Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast about electronic music and all things synth. I'm Caro C and in this episode we'll be hearing from J Will Goose Esquire, the driving force behind British electronica band Public Service Broadcasting.
Since their debut album in 2013, Public Service Broadcasting have been using archival samples from the British Film Institute to uncover voices around subjects like the summit of Everest and the race for space. Every Valley, an album about the British coal industry, reached number four in the UK charts.
We'll be finding out what gear and processes Public Service Broadcasting used to create their fourth album, Bright Magic, which has just been released. It's all about Berlin this time, and more centred around guest vocalists. Bright Magic was written and recorded in Kreuzberg's famous Hans Zitton studio recording complex.
Here's a taste of a track from Bright Magic to get us started.
Jay of Public Service Broadcasting. Welcome to the Sound on Sound podcast. Thank you. Hello. Lovely to speak to you today. I'm really interested in starting with how public service broadcasting came about as a quite kind of like concept band, isn't it? There's a quote out there that says you're interested in teaching lessons of the past through the music of the future Can you tell us a bit about how PSB came about?
Well, the first thing I would say is be very careful Um, when you're writing your publicity material for, say, a run of gigs at the Edinburgh Fringe, and you're trying to come up with a snappy one liner. I I thought that was funny, um, but then a lot of people have taken it quite seriously, especially when you're talking to, like, foreign press.
They they go, like, so this is what you're doing, aren't you? No, no, I was just I was just Um, in terms of how it started, uh, it was, it was just me having given up on the dream of being in a band and being professional musician and just thinking, right, well, I'll do something that's gonna be fun for me and me alone, then mucking around with some, you know, sort of mostly electronic, but sort of slightly acoustic elements thrown in.
music and, and hearing about some, some archive stuff that had gone on the British Film Institute website for the first time and, and thinking, oh, maybe I could use some of that in the way that, you know, DJ Shadow or, or Jurassic Five or, or even bands like the Manics have kind of embellished, you know, um, Embellished their music, I suppose, with spoken word samples.
It kind of, it seemed to add a kind of depth and a bit of, uh, a bit of character that I thought maybe this instrumental music was missing. So, I just started kind of adding them to the music and then from there it was just, it was just kind of a natural, it's a natural progression of a very unnatural idea musically, I think.
So, it was kind of, Using them for character first and foremost and then starting to realize that you could use them to do much more and you could Instead of just using this kind of dressing and you could use them to tell a story You could kind of leave narrative hooks in there You could really kind of build much more of an emotionally resonant piece of music if you use them in the right way and from there really going on to just kind of You Test and evolve the concept of what public service broadcasting as a band can be, but it just started with me mucking around really, um, and doing something for my own amusement rather than something that I thought was going to, you know, propel me to, I don't know, the Dublin castle or something, yeah.
Yeah, and you have done some amazing live shows and also, you know, your albums have done well, there's four studio albums, isn't it, including the new one. And I think there's something definitely in that. Teaching lessons of the past because you are using, you know, you're covering subjects like, I think the Titanic, space exploration, coal mining.
So there's something, I think it'd be, can be quite powerful to bring through those voices that maybe haven't been heard as much in history as well. Yeah, definitely. And one of the nice things about, about the way that we've worked has been that we've ended up, you know, kind of, especially with the BFI, some of the stuff that we've transferred or some of the stuff that we've kind of asked for digital copies of is the first time it's been digitized.
So we're kind of, we are in a strange way kind of helping the archiving process and helping to keep some of these films and, and voices alive. But yeah, I think my issue with the teaching the lessons of the past thing is it kind of sets us up as, It's like really arrogant know it alls who, who are just kind of, you know, learning about a subject and then everybody needs to sit down and pay very close attention to these, you know, these lessons we're about to hand down.
