When I was invited to be featured as part of the Process Series on Modyfier, I was excited and torn between compiling a DJ mix or sending one of my own productions called, “Cameronian,” that I made in memory of my good friend, Cameron, who sadly passed away last year. After a long think about it, I decided to record a DJ mix as I wanted to express myself on the decks instead of through a production.
I knew instantly how I wanted to set the scene on this mix, so I produced a hypnotic tribal track with a cut from one of my heroes, Sir David Attenborough. After much deliberation, I finally found the perfect sample which I feel describes the influence in my music from organic tribal sounds.
Once I had the introduction track sorted I had to decide which direction I wanted to take the mix in. It was always going to be deep, but would I take it moody or keep it nice and warm?
I'll leave it to you to find out what I decided. I will say I'm very pleased with it and would love and appreciate any feedback.
If anyone would like to listen to the track I was going to choose that I made in memory of my friend, the track is released on four:twenty recordings. You can check it out here.
Generally, we just set up our computer in the studio and record loads of different real instruments like Rhodes, drums, synthsizers and percussion. Then we turn the recorded jams into smaller loops and start to build a structure. Most of the time we record about three to four jams in one evening-session and only arrange the tracks very briefly. Then, maybe one week (or up to three months later), we rediscover the recorded jams, make a full arrangement and add some more instruments that we feel are needed.
For Modyfier, we wanted to show what this could be like by using our track, "Black Cartridge", as an example. The first part of this was generally a different track which was recorded on holiday on the beach in 2006. It was a very techy tune and done without any instruments. Just plain drumcomputers and samples. Later we recorded another track in Berlin with double bass player Stefan Schönegg. This was in the beginning of 2007. For this track we also recorded a lot of real drums and had a very jazzy tune in the end. Later, when we got back to our studio, we fused those two tracks together and suddenly had a jazzy track with a more techy style.
So finally, in summer 2008, the track was finished. It was recently released on a Russian compilation called "Salad Moscow" on Algorythmik Records. This example shows a little bit our working attitude (however, sometimes we also finish a track in one week). It always depends on our mood. Sometimes we just can't listen to a tune for a year and then we rediscover it and work on it again and sometimes we just instantly feel it and get it finished very fast.
Our studio consists of (extract):
Fender Rhodes Sonor Force 3000 Drumset Pearl Drumset Korg Poly 800 MOOG Little Phatty Clavia Nord Wave Clavia Nord Electro An old fucked up Piano MAM TB 303 Loads of percussions AKG C 414B-XLS Casio Keyboard Novation K-Station Microkorg Roland V-Drums Korg Kaossilator Various Boss Effects Cry Baby Wah Wah Motu Ultra Lite
I began work on “Sleep In Front Of” while living in the most northern major city in all of North America: Edmonton, Alberta, and completed it after moving to Montréal, Québec. Although not intentional, I can hear the effects of my move throughout the song. Halfway through the piece, there is a shift, where the density changes and another emotion is introduced. As often is the case with my work, a finished piece follows a fairly straight trajectory. By straight, I mean that once an idea is introduced I develop it and then move on, rarely returning to the previous direction.
The main idea behind “Sleep In Front Of” (and most of the tracks on Inland) was to build a song from strands of edited and processed instrumentation. I arranged the piece to embody characteristics of a pop or folk song. These traditional elements – chords, voices, rhythms – can be heard buried under layers of themselves. They have been deconstructed and then reconstituted to form a new composition.
The track began by improvising over some chords on the acoustic guitar and then editing these in the computer using a variety of effects processes. This gave me a basis to work with. Subsequently, I tampered with the voice, which included short, recorded phrases hummed, sung and edited.
A couple of years ago I started to experiment with using the voice as a sound source. I felt very connected to forms of music where the voice is prominent in the mix, as in folk or pop music. As a result I started working with prerecorded vocals, processing, editing and then arranging them with other acoustic instruments that I had recorded. For example, I worked with Kate Bush’s vocals along with acoustic guitar on “I Cut Along Lines” off of the Holden Into Ryley EP. I also used a portion of a vocal line from an old 10” that my parents picked up at a garage sale. Not sure what her name was, but her voice can be heard on “Rest Near Grey,” off of the various artists release called Tracks In The Snow. This was the jumping off point where I then decided to use my own voice as a sound source, first in a live context and then more fully realized on Inland.
I have continued to capture, build and reshape my voice. In both a live and recorded setting, my voice is an immediate expression that is unpolished and improvisational by nature. This improvisation and immediacy is meant to be edited and processed later, rather than to be a “good take” in its own right. This idea is not necessarily specific to “Sleep In Front Of,” or other tracks on Inland, but I am uncertain what role my voice will take on future recorded works.
