Let's talk about how you did your first record on a 4-track and how you maximized that — and about your new record and how that was done.
With the Count No Count recording, there was no bass. I had been experimenting with detuned guitars for seven years at that point. I got really into middle-eastern music and I wanted to be able to do things harmonically that used the timbre of the guitar, but was more interesting, harmonically. I listened to a lot of Iranian and Iraqi music and Syrian music. I really got into Asian drumming like Korean drummers and Japanese drummers. I was into this kind of organic sense of percussion from the first singles anyway. I wanted to do a recording without a bass guitar, without a bass player, without the concept of standard instruments. I wanted it to have a transistor radio quality and it would sound good over the phone. I still think it sounds best over the telephone. I did the whole thing with a shitty pair of Sony headphones and one channel blew out so I mixed it mono and recorded it to my voice mail. I would listen to it on the phone to check the levels. Especially on a song like "Empire" — it was a keyboard bass that comes in and out and there were literally over twenty acoustic guitar tracks on that one song. Getting a feeling for bouncing tracks for saturating the tape as much as possible, using the hiss as an instrument, as a kind of rhetorical device. It was important to me all at the same time, it was really a catharsis — a blowout sleepless 2 1/2 weeks of experimentation and limited resources. I did all the guitars with a Rockman direct to the tape deck. It's all Rockman, but they don't make Rockman like they use to. The chip has changed, the one I used was from 1979 and it has a special quality. I bought another one — the new one — and it didn't sound good.
Well, they improved it... theoretically. [laughter]
