Man vs. Machine: Conny Plank

Jul 12, 2007 2:48 PM, By John Diliberto

           

That's been the direction of popular music, however. To he constantly driving, with static, insistent beats. Especially with drum machines, where people go for the steady, hard driving sound. And you were doing that in the beginning, as well.
Yeah, that's true. But I found something that was very interesting in making music with mechanics and programs. If you understand it right, you can make it come to life when you create a tension between the machine and you. As long a you can manage this, it will be interesting. But most of the music I hear today, you don't hear that. After a few listens it starts to sound boring because it has no secret anymore, because the sound that is programmed always sounds the same. Nobody works on the dynamics of the sound so it becomes monotonous.

It's easier to program than to get a musician in to play it right, so you produce more. So instead of producing less and having good musicians, they produce more and more, like a factory. It's like a music industrial revolution, like they produce cars. They produce music in the same way. When you look at old cars, they were handmade and it was something really interesting as a piece of art. When you take a car today, you don't have these feelings about it. It's just a throw-away product.

You've been working with the Fairlight and Emulator since around 1982. In listening to this Arno Steffens record, was it almost all Emulator?
Basically it was played. We got a drummer in, a good friend of ours, and the basic track we always played so there is no mechanical feeling in the structure of the music. Then we looked for sounds that could replace the normal snare, tom-tom, cymbal sounds. We started to experiment with car crashes, with explosions ... everything that a rock drummer dreams about, because they want to sound like a monster war movie. So we took the real thing and made a super heavy drum track out of it.

Then we found out that if you used a natural sound like a falling piece of iron, it has its own rhythm. It falls and goes dang-a-lang, dang-a-lang-a-lang or something. You listen to this noise and you find that you get an inspiration for a rhythm. It's like a Polaroid and you use that to make a rhythm out of it. Then I find it very interesting to use samples from an Emulator or Fairlight because you can make them come alive.

(Edgar) Varese was one of the first composers who used normal noises not made by instruments. He used metal material, wood blocks, all kinds of material like tin buckets and he called it musique concrete. We go on developing these ideas, using just normal everyday sounds, in the streets, the workshop, and we make music out of it.

It's interesting that you mention Varese, because he and Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, and Stockhausen were the first samplers.
Sampling has been a technique for a long time. I always used bits of tapes to sample and now I use digital systems that are more convenient and practical because it's quicker and more precise to use. But it's no different from what I did before. It's only more clever.

How much are you processing the sounds after you sample them?
I use treatments, filters, echoes, reverbs and I have to adjust the elements to the ideas that I'm working on. It's like a carpenter with a piece of wood and to fit it into his construction he has to work on it. It's the same way with sounds. I have to adjust them to the picture that I'm working on.

I worked with a German group, the Humpe sisters (Humpe-Humpe, Warner Bros.). That was interesting because the girls sounded very sweet so I could make the music dirtier underneath. So there was a nice contrast between the heavenly voices and backing track.

What about pure electronic sounds? You were one of the pioneers of that on records.
I like synthesizers when they sound like synthesizers, not when they sound like natural instruments. I like them to have their own colors. The strange areas of colors that you can do with synthesizers is what's interesting for me, not just copying an acoustic instrument.

A lot of the records that you're involved with don't seem like they can be performed live. Your recording experience seems completely divorced from the live performance experience. I'm thinking of the Cluster records, Dieter Moebius, Arno Steffens.
We're in the same position as the old composers who needed musicians to play, but we prepare a program to play. We can put the programs, the music, the elements together in the studio and use this material and perform. This is the same process as when I mix something on the desk and I have all the elements there, the actual mixing is a sort of performance. It's playing, expressing something. This mixing can also happen in front of an audience because it needs inspiration, it needs attention and what the audience can give you. I think there's a possibility to do this on stage like what Lee Perry did with his dub-mixing. It was an incredible performance of a reggae song.

You don't seem to have a Conny Plank sound, yet it seems like you're very involved in the creative process of the records you produce and engineer.
I think it's a level in the spirit of the people that come together. The way I find people has to do with the state of mind of these people and how we communicate. That's what influences the product. I can be influenced by the musician so that the record comes out completely different from the last product I was involved with.

I also try not to have a "Conny Plank" sound. I want to be different and colorful, like a painter who uses acrylics, oils, and crayola, so I try to make the work I do sound different.

In the last four years I've moved away from programming and tried to work with musicians again in real time. I developed a system where I can use samples and programs with live music. That means you don't lock musicians into a program but you make a program that follows the musicians. That can be done.

Have you done that?
Yes!

Where?
Part of Arno Steffens material and with a band called Kowalski. When we used the sequences, I bound the sequence steps to the bass drum or a pattern of the drum kit so the whole program follows the drummer.

