Yesterday Amon Tobin told us why, on his 2007 album Foley Room, he takes all the songwriting credit after using improvisations from hired musicians to construct his melodies--a question I posed in this article. Today, we talk to one of those hired musicians: Simon Angell, guitarist in Patrick Watson's band.
I've said before that I think the individual talents of everyone in Watson's band--including Watson himself--supercedes anything they do together, something I'm sure will change with time. In the meantime, both Angell and Watson are a huge part of what makes Foley Room such a fascinating listen. Here, Angell explains how it worked.
Simon Angell
November 4, 2007
Locale: cell phone from somewhere in England
I mainly want to talk about your involvement with Foley Room.
I’m proud to have been part of it. It’s a big achievement.
Did you recognize yourself on the finished product?
I did, because I have specific sounds that I’ve been working on in the last year, trying to find my own sound on the guitar. People who have hired me in the last couple of years want me to sound like me and do a specific thing. I would lay down parts and he would cut them up, but not necessarily change the sound with plug-ins and shit. A lot of the sounds were done live.
When I did the session, it was with Sarah Pagé the harpist, and he would give us little melodies and tell us to go off on that. We’d do improvisations on that melody, and then he would overdub and cut it up. But the sound was true to what we did. I was surprised. I thought he would take it apart to the point where you wouldn’t recognize what we did.
He told me that basically took tones as raw material and constructed melodies later.
He did have a short, small melody in mind, maybe four notes. It can be heard throughout, but he would also turn it into different melodies and harmonize as well, using it in different ways. I was blown away that a guy who doesn’t necessarily have any musical training was able to hear music that way. When he was showing us the melody, he was trying to sing it to us the first time, but he couldn’t really sing. After about half an hour, he said, ‘Oh, if I do it on the piano do you think it would be easier to learn.’ ‘Uh, yeah, that’s probably a good idea!’ It went a lot smoother after that.
When I first heard the record, there’s a surf-y guitar line which I’m assuming is you, and then there’s a piano melody that I assumed was Patrick [Watson]’s. And I thought, why is this album written by Amon Tobin if the most melodic thing in certain tracks comes from a distinct player?
It’s a fine line. I’d say it’s what he’s done with those lines. At this point composition is not as cut and dried as it used to be. You don’t just say, ‘You wrote the melody, and you wrote the lyrics.’ On tunes now, the drumbeat can be the driving force of the tune. Patrick has some tunes that our drummer Robbie [Kuster] essentially wrote, just from his drum part. The lines are a lot more blurred than they used to be.
It’s a very Western notion that songwriting is merely melodies and chords.
Another thing I learned recently is that you can’t copyright chord changes. I learned that from Marc Ribot; I was taking some lessons from him.
When you think about how hip-hop has changed songwriting and how producers are king there—a producer can lay down a drum track and that is, essentially, the song.
Exactly. In hip-hop and electronic music, it’s the producers. In hip-hop they’ve got it a bit more. They’ve revolutionized—though that’s a bit too strong a word—the fact that the producer makes the track and then just hires a singer to do their stuff.
I was also thinking of jazz albums where a Miles Davis album is credited entirely to Miles Davis, whereas everyone who played on that album is just as much a part of the composition as we know it.
Miles was a known tyrant for that. There are a lot of tunes that he claimed as writing—and I don’t mean the improv, but tunes that Bill Evans actually wrote. I think “All Blues” from Kind of Blue is all Bill Evans. But Miles was like, “It’s my record! My record, my song!”
You’ve done a lot of session work in general, haven’t you?
Not so much in the last year because I’ve been on the road with Pat, but in the three years before that, yes. A lot with producers. I did a lot with Rama Sutra. Last year he was the reason I was able to pay my rent!
Does songwriting enter into any of the session work you do? What creative input do session players have, and does that ever result in a songwriting credit?
The thing I’ve learned about doing session work, is that the best session players are the ones who are best able to interpret what the composer/ producer/ artist wants. Not all producers or songwriters say: okay, this is the chord chart, this is the melody, etc. A lot of times you go in with just an idea. They’ll say, ‘I want it to sound like a house burning down, and there’s music coming from an old radio from the 40s inside the house. I want something that sounds like that.’ One producer actually told me that once.
It’s all interpretation. From my experience, I’ve been lucky by either surpassing their expectation or giving them exactly what they wanted.
-end-
Showing posts with label Foley Room. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Foley Room. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Amon Tobin vs. the law
Not having been a big fan of Amon Tobin’s previous work, I was shocked at how much his 2007 album Foley Room sunk its teeth into me—I mean, real teeth, as the sounds of snarling lions suggest at one point. Elsewhere, buzzing bees and industrial machinery interact with warm, earthy instrumentation as filtered through Tobin’s various electronic textures and jazzy beats.
I wrote about Foley Room extensively earlier this year, when I chatted with Tobin for an Eye article (no longer available online, inexplicably). But there’s one thing that I don’t think that Tobin—who has built his career sampling from vinyl, and branched out to record live musicians improvising this time out—answered sufficiently last time.
The question is this: there are beautiful melodies heard here as played by some of Montreal’s finest musicians, such as Patrick Watson, Watson’s guitarist Simon Angell, members of Bell Orchestre and others, and yet all songwriting credit goes to Tobin. Why? Who wrote the melodies? Does it matter?
I pitched the idea to SOCAN, the copyright collective for Canadian songwriters, who put out a newsletter and web magazine with articles relevant to anyone interested in the mechanics of songwriting and royalties. The article also touched down on the Secret Mommy album Plays, which we’ll discuss shortly. The piece can be found here.
I put the question as directly as possible to Tobin, after an opening softball question that allowed him to contextualize his compositional process.
Amon Tobin
November 1, 2007
locale: phone, from his Montreal home
Did working with live musicians change your compositional process?
To answer properly I have to put it in a bit of context. My whole approach has to do with transforming sounds and rearranging whatever people do rhythmically or melodically, and working with existing material to make new music. I’ve spent the last ten years or so working exclusively with little fragments of vinyl, and making music with that. I see my role as not creating sounds, but re-ordering stuff.
It’s a bit like building a house. I don’t make the bricks; I put them in an order to make the house I want.
With this last record, I wanted to try and see if it would in fact have a massive impact on the way the music sounds in the end, if I paid less attention to where the sources originated and just concentrated on manipulating the sound. I had no rules whether I was only going to use vinyl, or only use field recordings. I tried to treat all the things I recorded objectively. They all had the same importance as far as composition.
It’s no disrespect to the musicians—who, by the way, were all way overqualified to do what I was asking them to do. I was asking the Kronos Quartet to make drones and play their instruments with elastic bands and swords. From my point of view, I wanted to emphasize that it was about the choices you make with your raw material and how they’re processed and re-arranged, and less about where these things come from.
