During the years you've been in bands you have been constantly busy playing, touring and recording. Recently, you had a solo-guitar performance at the Cooler, which blasted my socks off. What else have you been up to over the past 2+ years?
In 1996 I spent quite a bit of time in The Netherlands, working on solo guitar and electronics material in Amsterdam at the STEIM music think-tank, performing a few solo shows, working with Nicolas Collins, and also working in an ensemble with composer David Dramm. David, myself, and two wonderful Dutch percussionists had a residency in Utrecht, working on David's song cycle, "All Lit Up." I did the live electronic processing--with distortion, resonant filters, various kinds of delays. I did things like put heavily gated contact mics on the vibes and hi hats, and run them through heavy distortion, or have them key-trigger gates on other instruments. I got a great deal of use out of my Peavey Spectrum Analog Filter. In the fall of 1996 I went to London and performed at the South Bank Centre as part of The Brood--a group comprised of Susan Stenger (from Band Of Susans), Justine Frischmann from Elastica, Sonic Boom from Spaceman Three, Robert Grey [Gotobed] from Wire, and me. We performed pieces by LaMonte Young, Phill Niblock and Rhys Chatham. Panasonic also performed; they're really fine. BOS did a cool show with them at the Knitting Factory in '95. The Aphex Twin, Bruce Gilbert (from Wire) and Caspar Brontzmann/F.M. Enheit were also on the bill. In 1996, Susan Stenger, Bruce Gilbert and I also performed in London and Manchester as a trio, so-called GilbertPossStenger. I had a solo show at Roulette in 1997, and did some record engineering/producing: Tone (for Dischord/Independent Project), Seth Josel (for O.O. Disk), local bands The Negatones, and Nickel Hex, another called Mold, and Skulpey. Several months ago I did a remix in my home studio of a Skeleton Key song with Page Hamilton. That was cool, because we ended up working with only 8 tracks out of a 48 (two slaved 2-inches), and I did things like run the percussion track through a Rat and a Dunlop tremolo pedal, and looping one measure of the bass guitar track on the hard drive and running it through two cascading digital delays--a Korg SDD-2000 and the ultra wacky Ursa Major MSP-126--to make a rhythmic overlay. We did that remix on my Akai DR4d's. I guess I also worked a bit with composer Phill Niblock--recording Jim O'Rourke and David First for him--and performed his guitar piece a number of times. The rest of the time I've been getting my home studio together and doing day job work (I do location video sound for television, mostly for the BBC). The thing I'm just finally getting to now is recording some new material on my own. I've been in foreplay mode on that for almost three years, it seems. I just hope I won't hate myself in the morning.
You really seek the cutting edge in the equipment aspect of studio recording, obviously committed to constantly improving your studio's production capacity. As you have tried out tons of different models, what are some pieces of outboard effectry that you have found less satisfying than their reputation would have them seem?
Some of the real low budget stuff that is cheap, you expect it to be halfway decent, but it is absolute crap. I put the Alesis 3630 compressor in this category, as well as some of the current cheaper DBX stuff. Yuck! For under $200, you can go out and buy an RN1773 (the Really Nice Compressor) from a guy in Texas, I have two of them, and you get an astonishing good piece of gear. There are times when the RNC sounds better on a given instrument or pair of tracks than my Joe Meek optical compressor which is a unit that costs ten times as much. The AKG C3000 microphone has been a disappointment to me. I used it one night on my guitar amp in Germany in '95, and was very impressed. I bought one when they became available in the U.S. and haven't ended up using it very much at all. I guess I should have known better, since I've never really liked the AKG 414, which is the mic that the C3000 is ostensibly patterned after. Now that they've cut its list price in half, the C3000 isn't such a bad deal, though.
At what point did you really dig in to furnishing your own equipped home studio?
I never really wanted to have a home studio, because I felt that I had been "spoiled" by working with all of the great gear at places like Baby Monster. I always wrote and demoed songs on four-track cassette, and loved the sound of it. In fact, I still think some of the four track demos have better guitar sounds in places than some of the BOS records we released. Maybe it has something to do with the in-line impedance transformers I used, and the input stages of the Tascam or Fostex. I loved to pack the level on. Meters be damned! It had long occurred to me that it would be wonderful to do stuff in my apartment that was spontaneous but a bit higher fidelity than the 4-track cassette stuff. In 1995, I started getting more interested in getting a home studio together. I bought two Akai DR4d's (stand alone hard drive machine) because I had heard such horror stories about ADAT transports. The first things that were done at the studio, that were released, were the last BOS tracks we ever recorded, two cuts for two Wire tribute CDs. Part of what made the studio possible was that I was given some fine equipment from my brother-in-law, who had decided to dismantle his own home multimedia studio. So I ended up with wonderful stuff I never could have afforded: a Bryston 4B power amp, two Westlake BBSM-6 monitors, a Lexicon PCM-70.... It snowballed from there, and I realized that my pathological equipment lust had a purpose. I could learn a lot by actually owning the gear because I would have time to experiment and really learn the engineering stuff that I had never had a chance to learn while we were paying by the hour.
What are some of the main things that you have learned in general about the recording process? What advice would you give to recordees, as they approach the notion of recording music in a studio?
A studio makes most musicians self-conscious. The easiest parts and riffs suddenly seem difficult, the grooves that were so effortlessly attained in rehearsal seem stiff and stilted. The problem is that in the studio, most people think too much and concentrate too hard. And there's time pressure and money pressure and a sense that the work is going to be permanent--a statement of sorts. Ideally, one should book enough time so that there's time to get acclimated, to make mistakes, to fool around a little without losing focus. In my best recording situations, that nervousness and sense of expectation was channeled into an intensity, an urgency that meant that the performances were one of a kind. I seem to recall vodka and whiskey also playing a role here. I guess a certain amount of preparation is important, if you do music that requires such things. With BOS, basic parts had to be learned and perfected beforehand, because our sound relied on a great deal of precision. I would also spend a great deal of time in the session auditioning and choosing guitars, and various permutations of amps, speakers and mics. I was very hands-on when it came to mixing those BOS records; the engineer would usually leave the room for awhile and just let me do my thing, and then return and be horrified by how upfront the guitars were. Don't always settle for the speaker close-mic'ed with a Shure 57. Experiment, but always have a sonic goal in mind. Otherwise it can become aimless, self-indulgent and costly. I've always thought that live performances and studio recordings were completely different types of events. A gig is like a play. Making a record is like shooting a film. There's a level or artifice and manipulation permissible in a session that is analogous to the way a film narrative is structured through direction and editing. A play or a concert on the other hand, exists in real time and has a whole different sort of aura. So, I've never been obsessed with things being "live" in the studio.
What has become of BOS recordings? Any thoughts on remixes?
