badu, and Common. In comparison, Madvillainy was the cult comic too abstruse to be adapted. And its odds of success only decreased after it leaked on a trip to Brazil.

Booked to speak at the Red Bull Music Academy, Madlib spent most of his two-week sojourn trawling for Tropicalia and samba loops in mom and pop shops scattered across Sao Paulo. Hijacking the only room with a cassette player, he rigged it up to his SP-303 sampler and started to gut and fillet the fresh catches.

“We went to every little store we could find,” Madlib says, still lamenting the two boxes of records forever lost in transit. “I was keeping Brazilian time, sitting in my room smoking some terrible weed and sampling shit, while everyone else was out partying and getting drunk.”

Madlib and Cut Chemist shared a suite with adjoining doors; countless strangers carouseled through the rooms. The beats for Madvillainy’s “Strange Ways”, “Raid”, and “Rhinestone Cowboy” were birthed. And at some point, someone wrangled a near-finished demo cassette of the album, took it on a plane back to the United States, and leaked it on the internet—14 months before its official release.

“Those were the early days of internet leaks, and we thought it would completely ruin sales,” Jeff Jank says. “People were approaching DOOM and Madlib at shows to tell them how much they liked the album, so they were like, ‘Fuck it, I’m done.’ Madlib started on other stuff, and DOOM, well, you never know what he’s doing.”



Nearly a year elapsed. In that span, Jaylib flopped commercially. DOOM snapped his hiatus with Take Me to Your Leader, a monster-movie concept album where he played a triple-headed rapping gold dragon named Geedorah. He also released Vaudeville Villain, playing teenaged Viktor Vaughn, a “young whippersnapper” and sometime rival to the metal-faced terrorist. The first Madvillain show also occurred at a Stones Throw Coachella set, but few saw it because Talib Kweli was playing at the same time. It was 2003.

It’s unclear why Madlib and DOOM started working again. The laws of their partnership are ungoverned by cycles of commerce, Gregorian calendar, or conventional reason. All that matters is that at some point that fall, they came back with thumbtacks and pop for the beer. The intent was to retain the raw integrity of the leaked Madvillainy while paradoxically refining it.

“On the original version of album, DOOM rapped in a really hyper, more enthusiastic voice,” Peanut Butter Wolf says. “Then he decided to rap in a more mellow, relaxed, confident, less abrasive tone. I think he did it to make it different from the all the other projects he dropped those years.”

The villain made minor lyrical edits, presumably for the purposes of posterity. A SARS reference switched to AIDS. A reference to 9/11 on “Meat Grinder” became “10/11.” He re-did every vocal and wrote what became “Accordion” and “Bistro”.

“I didn’t understand why he re-recorded his vocals,” says Jank. “I wasn’t crazy about the second version at first, but he was really just perfecting it as an album—he was very aware of the consistency from one track to the next.”

Between the leaked demo and the official release of the 12” to Money Folder/America’s Most Blunted, Madvillain cultivated a bigger buzz than anything Stones Throw had experienced. But the last stages of completion were fraught with complications.

The label asked Madlib to re-do a few beats, but he said he forgot the sample sources. Then DOOM demanded to alter some tracks. Everyone grew frustrated. Compounding the anxiety, Alapatt, the project’s chief A&R, realized it lacked a legitimate ending. With less than a week left to turn the record into the distributor, they rented DOOM a $60-an-hour studio. Selecting the beat for “Rhinestone Cowboy”, the villain smashed in timely fashion.

With the finale, DOOM slapped the white 10-gallon hat off Glen Campbell in favor of a black Stetson and silver skull. The diabolic sequel of “Rhinestone Cowboy” flips the original’s themes, similar to Madlib samurai-chopping samples. The Wichita Lineman crooned about a veteran troubadour who knows “every crack in these dirty sidewalks of Broadway/ Where hustle's the name of the game/ And nice guys get washed away like the snow and the rain.”

It doubled as testimony to Dumile’s tribulations in his first music industry rodeo. Out of necessity, the mercurial chrome-masked man replaced the kind temperance of the rookie. After a dozen years of grinding, Madvillainy finally re-directed the lights towards DOOM.

The encore encapsulates the album’s runic brilliance. Madlib loops a millisecond from a Brazilian gem cut by Caetano Veloso’s sister. DOOM is the phantom of the Grand Ole Opry rocking parties and departing in a jalopy. The grimy slimy limey references Eddie Murphy’s Delirious and an arcane 1970s kids show in the same bar. He cryptically alludes to the leak and subsequent delay. The wordplay is opaque and dazzling. The beat is psychedelic and sinister. The villain has the last laugh, but not so loud that you can’t hear the applause.



III. Two Historical Figures, Outlaws, and Desperadoes

A villain rarely admits their immorality. A supervillain not only understands their nefarious tendencies, they revel in them. They are gloriously wicked, self-possessed and theatrical, one step ahead and smirking into the fourth wall: Ric Flair, Kobe Bryant (admittedly), Satan in Paradise Lost, Destro from “G.I. Joe”, Lady Macbeth, Mr. Burns, Heather Locklear on “Melrose Place”, and Madvillain all glimmer in the hall of cracked mirrors.

Rap has few supervillains. It’s a genre filled with flawed protagonists and faceless corpses. (Aside from Madvillain, the only true rival in unalloyed supervillainy is Eazy-E.) And unlike most great anti-heroes, Madvillain escaped unscathed. They are resolutely shadowy and esoteric, a hieroglyph with a translation open to interpretation. They are unclassifiable and unpredictable: a Saturday morning cartoon with Saturday night sensibilities.

By the time of their fusion, Madlib and MF DOOM had mastered the rules, understood when to break them, and knew how to forget their existence in the first place. Madvillainy is both unmoored from the gravity of its time and a product of its temperature.