People obsess about where you come from, for instance, as a way to categorize music and musicians. ‘You come from here, so you must make this kind of music.’ It’s not that I’m setting out to challenge anything. I’m more interested in exploring this. For me, it is about using musicians in a way that is clinical and objective. I’d ask them to make a tone or a drone or something simple. Because they were people like Patrick Watson and Stef Schneider who were so talented, they couldn’t help but add colour to what I was asking them to do.
I wouldn’t characterize a lot of your music as specifically melodic—it’s not the point of it, really—but there are songs like “Bloodstone” where there is a very distinct piano melody there. Is that something Patrick played as is?
See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. There’s a tendency for people to focus on this kind of thing as if that’s where the importance of the music lies. I think it’s elsewhere. Patrick and Kronos Quartet have all the credit for that piece of music. Just as in everything I’ve ever done, I don’t take credit for any of the sounds I’ve used, only for what I’ve done with them. As far as the piano part, Patrick recorded a whole bunch of different stuff on piano which I then took and sliced and mixed with other bits of piano, too. Parts come from Patrick, a few notes from vinyl.
At what point does it shift from being a recording collaboration with him to a songwriting credit?
It’s a complicated area.
Because this album says “written and produced by Amon Tobin.”
For me, writing and production are about the choices that you make and what you do with the sounds you’re presented with. Going back to the brick analogy, it’s unfair to qualify what Patrick or the other musicians did as mere bricks. But when you’re breaking this stuff down to single notes, or even a whole passage—if you take something and recontextualize it to the point where it reaches a different musical significance. I don’t know what you’d call that credit.
If you took something by Beethoven and put a techno beat behind it—for some peculiar magical reason, the marriage of those two things did something that neither of those two things did, but which also couldn’t exist without those two elements. There is a credit to making that decision that those two things together make something else. But you always have to acknowledge that it wouldn’t have existed without the original sources.
The way I see it, honestly, in terms of a moral question, is that we’re all working with narrow parameters of music. No one is inventing any new chords or any new notes. We’re all working with this scale and re-arranging these notes and chords. The raw material is pretty much the same. All you ever do as a musician—whether you’re playing it yourself or sampling it—is reinterpreting or re-ordering these notes and chords and rhythms. That is what I see as the role of the artist, or the musician, or the composer or whatever you want to call it. I couldn’t say that I own C major or any other chord. I can’t take credit for those things, just for what I do with them.
Because your previous albums were comprised entirely of vinyl samples, did you ever deal with licenses? Or were all your samples unrecognizable to the point where nobody would bother with licenses?
You can draw a division between something like Puff Daddy’s famous rendition of “Every Breath You Take,” where the song is being carried by the sample and isn’t really being re-interpreted. It’s merely being released again with another layer on top.
Okay, I can explain this better… The distinction can be drawn by your objectives as a songwriter. If your objective when you’re writing a song is to end up with something that sounds like something you’ve heard before—whether you’re sampling or playing the guitar—if you’re trying to emulate something that exists already, then you’re plagiarizing and I don’t think there’s much merit in that.
I see sampling—when it’s done properly—as being the opposite of that. You’re starting with things that you gravitate towards, and you’re trying to transform those things into something completely different. You’re going in the other direction. I might start with something very recognizable, like, say, a Count Basie bass line. If I want to take that and turn it into something entirely new and different, that’s the opposite of me playing a melody on my piano and trying to steal a little bit of that magic: what I really want to be doing is playing that Count Basie line, but I can’t, so I’ll change a note or two. My objective is completely different there.
When researching this, I also came across the famous case of the Beastie Boys vs. James Newton. Do you know about that?
I don’t think so.
James Newton is a jazz flautist who was sampled on “Pass the Mic.” It was a large case, but ultimately the Beasties won because a) they legally obtained the mechanical license from Newton’s record company, and b) they took three notes from a non-scored jazz piece, and used a six-second loop of it throughout “Pass the Mic.” The court ruled that it’s unrecognizable from the original composition, and it’s not enough of a sample to warrant compositional credit—as opposed to whatever that De La Soul case was based on 10 or 15 years before that.
We’re on shaky ground there, because then it becomes a subjective argument: is it six notes? Seven notes? This is the problem with arguments about sampling, is that people talk about it in these terms. It kind of has to be that way, but it’s not making it any easier for anyone. How many bars is okay before you’re ripping someone off? How close is too close? It’s very subjective.
I asked you earlier and you didn’t answer directly: have you ever had to license things directly because you’ve used too much of one thing?
This is an area I won’t even go into. Not going there. But basically, from a musician’s point of view, I’m not concerned with the legal aspects of making music. That’s for lawyers and publishers. I’m concerned strictly with music. For me, all that really matters is whether or not I feel I’m doing something that I feel is worthwhile and has integrity.
That’s why I come back to what the musicians’ objective is. Is your objective to cheekily steal someone else’s music? Or is your objective to take that music and make it something of your own? Even then, the language I’m using isn’t accurate enough. The notes and the chords you’re playing belong to everyone. We have this keyboard with these notes and we all work with them. No one can claim ownership of this or that. The only thing you can claim ownership of is the physical recording, and that’s when you get into publishing and mechanicals and all that.
Another parallel I thought of was the session players at Motown or in Nashville. Someone comes in and has written a song with a melody and chords, and a guitar player there might have a lick that opens the song that ends up being the most recognizable part of the song. Is he a co-writer then?
It’s the decision that was made that should be credited. Whoever decided to put that lick at the beginning of the bar or wherever that makes it recognizable—the producer, I guess. He can’t take credit for that lick, because he paid the musician for it. The musician was free to make that decision himself, had he wanted to. He could have made his own track with that lick, but he chose to do something else with it.
These cases tend to pop up years later. Last year the organ player from Procul Harum decided that he had written “Whiter Shade of Pale.”
There’s a lot of money to be made from these kind of arguments. That’s why it’s almost a separate issue. What you can prove legally depends on the definitions in the law, and they’re too crude to be applied to the intricacies of music. A few basic rules have to be applied to a wide spectrum of different shades of gray. It’s the way it is because it can’t be any other way. But you shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it’s not quite accurate enough. One rule shouldn’t apply to something else that isn’t similar enough. The law in general has to be broad. When you’re dealing with something as complex as this, it’s hard to take a moral standpoint based on definitions in the law.
What did you tell your musicians coming in to the session? I’m assuming there was a very clear understanding from the beginning as to what was going on.
Oh, yeah. We all had contracts. I know these musicians personally, and they’re all very familiar with what I do. I don’t feel like I need to rip anyone off, personally. I’m not in that position. My input is in arranging, transforming and decision-making in terms of what goes where. All I’m doing is collecting source material and trying to build these musical structures out of it. I don’t really take any more credit than that for what I do.
From a legal perspective, things could be argued many different ways, especially when I sample from records. In my past, I’ve taken longer bars than just the occasional note here and there. There are times when I’ve made them completely unrecognizable. But, if I didn’t have that one piece of source material, the song may never have materialized. I don’t know. I’m repeating myself now.
When your album was done, how much of themselves did the original musicians hear on the record?
