Analogue presents ZOMBY

ZOMBY

Never one to be tied down by the boundaries of any scene or genre, Zomby’s catalogue so far has unfurled in all sorts of weird and remarkable directions. From the dark bubbling atmospherics of his early Dubstep releases on the influential Hyperdub label, through the twisted, molten klaxons of his hardcore-influenced “Where were you in ‘92” album on Werk, to the serpentine psychedelic chip-tunes woven through his recent output on Ramp, Zomby has defiantly marched to the two-step beat of his own drum.

While Zomby chooses to cloak himself in anonymity - notably obscuring his face with the pyramid eye of providence in his most used publicity shot - his musical output has created serious ripples both inside and outside of Dubstep circles. His album and EPs garnered rave reviews on websites such as Pitchfork (who describe him as “one of those crucial producers who can trace his lineage back though a youth of garage, jungle and rave”) and Resident Advisor (who proclaim that he “blew the bloody and stumped doors off the dubstep rule book”). It’s no surprise that every forward-looking new release from the influential producer is leapt on by a legion of DJs and dance music fans alike.

It’s not only critics who’ve taken notice of Zomby’s singular talents. Sharp-eared festival goers would have heard the unmistakeable bomb-scare sirens of ‘Euphoria’ dropped into Aphex Twin’s live sets last summer, and, more recently, none other than a certain Lady Gaga has blasted a cut or two during the interlude of her recent ‘Monster Ball’ tour.

In spite of the white-hot hype surrounding his musical output, Zomby only rarely makes live appearances. ‘Where were you in ’92?’ Zomby asks in his giddy love-letter to the mashed up days of hardcore; where will you be on Friday March 19th?

Analogue Episode 2

Analogue Episode 2 from Analogue on Vimeo.

Analogue is proud to announce the launch of Analogue Episode 2, the second installment in a bi-monthly web series that brings together interviews, music videos, short documentaries and live performances. Following the successful release of Episode 1(Kronos Quartet, Patrick Kelleher, So Cow) in 2009, Analogue returns with a brand new episode featuring the dark electronica of Irish artist Angkorwat, a short mini documentary style piece on fishing in Ireland soundtracked by the brooding music of Irish electronic enigma Hunter-Gatherer and an interview with recent Matador Records signee, psychedelic rocker Kurt Vile.

With each episode Analogue aspires to use an innovative visual aesthetic to explore the diverse spectrum of music we love (from indie and folk to classical and electronic) from both local and international talents. Analogue’s aim is to break from the traditional approach to music television and starts afresh with a progressive format applying diverse cinematic techniques.

The Analogue web series is Directed by Graham Seely & Tim Gannon and produced by Brendan McGuirk.

Second Square to None

Ed Devane and Fionn Wallace by Melissa Conlon

The number of venues for experimental music in Dublin has always been limited, and with the demise of what once were regular Lazybird events in the International it became more limited still. Celebrating their first birthday on the 20th of December, the Second Square to None collective - who run monthly events in Twisted Pepper - aim to plug that gap by providing a forum for experimental and noise music - as well as ambient, downbeat, and electronica - in the city. To my mind, probably SSTN’s most exciting function lies in its offering a space for genres of sound that would otherwise languish unheard on the Dublin scene - one of those being noise.

Noise music’s first manifesto came from Luigi Russolo in 1913, who argued that ‘The limited circle of pure sounds [as produced by orchestral and other traditional instruments] must be broken, and the infinite variety of ‘noise-sound’ conquered’. This ‘infinite variety’ was explored in the twentieth century by artists from John Cage to Lou Reed to Merzbow (and many many more inbetween), but as the twentieth century bled into the twenty-first, and computers became ubiquitous, the ‘infinite variety’ has morphed into something more like ‘infinity squared’. Not that the genre was growing tired, in need of a shot in the arm, as it were, but the ubiquity of both the hard and software needed to mangle and mash audio meant that more and more artists began to play around at the boundaries of pure sound.

‘Noise music’ is a term that, while not quite defying explanation, certainly makes it difficult. The frequent ducking into parantheses and juxtaposition of binaries in essays on the subject suggests that the same inability to describe the sublime that has plagued theorists for decades (not that that’s ever stopped them) inheres to theories of noise too. As an example: ‘If noise is process, is always a becoming-noise - or, alternatively, (not) coming into (not) being as noise, this exclusion (what we take to be in the exclusion) is undone when noise ‘is’ as noise is the coming undone of noise/organised sound’. Which is a terribly erudite way of saying ‘Jezzus, I dunno’.

