Patrick Sisson - Writer, Journalist, Cultural Documentarian, Music Lover

PATRICK SISSON

Interview: Flying Lotus

Feature
Pitchfork
June 14, 2010
Link

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Flying Lotus (Steve Ellison) comes across as gregarious and buoyant as his beats; lithe and animated on stage, the L.A. hip-hop head would be infectious even if you couldn’t hear a thing. It’s no surprise his music and personality have made him fixed point in a constantly expanding global network of creative producers, in some cases linked through the Low End Theory night and his own Brainfeeder label. He tackles more celestial connections on his new album Cosmogramma, completed in the wake of his mother’s death. Adding layers of emotional and musical complexity– including string arrangements, harp and saxophone from his cousin Ravi Coltrane– the record shows Ellison making a cathartic and creative leap, his own unique contribution to his family’s spiritual discography.

On the phone from his apartment in Echo Park, Flying Lotus spoke with Pitchfork about the genesis of Cosmogramma, being an extra in American Beauty, and Sundays with Aunt Alice.

Pitchfork: With everything you’ve been doing in the last few years, when did you find the time to record Cosmogramma? When was it made and where did you do it?

Flying Lotus: I did all of it in my apartment in Los Angeles. I started right after the Los Angeles album came out, but I didn’t really have a direction for it at the time. It kind of took shape over a year and a half.

Pitchfork: There’s a lot of live instrumentation on the album from working with the bassist Thundercat and arranger Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. Was this something you always wanted to do, to go down this path and incorporate these instruments?

FL: Absolutely. That was the goal from the get-go, to have this hybrid of sounds. It’s just been a matter of finding the right people. I try to have sessions with folks and it never really gels. I feel like I finally found the right way to communicate, too. I think I’m better than I was when I first started.
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Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings: Made In The Moment

Feature
EQ
April 29, 2010
Link

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Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings showcase the instinctual way Daptone does soul with I Learned the Hard Way.

The Daptone story already has its share of legendary characters: There’s bassist/producer/co-owner Gabriel Roth, who turned a two-story house into a recording studio for the Daptone Records label; then there are the Dap-Kings, who collectively played on Amy Winehouse’s sophomore album, Back to Black; and of course there’s the prison guard–turned–electric soul singer, Sharon Jones.

One lesser known—but no less important—of these characters is Chief Tape Operator Wayne Gordon, who’s had a hand in all of Daptone’s releases. A warm studio presence decked out in a white lab coat, Gordon has spent hours threading up an Ampex AG-440B tape machine, marking reels of RMG SM911 tape with a silver Sharpie and splicing together tracks with an X-ACTO knife. His presence alongside Roth helps explain why the music being recorded in Daptone strikes a special chord.

“I’d done a lot of digital recording work, but nothing of this magnitude [in analog],” Gordon says. “It’s suddenly like playing for the ’72 Dolphins. I was in college before, and now I’m in the pros.”
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To Rococo Rot: Speculation

Review
Pitchfork
April 13, 2010
Link
7.6

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To Rococo Rot’s skill lies in making electronic-infused post-rock engaging where most other bands fiddling with sculpted synths and cyclic bass lines settle for crafting something tasteful. Berliners Stefan Schneider and Ronald and Robert Lippok often sound as balanced and precise as their reversible band name. But they know how to finesse electronic timbres and human melodies, neither over-intellectualizing nor over-sentimentalizing their songs. What makes Speculation so welcome is that it represents a tweak to their established M.O. nearly 15 years into their career.

Recording sessions for Speculation, some of which were held in the rural studio of Krautrock legends Faust, succeeded in capturing a more live sound and looser atmosphere. Previous tracks have always been well composed. New ones like “Working Against Time” add bright cosmic rhythms and a sense of immediacy to the mix, as if you can feel the air move in the room between the synths and guitars. That song in particular has a swagger to it; synths pulse against a persistent beat, as if in reference to the title. Credit Stefan Schneider’s bass playing with plenty of propulsion and muscle, especially the dark, skuzzy tone on “Away” or the bouncy middle section of “Seele”.

