Thanks for taking the time to sit down again. I know we interviewed you a few issues back.
Yeah. That was at my old space, Dr Wu's, so it's cool to have you over here at Studio Windows.
I know you did a lot of live sound, and as you got older and into the scene, started getting more interested in recording. What was your initial interest in music? How did you find your way pre-live sound?
Some of my earliest memories are music-related. My parents both sing in the choir still, and my mom is a really gifted pianist. I remember The Planets by Gustav Holst and Beethoven's 5th, going and putting the record on and cranking the volume knob, which in my mind, took up the whole hand as a four-year-old child, just cranking the volume and running out of the room before the opening notes hit. That was like my idea of fun. There was all this music in the house. Being in elementary school and discovering Sgt. Pepper's... in my uncle's collection and just becoming obsessed with The Beatles. I feel like my entire childhood I was an avid fan of music. I played in the garage with a couple buddies, but I never really...there was some like gap between being a fan of music and being a maker of music. It wasn't until I was in college and I quit the computer science program that I was like, "Oh, well, what do I actually want to do? If I don't want to program computers for this semester, I probably don't want a degree, and I definitely don't want to do it for the rest of my life. What do I actually want to be doing?" I figured out I could make up a major and get into the recording program at the Cleveland Institute of Music without being a classically-trained performer.
Were you playing music as a kid?
A little bit. I had piano lessons. I sang in choir. I had bass guitar and would jam with people, but I never really, what I'm saying is there was this weird gap in realization of like, "Oh, I could get a 4-track?" I didn't have buddies who had 4-tracks. I grew up in the '90s, so like the grooveboxes, that would have cracked my skull open. I feel like that would have been the perfect introduction, but I didn't have any friends or elders who were like, "Oh yeah, you should check this thing out." So it took that inward, deep stare my freshman year of college of like, "Actually all I want to do is make records. I don't even know how to do that but that's all that I want to do."
So you just jumped into it from a real interest standpoint, like, "Oh, I could do this!"
Oh yeah. "People do this? I should be one of those people."
The things that you've subsequently done, like work with Eventide, have tapped into some of your computer-based knowledge, which is interesting. It's maybe kind of a little bit full-circle.
Yeah, sure. And the way most of us make music. I love working on tape, but to be real, the majority of the projects that I do and that I think most other people making music in 2019 do, we spend a lot of time at the computer. Even if we're not putting in the code, there are those same sort of analytical approaches, like, "If I want to do this, then I should group these things way to maximize my processing or to have infinite recall-ability when someone hits me up in two months and asks for those minute changes." The same sort of analytical approach I guess.
Can you give me an example of one of those times?
Yeah. So our studio, we don't have a console here. We had a Neve 5088 like Larry [Crane] does. We had that at Dr. Wu's, but our loan was such that it's like, "Do we build out the studio, or do we have a console?" We still have all this really fun outboard rack gear, so Jake [Aron] and I will print our effects, whether it's like a hardware insert in Pro Tools or tape or a spring print so that when we bring it back up, it's just another track of audio. I personally like grouping my stuff, sort of like-minded things, as if I'm preparing stems as we're working. It's like, "Okay, these pads and this washed-out guitar part are all kind of doing this thing, so let me process this as a group, because I know that's how it's working in the mix." But also if somebody wants a stem or if I want to process them all together, they're all working and functioning in the same way.
Have you taken any of your workflow from more of an analog process and incorporated it to the digital realm?
