EAT
STATIC (Merv Pepler)EAT
STATIC (Merv Pepler)If this sounds like a distinctly risky business venture in the narrowly defined world of here today, gone tomorrow high profile dance music, Pepler’s pre-release press statement is equally optimistic: “Eight Eat Static studio albums down the line, with our own Mesmobeat label established, headlining international media events like the Rotterdam Film Festival party, and scores of remixes under our belt for artists like Charlie Watts and Jim Keltner, we now feel totally at liberty to do whatever we want!”
And why not. Eat Static has certainly paid their dues; starting out back in 1990 as a techno offshoot of spaced-out prog rockers Ozric Tentacles at a time when sticking white labels onto mountains of 12-inch vinyl was all part of the job, such was the duo’s ultimate success that by the time their second album, Implant, entered the UK charts at number 11 in 1994, drummer Pepler and keyboard player Hinton’s unusually amicable disembarkation from the Ozrics’ ‘mothership’ was complete. As Hinton noted: “There came a time when Eat Static started to get more and more bookings. Longer tours were set up, and it came to the point where Merv and I were simply exhausted. We’d return from an Eat Static tour and two days later we’d have to go off on an Ozrics tour! It just became too much to do the two. We opted for Eat Static, as it was a newer, fresher thing to do. Another factor was that the Ozrics could carry on without us, but obviously Eat Static couldn’t.”
Planned as a live act from the outset, Eat Static can legitimately claim to be one of the UK’s first genuinely live techno outfits; Messrs Hinton and Pepler had already been regularly performing together under the Eat Static banner for well over a year before releasing their debut white label ‘Inanna/Medicine Wheel’ on their own Alien Records imprint in 1991. Playing many of their formative gigs at hardcore raves around the UK, they soon developed a spectacular live show capable of competing with – and, more often than not, blowing away – the hardest of hardcore DJs at a time when ‘live’ performances by their contemporaries consisted mainly of mimed PAs.
Eat Static were justly rewarded with a host of accolades; 1993 ended on a high, with their debut ‘Lost In Time’ EP achieving ‘Single Of The Week’ status in Melody Maker, and the group being nominated ‘Best Dance Act’ in the NME Readers’ Poll. Today the group has performed literally hundreds of shows with appearances at all the major UK and European festivals, including headlining the Glastonbury and Phoenix dance stages, and 1996’s Dance Valley event in Amsterdam. This frenzied activity is not to the detriment of recording – far from it, in fact. With no fewer than nine albums, two EPs, eight singles and numerous remixes currently to their credit, not forgetting various related side projects (including Pepler’s recordings as Dendron and collaborations with Propellerheads’ Will White as Champagne Charlie!, plus Eat Static’s ‘invisible third member’ Steve Everitt’s recordings as Alien Progeny), the NME’s 1993-vintage observation of the band as having “…the sort of workload that would drive your average indie band into early mental retirement…” still holds water today.
Central to Eat Static’s sanity in the capricious music business is a humorous ongoing obsession with kitsch sci-fi b-movies and alien culture; UFOlogy references are prevalent in many early Eat Static track titles, such as ‘Gulf Breeze’ (a well-documented recurring wave of UFO activity that took place in Gulf Breeze, Florida, USA, from the late 1980s into the ’90s) and ‘Area 51’ (an ‘Above Top-Secret’ installation – also known as ‘Dreamland’ – within the environs of the remote Nellis Air Force Range and Nuclear Test Site in Nevada, USA, where ‘recovered’ alien technology is reputedly stored). Once when asked whether they felt that their music might have benefited from the incorporation of such alien technologies, Hinton’s response was appropriately non-straightfaced: “We’ve often wondered about our Waldorf Wave, as it’s prone to doing some very strange things. Maybe Wolfgang Palm is an alien!”
With track titles
like ‘Follow That Camel!’ – a sumptuous, wide-screen
homage to the wonderful filmscores of Ennio Morricone and John Barry – and ‘Our
Man In Nirvana’ – for which Hinton and Pepler sourced a vintage Vox Teardop
amplifier and genuine Vox Continental organ to aid its ’60s flashback authenticity
– the legendary humour is clearly still present and accounted for on In
The Nude!
