We Are Scientists: Birthing “Barbara” At Mission Sound & Beyond

June 16, 2010 by Janice Brown

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN: Barbara. What does this mystical word evoke in your imagination? For We Are Scientists, this isn’t just a likely moniker for the hairdresser down the block. No no: It’s the title of their infectiously delicious new album. It’s a woman you want to get to know.

We Are Scientists' Keith Murray (left) and Chris Cain

This week marks the release of disc #4 from WAS, and it’s a musical milestone worth noting. The Brooklyn-based duo of Keith Murray and Chris Cain rock melodic all across the 10 songs here, energized by the punch of new drummer Andy Burrows and fully focused on a tighter sound.

Working with producer/engineer Ariel Rechtshaid, We Are Scientists hopped from NYC to LA to London to bring Barbara into the world, in all her glory. Once you dig into these hooks, we dare you to forget them. Wait! Make that a DOUBLE DOG DARE.

The new album sounds terrific. What was the recording philosophy  going in?

Our starting point, before we even got going with any songwriting, was  the desire to return to being a three-piece on stage. We spent the last  album cycle (2008’s Brain Thrust Mastery) touring with a fourth man on keys and second guitar.

While it was a lot of fun, and the songs on that album — with all their four  and five-piece arrangements — remain some of our favorites, two years of  that left us yearning for the excitement and simplicity of the trio:  three instruments, three voices, as much noise as possible.

So we wrote songs for three pieces, and when we went into the studio to record them,  we wanted to make sure the end result sounded like just three people,  that reproducing the songs live would be feasible for a three-piece.

That’s logical. How did that affect your choice of studios, which spanned NYC, London and L.A.? Where did you record in each city, and why?

I’d say our studio choice was a balance of financial responsibility,  logistical requirements, and the knowledge that the record needed to  sound decent or people would make fun of us.

We’re putting this album out on our own label, Masterswan Recordings, which despite an  association with glamorous peregrinations and flagrant excess is actually just Keith and my laptops and bank accounts, so our sensitivity to recording costs was fairly high.

Luckily, these days, when you cut money from the studio budget, that tends to mean the lounge isn’t full of brand new furniture, or the TV in the lounge isn’t 3D, or one of the  controllers for the XBOX is missing. Thanks to the state of technology, even very inexpensive studios have everything necessary to record top-notch sounds.   The logistical concerns arose from our decision to record with a drummer who lives in London and a producer who lives in LA. So all of us did some traveling once or twice, and we ended up doing sessions in London, NYC, and LA (at Strongroom, Mission Studios, and Sunset Lodge, respectively).

It’s the global village! Tell us more about what led you to Mission Sound in Brooklyn. What made it the right place for you to work, and which songs from Barbara were recorded there?

We discovered Mission Studios because Arctic Monkeys used it for some of their last record, and we dropped by a few times to fray power cables, pour laxative into the coffee pot, and generally do whatever we could to slow that monolithic band’s steady ascension into the western musical canon.

While our focus was sabotage, we couldn’t help noticing the homey splendor of Mission Studios. When it came time to book something in New York, we were surprised and delighted to find that this place was within our budget. We ended up recording drums and bass for “Nice Guys,” “Foreign Kicks,” “You Should Learn,” and b-sides “Pound for Pound” and “Down the Hall,” all in a fairly intense two-day session engineered by local maestro Chris Coady.

Let us inside your Scientist™ brains: What are one or two new recording tips that you learned recording Barbara?
I learned that, at least with our recording approach, the actual bass guitar you’re using is much more important than amps, pedals, mics, etc., in getting a good bass sound.

In LA we had access to a rental place with an amazing range of instruments that they let us take back to the studio and pay for only if we ended up using them on the record. So  I blew through about six classic basses before striking gold with a ’76 Gibson Ripper. We spent nearly a day fiddling with an old Ampeg set-up that belongs to our producer to get the sound that we used throughout the first guitar’s session. It sounded great, but it was no accident.

After that session, I spent a week hunting down a nearly-identical Ripper to eventually take on tour. And the nifty thing was that when we did the final drum work at Mission Studios, we went ahead and recorded scratch bass using my new Ripper through a D.I., and it sounded so good afterward that it went on the album.

