Mr. Frusciante
The first thing you notice upon entering John Frusciante’s Laurel Canyon home is the two Studer A-800 two-inch machines that nearly block the front door and hallway, leaving just enough room to get by them and into the house. In the tradition of great music being made in this canyon, John has made a commitment to home recording – analog recording to be more precise – that far exceeds most musicians’ recording setups. One bedroom is filled with a vintage API console, a huge Doepfer modular analog synth, and an effects rack with a Fairchild 670, Pultecs, 1176s and a vintage Neve and UA modules. Elsewhere there’s both an EMT plate and an EMT digital reverb. The dining room has a grand piano and several organs and keyboards. The living room is filled with guitars, along with a Mellotron and an ARP 2500. The walls are lined with vinyl and some really cool rock posters and photos. This is a house dedicated to making music.
Frusciante is best known as the guitarist for The Red Hot Chili Peppers, but what piqued my interest in doing this interview are six solo records he made in six months and released in 2004. The DC EP was produced by Ian MacKaye (Dischord/Fugazi) and recorded by Don Zientara at Inner Ear Studios in Washington, DC. The rest were recorded in various Los Angeles studios (Cello, Ocean Way, The Pass, and Mad Dog), by Ryan Hewitt (see his interview in this issue). The Will To Death and Inside Of Emptiness were tracked very quickly to two-inch 16-track and mixed to tape as well. Curtains is more acoustic based and was the first record entirely recorded and mixed in the Laurel Canyon home studio, done on an one-inch Ampex 440 8-track. Frusciante and frequent collaborator Josh Klinghoffer teamed up with Fugazi bassist Joe Lally for a project they named Ataxia. A Sphere In The Heart Of Silence is a largely electronic collaboration between Frusciante and Klinghoffer. These six records have become six of my fave discs over the past few months. Taken together or separately, they’re pretty stunning from both a songwriting and a recording standpoint, and for those only familiar with John as a guitarist, his soulful voice is the real hook. Slighly gravelly at times with a beautiful falsetto, it’s the kind of voice that sticks with you. The songs themselves reflect years of listening to music, but with the influences thoroughly absorbed and internalized, the end result is unique and personal.
A few days before he would take home several Grammies for RHCP’s Stadium Arcadium, I met with Ryan and John at John’s place, where they were in the middle of recording a new Frusciante solo effort. John was cooking breakfast and offered to make me some bacon and eggs as well. Such a nice guy! After John’s breakfast (my lunch) we sat down to chat in the living room, where large windows overlooked the pool and a lush, green, wooden section of Laurel Canyon, and talked about making records. The conversation that ensued was interesting not only as insight into John’s recording process, but also a look into the successful partnership John and Ryan have developed after working on so many projects together.
So, you’re working on a new record right now. Do you want to start off by talking about that?
JF: Ummm…I don’t know. I feel kinda funny doing that. I feel funny talking about something until it’s done. I don’t wanna exhaust the ideas by turning them into verbosity or something. For me, making music – it’s something you just do. I could stay the standard things, like, “Flea’s playing bass and my friend Josh [Klinghoffer] is playing keyboards and drums and synthesizers and I’m playing guitar and singing.” But we’re still in the middle of it, so I don’t wanna talk about mixing it when it’s not even mixed yet. I guess I could say we’re concentrating on the mix being in a constant state of change and having things come up and down – not being in one static place – with things moving around a lot. I’ve been into that kind of a sound for a while now. I would’ve done it on Stadium [Arcadium], but some of the personalities and differences of opinion made it where I couldn’t take it to the extremes I would have liked to. The kind of sound I hear in my head are instruments getting louder and softer and changing in tone and sound and having the music be sonically always in a state of change.
