Hele dikke plaat! Heb dan wel geen 5.1 speakerset, maar toch erg fijn voor mijn oren.
Electronica’s visionary takes off in a new direction.
The Mind of BT
By Stephen Fortner | December 2005
“Basically, my house is a hard drive,” laughs Brian Transeau. Though BT’s referring to the more than eight terabytes of computer storage at his home studio, the place actually does look like a hard drive, its sparse cubic forms and corrugated metal walls boldly rebelling against the Spanish-tile status quo of residential hills near L.A.’s Griffith Park. “It was designed by Frank Gehry [the architect behind Disney Hall and Seattle’s Experience Music Project building], and I think even the realtor didn’t know that when I first made an offer.”
It’s hard to think of anything more fitting than one innovator creating art from inside the artwork of another — though “innovator” only begins to describe BT. From his work with Tori Amos almost ten years ago on “Blue Skies” and producing *NSync’s “Pop,” to Emotional Technology’s juxtaposition of trancefloor soundscapes and pop songcraft and his acclaimed score for the Oscar-winning film Monster, BT has become the face of electronic music virtuosity, a techno-mage with formal training to match his DJ and synthesis chops, a massively overclocked brain, and the childlike enthusiasm of Shaggy from Scooby Doo. “Like, wow, man, you gotta hear this,” he’ll say. “You’ll totally freak out!”
Listen we did, thanks to the opportunity to be first to hear tracks from his fifth studio project. In addition to this creative endeavor, he’s also been working on a dance-oriented album, and he just signed on to score the romantic comedy Catch and Release, starring Jennifer Garner and slated for April 2006 release. But this is something else entirely. Labels such as “ambient” or “modern classical” fit for a few seconds, then the next passage in the song blows away the last, taking any attempt to classify along with it. We can’t restrain our editorial opinion: This as-yet-untitled magnum opus is fine art that works on many levels, mind-bendingly deep but a pleasure to kick back and just listen to. In a hundred years, it could well be studied as the first major electronic work of the new millennium. It’s that good.
New Music
“I get such a rush listening to this, even after working on it for hundreds of hours,” says BT. Even so, he’s a little cagey about the project’s release details. “I’ve got a title, which I’ll keep to myself for now, because I’m not sure whether it’ll be of the record or the project itself. I might not call this a BT record, per se.” Seven compositions, each about 15 minutes long, combine acoustic instruments, synth parts played real-time from keyboards, and “cut-and-paste, musique concrète type stuff,” he explains. “But the really cool part is that it involves seven short films by people ranging from a CalArts student to famous animators. Come summer, we’re going to take this out with drums, a string quartet, electric cello, and myself. Live, in 5.1, with projection, baby! We’ve talked to the Hollywood Bowl, who are very excited, and I’ve always wanted to play spaces like [Washington D.C.’s] Corcoran Gallery. While some of it is very rhythmic and makes me want to move, I want people to be able to just receive without feeling like they have to dance or be in a club mindset.”
Unlike the after-the-fact surround mixes often done for pop CDs, this work was composed for 5.1, and begs to be heard that way. BT cues up a track where expansive piano chords (all from Synthogy Ivory) fold into impossibly complex, evolving textures, suddenly going up in a mushroom cloud, breaking into granular desolation, then resolving back into walls of sound layered over beats that constantly evolve, one minute a march, the next, trip-hop. The emotion coming from the speakers is so undeniable that it feels like sacrilege to listen with your eyes glued to Logic’s play wiper. So I closed mine.
“After this, my new ‘normal’ album sounds more like indie bands,” he says, “which are what I listen to primarily, than my previous work. It’s got beautiful jangly guitars all over it, like Death Cab for Cutie or something. Imogen Heap is going to sing on it — I get goosebumps just thinking about her voice. I’ve always wanted to take those elements and put them in a context that makes sense on a dance floor.”
BT traces the musical sensibility that’s permeated all his work to a surprising origin. “The grandfather clock in my parents’ house played those pentatonic Westminster chimes every quarter hour,” he recalls. “Mom also took me to church a lot, so resolutions like the plagal cadence and Picardy third are prominent too. Listen carefully to anything I’ve ever done, and it’ll jump out at you.
“On this experimental record, I’ve been trying to explore more jazz harmonies. The thing is — and I’m gonna piss off a lot of people here — the II-V-I hits my barf button like nothing else. It’s the most horrible cadence in the known universe, so I’ve been looking at jazz that takes off in other directions.” For bands or musicians that proved formative, “Trevor Horn, New Order, and Depeche Mode were where I went to school,” he says. “Depeche in particular are the godfathers of electronic counterpoint, of interweaving a number of synth sounds that create tension against one another. I had their new album pre-ordered on iTunes for, like, two months!”
New Methods
When you spin this new disc, you’ll hear BT’s signature stutter technique, which fans know goes way beyond Max Headroom, sometimes comprising hundreds of micro-edits to a single syllable or note, each EQ’ed and processed differently, then time-corrected with precision that’d scare Stephen Hawking. Will he give up any more secrets?