A lot of them couldn’t hear them at all. I felt a bit bad about that in some ways. They’re so overqualified. I had a whole brass section come in and do stuff, and I doubt any of them can identify where they are on the record. Others did stuff that is clearly identifiable, like Kronos, Patrick or Stefan. I was nervous playing things for some of these musicians. I didn’t want to undermine their talent or the importance of what they do. But from my point of view, it was a very clinical process. Stef is an incredible drummer who did these intricate and great drum patterns, which many times were re-ordered to such an extent that I’m not sure he would approve of what I did with his drums. You’d have to ask them.
Ask them I did. Tomorrow, a brief interview with Patrick Watson's guitarist Simon Angell, who also played on Foley Room.
I wrote about Foley Room extensively earlier this year, when I chatted with Tobin for an Eye article (no longer available online, inexplicably). But there’s one thing that I don’t think that Tobin—who has built his career sampling from vinyl, and branched out to record live musicians improvising this time out—answered sufficiently last time.
The question is this: there are beautiful melodies heard here as played by some of Montreal’s finest musicians, such as Patrick Watson, Watson’s guitarist Simon Angell, members of Bell Orchestre and others, and yet all songwriting credit goes to Tobin. Why? Who wrote the melodies? Does it matter?
I pitched the idea to SOCAN, the copyright collective for Canadian songwriters, who put out a newsletter and web magazine with articles relevant to anyone interested in the mechanics of songwriting and royalties. The article also touched down on the Secret Mommy album Plays, which we’ll discuss shortly. The piece can be found here.
I put the question as directly as possible to Tobin, after an opening softball question that allowed him to contextualize his compositional process.
Amon Tobin
November 1, 2007
locale: phone, from his Montreal home
Did working with live musicians change your compositional process?
To answer properly I have to put it in a bit of context. My whole approach has to do with transforming sounds and rearranging whatever people do rhythmically or melodically, and working with existing material to make new music. I’ve spent the last ten years or so working exclusively with little fragments of vinyl, and making music with that. I see my role as not creating sounds, but re-ordering stuff.
It’s a bit like building a house. I don’t make the bricks; I put them in an order to make the house I want.
With this last record, I wanted to try and see if it would in fact have a massive impact on the way the music sounds in the end, if I paid less attention to where the sources originated and just concentrated on manipulating the sound. I had no rules whether I was only going to use vinyl, or only use field recordings. I tried to treat all the things I recorded objectively. They all had the same importance as far as composition.
It’s no disrespect to the musicians—who, by the way, were all way overqualified to do what I was asking them to do. I was asking the Kronos Quartet to make drones and play their instruments with elastic bands and swords. From my point of view, I wanted to emphasize that it was about the choices you make with your raw material and how they’re processed and re-arranged, and less about where these things come from.
People obsess about where you come from, for instance, as a way to categorize music and musicians. ‘You come from here, so you must make this kind of music.’ It’s not that I’m setting out to challenge anything. I’m more interested in exploring this. For me, it is about using musicians in a way that is clinical and objective. I’d ask them to make a tone or a drone or something simple. Because they were people like Patrick Watson and Stef Schneider who were so talented, they couldn’t help but add colour to what I was asking them to do.
I wouldn’t characterize a lot of your music as specifically melodic—it’s not the point of it, really—but there are songs like “Bloodstone” where there is a very distinct piano melody there. Is that something Patrick played as is?
See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. There’s a tendency for people to focus on this kind of thing as if that’s where the importance of the music lies. I think it’s elsewhere. Patrick and Kronos Quartet have all the credit for that piece of music. Just as in everything I’ve ever done, I don’t take credit for any of the sounds I’ve used, only for what I’ve done with them. As far as the piano part, Patrick recorded a whole bunch of different stuff on piano which I then took and sliced and mixed with other bits of piano, too. Parts come from Patrick, a few notes from vinyl.
At what point does it shift from being a recording collaboration with him to a songwriting credit?
It’s a complicated area.
Because this album says “written and produced by Amon Tobin.”
For me, writing and production are about the choices that you make and what you do with the sounds you’re presented with. Going back to the brick analogy, it’s unfair to qualify what Patrick or the other musicians did as mere bricks. But when you’re breaking this stuff down to single notes, or even a whole passage—if you take something and recontextualize it to the point where it reaches a different musical significance. I don’t know what you’d call that credit.
If you took something by Beethoven and put a techno beat behind it—for some peculiar magical reason, the marriage of those two things did something that neither of those two things did, but which also couldn’t exist without those two elements. There is a credit to making that decision that those two things together make something else. But you always have to acknowledge that it wouldn’t have existed without the original sources.
The way I see it, honestly, in terms of a moral question, is that we’re all working with narrow parameters of music. No one is inventing any new chords or any new notes. We’re all working with this scale and re-arranging these notes and chords. The raw material is pretty much the same. All you ever do as a musician—whether you’re playing it yourself or sampling it—is reinterpreting or re-ordering these notes and chords and rhythms. That is what I see as the role of the artist, or the musician, or the composer or whatever you want to call it. I couldn’t say that I own C major or any other chord. I can’t take credit for those things, just for what I do with them.
Because your previous albums were comprised entirely of vinyl samples, did you ever deal with licenses? Or were all your samples unrecognizable to the point where nobody would bother with licenses?
You can draw a division between something like Puff Daddy’s famous rendition of “Every Breath You Take,” where the song is being carried by the sample and isn’t really being re-interpreted. It’s merely being released again with another layer on top.
Okay, I can explain this better… The distinction can be drawn by your objectives as a songwriter. If your objective when you’re writing a song is to end up with something that sounds like something you’ve heard before—whether you’re sampling or playing the guitar—if you’re trying to emulate something that exists already, then you’re plagiarizing and I don’t think there’s much merit in that.
I see sampling—when it’s done properly—as being the opposite of that. You’re starting with things that you gravitate towards, and you’re trying to transform those things into something completely different. You’re going in the other direction. I might start with something very recognizable, like, say, a Count Basie bass line. If I want to take that and turn it into something entirely new and different, that’s the opposite of me playing a melody on my piano and trying to steal a little bit of that magic: what I really want to be doing is playing that Count Basie line, but I can’t, so I’ll change a note or two. My objective is completely different there.
When researching this, I also came across the famous case of the Beastie Boys vs. James Newton. Do you know about that?
I don’t think so.
James Newton is a jazz flautist who was sampled on “Pass the Mic.” It was a large case, but ultimately the Beasties won because a) they legally obtained the mechanical license from Newton’s record company, and b) they took three notes from a non-scored jazz piece, and used a six-second loop of it throughout “Pass the Mic.” The court ruled that it’s unrecognizable from the original composition, and it’s not enough of a sample to warrant compositional credit—as opposed to whatever that De La Soul case was based on 10 or 15 years before that.
