Spectral Analysis

Nov 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy

There is an ancient Zen koan that goes something like this: A brash but inquisitive street punk in search of The Knowledge pays a visit to a Zen master named Nan-in. The master invites him to tea, and as Nan-in begins to pour, the anxious youngster does his best to appear unfazed. But even after the cup is full, Nan-in continues to splash tea into the overflowing vessel, smiling with contentment. Finally, the kid can no longer contain himself. “What are you doing?” he blurts out. “Much like this cup, you are full of your own preconceptions,” the wily old sage answers. “How can I show you anything unless you first empty your cup?”

When it comes to modern electronic music, particularly in a fruitful breeding ground such as the UK, preconceived notions seem to accompany just about every new release on a DJ's radar nowadays. No less an avant-garde arbiter of taste, The Wire magazine in London started a recent cover story about Autechre with the assertion, “The world of electronica has become overcrowded.” Fortunately, though, Ed Handley and Andy Turner — the UK production duo known collectively as Plaid — have done more than just empty their cup; they've smashed it to bits (in the programming sense) and crafted an entirely new one customized to their own elusive and idiosyncratic vision. Spokes (Warp, 2003), perhaps the group's most challenging musical statement to date, is as retro as it is futuristic, as dark as it is optimistic and as organic as it is machinelike — all of it a vivid testament that categories needn't cloud the issue of what makes a record worth digging. Add that to an imminent club tour, a full-length DVD on the slate for 2004 and remixes for numerous up-and-comers, and Plaid is poised to shatter expectations on multiple levels.

As founding members (with former cohort Ken Downie) of East London's legendary Black Dog crew, Handley and Turner are no strangers to innovation. In 1988, the two school chums shared a keen interest in Detroit techno, electro and early hip-hop, parlaying this into their first tracks with Downie under the Black Dog rubric. When they tried to get deep-house godfather Larry Heard to do some remixes for them, he balked, contending that their music was “too weird” — a reaction that was undoubtedly perceived by the fledgling producers as an encouraging sign, because within a year of the brush-off, they released their debut Virtual (1989) EP themselves. This sparked a string of hard-hitting underground breakbeat and abstract techno EPs (with ominously cool titles including Age of Slack [Black Dog, 1989] and Parallel Squelch [Black Dog, 1990]) until eventually the Warp label took notice, releasing Black Dog Productions' Bytes in 1993. The classic Spanners (Elektra/Asylum) followed in 1995, but by this time, Handley and Turner were preparing their departure in order to pursue a collaborative identity as Plaid, a name they'd invented and recorded under even before the mysterious Black Dog Towers had risen above London.

“It was just personality differences,” Handley told an interviewer at the time of the split. “Ken was very focused on what he was doing as a band whereas Andy and myself are far more interested in doing the music. For us, the music was at the forefront, and that was it; there wasn't really any plan. I've got pretty fond memories of what we did as a group but also of the symbolism that goes alongside the name Black Dog — you know, about being guided through the underworld. I can definitely say I learned a lot when we were all together.”

PROCESS OF RECOMBINATION

After eight years and some dozen recordings — including the breakthrough album Not for Threes (Warp, 1997), which featured guest vocals by Björk, Nicolette (formerly with Massive Attack) and Mara Carlyle (now Turner's fiancée), and was followed by the expansive Rest Proof Clockwork (Warp, 1999) — it should be obvious to anyone who's been listening that Plaid has fully assimilated the breakup of the Black Dog into a fresh and wildly diverse palette of layered sounds, strange melodies and eclectic rhythm styles. And although it's true that, as studio mavens on a mission, Handley and Turner are well-known for their steadfast resistance to the overhyped nature of the commercial dance scene, their music never sounds alien; contrived; or, perhaps most crucial, too serious or self-congratulatory.

In many respects, Spokes marks a new approach for Plaid, particularly in terms of the genesis and synthesis of the music. “For one thing, this is the first album we've ever done that's been entirely computer-based,” Handley points out. “I mean, we weren't even using a mixing desk; this is all straight out of a [Mac G4] computer. It's basically just been bounced down internally within a desktop using virtual mixing [in Emagic Logic 6]. There was really no outboard gear at all except at the mastering studio, and that was where we added some warmth to the overall sound by going through some really nice digital-to-analog converters [by UK company Audio & Design] that we couldn't possibly afford to buy ourselves.”