This difficulty in describing, or explaining, in a broad sense, what noise artists do was apparent when I sat down with noise duo FYED last week and made the mistake of opening the interview with the question ‘So what is it that ye do?’. The pause that follows is fully fifteen seconds long, according to my iTunes, and then Ed, in answering the question, elides it entirely.

FYED are Ed Devane (founder member of the Second Square to None collective) and Fyodor, or Fionn Wallace, militant noise merchant and one time drummer with the now defunct John and Mary Trilogy. As Ed Devane, Ed makes ‘a lot of dancefloor music’, but for Second Square to None, and as half of FYED, he welcomes the chance to play with abstract, noisey (sic) improvisation: ‘To improvise droney noisescape stuff is a welcome change from that, ‘cos that stuff is very unspontaneous’.

Noise music need not necessarily be improvised, but improvisation lies at the heart of much of it. There is a sense that, in rehearsing and recording, the anarchic, experimental impulse that lies behind it is lost, or at the very least tamed. For this reason, the flowering of noise music throughout the noughties can be seen both as a function of hardware ubiquity, as aforementioned, and the power of the internet to allow links between local scenes to expand exponentially, meaning the potential for live collaboration, and the experimentation that goes with that, has mushroomed. As Marc Masters writes on Pitchfork: ‘Often improvisational and rarely repeatable, noise depends on live performance, and local venues and communities remain its most fertile audio labs’.

Which is where Second Square to None comes in. It offers both the venue (The Twisted Pepper) and the social hub (both online at secondsquaretonone.com and in the real world) for experimental/noise artists to come together. There’s no such thing as a ‘typical’ noise artist, but Ed’s comment that, ‘We’re using machines in a way that they’re not really meant to be used’ is instructive. From Sonic Youth through My Bloody Valentine through Merzbow right up to Animal Collective, a fundamental guiding premise of noise music is that, first, anything can be an ‘instrument’, and second, any ‘instrument’ can be used any damn well way you please. This can have its pitfalls, as Fionn says, ‘With the noisier stuff it’s hard to know who’s making what sounds…sometimes we don’t know’. Ed continues: ‘Yeah, sometimes like there’ll be feedback noise and I’ll be like (to Fionn) ‘Make it stop!’ and then I’ll realise it’s me who’s making the sound’. Fionn: ‘He’s always quick to blame me’. Ed: ‘That’s cos it usually is you’.

Similarly, the boys go on, ‘(At our first gig) There was this buzz that was going all the way through that was a dodgy cable going ‘bzzzzzz”. ‘And nobody could tell we weren’t making it like’. Says Ed, ‘They were like ‘that’s good I guess”. Which leads to a possible charge against noise music: only the initiated could possibly understand it, and, equally, if not even the artists know what’s going on, then what’s the point?

To which charges I would point to what some writers have called the ‘ecstatic’ effect of noise music. All music has an ‘effect’, or, rather, is affecting (if we can rescue that word from its nineteenth century rosemantic connotations). We need not be connoiseurs to be moved by (some would say manipulated by) a John Williams piece. Similarly, one need not be a conoisseur to be moved by a noisescape. The difference, perhaps, is that the movement may be toward the commonly understood form of ecstasy (joyous, literally ecstatic) or toward a darker, more unsettling kind, or even some combination of the two. Use of the word ’sublime’ is dangerous (not least because it makes one think of a campy woman describing a cocktail), but we’ll take our chances here and quote Torben Sangild: ‘One of the reasons for the ecstatic effect of noise is its sublime character. The sublime is that which exceeds the limits of the senses, perceived as chaos or vastness. Despite our ability to put these words to it, the sublime goes beyond making sense - we never really understand it. The complexity of noise (in the acoustic sense) overloads the ears and the nervous system and is perceived as an amorphous mass, incomprehensible yet stirring. The delight of the sublime is the satisfaction of confronting the unfathomable’.

The magic of noise music is that it does not dictate a direction for our feelings - it doesn’t seek to make us happy, or sad, or excited, or anything else. It’s non-manipulative of our emotions. Because of this open ended nature, you don’t need to ‘understand’ what’s going on; to clock that there’s a broken cable creating a buzzy noise is fine if you do, but if you’re busily getting lost in the noisescape and don’t notice, that’s fair enough.

