Martin Bisi: Producing Music from the Belly of the Brooklyn Beast

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN: Despite its neighborly demeanor, it’s known that Park Slope has an industrial backbone. Step off the R train at the Union Street stop, walk a few blocks down, and suddenly you’re in something like no-man’s land. Welcome to BC Studio.

Martin Bisi will see you know. The administrator of this otherworldly recording warren since 1979, one of New York City’s most progressive music producer/engineers is steadily advancing his craft. Today he’s recording strictly when and with whom he chooses, a meditative phase for a man who’s discography includes many of music’s no-holds-barred risk takers: Brian Eno, Bill Laswell, Herbie Hancock, John Zorn, Afrika Bambaataa, The Golden Palominos, Sonic Youth, Iggy Pop, Cop Shoot Cop, Ginger Baker, Bootsy Collins, Swans, Alice Donut, Helmet, Cibo Matto. More.

Things continue to sound very interesting to Bisi, as is evident from his current projects. Experience the noxiously charged drag of Woman, the marching ska punk of The Stumblebum Brass Band, and the huge drums he recorded for Boston epic experimentalist rockers Face of the Sun. Or why not check out the man himself? He records plenty of his own tense, heady music with guest stars like the Dresden Dolls’ Brian Viglione.

Explore the massive live spaces of his studio – the inner walls of some chambers date back to the 1840’s birth of this former warehouse – then sit down with him, the glowing controls of his early 1970′s MCI board close at hand. And buckle your seat belts, because when the topic is music, Martin Bisi’s mind moves fast.

You seem to have an uncomplicated philosophy about recording.
What I say is, “Ears over gear.” What that means is that I use ears as the guide and the actual tool. I’ve found that for either beginning engineers, or engineers that aren’t very good, the actual issue isn’t skill so much – the issue is hearing.

Seeing what I do versus what other people do, that’s really the way I’ve begun to understand it more. It’s hard for me to explain to you what role the board has versus the electronics of the tape machine, or the monitoring, or the carpeting in the room. Until you actually start comparing variables back to back, you don’t really know.

For instance, I’m afraid of changing the color scheme in here. Because God forbid I do and something’s off, and I can’t think in the same way. That goes for a lot of things in music: engineering, production, bands in general. You don’t understand the chemistry that’s there. People come here, get a certain result with me, and they think they know why – maybe it’s me, the gear, or something else.

Then they try it in a different context and – surprise! – it’s different and they don’t know why. People may say then that there’s a problem with the other engineer on their project, so I’ll talk to that engineer and I find out they don’t think there’s a problem. That’s the problem. Because if the engineer thought there was an issue with the gear or the converters, he’d do everything it takes to fix it.

When I think I know what the problem is, I just start trying shit to fix it – the qualities of the gear don’t have to dictate the results. So that’s why I say “ears over gear”. It’s about having a sonic vision in mind. If that sonic vision isn’t there, you’re kind of lost a little. Within that, however, a reference point is important. That’s why I’ve kept NS10’s since the 80′s in addition to other monitors, and I’m generally afraid of changing monitors. Something has to be an absolute.

Sometimes I kind of have a sonic vision, and I just start trying different things. I move the mic a little bit, and I’m constantly surprised at how it sounds. It’s a big room here, there’s 300 places you can put an amp, and so far I’m only up to #200. When I’m mixing, people will say, “What are you doing?” and I’ll say, “I’m just fishing around.” I’ll try a hundred things in three minutes. Sometimes I know what I’m looking for, sometimes I don’t – I just know when something starts clicking for me.

For example, I don’t say, “Everyone who records here will get the same drum sound!” although my ears obviously often take me to a point that I like, and sometimes I get similar results. Ironically, I’m actually not proud of the fact that there’s a signature drum sound that I get, but you can hear it on projects like Face of the Sun.

But if musicians have a distinctive sound, doesn’t it make sense that engineers and producers would as well?
Naturally, we’d all like to be specialists AND jacks-of-all-trades. But that’s not how things work. To quote Dirty Harry, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

Actually, I think a lot of professionals realize that they start working well in a niche, a specialty. I think there’s a lot of things I can do, but the places I’m going to shine and add something a little indispensable are in small niches. I’ve discovered that I’m not that exceptional with quiet music – not that I like it or dislike it. And some of these things take decades to understand the chemistry of what’s going on – you spend your whole life trying to understand why that is.

What’s a recent example of how your own approach shows up in the music that you work on?
How I affect the sensibility can be heard in my work with the band Face of the Sun. The drum sounds do sound like me – a vibe, a social thing, happens there. The guitarist and drummer came from Boston, and they wanted to work with me, and maybe there was a same-page situation thing happening. We got tuned into a sort of sound, and maybe that informed the overall quality of the project a little bit.

It’s another example of how it’s hard to know why things turn out the way that they do, but it’s definitely not just the gear. I roll my eyes when people say, “I want to record on your MCI board to get the Philly sound.” Forget it! It’s surprising to me that people think that if you work on certain gear, you’ll get a certain sound. It also comes down to the musicians: Jimi Hendrix always sounded like Jimi Hendrix. He was famous for taking guitars off the rack in music stores and sounding 100% like himself on instruments he’d never touched before.

Your collaborations include some of the most eclectic, pioneering and successful names in modern Western music: Brian Eno, Bill Laswell, Herbie Hancock, to name a few. How did you get on the same page with these hard-to-classify pioneers?
I think that musically, I’m not a purist – that’s a very common thread between me and those names you just mentioned. It’s a big deal: There’s really a big separation between purists and non-purists.

I’m very much in the Sgt. Pepper tradition. The recording is a piece of art, and the engineer should screw around and experiment in the studio. So I generally tend not to do projects, or draw projects to me, that involve a lot of just capturing a performance. That to me sounds average.