You obviously have a huge commitment to both analog and home recording. I mean, your entire house is basically a studio. What got you into this? Most musicians don’t take things that far…
JF: I guess I started noticing how much better I liked recordings that people did on tape more than I did recordings that people were making when they started doing them on computer. I started asking questions and reading books, and magazines and noticing that the whole approach to recording in the ’60s and the early ’70s was far superior to the approach now – both in terms of fast execution, producing records, being able to make a record quickly and being able to come up with a good sounding record – at least in rock music. Electronic music is the only thing that’s flourished in the digital age. It seems like you don’t have people making rock records that sound as good as Master of Reality of Led Zeppelin II or things like that – there’s a warmth there and an atmosphere there that you just don’t get. Ryan and I read something by Joe Boyd [Tape Op 60] where he was saying that a big part of the reason that recordings had so much atmosphere and vibe in the ’60s, was thay they’d have the people all playing in one room / they wouldn’t be playing in isolation booths. With the microphones placed right, the bleed in between the instruments was what was creating the atmosphere and what our ears register as being the cibe. That’s something that’s lacking when everybody is recording everything separately. Ryan was elling me about some people doing recordings when they’ll do the toms separate from the snare and hi/hat [laughing], and things go to crazy extremes. But generally, people do a lot of close mixing and they don’t want any bleed, you know? So we’re trying to incorporate more distant mixing and things like that – trying to incorporate the space and the air into the recording. Any room, no matter if it has a lot of bounce in it, or if it’s a small room, that space is still gonna translate into some kind of vibe, you know? So, we started paying more attention to how people were doing it in the ’60s. The ’60s were coming out of the period of time when engineers really had to learn how to do it one hundred percent, with the mic and no bullshit. We had gotten into a lot of weird habits in the Chili Peppers, like using a lot of compression and isolation booths and not having enough atmosphere. On the solo records, we started contradicting everything that the engineers who Ryan and I had been around were doing, and started doing everything the opposite of how they were doing it as much as we could. By starting out using no compression or as little compression as possible, we ended up coming at it from the other side. Even though we made a couple of albums that had kind of a bland sound as a result of it – I think once we got that exact, perfect little spot I feel like it’s superior to when people are planning it all the time, you know? Am I talking too much?
[Ryan and I assure John he’s not talking too much, although we pretty much agree with him. John continues on…]
It seems like this needs to be spoken of. Tape is really dying out. Ryan says I’m the only guy he works with on tape. To me it’s so clear that if you want to make records that sound as good as all those records in the ’60s and ’70s, it’s not going to happen on a computer. I’ve seen people’s skills go a long way and people being able to get good vibes out of a machine that doesn’t have a lot of vibe, but it’s never as good as what that same person would do with tape.
RH: It’s a whole other skill set to me as an engineer. When John and I started with Will To Death he called me up and said, “Hey, I want to make a record and I want it to be like the ’60s, but I only want to use a couple mics on the drums and no compression = let’s set some limits to start with. Are you in?” And I’m like, “Fuck yeah, I’m in.” No one has ever wanted to do that before. Everyone wants twenty microphones on the drums and everything compressed and everything detailed and super isolated to the point where we’ll spend half an hour moving the tom mic so that we don’t have the cymbal in it. But then at the same time people will say, “I want it to sound like John Bonham,” and I have to say, “Well alright, John Bonham could play his drums. His kit was tuned a certain way, It was surrounded by a bass and a guitar and a vocalist that sounded a certain way and had a certain technique, and it was mic’ed from 20 feet away. So, if you want to commit to that, I’m down.” But there’s so many times where people want that sound, but they don’t really know what’s involved.
JF: Sounds are so much in the human being, anyways. When people try to copy these sounds with only technical means – it’s so much about the human being. It’s like the difference when I hear other people play my guitars from when I play my guitar. It doesn’t sound like it’s the same guitar.
RH: Someone once asked me, “What kind of guitars does John play?” and I said, “It doesn’t matter.” He picks up his Les Paul, he picks up a Strat, he picks up a Jag and it sounds like John Frusciante and it sounds great, you know? You’ll get a different timbre out of it, maybe, but you’ll get the same intent and the same spirit.
