ONE STEP BEYOND
Jun 1, 2002 12:00 PM, by Chris Gill
As the duo known as Starecase takes over the DJ booth at Miami's Crobar nightclub, it's obvious that they're not going to deliver the usual DJ set. Paul Crossman — the bloke with the shaved head, also known as General MIDI — may be carrying a record box full of 12-inch vinyl, but his mop-haired mate Al “Eels” Watson has an Apple G4 laptop computer and a Roland PC-160A MIDI controller tucked under his arm. As the set unfolds, Watson spends as much time playing synth lines and controlling beats as Crossman does cueing up records. MC Jakes, who used to work with drum 'n' bass artists such as EZ Rollers and Technical Itch, mans the mic for most of the set, pumping up the audience with his high-energy raps, rhymes and toasts. For the grand finale, singer Jokate Benson joins Starecase to perform live vocals on “Second Time” and “Faith.”
“Watching a DJ can be like watching paint dry,” says Crossman. “There's no visual element to DJing. Bands can blow me away, but I find it really difficult to get inspiration from a DJ. We added a live element to our sets to make things more exciting for us and the audience.”
The incorporation of live elements into their DJ sets is one of Starecase's many distinguishing features. Their music is a category-defying blend of expertly produced breaks, progressive house, dub, trance and indie rock, somewhat similar to the music of BT, Deepsky and Hybrid but with its own distinct personality. Starecase's debut album, First Floor (Kinetic/Hope, 2002), features a variety of vocal tracks from guests — including Benson (“Faith”), Spiritualized's Sean Cook (“Bitter Little Pill”), Omi (“Second Time”) and Charlie Newlands (“See”) — balanced by ethereal instrumentals and pounding floor fillers. Although there are plenty of beats to keep a dancefloor busy, First Floor also delivers strong melodies, crisp production and enough emotional variety to appeal to listeners who rarely venture into clubs.
“The album is like a compilation of the various Starecase sounds,” says Watson. “While we enjoy doing remixes, we always focused on our own music. With this album, we have a much better idea of where we want to go in the future. We've become a lot better songwriters.”
The duo first crossed paths in 1997 at Bristol's Lakota nightclub. Watson, a former car-park attendant who had released the minor dancefloor hit “You Must Admit” as Flybaby in 1994, and Crossman, an aspiring DJ who had a day job as a computer programmer, discovered that they had similar musical goals and formed Starecase. “When we started working together, Eels would show up at my studio with acid lines written out in notation on sheets of paper,” notes Crossman.
Starecase released their first single, “First Floor Deadlock,” on the Lakota label and soon caught the attention of Leon Alexander and Steve Satterthwaite, who had just started Hope Recordings in Bristol. In addition to releasing several popular singles on Hope, the duo has remixed music for a range of artists including Timo Maas, Soft Cell, The Orb, Paul van Dyk, Kym English, BT, DJ Tiesto and Brother Brown.
Although Crossman often does solo DJ gigs as General MIDI, the duo decided almost from the start that they would form a band to play Starecase's music live. The six-piece Starecase Sound System, which currently consists of Crossman, Watson, Benson, MC Jakes, guitarist Andy Burrows and drummer Ian Matthews, has played at festivals in the United Kingdom and a handful of gigs in the United States. However, they refuse to play in normal dance clubs. “We made a conscious decision not to do that,” says Crossman. “When you put a band in a dance club, people stop dancing and just stand there and watch. Audiences in America have a rock attitude. They don't dance to live bands.”
Currently on tour opening for Timo Maas, the Starecase Sound System is turning heads of dance-music fans around the world, reintroducing audiences accustomed to DJ sets to the thrills of live performance. Remix joined Crossman, Watson and Benson on the rooftop of a Miami hotel to talk about the steps Starecase took to make First Floor and to take their music on the road.
You worked on First Floor for more than a year. Why did it take so long to complete?
Paul Crossman: It's a Bristol thing. Everything takes forever to do there. When Hope Recordings gave us the okay to make an album, we started writing it. Then we sat in the studio for three or four days going, “Uh, right.”
Al Watson: We were trying to find the “write album” button on our gear. We couldn't find it in the manual. We got a bunch of new kit in the studio and spent two months with our heads in manuals learning how to use it properly before we could record anything. That's part of making music these days. It took a lot longer than we thought it would. It got to the point where Leon [Alexander] got so fed up waiting for it that he said, “I'm going to take whatever you have in your computer and release that.”
