29 October 2011

Interview Magazine interview (2011)

Ladytron the Seducer

It's easy to slip into a trance while playing UK-based electro outfit Ladytron on full blast. Ethereal, ice-cold melodies float over a sleek, metallic bass line, with vocalist Mira Aroyo sprinkling in her native Bulgarian just to keep it interesting. Ladytron's fifth studio album, Gravity the Seducer [Nettwerk], which the band is currently on tour promoting in North America, shows the band at their most laid-back, while still adding new brushstrokes to the Ladytron sonic palette.

Over the past ten years, Ladytron (Helen Marnie, lead vocals and synthesizers; Mira Aroyo, vocals and synthesizers; Daniel Hunt, synthesizers, electric guitar, vocals; and Reuben Wu, synthesizers) has been busy: touring, writing songs for Christina Aguilera, DJing, remixing, and producing music for video game and film soundtracks. And it's no wonder these indie darlings are in such high demand: Ladytron pushes sonic boundaries and is known for a largely unclassifiable sound that has been called everything from New Wave to electro-dance-pop.

Already halfway through their North American tour, Ladytron plays Terminal 5 in New York this Saturday, October 8th, followed by an after-hours DJ set at YOTEL. We caught Ladytron synth czar Daniel Hunt while the band was in the middle of a two-day drive from Montana. We touched on roller coasters, whether being in a band for 10 years gets old, and why truck stops are so scary.

You recently played a concert at Six Flags in Mexico. How was that?

It was definitely not fun. There was a tropical rainstorm. It should have been fun. 6,000 people showed up to see us and they were all standing in the rain.

Do you even like roller coasters?

No, I don't really like roller coasters, either. [laughs] I mean, we liked the idea of playing at Six Flags, but nobody told us it was going to rain.

You're on tour promoting the new record, Gravity the Seducer. It sounds a lot different from the last album, Velocifero. Is the band moving in a new musical direction?

We've had people say it's completely different, and we've had people say, "Oh, you know, it's a twist on what they've done in the past or a refinement of that." I wouldn't say it's a new direction. I'd say it was an album that expands on a thread that's run through our records. We think there's enough dance music in the world and we don't really think we need to be making it. We can always get remixes done whenever we want. I just think in terms of what we've got up our sleeves, this kind of record is far more rough than anything else. There's definitely a bit of a jump between the last record and this, but if you look over all the albums and shuffle a little bit, you'll see there's a thread leading through.

Speaking of all the other albums, Ladytron recently released an album of greatest hits, Best of 00-10. What was the experience of summarizing 10 years of Ladytron into a couple discs?

It was a little bit eerie. I mean it was fun, but it was like, how long have we been going? We also had to compile a photo book, and when we started, we just looked like children. It was a good experience, and it was also interesting to put tracks together in a new way—especially considering a lot of our audience have only been aware of us for a few years. It gives us a chance to say, okay, this is what we've been doing for the last 10 years.

One interesting thing about Ladytron is the almost orchestral use of layering.

Yeah, that's important to us. One thing that we're conscious of is that a lot of music now is created and mixed for laptop speakers. And that's fine, but after a while your ears don't lie to you, and some records only have a shelf life of a few weeks. Sounding good on laptop speakers is fine, but we're very old-school in that regard, very traditional. We like albums, we like records that are mixed to last forever. Gravity the Seducer, more than any of the records we've done before, is one for headphones.

That old-school vibe really comes through, even with the analog instruments you use on stage.

Well, that's from when we started. That was the gear we had, and that's what we made the band out of. When we first came out, nobody was using instruments like that, so it gave us a little bit of an advantage by having a limited sonic palette. By having more limited tools, you often end up developing better ideas because when you're flooded with the tools, the ideas get swamped. It was a bit of a novelty, a gimmick-not an intentional gimmick, but it worked as one.

You guys have been together for a while. Does it ever get old?