For sure. I had this conversation with a friend getting I'm ready to work with this fall. He was talking about how on his previous record, it was the first one he had done completely in the box, because he had always come from tape. He felt like he overworked it, because it's like trying to get everything perfect. My feeling is like just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Taking that sort of tape approach of, "Well, how is the take? How does it feel? Does it sound good?" Not to say that I don't edit things, but it's generally if something's bothersome, not just because it's slightly out, you know? I'm not trying to quantize everything to the grid. It's like, "Oh, that hit's early, but otherwise it's a perfect take. Let's just nudge the hit." That kind of thing of using technology, using the computer to do things that you couldn't do on tape. Like you couldn't splice just the bass guitar coming in slightly early. You'd have to do the whole take. But you can do that on that one track, so why not just do that and leave everything else cool because you were happy with the take at the time? I do a lot of electronic music on my own. I have been moving more and more into the sort of recording situation where I get a group of people in the room, and we get a sound, get an idea, and hit record to see what sticks. Trying to get that first take, riding the rails kind of feel. It's difficult in electronic music, because so much of it is just right on the grid. I still do this often, but you come up with a loop and expand it and just sort of copy-paste. To come at it from more of the old-school approach of people in the room, even if it is just like a sampling drum machine and a direct bass and a bunch of synths, you're getting that sort of weird and wobbly human touch to it. Then to edit it, I try to keep that same approach, where it's not putting it on, I'm not trying to like quantize everything and put it back on the grid. I'm doing like the old-school edit of, "Oh, we went on like what I guess is the equivalent of 12-bars. It would feel more natural if it's eight. Let me just like cut four." Or, "Oh, what she's doing over here feels like a chorus. Wouldn't it be nice if it was up here and I was setting my marker based on like the hit of the drum machine and then dropping it in there, even if I don't have it on a grid?" It's just sort of Slip mode, I guess. Yeah. Looping back to your question, all of these sort of old-school approaches, it's not that they're better because that's the way that people used to do it. In my mind, it's better because it feels more human. It feels more natural.
Is that stuff you're doing with Eaters?
I have this new group called P.E., and it's myself and one of the other members of Eaters along with a few members of the band Pill that recently broke up. So that project started three of us in the room here doing exactly what I described, just old E-mu SP-12 sampling drum machines with like a mic set up so that we could record new samples. The piano was mic'd up, and the bass was going through effects, synths, and we just spent a weekend jamming and then started having people add to it and edit. All of a sudden, songs started coming out of it. Then it's just refinement at that point.
An approach similar to what Teo Macero used for [Miles Davis'] Bitches Brew.
Yeah, exactly.
Take performances and create the arrangement and themes.
Huge inspiration.
It really has the feeling that it was sort of live but then has a repeating theme as a cut/edit. It was very forward-thinking at the time.
Absolutely. Can is another, and [Brian] Eno we were talking about earlier. That's the kind of music that I listen to on my own. It goes back to the "Just because you can doesn't mean you should." How can you capture these ideas and build them up instead of trying to fit them into a specific box?
Yeah. I was in Japan recently and got into this idea that the Japanese have this concept where spaces exist for things to happen. So the potential is there, even though it's an empty room. It's called Ma, I believe, the idea of silence, the use of silence and space, but another concept is the idea of potential being there in the room. I think it's a really great application in music production.
Absolutely. What you were talking about, all the set-up in the beginning, I spend so much of the time, like what we would consider preproduction, thinking about the set-up based on my conversations with people. That first day, I still get anxious like, "Oh, it's taking too long, it's taking too long!" But I have come to embrace that like, "Okay, this is just part of what happens on Day One." But I guess going back to the whole systems engineering mind of like, "Okay, well, I know we're going to want to try this, and this worked out based on what she was saying. I want to make sure we have that available in case she wants to jump into that." Then you don't have to think about it the rest of the time. The way I think about it is that I've learned... I went to Cleveland Institute of Music. I learned how to do proper mic placement for classical stuff. I worked with like jazz ensembles and did live sound and sound for film and post-production. I have done all these different things. Maybe I don't use them anymore, but it's just like a trick in the tool bag, so I don't have to think about it. Then I can think about whether it's me making music or you making music. "What are we trying to do here?" You can get into the philosophical and emotional aspect. "What if you didn't play on the one and were playing more on the two and supporting what he's doing on saxophone over there?" Listen from more of an observational standpoint instead of freaking out about, "Well, the mic needs to be like this." The mic's fine. It sounds great. My favorite recordings are the ones where I'm producing start-to-finish and able to have the conversations with the group or artist before we even start and talk about what we're going for. Then we record it in such a way that it moves things in that direction, so when it gets to the mix, we have everything so you're getting all your ducks in a row I guess from the beginning. A lot of the work that I do is mixing only or mixing and mastering, where somebody else, whether it's an artist or a different engineer recorded it, and it's coming to me. The first thing I do is usually mute a bunch of the drum mics. I don't need all these. What sounds coolest? What has the best vibe? What's exciting to me hearing it? I don't need three mics on the snare.