For all the liberty ostensibly granted to independent hip-hop, the majority of records from the millennial underground boom followed a verse-chorus-verse approach. Beats opted for an austere boom-bap purity. Lyrics gravitated towards elliptical concerns about lyrics—either a rapper’s superior bars or a rival’s wack ones.

Madvillainy absorbed this ethos, but refused to adhere to an orthodox code of ethics. It’s the work of two men still enchanted by hip-hop’s possibilities, but exhausted by its tedious posturing. There’s a yellowing never-digitized article on “How to Spot a Wack Emcee”, cut out and hanging from the wall of Poobah Records in Pasadena. Authored by DOOM, it’s as close as you’ll find to a metal-faced mission statement.

The indictment lacerates rappers who lack showmanship, who refuse to edit their verses, who are vulgar to the point of silliness, who are too self-obsessed, who say “you” too frequently, who use excessive choruses, who scream too much, who are too fashion-obsessed, who pose half-naked (“When I buy the album, I want to listen to it, not take home soft porn.”)

His opus is the antidote to these aired grievances. The words seem absurdist and improvised, but reflect precise diction, alliteration, and internal rhyme. He embodies Mark Twain’s epigram that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and lightning.”

But Twain never described himself as “the worst-hated God who perpetrated odd favors, demonstrated in the perforated Rod Lavers.” DOOM breaks out into drinking songs about Drano. He plays the affable maître d’ at the Madvillain Bistro Bed and Breakfast Bar and Grill. On “Figaro”, he name-checks a character from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and a Mozart comic opera. In the next inhale, the villain sips Olde English and sticks the head in.

The slang merges hip-hop stoner with Hanna-Barbera. This is the same heroic antagonist who sampled “Scooby-Doo” on Operation: Doomsday, and so Madvillainy may be the only great rap album with the phrases “silly goose,” “egads,” and “sheesh.” His lexicon conforms to the character. The villain speaks a certain way; he exhibits his own strut, his own sneer.

Hooks are practically non-existent. Song titles are mostly selected from a single line. Wildchild gets a track to himself for no apparent reason. It’s underground not strictly from convulsive reaction, but because it afforded the freedom to be fully raw.

The mask enhances the drama and mystery, but also nullifies conventional expectations. Looks and style aren’t necessarily synonymous. Your ears focus on the flip-book imagery and supernatural exploits, not the 30-something, chubby, balding wizard in the vocal booth.

When all narration follows a costumed third person, you are not shackled to notions of authenticity—a rarity in a period bookended by 50 Cent and chants to “keep it real.” Thus, the stories range from clever rap boasts about skills and money, to wariness of a girl with rancid breath, to an abstract meditation on war and religion.

No other rap album exists in the same constellation as Madvillainy; however, cosmic kinsmen do exist. Supreme Clientele shares its elemental composition of cartoon skits, delirious vocab, and metallic alter egos. Both Dilla and Madlib inherited DNA from the holy trinity of Marley Marl, Pete Rock, and DJ Premier. Within hip-hop, you can trace the legacy of conceptual ambition and psychedelic experimentation back to Prince Paul and De La Soul (or Rammellzee, who one-upped the mask with a suit of robot-samurai battle gear).



But if nothing is remotely like Madvillainy, it’s because there’s no one left like Madlib and DOOM. The producer controls the dial, scrolling through decades and sounds as easily as a scrapbook. He stitches together the tale of two supervillains from snippets of old cartoons, noir, horror movies. Instrumentals are inserted as interludes. Effects are spliced to add three-dimensionality: A phone rings. Tapes rewind. Redman yawps. Bong rips bubble. Dhalsim grunts “Yoga Flame!” DOOM coaxes maximum oxygen out of every beat, letting them build and breathe.

The Beat Konducta’s abyssal record collection contributes everything from Gentle Giant and Frank Zappa, the Whispers and Atlantic Starr, all the obscure Brazilian loot plundered from Sao Paulo. But its spiritual epicenter is jazz. Two masters joining forces for the sake of seeing what might happen. It’s the hip-hop cognate to Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman colliding on Free Jazz, one uninterrupted and fearless jolt of creativity.

If you asked Madlib, he’d inevitably admit the heaviest debt to Sun Ra, the patron saint of intergalactic flight. If there is a central artery to Madvillainy, it’s “Shadows of Tomorrow”, a re-interpretation of a gnostic spell from the late jazz explorer. In his Quasimoto guise, Madlib repeats a series of incantations about time and eternity.

Today is the shadow of tomorrow
Today is the present future of yesterday
Yesterday is the shadow of today
The darkness of the past is yesterday
And the light of the past is yesterday

It can be a jazzman’s lament, a sacramental hymn, or a Buddhist mantra. The Greeks believed in the concept of kairos, “the supreme moment,” the evanescent rotation in which all our stars align. To the early Christians, kairos was when God intervenes. In rhetoric, it was a “passing instant when an opening appears, which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved.” These are things that do not answer to temporal law or skeptical debunking. They are the skips in the record that you can’t explain. This is Madvillainy.



IV. The Wisdom of the Future

Upon its release in March 2004, response was unprecedented and immediate. Among other raves, this website gave it a 9.4 and called it “inexhaustibly brilliant.” The New Yorker went one superlative further to say “Madvillain redeems the pretensions of independent hip-hop.” After two years of hectoring Stones Throw for making unsalable records, distributor EMI couldn’t keep Madvillainy in stock.

“Everyone was suddenly talking about it,” Alapatt says. “Def Jux was the indie-rap behemoth, and now we were being mentioned side-by-side. It kept the lights on at Stones Throw for years—until Donuts came out.”

Madvillainy has sold approximately 150,000 copies, making it the label’s best-selling rap album (and third overall after Aloe Blacc and Mayer Hawthorne). The revenues allowed Stones Throw to finally open an office in nearby Highland Park. Most of the credit belongs to the music, but the cover artwork from Jank burnished the iconography.