[laughs] I don't know. We felt burned out after the last tour finished, because we were more or less on the road constantly for four years. We put an album out, toured for two years, put another album out, toured for two more years. We didn't have a lot of time off at all. We can't tour and we don't want to tour as much as people might want us to, for our own sanity, for our own happiness. So we're being more considered this time. Like for example, this U.S. tour we're only doing three and a half weeks. For the band to continue, it's better that you play less and don't burn yourselves out, because we've put a hell of a lot in this. From 2005 to 2009, it was incessant.

What were you doing before Ladytron?

We were all doing bits and pieces. The girls were still in school—Mira was doing a Ph.D. in genetics, Reuben was working in industrial design, Helen had just come out of university, I was organizing a lot of parties and stuff. I had my own studio before I came to the band, so I came to this as a producer and I've done bits and pieces with other bands before.

All right, tell us something about Montana. You're driving through there now, right? What are you seeing?

Well the drive here is amazing, especially driving through Washington state. The scenery is incredible. But we go from the sublime to this horrible cluster of hotels and gas stations.

Do you have any horror stories?

We've had horror stories before from truck stops and whatever.

Truck stops are hilarious.

Well, this is the second time we've stopped in Montana. We've only stopped here once before, and boy, did it scare us. We had a scary time in St. Regis, Montana once where I was more or less confident that we were going to be killed. It was a little bit like Race with the Devil [1975]. I expected to wake up in the morning and see a ring of fire around the bus. We haven't been back since.

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Electronic Musician interview (2011)

Infusing Cold Synths With Guitar Fire

It makes absolute sense that Daniel Hunt's "favorite record ever" is My Bloody Valentine's 1991 album Loveless. Aside from the obvious fact that Hunt's band is also a quartet comprised of two men and two women, Ladytron is like MBV for the electronic set: dense layers of synths rather than a shoegaze-y wall of guitars.

"I grew up listening to music that I could not fully understand", Hunt says. "I like this kind of swell where you hear certain things and you're not sure what they are, and you're not sure what is connected to what".

That isn't to say that Ladytron is creating an amorphous sonic mess in the studio. Ten years after releasing their debut album, 604, Ladytron has learned a thing or two about maximizing space in the mix. With the band's fifth full-length record, Gravity the Seducer, Hunt says they're more cognizant of when to say when.

"I think we're instinctively preempting those problems in the mix by not throwing too many bass-y mono synths and layers down there", he says. "We're just a bit more aware of what's required than we used to be. With the first and second records, the mix engineer would be like, 'You know, you put seven basses on here.' And we'd go, 'Okay, well it's your job. You just make it work!' We're a bit more considerate now".

While Ladytron dove into recording their previous two albums immediately after months on the road—thus creating an album that would easily translate to the stage—the band took a different approach to Gravity the Seducer. "We probably had about a year off from the road in which to write and prepare and had a clearer idea of what we wanted", Hunt says. "It was refreshing to make a record without thinking about the accompanying tour. We didn't care about it, so I think the record sounds freer and more coherent as a result".

One of the group's sonic schemes was to create a cinematic feel by using signature sounds throughout the album, including Sequential Circuits Pro-One, Buchla, Mellotron/Chamberlin, Conn, and Crumar Stratus keyboards. "We consciously tried to restrict ourselves to a sonic palette for the record", Hunt says. "We got to a point with every track and then went, 'What's this missing? Okay, we haven't put the Conn organ on it yet.' That organ had this really beautiful harmonic setting on it. Once we started using that—I think we used it on 'White Elephant' initially—it ended up on almost every song, if not every song. But unfortunately, we couldn't take it away with us. It's still stuck there in the countryside".

Although Ladytron's synth palette was limited, there was still no shortage of layers. Fortunately, it wasn't too much for co-producer Barny Barnicott to handle. He carved out space and attended to detail without overdosing on EQ, all the while making the album sound great on hi-fi systems and crappy laptop speakers.

"I tend to balance very quietly on medium speakers and then switch to a small portable radio for finishing off [the mix]", Barnicott says. "If you get the balance right like that without reaching for your EQ too much, a mix tends to work well across all platforms".

While Barnicott's methods are sophisticated, Hunt suspects that other producers sometimes resort to gimmicks to get a mix to sound right through lo-fi sound systems. "I have a theory that the prevalence of square waves and Auto-Tune in pop music these days is because people are listening to their music through their laptop speakers", Hunt says. "I've got no scientific evidence to back this up, but that's my instinct".

