March 04, 2009 02:41 PM ETDavid J. Prince, N.Y.
Daft Punk, the French electronica duo known for their robot personas, have been tapped by Walt Disney Pictures to compose the score for "TR2N", an update of the studio's 1982 science fiction classic "Tron", Billboard has confirmed.
The film, currently in production, is tentatively scheduled for a 2011 release.
The "TR2N" score marks Daft Punk's first foray into the studio since 2005's "Human After All." After an extended hiatus, the duo reemerged in 2007 for an extensive world tour, spawning the Grammy-wining live set "Alive 2007." The group's 2001 track "Harder Better Faster Stronger" was adapted by Kanye West for his single "Stronger," and the pair appeared on the 2008 Grammy Awards with the rapper.
The musicians, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter split their time between Paris and Los Angeles, where they have have assembled a new recording studio for the TR2N project.
Daft Punk have worked in film before, most notably as directors of their feature "Electroma," although that film used none of the group's own music. As Banglater explained to Billboard in 2007 about the pair's next musical project, "The cool thing is that we're always trying to do something that hasn't been done, or ultimately, that we aren't doing ourselves yet. It is challenging to get back in the studio and work with ideas we haven't expressed before. Some ideas take time, but some just take a few weeks, so we'll see."
The original film, which pioneered the use of computer graphics, was scored by Wendy Carlos, an electronic musician and composer whose "Switched on Bach" album was one of the first to highlight the Moog synthesizer as a musical instrument.
Comment:
Mikael Carlsson comments:March 05, 2009Cool. And here is the actual origin of this scoop: http://upcomingfilmscores.blogspot.com/2009/03/daft-punk-tron-20.html :-)
Showing posts with label soundtracks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label soundtracks. Show all posts
Friday, March 6, 2009
Daft Punk Scores TR2N Soundtrack
Sunday, February 15, 2009
The Big Score (Amon Tobin Interview April 2007)
Forget everything you may have heard about the principles of field recording, tape editing and musique concrète that supposedly went into the making of Amon Tobin's latest album. Although the Montreal-based DJ and producer did spend the better part of a year collecting snippets of environmental sounds and live musical performances — making this the first time he'd even touched a microphone in more than a decade of making records — this was no Matmos or Robin Rimbaud project, where the sound library would become the sole basis of an album. As Tobin describes it, he was going for something completely different.
“This was all about transforming sound,” he says in earnest. “It was about changing a sound from its origins to try to make it into something new. It's no different, really, from what I've done in the past — it's just that this time, some of the sounds came from places like a foley room or from field recordings, as well as vinyl. Vinyl still plays a big part in this record. Although I'm interested in a lot of the history of musique concrète, I really just wanted to make good tunes. That was the main objective.”
Going back to his debut Adventures in Foam (Ninebar, 1996 — released under his Cujo alias), Tobin has gradually carved out a niche for himself as an aggressively elastic beatmaker with a keen ear for melody. The musician's sensibility that he brings to DJ culture has not only changed the face of
These influences are just part of the fuel behind Foley Room (Ninja Tune, 2007), which finds Tobin pushing himself toward a more intimate exploration of the essence of sampling — that is, the creation and manipulation of original sound sources — with an emphasis on extreme signal processing and a feel for harmonic structure. The album's title, of course, is a nod to the art of foley sound effects done for film — and there is definitely a filmic mood to much of the music here — but as Tobin points out, this is first and foremost an album of finished songs, and from the get-go, it plays that way. With guest appearances from the Kronos Quartet, drummer Stefan Schneider (Belle Orchestre), cellist Norsola Johnson (Godspeed You Black Emperor!), sound designer and pianist Patrick Watson, bassist Sage Reynolds, harpist Sarah Page and more, Foley Room undulates with a constantly shifting interplay of rhythms, hummable melodies and otherworldly tonalities. And sometimes, you can dance to it.