There’s a big difference between me and Steve Albini. He has an attitude that’s almost like jazz: He feels an engineer is there to capture a performance – that a band has a sound, and an engineer should be transparent almost. In his case, I feel it’s a little disingenuous, because his stuff does have a sonic signature. The project goes a certain way just because of his presence. I could even go in to work with Steve Albini and come out sounding like Jesus Lizard!

I tend to draw people who want me to massage a certain something into the music when I’m mixing. It’s funny because it sounds so normal to you and me that you would want that from an engineer. But I mentioned Steve Albini, because there’s a lot of people who don’t want that. That cuts out half of the people who might be interested in working with me.

So what projects wind up having a mutual attraction for you?

I’ve said that a producer should be a little trendy. For better or worse, I respond to trends, and I’ll be like, “We can’t have this project associated with this other thing.” Let’s say it’s hard indie rock, I’ll say, “Whatever we do, it can’t sound like metal.” Then I’ll do whatever it takes, like I’ll distort the vocals, so it won’t sound like metal.

When I start a project I’ll say, “What does it sound like? What are we going for?” If it’s indie rock, I go out of my way to make sure that’s what’s conveyed. A lot of people I work with have the same outlook, they just may not say it as shamelessly as I do. People are sometimes more caught up in scenes than they care to admit.

A lot of what I’ve worked on is connected with a social happening. I’m down with that. Laswell is smart enough to understand that social energy is important in the music. It causes people to say, “We’re angry about this music. We hate pop music, so we do everything we can to undermine it. We’re going to be lo-fi because we hate hi fi.” That’s good creative fodder.

Not to have a chip on my shoulder, but why I got into music is social happenings. Social trends. A lot of that was informed by the 60’s. I grew up in the ‘60’s – I was informed by the time and the music. I’m more enamored with “punk” than with punk music. I respond to the message. I think that spirit is what ties me into people for really effective collaborations.

In your opinion, what does a music producer do? That’s another topic I know you have distinct ideas on.
Process is a big part of it. One thing I say to all kinds of creative people is that an artist is only as good as their process. Without a good process, what the hell will come out?

Process involves understanding creativity as a sort of opportunism: Something presents itself, and I better jump on it, rather than fishing around. I think creativity requires a certain amount of subconscious screwing around. It’s good that I don’t know what this will lead to — that allows me to make mistakes, go up wrong alleys, and then a part of that is me jumping on opportunities. And a part of that is respecting the time-and-budget policeman. That’s why process is a good thing for a producer to have.

The other reason a producer is important is in the context of a recording studio. An artist might be used to their process, but here, for example, there is no audience:  Part of what’s compelling about the performance is missing in the studio. So the producer’s processes help make the most of the recording time.

Another place where a producer is important as a creative component is mixing. A musician is used to playing on a stage, and managing their levels, or arranging. It’s very different being in a room and having all the amps and instruments coming from different points. Try cramming that into two speakers, where things are on top of each other. Try having a snare drum on top of a vocal, all things coming from the same point. Maybe you can do a little panning, but that’s it.

So in terms of arrangement, I think arranging for a recording is quite different from arranging for live. Live, things come from different points: A drummer might wail, but a vocalist is over there, so imagine putting the vocalist right over the snare drum: When you’re mixing, that’s what you gotta do. And to do that takes years, and hundreds of hours of engineering, to get right.

I get the impression from some of the things you’ve said and done – like the videos on your site where you took your prized records off the wall in 2008 – that you’re interested in consciously evolving.

That’s really very true with me. I tend to jump ship a lot. I’ll say, “I’m sick of the attitudes of people who do free jazz. I’m sick of indie rock attitudes.” That happened. So I say, “I’m going industrial.” After five years of certain attitudes, I just get sick of it. I can only function if I’m reasonably happy on a day-to-day level. So having an agenda, or doing things for too much of a long range, careerist attitude – it doesn’t work well for me.

So it’s about the scene, and the right people with the right spirit and the right kind of energy – I’m drawn to that like a fly to shit. I’ve had a good social instinct, and I’ve been in the right place. I’m not sure if that would apply in Kansas, but it’s part of what’s good in NYC. Here’s there’s a lot happening. Overlapping. Big turnover. Things move fast. NYC is definitely a destination that people are drawn to.

You’ve been a prolific member of the NYC recording scene for a long time – working out of the same Brooklyn studio since 1979 – how would you describe the current condition of the music scene?
I’m generally quite happy with the way things are in Brooklyn. I am of the scene and the scene is of me. I’ve come to appreciate it from touring. There’s a lot more boring music out there – I’m surprised how much more straight and boring things can be in a lot of towns. You can make weird music anywhere, so why aren’t they?

Right now in Brooklyn, if you want to get a leg up: Be weird. Be twisted. That’s at a higher premium, and I’m all for it.

– David Weiss

The Spirit of NYC Mastering: Get Inside the Ears of James Cruz and Zeitgeist Sound Studios

LONG ISLAND CITY, QUEENS: Scratch below the surface of any of today’s independent masring engineers, and most likely you’ll find a team player there. There are a lot of one-person shops dotting the NYC landscape, but these individual practitioners weren’t always flying solo.

Case in point: James Cruz, founder and sole proprietor of Zeitgiest Sound Studios in Long Island City. In another dimension – circa 2004 – Cruz was a young addition to a mastering dream team operating within the dearly departed Sony Studios. His collaborators there were some of the heaviest hitters – then and now – in the industry: Vic Anesini, Vlado Meller, Joseph M. Palmaccio, Darcy Proper, and Mark Wilder. The late, great technical genius Dave Smith, VP of Sony Music Engineering, oversaw it all.

Change being the constant that it is, in 2007, Sony Studios closed to make way for something else deemed more useful. The All Stars are now scattered across the planet, but Cruz, a longtime resident of Astoria, made it just across the river to Long Island City to found scenic Zeitgeist. Since settling in, his credits have included the last three Calle 13 albums (winners of a total of seven Latin GRAMMYS and two GRAMMYS), Mary Mary, Cee Lo, Three-6 Mafia, Natasha Bedingfield, and more.