But before reaching these compositional highs, Eat Static first had to ride out a few lows, not least the messy demise of Ultimate Records to whom they had signed in time for Abduction, their critically acclaimed 1993 longplaying debut. Even then the group ultimately managed to turn this unfortunate situation to their advantage with the 26 July 1999 inauguration of their own Mesmobeat label with the simultaneous release of The Alien EPs and Decadance albums. Principal Eat Static spokesperson Merv Pepler is typically upbeat about the event: “After the Ultimate thing we looked around at a few deals. There were offers, but nothing was really right; those offers were not really going to put us in a better situation than we would have been in with Ultimate, had they not gone bust. Also, having been going for 10 years, we kind of knew the ins and outs of doing a label anyway. It was more a case of saying, ‘Why don’t we just do it ourselves now?’ So we did.”
Mesmobeat ironically shares an office and resources with Ozric Tentacles’ new independent label venture, Stretchy Records. Presumably this unique business set-up benefits both parties?
It kind of does in a way, even though the labels are treated as two separate entities. I think the Ozrics just did exactly the same thing as us at the same time. It was like, ‘Why are we bothering with other people’s labels? We can do everything ourselves now. We can do all the artwork and all the music. We know which distributors to get our stuff to.’ It was the right time for both of us to do it, and it’s kind of nice sharing stuff. I’d rather have an operation with only three or four people involved because not a lot can really go wrong that way. And if something does go wrong, it’s easier to see why and rectify it quickly. Whereas even friends I know who are on bigger labels often see little problems dragging on and on for weeks. With our label everyone’s obviously got their own role and it means stuff moves a lot quicker.
You’re already rapidly approaching your label’s second anniversary with the 26 March 2001 release of your eighth studio album In The Nude! – its fifth release! How is independent recording life treating you guys?
It’s good. We’ve pretty much got Mesmobeat established now with good relations in Europe. And stuff is moving in the States, too. I think this next year is going to be even more exciting because I’m now looking for other music to release on the label, whereas up until now we’ve had neither the finances or time to go out and look for other stuff. Another nice thing about having our own label is that we can now channel out some of the older music we’ve got that’s still pretty fresh. I can pull out DATs from between ’92 and ’95 with stuff that still sounds really good now – not in the commercial sense that it fits in with the current dance trends, as such, but like all our music, it’s a bit more timeless.
Almost like a continuation of the first two Mesmobeat releases, then?
Kind of. The Alien EPs and Decadance was a nice way to kick off the label. We didn’t have a new studio album recorded yet – we hadn’t started Crash And Burn! So The Alien EPs was sensible because so many people had been trying to get hold of the first 12-inches that we did, so we thought, ‘Well, let’s put all those 12-inches once and for all on a CD, and chuck in a couple of bonus tracks for good measure.’ And Decadance was really a celebration of our tenth anniversary; it’s basically a track from each year drawn from those 10 years.
When revisiting early Eat Static material like your cassette-based unofficial debut album Prepare Your Spirit for re-release or first-time release on Mesmobeat albums were you in any way surprised at how your sound has progressed?
In some ways, yes. Obviously the difference in production is noticeable; I love the vibe of those old cuts, but sometimes it’s like, ‘What an awful sound!’ Then I remember what I was recording on at the time – my ‘mixer’ was an old Tascam 4-track Portastudio and I had an awful little pair of beaten up Mission speakers! But there’s still a lot of those old tracks where it’s like, ‘Wow! What the hell’s doing that?’ So some things are actually nice to hear again, just from the angle of what we were doing with the synths back then.
Coming full circle, one can easily relate the laidback groove of the In The Nude! title track to earlier Eat Static material like ‘Area 51’, yet elsewhere you appear to be taking a very different musical approach. Has the way you set about consciously creating tracks changed in recent years?
In
The Nude!
is probably the first time where we really didn’t care about our influences
coming through anymore. In the past we’ve almost had to hide a lot of them.
Because we were still full-on with the Ozrics when Eat Static started, I deliberately
wanted to keep everything really separate – even down to the fact that I wouldn’t
ring up the promoters who put Ozric Tentacles on to try and get Eat Static gigs!
Back then I wanted to keep it totally electronic; for the first six or seven
years there’s no guitars on any Eat Static stuff, which is quite surprising
considering Joie and myself both come from guitar-based band backgrounds. With
this album it was like, ‘Fuck it! Let’s have a load of guitar all over this
one.’
Are you specifically referring to the apparently guitar-driven ‘Our Man In Nirvana’ here?