It's, it's much more about kind of finding stuff that we find interesting and voices that we find interesting and, and sort of sharing them and, you know, and that, that kind of more, um, more sort of collaborative approach rather than sort of being overly, overly kind of didactic, I suppose. Yeah, that, that's what annoys me about that.
about that quote that I wrote, and I think it's still on our website, so it's really my fault. But yeah, um, yeah, it's, it's kind of, it's, it's more, it's more sharing interesting experiences and interesting topics and interesting ways of looking at things, which is, which is what all my favorite art and my favorite music does as well.
So just trying to follow in those footsteps. Yeah. And how has the band evolved in terms of what gear you use, whether it's in the studio or live? Well, you know, I mean, we've, we've been lucky, the albums have done reasonably well, so we've been able to have a career in music, but also to, you know, gradually expand the equipment with each release, so, you know, the first record was, was made and mixed on a pair of Adam A6s, I think they were, um, one of, yeah, they were B stock, and they were mismatched, one of them was out of phase with the other, which is interesting, um, they had different kind of scales for, for the volume on the front, so the first two records were mixed on that, actually, um, And, and the first record was made on just a Motu, I mean, I think it was a Ultralight Mark III or something, so.
And then for the second record, I managed to get hold of a UAD interface and a, and a Neve summing mixer. And then for the third record, it was, I managed to double those, and we, we bought quite a lot of equipment for that, because we kind of built our own studio in, um, in an old workers institute in Wales for that record.
and, you know, kinda took all that gear to Berlin when I went there and, and bought a few extra bits and bombs as well to starting to get more into the world of kind of more tactile stuff, more analog stuff, um, so really it's, you know it started from very humble beginnings and now it's, you know, it's, it's, quite, er, sort of, yeah, I'm very lucky to have the kind of, the technology.
Studio toys that we have but for the for the most recent record. I bought a decade stream synth Which is the black corporation thing which really influenced the sound of the record a lot And a juno 106 and a couple of space echoes and really, you know If you can't make a decent sounding record with those on board and you probably need to get out of the music business I think Yeah, tell us a bit more about the tactile and analog gear that you've been able to accumulate.
Yeah, I just find it a much more inspiring way of working. Um, I mean, obviously it's, it is a luxury and you can have a very similar experience with digital, um, you know, digital kind of interfaces and digital controllers for, for digital synths. But I just find when all the buttons are there in front of you and when you can just Sometimes just by accident just be mucking around with it and come up with an interesting sound.
I found that much more Inspiring and sort of improvisational approach to music and that there are a lot of things that happened on The most recent record bright magic that were you know, they were about those kind of more happy accidents And, and, and just the, the quality of the sound, I think, is, is a big factor in it as well, I, I think, for me, just the richness of the sound that you get from, from the Decca's Dream, for example, or, or the Juno, just, I mean, the bass off the Juno is absolutely outrageous, so, um, it's, it's being lucky enough to kind of have got to the point where those, those studio tools are a realistic proposition rather than something you kind of, you know, dream, dream about.
We'll go for the emulations. I mean, I have got the emulations and they are very good, but they're kind of good in a different way and slightly less, kind of, less playful. I think, I think the good thing about physical equipment is that it encourages you to be playful, and that's, that's a good state to be in when you're trying to be creative.
Yeah, definitely. I think it links it to the physical more, doesn't it, as opposed to kind of cerebral or, or painting vibes. That kind of way of approaching it. Yeah, definitely. And especially, you know, just having a pair of space echoes to just send, send stuff into and just, you know, actually playing them in real time and mucking around with the intensity knob and the, you know, switching the mode selector knob.
And, and yeah, it's just, it's just fun. Um, and it, you know, you can have some, you can get some really interesting results that just add a lot of texture and depth to what you're doing. So, um. Yeah, when I listen back to the early records, I kind of like, oh, I wish, I kind of wish we'd had all that then, but you know, that's not how life works.
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, are you more of a kind of have a jam session and see what happens and see if it turns into a track or do you have a very definite idea of a track before you create it, if you know what I mean? I have an idea of what I'm trying to accomplish, I think, and I have a rough idea of the kind of palette of sounds and, and, you know, the general character of it that I'm going for, so, um, and, and often I just have a little nugget of a musical idea that's kind of been floating around for a while, so with the first single off the new record, People Let's Dance, it just starts with a kind of You know, very little baseline idea, and that's all I had.