For an example of the bass  recorded through the arduously tweaked Ampeg, see “Rules Don’t Stop” or “Break It Up”; for the bass through a D.I., see “Foreign Kicks.”   Sorry, that was a long, nerdy story. I can’t even re-read it, and it’s my story.

Nah, we love nerdy gear stories! Moving on to the mix, who mixed the album and where? And what was different about having your new drummer, Andy Burrows’, drums in the mix? What other factors affected how “Barbara” was constructed differently?

The incomparable Dave Schiffman mixed the album at his home desk in Los Angeles. I never even saw the set-up. Dave would just send us test mixes to listen to and we’d email back comments. He was fast and effective as hell.

Andy’s the best combination of “expressive” and “tight” that I’ve ever seen in a rock drummer. I think from a production/mixing standpoint he’s kind of a dream to work with because when you record him, his instincts are so good.

It’s always worth pushing Andy for an extra fill idea because nearly every one he spits out is useable and awesome. His beats are very creative but in a way very conservative in that they always, always serve the song, not the drummer’s much-mythologized desire to lay down beats that grab your attention. So I think we and Ariel and Dave — producer and mixer respectively — had an unusually clean set of drum recordings, and also an unusually rich, coherent set of options, when putting together the final tracks.

Other than that, the big difference with Barbara was the staggered recording sessions. In the past we’ve always gone in for a couple weeks and banged out the album. This time we had several multi-week breaks, which could’ve hurt momentum, I guess, but instead gave us plenty of time to let ideas marinate and to make sure everything sounded the way we wanted it to.

There was an opportunity to live with choices for a while, and then to change them if we wanted to. In short, we were able to fix all of the problems that would otherwise have made it to press, resulting in an indisputably perfect record. Trust me!

The proof is in the listening: We can’t get “Jack and Ginger” out of our heads. Tell us  something surprising about how this song was written or recorded.

I can tell you that the synth line in the verse, which is a pretty big hook, was kind of an afterthought — the song was written with no keyboards (actually, there was originally an organ filling out the mix, but no lead synths). We were working in Ariel’s guest house/studio after all of the recording was done, just getting rough mixes together, and he  started fiddling with a lead synth line that immediately engaged all three of us.

We spent five or ten minutes honing the exact melody to where it is on the record, and suddenly realized with some horror that we had broken the Prime Directive for this record: we had added a fourth fucking instrument to a track. It really tortured us, actually, the decision of whether to leave that synth line on there or not. In the end we decided that the song would still sound good live without the synth – it would just be different.

And there’s no rule that says the live version has to accord perfectly with the record. Over the course of the few shows we’ve done thus far on Barbara, though, we’ve always had one idle friend or another come out and play that part whenever an idle friend was to be found.

Honing in on the homeland, what borough/neighborhood of NYC are you based out of? After having traveled the planet over, why do you still think NYC is the place to be?

I’d say we’re based out of Brooklyn. Since we moved here back in 2001,  I’ve lived in Manhattan and Keith has lived in Brooklyn, but we’ve always practiced in Brooklyn, and that seems like the musical seat of the band. I guess?

Maybe we’re pan-New York. I suppose I wouldn’t call us an intrinsic part of “the Brooklyn scene” the way maybe a Dirty Projectors or a Grizzly Bear are. Let’s say we’re pan-New York with a Brooklyn bent.

New York City is the place to be because the number of top-notch restaurants is staggering; the people are (contrary to legend) very approachable; the people are serious about accomplishing their goals, and act like it; the people are fucking good looking; the city is fucking good looking; the city is easier and cheaper to navigate than any competing metropolis; and the city (in keeping with legend) has everything you could possibly want to watch, listen to, taste, interview, photograph, fuck, read, or record.   — David Weiss

Tags: Ariel Rechtshaid, Chris Coady, Dave Schiffman, Mission Sound, Strongroom, Sunset Lodge, We Are Scientists

Chris Coady Talks Beach House, Destination Recording and Music Of The Digital Natives

