Wax On, Wax Off
Dec 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy
In case you missed it, the album as we once knew it is dead. Or at least, that's what Beck — ever true to his iconoclastic roots — is fervently trying to bring about. “There are so many ways to take the idea of a static album and animate it from the linear structure that we're all used to,” he says from his backyard, where his two-year-old son Cosimo (with actress Marissa Ribisi) can be heard frolicking with happy abandon. “Whether that's creating something where there's a lot of versions of the same song, and you'd never hear the same version twice, or whether a record remixes itself, I don't know. Maybe that's not attractive to some people, but if it's in the right hands and done with some kind of taste and originality, it could be pretty heavy.”
While just about all of Beck's musical output since he first burst on the scene with Mellow Gold (DGC, 1994) has somehow challenged the status quo, it could be argued that last year's Dust Brothers co-production Guero (Interscope, 2005) was his opening salvo at redefining what an album can represent. Besides the traditional full-length CD, the music on Guero was completely remixed as Guerolito (with contributions from Boards of Canada, Air, El-P, Diplo, 8Bit and more) and strategically leaked in various incarnations on the Web. Meanwhile, a separate DVD featuring “textural movies” and “vision-scapes” by the London-based imagineers D-Fuse (not to be confused with the DJ from Texas) was also released, making Guero a real multiplatform, multimedia experience (and prompting Wired magazine to seek out Beck for its “Rebirth of Music” issue in September).
The Information (Interscope, 2006), as its title suggests, is yet another Becktionary foray into hyper-interactivity, complete with do-it-yourself cover art and accompanying DVD chock-full of low-budget videos for each of the CD's 15 songs — all well and good, but as with any Beck album, the most radical element is still the music. Joined by some gifted and eclectic session players — including guitarist Justin Stanley (Nikka Costa, The Vines), bassist Jason Falkner (Jellyfish, Air, Travis), percussionist Alejandro “Alex” Acuńa (Weather Report), DJ Z-Trip and drummers James Gadson and Joey Waronker — Beck engages once again in a full-on studio binge with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, whose psychedelic, analog touch complemented the melancholic dreaminess of Beck's songs on Mutations (DGC, 1998) and Sea Change (Geffen, 2002). From the distortion-hugging flanged beats of the opening “Elevator Music” to the intergalactic three-part coda “The Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton,” The Information, it turns out, is a constantly morphing headphone riot that swells with sonic quirks galore.
“All of my records tend to have crazy sounds going on to some degree,” Beck says, “and I think Nigel and I definitely share that. He brings a little bit of alchemy into it that's sometimes mysterious and sometimes very simple, but whatever it is, it's always just right for what needs to happen. I don't know if I'm allowed to give away his secrets, but what he uses to get his sound is not all that different from what other people are using — it's just the way he's using it, or what he's using it on.”
EMBRYONIC JOURNEY
In fact, Godrich is very secretive about his process, which is why he declined to talk about his techniques with Remix, and he even forbid his engineering team to speak up on the topic. But to get a feel for how the new album constitutes yet another leap forward for Beck's ever-protean muse, it helps to go back to the beginning — late 2003 to be exact. “About a year after Sea Change came out,” Beck recalls, “Nigel and I got together again and just decided to throw out whatever system or conventions we had in working with each other and to just start over and do something totally new. We wanted to do what we'd always talked about, which was to not be constrained by time or prewritten songs and to really experiment and see what happens.”
Just as every experiment needs a jumping-off point, there were a few lines of convergence that helped light the way toward a new musical direction. One of them ran straight through the song “Diamond Bollocks” — the hidden track on Mutations that recalled the lysergic forays of Revolver-era Beatles — while another connected to Beck's then-newfound obsession with Game Boy programming and its signature raw, unpolished sound.
“I was even considering doing the whole record at 8-bit,” he says, “but I also wanted to do something that was very percussive, and that was when Nigel said that he'd always thought about doing a hip-hop record, which was a big shock to me. Based on his other work and the work we'd done together, I'd thought he was more into the sort of singer-songwriter, Joni Mitchell/Nick Drake school, but it turns out he loves breakbeats — so then we had this idea of making a breakbeat, mixtape type of record.”
Eventually, the two decided to bring a full band into Hollywood's legendary Ocean Way Recording for a marathon seven-day session. “Basically, we went in to record what we called our homemade breakbeat library,” Beck explains. “I guess this is the thing people do nowadays — the problem is you rarely get something that sounds like old vinyl 45s, which is what we were after. But Nigel definitely has the production skills to get that down. There are some great drum sounds on Sea Change and Mutations, so I knew that he could do something in that vein.”
LIVING IN STEREO
When it came time to tell the band what to play, it was clear to Beck that only one approach could possibly conjure up the freeform, gritty sound he was reaching for. “We started out trying to do these long, early '70s Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock — style jams,” he says, “and we created dozens of tracks. A lot of them were 20, maybe 25 minutes long, and for a while we were into the idea of them being in that state, but they definitely weren't in a normal song structure. They were more like a rhythm section that just kept going on and evolving.”
Interestingly, Beck and Godrich had both agreed on two fundamental aspects of recording those initial sessions that would set the basic tone and technique for assembling the entirety of what became The Information. First, everything would be recorded to Digidesign Pro Tools and not to tape — a purposeful deviation from Beck's two previous albums with Godrich — and second, literally everything that was tracked in that first week of recording was mixed down live to a stereo pair. As with every studio move that Beck makes, there was a method to the madness.
“In a way, it was forcing our hand into having to commit to something,” he notes. “So if it's like, ‘I don't think that bass or that keyboard part's working,’ then it's like, ‘Well, too bad. It's in there.’ We were committed from the beginning to how it sounded — we might even track a whole other song on top of a song, down to another stereo pair. The idea was just to do it all right on the spot.”
But it's the next step that really boggles the mind, if only for its elegant simplicity. “After all that intense recording,” Beck says, “we reconvened a month later, and we took out our favorite things and had them pressed up on 100 copies of vinyl. Then we had Z-Trip scratch the records back into the mix (see the sidebar “All Tripped Out”), and basically, we just destroyed our beautifully recorded Nigel tracks. [Laughs.] We put them through cheap samplers and ran them backwards and put dirty effects on them and tried to not be precious about it — really the idea was just to be, like I said, reckless with them. From there, it was just the process of what I do with all the other records — I get a rhythm track going, and then I write a song over it. That's essentially how the album came together.”
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