When we say “handmade music,” we really mean this sense of crafting something , of touching something – not so much the technique or the technology as the intention behind what you do. In a striking film portrait of Nick Zammuto for nakedmusicians.com, the craft of living is spotlighted as much as the craft of music making.

Nick, is known for his role in duo The Books (with Dutch-born Paul de Jong), and their distinctive, rhythmic, homebrewed-original sound. Here, he covers his manipulations of everything physical and temporal. Sound sampling is a tangible process, the poetry of things put together and assembled in surprising ways. So, too, is his life in music, as he talks about raising kids and literally building a home. They are all of these activities a way of stopping and shaping time, of composing yourself and your loved ones into the future. The resulting sounds and stories might just make you want to move around.

You can learn more about Nick on his site:

http://zammutosound.com/

Burlington, Vermont-based filmmaker Matt Day is responsible for this gem.

And if you’re in the Eastern USA, you can catch Nick live:
FEB 3: Mass Moca, North Adams, MA
FEB 4: 92YTribeca, New York, NY
FEB 6:Brighton Music Hall, Allston, MA

Sounds from his new EP, via SoundCloud:
Zammuto – Idiom Wind EP – Make Mine, London UK by zammuto

Mastering – a step by step guide to good sound by monolake

Sadly, as Robert Henke concedes:

i still think it needs to be louder and it lacks dynamics and punch. I STILL THINK IT NEEDS TO BE LOUDER AND IT LACKS DYNAMICS AND PUNCH!

It’s like banging your head against a brick wall.

No further comment at this time.

Artist Zack Wright, for a handful of followers of what we used to call IDM, will be a blast from the past. Recording as Deceptikon on labels like Merck and Daly City Records, Zack is back. His name is now Dkon, and the story is more than just him: in the absence of a Merck to release adventurous music, Dkon is helping launch a new label entitled Tokyo Ghost Island, with an EP to be followed soon by new records from Jemapur, Secret Palindromes, and an EP from Stockton & Malone, among other things.

Swimming upstream against gear fetishism, the 800 EP is proud to be cheap. The Korg Poly 800 on which the release is focused is a dirt-cheap eBay score, but as Dkon puts it, it’s also “one of the most underrated analog polysynths out there.” I’d be nervous about CDM driving up its value before I can get one – it’s been on my wish list – except that there are a lot of them. It was the first synth for many players.

With that spirit, Dkon sends along a manifesto of sorts about music making. He’s been coupling the Poly 800 with a production workflow entirely centered on Renoise, the modern tracker, for recording and sequencing. But tools aside, there’s a minimal philosophy here I think a lot will like.

Oh, and about the album: it’s raw, unaffected, with the sweet spare sounds of the Korg set to good-natured beats, as clean as your local Poly 800 in a garage sale probably isn’t. It’s not retro; it’s just … well, good. The synthesis is unabashedly front and center, everything perfectly machined in pure economy. Less is more, indeed. Have a listen: the full tracks are on SoundCloud:

Dkon – 800 EP by Dkon / Deceptikon

Grab the EP on iTunes

Facebook fan page

(I love this sound — but for a radically different side of the artist, be sure to hear some of his past work and remixes below; he’s got quite a range.)

For his part, Dkon is based in San Francisco, by way of Tokyo, Seattle, Washington, Eugene, Oregon, and Portland, Oregon, except I ran into him in Brooklyn at Percussion Lab.

Bonus points if you remember Deceptikon. And if you don’t, you know we’re not music snobs here; I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised to discover him through the new Dkon music. (See bottom for some Deceptikon music, too.)

But let’s see if you agree with Dkon’s philosophy, behind this record and DIY, economy-be-damned, do-it-on-the-cheap, make-it-great spirit. He shares those thoughts with CDM:

DKON’S TIPS FOR CREATIVE SUCCESS

1. Less is more.
If you read nothing else in this article, read this. Having more options is not good for your creativity. Learn what you have, use what you have. Having a limited set of options forces you to focus.

2. You don’t need expensive stuff.
There are a lot of people who think you need to keep improving your studio, and getting the latest, most expensive gear in order to have the ability to be able to make something good. This is nonsense. From an economic point of view, the 800 EP cost me about $125 to make. (Renoise license of about ~$75, and I bought the 800 on Craigslist for $40). I made my first several albums (*Lost Subject*, *Greater Cascadia*, and *Mythology of the Metropolis*) with very limited means and equipment. Make do with what you have. Buy gear secondhand, but only what you will actually use. Use free or cheap software. Use free or cheap plugins.