Here, Cruz cues us in on many things mastering – why he stays in the box, how artists can make the most of their session, and the beauty of being your own boss.

Tell us about the “signal path” that got you into mastering.
Ha! If you want me to start at the top…Just about out of college I sent resumes all over town — I wanted to be a record or mix engineer. Troy Germano at the Hit Factory called me for an interview and hired me as a GA (General Assistant) in the mastering department. At the time I had never heard of mastering and knew nothing about it, but he said to give it a try and eventually I can move over to “the other side.”

This was at the time The Hit Factory was at its peak: The engineering staff consisted of Herb Powers, Tom Coyne, Chris Gehringer and Roger Talkov. At the time Roger was one of the few people in New York with a new workstation called Sonic Solutions, and he was betting on it being “the future of the business.” Roger needed to move on, I decided that I would learn the system, and I was literally learning trial-by-fire style doing sessions for Celine Dion and Jim Steinman two days later.

Soon after that Tom went over to Sterling Sound so I picked up the computer, put it in his room and said “mine.” I was doing Toni Braxton sessions with LA Reid the next week. All while still making coffee and running the library. Then I learned how to cut records from Herbie – one of the best vinyl cutters ever and learned my EQ chops from Gehringer. It was a pretty special time. I liked it so much that here I am 20 years later. I never went to “the other side.”

That sounds a little like how I got started writing about pro audio! Your mastering career led you to a nice distinction – one of the final group that made up Sony Mastering: What do you feel was special about the people that were there? And the facility, for that matter, at the time that it got shut down in 2007?
Sony was amazing. The Hit Factory was great for many reasons but Sony was amazing. It was one of the most underappreciated and under-used facilities ever. Never again will there be a place like it: You could walk in with nothing, book a production room, record, mix, master and duplicate your album. Then you could go down the hall and shoot and edit your video and do artwork, and even do a live broadcast from the soundstage.

Another thing about it was the technical staff. By far the best in the business. I could ask them for the most bizarre setups you could think of and it would be done in 30 minutes, without ever having to rent gear. The mic locker was epic.

Then there were the engineers. Of course everyone knows the juggernaut that is Vlado Meller, but on top of that was Mark Wilder, a pair of golden ears if there ever was one, and Vic Anesini who did fantastic work. It was a place where we all worked on making each other better and it was always great to have these guys to give an opinion on an EQ or compressor setting. I feel like The Hit Factory was a long training session and Sony is really where I came into myself as an engineer.

I always wondered why it was so quiet every time I was at Sony. After that, why did you decide to go solo and set up Zeitgeist, rather than joining another mastering facility?
Honestly, Sony shut down and I had no interest in working for someone else anymore. I couldn’t really see myself at Sterling or Masterdisk so I didn’t even pursue it. I figured I had already worked in two of the best spots ever and now it was time to do my own thing. I also like the idea of being completely responsible for myself and not having to answer to anyone.

So how would you describe what you’ve created in Zeitgeist – what were your objectives for the room? How did you set it up?

The most important thing for me was the vibe. Even though I’ve worked in these amazing studios, all the rooms always felt very cold and sterile – there’s really only so much you can do with a black couch and lava lamps. So first and foremost I wanted sunlight.

I also went in the complete opposite direction of the “modern mastering room” and went back to what it was originally intended to be, and that’s the best-sounding living room stereo in the world. So I did just that: I built a giant living room with tons of comfort and a front window that’s 20’ long by 8 ½’ high — I barely even need to use electric lighting anymore.

Zeitgeist is the Comfort Zone. You also mentioned to me that you master virtually 100% in the box. Why is it that?
Pristine signal flow — mastering rule Number One. When I started everything was on tape. It came in on ½” (sometimes DAT) and ended up on lacquer and/or UMatic. There was always a physical medium so there was always multiple pieces of gear, a bunch of feet of wire, patch bays etc…

Even though everything was as high quality as possible, it always imparted a sound. Sometimes it was good, sometimes it was bad. Along the way I noticed everything started to go all-digital — started with DAT then recordable CD. So I started to back off on the analog gear. I didn’t want to convert to analog, go through a bunch of stuff, then have to go back to digital. Eventually it went to all WAV files so I found no reason to ever leave the box.

I’m using very high quality mastering grade plug-ins and my signal flow is as short as possible. Do I miss analog stuff? Yes. Very much. I would much prefer to turn a knob then adjust a trackball! There are definitely some advantages to doing it this way, though, besides the signal flow. It allows me to work much faster, which benefits the client in the end. I also have a lot more flexibility than I ever had with analog stuff.

There’s always a tradeoff, in either direction. How is your workstation configured?
My workstation is the Sequoia by Magix and my main EQ is the Orange Linear Phase by Algorithmix. I can’t live without them. It runs on Windows XP and the computer was custom built by Sony’s computer genius Jim Yates.

It’s a powerhouse of a system and extremely stable. It’s so over-engineered I have seen no reason to update it yet, to be very honest. My next batch of plug-ins will probably be the Sonnox Oxford stuff – it’s not new but it is some great-sounding stuff. Universal Audio is also doing some very cool stuff with all their emulations.

Turning around to what’s coming into your system, what would you say are the trends you’re seeing in terms of the recording techniques and audio quality of the music you’re getting? How are projects evolving, and how is that affecting the way you approach your job?
Let me start here, and this is as diplomatic as possible: owning Pro Tools doesn’t make you a recording engineer, in the same way that owning a frying pan doesn’t make you a chef. That being said there are more and more projects being done in smaller project studios and fewer people are actually involved in the process. There is actually a very good article in a current magazine about the engineer becoming a loner, where in the days of the larger studios there were always other people around to give opinions and push you to be better.

That’s a major change that’s affecting the way things are done. As far as audio quality, it’s always been hit or miss. There have always been bad engineers and great engineers. As technology gets cheaper there do seem to be more and more engineers though.

