Bedknobs & Boom-Chiks
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy
Their latest album finds them probing the high-end wares of a professional studio, but at heart, the members of Hot Chip prefer to record right where they sleep
SOUL INSPIRATION
If you saw them in a pub or riding the Tube, you'd probably think the techno-geeky lads in Hot Chip would be the last bunch on Earth capable of delivering some legitimately funky soul, but the churchy “We're Looking for a Lot of Love” and the Chi-Lites-meet-Eno vibes of “In the Privacy of Our Love” dispel all such preconceptions. What's more, Taylor and Goddard really outdo themselves with “Wrestlers” — a slippery clap-track based ballad that's an homage of sorts to R. Kelly's “I'm a Flirt.”
“Even though the song was made in a bedroom,” Taylor says, “it had to have no surface noise on it because it's meant to be a loud, mid-tempo R&B groove that would work in a club, even if people don't normally sing about wrestling. [Laughs.] Me, Joe and Owen made that song in an afternoon, and I like that there's a lot of force behind that bass synth line and the vocal melody.”
Layered vocals, in fact, fuel this and just about every other track on the album. “Usually, we do two takes of the same vocal part and then just put them together,” Taylor explains. “They'll be slightly different — there will be tiny little idiosyncrasies in the way I've sung or Joe has sung, so if you stack them together they just work because they don't sound too artificial. Other times, we just double one performance and shift it a little bit out behind the beat. I do it more with records I've made on my own; it's that short delay you get on early rock 'n' roll records, like Jerry Lee Lewis, or even later on with John Lennon.”
When it comes to creating the beats for Hot Chip's soulful excursions, Goddard claims one producer in particular as a key influence. “I always want to make something that's funky,” he says, “but there's also a desire to make something that's just weird. It comes a little bit from Timbaland — the layers of percussion that are just these perfect little strange grooves. He's a massive inspiration probably to a lot of people, but particularly to me. When you put headphones on, there will be rhythms coming at you from all over the place, but all the patterns work perfectly together in the best way, so your ears are constantly being excited. If I can create that feeling, then I know the track is working.”
While You Were Sleeping
As veterans of low-to-the-ground production setups, Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard are veritable poster boys for what a good old-fashioned bedroom rig can achieve when pushed to its limits. And they're not the only ones who think so; besides the DFA's James Murphy, whose label handles Hot Chip's U.S. distribution, everyone from Amy Winehouse to Kraftwerk has been lining up for remixes. Their latest client is Robert Wyatt — like Kraftwerk, another hero of Taylor and Goddard's rug-rat days.
“Whenever I'm looking through a gear magazine,” Goddard observes, “I think about Lee Perry and the fact that you don't need all this stuff to make music. You can get it, and you can make good music with it, but it's about imagination more than equipment, pretty much always. But having said that, I'm starting to miss the fact that I can't get this lovely tone on a guitar just in my bedroom. In the future, I might try working with a few other things. But I still think it's really important for people to stretch what they've got and to learn the ins and outs of all their equipment.”
As for the nature of that equipment, again, Taylor prefers to keep at least a few production secrets close to the vest. “We don't really like it if people can tell exactly what we're using,” he says, “which is why I think we like to combine live sounds with preset or programmed sounds. There are things that are literally played with your fingers on a keyboard, and there are some things that are written on the computer. It's just more interesting to me to combine an electric guitar with a synthetic pan sound, for example, than to do it all on the computer or all live. The bedroom setups we use are great for achieving that.”
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