Do you have a conversation and set expectations beforehand?
With a mix?
I've personally run into and I know many other people have as well, where somebody says. "I really want you to do your thing. I love this record you did, I love that record… and then you get in there and mute a bunch of stuff, and it's like, "Where's my guitar in the verse?" A lot of times it's stuff that they've tracked themselves, and they haven't really had somebody helping them with arrangements, but they've become very married to it.
Yeah. I definitely have run into that. This building that we're in has I think 15 studios. It's a cool community. One of the other engineers in the building was telling me that he always provides the options. He says, "Even if they're not that different or I know option B is the best one, I'll always give the other one." So when I do get into mixing, I can't help but tweak the arrangement. I'm coming at it from that outside perspective, but also a producer's mind. Even if I didn't track it and I'm halfway around the world still, you know what, if this thing came in at this moment, it would help elevate it and give that chorus a lift. It doesn't need to be hanging out before or after. So what I'll do is print a mix with the arrangement they gave me and then here's my idea of the edit. A lot of times, people choose to go in the direction we've got, especially if it's someone I've built a rapport with. I would say that a fair amount of times, people are like, "No no no, that acoustic guitar needs to go on throughout the entire time."
"Okay, you're right..."
"If you insist!" I feel like a lot of people in Tape Op touch on this, that more and more of production is moving onto the artist. That's amazing, and so much of how I got good at what I did was making my own records and fumbling and having the other people in my band be like, "I dunno man, this doesn't sound that good." Going back and trying another pass on the mix. But I think that outside perspective that we're talking about, it's healthy, even if you say no. "No, I don't want to do it that way." At least there is someone else coming in and listening to your song with the mindset, with the ears of having done it many times for other people.
Yeah. And as a listener!
As a listener.
I think that's the most important thing. To me, that's one of the most important jobs of a producer. It's really just being a super listener with the option of making changes.
Yeah. And it goes back to the earlier point of like, you learn the technical things so you don't have to think about them. You can listen as a listener. Like, "Hey, it feels like this bridge should be taking you somewhere else. Do we have it come earlier? Do we play with the arrangement?" But like you're listening as a surrogate for the future audience.
If I'm going to produce something I have enjoyed someone I trust engineer it. It took me so long to realize that. I can't serve the artist as well if I do both. I have to join the band.
I mean, I hear that. I wish I had like a piece of advice beyond just like "learn as much as you can so you don't have to think about it." But I don't know how I'm able to balance that. People talk about, "Well, how do you master your own mixes?" "I dunno. Space? Don't listen to it for a while and then come back and go, 'Oh, this needs to be tweaked.'" But unfortunately there just isn't the budget to hire assistants or additional engineers for the majority of the projects I work on. It's like, "All right, how many hats do you need me to wear and end up with a stack on top?" But I'm okay with that. I think it's fun. You get to join the band but also be the weirdo in the other room on the talkback.
With Eaters and P.E., when I listen to Eaters, sometimes that stuff gets pushed out into the extremes. I feel like doing your own projects is probably pretty healthy in terms of getting a lot of stuff out of your system and being able to do things and have an outlet for that stuff that might end up on someone else's record otherwise.
Yeah. Yes. I absolutely agree. I had a client really early on make a comment about how happy he was that I had my own recording project. He's like, "You're listening to it as a musician, and you're responding to what I'm doing as someone who makes their own music." I think that is really healthy, but it's exactly what you're saying as well. I get to spend the hours chasing a sound that I wouldn't necessarily do with a client. "Well, hold on. I have this idea in my head. Let me just keep working on this." We're on the clock and people get bored. But then if I learn it on my own, I can show someone or use it on someone else's record. Like, "Oh, check this out. I did this thing." We don't have to go through the trial and error so much. But yeah, I think for me, it's certainly a pressure release. I like to keep busy. It's very different making your own record than making records for other people. I certainly invest a lot of myself into the records I produce. The records I mix too, but especially the things that end up taking weeks or months of our collective time, I'm invested. But having those own things of well, I don't care if everything's running through guitar pedals. "It sounds cool. Let's keep going with that."