On that topic, you said that client education is something you’re a big proponent of. What’s an example of a correctable mistake you often hear on the projects you get – something that people could easily fix so that you can deliver a better master?
I love for new clients to call me before the session and ask as many questions as they want. I am a big believer in one-on-one communication with the client. It benefits everybody.

The biggest mistakes I get are too much compression/limiting – see “level wars” discussions in every audio publication and message board written in the last 10 years — and the tops and tails of the tracks not being right. If your mix engineer is adding a limiter on the two-mix just to make it loud, tell him to remove it before sending it to mastering. Your mastering engineer should be able to make your track loud without wrecking all the wonderful dynamic range that makes music connect on an emotional level.

It’s also helpful to leave a second or two of air before your song. Don’t start your WAV right on the music, let it breathe a bit. Your mastering person can trim it for you. And lastly, that applies to the end of the track too: Leave some air at the end so your mastering engineer has some room to work, especially when sequencing an album. The worst, and costly, mistake is not being prepared. Call your engineer before the session and get in detail the way that things should be done, if you have any questions.

That’s some super-solid advice! Things are pretty competitive here in the NYC mastering scene, right? How are things evolving for you and your competition?
I think the smaller guys are making a pretty serious play. To be very honest, and I mean this with the utmost of respect, I don’t really see how the giant muti-room places can survive with that business model much longer. The overhead is just too high. As budgets continue to shrink and the web continues to shut down labels it’s going to be the boutique studios that will be able to keep up.

On another tip, who are some music innovators that have inspired you – be they engineers, artists, business people, chefs…?
Wow. Good one — there are so many. In no particular order: Jimmy Page, Pink Floyd, Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, Pete Townsend, Geoff Emerick, George Martin, Brendan O’ Brien, Jim Thirwell, Jon Brion, Joe Strummer, The Talking Heads and XTC. Just to name a few.

That’s a heady mix! Finally, when you sit down to master a record – whether it’s an indie artist or major label hit – what’s the big payoff?
I love doing an attended session and playing the before-and-after for a client and seeing their face light up. That’s a lot of fun for me. When everything is complete, the client sits down and listens to the complete product, and says “YES!” that makes me very happy.

File under “What a Feeeeeeeling!” Anything else to add?
I need a vacation. It’s been way too long.

Amen!

The Good Listeners Bring “Don’t Quit Your Daydream” To Woodstock

Woodstock, NY: Couple weeks back, we had the opportunity to attend one of Levon Helm’s Midnight Rambles up at his studio, “The Barn,” in the woods of Woodstock, NY. It was the weekend of the Woodstock Film Festival, and Don’t Quit Your Daydream, a documentary about LA-based duo The Good Listeners, was a featured film making its East Coast premiere.

Helm, legendary drummer for The Band, invited The Good Listeners to open the Ramble on Saturday night and they fit right in, bringing the rowdy, music-loving audience to their feet with tunes from the Don’t Quit Your Daydream album.

The story of The Good Listeners and the making of their latest record is an odyssey wherein band-mates Nathan Khyber and Clark Stiles pack up all their instruments and studio equipment, jump in an RV, and head out on a month-long, cross-country trip stopping to record a song-a-day in 10 different locations.

The Good Listeners make a kind of alt-pop music that fuses acoustic and electric indie roots-rock sounds with experimental studio sonics. Both are multi-instrumentalists, but Khyber is the singer/songwriter and Stiles is the producer who builds their sonic world, a pastiche of live playing and looped guitars, sampled sounds, pedal FX and analog synths. If David Byrne and Brian Eno hopped in an RV with some choice equipment, and gave themselves similar restrictions, the result might not be so far off from Don’t Quit Your Daydream.

The key to The Good Listeners’ sound is spontaneity, and they’ve been inventive about how to enforce that in their recordings. Their first record, Ojai, was made from scratch in ten days in a home studio in Ojai, CA; their second, Crane Point Lodge, was written and recorded over a month in a lodge in the Adirondacks; and their third album, Don’t Quit Your Daydream, was recorded on the road in ten non-studio locations around the country with a collaborator in each port. This is the process documented in the film.

“We approach each record as a blank canvas,” says Khyber. As for Don’t Quit Your Daydream, in particular, he shares, “We really didn’t have a game plan starting out. We write the songs in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way — very quickly and on a daily basis. But one thing we did plan in taking it out on the road was to get some local flavors and indigenous styles on the recording.”

Stops along the Don’t Quit Your Daydream trail included “The Integratron” dome out in the Mojave desert where they teamed up with musician/songwriter Bingo Richey, a Bayou Swamp Tour boat in Louisiana where they hooked up with Cajun musical tour-guide Ron Black Guidry, and a horse barn in Louisville where they met up with friend and actor/musician Adrian Grenier.

On the East Coast, they tracked songs at the Paul Green School of Rock in Philly with teenage rocker Gina Gleason and on a Brooklyn rooftop with college athlete and musician Christian Strekely. In each location, they wrote and recorded a song in one day with their collaborators, totally from scratch.

Lyrically, the album channels a kind of peripatetic spirit, and a longing for connection that’s literally being played out in the production process as the guys find a way to connect creatively to people whom (in most cases) they’ve never met. Even with the diverse locations and flavors, there’s a real cohesiveness to the sound of the record overall; it’s both real and cinematic in how it documents what happened in that location, on that day, the songs building like stanzas in a modern-day epic poem.

“A lot of that is Clark’s doing,” says Khyber of the album’s cohesive sound. “He’s a really good producer. And our process is organic in that a lot of what we do is based around the hiccups that we stumble across, and artifacts that are left over in the looping process.”

Tracking A Record Cross-Country

Stiles had been working as a producer in Los Angeles, engineering records for The Dandy Warhols and Pink Martini among others, when he and Khyber formed The Good Listeners. He’d been burning out on producing with other bands, and decided it was time to retire from the studio grind.

“I found myself working on other records thinking about how great it would be to be putting as much effort into my own records,” says Stiles. “So I found new ways to make money and let my work be my work and let music be fun. Nathan and I have a really strong skill-set and it’s so nice to be doing it for ourselves.” As a result, this band has the benefit of a fine-tuned production process, conceptualized by a skilled recording engineer.