If you’ve read this far, the image is already seared into your synapses. DOOM barricaded behind the iron mask, eyes like arrowheads, weight of the world in his retinas. The color scheme is sepulchral grey; the mask is scarred and battered, but stolidly intact. Jank envisioned it as a sly riff on King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King and Madonna’s self-titled debut.

“The idea was, ‘Who the fuck is this dude walking around with a metal mask? What’s his problem? What’s the story behind it?’” Jank says. “When DOOM saw it, he just groaned. He didn’t want to see himself.”

Typical supervillain response. A more fitting impression came from Mos Def, who described picking up the vinyl despite not owning a record player: “I bought it just to stare at the album. And I stared at it and I just kept going, 'I understand you.'”

Its impact is incalculable. You can point to Odd Future, particularly Tyler and Earl, whose theoretical EarlWolf project is built off the blueprint—right down to the perpetual delays. Thom Yorke is an avowed Madvillain fanboy. New York’s Joey Bada$$ and Bishop Nehru could be DOOM’s illegitimate seeds. Flying Lotus’ Captain Murphy alias ostensibly exists to the fill the black-light void that Madvillain bequeathed.

Most of a Madvillain sequel sits in a hard drive somewhere in London. Maybe. Due to a never-fully-explained immigration snafu, DOOM now roams his country of birth. It’s unclear when he’ll be allowed to return to America. Then again, he could be here right now.



When the initial paper plate pact was signed, Stones Throw locked up a deal for two more albums. One was optioned. The last eight years have been spent trying to coax it into existence. For a while, DOOM and Madlib shared adjacent studios in a former Masonic Lodge in northeast Los Angeles. Some songs were recorded. None were released.

“I’m waiting on DOOM. He has the beats. I’ve done my part,” Madlib has said repeatedly over the last several years.

When Kanye West sought Madlib beats for what eventually became My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, DOOM brokered the meeting, hoping for a cut of the potential windfall. For hours, the three of them sat in that Masonic Lodge, shrouded in smoke, piles of records, and the smell of pan dulce from the Mexican bakery downstairs. At some point, Kanye fell out of a rickety half-broken chair lying around the studio. Madlib and DOOM laughed, as villains do.

In the interregnum, Madlib’s carved up a career’s worth of damaged psychedelic loops, free-jazz odysseys, and smashed Piñata in partnership with Freddie Gibbs. When reached by phone, The Unseen mentions an arsenal of stockpiled records with Scarface, Mos Def, and Talib Kweli, and miscellaneous beat tapes and Yesterdays New Quintet reunions.

Earlier this spring, DOOM sent Peanut Butter Wolf an email. After a long hiatus, they’d recently reconnected about Madvillainy 2. The note read: “I’m just about done, doing some final touch-ups over the weekend, then she’ll be ready. Sounding really dope.” Wolf’s subsequent decision to post the message to his Instagram angered the sphinx. To date, no new songs have been sent.

This consistency of inconsistency is unrivaled and in-character. Whether sending DOOM imposters to his shows or refusing to reveal a single personal detail, expectations are there to be obliterated. A supervillain’s actions aren’t supposed to be understood or interpreted. Above all, the commitment remains supreme. The light is never to be invited in.

Rock 'n' Roll Jedi



When Dave Grohl got onstage with the rest of the Foo Fighters last winter to accept their Grammy for best rock performance, he went on a rant about “the human element” in music. “Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument—learning to do your craft—that’s the most important thing!” he said. “It’s not about what goes on in a computer!” Then he pointed at his heart and his brain. “It’s about what’s going on in here and here!”

Dave Grohl as John Connor, fighting the rise of the machines. Not that Grohl wasn’t a hardline punk rock soldier with Nirvana, but after Kurt Cobain died, Grohl surprised us by becoming a goofier warrior. With the Foos, Grohl seemed to be the biggest trickster in rock, making videos that referenced Mentos commercials and cracking jokes in Spin about musicians who took themselves too seriously. Now he was seriously positioning himself as a crusader against Apple’s GarageBand software? Of course, he caught himself right away. He didn’t want to be perceived as the out of touch, anti-technology drummer guy—the new Lars Ulrich! So a few days after his speech, he released a statement that essentially apologized to laptop DJs such as Skrillex, signing off with a classic Grohl joke: “So, don’t give me two Crown Royals and ask me to make a speech at your wedding, because I might just bust into the advantages of recording to 2-inch tape.”

But now Grohl has produced an even grander statement, directing a documentary about the rock ’n’ roll Jedis and their ancient analog tools. The film is called Sound City, and it’s the story of Sound City, a lovable dump of a recording studio in LA—well, actually in the valley—where Nirvana recorded Nevermind, Fleetwood Mac recorded Rumours and Rick Springfield recorded “Jessie’s Girl.” Hallowed ground, this. And Grohl interviews all the saints—Neil Young, Stevie Nicks, etc.—who are now his buddies.



I ask Grohl if he was comfortable being the interrogator after all those years being on the other side of the microphone. “You know, it’s funny,” he says. “Obviously I’ve been doing interviews for a long time, but I was nervous when I had to interview other musicians.” I can instantly commiserate. Yeah! I think. Musicians can be really hard to interview—always invoking the “magic” of the creative process while desperately dodging any push toward specificity. It’s probably because they’re drawn to an art form that attempts to convey emotion by circumventing language in the first place. But Grohl says that once he started talking to the musicians, he realized he was one of them—and then it was easy. (Damn it.)

“Mick Fleetwood was one of my first interviews,” Grohl says. “And if you’ve ever talked to that dude, he’s the sweetest guy in the world—he’s just a trip.” It was during this conversation that Grohl realized, “Oh right, we’re just talking about music here. And because we’re talking about music, it can become a debate. And it’s not really a two-sided issue. It’s like one of those f****** Dungeons & Dragons dice that has all the different sides to it.”