“I definitely wanted the music to stand up on its own as melodically and rhythmically strong,” Tobin observes, “without it relying on some kind of ‘concept’ or school of thinking. It's funny in a way because I find that my previous stuff is far more conceptually rigid than this record. Throughout five albums, I made things in a really specific way — 100 percent from vinyl — where every single sound existed in a previous musical composition of one sort or another but was transformed and made into a new track. That to me is a constant, and I'm still very interested in that.”
ROLL TAPE
Ideas for the first stage of recording for Foley Room began taking shape in 2005 while Tobin was on tour to support Chaos Theory (Ninja Tune, 2005), which he had recorded in collaboration with UbiSoft Entertainment for the company's Splinter Cell 3 video game. “It just sprung out of nerd-dom, really,” Tobin recalls with a laugh. “I'd been talking to my soundman Vid Cousins for a while about getting very tiny sounds and trying to make them into big, epic sounds. We're just into sounds in general, and I wanted to see what musical things could be drawn out of recorded noises.”
Tobin soon got his hands on a Nagra IV-S portable reel-to-reel tape deck — the latter-day descendant of the ever-reliable and rugged unit that has been used for decades on remote film shoots to capture ambient sound and dialog while on location. Supplementing that with a pair of high-definition microphones by Earthworks Audio, Tobin and Cousins were ready to dive in, criss-crossing the country on a quest to amass as many animal and machine-made sounds as they could get in roughly a nine-month period.
The journey also included stops at several different studios, including the Kronos Quartet's studio loft in
“I sat in the middle of the four of them with headphones and the handheld mics,” he explains, citing the near-total lack of handling noise from the Earthworks pair, “and what was delicious about it was that I could hold the mics out, and if I wanted more cello or less viola, I could just move my hands and have the balance I wanted. It was as if I was turning faders on the desk. I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to record that way [laughs], but one of the nice things about making this record was that I entered it with no knowledge of how you're meant to record things. I just did what felt right at the time, and I'm sure I made some mistakes that ended up being useful for me in later stages.”
DRUMS FOR DAYS
Naturally, percussion and drums comprised an essential ingredient in the making of Foley Room, just as they have for the bulk of Tobin's recorded output. Most of the drum elements were tracked with Stefan Schneider at Planet Studio in Montreal — again, primarily using the Earthworks/Nagra setup, along with several overhead mics — and later dumped into Cubase for chopping and sequencing at his home studio (see sidebar, “Visions of a Beatsmith”). One of the more stripped-down, syncopated and yet strangely busy examples is the aptly named “Kitchen Sink” — a throwback of sorts to Tobin's more overt drum 'n' bass concoctions, but with a sophisticated organic feel that recalls Photek's classic “Ni Ten Ichi Ryu” at a slower tempo.
“I had this idea of trying to make quite a liquid song by actually taking parts of the drum kit and submerging them to see if we could bend the sounds by hitting them in different areas,” Tobin says. “So Stef took his kit apart and put bits of it in these vats of water that we had in the studio. We were just dipping cymbals, and he was striking them at different points of submersion, or he'd float these little metal bowls on the surface of the water, and if you struck them with metal sticks, you'd get that lovely bending sound — like when you're doing the dishes.”
Schneider's drums — as sampled and sequenced by Tobin — get another treatment entirely in “Ever Falling.” Propelled by a Brian Wilson-esque vocal melody that churns in a murky staccato (an effect created by manually nudging the original taped vocal on the Nagra), the song gets a psychedelic jolt from the layers of shimmery aftereffects that seem to chase after the individual drums that make up the main rhythm.
“That was a combination of using noise reduction and EQ,” Tobin explains. “Some noise-reduction plug-ins [such as Sonic Foundry's DirectX, which has a Keep Residual feature] allow you to look at the dirt you're taking off a track; I just took that garbled noise from the drum track and ran it through the GRM Tools EQ plug-in, which seems to add a harmonic content when you adjust the different faders. I was left with this really metallic, liquid-y plastic type of sound; I mixed that with the original drum sound and balanced it out so that the drums have this strange sheen to them.”
