I was driving along a sunny strip of highway in the middle of nowhere, fighting off road trip hypnosis and the potential disaster that goes with it, when the mix tape supplied by a friend suddenly became interesting. Groovy beats, off-kilter rhythms and slightly skewed lyrics drifted out of the tinny car speakers, rousing me from my stupor. Solex sounded like nothing else I'd heard. Elisabeth Esselink crafts her Solex songs in the basement studio of her used CD shop in Amsterdam. She samples from bargain bin rejects, TV game shows and her own bootlegs of live performances. Her most recent CD, Low Kick and Hard Bop (Matador Records), offers new rewards with every joyous spin. I spoke with Elisabeth about songwriting and recording as she was getting acquainted with her new Macintosh G4.
How were you involved in making music before you started Solex?
In my first band I was a singer, and I've been a singer in a few bands and a drummer in one band, an all girl band. I did play guitar for a while but I've never played guitar in a band. I had classical guitar lessons, with a Spanish guitar, but it's not really used if you're playing pop music, I'm afraid.
You just happened to get a sampler at an auction?
Yes, that's correct. I went to that auction to buy CDs for the shop, because we only sell second hand CDs, so the first year we had to go to a lot of auctions. They sell a lot of stuff at this auction, they sell refrigerators, and drum sets, you name it they've got it. They had this sampler and an 8-track tape recorder, and I already had a 4-track tape recorder at home, so I knew how to work with that and I got it on the first bid, so it was really good.
How has your studio set up changed since then?
It was a very old sampler, it was only an 8 bit sampler. So the first Solex record, Solex vs. the Hitmeister, is made with that old sampler, and you can hear it a little bit because the sound quality isn't one hundred percent. After that I thought I might want to use a better sampler, so I bought a new sampler and I bought a digital 16-track recorder. I made the second record with that stuff and also the third record.
Now that you've bought a Macintosh G4 are you going to be using it for recording?
I'm not sure yet. Actually, when I started playing live with Solex I used backdrop projections, I went on my bike through Amsterdam with a camera on my shoulder and filmed the whole ride and I projected that during the show. Then my camera broke down and I didn't do it for a while, but now I really want to get into that again. I want to use Final Cut Pro, that's a video editing program, and so I want to use the computer more for film than music. I might use it for music as well, but I'm still very happy with the 16-track digital recorder.
And what kind of recorder is that?
It's a Roland 1680, it's one of the first 16-track digital recorders, and now they have only 8 tracks and 18 and 24 tracks. But it's very handy and it's got a lot of effects in it and I know how to work with it really well now so I've gotten used to it.
Is your approach when you're learning a new piece of gear to jump right in and play around with it?
Most of the time I just try to work with it immediately but then I have to get the manual after fifteen minutes anyway because I bump into problems. So in the end I read the whole manual, but I don't really start by reading the manual. It's also too abstract if you just read the manual and you're not working with it at the same time.
I read that you wrote forty songs for Low Kick and Hard Bop, is that right?
Yeah, I thought, "Well I'm really going to take my time for this one," because I didn't have much time for Pick Up, so I wanted to have the luxury so that I could make songs to fill the record. The idea was that I had a lot of options. And also I really wanted to add something with a new record. So you need a lot more songs so you can choose.
That's a lot of songs! Do you have a regular schedule that you follow to write that much music?
I don't really have a schedule, but I just go to the studio every day and so some days are really productive, and other days I don't manage to get things done, but every day I go to the studio and try to work on songs.
Your studio is still in the basement of your CD store?
Yeah it is. Lots of material to sample from.
Tell me how your sampling has evolved over the past three records.
For the first record I had the most pleasure in finding really terrible CDs, which were also the cheapest CDs in the store. They were very unknown or just very badly recorded or very bad songs, and the challenge for me was to find really good segments on these terrible records. And I still kind of have that approach. Because for one thing, the thrill is bigger when you can find a good fragment on a lousy CD. If you go to make a sample from a CD that's already really good, there's not that much fun in playing around with something that's already good. So it's nice to make something good from something bad. For the second record I also made recordings on the street like street noises, and I also wanted to sample from bootlegs and I made a lot of bootlegs myself. I just went to small venues in and around Amsterdam with a DAT recorder. So the second record is more or less a "live" record — although it's a studio album, of course — because most of the sounds come from live recordings. And on the third record, I didn't want to limit myself or conceptualize the source of sampling, so I thought, "Okay, I'm going to sample everything I can get my hands on." I still want to have bad records, but I also used street noises and bootlegs. Lately I've also been listening to a lot of hip-hop. I never really wanted to sample human voices, but I tried to rap myself but I didn't really do a good job, maybe because I'm not from a ghetto or something. I thought maybe I can get a solution for that by sampling a lot of voices and cut and paste them together in a way that you could get a rap. So I tried that, but it didn't really work the way that I hoped it would work, because you completely miss the flow, of course, if you take fragments of words and glue them together. It became more like a sound effect instead of a rap.
How about the noisy deaf people mentioned in your press info, are those people you know?
I also took a lot of voices from TV and from radio, and so I just watched programs where there was a lot of talking because I needed to sample voices. I didn't want to have any voices of well known people, because you can recognize it immediately, which makes it harder to use if you don't want to pay clearances. So I ended up using words of people that were in quizzes [game shows], like they were only once on TV as contestants. I also bumped into an English documentary about deaf people, and they were really noisy and rowdy and I don't even know what they were talking about anymore because I was so focused on the way their voices sounded. I thought it sounded great.
