Simian Mobile Disco
Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Dominic Umile
When London natives Jas Shaw and James Ford were in psyche-pop band Simian, their post-show DJ outings on tour might have been an accidental, necessary distraction for the duo at the time, but the throw downs eventually led to sizable matters. Their party-rockin' moniker, Simian Mobile Disco, is what Shaw and Ford called themselves full-time when their band dissolved. On SMD's Attack Decay Sustain Release (Wichita, 2007), Shaw and Ford's clearly defined motive to wreck shit at parties is coupled with winning pop melodies.
Simian Mobile Disco's lively dance music bursts with analog squeals and jittery drum sounds (often from keyboards) that mimic old beat machines. Robot-blip electro workouts aimed at sexually loose basement keggers are frequent on Attack Decay Sustain Release, but cuts are condensed into traditional pop-length timeframes and given little room to slow down (even with their sporadic acid breaks). Shaw and Ford's synth-driven floor fillers usually soar into peak regions very quickly.
“It was easy and quite fun to cut the long versions down,” Shaw says of the editing process for Attack Decay. “We were pretty brutal in doing so, but that's the way it goes. You can't get all precious about sections in tracks; otherwise, they would all be 20 minutes long.”
Recorded into Pro Tools, a hard-house style track called “Wooden” clocks in at just under a pithy four minutes. Shaw and Ford piled snare taps and brush sounds on hefty kicks for “Wooden's” mighty percussive base, while rather dramatic sonics from a Korg MS-20 were swabbed with glassy delay effects (from an old DOD Analog Delay and an Electro-Harmonix Memory Man Deluxe Delay) for resonance around the central melodies at work.
“Most of the percussive sounds on ‘Wooden’ are synth sounds,” Shaw says. “It's more laborious, but you get something that can change and move with the track rather than just a static sample; we are not fans of samples. Usually, we'll program something really simple with old sounds and then build the track up a bit. Once there is a bit of structure, we can make some suitable synth percussion and do a proper take with builds and fills done on the nod, meaning one of us nods our head to signal that we are going to change on the next bar. It's actually quicker than programming the changes, and you often get things that you would not have programmed. Plus, making things from scratch forces you to make new sounds, as you never get it quite the same as last time.”
To keep the momentum going, Shaw and Ford save all time-consuming studio experiments for personal time. “I think that we both spend much more time laboring over synth patches and mixes when we are on our own,” Shaw explains. “This is good, as it means that when we get together in the studio, we can work fast but still make interesting sounds. You can't spend two hours on a string sound when someone else is waiting to track their next idea. The pressure forces you to work quickly.”
The guests on Attack Decay offer speedily satisfying vocal hooks (a la Justice's redux of Simian's “Never Be Alone”) rather than elaborate, overwrought verse. NYC MC Char Johnson freestyles lazily about nicking vinyl over ominous MS-20 bass riffs and wobbly beats on “Hustler,” while the Go! Team's Ninja squeezes in MC duties between all the Doepfer analog machine surges of “It's the Beat.”
“We gave Ninja a load of things to read out, and she came up with some other bits, too,” Shaw says of tracking the Spank Rock/J.J. Fad—sounding track. “As with many of the vocals we end up using, it wasn't very structured when we recorded it. The actual ‘It's the beat’ part was not even considered a chorus; it's only when we went through and compiled the vocals that this stood out as the most catchy part.”
But before the squiggly one-offs and tin-can vocal effects of “It's the Beat” finally dissipate, it doesn't even break three and a half minutes.
“A three-minute intro is fine if you are mixing it in a club, but on an album, it's just boring,” Shaw says. “It's great to cut a track back to the bare essentials.”
| Want to use this article? Click here for options! |  |