JF: It’s the same way with recording. It’s not like I think, “Tape is great, no matter who’s working on it.” It’s that whole way of thinking. Ryan’s developed the ability to really listen with his ears. Another common problem today is people spend so much time looking at waveforms on screens that they’ve forgotten to listen with their ears. You talk to people who recorded The Beatles, and it was all about hearing what was going to be recorded, then thinking about how it was going to be recorded. Ryan is doing that. He shuts his eyes and uses his ears before things are being recorded, before the microphones are placed, to really imagine it in his mind and then make it come to pass.
RH: That’s actually kind of a recent thing, when taken in a literal sense. I’ve always obviously listened closely, but working on tape with John requires a lot of forethought and answers to questions such as, “Are we going to process this later?” and “How many tracks do you need for this part?” John will say, “Maybe I want to process this later, I want to do this to it later or we’re going to have ‘x’, ‘y’ and ‘z’ with this at the same time as a composite sound.” There’s all kinds of different sounds that we’ll go for. Thinking in advance as much as possible about how these sounds are going to relate to one another, especially spatially with height and depth, will determine how the sources are recorded so that they can fit together in the mix without having to EQ the life out of them. John and I had a conversation before this record about certain things that we wanted to try, like putting more space and air into things, about using distance as a tool to create a sound that sounds different or that relates better to another sound. It’s really interesting to listen with a different ear. I was just talking to a homeopathic doctor the other day about how a lot of people unconsciously listen with only one ear while the other wanders off into eavesdropping on other conversations or is distracted by something else. She was telling me, “Concentrate on listening with both ears so that one ear is not listening to one thing and the other ear is listening to something else. Listen with the full intent with both ears so that the energy is in the middle of your head.” It’s like you’re trying to hear a conversation in the other room or if the tea kettle’s boiling while simultaneously having a discussion with the person in front of you and trying to get a guitar sound. After thinking about this idea, I’m able to focus so much more on sounds, words, music. We were getting a piano sound the other day, and I’m standing in front of the piano listening and I put the mic an inch and it made to me, a word of difference. John started playing and I was like, “Fuck. There’s this one note that’s out of phase or this one harmonic that’s jumping out.” I kept having to go and change the mic again and again before I was totally happy. But I was really focusing in on so many more details that I had been able to before.
Well, there are no decisions being made anymore. Decisions are put off until the mix. It’s become ridiculous, with Pro Tools especially.
JF: Yeah, Pro Tools has enabled that. It’s like, “We’ll fix that later,” or “Let’s keep 15,000 tracks or whatever.” We’re putting the pieces together. Luckily I feel like that’s something that on my records – you can hear gradually through those six records that we made and the one here, especially by the time of A Sphere In The Heart Of Silence (that’s a collaboration with Josh Klinghoffer). Everything fits together and creates one sound. We really got it in terms of being able to have all the separate sounds create one record. Another thing that I’m not particularly crazy about in modern recordings is the way they use compression to make everything give the illusion of sticking together, but everything is still very separate. They’re trying to create this definition to each thing. Things like the phenomena that used to happen on old records where you couldn’t tell what notes were the piano and what notes were the guitar and things like that, because they were both creating one sound – you never get that nowadays. Treatments are also something that we do a lot of. Ryan and I are really in sync with each other when it comes to doing electronic treatments after things are already on tape, sending them through the synthesizer, putting them back on tape, and sometimes getting rid of the original signal and using both in stereo and doing fades between two of them.
