GOLDFRAPP
Apr 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Christine Hsieh
Far be it from Goldfrapp to do anything the usual way: The duo (Will Gregory and Alison Goldfrapp) is known for creating timeless melodies and eerie atmospherics reworked with a peculiar, vintage-inspired twist and backed with cinematic, bombastic and often orchestral soundscapes. With their latest outing, Black Cherry (Mute, 2003), Gregory and Goldfrapp have found that their sprawling collection of aging synths is still more than adequate for turning up the energy a few notches — and many are perfectly capable of adding an urban-industrial tinge to their unique brand of melancholia.
Take, for instance, the Russian Polyvoks synth that Gregory found in Berlin. “It's made by the Russian military, apparently, out of military components,” he says. “It looks like a tank!” Although neither he nor Goldfrapp knew how to work the darn thing (the instructions were written in Russian), this beast of a machine ended up forming the rhythmic backbone of several tunes. It added that distinctive, submarine bass sound to “Black Cherry” and a throbbing, metallic growl to the aggressive, retro-tinged “Train” (which, combined with the raw, organic sound of Goldfrapp's Roland SH-9, came out as a sharp homage to the disco era).
Their studio is crowded with all sorts of equipment, from a Korg 700 (“I use it a lot to treat my voice,” Goldfrapp says of the machine she uses to transform her vocals into a computerized howl) to a Roland Jupiter-series synth and various Casio keyboard castoffs. But the duo is reluctant to part with any of them. Gregory and Goldfrapp prefer to treat the synths in the same fashion as their acoustic instruments. By experimenting with their sound capabilities sans preconceived sounds or goals, they're able to reshape the resulting effects and push their own creative sensibilities into new territory. “A lot of the old stuff, even though it was sort of eclectic, was still basic,” Gregory says. “If you moved your hand one way, you could change it in a very obvious and basic way. I think with a lot of the synths now, there are no knobs that will do that for you. I'm sure they're great if you know how to work them, but they just don't have that kind of instant appeal.”
The duo's instinct to keep things basic also arose when it came time to record the strings on “Black Cherry.” In that case, the demo recording turned out better than the elaborate “real” take. “I find it hard to live with top lines that are MIDI,” Gregory explains. “But with ‘Black Cherry,’ when we recorded the strings, they didn't sound as good as the MIDI strings we used to write it with. Sometimes, you just want something that's more static.”
By embracing mechanical electronic sounds, Gregory and Goldfrapp have added a unique twist to their moody productions. “People actually playing synths lend a very strange atmosphere,” Gregory says. “Live jammed synths always try to sound like proper instruments, but they don't quite make it, and that falling short is what gives it that alien sort of feel. It's artificial, and there's something a bit sad to it, like glam rock that's played on Mars.”
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