Since the early Black Rock Coalition days, Vernon Reid and DJ Logic have gotten together to make music "when no one was looking." Through collaborating on each other's projects, they got the idea to incorporate as the Yohimbe Brothers. Over the last ten years, they accumulated the material that wound up on their recent album, Front End Lifter. Yohimbe being a legendary organic sexual stimulant, the alter ego brothers purport to deliver a kind of sonic marital aid in a high testosterone blend of funky beats, heavy guitar riffing and psychedelic electro-collage. Just think, Vernon and Logic mixing it up with guests Prince Paul, Slick Rick, Living Color, among others and you're probably close. Clearly audible are the influences of Handsome Boy Modeling School, Material, Squarepusher [Tape Op #89] and P-Funk, along with several other traces. I recently sat down with Vernon and Logic before a rehearsal for their Fall tour to get a handle on their assembly process.
"Welcome to the Freq Show," was one of the early Yohimbe Brothers tracks. That was my first totally successful jungle track," says Vernon. "That track, I'm really proud of. The whole Raymond Scott, cartoon thing was something I'd never really heard in drum 'n' bass, you know. I think of the extreme tempos and I start thinking of these like, wacky cartoon car chases, and Roadrunner. I grew up on Warner Bros. Cartoons. Actually, I had been turned on to jungle by Doug Wimbish, back in the '90s. Because of the whole Tackhead thing, Doug's been on the forefront of the electronic thing forever. I remember he stepped to me and he said, 'Yo, man, they got this music comin outta Bristol, YOU are gonna love this shit. They're calling it jungle.' And I remember going to Camden Lot and there was an outdoor store, where every week there was this cat that would play the latest jungle joints and people would literally gather around the store, and there was the latest by Peshay, boom, the latest by Goldie, boom. And people were like, 'Yo, I'll take two.' It was this incredible thing at that time. And through developments, people were coming along like Amon Tobin, and Metalheadz (Groove Rider, Goldie, etc.), Amity Trio, who I respect a great deal. And when Squarepusher came out, I said, 'Oh, See? See?'" [shakes his head] "Now, my first drum and bass beats were pitiful. But then I kind of figured it out. I started listening to 'Funky Drummer', again and again and I said, 'Oh! I get it,' you know? Because the basis of the whole thing is the 'Amen' break. It's so funny, we've heard it so often, you know, you roll your eyes, 'Oh that again.' But it's comforting in a way. You know you're hearing jungle when you hear the 'Amen' break. So I started listening to it from this deconstructionist point of view. I found that the things that I wanted to say with it, even though the influence of Squarepusher's in there, it's definitely got a different vibe." Logic's first reaction was to "bust out laughing. I was like, that's ill, that's out. [Vernon said he] was listening to Squarepusher and it had that vibe, but I was like, 'Wow, that's out — that's different.' It's definitely going to attract ears, people are going to be like, 'Whoa'."
Everything was recorded at the Dharmalab, which is the dining room of Reid's home, a Victorian house in Staten Island. "It's beautiful, because I live on a cul-de- sac, there's no through traffic. One thing that's great is my neighbors are situated in such a way I can play as loud as I want to, at any time, 'cause it [has] an earth basement, so it's really isolated. If you're playing really loud, you'll hear it from the street but I've never gotten a phone call. The thing that's cool about it is that everything sounds actual. Everything sounds very alive. The house is over a hundred years old." There's nothing permanent about the Dharmalab set up. Vernon keeps it modular in case different sessions require him to move things around. "No commercial facility could ever exist the way this thing does. The rooms aren't massive, but there are a lot of them. There's like a foyer where you walk in to the house which gets most of the work. I've recorded in my living room, off the foyer, in this office room, the basement, this little bathroom next to the Dharmalab. One space that we talked about recording is the attic. We were going to have to move everything. You need a video system [to monitor]. I'd have put like a camera system." Logic adds, "Yeah, trying to get the wires up there was just — That's where we were actually going to do the drums. We were trying to get the drums up there, but... " [throws up his hands] Vernon goes on, "It's recorded live, there's no soundproofing. Which is a dangerous thing cause you remember the birds," he says, turning to Logic, who tweets and laughs. "The birds seem to respond to singers. Or brass. [They] are the most mysterious thing because they'll be quiet, quiet, quiet, and you're getting ready to do a take, like I was recently recording Graham Haynes. We did a track for Logic's The Anomaly. One take, dadadadaDA. 'that's great' Cheep. Cheep cheep cheep. Yeah, it's good to have a sense of humor about it. And the church bells. The whole thing about the church bells, is they're great if you're doing like a murder ballad, or you're doing some kind of doom and gloom, dressed in black, gothic thing. [They] come in at the right time, you gotta use it, but other than that you have to wait till the church bells toll."