Meanwhile, Ladytron avoids using über-artificial plug-in processing on vocals and synths. Hunt (like his favorite band, MBV) is a fan of using lots of guitar pedals. In fact, he used to play mostly guitar at gigs, but more recently has played and recorded synths—which range on the album from deep, round bass to high, plinking bells—through his guitar pedalboard. "On the records, it made sense for me to play guitar for a while, and where certain songs didn't have guitar before, I actually added it live, and it enhanced what we'd done on the record", he says.

"But this time, we actually went back and added this old Italian polysynth, a Crumar Stratus, which has quite a nice Farisa-y organ sound on it. So I was playing my guitar parts on the keyboard and putting it through my pedalboard, and it sounded surprisingly good. It's going through an overdrive, delay, tremolo, and also an Electro-Harmonix POG Polyphonic Octave Generator. We also used a lot of this Empress Superdelay, which is like an octave delay, and it has some really beautiful effects that I haven't been able to recreate with anything else. It's just instant magic".

One particularly catchy riff that begins midway through "White Gold" sounds like palm-muted guitar but was actually created with a set of chromatic plastic tubes called Boomwhackers. "I saw them being used at my daughter's nursery", Barnicott says. "I think Reuben [Wu] and I had a couple of them, each in the right key, and came up with a rhythm that worked with the tune. Then the engineer, Alex [Miller], processed it quite heavily through the desk".

"It kind of reminds me of Miami Vice or something", Hunt adds with a laugh. "We physically constructed a riff by arranging those tubes and hitting them with beaters. I don't even think we had a complete scale to work with. But we didn't have to do that much editing. We just had to make sure it was timed enough, and perhaps we might have had to pitch-shift one note in [Celemony] Melodyne to make it work properly".

For an album with no guitars, the members of Ladytron certainly have a lot of guitar-related tricks up their sleeves. To add depth to synths and vocals, the band also processed parts through a Holy Grail reverb pedal, into a guitar amp, and then miked up the room about 10 feet away from the amp. "We ended up taking existing parts, reprocessing them quite a few times, and then bringing them in and out of the mix, so the tunes have movement to them while still having a simple arrangement", Barnicott says. "So we put a lot of the synths and vocals through reverbs and amps and recorded the room to give everything more of a 3-D sound and some natural distortion and grit".

The Holy Grail/amp combo is one of Hunt's favorites. "It's a really kind of glacial reverb", Hunt says. "I'm a really big fan of [legendary British producer] Joe Meek, so often when I'm working on something, it's like, 'What would Joe Meek do?' I draw the line at shooting my landlady, though".

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10 October 2011

Press conference at Six Flags, Mexico (2011)

24 August 2011

Stereogum interview (2011)

Name: Ladytron.
Progress Report: Ladytron's Daniel Hunt discusses the group's fantastic new album Gravity the Seducer and examines the relative joys and pains of making music with the same band for well over a decade.

Since releasing their first EP in 1999, Ladytron have consistently conjured up seamlessly beautiful electro-pop equally suitable for dance floors and séances. Earlier this year the band released Best of 00-10 — a sprawling 33 track deluxe treatment documenting the band's excellent first decade. This October they will release their fifth studio album, Gravity the Seducer — a moody, sensual, cool-as-ice collection of songs that should further cement their position of contemporary music's finest purveyors of erudite pop music. We called up founding member Daniel Hunt to discuss.

Hey Daniel! What part of the world are you in right now?

I'm in Liverpool. It's good to be back home for a while.

I'm in NY right now, where the temperature is approximately 1000 degrees today.

Oh I wish! We've had our four days of summer here. This is my first British summer here for years, so I'm making the most of it.

What can you say about the making of this album? Was it a vastly different experience from previous albums?

