Where's Your Club At?
Nov 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef
Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe know what you want. Years spent DJing from Brixton to Ibiza have inured the duo to fans screaming for bigger beats, louder noises and more wailing-diva wampum. Basement Jaxx's massive house hit “Where's Your Head At” may have sounded like the work of two adrenalized frat-house party boys thrusting their pelvises at full force, but back in England, the sleepy DJs were pondering something greater than 4/4 grooves and disco shout-outs. They wanted release. They wanted nirvana. They wanted the life of the mind beyond the dancefloor.
“We don't DJ much anymore as Basement Jaxx,” Buxton says from his home near Brixton, London. “We have done that enough, and the big clubs only want the most obvious, stupid music. Most of it musically doesn't stand up outside those few minutes. It is fine for people who are hyped up on drugs: They just want it banging and pushing all the buttons. But that doesn't excite me like the original house music did.”
Buxton still DJs his weekly Rooty parties, spinning everything from homemade 50 Cent/White Stripes bootlegs to Tito Puente and The Neptunes, but Ratcliffe no longer cares to press the vinyl or the club flesh. Although Buxton is the public face of Basement Jaxx, Ratcliffe keeps its soul fresh, fired and lubricated by experimenting with the duo's newly acquired Mac G4 and Emagic Logic rig and improvising on his Fender Strat guitar. After the extroverted mayhem of Rooty (Astralwerks, 2001) and the jazz and Latin inflections of Remedy (XL, 1999), Basement Jaxx takes a left turn with Kish Kash (Astralwerks, 2003), an album as much about internal organs as internal sounds.
“This is less club-based, because you do get restricted if you always use the 4/4 house format,” Buxton says. “We have done so much of that. Now, we don't care if we don't fit in.
“Kish Kash, like Rooty, is about relationships,” he continues. “What is important in life is relationships, whether that's between George Bush and Saddam Hussein or between you and your girlfriend. In the Middle East, cish cash is slang for money. Kish Kash is a mutation of that. Also, cish cash in Hebrew means your internal organs. If your cish cash is out of balance, you are in a bit of a mess. It is the substance, not the spirit — it is not the mind; it is the substance.”
KASHIN' IN
To all of this puzzling slang and Middle Eastern mysticism, Basement Jaxx comes balling and wailing with Kish Kash, a Philly-soul-meets-Prince-funk hybrid of riotous R&B epics, Bollywood tracks, Missy Elliott thumpers and Arabic-tinged dream songs. Forget your boom-boom house beats and fist-in-the-air ravers: Basement Jaxx has finally, thankfully, grown up.
“When we did Rooty, we were DJing a lot more, so there were more clubby tracks,” Ratcliffe says. “But with Kish Kash, I haven't been DJing for a year; we've pulled away and gone off on our own little bubble. It is psychologically important to get away from the safe ground of 125, 132 and 133 bpm. We did that for years. Tempo doesn't matter on this album.”
“But we didn't want to lose the grittiness of our sound,” Buxton elaborates. “There are so many plug-ins now that you can forget about what you are trying to say and instead spend [too] much time producing it. While people like The Neptunes are going more minimalist, we are going more maximalist.”
A perfect example of Basement Jaxx's new “maximalist” credo is Kish Kash's opening track, “Good Luck.” With The BellRays' vocalist Lisa Kekaula vamping like Gladys Knight of old, the song revels in blitzkrieg bass, galloping thunder drums and Curtis Mayfield chinka-chink guitars, with the cinematic spirit of Philly-soul strings infusing it all. But “Good Luck” isn't merely a feast of Logic-enabled sound architecture, but rather a solid feat of mid-'70s — styled songwriting craftsmanship that Gamble & Huff could easily party hardy to. Climaxing with racing acoustic drums, triumphant strings and overloading bass, the song keels into a breakdown detour of synthetic sounds popping and pealing to a final, oddly anticlimactic outro of alien sirens. But from a purely sonic angle, “Good Luck” is Kish Kash's magnum opus, summarizing in sound everything that Ratcliffe and Buxton have learned as Basement Jaxx.
Elsewhere, Kish Kash revisits Basement Jaxx's Prince obsession with the Missy Elliott soundalike “Right Here's the Spot” and “Plug It In” (with 'NSync's JC Chasez). The Bollywood insect beats of “Lucky Star” contrast with the '70s Graham Central Station zeal of “Supersonic.” Meanwhile, the title track (spelled “Cish Cash”) is all buzzing punkadelia and slashed wrists: Basement Jaxx's idea of a punk good time with Siouxsie & The Banshees' icon Siouxsie Sioux. After these hyperactive extravaganzas, Kish Kash cools with songs such as “If I Ever Recover,” “Tonight” and “Living Room” (with Me'Shell NdegéOcello) creating chilly mood music for adults who are too tired to shake that thang.