Many people hear the phrase ‘noise music’ and shy away (I know I certainly did, for a long time). Its Greek root is the word ‘nausea’, after all. But there’s nothing in the noise handbook that says it has to make you sick, or uncomfortable; nor does it have to break your ears. Ed points out something that did indeed put me off noise music for a long time: ‘That’s something that I’ve actually read a good few times, that noise..it’s this big macho thing, y’know, ‘I’m so hard I’m gonna go deaf in the next year or so”. He goes on, ‘That’s a load of bollocks really…that’s pointless’.

Which probably explains why I’ve yet to be to a Second Square to None event (all of which are in part curated by Ed) that makes my ears and nose bleed. Post-gig tinnitus has been thin on the ground. The noise - by artists like Ventolyn & Becotyde, Push Move Click, Keith Lindsay, Fyed, Boys of Summer, Uninerves, Magnetize and more - may be noisy, it may be loud, but it’s not macho posturing or undifferentiated aggression. And it does take you off to wide open spaces in your head. Plans are afoot to fill the dancefloor of Twisted Pepper with Buddha Bags for the next Second Square to None in mid-December so people can sit back, close their eyes, and float away, transported to (or at least near) that place, the sublime.

Second Square to None runs monthly, on Sunday afternoons, in the Twisted Pepper. The next event is Sunday 20th December; 3-7pm. The live stage will feature Legion of Two, Cignol and Ilex while the DJ room will see Fran Hartnett, Thatboytim and Swarm Intelligence doing their various things. Admission is always free. For more details, and to hear live-sets from previous SSTN events check secondsquaretonone.com

FEEDBACK Festival 2009 - This weekend in Whelans

8 bands and 2 DJs for €10 with all proceeds going to the Peter McVerry Trust, sounds good to me! As per the PMV website. “The Peter McVerry Trust supports young homeless people to break the cycle of homelessness and move towards independent living through the provision of a continuum of care services.” So needless to say, it’s a very worthwhile cause.

I’m particularly looking forward to catching Cap Pas Cap as hopefully they’ll be playing some new material from their as yet unreleased album, which is due out early next year I think. So pop along this saturday, enjoy some great music and support a worthy cause.

HEALTH

Jake Duzsik of noise band HEALTH talks to Analogue about their new LP ‘Get Color’ and more.

Your sophomore album is called ‘Get Color’, I read in another interview that you took the title from a craft show of some sort or was that you winding an interviewer up?
I think that might be a bit of a misnomer. I think someone else might have said that, I don’t know anything about that one.

It’s funny because I was doing research for the interview and I think I saw it on Drowned in Sound. I can’t remember which one of you did the interview but it was like ‘ yeah we took the title from this TV craft show’ and then all of a sudden there’s a link to this TV craft show called Get Colour!…

Oh yeah I don’t know.

I presume there’s a meaning behind the title?

Yeah, we kind of wanted to think about it as sort of a slogan in the way that we’re trying to be, at least in our estimation, as close as possible, something that resembles a rock band in a modern sense. Not that we play like rockin’ music with riffs and solos but the way we associate rock music with aggressiveness, physicality, edginess, things that are really important to us when discovering music and we all have that bond as musicians and music fans. Like all of us can agree that Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin are some of our favourite bands ever. Or for me and John, Punk Rock like Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys and stuff like that. So in a way, it’s kind of like, our modern not cheesedick way of saying get ready to rock or like get rockin’. You know if you say ‘get ready to rock’, you’re a fucking douchebag.

And you’ve got the devil sign in the air…

But the devil sign, all that stuff, it still comes from… even if Black Sabbath fans were like dunces or if you look at that music , it’s still progressive in a very aggressive way and that’s sort of part of our, I guess, mission statement as a band. So Get Colour for us is our way of saying ‘Let’s rock’ but without doing it in an antiquated irrelevant way.

That’s a bit of a bold statement.

Yeah a statement of purpose.

So it’s been about two years since your debut album came out, a lot has happened in that time. A lot of touring,
supporting NIN, the world finding about the smell and going apeshit about it, your remix album and then more touring… After all this, did you go into the studio with a clearer vision of what you wanted to do?