Hotel Morgen, the trio’s previous record, wasn’t nearly as energetic; momentum was sometimes slow to establish itself (and quick to fade) and the short closer, “Opak”, was an awkward send-off. Speculation sounds much tighter, confidently moving between tracks and themes. The digital tones the band has been playing with for years sound richer yet also lighter, supporting soaring cyclical melodies.

The growing sense of looseness culminates in the epic, nearly 11-minute jam “Friday”, which includes the mad organ playing of Faust’s Jochen Irmler fiddling away on a homemade instrument. It’s relatively unhinged for the group, yet they keep pace, enriching this particular freakout with bubbling cauldrons of noise, brusque tones and beats. It never quite boils over, as if the group’s cool, calm hand still has sway. The music of To Rococo Rot has always had an organic element; Speculation furthers that with a real sense of play and exploration.

Herbert: One One

Review
Pitchfork
April 12, 2010
Link
7.6

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While Matthew Herbert’s methods of recording audio samples are inspiring and outlandish, he always captures a bit of the human element. It’s not just because his discography includes a noisy digestive tract turned into a euphoric house melody; there’s an appreciation for randomness, mistakes, and chaos that runs through his work. On his new solo album, One One, an artist who weaves multiple meanings into his music through contextual sampling strips down to a single source: himself.

At first, it seems like a playful volley in Herbert’s game of dissecting music, politics, and theory. The first of a trio of conceptual releases, including One Pig (composed strictly of sounds from one pig) and One Club (sampled crowd noise from a club), One One focuses more on instruments and is 100% Herbert, including his own intimate vocals. It’s a solo record simple and straightforward, less of a concept than we’re used to from someone who can turn a rhythm track into an arch-consumerist critique. What then is the difficulty, statement, or challenge when an acclaimed producer makes his own album?

As with many things Herbert, it’s not that easy or simple. A quieter, stripped-down approach to his typically tight rhythms and rich tones, One One has a deceptively relaxed vibe. It may be the rural studio that it was recorded in, or it may be Herbert being more introspective (just listen to him sing about home on “Berlin”). He knows how to get the most out of his source material, and when that happens to be his own voice, he plays it cool or sticks to gentle, simple melodies. He doesn’t showcase substantial range or a hidden talent, but Herbert does demonstrate a lack of artifice, self-awareness, and variety.”Singapore” shines with a bright, folksy vibe and retro vocal harmonies. On the slow-burning single “Leipzig”, his detached storytelling style fits the song’s slinky, clubland theme.

While it’s conceptually all about one man, by the end of the ten heartfelt tracks, it doesn’t feel as personally revealing as it does poignant. Maybe it’s because the self-contained solo project is more subtle overall, with poetic, yet still political, lyrics (“And with the rising of the seas/ Mouths will be open/ And with the drying of the fields/ Everything will be gone”). Herbert met the challenge of ditching some experimental baggage and being more straightforward; he doesn’t always need an elaborate platform or sonic ruse to say something worth hearing.

American Pastoral: Digital Recording Tools Helped Midlake Record Airy Folk Jams

Feature
EQ Magazine
April 2010
Link

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The music of Denton, Texas, band Midlake sounds labored over in the best possible way, an artful, sepia-toned style of folk rock exuding the craftsmanship of a handwritten manuscript. But the band’s airy, languid delivery masks the precise arrangements and extensive effort expended during composition and recording. Making The Courage of Others [Bella Union], the follow-up to the band’s 2006 breakthrough The Trials of Van Occupanther, took more than a year and a half, including a side trip to the Sand Hill Farm in Buffalo, Texas, to shake up recording sessions after frustration had metastasized.