May 4, 2010 by Janice Brown

3 Comments

LOWER EAST SIDE: We meet up with producer/engineer Chris Coady as he’s heading into the studio for the day. He’s mixing Abe Vigoda and it’s crunch time so we promise not to keep him too long…

Chris Coady at DNA Downtown

Starting at Quad in the early aughts, Coady’s come up through tumultuous times in the music industry and kept incredibly busy the entire time. Teaming up with David Sitek to build Stay Gold Studios, where he engineered TV on the Radio and Yeah Yeah Yeahs records, along with !!!, Cass McCombs, Blonde Redhead, Architecture in Helsinki, Coady’s been the trusted engineer to some of the most admired and sonically experimental artists in the Brooklyn indie-rock scene.

Since Stay Gold closed, he’s only built on that reputation, flourishing with adventurous electro-pop and rock artists like Lemonade, Telepathe, Islands, …Trail of Dead, ArpLine and Delorean.

Coady recently co-produced and engineered Beach House’s at-once intimate and majestic Teen Dream proving once again an indispensable production partner to the visionary artist.

Inside DNA Downtown — the bunker-like studio he shares with a producer-colleague — Coady points to racks of outboard gear once in the chain at Stay Gold and to the SSL G Series console formerly of Quad. The room is filled with equipment, the urgency of a deadline fast approaching and the promise of this young sonic mastermind. We get right to it…

So this is your studio. Tell me a bit about it. You share it with another engineer?

[Prior to opening DNA,] I had been working a lot at The Carriage House in Connecticut, which is really nice — they also have an SSL E/G series console. I’d been talking to a friend of mine about opening a Pro Tools room. He thought we should be more ambitious, combine our resources and open a [more serious] room. A lot of the outboard gear is mine, and was originally at Stay Gold. The console is his and we share the Pro Tools system and the speakers.

And you can do projects start-to-finish here?

Sure. And I have recorded projects here top-to-bottom, which — even though the space is small — have come out sounding great. I generally don’t use a lot of room reverb. For the most part, the sounds I record are usually pretty tight, so having a small studio is fine for me. I close-mic my sounds and then I create most of the ambiances artificially. So, a lot of times the drum sounds I get will be the same whether I record them here or in a nice big studio.

But with the Beach House record, now that’s a big sounding record…

Yes, and that record, by contrast, is filled with lots of room reverb. When we first got to the studio [Dreamland Recording, near Woodstock], I put up these two Earthworks mics, way on the other side of the church from where the band was set up to play. I’d set out to design the ultimate setup of all their organs and keyboards in the studio — they’d brought their own piano in addition to all these thrift-store 70s organs. I wanted to create this awesome environment for them to play in that would be visually stunning and inspiring.
Within a few days, everything got moved around and it became a free-for-all but the one thing that stayed were these two Earthworks mics setup far away from everything, on stands really high up in the air — left and right, pointing down at them. And these Earthworks mics and the studio’s API mixing board had a really cool marriage.

Beach House. Photo by Jason Nocito

So you ended up using those room mics throughout the record?

Yeah, they were used quite a bit, especially on guitars. The record opens up with that sound — Alex’s guitar and Roland Jazz Chorus Amp pointed in the direction of those mics.
Also, we didn’t realize this until later on, but it turns out that outside of the church, right above where those room mics were set up, there was a bird’s nest. So when we went to mix, we found all these baby birds all over the album. And it was impossible to get rid of all the chirping! You can’t exactly hear it all over the record, but it’s definitely there!

Sweet! Was that a problem at all? Or just kind of amazing?

We were psyched! But it was totally consistent through the whole thing. I think at one point we tried to bring it into focus but it wasn’t quite loud enough…

Did you mix the record there? Or here?

Two of the songs were mixed here. We went through the mixing very fast at Dreamland, which made me nervous because I wasn’t used to the monitoring environment. The band wanted me to do it intuitively. And that did work, for the most part. But we did end up remixing two of the songs here, and I’m glad we did because those two songs have a slightly different feeling. The mix for “Norway,” for example, sounds more deliberate, less spontaneous.