The processing goes even further in “The Killer's Vanilla,” which features a long freestyle drum break that was meticulously programmed. “It's a mixture of three different kits,” Tobin says. “One of them was recorded with [live drum 'n' bass specialist] Kevin Sawka in
“What I wanted to do with that drum pattern was to accentuate the melody,” Tobin continues. “There's really a lot of suggested melody in drums that people don't always realize. When you combine that with what's actually going on in the tune, sometimes you can get some really interesting accents to happen.”
SOUND COLLISIONS
When it came to crafting melodies from the many snippets of performances — as well as pairing instruments with their environmental “counterparts” (such as the surf guitars and buzzing wasps in “Esther's”) — Tobin went all-out with his manipulation regimen. Most of that took place in Cubase, but sometimes it even meant returning to the Nagra to manually flange or pitch-shift the original source material. Since aliasing and unwanted artifacts make digital pitch shifting a tough pill to swallow when a sound is dropping several octaves, the analog flexibility of the Nagra became yet another function to be exploited.
“What's funny is my particular Nagra is a bit of a dodgy unit,” Tobin quips, “so sometimes you can even just switch the thing off, and something cool will happen. I used it all the way through ‘Big Furry Head’ — there's kind of a chuuung! sound there that's just the Nagra being switched on and off. I thought it was a really wicked sci-fi noise, so we kept it.”
“Big Furry Head” swivels, of course, on the recorded growls of live tigers which, when layered over the buzzing synths, plucked harp and eastern-sounding percussive elements of the song, transmit a fittingly Serengeti-ish atmosphere. “They have this quality in their roar that I can only describe as a breaking up in the high end,” Tobin says. “I mixed that with synths to try to create a new synth sub sound. It turned out to make quite a colorful picture in the end, but for sure, it's just about trying to make links between these different sounds and seeing what happens when you put them together.”
“Straight Psyche” presents another mash-up of seemingly disparate sounds in order to craft a new one, but in this case, the source signals were both from played instruments. By grabbing a Hammond B3 organ and a vibraphone and wrenching them into the same temporal space, Tobin conjures yet another otherworldly mood that seems to emerge from the ether of an alien spaghetti western set in the distant future.
“There are these really beautiful harmonics from the vibraphone that just seem to get picked up by the
Citing his original mission of trusting his instincts by attempting to combine sounds that share similar sonic qualities but might have very different origins, Tobin again points to “Esther's” — part of which was recorded with John Usher (an expert at capturing close-miked insect sounds) at
“I was thinking of the buzzing sound of the surf guitars in that song,” Tobin says, “so the obvious sound to try out was a bunch of wasps buzzing in a jar. Then maybe you mix those together with a motorbike revving its engine — so you get the fast strumming of the guitars picked up by the bike, with the wasps suggesting another crazy guitar sound — and suddenly you've got something that really gels.”
KEEPING IT IN THE ROOM
Much like a movie editor faced with the task of assembling hundreds of live-action and visual-effects shots and then merging them into a cohesive whole, Tobin has clearly gone the extra creative mile with Foley Room. As a testament to the lengths that analog sound sources can be stretched, stitched and stomped on in a digital world, this is one album that can find as much appreciation among the old-school electronic avant-garde — represented by such august organizations as France's Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), who invited Tobin to perform last year at the prestigious Presences Electronique festival — as it can among the hungry young mavericks still clawing their way up through the club scene, where Tobin still DJs on a regular basis.
“The performance at GRM was showcasing Foley Room as a bit of a work in progress at the time,” Tobin explains. “It was played over 47 speakers in the performance space at Radio
Tobin is also quick to point out that this album, perhaps more than any other he's done to date, is strictly a studio affair — and thus impossible to present live. “That's been the trouble all the way through since day one,” he says somewhat ruefully. “I've been fortunate though because I've been received very generously from people with my DJ sets. I mean, I feel like the option is there. I could do the whole thing on Ableton or a couple of laptops, but I think of live shows as something that should be worth seeing at the very least. As much as I can appreciate the way different people work, for me personally, I don't find much enthusiasm for a laptop set. It just seems really boring to me.”