Definitely. I mean we also went into a proper studio so we had more of a crunch time . There were certain things in the first album that were also figured out, because it was the first time we ever recorded an album, that were figured out while we were recording. Especially because we were doing it ourselves so there was more time for experimentation that can be both a burden and a blessing, but for me vocally the first album was, the early tours, the early shows were all places you know you’d play an art gallery or someones basement or a warehouse, and our stage volume was such or just how hard our drums are hit, I never had monitors so i couldn’t hear myself or anything like, so what the music was live, especially figuring out the balance and mixing of the instruments and adding things that maybe wouldn’t be done live or layering, and especially vocals was just a learning process. Since we’d already done that and we already knew. Like track-listing for the first album, we had to decide what order the songs went in we had to figure it out whereas with the second record we already knew before we even started recording. It’s like this is the first song, this song is going here, this one is last. I already knew all the harmonies because I already had prerecorded them, rather than coming in being like I’ll just do this on the day. Everything was worked out. So it was much more of a cohesive kind of thing. I think that’s something that just happens. To reiterate all the things you just asked me about as far as writing our first record, releasing it, having a remix record, touring, writing a new record, like there’s more of a solidarity that starts to form around your band, an understanding, just this cohesiveness you get with becoming more comfortable with each other as musicians and what your band is.

You mentioned that you recorded both albums yourselves…

The second one we produced ourselves, the second one was engineered by someone else whereas on the first one we did everything ourselves.

That’s pretty hardcore.

It was more out of financial necessity at the time.

It seems like there’s a lot of bands these days, I suppose just independent culture in general, recording and doing stuff their own way instead going ‘OK we want this legendary producer to come in and do it’, it just leaves a lot more room for yourselves to change it afterwards.

I think a lot of the revolution in recording technology is allowing people to make to make albums, for better or for worse, because obviously a lot of people are making albums in their bedroom studios that just sound like shit and even worse, big studios or big producers are using… just the way records sound are changing now. There’s always like an ebb and flow of technology, there’ll probably be, i think already is, starting to be a reactionary sort of feel to everything sounding so plastic and digital and auto-tuned and whatever. But I think for a lot of bands like us, not being able to work with a legendary producer or something, it’s a financial reality of the music industry. Doing it yourself is more viable now than it ever has been and you can, with know-how and some luck, you can make an album sound great without having to go to a big studio.

I mean that’s the thing, Metallica releases whatever album, what’s that one? St Anger, with the fucking snare drum that sounds like a calypso drum. I mean how much money was spent on that record, whereas not talking the music one way or another, those Grizzly Bear albums that were self recorded sound incredibly rich and sound more like the old fashion of recording things in a space, where you feel the space, you hear the space, it’s just a different style. We’ve learned more and more too, because we recorded this album analogue rather than digital. Most musicians who are even slightly geeky about engineering technology or history are going to have sort of a, like a hard on for recording something analogue because it’s like every great record that you love recorded on analogue technology. Like two inch tapes, it’s like something you either just go with and get out of your system or you’re going to end up talking about it forever. And the reality is that analogue tape certain components that just are amazing and makes things sound warm. The natural compression is just like the way you compare digital technology and photography. You can have a beat up manual 35mm Nikon camera and take photos and it just looks magical, and you can have someone take photos on a ten thousand dollar digital camera and technically speaking, there’s higher clarity in the image and the same thing can be said for digital technology and analogue technology in recording but there’s something about the older one. That’s the thing, whether it’s photography or music, a record is not what a band sounds like live, it’s an approximation of what that band sounds like, it’s actually symbolic. You’re taking technology and trying to translate to exist in another medium so making that sound good is not a question of what is the clearest representation in terms of ‘oh the sample rate is much higher on this digital technology so it must be superior’. In a roundabout way of getting to what I’m saying is like, as far as bands recording albums themselves, the one thing no matter what, how much gear you have or whatever, there’s just no accounting for taste. It’s like the number one thing. So it’s like if you go record an album with a great producer but he’s lost his fucking stride in his step, if you don’t know what’s up you don’t know what’s up. Or if something is not right for that music or whatever. That coupled with us being incredibly neurotic about everything we do…

It’s another sense of control, creative control.

Yeah absolutely.

Although you’re sometimes classed in the experimental genre bracket, ‘Get Color’ seems quite measured and balanced, quite thought out, with melody and noise in a shifting equilibrium. Did that come during the song writing or the recording?