“Some of the grids I’ve made for this go to 2,048th-notes, he grins. “The hi-hat patterns use a new thing I call exponential and logarithmic triplets. It’s taking unreal note values [that is, the note values above 64th-notes that don’t have symbols in traditional music notation] and putting non-linear spacing between them. I’ll do a ‘gesture’ of, say, 512th notes slowing down to eighths, but up on the fast end, the rests between all the micro-edits get progressively longer according to a mathematical curve. You have to look at it to fully appreciate it. What you hear is like the rhythmic equivalent of portamento. Initially it was all done by hand, but we finished the plug-in midway through the record.” The plug-in? More on that in a bit.
You’d think BT would be the last guy on earth to limit his tools on purpose, but he did exactly this on this album, inspired by his Berklee mentor, Richard Boulanger. “Dr. B is like f***ing Yoda!” he says. “He’ll assign a book or exercise that seems abstract and weird relative to the musical problem you’re having, but if you do it, everything falls into place. It’s scary.” One exercise he was assigned was to construct a full arrangement from a 15-second audio clip, using as much editing and processing as needed. “It could be a speech by Martin Luther King,” he explains. “You’d use the plosives [P’s and K’s] as drums, then take the word ‘how,’ time-stretching and pitch-shifting it like crazy to make building blocks for chords, and so on. It forced you to think about the music more than the tools.”
But back to the new record. “So I came up with three pools,” he says, “and allowed one or two things from each pool per song. One was keyboards, soft synths, and stuff I’d find on KVR, as well as the plug-in. The second pool was organic and found sounds: cello, melodica, hammer dulcimer, my daughter Kaia’s toy piano. The third was academia-level sound design stuff like Kyma, Supercollider, and CSound. On each composition, there’s no more than half a dozen elements from which I’m building everything.”
How does he get around the inevitable creative blocks that come up when staring down a blank arrange window? “Know how you get through ’em?” he asks. “Friggin’ write through ’em! You write and it sucks, and you write and it sucks, and every bad chord progression you ever wished you’d forgotten comes up, and your beats are cheesy. Then, maybe accidentally, you get something good, and it breeds, and you’re back. If you get to the point where 50% of what you complete doesn’t make you wanna puke, you’re doing better than me!”
New Software
In our January 2004 interview with BT, he told us how he co-developed a plug-in using Cycling ’74’s MaxMSP to simulate his stutter edit technique live, strictly for his own use. Since then, “we’ve dropped the suspension and put 20-inch rims on it,” he says. Not to mention starting a software company, Sonic Architects, to develop it for commercial release. “It” being the plug-in he mentioned earlier. It’s got to be like having a little piece of BT’s soul in a box.
“Thanks to a programmers’ library called Wave++, we can reverse-port stuff done in MaxMSP, CSound, or similar sound-design environments into the C++ computer language,” explains Professor Transeau, “Which means people can run it on its own, in a DAW, in Live, whatever.” We asked for a screen shot, but there’s no graphic user interface yet, so instead BT assured us that, “When it’s out, it’ll make it seem like you spent hours squinting at your computer screen like I used to, and I promise, you’ll spend those hours remixing your ass off!”
The nice folks at Binary Acoustics are also sticking their toes in the water of scanned synthesis, “an incredibly complicated way of manipulating wavetables. It’s been around awhile in CSound and the über-geek programming community I hang out in, but musically, we barely know what to do with it yet. People are learning it by emulating more familiar synthesis models like FM.” Imagine samples living on the surface of a hollow 3D object. Now imagine that surface is flexible and can be warped and molded at the same time it’s being “scanned” by a phonograph needle-like function, and that you can turn the whole object any way you want, and you begin to get the idea. “Basically, any sample can be used to disturb the overall system, then that can turn around and affect individual samples, and the sound defies description. This blew my mind like the first time I heard granular synthesis.” For an introduction to the concept written by BT’s professor Dr. Boulanger, see the links in “For More Info” on page 22.
New- (and Old-) School Values
Beginning in 2005, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences recognized a new Grammy category: best electronic/dance album, largely due to the lobbying of BT’s good friend, noted producer and remixer Carmen Rizzo. The first winner? The incredible Kish Kash by the Basement Jaxx. “It’s a long-overdue validation for electronic musicians,” approves BT, “But we need to go further.”
What he has in mind, and is already up in NARAS’ grill about, is a standardized remix format. The idea is, “to make it easier for fans to do mash-ups, something I think is a wonderful way for people who might not play an instrument to connect with their music. If an artist is open to having their fans remix their stuff, as they should be, then a standard package of stems gets released with the album: a vocal-down mix, an a capella, drums and bass only, etc. Of course, we’d need to make it as cross-platform as possible.”
Since BT spends a lot of his performance time in a DJ booth, doing decidedly non-DJ things, we asked him how he feels about the dance-venue mindset. “The culture needs to move beyond its emphasis on beat-mixing,” he says, “which comes out of its analog purism. Don’t get me wrong, good turntablism just amazes me, but I could teach my Boston terrier to beat-mix. That’s why I get so excited about what you can do with a laptop and a program like [Ableton] Live. With all the stuff I have going on in a solo club show, there’s a precarious factor that’s almost like playing with a band: Total groove while teetering on the verge of a train wreck!”
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