Ladytron | Layer Cake

Jun 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By David Weiss

USING GOOD STUDIO JUDGMENT ALONG WITH DELAYS, EBOWS AND SYNTHS, LADYTRON THICKENS UP THE SOUND WITHOUT SPOILING THE RECIPE

Unknown to the world at large or even his bandmates in Ladytron, Daniel Hunt has a brand new theory about The Beatles.

“They were the Internet of the 1960s,” keyboardist/guitarist/producer Hunt says. “There's so much information available now that music is one of the few forms of communications that is actually pretty direct. You can have one important album that reaches an enormous amount of people, probably more than any news broadcast. Back then, The Beatles could release an album to a wider audience than any other form of media. There were no global news networks, so one of the most globally pervasive forms of media was The Beatles.”

Vocalist/keyboardist Helen Marnie and keyboardist/programmer Reuben Wu seem surprised to hear this revelation — apparently they had no idea that such a concept has been forming in their collaborator's mind. Co-lead vocalist/keyboardist Mira Aroyo is not with them here in the multimirrored basement bar of a Manhattan hotel; instead, she's recovering from a broken leg suffered on a European ski slope. She'll have to learn about Hunt's Fab Four concept at a later date.

Forty years or so later, Ladytron has unassumingly asserted itself as another Liverpool foursome to be reckoned with. Their fourth album, 2008's Velocifero (Nettwerk), fires a fresh salvo into the broodingly energetic atmosphere of electronic music that they alone seem to occupy. The 13-song collection has all the signatures of Ladytron, which start first and foremost with Aroyo and Marnie's unmistakable vocal arrangements — tense, soaring, beautiful, cold and expressive. The simple danceable beats are tough without being overpowering, almost always wrapped around a grain of distortion. On the new disc, art and science combine in the multilayered analog synth lines, a pallet of mechanical organic sounds mixing increasingly with the precision of soft synths.

CODE ON THE ROAD

Life has been a positive blur for Ladytron throughout the current decade. Their 2001 debut, 604, and 2002 follow-up, Light & Magic (both on Emperor Norton), caught the attention of an audience struck by the group's analog-heavy style of storytelling, as well as their unique visual style. In 2005, the album known as Witching Hour (Rykodisc) combined indie-rock bite with the sawtooths of their Korg MS-20s, and propelled them on a road trip that technically never had to end, based on the Ladytron cult that grew around songs like “Destroy Everything You Touch,” “International Dateline” and “High Rise.”

“We toured for ages,” Hunt says. “We started in mid-2005, and if you include when we went to China, it was more like three years. We could have carried on that way forever. We had to finally just say, ‘No.’”

“Once you get into the swing of playing live, you stop being in a musical state of mind about the record that you're playing onstage,” Wu adds. “And it becomes an incubation period for the next record.”

“It's not as if you're on the road writing,” Hunt says.

“Some bands do,” Marnie interjects. “But maybe what they write…”

“…songs about being on tour?” Hunt concludes for her. “I prefer to wait until you get home and get some energy to go and write somewhere else.”

Ladytron took maximum advantage of any breaks in the hectic schedule, with each member putting together demos of their own songs while at home, typically using Steinberg Cubase SX running on laptops, along with Native Instruments soft synths and analog instruments recorded directly into the computer. As in the past, the band remains steadfast in their right to use the DAW that they believe is best for them. “People are always saying, ‘Use Pro Tools, use Logic,’” Hunt says. “Why? Is it better? We've had no problems; we know how to use it. We get results very quickly, and there's no use changing. Pro Tools is a necessity when there's a rig in the studio, but in that case you just get a good engineer.”

As a result of their abundant-yet-homeless existence, it was inevitable that infinitely portable soft synths would play a larger songwriting role for Ladytron. For many electronic bands this would not be particularly noteworthy, but it is for a group that made its mark via its commitment to analog synth legends such as the ARP 2600, Solina String synthesizer, Harmonium (with Leslie amp) and Korg MS-10 and MS-20.

“I just think you have to be realistic about it,” Hunt states. “If you're traveling a lot and using a laptop to make music, you need soft synths. Soft synths would be of little use to us live, but they're indispensable in the recording process. They sound increasingly good now, and we always combine that with live instruments. But it's not just for tradition's sake: There are things you get from an MS-20 that you couldn't get out of anything else.”

“The act of playing an MS-20 in the studio is different from sequencing by putting boxes onto grids,” Wu says. “It's not as perfect, but you can hear the groove.”

“People are building analog-style instability into soft synths now, but it's a different kind,” Hunt adds. “I like the way its converged there. Some people are hardcore about software and say hardware is dead, while other people are ultra-fascistic about the hardware and say that software can't replicate it. I think we're somewhere in between.”

INTO THE FIRE

Armed with a treasure trove of skeletal demos, the foursome of Ladytron officially concluded Witching Hour touring on Sept. 29, 2007. Their breather would last exactly 96 hours, as the group dove into the studio to sift through two albums' worth of material to begin creating Velocifero, a name that quite appropriately translates to mean “Bringer of Speed.”

According to Hunt, the quick return to recording came from an even combination of outside pressure to release a new album and their own eagerness to create. “We toured longer than we expected, and we knew we had to get the record out and keep things moving,” he says. “It would have been easy enough to have a break, but it's now four years ago since we recorded Witching Hour. We made this album, and when we get a chance, we're going to record another one pretty quickly — we've basically got another album in reserve with a different feel.”

While Witching Hour was recorded in a Liverpool studio with producer Jim Abbiss, the seeds of Velocifero would be sown across the Channel in France. Before hard drives could get spinning for real, however, first came a brief misstep in a record company's in-house studio. The lighting was shot, the air conditioning was running hot, and despite the laid-back nature of Ladytron, the facility was graded unacceptable.

“I had to say, ‘I'm sorry, I can't record here,’” Marnie recalls. “It was just like a hole. We spent a day in there and said, ‘Look, this is a bad idea.’ Then we went to The Garage, and it was perfect. The lighting was good.”

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