Song writing process yeah, I think like I said it takes any band awhile to sort of come into their own and figure out, and hone in on what their sound is. And that’s true of any band, especially with a band as weird as we are where figuring out our sound was like this bizarre process. It wasn’t like we were ‘we’re going to be this type of band!’. It was just like this strange evolution of not wanting to sound redundant or to recapitulate to whatever was going on at the time but still wanting to be heavy and structured so not wanting to just make, no offense as far as the monarch that people apply, “experimental music”. Mostly if I hear experimental before some type of music, I’m like ‘ah this is going to be boring and just a waste of my time’, just masturbatory.

I think we are experimental, absolutely but I don’t want to be associated with most of the things I hear as “experimental”.

Grizzly Bear at Vicar Street November 1st

Analogue managed to blag the wonderful Cáit Fahey a photopass to Grizzly Bear at Vicar Street a few weeks ago. A little of the magic of that gig is bottled below… Highlights of the night for me included ‘Ready, Able’ and ‘He Hit Me’.

Analogue Episode 1

Analogue Episode 1 from Analogue on Vimeo.

Analogue is proud to announce the launch of Episode 1 of a new bi-monthly web series featuring interviews, music videos, short documentaries and live performances.
—
Episode 1 running order:
Kronos Quartet & Wu Man interview
Interlude: Music vid for ‘Finds you’ by Patrick Kelleher
So Cow interview and performance of ‘Bat Toes’
—
Directed by Graham Seely & Tim Gannon and produced by Brendan McGuirk
—
All feedback welcome.

Hipster Youth

Nope this isn’t another blog post obsessed with laughing at or glorifying hipster kids. Hipster Youth is the re-incarnation of Porn.exe, a gameboy infused one man electronic outfit. Dubliner Aidan Wall is on a mission to reinvent the way in which we think about the modern 8 bit aesthetic. Crystal Castles it ain’t but there are some parts that I could see Timbaland potentially shoplifting for his next producer gig. Hipster youth is fun, intricate and at times emotive music. Hearse Road Trip is a free 6 track Ep that’s well worth checking out.

Download Hearse Road Trip

Launch of Analogue Episode 1

Analogue presents…
HUNTER-GATHERER

THE GREAT LAKES MYSTERY

ANGKORWAT

Screening of Analogue episode 1

Dj Karluss

@ the Joy Gallery, Rutland Place, Dublin 1
Thursday November 5th
Doors 7.30pm
Entry €5

—-

Analogue is proud to present of a screening of Episode 1, a brand new online music tv show featuring the Kronos Quartet & Wu Man, Patrick Kelleher and So Cow.

Following the screening Angkorwat, the Great Lakes Mystery and Hunter-Gatherer will perform.

—-

You can check out the pilot episode featuring Adrian Crowley, Jimmy the Hideous Penguin and Final Fantasy here.

Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy’s long awaited third record was finally announced last month, to shouts of joy and murmurs of amused interest. It’s something of a concept album, based on a world where the sole deity is the violinist, singer and loop-pedal genius himself, and it does, admittedly, sound rather odd. Yet for Owen Pallett, a man who named his music project after one of the nerdiest of video games, such imaginative underpinnings might not be too out of character.

More interesting, perhaps, is the scale of the record. Unlike his hastily put-together debut, Has A Good Home, or its follow-up, the gloriously-titled He Poos Clouds, Heartland is a more ambitious endeavor. I wanted to know about Spectrum, the fictitious setting for these songs, and how he ended up there. Thankfully, Owen is the obliging type, and was ready to answer various questions on the album, his literary pursuits, and his work elsewhere.

Okay. Some of these questions are a bit nerdy.
No sweat, Shane. I prefer the nerdy questions to ones about “classical background”, those ones really get on my tits.

You’ve been a bit ill lately - how are you doing now?
As of this morning, I am feeling 100% better, which is a relief. Saturday night, I literally thought I was dying. I lay on the floor of the tub, with boiling hot water pouring out of the shower head, shivering and crying. My advice to you: B supplements. Don’t stop taking them, for any reason.

Heartland has been a while in the making. Now that it’s finished, was it what you wanted?

Hard to say, really. I had a goal of creating a turgid, non-wimpy, non-blasty orchestral record, something really full of blood and guts. Not ten horns a-blazing nine harps a-swelling eight timpani pounding. Just dense and mechanical, as if a piece of orchestral music could sit next to a Gang Of Four song. And I think I killed it, in that regard. Like, I got it right.