“The studio was getting quite dark, and there were bad vibes in there from so many failures every day,” admits frontman Tim Smith. “It felt like we needed to get away.”

The work done on that farm set the stage for final recording at the group’s small hometown studio in Denton. British folk music like Pentangle and Fairport Convention and the guitar tones on American singer-songwriter Jimmie Spheeris’ debut album Isle of View, seeped into the new songs, according to Smith. The bulk of the album was tracked as the band played together—as opposed to overdubheavy Van Occupanther—with the drummer in the main room and other members performing in the control and storage rooms. On “Rulers, Ruling All Things,” a subtle bass thump, winsome drums, and guitar and flute melodies are as intertwined as a Celtic knot. But it wasn’t recorded with the kind of acoustic and vintage equipment one might expect.
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Ulrich Schnauss: Missing Deadlines: Selected Remixes

Review
Pitchfork
March 26, 2010
Link
6.1

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As a teenager in Kiel, Germany in the early 90s, Ulrich Schnauss discovered bands like Ride and My Bloody Valentine by tuning in to British armed forces radio. “As soon as I put the headphones on,” he says, “the world seemed to be a nicer place.” Nearly 20 years later, after three albums and a slew of remixes, Schnauss still seems engrossed with those lush sounds. Like Sonic Cathedral, the British club night and label that embraces shoegaze in all its permutations, he takes a wide-angle view of the genre, seeing it as a current that runs through many different eras. The solid source material he reworked for the remix collection Missing Deadlines– which ranges from solo work by members of Slowdive and Ride to songs by Rainbirds’ frontwoman Katharina Franck and the John Tejada/Takeshi Nishimoto project I’m Not a Gun– speaks to this sense of related history and possibility.

Taken as a whole, though, Schnauss’ treatment of these tracks is aesthetically redundant. Prone to creating ethereal music that sometimes skews toward being too amiable, many of Schnauss’ remixes sound like pretty shoegaze setpieces, orchestrated to create a familiar emotional payoff with tricks we’ve heard many times before. While he pulls some of the songs in a more dance-friendly direction, his bent guitars, clouds of static, and vocal echoes have a way of blending together here.

Take Madrid’s “Out to Sea”, a track built around bright synths, gentle guitar, and breathy vocals. Schnauss’ remake bathes it in warm synths and gauzy vocals, softens the guitar, and washes out the sound, placing a halo around the song for emphasis. That dreamy haze also seeps into his treatment of “Remembrance”, a single by the Joy Division-influenced Dragons that’s smoothed over with bent vocals and thick, swirling layers of suspended synths. Mojave 3’s epic “Blurbird of Happiness” has a warm, rambling vibe that Schnauss over-accents with nature samples and back-masked glockenspiels that sound like wind chimes. Orbital-like echoes are applied to Juanita Stein’s vocals on Howling Bells’ “Setting Sun”, maintaining the track’s sensual groove, while the rhythm of A Sunny Day In Glasgow’s “Ghost in the Graveyard” is brought more to the fore until it sounds a bit like M83.

But redundant or not, Schnauss knows how to create sweeping, emotive, grandiose music– and his remix of Mark Gardner’s “The Story of the Eye” gets it right by bulking up the track, trading the quiet focus and slow bassline for vocal layers and accordion-like synths. Schnauss always adds a certain signature to his remixes, but it’s not always clear if making something busier necessarily makes it better.

Georgia Anne Muldrow: Kings Ballad

Review
Pitchfork
March 22, 2010
Link
6.9

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Georgia Anne Muldrow’s latest album, Kings Ballad, was supposedly crafted against the backdrop of Barack Obama’s early days in office. And just as Obama is, for better or worse, an inspiring figure whose influence isn’t quite in sync with his accomplishments, Muldrow can sometimes come across as an amazing artist in theory: She hasn’t totally delivered on the promise hinted at by her debut album, Olesi: Fragments of an Earth. It’s not her inspirations or intentions that are in doubt. But hope is a campaign, not a governing strategy; similarly, dropping spiritual signifiers and referencing legends Nina Simone and Alice Coltrane doesn’t necessarily make great music.

