HEALTH

November 29, 2009 by Brendan McGuirk
Filed under Featured, Interviews

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”.

HEALTH

Analogue Hour no. 42

More acts announced for All Tomorrow’s Parties May 2009

Video of the day

Analogue releases

Link Love

Categories

Archives

Advertisement

HEALTH

Analogue Hour no. 42

More acts announced for All Tomorrow’s Parties May 2009

eNews & Updates

Video of the day

Analogue releases

Link Love

Categories

Archives

Advertisement