Illyah Kuryakin

In his tiny apartment in New York, Dean Wilson, aka Illyah Kuryahkin, has created some of the strangest and coolest music we've heard in years. His first album, Count No Count, was recorded on a 4-track cassette and sounded like transmissions from another land. His new album, Thirtycabminute, is a haunting affair that was recorded with Pro Tools, DA 88s and more, but still a lot was done at home. I visited his place and later we went out for beers. It was fun.

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]

That's one way to look at it. For example, on a song like "Marvel", I set the guitar on a chair and ran it into a dB boost pedal and just turned the tone control all the way to low frequencies. I turned the gain all the way up, so I was overdriving the Rockman and then I ran it into the 4-track and rolled off all the high-end and blasted the graphic EQ and overdrove the channel, so it was nothing but low-frequency distortion. I just sort of tapped on the guitar and put the microphone in the room and the air- conditioning unit was humming the whole time. I had a triplet pattern that was played with handclaps and then I played the maracas every four beats. I would play the maracas and run my fingers on the tip of the guitar and it would sound like someone trilling on a Fender Rhodes. There were moments like that where I just started discovering sounds and how it worked, but the really big breakthrough was "Fuzzball", the instrumental one. It was so liberating to have this $50 keyboard and run it through a Rockman with distortion and then blast the tape machine — run the levels way over the top and just hit one note and hold it. The keyboard automatically had a decay, when you hit it, it's just like an explosion. While it's decaying, all of these wonderful accidents start happening, everything's confused, its trying to find order. The keyboard is trying to figure it out, the Rockman is trying to figure it out, the tape machine is trying to figure it out, the tape head is trying to figure out where to put it on the tape. There were just moments like that where it was incredibly liberating. After I did "Fuzzball", I changed the whole way I approached recording. The first song that I recorded, it's called "Spiderglow", I took a transistor radio and tuned it in to Radio France and I ran the guitar through the dB boost, Rockman, kind of stereo distortion and I just jammed this radio on to the guitar and played the chords of the song. I had these voices of people talking running through the pick-up of the guitar. That was really the starting point, I was using percussion and the Middle Eastern tunings. When it came to getting sub-mixes, I got into to stereo panning, 'cause I had to bounce everything. All the percussion tracks were live, and if I got to the end of the song and I made a mistake, I had to start over again. I had to do that so many times. The songs themselves kind of came together in different moods and phases. The acoustic guitar sounds are all just with a Shure [SM] 57 sitting on the desk with total ambient noise, lots of tape hiss. A lot of stuff was just room noise... just capturing room noise.

It was a joy when I first heard that record, I thought someone was doing a really different thing than what you would expect. It's really interesting to listen to.

One thing about the 4-track that I forgot to mention. I wanted to make it sort of allegorical, kind of like a metaphor. I wanted to make the actual 4-track cassette so that it had exaggerated... almost the way a photographer will scratch a negative or do something with malformations or deformities. Somehow being so realistic that they implied something else. That they eluded to something else — bigger and more familiar or something that was actually produced. I was really trying to make something that referred to a bigger production. Something that gave you the sense of largesse or depth or space.

Sometimes it sounds to me like something you're picking up on the radio from another country. I think that's part of where you succeeded — it sounds like from some other place in time. With the layering, like congas, it does start to sound like an ensemble.

I made a conscious decision to take it to a bigger studio and mix it. I went to Baby Monster, it's a place that was run by a guy who used to play with that batch of people like The New Riders Of The Purple Sage and David Bromberg and all of those guys. He's got a really rare Neve board and he bought these huge plate reverbs from the old Atlantic R&B recording complex. He also has three monitor sends with really big sub-lows, smaller 3-way JBLs and the Auratones. I really liked the Neve board and I wanted to work with his big collection of vintage valve compressors. I wanted to use that stuff in the mix, before we mastered. When I got there the engineer turned out to be a computer geek who builds his own computers, but runs the studio and maintains all the valve stuff. What we ended up with was this real hybrid of digital and analog stuff. We had the whole studio running, we had all the outboards running. He had Aural Exciters and all these digital compressions running and the Neve board. We took all the 4-track cassettes and we put them on to ADAT, so we worked from a digital master in the mixing and we ran that through the Neve and we took the 4-tracks and spread it out into 20 tracks so that we could run different effects, different EQs, notch frequencies and all that kind of stuff. We did the sequence, because he had the computer set up, we did all the editing between songs... everything.