LOGICAL PROGRESSION
Ratcliffe and Buxton haven't changed their gear that much from the Rooty sessions, only exchanging their Soundcraft Spirit board for a classic Amek Big console, and their antiquated Atari/Cubase system for the faster G4/Logic setup.
“The Amek has got its own sound that has definitely contributed to the sound of Kish Kash,” Ratcliffe says from his home near Buxton's Brixton digs. “It is a lot deeper, a lot richer. It is very punchy, a lot more three-dimensional somehow than the Soundcraft board. The Amek EQs are really sensitive. The greater separation allowed us to place things easier. But then, the Spirit costs £2,000, and the Amek, new, would have been around £12,000.”
Shiny new technology also increased Basement Jaxx's ease of composing and sound source assemblage. Things that once took days now take hours. “This was the first time we'd worked with a Mac G4 running Emagic Logic Platinum,” Ratcliffe says. “With Atari and Cubase, everything was running off samplers, including vocals, and any instrumentation was always put through a sampler, then played by a MIDI keyboard. Then, it was all time-consumingly positioned. Playing stuff into the Mac makes the possibilities and the spontaneity much greater. We use the EXS24 sampler plug-in a lot.
“Everything goes into the Mac, then into the Amek Big board, and we do the final mix to DAT,” Ratcliffe continues. “We like hands-on EQing and outboard compression and effects. We don't like to use too many Mac effects, because you start to sound like everyone else. And we prefer to use older equipment.”
That means Drawmer and Behringer compressors for “a nice soft sound” and a Roland Juno-106 and a Moog Minimoog for bass. Many of the drum tracks on Kish Kash feature either a live drummer or samples given to the band by former Orb member and current neighbor Andy Hughes.
“He is in the studio next door and helps us out with our technical difficulties,” Buxton says. “He is an expert with Logic. And he gives us a few kicks and snares. That and samples are where most of our beats come from.”
HAPPY ACCIDENT
“‘Good Luck’ began as an accident because it wasn't working as it was,” Ratcliffe reveals. “This was a very hard track to make, a real dive into the unknown. We wanted to juxtapose Lisa's rock-soul voice with something housey and clubby, but none of our ideas were gelling. I started playing a rock guitar riff, something like AC/DC, and we had a high tempo, which she insisted we push even higher. She was feeling it, and Felix was writing lyrics on the fly, a line at a time. All the while, I was playing the guitar with a click track and no other music. When she left, we realized we had an entire song with her voice. Now, what are we going to do with it? It is too fast for a house track at 154. We started re-creating the track, first with more soulful chords on the guitar.”
Ratcliffe's guitar and Kekaula's vocal became the basis for the track, followed by eight months of slowly adding drums, a vocal chorus, strings, bass and effects. “Things work in surprising ways,” Ratcliffe says. “You don't plan everything. A lot of it is just recognizing which accidents are good.”
To the initial track, Buxton added an intro of scat vocals and percussion, some of it being Ratcliffe's Stratocaster chopped up in Logic, then spat out as drumlike stabs. The Stratocaster was compressed like everything else, through a Drawmer, but initially into a Line 6 Pod. “My guitars run through the Line 6 Pod set to the British Blues setting into the board,” Buxton explains. “Getting a good organic, biting guitar sound is hard to do, and the Pod has it all.”
Drums came courtesy of Hughes and Faze Action's Tuggy. Part man, part machine, the drums slam the song home with an apocalyptic shudder. “We wanted the drumrolls to be as cracking as possible,” Ratcliffe says. “When we played it down with just guitar and drums, it sounded like any other band. So we started adding our own kick drums to Tuggy's drums; his drums ended up quite low in the mix, but you still get the feel of live drums. And the drumrolls, which have so much energy, still pop out. But the kick and hats are more synthetic and hip-hop — sounding. The snare drumrolls make that whirring sound because they are two hits — the live and the sampled snares — phasing together. We used Logic to chop up and align them, and they sound punchy and very compressed.”
After employing four singers to punctuate the song's gospel chorus and exclamation, “No more lies! No more lies!” Basement Jaxx brought in arranger Will Malone and a 16-piece orchestra to record the swirling, sometimes dueling strings that surround the track. “That gave us a boost,” Buxton admits. “You are hearing the strings with our synth bits playing all of the actual lines. The live strings played throughout the track, with some of our strings that we left in there. We had to make sure we didn't go up our ass with the sweepy, sad strings and make it all lassie music.”
To short-circuit the possible “lassie,” or girlie, outbreak, Basement Jaxx rented a Minimoog for a day and played it in every manner possible, saving the results to DAT as samples. The bits and pieces became the song's unruly bass ripping. “Getting the bass sound helped make it,” Ratcliffe says. “For a long time, it sounded too small, like a band in a garage somewhere. For Basement Jaxx, we wanted it to sound a bit grander, bolder. We tried lots of different bass sounds, but when we got the Minimoog bass sound, it filled so much space. Suddenly, a lot of things we'd been trying, we didn't need anymore. That bass sound was doing all that for us. We played the Minimoog through a control keyboard sampled from Logic's EXS24 plug-in. Getting that and the strings were two big breakthroughs in that track.”