Um, but I was happy to leave it at that in my head for a long time when I was working on the record. Just thinking, right, I know that song's gonna have that to start with, and it'll build from there. Um, and it did build from there. It went from one little baseline idea to over 200 tracks in the final project.
So it definitely, definitely did grow and expand. But often, yeah, most, most of our songs do just come from a tiny little idea like that. And, and then just kind of, it comes from layering stuff up in the studio, playing around with stuff. Um, And just listening to what my ear is telling me kind of needs to happen because often I can hear something, I can hear something without hearing it, if you know what I mean.
I have to try and translate that sound into reality. And again, that's where I find the physical stuff helps with that because it's just, it's just easier to kind of grapple with when you're trying to get a certain sound out of, out of your equipment. And out of your head. Yeah, yeah. And that's that's the hardest thing to do.
Because even even when you get better at it, and I have got better at it, it still doesn't sound like you originally imagined. It's kind of what you were aiming for, but a bit different, which there's nothing wrong with that. But it's just a bit frustrating sometimes. And you mentioned the Deckard's Dream synth.
Can you tell me a bit more about that? I don't think I know that one. Yeah, it's um, it's, it's a modern incarnation of the Yamaha CS 80, which probably had its most famous moment on, on Vangelis Blade Runner soundtrack, so it's named after the lead character from Blade Runner, Rick Deckard, Harrison Ford's character, um, and it's just, it's just a wonderful, wonderful machine, it has many virtues over the CS 80 in that you can pick it up with one hand rather than needing four people to move it.
And it seems to be slightly more reliable touch wood. Um, so yeah, it's, it's, it's got that richness of sound. It's got that kind of unusual character to it that the CS80 has. It's definitely, it's a sound, you know, if you're after that sound, that's where you get it. You're not going to get that from, you know, from something trying to recreate it.
I don't think it has a lot of kind of architectural oddities in the way that it's put together. And it's just such a rich, rich sounding machine, you know, from, from just one. One voice of it's an eight voice synthesizer, but just one voice you can just get so much kind of depth and warmth and character to it that it just changes the whole atmosphere of a track and it's It's across every track on on the record and nothing else is I don't think so It really is imparting a lot of the mood and sort of uh character of the album
Wow, cool. And do you mix it all yourself? You're talking about having like 200 tracks there. Is that all you? Um working away with that week because it is does all sound quite especially the newest up sounds really quite tightly woven You Yeah, it is me. I mean, I've kind of occasionally flirted with the idea of being less of a control freak and, you know, handing over the reins to someone else, but I kind of, it doesn't, I don't just do the kind of the writing stage, the recording stage, the mixing stage, they're kind of, they are interlinked.
And I find if, if I were to hand the mixing stage over to somebody else, I might miss some of the kind of last minute changes that I do make compositionally in there. And, um, it's, it's not just kind of a separated process. So, um, Much as they might technically sound better in the hands of somebody else mix wise, I think they would lose something from the kind of the last minute changes.
So I haven't yet been able to kind of push that button and give them to somebody else to fiddle with. So yeah, it's a lot of work. Um, and I do go around the pipe a bit when I'm finishing a record, but, um, Yeah, I just find that way of working to be kind of the best for, for what I'm after really, what I'm trying to accomplish.
Yeah, lovely. And it feels like you have moved away a bit from the using more direct archive material, audio material, in Bright Magic. So how, how did that record come about? That seems more like it's featuring vocalists or collaborating with vocalists. Yeah, I mean, it's something we'd kind of been Doing on and off for a while, you know, it started with working with the smoke fairies on the race for space for our track Valentina and, you know, our, our cast of collaborators really expanded for every valley with Tracy and Campbell and James Dean Bradfield and Lisa Jen Brown and Haiku Salute.