Although his fans may not be seeing him onstage with a live band any time soon, Tobin is certainly keeping busy in the studio. A new collaboration with the Dutch drum 'n' bass trio Noisia is already in the can, while a down-low project with Doubleclick called Two Fingers is expected to jump off at any moment in 2007. And of course, he still has to make the transition to the mind-blowing expanses of Cubase 4.
“I really didn't want to try anything too new and untested when I was making this record,” Tobin confers, “because frankly, I needed things to work. But Cubase 4 sounds pretty wicked, and I can't wait to try it out. If it's anything like what the transition was from VST to SX, then I know it will be inspiring.”
VISIONS OF A BEATSMITH
When Amon Tobin relocated from the
Tobin has experienced a reawakening, of sorts, to the advantages of analog gear — a conversion that was brought on, in part, by adjusting his ears to the plethora of analog sounds and performances he'd collected on the Nagra tape machine. Once those and other vinyl sources were transferred to Cubase for digital editing and mutating, Tobin felt he had to maintain the “roundness” of the mix by putting an analog-effects chain in place after the music had gone through the digital realm.
“There are some incredible software emulations of compressors and reverbs now,” he concedes, “but I haven't really found any two that can do what the Chandler TG1 and the Manley Massive Passive can do. With the Manley, you can push things without them hurting you in the same way a digital EQ sometimes does. I'm using the digital plug-ins more for extreme EQing or very surgical parametric stuff. For the main EQ that I'd apply very slightly to a whole track — or if I just want to brighten an entire sound — I'd rather use the Manley. I think I've found more faith in analog gear than I had in the past, so really this album ended up being a mixture of analog and digital processing.”
INSIDE THE FOLEY ROOM
Computer, DAW, recording hardware
Apogee Rosetta 200 and DA-16X converters
Apple Mac G5/dual 2 GHz computer
Nagra IV-S portable ¼-inch tape recorder
Steinberg Cubase SX3 software
Mixer, control surface
JazzMutant Lemur
Samplers, turntables, DJ mixer
Native Instruments Kontakt software sampler
Numark HDX turntables (live)
Rane TTM 56 Performance DJ Mixer
Roland VariOS sampler/synth
Technics SL-1210 turntable (studio)
Synths, software, plug-ins
Audio Ease Altiverb reverb plug-in
Clavia Nord Electro and Nord Lead synths
GRM Tools ST (Spectral Transform) plug-in package (featuring Contrast, Equalize, Freq Warp and Shift)
Native Instruments Reaktor 5 software
Roland V-Synth
Waves IR-1 V2 convolution reverb plug-in
Zebra 2.1 soft synth (designed by Urs Heckmann)
Mics, EQ, compressors, effects
API 2500 discrete 2-channel stereo bus compressor
Chandler Limited TG1 compressor
Earthworks Audio QTC50 high-definition microphones (matched pair)
Manley Labs Massive Passive EQ
Mutronics Mutator stereo filter
TC Electronic FireworX multi-effects processor
Monitors
Klein + Hummel O 500C digital active monitors
Amon Tobin Interview (Sound on Sound April 2003)
If you don't think the sampler can be a musical instrument, you haven't been listening to the music of Amon Tobin!
Simon Young
While the sampler has become a staple ingredient of most studios, few people can claim to have exploited it to quite such extreme levels as Amon Tobin. His current album, Out From Out Where, is his fourth on Ninja Tune, all of which were made entirely with just a sampler, a few effects, an ever-growing record collection and not a single real instrument in sight. He has developed a unique, idiosyncratic voice that embraces such diverse styles as drum & bass, hip-hop, jazz, Latin, film soundtracks, electronica and downright mad sonic experimentation. The result is a dizzying kaleidoscope of sounds, all tied together by a sexual undercurrent that has made his music a favourite on the American strip-club circuit!
From Brazil To Brighton
Having spent most of his early life in Brazil, Amon moved with his family to Britain when he was 10, eventually settling in Brighton, where he began his hip-hop experiments in the early '90s. He released his first album Adventures In Foam on Ninebar Records back in 1996 under the Cujo moniker, but Ninebar's dubious business sense meant Amon wasn't making any money. Fortunately, two artists on Ninja Tune, Funki Porcini and DJ Food, picked up on a couple of Amon's EPs, and so began his fruitful career with Ninja, the label set up by electronic/hip-hop pioneers, Coldcut.