In a recent conversation with a friend, I remarked that I recently came to the conclusion that I had been feeling a sort of abandonment, that I had wounds that probably hadn’t quite healed from leaving a scene that I loved dearly, and believed in totally. That scene was Jungle/DnB – I was a full on believer in it from maybe ’98 through ’04, and had followed it somewhat since ’96. For a while I had staked my reputation in moving up in the New York Jungle scene, and believed in it so strongly, its manner and method of presentation, its sounds, its people, its heroes, that I spent a good chunk of my paycheck each week on the latest tunes, and did everything I could to invest in it. And eventually, maybe suddenly, maybe gradually, I left it … but, perhaps in classic male behavior, managed to still be aggrieved, as though Jungle had abandoned me by becoming stale (although I maintain that it remained interesting for YEARS after many other critics marked it as dead). I somehow felt ripped, torn away from, and full of jagged edges because of my association with Jungle.
Now, I have no real cause for complaint...I was always an outsider even in that scene, and perhaps that’s why I never attained the heights I wanted to in it. But it didn’t matter...because how could one focus only on Jungle when Portishead, DJ Shadow, Boards of Canada, Jack Dangers, and Deadbeat among many others were all making brilliant creations explicitly or implicitly based on the awesome hip-hop, dancehall and roots music that had come out, continued to come out, and will keep coming out for a long time to come? Jungle I listened to dance too, those guys I listened to to LISTEN to. And I never thought a mix was worth its salt if you couldn’t LISTEN to it, in that way.
2008 and 2009 have brought us musical omnivores an overwhelming wealth of amazing music within the very loose umbrella of a genre that’s still struggling in vain for a name. Wonky has been applied, but wonky doesn’t really exactly cover the glitch/hyphy creations of EPROM, the synth-saturated psychedelics of Nosaj Thing, or the chunky beat creations of Bullion. At the end of the day I kind of just think of it as hip-hop, but what crazy hip-hop this is...Paul White’s arpeggiations that careen off into the stratosphere, LXC’s echoing drum beats that breath and drip with space, or Lazer Sword (and ½ of Lazer Sword Low Limit’s) superb melding of club music with trip-hop and the west-coast sound that’s pervading us here in San Francisco these days.
If there IS one artist on this mix who deserves the title of Wonky, it’s surely Dimlite, the crazy Swiss man who’s “Ravemond’s Young Problems” and “Quiz Tears” appear in the middle of the mix. These must surely be two of the most difficult tracks to mix together I've ever attempted, but in that challenge came the process of this mix...how to convey to the world just how wide and weird beat music is now, and how powerful it must be if it can support an artist like Flying Lotus going from playing small shows in his native LA to headlining festivals all over the world in the breathtakingly short span of two years.
So, for me as a veteran of the DnB scene, which often praises, above all else, flawless, seamless mixing, for this mix I attempted to work against myself by following in the presentational footsteps of Flying Lotus, The Gaslamp Killer, and The Bug, three of our most successful guests at the San Francisco party Surya Dub I help throw. Gaslamp, but all three to a certain extent, present the music that I’ve grown to love over the past couple years like they were smashing the audience over the head with a hammer, which is kind of the only way to do it if you want to mix as fast as they do, layer the way they do, and interact with a music that, let’s face it, doesn’t lend itself to seamless mixing.
Now, ever the outsider, I’ve actually tried to reverse the reversal as I made the mix and meld many of these tracks together as seamlessly as I can, sneaking in Pink Floyd over Teleseen, or layer The Jungle Brothers, The Beatles, and Ghosts on Tape for as long as I can so that it’s difficult to know what’s going on, and what beat comes from where. To me that’s the great thing a DJ can do, and I can’t even recall the number of times when people refer to me as a mashup artists, and I’m like “Dude, I’m just a DJ."
So where am I going with this? Perhaps just to say that, in addition to everything else this mix could be for a listener, to me it was sort of catharsis, coming to terms with the kind of music that I listen to and love now, and kind of have always loved, and the best way, as a DJ, to present it, riding the jagged edge between seemless DJ and selector DJ, in the same way that the beats are full of rips and tears that befit new approaches to playing them.
And as a final note, this will probably be the last mix I do on Serato and using a sequencer (I’ve used Digital Performer for years). As of next week I dive fully into Ableton Live, since I think it’s the application that can let me both have the rips and tears I seem to need in my life, and yet also may be the way to stitch the beats and pieces back together into something seamless and beautiful. Wish me luck...
When I was asked to return as a guest to Killswitch, a local happy hour at a small bar, I agreed, tossing out, "Maybe I'll have my live set done by then." "Shall I put that on the flyer?" "Sure." And so it was done. I had to finish SOMETHING. I had just under two months. This set was played live from 9-10pm on June 26, 2009.
Of course, most of the work on this was done about a week before the performance — up until about three hours before show time. I hadn't even played the set through once before performing. I need pressure to perform. I've always been this way, up all night before the paper's due, etc. All that lack of preparedness in mind, I think this turned out pretty well! Well enough that I'm sharing it with you. I don't want to be too precious about my mistakes; they don't help anyone if they're kept secret, so now they belong to you, too.
The keys and guitars in the first track (about eight minutes or so) are loops I pulled out of leftover audio from a 40 Thieves session with Jaswho?, a longtime Thieves contributor. I programmed the drum loops out of my sample library, recorded myself singing a little bit over the top, looped and pitched that, and just made up the arrangement as I played.
