Macha: Ethno-indie rock & field recordings

Macha are a different band. Their use of Indonesian and other "ethnic" instrumentation within the format of what you would call a "rock" band is rather unique. The instruments add a texture not available from guitars and they utilize them in a way that doesn't call up the soppy tripe of "world-beat" or the pretense of Dead Can Dance. Their recent album, "See it Another Way," was recorded at Chase Park Transduction by David Barbe and the boys [ Tape Op #14 ] in Macha's hometown of Athens, Georgia. I caught up with Joshua Mckay and Kai Riedl in New York and saw an amazing Knitting Factory show a few nights later.

David Barbe has a thing about having to take a two hour break and not working weekends; did you guys encounter that when you were working with him?

Joshua: Yeah, definitely. He was the daytime shifter. The way we had to do our recordings was on a small budget, too little time to do it at home and too small of a budget to do everything that we would like. When we get our six days allotted for making the record, it needs to be literally six 24-hour days. We developed a system where I would come in at nine in the morning and work with Dave until 6:00. At 6:00, Andy Baker, who has a little nighttime stamina about him, would come in from 6 to 2. Andy LeMaster, who's the wild man, night animal would come in later.

You don't hear about that too often.

I don't think it's so common, it's tricky for all parties involved, and there's a certain element of uncertainty...coming in cold. Fortunately, all three of them seem to have their individual perception and they work great as a team. Usually it was very systematic. I had to chart out all the instruments that were going to be tracked so we could have an idea of how we were going to get it done in time. We didn't get to experiment a lot; most of the experimentation was with getting the sounds.

Like how to mic something? You've got some unusual instruments.

Yeah, and they really change in the sound environment. We learned a lot from the first record. The first one had a more elaborate recording situation. On the second one, I learned from the mistakes on the first one — like the shape of the room and the mics we chose. The big thing with the first record was getting really nice sounds, because I was doing a lot of overdubbing one instrument at a time. When you're getting a nice sound in the room, one by one by one, when you pull them all together it sounds a little too diffused. After the first record they built these really great, huge baffles that can make a little room inside the big room.

That's a good idea, I do that with office panels, you can get them used.

These are just towering things that you hope they don't fall on you.

Do they lower them down from the ceiling?

No, they just have them on wheels. They've got the physics right- what seems like a very shallow base for such a huge baffle somehow sits right. Those guys work hard. They're so into finding the way to the greatest sounding recording studio. They really, really think about preamps and compressors, not effects racks.

What kinds of things were they pulling in when you were working there?

Kai: They had this plate reverb that we tried to use.

Was it working?

We used it a little bit but it was on the blink. I think it was on the blink on the second record.

It was in mono, wasn't it?

No, it was in stereo the first record .

Yeah, but on the second record it was mono. 

One channel wasn't coming back?

Right.

In the sessions did you start out with a basic scratch track or rhythm track to build the songs on?

Generally it's two people laying down basic tracks.

Do you have charts to figure out what's going to be added when?

The arrangements are definitely worked out. We record demos at home on cassette 8 track. A big part of the stuff I talked about with the engineers was how I could get it to be a "not-so-professional" rock recording. I was really trying to get the sounds of our wooden room at home, and the good tape compression of a cassette multi-track. I'm really a fan of getting what you want with the sound that's going to tape. There tends to be so much that isn't decided until mix time and not a lot of mix time to do it. I'm really just trying to create the sonic panorama, I don't really want to be thinking of the sounds, themselves, too much. We're really kind of into the "true" sound, the way the instruments sound in the room with a wooden floor at home. We're in love with what we got. We use distortion or mild stereo delay. We really don't go too wacky with changing the sound; it's more like combinations of them to cause some kind of interference.

What are the non-rock band instruments you are using?

The vibes are in there a lot, the hammer dulcimer, the Fun Machine is in there a lot.

The what?

A Fun Machine is this organ, a Baldwin '70s home entertainment organ. You're at the skating rink if you listen to it straight up. Plug it into an amplifier and it goes wild.

What other instruments do you use?

The Javanese zither, the songs "Salty" and "Submarine Lover" both have it. It's that kind of twangy, zingy sound. It's a beautiful instrument from Central Java; you play it perpendicular to yourself. There are long sets of double strings with two legs at the end of it with a big resonator box that gets wider towards the end. We've got nipple gongs, which are tuned smaller gongs with a big strong nipple in the middle. Steel drums get a lot of use. We have a bunch of double reed horns.

Do you take a lot of stuff on the road?

Yeah, we take enough, more and more. Recording instruments is the live translation of everything.

Do you have little pick-ups on things?

Little pick-ups, we haven't been able to invest in proper amplification. We just slide a couple of Dean Markley acoustic guitar pick-ups in under the strings of the zither. We use a clip- on mic for the hammer dulcimer.

