Felix da Housecat: The Next Episode
Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef
“Before I made Kittenz and Thee Glitz, I was really hungry,” Felix da Housecat says from his London flat. “Back then, I was just fed up; I was bitter toward the electronic-music industry. I was in straight rebel-underground mode. Then Kittenz became so successful, and I got caught up in the hype. Britney Spears, Puffy, Marilyn Manson — they all wanted my sound. I was living the glitz and partying like crazy. I lost myself in the plot.”
Felix da Housecat (born Felix Stallings) is the quintessential man-boy artist, his mind racing 1,000 miles a minute, his ideas bouncing off the walls like reflections from a disco mirror ball. He's feverishly creative, fast as a whip and as scatterbrained as they come. His breakthrough, Kittenz and Thee Glitz (Emperor Norton, 2001), almost single-handedly heralded electro-clash, a term Felix despised, referring to music that he felt was less than genuine. But soon enough, the glitz got the best of him, and partying became a lifestyle, not a weekend retreat. He followed Kittenz with various projects: working with Sean Combs on an upcoming dance album, releasing the imaginary soundtrack Rocketmann! (Pias America, 2002), recording Devon Dazzle & The Neon Fever (Rykodisc, 2004) and the still unreleased Keyboard 22 and Son of Analog. But it all faded next to his appetite for destruction.
“I was more into being the rock star than the focused artist,” Felix admits. “And I didn't even realize it until Junior Sanchez pointed it out to me. I'd left my management; I was bugging. I was partying all the time. It got out of control. I was even distracted while recording Devon Dazzle. I felt I had to live up to Kittenz and Thee Glitz. I wasn't ready to record; that album was stressful. One day, I just snapped. Two years had gone by and no record made — I knew I had to get back in the studio. Virgo Blaktro is deeper.”
Virgo Blaktro & The Movie Disco (Rude Photo/Nettwerk, 2007) salutes black disco heroes and soul-funk stars, everyone from Prince and Cameo to Parliament, the Thin White Duke and Chic influencing Felix's synth-heavy opus to good times.
LET GO OF THE REINS
“For Virgo Blaktro, I wanted to do a Black electronic take on music,” he explains. “Not saying it is a color; it is deeper than that. When I say ‘black,’ I am speaking of the grooves within the music, the swing and the feel. Kittenz was just straight Euro and very flat when it came to the grooves, but it worked. With Virgo Blaktro, I focused more on the melodies and the grooves.”
Recorded in three different studios with as many producer/engineers, Virgo Blaktro & The Movie Disco charts the perfect evolution of Felix Stallings. The focus is on the streamlined black soul of Prince and Ray Parker Jr., the hard funk of Cameo and the disco grooves of Chic. To that end, Felix spread his net wide, working primarily with Belgian dance producer BC and Atlanta star producer Dallas Austin and his superengineer, Rick Sheppard.
Felix relinquished his famed control — his practice of playing, producing and mixing everything himself — to BC and Sheppard. Original tracks were cut at BC's Diamond City studio in Antwerp, Belgium (“Tweak,” “Future Calls the Dawn,” “Radio”), at Barcelona's Movie Disco studio with producer Mr. Charly “Eyebrows” (“Moviedisco,” “It's Been a Long Time,” “Monkey Cage,” “It's Your Move” and “Like Something 4 Porno!”) with further recording, rerecording and mixdown at Austin's DARP studios in Atlanta.
“I've always mixed and engineered all my albums,” Felix divulges. “I'd share songwriting credits or drum programming, but everything else was all me. For this album, I wanted to bring in some high-end engineers and dope programmers and producers so I could focus on the songwriting. It was taking so much of my energy on top of DJing; I wanted to take a new angle. I wanted an electronic disco-type sound, with live bass, guitar and drums, and added synths.”
HO, HO, IT'S MAGIC
Working with BC (aka Alain Croisy) in Antwerp after becoming enamored with his supertrigger finger in Apple Logic, Felix got down to business. Relying on BC to match the old-school keyboard sounds he heard in his head to various virtual synths, Felix found he was free to create. But some practices die hard.
“BC would pull up my favorite synths and drum machines for me to work with,” Felix explains. “Then I'd take a bottle of mescal, drink a couple shots, and start playing and creating. I'd establish the blueprint, and we'd take it from there. So much of the recording process for this album is a blur. BC taught me some things, but he is so fast I just focused on playing the keys; we did the drums together, and he did the bleeps and blunders.”
“It seems like Felix doesn't know what he is doing,” BC says from an Atlanta studio, “but he comes up with these amazing melodies. I always wonder afterward, ‘How did we do that?’ You see him bending over the keyboard coming up with melodies. It seems like he doesn't know anything about music, but he does.”
Eventually, Felix moved to Atlanta's DARP studios where he rerecorded certain tracks. But “Radio” and “Future Calls the Dawn” remained untouched from their Antwerp incarnations. Beyond recording locations, two themes run throughout Virgo Blaktro: down with midrange, up with “The Magic Box.”
“Me and BC always argue about virtual synths,” Felix says with a laugh. “They are already so compressed and EQ'd. But one thing about my sound that I explained to BC is that I don't like a lot of midrange. In all my synths in all my songs, I drop the midrange. With all the EQs across the board, I bring some of the midrange down to give it that warm sound. The only thing that I don't drop in the mids is the vocals. When we are working, I am still getting my sound. We don't add a lot of compression outside of the kicks, and we will only compress the synths if you can't hear them in the mix. So once I got it half the time when I am recording, I am screaming in BC's ear, ‘Drop the mids!’”
Meanwhile, Felix pumps up his vocals with a secret device he calls “the magic box.” Remix was told he wouldn't divulge the actual model and manufacturer of this secret weapon, but Felix was relatively easy to crack.
“A lot of the vocals,” he finally explains, “are me through my magic box. Puffy, Dallas, they all want to know what the magic box is, but I can't tell you! DigiTech made it in the early '90s, but it's not a vocoder; it's called a Vocalist. You can't find that shit no more unless you go on eBay.”
But it was a worthwhile purchase for vocal-challenged Felix. “Those glistening vocals in ‘Radio’ are from the magic box,” BC says. “You can connect the magic box to your keyboard and play the notes that you are singing at the same time; it just layers it like a vocoder-ish effect. It is kind of a hassle to connect it all the time, but it does something special. Felix is not the greatest singer in the world, which is why we used that. I also used Melodyne to tune the vocals. I tune them really hard; then they start to sound like a little robot.”
Although “the magic box” is a savior in the studio, it still needs some coaxing to work to Felix's benefit. “Basically, I made two presets where the DigiTech will capture the voice instead of the keyboard voice,” Felix explains. “You just play the keys and mix your voice with it. But you still have to be able to hold a tune; you can't just plug it up and it will sing for you. The Vocalist is very hard to operate, and it's only MIDI'd for the notes. So when Rick Sheppard is running a session, he is punching me in 'cause I can't sing and play the notes at the same time. I write the melodies, and then I punch in the vocals section by section. It's very hard to sing through, play at the same time and hold the key so it registers through the Vocalist, but it is amazing.”
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