The Null Device Blog

Reverence has now come and gone.  And as usual, it was a crazy fun time.  Lots of great performances by a lot of great bands – I was particularly impressed by The Dark Clan, The Atomica Project, and Alter Der Ruine.

Our performance was, I think, one of our better ones.  We were beset with some technical problems, though.  During soundcheck, our illustrious soundguy Adam offered me the use of a condenser mic, instead of my trusty 58Beta.  I took him up on the offer, despite never having tried our setup with phantom power or anything like that.  So naturally, during the first song, the mic cuts out.    D’oh.  I switched over to a regular 58 on a different line and did the rest of the show that way.   Which was fine, but meant that I couldn’t record the gig as I’d hoped, and it also meant that all my cool vocal effects were now gone.  Ach, well, they’re just ornaments.

We had some shenanigans prepped for this set.  We unveiled an electro cover of Jace Everett’s “Bad Things” (from his 2005 self-titled release…but better known as the theme to “True Blood”) which went over well.  As our second-to-last track, and as a celebration of the 5th anniversary of our first Reverence shenanigans, we Dan got onstage to sing “Lestat in Punjab”, the ND-assisted sequel to “Lestat in Cuba.”  I played the dhol, Elizabeth played the chimta (the “salad tongs of doom”), Dan sang, Lane assisted, and it was all sorts of fun.  The crowd ate it up.  I’m no great dholi, so I had a very sore shoulder on Sunday morning.  I also got chunks of the crowd to sing along with “Blow My Mind”, which was fun.  An easy hook in the chorus makes that possible.  And Ryans Bannen & Parks always know the words.

We also had some great, albeit hot and occasionally blinding, lighting.  Made for some great pictures.

I drank a lot of water after we got offstage, and spent a lot of time slobbed out on a bench in the back  or outside in the cool air recovering.  Got some nice complements – apparently we even made a Panjabi girl cry (which, she insisted, was in a good, nostalgic way).

Overall it was great fun.  Well-managed time-wise, the setup and teardown was efficient and easy, sound was good, everybody from the other bands were friendly and having fun too, the incomparable Lisa Q sold merch, and Matt Fanale had a big grin plastered on his face all night.  It was all sorts of awesome.

Recursions is sort of a mishmash of various sources, written over various times, remixed by various people.  It’s astonishing to me that it holds together as well as it does, given the disparity of sources.  Al the tracks are, in one way or another, storied.

We had a few goals for this release; we wanted remixes that were not of the typical “take the song and make it go oontzoontz” variety (it’s sort of always been a goal, I guess), we wanted to branch out a bit and try some new sounds, and we wanted to put together something that was, if not entirely original tunes, represented our sound fairly well.  Along the way I’d tried to get remixes from some “bigger” names – Cheb I Sabbah, Transglobal Underground and Dan LeSac to name a few – and while the guys were incredibly nice and encouraging (I had a very nice conversation with Tim from TGU) their remix prices were unfortunately well out of our budget.

Another goal we had was to try to market and distribute this a little differently from our traditional releases.   We’d done the downloadable release before, but now we had access to services like Bandcamp.com which made it easier to make donations and gather stats than doing it by hand.   Also with this release we treated the whole release like a full-fledged album – full ISRC codes, UPC,  ASCAP registry, etc – despite the fact it was to be distributed primarily in an electronic form.

It’s been an interesting ride so far.  We’ve learned a lot of interesting things in the process that may help us fine-tune our distribution process in the future.

Anyway, track-by-track…

1.    Return (Rebuilt by Stripmall Architecture)

“Return” was one of my favorite tracks from “Excursions”, and it also was easy to smack into a remix kit.  So I had a remix kit, and a goal of getting remixes from people who I didn’t ordinarily contact for remix work.  

Halou had just released their last album, and I loved it.  I’d been a fan of their form of delicately-crafted dreampop for a while, and they’d released a synthpoppy side-project disc on Nilaihah a few years back, so on a lark I sent an email to Ryan Coseboom asking if he’d be willing to remix a track.  After some discussion, in which we discovered we knew a lot of people in common, we worked out a deal and he agreed to remix “Return.”  I had nearly as much fun finding out what gear he used on the mix as I did actually listening to it.

The end result was just all sorts of cool, and in the process I got to do a little musical-hero-worship in the process.

2.    Twisting and Turning (Null Device’s Club mix)

Okay, we needed at least one club-friendly track.  On “Excursions”, the clear club favorite was “Twisting and Turning”, featuring Ramya S. Kapadia.  Shortly after releasing that album, I decided to tweak the song and turn up the club knob a bit.  If nothing else, it gave me an excuse to play with Ultrabeat’s step-sequencer.

Part of the plan was to make the track sound a little less like Underworld, but somehow it ended up sounding a little more like Underworld.