Someone else to pick up on Amon's sound was maverick satirist Chris Morris. Morris had frequently plundered the Ninja back catalogue, including Amon's work, to provide a suitably warped backdrop to the twisted sketches on his Blue Jam Radio 1 shows. This led to a collaboration, where Amon cut up the voices from a Morris sketch and turned them into melodies on the track 'Bad Sex'. This certainly raised his profile in the UK, but he enjoys even greater succes in both Europe and the States, where his last album Supermodified outsold the likes of Massive Attack and Björk.
Studio Tan
Released in October 2002, Out From Out Where was some 18 months in the making, the work being particularly intensive in the last six months. Amon is something of a night owl when it comes to writing his material, working through the small hours to put a track together in one block. "I'll start in mid-afternoon and work through to the next day. Usually by then, I'll have got the arrangement. Then I'll pull it apart, work on the production and mix it over the course of the next two or three weeks. I might change the arrangement, but usually most of it's done in one go in a couple of days. Even though it's laborious, it's also quick if you know what you're doing. I've also got more confident, so I won't be spending 1000 hours looking for the exact right snare. If something actually works, I'll use it, but if I'm slightly uncertain about it, I'll throw it away until I find something I'm completely certain about.
Amon Tobin's Montreal studio is based around a Mackie D8b desk, an Apple Mac running Cubase VST, and enormous quantities of records...
"When I first started, I used to throw out a lot, but maybe because I've now got more control of my sounds, now the music is closer to the original idea I had in the beginning. Before I'd find a sound and just put it with another sound to see what happens. Sometimes it would lead somewhere and sometimes it wouldn't, whereas now that random element is somewhat tapered, so the ratio has improved, but I might throw away maybe one in four tracks." Photos: Shane Ward.
Does the writing process begin with a basic loop or sound, or does he try to realise a strong preconceived idea in his head? "It's a bit of both. When I first started, it was much more finding a sound that inspired me to find more sounds to go with it. Now I find it a lot more satisfying if I have a framework to work inside or a goal to achieve with the music, and then try to find the sounds to fit in there, manipulating them until they do. It doesn't always work like that, so I still stumble across sounds that make me think 'Oh, I know exactly what would work with that,' and off I go." But does he have definite sounds in his head that he tries to recreate? "Oh definitely, mainly different types of beats, but also bass sounds or more abstract ideas of the types of noises I want. Sometimes I'll have an idea for a melody and that gets really tricky; for example, I'll find three or four saxes that have the right notes, so I'll try and piece them all together."
Needing Treatment
Amon has a pragmatic and highly effective way of dealing with the discrepancies between the tone and production of the samples. "It's amazing what you can do with filters; I look at it as being a bit like watercolours, when you've got various different blotches and then you use a wash to bring it all together. I also use a lot of effects in my stuff for that reason — it's not particularly because I love delays and reverbs or whatever. Processing is the answer. I'll take a lot of samples to make a melody, then process it with one type of filter or modulation effect, re-record it, cut it up, and by then it will sound like one sample — but sometimes if it doesn't, it can be really interesting anyway."
Filters and EQ also play a big part in isolating specific sounds or instruments within a sample. "You can take out an entire frequency that holds an instrument, so that you can no longer hear it, or you can hear it in such a background way that it becomes an interesting subliminal part. Unfortunately that means it can sometimes sound really harsh, because the EQ has to be so extreme. Some people have even said it's a characteristic of my sound. I love that — here's something I f**ked up, and someone relishes that!
When you do as much sampling as Amon Tobin, the Akai S6000's detachable front panel comes in very handy.
"Something that I'm aiming for, but I don't always pull off, is to have a mix where the different melodies, drums and bass are all sitting in their own frequency realms, so things can stand out. You can also do a lot with stereo, where if I want something to stand out, I'll make it mono and then put it somewhere in the stereo field where there's not much going on. All these things cause their own problems, like phasing problems, but I'm sure eventually experience will win with this one and it can be mastered, but it's obviously going to take a long time because I'm using so many different sources. I've had up to about 80 different samples in a tune, so it's a lot of sounds and some of them will only happen once." 