But Kings Ballad stands on its own, a vessel for Muldrow’s lyrics and beliefs. It sounds more concentrated, cohesive, and restrained than previous albums, especially her binge of releases last year. Soulful where she was occasionally brash, her voice pivots and floats but sounds more grounded and assured, like on “Doobie Down”, where she calmly vamps over her own coos and chorus (“No apologies, I’ll be as black as I want to be”). It flows well, outside of a final stretch of songs seemingly tacked on for variety, including vaguely Latin “Morena Del Ray”, vocoded sci-fi riff “Industrial Bap”, and the senseless pop-punk outlier “Room Punk!”.

Throbbing low end plays well with jazzy piano throughout the album, like the riff on “Indeed” and the elegiac, descending line on “R.I.P.”, an ode to Michael Jackson that achieves a certain tension by ending on a snapped beat. The instrumental passages, including the liquid funk-lite of “Chocolate Reign” and chugging “R.I.P.”, are decent. Her beats aren’t the most adventurous take on splashy, one-two rhythms, but they work here. Kings Ballad still doesn’t meet all the expectations Muldrow may have initially inspired, but it’s a positive, measured sign that there’s more to come.

Autechre: Oversteps

Review
Pitchfork
March 22, 2010
Link
7.2

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After more than two decades of recording together as Autechre, Sean Booth and Rob Brown can still create the aural equivalent of whiplash if they want to, or showcase a deep knowledge of dance music. The production duo’s energetic 12-hour online radio broadcast from earlier this month– joyfully tweeted about and linked to by fans– was a massive, almost exhausting display of influences and favorites. Floating between Coil and Lord Quas, the mix inspired someone to crowdsource the track list on Google Docs.

Oversteps takes a much quieter approach, focusing on a smaller scale. Coming after 2008’s Quaristice, a varied collection of shorter tracks that originated during live jam sessions, Oversteps leans toward some of the slower, more atmospheric aspects of albums like Amber (minus the metered pulse). After the album’s initial 20 seconds of silence, the opener “r ess” slowly surfaces– cold, distant synths arc overhead while broken, incomplete rhythms clatter and collide– seemingly suggesting that steady beats aren’t the main focus here.

Many tracks, such as “O=0” and “d-sho qub”, do contain propulsive rhythms, and a slow funk and dull handclap seep through “Treale”. But the textures are where things get interesting. Whether it’s from tones floating in space or notes brushing up against each other in quiet but effective dischord, the ambience and atmospheres of Oversteps are haunting. “st epreo” expands and contorts with bass notes that seem bound to the rules of fluid dynamics. “Yuop” steadily builds and crests with ringing, grandiose synths. Sometimes, the lack of propulsion distracts, like on “pt2ph8”. But the overlapping round of notes in “see on see” points to a clear design within the synthetic ether.

Autechre have evoked heavy moods while pushing the possibilities of production technology forward and broadening the vocabulary of electronic music. The famous video for their track “Gantz Graf” suggests as much, that they harnessed the grating sounds of a machine in the middle of a grand mal seizure. Oversteps finds them working in a comparatively less rigid fashion, almost organic compared to something like Confield. Focusing on creating tension and release within their compositions, they’re still incorporating new designs, not merely repackaging the previous products.

Room On Fire: Hot Chip Set Alight Their New Studio With a System Wired for Improvisational Sound

Feature
EQ Magazine
March 2010
Link

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English band Hot Chip has a particularly kinetic take on dance music. It’s funky machine music with pop soul, a combination cheekily referenced by a recent band shirt boasting an image of R&B eccentric R. Kelly sporting a red Devo hat. The group’s myriad influences came to play on One Life Stand [Astralwerks], a slower, more layered record influenced by the Detroit/Chicago techno/house axis and a 110–120 BPM disco pulse. Between the buoyant, Vangelis-like tones of “Brothers” (created with a detuned Moog Voyager) and “We Have Love,” a funky synth jaunt with a fat rubber bass line, the album is a stylistic free-for-all.