“We subscribe to the point of view, based on our experience, that the things that you don’t deliberate on, the unintended things, are the best,” says Stiles. “We like to let things happen, and unfold and the accidents are greatly welcome because the most exciting thing about music is when it’s unpredictable and you can’t think your way into unpredictable, it just has to happen.”

To make Don’t Quit Your Daydream, the guys and their roadie musician buddies unpacked and setup a full-fledged studio in each location. “We arrange all of our gear in such a way that we can just bounce around to the different stations and not have to think too much about making special patches for anything we might want to do,” says Khyber.

And it’s an impressive assemblage of musical equipment they carted around. “We have a mishmash of gear we’ve been collecting since the 80s,” Stiles notes. “I have some old Neumann microphones, an awesome drum set from the 80s, we’ve got a Rhodes and a Wurlitzer, but then we’re also using Pro Tools and we have a new Moog. We hang onto gear we love and buy a few new things every time we make a record.

“For pre-amps, I have some APIs, GMLs and Manleys. I don’t use any outboard compression — we basically record everything flat, I go straight from the mic pre to the Apogee converter into Pro Tools and the majority of what we do in Pro Tools is really just hi-pass filtering, very little EQ’ing. I try to keep everything as natural sounding as possible. It’s nice because then we like to mix in miscellaneous sounds and we have a lot more fun trying to get the sound in the room as opposed to over-tweaking in Pro Tools.”

The production of a song is about capturing the new environments, nuances, musical and lyrical gems of each day. “We want the outside noises to leak into the music a bit, so that we feel like we’re wrangling the sound more than creating it in a lot of cases.”

In this way the method of production becomes an intrinsic aspect of the band’s identity, their sound. “It really works for us,” Khyber allows.

“It’s really refreshing for both Clark as a producer and musician and for me as a writer to kind of do this so quickly that we’re not second-guessing ourselves to a degree and belaboring something when your gut instinct is typically the right move anyway.

So a lot of the record is first passes, first vocal takes. I think the process has enabled us to keep it fresh and fresh sounding.”

And Stiles mixes as they go. “It shouldn’t take that long to write, record and mix a song and that’s kind of our theory,” says Stiles. “If you listen to our end of day mix as opposed to the album versions, they’re not that far off. I typically mix while I record and we’re editing while we’re writing; we’re doing all the work that day.”

The Journey Is The Destination

At the end of the month-long trip from Los Angeles to NYC, The Good Listeners had an album, amazing footage for their documentary and a great, human story to tell. “I think what we learned through making this record is that we actually have something to share,” says Stiles.

“We’ve spent years developing our skills and craftsmanship and that is something that’s really nice to go out and share with other musicians. We learned a lot from our collaborators and we tried to give something back to them as well.”

As for the fans, well, the DVD + CD experience of Don’t Quit Your Daydream is super-engaging. Watch the movie, listen to the finished record, and you feel you’ve traveled the road with them and you’re that much more connected to their songs. Or at a film-screening event, hear them live and it completes the journey.

“I think it’s quite nice to see the genesis of the songs and then see them come to fruition on stage,” says Khyber…as in The Midnight Ramble, a perfect epilogue for those who caught the film. And it was a high point for the band.

“It was very intimidating, we were actually kind of terrified,” says Khyber. “We’re certainly no hacks, but we also don’t feel we’re virtuoso instrumentalists. And there we were playing in a room with guys like the musical director for Bob Dylan’s band!

“But it went over quite well and people did really seem to enjoy it. And you always have to remind yourself that, at the end of the day, you’ve written these songs and if you’re able to perform them and people are into it then you’ve done your job!”

For more on The Good Listeners and Don’t Quit Your Daydream, visit www.thegoodlisteners.com and www.dontquityourdaydream.com. Download the movie and album on iTunes!

On The Record: Laurie Anderson, Mario J. McNulty On The Making Of “Homeland”

SOHO, MANHATTAN: Iconic NYC artist and sonic adventurer Laurie Anderson released her amazing new album, Homeland, earlier this week. Years in the making, Homeland emerged after a challenging and at-times vexing process in the studio, and very nearly never emerged at all.

“It’s this very, very weird hybrid,” says Anderson, struggling to pinpoint what ultimately makes up Homeland. “I’ve never worked on something this odd before: it was sort of a bunch of filters, a bunch of live [recordings] and a bunch of studio ideas. I’m not even sure what to call it because it’s such a bizarre collection of things.”

It started with sonic scaffolding. Anderson is credited as an engineer on Homeland, and would have to be for the way the songs are composed: they are, in effect, engineered.

“I start with many different rhythmic riffs — even though Homeland doesn’t sound particularly rhythm-driven, it really is,” she describes, when asked of her sonic palette. “By that I mean most of the songs are built on these scaffolds that get removed, and they are mostly violin filters that I’ve been building myself with a software designer named Konrad Kaczmarek. They were based originally on Eventide filters but we went further afield in building our own.”

These became the building blocks for Homeland — movements both ominous and euphoric built up underneath and around an epic narrative. And Anderson toured the work, developing it on the road, recording performances of her constantly evolving Homeland live show all over the world for three years. “That’s various versions of the show, in various tempos, in various keys,” she points out.

Along the way, she recorded with a variety of collaborators, including Tuvan throat singers and igil players of Chirgilchin, and captured improvisational sessions with NYC experimental jazz and rock musicians including Rob Burger (keyboards), Omar Hakim (drums), Kieran Hebden of Four Tet (keyboards), John Zorn (saxophone) and Antony Hegarty (vocals).

“I wanted to make a record that would really relate to the live shows,” Anderson shares. “My live rig incorporates so many tools now — soft synths, homemade pedals, vocal processing, different vocoders, the homemade software we call ‘Tide’ in homage to Eventide” — to where I can do almost anything in the live show. It’s really, really exciting and I wanted to get that feeling into the record.