Perhaps more than half of those samples make up his incredibly complicated beats, which frequently incorporate sounds that quite evidently are not conventional or electronic percussion. "I got really into taking a sound that has nothing to do with a beat, and incorporating it into a loop to give that snare a completely different characteristic, just by virtue of it being melded with something else."
It also works the other way, so Amon creates melodies or bass lines by manipulating unpitched sources. "'Proper Hoodage' has a bass sound that is from the percussion, which I treated with formant filters, which can create chords out of sounds. I mixed that with various plug-ins to try and create a note as opposed to a percussion hit. When I sampled it back in, it synchronised so well, because the bass sound was made out of the percussion so it fitted with it perfectly."
"I feel like it was made for me. It's been sold as a convenience tool, so you don't need to bring your records with you any more, you can just bring a laptop. But I bring my own decks when I DJ, because I want that control and I don't want to use someone else's equipment, so it's no more convenient for me. But it helps me to make a much more personal set, because I don't have to make dubplates any more. So my one-off versions of tracks that I used to have to make to DJ with, I can do instantly now. I can really experiment with how they mix with something else, or I can record single elements of tracks and play them over something else, so it becomes much more of a live tool. That's what it's all about for me; I don't think there is any point in going to see someone play live who's just playing his own records, you can do that at home. I think it's really important to make something that's happening at that time, and it might go wrong as well, so you've got the precarious tension that creates." Unfortunately, as Amon has learnt to his cost, the rather domestic-looking Final Scratch interface has been a source of some of those problems. "I've had a couple of shows where it's crashed outright. USB is just not reliable enough, the thing should be Firewire. Also, the timecode records warp, and when you get fluff on the needle, they react in a totally different way to analogue records. The warping causes exaggerated speeding up and slowing down of the waveform that actually makes it impossible to mix, let alone listen to! I'm still going to stick with it, because the potential is so good, and you're bound to get these problems with new equipment." Another problem Amon has faced in the live arena is the inadequacy of some PAs, which struggled to cope with the huge sonic range of his music. "That's been a massive problem, especially in Europe. Sometimes you're up against things you just can't control, like the law in France, where you've got a 105db limit. It's so frustrating, because it doesn't have to be blasting all the time, but it's meant to be a full-body experience, you're meant to feel the bass. I find it really hard to control an atmosphere with those constrictions. If you've got a top-notch sound system, you don't need to go that loud for that to happen, everything is detailed and clear. But if as in most cases on this tour in Europe the sound system wasn't quite up to scratch, and you've got this low dB limit, it made it very hard to feel confident that I was doing what I wanted to do." Amon is unequivocal when it comes to saying which he prefers, studio or live. "It's two different things, but I definitely prefer being in the studio if I had to choose between the two. Going out DJing started off as a necessity to promote a new record, but now it has become something that I do enjoy doing, just not all the time so consequently I don't play that much. It's a priority for me to go and create."
Playing Live When Amon plays out, he doesn't use his studio equipment, but instead DJs his material with conventional record decks and some cutting-edge DJ technology, namely Stanton Magnetics' Final Scratch software, running on a PC laptop. It plays WAV files, which are triggered by a special timecode disc that plays on conventional decks. The idea is that you can store all your tracks on hard drive instead of lugging around flightcases of records, while (in theory anyway) the timecode disc enables you to perform all your usual DJ tricks of slipping, scratching, vari-speeding and so on.
Tasty Organic Sources
Evidently, Amon's sampling methods are a far cry from simply lifting melodies and breaks wholesale from old jazz masters. "In the past, I've taken massive chunks of things, but as time has gone by, for my own integrity and for obvious legal reasons, I have moved away from that. It's a slightly dubious area for anyone using samplers, but fortunately it's never caught up with me. Either the samples have been obscure and uninteresting enough for people not to worry about, or the manipulation has been so extreme that people don't recognise them anyway."