But because Grohl has so forcefully advocated for the side of the die that defends and preserves the craft of making music with amplified guitars, he’s been labeled a “rockist” by music critics. That is, someone who is prejudiced not only against other genres of music, whether rap or dance or bubblegum pop, but against the ways in which other kinds of music are manufactured. And because music critics use words like “rockist,” Grohl (correctly) believes this critical language is gibberish. So he made Sound City for the people who speak his language: rock musicians and people who want to become rock musicians.

“This movie wasn’t made for cynical middle-aged music critics, it was made for my daughter,” he says. “Or for the teenager down the street who’s trying to figure out how to start a band. When I think about kids watching a TV show like American Idol or The Voice, then they think, ‘Oh, OK, that’s how you become a musician, you stand in line for eight f****** hours with 800 people at a convention center and then you sing your heart out for someone and then they tell you it’s not f****** good enough.’ Can you imagine?” he implores. “It’s destroying the next generation of musicians! Musicians should go to a yard sale and buy an old f****** drum set and get in their garage and just suck. And get their friends to come in and they’ll suck, too. And then they’ll f******* start playing and they’ll have the best time they’ve ever had in their lives and then all of a sudden they’ll become Nirvana. Because that’s exactly what happened with Nirvana. Just a bunch of guys that had some s***** old instruments and they got together and started playing some noisy-a** s***, and they became the biggest band in the world. That can happen again! You don’t need a f****** computer or the Internet or The Voice or American Idol.”



Grohl says that when he was young, he didn’t have a rock documentary like Sound City to help him, he only had Beatles records. “And those could teach you all of those lessons just by listening to them,” he says. As if to prove his point, the second half of Sound City somewhat bizarrely focuses on Grohl buying the original engineering board—the mystical Neve Board—when the studio closed and putting it in his own garage. The rest of the movie is about a bunch of famous musicians jamming with Grohl in said garage—Nicks, Springfield and most incongruously, Paul McCartney, who came and recorded with the remaining members of Nirvana (and ultimately performed with the band at the 12-12-12 show and on Saturday Night Live).

One of the reasons the film’s shift in focus seems so bizarre is because the jam session with McCartney and a semi-reformed Nirvana overwhelms his original point. Grohl has had to answer many questions about this portion of Sound City. He acknowledges this. “At this point everybody knows we recorded a song with Paul McCartney,” he says. “We were trying to keep that a secret but it’s hard to keep a Beatle under wraps.”

“You know, it was a funny day in the studio, but it was just a day,” Grohl continues. “I’ve met Paul before and we’re friends, but Pat [Smear] and Krist [Novoselic] haven’t. So they were really nervous.” I ask him what it was like to jam with Sir Paul. Was McCartney anything like Cobain? Similar melodic sensibilities? Different styles of playing with others? Anything specific?

He points to McCartney’s confidence—which he says is an essential trait for a musician—but then adds: “No two people play the same. Even if you’re playing the same song on the same instrument as somebody else, you will play it differently because you are you. And that’s a good thing! All of your imperfections and all of your bad habits give you your own sound and style. Music’s not meant to be perfect. It’s meant to sound like the way you do it. So the way that Pat and Krist and I sound together sounds like Nirvana. If you substitute those things for someone else, it won’t sound like that anymore. That’s what the movie’s about. When you put human beings together with other human beings to make music you get magic.”

I feel like he can sense that I don’t totally understand what he’s talking about—that I’m probably thinking, Maybe Dave’s not a rockist—but he’s DEFINITELY a musician. By playing with McCartney is he telling me that you can’t really bring Nirvana’s sound back, not with a Neve board, not with Paul McCartney, not with a Kurt Cobain hologram? Maybe. He tries to appeal to me directly, guy to guy.

“I guarantee you, that chick you dated in high school—go kiss her again,” he says. “You know what she’s going to kiss like? Like she did in high school.” //

Taken from - http://deltaskymag.delta.com/Sky-Extras ... -Jedi.aspx

The retro-loving party taskforce invite us into their cluttered beat laboratory

Back in 2013, Crack descended once again on Worthy Farm and, by nature, the delirious hinterland that is Block 9, The Common and Shangri La. After watching Bicep on the then-brand-new Genosys stage, we ended up spending a large proportion of the morning with them courtesy of a mutual friend, sucking in the haze of a dry Glastonbury morning at The Stone Circle; blissful ambience punctuated by balloons and the humour of two affable Northern Irishmen.

Our second meeting with the Bicep boys is in their new Shoreditch studio, a space with pieces of hardware and Expedits rammed full of vinyl everywhere your eye rests. If hedonism characterised our first meeting, this is a more relaxed affair. Matt McBriar and Andy Ferguson are in wonderful contrast to one another. The former is the distinct mouthpiece for the duo, while the other reclines, intently chipping in when appropriate with amusing quips.

Surfacing from beneath a blog that exposed them as studious hunters of all things disco, Italo and ultimately rare, Bicep’s production sound initially owed a debt to 90s piano house as much as any other more convoluted genre strain. This retro fetishism was hugely refreshing at a time when every other UK producer worth their salt was making house music with lashings of bottom end heft attached. The good prevail, and the result is a label, an image and a touring schedule that has for the last year cemented their place as leaders of their field.

Oh … and they like taking their tops off as much as we do.



So does the studio represent a bit of a respite from the relentless tour schedule? Is that whole lifestyle beginning to take its toll?

Matt: I wish I could take some time off. I’m just rolling from one thing to the next, and it’s got to the point now where sitting around listening to a load of people talk about fucking coke before a gig is my idea of hell. So now I just try and arrive at gigs as late as possible and then split.

Andy: When you’re tired in here [the studio] and you can’t even move a wire around despite needing to get shit done, it’s not good.