“So it’s like I ‘wrote the record on the road,’ and then came back to the studio and tried to ‘record’ it, but all of those terms were sort of meaningless by that point. I thought, OK now I’ll take some of these live files and paste them together into these songs in the studio and get that live feel. And, that was beyond hard! We took some of those rhythmic elements, printed them and then tried to make a studio version and the air went out of the whole thing.

“And, I thought, No!! I really didn’t want to do something that pristinely goes from my box to your box. I [found myself] sitting there working with all these clean files thinking now what? I’m going to put fake air around them? No! That kind of air to me feels like air-conditioned air — stale air from a hotel in Tokyo that’s never been aired out. I wanted to use air that had been pumped through real places; waves that had been somewhere.

“At that point, the record budget was pretty much over and it was just me sitting with like 100,000 sound files. Here I’d been thinking I’m going to make this spontaneous live thing, and now I was digging through and labeling all these files. I truly would never recommend this to anyone. (laughs) Do not try this at home!”

HOMELAND EXCAVATION: DIGGING, COMPILING, MORE RECORDING

It’s somewhat unsurprising, for an artist who’s always so embraced technology, that the infinite possibilities of today’s methods of music production might tip the scales into the overwhelming. “I got super-depressed looking at all those files and I actually stopped working on it many times,” Anderson admits. “At that point, I was only working on it as a hobby, a couple days a month. I thought I would never finish it. And it was because of Lou [Reed] that I finished it and because of Mario [McNulty] too. Mario really hung in there, and he said it is possible to do this. He was really willing to dig into those bins, and he was really patient.”

A NYC-based engineer/producer, Mario J. McNulty had worked with Anderson before. He mixed sound for a short film she directed in ‘05. “The first time I ever spoke to Laurie, we had a really nice chat about mixing,” McNulty recalls.

“And it was so great because it was abstract and artistic — the ultimate way I like to approach things, in a totally non-conformist sense. It wasn’t ‘this is a rock mix’ where the kick drum does this, etc. It’s not of the mainstream world at all, it’s of this world that I really admire, of Laurie and Eno and Gabriel and Bowie and Talk Talk and all of these records that I’m really passionate about.”

“That’s maybe the only talk we’ve ever had about mixing, and we’ve worked on and off ever since,” he continues. “So, on Homeland, we never had to talk specifically about what the album should sound like, because I already have a good sense of what she wants: she wants beauty. And, her vocal needs to be in the right place and really only she knows where that is. I mixed the record, but she’s very, very involved in the process.”

McNulty went into Anderson’s studio in SoHo and began the process of compiling Homeland, with the expectation of beginning to mix it. “There had been a lot of different people working on it, so the material was all over the place, literally,” he describes. “On different hard drives, in different studios. Neither of us realized how spread out the project was. I consolidated it all into one location, so something could be played back that made sense to her. And by that point, she was realizing she had more work to do. It just wasn’t moving her the right way.”

Anderson put mixing on hold to do some more recording, editing, and arranging at her studio, which has been her workspace since the 80s. “She has a lot of equipment, but the main recording system there is a Pro Tools HD2 rig,” McNulty describes. “And she has a series of laptops with soft synths, vintage and modern keyboards and racks of time-based effects like her Eventide Harmonizers, which she uses in the recording process as well as in mixing.”

“Pretty much any time we would need an effect, we’d go to the Harmonizer,” says McNulty. “She’s one of the pioneers of the Harmonizer so she’s very familiar with it and even the software emulations of the Harmonizer, so we would get into all kinds of sounds with them. She’ll record violin through this really awesome stereo delay patch that she made — and she also has patches that Brian Eno made for her stored in her Harmonizer.”

As she has throughout her career, Anderson used filters to essentially create new instruments, new voices. Homeland’s “Another Day in America” uses one of her classic vocal filters to voice her male alter-ego, “Fenway Bergamot,” the darkly comic storyteller, the omniscient narrator of the Homeland live show.

“Mario’s the reason I added Fenway Bergamot to the record — we just put up a mic and improvised for awhile to see what would happen,” Anderson recalls. “And that became ‘Another Day in America.’ I’m very glad I included that because my music is about words and their rhythm, so to have that very stripped-down [piece] in the middle is kind of what I was going for as well.”

THE MIX OVERLAY: UPGRADING THE SIGNAL PATH

By the end of the summer of ’09, Anderson had finally finished recording and decided she wanted to mix the record in her own studio. “I proposed that we rent some equipment, basically do an upgrade to the studio,” says McNulty. “So I called Jim Flynn Rentals and explained how I wanted to mix analog but that I wanted to avoid all the old analog gear that I wasn’t liking in her space, like her Mackie consoles which she mainly uses for monitoring.

“We did what Jim called a “mix overlay,” McNulty relays.  “We upgraded to an HD3 system and added a Dangerous 2-BUS for analog summing, and a series of compressors — Urei, LA2As, 1176s. We also had some gear from Lou Reed. He brought over his LA2A, which is the best LA2A I’ve ever heard, and some Avalon compressors and EQs. We were able to basically bypass her patch bay and patch all of our analog compressors and EQs by hand. So it was a totally custom setup.”

McNulty also rented an A-Designs Hammer. “I used one side of this stereo EQ on Laurie’s voice, and it’s just a fantastic sound,” he adds.

They also rented an arsenal of plug-ins. “Laurie had a good collection of plug-ins but I also needed some other tools that I find really useful when mixing, like the McDSP Emerald bundle, the Crane Song tape saturation plug-ins and the Sound Toys bundle — TimeBlender, PitchBlender, and Echoboy is my favorite. They’re really useful and really fast — sometimes you need to just pull things up quickly, especially in a mix scenario. I also used the Waves SSL plug-ins and EQs, which Laurie owns, and the Sonnox EQs. For effects, I’ll use ReVibe, Waves and the Eventide Harmonizer plug-ins as well.