Amon undoubtedly has an attention to detail that ensures his programming is utterly transparent. His tunes have a live, organic quality that belies their programmed origin, helped by choosing highly idiosyncratic and energetic sample sources. "It's what I'm attracted to really, sounds that have those qualities. It's always changing, I used to go strictly into jazz record sections, then I deviated into easy listening and soundtracks. I can't really go into the composers I like, 'cos they're the ones that I sample!" he jokes.
"Recently I've come across a whole load of Bollywood soundtracks, which have been amazing because they've got this notion of what Western music sounds like that is just as skewed as Hollywood's notion of Eastern music. I'm quite fascinated by the misunderstanding that creates something new. If you listen to Martin Denny and all that easy-listening stuff from the '50s and '60s, their idea of Hawaiian or Eastern music was so far off from reality, but by virtue of that, it created a new sound. It goes the other way with Bollywood, where they'll have this idea of what disco, funk or soul is, and it's just totally mad! Bollywood movies are hard, because every song starts the same with an incredible, massive introduction, and then this really piercing, squeaky voice will come in. You have to sit through all that, before you get these really amazing, lush sounds, which are really beautifully produced. I'm also getting more into electronic sounds, but from the '70s. Their notion of future electronic sounds is just great. I started to appreciate emulations of real strings done really well by experimental processes. They've got a unique quality to them which isn't real strings but isn't those horrible 1990s pads." 
Despite Amon's obvious enthusiasm for his sounds, their source is ultimately not that important to him. "It's so random really, but it's more about where they're going rather than where they're from. I think you can take a sound from almost anywhere and make it relevant to your track."
"I also love programming drums with MIDI and I've never understood how people can programme drums with audio. I did a collaboration with Steinski and he was using Pro Tools. We had this big break and I instantly wanted to chop it up, assign different MIDI notes and make a beat, but I was amazed at how he could just cut slivers of the waveform and drag them around, which is just insane and totally beyond me!" With the ever-increasing power and ubiquity of DAWs, more and more people transfer their MIDI-generated sounds on to audio tracks if only to curtail the endless flexibility that MIDI offers, but having too much choice doesn't bother Amon. "I know sometimes it's a bit dazzling when you sit there and think 'I could do anything, but what the hell do I do?' But I come at it from a different point of view, where I have a specific thing I want to do and I'll take whatever options are available to realise that." Recently he has been experimenting with Steinberg's Halion VST soft sampler. "I think it's awesome. The Akai is great because you have so much control and there are so many things you can do within a program, but you do always have to set up a program and key groups within the program, and so on. It's really laborious and it really f**ks with your creative flow. It is music after all, even though we're doing it with computers, and there is some soul we're trying to keep alive, so anything that makes the process more transparent is good as far as I'm concerned. Halion offers that really well; you can just grab a waveform and put it on a key. If you want it to cover more keys, you just stretch it. "I like things that are user-friendly and intuitive, and I've never been an advocate of that elitist attitude that if you don't know about the latest or most complicated bit of kit, you can't cut it. That's bollocks! What's important is your ideas and being able to get them out as effectively as possible. People who are fascinated by the interface are interested in a different thing to me, but it's not going to help them come up with great music." Amon also uses a TC Fireworx multi-effects, which contrary to conventional wisdom, he doesn't place on an aux buss on his mixer, as he explains. "I don't like to have effects running in real time in the final mix, I like to have the sound already recorded with the effects in my arrangement. I suppose it's having the control of say, the modulation sweep peaking at an exact point and I know every time the sample is triggered, it'll be at that point." Software compression plays a big part in the beefiness of many of his sounds, though he leaves any overall compression to the mastering house. "If I was to try to polish off the track and then go to master, it would just be done again and it would sound too f**ked. I have done that in the past, which is why some things sound too f**ked, because they've been compressed and compressed again. It's all things that you pick up as you go. Compression is not so much about volume, but the way volume is perceived — something sounds louder even though it isn't. But sometimes it's nice if it gets abused as well, I quite enjoy the pumping effect that you get when you over-compress. I think some of the software ones are great — when I want it to flat-line, they're good for abusing the parameters. "I'd like to experiment with some serious hardware compression, but it's always a priority with me to maintain the momentum we were talking about. I'm not a tech-head and I don't want to lose myself in valves and pretty lights. There's so much bullshit surrounding equipment. I'd much rather listen to some badly produced wicked tune over some crystal-clear ambient nonsense produced on a Neve desk."