M: You hear a lot of the music produced these days from DJs who are pretty good, and it just passes by. You can tell there’s no decent quality gear being used. The more we’ve bought this stuff and developed an ear to listen to it, the more we’ve dug further back into time to achieve a good sound.

How long has the studio taken to assemble then?

M: It started last October. Prior to that we’ve been buying bits and pieces over the last two years.

A: It’s like a wormhole, you start buying this stuff and it just keeps going, there’s always something we want. This over here [Arp Odyssey analogue modular synthesizer] is semi-modular so there are literally no presets, so you have to turn it on in the morning and leave it for a bit while the oscillators heat up, and then you have to tune it. It was made in 1976.

What’s the end game from all this equipment investment then? Are we looking at a full-length record?

M: There’s no point in having another house music album with a couple of female vocal bits that work in a nightclub. We do singles that are aimed at the dance floor, they aren’t meant to be life-changing pieces of music.

A: You need a vision for an album. Space Dimension Controller for instance, his vision for his album is that he thinks of a story and the songs almost write themselves. If we did an album it would definitely contain a concept and I know Matt has talked about going to Scandinavia and just sitting there for six months in the winter and writing an album.

Soundcloud

So taking it back, what were your first partying experiences in Northern Ireland?

A: Basically there was one club called Shine. When we were growing up in school together we were surrounded by commercial hip-hop and shit Euro music. Belfast has got a very cool little punk scene and I got into a bit of that. I wanted to be in bands but I played sport and committed to that. I played rugby and I nearly played cricket professionally. It was a case of choosing cricket or music, but I chose music and started going out more.

M: I remember stumbling across Shine one night, Umek was playing, and I didn’t understand the concept of music being part of a bigger set. Up until then it was always a case of going to a club and the guy would play one anthem and then another and that was music to me. So when I heard this repetitive rumbling techno with no vocal and 800 people going mental, I was like ‘Woah!’. I got a set of decks immediately and started buying loads of hard techno and going out at every single weekend to see Dave Clarke, Green Velvet, Underground Resistance.

Dave Clarke often talks about Belfast being a proper hotbed for that kind of music.

M: It was in the SU building and it could hold between 1000-1500 people and they sold ice lollies on the door. People were smoking indoors and every time you walked back into that room was like going straight back into battle.

A: I’d have a Twister in one hand and a Stella in the other.

M: I went to university and that instantly died away. Minimal techno got really big and I fell out with it. I stopped DJing and stopped music. That era in the UK was awful, there was no musicality involved and it was just dry.

A: It was the musical sound of a cappuccino machine.

M: That’s why we started the blog, we just put up loads of weird 70s music and Italo disco. Anything that was strange, weird and off centre, basically.



So did you used to visit each other at university?

A: Matt was in Liverpool and I used to go up and see him all the time.

M: While I was at uni I also had no interest in DJing out and I didn’t have decks. Before I started Bicep I hadn’t DJed in seven years. I was still buying vinyl but I wasn’t trying to DJ out. That was the starting block for the blog though, wasn’t it? It wasn’t a case of you guys posting mixes, it was more of an educational tool, weird music and humour. But we were making bits of music on the side. Just messing around and making edits and stuff. So we had one or two records out, and then I moved to Dubai.

Dubai?

M: I got offered a graphic design job in the UK mid-recession. It’s the easiest place to get your head down and get locked into music as there’s nothing else to do other than go to the beach. I brought some equipment into my office and just practiced after work on Ableton. Things just came together when I came back to London, so we quit our jobs and said we’d just starve for a year. When your first gigs come in and you’re staying in a hotel for the first time you’re like ‘Woah!’

A: It was fucking tough for a year. Next level broke. I was sleeping on his couch and waking up at seven each day to go to Tesco, cause that was when the reduced section came out!

2013 was the unequivocal year of ‘Taps Aff’ in the Crack office. That’s your shit though, what are the origins?

A: It’s not even our shit, it’s more of an Irish saying. The Revenge also had a record label called Tops Off and he used to put edits out on there that were tunes to take your top off to. There were friends I used to say it to at university, I’d be like ‘you coming down for some Tops Off?’ If you were doing ‘Tops Off’ you’d just be playing party bangers.

M: It’s a Glasgow and Belfast thing. Basically places with really shit weather and the idea is the minute there is a little bit of sunshine you whip it off. Belfast and Glasgow are two places you are least likely to take your top off, so it becomes a cheer! It was fun when we were DJing and there would be 50 people with their top off. Then it got to the stage where people expected us to do it. So we stopped.

A: You’d get one really creepy guy coming up to the decks and being like [creepy old man voice] ‘tops off?’

Taken from - http://crackmagazine.net/music/bicep-feature/

Music has always been a matter of energy to me, a question of fuel. Sentimental people call it inspiration, but what they really mean is fuel. I have always needed fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.

Lacking inspiration so spent the morning on the green tea/gingko/guarana and watching documetaries;

Hunter S. Thompson Omnibus 1978 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laamYjS ... gest-vrecs
Buy the Ticket, take the Ride - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISNp4xWE3ag
Philip K. Dick - The Penultimate Truth (full documentary) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM921saJqXc
Fear of The Unknown: Lovecraft Documentary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spoz_1KyZiA
The Beautiful Yet Dark Mind Of Edgar Allan Poe - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6IiusT-Seo
J.D. Salinger Doesn't Want To Talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxVRPbhtxRg

And lo, did the inspiration return. Not so much writers block (that doesn't exist, get over it) but a lack of direction or inspiration. Watch an movie, read a book, listen to an LP lying on the floor. Keep a notepad to hand, always. Always.

I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas, or at home—and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed—breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crêpes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned-beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert…Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours, and at least one source of good music…all of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

Go for a fucking walk as well. There is no excuse for not getting fresh air and a bit of colour on the skin. Load up the personal music system with noise. Sounds. Could be tunes, could be the sound of planes crossing the sky whilst birds chatter underneath. Again, keep the notebook to hand. Anything and everything to be recorded no matter how mundane the thought the spark may seem at the time.