3. It doesn’t matter what software you use.
There are so many DAW options now, but they all do basically the same thing. The only real difference is workflow. Pick one that appeals to you, learn it as you go along, and you will succeed. I have been using mostly Renoise for the past few years because I like the workflow and relatively simple interface. It may look confusing if you’ve never used a tracker before, but once you get the hang of it, it’s incredibly fast to get your ideas down, which is a major advantage. When inspiration hits you, the faster you can start working, the better.

4. Work around the limitations of what you have.
If something is limited in some way, use it to your advantage. Why do you think things like the 303 and 808 are still universally adored? They are both incredibly limited instruments, but what they do, they do very well. Using a more concrete example in my case, the Poly 800. It’s horribly tedious to program, but has a great sound and a lot of character. If it was covered in knobs and sliders, I don’t think it would be as appealing in a bizarre kind of way. The limited nature of the instrument encourages creativity.

5. Treat everything as a sample.
Especially in regards to software like Renoise. Find a sound on an instrument you like. Record yourself playing a few chords or a sequence of notes. Chop it up, sequence it, and rearrange it. Usually, if I do this, the sequence that ends up being used is different than the one that I originally played. Move things around, play with the pitch, change the envelopes. Being imprecise with your editing gives it a more humanized feel, without resorting to adding “humanization” after the fact.

6. Fidelity is highly overrated.
Do you think anyone is going to care if your snares are amazingly compressed and EQ’ed if your song is terrible? No. Making your music sound “nice” should be an afterthought. Focus on content, not gloss.

7. If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.
Making music, or art of any kind, should be fun. Treat it as play, not as work. Don’t think of what you want to make before you start – let the finished product reveal itself through your work. Dive in and explore without conscious thought.

http://www.deceptikon.net/
http://soundcloud.com/dkon
http://www.renoise.com/

Inside the Studio: Gear and Renoise Session Screenshots

Click the images for a closer look; all images courtesy the artist and used by permission.

More Music

Remixes by Dkon / Deceptikon

Mythology of the Metropolis 12″ by Dkon / Deceptikon

Artwork for the Mythology of the Metropolis album is, I think, really beautiful:

The painting is the work of Philadelphia-based Richard Bailey, aka artist proem, who also did my album cover as well as the CSS work on CDM. This isn’t some sort of cabal we’ve put together; I keep running into these lads and the connections between them by pure accident. There’s a sort of diffuse, scattered community of people who are expatriated from a forgotten IDM nation. If IDM dies, CDM lives, at least.

And for good measure, the music video for “Broken Synthesizers,” via reader mikrosopht in comments, who worked on it.

Brilliant idea – hacking YouTube timelines to make an interactive 909 – though I can’t get it to work for me at the moment.

Thanks to Dkon for all these ideas.

Care to debate – or echo – his creative tips? Sound off in comments.

Compose and sound designer Diego Stocco, seen often in these parts, has an endlessly-inspiring approach to inventing new timbres. That process of, as he puts it, “bringing music into the process of creating sounds” is sometimes destructive – as in, sawing an instrument in half destructive. It seems often at the edge of obliterating the object, but sliced thinly onto the side of unleashing its auditory potential. Sometimes, it’s gentle, putting an ear to the world. But his work is always exploring new frontiers of possibility.

Diego himself comes to the microphone to explain his philosophy and background in a fantastic interview launching a new video series, entitled Take, produced by the LA-based FIDM Digital Arts:

Take 5 with Sound Designer Diego Stocco [FIDM Blog; more digital artists and directors and such to come in that series]

Diego also sends CDM some of his latest work, an eerily-ethereal reconception of the sound of a filling oxygen tank, which becomes in turns percussion or vast, imagined space calliope.

Here’s the musical soundscape, a cinematic composition from layers of the single sound:

Diego Stocco “Oxygen Tank” by DiegoStocco

And the source recording on which the piece was exclusively based:
Diego Stocco “Oxygen Tank Original Noise” by DiegoStocco

Diego tells CDM:

This is sound design/cinematic piece I created out of the noise of an oxygen tank while being refilled. It makes all sort of interesting overtones because of the high pressure. This piece is more about sound designing the noise into different elements rather than playing parts with the tank.

I didn’t add any other sound to it, everything comes from sound designing these noise snippets [as embedded above.]