So what's the big switch with the recording set up on your new album? The 4-track was retired?

Somehow, Greg and Dan [Arena Rock Records] got a hit and it was right about the time that I was...

Harvey Danger?

Yeah, and I had a whole bunch of 4-track stuff that I worked on with Kurt Ralske from Ultra Vivid Scene. I went to his studio and we mixed and did some vocals and overdubs there. So, I had about seven or eight tunes that I wanted to release and that was right when Harvey Danger started taking off. I had to wait for the Harvey Danger thing to take its toll, because they were so busy with that. It turned out that they wanted to do a bigger budget recording. I got an advance and I decided that because I had worked in film before that I really wanted to get into understanding more about recording to disc. I bought a computer with my advance that I just sold a couple of days ago. I bought a computer, I got Pro Tools, and I got an Audio Media 3 card. The Pro Tools oftware is an amazing editing tool. I had this idea that I wanted to incorporate upright bass... I don't know, I wanted to take this Middle Eastern percussion thing a step further. I wanted to have a drum set that was a mixture between a Middle Eastern percussion idea and a drummer. I got into this idea of playing at a low volume that was really organic, with upright bass, a percussionist that has a kick drum, but uses percussion at the same time. Electric guitar at a low volume with a big fat sound and maybe another instrument like a horn or vibes or piano. I wanted to have a Fender Rhodes like the Money Mark stuff... that '70s kind of thing. I got in touch with an upright bass player and a drummer. When I met the drummer, he had learned all the songs from Count No Count , he went out and bought it and learned all the songs. He had this whole concept of how to perform it live and that was really interesting to me. We got together and played and it worked, it was cool. I recorded the rhythm section later that winter. We recorded all the 4-track stuff and a total of about twenty songs in three days, in an ADAT studio. It was digital recording from the beginning, but the engineer borrowed a Neve 16-track sidecar and some Coles mics for overheads. We had three Neumanns for the drums, the bass had a Neumann and a Beyer and a direct. We ended up with 8 tracks of drums and bass for 20 songs, then I went to a digital studio and transferred everything to hard disk and brought it here and hooked it up to my computer and did all the guitars, percussion, a lot of samples and I did submixes, because with the Audio Media 3 you can only play 4 voices back at once. I couldn't do the vocals because I had to run the machine at the same time and it picked up the CPU noise, it's like a 15K spike that you can't get rid of. I went out to my friend Frank Egan's studio called Sounds Easy. Justin Guip is the engineer who recorded the original tracks. Justin and Frank and I did all the mixing... Frank had the Pro Tools studio, we used two DA88 [Tascam] machines. We put the rhythm tracks from disk to DA88s and I had all these Pro Tools tracks that we opened up in his Pro Tools rig. We then ran it through a Yamaha 02R for automation. I had to do the vocals out there, so we ran the vocals through an Avalon [mic] pre. We did all the vocals through the Avalon, and all the vocals on the record... there's a minimum of four vocal tracks on every song. Some of them have six and eight. It's a very strange vocal sound. I had to fix a couple of acoustic guitar tracks and I added a couple of keyboard tracks to kind of resolve things. We also mixed at Frank's studio, we did our preliminary mixes through the O2R. Justin focused on all the kit, upright and the basic placement of guitar sounds. Frank ran the Pro Tools and I kind of oversaw the production. It took about three months to mix, we did 22 songs. We worked from ten to four every night for months.

After you got off work?

Yeah, I went to work at nine... off at nine. We did a different style of production. With Pro Tools we fixed pitch variations in the double and triple vocals. We took out a lot of mouth noise, glitches... we did so much precise editing. And we used plug-ins, we added guitar sound plug-ins... all in Pro Tools. We used one pair of Yamaha Standard two-way speakers.

NS10s?

The NS10s and one set of Genelecs. The way we recorded the rhythm section was really a room sound. We kept that and I did all the guitars direct. The guitars are really fat. I did them through a... I used a tremolo and a Korg delay. For some reason the preamp and the Korg made this beautiful guitar sound. A lot of times I didn't even use the delay, I just ran the guitar direct through the Korg directly to disk. It came out really fat, it was very nice.

One of those mystery things.

Yeah. I used a lot of slow tremolo. I'd have stereo guitars and really slow, shallow tremolo, so it has a shimmering... it worked really well in a live situation, it builds kind of a spiral effect.