“We also used her hardware Harmonizers on the mix — she has special reverbs, cave reverbs, all kinds of de-tuned stuff that won’t be found in any other H3000 because they are patches that were designed either by Laurie or by Brian Eno. So that was a real treat!”

HOME-STRETCH: LOU REED, HI-FI- MONITORING, KILLER BASS!

Though Homeland had involved many people’s contributions along the way, including Roma Baran who’s credited with Reed as a producer, by the end, it was Anderson, Lou Reed and McNulty finishing the project in the mixing stage.

“That was, in a way, the hardest stage,” says Anderson. “In the beginning of a project, it’s all experimentation and great and at the end, you realize ‘oh, but we do have to eventually make something and present it to someone.’ Lou said he was going to come in and sit here in the studio with me until I was done. And I thought, ‘oh, that’s a bad idea for a couple!” (laughs) but I would truly, literally be working on it today, without that.’

“Lou is a great producer,” Anderson continues. “I’d play something and he’d say that’s done, let’s move on. And I’d say ‘No, no! It needs horns, background vocals, etc…I can’t leave that vocal on there.’ Lou is a really fascinating blend of perfectionist and purist and somebody who’s just really loose. He’d say, ‘Leave that raggy stuff in! Why would you take that out?’ And ‘This doesn’t need 17 more parts. Air can be part of it. Air can be rhythmic.’

“Every writer I know is indebted to their editor if they have a good one and same with a musician to their producer. And Mario in a lot of ways worked as a kind of producer. He wasn’t just the engineer — he would definitely express himself in a way that was so well-timed, he understood the process so well that he was never intruding but he had this way of putting his opinion in.’

They monitored Homeland on a few systems. “Laurie has her ProAc speakers that she’s used to listening on in the control room and then I added NS10s, which Lou and I would listen on,” says McNulty. “We also wanted a really hi-fi monitoring setup we could listen on, so Lou brought these huge ATC monitors over from his studio. We set them up in the live room — on foam on the floor — and there was a couch and blankets, and people would sit in there and listen on these huge 3-way monitors, which have this incredible frequency response.

“That was great — to be in the control room with the nearfield monitors and then be able to clear our minds, take two minutes and go in the other room and crank it on the big guys — see where the bass is sitting, see where the vocal is sitting.”

What was Anderson listening for? “We conceived it with a very wide sonic range,” she describes. “And I wanted scary bass. I wanted the bass to jump out and kill you! I’m so sick of hearing MP3s coming through people’s laptop speakers and you hear this tinny thing…and you think, ‘That’s the song?’ Why did I spend more than two minutes on the song if it was going to sound like that? So, I wanted to make something where if you wanted to crank it up on a huge system, you’d hear tons of colorful details and all these little things.”

Nonesuch Records released Homeland on June 22. Buy it HERE! The album is available as audio-only and as a CD+MP3+DVD (which includes the 40-minute documentary “Homeland: The Story of the Lark.” Anderson will perform “Another Day in America: Songs from Homeland & other stories” at Le Poisson Rouge, July 13. Tickets here!

Mario J. McNulty is represented by Joe D’Ambrosio Management.

School of Seven Bells: Set to Soar Higher with “Disconnect from Desire”

GREENPOINT, BROOKLYN: You always remember your first time. For me, it was in my office. The afternoon sun was shining. I slipped it in.

I pressed “Play” on my CD machine, and the sound of Alpinisms from School of Seven Bells filled up the room. Like a lot of people, I was instantly struck — and a little bit transformed — by what I heard: psychedelic; dreamy; lucid; noise; world music; pop; guitar; elevated intelligence; hair-raising emotion; loopy live beats and heavenly hypnotic voices.

Since their 2008 debut with Alpinisms, Benjamin Curtis and Alejandra + Claudia Deheza have been on the move far more than they ever expected. The Brooklyn trio’s original sound was not just widely heard, it was widely embraced by an enchanted global audience that was more than ready for a band just like this one.

Now that the twin sisters and their guitar-wielding collaborator have one album under their belts, their musical world has become rich – very rich. Confidence and control guided their every move as they recorded the transcendent Disconnect from Desire, dropping today, July 13th on Vagrant/Ghostly International. Curtis gave us a group update and album preview on an early summer day, straight from a comfy bench in McCarren Park.

Things have obviously gone well for School of Seven Bells since the release of Alpinisms in 2008. Were you surprised by the big response that the band and your sound received?

I think if you make anything, you should have a big degree of confidence that people will like it. I definitely expected SVIIB to find its place in the current music scene, but at the same time there’s a lot of discovery happening with a first album as the band finds its feet.

I also think that because we’d been in bands previously, we were familiar with the various phases, and we got there more quickly. We’ve always been looking forward to Album Two.

It seems like SVIIB didn’t have the typical “band plan”, but somehow your success so far has played out in textbook fashion.

That’s totally true. We didn’t expect it to become as traditional a band as we’ve become. We had no preconceptions. We knew we were going to make some music, and that was really it – we didn’t know how it was going to happen, when or how much. It’s definitely all a surprise at this point.

When did you start to make more specific plans to record Disconnect from Desire?

We were touring a lot, playing show after show after show. I think a lot of times, you have this moment where you say, “We’ll I guess we have to make album number two.” But we never really had that, because the music just started coming, and it came really quickly.

In particular, last Spring on a tour of Europe, I just started writing music on my laptop, a little keyboard and some acoustic guitars. A lot of ideas came really quickly, in the span of a couple of weeks, and that’s basically the musical bedrock of Disconnect from Desire. It was really exciting, really coherent. Ally and Claudia were on the same wavelength exactly, and started sharing things, and the basic idea for the album was ready to go. It was just a matter of finding the time to make it.

What is Disconnect’s “basic idea” that you referred to?

There’s a few. One would be a very general one that’s not even about the aesthetic or the instruments or the music, which is just that we’re really sure of what we’re about right now. There’s this sort of confidence that now we can make the SVIIB record that we really want to make. Whereas before there was a lot of “Is this good? Does that work? Does any of this make sense? Will anyone care?” That’s good. That can be creative. But I also think confidence can be more powerful.