Get into a rhythm of things.

^Funny that. Just rewatched Dub Echoes and one on House music (Pump Up the Volume?). But that list of writers leans heavily into the realm of my favorites. Very stoked to have an excuse to teach some PKD again in one of my courses : )

Edit: also gonna watch all these.

Studio Stekker: See what happens



This small Dutch event has a simple pitch: come make music with no restrictions, no expectations and a peerless collection of synths at your disposal. As Jordan Rothlein discovered, there's nothing else like it on the festival calendar.

"Everybody stay here for awhile, in this zone. We'll go up and down, up and down."

It's sometime after dinner on a sweaty Wednesday in Utrecht, and Mathew Jonson is working the mixing board at the front of a makeshift recording studio, assembled in what was once the stage of a shoebox-shaped ballroom. A black curtain separates the space from the rest of the room, and a couple of mismatched lamps lend it a warm glow. There's gear everywhere—drum machines, a mattress-sized modular system, three or four MacBooks—enough that it's hard to tell what's doing what in the thick mix pumping from the oversized Adam Audio monitors behind the mixing desk.

From my perch on an old leather couch at the back of the room, I've barely seen Jonson's front side for the entirety of the session—with a wide stance, he's got most of the front of the studio within reach, tweaking the knobs and improvising basslines while feeling the groove through every inch of his body. He turns around to make sure he's on the same page as the rest of a motley crew: Sebastian Mullaert, formerly of Minilogue, on an intricate MIDI system to Jonson's right; Colin Benders, AKA Kyteman, the renowned Dutch trumpeter and hip-hop artist, patching the modular; Nathan Jonson, Mathew's brother who produces as Hrdvsion, manipulating an Ableton Push controller opposite Benders; and Colin de la Plante, AKA The Mole, who's set up his MPC and effects on a table at the back of the room facing away from the monitors. Everyone's nods of approval quickly transition into head-bobs in time with the elastic techno they're brewing, an expanse of breaky drums, overdriven synths, sensitive keyboard melodies and trippy sample ephemera. (I can see that most of the latter is coming from de la Plante, the session's de facto details guy.) Aside from the occasional smoke break or stopping the DAW to re-clock everyone's gear, this jam went on, in one form or another, until midmorning the next day.





It was one of many sessions I got stuck in at this year's Studio Stekker, a relatively new offshoot of a daylong electronic open-air on the outskirts of Utrecht called Stekker In Het Park. Starting last year, the festival asked a number of the acts they'd booked if they wanted to come to town a week early, set up in a studio complex and work on whatever, with whomever. The week was such a success, both for the quality of the output and the unusually strong camaraderie it fostered among the participants, that they organized a second go-round and planned to make it a yearly part of their programming.

It's an event with a premise so simple, it's hard to believe there aren't more like it. In looking for a comparison, I'm reminded less of Red Bull Music Academy than the Levon Vincent Apprenticeship—that rare moment when one artist is in the position to foster the creativity of another. A gloss of the details, though, reveals some very legitimate challenges. While a week among peers in the studio is an easy sell to artists, it's not especially appealing to their agents, whose signees would be off the grid for a week at the height of festival season. There are issues of who brings what, who owns what from the sessions, how to avoid collective exhaustion and how to keep the vibe rolling for an entire week with a group of veritable strangers. And what does it mean for a project like this to grow, when making it larger and more prestigious might be antithetical to its very aims? Keeping the lights on at creative events like this typically requires an enormous amount of sponsorship, whether that's corporate branding or state largess, so it's hard not to think cynically about Studio Stekker's aims and what might really be behind it all.

Studio Stekker is the work of organizers Geurt Kersjes (known to all as Pitto) and Thijs de Boer; their tireless right-hand man Wanne van den Bos; Benders, who along with his father spearheads Kytopia, the studio space; Allert Aalders and Ben Spaander, who are responsible for Studio Stekker's peerless synthesizer list; and countless other volunteers and support staff. At no point during my week in Utrecht did any of them seem interested in anything anything aside from making space for free-flowing activity. There isn't just the veneer of no rules and no expectations—there actually aren't any. When Pitto, the week's lanky, shaggy ringleader, addressed the participants at the end of dinner on the opening night, he said a number of times that there were would be a few ground rules but never got around to mentioning them. Eventually, he settled on banning smoking inside the building, and asked that everyone make sure the front door closed and locked behind them. The neighborhood weirdos, he explained, had a habit of wandering in, often in varying states of undress.



Three festivals ago, Pitto showed off his studio at Kytopia to Matt Didemus of Junior Boys, who'd been booked to play Stekker In Het Park. "He was like, 'What if next year we do a couple of days of fun with friends and artists?'" Pitto recalled. "This was the moment that the idea was born." Benders thought it had legs, and in advance of the 2013 edition, they made the pitch to some of the artists they were looking into for Stekker In Het Park. If you can find an ulterior motive for Studio Stekker, it's this not-especially-sinister one: given the hundreds of other festivals on Europe's saturated summer calendar, the organizers hoped the event might set them apart.

"It's like a stop in the summer where you have your summer camp—bad word, maybe, but you can have some relaxed time, and make music and meet other people," de Boer told me over beers one night. Outside of Stekker, he promotes parties in Amsterdam and around Holland, and has made a career providing infrastructure and logistics to festivals. "I think people come out of it quite relaxed, although they do quite a lot of work in there—surprisingly, because we don't say you have to. We give everyone a bike. You can get out of town, get stoned, I don't know. It's okay with me. But luckily 99% stays in, makes music, joins each other. So do we have to set rules? We've said, 'Let's do no rules and see what happens.'"

