4 Jul
2012
4 Jul
'12
1:14 p.m.
Hi!
My answers follow in the mail body.
On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 11:20:48AM +0200, Julien Claassen wrote :
Hello Aurélien!
That again is some fascinating music. Partly a little too
psychedelic for my taste, a little reminiscent of Magma and their
Magma has surely been an inspiration, and we already share stage with
them in Germany several years ago...
Unfortunately, Magma is not half what it used to be, and I wouldn't call
them an inspiration today!
By myself, the main inspirations are Zappa, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum,
and, as weird as it might seem, Busta Rhymes, Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg and all
that kind of stuff.
genre in the way it progreses and builds. But the
progression of
styles as such is lovely. From metal to something akin to fusion to
the electronic bit to the final rise. and as with your previous
recordings excelent playing! Chapeau!
Thanks a lot.
There's only one thing, that doesn't agree
with me and has never
fully agreed with me in your other works: The mixing/processing of
the drums. The bassdrum in my ears has to much low end, sounding to
me rather amateur. Not the playing, that's for sure, just the sound
in the mix.
Couldn't tell if I'm right or not, but I think you're speaking of
electronic bassdrum.
Actually, there are 2 acoustic bassdrums in Yüla's drumkit, one being
quite "rock", so with not that much low end, actually. This one has kind
of a "double-layer with oil" skin, so it, acoustically, gives a lot of
what we call "kick" (Hi) in France, quite less low end. The second one
is a jazz 16" bassdrum, so with much more a "body" sound, Yüla plays it
in a "Christian-Vander-approach", so the aim is to get a "note" on
it.
On electronic side, there are 5 different kicks, mainly played together,
or almost, and one of them has a lot of low end, yes. It's the
dub/dubstep part of the game!!! Would say it has a lot to do with live
playing, in which we look for that low end cohernt with percise "front
montant" (couldn't remember the word in english).
The snare drum - always one of my favourites :-) -
sounds very dry and thus sometimes doesn't really fit for me.
Oh really? Actually, I've to precise I was at the "artistic direction",
but I didn't technically produced the sound, it was Charly, one AMMD guy
who did it. And actually, during mixing session, I felt there was too
much reverb on the snare (especially a quite short and low-medium one),
but as it's something I always feel, I finally didn't talk about it.
What you say cumforts me, I always want less reverb, and there should be
more!
Yet,
it doesn't disturb me realy, it's just a question of different
preferences.
Surely. And actually, the album will be available online in September,
as well as the *multitrack sessions*, so you might change it the way you
want!
Actually, I will get back on this later, but we have developped a
software called spiderjessica/audiogit which aims to change the point of
view of what we call a net-album: a spiderjessica net-album might evolve
in time, and is versionned (through git), which lets the user choose
between the version he prefers for every track, and so on. This will be
hosted by Dogmazic www.dogmazic.net.
Sebkha-Chott NeXXXt Epilog will be the first spiderjessica's net album.
As said before, I'll get back to you with this later, when I will have
some text describing the thing correctly, in french and in english!!
Oops I forgot to tell what aim we were following on this album.
The point was the following:
- there are "organic instruments" in Sebkha-Chott (drums, bass,
saxophone, guitar in some way), and espacilly two of them (bass and
drums) are very good instruments with a really natural beautiful
sound. For those instruments, we aim to get the most transparent sound
we might get (kind of world music or even jazz, or baroque/classical
music point of view),
- there are "processed instruments" in Sebkha-Chott, those one has to be
produced in the biggest way (think of hip hop much, really),
- in the end, the sommation of this all should sound as a sole block, a
sonic material, in which you might not want to split instruments from
the other when you listen to them. That's particularly true on "metal"
parts of the album, in which the electronic and organic drumkits are
mixed in such a way you might not be sure of who is what.
It reminds me of a drummer in a band, I once played
with. He was great, but his idea of mixing drums wasn't very
compatible with the rest of the music. For he mixed them solo and in
such a way, that they would sound good as a single instrument.
Hehe! Drummers shouldn't take part of the mixing of their drums!! ;)
OK, now that I got my drum-mania out of the way, I
can go back and
close the mail with my original impression: Fascinating music, well
played.
Thank you very much, once more!!!! :)
Short - sort of off topic-ish - question: Is there
anything new
from the project, that feature Inuki? I can't recal the name of that
project, only, that I enjoed it tremendously and still do.
I think you're speaking about Lemurya. I couldn't say what they're doing
by now, they finally leave the AMMD without really leaving it, just by
having no real news/contacts. There are some gigs planned in which we
wanted to push them, never got any feedback, so I guess the band is
quite dead, and "Soma" will be the only thing recorded by the band, but
I cannot tell you I'm sure of it, and I hope I'm wrong, actually. The best
is probably to contact one of them:
Damien Hervé <neimadherve(a)hotmail.fr> (guitar player)
He will tell you what they're about by now.
Warmly yours
Julien
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Such Is Life: Very Intensely Adorable;
Free And Jubilating Amazement Revels, Dancing On - FLOWERS!
====== Find my music at ======
http://juliencoder.de/nama/music.html
.....................................
"If you live to be 100, I hope I live to be 100 minus 1 day,
so I never have to live without you." (Winnie the Pooh)
--
Aurélien