Disco Sunday #40: Interview with Simian Mobile Disco
I recently had the pleasure of talking to Simian Mobile Disco co-founder and producer extraordinaire James Ford. It’s only taken me six weeks to transcribe the resulting conversation, because I am up to my eyeballs in working on some amazing new songs with Little Boots, HEALTH, The Mae Shi and many more. So very exciting, and…surprisingly time consuming! A huge thank you to Johnatron, Bearbaby and Modmixer for keeping DW alive in my summer absence, and apologies to anyone who may have missed me (What, you didn’t even notice I was gone? You are a mean, mean person.)
Anyway, my interview with SMD has some fascinating insights into their productions, including the story behind one of their best loved tracks (and my vote for “song of the year” in 2006) “Hustler.” And similar to my interview with The Presets a few weeks ago, he’s got some inspiring and down to earth thoughts about the creative process.
Baron von Luxxury: Walk us through your creative process – how do you write songs?
James Ford: The main thing for us, and this is related to our live show, we try and not use loops and samples. So each track is a performance of me and Jas playing around with a synth or a drum machine. We’ll program a simple beat and lay it out, then over the top we’ll get some MIDI from a computer, like a bassline or something and put that thru whatever box or synth we’ve most recently gotten from Ebay. Then we’ll jam or play for 15 or 20 minutes until something interesting happens, and record whole time. Then we’ll chop out the most interesting 4 minutes, and go on to the next part on the next machine. We keep doing that and gradually build up a bunch of tracks that we’ll then edit down.
When it comes to vocals we’ll have something pretty stripped down. We find its difficult if you fill track too much. So sometimes we have simple bare bones songs we give to vocalists and they’ll come back with something. In the case of “Hustler” we actually started with vocals. I was doing production session with this girl Char, it was kind of singer songwriter fare. At the end of session she said she could rap. So I put on a beat I had knocking around and she freestyled for 20 mins. Then me and Jas edited it down to try and make sense of it, and that was the vocal for Hustler – then we wrote the rest of the track around that.
BVL: Do you have a “go to” drum machine or piece of software you use to start off the beats?
JF: Sometimes it will come from a drum machine: we’ve got the usual suspects – 808, 909, Linn – and sometimes we’ll get an interesting pattern from one of them. But more and more these days we’re making drum sounds from modular synths, since you can get everything from kicks and hats from the synths. Then we’ll program some MIDI in ableton and then the synths will be the sound source. We don’t really record or mix into Ableton because I don’t particularly like the actual sound of it. But as a programming tool its really powerful and really quick. So we generally program in Ableton then we record into Pro Tools. And we’ve got a mix setup here with outboard compressors, reverbs and such to mix out of Pro Tools.
BVL: Is the idea of not using samples a matter of principle, or is it an aesthetic philosophy to enable greater creativity by creating limitations?
JF: Exactly, that’s a massive thing for us – to try and limit yourself because there are so many options in the world of recording. Recently we’ve enjoyed recording on tape because it’s a limitation that forces you to up the performance and sounds because you can’t fix it later!
BVL: How do you work as a producer with bands like Klaxons, Mystery Jets, Test Icicles etc? Do you have a certain process or is it different every time?
JF: I’ve found it’s limiting to try to have a strategy when you go into a project as theres so many variables you never know what you’ll be faced with. I think being a good producer is about being able to adapt to the situation and do the best thing for that situation at that time. The technology around you really defines the record you make because it guides your decision making process. To be in a posh studio with all the toys at your disposal and a nice desk is a really different process than recording in Jas and my little studio, or on tape, or Pro Tools.
BVL: What was it like producting the Klaxons – did they come to you with the songs fully formed, or were you fairly involved on the songwriting and arranging front?
JF: The Klaxons have quite a weird process – they are very very strong melodically, for example. But I played all drums on that record, and was very much a part of arrangement input. So it was almost like being in the band for a few months! But they definitely did have a lot already formed, but I really enjoyed the extra things like working out harmony parts with them.
BVL: Who are some of the sounds you’re tracking for the next SMD record, and/or bands you’re following these days?
JF: I really like the Italo-y space disco-y thing, though I don’t necessarily think the next SMD record will sound like that. I quite like the Telepathe stuff, Black Mountain are good. Weirdly there are a lot of good bands in America right now and not a lot exciting me out of the UK, other than Late Of The Pier. Lots of LA bands are quite interesting, like HEALTH and stuff like that. Dave Sitek has produced a lot of interesting stuff, Dave Fridmann as well. Stuff I’m really getting excited about is the more proggy stuff like Robert Wyatt.
BVL: I know that Jas is a having a baby (as we speak!) and that you’ve recently been married, so clearly you’ve got a good sense of balance beyond the sex drugs and rock n’ roll mythology. How do you think about having a life in music, a career?
JF: Its hard to answer because I haven’t had much longevity yet! But for me the important things are to trust your instincts on things, if you think things are dodgy it probably is. So, just try to have a balance between a social life and doing what you want to do. It’s an interesting question! I guess at the end of the day you’ve got to answer to yourself about the stuff you do and put out there. In your heart of hearts you know if something’s shit or if its good. A good bit of advice a friend gave me was “make sure all of your mistakes are your own mistakes.” I think it means you’re taking responsibility for your actions. So if you do mess up but you had the right intentions, you can’t be criticized for that.
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“Are You The One (Simian Mobile Disco RMX)” – The Presets
SMD recently turned in a stellar mix of techno, disco, and bloopybloopy for the 41st installation in the always stellar Fabric series, which you can buy at Insound. SMD are also in charge of creating the next chapter in Nike’s excellent Original Run series. URB has a five minute clip, go have a listen while you putter around the house procrastinating finishing your next album. xx, RELATED POSTS:
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Thank you for this interview. I love SMD and their technical style.
DJ. L.S.