One of the questions I was going to ask was what are you like about working with Ryan, but I think you’ve kind of answered that. What don’t you like about working with Ryan? [laughing]
JF: Well for one thing, it’s really important to have somebody who you’re comfortable around. I think that as a performer in the studio, you’re so naked. You’re moving with the ebb and flow of human nature, going through emotional change. Sometimes you feel you’re on fire and everything flows really easy and then there’s other times when you’re struggling – and I think it pretty much happens with anybody. The stuff we went through when Ryan was first working with me was really though. Shadows [Collide With People] was a really difficult record to make for me and it was painstaking to get good vocal takes that were as perfect as what I was imagining in my head. It was rough – really ego shattering. You feel like the littlest ball of slime a lot of the time while you’re trying to make a record, and you’ve got somebody who’s putting you under a microscope, somebody who’s seeing every detail of what you’re doing. You’re in there trying your best to sing your heart out and your friends in the other room are listening to every detail and telling you exactly when something’s a little off. It can be really humiliating. A loy of people nowadays in the Pro Tools world will sing a bunch of vocal takes and then leave and let the engineers figure it out. As I’ve gradually gotten better at singing, Ryan’s gotten super sharp at being able to tell when something’s a little off. If I went in with a new producer right now, things might seem frustrating. But with what Ryan and I have been through already, it’s gotten better and better and better – it seems like the worst is behind us and we have this foundation together. I feel totally trusting and comfortable with him and I feel like that counts for a lot, feeling comfortable with the person recording you. As an artist you want to get inside the song and get inside the music and forget about it being a performance. Even though I have really specific aesthetic ideas about how a record should sound, I don’t have the technical knowledge to be able to execute it myself. Ryan and I listen to records, and when he listens to music he hears what the room was shaped like. For me, it’s really easy to decipher what the guitar is playing, but with Ryan, he’s able to hear what kind of microphones they’re using. He’s my ability to manifest what I’m hearing into reality, because that kind of knowledge is the connector between the music that I hear in my imagination and having it come out onto somebody’s CD.
You guys seem like a good team. Two other people you’ve worked with are Rick Rubin and Ian MacKaye.
JF: Ian has had a big effect on me as a human being in lots of personal ways. if anybody I know is a good role model, it’s him. He does everything with so much integrity and stays true to himself, and he isn’t led around by his emotions or his ego and deals with the matter at hand. he seems to be one of those people who knows who he is, his place in the world and what he’s here to do. A lot of my ideas about how to record – especially at the time of those six records – it was largely influenced by him. We were having a lot of conversations because I’d spent a lot of money on Shadows – I think it was $150,000 or something like that. I felt like it was way too much money and my managers were saying, “God, if you’re going to spend this amount of money you should get your own recording studio.” It was an expensive record and I felt really bad about it. Talking to Ian, I found out that every Fugazi record was made for $10,000 or less. Ian has this philosophy that the economics are equally as important as the artistic parts of making a record. By working within the limitations that awareness of the economic aspect makes you work within the divine spirit of music actually responds to that in a certain way. When you’re wasting a lot of money making a record, I think the actual music current isn’t as responsive or as giving towards you. If you think about all the records in history – especially in the ’60s when people would do records in a day or two days – people had to work within these intense time restraints, and the energy of their music was so on fire. They didn’t get so lost in little details and picking stuff apart and over thinking things. They played everything as quickly as they could as a band, and everything has this extra fire attached to it because you’re under pressure, you know? I realized that quality informs so much of the music that I love. As an example on the [Frank Zappa &] The Mothers album Absolutely Free, I know the vocals were all done in an hour for the whole record. That’s