3.    Think it Over

During the recording of “Excursions”, I’d had this urge to write a meaningful political song.  I started writing an aggressive breakbeat thing, with a sample of an old Um Kalthoom recording as a centerpiece.  Then I read that her estate was fairly litigious about such things, so I removed the sample and spent a lot of time trying to write something that evoked the same feel, without using the same melodies or any samples.  It took a while, and exhausted my supply of kanun samples.

Meanwhile, Dr. Goedken provided me with a set of lyrics that were exactly what I had hoped for – a veiled, but clear, political critique of our then-president’s policies.  Unfortunately, no matter how hard I tried, I could not get them to sound anything other than ridiculous in my voice.  I am no Zack de la Rocha.  I trashed the vocal takes and moved on to other things.

Later, in a moment of randomness, I decided to play back the track from my old “abandoned mixes” folder, and I decided it sounded pretty good as a standalone instrumental.  It’s short, which helps.

4.    Travelogue

 (2009 Version)

Travelogue has always been, in my opinion, one of the best tracks we’d ever written.    Unfortunately, when I first recorded it for A Million Different Moments, some of my production skills were lacking, meaning the end result wasn’t quite as lush as I’d hoped.  

As we developed our live set, Travelogue became one of the highlights and sat squarely in the middle of the set, where I could break out the fiddle and blitz periodically.  Chuck had replaced my bouncy MS2000 bassline with one that was funkier and had more movement, so I had him lay that one down in the studio underneath what were essentially the backing tracks for our live version.    I slowly built more parts into that version, doubling the violin parts with sampled duduk, replacing the old recorded string ensemble with new, more up-front solo violin parts, and re-recording the vocals with better preamplification and mic technique.

The end result is one of my favorite bits of ND output to date.

5.    The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove

After a particularly cold show in the Twin Cities, Chuck and Elizabeth decided to make the long haul back home after the gig instead of crashing in the hotel room the promoter had rented for us.  Sometime in those sleep-deprived, pre-dawn hours, Elizabeth’s ipod had offered forth Dead Can Dance’s “Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove” and both of them had giddily decided we should cover it live.  This made a lot of sense to me, although I had thus far avoided it as almost being too obvious.  I hacked together a version, we practiced it a few times, and I wrote some vocal harmonies to deal with the fact that we had two singers onstage needing to do things, and we rolled it out at an Inferno gig.

The response was rather stunning.  It quickly became a live favorite, and over the next year we pretty much played it to death.   

When it came time to put together Recursions, finishing up a studio version of Lovegrove seemed like a no-brainer.  I had Jill record her parts,  I mic’ed up Elizabeth’s dumbek and recorded her parts,  plugged in the electric violin and bussed it through an array of harmonizers and octavers, and called it a day.

6.    I Promise (Bogart Shwadchuck mix)

While one of the goals of Recursions was to get remixers who weren’t the usual suspects, I made an exception for Bogart.  Not merely because he’s a friend, but also because his recent output has been frankly incredible.  His various projects have swung from house to hardcore dnb to dubstep to R&B-ish electro, and I knew that I would pretty much be guaranteed to receive a remix that would surprise me.

I asked what he’d like to remix, and he said “I Promise.”  This was the first surprise, mostly because it’s probably my least favorite track on Excursions.  What I got back surprised me even more.  I half-expected Bogart to take the track and amp-up the drum-n-bass to some sort of crazy levels, but instead he sent back this massive dubstep wobbler that made me completely change how I looked at the song.

7.    Triangular (Null Device’s Panjabi Lowrider Mix)

A few years back, I’d snagged a remix kit for Stromkern’s “Stand Up”, and I banged out a bhangra-hop mix that was, honestly, of fairly poor quality.  I just didn’t have the practice at the time to really suss out dhol mixing and my attempts at glitching hip-hop beats just weren’t particularly good.  I did, however, call it the “Panjabi Lowrider Mix”, because it had that bin-shaking sub-bass commonly heard emanating from low-slung cars, and of course some crazy bhangra beats.

Early in 2009, on a lark I decided to revisit the concept with Triangular.  It was halfway there, being a bhangra track at its heart.  I used a lot of the desi-hop clichés – the heavy autotuning on the Panjabi melismatics, the drrrryyyy percussion, the obviously-synthesized tumbi, the subby dub bass.  It was an afternoon project, just as an experiment, and I liked it so much that I kept it.  I had to re-record some of the vocal takes because my only existing copies of the verses were covered in effects and didn’t mix well.

8.    Footfalls (2009 Version)

Another result of our live arrangements – we’d been playing “Footfalls” as part of the set since 2003, and frankly we were all getting a little sick of it.  I decided that a new arrangement would help, so I grabbed a slew of taiko samples, upped the bombast to Bear McCreary levels, then added a bunch of drum-n-bass beats to the whole thing.  At the same time, I was busy reconfiguring “Walk in London” as a French house track.  

I finished a studio version of one, but not the other.

I love the crack of the orchestral bass drum that runs through the track.  I came close to ripping out the breakbeats entirely and letting the whole thing ride on the ethnic percussion, but that didn’t pan out as well as I’d hoped.

