Voyage of Discovery
May 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef
FOURTEEN YEARS AFTER PORTISHEAD'S GROUNDBREAKING DUMMY, THE BRISTOL TRIO RETURNS AND ITS WORLD HAS NEVER SOUNDED OR LOOKED STRANGER
“America's music is just dying, right?” asks Portishead's Geoff Barrow on the phone from Bristol. One third of this seaside town's greatest musical export is ready to discuss Third, Portishead's first album in 10 years (“I'm aware of [Remix's] nerdiness,” he jokes), but first, he has a few things to get off his chest.
“[America's music] is shit, isn't it?” he continues. “The hip-hop artists are just rubbish. Jay-Z's records always sound good, but he got the sack from Universal. If you end up with a country Britney, it doesn't matter 'cause they're all twats anyway. Timbaland came to England trying to find a Coldplay to produce. Everyone told him to fuck off. He went to America and got his own band and they are gi-normous, the most revolting people you have ever seen in your life. They are called Timbaland. We all like it underground but no one is buying it. Even Moby is struggling.”
The members of Portishead — Beth Gibbons, Adrian Utley and Barrow — haven't made a proper studio record since 1997's Portishead (Go! Discs/London), the follow-up to their own gi-normous debut, Dummy (Go! Discs/London, 1994), but they have been listening. Barrow didn't like what he heard.
“Mark Ronson's record is shit,” Barrow exclaims, referring to the celebrated Amy Winehouse-associated producer's release Version (Allido, 2007). “He is a massive superstar in the UK. He considers himself as Quincy Jones. I'll tell you who else is really bad: DJ Spooky. He is so full of shit. At least Mark Ronson is talented. I saw DJ Spooky at the Knitting Factory, and I tried to buy a beer to throw at him. There are black people in England, so you don't have to come here and make out that there aren't any black people in England's art community. You have someone like Madlib who is a fucking genius — a genius! [He's] a real true artist in what he does, when he takes American TV soundtracks and turns them into hip-hop. Then Spooky turns up and plays a couple shit European drum 'n' bass records.”
THE NERVE!
Who is Barrow to be mouthing off about U.S. musical exports? For the uninitiated, Portishead single-handedly (well, along with fellow Bristol residents Massive Attack) invented trip-hop, a media-acquired term that never matched the depth and glory of Portishead's first three releases.
Like mad-alien scientists traveling the galaxy only to sample Earth's musical styles of the '60s, '70s and '80s, Portishead remain one of the most original, if remote acts of the 1990s. With Gibbons' beautiful, mournful howl at their noirish music's center, Barrow and Utley surrounded her melancholy with everything from theremin and crackling '50s guitar to samples of Isaac Hayes, War, Weather Report and Lalo Schifrin's Mission: Impossible theme. Inspired by hip-hop and the soundtracks of John Barry and Ennio Morricone (Barrow), as well as Janis Joplin and Edith Piaf (Gibbons), Portishead hit mid-'90s America — then in thrall to grunge — like a blast from some nightmarish torch-song past. Mixmag said it best: “Beth Gibbons sounds like a chain-smoking Joni Mitchell hanging out with Cypress Hill.”
Portishead's third album, Third (Island/Universal, 2008), reclaims time lost with a blaze of intuition and originality. Never ones to rest on their credits, the band made Third sound as deranged, doom-laden and experimental as anything previously released by the admittedly agonized trio.
“The new album is less hip-hop if you listen to modern hip-hop,” Barrow (drums, production) suggests. “But Third is purely influenced by old hip-hop [and metal drone group Sunn O))), as Barrow says later]. For me, it's Public Enemy, Marley Marl, EPMD, Flying Lotus and Madlib. That is pure mad music, out-of-tuneness and noise. But people are worried about making money. I'm not; I just want to make a decent album that is heavy.
“In the past, we might have relied more on soundtracks or orchestral noises or keyboards,” he continues. “Dummy was a fairly experimental record. Then the second record was the same thing. People thought it was another weird record by Portishead. Third is exactly the same, but it is a lot more heavy, less reliant on blues and soul and more reliant on purely sonically interesting sounds.”
UNDER THE RADAR
Working in a Radar 24 digital system, Portishead generally avoided direct sampling, instead creating its new nightmare scenarios with a combination of live and programmed drums (played by Barrow and Clive Deamer), guitar and a massive battery of modular-synth systems effected by a collection of '60s and '70s compressors and EQs, further warped by a Roland Space Echo. But it began with the group's wholesale rejection of Pro Tools.
“When we began recording Third in 2005,” Barrow recalls, “Pro Tools sounded shit. I would go into recording sessions where no one was listening — they would just be staring at a screen talking about a fucking plug-in that sounded shit. People were really excited when Pro Tools could reproduce the sound of a turntable stopping on a beat. That made me want to puke. They sorted it a year or so ago; now, Pro Tools sounds great, but it doesn't create soul, it just creates nerds. Jay-Z's albums always sounded good, but there was generally a lack of soul.
“But Radar is amazing,” he adds, offering a solution. “It makes you make decisions. When you record a bad saxophone solo on 138 channels, you can to listen to it forever in the [Pro Tools] mix. With Radar, you have 24 channels, like tape. So you have to make a decision. Also, Radar sounds not dissimilar from tape.”
“We used to have a tape machine, an Atari 1040 computer and a couple samplers,” Utley (guitars, synths, production) recalls. “We'd record live through nice equipment or terrible equipment. The difference with Radar is now we can capture audio on a hard-disk recorder and cut up things and have multitrack loops. We used to play a track and overdub or get people in to record, mix that, then cut it to vinyl, then sample that. Now we're just playing straight to Radar, which sounds so good. Pro Tools|HD is up there now, but Radar sounds like tape. There is no sense of urgency — obviously, we took 10 years to make this record — but it really works for us.”
Writing and recording as far back as 2000 (“Nylon Smile”), Portishead met at Barrow's SOA studio (called State of Art because it is anything but). Moving beyond their former roles, Gibbons brought in guitar riffs; Utley created noise and ideas from his ARP, Analogue Systems, Doepfer, EMS, Plan B and Moog modular synths; and Barrow recorded guitar and bass lines, as well as drum loops (created one drum and cymbal at a time). Barrow is not impressed with the general state of the plug-in, so Portishead avoided them.
“When you listen to people who make interesting production records,” he says as he ascends the soapbox again, “they all sound like they've been made in a box. They've taken a plug-in, and when they get really crazy they stick it through an amp. For fuck's sake, look at the people you really respect, and that just sounds boring. Music is so easy to distort or alter now. That is why the drums on this album are quite normal. I just want them to sound real and interesting rather than ‘plug-in interesting.’”
“Even from the early days, we wanted to achieve the same sound as now; it's only 15 years on,” Utley adds. “It's usually slightly disruptive and experimental and pushing a few boundaries. We use a mixture of extremely broken equipment and extremely rare equipment, like my valve [Neumann] U 47 and RCA ribbon mic; they have this warmth but also a fidelity that we would then completely deconstruct. It's not all that stuff that you can hear on modern recordings. That's not interesting to us.”
| Want to use this article? Click here for options! |  |