all the time they had to do the vocals, and it would never be what it is without that limitation. There are a million records you could say that about. In the ’60s people did not spend months and months and months making a record. A record was made in a couple of weeks or a few days or whatever. With those ideas in my head, I started thinking, “I should attempt to make records as quickly as possible.” I started to realize that I was able to record vocals quicker than I was on Shadows, when I was kind of nervous and not in a very centered place. One time we recorded vocals for three songs in an hour or two and it started to feel like, “Okay, we can actually do this quickly,” We did three songs in three days at that first session for Will To Death. We started to realize we could get a lot done in a really short period of time – keeping that fire in our hearts that’s lit by that pressure of having to record in a specific amount of time. For me, an equally important part of it was doing more things for myself. In the Chili Peppers, by necessity wer have so many people doing things for us all the time. One thing that I really respect about Ian is that he does a lot for himself – as much as he’s capable of he does himself. I’d get that set in my mind – “Okay, this record’s gonna take five days.” That was a big part of the whole artistic process of it as writing the songs or doing the tracking in the studio. I hear that when I hear the music. People who have an unlimited amount of time in the studio end up taking it for granted and not really using that freedom. Ian had been encouraging me to come out there and do some recording – I loved the Fugazi recordings. It was a real interesting experience ’cause Ryan and I naturally gravitated towards using the really good equipment- Neve consoles and Ampex machines and stuff like that. At Don [Zientara’s Inner Ear] studio the equipment is real ’80s, [comparatively] inexpensive equipment, and it still came out sounding great. It was the personalities and the vibe.As long as you have that spirit going into it, that’s what gets captured on tape, and the actual, specific equipment doesn’t really matter a whole lot. People who are already bringing a vibe to the table and people who already have a powerful energy as a band or as an artist – that studio totally reflects the goodness of whatever they’re bringing to the table. It was a fun experience. I think my voice was out of place – it was freezing cold there. We did it in wintertime, but we did everything super quick. We actually did the vocals for that album in front of the speakers with no headphones. That was what Ian was into at the time – having the music coming through really soft in the speakers and standing there doing the vocals live. That ended up creating a real personal sound, especially when you’re comfortable around the people adn they’re all standing right around you. It really is more like a performance. It’s so much about personal interaction. Like we were talking about how a guitar sounds like a person who’s playing it – I think a recording is so much about the sound of the people who are present, their energy that goes into it.
So it sounds like Ian kind of helped you rethink your whole approach to recording more than saying “Oh, play a D chord here instead of…”
JF: Yeah. He didn’t have the official role of being a producer, but it turned into that. His thing was, “I want to help out.” But then as the recording went on, he was the one who was mixing it. Even though he doesn’t usually suggest stuff with bands – there were a couple of little things, like a little bass riff that he suggested in one song – he made the whole thing happen. It was fun for me to hand over that job of overseeing everything to somebody else, because he was naturally gravitating towards that position. So it was fun for me as a break from the records I’ve been making with Ryan to not have to be the creative force behind organizing the ideas and conceptualizing the way it should sound. As far as Rick Rubin goes, his ideas in terms of vocals and drums and arrangements and everything are really good and really a big part of the way the Chili Peppers’ records sound. He’s not there for my backing vocals and he’s not there for my guitar parts, so he doesn’t really have a very big effect on me other than when it comes time to mix. Then we’re constantly going head to head, disagreeing on things and compromising with each other. I’m following the creative urge that the songs came from, and he’s following his idea of what sounds right to him as a producer and the two things are not usually the same.
Are you happy with where they end up in the end or does it still bug you sometimes when you hear some of those compromises?