What's your approach to songwriting, do you start with a sample and then layer on top of that?
I've got 16 tracks and I always reserve two tracks for the vocals, which come last, and I start with a loop which also functions as a click track for all the other tracks. The loop can be a drum loop, or it can be a bass line or a guitar loop or something that is there for three minutes or how long you want the song to last. So that is the basis, then I just try to find good samples that fit in rhythmically and melodically with each other and with the loop. When I've got 14 tracks completely filled with samples, I start chopping it up so that a kind of chorus/verse structure evolves. When I'm completely happy with the instrumental part, I try to come up with a melody line for the vocals, and when that's done, I'm always counting how many syllables I need for the melody. For example, if I need a hundred syllables then I just write down a hundred syllables and I just start writing lyrics, and then I just record the syllables with the lyrics [laughs] So it's not really typically a singer/songwriter process, because if you asked the same question to a singer/songwriter, then first there are the lyrics and then there's the music. But my English is not good enough for that. [laughs]
Once you have the tracks done, do you mix it yourself?
Yes. I've got very good speakers.
What kind of speakers do you have?
I bought professional studio speakers, Genelec. So I mix it and then I write down the mix and all the figures that are in the correct mix and I take the 16-track recorder to a mastering studio and I connect the 16-track recorder to the computer in which the mastering happens and I just play that same mix again and then it's in the mastering computer. It's also kind of a check up for me because I'm working for half a year on the same songs, so it's kind of tricky — you can lose perspective very easily. Sometimes it happens when I'm mastering a song and the guy in the studio says, "Well, are you sure you want to have this low end in it?" So it's kind of my last check up for things. And it's also good to hear it on different speakers and stuff.
I noticed in the liner notes that you credit someone with drum fills. Is that live drums or is that drum machine drum fills?
It's live drums. It's a very small studio but I've got a very small drum kit as well in the basement. That's true, I also reserve one track for drum fills. Because if I would have only samples and voices it could also become kind of sterile. And so I always ask the drummer to put the headphones on and just freak around over the finished song and then later I mix that recording. The drum kit is only recorded with one stereo microphone so it's only more for the ambiance then for the actual things that he's drumming. So that track can glue all the different tracks together more or less, or anyway that was the general idea behind it. [laughs]
That's interesting.
And sometimes it really works that way.
What kind of microphones are you using?
I use Audix, it's a very good live microphone, and for the recording of the voice I use a Sennheiser and for the recording of the drums I use a Sony stereo microphone.
Do you have a favorite piece of gear you use? Or is the 16-track your main piece of gear?
Yeah I think that's my favorite, you know lately everybody's so happy and enthusiastic about Pro Tools. I have never worked with Pro Tools and many people say, "Well the minute you're used to Pro Tools you'll want to throw away your 16-track recorder" because it's so slow and that's one of the things that I don't like about the 16-track recorder because it's slow in editing and if you want to write a CDR. But then again, I don't really mind that it's slow, and I think the effects that are in the 16-track recorder are great. So I don't really see why I should need Pro Tools.
Are there things you can't do with your Roland 16-track that you wish you could?
Well I know someone who has bought a Boss groove sampling workstation SB505 and it has got a feature that I wish I could do, but it's more of a sampling thing. If you make a long sample on that workstation you can cut it up very logically and very rhythmically, and that could be really good, because sometimes, especially with editing of the vocal samples, it had to be really rhythmical because it needed to be kind of a rap, so that took a lot of time to get it in the proper place, to get it rhythmically right. If I would have used that workstation it would probably be much easier.
What records have inspired you?
I can remember the Let's Get Killed CD from David Holmes. He is from Scotland, I think, and he went to New York to record conversations he had with homeless people in the street and he used those tracks as vocal tracks because they're all instrumentals otherwise. And that was an inspiration. I thought, "Wow, that's really cool."
That sounds intriguing, I'll have to track it down.
I think it's five years, four years old or something, and I played it a few weeks back and it kind of surprised me because one way or another it already seemed old fashioned, and that's also the danger, I think, if you are making electronic music, that you are so dependent on whatever is sold in music shops, because you are all depending on and inspired by new techniques and stuff. But if you don't really make a twist, you will never get something timeless. Especially in dance music you can really hear which year a song is from sometimes, "Oh yeah. That was that kind of thing that was in the market then" or that kind of sequencer or that kind of sound.
What are you working on now?
I'm now working on a project with a modern classical Dutch composer and that's kind of bizarre because that's a whole different world, and those people are all very scholared and they can read notes and stuff. [laughs] He took six Solex songs and rearranged them and he has got an ensemble with classical instruments and we're preparing some kind of small show for a festival in May and he's going to play the six Solex songs with the ensemble and then I'm going to trigger some samples as well. He's combining that with work of the American composer Charles Ives. He was from the sixties and what he did was kind of a predecessor of sampling — he used a lot of quotes in his music writing, he quotes marching music and he combines it with classical music, so it's very cut and paste but it's all written down. I also made my first footsteps in the DJ world. And that's just pure fun, I'm not really an excellent mixer but I remix some stuff in my studio and just take that with me when I have to play some records.
How often are you doing that?
I do that a few times right now, and tomorrow I'm going to DJ at the concert of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion at the Paradiso in Amsterdam so that will be fun, hopefully. I've done a DJ set in London and Peaches played, that was fun as well. Next Tuesday I'm going to do it in Brussels, that's kind of a Matador night, and then Thalia Zedek will play. But I think those DJ sets are pure fun there's a limited amount of stress [laughs] and a big party most of the time.
