NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM
Aug 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef
The Chemical Brothers talk with Remix about their vintage-synth collection and recording their album We Are the Night.
Watch the Remix video interview with the Chemical Brothers here.
“Instead of sitting in a bedroom with three keyboards and a sampler, we were sitting in a studio with 30 keyboards,” says the Chemical Brothers' Tom Rowlands.
On their sixth album, We Are the Night (Astralwerks, 2007), the Chemical Brothers delve deep into the world of ancient '70s- and '80s-era synths, making all their squiggly sounds and technical challenges a part of the joy of music making. The London duo of Rowlands and Ed Simons has always worked it out with classic sounds, but We Are the Night finds the Brothers exploring some of the oldest synths imaginable, such as the ARP 2600, Roland System 700, EMS Synthi AKS and VCS3, Moog Minimoog, and the rare Dutch-made synth, the Synton Syrinx, and its more recent sibling, the Synton Fenix.
“We've always used those synths,” the easygoing Rowlands recalls. “But this time we really got into the combination of those wild synths and a computer and Logic, doing very long sweeps of playing with those synths and editing the results easily on a computer. Back in the old days, we would have a synth running and sample it into the Akai [samplers] and then create a segment like that. But now we have the freedom of having it all in the computer; we can do a long 20-minute jam playing around with the synths and then edit the highlights and use it in a track. If anything, it's a coming of age — the precision of the computer with the unreliable and unrepeatable nature of synthesizers. It's a dream combo.”
We Are the Night changes course from the Chems' 2005 treatise, Push the Button (Astralwerks). Where that album gloried in massive funk beats 'n' breaks, We Are the Night clings closer to four-on-the-floor terrain. Where Push the Button produced a stadiumlike soundfield, We Are the Night reflects the mind of a nocturnal DJ. We Are the Night eschews the globetrotting DJ ethic in favor of a purer experience: the club as nest, sanctuary, and altar — a virtual home away from home.
“I was really surprised,” Rowlands says. “People were around when we mastered the album, and they were just dancing the whole time. It's only right at the end of the record that there is any moment that lets up. It just pushes you all the way to the end. A lot of this record seems to jump straight at you as being music that's going to make a room full of people dance. We have always been a dance band, but in this case there is less jerkiness to it. There is a nice psychedelic pulse.”
“Hedonism and abandonment have always been themes of what we do,” the at-times-persnickety Simons adds. “That is what is good about being in a club and getting completely absorbed in music and the headspace that creates. It's an escape from whatever reality you are in. That's the joy of psychedelic music. There are lots of different albums we could have made after two years of being in the studio. This is the one we felt like giving to the world at this moment.”
While admitting that they no longer hit the clubs like they did in the '90s, Simons claims that the experience has stuck with them, that they don't need to maintain residencies or work the tables at local one-offs to stay connected.
“That feeling of how a record can fill a room with sound, how a beat can affect people, how little nuances in music work, how one sound can take over — that is not something that you need to experience every Friday night,” he says. “That is something you know and think. The studio we use helps; it's the Neve Room at Miloco Studios. It has these amazing monitors. They are whacking good monitors, a combination between Dynaudio tweeters and ATC drivers. We insist on going there; it is integral to re-create that club experience. We have been to more expensive studios, but nothing quite matches them.”
Beyond the Miloco Studios' monitors and tried-and-true Chems gear like the Culture Vulture, SSL AWS900+, EMS Synthi Hi-Fli Analog effects unit and various Akai samplers, the sound of We Are the Night is all about the synths. Without further ado, Rowlands and Simons divulge the ins-and-outs of their synth collection.
ARP 2600
“We have the normal black-and-white 2600,” Rowlands explains, “not the really rare one, the Blue Meanie. All the modules inside that one are sealed in plastic. The ARP 2600 is a synth that you can play, and something good just seems to happen. It's quite simple, yet inspirational. Synths like the Minimoog and the ARP 2600 were successful because they were simple, but you could achieve quite complicated things with them. It was the days of improvements over the big modular systems, which could seem incomprehensible. With those, it would take 10 minutes to get a normal lead sound, but with the 2600, you can touch just a few things, and you will be playing and having fun. Sometimes in the studio you want that difficult challenge of making a sound, and you want to spend three hours. Other times you just want to have an idea and then do it. The ARP and the Minimoog are those machines. They want you to touch them. The 2600 has one of the best distortion sounds; the preamp in it has a setting where you can choose the distortion from times 10 to times 100 to times 1,000 on the input. Anything that offers you 1,000 times the input — whoo! You do hear a big difference.”
ELEKTRON MONOMACHINE
“Unlike the other gear, this is a brand-new synth, really,” Rowlands says. The Chems used the Monomachine as well as Elektron's drum-machine cousin, the Machine Drum. “We really love it. It's all over the album. It's actually set up like a drum machine but with proper synthesis. So you're writing a bass line, but if you've grown up programming on something like a Roland TR-808 with the flashing lights, you will be comfortable with the Monomachine. For each step you can tweak so much; there are hundreds of parameters for each step. You can really get into messing around with it. I really like its sound. It's very different from the other synths that we've got. It's digital, and you can make very lovely sorts of things, and it can do very hard, rough things. It's on ‘Saturate’; that track is practically all the Monomachine. You can start playing with the Monomachine straight away. Then you may wonder how you do other things later. [The options] are just different sound sources you can use, different synthesis options that you can use within the Monomachine. I can't remember which ones we used — not the voice modeling program, though. It is digital; it is just different.
“The way you program it, you can automate each step. The first step, you can have it tuned to X tuning. Then you can have the decay down, and you can have the LFO modulating it one way and the distortion pushed right up. For step two, if it is a 16-step sequence, you can have all those parameters set completely different. Then the third step is completely different as well. You can end up with totally mad sequences, something you couldn't physically do on any other sort of machine. And it looks cool, more importantly!”
“We like that company,” Simons adds. “A lot of people are obsessed with making things that have already been made or copying the software. Elektron is trying to do something new with nice, quality hardware. They are really individual-sounding machines.”
EMS VCS3
“Our engineer has that on constantly in our studio,” Simons says. “The VCS3 has its own speaker on it. We might be trying to do a complicated mix or program something, and the EMS is always squeaking in the background. ‘Can't you turn that fucking thing off?!’ This has been going on for 10 years. But it's good.”
“It is a modular synth, and usually with modular synths, you have to know what you are doing,” Rowlands explains. “But because this is the one with the little matrix panel in it, you just get your patch pins, and you can stick the pins in anywhere. It's really good fun in that you don't have to get annoyed. You can be very quickly gratified even if you don't know what you are doing at all. You can put pins in like spelling your name or something, and you'll get the sound of your name.
“The sound that starts ‘We Are the Night,’ that is a classic EMS. It's on all our records really, from the beginning. Even if we are not using the synthesis bit of it, we always use it to put sounds through. It has such a good filter, nice reverb. And on that track and other tracks, we always play the Fender Telecaster through it. Probably the sound of our records is an EMS and an Eventide Harmonizer.”
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