Is this what we were talking about in the studio, where the drum will trigger a sequencer pattern?
Yes, but it's live action. Before, when I worked with Ultravox, you had a sequence and the drummer had to follow the sequence. DAF was also an interesting example of minimal pop music. We had one sequence, one drummer, and one voice. The drummer was able to create a tension between the sequence and him. Then it was interesting when you moved the filter of the sequence reacting to the drummer and then the drummer reacts again. That's a good way of making a mechanical thing work with live music.

Repeated rhythms have always been a hallmark of electronic music. First with tape loops, then synthesizers used as drums and finally the whole evolution of drum machines. You've been involved with every step of that development.
First there were these cheap Italian drum machines that just did this pop-pop-chink-chink sound. I was interested because there was a cold atmosphere around these little machines. They were incredible, stupid and locked, and this was an interesting element that you could relate to. I treated those machines, distorted them, and changed their quality; it was meant to be a crazy mechanical element in the music. So the music you put on top of a thing like this is influenced by his silly little drum machine.

After a while the Japanese companies became more clever in the artificial drum sounds and then there was the step to the digital drum sounds. That's when the trouble started, because it sounded the same as drummers, more or less, arid many drummers lost jobs.

But soon I got tired of those sounds because you get a picture of a real drum sound. When you use an electronic drum machine where the sound is electronic it's okay because the situation is clear. But with this, it's a bastard situation because it's the machine pretending to be a drummer. After a while, to me, it sounds more dead than an electronic drum machine. When a drummer hits his kit, every beat sounds a bit different. That you can't do on a drum machine. When the drummer hits the center of the snare its a bit different than when he's off-center. He emphasizes certain beats, and the range of expression available on a drum kit is much bigger than a real sounding drum machine. Machines that sound close to a real drummer are as stupid as synthesizers that try to sound like a real instrument.

I thought it was interesting that you produced the first Eurythmics' LP with an actual band, yet when they went off and produced the next one on their own, they went almost completely electronic.
They had no other choice because it's cheaper to work that way. Their first successful record that they did on their own, they did on an 8-track machine and they spent the time to program very carefully. It's much more expensive to hire musicians to work in the studio. So they had the time and their own place and they had an interesting development based on what we did before. Dave Stewart is a man with very good ideas so he went to a good producer, himself.

One of your techniques is to record a sound and then release it into an acoustic space and rerecord it.
The most important thing is the right ambiance, how all the elements are together in one ambient situation. I discovered that when I record something that doesn't fit into the picture, I try to get all the elements I recorded together into one room through the speaker system and pick it up again, including the ambiance, with microphones. They seem to work better and have a more transparent relationship to each other. It creates more space in the sound picture. It has to do with the time that the sound travels to the wall and comes back. The ear is more accustomed to this situation than close-up sounds. You never listen to an instrument, holding your ear close to the instrument.

I also noticed that when musicians play with headphones they never play with the same dynamics as when they listen to their own music without headphones in a natural way. Without headphones, they are much more sensitive to dynamics. They react to each other much better.

What about using digital reverb and devices like the Lexicon that create the rooms for you?
Most of these units have nice reverb programs for the ear. But it's very rare that you get a unit programmed that way where you can feel the room. I just bought a unit by a German engineer called a Quantec, and his intention was to get a real room quality out of this init. When you listen to it you immediately have a room feeling. You can change the parameters of the room. This seems to me now the most true sounding unit.

A room situation is an objective situation. It gives you something you'd find naturally so it's less disturbing. It's also an experience with the ear. A good example is the echoes that Elvis Presley used on his first recordings. They were perfect, because they matched the idea of the music so much. It also created a sound, this typical rock and roll sound that lasted for a long time. I think it comes from those moments of singing in a bathroom. It's a feedback process. Each echo is a feedback and the excitement process of music in the brain is also a feedback process. It's attractive as a listening phenomenon.

All these echoes, reverbs, and delays are involved in this feedback idea. A guitar feeding back with an amplifier is also really powerful. It's like the experiments with biofeedback in the late-'60s. They invented little machines where you had a headphone and a detector on your brain and the alpha waves come out of the brain and you get a tone. It assures the brain that it's there and it creates a weird feedback process from inside the brain to outside the brain.

The records that you produce are adventurous variations on rock themes, especially those in the last five years or so. Your own music tends to be more abstract. Are you getting out a lot of things that you can't do in your other productions?
It's like a playground where I can be free. To be honest, more than half of what I do in this free time is crap and I have to throw it away. But sometimes a beauty comes out of this and it's a free situation where you take an element and get inspired by it. It's a meditation process. I don't want to write a piece of music that's like a song. It may turn out that way, but it starts as a free expression and I bring it into order.

I'm more in the function of a medium and not as a creator who has a character and impresses this character on every note. I'm not a musician. I'm a medium between musicians, sounds, and tape. I'm like a conductor or traffic policeman.