SONIC SERENDIPITY
Sep 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Kylee Swenson
A metamorphosis has been taking place in the Supreme Beings of Leisure studio in Ramin Sakurai's house next to an L.A. freeway. Guitarist Rick Torres and bassist Kiran Shahani have moved on to other projects, leaving Sakurai and singer Geri Soriano-Lightwood to record the band's second album, Divine Operating Systems (Palm Pictures, 2002), as a duo.
Whereas the self-titled SBL debut traveled a loungy, electronic path, Divine maintains a harder-hitting, disco-dance theme. It suits Lightwood's I'm-no-shrinking-violet voice, which underwent a change of its own. “Hormones really affect your vocal cords,” she says. “I learned that on the last record after I had my baby. My voice got lower, but I was happy about that.”
Meanwhile, Sakurai was relieved to abandon 2-inch tape and record most everything in his home studio straight to Digidesign Pro Tools. “We went over budget last time using 2-inch,” he says. “And I'm the kind of guy who is about the performance more so than the sound, anyway. If I played something a certain way and I can't re-create it, I'll just leave it even if it sounds like crap.”
But the sounds on Divine are not remotely rudimentary. Even the demo vocals recorded in Sakurai's room by the freeway sound polished. The duo only used one-fourth of the vocals they later recorded in a pro-studio vocal booth. “There was something about the essence that I captured immediately without thinking about it too much that we couldn't re-create afterwards,” says Lightwood. It helped that her voice was in the company of some good mics and preamps, including an Audio-Technica AT4033a, a Neumann U 87 Ai, a Neumann M 149 and an Avalon VT-737SP preamp.
The only bittersweet part of recording Divine was its standout “Catch Me,” originally written for a Ford Thunderbird commercial. “We sat down and had a meeting with the advertising people,” says Sakurai. “When it comes to TV, usually you're talking to people who have a hard time describing music. The guys were saying, ‘Imagine this woman is putting on this dress and pearl necklace. She's by the ocean. She and her husband go out to have a martini in South Beach, and there are all these art deco buildings, blah, blah, blah.’ I'm thinking they want this loungy, South Pacific-y kind of thing. So I went back home, started with the Rhodes, came up with a good percussive groove and added vibes, guitar and four layers of a 12-piece string section. I gave the mix to Geri, and she sang this great hook to it. But these guys said, ‘It's not quite what we're looking for.’ They ended up using a reggae song. I was like, ‘You could have just told me to write a reggae song!’ But now we have a song that is just killer. Plus, the Ford Thunderbird flopped like a pancake out of the griddle anyway.”
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