Crossman: He was literally going to tear the hard drive out of the computer! We worked with three vocalists before we found Jo [Benson], and we thought we had a good album, but the label thought there wasn't a hit on it. The album wasn't finished until we recorded “Faith” with Jo. When we finally delivered the album to the label and they listened to it, you could almost hear them all thinking, “Now, we can market this puppy.” It took us a long time to do, but we're perfectionists. We wanted to make sure it was right.
What new equipment did you get?
Watson: We had a very simple setup: a sampler, some effects boxes and a really old PC that was struggling to do much of anything.
Crossman: The PC died recently. We had a wake for it. When we look at what we had, we wonder how we did anything. We got new monitor speakers, a new desk, new outboard processors and a new computer. For the first couple of months, we were trying to learn to read Japanglish. I can hear a difference in the early tracks when we were learning to use the gear and the later tracks where we knew what we were doing.
Watson: We should have a competition to see if anybody can guess the chronological order that the tracks were recorded.
What software are you using?
Crossman: [Emagic] Logic Audio all the way. We're excited because when we get back, we've got Logic 5 waiting for us. We have three computers networked together. We use a lot of soft synths, but we like to run them through expensive outboard processors. Timo Maas is the inspiration for that. The sound that he gets is phenomenal. He has a lot of very tasty outboard gear. We can just about afford the catalogs. You can tell when music is written entirely in a computer; it has a certain sound. Since we were moving away from 12-inch releases with the album, it was a chance for us to break away from that sound. If we were doing techno polka, we could have done that on the computer — Strauss in trance; you know what I mean.
How did you master the album?
Watson: We have an incredible mastering engineer working for us, John Dent. His mastering studio is about 30 miles outside of Bristol. He used to have a place called the Exchange, and between 1977 and 1987, he mastered about 70 percent of all the Number 1 hits in the UK.
Crossman: There was one week in 1983 where he mastered all of the Top 10 hits in the UK.
Watson: He's the kind of guy who will stay up until five in the morning trying different cables between his equipment.
Crossman: When we went in to master the album, we showed up at his studio with our laptop and a CD that sounded horrible. He said, “Hang on a second,” and he came back with this 8-band parametric EQ and said, “I think we could use this.” We do all of our recording in-house, and I think we've resigned to the fact that what we can do there is quite limited. It's an incredible writing studio and quite a good production studio, but these days, you need to have the best stuff. What do you want to do? Spend $20,000 on a load of Apple gear, or spend $10,000 on something that's going to provide you with a really good input signal and take the other $10,000 to hire out a big studio and run your music through an SSL board to get that classy sound?
Watson: We felt that our sound on this album was a bit limited.
Crossman: Working with John was an incredible experience. He had these boxes of Cult and Steel Pulse 24-tracks that he was remastering. We were sitting in this studio with all this history in it, but he has almost no equipment there. Everything he has was built by a Lithuanian hermit. He used 3-stage limiting on our stuff. When he was done, our album sounded like it was 10 dB louder. Mastering is an art. It's like magic.
Crossman: John played us music over two different pairs of speakers and asked us what we liked. They sounded exactly the same to us, but I trust his ears. You could hear everything. It's electronic music, but you could hear us coughing in the background. The wires must have picked it up.
What synthesizers do you use?
Crossman: The Access Virus and the Korg Triton. We have a [Sequential Circuits] Pro-One, which I've had for years and is absolutely fantastic.
Watson: We try to record everything in the computer as soon as we can. It's unbelievable what you can do with computers now. We used to fight with [Steinberg] Cubase on the Atari.
Crossman: When you'd play a track, the screen would take four seconds to redraw itself. But, to put things in perspective, when you've got more technology and equipment to deal with, it can get more difficult to write. When we had the Atari and a sampler, we would bang tracks out immediately.
Watson: It's not what you've got. It's how you use it.
Crossman: But while the technology is moving up, we're using a lot more organic sound sources, like live guitars and drums. We're starting to write songs again instead of just club tracks. We like to challenge ourselves.
Was the inclusion of all the vocal-based songs on the album part of your move to break away from dancefloor tracks?
Crossman: Yeah. We were writing an album. We had the freedom to do whatever we wanted. Bristol is a funny place, because it is really small and has a strong musical identity. We met every single vocalist we used on this album within a mile of where we live.