I thought there was some stuff you did with micro-cassette recordings on the first record. [self-titled]

Our first 2,000 copies of the first record came with a free second disc that was 70 minutes of Indonesian recordings. The pieces on there from Bali were from my first trip to Indonesia. I got nine hours of Indonesian music and sounds on micro-cassette. Some of it sounds really interesting because of the way it was recorded. I have so many micro-cassettes and I'm trying to find the hi-fi micro-cassette player. The only recordings that have been done in Western Java were done by the government for the Library of Congress. This is a cultural group that's kind of refusing to modernize, they haven't learned the national language, and they don't have any electrical systems of any kind. Certainly the sound of the music is quite different than anything else. It's much more like Aboriginal music all over the world. The rhythms are much more simple pulse rhythms. You could almost mistake it for Native American in some ways.

With a cultural group like that you're obviously an outsider. How do you go about...?

That's a special situation. Basically, we had to get a government escort to go into the place. It was an unusual circumstance; these people have kind of defied their government and modernization. It's like going back 200 years, they're still animist- they haven't accepted a modern religion. Indonesia is really weird; you have to declare one of five religions to be a citizen. So, you go and get a government official to escort you. We had this really great guy named Arif, he had been there many times, and he knew the language.

Where did you put your recorders and mics in situations like that? You probably wanted to be kind of unobtrusive about it.

Exactly, but it was just one mic.

Did you carry it on you when you were recording or did you set it up?

 I carried it on me, circumstances would change in a lot of situations- there would be random people coming in. This one couple that we met had been married for 25 years; they played music on the street and he made zithers and she had a really beautiful voice. We went to their house to record them in their living room. On their front porch some neighbors were skinning this huge snake; they were completely wasted with this snake in their hands. We had to kind of move around them to get into the house and this guy followed us into the house. He sits down and starts singing along when everyone starts performing. He was so completely out of it, it was really wild. How do you work a set up for that situation?

With a situation like that, do you offer them some kind of compensation?

No, they welcomed us, I think he knew that we were going to buy some instruments at the time. We're talking of a place very different with interactive time than what we're used to here. Everywhere you go everybody says hello to you.

It's not like New York, huh? [laughter]

We went to Taipei for our somewhat contrasted Asian experience. We played a couple of shows in Taipei, going through Taipei, you look at people and they were always just looking away, they seemed scared of us.

How did you end up getting a gig in Taipei?

This band called Ladybug came from Taipei to Athens [Georgia] and I was curious to see them and I ended up hanging out with all of them. I invited them back to stay at my house. There manager who works for this label called Crystal Records in Taipei, Randy Lynn is his name, he was trying to bring in American indie bands over to Taipei. He wanted to bring us over, it was really cool, and we were the fourth band to go over.

This whole band.... The sound of it and everything is completely different, yet your working with world instruments but your not playing the safe ethno, world beat band thing. Is it just a combination of your guys' interests in music? I assume you like rock stuff too.

Oh yeah, basically it's the satisfaction of bi-polar personalities. It's just listening to world music all the time for years. It's kind of affected my orientation, like Thai food — you try it the first time and you want it again until it's part of your diet.

How did you mic your instruments in the studio?

We tried everything, I think the mic that got the hardest work was the Earthworks "anal probe."

The TC30?

The 0M1 actually... The OM1 got a workout with the snare drum, all my vocals, most of the string instruments although the Sony Handycam video camera actually was the most preferred acoustic instrument mic, it really allows the overtones to take off.

So how do you do it? Do you just set on "record" and take a tap out?

Yes, it has left, right on it.

What numbered camera is that?

They discontinued that one because of the controversy in Japan. In Japan some intelligent fellow discovered that there was a red filter that you could put on it so you could see through women's clothes, so they stopped making that particular Handycam. Another mic that was really nice was were the Coles ribbon mic's.

The 4038's?

Yeah.

Those were great for the guitars and for any loud sounds that had an edge that we were having a hard time getting rid of, like the steel drum. The steel drum was the hardest struggle to get the sound. We set up 6 different mic's and we went and listened through and found the one. It turned out to be a combination of two and we didn't know which ones they were. For some reason something got moved or something didn't get written down and we spent the next 5 hours trying to get even close to what we had again. We never got the sound but we got to the closest proximity to it with the Coles. We use [ShureSM]58's and the video camera at home. On the new record, "Mirror" is obviously the lo-fi sounding one, it's a very old recording that went from an eight-track demo to a 2" sixteen track. The mix is two years old I put it together in a half-hour to get over to the radio station and have something to play. It ended up getting laid onto our sophomore struggle; it's just what it is.

Was there other stuff you did on the first album that was different, recording wise, from what's on the new one?

It had a little more flip-flopping between the DA88's for stacking up tracks and bouncing them down to two on the sixteen-track. The horns especially, I'll lay down ten horns, like temples, they've got all these horns going.

Did they sync them up... the DA88 slave off the sixteen?