But as much time as the group spent in the studio in front of the computer, a significant chunk of the 10 tracks on Spokes started out as live experiments during the group's 2002 tour — another new twist to the creative process and an inspiration for the cycling-related title of the album, as well. “We always had this idea that it would be great to be able to write wherever we were traveling,” Handley says, “because, otherwise, you just end up watching DVDs or computer games or whatever. So we got a hold of these Titanium PowerBooks and set them up. We were over in the U.S. for about three weeks last year, and we started to get some ideas together as we traveled around. Some of these we actually ended up playing out in clubs when the beats were in their very early forms. It had been something we'd sort of dreamed about and finally got around to doing.”

Once back in the studio, the experimentation began in earnest, with each producer building upon what were essentially rhythm elements and fleshing them out into finished tracks. “I think the big issue with quite a lot of our tracks is the simplicity-versus-complexity problem,” Handley says. “Obviously, when you've got a fairly powerful computer and you're working in a Logic environment where you can build your own generative patches, you can go on almost indefinitely with layers if you can actually mix it [well]. But day by day, our preference changes. Sometimes, you want lots of space in the music, and on other days, you just want a dense sound. I think overall on this album, we opted more for the dense than the sparse.”

Turner agrees, adding that this was also the group's first complete run-through with Logic 6 and that the program freed up a considerable amount of processing power for sampled sounds and virtual instruments. “We were working with Logic 4 until quite recently, and there are just some major improvements with Logic 6,” he explains. “We use loads and loads of VST plug-ins — layering them up to try and get unusual sounds out of them — and there were some real problems with having to constantly bounce down sections and then bring them back into the mix and balance that out again. The Freeze function with Logic 6 basically does all that for you, and it does the bounce offline so you can save a huge amount of time.”

MANIC ORGANICS

Given their almost exclusive reliance on Logic and its various software plug-ins, it's amazing that Handley and Turner somehow still manage to make their vast array of technology sound unmistakably human. As it turns out, a few of the tracks on Spokes do have their origins in the analog realm. What's fittingly Plaid-like, of course, is that the original audio sources quite often prove to be just as bizarre as their computer-tweaked counterparts.

The creepy found sounds that open “Zeal,” for example, invoke the frisson of a classic late-night horror film. Aptly enough, when this soundscape morphs into a dark and infectiously funky 7/4 beat, the sheer underlying strangeness of the tune becomes readily apparent. “Some friends of ours were shooting footage that will be in a video for that track,” Turner says. “They were in these catacombs owned by the Henson family [as in Jim Henson's The Muppets] that run under quite a large area of northwest London — it's maybe one or two square miles of just underground caverns. So we went down there with a couple of nice stereo mics and bashed some stuff around. The space had a really interesting reverb and ambience, you know, with these long sections of pipe and water dripping everywhere. We recorded all that to DAT and then did a bit of processing on it afterwards.”

An old-school analog monosynth originally designed by Bob Moog is the headlining instrument in “Crumax Rins” — a liquefied two-step jam minced with low-frequency oscillators and relentlessly elastic keyboard bass lines. “That's a synth from the early '80s called the Crumar Spirit,” Turner reveals. “And it's weird: Right after that session, the thing just died. I mean, it literally never worked again, so it was kind of like we had been ‘rinsing’ the last sounds out of it, which is how the title came about. We recorded some large sections of that, and then what we grabbed was put through a lot of spectral processing — that, in combination with delays and some other effects, is how it ended up sounding the way it does.”

One of the most unusual sound sources on Spokes forms the basis of the main rhythm pattern in “Quick Emix,” the album's closing track. “Most of the percussive sounds on that track were originally bat noises,” Turner says. Before he can be asked whether he's talking about baseball, he continues: “You know, nocturnal creatures. We managed to get a hold of a load of bat chatter — they make quite unusual-sounding clicks with a strong sort of attack — and we cut the sounds down into little pieces. We basically set it up in Logic as a kind of drum machine and allowed it to randomly step through the different kinds of clicks and blips of the bats. It's not ultrarandom, but certainly to most ears, you don't really pick up a pattern if you listen to it churning away.”

