WALK THE LINE
May 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Genevieve Powers
LOST & FOUND IN TRANSLATION
Momento is split between songs in English and those in Gilberto's native language, Portuguese. The choice between languages was never cerebral, though; instead, Gilberto — you guessed it — goes with the flow and writes in whichever language suits the song. “It's unexpected, really,” she says. “Sometimes you just know it. It's so crazy. For instance, with ‘Momento,’ when I got there, I already said to Guy, ‘There is no way I can sing in English on this song.’ And then ‘Close to You,’ same thing: I started writing the song, and it came out in English. I even remember there was a point where Guy was like, ‘Bebel, this sounds like a rap. I can't believe it, a Brazilian girl has written a rap.’ It was really freedom of any conception, more like, whatever the vibe brings us, we'll just go with the flow.”
Lyrics in Portuguese did present a problem for Sigsworth, however. “Especially when I was doing the vocals, it was hard for Guy to direct me,” Gilberto says. “It was a bit challenging to have the whole of the lyrics on my back without having someone to at least understand a little bit what I was trying to talk about.”
“You get into mixing and you don't know which is the important word to make louder,” Sigsworth adds. “I would ask her to talk me through things and had to rely very much on her to tell me about that. And in fact, riding vocal levels was a very painstaking process 'cause I had to make sure she's completely happy. She felt that on her last album, her vocals had been a bit too heavily squashed. So I thought we won't compress; we'll just ride really softly so that the vocal is always at a good level throughout. I didn't use an automated effect. I did it by hand, which is much slower, but it made her much happier with the result. Funnily enough, we did have a few moments quite late on where she'd say, ‘Oh, no, I sang the wrong lyric then,’ and we had no idea.”
303 MEETS ACOUSTIC
Throughout the recording process, Gilberto and Sigsworth were continually trying to combine the organic with the electronic, layering the instrumental elements of her band with the effects and noises he prefers. Sigsworth often anticipated Gilberto's preferences and countered them in advance to create balance.
“For ‘Close to You,’ she had a melody with some lyrics, so then I was punching up sounds to fit it,” he explains. “Those first thoughts in my imagination were that the song just had the feeling of a beach at night where you can hear the waves lapping. I wanted to create noises that suggested that, so I put in some electric pianos and some soft-focus white noise. It was always trying to get that spray of the sea in a very gentle way into the song.
“Then I played some chords on a Rhodes and got some percussive sounds, which were mostly African udu-type drums but really tuned down an octave so they sounded a bit unusual. I knew that she was bringing in her band to add in a little bit more flavor on top of the percussion, so I didn't over-program it but kept it quite light. Then for bass, I was thinking she'll probably put in a guitar, so I'll put in a 303. There is actually an acid-house synthesizer doing something, vaguely. It's very intermittent and in a soft way, not at all heavy Detroit, but I just thought, ‘Let's go for the opposite 'cause I know what she'll do.’ There's an element where I know naturally the song's going to get pulled that way, so I'm going to pull it the other way in advance.”
Other times, Sigsworth took an organic sound and manipulated it in Pro Tools to achieve his desired effect. “Sometimes I like the things to sound very organic and real, and sometimes I like the listener to know they're not,” he says. “For instance, if you listen to the beginning of ‘Azul,’ I created this part that I knew could be played by two interlocking guitars, but then I actually thought, ‘It's quite interesting to do it in a deliberately artificial way where you just play one chord at a time, chop it in the computer and then stick it together.’ You can hear that it's not really like a player would have played it, but it gives it a special sound as created in its own digital way.”
Although Pro Tools is a bit outside of Gilberto's area of expertise, she still says that she's fascinated by what the technology allowed her to achieve on this album: “I like to mix different instruments and different cultures and different vibes, and I think only with the Pro Tools this could be possible. Since I start working with electronics and people from other musics, I think it's a whole new world. It's like a new Bebel inside of me. It's like you just let the phantoms go away from your head. It's amazing when I see other artists copying Brazilians just because they want to capture the vibe of a Brazilian song. That doesn't mean they're doing a real samba, but I'm fascinated by this mixture, and I just like to take advantage of it. It's like a boat, you know? You just go with the flow.”
A SAMPLING OF SIGSWORTH'S FROU FROU CENTRAL
Computer, DAW, recording hardware
Apple Power Mac G5 computer
Digidesign Pro Tools|HD system
Keyboard, software, plug-ins
Celemony Melodyne software
Cycling '74 Pluggo plug-ins
Native Instruments Kontakt, Reaktor software
Roland C-80-AK Digital Harpsichord
Roland TB-303 bass synth
Mics, mic preamps, EQ, compressors
Avalon Vt-737sp preamp/compressor/EQ
Focusrite Liquid Channel preamp/compressor
Neumann U 87 mic
Sony C800G mic
Monitors
Dynaudio Acoustics AIRs
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