More Diego Stocco goodness:
http://diegostocco.com/

or search CDM.

A few decades is a short time in the history of instruments. But something magical is happening: the electronic instrument, the computer, is finally easily shifting into performance scenarios, into improvisation, and into bands. (The performance features Livid’s Ohm64 and Ableton Live, with sax, guitar, and drums, at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge. See a note on the rig at Livid’s blog.)

Look no further than Nicolas Jaar. In an insightful performance and conversation for MTV Hive, he reveals how he thinks about music – and puts his chops where his mouth is. Excerpt:

“I think honesty and electronic music weren’t really tied together for a while … it was more about forgetting and partying. And now everything is coming together.”

That notion of “honesty” appears to cover finding his voice, finding a performance technique, and finding musical ideas.

In my dream world, this is what MTV looks like when you turn on your television, before reality killed the video star.

We’ve had some reports of difficulty playing the video. We will hopefully get to do our own interview with Mr. Jaar soon, which we’ll make available to all.

And yes, while I enjoy watching the video, I’m very unclear what Nico means by “honesty.” It seems to be a personal take on what he’s doing in his own work, and I’d like to know more, as to me, it’s unclear. Some reader comments, rather than wanting to know more or questioning what he’s saying, instead decide to say that so much as posting this video on CDM takes away from the site’s integrity or suggest that he’s a bad person or that I don’t know that people have used sequencers in live bands before 2011. So, yes, that’s a … perspective. Carry on. I’ll continue trying to do actual research. Nico’s on tour; we’re waiting for him to get back to the US to do a proper interview, for those with more open-minded attitudes.

Amidst the many examples of virtuoso finger drumming and pad performance on YouTube, here’s a potentially-inspiring jam produced by artist Teezva for Vestax. We must have missed this video in the NAMM deluge of last year, but it perhaps remains worth posting. It’s doubly so, as I still haven’t seen any of Vestax’s PAD-One hardware in the wild. (PAD-Ones, if you’re reading, come say hello!)

One interesting element of the performance is that Teezva seems effortlessly between triggering clips and loops and individual one-shots. Many performances I see tend to focus on one or the other, but compositionally, that provides more flexibility.

Just keep tapping those fingers to keep your dexterity up.

Via Beatnick audio, another live take with Teezva, in which he also talks a bit about what he’s doing. (And yes, he really can replicate this performance, lest you thought the above video was the result of umpteen takes.)

Here’s the PAD-One, looking for all the world like a KORG padKONTROL and a nano series had a love child:

Vestax PAD-One

– though, naturally, this is applicable on any pad controller you like.

When musical traditions meet, handled by people with real mastery of their technique, wonderful things can happen. That can be true of master instrument builders, for one. I got a chance to hear the sounds of the Moog Lap Steel Guitar in June while meeting with the folks from Moog Music. It’s an incredibly-delicious instrument, both in terms of how it’s engineered as a guitar and in bringing the filter from the Moog synth, now itself a tradition.

And you thought bluegrass and synthesis had nothing to do with one another. Think again. -Ed.

The history of musical instruments and of music itself is a story of the search for ever-greater tools for expression, and of an ever-deepening well of ideas to express. Combining innovations by instrument makers from around the globe (and across decades and centuries) with musicians who take a similar approach to their art is bound to produce music that displays a welcome hybrid vigor.

A prime example of this is Billy Cardine and the Moog Lap Steel. A bluegrass virtuoso who has performed everywhere from Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to the Ryman Auditorium and Bonnaroo, he also studied in India and will perform at the upcoming Bangalore International Music Fest with chitravina master Ravikiran. [Ed.: the chitravina is an ancient Indian instrument dating back at least two millennia. It's a fretless string instrument, and can itself be seen as a precursor to slide instruments in places like Hawaii - it's played in the same way, with a slide. Just dig those 21 strings. -PK

Billy was instrumental (pardon the pun) in the development of the Moog Lap Steel and played a prototype at its debut at Moogfest 2010 (see video, below). Combining the unique expressive qualities of the lap steel with the innovative string control abilities of the Moog Guitar – adding an onboard Moog filter – results in an instrument with incredible expressive potential.

And since there is a CV (control voltage) input for external control of the Moog filter, why not bring some modular synthesis into the mix? Against a backdrop of synth drones and arpeggiations, with a sweep of a pedal the MakeNoise René sequencer can be brought in to modulate the Lap Steel’s filter cutoff frequency. The René has two independent clock inputs. In this video (top), only one of them is synced to MIDI clock, resulting in some nice, subtle glitchyness.

