POTENT PORTABILITY

Sep 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Joe Silva

It's one thing when your laptop fails and 99 percent of your new album is suddenly inaccessible. It's a far bigger deal when you wake up and the name of your innocent indie synth-pop project is linked to what might be the defining news story of the 21st century. But Dan Geller and Amy Dykes, the ultrablonde duo that makes up I Am the World Trade Center, didn't allow either to phase them too much. Not only did they retain their name and salvage their data, they didn't feel the need to let their accidental involvement with Sept. 11, 2001, affect the content of their new album, The Tight Connection (Kindercore,2002).

“I felt like I needed to slightly address it lyrically, but I didn't want it [noticed] when you first listened to it,” Dykes says. “I didn't want to change the mood of the record.”

IATWTC began when Geller moved his Kindercore Records operation from Athens, Ga., to Brooklyn, N.Y., and decided — due to space constraints in his apartment — to piece together an album of material on his Gateway laptop. The result was the tech-pop of Out of the Loop (Kindercore, 2001). Geller's initial challenge was to get affordable, decent sound into his machine. “There were really no high-end sound cards for my laptop,” Geller says, citing cost as a factor. “The Roland UA-100 Audio Canvas changed everything.”

With the UA-100 onboard, Geller produced all the material for Out of the Loop by using a combination of Sonic Foundry's Acid 2.0 and Sound Forge 4.5 and Image-Line's FruityLoops. For the latest record, Geller ditched the Gateway for a more muscular but decidedly generic platform. “It literally said ‘Notebook’ on the top of it,” Geller says. “That was actually the brand name.”

After moisture on the motherboard caused the bargain-basement laptop to fail periodically, Geller backed up his precious data and was able to finish the rest of the recording by having fans blow on the Notebook. He also expanded his rig with a Nord MicroModular. “I got that and went crazy with it,” he says. “I was able to drive it with FruityLoops, basically, so the signals were still coming out of the computer, but the sounds were being fed from the Nord back into the laptop.”

With that intensely stripped-down setup, Geller recorded The Tight Connection in only three weeks. Apart from his scaled-down kit, the biggest influence on the record was Geller and Dykes' live show. By chaining not much more than a Roland SP-808 Groove Sampler to a Roland D2 Groovebox and employing a Roland SPD-6 Percussion Pad, Geller and Dykes are now free to focus on more of a fun, feel-good presentation.

“It took me a good year to work that out,” Geller says. “It doesn't sound that flexible, but we can do surprisingly complex things with it. It's become more streamlined to where the gear matters less and less, and it's more about entertaining the troops.”

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