The next track (comes in around 9:30) is called "Da da da." I made this maybe two and a half years ago with Layne from the 40 Thieves when I first started to work with them. It was the first time I tried to really direct the track-making process with his acting as engineer. The bass is from an SE-1 we no longer have access to, and I think the strings are from our Juno. I was super nervous and couldn't think of lyrics, so that's why you get the silly da-da-da-ness on the vocals. At the time, I called the track "too Get Physical," meaning I wasn't being original enough. Layne had to remind me that making something that automatically brought a label's sound to mind was something many people strive for. Now, I don't know if it reminds me of any sound. I kind of had forgotten about it, but I was lucky to find a CD burned of the files for this a few weeks before show time, so I was able to pull out parts and re-play it live. I still love the weird gun-shot like sounds in this (like at 11:43), though I think I mixed them in a bit too quietly in this set.
The next track was made entirely of pieces I wrote the week leading up to the show, all drums programmed by me, pads played by me, then looped, and triggered live. I like the softly wonky bass in this one; it's just a funny sound to me. Part of the way through, you can hear I mis-triggered a loop, so it's off, and I obviously didn't catch this while playing live, so it's here to haunt me. I think at this point in the show, I started to actually have fun... The audience was full of friends who'd come out to support me, and I love my San Francisco family. There's a lot of talent here, and we're close-knit.
Woah, loud drums at 26:27! At least you can tell I'm mixing live, eh? Ah yes, a note on equipment. I'd borrowed an Evolution EC-33 controller from my good friend Tana, had my duet sound card, a Shure SM-58 mic, and my laptop running Ableton Live 7, plus my trusty Sennheiser headphones. Anyway, that loop and the vocals are sampled from a Human League track I cut up. The bass I played, and I made the knocking sound and played the keys. My microKontrol has been dropping keys, so I borrowed my friend Alona's M-Audio Axiom-49, so I had a keyboard controller to work with while I created the music. I get by with a lot of help from my friends!
At 33:20 starts an edit I made of this old track "IN-TEN-SIT-T" by Mickey Oliver that came out when I was ten years old. I found the record at A1 in New York on a digging spree with Alona a year or so ago. I liked the feeling of the raw '88 house, but the original track (I forget which mix I edited) was a bit much in places, so I created some loops and again, made up the arrangement as I played. I think it's a nice bridge into a little more intense part of the set.
37:51 brings in the hint of one of the biggies, "Sweat (On the Walls)," a track of John Tejada's that I did vocals on ages ago (2005). This track will never die though, and it always gets a great crowd reaction. I've done vocals live for John before, so I had the instrumental ready to go, but I have the delay feedback up too high, and you can hear me trying to figure out why it sounds so weird to me in the booth: "...and now, it's better?" (40:56) Of course, the problem wasn't really solved — I'd never played live never mind trying to mix a mic in, play, and remember lyrics — and so I totally lose my place, and the vocals are not really in the right place in parts. And yes, my mom & dad were there, and when I saw them, the HI-MOM-LOOK-AT-ME reaction just blurted out. Ha! I love that their presence is noted in the mix though, as they've always been supportive of my music obsession, even coming to my parties when I was 17 and throwing them because I wasn't old enough to get in otherwise.
The funny part about this next track (45:27ish) is that I was going to trash the parts completely. It's pretty much entirely made of loops I'd deemed "excess" and failed attempts at writing something useful the night before the show. (I'm kind of hard on myself, I know!) Turns out the bassline's kind of groovy, and the audience really reacted to this track. I'm working on making it a standalone.
The last track is "Don't Turn It Off," a cover the 40 Thieves and I did of this old UK disco band, Hot Chocolate. Our version came out about a year ago on Permanent Vacation, and it's still gaining traction, having shown up on a Ministry of Sound compilation at the start of the summer. Brennan Green did a remix with an nice acid line that came out on his label Chinatown recently, and Greg Wilson made an extended edit with parts we sent him that I'd just gotten. I used Greg's version for this, just made an instrumental edit before the show. I threw a little housey loop over the top to give it a shuffle, since it's a bit fast. The vocals are not my finest, but I was all nervous after not knowing what went wrong during "Sweat." I kind of ducked down behind the booth and cupped the mic in a weird way, trying to shelter it from feedback, and the levels were off, so I couldn't sing as softly as I'd have liked. Anyway, it is what it is! Time to practice singing more!
Ha, the end! "Ta-da!" I'm such a dork. I was really touched by the sincere support and sheer number of people that came out to see what I'd done, and I was so relieved to have DONE IT. I was a bit overwhelmed, and you can hear it in my voice. It's touching to me still!
All in all, making this set was totally nerve-wracking, but playing it was absolutely thrilling, and I am so happy to have made the step in this direction after ten years of DJing and various collaborations. I'm excited to learn from my mistakes, and make my live performance more and more entertaining for you and expressive of the Qzen sound, whatever that turns out to be!
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