The setting this year gave Studio Stekker an especially freewheeling vibe. Three months before the event, Kytopia got word that their building was being redeveloped, and they'd have to find a new location more or less immediately. Benders had gotten offers to take the studio somewhere else in the Netherlands, which would have been a major blow to Utrecht's cultural fabric. Kytopia's plight, though, coincided with another major change in the city's musical landscape: Tivoli, Utrecht's most famous concert venue by a mile, was about to make a long-in-the-works move from an ancient building on the Oudegracht ("old canal") in the old city center to a contemporary construction near the train station, where it would be combined with Vredenburg, a hall known for its classical and jazz programming. Benders' Kyteman Orchestra played Tivoli's final seven nights, all of which sold out. During the run, officials from the venue started showing him around the old hall's nooks and crannies, gauging his interest in transforming Tivoli into the new Kytopia.

"I practically grew up here," Benders said—a sentiment echoed by every Dutch person I spoke to during Studio Stekker, whether from Utrecht or otherwise. If you grew up in Holland and had even a passing interest in music, you probably have a collection of beer-tinged Tivoli memories. And it seemed like an oddly perfect fit for Benders' studio concept. "The more I saw of the whole building, the more I felt like, yeah, this would be a major fuck-up if we would end up saying no to a place like this." Two weeks before this year's Studio Stekker participants arrived, Kytopia got the keys to the old Tivoli. For the studio week, the space was still very much a work in progress—busted pianos and organs seemed to line every hall in the mazelike building, and makeshift studios were crammed in every bend in the walls large enough to accommodate studio monitors and a laptop.



After dinner on the first night, the invitees wandered the halls looking for their creative home for the week. Every space came with its own quirks. Martin Stimming and Stuttgart producer Johannes Brecht, who planned to collaborate on a new live set to be performed at the festival, ended up in the old box office, a long room near the street with a yellow, purple and red stained-glass ceiling. Didemus and Montreal producer Adam Hodgins, AKA Iron Galaxy, set up in an isolated room at the back of the building, with big windows opening out onto a school playground. Danish singer Jenny Rossander (AKA Lydmor) and her producer Andreas Arenholt Bindslev had a small setup on the top floor but would occasionally retreat to the garden with an acoustic guitar to write songs. At one point, Francesco Tristano and Sie Medway-Smith, the veteran British audio engineer with whom he's developing a new live/studio project, thought they might lose their studio's desk; it had been fashioned from a cupboard door, and the guy with the cupboard needed it back. Drilling and hammering occasionally competed with kick drums and synth arpeggios for sonic space over the course of the week, but no one seemed to mind—it added to the pitch-perfect disorder, the feeling that producing something pristine and polished was neither realistic nor desired.

The artists, for the most part, split up into studio teams and spent the week working in those clusters. There were a few notable exceptions. Alphonse Lanza, AKA former Azari & III member Alixander III, started out with Hodgins and Didemus (whom he's known since the '90s) but spent much of the week lending a manic jolt to whatever session he'd wander into. On one afternoon, I saw him sneak up on Franziska Grohmann—the Freund Am Tanzen-affiliated vocalist who goes by Delhia de France—as she recorded on the grand piano in the main hall, grab a megaphone and begin humming a countermelody at shrieking volume. (Lanza's father, the elder Alphonse, had traveled with him from Toronto and spent the week drifting between studios. He became the beloved mascot for Studio Stekker 2014 as a whole, a folksy antidote for any conversation that drifted too far into control voltage.)

Grohmann became a kind of lone wolf, dropping in on sessions with her laptop and microphone and lending ethereal, improvised vocals to techno instrumentals. Her stint in the Jonson/Mullaert/de la Plante studio produced one of the week's most sublime moments: the skeleton of a Mathew Jonson anthem with a sultry vocal twist. As the jam died down, Jonson admitted he'd been searching for ages for a vocalist in Berlin, where he lives. He and Grohmann, who lives more or less down the road from his studio, agreed to meet up and re-record the track, and she joined him, Nathan and de la Plante onstage for their live set at the festival.

Though producers spent much of the week squirreled away in their studios, there were some places you'd find everyone: a landing with an open window at the very top of the building, for a quick cigarette or fresh air on humid 30-degree afternoons; at the refrigerator by the kitchen, which seemed to contain a self-replenishing supply of Grolsch Kornuit cans; at the Albert Heijn down the Oudegracht, where everyone would stock up on trail mix, berries and gouda; and in the garden, where each night at 7 PM volunteers served leisurely dinners, and where I'd hear the organizers and participants ruminate on their studio week or life in general.



The critical communal space, though, was Sonar Traffic, Aalders and Spaander's synth studio and the week's real trump card. Aalders and Spaander had worked together as sound guys at the old Tivoli, and decided a few years ago to merge their epic collections in one location—a place where artists could flesh out bedroom productions with gear they'd salivated over for years. By now Sonar Traffic has so many synths that their owners said they suffer from a kind of "company blindness," where some synths don't get played because they've become desensitized to their presence. Though affiliated with Studio Stekker last year, they hadn't shared a space, and producers had to get a lift by van to their old studio. At the new Kyteman, Sonar Traffic had been given the attic, and it brought practically every synthesizer worth mentioning under their roof. Participants could take more or less anything to their studio space (or at least record samples up in the attic), and within reason, they'd let you take them to the festival on Saturday for live sets. You could find Aalders and Spaander upstairs every day until impossibly late, offering advice on which Juno or Jupiter would best suit a track, cooking up bespoke FM patches on their Eurorack system or waxing philosophical over a beer or four.

"A rollercoaster ride of awesomeness" was how Aalders described his Studio Stekker late on Thursday night when I dropped by. He has the unmistakable look of a lifelong roadie, dressed in functional black pants, utility boots and t-shirts emblazoned with the logos of famous synth manufacturers. "You're with a group of people who are kind of like-minded. How do you say in English? 'Gezelligheid'—this is an untranslatable Dutch word, 'good times between each other.' You see people go off into their separate little corners, and I'll drop by and see what they're doing, help them out here and there. I just love doing that. Sometimes it's a bit hectic—five people at the same time asking you stuff. But I still think that's fun, because I also hear what's coming out of it."