Well, the lead guitar is real on that one, but the rhythm guitar is all samples. I’ve been into that kind of ’60s psychedelic garage stuff for years and always wanted to do a track like that on the computer; I just never expected it to end up as an Eat Static track! It was the same with ‘Salon Kitty’ – Steve Everitt’s a really good guitarist, and it was nice to get him to play some of that sort of Latin guitar stuff. I think Crash And Burn! helped in that respect; there’s a little Latin tinge there, too. I’ve been listening to lots of ’50s and ’60s mambo and stuff lately, and it’s so highly charged, energy-wise. Just because it hasn’t got a great big, stomping kick drum doesn’t stop it having a party music vibe.
Elements of last year’s Crash And Burn! album invites comparison with Swiss ‘samplemiesters’ Yello – particularly the lo-fi brass bursts underpinning the title track and ‘Love Truncheon’. What’s the story here, and why the lengthy gap after 1997’s Science Of The Gods?
It’s funny, a lot of people have said that about Crash And Burn! Basically, Science Of The Gods was a hard album to make, anyway. Joie and myself were going through a lot of shit around that time, and the whole relationship with Ultimate was falling apart. That’s when I got into listening to old lounge stuff; this guy in America sent me all these weird Capitol Records releases because he was looking for people to do contemporary remixes for what became the Electro Lounge album. I was just astounded when I started listening to this stuff – more from the production side. It really brought back home to me the importance of melody, because Science Of The Gods really hasn’t got a lot of melody. It’s more concerned with the sonic side of things and being part of an alien trilogy that I’d always wanted to do – Abduction represents the nice one, Implant is the weird one and Science Of The Gods is the really disturbing one. So I think hearing all that sort of lounge, exotica and swing stuff helped bring a lot more melodic content back into Crash And Burn! But rhythmically I was trying to remain faithful to where Abduction and Implant had been coming from.
According to its liner notes, In The Nude! was mostly “…recorded at s4 studios in deepest somerset”. If I’m not mistaken, S-4 is another name for the infamous Area 51 ‘Above Top-Secret’ installation in the Nevada desert – a token reference to the UFOlogy themes that dominated your earlier work, perhaps?
That’s
right, and it’s also the fourth studio we’ve had.
What stage is your rural home-based set-up at now, and where would you ideally like it to be?
I’m aiming to move out of here within the next six months and purpose-build our own dedicated studio. Everything’s in a bit of a transitional phase right now – obviously it’s not ideal here from a soundproofing point of view. I’m still renting, so I don’t want to spend precious time and money converting a room into a proper studio when it’s not my own place. The next stage is to get everything into a proper soundproofed environment and leave the bedroom studio world behind – I’m fed up with crawling around the floor and squeezing behind racks!
But I knew this set-up would still get us through In The Nude! The sound we’re getting at the moment is good enough, plus I did half the album at Steve’s studio. He’s got a nice Soundcraft Solitaire desk, so most of the album was actually mixed at his place anyway. Generally, when Steve’s more involved on an album I know we’ll do the nicer, silkier tracks like ‘Salon Kitty’ at his place, whereas when I’m on my own I naturally tend to do the rougher, more aggressive tracks – that’s what I really liked about the early days of Eat Static, when Steve was full-time; it was always a nice balance between the really nice, pretty, silky tracks and the kind of rough, raw and ready, analogues-screaming-kind-of-stuff. Steve’s always a bit too reserved to go silly with the synths, whereas Joie and myself are like two naughty boys when we get together!
To
be honest, the majority of the synth sounds used on In
The Nude! were from the SH-5. A lot of pads this time came from that
little Yamaha formant synthesizer, the FS1 – I’ve really got into that thing.
A lot of the squelchy stuff was from the Novation Supernova – the rack one,
which Steve’s bought.
Speaking of virtual analogue synths like the Supernova, are you of the opinion that the sound of genuine analogue instruments like Joie’s beloved vintage Roland SH-5 simply cannot be replaced?
There’s still a digital quality – a kind of brittleness – about them that I don’t like. I didn’t mind that new Korg MS2000, but none of the newer synths really impress me that much anymore. Plug that SH-5 in and it’s just a different world – and the Oscar, too; we had that back briefly, but it’s gone off for repair again! There’s something about that Oscar – it’s that true analogue thing again, I suppose. I don’t mind the Waldorf Wave, either – that’s one of the only modern synths I’ve heard that’s still got depth due to it being a digital hybrid. It doesn’t start cutting up when you hit the low notes; it’s got a real beefiness to it still. Having said that, I’d like to take this opportunity to shout out to Waldorf: please can you finish my Wave?
We used a bit of Joie’s PPG Wave 2.3 on this album – we finally got that working again. I think we used it for a couple of sounds on the In The Nude! title track. We laughed; it was almost like it woke up and did its little bit for the album, then died again! A lot of our old stuff is like that. Another synth that was really prolific on the new album was the Korg Polysix – nearly all the sounds on ‘Mandrake’ are Polysix, apart from the stereo stuff. There’s something cute about that synth.
