When I listen to what you're doing with Lee Perry, it's still dub mixing. It's not Skrillex-style dubstep.
When we did dubstep remixes in 2007, Skrillex didn't know what dubstep was. I actually ended up living with some guys from SMOG Records in L.A. for a little while, and they were telling me how Skrillex showed up to their shows – they were already playing dubstep. He was like, "What is this? Teach me how to make this!" That was years after we had already done dubstep remixes based on what was evolving with Lee. The funny thing was coming to New York – being into drum 'n' bass, hip-hop, and electronic music – we were doing something that we didn't have a name for. Dubstep was what we were already doing, basically. We annexed some of those names because people recognized it as a certain type of sound. We had those same influences evolve into something different. Working with "Scratch" was cool, because it makes sense for him to be involved in all that. Everything I just mentioned, he's at the root of. The interesting thing about this album is that it came out of us playing it live so many times. I'd be listening to our shows in the car, driving around, and we heard it evolve very naturally. Then I recorded Lee after a bunch of the guys in the band got their parts down in New York. I went down to Jamaica for a week and half, and we recorded all of his vocals. We actually recorded so much more at his place than [what showed up on] the album. In a way, when we were getting the album, it was like, "Yeah, let's get this out of the way." We'd been playing it for a year, and then he wanted to record a bunch of new music and do remixes of what we had on the album. Even though we were already thinking past it, we were like, "Let's put out what we've been doing. Something that's more representative of the live show." To him, playing live is so important. The album is a good representation of it, but there's something about Lee's physical presence. The show is about creating a vibe, a connection, and a communication between people. That's why it is like a religious type of experience. When you get to the root of music throughout the history of humanity, it's always been closely linked to peoples' religions. There's no religious ceremony that doesn't have music, throughout all of history. In this day and age, a lot of people see a separation, especially in America where people are generally not very religious. Reggae is one of the few forms of music that has a very strong religious component, but people don't think of it as they would Christian rock. People don't call it Christian reggae! When you go back to a lot of the influences on Lee's music – Africa and the drumming – it's like, "Why did we configure the band this way, with the horns and the percussion being almost lead instruments?" That's the core. The drum and bass are the heartbeat for him, but the horns and percussion on top of it are such important elements in his music.
It's a human need to feel. I think that's why many people are religious; to have that communal experience.
I don't know if you've ever been to Burning Man, but I feel there's a lot of artificial spirituality there. A lot of people grasping. People are struggling to find meaning to their life. The interesting thing about Lee's worldview is that Rastafarianism is part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but he's got this whole idea of being connected to nature. It brings it all together. It's more of an Eastern view. I studied a lot of philosophy, and Asian philosophy tends to view more the interconnection between people and society, that we're all interconnected, with the web of nature being tied in. It's the whole reason Buddhists are vegetarian. Lee, being vegetarian, said to me once, "People think if they eat the animal they're going to get the energy of the animal, but that's a fallacy. We've got to respect the animals. They are our brothers." That's an enlightened, global, universal worldview. That's underpinning the music. I said to him, "I can't believe how everywhere I go, I find reggae is popular." People who are into it are super dedicated. Reggae hits on something universal. Connecting your heartbeat and soul to something spiritual, that people can get no matter where they are. With his music, I feel we can incorporate other styles into it, and even get rid of a typical band format. I was afraid when we did that, even though he was pushing us to do more new music at first. We didn't go back to a lot of the old music, and I was afraid that a lot of fans of his would be disappointed. I wondered, "When we go play these venues where people are coming to see a reggae band, what are they going to think?" But they were receptive to it, because it hit the core of what they were about. You saw the show. My impression is that people don't think we're bastardizing the music by doing a dubstep version of Super Ape, or something that would make you cringe. We can incorporate elements, because it's an evolution of everything he started. Tapping into the wobble of a dubstep bass is getting into what he's trying to communicate. The ideas he talks about; what are the sounds that represent those ideas? That represent water? That represent being a fish? That represent the strength of the Super Ape?
It's amazing for you to have Lee's influence as you're making music in the genre. There's nothing more pure. It's a pretty unique situation.
It's a real honor for us, all the time, to be up there. It's not just inspiring because Lee created all this. It's inspiring because he's the most inspiring person in the room out of all of us. He's bored already because we're having a normal conversation. He's got to do something creative all the time. It keeps all of us on our toes. Being around him is a constant reminder of how important it is to tap into that part of your soul and stay inspired. That's more powerful than anything he could ever tell us, like, "Play this note," though he does that sometimes. Last night he was telling Troy ["Shaka" Simms], and sometimes he'll tell Larry [McDonald], "Do this beat and beatbox for people." He'll have me make up beats or bass lines right on the stage. He has no boundaries during our live shows, in so many ways. He'll stop the show in the middle and write a song or change the whole set list. Sometimes he'll even be like, "That show was perfect. But tomorrow night we're going to do this different." It can't be perfect the same way. He definitely got mad a few times when we were doing the Super Ape tour. I said he had to do it in the order of the album – that was over pretty quick! [laughter]
I love that you're doing shows on a laptop, with such a minimal setup.
A lot of people think if you're using a computer you have to make music that sounds like a computer. Bleeps and bloops; an Atari or something. It's just a tool. With this band we're trying to have interactive improvisational chemistry. Using the mixing board the way Lee was doing it is using it as an instrument; like the conductor of a jazz band. Too often you see the computers up there as a backing track and everyone's playing over it. But that's boring. It's not playing off the energy of the crowd or the other musicians. The amazing thing about studying what he did on the Super Ape album, and trying to get some of the sounds, there's so much power in a lot of simple tools. As Lee was saying, you start out with four simple tracks. What do you have on a basic mixer? You've got the EQs and the sends. I teach music at this school called Dubspot – we've had Lee visit before. It's "dub university;" all these kids coming, inspired by the music. So many people come in and say, "Oh, I don't have this plug-in or that plug-in! I won't be able to make my music sound like this." What you get with a laptop now is infinitely more powerful than what Lee had in his studio 40 years ago. He proved that with simple equipment you can make world-class music that will last an eternity. The music he made there people are still like, "How did he do that?" You're only limited by your own creativity and inspiration. That's something that a lot of people don't get. On the song "War ina Babylon" – he has this sound in there. The bass line is [low] and this sound is up high, like a Motown guitar doing "that" note. I'm a guitar player. I'm very familiar with getting all kinds of guitar sounds, but I could not get this with filters or wah pedals. I know he does a lot of crazy sounds with horns. I thought, "He'll never tell me what he did. I think that's a horn!" I started messing around with a trombone. "Oh, my gosh, that's a trombone that's filtered." It's just the way he used the EQ. He didn't have any filters back at the Black Ark, just the mixing board and the EQs. What most kids these days are trying to learn with computers is to take synthesizers and do all this filtering or subtractive synthesis to do sound design. Lee was basically doing sound design on real instruments, instead of using a sampler or filter.
As it was going down!
I don't think anyone was thinking that way, at the time.
It's real mixing. The mixing is as much of the art as the making and recording of the music.