Bring this to life with Billy’s unique style… the results… the expressive vigor of hybrids.

And More Sonic Experimentation – With a Fiddle

In another example of electronic expression in unexpected genres… Casey Driessen, violinist with Bela Fleck, the Sparrow Quartet and others visits the ExperimentalSynth Studio to check out some Moogerfooger effects processors.

Ed.: For a change of pace, I have to also embed here a preview Chris shot for the workshop he was teaching for the Moog Foundation. You get some computers here. And actually, I’m impressed by the sense that, in some sense, it doesn’t matter – this Mac laptop could easily jam with the violin, with the banjo, with the slide guitar… That’s important. Working solo in the dark hours of the night is terrific. But it means you can also play – really play, not just get lost in some chaotic soundscape – with friends from a range of musical traditions. -PK

More Experimental Synth:
http://www.experimentalsynth.com/

Something has happened to the mystique of the musical artist, as the superstars have faded. It seems people are increasingly interested with understanding process, in understanding what’s inside the magical black boxes of sound.

Jess Gitner hosted Derwin Panda, aka Gold Panda, at National Public Radio’s studios for Morning Edition. She talked to the artist about the basics of how he constructs music from samples. It’s actually quite nice to me to see a story that’s elementary enough that it could be understood by non-specialists — it’s all to easy to forget that for the vast majority of even the music-loving public, a lot of what people do is a complete mystery.

It’s also worth watching Gold Panda in a live version of “You” for KCRW (a US public radio affiliate in Los Angeles). He uses the tried-and-tested Ableton laptop-plus-MPC combination. We spoke to Gold Panda at length about his process back in October, just before his debut album really blew up (entirely and unequivocally having nothing whatsoever to do with CDM):
Gold Panda Interview: Inspiration from Samples, Loved Ones, and Distracting Dogs

Listen to the whole NPR piece:

Gold Panda: Breaking Down Found Sound [The Record with Ann Powers / NPR]

In other news, Rick Moody, himself a novelist and musician, does a wonderful, intimate interview with Moby for The Rumpus. (Thanks, Paul Artz!) It’s ironic that Moody is conducting the interview, as he has been crafting an extended manifesto about why not to use drum machines (though he claims it’s only “rhetorical.”)

SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #29: The Museum of Broken Things [The Rumpus]

There are some insightful moments; I like this quote:

Not to get too odd and esoteric, but there’s the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi. Do you know what wabi-sabi is? The more entropic something is, the more endearing it is. A bucket that’s forty years old that’s been used by a lady to clean the floors of a house she’s been working in is way more interesting than a brand new bucket from Walmart. A broken down, crummy Wall-E is way more interesting than a brand new robot. And that’s part of my love of these guys, they’re all about entropy. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. They’re all dusty, they have pencil scribbles on them, none of them is cool, and the ones that sort of pretend to be cool are the least cool.

I’m not entirely sure Moby’s history of the drum machine is completely accurate – for one, I’d question whether it’s true that no one makes or is interested in drum machines any more. But it’s worth it for the massive gear lust geek-out.

In fact, if you read just one line of this rambling article I’m writing, read this one:
What would we need to do to resurrect the PAiA 7701 Drummer Boy or some similar design?

Where’s my blink tag when I need it?

Also, if you read only two lines, what’s Moby’s account name, so we know the next time he snipes us on eBay?

As for this business of drum machines:

I can’t stand drummers, and sometimes, other people, generally. I grew up loving the flavor of grape bubble gum, which is clearly an entirely-synthetic flavor barely resembling the taste of sugar, let alone a fruit. So I must be cut out for 80s drum machine collecting. But I’m just saying that rhetorically.

Also, internal combustion engines? So much more awesome than the horse. So much more.

Mastering to me is a bit like applying stain to wood: done correctly, it brings out the definition of what’s there rather than covering it up. But making mastering effective is a really special art. Danny Wyatt, a veteran mastering engineer now working as an instructor with Dubspot, has some serious credentials both on the mixing and mastering side and as an educator. He’s worked with a range of artists over the years (Wax Poetic featuring Norah Jones, Curtis Mayfield, Thievery Corp., the Roots, Ultra Records, and Mos Def, to name a few). But he also doesn’t mystify his knowledge: he’ll tell you straight what he believes, both face-to-face and as a teacher.