Yeah, I see the Radial stuff over there.
Yeah, these EXTCs, the things to go from the patchbay out into pedals. We started with two, and then Jake bought one and I bought another one, so now we can go dual-stereo. Those things get used all the time.
It's a way to get very sort of different things happening. Especially in the world today of plug-ins and presets. You turn on the radio now, and you know as a record-maker that A) they didn't necessarily go the extra mile but hey, put it on and no one's going to know. And that's true, no one knows, but you start sounding a little same-y, hearing the same things over and over again.
But I think where you're going with this goes back to our earlier conversation about the analog techniques of committing to a sound. When you're going through a pedal or a tape echo or a spring reverb, you have to commit it. There's no recall on most of the pedals. You have to use your ears. It's not like you can tempo-sync the tape echo to your session file. I think that it changes the way you listen but also the way in which you approach the record. That's why I love working on tape, even if it all ends up in the computer at the end. Doing those basic take where we're collectively all just listening. It's not like, "Well, could we take the verse of this and combine it with the chorus of this other take and go back there?" That has its time and place for sure. I do that often, but if it's a band, or like a situation where you're working to capture that interaction of people, I love tracking to tape. We're all just in that moment, and it's like, thumbs up, thumbs down. Try it again.
Yeah. Well, it changes the way you are engaged without the sort of safety net of, "Oh yeah, we'll just fix it!"
Yeah. People aren't looking at this, but there's just piles of pedals everywhere. I ended up digging through a create and finding an 8-channel TS snake for all the EXTCs, because there were just piles of cables on top of things. Oh, here's one big one, because we're going to use this every day. I always gravitate toward it, especially now. I spend so much time at the computer. If I can just grab a knob and twist it, I'm going to be way happier than if I have to sit there and click over and over.
There are a bunch of studios right here in this building. You've got Studio G over here, Strange Weather's down the street. Any number of studios around. How are you finding work?
Well, work has been good. Jake and I have been... we started building out the studio about two years ago. I got a reminder on Instagram the other day of me and my contractor building out enclosures for the electrical socket. It's like, "Yo Kyle, can you believe this has been two years?" Jake and I had been working at Wu's for a while. Things were going well. Both Jake and I have our own clientbase and are constantly working on stuff. That's what encouraged us to take the leap with this. I've worked with Jake for so many years now and we've lived together. He got married while we were living together, so like he and his wife and I were all together. He's family. There's that faith of like well, I know he's got my back, and he knows I've got his back. I feel like both of us were deep enough into our careers to also have the faith that we'll continue to grow and bring people in. But I'll say the last year and a half since the studio's been up and running has been the most productive period of my life. Even if I'm not working on other peoples' stuff, I'm having Eaters or P.E. come in, or I'm working on a record with my buddy Austin. Just using the space. It's like manifest destiny I guess. "Well, I have it. I might as well use it now." I've consequently been making a lot more music in this space than I did before. It's like, "Well, maybe we can get in here for like a couple hours around people." No, it's my space. If Jake's not using it, I can use it. I think the more you put in, the more it comes back to you as well. It's funny with the cycles of release, everything gets bunched in fall and spring. Even though the last month I feel like has been pretty mellow for me, all these releases that I worked on over the last year are coming out in rapid succession. I've run into people who are like, Dude, you've been busy!" I'm like, "Oh, I guess." Long view, it has been a lot of stuff. That's always a nice reminder too. I dunno. I guess like in terms of the ebb and flow of freelance, it's just a real thing. I've been doing this for 15 years. I've been freelance for 15 years. It used to really freak me out when I didn't have work for a couple weeks or a month on end. Then you'd be in the thick of it and be freaking out like oh man, I wish I had time to finish that song I started or go out of town for the weekend or like cook a meal for myself or whatever. I think it really was having the studio up, because it's really only within the last couple of years that I'm chill about the ebbs. Oh yeah, I will finish that record that I started last time I had free time. I will go out of town, and I will cook three meals for myself today. I guess that's the best advice in terms of headspace. If you really are trying to make it in this business, work as hard as you can, but don't beat yourself up if you end up with free time. It's never going to be constant.