We’re on shaky ground there, because then it becomes a subjective argument: is it six notes? Seven notes? This is the problem with arguments about sampling, is that people talk about it in these terms. It kind of has to be that way, but it’s not making it any easier for anyone. How many bars is okay before you’re ripping someone off? How close is too close? It’s very subjective.
I asked you earlier and you didn’t answer directly: have you ever had to license things directly because you’ve used too much of one thing?
This is an area I won’t even go into. Not going there. But basically, from a musician’s point of view, I’m not concerned with the legal aspects of making music. That’s for lawyers and publishers. I’m concerned strictly with music. For me, all that really matters is whether or not I feel I’m doing something that I feel is worthwhile and has integrity.
That’s why I come back to what the musicians’ objective is. Is your objective to cheekily steal someone else’s music? Or is your objective to take that music and make it something of your own? Even then, the language I’m using isn’t accurate enough. The notes and the chords you’re playing belong to everyone. We have this keyboard with these notes and we all work with them. No one can claim ownership of this or that. The only thing you can claim ownership of is the physical recording, and that’s when you get into publishing and mechanicals and all that.
Another parallel I thought of was the session players at Motown or in Nashville. Someone comes in and has written a song with a melody and chords, and a guitar player there might have a lick that opens the song that ends up being the most recognizable part of the song. Is he a co-writer then?
It’s the decision that was made that should be credited. Whoever decided to put that lick at the beginning of the bar or wherever that makes it recognizable—the producer, I guess. He can’t take credit for that lick, because he paid the musician for it. The musician was free to make that decision himself, had he wanted to. He could have made his own track with that lick, but he chose to do something else with it.
These cases tend to pop up years later. Last year the organ player from Procul Harum decided that he had written “Whiter Shade of Pale.”
There’s a lot of money to be made from these kind of arguments. That’s why it’s almost a separate issue. What you can prove legally depends on the definitions in the law, and they’re too crude to be applied to the intricacies of music. A few basic rules have to be applied to a wide spectrum of different shades of gray. It’s the way it is because it can’t be any other way. But you shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it’s not quite accurate enough. One rule shouldn’t apply to something else that isn’t similar enough. The law in general has to be broad. When you’re dealing with something as complex as this, it’s hard to take a moral standpoint based on definitions in the law.
What did you tell your musicians coming in to the session? I’m assuming there was a very clear understanding from the beginning as to what was going on.
Oh, yeah. We all had contracts. I know these musicians personally, and they’re all very familiar with what I do. I don’t feel like I need to rip anyone off, personally. I’m not in that position. My input is in arranging, transforming and decision-making in terms of what goes where. All I’m doing is collecting source material and trying to build these musical structures out of it. I don’t really take any more credit than that for what I do.
From a legal perspective, things could be argued many different ways, especially when I sample from records. In my past, I’ve taken longer bars than just the occasional note here and there. There are times when I’ve made them completely unrecognizable. But, if I didn’t have that one piece of source material, the song may never have materialized. I don’t know. I’m repeating myself now.
When your album was done, how much of themselves did the original musicians hear on the record?
A lot of them couldn’t hear them at all. I felt a bit bad about that in some ways. They’re so overqualified. I had a whole brass section come in and do stuff, and I doubt any of them can identify where they are on the record. Others did stuff that is clearly identifiable, like Kronos, Patrick or Stefan. I was nervous playing things for some of these musicians. I didn’t want to undermine their talent or the importance of what they do. But from my point of view, it was a very clinical process. Stef is an incredible drummer who did these intricate and great drum patterns, which many times were re-ordered to such an extent that I’m not sure he would approve of what I did with his drums. You’d have to ask them.
Ask them I did. Tomorrow, a brief interview with Patrick Watson's guitarist Simon Angell, who also played on Foley Room.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Amon Tobin
Amon Tobin's new album Foley Room is named after the recording studios that film companies use to record sound effects. Tobin has always been a sound sculptor of the finest order, but most of this album eschews his vinyl-based sampling approach and is instead composed from sounds Tobin gathered on field expeditions (lions, tigers, and wasps, oh my!) as well as asking his Montreal neighbours to attack their instruments with various metallic objects (swords, chains).
That's the hook to get people talking, anyway. But when I sat down and listened to Foley Room before reading the liner notes, I immediately fell in love with not only Tobin's world of sound, but his compositional sense and ability to create visual narratives out of sparse melodies and harsh textures. To these ears, it's head and shoulders above anything else he's ever done: I liked previous albums fine, but nothing hit me like a brick as this one does.
Plus, he uses my favourite Montreal drummer: Stef Schneider of Bell Orchestre, a wonderfully charming man who is dangerously talented and should be far more visible than he is. Hire this man now! (update: thanks to this great article by Sarah Liss at Now I found out that Schneider is playing with equally beautiful people Pietro Amato (Torngat) and Jessie Stein (SS Cardiacs) as The Luyas this Sunday at Wavelength.)
For my original review of this CD (written for a lay audience), go here. For my article in this week's Eye Weekly, drawn from today's transcript, go here.
Mostly I was fascinated by Tobin's shift in direction here because I've never fully understood why the DJ Shadows of the world spend what--to me--seems like hours scouring for records and then isolating the sounds they want, when they could just hire someone for a few hours, get them to play exactly what they want, and then dissect that all they like. The effort put into obscuring the original sound source (something I wish Shadow had done a bit more, after I finally heard the David Axelrod albums he plundered from) seems more labour intensive then just going out and getting the real thing.
Either way, I'm glad Tobin did, and I'm convinced it has something to do with why Foley Room towers over his other albums. Even though he disagrees.
Finally, comparisons to Matmos are obvious, but there is always something with Matmos that feels like work: like I have to know what narrative they're trying to create before I hear it; like I have to know what components went into it to appreciate it; like it's all an academic exercise. That's less true of last year's The Rose Has Teeth..., but I always feel like I should like them because: a) they're really smart and funny guys; b) they've been right-hand men to Bjork and c) did I mention they're really smart and funny guys?
With Tobin, even though we have mutual friends, I don't feel any obligation to like his music for any reason other than that Foley Room is totally enrapturing.
That said, having seen a DJ set of his before, I'm not convinced that tomorrow's show at the Opera House will be the bee's knees--7.1 surround sound notwithstanding (explained at the end of the interview)--but I'm still curious to see what happens.
Amon Tobin
April 10, 2007
Locale: phone interview, having just checked into his London hotel
As someone who previously only used elements sampled from vinyl records—why have you waited this long to bring in other elements?
I think there’s still a lot to be explored with vinyl samples. It wasn’t a compromise to use samples from vinyl. It wasn’t like I couldn’t get a hold of microphones.
It was really because when you sample something that was in a different musical context before, and you adapt that and change it into a new piece of music, there is an energy—I believe, anyway—that you keep from where the sound came from. When it’s put unnaturally into an arrangement with lots of other things pulling in different directions, there’s a dynamic that happens there.
It’s a lot to do with the fact that you’re taking someone’s finest hour, on say a set of drums, and you’re taking a few seconds of that momentum and then extending it. The way you program the rhythm to extend it, the energy of that tiny little second is stretched out as far as you like.