What about sampling?
I’m really flying on the Akais; I’m actually getting really creative on them, whereas in the early days it was just a case of trying to get them to do what I wanted. Now I’m well into all the subtleties of using second filter boards, cleaning stuff up and using lots of controller data. In The Nude! is a lot more sample-based than the previous albums, but even if I sample the keyboards I still like to make sure there’s lots of expression.
Returning to the pseudo-grunge-sounding ‘Our Man In Nirvana’, here the drum track sounds incredibly realistic – if not real. Have you sat on a drum stool recently?
I haven’t, to be honest. I’ve had a couple of people recommending those new Roland V-Drums to me; I’d like to check them out. I’ve tried a few electronic kits, like the Clavia one, but they still have a plastic feel about them that I cannot stand, whereas the V-Drums apparently feel like the real thing. I’m only interested in playing again as a means of getting information into the computer. I’ve got so quick at what I’m doing with the mouse now and getting such good results that I’ve never really felt the need to get behind a kit again. I feel my programming is now of a standard where I can make drums sound like they were played, anyway – all those funky drums on ‘Our Man In Nirvana’ are completely programmed.
So how did you get such an authentic ’60s sound on that track?
I think that’s just down to the nature of the sounds I used – posh, thin hi-hats and a really classic, woody, funk snare; that probably comes from my Jaki Liebezeit influences with Can. Because I was on such a roll with it, I programmed that whole track in about four hours! Basically, I set up a proper drum kit; it’s not just dance drums – there’s probably about eight different hi-hat variations on there.
To the untrained ear, it certainly sounds real…
A lot of people have said they thought it was real drums on that track, which I take as a real compliment.
Coming from a drumming background, how do you feel about technological developments that have led to sampled loops becoming the rhythmical backbone of many forms of modern music production, and is this something you’ve possibly veered away from because of your own percussive abilities?
I think that’s partly down to the fact that I started seriously getting into the Atari and programming stuff around the time Static started. Over the years a lot of people have asked me how I can stand programming because I come from a live drumming background, but I’ve always tried to have a lot of variance going on in our rhythm tracks; it’s never just a case of one thing continuously looping. I’ve got a lot of friends who are now running around raving about all this latest software like ACID and Reason – all that virtual studio stuff. But, to be honest, none of that’s ever really interested me. I’ve messed about on ACID, but I just don’t like loop-based music, really.
I kind of sensed that, yet so much dance music is heavily reliant on loops…
That’s why I’ve deliberately not loaded any of that new software into the computer. I’m just sticking to my basic Cubase and ReCycle! Even if I do use loops then the first thing I do is chop them up using ReCycle! so I can just use elements or, again, introduce lots of variation – I can alter the feel, the shuffle, move the snare drum, change the snare, or whatever. I have to have that kind of control; I don’t like throwing loops into a computer and building tracks from loops – it just hasn’t got the power.
Having recently headlined the Funkt Tour in the UK, with supporting DJ sets from the likes of Orbital’s Phil Hartnoll and Drum Club’s Lol Hammond, in what ways would you say the Eat Static live show has changed over the years?
It’s
a lot simpler at the moment. I’m always tweaking the live set-up; I’m never
happy on stage. I used to take absolutely everything out on the road, which
had its advantages, but ended up with more disadvantages in the end. I had loads
of things going wrong all the time – especially with the drum machines and MIDI
thru boxes. It’s not just a case of getting a studio to work on the stage, but
the fact that by the time you actually get to go on stage the room is scorching
hot. During our last gig in London I was literally sweeping sweat off the mixing
desk! I generally loose about a third of the mixing desk on a tour.
So I’ve eased everything back a bit in the last few months by taking the Akai DR16 out on the road now, which has made the show a little bit more pre-programmed, but at least we don’t have to worry so much about whether all the drum machines are working. When I first went over to using the hard-disk recorder it kind of felt like I didn’t have so much to do on stage anymore because it’s now more of a mix thing. But in fact we’re probably getting more variance every night on stage now, just from the confidence of knowing that the backing tracks are always going to work. I normally mute nearly all the backing stuff, because Joie and myself are always feeding in new tunes. So this new way of working actually forces us to play more live now, which makes it more interesting for us. On the last tour, some of the tracks were completely different every night. Only the bass line and a couple of sequences were coming from the DR16. Obviously, I never record any effects; everything’s dry so I can ride all the effects live.
