AFRO-MYSTIK

May 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Kylee Swenson

On the outside, it looks as though Afro-Mystik leader Chris Smith has a business head before a creative soul. After all, he founded the world-renowned Om Records in 1995 as a serious enterprise. But while catering to house, downtempo and hip-hop artists in the San Francisco scene, Smith (aka DJ Fluid) quickly got to the business of his own artist roots.

Smith started making electronic music at age 14 with a Roland Juno 106 and a Commodore 64 computer. In 1999, he formed Afro-Mystik, aiming to satisfy his love for broken-beat, jazz, African and Latin sounds. With organic sounds — including percussion, flute and bird twitters — mixed with electronic thumps, synths, vocalist Omega's soulful voice and guest MC Capital A's lulling cadence, Afro-Mystik achieves a calming effect like that of Sade's band, Sweetback.

Percussion and Rhodes are key to the mellowing experience of the six-member group's second full-length release, Morphology (Om, 2003). When recording the conga and timbale tracks, however, Smith discovered that the Om studio wouldn't cut it. “Even if I were to go out and invest thousands and thousands of dollars for more microphones, I still don't have a room here that's gonna work,” Smith admits. “So I went over to my friend Henry's studio, Cyclops. It's almost like a barn in there, but they put up sound diffusion, and they had someone who knew what he was doing do the sound design.”

Back at Om, Smith maintains his love affair with Rhodes sounds with a real Fender Rhodes 73 piano — “It only makes one sound,” he says — and the Emagic Logic EVP88 vintage piano soft synth: “You can manipulate that a lot more.” Smith also gets tweaky with Native Instruments Absynth, a Novation SuperNova, a Clavia Nord Rack and his Juno — but without getting too lost in LFOs and envelope filters. “I'm not a techie tweaker guy, where I want to go in and build my own patches. If you listen to Afro-Mystik, you're not going to hear anything where you're like, ‘Oh my God, I've never heard that sound before.’” Instead, much of Smith's tweak time is spent on EQ. “I try to cut out all the frequencies that I don't need,” he says. “That helps a lot to get out some of the garbage that you don't really even hear.”

Smith also experiments with different reverbs as a way of separating sounds. “Don't overdo it,” he warns. “If you have the kick and the snare, maybe put a small little room on that — barely — and pan it. But I think it's important not to just drown everything in effects. I only just figured out that I put way too much wetness on my mixes that are going to vinyl. If you've got a track that you're going to put on a 12-inch for clubs, you don't need as much reverb on it as you might need for something that's for listening on a CD. Because there's already so much room in the club, the song gets jumbly. If you cut out a lot of that reverb, it makes things sound cleaner and tighter in a club.” So reverb is like salad dressing — if you put too much on, it's just nasty.

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