I feel I know Danny’s work a whole lot better, too, having had him master my new solo electronic album, which will be released soon. You can get sort of a loose sense of how someone works when they’re manipulating someone else’s material, but you really get close to their technique when they’ve got their hands on your own stuff.

I like handing over work to a mastering engineer both because they can then provide some objective distance, and because they specialize in the craft. But knowing basic mastering technique is increasingly essential for anyone working in sound – aspiring engineer or not.

Danny has some free videos out, included here, that explain some very useful techniques and tools:

• How to use a limiter, here illustrated with iZotope’s Ozone 4, including its “Loudness Maximizer.” We’re talking distortion-free loudness, not nasty, justly-notorious brick-wall limiting.
• Mid-Side EQ, which I’ve heard Danny call “ear candy,” for widening the stereo effect of a track (here with another of my tracks as the example). Again, he uses Ozone, though other tools could work, too.
• Compression of a bass with URS Classic Console Strip Pro – dubstep-style here, but applicable to a wide range of things. especially with the emulation of the LA-2A modeled compressor.

If those videos whet your appetite, Danny’s class is now taking enrollment for an in-depth online course, so you can benefit from this level of instruction without having to be in New York:
http://www.dubspot.com/mixing-mastering/

And stay tuned, as I did an interview with Danny that digs into his workflow and approach, which we’ll have here on CDM soon.

Have a look at the videos right here:

Perhaps it’s something of an irony, here on a site that heralds shiny technology, but there is a longing among many musicians to return to something raw and unvarnished in music. There’s discontentment in the ranks of the techno-futurists, enough to sow the seeds of rebellions. If that feeling could be given a voice, Anika would be a good candidate. A political journalist who found herself, entirely unexpected, at a session with Portishead producer Geoff Barrow, she is a vinyl-loving, politically-minded throwback, an antidote to everything that commercially-calibrated in music.

http://www.stonesthrow.com/anika

The first thing you should know about Anika’s self-titled debut is that some people immediately hate it. Others just as quickly fall in love with its tendency to sound as though it were made 30 years ago. It’s not retro as pastiche: the music is unrehearsed, largely unproduced, fed through cavernous spring reverbs and played on abused instruments and machines. It sounds like another decade because it was made in the way those records were produced. But it’s also divisive, something unprocessed enough that people can form strong opinions about how it tastes.

And, of course, there’s the question I knew I’d have to broach – the fact that the results sound rather a lot like Nico (of Velvet Underground fame). (The New York Times’ Ben Ratliff described the effect neatly as “healthily irritating.”) Barrow must have been pleased; the guy’s festival here in New York is “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” so you do the math. But it works, because the similarity is entirely organic. Anika, too, is German-born, here German by way of England with a hint of Welsh inflection, and intentionally over-pronouncing the lyrics she intones. She doesn’t sound like an imitator, but like a successor. (She also sounds a great deal more English and Welsh, for the record.)

When Anika was to do the photo shoot, she tells me, Geoff instructed the photographer to “make her look as rough as possible.” That might be the best way to sum up the musical performance and production here, too, a punk rock, just fell-out-of-bed approach to music. And like Nico, like Anika herself, no matter how rough the styling, the results are somehow oddly irresistible. (Anika, on the cover of the album, seems to channel Warhol.)

Producer Geoff Barrow, who gave us Portishead, BEAK>, and Invada Records, might be a surprising pairing on first blush. But his own sense of the importance of song-writing, of the album as a vessel for expression and not just mass-production, and taste-defying, upstream-swimming aesthetic here is perfect.

And I wouldn’t mention this here if I didn’t find this album relevant to the other techniques of production in a digital age. If it makes people angry, actually, that’d even serve its purpose.

I spoke to Anika in New York, where she was doing a series of DJ gigs. The night before, I saw her at Gallery Bar; she struck me as almost delicate with her collection of all-vinyl, no computer in sight. (She told me that she’s doubly careful because she’s actually clumsy, which I can appreciate as something of a klutz myself.) But for all the practiced carelessness of this record, Anika herself is careful and thoughtful. And I think, whether you’re in the love it or hate it camp as far as the music, what she has to say about musical expression and the industry will be very, very familiar to readers here.

CDM: Tell us a little about your background – before you got into promoting this record, you were really a journalist, right?

Anika: I was a political journalist. I had to give it up officially. It’s the Berlin-based news network – ESNA, it specializes in education and science policy, and I was the UK correspondent. We’re a news network, newspapers and policy makers buy our service. It’s on a very specialist scale.