It also seems like you're keeping yourself busy with projects that are musical but not records. With the Eaters you've done a couple of art installation type pieces. Can you talk a little bit about those or one of those?
For sure, yeah. Eaters is a project I started with my friend Bob Jones back in 2012. It started as a studio project and then as we had a record-worth of material that was coming out, we started performing live. I brought in a friend of mine who I'd gone to school with who's a glass sculptor. He's not a musician, but he's just this incredibly gifted artist. He and I had toured, him doing visuals and me doing front-of-house for people, so I brought him into the fold to do what he calls kinetic light sculptures, so he designed these different sculptures to perform while we were performing music. From there, it became more of a collaboration in terms of building sound sculptures. We have this one piece called "Moment of Inertia." It's a prepared turntable. There's no motor. It looks like a layer cake of glass on like an industrial potter's wheel, so you spin it and get it up to speed, and there's a record on top that we had specially-cut so that as the turntable slows down over a period of like seven minutes, the music just naturally slows down. So we had it cut so that it speeds up. Like in Ableton, I had the thing speed up and then had a special acetate cut so that as the record is speeding up and the turntable is slowing down, you get this weird up-and-down up-and-down tempo thing that eventually just dies, but you can hear the pitch constantly going down. Things like this that are just really fun experiments. What we're working on right now is we made a record in here where Chris, the visual artist, brought in a glass harmonica that he had made. A glass harmonica; Benjamin Franklin is actually the person who conceived of it, but it's the principle of running your finger around the rim of a glass to make it resonate. But it's an instrument where it's a bunch of nested dishes around like a central rotating spit basically. So, you dip your fingers in the water, and you can play chords or melodies instead of just two things at a time. Chris built this, but it wasn't on a scale. It was just like, these sound cool together. "This one's rainbow, this one I etched a zoetrope into so when you flash a strobe it looks like it's melting." He played it for Bob and I and Bob was like, "Dude, you've built a microtonal drone machine." We've been doing these sets where he plays the harmonica and we play processed synths. Bob's classically trained in double bass, so we've experimented with that as well. We're not trying to make songs. Just what seems fun.
That's so cool. I'd love to hear that.
Bob from Eaters is also in this project. It started as an improvised one-off set for a friend's record release show. We had so much fun doing it. We came into the studio for a weekend and just jammed, like I was saying. A few of the members were in a band called Pill who had a record come out in Fall 2017 wait, what year is it? 2018. So they got busy, and it just sat on my hard drive for like six months. Over the winter we all got back together and made this record. Especially once Pill broke up, it's like, "Okay, this feels hot. This feels exciting. Let's go here." That's been really fun and liberating. I play MS-20 and I sing through a ring mod on stage.
Wow.
That's all I ever wanted!
That's awesome.
Because it came from a place of improvisation, and because Bob and I had tried to retrofit this studio creation with Eaters to the stage, with Eaters, and I feel like with a lot of live electronic music, it becomes very scripted. Even if you're not playing to a backing track and you're queuing up loops and samples live, we sort of painted ourselves into this corner where the best performance was technically the most accurate, so you're just trying to hit your marks. It has its own validation and appeal, but after a while it gets kind of old.
Well, for you.
For me, yeah. And my bandmate. But with P.E., we really were trying to keep that spirit of improvisation and tact. Still chopping up loops and samples but feeding them into an Octatrack so that it's really fluid. Sampler, synths, bass guitar, saxophone, vocals. I don't think we've played the same song twice the same way. Every time it's just like, "What's happening?" on stage. That's been really liberating and exciting. Certainly for me, having those experiences encourages the way I approach the recordings. It's like, "No, trust me. This'll be fun. Let's go off on a limb a little bit." Maybe it gets a little shaky or weird, and we can always go back to the trunk if we need to.
Do you think that people are coming to you for a certain thing? You have the Liturgy record and then on the other hand you have a Drums record.
