Rhythm and Noise | John McEntire

Dec 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Rich Wells

           
 

FROM POP TO EXPERIMENTAL, IT'S ALL IN A DAY'S WORK FOR ENGINEER-DRUMMER JOHN MCENTIRE

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Photography by Rich Markese

John McEntire is a ubiquitous fixture in Chicago's thriving independent-music scene. For close to 20 years he's been a drummer, percussionist, writer, engineer, and producer for groups both influential and musically diverse. Two groups for which he's most widely known are Tortoise, an instrumental quintet that features three percussionists, an experimental nature, and a fiercely open-ended musical direction, and the Sea and Cake, led by guitarist-vocalist Sam Prekop, which makes sparkly and sublime pop/rock and has just released Car Alarm (Thrill Jockey, 2008).

McEntire is equally famed for his work with other groups, such as Stereolab on Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Elektra, 1996) and Dots and Loops (Elektra, 1997). He has also appeared on record with Bright Eyes, toured with Tropicália legend Tom Zé, produced Afrobeat-leaning Antibalas, and mixed Widow City (Thrill Jockey, 2007) by the Brooklyn-based Fiery Furnaces, a popular and critically acclaimed group comprising the Friedberger brother-sister songwriting team.

McEntire works almost entirely out of his well-appointed Soma Electronic Music Studios (somastudios.com) in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood. While relatively compact, Soma is equipped to handle nearly every type of recording need. A moderate-size live room and a deadened iso booth are the main areas for tracking, although McEntire frequently records drums and bass in the control room. Even Soma's hallways are regularly put into service.

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The control room features one of the 13 Trident A-Range consoles still in service and a fine complement of new and vintage outboard gear. A 2-inch MCI JH-16, with 24- and 16-track head stacks, stands ready, as does a Digidesign Pro Tools HD2 Accel system. The room also boasts an entire wall filled with analog synths from Buchla, Moog, CMS, EMS, Korg, Synton, and Serge, among others. (See the online bonus material at emusician.com for more info on his analog synthesizers and other goodies.)

I had the opportunity to speak to McEntire in August and to find out his thoughts on recording, production, and arrangement.

Tell me about the process of recording the Sea and Cake.

With the Sea and Cake, the focus of recording basic tracks is always to get a great band sound so that we can then concentrate on the other elements that will most likely be the focus of the tune, like the vocals (obviously), and guitar and keyboard overdubs. Sam is the principal songwriter, and he'll usually come to us with things about 90 percent written. We may add or subtract four bars here and there, but that's about it.

With this group, we usually try to do full band takes, or at least as much as we can, together. With Car Alarm, I was out in the live room, and Eric [Claridge, the bass player] was in the control room running Pro Tools. This was before I bought the Frontier TranzPort, so it was helpful to have someone running the machine.

Sam and Archer [Prewitt, the guitarist] will often be in the live room, with their amps separated in the iso booth and the hallway. And this time we had the bass amp set up in the control room. Every possible combination of where you can put things to get the isolation you want, we've tried over the years. There are enough possibilities that you can pretty much do whatever you need to here. But just barely! If you had, say, three guitar players that wanted to track at the same time, that might be a little difficult, but it's extremely rare that that kind of thing happens.

Starting with your album The Fawn and continuing through Oui and One Bedroom, programmed drums and electronics became an integral part of your sound.

The Fawn [Thrill Jockey, 1997] is 70 to 80 percent sampled drums and percussion. For getting basic tracks down, we'd set up a loop that everybody thought had the right kind of feel. Then I would go back and do more in-depth programming and editing. There were actually some very practical reasons for using programming when we were working on The Fawn: we'd recorded The Biz [Thrill Jockey, 1995] at my home studio, which was what eventually grew into Soma. But when we started working on The Fawn, it became apparent that I could do more with samplers and sequencing and programming. Sam and the other guys were interested in trying to shake things up a little, because we'd already done three relatively straightforward records.