I studied politics in University. I’m officially more of a political journalist. Music has always been there, but it was more of a hobby. I’ve been doing all sorts over the years. I did a bit of work for BBC Wales News, a lot of news stuff, worked for newspapers.

And this is something to which you intend to return.

It’s definitely something I’m going to back to. I was doing that full-time in Berlin up until October when I said, okay, I have to go back to England to rehearse, because the album’s actually doing alright. I recorded it not necessarily with the hope of releasing it. We did it as an experiment, more of a mini-rebellion for me against what I disliked about the industry at the time.

I can think of a pretty long list myself, but what was it specifically that you disliked?

I worked as a promoter. In Cardiff, I used to book bands for four bands in Cardiff and one in Bristol. I used to deal with entertainment for the venues, do all their graphic design, all their marketing, set up a label for them, release local bands in Cardiff. There were just a lot of things I really disliked about the scene, and about the way it works.

In England, people weren’t going to gigs. In my venues, the bands would always be secondary. One of the venues that I worked for, they got a sound restriction the minute I got there, which meant they couldn’t have live acts before twelve. They weren’t aloud to have any live music before midnight.

For the venues, music was always secondary. It wasn’t their biggest income, really. They knew it would only ever make ten pounds a night. Since people aren’t willing to pay for gigs, the most I could charge for a gig was four pounds – like, six dollars. People wouldn’t pay more, and they’d normally expect it to be free. And the way they run it, they never took the bar into account. I usually just break even. I don’t think I ever made money from gigs, ever. I don’t think anyone does.

I worked directly for the venue, so I was on salary. It was four venues. I had to make sure there was a band on every night in two of the venues. For the commercial nights, I had to come up with the concept, the graphic design, book the DJs. I had to do all the graphic design for the bars, the cocktail menus, the food menus, worked with the food and cocktail people to come up with good stuff. It was a lot of work for one person. I had to rep the gigs at night, as well. I’d come in at ten in the morning and I’d be working until about four or five in the morning. I’d go home, sleep for an hour, and come back to work. I’d normally work six, seven days a week. It was a bit much. I had to rep the gigs, so I had to cycle from one venue to the next to sort out the bands, give them their beer, cycle back, buy some more beer, give it to the bands, and maybe DJ at three in the morning and go home. And they’d always say, oh, well, you’re not structuring your time well enough.

So I quit, because I hated it. I was being absolutely taken advantage of. So now I know I only want music as a hobby and not as a career. And then a week later, I got a call from my friend saying, oh, yeah, my friend’s band are looking for a singer. Do you fancy having a go? I tried a few bands in Cardiff, not because I want to be in a band, but because I had a load of lyrics, and I wanted to see how it worked with music. I recorded stuff that directly rejected all the kind of stuff that most bands thought that they have to fit in. So on purpose, we rejected the whole imaging of it. The way I sang it, at first it was political.

How would you say it’s political?

In two ways. The songs I write are [often] directly political. It was also political in the fact that it was a statement for me. It was directly rejecting everything that pissed me off about the industry at the time. It didn’t fit. It wasn’t pleasant to listen to. For ages, in England, all the bands that were doing well were so pleasant and so nice, and they’d go on [BBC] Radio 1 and they’d have interviews and they’d be, like, oh, yeah, it was so nice, I love the record… It was great, and I think music like that is really important to have, but there was no alternative.

It’s great to have that, if you want to do the washing up or you want to do the Hoovering, fine. But there was no music that was any different.

When indie became music, rock music became mainstream, between 2000 and now,, for England, it is commercial rock, isn’t it? In England in the 90s, at least people did stuff that was more rebellious. It wasn’t so nicey-nicey all the time. What if you’ve got something to say? And people were too scared to make any statement, in case someone didn’t like it. There were scared to take a risk. And that’s the thing about this record. It wasn’t designed to be liked. It was designed to make people think.

It’s like “No one’s there.” Now it seems cliche, but when I first wrote it, it was when the English media was writing all these headlines … personifying the recession as if it was some wolf that was going to eat your children. It was just the politicians’ mistakes, and the fact that we spent beyond our means. It was scaring people so much that they weren’t spending any more, so it actually makes things worse.