But how do you compare that with using the people you work with on this record, bringing people in for a day or a couple of days?
I go from one extreme to another. It’s the same with digital or analog. I always wondered which way I should go, and it turns out that a bit of both is the best for me and my experience.
I was quite militant about only using vinyl and only using samples. But it’s important not to get too trapped in your own ideas of what you should be doing. To be honest, it’s not so much about source material, because I’m pretty sure you could find anything I recorded on vinyl somewhere. People have recorded lions and tigers before, trains and robots and all that.
The bonus for me personally was that I was able to learn a lot more about the music making process and about recording from that startpoint. It was much more to do with a personal education, really, on making and recording music.
Do you feel like you have more control when it’s you pointing the microphone at the animals or the musicians? As opposed to trying to find a piece of vinyl that suits the thing you have in mind, you can just go out and do it. Does this approach have more immediacy?
To some extent. You win and you lose. There are things that you find by chance on vinyl that you never imagined, and vice versa when you go out with mics. A lot of emphasis is put on the origins of sound in sample-based music, and I really think it’s important, but it’s even more important what you do with these sounds: how they’re put together, manipulated and arranged. If you think about it, lots of people have said that I have a particular sound, which is odd when you consider that all my material comes from other places.
Not recognizably, though.
No, because I think my job, my creative output, is how it’s all put together. I think the sounds could come from vinyl, from musicians, from field recordings, but the reason I did it this way was for selfish reasons. I just wanted to learn about it. It’s not because I think it’s a better or more effective technique. I still go back to records for inspiration and sample material.
Does vinyl play any role on this album?
Definitely. There are vinyl samples in there too.
Considering everything you just said, for me as a listener—as someone for whom this process is very alien—there’s something very tactile to this album compared to your other works. There is something that sounds more hands-on. I purposely didn’t read the liner notes or watch the DVD before I heard the record; I just wanted to absorb it. And for whatever intangible reason, it really struck me right away.
That’s great. There are a few things that have played into that, as well as the sound sources. I think I’ve learned a lot more about production in the last couple of years. I know a lot more about engineering. I still have a lot more to learn, but I have had a certain amount of progress. I was able as well to plan ahead a bit more, as far as getting different elements and textures from different places with a view of putting them together. Rather than wrestling with extracting the things you don’t want from a vinyl sample, which is what I’d normally be doing.
Also, you can’t take away the fact that the musicians who were involved were very proficient and couldn’t help but add their musicality and their talent to the process. The record benefits a lot from that, and you have to give credit to people like Patrick Watson and Kronos Quartet and Sarah Page and Norsola from Godspeed and all these people. Even though I was trying very hard to get them to work objectively and do very simple things, they were all so overqualified for the role I was giving them, that they couldn’t help but put something extra in there. That probably comes across in the record.
From checking the liner notes, however, you take all the compositional credit. Did all the melodic ideas come from you, were you directing them the entire time?
Mainly what I was trying to get them to do was unusual things with their instruments, in ways they weren’t used to using them. So we got the Kronos Quartet to all play the same violin at once, all four of them. We got them to do improvisation, which they never do. They’re all classically trained, and improvisation isn’t something they’re into. Norsola was playing her cello with a sword at one point.
The idea was to get source material that was pretty basic. I got drones mostly from the Kronos Quartet. Patrick Watson gave me little piano melodies that I then cut up and re-arranged, and even mixed them with some vinyl piano to make different melodies from. It was all treating everything in the same way: a rock falling, a musician, a vinyl sample. All these were treated as an objective source, and then applying the arrangements and the creation of the music afterwards.
It’s also the reason I worked so much in a foley room with Vid Cousins, who was really a technical hand in the recording of this project. Because I don’t know anything about microphones! Vid was really the man who pointed me in the direction of these particular mics, for example. The idea was to give myself as much flexibility as possible after the recordings were made.
Everything was recorded in a very dead space, and I could then either place that sound in a cathedral or a small chamber if I wanted to. It left a lot of room. The same with the musicians. I tried to get them to do things that I could then manipulate and form melodies and make songs from.
Having said that, I did at times ask them to play specific melodies. Sarah Page, who played the harp, I asked her to play a melody that appeared on a record. That happened every now and again, but I felt that was a compromise on my part. I really wanted to think about the tunes after I had all the sounds.
How long was the time divided: how long recording versus treating everything later?
We spent about four months on the road recording everything we could. About a month or so just archiving the sounds. We did it all on tape, so that gave another element. There’s creativity with tape: you can manipulate it as it’s going into the computer, so there’s a bit of that going on as well. Then I put everything into different sections and could work with it. Then it was processing, and then it was the arrangements. I think I started that in January and it went to October.
Now, was that more intense than previous records?
Yeah, because it was all done in different stages. It wasn’t harder, but it was more time consuming. And it was really good fun, to be honest. I don’t think I’ve had that much fun making an album before.
It sounds like an inherently more social process than anything you’ve done before.
It really was. I made new friends. I got out of the house (laughs) and had some road trips.
Other than Kronos in San Francisco, how much of it was made outside of Montreal?
Not much. I used some drums from a session in Seattle with Michael Shrieve [sp?] and Kevin Sawka. We were trying to get to Texas to record the bats under the bridge in Austin. Also Terry Bozzio lives down there as well, and I was hoping to record some of his drums, because he’s obviously pretty wicked. But we did what was practical in the time frame we had. A lot of it was done in Montreal, in my flat.
Did you turn it into a dead space?
No, that was Ubisoft, actually [the Montreal gaming company that commissioned him to do the soundtrack for Splinter Cell]. They let me go in there after hours into their foley room to do the really clinical recording. The harp and some of the guitars and Patrick [Watson]’s stuff were recorded in my flat. There were a few things at McGill University as well.
The wasps?
That’s right, much to the dismay of John, who was having to cope with us coming in with various insects into his clean laboratory.
What did you learn from working with [drummer] Stef Schneider [of Bell Orchestre]?
He was perfect for this, because he’s like a foley drummer. He was playing drums with all kinds of different paraphernalia, and contributed an incredible amount to the record. He turned up with vats of water and various percussion we could dip into the water. He was throwing lentils and chick peas over skins of drums and playing with egg whisks, and having a blast, really.
Did most of that come from him?
Definitely. A whole ton of toys. He just rocked out. There were a whole bunch of things that we just tried, and then made some choices with the material that was there.
What was the most ridiculous thing you wanted to try?
The wasps were pretty silly. There was no need for that, really! We did some things that sounded like they would be great, but turned out to be pretty bad. We didn’t get much from that radar. It seemed cool, but I didn’t get the sounds I thought I would. That happens all the time, which is part of the process: trial and error. I have meters and meters of tape that weren’t used. Which I’m sure I could still go through and find new things.
How did you coax some of the animal sounds, or were you waiting around a lot?