Though he's working on a smaller scale than in the big studios he had used in the past, Vernon credits his engineering knowledge to that experience: "A lot of this stuff I learned from working with Paul Hamingson and Ed Stasium [Tape Op #98], working on the Living Color records, watching hem mic things, you know. And Ron Saint Germain. I consider these guys my teachers, more than anything else. Watching how they would do things. You know, move the mic just 'that' far. The difference between using [one mic or another]. It's funny because you read a review of a microphone and they'll say 'this mic is good for this,' but not everything is good for everybody, like I one time was recording vocals and I had the [Neumann TLM103] and it didn't sound good. And this thing ALWAYS sounds good. On everything. And I had this Audio-Technica, this old 4030, and I was like, 'Lemme put this mic up.' And it sounded great. It's fuckin' weird."
The Yohimbes worked on their own for the most part, with advisory help from Rich Tizzoli, an engineer who Vernon says, "...really came through. He really turned me on to the ART stuff. The compressor and the mic pre. And you know he really helped me out, talking to me about recording issues and things like that. An unnamed collaborator on this, he's a good man." The liner notes also credit engineering to the "almost legendary" Isaac Indigo, whose role is difficult to pinpoint. "Isaac, he's kind of like the audio advisor. You need other sets of ears. He kept it from being too fusion, too. Almost legendary, because Isaac's like one of them Wil-o-the Wisp type of characters. He's kind of a knock-around guy, you know? He would come through, he was like, 'Yeah man, I like pop music.' And he'd walk away. And we'd say, 'What was that?' He reminds me of the rapper Sensationale, like, 'Excellence makes wack irrelevant.' He was like, 'Yohimbe Brothers, yeah. Yo, Him Be.'" This kind of esoteric commentary suggests the title "esoteric-nician. He's an esotericnician. That's what he's going to be on the next one, man. One day we're going to nail him, we gotta get Isaac in the studio, 'Isaac, just talk. Just tell us the story of your life.'"
Vernon handled the engineering on his 867 MHz Mac G4 with a MOTU 2408 interface. "We recorded in Cubase and Nuendo. Cubase 5, but it started out in 4.1, like the jungle thing ["Welcome to the Freq Show"] I use a lot of plug-ins, it's one of the things I like about working in Cubase and Nuendo. Destroyer Effects has got these really cool plug-ins, [like Transverb], that are almost reminiscent of the stuff you would get from like an H3000, an Eventide type of thing. I also used [Native Instruments'] Absynth, and Reaktor, and Reason, connected Reason to Cubase using Rewire, and you can hear that on 'Tenemental'. Now I listen to a track like [that], it's different than most tracks. It's really got this whole other thing that I can't explain 'cause it's got this hard, hip-hop vibe, but there's this wonderful ambience that goes along. You know, like that first break down during the guitar solo there's this kind of weird, enveloping, panning stuff that's actually coming from Reason. I think Reason is an incredible program, an incredible learning tool. Like learning about signal flow, and patching things and bussing things wherever. And you can flip things around, do the 'things that should not be', you know, amazing stuff."
Most of the beats are from Logic's collection, or generated in Reaktor or Reason, but several tracks feature Wil Calhoun or Yuval Gabay (Soul Coughing, UV Ray) on drums. Logic laughs about recording them "in the closet. A hallway. At his house, I was just like, 'Wow.'" [shakes his head, laughing] The resulting sound is very much a kind of cut-and-paste kind of drum sound, almost as though the whole thing were collaged from samples, but Vernon recorded everything with very little editing and he "tight mic'ed him, couple of overhead KSM27s, RE20 or RE22 on the kick drum, and that was it. I'm trying to remember if I used the TLM 103 on the snare. We played Yuval a couple of tracks, and said, 'Which track are you feeling?' And he said, 'Yo. That.' We did the track "Ponk" [the album's opening tribute to Joey Ramone]. The only live track, with upright bass, Hank Schroy on bass, and that started out with a Reaktor thing, kind of burbling drums. There are some ancient instruments, you know. We recorded Jimmy Lee playing the Saz, a Middle Eastern instrument, which is very nice, on the 'Callipygiac Caldonians.' I don't know what it is about those kinds of stringed instruments, like balalaikas, and sazes have this bright, almost like, I don't know how to describe it. It's like, pianistic in a way. It's like — BLANG It's this huge thing. It's this little tiny body. How the hell did I mic that?" Logic jumps in, "It wasn't really up close to it, 'cause it was really loud." "I went, of course, with the TLM-103," Vernon goes on. "Also, I remember it was off from him because you had to really let him strum, so I kinda mic'd it off axis — and it worked out good. For the most part, the TLM 103 is sort of my 'go to' mic. I use some of the new Shure stuff, the KSM27. For recording [vocals], I used the 103, the KSM44. I used the 44 on the violin, recording through the ART mic pre. I also used Groove Tubes, you know, the first