The EM Poll

Yours, Mine, and Ours

Oct 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

           

And you had Killen there for the mix anyway, right?

I had him there for the mix, and he's obviously a very smart and skilled guy.

So you rerecorded it at Allaire?

We kind of redid everything up there. We basically did 6 to 20 takes of about 16 or 17 songs. We got set up, and we would just kind of press record and go. And we recorded everything with an almost “live in the studio” sensibility. And usually by the time we got to whatever it was — take 6 or take 8 or take 10 — we'd pretty much got what we needed.

But you did the vocals later, right?

Exactly. And then I came back here and fine-tuned everything. To be honest, I tried very hard to keep as much as I could from the initial [Allaire] recording so that it had that kind of texture. So there was a sense that there are four or five musicians playing in a room together, and it's not that we're just overdubbing for the sake of some sort of anal perfection, you know what I mean?

What about the strings?

They were done in London at Angel Studios with the London Session Orchestra. I've worked with them on all my records and Simon Hale is a really great arranger who I love.

I was listening to them and thinking, “There's no way these are MIDI string parts.” If they were, I wanted to know how you did it.

No, they're very real. Getting back to this issue of electronic music versus kind of organic music — in the end, there is a thing about human hands on a wooden instrument that is very emotionally involving to me. It's not that electronic music is not emotionally involving, it's just that it does it in a very different way. And I guess I like electronic music to sound electronic, and I like organic music to sound organic. When one thing tries to do the other, it's always a bit frustrating.

Ironically, by releasing the remix tracks, you're promoting the crossover of those two styles.

I am. But I'm not promoting a hybridization of them; I'm promoting the use of the raw materials of one style and wanting them to be used for music production in the other style.

So the tracks that you initially did here were programmed tracks and you didn't really feel that they had what you wanted?

No. There was a lot of live instrumentation and there were combinations of real drums, programming, and a lot of stuff from Reason. When I listen to a record by Air or Bjork or Boards of Canada or Mum or any of these electronica bands that I really respect and admire, I really love the way those records sound. I have a pretty good sense for how they did those kinds of things, but I'm not always so confident about doing them myself. As much as I can appreciate that world of music, and I dabble in it to some degree, I'm much more interested in what other people do in that realm. And again, that's another reason why I'm putting it out there on that DVD, and kind of putting it out there into the universe: so that other people can do their thing with it and make it their own.

So you felt like you needed the interaction of live musicians on the CD?

Yes. Those are the records that have been the biggest influences on me, whether it's the first three David Sylvian solo albums or Mark Hollis's record or Talk Talk records or Jeff Buckley's record or a Radiohead record or the new Elbow record. Those are really just bands that are playing together and making music together in some way. There are often modernist kind of things going on, and there's often experimentation that's happening in a very progressive spirit, but it really is musicians playing together. And that ends up being really important to me. Not to discount electronic music that's solely programmed, but I think that what really moves me deepest is music with real players.

Mike Levine is an EM senior editor.

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