I ROCK
Jun 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By James Rotondi
“We always thought that electronic sounds didn't go well with classical instruments,” says Buffalo Daughter's suGar Yoshinaga, “but then we heard composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was mixing those sounds back in the '50s! That really excited us.” In their seven-year history, Japan's ultracreative sample-rock trio has blended everything from garage-rock to noise to hip-hop on albums such as Amoeba Sound System (Cardinal, 1995), Captain Vapour Athletes (Grand Royal, 1996) and New Rock (Grand Royal, 1998). But the lush string quartets, Laurie Anderson — approved vocal mixes and boomy Bonzo drums on their latest record, I (Emperor Norton, 2002), suggest that their influences are increasingly at odds with the cut-and-paste community.
And though Yoshinaga may describe I as “our acoustic album,” it's no less lacking in audio alchemy, boasting a spacious hi-fi mix and mastering, as well as Emagic Logic Audio — constructed sequences brimming with fat synths and Casio croakers — from the vintage Minimoog played by Yumiko Ohno in the anthem “Earth Punk Rockers” to the fascinating digital-beat pastiche Yoshinaga created in Native Instruments' Reaktor for the song “Five Minutes.” There's also plenty of straight-up rock, like the driving, Liz Phair-ish “Volcanic Girl.”
Nor have they given up sampling; witness the snippets of Japanese high school girls' voices on “I Know,” cleverly chopped-up on an Akai MPC2000. The band's turntablist and sample guru, the aptly named Mooog Yamamoto, works a Technics SL-1200MK3 and a Vestax PMC-07Pro, but his technique is more understated than that of most scratchers. He prefers to weave cool textures — many drawn from contemporary classical records — into the mix, rather than stutter or chirp. “I play turntables like a guitar,” he says, “and I grab short loops in real time with my Pioneer CDJ-1000.”
Of course, there are plenty of real guitars on I, as well. For the pretty guitar piece “Long, Slow, Distance,” Yoshinaga set up her Mac PowerBook G3 in Ohno's kitchen and recorded a “really cheap acoustic guitar” using Digigram's VX Pocket PCM sound card and Logic Audio Platinum. That's relatively lo-fi for the record; the giant cascading vocal textures on the Pink Floydian “Mirror Ball” were produced with no fewer than 24 tracks of Yoshinaga's and Ohno's vocals.
Buffalo Daughter's shift from collage-hop to art rock coincides with their jump from Mike D's now-defunct Grand Royal label to their new home at Emperor Norton, a defection that took place just a few months before Grand Royal's collapse. “A couple months before they closed the office, they had changed a lot,” explains Yoshinaga. “They'd hired a whole new staff and fired a lot of the older regime. Plus, Mike D used to be really involved in running the label, but he wasn't at that point. So we didn't feel that Grand Royal was a great place for us anymore.”
Nevertheless, Grand Royal was a vital label throughout the '90s, and Yoshinaga nostalgically laments its demise: “When Grand Royal closed, it made us realize that the '90s were really over.”
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