one they came out with, with the crazy, heavy preamp power supply. I used that the most. I also use an ART compressor for signals going in. I use it sometimes for vocals. And I use PSP stuff for post compression. They make incredible stuff. I think the professional sound quality stuff is really cool. For drum loops, the mix bass plug-in, there's a preset, 'drum loop 1'. It works, like every time. Any time you have a loop, you can't hear but you don't want it to go in the red, just insert it and it's like, BOOM, SNAP, ba BOOM BOOM CRACK. It's amazing." On "Ponk," the guitar "was recorded using a Mesa Boogie Subway amp, which was put in my basement, and mic'ed with the KSM 32, that's how I got that sound. The guitar sounds are all different. A lot of it is mic'ed amp. Some of it is using a VG88 plugged into an ART mic pre, or a TL Audio tube EQ as a pre-amplifier. That's a funny thing, because I didn't want to just go with guitar models on things. That's my big argument on using things like the VG88. If you listen to the stock programs of these things, they suck. They're terrible. There's no way you could compare that to plugging a guitar into an amp. Live stuff is awful. But a lot of the processing is really powerful and if you really get into it, and you actually are meticulous about programming, and let your ears really judge [it can work]. You can't play with a sound unless the sound is pleasing. The other thing is creating instruments or tunings that really are a product of your imagination. I mean, that's the thing, that's always attracted me about synthesis."
Which brings us to Leon Gruenbaum's Samchillian Tip Tip Tip Cheeeppeeeee, a MIDI interface using a PC keyboard to play interval directions within a given scale, rather than specific pitches, enabling the player to play incredibly fast lines. It's an extremely unusual instrument in performance, but for recording, it's basically just a synth. Says Vernon, "It's essentially recording a keyboard that's really whacked out. The technical term is whacked out. The first time I met [Leon] I'd been doing an exhibition of photos and he came to the opening and said, 'Hey man, I really like your music, and I want you to hear some stuff that I do.' So he gives me a tape. I called him up and I said, 'What kind of sequencer do you use?' and he said, 'I'm playing all the notes live.' I said, 'Playing all the notes live?' 'cause it's incredibly even, and he said, 'Oh, I invented a special keyboard for it.' And it just went from there. I love that."
Recording a turntable is fairly straightforward. "Deciding whether or not to run it through — sometimes when [Logic's] scratching things, I'll run it through a mic pre, just to give it a kind of, I don't want to say warmth, a pleasing distortion. Challenges are like, clean signal path. Clean cartridges. Needles are a big issue, when you work with a turntablist. Slip mats, needles, these are the things that you have to become educated about. Just dealing with grounding, you just have to find something. 'You're buzzing.' 'No I'm not. I'm grounded, I'm grounded fine, man.' 'It's you.' 'No, it's not me.' 'See this, this is your ground wire." [Logic laughs] "He knows. He knows — Screw the ground wire in!"
Until now, Logic had been fairly quiet, chiming in every now and then. Sensing that the conversation is moving to his turf, he livens to the change. I asked if he used a time stretcher to match up the voice of a squaredance caller to the beat on "Bamalamb" "That was done with vinyl. Just pitching it and using my finger. I was kinda time stretching with the fingers. Manual time stretching. It was hard, but I got it down." Concentrating on spinning, Logic doesn't yet have a recording set-up of his own. "I just come by Vernon's, I might have an idea, you know. I have an MP and an ASR, that's what I basically work my stuff on. Computer stuff, I just go by Vernon's, and lay stuff down." Vernon chides him, "The next step, we're gonna sit you down, 'This is a file. Save the file.' When we're on the road, I'll bring my laptop. He's motivated because he wants to get into that Final Scratch thing" Logic concurs, "Yeah, Final Scratch is awesome. Basically, it's like taking away all the records. We don't have to carry records no more. You just put it all into the computer. You make a file, just like your record collection on your shelf, all jazz, all hip-hop, and whenever you're going to do a spin set, you just click onto that file. You use a regular turntable, and a laptop, they give you these two plates that are vinyl, and you use needles. It's the same, but the signal is coming from the laptop. But you're still actually DJ-ing, [just] not switching the records. You're switching them from the computer. I've really checked it out. You know, just seeing how the mixing and the scratching the time delay and all of this and that they really like [snaps] got it down precise. I thought it's great, you know, just for all the guys that carry records all over the place, you know, breaking their back. They're not taking away from you touching the vinyl too, it's just, maybe the sound might be a little clearer but you want that sometimes, and you could also add that crackle snap and pop too, you know? So they're definitely working with the DJ. I'll be having my laptop before the next time I see you."
