Postcards From the Edge
Dec 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef
Hitting Manhattan for a nearly sold-out performance at Central Park's SummerStage this past September, Underworld brought not only music but live digicams, projected visuals resembling dead Moonscapes, audience interaction and gigantic inflatable pods that looked like Tylenol tablets floating over center stage. Performing classics like “Born Slippy” and “Mona,” as well as new material from Oblivion With Bells (Side One, 2007), Underworld proved why they continue to be vital to the health of what is loosely called dance music.
But what makes a stage show such as Underworld's tick? How does the band draw from its vast 20-year-old catalog to create a mesmerizing 3-D audio/visual experience using light rigs, live cameras, video screens and front-of-house mixes? As with any large-scale venture, Underworld's live show begins with a small idea. Before every tour, Rick Smith, Karl Hyde and Darren Price (a member of Underworld's live band) gather with their crew to formulate a game plan. Haydn Cruickshank (lights), John Newsham (front-of-house sound) and Toby Vogel (visuals) have been with Underworld collectively since the late-'80s and work hand-in-glove with the band members to achieve their vision.
“Preparation is a weird thing,” Smith says. “It's like preparing your instrument for the jam. It's not to prepare something so that it flows like you expect. You try to find this balance where you are preparing things so you have some idea of what is going to happen. And yet it has all the potential to go askew and make you think about what you are doing. The danger with too much preparation is that it becomes a routine. Then it's dead.”
Underworld's live setup is primed for improvisation. “Over the years, Rick has developed an instrument onstage, which is as live as the guitar or a violin,” Hyde adds. “The fact that it is electronic disturbs some people's minds, like it is an inanimate object, and when you press ‘Go,’ it repeats itself the same way every night. Without Rick playing his instrument, it won't do anything. It will be just a bunch of noise, a sound clash. His instrument is the mixing desk and the computer and those electronic things that are often looked down upon as being repetitive sound generators. It takes months of preparation, then us getting together in a room remembering how everything goes. That element of disaster is important to our work.”
MASTERS OF DISASTER
Smith's live “instruments” — including a Midas Heritage 1000 console, two Apple iMac G5s (running Logic Pro 7 and Ableton Live 6), three PowerBook G4s, a Roland VP-330 Vocoder and a Clavia Nord Lead 2 — enable him to re-create and remix any Underworld track live on the fly. It's a whole lot of processing power that requires a lot of audacity to use.
“Every performer is really fearful of messing up and yet, that is often what we are aiming for,” Smith admits. “It's not to mess up and spoil things; it's to be able to deal with it and encourage us to get over that fear. If we screw up, it just puts us in another phase: ‘Okay, this is new; what do we do here, hold or drop or raise the ante?’”
Watching Underworld perform at Central Park, what leaps out — besides the music and Hyde's gold lamé suit — are the dual Apple laptops positioned stage right next to the large Midas board. Cloaked from view are three more Macs, all forming what they hope is a foolproof sonic chain.
“Five Macs onstage,” Smith says with a laugh. “It looks ridiculous, doesn't it? But they all get worked. It's all to do with trying to get 'round problems of electronics and sequencers, and having a predictable, linear presentation. In the early days when we used to use one computer, an Atari 1040ST, you would prepare this open jam, a series of loops and options that could come up on the console but, of course, it still hung around this spine. What we tried to do was take two different pieces and run them in parallel, just as a DJ would, but not just overlap them. The five Macs really come from the need to run things in parallel; very largely, it's to keep us guessing.”
Native Instruments Kore lies at the heart of Underworld's ability to work comfortably onstage today. Running inside Ableton and Logic, Kore is holy manna as far as Smith is concerned.
“I really do think Kore is the most amazing musical invention for a long time,” Smith exclaims. “It saves us fortunes because of the interfaces and options it makes available to us. We generate so many random ideas that when archiving those ideas, it is a bit like a library that is not organized. You need something to alphabetize all that. Kore allows you to access information in a very quick fashion. A file that is made in Logic or Ableton can be played back in the finder, copied across and played on a different computer with no problems, and you can still know where it is and what it is from.”
The multiple Macs store the elements of Underworld's original mixes, so no need for absolute pre-tour preparation or extracting single elements for eventual mixdown. Underworld creates new mixes at every show. But with Oblivion With Bells, there was mental preparation.