Do you end up doing most of your work here at DNA?

I prefer to work here, but I end up traveling a lot. The bands I’m working with seem to not want to record in New York City so much. They want to go out to the country because it adds to the story — they find it inspiring and like the idea of living there during the recording. They don’t want to be getting texts about some party going on down the street.
And I appreciate that — going out to the middle of nowhere and shutting off your cell phone and not having Internet. But, I do this all year long. So it starts to get a little crazy when I haven’t checked my Internet in three days because that’s my only connection to normal life! Three isolated sessions in a row and that’s half my year that I’ve been sort of off the grid.

But has that approach helped get better results? When you and the band encamp somewhere, away from all the distractions?

If the band wants no distractions, that’s what we’re going to do. Because if the band’s not getting what they want, you’re going to hear that on the album.
Beach House is a band that knew what they wanted: they wanted to go out to the middle of nowhere and record, they wanted to record on tape and they wanted a co-producer, not a producer, because they wanted to be hands-on on the production side. They came with the most complete set of demos that I’ve ever gotten. The album was completely mapped out, from the beginning. All we had to do was do a really good job recording it.
There are a lot of bands who don’t know what they want and they hire a producer to help them figure it out. This time, we did it totally based on what the artist wanted and I’m really happy with how it turned out.

Awesome, it is an amazing record. And you also recently engineered on the Delorean record, Subiza. Did you just mix, or have any hand in the recording as well?

Delorean was an interesting project because they recorded it themselves and had me mix it, but they were in another country [Spain] in a different time zone. So we mixed it over podcast. So, the mixing board was going into the computer and being sent over NiceCast.

And this was happening in real time?

Yes, and so they would listen and give me direction. It was an insane amount of tracks. One song had nearly 300 voices in Pro Tools. They’d say “Can you turn up that shaker?” and you’d go in and there’d be 20 shakers! And so…it was daunting.

Seems like that process would take a lot longer – did it?

It took a really long time and we did it over a long period of time — a week here, a week there. I’d love to work with them again, but I think I’d prefer to work with them in person.

Do you see any trends in music that you find inspiring from an engineering/production perspective, i.e. artists taking a more experimental approach to music?

Well, there’s definitely that. And also, I think there’s a new wave that’s happening right now, of young artists who are making music I find really imaginative.
But one thing I’m not really into is the way that Internet culture has influenced music culture. People are always thinking about how they’re going to be perceived on the Internet. And I really find that tragic. That music blog culture has such an impact on a band’s success to the point where with younger bands who’ve never consciously lived in a world without the Internet, I sometimes feel when I’m watching them perform that they’re performing thinking of the Internet, the bloggers. What are they going to say?

Zola Jesus. Photo by Indra Dunis.

Do you think that’s affecting what kind of music is being made? Like a band going for a noisier, more distorted sound because they think bloggers will favor that?

Well I’m really lucky to work with bands like Beach House who don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks about their music. And I think that’s great. But then there’s the other half of bands that may have just come off a terrible tour and they’re in the studio thinking: if we don’t get a good blog acceptance, then we may as well not make music anymore. And I guess those people shouldn’t be making music in the first place. But in the 90s, it definitely didn’t seem like critical acceptance was nearly as much of a factor for bands.
But back to what I’m psyched about: I feel like there is a new wave of kids who are around 20 years old, making music that’s so wildly imaginative. I’ll hear some of these bands and just think ‘wow, that is a wild, forward-thinking sound.’ And then you find out they’re only 20.

Can you mention any artist in particular?

Yeah, lately I’ve been listening to Zola Jesus. And I read an interview with her, where she was citing her influences and she mentioned Morton Subotnick. And you wonder, how did she even come across Morton Subotnick? And I guess that’s definitely one of the positive effects of the Internet on music! I remember when I was younger, going to the library to research music. And now, these kids have grown up having access to absolutely everything.

For more on Chris Coady, visit http://justmanaging.com/producers/chris-coady/ and get in touch through his manager, Dan Backhaus.

Tags: API, Beach House, Carriage House, Chris Coady, Delorean, DNA Downtown, Dreamland, Earthworks