Geeking Out With Infected Mushroom

Sep 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

INSIDE THE DUO'S SLICK HOME STUDIO AND THE PRODUCTION OF THEIR NEW CD

They are considered innovators in the electronica subgenre psy-trance, but Erez Eisen and Amit “Duvdev” Duvedevani, better known as Infected Mushroom, aren't so quick to agree with that classification. “To be honest, we don't see ourselves too much as psy-trance,” Eisen says. “I think you can call it electronic rock or something like that. We don't think about these things too much anyway.”

The band's new album, due out in mid-September, is called Legend of the Black Shawarma (Perfecto, 2009). Eisen and Duvedevani produced it in their studio — located in a custom-built structure behind Eisen's house — in L.A.'s Studio City. Of the new CD, Eisen says, “I think it's a little bit more aggressive, and I kind of compare it to our last album [Vicious Delicious, Reincarnate Music, 2007] because it's diverse. A lot of the tracks are different. It's more aggressive and has more songs, and even the songs are more like heavy-metal.”

Infected Mushroom was formed in Israel by Duvedevani and Eisen in the late '90s. The band moved to the Los Angeles area four years ago. Legend of the Black Shawarma will be their eighth album together, and it clearly shows off their impressive production talents. Eisen, who got into music production originally through his interest in computers, took time off recently from his busy touring and production schedule to talk to EM.

Although you use a full band for touring, when you record it's just you and Duvdev, right?

Yeah, it's only us.

What are each of your roles in the production process?

It's basically the same. We both know how to do everything. I like to play more with sound and stuff like that. Duvdev brings the vocals and the lyrics to the studio. He does the singing. I like to tweak, build sounds and stuff like that.

Tell me about the origins of the band. You are both from Israel originally?

Yeah. We were both in the Haifa area.

What was the music scene like back there.

When we started, when we were pretty young, we were listening to a lot of heavy-metal stuff, and the scene was mainly rock — heavy-metal. My partner used to go to Goa parties and things like that. He was really into listening to the music, and I was more into computers in the beginning. So I was thinking, ‘How could I make music just with the computer?’ I didn't have the budget to invest in a studio; I just had a computer. So I started on a really weird program called Impulse Tracker, it's very old.

Was it a sequencer?

It was a sequencer/sampler that you basically just play WAV files with — very limited. But I did two albums on this software. And I met with my partner, and we said, “Lets invest some money and build a decent studio.” We brought a really horrible Gemini DJ mixer, and we had the first Nord [G1]. And [we used Steinberg] Cubase XT, I don't remember which number.

How did the band get its break?

The first album, nobody was interested in. But still one guy listened to it, and he thought it was cool and he gave us a chance. And then the second album, that was the break [Classical Mushroom, YoYo Records, 2000]. It was very commercial, a lot of classical influences, which were not so common in techno music at the time because the music was very monophonic. We said it was boring for us because we'd both learned classical music. So we just put some scales in and stuff like that, so we did more classical scales and more melodic [lines]. Everybody hated that in the beginning, but it was a big hit for us. It was our best-selling CD. We got a Gold record at the time, and we didn't expect that.

How long ago was that?

It was eight years ago, I think.

How did you get your production skills?

Just sort of trial and error. We didn't have too many people in our area to teach us so we did it ourselves. We bought some kind of gear, like the first Nord, and we just played with it and we learned.