But it did take way more out of me than I thought it should. I realized–too late–that with the orchestral albums I love, typically, the exec. producer, producer, songwriter, singer, arranger, conductor, engineer, mixer and so forth, they’re all different people. I really should’ve hired some interns, cause this record… well, it took a lot out of me.

The new material references characters from the EP like Blue Imelda and No-Face - What can you tell us about their backgrounds? What’s Lewis’ story?

I’d rather just let the album speak for itself. I listened to “Ziggy Stardust” and “Outside” hundreds of times, trying to connect the dots, unlock the secrets. Those songs hit pretty hard, but the concept part never really panned out for me.

Where did you get the idea from, of making an album of a place where you are the deity? Did Flann O’Brien play a role in it?

Actually, I got the idea from “The Lover’s Discourse”, of all places. That book is all about interpreting Barthes’ passions, and how the signifiers of a courtship can affect them. I started thinking about what role the “other” played in those dialogues, how she felt, what her interpretation might be. Barthes’ essay “The Death Of The Author” figured into it as well.

Some of the new songs seem a little different from those of He Poos Clouds - when listening to Lewis Takes Action or The Great Elsewhere, I’m partly reminded of Destroyer’s ‘Your Blues’… Did you feel any particular influences while you were writing?

Your Blues was 100% the inspiration for He Poos Clouds. That record made me feel like I could sing anything, do whatever, and it would be fine. Heartland, though, I don’t know. None of the songs on the record were inspired by other people’s songs. I did listen to the a cappella tracks of Pet Sounds a bunch before recording the vocals, but that was about it.

Huh. That’s funny about Your Blues, it really does come to mind when I hear the new songs, and that’s an album I adore. I think Destroyer’s influence on everybody is non-erasable. He really is something special.

What is your favourite song on Heartland?
I don’t have a favourite song on Heartland, they’ve all been my favourite at one time or another. Rising and falling in the polls. “Oh Heartland, Up Yours!” is a really good one, though, I sang it drunk in a single take, in Nico’s walk-in closet, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of nylon drapings and capes.

What do the Czech Symphony add to Heartland?

Everything, really. The record sounds nothing like Song Cycle, but like Song Cycle, it’s an orchestral record. There was nothing there until the orchestra laid it down.

What was it like playing with the Vienna RSO? It looked fun.

They are a world-class orchestra and the conductor was brilliant. I didn’t get any sleep the night before, and as a result, my voice was timid, so it didn’t go exactly according to plan. But yeah, it was fantastic. I want to write only orchestral songs, forever.

You’ve done some work on the forthcoming Luyas record - what was it like? From what I’ve heard of it it’s gorgeous…

I didn’t do much on the record, it was already smoking hot. Just added some bassoons and cellos to compliment the horns. A few violin ideas. I played my ARP 2600 on another song. I love that band, they are actually my favourite. Watching them play is fantastic. You’ve got Jessie with her polarizing singing voice, coupled with terribly non-intuitive instrumentation… moodswinger + french horn + kit? Difficult one to make it work. But they do make it work. Hearing them puzzle through it over the last couple of years has created some of the most affecting music I’ve heard.

Excellent news. What is the score for The Box like? It sounds like a really interesting project… Will the music get a release of its own?

The music from The Box is beautiful, if I may say so. It sounds like an old-fashioned recording… we used a small string ensemble and Win and Regine have a real Mellotron that they used to do a lot of the tracking with. It would work well as a score to “The Conversation” or something. Or “The Tenant”. It works great in “The Box”, too. I haven’t seen the final cut of the movie, I’m looking forward to its premiere.

Last time round you were reading Ulysses - did you finish it? Is it good?

While working on “Heartland”, I was getting this strange feeling… seeing videos of The-Dream making hits in a manner of hours. Hearing about Jona Bechtolt programming songs in 20 minutes. Meanwhile, I was taking a full eleven months to produce this record, and working on it day and night. The very nature of it, featuring a fifty-piece string section, full percussion, winds and brass… it seemed so preposterous, especially given that 80% of the people who’ll hear it will be listening to freely downloaded MP3s on laptop speakers.

One of the things that kept me sane about it, was to read all these gigantic, overblown classics of literature. Ulysses, sure, but also Complete Proust, Moby Dick and Gravity’s Rainbow. I’d read one of those National Geographic style “anatomy of a whale” chapters of Moby Dick and feel like Herman was holding my hand, saying, “There there. It’ll be all right.”

Next Page »