There was an awful lot of waiting around. Animals aren’t always the most co-operative things. They have their own agenda. You turn up and hope they do something. There was a certain amount of coaxing, but we either got lucky or we didn’t.
Who’s playing the Hammond?
Actually, I played some of that. Oh shit, I wasn’t actually going to admit that. You caught me—I’m tired! But there are bits of Hammond from records as well. I wanted to make sure that when I did the liner notes I left things as ambiguous as possible. I didn’t want people to get all trainspotty about it. A lot of the musicians are actually confused about which parts they played, because the idea was to look at all these things as objective sources.
Does anyone come to you and say, “Where the hell am I? I thought I played on your record!”
(laughs) I was a bit worried about that, actually. I didn’t use everything I recorded, obviously, and I’m sure there are people credited that wouldn’t recognize their sounds at all. Partially because a lot of it was manipulated beyond recognition anyway, or mixed with other sounds. A lot of the sounds recorded were done with a view to mixing them with another sound to make something new. Particularly for brass stuff and some of the engines and robots and stuff. The recordings were made with a view to changing them in the first place.
I do love the wasp/guitar/motorbike combination. Did you learn more about instruments themselves, or trying your own hand at keyboards, percussion or strings?
Not really. I had such a wealth of talent around, I didn’t feel the need to jump in at any stage. I have my limits. I also appreciate the fact that people have a different outlook to give, and it’s best to give people room to breathe. I tried not to direct people too much. Maybe I’d have one or two ideas I really wanted to get across, but I spent a lot of time saying, ‘Here are some chains. Mess around with them on your instrument and see what happens.’
In my research, I found one quote of yours where you said that using session musicians would be settling for second best, compared to what you could plunder from existing vinyl. Has that impression changed?
Well, not really. I really think that if I’d gone in with a song, and said to people, ‘Let’s play this song. You do that beat, you do that bass line, and off we go.’ I don’t know if that would be as effective as trying to find these things on little slivers of vinyl. For me personally—please understand that I’m only talking about my own way of working, this doesn’t apply to everyone at all—I work most effectively like that.
The approach here with musicians was just to get basic source material. It was very different from getting a session player in to play a bass line. It was more like, ‘Go crazy on the drums, play whatever rhythm you want, because all I want is the sound and the tone of the drums and the different textures that I can then cut up and re-arrange later.’ Stef Schneider is an amazing drummer, but god knows what he thought when he heard the album, because the patterns are completely different. It’s all been cut into little pieces and re-ordered.
Compositionally, I find it different from a lot of your other stuff. Did Splinter Cell change the way you thought about composition, or did these sources effect the way you write? Or do you even notice a difference?
On some songs there were some familiar structures for me, where things start in one direction and then take a left turn and then resolve in the end. I like the big dramatic crescendos though, because I love a bit of drama! ‘Always’ has a verse/chorus thing and a bit of a pop sensibility to it. I always admire people who can pull that off. Every now and again I have a stab at it.
It’s interesting to me how that track is near the end of the album. It’s like going through this journey and then having this sweet at the end.
It was a bit of a fuck-you putting pressure on me for a single. This record wasn’t about that. As much as I enjoy three-and-a-half minute songs, I didn’t want that to be the second song on the album and then off we go into an epic number. I like doing it, but like you say, it’s a treat in the middle of some more obscure arrangements.
One of the other things I like about this album is its lack of concept, treating sound as an end in itself, leaving the narratives open for the listener. As much as I enjoy Matmos, for example, at times that does get trainspotty for me, or harder to appreciate without knowing what narrative they’re putting on it.
I was aware of all this when I was making the record, and comparisons would be drawn with other people using field recordings. It wasn’t too much of a hang-up. Basically, I want the music to come first, the satisfaction I get from making music. Whatever idea I have to begin with, I don’t want it to restrict where the song could go or how good it could be. I don’t want to be saying, ‘Well, I’d like to do that, but it doesn’t fit into my concept.’ It’s not going to happen. I want the music to be king, and everything else just facilitates that.
What do you think this project opens up for you? What comes next?
Who knows? I’m excited to try something new for myself. I have learned an awful lot. I hope I can apply these things I’ve learned to the next project I make and keep trying to improve and keep myself interested. I feel like my whole output over the years has been a learning curve. I focused on one area for a long time because there was a lot to explore. Maybe in time I’ll look at different areas.
What does a 7.1 surround sound DJ set entail?
It’s just a regular DJ set with better sound than normal. A problem I’ve often encountered is that you have this big stack at the front blowing everyone away, and at the back it’s all muffled and no one can hear it properly. Only in the middle do a few people get a decent sound. Considering that when I play there’s not much of a stage show, not much to look at, we’ve concentrated on making the event about the sound, trying to make it a different musical environment for people to listen.
But you haven’t mixed any of your own material in 7.1?
No, not at all. We’re using a system being developed by Dolby which is pretty effective. It takes things that are in stereo, or the higher frequencies and spreads them around the room. You can put any stereo signal through it. We’re using that in conjunction with a few other things that my soundman Vid has developed himself. It’s a pretty interesting effect. It’s a lot of bass, which is important, and a lot of detail that surrounds the room. It envelopes you a bit more in a three dimensional experience.
Had you seen other people do this, or did you just want to try it?
I tried it on the Splinter Cell tour in 5.1, and we had a few phasing issues while trying it out. A lot of those tracks were mixed in 5.1. We tried it, and it turns out that it’s better in 7.1, because the speakers aren’t pointing directly at each other. You have far fewer phase cancellation issues and it works a lot better.
-end-
That's the hook to get people talking, anyway. But when I sat down and listened to Foley Room before reading the liner notes, I immediately fell in love with not only Tobin's world of sound, but his compositional sense and ability to create visual narratives out of sparse melodies and harsh textures. To these ears, it's head and shoulders above anything else he's ever done: I liked previous albums fine, but nothing hit me like a brick as this one does.
Plus, he uses my favourite Montreal drummer: Stef Schneider of Bell Orchestre, a wonderfully charming man who is dangerously talented and should be far more visible than he is. Hire this man now! (update: thanks to this great article by Sarah Liss at Now I found out that Schneider is playing with equally beautiful people Pietro Amato (Torngat) and Jessie Stein (SS Cardiacs) as The Luyas this Sunday at Wavelength.)
For my original review of this CD (written for a lay audience), go here. For my article in this week's Eye Weekly, drawn from today's transcript, go here.
Mostly I was fascinated by Tobin's shift in direction here because I've never fully understood why the DJ Shadows of the world spend what--to me--seems like hours scouring for records and then isolating the sounds they want, when they could just hire someone for a few hours, get them to play exactly what they want, and then dissect that all they like. The effort put into obscuring the original sound source (something I wish Shadow had done a bit more, after I finally heard the David Axelrod albums he plundered from) seems more labour intensive then just going out and getting the real thing.
Either way, I'm glad Tobin did, and I'm convinced it has something to do with why Foley Room towers over his other albums. Even though he disagrees.
