What's your songwriting process? Do you generally start with a drumbeat, a riff, or a vocal melody? Or do you jam to come up with something and go from there?
Kathleen: We actually just started incorporating jamming into our songwriting process on this record, really minimally, but the way we typically have started is with a sample. For our first record we would take a whole bar of music or a few bars which included drums, maybe keyboards and guitars, and loop that and then sing over it and work from there and then try to change it up enough so that it wasn't boring.
Johanna: For the first record those long samples were generally done on an Ensoniq Mirage, which is this really old sampler. They are actually crappy- sounding samples because we made such long ones. So the sound of the first record, which to me really characterizes a lot of the songs, are these really stretched out, bad — as in poor, low resolution — samples.
Do you still use that sampler?
J: No.
It bit the dust?
J: It sucks. We both have them in our closets.
K: They're as big as we are and weigh more then we do.
Wow, that's impressive.
K: But we updated to an MPC60 for this album with 8 channels out and an upgrade.
J: The upgrade gave us more memory. It's an Akai MIDI Production Center [MPC], which means it's a sampler and a sequencer in one, so it sequences samples internally to make drumbeats or whatever, but it can also trigger other instruments — it's a MIDI trigger. We actually upgraded before the record because we had to figure out how to produce the music made on our first record live. So it was a ridiculously painstaking process of re- sampling stuff from the Mirage and from drum machines and resequencing it all and now we solved our problem by putting it on minidisc, because why bother? It's still playback, whether or not it's live MIDI or it's on a minidisc.
It seems like you're eliminating some possible hazards too.
K: Definitely. We had stuff break too often on the first couple of tours. For our actual process, the MPC became sort of the center of our songwriting for this album. I got a bunch of weird records from Canada and sampled a bunch of stuff and then shared them with J.D. and Johanna and we'd go, "Oh that drumbeat sucks. Johanna, why don't you take it home and try to make some better drum beats for it" and so she would do that.
J: I think that the revolutionizing step in our collaborative process is that we have matching samplers so we can trade discs and work at home. It seems like that's the way a lot of collaborations work these days with people being able to exchange computer files, Pro Tools or whatever, and that's really exciting. I'm hoping we'll be able to work more like that, even in different formats, like Pro Tools or [Emagic] Logic or [Propellerhead] Reason.
K: It's really collaborative to be doing that, and we have a Tascam DA38 8-track, so as we're working on something we can put it down on a couple tracks of tape and then one of us during the day can be at home working on the MPC and then another can be working on lyrics or adding a guitar part or bass or whatever in the studio. It's cool because we can all be working on the same song at different locations and then come back together. So it's like we electronically jam but we're not in the same room. And it's been really cool that each of us can figure out what we're good at and what we like to do. If right now I'm really into playing guitar, I can do that, and if J.D.'s really into singing and figuring out different vocal melodies, she can be working on that and finding out what her direction is, and Jo got into beats on this record and she was taking stuff home a lot and taking ideas from records and also sampling live drums directly into the sampler and then manipulating them, and she could be doing that and we could all be working on the individual areas we're interested in and then bring them back together.
Yeah, that sounds really exciting because it gives you the opportunity to try different things — you're not only the guitar player or the drummer, you can do any of it.
J: Exactly.
K: And there's no one standing over your shoulder, watching you making all your mistakes. We can do it all in rooms by ourselves and then bring it back and learn how to talk to each other about it — "Oh, I really like that idea you're going with but I'm not quite sure about this one, let me take that home and see what I can do to it to improve it."
And that works pretty well for you?
Both: Yeah.
Do you usually just jump in with a new piece of equipment and play around and push all the buttons, or do you prefer to study the manual before you start?
J: I would say our relationship to the technology up until this point has been on an "as needed" basis. Like we're going to go on tour, so we have to research and find out what equipment isn't going to break, if there will be parts available in any major city, [and verify] that it's a replaceable thing. Questions like that were the guiding factor in getting stuff initially. And for that reason, I have the sampler I have, the Akai S2000 which is a rackmount thing, but which we use in this really simple way. It's just basically a sound bank for a keyboard and it can do so much more, it's a really powerful sampler. So next time I have a couple of months off, maybe I'll figure out what else it can do. And that's kind of exciting. I feel the best way for me to learn how to do something is that I have to figure this out because we have to leave on tour...
K: ...in ten days...
J: ...and it has to work. So that's a really good motivator to open the manual and figure stuff out. Then there's all this other stuff that's possible to investigate later.
Have you found that you've had happy accidents when you've pushed some weird combination of buttons and come up with a really cool thing?
