Puisqu'ils sortent un nouvel album profitons-en:
Citation:
The sonic barnyard cameo — triggered by singer and founder Wayne Coyne from a circuit-bent Animal Band children’s keyboard — is just the beginning when it comes to the Lips’ offbeat creativity; previous musical experiments included conducting an orchestra of 40 automobiles, as well as releasing a set of four discs that were intended to be played simultaneously. No strangers to music technology, the Lips continue the experimental tradition with their newest release, At War with the Mystics (Warner Bros.), an exuberant recording full of unconventional sound design and keyboard work, courtesy of sources ranging from a Roland XP-80 to Propellerhead Reason, a bargain basement Realistic Concertmate to the tweakiest of Native Instruments plug-ins.
The Oklahoma City band has come a long way since they formed in 1983 and debuted in a transvestite club soon thereafter. With recent cult records such as Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (Warner Bros.), the Lips have evolved from brilliant underground oddballs to widely respected mainstays of the alternative music scene. We caught up with drummer-turned-guitarist-and-keyboardist Steven Drozd before the gig at Bimbo’s to get the story behind the Lips’ latest adventures.
What keyboard gear do you tour with?
I’ve had the same stuff for years. I bought a junky old Roland EP-707 back in 1995. I wanted to find a keyboard that had a good acoustic piano simulation, so I went to all these music stores in Oklahoma City. I got on all the pianos and played “Evil Woman” by the Electric Light Orchestra, and I finally found this one that sounded pretty fat. It wasn’t digital and clanky, too DX7-ish or anything.
How did you come up with the synth sounds you used on Mystics?
We have so many ways of getting sounds now. I use [Propellerhead] Reason a lot. I think it’s amazing. I got my first computer about three-and-a-half years ago. I didn’t know anything about computers and a friend of mine hooked me up with Reason. He said, “Poke around for about a month and you’ll start to see how some of these things work.” And within a month, I’d figured it out enough where I could start making my own music. I love that.
A lot of [the synth material on the record] is Reason sounds. A lot of the real clunky, low-bit sounds are from this Realistic Concertmate keyboard I bought on eBay for 15 bucks: bottom of the barrel, cheapest sounds. Acoustic Piano, one’s called, but it sounds nothing like an acoustic piano. It’s great. There’re some really cheap sound effects, too. The piano sound on “Going On” has that cheapo keyboard. And the organ sound on “The W.A.N.D.”
It’s funny, ’cuz I bought a Nord G2 a couple years ago, and it was like $1,700, and I’ve used it twice, maybe. And then I bought this little Concertmate keyboard and I use it more than the Nord!
“The Wizard Turns On” has some really funky electric piano sounds.
We used a real Wurlitzer, real electric bass, a drum loop from another song of ours, and then all these crazy sound effects at the beginning, and that’s Metaphysical [from Native Instruments Electronic Instruments 2 XT]. We recorded the Wurlitzer, the bass, the drums, then our producer Dave Fridmann ran all of that through a Korg Kaoss pad, and then he ran that with Metaphysical.
You mixed the entire stereo track through a Kaoss pad? That’s wild.
Well, we did it and realized we were stuck with it being like that. When we tried to undo it after using the Kaoss pad, it was pretty dull. And the flute on there is just the Roland XP-80.
When people use a lot of software synths and plug-ins, one common danger is making the final mix too dense. All your songs breathe, though.
Consciously, we did want to do more rock riffs with more space in them, because we’re still doing a cover of “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath [plays first two chords of the song] and there’s all that space in there, just the drums keeping the rhythm. We started examining that and it’s pretty cool how these riffs are so powerful because they’re sparse. That influenced us as we were making this new record.
Do you and your bandmates have personal studios?
I have a Power Mac with Pro Tools. Wayne still has this four-track recorder — I think he got in 1988. We come from different ends of the spectrum as far as technology goes.
With so much powerful music software available, have you ever found the choices to be overwhelming?
It can totally be overwhelming. Sometimes, if I’m trying to be creative and come up with a new song, I just tell myself, “Okay, you’re going to deal with only one of these ten sounds. Don’t even open up Absynth, man, ’cuz every note can be tweaked a million times in a million different ways.” Sometimes I sit down and say, “Look, you’re going to open Reason and you’re just going to use the Mellotron flute or strings.” It can be overwhelming, but it’s also exciting.
There are lots of intricate sound effects on the album. Do you use backing tracks to reproduce some of those live?
Our backing tracks are actually on the same DV tape as our video. So our audio and video are already synced up and we’re just playing on top of it.
How do you decide what goes on that DV and what gets played live? We decide what gets the most bang for our buck playing live. After we record a song, I think, “Am I going to play keyboards or guitar on stage? Which one is going to have the most entertainment value?”
Since you’re tied to video playback, how much improvisation do you do in concert?
I have room to move. Even though I’ll be playing parts, I can still play variations. Cliff, our drummer, has the drum parts note for note like they are on the record. And that’s cool because it gives everything a nice anchor.
There’s a cool, quirky sense of humor in Mystics.
I hope so, yeah. There’s that classic line: Take your art seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously.
At the same time, it’s not fluff. You’ve got emotional depth and compositional complexity.
I guess it’s the dynamic of all of us working together. I get some of the best things out of Wayne, and he gets some of the best things out of me. We’re still really close friends — all those hokey things you might say. It never seems to be too much of a struggle to get anything done.
What advice can you offer to music software newbies? Be patient. Don’t feel like you have to learn every little thing before you start creating your own stuff. I’d say as soon as you can figure out the most basic bullsh*t, just start trying to create your own thing. That’ll keep you fired to learn more about it. Just learning about it academically — I’d never do that. I only learn what I need to know to create with it. As soon as you figure out the most basic stuff, just jump in. That’s what I did.
