Plaid might be most well-known for their many remixes, especially those for Bjork and their own earlier trio, Black Dog. But it's the current duo's unique approach to the "techno" genre that sets them apart from the burgeoning digital-based dance scene. Plaid makes dense, syncopated, beat-happy music. Beyond techno, outside of drum and bass and bordering on artpop, they synchronize rhythm and melody in the digital domain into complex but coherent songs. Parts fit together and the whole winds up greater than the sum of its parts. Songs are built of disparate musical timbres and tones, swirling around the ears like a gentle cyclone. As a fan (who also loves Can, The Ramones and Muddy Waters) at a recent show in San Franciso put it: "How can something so bizarre be so wonderful?" Ed Handley and Andy Turner were tracked down in Southern California the morning after a show Ed described (with typical understatement) as: "... a polo club, quite nice actually." Actually it was a polo field, and contained over 50,000 people (The Coachella Music and Arts Festival, in Indio, CA). Their new album is Double Figure, out on Warp Records.
Tell us about your studio environment.
We've had a proper external studio space for about 3 years. It's really cheap and it's in north London. We bought a big old analog desk fairly recently because they've come down in price so much...
What kind?
It's a Soundtracs Quartz. It's a late '80s/early '90s desk but it's got very good EQ and a very nice patch bay on it. We run so much stuff through the computer now that it's good to have an analog in to it all. We've been recording for so long we've got a fairly decent collection of analog synths, too. A few of them are getting a bit dusty now because we're using a lot more software these days.
What kind of software are you using?
We've used Logic Audio for a few years and we use all the kinds of plug-in stuff you can get for it... the various kinds of softsynths. We use Reaktor a little bit, and any little interesting bits of software we can get our hands on, really. We're not that radical with our sound design... if we like an electric keyboard sound we'll just use an electric keyboard sound. But I like the fact that you can build a synth from the bottom up. You can actually design your own synth, say in Reaktor, which would obviously not be possible with hardware, well, it would take years to design and build it so... that's the ease of it, the customization of it, really.
Are most of the sounds you use built from the ground up or are they samples?
We don't design all our sounds, we'll use acoustic sounds and found sounds, we may even use presets sometimes if they fit... it's about how it sounds.
Do you play instruments yourselves?
We can both play keyboards very badly... Andy plays flugelhorn, he learned that when he was young... he plays brass a little bit. But no, we're not technically very good players — it's all kind of computer-aided.
So where do you get the lovely clean guitar melodies in songs like "Ralome" [from Rest Proof Clockwork] and "Kortisen" [from Not For Threes] or is that a trade secret?
That's a friend we've known for a few years. We write with him sometimes. He's really into this baroque, medieval thing and we've got a real fondness for that kind of "oldey" "Greensleeves" vibe.
Speaking of "oldey" sounds I noticed the opening keyboard figure on "Shackbu" sounds like something from Gentle Giant...
Okay, yeah, that's ahh... well, most of our stuff is played, we don't really work with melodic loops. We might work with rythmical loops but all the melodic stuff is played.
I didn't mean to imply you'd stolen the melody...
No, no, I'm just saying that would have been probably a FS1-R [Yamaha sound module], like a DX piano sound through a pedal or something...
But the actual melodic structure is reminiscent of that particular era of prog rock...
Oh, I know what you mean, yeah...
Do you have any influences from that sometimes dense and ponderous music?
Yeah, sort of. I like Stevie Wonder and stuff like that so I like that kind of production... but we tend to listen to a lot of modern music. We're not really collectors of old music or anything... somehow we've been influenced by lots of stuff...
What are some of your favorites?
Well, it's sort of the obvious ones, really. It's definitely the Detroit masters — Derrick May, Juan Atkins. We grew up listening to electro and early hip-hop. We get influenced by everything we hear. We do try and listen to quite a wide range of music so... loads of different things.
Do you create music in the studio together or work separately and add parts later?