One Life Stand was the first major project recorded in the band’s new East London studio last spring. The space’s straightforward layout was inspired by a visit to Peter Gabriel’s famous Real World complex, where the band recorded a cover of Vampire Weekend’s “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.”

“When you’re putting together a studio, you have to decide if you’re going to try and compete with the big boys or whether you’re going to make it into a place to sketch out ideas,” multi-instrumentalist Al Doyle says.

So the band designed the lone room to be flexible enough to capture fleeting ideas but technically adept to make small, refined adjustments. Reinforcing the band’s improvisational studio style, they connected keyboards and other units to an extensive MIDI setup wired to a Toft ATB24 analog mixing console, which feeds into a computer running Cubase 4. The group also sends a second feed into a computer running Ableton Live for extra tweaking. Meanwhile, a Bricasti M7 Reverb provides spaciousness to sounds recorded in the small room, and the band records vocals with future shaping and editing in mind, via Celemony Melodyne or the Eventide Ultra-Harmonizer, to avoid repetitive extra takes that stifle creativity.

“We want to keep all options open,” Doyle says. “We just really wanted to get a decent signal. We were using these great DI’s made by Radial. We weren’t too concerned about perfecting mics and signal chains. It’s destructive editing at that point. If it’s recorded clean, you can do whatever you want.”
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The Besnard Lakes: Are The Roaring Night

Review
Pitchfork
March 16, 2010
Link
7.8

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You can only be the dark horse once. The Besnard Lakes may have been a (mostly) unknown quantity when they broke out to a wider audience in 2007, but they were also insiders of sorts– guitarist/vocalist Jace Lasek had done production work with Montreal heavyweights Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown. Fitting of its title, Are the Dark Horse had a subtle, almost shy, quality– on many songs, the group’s quiet side slowly swelled into a symphony. On the follow-up, Are the Roaring Night, husband-and-wife duo Lasek and Olga Goreas map out a sonic landscape that follows the peaks and valleys of their previous work, but the terrain is more ragged.

New songs like “Glass Printer” sound more electrified and easily triggered from the outset. Marching forward with the inexorable, unforgiving pace the title implies, “And This Is What We Call Progress” pairs a steely two-drum pulse with a line of static suspended by an EBow. Even the slow, pretty interludes often exude more tension than the suspended-in-space, Spiritualized vibe of an older song like “For Agent 13”. There’s more unease in the band’s bold space rock– vocal harmonies mask that sense of menace on the two-part “Like the Ocean, Like the Innocent”, which opens the album with oscillating notes and fluctuating guitar. After trading cloying choruses with Goreas, Lasek sings, “Deciphered your lines from the short wave/ It said ‘Kill all the swine, young and old.'” Darkness and destruction are also central to “Land of Living Skies”, made even more poignant after an opening segment of sinister radio transmissions.

Talk of scrambled signals and short-wave technology is fitting considering Lasek’s production background (check out the online gear list for his Breakglass studio). An impressive array of crunchy guitar tones courses throughout the album, pushing forward two-part epics so the steady cycle of build and release doesn’t become overwrought. Craftsmanship permeates the peels of reverb-laden melodies or the Loveless-like gyre of lead single “Albatross”. Are the Roaring Night sounds richer, and while it doesn’t rewrite the formula, it contains many small refinements to the band’s songwriting and production skills. Outside of the twinkling, sub-orbital synths on the closer “The Lonely Moan”, there isn’t anything that would be considered a radical departure. But when you make the kind of entrance the Besnard Lakes did, there isn’t much to fix.

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