You recorded Alpinisms in a home studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Did you return there for Disconnect?

We all move up to Greenpoint January (of 2009), and we didn’t really start tracking anything until July. We never thought, “Hey, let’s go to this studio and book time,” we just started working in the way we’d always worked. It sounded great. It just got to the point where it was important for us to make Disconnect from Desire in the same way we made Alpinisms.

When I interviewed you for Remix in 2008, you were using a pretty basic setup: Neumann U87, Universal Audio SOLO/610 preamp, Focusrite interface, and MacBook Pro running Logic, plus a lot of effects pedals that you put on guitars and drums. How was your recording rig different for Disconnect?

I built a Hackintosh, a much more powerful computer, which is awesome. We were able to lay a lot things down more at once, without fear of the laptop bursting into flames. Otherwise, it’s all similar. There’s a lot more guitars on this album, and I think probably that was the biggest difference. We’re singing into the same vocal mic, the U87. And we bought a few things for the guitars, like a Sennheiser mic, and used the Neumann sometimes, plus the Shure SM57 a bit – everything through the same preamps basically.

All the synths were from the Access Virus again. We had a lot of fun using the external input on the Virus, triggering guitars through that, which is a new thing I figured out how to do. Other than that, it was pretty simple.

Another thing we discussed in 2008 was your heavy use of effects, convolution reverbs, and anything else screwy on everything besides kick drum or bass. Was that the approach on the new record as well?

I think the attitude on effects is definitely scaled back — there’s a bit of a less-is-more attitude on this record for sure. I know it’s an old story, but it’s all about knowing how to use what you have, and playing to your strengths. We spent a lot more time this time making sure the sound was really good, whereas before I’m not sure I could tell you if everything sounded great or not.

Now I know how to position a mic in front of Ally and Claudia, and I know how to mic my guitar amps to get the sound I need. I know how to record the synths and the drums. That was just one of the reasons the record took so long, is that we took a lot of time to make sure it sounded right before putting everything down.

It can be tough to stop using a lot of effects, but it can also be liberating…

Before there would be a lot of throwing ten things against a wall and making sure that all of them stick. This time, it was more about finding that one great thing, maybe two, and making that work in the arrangement. Which, incidentally made the record a lot bigger-sounding.

I think Brian Eno said that every object you add decreases the significance of every other object in the field. I’m probably butchering that quote, but it made a lot of sense to me, and it’s probably true.

The most magical aspect of SVIIB is how the singers approach their craft. How are Ally and Claudia evolving in the way they collaborate?

Ally’s becoming a lot more confident as a singular voice, which had a big effect on Disconnect from Desire. There’s a lot of moments with an actual lead vocal, which didn’t happen as much on Alpinisms.

That confidence was really great to discover. Having that individual voice out front, leading things is great. I think that as a team, the sisters are more deliberate with the whole color of their harmonies, their sounds, and the texture of their voices.

The new track “Babelonia” (which is available for listening now on the MySpace site) is positively addictive. How did that particular song come together?

There’s a lot of dynamics in that vocal arrangement, and I think if you muted the track the a capella would absolutely stand on its own. We did a lot of fun things on that track. The verse is an example of Ally writing in these leaping arpeggios, and there’s definitely a lead vocal in that song.

We also did a cool thing where, in the chorus, Ally sang the vocal a whole step up, and then we pitched it down back to normal to give it a different artificial sound, which I think was really a cool half accident/half idea.

I had been coincidentally listening to Stereolab’s Mars Audiac Quintet just before I heard the new singles “Windstorm and “Babelonia”, the latter of which sounds like an alternate dimension Stereolab track to me.

The similarities are that there’s so much freedom if you’re writing to what’s essentially a drone. It’s so interesting to see how far you can push the melody over that. The album is so fractured. The idea is one of taking the personality from the lyrics and playing them to the melody, which I think is so interesting.

You asked the hit-making mixer Jack Joseph Puig to mix the record, which came as a surprise to me and a lot of other people.

We just put a lot of energy into the arrangement and tracking, I think that we didn’t have enough objectivity to approach mixing it all. And from the start our idea was to have someone from another world, musically, mix it. The way we recorded it, it wasn’t going to be reinvented in the mix. A lot of minimalism was created in the mix.

Jack approached us, and we said, “Hell yeah! One of the greatest mixers out there mixing our music, how can you say no?” He did a great job. He took some approaches that were unexpected, but for the most part, he just really listened to the music and never reinvented the song.

And especially with the comments that we would come back with, I never saw someone as open as he was. We would say, “This should be really loud,” and he would say, “That’s not how I do it, but if that’s what you want, this will be really loud, and it will be amazing.” That job – mixing – is totally a combination of service and creativity.

Soooo…the Second Album’s about to come out. What are you expecting now?

It’s looking like we’re gonna tour that much, and it just feels great. It’s a completely different experience coming back with this record, just playing for fans on these shows who have spent time with our music. We’re feeling a lot of love, which is really exciting.

It just all comes down to demand. If they want us to play somewhere, we’ll play there! We’re not trying to force anyone to have us play everywhere on Earth. We get asked, so we do it. We’re LUCKY.

With the release of Alpinisms, you were clearly not sure that people would “get it”. But lo and behold, it seems like they do. So what’s the “it” that people actually get about School of Seven Bells?

That’s a really good question. Maybe a few things – it’s speculation because the three of us are always the last to know what we do. But maybe it’s a realization of what people love about pop music. Maybe it’s a way to listen to music that’s new in a slightly different way. That’s all a musical personality is, just opening another door – one that maybe people hadn’t thought of.

I feel like that happens with a lot of people that we talk to: they say, “I was hoping there was a record like this,” which is the best reaction you can get. That’s what makes me love music, when you say, “That hits the spot. That’s perfect.” You can’t plan that. Either you do it or you don’t.

– David Weiss