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Nitzer Ebb: Analog synths and ambient samples put
NITZER EBB
Analog Synths & Ambient Samples
Put A Polish On The Industrial Grind
by Alan di Perna
There's a vague threat in the dark way the bass line unfolds
beneath toxic kicks from a painfully distorted snare sample. The
rhythm is spare, its sonic spaces like blackened windows in a bad
neighborhood. Then comes this voice -- snarling, insinuating,
making Dennis Hopper's character in Blue Velvet seem like Mr.
Rogers. A nameless anxiety constricts your throat. You're waiting
for the Lightning Man to strike.
And this is just Showtime, Nitzer Ebb's latest, most
restrained album. Their earlier records are even more intense.
"We were trying to grasp more traditional song structures on
Showtime," explains Bon Harris, the percussion-playing half of
the Nitzer duo, identifiable by his five o'clock shadow haircut.
"On our earlier stuff, we couldn't really bring out too many
moods. It was far too fast and in-your-face. We wanted to pull
things back a bit and give each sound more space. Most bands
start off with a fairly general song-oriented approach and then
start exploring the avant-garde. We did it the other way around.
We're going into more normal things, but it's okay because the
music hasn't lost its edginess."
Why this newfound maturity? Well, Nitzer Ebb were awfully
young when they started out. They were at a very impressionable
age during the late '70s/early '80s upheaval that brought us such
electronic iconoclasts as Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle.
"I remember going through a period of about six months where we
were Throbbing Gristle," laughs vocalist Doug McCarthy. "We'd
just play around at home with tape loops, repeating one line over
and over on guitar."
McCarthy is recalling his and Harris's early teens, when the
two were friends in Chelmsford, Essex, near London. Long before
they summoned the courage to play a gig, the duo would get
together and work out their music privately. "At that time, we
were listening to a lot of German bands, like Deutsche
Amerikanische Freundschaft, Die Krupps, and Malaria. And we were
into groups like Bauhaus, Killing Joke, and the Birthday Party.
All of these bands were really performance-oriented, very
aggressive live. That's what made us want to be in a band. When
we saw these groups, we were 13 or 14 years old. You'd go to one
of these shows and people were just beating each other up in the
name of dancing. Just having fun. That release was something we
wanted to tap."
McCarthy was only 15 when Nitzer Ebb played their first gigs
in 1983. The following year, they released a single, "Isn't It
Funny How Your Body Works," on their own Power of Voice label. It
came out at a ticklish time. In '84, the industrial electronic
dance music ahd ceased to be a fad, but hadn't quite become an
established genre. "Some reviewer said we were two years too
late," Harris recalls with just a hint of acrimony.
"We were still right into electroinc music when it wasn't
trendy to like it anymore," continues McCarthy. "It had had its
big peak. But as far as we were concerned, it wasn't finished.
Then, a few years later, house music and acid house came along
and justified what we were saying. If anything we were two years
too early."
More indie singles followed. But Nitzer Ebb's debut album
didn't come until 1987, after they had signed with Mute in the
U.K. and Geffen in the States. That Total Age is rife with
frenetic but precise sequences and sampled machine-shop clangs.
Their follow-up, 1989's Belief, is much in the same mold.
But on Showtime, a different game is afoot. Arrangements,
while still electronic, are more minimal. Tempos aren't as
rigidly quantized. Industrial overkill has fiven way to an
atmospheric moodiness. The feel is still anxious and postmodern,
but with more of a David Lynch/Alfred Hitchcock slant. Harris and
McCarthy have discovered that the familiar can be more menacing
than the strange. They've found the chill within the '50s lounge
jazz, the foreboding behind traditional clarinet or saxophone
sounds.
"What Bon and I did for the album was make a list of genres --
styles that we wanted to steal," McCarthy says. "The list
literally ran through everything: '50s rock and roll, rock, rap,
jazz. And we structure the songs around our ideas or
interpretation of what each of those genres is like."
What helps make Showtime's song-oriented approach unusual is
the fact that Nitzer Ebb is one electronic band that doesn't
really compose or perform with keyboards -- or, for that matter,
any other instruments that encourage conventional
melody-and-accompaniment. Instead, Harris and McCarthy spend a
lot of their time programming.
"Neither of us is actually musically trained," says McCarthy.
"We can't play keyboards as such, so a lot of our music is
generated from editing pages of a computer [an Atari Mega 2
running Steinberg Cubase software]. We did our first single,
'Lightning Man,' by starting with a straight sequence and then
just playing with it. We shuffled the timing around a bit. Then
we started dropping notes out of the parts, which we wouldn't
have been able to do if we had just been playing the parts. Even
if we had been, it wouldn't have achieved the same results.
It's interesting to approach a melody that way. You've got it all
in front of you, so you can choose which parts of it you want to
keep."
Their drum parts, though, are often entered into the sequencer
in real time, using Simmons pads. "We started doing it that way
on the last album, and we're gravitating toward it more and
more," says Harris. "You can spend a lot of time mucking around
programming, whereas if you just set up the pads, you can run
through the song for half a day and get a lot variations. Some of
the mistakes you make are better than anything you'd planned."