It was just interesting reading people’s opinions on matters and how they’d been framed. I remember my housemates at the time making all these throw-away comments about religions that they didn’t really know anything about. It’s the same with the Recession. A lot of people didn’t know much about it and didn’t look into it and understand why. That’s the thing about “No one’s there.” It’s just saying you need to question what you’re told.

And I imagine there’s also the politics of the music itself – you had said that music itself had suffered.

The reason music was suffering was because the people going to gigs weren’t taking risks. Firstly, people stopped buying music, which was pretty shit. Gig goers in England weren’t taking risks. So I’d put on a really good band, but they hadn’t had that much press coverage that week. People follow too much what they’ve been told. So this year, at the moment, the BBC released their top ten bands of the coming year. So all the music media has been writing about these bands and no one else. They’re just so lazy. And now they will be the top years this bands because they’ve been told. It’s like the chicken and the egg – which came first?

All those people on that list have the whole package, they’ve got the photos, they’ve got the MySpace friends. It’s just so predictable.

So, really, it’s not only the press, but the listeners, as well?

It’s the chicken and the egg. What comes first, the apathetic listener, or the [press]?

Just thinking about the production here, too, do you think you can record rebelliously, as well?

You can record it rebelliously by not over-producing it. That’s exactly what we did. To try and get that, we had to go to extremes. We didn’t plan any of the songs before we turned up that day. We’d walk in – we’d go the night before and spend the night on YouTube finding things that we could twist into a completely different form, and then we’d go in the next day and say, look what I found? And then I’d go print out the lyrics, Billy would figure out the bass, and then Jeff do that and Matt would walk in, and then we’d try it out, and then the third take was the one that we used. And that’s why it’s not perfect, and that’s why it’s funny when people say oh, yeah, what is this? It’s not perfect singing or whatever. It’s like, oh yeah, it’s not. It was never meant to be.

Okay, I have to ask – obviously, the comparison is going to get made to the Velvet Underground. Was that a conscious influence?

It was really weird with the singing thing. A lot of people said oh it’s Nico and rubbish — like a rubbish, rip-off version of Nico. But firstly, I’d like to point out I’m actually half German. I learned German before I learned English.

When I was doing it, because I had a lot of political lyrics, and because some of the stuff we were doing was Bob Dylan, if anything, I tried not to sound American. So I over-pronounced everything, because I didn’t want it to sound American. And I happened to be living in Wales at the time, for the last five years. It actually sounds a little bit Welsh, but people don’t know that. And so that’s where it ended up where it was. It was me trying consciously not to sound American and then trying to sound Mockney. Mockney is like the London accent. And I didn’t want to have that, either.

I personally didn’t realize we were going to release it. I did it just for a bit of fun. I didn’t realize it was Geoff Barrow at first.

Wait – really? When did you find out that’s who it was?

[laughs] I thought it was just some guys that wanted to record stuff. And when I turned up, no one had borrowed to tell me that it was Geoff and people. I only found out after a few sessions.

My friend kept telling me, oh, they’re called, like Beep or something. I typed in Beep onto Myspace and I couldn’t find them. I think eventually it’s because Geoff gave me a CD in the studio. I was like, oh yeah, do you have one of those Beep CDs, and he said, oh, you mean Beak? And he gave me the CD. And so I went on their MySpace and I was like, oh, right, so that’s Geoff Barrow then… [laughs]

It was good, because I think we all just wanted to do something different. At first, they were just looking for a singer, I think, to do Beak stuff. But then, I just did stuff slightly differently and it ended up being a solo project.

Geoff just kept saying don’t practice. That was his only input, he said don’t practice. At first, it was just to get that kind of rawness, where we weren’t trying to fit it into anything. If I’d had more time, I probably would have had singing lessons, and it would have lost all of its vulnerability and everything. And it is vulnerable, because people can dislike it. It’s easy to go off and make stuff perfect, and then if people don’t like it…. At this sort of point, it is … [pauses] very vulnerable. It’s vulnerable to attack. Because it’s me, not necessarily feeling particularly one hundred percent when I was doing it, it makes it even more vulnerable. But at the same time, it makes it more genuine and more sincere.

It’s a rebellion against what we were told to be. We were told the right way, how best to produce a perfect record. I could have probably got singing lessons, gone to the gym a bit, got a haircut. And that would’ve been alright. And I could have fit it in.

