EAST LONDON CALLING
Feb 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy
SPATIALLY YOURS
Compared with the more skeletal, basement-sounding rawness of Silent Alarm (itself a masterful touch from producer Paul Epworth), there's an immediate sense of the otherworldly and supermassive that emerges in Weekend's opening cut “Song for Clay (Disappear Here)” — a feeling that also has, according to Okereke, some cinematic roots.
“I was going for something almost like a Bond theme,” he says, referring perhaps either to Paul McCartney and Wings' “Live and Let Die,” the John Barry scores of the '60s or maybe even Garbage's “The World Is Not Enough.” “It has a melodramatic intimacy to it, and there's a lot happening — for example, the drums had to be processed a certain way to get that dramatic effect. I remember Jacknife said he wanted it to sound like you'd been mugged violently with broken glass — something really shocking or visceral.”
Lee describes a wide-open process that relies heavily on audio manipulation in Logic — a program he first started using on his own recordings nearly 10 years ago — to achieve the appropriate shock value. “There's very little that isn't touched, to be honest with you,” he explains. “I normally get everything recorded into Pro Tools and then treat the parts as individual stereo files in Logic, and once they're in there, anything can happen. With the drums, I might change them for the chorus of the song so the room opens up, or I might put them through the [SmartElectronix] SupaTrigger plug-in so they regurgitate themselves. For the guitars, I might use [Logic's] Sample Delay to get some space on them — and at the same time, Russell can get some amazing swelling guitar sounds with the pedals he uses.”
With the six weeks of sessions they had blocked out at Grouse Lodge, the band had the time to try multiple versions of the same song, even playing along live with their own previously recorded tracks that had been, again, run through the wringer in Logic. The strikingly weird Roxy Music-versus-The Cure overtones of “On” — the album's arguable centerpiece track, along with the infectiously catchy UK single “The Prayer” — benefit from an exhaustive reworking of live takes.
“We recorded ‘On’ as a series of loops,” Lee says. “Most of that was done to the drum beat and the bass guitar, which meant that we half recorded it as a band and then dumped it to Logic to be manipulated. We left the whole middle section of the song blank — I got them to play just random things for that, which we also put together in Logic. And then they played on top of that again, if that makes sense. Basically we would replace a lot of things that were on the original rough tracks, and if we thought we'd lost anything, we'd record the band playing live again over what had been replaced. We did that quite a lot just to break things up a bit.”
“On” also makes use of a string sextet — yet another manifestation of the orchestral but with the electronic twists (in the form of glitchy distortion applied by Lee) that bring the song into a 21st-century mode of thinking.
“The way that strings are used in rock music tends to be really reductive,” Okereke observes. “I mean, it hasn't really moved on all that much since The Beatles. I wanted to make something that really was a part and that moved from A to B in a real natural and exciting way. The idea was to make it sound like you were standing on the edge of a precipice. It's not just something nice that sustains in the background. There's a real sense of danger and discord there.”
VOX POPULI
Of course, in following his intent to explore the expansiveness of the sound that was in his head, Okereke also felt the pull to layer vocals — sometimes dozens of them. The album's closing track “SRXT” — named for the UK-manufactured anti-depressant Seroxat and directly inspired by Brian Eno's classic (and disturbingly beautiful) “By This River” — pivots on a double-tracked lead, as well as a veritable sea of background vocals.
“I really didn't notice it until after we were done,” Okereke admits, “but there are loads of stacked vocals on this record that resemble choral sections, and I really attribute that to Penderecki, who I'd been listening to. I'm not really thinking of solo voices anymore. I'm thinking of my voice as a real instrument, in the way I think of a guitar as an instrument. That's why there are so many choral interludes — like in the middle of ‘The Prayer’ and ‘SRXT’ and in ‘Uniform,’ with this criss-crossing of vocals. ‘Uniform’ alone must have at least a hundred tracks.”
As Lee remembers it, there are even more. “I think ‘Uniform’ probably had about 120 tracks,” he says almost matter-of-factly. “From the beginning, we were playing with the idea of the record not being a rock-and-roll record, so we would just keep stacking vocals to get the size we wanted. That also meant we were submixing a lot. I do a lot of that anyway, especially with guitars, and I think it's because I learned to mix using Logic. I don't really like mixing on a big desk. Even though I do spread everything out, submixing can be great for putting order to a song.”
KNIFELIKE MOVEMENTS
Although much of what resembles synth textures on A Weekend in the City was actually generated by Lissack on guitar, there are actual synth parts that crop up throughout the album. “Hunting for Witches,” which starts off with a John Cage-like collage of spliced voices that create the main rhythm, surges with the squawks and squeaks of what is perhaps a temperamental EDP Wasp and a gurgling Minimoog — just two of the many units in Jacknife Lee's arsenal.
“I also have some Alesis drum machines from a really good guy in England who does a lot of circuit bending,” Lee raves. “Gordon would take those and do maybe 10 minutes of just plugging things in and out, and then I would listen back and chop out the nice bits and put them in time. If you're gonna play a drum machine or a Moog live over a track, the best thing to do is just play it all the way through. Not all of it is gonna be good, but once you've gone through a few takes, you can find the right little bits and move them to the right place.”
When documenting the creative arc that Bloc Party has followed since first coming together in 2003, “movement” is certainly the operative word that comes to mind. Now that electronics appear to be a permanent ingredient in the band's overall sound, it only makes sense that Okereke should be hacking out his own signal-processed path on a recently acquired Logic setup (Lissack's laptop, meanwhile, is outfitted with Pro Tools and Propellerhead Reason). Whether that means the band will be composing even more often with computers while on the road, only time — and tenacity — will tell.
“I guess the more you do the better you get,” Okereke notes. “I did want to make sure that whilst we're on the road in the future, we can jot ideas down quickly. Matt is very good with programming as well, so I think we're gonna make a concerted effort to start the year that way. It'll be great if we can just keep exploring more electronic avenues.”
That said, one thing seems a virtual certainty: There's bound to be a contingent of the notoriously fickle UK music press that will devolve into fits about Bloc Party's new direction.
“And you know, that's what I don't understand about the rock fraternity,” Okereke says, clearly a bit miffed at the prospect of having to defend his creative decisions to a bevy of — well, wankers. “They're so paranoid about the idea of using electronics, but there is so much fascinating avant-garde pop music being made now, like with Justin Timberlake or Missy Elliott or The Neptunes, that the argument against using a synthesizer because it's somehow not real is just stupid. A good artist will make use of everything around them to try and fully represent what they see. That's what's so powerful about this music.”
| Want to use this article? Click here for options! |  |