How did you meet Benson?
Crossman: She was singing in Doreen Doreen, the best cover band on the planet.
Jokate Benson: They are very kitsch.
Crossman: Andy, who plays guitar and sings in the band, is a mate of mine. Our drummer is from his band, as well. When we used to go hear Doreen Doreen play, we'd go, “I'd like that drummer, that vocalist and one of those please. Does that one come in green?”
Benson: I was also working with a drum 'n' bass artist from Bristol, DJ Ming. I let go of those two projects to give myself space for something else to come in. These guys asked me if I wanted to do a track, and I said, “Yeah.” I wrote the lyrics to “Faith” about feeling like I needed someone to let me know what I should be doing. It's not a love song.
Crossman: When we met Jo, she was tired of making music.
Benson: I give it up for about two months every year. I've done everything — jazz, blues, funk, hip-hop, drum 'n' bass. But this is the first dance thing I've done. About a year ago, I nearly gave up working on music completely. I said to the gods, “Prove to me that I should be doing this, because it's just doing my head in.”
Watson: I feel that way every day.
Benson: I wanted to go to Australia and learn how to surf, but then I met these guys. “Faith” is unlike anything I've ever written before. I wrote the song in my bed. I can't write songs in front of people. I prefer to take a track home, put it on the stereo, chill out with a cup of tea and just write. The melody for the chorus came first. We had to do a fair amount of work on the verse. “Faith” is quite girlie compared to the way I normally sing. The words love and joy are in there. After we finished it, we went away for the weekend, and when we came back, we really liked it. It's pretty catchy.
Crossman: When we delivered the track to Hope, they were dancing around the office going, “Oh my God!”
Benson: It's quite hard to sing live. There are no breaks in it. I have to sing all the way through, and I have to push my voice because there are a lot of high notes. I need to have a good brandy before I go onstage to get those vocal cords open.
It's so much easier to just show up at a gig with a record box and spin records. Why did you form a band?
Watson: You feel like you're cheating when people pay to see you and there's not much of a show. In the UK, you can get away with playing a five-minute set with your back to the audience. Audiences there don't know when they've been cheated. We love going to see concerts in the U.S. You've got to admire a band like Aerosmith. They put on an incredible show.
Crossman: I have a big heavy metal background. I was a guitarist, and I've got this fantastic tape: Learn to Play Heavy Metal Guitar and Bass. I used to throw that in at the end of the day and piss my parents off, playing the same thing over and over. What I love about heavy metal is the theatrics. Having a drummer in a cage that rises above the audience is brilliant. Slipknot have it sorted. They turn up in masks.
Watson: When they re-form 15 years from now, you just know they'll do the Unmasked Tour.
Crossman: In the UK, the whole metal thing is huge. Linkin Park sold 400,000 copies of their album there. It's exactly like it was in the mid-'80s again. A lot of British pop bands are doing their thing, and you have the American metal sound. I love the production of that shit. The guitars sound huge. And all that funny facial hair has come back, as well. We feel a lot like what happened with punk in the UK. All these punk bands were so unfashionable. That's how I feel about what we're doing. We're out there singing about love and peace.
Benson: The Bristol scene is great, but the music is all “slit your wrists” stuff. I started off doing R&B, but people wanted me to do something different. So I tried the whole weird Björk thing, but that wasn't me. One of the nicest things I read about us was in DJ magazine where they said that “Faith” is breezy but not cheesy. That's perfect.
What influenced your choice to have an MC?
Watson: We just want to make as much noise as we can. It's not that interesting to look at two guys nodding behind decks.
Crossman: When we played at Crobar, they gave Jakes a wireless mic. He was walking into the toilet and MCing while he was taking a piss.
Watson: I remember going to the Tribal Gathering raves in the early '90s, and all the house and techno DJs used to have MCs. I thought that was brilliant. When the epic trance thing kicked off with Sasha and Digweed, suddenly there were no MCs. Each tune was another epic, “Visions of Mars” or something, and on and on it went. Because it was just us two guys, we wanted to put a different slant on it. Paul spins records, but I've got a laptop that I use to control beats and sounds.
How do you incorporate the laptop into the DJ rig?
Watson: I have a little box that I plug into the computer that reads the audio, detects the bpm and converts it to MIDI Clock. I'm not a DJ, but it's fun for me to play out with Paul. I just turn up and do what I do in the studio.