Mhmm. The Parquet Courts stuff. I still get a lot of people who hit me up and are like, "I want it to sound like Parquet Courts". It's like, "Well, you don't really sound like Parquet Courts."
Right. Of your catalog, I feel like you have this dirge-y indie metal band, and then you've got some stuff that is more drum machine-y and some sort of pop leaning stuff.
Absolutely.
They may not even seem like things that the same guy would do.
I get a lot of people who are confused when they look at my discography. But for me, I want to keep interested. Part of that is very much like self-fulfilling. Well, I don't want to get pigeonholed. I don't want to do like 8-track scrappy punk records the rest of my life. I love doing those, but there's so much more. Especially the older I get and the longer I do this, it really is like, "Well, A, does it seem like there's something I can really sink my teeth into here, whether it's metal or pop or something completely different, but also, do I like the people? Do I want to be in a room with a group of people sharing our creative and emotional energies for an extended period of time?" I think that ultimately it does all kind of influence one another. I learned so much about tape doing those Parquet Courts and those Fergus & Geronimo records. Sunbathing Animal, and Light Up Gold, and Tally All the Things That You Broke; those were done on 8-track tape. My drums are a stereo pair, sub-mixed down. "Do those drums sound good to you? Cool, because that's the way it sounds now. We can EQ and compress it differently, but this is what it is." Maybe with some of the more like ornate records, we have a bunch more mics that we can use, but that same sort of commit – like, "Are you happy with this? Sounds good to me. Let's move forward." I feel like the fastest way to kill the momentum is when you start A/B-ing different mics and different EQs. There's a time and a place for that but once things get going, don't change it unless it sounds bad. I guess I took a pretty hard tangent from your initial question, but I think my production approach in general is that I think we touched on it earlier. Coming from a fan, as a listener, and just what do I want to hear, trying to connect with the artist on an emotional level about what they're trying to do with their song, like, "Does this chorus serve its purpose?" Or rather, "How can we have the arrangement serve the chorus?" It's pulling from that technical bag of tricks to throw things at the song to make it compelling. Part of the fun for me is pushing those different boundaries of how one makes a record. Whether we're documenting the band live to tape or doing a synth metal opus or just like a weird microtonal drone record that I'm just going to record a bunch of stuff and then edit the pieces to make it feel like coherent movement. I think ultimately it comes back to using your ears in the moment and trying to get something that everyone's excited about and then committing and moving forward so that you can get to the actual music-making.
There's a huge element of trust in that.
Yes. We can have all these conversations beforehand, but then when we actually have the studio booked and we're starting the record, it's like, "All right, let's all grab hands and jump off that cliff together. We'll land. Trust me, we'll land down there and it'll be cool, and we'll have a record to show for it, but that whole dive down, it's just like all right dude, I'm following your lead on this." It doesn't always work out. Sometimes attitudes are such that we don't work well together. Sometimes a person's perception of what they're going for is so rigid that it doesn't matter if it's me or anyone else. They kind of need to be calling the shots. But by and large, it is ultimately about communication. That's why I love the records where we can have those conversations before we even set foot in the studio so that I'm working to get in your headspace. Because we've had these conversations, we can all move toward a common goal, even if you can't express it directly. I can filter something and put out ideas, and then based on what you respond, we can pivot from there and see where it takes us. That's a big part of the fun of making records. You don't actually know what you're going to get until the end of it.
Yeah. I think that that is a huge part of it, like when somebody says, "Well, what's it going to be like?" I dunno. I know it will be good, because we're doing it together! As people are deciding who to work with, it maybe shouldn't be so much "Well, I like the record you made." Maybe it should be "Are we good with each other? Are we cool? Can we hang?"
Exactly. "Do I want to hang out and spend all this time in a room with you trying to get on the same level?" I love being able to meet with bands, whether they're based in New York and have them over at the studio, or they're on tour and go see a show and step out for a bite and just have a 45 minute conversation. You know whether or not it's going to work after that. When you either know exactly what the path's going to be or are so fixated with the couple of steps ahead of you, then you're missing all the fun tangents and fields and mountains that are off to the side of the path. Maybe that's where you ought to go.