Finally, comparisons to Matmos are obvious, but there is always something with Matmos that feels like work: like I have to know what narrative they're trying to create before I hear it; like I have to know what components went into it to appreciate it; like it's all an academic exercise. That's less true of last year's The Rose Has Teeth..., but I always feel like I should like them because: a) they're really smart and funny guys; b) they've been right-hand men to Bjork and c) did I mention they're really smart and funny guys?
With Tobin, even though we have mutual friends, I don't feel any obligation to like his music for any reason other than that Foley Room is totally enrapturing.
That said, having seen a DJ set of his before, I'm not convinced that tomorrow's show at the Opera House will be the bee's knees--7.1 surround sound notwithstanding (explained at the end of the interview)--but I'm still curious to see what happens.
Amon Tobin
April 10, 2007
Locale: phone interview, having just checked into his London hotel
As someone who previously only used elements sampled from vinyl records—why have you waited this long to bring in other elements?
I think there’s still a lot to be explored with vinyl samples. It wasn’t a compromise to use samples from vinyl. It wasn’t like I couldn’t get a hold of microphones.
It was really because when you sample something that was in a different musical context before, and you adapt that and change it into a new piece of music, there is an energy—I believe, anyway—that you keep from where the sound came from. When it’s put unnaturally into an arrangement with lots of other things pulling in different directions, there’s a dynamic that happens there.
It’s a lot to do with the fact that you’re taking someone’s finest hour, on say a set of drums, and you’re taking a few seconds of that momentum and then extending it. The way you program the rhythm to extend it, the energy of that tiny little second is stretched out as far as you like.
But how do you compare that with using the people you work with on this record, bringing people in for a day or a couple of days?
I go from one extreme to another. It’s the same with digital or analog. I always wondered which way I should go, and it turns out that a bit of both is the best for me and my experience.
I was quite militant about only using vinyl and only using samples. But it’s important not to get too trapped in your own ideas of what you should be doing. To be honest, it’s not so much about source material, because I’m pretty sure you could find anything I recorded on vinyl somewhere. People have recorded lions and tigers before, trains and robots and all that.
The bonus for me personally was that I was able to learn a lot more about the music making process and about recording from that startpoint. It was much more to do with a personal education, really, on making and recording music.
Do you feel like you have more control when it’s you pointing the microphone at the animals or the musicians? As opposed to trying to find a piece of vinyl that suits the thing you have in mind, you can just go out and do it. Does this approach have more immediacy?
To some extent. You win and you lose. There are things that you find by chance on vinyl that you never imagined, and vice versa when you go out with mics. A lot of emphasis is put on the origins of sound in sample-based music, and I really think it’s important, but it’s even more important what you do with these sounds: how they’re put together, manipulated and arranged. If you think about it, lots of people have said that I have a particular sound, which is odd when you consider that all my material comes from other places.
Not recognizably, though.
No, because I think my job, my creative output, is how it’s all put together. I think the sounds could come from vinyl, from musicians, from field recordings, but the reason I did it this way was for selfish reasons. I just wanted to learn about it. It’s not because I think it’s a better or more effective technique. I still go back to records for inspiration and sample material.
Does vinyl play any role on this album?
Definitely. There are vinyl samples in there too.
Considering everything you just said, for me as a listener—as someone for whom this process is very alien—there’s something very tactile to this album compared to your other works. There is something that sounds more hands-on. I purposely didn’t read the liner notes or watch the DVD before I heard the record; I just wanted to absorb it. And for whatever intangible reason, it really struck me right away.
That’s great. There are a few things that have played into that, as well as the sound sources. I think I’ve learned a lot more about production in the last couple of years. I know a lot more about engineering. I still have a lot more to learn, but I have had a certain amount of progress. I was able as well to plan ahead a bit more, as far as getting different elements and textures from different places with a view of putting them together. Rather than wrestling with extracting the things you don’t want from a vinyl sample, which is what I’d normally be doing.
Also, you can’t take away the fact that the musicians who were involved were very proficient and couldn’t help but add their musicality and their talent to the process. The record benefits a lot from that, and you have to give credit to people like Patrick Watson and Kronos Quartet and Sarah Page and Norsola from Godspeed and all these people. Even though I was trying very hard to get them to work objectively and do very simple things, they were all so overqualified for the role I was giving them, that they couldn’t help but put something extra in there. That probably comes across in the record.
From checking the liner notes, however, you take all the compositional credit. Did all the melodic ideas come from you, were you directing them the entire time?
Mainly what I was trying to get them to do was unusual things with their instruments, in ways they weren’t used to using them. So we got the Kronos Quartet to all play the same violin at once, all four of them. We got them to do improvisation, which they never do. They’re all classically trained, and improvisation isn’t something they’re into. Norsola was playing her cello with a sword at one point.
The idea was to get source material that was pretty basic. I got drones mostly from the Kronos Quartet. Patrick Watson gave me little piano melodies that I then cut up and re-arranged, and even mixed them with some vinyl piano to make different melodies from. It was all treating everything in the same way: a rock falling, a musician, a vinyl sample. All these were treated as an objective source, and then applying the arrangements and the creation of the music afterwards.
It’s also the reason I worked so much in a foley room with Vid Cousins, who was really a technical hand in the recording of this project. Because I don’t know anything about microphones! Vid was really the man who pointed me in the direction of these particular mics, for example. The idea was to give myself as much flexibility as possible after the recordings were made.
Everything was recorded in a very dead space, and I could then either place that sound in a cathedral or a small chamber if I wanted to. It left a lot of room. The same with the musicians. I tried to get them to do things that I could then manipulate and form melodies and make songs from.
Having said that, I did at times ask them to play specific melodies. Sarah Page, who played the harp, I asked her to play a melody that appeared on a record. That happened every now and again, but I felt that was a compromise on my part. I really wanted to think about the tunes after I had all the sounds.
How long was the time divided: how long recording versus treating everything later?
We spent about four months on the road recording everything we could. About a month or so just archiving the sounds. We did it all on tape, so that gave another element. There’s creativity with tape: you can manipulate it as it’s going into the computer, so there’s a bit of that going on as well. Then I put everything into different sections and could work with it. Then it was processing, and then it was the arrangements. I think I started that in January and it went to October.
Now, was that more intense than previous records?
Yeah, because it was all done in different stages. It wasn’t harder, but it was more time consuming. And it was really good fun, to be honest. I don’t think I’ve had that much fun making an album before.
It sounds like an inherently more social process than anything you’ve done before.
It really was. I made new friends. I got out of the house (laughs) and had some road trips.
Other than Kronos in San Francisco, how much of it was made outside of Montreal?
Not much. I used some drums from a session in Seattle with Michael Shrieve [sp?] and Kevin Sawka. We were trying to get to Texas to record the bats under the bridge in Austin. Also Terry Bozzio lives down there as well, and I was hoping to record some of his drums, because he’s obviously pretty wicked. But we did what was practical in the time frame we had. A lot of it was done in Montreal, in my flat.