Actually, I’m toying with the idea of feeding the Roland MSQ-700 sequencer and all the old Sync 24 stuff back into the live set at some point. It would be nice to have a kind of half-and-half situation, where it doesn’t matter if the live sequenced stuff goes down as we’ve always got the hard-disk recorder to fall back on.
Outside your own musical endeavours, Eat Static has accepted a diverse range of remixing jobs over the years, including, most bizarrely, the Charlie Watts/Jim Keltner Project. How did this happen, and what was your approach?
It was really nice to get that one, because Charlie Watts hasn’t really got any concept at all about remixing. His record label said to him, ‘Look, you’ve got a great album here; why don’t we get some people to remix it?’ So he said, ‘Well, you get some people to send me some examples, and I’ll say yes or no.’ It was quite scary; I had to do a minute-long kind of teaser for him to see if he would go for it. Basically, I got sent the whole album and picked the track I liked most, and the record company sent all its separate multitracked parts. There was a lot of music there – two 90-minute DATs completely filled up with tonnes of stuff! It took me about a week just to go through it all, but I had so many ideas for it that even my minute-long ‘teaser’ ended up being about four-and-a-half minutes long – almost like the finished remix, in fact! It was quite stark sounding, but I got a message back saying that he loved the track, and not to ruin it by putting any music on it! Then when I finished the track properly, I actually had a hand-written letter back from him saying, ‘Thanks for doing a wonderful job on my record.’ That’s never happened to me before; half the time when I’ve done remixes in the past I’ve even got to chase up a copy of the CD. I couldn’t believe it!
Likewise, remixing Ozric Tentacles’ ‘Strangitude’ – a track on which you originally performed – for the Floating Seeds Remixed album must have been a strange experience?
There were only a few Ozrics tracks that I wanted to do, but the trouble was most of them had already been picked. I think Steve Hillage did ‘Sunhair!’ which was one I’d had my eye on. ‘Sploosh!’ was the one I really wanted, but Simon Posford got that. But I’ve always loved ‘Strangeitude’ – even when we originally did it, it always had an interesting vibe; half dance music, half I-don’t-know-what. So it was fun to pull that one apart and build it up again. I was quite pleased with the result and it went down well with the people who bought the album by all counts.
STOP
PRESS: WHEN MERV MET FREDWith the 10 April 2001 Stateside release of Crash And Burn! (on Cyber Octave Music, specialists in ambient, leading edge electronica, trance and dance – a division of contemporary instrumental giants Higher Octave Music) it would appear Eat Static is going down rather well with another name artist, namely B-52s frontman Fred Schneider, so much so that Schneider wants to rework a vocal version of that album’s title track. Having already completed the lyrics, Schneider and Pepler are hooking up in New York City in early June with a view to a single release in July. As Pepler highly rates the B-52s, this breakthrough is understandably a dream come true. Eat Static is definitely a band that isn’t going to ‘crash and burn’ in a hurry!
SYNTHS/KEYBOARDS: ARP Axxe • Casio CZ1000 • Ensoniq Fizmo • ‘Homemade boxes’ x2 • Korg Mono/Poly • Korg Polysix • Korg Prophecy • OSC Oscar • PPG Wave 2.3 • Quasimidi Quasar • Roland SH-5 • Roland TB-303 • Roland SH-101 • SCI Prophet 600 • Vox Continental • Waldorf Wave • Yamaha FS-1 • Yamaha V-50
SAMPLERS: Akai S3200 • Akai S3200XL • Akai S6000 • Roland W-30 • Roland S-330
DRUM MACHINES: Alesis HR-16 • E-mu Procussion • Korg DDD1 • Roland CR-78 • Roland TR-808 • Roland TR-909 x2
RECORDING: Akai DR-16 hard-disk recorder • Alesis amplifiers • Mackie 32:8:2 mixer x2 • Mackie 24-channel expander • Pentium II 233MHz (running Steinberg Cubase Audio XT)
Abduction (Ultimate/Planet Dog, 1993*)
Implant (Ultimate/Planet Dog, 1994*)
Science Of The Gods (Ultimate/Planet Dog, 1997*)
B-World: Live (Ultimate/Planet Dog, 1998*)
The Alien EPs (Mesmobeat, 1999)
Decadance (Mesmobeat, 1999)
Crash And Burn! (Mesmobeat, 2000 )
Prepare Your Spirit (Mesmobeat, 2000)
In The Nude! (Mesmobeat, 2001)
