SEXY BEATS
Dec 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Kylee Swenson
The eccentric Gus Gus collective clearly march to their own drum machine. The Icelandic group's name alone is an example: It was inspired by Fear Eats the Soul, a 1974 film by German director R.W. Fassbinder featuring a prostitute known for her great recipe for couscous, which she mispronounces “gus gus.” It's a bizarre association, one that befits a group — recently pared down from nine musicians, actors, photographers and filmmakers to four musicians — native to a country with moonlike glacier landscapes.
From their debut album, Polydistortion (4AD, 1997), to This Is Normal (4AD, 1999) and their latest, Attention (Moonshine, 2002), Gus Gus have stuck with the same few vintage synthesizers to create their spacey, avant-garde sound. The Icelandic quartet — Biggi Veira, Buckmaster, President Bongo and new singer Earth — would rather cut the clutter than add more. “It's better to get more intimate with the gear that you have,” says Veira. “I find that the Roland Juno-2 always mixes nicely, the basses from the ARP 2600 are exceptional, and the Roland SH-101 is always sexy. So I don't need any more synths.” Gus Gus use a Doepfer modular system, a Roland TR-808 and a TR-909, and an E-mu Drumulator for creating beats, as well as Emagic Logic Audio for audio and MIDI recording, but Veira doesn't use soft synths. “It's just not me,” he says.
Producer Gareth Jones, however, did help Veira let go of some preconceived notions about recording. “He pushed me to record cool sounds into Logic right when I came up with them instead of trying to reproduce them later,” says Veira. “It's just to keep the creativity flowing.” Jones also urged Veira to push his preamps and compressors harder. “He showed me that gear or how you produce things doesn't matter; it only matters how it sounds in the end,” says Veira, so he cranked up his TL Audio compressor and Mackie VLZ-1604 mixer to the limit. “Even though the meters are in the red and some might say, ‘It's distorting; it's not good,’ I think it sounds amazing,” he says.
Gus Gus were further inspired by Finnish techno artist Jimi Tenor. Attention's sparse dance track “Call of the Wild” was originally a remix the group did for Tenor, but it wasn't released because Warp Records dropped Tenor from its roster. Using just Tenor's backing vocals from the original song, Gus Gus took the remix and made it even more their own track. “To get that wicked hi-hat sound on ‘Call of the Wild,’ I put the hi-hats through the LFO on a Roland SH-2 synth,” Veira says. “It's this swarm of hi-hats in all frequencies.”
But according to Veira, what's more important than sound treatment is the arrangement of parts: “It is always our goal to create some three-dimensional environment in music, so it has an angle and depth to it. This is a more in-your-face album, but it's still really spacey. Instead of doing endless layers of stuff, I try to use a few layers in every track and have each layer sound amazing.”
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