BILL LASWELL
Aug 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy
Superproducer Bill Laswell has produced and worked with artists ranging from Mick Jagger and Yoko Ono to Herbie Hancock and Afrika Bambaataa,
Backstage at a packed venue in Milan, Italy, a lone figure is standing calmly amid the pre-gig murmurs, tapping out a rhythm on the table in front of him. He looks up just as a small group of Tibetan monksmake their way toward one of the stage doors. For producer and bassist Bill Laswell, it's not unusual to be gearing up for a heavy dub show with a backing chorus of Mahayana Buddhist throat singers — in fact, it's all just another day in the life.
“It helps to be open,” he says, explaining the mindset behind a performance that, for the most part, will be totally improvised. “You have to listen and respect the space if you can. Everybody is guilty of not always doing that at one time or another. So you just find the space, respect it and find the moment where you can put in your idea. If everyone playing respects that design, then you can make music.”
Making music has been Laswell's mission for more than 30 years now, and with some 400 albums to his credit, he's left an indelible footprint on the industry. One common point of entry toward an understanding of his impact as a producer begins with Herbie Hancock's Future Shock (Columbia, 1983), one of his earliest studio gigs for a major label and featured the worldwide monster hit “Rockit” — a Kraftwerk-influenced track that subverted the still-nascent hip-hop underground (thanks in part to the presence of GrandMixer DXT on turntables) and flipped the mainstream pop masses on their ear.
“There was a moment when we knew,” Laswell recalls. “We were leaving L.A. to go back to New York, and we stopped at a store that sold stereo gear. I was interested in some speakers, so I gave the guy there a cassette with two tracks that we had just mixed, and said, ‘Play this.’ And as ‘Rockit’ was playing, I felt this kind of chilling experience in the room, and I turned around and suddenly there were like 50 kids in the store demanding to know what it was. That was when we had the feeling that we'd done something that would translate.”
Laswell's collaboration with Hancock would last for two more albums — and rekindle, years later, on the inspired electro-fusion slugfest Future 2 Future (Transparent, 2001) — but the doors it opened were many and multifarious. Full-length albums with everyone from Mick Jagger (She's the Boss [Atlantic, 1985]) and Yoko Ono (Starpeace [PolyGram, 1985]) to Afrika Bambaataa (The Light; EMI, 1988, with George Clinton, Bootsy Collins and Sly & Robbie) soon followed as Laswell became one of the hottest producers of the '80s. But it wasn't a title he bore easily.
“I've never seen myself as a producer,” he explains. “I'm a finisher. The reason I moved away from playing bass for other people” — on such experimental classics as Brian Eno's ambient On Land (EG, 1982) and the sample-crazy My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Sire, 1981) with David Byrne — “was because I didn't want to be manipulated for someone else's means. You start by wanting to have more control over what you sound like, and then you realize, ‘Well, that can be true for everybody,’ and then you start to gravitate toward putting the whole thing in perspective.”
The picture became clearer when Laswell opened his Greenpoint Studio in Brooklyn (now relocated to West Orange, N.J.) in 1989. With a customized Neve 8068 console, the open loft space became known for its expansive, heavy room sound, which provided Laswell with the latitude to explore the lower bass frequencies that other producers were afraid to touch. “For me, the bottom end is always lower than everything else,” he says. “But it's warmer than normal, so that sets the tone for the balance. It's almost like you've gotta cook it. You can't just lay it out according to what a computer screen looks like and say it's okay. It's not like that. It's a feel.”
In 1991, Laswell's Axiom label opened for business to present manifestations of that feel. One highlight was Hallucination Engine (Axiom, 1994) — a collective exploration of dub, jazz, funk and electronics under the group name Material (a name that dates back to Laswell's “no wave” trio, founded in 1978, with Michael Beinhorn and Fred Maher). Another notable release was the Altered Beats project, Assassin Knowledges of the Remanipulated (Axiom, 1996), which united Grandmixer DXT, Prince Paul, DJ Krush, DJ Rob Swift and the Invisibl Skratch Piklz for an unprecedented turntable sound clash.
It would take several lifetimes to fully absorb the scope of Laswell's oeuvre — and this doesn't even begin to address the vast wave of remixes he's done for everyone from Sting (“A Thousand Years”) to, most recently, Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails' “Vessel” from Year Zero [Interscope, 2007]). Meanwhile, his various touring groups, under such names as Praxis, PainKiller, Material, Tokyo Rotation and Method of Defiance — the latter of which released a drum 'n' bass/hardcore/dub album in 2007 titled Inamorata (Ohm Resistance/Sublight) — seem to surface momentarily in one country and then vanish. To an outsider, it might resemble a nomadic, and certainly chaotic, existence — an assessment that rings true when considering all the previously undiscovered terrain where Laswell has chosen to tread musically.
“You can't think about the business,” he says firmly when asked about what accounts for his longevity in the music industry. “Making music is the making of art and magic. The business is just people making money.”
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