Every studio, then, had some bit of gear they couldn't get at home. Rossander and Arenholt Bindslev got their hands on a Roland Jupiter-4, from which they wrought gorgeous, sweeping pads. Tristano and Medway-Smith borrowed a Korg PolySix for growling basslines, and, without enough Yamaha DX7s to go around, wound up with the less famous DX11; an inside joke quickly developed between them where they'd say "DX11" as quickly and as slurred as possible so that unassuming ears might hear DX7, as a sleazy salesman might. Didemus and Hodgins ended up with perhaps the week's rarest instrument, procured through a connection at an instrument shop down the road: a Synton Fenix, a modular synth dating to the late '90s, of which only 75 were made. It looked like a bitch to program, and patches were difficult to replicate, but its crystalline, three-dimensional sound had a level of detail that made it as real as anything acoustic. At one point while Didemus, Hodgins and Lanza were repatching on their first day with the synth, I heard it emitting some nearly pure tones—just an oscillator or two hitting the output—that sounded calm and warm, like deep-hued brushstrokes. As patch cables tangled and knobs twisted, I heard those clean lines get mangled, sliced open and scrubbed with steel wool, and in a magical moment, we had a raging synth lead we'd likely never hear again.





As I wandered around Kytopia that week, I encountered countless moments like these—unpolished and provisional, maybe, but energetic and utterly inspiring. At least once a day, I'd be sitting in the back of a studio and catch the exact instant when things would really start cooking, when all the heads in the room would start bobbing at the same rate. I'd guess this level of ease, from one artist to another, is tremendously rare in a scene where everyone's got a flight to catch. "After a little while, this collective consciousness starts to develop," Rossander mused one night in the courtyard after dinner. "We're all getting to know each other, getting into each other's stuff, and then suddenly it's this thing. It becomes something.

Taken from here - http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?2099

Equipment Guide: Portable On His Live Set Up

Something we've gleaned from indulging our inner geek in these gear based interviews is that everyone has their own touch on bringing their sound to the stage, but in our latest session with Portable we think we've uncovered one of the most obscure and interesting arrangements yet. There's no photos for this one instead we've included the Süd Electronic boss's most recent Boiler Room set as a visual and sonic illustration of the live set in question. In the discussion below we uncover the secrets behind the boxes (not your standard stuff) as we look forward to experiencing first hand in Room Two this coming Saturday night. There’s also an extra special teaser video Portable has put together especially for the occasion...



Ok so I’ve found your Boiler Room video of you performing live and I’ve made my best attempt to ID what you’re using – butam coming up stumped. Can you please run us through your set up?

For me setup I have a little controller that was discontinued some years ago from JL Cooper, a US company more famous for video controllers than midi controllers,but this one unit is my pride and joy, we have 72 trigger buttons in total and 32 tiny sliders, this controls all my clips in Ableton and also my volume of the seperate tracks, it’s super tiny and I am always asked how my hands can do that, but I guess practice makes perfect.

I have the first edition of the Fader Fox for scrolling through the different tracks My newest addition is a wireless midi controller from Numark, that kind of looks like a game controller and is a lot of fun in the live set. Then my voicetouch live for vocal effects. And of course my customized microphone.

And an teenage engineering OP1.

Are all the controls triggering Ableton or are some synths or drum machines in their own right?

I use both, the midi gear is controller seperate parts of the songs in Ableton, bass, drum, hi hat etc, And then I also use the OP1 as a synth is some tracks with live modulation and as a drum machine in other tracks !

Can you talk us through your choice of microphone and do you put any effects onto the vocal when you play live? It sounds kind of harmonised like there’s multiple parts playing at times…

Yes the mic goes through the voicetouch live for my live show, because the studio recordings I harmonise with myself and the voicetouch live makes harmonisation while live possible, I also use it for crazy effects during my show.

There’s not many electronic artists that sing live – I know a few have done so on their tracks but are still petrified of singing in front of crowds! As a performer what do you find that singing gives to your own experience?

I really love it, everytime I am live my set is different, I would play different tracks or just different mixes and depending on the party, so the live vocals just adds something completely personal to the show and I have been fortunate enough to be booked only as a live show all over the globe , and each time after the show there is tremendous thanks and gratitude, because I sing from the heart, my last show at Panorama Bar's Perlonized some people came up after and said they were close to tears, so that was sweet!

How often do you rework your live set? Do you like to keep some of your older tracks in it or do you prefer to keep it more looking forward?

I have a mix of things, I play the hit tracks as it were but make different mixes of them, then I also throw in new upcoming tracks and also some really old ones mixed with each other,like a medley, so it never really sounds the same as the recording or even another live set.


I know you have a life time of experience under your belt but are there still times when you get nervous before you play?

Actually sometimes I do, I recently played in Cape Town and my parents and family were attending, I was really nervous then, but in the end it all worked out and things were magic!

It is weird that when people you know are there the nerves are stronger. You’ve recently announced your EP Sportable on Perlon how did the release come together for you – like were the tracks put together over a certain timeframe or with any particular ideas at the front of your mind?

I’m always composing, the EP was composed in S.America and Barcelona and put together here in Berlin. It was over a period of a year I guess, so each track has quite a different feel to each other. Also with this release I had a music video made for each track. This will be featured on Inverted Audio, groove Magazine online and electronic beats over the next few weeks. One video was made in Puglia, Italy,another San Francisco and another in Istanbul!


What’s the rest of your year looking like can we expect anything more release wise from yourself or Sud Electronic?

I have a südelectronic ep completed but with some delays that will be out next year. Aug 27th sees the release of Sportable on Perlon and in Nov I have a new release on Live at robert johnson!