So, you know, and, and the Beaufort choir as well. He sang on the last track there. So, um, you know, that record was kind of, there were a lot of collaborators on there as well. And a lot of the human voice on there rather than kind of recorded voice. Um, I think it was, it was. partly because it gives you more freedom to kind of shape the narrative and control of the record and kind of take it in directions that mean you're not so reliant on finding the bit of archive that kind of fits with what you're trying to do.
We're just to kind of, just to stretch what we do really into kind of grow and evolve how the band operates and kind of grow as a songwriter. Um, you know, not to just kind of have a formula and stick to it because that's, that's really the death of, of creativity, I think. So the new record is kind of about people who moved to Berlin.
You know, because Berlin is kind of a mecca of creativity or has been over the years and, and trying to sort of, you know, unravel why that might be. So to move there and, and just kind of keep working the same way we always had done and not take any of our own creative risks and not kind of change our formula just felt a bit, um, pointless.
It kind of felt like, let's, let's use this as a springboard to make our own leap and, and change things up a bit and, and see, see where we get to. And that's, that's how the record came about, really. Yeah, wonderful. Cool. And did you invite vocalists who are also based in Berlin then? Yeah, a few. Um, I mean, Blixer Baugelt is on the record of Einstürzende Neubart and Bad Seeds fame.
But he, we kind of, we first met via Zoom collaboratively during the pandemic, and I was in London, he was in Berlin. By the time I got to Berlin, he was in Portugal. So, um, I think he's nominally based in Berlin. They've still got their studio there, which is where we did the vocal tracks. But, um, we didn't actually meet in person, but Andrea Casablanca, who's one half of the Berlin based band girl, she was very much there and, um, era who sang on two tracks on the record is, is in Berlin and, and so is Nina Hoss who reads, who reads a poem for the last track on the record, she's a fantastic and very well known, uh, actor over there.
So, um, yeah, most of it was working with. either people who were kind of based in the area or had very strong historical links with Berlin. And did you co write or write the lyrics with them? Because they're all in German, aren't they? Some of them are in German. Blue Heaven is mostly in English, but I didn't co write the German so much as kind of Have a bit of an editorial steer over it.
So just just trying to sort of steer it in certain certain areas. So with with people, let's dance, you know, it's all about kind of, uh, you know, forgetting time and place and the movement of souls and the heat, you know, the heat kind of building and trying to get this conjure up this atmosphere of, you know, um, a late night environment where people are dancing, basically.
Um, so it was kind of giving the framework and the context of that and then letting Annalena sort of, you know, do her thing. Annalena a. k. a. Era, um. And, and, you know, occasionally saying, you know, this line works for me, that line doesn't, sort of being more of an editor, really, rather than a co creator. But with Andrea for Blue Heaven, that was a bit more kind of line by line, we were both kind of chipping in with this, that, and the other.
Um, but obviously, yeah, the German section, she, you know, She very much took the lead on. My German wasn't too bad while I was there. I could, I could get by without being spoken to in English, so it can't have been awful, but um, it's all gone again now.
So alongside, obviously, the music, and your lovely equipment that you're able to use and the vocalists. What other kind of elements were, are in there within that weave of Bright Magic? Well, I should say, actually, before we get onto the stuff that we recorded ourselves, um, that there are, there are still extensive samples across the record, but they're not used in such an obvious way.
So a key, Ruppmann's film Wockenende, which is from the late 20s and was basically the first kind of audio collage. It's called a film, but there's no actual, you know, visual content to it. It's all audio. It's contemporary sounds of 1928 Berlin, all these voices, all these kind of sounds of industry and sort of, um, you know, mechanical, um, kind of collisions and clanging and, and just fascinating kind of audio snapshot of the time, really.
So that's kind of woven through the record. You have these voices dipping in and out. And a lot of these, the industrial sounds are kind of chopped up and made rhythmic or a lot of the bell sounds turned into percussion sounds or some of the clanging made into symbols, you know, all that kind of stuff is going on.