Amon's Gear Amon's studio setup is based around a Mackie D8b digital desk and an Akai S6000 sampler triggered by Cubase VST on a Mac. Amon chooses to trigger all his samples via MIDI from VST, rather than building up audio tracks. "I do use the audio side of VST: a lot of my samples will have gone through several layers of plug-ins before they get to the MIDI stage. But when I'm programming, I really like the versatility you have over each note with MIDI — I know you can do similar things with audio, but up till now, I found I've just had a bit more control with MIDI. All the controllers you have are so powerful in MIDI, you can do cheeky things like assign velocity to filters. It's just how I first got into working; my first sampler was an Akai S01 and there wasn't any hard disk recording, so how much control you had over the MIDI determined how much control you had over the audio.
Isolation Vs Collaboration
Amon usually works in total isolation, from the initial idea right through to overseeing the mastering, but does he feel limited by not having anyone to bounce ideas off or to tell him when to stop? "I think you win and you lose. I don't have the reassurance of someone saying 'Yes, that's really good,' or saying it's no good, or whatever, but then I have total control. I've never really thought of myself as a control freak, but I guess I must be because the idea of anyone having any say in what I do is totally unacceptable! I do accept other people's ideas and when I've collaborated, I've learnt so much, especially technical stuff. But I know that if it came to the bottom line and I said something doesn't work and they say it does, I'd just say 'It's not going in and that's that,' so working with other people is probably not my way of doing things."
Amon's outboard gear, from top: Roland VP9000 Variphrase processor, MOTU 828 interface, TC Electronic Fireworx multi-effects, Mutronics Mutator compressor, Akai S6000 sampler and Tascam DA20 MkII DAT.
However, a desire to work alone isn't the reason why he always uses samples and never live musicians or real instruments. "I like using sounds that have existed in a different musical context before. It's not musique concrète or found sounds and I won't use session musicians or sample CDs. I find sample CDs of, say, a session drummer really flat, because they don't have any real musical context. The energy that I'm after is may be in the middle of some one-off recording that happened in a special time at some festival, where the drummer was just going off and there is that bit of energy that you just take. You can extend it or rearrange it, but the energy's still there. That's always what's fascinated me about samples and what I can't get out of session musicians or sample CDs. It's not that I'm against it; it's a perfectly valid way to work, but just not one that appeals to me. I don't think I can get anything that isn't already on vinyl, so why use a session guy when I can use the sax player or the drummer? Why settle for second-best?" 
The fruits of one of his rare collaborations can be heard on 'Verbal', which is the first single from the album. The mad cut-up vocals are those of MC Decimal, a mystery MC whose true identity Amon refuses to reveal. "He's far too mysterious and it would ruin the mystery! Prefuse 73 did something similar with cutting up vocals and it was inspired by that, really. It was a way to try to make a percussion sound out of the vocals. The idea was to not just have snippets of vocals dotted about the track, but to have it as the main focus. It's a whole rhyme where there aren't any words, because they never finish. I chopped up all the different parts of the words and put them in different sequences to try and make my own flow, so that it sounded like a rhyme but it wasn't."
Since he completed the album, Amon's been working on a string of further collaborations, with Bonobo, P Love, Steinski and a possible forthcoming one with Kid Koala. He hasn't been idle with his solo material either, though inevitably for someone who moulds such an eclectic mix of sounds into such idiosyncratic music, he struggles to categorise the results. "I've been making some R&B-influenced stuff; it's more like A&B, anger and blues, like really dirty beats but chopped up in a different way to straightforward hip-hop. Downbeat but almost upbeat at the same time! But I have only done two tunes since the album, so I need to do a few more before I announce a new direction."
Whatever the results, there's no doubt that they'll be worth checking out.
Published in SOS April 2003
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