It felt a little bit easier because the three previous albums, the previous one in particular, we ended up touring for a long time. We toured Witching Hour for way longer than we were expecting to and we were literally off the road for about a week before we were already in the studio. Obviously we already had material written prior to that so it wasn't like we were working for scratch. But it also wasn't like there was a lot of time to go and live normally and recharge and whatever. This one we actually finished a year ago and it was mixed and mastered in October. The delay here is really just an issue of scheduling. We had a "best of" compilation out at the time, so it didn't make sense to release this new record so soon. We have been sitting on it for a while, I'm just glad people are able to hear some of it already because we were dying to get it out there.

That must feel strange. There is always that weird limbo period between when something is finished and the time it actually gets released.

Yeah, it was probably more acute this time because I had just came away with such a good feeling about the record and I was desperate to hear it. It has been quite frustrating to us. But we came away with a really good feeling about it, I think looking at it a year later and as objectively as I can, it is definitely our most coherent piece of work. It's definitely the least, I don't know how to say this without misleading, but you know previously we may have had one eye on making sure some kind of commercial "boxes" we needed to check. Even if it wasn't overt, we would still have some sort of eye on thinking about what might happen with certain tracks commercially or whatever. I think that's as much as my band would admit to. I think that this time we didn't do it at all to be honest and the end result was something that we all were happier with … so it will be interesting to see how it is received. I just feel that as soon as you step away from those kinds of constraints things get so much better … but obviously with the way things are these days, I don't quite blame people for kind of playing it safe in that respect. Once you step away from that, I don't know, the quality of work increases and you got to give the audience the benefit of the doubt that they will appreciate that and that they will appreciate the development and appreciate the extra levels of work. The best thing I can do to gauge this is to play it to my friends and the response so far has been really positive … so I'm happy.

Well the record has a very seamless quality to it. I mean it seems very much of a piece.

That was what we wanted. That is the kind of record we wanted to make. There's still a lot of variation in it though. Our albums in the past have been quite intentionally disjointed and they worked to a point in that way, but this one is way more coherent. There are still quite the extremes, you know. For example "90 Degrees" and "Melting Ice" appear very close together on the record, but they basically represent the two extremes in terms of styles on the record. When it comes to the structure of it — the sequence and everything — we are old fashioned, we are traditionalists, we like the idea of people sitting and listening to records all the way through which is not a particularly fashionable viewpoint these days but we don't know how else to do it.

How was the record recorded? Do you guys have your own studio now?

Yeah. We've always had our own studio, but when we think things are about 60-70% finished, we take it somewhere else to complete the recording. We did the first album in Wales, the second one we did in L.A, for the third one we remained in Liverpool, the fourth one we did in Paris and this one we did in Kent with Barny Barnicott. He now has his own house in the countryside where he moved a studio from London that was closing down — he basically got all the gear from there and transplanted it in the middle of the country. When we made it we all lived in different places: three members of the band were living in London, while I was living in Italy until two months ago. So, the idea of us having a studio as a home base wasn't really applicable.

That does change things. When everyone lives in different cities you really have to plan. It's not like you just turn up in the afternoons and jam and see what happens.

Exactly, but we have never really done that to be honest. We have always lived all over. Now there's three of us in London. At the very beginning there was three in Liverpool, and I think that was the closest we have all ever lived within proximity including the house in Italy for almost five years. The last two records were made while I was up there.

Has your process as a band changed radically over the years? How do you guys tend to write music? Do you all write together? Does everyone bring their own bits and you sort of play around with them?

Yeah, everyone brings their own bits in — either complete tracks, or it's like 'I brought a song in and it needs working up and producing' or 'here is an instrumental that doesn't have a vocal.' You know, here's part of something that needs something else. It's different every time. I think that what has developed over time is that everyone is a lot more confident with putting in all these completed demos to work from. At the very beginning it was more my responsibility to tie everything together. It still kind of was with this record, in terms of bringing the threads together. But everyone is a lot more confident in the studio now, so I guess that's just development naturally over time. It's not really any conscious change in process, just getting better at it and not wasting time on the things that don't really make a difference — like concentrating on the actual sounds rather then this musical alchemy.

Its interesting thinking back to when I first saw you guys play in New York which was in the early-2000's I guess and when the Best Of compilation came out it really made me think about how long you've been doing this. I bought 604 right after I moved to NYC. I was a baby!