AS THE WHEEL TURNS

Plaid's embrace of the possible in music, some might say, is what sets Handley and Turner apart from their contemporaries. It's a creative stance that emulates yet another “human” side to their interactive relationship with the virtual recording studio, because if the music sounds less rigid, less structured and more open to chance occurrences, then emotion begins to manifest itself — a state that all too often, according to some critics, is missing from most electronic-based music today.

In the final analysis, the palpable sense of freedom that comes from improvising within a digital universe is what Handley and Turner seem to enjoy most, and it shows brilliantly in the “spectral atmospherics” that course through the music of Spokes. As a product of using Logic to coax the computer into a virtual state of flux, the music of Plaid seems to suggest that even the unit itself can begin to behave as though it's wet-wired into the mind of the composer. The randomness and disorder in all things, perhaps, is the key to realizing a Zen mastery of the machine.

“In a way, my approach to writing is more improvisational now, where really the pleasure is just in messing around,” Handley says. “I mean, you could write in a very technical manner using all the rules, but, obviously, that just ends up sounding like textbook music. It seems to me that the majority of interesting music comes about quite accidentally, and that's where I think you can find techniques for creating an environment where those accidents happen — where you maybe approach things in a slightly different way, you know, just challenging the systems that you use to write.”

“That's where Logic gives you real flexibility,” Turner agrees, “because the environment's very good at just throwing up ideas — sometimes, almost as if you were working with a session player. Of course, there's a certain amount of vetting that has to happen afterwards, but I think the advantages far outweigh the problems. I mean, in the live situation, for example, it's pretty nice to have certain elements of a track maybe being randomized so that every night, you're playing the track and it's within certain parameters, but you're getting a slightly different feel every time. I think that definitely lends a little more excitement to the music.”

All of that begs the question: With so many sonic possibilities at their fingertips and with the breadth of choices that Logic affords, how do Handley and Turner decide when a track is truly finished? “When it's just too painful to carry on, you know you're done,” Handley says with a laugh. “Of course, there has to be some mutual agreement between us that it's finished, I think. Usually, that's when the track starts to turn ugly or when you know you're maybe overworking it, or maybe it reaches that point of saturation when you've heard it too many times. I think then, you know there's no point in trying to go further, because you're already there.”

INSIDE THE PLAID BUBBLE

“Plaid Bubble is what we put down on our releases as a term for a space that's hopefully not too affected by external influences — as much as you can ever find one of those!” Andy Turner says of Plaid's studio gear. “It's sort of a light industrial unit where we have a lot of our outboard gear, most of which is slowly gathering dust at the moment because we pretty much wrote the entire album on the various Macintoshes we've got.”

Apple Mac G4 dual tower

Apple Mac G4 PowerBook

Arboretum Ionizer plug-in: “Some weird drum processing is achievable with this,” Turner says.

Crumar Spirit synth: “This unusual analog synth has great warm bass lines and pads,” Turner says.

Cycling '74 Pluggo plug-ins

Emagic EXS24 mk II soft sampler

Emagic Logic 6 software

MOTU 828 FireWire audio interface

MOTU 896 FireWire audio interface

OhmForce OhmBoyz delay plug-in

OhmForce Quad Frohmage filter plug-in

Native Instruments FM7 soft synth: “Good FM sounds if we can't be arsed to switch on the Yamaha FS1R,” Turner says.

Roland VP-9000 VariPhrase Processor: “It's really annoying to use, but it does create some good sounds,” Ed Handley says. “Roland has created this thing called VariPhrase sampling, and all that really means is that it does real-time pitch-shifting and time-stretching as you play over, say, a keyboard range, whereas a conventional sampler will just pitch it up and down.”

SFX Machine plug-in

Sound Transformer plug-in: “Spectral effects for Macintosh,” Turner says. “Peculiar filtering, although a real-time version would be nice.”

Yamaha CS-40M synth: “We've used this for sampling percussive hits and effects,” Turner says.

Yamaha FS1R rackmount tone generator: “This is a versatile FM synth that sounds good live,” Turner says.

Waves Renaissance plug-ins

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