Did you turn it into a dead space?
No, that was Ubisoft, actually [the Montreal gaming company that commissioned him to do the soundtrack for Splinter Cell]. They let me go in there after hours into their foley room to do the really clinical recording. The harp and some of the guitars and Patrick [Watson]’s stuff were recorded in my flat. There were a few things at McGill University as well.
The wasps?
That’s right, much to the dismay of John, who was having to cope with us coming in with various insects into his clean laboratory.
What did you learn from working with [drummer] Stef Schneider [of Bell Orchestre]?
He was perfect for this, because he’s like a foley drummer. He was playing drums with all kinds of different paraphernalia, and contributed an incredible amount to the record. He turned up with vats of water and various percussion we could dip into the water. He was throwing lentils and chick peas over skins of drums and playing with egg whisks, and having a blast, really.
Did most of that come from him?
Definitely. A whole ton of toys. He just rocked out. There were a whole bunch of things that we just tried, and then made some choices with the material that was there.
What was the most ridiculous thing you wanted to try?
The wasps were pretty silly. There was no need for that, really! We did some things that sounded like they would be great, but turned out to be pretty bad. We didn’t get much from that radar. It seemed cool, but I didn’t get the sounds I thought I would. That happens all the time, which is part of the process: trial and error. I have meters and meters of tape that weren’t used. Which I’m sure I could still go through and find new things.
How did you coax some of the animal sounds, or were you waiting around a lot?
There was an awful lot of waiting around. Animals aren’t always the most co-operative things. They have their own agenda. You turn up and hope they do something. There was a certain amount of coaxing, but we either got lucky or we didn’t.
Who’s playing the Hammond?
Actually, I played some of that. Oh shit, I wasn’t actually going to admit that. You caught me—I’m tired! But there are bits of Hammond from records as well. I wanted to make sure that when I did the liner notes I left things as ambiguous as possible. I didn’t want people to get all trainspotty about it. A lot of the musicians are actually confused about which parts they played, because the idea was to look at all these things as objective sources.
Does anyone come to you and say, “Where the hell am I? I thought I played on your record!”
(laughs) I was a bit worried about that, actually. I didn’t use everything I recorded, obviously, and I’m sure there are people credited that wouldn’t recognize their sounds at all. Partially because a lot of it was manipulated beyond recognition anyway, or mixed with other sounds. A lot of the sounds recorded were done with a view to mixing them with another sound to make something new. Particularly for brass stuff and some of the engines and robots and stuff. The recordings were made with a view to changing them in the first place.
I do love the wasp/guitar/motorbike combination. Did you learn more about instruments themselves, or trying your own hand at keyboards, percussion or strings?
Not really. I had such a wealth of talent around, I didn’t feel the need to jump in at any stage. I have my limits. I also appreciate the fact that people have a different outlook to give, and it’s best to give people room to breathe. I tried not to direct people too much. Maybe I’d have one or two ideas I really wanted to get across, but I spent a lot of time saying, ‘Here are some chains. Mess around with them on your instrument and see what happens.’
In my research, I found one quote of yours where you said that using session musicians would be settling for second best, compared to what you could plunder from existing vinyl. Has that impression changed?
Well, not really. I really think that if I’d gone in with a song, and said to people, ‘Let’s play this song. You do that beat, you do that bass line, and off we go.’ I don’t know if that would be as effective as trying to find these things on little slivers of vinyl. For me personally—please understand that I’m only talking about my own way of working, this doesn’t apply to everyone at all—I work most effectively like that.
The approach here with musicians was just to get basic source material. It was very different from getting a session player in to play a bass line. It was more like, ‘Go crazy on the drums, play whatever rhythm you want, because all I want is the sound and the tone of the drums and the different textures that I can then cut up and re-arrange later.’ Stef Schneider is an amazing drummer, but god knows what he thought when he heard the album, because the patterns are completely different. It’s all been cut into little pieces and re-ordered.
Compositionally, I find it different from a lot of your other stuff. Did Splinter Cell change the way you thought about composition, or did these sources effect the way you write? Or do you even notice a difference?
On some songs there were some familiar structures for me, where things start in one direction and then take a left turn and then resolve in the end. I like the big dramatic crescendos though, because I love a bit of drama! ‘Always’ has a verse/chorus thing and a bit of a pop sensibility to it. I always admire people who can pull that off. Every now and again I have a stab at it.
It’s interesting to me how that track is near the end of the album. It’s like going through this journey and then having this sweet at the end.
It was a bit of a fuck-you putting pressure on me for a single. This record wasn’t about that. As much as I enjoy three-and-a-half minute songs, I didn’t want that to be the second song on the album and then off we go into an epic number. I like doing it, but like you say, it’s a treat in the middle of some more obscure arrangements.
One of the other things I like about this album is its lack of concept, treating sound as an end in itself, leaving the narratives open for the listener. As much as I enjoy Matmos, for example, at times that does get trainspotty for me, or harder to appreciate without knowing what narrative they’re putting on it.
I was aware of all this when I was making the record, and comparisons would be drawn with other people using field recordings. It wasn’t too much of a hang-up. Basically, I want the music to come first, the satisfaction I get from making music. Whatever idea I have to begin with, I don’t want it to restrict where the song could go or how good it could be. I don’t want to be saying, ‘Well, I’d like to do that, but it doesn’t fit into my concept.’ It’s not going to happen. I want the music to be king, and everything else just facilitates that.
What do you think this project opens up for you? What comes next?
Who knows? I’m excited to try something new for myself. I have learned an awful lot. I hope I can apply these things I’ve learned to the next project I make and keep trying to improve and keep myself interested. I feel like my whole output over the years has been a learning curve. I focused on one area for a long time because there was a lot to explore. Maybe in time I’ll look at different areas.
What does a 7.1 surround sound DJ set entail?
It’s just a regular DJ set with better sound than normal. A problem I’ve often encountered is that you have this big stack at the front blowing everyone away, and at the back it’s all muffled and no one can hear it properly. Only in the middle do a few people get a decent sound. Considering that when I play there’s not much of a stage show, not much to look at, we’ve concentrated on making the event about the sound, trying to make it a different musical environment for people to listen.
But you haven’t mixed any of your own material in 7.1?
No, not at all. We’re using a system being developed by Dolby which is pretty effective. It takes things that are in stereo, or the higher frequencies and spreads them around the room. You can put any stereo signal through it. We’re using that in conjunction with a few other things that my soundman Vid has developed himself. It’s a pretty interesting effect. It’s a lot of bass, which is important, and a lot of detail that surrounds the room. It envelopes you a bit more in a three dimensional experience.
Had you seen other people do this, or did you just want to try it?
I tried it on the Splinter Cell tour in 5.1, and we had a few phasing issues while trying it out. A lot of those tracks were mixed in 5.1. We tried it, and it turns out that it’s better in 7.1, because the speakers aren’t pointing directly at each other. You have far fewer phase cancellation issues and it works a lot better.
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