McCarthy explains the the song "My Heart," from Showtime
started off. "But there was no actual time signiture. It didn't
have to be 4/4. Bon got the pads up and came out with what turned
out to be 7/8. Of course, we didn't know it was 7/8 at the time.
It took us about two hours to work that one out."
Like a lot of electronic groups these days, Harris and
McCarthy find themselves turning more and more to old analog
synths. They made especially heavy use of a Moog System 700
modular rig, an Oberheim Xpander and OB-X, and a Sequential
Pro-One on Showtime. Characteristically beefy analog timbres were
part of what they were after. But they also used analog to get
some of natural instrument sounds, such as the trumpet and
harmonica on "One Man's Burden."
"You can get ridiculously close to real instruments on the old
analog stuff," Harris marvels. "The old stuff doesn't look like
it's going to sound like that, but it can. And it's more
interactive than modern synths. You're not just pushing the same
button all day. You've got this big thing in front of you, and it
actually does stir your imagination."
Not that Harris and McCarthy are exclusively into analog. The
calrinet and trumpet sounds on "Lightning Man," for instance, are
factory E-mu samples transferred to and played back on an Akai
S1000. "We had shied away from doing that in the past because
it's so obvious," Harris explains. "I mean, who doesn't use brass
samples on their records? But this was one case where the song
really dictated it. The track had this cheesy, gangster movie
feel, and we wanted to go whole hog with it. The horn samples
work well there because the basis of the track is so electronic,
but the whole atmosphere is not completely electronic."
In trying to evoke such older styles as jazz and '50s rock,
the duo began thinking about ambience more than they had in their
strictly "industrial" period. Here, too, sampling proved a
valuable tool. "A lot of times we were working with samples of
entire phrases rather than single notes," Harris explains. "so we
could get the ambience of the room where the phrase was played.
With other sampled sounds, we would edit away the instrument
itself -- a bass guitar, for example -- and just use the ambience
fromthe sample. Bits like that can really add to the atmosphere
of a recording."
In many cases, the real power play was to combine sampling
with analog modular synthesis in a symbiotic relationship. "When
you're working with the old modular synths, you pretty much have
to sample the results every time you get something you like,"
McCarthy cautions. "Who knows if you'll ever be able tog et it
back? Those systems aren't the most stable devices in the world.
So every time we got a good sound or sequence, we'd think,
'Better sample a bar or two of this, just in case it goes out of
tune.' We had numerous disks with these two-bar phrases of things
that were good."
Almost most all sound sources, sampled and otherwise, were
routed through the System 700 for further processing. This is
what's responsible for some of the wildly modulated timbres on
such tracks as "Nobody Knows" and "Rope." At certain points, the
modulation gets so heavy that you can't really hear what notes
are being played. You're left with a sound that exists somewhere
in the grey area between riffs and textures -- a Nitzer Ebb
specialty. "Even if something was sounding all right," McCarthy
notes, "we'd bung it through the System 700, just to see what
happened. It could be an instrument, a mixer, an effect, the drum
kits.... The possiblities are pretty inexhaustible. We did that
on nearly every song. Our motto was, 'Reach for a modular synth
when you're stuck.'"
The Nitzers' fondness for old modular gear is something they
share with the man who has been instrumental in their career:
Mute Records owner Daniel Miller. Miller, of course, is a key
architect of the '80s synthpop sound. He produced the earliest
outings from Depeche Mode, Yaz, and Fad Gadget. He released a few
seminal recordings of his own, under the name the Normal. And he
turned Nitzer Ebb down when they first sent him a demo in 1983,
only to reconsider in '86. "He's the main man," says Harris
affectionately.
"But we won't work with him in the studio anymore," McCarthy
adamently adds. "He takes too long! He's got this agelss
approach. You know how, when you first start out, you think,
'Wouldn't it be a wheeze to stay up all night in the studio?' But
after a couple of years of it, you start thinking, 'Oh my God, I
want to go home; it's 7:30 already.' Well, Daniel Miller has
still got that boyish excitement when you get him in the studio.
He still likes to say up all night in there, because he's got an
artist's opinion. So if you want to spend more time and money on
a project, as long as you can justify it, he'll do it. He hasn't
got any qualms about spending money. And if he's there, he'll
spend loads of it. If he goes on a project, the budget's a
nightmare."
Harris and McCarthy generally prefer to work faster. Both
Belief and Showtime were completed in about six months. But
still, they're not the most linear guys in the world themselves,
as McCarhy admits. "We took the tracks on Showtime through a lot
of changes. Looking back on it, there were some songs where the
only way we could have learned what we wanted to do was to go in
completely the wrong direction before we could arrive at what was
right. That's why we try to keep all the tracks in the sequencer
until the final mix, rather than recording them on tape. We're
always changing things. We work by a process of eliminiation."