And it's kind of, I guess it's complimented by or slightly sort of Set in opposition to our, our own recordings, um, you know, some stuff like the opening track is supposed to conjure up this kind of idea of Berlin as a, as a swamp, you know, before the city is actually settled and before this, this kind of metropolis emerges from the marshland.
So, you know, I went and kind of recorded lots of bird calls and kind of marshy, bubbling sounds and stuff like that. And, and then you have these kind of mechanical sounds from Wockenende kind of bubbling up through that as the, as the city kind of rises out of the swamp. Um, so it's kind of, you know.
setting the scene for that and juxtaposing my kind of more modern but also primeval sounds against the more mechanical stuff from from ruttman's film and then just doing some really geeky stuff really that i found really interesting but maybe other people don't um the second track on the record is called in lifting it's about um it's about an exhibition from the late 20s in berlin celebrating All things artificial light, really.
Berlin was, was the main manufacturer of light bulbs for Europe and was the first to kind of really be fully electrified, um, to the extent that it was. Um, so I got hold of an electromagnetic field device thing called the Ether from Soma Synths and Yeah, that's so much fun. Wandered up and down, um, Leipziger Straße, which was the first street to be electrified, and just tried to capture these kind of electrical impulses and, and these little bursts of static, and they're kind of littered across the track, but, um, took it one step further than that, and some of the little impulses and pulses that you get, I made a bass drum out of one of them, made an electronic bass drum sound that is in the track, and also manipulated the hi hat sound sort of similarly, so.
It was kind of, the whole point of going to Berlin and writing and recording there was to try and kind of pick up, you know, to be almost a receiver myself and to pick up all these sounds and atmospheres, um, and to do that with, with this little ether device which is, you know, capturing these electrical impulses and weaving them in, into and out of that track I found, um, just really satisfying and really, really nerdy way of kind of, you know, doing a microcosm what the record in general was supposed to be about.
Yeah, brilliant. I love those electromagnetic recording devices. It's just amazing what's going on that we don't hear or sense. I remember the escalators, they were definitely, there was a lot going on there. Yeah, I went on a, there was a sort of sound walk kind of thing that I did in Manchester. And we went round into the department stores and you know, the lit up kind of branding adverts really.
They're, They were, they were quite special and we were showing all the staff. They were like, Oh my God, I had no idea my workplace sounded like this. Yeah. It's really good. It's kind of, they, they sell that devices, um, or they, they market it as it's to hear, to be able to hear the world around you properly or something.
So yeah, it definitely kind of, um, it's an interesting experience wandering around with it. I don't think it's particularly expensive either. So if you're into that kind of thing, it might be a fun thing to do. Yeah, yeah. So what's your sample of choice then? How do you like to manipulate those sounds into music, really?
I do it all just in, in logic, really. I kind of, you know, um, get the raw audio in there and then just kind of, um, you know, chop and slice and pitch shift around and, and time to stretch some stuff and, and, you know, use sort of destructive audio techniques, I suppose. Um, You know, reverse stuff, double stuff, uh, yeah, kind of try and move stuff in the, in the, the stereo image.
Um, and then for the stuff like, you know, making a bass drum out of, um, out of this little impulse, it was kind of a little sound that went like, ba ba so just take one of those. Um, I think I pitched it down a couple of octaves before putting it into the Electron Analog Rhythm and then there just kind of adding, you know, rolling off the frequency, adding a resonant peak and just, you know, just trying to build a cool sounding bass drum.
And actually it sounds remarkably good, I think. Um, yeah, I was really quite pleased with the results of that. Um, so yeah, it's kind of a mixture of tools, I suppose. I also took, um, I did have the new Waldorf Uh, Iridium, which is their kind of modern, I guess, sort of semi workstation, semi kind of wavetable synth.
And I kind of took some of the, um, some of the samples from Wockenender and some of the other stuff that we had done, um, and kind of made wavetables out of them, and then used that as the basis for, uh, you know, synthesized sound, which, which also struck me as quite an interesting thing to do. Um, you probably can't, can you?