The Minimoog also played a part in the song's two-step breakdown, again as a percussive element to which sampled bells and flutes were added. “We used those Minimoog sounds we had on DAT for a lot of things. [We loaded one of them] into the Mac; then, with the EXS24 plug-in, you can convert it to an instrument,” Ratcliffe says. “Basically, you are playing that instrument. The original source is a Minimoog played through the EXS24. Then, the song ends with a bunch of sirens we made with Logic's ES2 plug-in.”
“It was hard to know what ‘Good Luck’ should be,” Buxton concludes. “We started it at the beginning of the album and finished it last. People liked it from day one and thought it sounded like a radio record. The really heavy bass sound helped it. But getting a good chorus was difficult.”
BEYOND DETAIL
“Supersonic” and “Tonight” take respectively different approaches: The first matches a loop from Robert Randolph's “sacred steel” (Pentecostal praise music lead by pedal steel guitar) with a 70-year-old Jamaican singer and a Juno bass line, and the latter uses Logic's EXS24 and ES2 plug-ins to create shuffling brushes, mariachi trumpets and smoky guitar. “The ES2 is good for those sounds,” Ratcliffe explains. “It's very modern, but for chords, it is too cold. It is very wiry, so it's good for percussion. It's like static electricity: very pure. It is how you arrange it, as well; we put lots of short notes in a row, and it makes that pprrrrrrr sound of the brushes. You adjust the velocity, and you get that. It takes time to pay attention to details like that.”
Kish Kash is chock-full of detail, and although the Basement Jaxx boys are upbeat about their future, they admit that they don't really know what that future is. Fittingly, Kish Kash closes with eerie Minimoog tones akin to a futuristic mob of horny aliens cruising for nubile human flesh. It sounds like potential destruction, but Ratcliffe and Buxton simply think it's fun.
“Does that give you a bad feeling?” Buxton asks. “Well, like we said, we don't know where we are going. So Kish Kash is reaching into that void, out into the unknown. Your nerves are on edge a bit, but I like those spacey, ominous noises. They don't scare me — they invite me. It's like, ‘What's around the corner?’ It could be scary, but it might be nice.”
MOOG TO THE BASS
Simon Ratcliffe explains making bass with the Moog Minimoog: “We have used the Minimoog for a long time. We kind of got in the habit of hiring one for about £50 a day. It has a got a roughness we like, but it doesn't stay in tune, unfortunately. It has got a crunchy sound that you can't mimic with anything else. And the one we hired is not even MIDI-compatible. We used it on ‘Set Your Body Free’ and ‘Good Luck’ on Kish Kash. It was really nice and dirty. You can get nice chords on it, as well. You get a bass tone on one cut; then, the other one is pitched up seven tones. It is really good for playing deep riffs in house music. We like the unpredictability of it, as well. It does its own thing sometimes: You touch it by accident, and it goes off. It is a cool instrument.
“Everything we do, we record on DAT because you never know when an accident might happen that might be good. We had the stuff on DAT and sampled the Moog to a click track. I was just playing deep-house riffs, but they are also quite rocky riffs. They are like bass lines: four notes repeating themselves in a loop. Actually, the core of good deep house and good rock is often the same, I find. It is the same kind of emotion. I played that for half an hour, then listened back to the DAT. The Moog wasn't MIDI'd, so the timing wasn't spot on, to say the least. We ended up taking a note, sampling it into the Mac, putting that note into the EXS24 as a sound wave. Then, we could play that note up and down the keyboard. So we retain the Moog sound. The note we chose died down in pitch at the end of every note; the sound was actually pitching down every time. Things like that are cool — anything that gives a note a particular character gives it emotion. On the EXS24 filter, if there is too much crackle, you can take the cutoff down a little bit to smooth it out. Then, we put it on the Amek Big desk, added a little bit of bass EQ and some chorus to make it more spread out. Some of the distorted noises on the Minimoog are also featured in some of our tunes, but it is subtle.”
BASEMENT GEAR
Alesis MicroVerb 2 signal processor
Amek Big 28×24 console
Apple Mac G4
Behringer MDX2200 compressor/limiter
DigiTech Studio Quad signal processor
Drawmer 1960 mic pre/tube compressor
Emagic ES2 soft synth
Emagic EXS24 mk II soft sampler
Emagic Logic Platinum DAW
Fender Stratocaster guitar
Line 6 Pod signal processor
Moog Minimoog synth
Pioneer DJM-500 mixer
Roland Juno-106 synth
Roland Space Echo signal processor
Takamine acoustic guitar
Tascam DA-20mkII DAT recorder
Technics SL-1200MK2 turntables (2)
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