Soul Distribution

Apr 1, 2001 12:00 PM, By Matt Gallagher

Electronic sound sculptures send Soulstice in myriad directions.

The music of San Francisco's Soulstice is a rich amalgam of styles — including soul, R&B, techno, house, and Brazilian jazz — that evolved from the group's foundation in DJ performance. Soulstice comprises vocalist Gina René, turntablist Mei-Lwun Yee, and keyboardists Andy Caldwell and Gabriel René. The band's debut CD, Illusion (Om Records), is a finely crafted tapestry of samples, drum loops, keyboards, guitars, horns, and vocals.

“A lot of it is experimentation,” says Gabriel René. “We went through pretty much every genre of electronic music before we settled into our current ambiguous style.” Caldwell adds, “We're waiting for everyone else to describe it for us.”

Soulstice has been together for five years, and Illusion is the culmination of its efforts. “We've been through several record deals,” Caldwell says. “For the same record,” adds René. “Plus, we're perfectionists. We're trying to be Steely Dan now or something.”

The band recorded most of Illusion in a rented warehouse space in San Francisco. “It's about a 250-square- foot room that we built in one corner,” Caldwell says. “We built a vocal booth and put a sliding-glass door in there. It's very industrial.”

Illusion was tracked on a Digidesign Digi 001 digital-audio system connected to a Mac G4/450 MHz running Pro Tools 5.0. “Earlier we used [Opcode's] Vision, but for the album, we just did it in Pro Tools 5, all the MIDI and everything,” Caldwell says. Soulstice captured vocals and acoustic instruments with a CAD E-300 large-diaphragm condenser microphone and a Joemeek VC3 mic preamp/compressor.

“We used the Soundcraft Ghost 32-channel [mixer],” says Caldwell, noting that they mixed a few of the tracks on a friend's Pro Tools system. Their outboard processors consist of an Alesis Midiverb II, Alesis Quadraverb, and a Lexicon MPX1. “The dbx 1066 compressor was our workhorse for a lot of the drum sounds.

“Our main instruments were the [Ensoniq] ASR-10, the [E-mu] E4XT, and the [Clavia] Nord Lead,” says Caldwell. He also mentioned a Yamaha EX5, Yamaha FB01, a Roland Juno 60 with a built-in MIDI converter, and a Roland SH-101 bass synth.

“There's no real formula for the sound sculpturing that we do,” he says. “For every song, we pretty much construct a whole new set of sounds.” Soulstice sampled most of the album's drum sounds from vinyl, and only the title track includes acoustic hi-hat and cymbal samples. “We'll spend a whole day looking for a snare drum sound,” says Caldwell. “Snares are key. Distortion is always friendly too. We put a little distortion on certain sounds, and it just fixes things.”

Several freelance musicians augmented their tracks with fresh musical ideas, instrumental expertise, and acoustic sounds. “We're treating session players as human samplers,” Caldwell says. “They lay a bunch of samples down, and we put them together.”

Soulstice occasionally ventured outside of its warehouse to record tracks at three commercial studios in San Francisco: Toast, Mobius, and A Different Fur. “Over the course of the record, we recorded on every level of system,” says Gabriel René. “We were actually on SSLs and Neve consoles.”

“I think if we had owned all that gear ourselves, that record would sound really insane,” Caldwell says. “But the times that we did go into thousand-dollar-a-day studios, I was never satisfied with what we came out with. Once you know the limitations of working in another environment, you tend to maximize what you already have just because you know what you can do there.”

For more information, contact Om Records; tel. (415) 575-1800; e-mail info@om-records.com; Web www.omrecords.com.