Crossman: When you book Starecase, you can get us in four different ways. You can get just me as a DJ. As a DJ, I tend to do a lot of fact-finding missions, so I end up playing on Wednesday nights to three guys with Confederate flags on their backs. Or you can get the Starecase Sound System, which is just me and Eels. Or you can get the Sound System with Jo and Jakes. And then we've got the full live band. The more people we get up there with us, the farther Eels and I move towards the back of the stage.
Watson: We put the drummer up front, like they did in the '60s. We need to get him to put a Starecase logo on his kick drum.
Crossman: We do a fantastic “Smoke on the Water.” Honestly. It's a warm-up song. We do all the rock classics.
Have you ever thought about remixing any of those songs?
Crossman: We have taken music from a rock act that has nothing to do with dance music and turned it into a dance tune; those are the best remixes that we have done. When a trance artist remixes another trance artist, it's like preaching to the converted. Terminalhead is signed to a label that's owned by Sanctuary Music, which is Iron Maiden's management company. They just remixed “The Number of the Beast.” I love shit like that.
I noticed some guitar on the album, as well.
Crossman: We got Andy a guitar with a Fernandes Sustainer, which is like a built-in E-Bow. We wanted to use outside influences but keep them electronic-sounding. I think we need to put some Muddy Waters loops over trance music.
As a DJ, is it difficult to deal with all the extra gear onstage?
Crossman: What's great about our band is every instrument is DI'd. There is no backline onstage. We can get all of our kit and us in a people carrier. We have the best drum kit in the world. It's electronic, and you can hold it with one hand. When the drummer is warming up, you don't have to deal with a lot of noise. We can set everything up really quickly. Playing with the Sound System gives me so much confidence. I've got loads of people around me. You can see where bands like So Solid Crew are coming from — 35 people onstage together.
Most of Starecase's fans are people who go out to dance to a DJ in a club. Given that you refuse to play with the band in a dance club, are you concerned about playing to apathetic audiences?
Crossman: We prefer to bring our music to people who have never heard of us. I'd like to bring our band to a rock arena and show that you can play electronic music without pressing Play on a DAT. We play the music live, but we haven't quite turned into a jazz band yet.
MIXED OPINIONS
Starecase's view on remixing
The members of Starecase have done their fair share of remixes for other artists, but when it came to having their own material from First Floor remixed, especially the single “Faith,” they were reluctant to hand over their music to someone else. “Look at what happened to Kosheen with the John Creamer and Stephane K. ‘Hide U’ remix,” says Crossman. “What do you do when a remix of one of your tracks is in the Top 10? Would you perform the remix version onstage? We're still fighting with that. A lot of it has to do with the disposability of dance music. If you don't like one mix, you have another 10 to choose from. But which one is going to work?” Watson adds, “You have to get to the point where you stand by something and say, ‘That's it.’”
Starecase partially funded their album and bought new studio equipment by doing some rather high-profile remixes. “If it weren't for remixing, we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing now,” says Watson. One of the duo's favorite projects was a remix of Soft Cell's “Memorabilia.” “We got our hands on the original multitracks for that song,” says Crossman. “When you listen to the individual tracks, you can hear New York at four in the morning and more drugs than you could ever do in your life. It taught me a lot about songwriting, because I got to hear the record broken down into its individual pieces and figure out how they put it together.”
But since Starecase started working on First Floor, their perspective about doing remixes changed. “Doing remixes can suck away a lot of your best ideas,” says Crossman. “Before we started working on the album, we would try to put six tracks into one — the Shepherd's Pie mix — when we were doing remixes. When we started doing the album, we remixed things strictly for the dancefloor. I think our remixes improved by leaps and bounds because of that. We stopped trying to put in all these fills and weird sounds in the background and just started dancing.”
Starecase Selected Equipment List
STUDIO EQUIPMENT
Allen & Heath GS3000 mixing console
Dynaudio BM15 active monitor speakers
COMPUTERS
PC running Emagic Logic Audio, various soft synths and plug-ins
Apple Macintosh G4 laptop
SYNTHS
Access Virus synth module
Korg Triton synthesizer
Roland JV-2080 synth module
PROCESSORS
Lexicon MPX1 multi-effects processor
TC Electronic FireworX multi-effects processor
Boss HM2 Heavy Metal pedal
Boss VF-1 multi-effects processor
dbx 566 tube compressor
| Want to use this article? Click here for options! |  |