Discern it in any way on the record itself, but you know, I know it's there So it was it was good fun to play around with
and how does that work in terms of you know? Sort of intellectual property copyright or the sort of legal side of of really employing material that's come from already published Yeah, well, I mean, in the early days, as I was doing it for my own amusement and didn't anticipate it would go anywhere, I just got on with it, you know, I just did it and didn't ask anyone's permission and, um, figured I didn't really need it because no one was going to listen anyway.
And then, and then it started to kind of gain a bit of momentum, gain a bit of traction, and I thought, oh, crikey, you know, I'd probably better, um, I'd better speak to somebody and get, um, get some permission. And so that, that was when we really started to build some relationships with the BFI, for example, and with, uh, for the first record, it was, we.
Approach studio canal as well to get the rights to the conquest of Everest. Um, so yeah, it was it was, you know We we were really lucky to find collaborative partners in people like the BFI and studio canal who? Recognize the position we were in and that we wouldn't be able to pay commercial rates of god knows how many thousands of pounds per Five seconds or whatever and could accommodate us, you know in a flexible manner There are a few things for the new record that we wanted to sample, but you just you know If you run into these kind of massive bureaucracies, they just have ways of doing things, they just show you their rate card and, and, you know, you try and explain what you're doing and, and they say no, so some of these things have to stay off the record, but it's interesting because, you know, recorded sound and recorded film is interesting.
Yeah. You know, we're kind of getting on for over a hundred years since a lot of that started. So a lot of these people who, um, who created all this stuff, um, have, you know, they, they have expired plus 70 years. So, so the copyright has actually elapsed in some cases. Anyway, Ruttman died in 43, I think, in the war.
Um, so his stuff is, is basically, you know, it's in the public domain now. And, and more stuff drops into the public domain every year, which, um, which is fantastic. I think, I think it's a fantastic kind of, um, Collaborative inspirational way of working and in music I do find it slightly frustrating because in art You know, you can just a collage is a valid art form You don't have to ask anyone's permission to you know, you can just create a collage it can be anything You are making a new piece of art by using it But it doesn't work that way with recorded sound or with, with music, which I can understand some of the arguments for that.
But at the same time, you know, it does feel like copyright sometimes does stifle, yeah, it does sometimes stifle creativity. And, and a lot of these people who are the gatekeepers to these estates and archives just have the wrong kind of attitude in my eyes, considering they're looking after the estates of, Fundamentally creative people who might have been more collaborative and more open to the kind of approaches from you know oddities like us Then they're kind of these yeah these modern modern day gatekeepers It's it can be slightly frustrating when you get when you get confronted with that kind of level of officiousness But overall we've been we've been very lucky Is it 75 years and then music becomes 70 I think it's death death of the death of the writer and then 70 years Um in film, it's a bit more complicated.
It's it's the it's the producer the director and the screenwriter. I think whoever dies last um they're, they're kind of the benchmark for, um, you know, whenever the copyright expires. So, and it all goes back to the, what was it, Jung talked about the collective unconscious, collective creative consciousness.
Yeah.
Let's talk about how you translate Processes and gear in the studio into a live setting. So I'm guessing you must be in the process of preparing bright magic for live. Yeah, a lot of it is about recreating the sounds that we made live either sampling some of these synths. Um, I'm having to do quite extensive sampling of the decades dream because I just can't recreate that with, um, with the tools on offer.
So, um, I basically transferred to a kind of a music workstation for this tour, so, I've recreated pretty much every single synth sound across all our tracks, not just the new stuff. Um, and it's using a Roland Phantom 7, Uh, which has some fantastic kind of modern day emulations of Juno and Jupiter 8 and, Um, the Jupiter 8.
Is it 8X and, um, and the SH 101. So I'm using a lot of those kind of modern recreations. Um, and you know, for live use, you need it to be reliable. I can't, I don't really want to be carting around analog synths on tour, um, because we need spares of everything as well. And it just becomes very unwieldy and expensive.