JF: None of the albums I’ve done with the Chili Peppers ever sound right to me. [laughs] They’re always differing largely from how I thought they were going to sound, but I think they’re fine as they are. I didn’t even try to get involved in the mix of Californication or Blood Sugar [Sex Magik], but I’d get it back and I’d be like, “Oh. That’s nto the way I wanted that to sound, but it sounds fine.” [laughter] It’s not like it ever sounds bad to me, but it’s never what I was picturing when we were recording it, you know? I guess since I’ve become involved in the mixes, they sound more familiar to me when I’m listening to them. There’s gonna be certain sections where I might have thought it wound be good to have the lead guitar blaring over everything else including the vocal, and that never happens. Part of Rick’s thing is to center on the vocal all the time, and you don’t have a vocal that’s being buried by an electric guitar. It doesn’t occur. It’s cool. I respect Rick a lot and I think he has a really good sense of musical balance and has a really clear sense of a well-balanced musical composition. He also inspires me, ’cause a lot of the time the things I do on solo records, especially all the things I’m doing on this record, they’re the antithesis of whatever it is that I don’t like about his way of doing things. In a lot fo ways he inspires me to do things differently. When you don’t have someone like that to react against, you don’t want to do anything at all. Having to work within that restraint of having somebody else who’s constantly pulling in the reins on you, to finally have that freedom to do whatever you want, it makes you end up being a lot cleaner about where you want to go. but he’s been a good friend and definitely a good producer for the band. I’ve learned so much from him. I’ve gradually developed my own sense of skills as a producer. When I met him, I think I was noticing the way he’s a producer without having a deep amount of technical knowledge and it’s mainly being a matter of his sense of musical balance, which is something that I also innately have. To see the way he ends up applying that into making a whole career, to be able to give such a variety of things to so many different musical situations with people by following that sense of balance that he naturally has in his head – it’s been inspiring for me and I’ve learned a lot from Rick, whether by contradicting him or by following his lead.
(At this point we move into John’s control room so we can talk about his modular synth and how he uses it on records.)
I heard you once say in a reference to your modular synth that you weren’t really interested in oscilators.
JF: Yeah… I’m more centered on using the synthesizer to change the sound of other instruments more so than using it as a source itself. The infinite amount of possibilities that you have using filters and things, you can bring out different aspects of the atmosphere in the air. if you want to use a high-pass filter and bring out the absolute highest frequency that the ear is capable of hearing in a given piece of music, that can be all you’re hearing. Normally that frequency would be getting covered up by the lower frequencies. You can get to where the atmosphere is and focus on that. I’ve started to become really interested in bringing out different aspects of the sound through filtering and changing the atmosphere that the recording was done in. If you record a guitar in a particular room and it has a certain sound, through filters you can bring out one specific aspects of the room rather than the natural sound of the room. There are a lot of possibilities. For me, having the modular and treating the sounds on tape is like being able to go back in time and change the actual atmosphere that a sound originally existed within. It takes a record away from the static energy I was talking about, and makes it into something that can have more subtle opportunities for movement and constant change. When I listen to a recording, my favourite thing is for it to make me feel the way I do when I’m looking at the ocean or something. It’s this subtle movement that you’re not conscious of. It seems natural enough that things aren’t staying in one place. The outro of “She Looks To Me’ on the Chili Peppers album [Stadium Arcadium] is a good example of that. There are these harmony guitars and they’re being treated by this real resonant phase shifter. By having a human slowly turning the frequency knob, one of the three harmonies going into it would come out more than the others, depending on where the knob was. We did it twice on both speakers. So you’d have what I was talking about on the left speaker and something different [a different performance through the phase shifter on a different track] on the right speaker. It sounds like things are panning back and forth speaker to speaker because at certain moments there are going to be differences and similarities between the two speakers. When there’s similarities, it’ll sound like they’re going to the center, and when there’s differences it’ll sound like they’re going from side to side. There’s no stereo movement going on – it’s hard left and hard right – but it’s creating this sense of movement that gives the illusion of things flying back and forth from speaker to speaker. When I listen to that section of that song it makes me feel like I’m looking at the ocean. The patches I do are pretty basic, like envelope filtering or LFO modulated filtering and then run it through a high-pass or low-pass filter depending on the situation. We’ve done some interesting things with that Analogue Systems frequency shifter – that thing is pretty amazing. I definitely prefer noise to oscillators in terms of sounds that a synthesizer generates. So I generally use the synthesizer to change the sound of my guitar or to change the sound of the vocal. Learning about the modular and starting to figure out new ways to apply it onto records has made me think more in the dimension of sound and ways to bend sound – to have it be expressive in terms of the sound itself, not just the performance.
