ROOM TO MOVE
Apr 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Stacia Monteith
In an oddly shaped room in an elegantly angular Los Angeles house, the first structure built by modernist architect John Lautner, Electric Skychurch founder James Lumb has piled racks of audio gear and musical instruments to create an unusual but highly efficient home studio. “There are no right angles in the house, so there are no boxed corners,” Lumb says. “I do a lot of natural room reverb and use the different parts of the house to get my sound. My sound, at this point, is linked to the architecture of the house in the way that the sound reflects off the walls.
“To me, the real strength of a recording studio is using it as a single instrument,” he continues. “Imagine a network of computers as being a musical instrument. When you reach the point where your recording studio is as comfortable as your car, then you really start using the studio as an instrument. Your emotion and personality can be at the helm.”
An ever-changing ensemble throughout the past 10 years, Electric Skychurch is currently a James Lumb solo project. His newest release, a collection of personal songs created during the past decade called Sonic Diary (Varese, 2001), has been likened to works by Orb, Orbital and Aphex Twin due to its complex and atmospheric melodic structures. “I have a dual set of material,” Lumb says. “I have the stuff that I've been developing with different bands, in front of crowds. Then I have the stuff that I've been doing in the studio.”
On Sonic Diary, a mixture of lo-fi and hi-fi creates feelings of darkness and space. “The album moves between gritty pieces that I did with 12-bit vintage samplers to pieces that were done on huge analog boards in big studios,” he explains. “I stick to doing simple recordings of analog instruments as opposed to using a lot of new software synthesizers. I got frustrated with the stuff I was doing with my computer. Although it was easy to do tricky, complex, progressive and oblique, I just started getting ear fatigue from the high-frequency distortion that's inherent in the process of digital modeling.” Indeed, Sonic Diary sounds as though it was traditionally engineered, which makes sense for an artist who cites Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (Capitol, 1973) and Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden (EMI, 1988) as favorites.
As a teenager, Lumb repaired Kaypro portable computers and used his savings to buy his first synthesizer, a Roland Juno 106. He now has more synths than he knows what to do with. They share the space with old tape delays, preamps, outboard Apogee converters and a number of new units he has been asked to test.
Lumb is as much a gearhead as anyone, but because he comes from a traditional engineering background, he's enthusiastic about what happens when electronic songwriters think outside of the box, using other tools they might have at their disposal. “If you only have the money for an iMac, get [Propellerhead] Reason and start making tracks. If you want to dump money into a [Roland] Jupiter-6, a Moog modular and a 2-inch tape recorder, give me a call,” he jokes. “I want to come over.”
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