We start our ideas separately and at some point we meet up and mix together. Basically working on the computer is a solo operation, really. So we tend to see through quite a lot of the ideas by ourselves and get together at a later point.
Do you find that one of you tends to handle the beat and rhythm and the other the melodic and chordal parts?
A little bit, yeah. I'd say Andy's probably a better rhythm programmer than I am. He's a bit of a drum specialist, but we all do everything because we all like doing everything.
Do you work exclusively on Macs?
We do currently but it's not a sort of principle, really... we used to use Amigas and Commodores until about five years ago, but found there were more possibilities with Logic so that's when we started using Macs. But there's no particular reason other than they were available at the time.
[At this point the phone got handed to Andy]
What remixes are you working on now?
We've remixed this kind of traditional African mbira track, a kind of electronic version which is coming out on a label called District 6... soon apparently. I think it's going to be an album of traditional songs plus a couple of electronic remixes of them. I think the series is called Juxtapose or something like that. And that's pretty nice, actually. I'm well into that mix.
What's an mbira?
It's like those thumb pianos, basically you get like a gourd... it's like a block of wood with thin metal strips on them. It's got a well-known sound, actually.
Like a kalimba?
Yeah, a bit like that but they've got sort of a box around them. The wood has got a sort of acoustic box on it that resonates the sound a bit and then it's also put inside a gourd which has got either shells or bottle tops around it. You get a kind of high rattle in with the sound. It's quite unusual.
Will you use those sounds on any of your own material?
We did actually do a track with an mbira on Rest Proof Clockwork which I think was the last track. I can't remember the running order now. We worked with an mbira player in England but basically we couldn't get it as tight — as we quite like sort of quantized stuff. In the end we just ended up sampling individual notes and tried to kind of randomize the rattle so it sounded fairly authentic although it's a little bit "space mbira" or something. We'd written some melodies based on the theory of how we thought they were played but, as it turns out, this guy couldn't play it as we'd written it so in the end we used sampled one-shots.
How's Logic Audio working for you and why did you choose it?
It was a bit stumbled upon really... we used to use a sequencer called Doctor T on the Amiga for years and then we were asked to do the tour with Bjork about five years ago. We needed something that was a bit more portable and robust for the road and so we ended up with a little Mac 5300 and got Logic with it. It's not really that calculated a decision but we're well happy with it. It's really flexible and seems to be fairly solid. We hardly ever get crashes... touch wood. It's really a good package actually, there's lots of bolt on VST stuff and there's a really good new software sampler made by Emagic called EXS24. We use that and the [Emagic] ES1 software synth. It's really cool, actually. It's well handy being able to write when you're traveling. Often you're away from the studio for a bit. It's frustrating if you can't set up your gear in the room so it's well handy.
So now "setting up the gear in your room" means putting on headphones and turning on your laptop?
Yeah, we're getting in to that. Becasue we were away for so long doing the Bjork tour we used to take a little travel case with us with some foot pedals and a 303 and a 202 and little bits of gear that we could easily set up. We used to write with that but it was fairly limited. With the G4s you can do everything.
How much time elapsed from the time you first looked at Logic Audio til when you were using it onstage with Bjork?
Two weeks. It was well, mad actually — it was well in at the deep end with it. But it's pretty intuitive. If you're familiar with any computer software it's menu driven stuff. If you know what you want to do basically you can generally find the right bit of the package to do it. It's knowing what you want to do that's the most important thing.
If knowing what you want to do is the most important thing, how do you know what that "most important" thing is?
I don't know, really... I suppose you're just kind of driven or you get an idea in your head. I dunno, everything seems to follow along naturally when you're writing. You might hear a sound and that pushes you in a certain direction or you might get a melodic idea from the sound. It's difficult to know what the motivation is.
Louis Armstrong said there's only two kinds of music: Good and Bad.
Yeah! That's pretty accurate. There's an old jazzman who said, "Too much talk stinks up the place." I can't remember his name... It's much better to listen to the music than to try and talk your way around it. It's difficult.