For the past two albums, they've been aided in this process by
Flood, that producer with a single name but a multiplicity of
credits, including U2, Erasure, Cabaret Voltaire, and Nick Cave.
McCarthy praises Flood because he "can understand our musical
vocabulary, which involves saying 'thing' a lot, as in, 'This
track needs more of the wibbly thing, you know?'" Harris, for his
part, likes the way the producer "understands that thin line we
like to treat between the melodic and the atonal."
But will the masses -- particularly the American massess --
ever understand? Nitzer Ebb got a chance to test the waters last
year when they made their first visit to the States, opening for
Mute labelmates Depeche Mode. Their live show preserves the
stripped-nerve aggression they imbibed at early '80s Birthday
Party shows in London. There's lots of shouting and pounding on
drums. How did this sit with the Modes' teen pup audience?
"On the whole, they were either shocked into silence or jogged
into moving about," McCarthy responds. "We had a good feeling of
perversion -- that we were manipulating these kids' musical point
of view. Some of them are so young that these are the first
gigs they've gone to. So they haven't got that inbuilt thing of
having been perverted by the general music press or radio by
being told what is pop music and what isn't pop music, what is
listenable music and what isn't listenable music. So they don't
differentiate between us and Depeche Mode that much. They see us
just as bands. If they like us and they like Depeche Mode, then
we're a band just like Depeche Mode. From that point of view,
we're making quite good inroads with the young audience -- 13 and
14 or so."
Which brings us back to Nitzer Ebb's old nemesis:
categorization. True, things have improved since the days when
"latecomers" was the only pigeonhole the press could find for
them. But use the term "cyberpunk" around the lads and they make
barf faces.
"All that stuff doesn't mean anything to us," McCarthy shrugs.
"I guess there are labels that the press gives to bands like us.
Our label at the moment is that we're an industrial band, which I
don't particularly think is applicable. Especially with the music
that's on Showtime. But there are the kids who go to industrial
concerts, and I guess they're a part of our audience. There's
also a surprisingly large element of the audience that is
uncategorizable. We did go through a stage where we formulated
who we were and who we were playing to. But it became stale,
because we felt like we couldn't go outside of certain parameters
or else we'd no longer appeal to the people we were supposed to
appeal to. So we decided to make the music for ourselves, not for
any audiences."
What's next? Harris and McCarthy plan to make an EP when they
get off the road with Depeche Mode. But as yet, there's no
definite game plan for the project. More vintage analog timbres?
Maybe. More sampling? Probably. But are Doug and Bon worried that
the great return to analog signals the end of an era? That
electronic pop is becoming an '80s nostagliga sound?
"Bands like us are there to prove it isn't," McCarthy replies.
"The reason why electric guitars don't sound like the '50s is
that people have continued to try to make new music on them. We
intend to keep doing the same with electronic instruments."
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
LESS CAN ROAR: NITZER EBB LIVE
Streetwise: That's a good way to describe Nitzer Ebbs concert
setup. It's powerful but minimal -- just the thing for an opening
act subject to the perils of disappearing sound checks and the
need to set up and tear down in a hurry. The rig is also ideally
suited to the duo's stage aesthetic, which evokes rap
performances more than tradtional rock arena shows.
"We want the equipment to be as compact as possible," says
Julian Beeston, the elusive "third Nitzer" who joins the group on
percussion for live gigs. "We don't want mountains of keyboards
onstage. If it all fit into one rack, we'd be happy."
Actually, the're pretty close to that ideal. Beeston and Bon
Harris each have an Akai S1000 sampler triggered by an assortment
of Simmons pads, which both play standing. Neither percussionist
has a conventional drum kit, though Beeston has a Premier snare
drum with a Simmons pad mounted inside, and both setups also
include cymbols.
Apart from vocals, all of the band's music emanates from a
modest pile of equipment at stage left: an Atari Mega 2 running
the Cubase sequencer and driving an Akai S1000, a Yamaha TX81Z,
and an Oberheim Xpander. For the song "Getting Closer," one of
the Xpander's stereo outputs goes through a Yamaha SPX90
multi-effexts unit, and the other goes through a Rat distortion
pedal. That it for gear.
"Most of the music is on hard disk -- a PMR drive for the
S1000," Harris explains. "We start each song on Cubase. It
changes the sounds on the synths and sends a patch change to the
S1000, which then loads up the appropiate song. We have so many
tape loops and old analog synths on our records that sampling is
the only practical way to reproduce it all live. We wanted to do
it before, with the S900, but that just has monophonic outputs,
so we would have needed quite a few of them. Also, there was a
problem of loding the samples for the songs. When we found out
that the PMR drive and software for the S1000 would let you do it
remotely, we knew we'd foudn a viable solution. And of course the
S1000's outputs are polyphonic, which is very important for us."
With this setup Nitzer Ebb have all they need to shock the
house. "One of the things we've always had to fight against is
the notion that if you don't have a guitar, it's not a real
band," says McCarthy. "That's one reason why our show is so
energetic: to prove that you don't need guitarts to be a good,
exciting live band."
-- Alan di Perna
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