“As with all the previous albums, the translation of the studio versions becomes an extension of the original writing,” Smith says. “The final mastering and printing of the studio version is absolutely not the end of the writing process, just a semicolon. When we prepare for our live work, we look at each track in isolation and approach its particular problems in whatever way is appropriate — to somehow maintain essences of the album version and yet be flexible enough to fuse into our live jams. [Smith admits to occasionally stripping excess reverb, for example]. In that context, this album, even with its more filmic nature and many acoustic recordings, was no different than any of the previous ones. Our tendency in recent years to play tracks live before they are finished or released also helps immensely.”
RABBIT IN A HAT
Underworld's live flexibility aids its pursuit of “the humongously long jam,” which now happens in real time, a real high-wire act. And until recently, there was no actual setlist, just a first song title thrown up 10 minutes before showtime.
“What changed this year,” Hyde asserts, “is that the light, sound and visuals guys weren't getting a fair chance to improvise. On this tour, we got cards with titles that we'd lay out in the dressing room, and then all the team got together and Rick would start moving the titles around. Anything that worked the night before, we'd avoid. If you start thinking from experience, you're not responding to the moment. So five or 10 minutes before the show, Rick will put together a setlist, but with the idea that we might change it. If the crowd takes it to another direction and Rick responds to that, then off we go.”
Between Smith, Hyde and Price (whose role is apparently of a supportive, technical nature), hand signals are still used, along with body movements, eye gestures and occasionally, Smith's taking control of the vocals, with or without Hyde's consent.
“It is not always a good feeling between us,” Smith reveals. “Oftentimes it is, ‘What was that? Why did you do that?’”
“Sometimes you miss the direction,” Hyde acknowledges, “or maybe it was a better direction but it cut across your initial idea. One of the best things that ever happened to me was the mute button. Rick might take me out because he doesn't think what I am doing is appropriate. Maybe the music needs a break. You learn so much from that. In the same way when we are writing, Rick might mute one of my parts. You have to stay open enough that you don't get upset.”
SOUND FUNKTIONING
As for getting down to business at the preshow crew meetings, Smith and Hyde shy away from specifics, but front-of-house engineer John Newsham (of Surrey's Funktion-One) fills in the blanks.
“We talk about the new music that we haven't done live, about what each tune is trying to do musically and what Rick considers the important aspects of the tune. Rick does most of the mixing onstage, so I have to make sure it sounds good in the house. If we are using a house or rental system, I have to present the band's music through that system. In our rider, I ask for a Midas analog mixer, as digital mixers aren't quick enough. I have 12 channels of submixes of Rick's main mix; one of those channels can have several mixes coming down it. I have to EQ this stuff on the fly.”
Meanwhile, Smith is also working up a sweat on the fly. “Rick is running 99 percent of sounds in Pro Tools,” Newsham says, “running two separate systems of Logic Audio sewn together at the Heritage mixer. He can remix from all the original samples and loops, creating new remixes every night; he can also remix another tune at the same time and overlay the two. Like a DJ mixing vinyl, Rick can crossfade between ‘Born Slippy’ and ‘Skyscraper,’ for example, between two complete 40-channel remixes. Added to that is live vocal and guitar, Karl's spoken word mixing on a Pioneer CDJ, a Vocoder with a keyboard or guitar and Darren Price's Ableton system.”
When first entering a venue, Newsham plays a collection of personal CDs to gauge the room sound, followed by an automated female voice program (in Logic), which tests individual channels. Depending on the room, he will use a dbx 160 or a Yamaha SPX2000 to compress/effect vocals, his smaller Midas mixer running 12 channels assigned to three kick drums, two Roland TR-909s, an Electro-Voice vocal mic, Gibson Les Paul, percussion, effects and backing vocals, keyboards, vocoder and bass lines.
“Rick might be in his own world with a flat mix,” Newsham conjectures, “and I am out in the room with a system that sounds bright and maybe with glass walls or slapback. I need to pull the reverbs and effects right back just in order to be able to hear the main parts of the music. Occasionally, I might add reverb using a Lexicon PCM or another Yamaha SPX2000 to brighten the room if it needs it.
“We have very rarely had crashes,” he adds. “We are running two complete setups onstage so one can always take over. And Darren's Ableton setup can also cover a glitch.”
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