The Null Device Blog

I have to say, I’m incredibly proud of the work we did on this album. It’s been a long haul to get here, and there’ve been some difficulties along the way, but the end result is, in my opinion, pretty damn solid. I hope people like it as much as I do, but even if they don’t, I’m still extremely grateful that I got to work with the people I’ve worked with and put out the music we’ve put out.

Sure, there were some downsides – the studio floods being the peak of those, and my ongoing battle with sinus infections making recording vocals difficult, but hey, we got there.

Eric G has certainly been at the top of his game for lyrics. Everything he sent me just “clicked” in terms of my knowing how it’d fit into the songs or how it’d sound. And, as always, his instincts were pretty spot-on. While I’m meandering about in some song with a 3-minute dhol solo, he pulled me back from the brink of madness. More than once. Thanks to his pushing, this is an album of tight pop songs and not epic-but-ultimately-boring 9-minute songs.

Bringing Jill on board was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done, bandwise. Oh, sure, she’s worked with ND before as a guest vocalist, but since we’ve started playing live together, it’s become pretty clear how well her vocals fit into the kind of music we’ve been writing. Subsequently, she crops up on nearly every song on Suspending Belief in some capacity, and gives a lot of great depth to the songs. Plus, we’ve worked together enough that we can always bang out her vocals in just a few takes.

The Null Device Rhythm Section – Elizabeth and Chuck – were of great help. Elizabeth contributed some cello on the album, and more importantly helped me refine the studio versions of some of the songs that we played live by coming up with percussion parts. Chuck did the same with bass parts – certainly, the bassline in “Notes from the Fallen” got a bit of an overhaul after I heard Chuck’s take on it.

The most surprising addition to the whole thing was Raya. I’ve known Raya for a while, but until last year I didn’t know she was a singer. Wendy and I were visiting her in Chicago, and I forget why, but on the drive back from a museum she let fly some classical greek. My jaw fell open, Wendy just looked at me, stunned, and the first words out of my mouth were “OH MY GOD I NEED TO GET YOU INTO MY STUDIO.” So a few months later, I had Raya standing in front of my mic, blitzing through some Euripides and some Rabia al-Awadiyya without any especially clear concept of what I was going to do with it, only knowing that I was going to do something with it. So we knocked it out in an afternoon and then went to see “Slumdog Millionaire.” It was all kinds of awesome.

I of course need to thank a number of musicians who helped along the way. Most importantly, the lead guy of The Dark Clan and ND-guitar-hero-emeritus, Dan Clark. This dude has always helped push me as a musician and a studio nerd, and has always been a great sounding-board for some of my crazy studio ideas and my new obsessions with microphones and acoustic treatment. And certainly, there is no possible way we could’ve put this tour together if he hadn’t done about 97% of the legwork (I’m entirely lost when it comes to most of this process). Also, there’s the Chicago contingent of Andrew Sega and Ned Kirby, who are always good guys to bounce ideas off of (and drink beer with). Matt Fanale, for being our primary local hype-man and throwing our little project more bones than we probably deserve. Dylan Wheeler, for doing the same on the west coast and Jim Semonik and Zak Vaudo for hyping us in their respective eastern corners of the country. Ryan Parks, for giving us more interviews and radio time than any band with no album to hype probably deserves. And, naturally Ms. Kristy Venrick for actually, you know, selling our music.

Of course, I cannot fail to mention my lovely fiancee Wendy, who’s been ridiculously supportive of the whole process, and who somehow manages to not get irritated at hearing the same 8 bars of a song played 350 times, punctuated only by my foul language as I try over and over to get some weird detail right. She has to put up with the awful noises, the wall-shaking band practices, half the house getting taken over by classical indian ensembles, the endless hours in which I’ve disappeared into the basement, my long and indecipherable rants about studio acoustics, that glassy-eyed stare I get when I’m getting obsessed with building new bass traps, the late nights I keep at shows, the constant accumulation of gear and instruments in the basement, and all the other inconveniences associated with living with an esoteric and obsessive musician. I can’t thank her enough.

This album has been a wild ride, and it’s been a labour of love, if I may borrow the cliché. I hope the rest of the world likes it as much as I do, but even if it finds favor with just a few of my friends, it has for me been an entirely worthwhile adventure.

“Recursions” has been out for a month now and I’ve been tracking it with much interest.  For me, it’s not merely a release, it’s part of a continuing experiment in distribution models.

We did “Footfalls” as a giveaway, to see if it would boost album sales for “Sublimation.”  It did, kinda.  We did something similar for “London” and it too gave AMDM a little bump – helped probably by the fact that this time we got the label on board to help out.  We also printed a number of CD versions of it to sell at shows, and those, surprisingly sold out quickly.

When we conceptualized “Recursions”, we decided to take the idea to its logical conclusion – this wasn’t going to be just another “hey download some free tracks from the internet!”, we were going to treat this like a full release.  That is to say, full distribution channels, available downloads, tracking, etc.

In terms of both marketing and money, it’s been our most successful release to date.  It hasn’t sold as many copies as, say, Sublimation, but unlike our other releases it’s completely recouped production costs, making a small profit even, given us a mess of contacts for promotion and “fan relationship” building, and the bulk of promo has been entirely word of mouth.

Production costs were kept low, mainly due to the fact that we didn’t produce a large run of CDs.  We had 100 run up at a cost of roughly $130.    Okay, sure, costs would’ve been higher if I didn’t happen to have a small mastering business that I could just use for my own purposes, but still, the upshot is we DIY’ed the whole thing.  I cut costs here and there – bartering, begging, promising beer to people.  I probably could’ve spent another $100 if I had to shell out retail prices for things like UPC codes.