I didn’t actually want to be a musician. I wanted to be a politician. I did it for kind of almost the right reasons. I wanted to do it for sincere reasons. There’s this hyped-up image of this amazing pop-star lifestyle. And because of these reality shows where the emphasis is only on the person’s voice, and then probably what they look like, and then nothing else matters. Nothing about what they want to say, the individuality. People often want to be famous, or they want to be musicians for completely the wrong reasons. And I think that’s why so many people have reacted strangely to the record. I know a lot of my friends at home who are used to mainstream records say, oh, this isn’t really my thing. And it’s fine. I know a few people have commented on my singing ability. And that was never really the point.

How did it come to be that you wound up going this route, then? You had been writing for some time?

I’d been writing loads in that year. It was in the years when I only had two hours at home a day to sleep, and I could never sleep. I was so shut down after work. So I ended up buying a rubbish guitar and trying to put structure to my words. I’d written for years, but never put much structure to them. Still can’t play particularly well, but it helps structure it. I used to just sit there for two hours in the time when I should have been sleeping. I think my housemates thought I was nuts at the time. But it was my way to unwind. So I wrote loads in that year.

I tried out with a few bands in Cardiff, just some jamming sessions with my friends. And it didn’t work because they had big electric guitars and would just drown out my lyrics.

I think it was because my Geoff said to my friend, oh yeah, we’re looking for a weird singer with a bit of a weird voice. And my friend was like, oh, I’ve got exactly the person.

When you did hear yourself on the album, did you say to yourself, oh yes, that’s really my voice, personally?

I didn’t listen to it. I just did it and didn’t listen. We just recorded and that was it. I just walked out of the room, went in the kitchen and made some tea, and didn’t even want to know what happened to it.

And then sometimes I’d say, oh, well that sounds really bad. I’d say, can I do it again, and we’d do it again, and we never used that one, because it just sounded, too …

I think the record can be quite enjoyable. But people seem to be one extreme or another – they’ll fall in love with it, or absolutely hate it. That to me is rather interesting.

I don’t mind. I quite like asking people why do you dislike it – because some people really do to an extreme. It’s always nice to hear why. It’s always good, because it’s made them think. It’s made them question why they don’t like it. That’s good. That’s an achievement.

I couldn’t listen to it for ages after. I just forgot about it, took up that job in Germany with the intention of staying, moving to Brussels to work in policy development.

That’s why I let [Geoff] do it. It was rejected all the pre-cut roles, how it should be. That’s why it worked so well. Geoff’s a bit of a rebel, as well. He doesn’t like fitting to what he’s told.

That’s why it’s good for me to do these DJ tours and only use vinyl. It’s really difficult for musicians at the moment … if you sell your soul and make knocking music and get endorsed by some big company, it pays for you to do that. But if you don’t, it’s really hard to try and afford to [be a] musician. I was fortunate that I moved to Berlin and managed to live. It’s really difficult how people don’t buy music any more. I know it’s really cliche to say, but it’s true. Especially with vinyl, that’s why it’s really important to endorse vinyl stores. It’s really important to buy.

So, to you playing vinyl isn’t so much about nostalgia or authenticity, it’s the economics around that physical object.

Yeah. That’s why I bought vinyl today. Even though I could probably pick up the phone and say could I have some vinyl, please. I think you need to put something back, because otherwise it’s not fair.

So many [shops] have shut down in the last years. And they do help underground music survive. They have in-stores, and they help promote records. And that’s why I was in Other Music. They helped with my record a lot.

That’s the problem with the whole downloading culture. It’s just a reflection of consumerism, how we want everything now.

What’s in Anika’s Vinyl Shopping Bag?

Anika and I met for the interview at Manhattan’s terrific independent music store, Other Music. (If you do prefer digital downloads, or happen not to be in New York, they also have a digital store – so, in fact, you can have it both ways after all.)

In fact, the very first thing she did was to show off her acquisitions. Here’s what she bought, with some commentary, via her Tumblr blog:

The Soft Moon Parallels 7” (This band played before me at Part time Punks in LA and i really liked them! I hadn’t heard of them before)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgwGEG10WIY

Nite Jewel – Am i real? six song ep (I like nite jewel)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9A_2AN39X8&feature=related

Kleenex/Lilliput 4 vinyl box set (This just excited me so much that i closed my eyes and handed over the cash..)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY2nXUUvwg4

Circuit 7 video boys album 12” on MW (I love the MW label and wanted these tracks for a while)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_hV-uqNZ5c

Oppenheimer Analysis album on MW (I always play radiance because i have the single, so was desperate for more!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6faunFcrT0

Anika – I Go To Sleep by stonesthrow