So, um, I'm kind of. trying to consolidate everything into one machine, and that does everything, um, and just recreate all these sounds, try and have the songs kind of be loose enough so that you can still improvise, you can still kind of perform them differently every night, and have that kind of element of, is it a good performance, um, you know.
Can people tell when we've had a good night versus a bad night, because I think that's an important part of live music. Um, but at the same time, kind of having a solid enough structure that we can, you know, play to video or, or have kind of sound clips dropping in at the right times in the right places.
So, um, yeah, looping, looping as much stuff as possible, whether that's with MIDI looping, which we use a lot more than audio looping, um, And just kind of setting all those processes in place so they kind of happen in the background. And music, the more musically engaging stuff can happen in terms of what the audience sees.
It's not just, you know, three blokes with laptops on stage or whatever, because I find those shows very unengaging and quite dry. Um, you know, it's, it's, it's obviously live music happening before you, um, with the very real potential for things to go quite badly wrong. So, um, yeah, that's live music for me.
Yeah, you need that element of risk, don't you? You need that. You need people to feel like they're going on a journey with you as well, which I guess you need to balance with. You can't spend the time, you know, taking a particular sample and manipulating that live in the kind of music. Yeah, I think so. I think it's about what you're really trying to achieve.
You know, if you're, if you're taking those kind of more long form and experimental and, and, you know, truly improvisational approaches, then, then that's great. But obviously, um, You know, you are losing some other aspects of performance that, you know, it's all about finding the right balance, really, for what you're trying to do.
Our kind of live solution, if you wanted to call it, is so, um, hideously kind of contorted and convoluted. Um, you know, I use Reaper for live stuff, so I use Logic to write, and I use Reaper for live stuff, because it's so reliable and so customizable. Um, And then, you know, I don't have to touch the laptops when we play, they can just be there and I can just keep an eye on them.
Um, everything's done through like MIDI controllers and floor controllers and, um, just, yeah, just trying to build as much flexibility into it as possible, while also having that, that stable kind of environment so that we're not gonna lose the show halfway through and have, have a crowd full of very angry people.
Um, we have had to abandon one show once, which was just the worst feeling ever, so I'd really not, I'd really not like to do that again if possible. And, um, any live instrumentation on stage? Yeah, we've got Rigglesworth playing a full live drum kit, but also he's got the Roland SPD, so he can send me MIDI triggers, but also he's got samples on that, um, so we can loop some of his electronic kind of kits that, that would work in the background, and then he can drum on top of that.
Um, he's also got the Mallet Cat kind of, um, MIDI percussion instrument, so he can play some synth lines on that, or he can do some vibraphone stuff, um, which again comes to me So he's got his hands full already, we've got Jeff Abraham, who is playing, not all at the same time, but he's playing across the set.
Bass, guitar, uh, flugelhorn, keys, percussion, and I think we're even adding backing vocals into the mix for the new show, so he's got his hands full as well. Um, some of his stuff loops as well, we do some live bass looping and some percussion looping, so, you know, we're kind of layering stuff up as we go there.
And then I've got guitar, plus this keyboard. Plus, occasionally a banjo, plus, you know, lots of buttons to press. Um, and then, and then, Mr. B is kind of doing a lot of the video work live as well, so, Um, it's, we are really kind of using our resources to pretty much a maximum, I think. Um, and, and covering as much as, as we can of what's on the tracks live as possible.
And because a lot of the tracks are kind of layered, and very, you know, they kind of, they do build up. Um, We can kind of play a surprising amount of it live every night. But again, sometimes you just do have to leave some stuff on track. And if it results in a better result musically, and kind of from a stage point of view, then I'm kind of comfortable doing that.
What I don't like is when it's just out of laziness and when it hasn't really been thought about too much. Um, but we've definitely put the effort in. I think, I think people can tell hopefully.