Next step was to throw this all on bandcamp.com.  I really, really like this service.  It’s incredibly flexible and consumer-oriented, and I really want them to thrive.  They’ve really hit upon something good for a distribution model – give the consumer the formats they want, while giving the artist the ability to control how things are distributed and what information is collected.  Using their system, we gave away Recursions with an optional “enter your own price” field.  Not only did people enter their own price, but they were awfully generous about it.  I expected maybe a few people to throw a buck at it here or there – instead, an awful lot of downloaders spent $5-$10 (usually, the people who downloaded the high-quality FLAC or AL versions gave more).    Better yet, we collected a lot of email addresses – people willingly signing up to our mailing list in exchange for downloading, meaning the next time we have a show or a release, we’ve got a significant number of new people to tell about it.

We spent another $35 to use TuneCore to put the album on Amazon, eMusic, iTunes, and elsewhere.  I know, why bother when it’s free?  Well, to see if people who don’t go to bandcamp.com find it and buy it anyway.  Or to see if people who love the iTunes interface – I’ve heard they exist – buy it.  The more places it is, the easier it’s to find.   This should hit those stores in a few weeks yet.

All told, so far, this release has managed to make a small profit.  Barely enough to, say, buy a hearty breakfast after a show, but still, this is an accomplishment that in over 10 years of writing and releasing music, hasn’t really happened before.  Certainly not within a month of release, anyway (I *think* Sublimation may have finally sold out its first run.  I haven’t seen sales figures on that in a few years).

The upshot is that DIY releases can work.  Maybe not well enough to make a living on, but certainly well enough that they can pay for themselves.  This isn’t news for some people, but for a band like ours, with a low profile and lower album sales, this is a Big Deal.

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.

In the past week I’ve crash-coursed in the mechanics of putting out a CD with all the appropriate “stuff” attached.

It’s danged easy to put out a CD – got a CD burner and a few blanks and you’re set.

To put a CD out that you can sell widely?  That’s trickier.

First off, there was licensing.  “Recursions” contains a cover of Dead Can Dance’s “Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove.”  Yeah, I’m a small enough artist that likely nobody is going to notice if I didn’t pay the mechanical royalties for the cover, but…well, hell, it’s easy, and if I liked the song enough to cover it, I should help support the artists who wrote it.    And, there’s the additional issue that if on the off chance Brendan Perry does happen to come across the song, my arse is legally protected.  It’s cheaper to pay the $50-some for the digital download license now than it would be to pay the lawsuit later.    The fees vary – for downloads they require an estimate, and then charge .0105/download.  You can renew easily if you go over that estimate.  CDs are usually a flat fee of $35/500CDs.   And this only applies to songs managed by the Harry Fox agency…which is most of them, actually.  www.harryfox.com

Then, there was the UPC symbol.  Amazon won’t sell a disc anymore unless it’s got a UPC symbol.  A lot of aggregators, like TuneCore or CDBbay, or CD duplicators, or design bureaus all have the stuff to add a UPC.  It’s often cheap or free through one of those services.  I, of course, did it manually.   I procured a UPC from someone I know who has a lot of them (I could’ve also bought one from one of the many UPC resellers online), then did some figuring and got some tools from Simply Barcodes and some advice from AccuGraphix et voila.  A right pain in the ass, let me tell you, but now I can sell this stuff wherever I want without any hassle.

Finally, ISRC codes for the tracks.  International Standards Recording Codes (ISRC) aren’t required, and they’re not a deal-breaker, but if you’ve got ISRC codes, things are easier to track and easier for some services to make sure your music isn’t duplicated, misattributed, etc.  They’re also embedded in the Redbook Audio CD standard.  So it doesn’t hurt to have ‘em.  Now, to get them is another story – you gotta sign up at  usisrc.org for a one-time $75 fee, which means you can assign up to 1000 ISRC codes a year for your own works.  I toyed with the idea of becoming an ISRC manager, which would allow me to assign codes for clients’ works in addition to my own, but that cost more and I don’t think I’m going to want to pay a few hundred a year for a service I might use 4 times.

What’s left?  I’ve got to register all the tracks with my rights management organization (in my case, ASCAP) so that club somewhere that actually pays artist royalties when they play tracks will send me my six cents.

I may be a small-time artist, but I go by the book.

Looking over some stuff the other day, it turns out we’re a lot closer to having a new release than I thought.

So, here’s what we’ve got on tap, in no particular order, for the next “EP” (although it’s less of EP than a …well, whatever), tentatively titled “Recursions”:
Travelogue (2008 version)
Triangular (Null Device’s Panjabi Lowrider mix)
Footfalls (2008 Version)
The Choir (unreleased from Excusions sessions)
Hourglass (Live, Acoustic @ The Inferno)
Think It Over (Dub, Unreleased from Excursions sessions)
Unspecified remix 1
Unspecified remix 2
Twisting and Turning (Null Device Club Mix)
The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove

So yeah, how bout that.  I’ve got most of this stuff already done.  Need to record a few more parts for Lovegrove, finish the Panjabi Lowrider Mix (it’s almost done), finish wrangling the last two mixes, and then master the puppy, and I’m good.  The first two tasks I should have done in a week or so.

I’m attempting to get some different remixers than normal to do stuff, but that may or may not happen.  I’ve got a couple of “blue sky” possibilities that may turn out to be just too danged expensive, but it’s worth a shot.

Haven’t fully decided how to release it yet.  We’re leaning towards “free” again, but we may do a “bonus track version” on iTunes or something (I’ve got a few notions clattering about in my noggin for what I can do for a bonus track – the phrase “An Irish Pub in Amritsar” keeps popping up).  We’ll likely do a short run of physical CDs too, for sales at shows.

So, uh, yeah!  Something may actually happen!