Do you mainly use filters then, or do you use envelope generators to trigger other sounds too?
JF: Yeah. I mainly use the envelope generators if you want the filter to respond to the hits of your guitar, or the hits of the keyboard. We did a good sound the other day where we were envelope filtering only the echo of the Fender Rhodes. The echo has like a “THOOM!”, but the keyboard attack is normal. But the echo is this strange envelope filter sound, and it really created a good atmosphere and it made the instrument sound totally unusual, especially in stereo. It’s been really fun on this record doing a lot of processing. I try to use the modular to have that sense of playfulness on the record. I’m a big fan of the way George Clinton produced the first couple of Funkadelic records, and the way Jimi Hendrix was doing things on Electric Ladyland. That sense of playing with the sound of things and when it’s on tape – it’s not done. There are still many opportunities to create movement in the sound. George Clinton was using a lot of Echotrexes and they both [George and Jimi] were doing a lot of panning and putting things on two different tracks, and having one of them bring a really dark EQ and one of them bright, and going back and forth. Once it’s already on the tape, it’s still fair game to play with. I try to bring the spirit of what those people are doing. It’s not so much that I’m inspired by Kraftwerk or something like that in terms of what I want to do with synthesizer. A loy of times I use it to create feedback or distortion. I try to bring out the human elements of it. It’s not meant to turn into some kind of electronic thing, but to bring out the humanness.
Do you run drums through it much?
JF: Yeah, we’ve done great things with drums through it. You can get incredible drum sounds out of a resonant high-passfilter. There’s one moment on the first Ataxia record [Automatic Writing], I don’t know how to describe it… [laughter] High-pass filtering can be awesome on drums. We got a cool snare sound on the Chili Peppers album on one section by putting the snare through a comb filter. For me it’s hard to imagine making a record now without the modular. I need to change the sounds. I can’t stand the static recording thing…
So it’s like the ultimate processor then – although I suppose you could do some of the things you’re talking about with simple pieces of guitar.
JF: This is simple though! People get intimidated by seeing such a big thing, but I might only be using one or two of these things – it’s having them all in one place, and having them all be adaptable to each other and modular and all that.
And having so many different tools?
JF: Yeah! Between this and the effects that I have, that’s most of what’s available in terms of processing sound in an analog way. To me the laws of a modular synthesizer correlate to the laws of nature in a certain way. A filter is basically the same thing as cupping your hand to your mouth. It’s a principle that exists in nature, where they figured out electronic means to produce that phenomena. It doesn’t seem like modular synthesis has changed that much since it was invented in the ’60s. There’s an infinite amount of possibilities, even though there’s not an infinite amount of modules that can still be invented.
You seem very unintimidated by technology. You have a great approach to it.
RH: It’s fun because John encourages me to do a lot of extreme stuff, whereas a lot of commercial records are so safe sounding. We get to do a lot of different, experimental things and we’ll spend time trying to figure that out.
JF: Yeah. On Stadium Arcadium we did a lot of stuff with tape speed manipulation and stuff like processing harmony guitars like we were talking about. We didn’t know exactly what we were doing or how it was going to come out sounding – just experimenting. Being in the studio shouldn’t be trying to capture what you play. There should be a certain amount of playfulness and experimentation to the possibilities of what you have when you’re in a place where you can actually take a moment and have it exist on this piece of tape that can be manipulated and stuff. There are so many possibilities – it’s a shame for them to go to waste by just connecting the dots. It’s fun to experiment.
I noticed the Oblique Strategies cards on the console. That’s a very Enoesque approach with all the treatments and such.
JF: Yeah, he’s been a big inspiration. Using the synthesizer not based around the oscillators, like we were talking about – he’s definitely one of the main forerunners. If not the forerunner. [It’s about] having it be more human and having it be more about those human elements.
* The interview is followed by one with Ryan Hewitt, also a recommended read which you can find here.