J: Totally. With the Ensoniq it was so random.
K: It was so random that sometimes things would get slowed down when we didn't think they would. Or we weren't able to sample a single note off of a Farfisa, we had to sample a whole riff. So it would kind of change the sound of the music and how we were playing it. But it ended up being really cool.
You recorded the From the Desk of Mr. Lady EP in your practice space and then brought it to Chris Stamey who mastered it, right?
J: Yeah, the EP we recorded in our practice space on an Alesis LX20, 20 bit 8-track [ADAT] and also on Kathleen's...
K: I have a Tascam 388, it's 1/4" tape and it has the tape bed laying down and the mixer as one part. I did a solo record on that and then we've used it a little bit in Le Tigre. We did a lot of stuff on the first record on that and transferred it to digital later. And we did a little bit of the EP on that. The EP was kind of pieced together from stuff that didn't make it on the first record because we needed to improve it. We wanted to make it better — add backups, remix it, change a tempo or whatever. A lot of it we record on our own and then mix somewhere else, which is actually how we did the Feminist Sweepstakes record, but with the EP we mixed a lot of it on our own besides two songs I think, besides "Bang, Bang" and "Mediocrity." We mixed on our own and then had it mastered elsewhere.
So with the new record, Feminist Sweepstakes, was the process basically the same as with the EP or was it different?
K: The difference is that we mixed most of it with Chris, we didn't mix it ourselves.
I think I know the answer to this question but — are you into recording everything dry and then adding effects later?
K: No, to the chagrin of Chris Stamey! I have a Zoom box that a friend got me in Japan for three hundred bucks and it has ninety-nine effects on it. Some of them are called ZZ Top, stuff like that. I got it four years ago when I was doing my solo record, Julie Ruin, which I recorded and mixed on my own on my Tascam, with a little help from my friend Paul. A big part of that record was playing with the Zoom Fire and using effects, because in my previous band I had always done stuff dry and then added effects later and I was always really annoyed by that process, because it made singing not as enjoyable. I really liked how using the effect while I was singing made me sing different. I've tried going through the effects out and then the return, but it always sounds like [the effect is] laid on top and not a part of the actual singing. And also, as a woman, I've had enough bad experiences with men in recording situations that I like to have as many decisions already made before I go into any room with a male engineer — even though Chris is really supportive and awesome to work with. Just from previous bad experiences I like to have made the decision about how I want my vocal to sound [before going into the studio]. That's why I like to have a lot of the vocals recorded before we even get into the mixing situation. So, by having a little effects box I can experiment with I can say, "Okay I tried ten different effects and this is the one I decided on and this is the style I'm singing in."
Is the Julie Ruin project what got you into recording?
K: Yeah. When I was in Bikini Kill I didn't even have a 4-track until our last record, Reject All American, and I remember spending $600 on my 4-track — it cost more than my car and it was a really big deal. I still have a picture of me opening the box. It paid itself off in like two weeks — I recorded stuff that actually got used in a soundtrack for a short video and all kinds of things. But it really became part of my songwriting process then and I just didn't have enough tracks. My friend Paul had the Tascam 388 and I asked him if he'd help me record some stuff on that, and then I got a matching one so that I could continue to work at my house with it. I just got so obsessed with being able to work whenever I wanted, because the recording studio situation is so expensive. Every time Bikini Kill did our records it was basically, "Okay you have seven days to make this album" and we'd have toured the material for a really long time and gotten good at it so we wouldn't spend any money in the studio, we could just go in there and crank it out. It was really fun, but my idea for the first couple of records was to capture the live sound as true as possible — it wasn't so much about using the recording apparatus as a tool, it was just sort of trying to take a picture with as much detail as possible as opposed to trying to make art. Or trying to capture something realistically as opposed to like...
J: A conceptual project in its own right?
K: Thank you, Jo. And so that was what was really great about the Julie Ruin thing. It allowed me to record over a long process of time, which I'd never done. To have the writing process and the recording process meld into one thing was much more spontaneous and immediate. I could get ideas in the middle of the night and go over to the mixing board and just do it. I could do three thousand mixes if I wanted to because the tape was so cheap. I really wanted to gain confidence so that when I did go back into a more fancy studio I could say what I wanted and know what I wanted. It was really about learning what EQ did and what kind of sounds I was attracted to. I figured out a lot — how I like guitars panned, and that I like really trebly guitars, but I also like nice bass on drums and just trying to figure that out and how to communicate it. And now I have the problem that I can't really talk about it as well as I can just reach over and do it. So I want to work with engineers who don't mind me sitting there and fiddling with the knobs when I'm not hearing what I want to hear.
