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?