So I know that, yeah, the visuals obviously a big part of your live shows, especially what visuals will accompany the Bright Magic live material. Well, it's more of a conceptual record and it's more abstract and kind of, you know, it touches on a lot of expressionist art, I think, so I think it's not going to be quite as simple as a kind of four by three archive, you know, footage kind of screen simultaneously, I think it will be a slightly more interpretive kind of way of using, you know, some of the visual matter that we do have versus, you know, using the lights and using kind of set design and stage design to tell as much of the story is kind of the conventional archive footage, while also being able to kind of, present, you know, that stuff for the older stuff that relies on it more.
Um, so it's kind of finding a balance between those. Um, you know, that there are, there's a sequence of songs on the record called Lickspiel which is, um, 3, and they're based on early Expressionist films, so I think the intention is to kind of slice those up and perform them live as we perform them live.
Um, Lickspiel 3 when we play it live is, is just totally live, there's no click or anything, there's no, um, There's no kind of pre recorded elements to it, so, um, it just, it needs to be done live, that's just what needs to happen. But some of the others we can kind of have maybe a bit more of a framework and, and play with the elements at our disposal.
Um, and, and yeah, we, you know, we are adding extra stuff musically to the show as well. We have a brass section who've been touring with us for many years now and, um, we also bring in live vocals on the tour because, you know, they're starting to become more and more a part of, of the sound and of, of this record in particular.
So, um, Eira is going to be on tour with us, uh, singing her track. from other singers that we've worked with, which feels like a big step forward, I think. Should make it even more engaging, hopefully. And where are you touring? Is it just the UK or elsewhere as well? Yeah, it's UK and, uh, dipping a toe into Europe, really.
We're not there for too long. We're there for seven gigs, I think. But, yeah, most, most of the UK in October and November. Um, but we are going over to Belfast, Dublin, Cork, um, in January. So we're not quite doing the full UK because Northern Ireland, as, as our Northern Irish fans, uh, keep telling me, you know, you can't, yeah, if you call it a UK tour and not doing Northern Ireland, people get justifiably quite angry.
So, um, we're covering that a bit later, but yeah. Otherwise, Scotland, Wales, England. Yeah, should be coming relatively near to you if you're interested. So has sound on sound maybe contributed to your trajectory at all in terms of music production or, yeah, recording techniques and all that kind of thing?
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think I use it, um, I use it for, it's quite a practical resource. And I have kind of a few things that I just revisit many times. I'm kind of sat in my studio now surrounded by, Um, some acoustic treatment that my dad and I made based on Paul and Hugh's article from like July 2005, I think, and they're still, they're still, I wouldn't say going strong, but they're still operational and, uh, structurally intact, and definitely helping to treat this very unfriendly studio space and make it, you know, workable in.
There's that from a practical point of view, but I also just find sometimes I've just got technical questions and technical issues that, um, You know, I mean, the human particular is just that, you know, there's always a forum post with you answering somebody's question about, you know, calibrating this or, you know, stereo panel or that or, you know, um, and I just find some of that when I get into the mixing process a bit more kind of in depth and start to trip myself up and go around in circles, sometimes I have to just come out of it and go, am I doing this the right way?
You know, technically, have I got this configured? How it should be all the game structures, right? Or all, uh, you know, all the ins and outs, right? Is this the best way I could be doing it? Um, you know, So yeah, I think I, I think I actually asked for this most recent one, um, why is my Juno working okay plugged straight into my UAD stuff, but some of the other stuff isn't, and, and Hugh came up with the answer, it was something to do with unbalanced outputs, and yeah, it was, it was very helpful, because I had no clue what was going on.
I was like, is this, is the synth broken, or what? Um, yeah, anything to do with impedance. I just, my brain just goes, nope, find someone who knows the answer. And, and there's always someone in, in the forum, definitely. Great. Thanks a lot for your time today, Jay, and all the best with the touring and release of Bright Magic.
Thanks very much, Cara. Cheers. Thank you for listening, and be sure to check out the show notes for further information, as well as links and details of the other episodes in the Electronic Music series. And just before you go, let me point you to soundonsound. com forward slash podcasts Where you can explore what's on our other channels.
This has been a Karo C production for Sound On Sound.