No, that time we didn't have it synced so we had to get the touch right. They're now synced up at the studio and now they're 32 track. We definitely want to explore more with flipping and bouncing back and forth and changing the sounds, especially editing. We've got a couple of samplers that we've needed for getting some of our instruments into the live shows that we can't bring with us. I guess another thing that was really different between the two records is that we mixed the first record at a different studio in Nashville.

Were you doing it at David [Barbe]'s place originally?

The first record, we mixed one song at David's and the rest was in Nashville with Mark [Nevers, at Wedgetone], who's worked with Vic Chestnutt and Lambchop. The second record, we mixed it all at David's.

What were the advantages and disadvantages of both of these kinds of situations?

I just wanted to go to different room because I didn't feel like mixing on K-Roks. The place in Nashville was a mixing studio; it sounded really ideal. The guy had worked all kind of different sessions and was in a band that was experimental. It sounded like a good ideal circumstance, it was going to be a little more money so there was a lot of pressure to do it all over the weekend. We weren't sure what we were getting into. It turned out that the studio had automation, which put us in the position of having to sacrifice one of the sixteen tracks for timecode. If we hadn't had automation, that record would have not gotten mixed. The way we recorded, I had to stack up four different instrumental events on one track.

They had to come in and do different things at different levels.

Yeah, with automation it separates it out to six channels of all the different versions. It saved our fucking asses; it was such a godsend!

Have you guys ever done really different remixes of your own stuff?

Some guys in Athens have remixed some things on their own; somebody said they heard it in a club. I'm anxious to hear it. The beauty of remixing is that you can take out something and show it in a different light. I have asked this one DJ, a guy named Hahn Rowe who's an all around amazing musician. He used to play in a band called Hugo Largo. He's also a really gifted sonic manipulator and he goes by the name Somatic doing a pretty straight up drum'n'bass kind of thing. He's just gifted — he does remixes and he DJ's.

Do you know if people do remixes off anything other than ADATs?

I did some stuff with Anthony [Saffery] from Cornershop, the sitar player. We worked together on a record and I sent him a song dumping tracks off onto DAT, the whole song two tracks at a time. He took that and threw it into Pro Tools and made something new out of it, which I don't know if he ever finished.

For us, I really want to just go from the tape to Pro Tools.

If it was a 24 bit Pro Tools, you could get a little more clarity out of it. What people are throwing into their sampler are these little bits of songs. With these remixes, they get a drum loop out of some section that you did and some other sounds from different parts of the song and build something new out of just these little things, it's all sampled down to 16 bit anyway.

They're getting the ADAT tapes to have all the pieces that he prefers and manipulating the samplers. It depends on the DJ, whether they have something like Pro Tools, or just one sampler, or whether they have multi-track tape.

Have you thought about setting up your own studio for the band?

We want to get it to where we can record basics at a studio and bring it home and spend the time that's right, then go mix it somewhere.

Recording drums is definitely a lot of work, getting that kind of stuff down, but it seems like with a lot of your instruments you could use the Handycam or pick up an Earthworks and a couple of mic's and some good mic pre's...

We get the sound that we want at home, we get things at 2 AM in the bathroom that can't be replaced by any time constraint. Back at home, the stuff that we have on tapes are the source materials for what we really sound like. There's a way we sound in the studio, but the way we sound at home is what we really sound like.

Do think it would be a little less shimmer-y in the end?

Definitely, the cassette recordings and the micro-cassette recordings have all the distortions that come in those formats and that's what we tried to recreate in the studio. We couldn't get it. We kept driving compressors and driving the pre-amps and the tape, we still couldn't get that cassette power.

That's definitely going to be made available to us. We won't do the record unless it's afforded that. 

Then go mix at Chase Park or somewhere?

Somewhere that's got a good, true room so we can know what we are doing with all of this. 

I like the kind of hybrid things that are happening now, when people record some at a studio, take it out and add things and come back, using the studio when you have to and bringing the creative parts back in on their own time.

One thing I've wanted to do is a complete multi-track, micro-cassette session with all these different song pieces with the instruments down on micro-cassette. The micro-cassette is as "field recording" as you can get. Our stuff will start out as this field recording and then it'll evolve into this studio sound.

What about mastering?

We knew something wasn't right with the first album but we couldn't pin it down. On the second record we got in touch with a man named Glen Schick, Glen Schick Mastering. He loved our stuff and he wanted to do our next record. We went to do the second record and we realized how much we were missing aesthetically and professionally. He (Glenn) had already heard a lot of Indonesian music so he kind of understood that we didn't want anything clogged or...

Where does he work out of?

He's out of Atlanta; he's our golden gem.

He is! His room is a fantastic place to do what you're doing.

He's also like David Barbe, trying to continually upgrade his situation. He's crafting his sound space.

I like the record, I think it sounds great it jumps off the CD sounding really clear like the high end is kind of shimmering, and it's got a really good sound.

Thank you.

You're welcome. That's why I'm sitting here talking to you guys, if it sucked I wouldn't be here.