That's why we released the compilation: to make everyone feel old.

Is it hard to believe that you guys have been making music together for well over a decade now?

Well, yes. I kind of resent "best of" compilations in general. I was thinking back and there have been some compilations that felt important in a band's back catalogue when it didn't just seem like repackaging old songs for commercial purposes but it actually felt important. For example, Songs To Learn And Sing for Echo and the Bunnymen. It was kind of like ushering in the second wave of their audience. The Smiths compilations, for example. I guess I'm thinking of mostly bands from the '80s. Anyhow, we thought, well there is a positive way of doing this and since we've been together so long, there was probably a lot of our audience who wasn't even aware of the majority of our material. So we made a choice of putting together a compilation that we felt was immediate and wasn't just a selection of singles. We put the tracks that we thought should have been singles even if they weren't and often they correlated with the tracks that were well liked amongst our audience, so that made sense. And also it was a chance to draw a line in the sand, really. I mean this new record is different. It still sounds like us but it is different. You know the last thing we want to do is to be making the same record. It was nice to be able to put what we've done in a new context — over ten years of work — that had some benefit beyond trying to just sell some records.

I think its cool that as a band you have a really great trajectory in terms of building on the strength of each successive album. It seems like you have developed a really devoted fan base that has grown very organically, which is not easy to do now. I feel like it's harder and harder for bands to do that now, not only because we're even more obsessed with only what is "new" now more than ever, but also because there are just so many bands … and thanks to the internet, we are inundated with hearing about all of them all the time.

Yeah, that is certainly part of it. I like to think that we've done things in a good way and were lucky to have our audience... but there is that aspect of saturation. I was talking to someone else about this in another interview recently. When we began, we were witnessing the beginning of changes within the industry, so we sort of experienced the tail-end of "how things were" and also the benefits and drawbacks of "how things became." But this is something that we realized pretty early on. With Witching Hour, for example: It is often thought of as our best record, I think it is in a way and I really like it, though I actually prefer the new one. What people don't understand is that we were touring that record for two years and we had been completely orphaned by our label, so we didn't have any marketing whatsoever besides a couple of copies being let out in the first months. What we found and what kept us going was that we went on tour. The tour we did in the states in 2006, we were told by our management that it wouldn't work and it wasn't viable and we went and did two sellout tours across the States and Canada with absolutely no backup at all and it made us realize how things had changed. And not just for us. The audience was clearly there, but it was still not apparent to the old-school industry people... even though we were seeing it with our own eyes. That changed a lot for us, it made us realize that we could keep on touring and making records as long as we found it fun, which is obviously quite a fortunate position to be in.

How will it be touring this record?

I'm looking forward to it. We made a conscious decision to not do so much because we really hammered the last two records. We wanted to just limit how much we did to give ourselves more chance to breathe. Obviously that means we can't play everywhere and it is a shame sometimes, but often that's not our decision. It's basically down to promoters. For example we've got no Texas gigs on this U.S tour. I know it can be quite frustrating for our audience. We decided to be a bit more careful this time because I think it was basically from 2005 to 2009 where we just hammered it, where we were never off the road.

It's hard to have a real life outside of that.

It gets difficult. This is part of the problem now: the pressure on musicians. There's this assumption that its all fine because everyone just goes on tour and they make their living that way but really you are up against every other band now. Every other band now that ever existed and is still alive and on tour. And there's only so many venues and so much money to go around and also it's like, if you're going to be doing this, what's the point if you've got no life at home? So it also puts a pressure on the creativity. No one is going to make good records if they are on tour for 10 months a year. So we've been lucky enough to look at that situation and make some choices, which has helped us. We have seen both sides. We've basically done that for four or five years, so we are going to pick and choose from now on.

The record is out in September. What will happen next for you?

Our North American tour starts in Mexico, and then through the U.S and Canada in September to October, and then we have a little bit of a break, and then it looks like we are doing South America and Australia and New Zealand and maybe a little bit of Asia before we hit Christmas and then... well, then we will deserve a rest.

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