9.    The Choir

Early on in the creation of “Excursions”, we were going through a little bit of an identity crisis.  AMDM had opened up a number of stylistic avenues to us, and our live show was based around a more rock-oriented setup.   I wasn’t quite sure how to proceed.

One of the first tracks that come out of the Excursions sessions was this one.  I’d given Dan a click track, a key signature, and a rough outline of what I was looking for, and one afternoon he came over, set up his rectifier and blitzed some riffs into Logic.  I doubled those riffs with some synth bass, and wrote a really long, understated intro that gave the distinct impression that that track you were about to hear was going to be a low-key, ambient affair – until the guitars kicked in.  I overdid it a bit, so I trimmed back the intro by half.  I just kept trying to ramp up the sheer size of the production, at the end throwing in a big chanty gang vocal mixing a dozen vocal overdubs and some vocoders.  It got really hard to mix, because even with the ability to freeze tracks, there was so much going on in that last bit that my poor DAW just couldn’t play it all back in realtime.

As we neared the end of Excursions, we had a bunch of tracks ready, and The Choir was the odd man out.  It wasn’t mixed quite as solidly as the others, and it was the lone synth-rock track in a sea of ethnotronica.  It stuck out on our test playlists.  So we shelved it and decided it was perfect B-Side material.

I pulled it out for Recursions, cleaned up some of the mixing and tweaked a few of the effects, bringing it closer to my current recording “specs.”  The vast range of dynamics, particularly in the low frequencies, make it somewhat hellish to play on the radio, as I’ve found out.  Broadcast compressors do not deal well with a sudden large spike in bass at around 100hz.

10.    Under The Gun (The Dark Clan Graves mix)

Last time we did a free release, I’d given Dan Clark a track, and he’d brought back something great…which we didn’t use and instead I cajoled him into using parts from it to make an acoustic version of “Walk In London.”  That worked really well, of course, but it meant that a real Dark Clan mix had never really surfaced.  

Since then, TDC has really exploded as a great live band, and has honed their sound into a tight power-pop unit.   I couldn’t pass up the opportunity for another mix.  

As with Bogart’s mix, what I got back was entirely unlike what I expected.  Many of Dan’s recent mixes for other acts had gone the big, sweeping majestic metal route.  My jaw hit the floor when I played back an angular, indie-rock style song.  It’s ironic, as when Dan was playing live with ND, I often tried to convince him to play more parts in this style.  Now that he’s off on his own, he’s giving me the spiky, Bloc Party-ish sounds that I always wanted.

I should know to expect the completely unexpected with a Dark Clan mix.  Dan draws from even more genres than I do.

11.    Hourglass (Live Acoustic)

At a show in 2006, after a dramatic failure of a club’s soundsystem, Dan and I soldiered on by playing the acoustic version of Walk In London that we’d been working on to finish up our set.  It came out surprisingly well, especially given the fact that we were just sort of winging it.  Shortly thereafter, Matt Fanale came up to me and asked if we’d like to do a whole acoustic show.  I said “sure!” not realizing just how much work it was going to be.  

After a few months of practice, we had a full acoustic set, with some songs radically rearranged.  Ione of those, “The Hourglass” got made over in a Spanish guitar style (this eventually prompted me to put Spanish guitar in “Snow and Joy” on Excursions) with Dan doing his thing.  We debuted this all at a gig with Hungry Lucy and Bloodwire, which turned out to be a fantastic night overall.  This recording comes from that show.  We performed acoustically again later, shortly after Elizabeth joined the band.

The intro chatter comes from the fact that, during that show, Dan noted to the audience that all the guitar solos from our normal live set had been offloaded to my fiddle parts (a necessity, since the guitar was responsible for pretty much the rest of the song content), so it looked an awful lot like I was deliberately stealing all the good solos.  This became a running gag during the set.

12.    Return (Bloodwire Mix)

After the aforementioned show, I decided that at some point  I was going to have Shawn and I-Li do a remix for me.   I loved their sound, a mix of precise electronics and this dreamy, spacious quality.   I’ve also loved Shawn’s previous projects, so when he agreed to do a mix, I was overjoyed.  I sent them the kit for “Return.”

I didn’t hear much back from them for a while.  They were busy playing a lot of shows, so I sort of assumed they’d just run out of time.  Then, about a day before I finished mastering everything, I get an email from Shawn with the mix attached, and I was pretty much blown away by it.  

I also had to remaster it a few times, because each time I tried to master it, I did something wrong.  The first time, I overcompressed it and squeezed out the incredible dynamic range it has (the raw number of complete silences in the arrangement meant my RMS meters never reported quite what I expected them to).  The second time I overcompensated and the track ended up  several db quieter than all the rest.  The third try, I got the proverbial porridge just right, and ended up with a great track to bookend the release with.

The missing 13th track is, of course, the house mix of “Walk in London” that I nearly finished.  Nearly.  I never quite got some of the synth noises right, so I set the mix aside and then completely forgot about it.  Perhaps it will someday see the light of day.