Bedknobs & Boom-Chiks
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy
Their latest album finds them probing the high-end wares of a professional studio, but at heart, the members of Hot Chip prefer to record right where they sleep
Alexis Taylor is rummaging around his flat, looking for the lap-size Yamaha keyboard he bought at a car boot sale a few years back for three quid. “I know it's here somewhere,” he says, audibly sifting through papers, coils of patch cords and pieces of gear before pausing to make a larger point. “You know, I can't tell whether it's a good thing or not to give away all of your secrets, but really the secrets aren't in the equipment. They're more in what you play and what ideas you have. I remember when I first mentioned the Casio MT-70 that we used all over our first two records, and suddenly loads of people just started buying it. It was quite funny.”
Since the release of their sophomore effort, The Warning (EMI, 2006), Taylor and his band Hot Chip have been having a time of it for more reasons than mere copycat worship. Not only did that album make the final cut for the UK's Mercury Music Prize, but it became a certified hit in Britain with two Top 40 singles — no small feat, considering the band had been pegged as a quirky electro-pop art-funk quintet with bargain-basement production methods. Of course, with that style having struck such a heavy nerve (as evinced by the success of LCD Soundsystem, M.I.A. and Funkstörung, to name a few), it was only a matter of time before Hot Chip should start to make waves on this side of the pond.
Made in the Dark (DFA/Astralwerks, 2008) marks a new direction for Taylor and his bandmates — Joe Goddard, Owen Clarke, Felix Martin and Al Doyle — partly because it's the result of a few new recording approaches that Taylor and Goddard (Hot Chip's primary production brain) sought to experiment with. “There wasn't a massive change in a lot of the ways we worked on this record,” Goddard is quick to explain. “I still used [Steinberg] Cubase SX3 on my laptop in my bedroom for most of it. But Al and Felix worked on a few songs in their studio using [Apple] Logic, and we also tracked three songs at the Strongroom, which is a real studio in London — that's something that we've never done before. They just had a good live room, so we went in there and set up with all our amps. We actually recorded five or six songs, but three live takes made it onto the record.”
Rife with squiggly synth hooks, raucous guitar and bass lines, a sedulous mixture of programmed and live percussion, and moments of soulful introspection laced with wry humor, Made in the Dark is a multilayered, headphone-happy outing that brims with spontaneity — a hallmark of many a Hot Chip recording or remix. “We've never really been too good at bothering to get rid of the little imperfections,” Taylor admits, finally stumbling across the Yamaha PortaSound VSS-30 synth he's been looking for. “But I think that adds some personality, and it's good not to be too dogmatic about it if that's what suits the song. You shouldn't just say, ‘Oh we never do that, so let's not bother.’ If somebody's playing the guitar and they're only really gonna play a little melody once or twice, it's better just to record them doing it while they're in the right groove. As a group, we're working with a lot of different types of musicianship, so we almost have to be spontaneous whenever we can.”
BENDS IN THE ROAD
Leaked this past June, the ominous-sounding single “Shake a Fist” was the opening punch. The track had become a staple of the band's live sets and, according to Goddard, the studio version — which avails itself of a spoken-word sample from Todd Rundgren's Something/Anything? album as a bridge between sections — was nearing completion before The Warning had even been released. “I take my laptop while I'm on tour,” he says, “and so do Alexis and Felix. We're trying to constantly be working so that even if we're touring quite heavily, we can still build up a back catalog of stuff. ‘Shake a Fist’ was like that.”
Goddard generated many of the song's jagged, undulating synth sounds with Arturia's suite of plug-ins — in particular, the Moog Modular and Prophet-5 emulations. “I just got really into the Moog Modular,” he says. “There's one range of presets by a Japanese designer who uses the LFO a lot. You can hear this strange chorus and a wobbly LFO on some of these sounds, which I've used in lots of different productions. I also like to have two envelopes controlling noise and melodic sounds, so if you have the noise on a separate channel in Cubase but following the same melodic part, it just gets much punchier.” (The latter trick gets a real workout in the robotic banger “Ready for the Floor.”)
Meanwhile, “Bendable Poseable,” as its title suggests, swings hard in the rhythmic sense. Using just a Shure Beta 57A mic going directly into Cubase, Goddard recorded a number of different live percussion parts and fashioned them into a jittery, three-minute loop that he emailed to Taylor, who laid down the main vocal using his own GarageBand setup. “I used the Cubase plug-in QuadraFuzz to add a little distortion to the drums,” Goddard explains. “One is an analog drum machine setting that gives them a little more fuzziness and crackliness so they sound edgy and not dull. Then you can mix them so they all have their own space.”
STRENGTH TRAINING
Exploring new spaces became the operative method for the spate of tracks that the band recorded at the Neve console/Pro Tools-equipped Strongroom studios in London. Album opener “Out at the Pictures” probably best captures Hot Chip in a live setting, in part because the first third of the song is actually taken from a 2007 performance at The Fillmore in San Francisco. When the live energy of a packed house merges with the live in-studio take, the transition is virtually seamless.
“It's all about playing in one take,” Taylor explains. “It's a completely different way of recording for us — even of making music and writing — because we're so used to working in a bedroom [see sidebar ‘While You Were Sleeping’]. We wanted some of the instruments to go through amps, and we wanted the sound to leak from each mic and amp so that you could hear that we were all together in a room.” The track also features bandmember Martin laying down live beats on an Elektron Machinedrum SPS-1, which was mixed by Dan Carey (M.I.A., Kylie Minogue), who worked his magic for six other tracks on Made in the Dark.
“Dan did record some things onto tape, as well,” Goddard says. “He took our basic mix of the drums that we tracked at the Strongroom for ‘One Pure Thought’ and bounced them to 2-inch tape, which really created an amazing effect. It just brought them all into one sonic space and made them sound less like a digital, clean drum machine. Your ears can make better sense of the track now, and it just sounds lovely, you know?”
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