Splitting Up a One Man Band
Gotye’s right hand lieutenant Tim Shiel helps the world’s favourite one man band multiply onstage, applying a few tricks to his own project, Time Shield, along the way.
15 April 2013
Story: Jason Allen
Gotye is the quintessential 21st century one-man band. Give the man behind it, Wally de Backer, a copy of Ableton, a microphone and a crate of old records, and he’ll churn out, well, left of centre, world-beating hits. But translating primarily sampled and synthesised music that Wally has created mostly by himself into a live theatrical experience with a full band takes a bit of creative forethought.
For the last two years, the international live touring juggernaut that is Gotye has been running on an electronic backbone under the command of trusted lieutenant Tim Shiel. Tim met Wally when they were both undergrads at Melbourne University. The length of their friendship combined with Tim’s deep experience in electronic music production ensured the level of trust needed to realise the Gotye vision live. Together they developed a flexible, reliable live rig capable of handling sampling, synthesis, video, triggers, multiple MIDI controllers and the pressure of packed houses in some of the world’s most famous venues.
A SPECIFIC VIEWPOINT
During the Making Mirrors tour, Gotye took to the stage with two Macbook Pros, both running Ableton, connected via Firewire to two RME Fireface 800s. The first Macbook was dedicated to playback of each song’s background parts and effects, triggered by drummer Michael Iveson on a Novation LaunchPad. It was also responsible for the video elements of the show. “Ableton has a very basic implementation of video playback,” explained Tim. “Because we played to a click, film clips could be cut to a song and synced to our performance. You can drag video clips into a track and a little video window pops up. We’d then drag that window onto the second screen, which might happen to be a two-storey video wall at Radio City Music Hall.”
The second Macbook really got a workout — it sat with Tim and was dedicated to sample triggering. “It was one Ableton session for the whole set that was full of Drum Racks containing samples cut up from stems of the final mix of the record. The Drum Racks were routed to various MIDI controllers for each individual song,” explained Tim. “We had about 140 individual channel strips in that set!”
As a writer and producer, Tim prefers to work in Ableton’s Arrangement view rather than its unique Session view. “Session view is a useful creative tool, and it’s especially useful for live performance, but I find it makes it harder to manage the development and flow of a song. When I’m working on a song I very quickly start to think in terms of how it’s going to flow, and visualising that is very important,” said Tim. But for the Making Mirrors tour he used both; the playback and video Macbook running in Arrangement view, and the sample trigger Macbook running in Session view. Arrangement view gave drummer Michael Iveson an easy horizontal reference of the band’s progress through a song, while Session view allowed Tim an immediate vertical overview of which Drum Racks were armed and unmuted.
Even with the show so dependent on the Macbooks, the tour was completely free of any show-stopping technical issues. “The only problems we’ve ever had on the road I could count on one hand and were the result of, umm, human error,” said Tim with a sheepish grin. “I don’t know why, but I take it personally when people are anti-computer in a live setting.”
TEENAGE ROADTRIP
Despite spending almost all of 2012 touring with Gotye, Tim has kept up a rigorous schedule of writing and production, a lot of which was carried out in various hotel rooms and backstage spaces around the world. Tim’s portable production tool of choice is Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 portable synth/sampler/controller. “I don’t really fixate on gear, but the OP-1 was the one thing on my wish list. The interface is so interesting to muck around with. It’s an idiosyncratic piece of gear. It has appeared on every track I’ve done in the last six months in some way. It’s just cool, and super portable — it was fun out on the road. I would basically take over any empty room I could find and set up my portable rig, which really just consisted of the OP-1, a Korg microKEY and Ableton.”
Two years on the road, including gigs at the Sydney Opera House, Coachella Festival, the Late Show with David Letterman, Radio City Music Hall and the Hammersmith Apollo was both an inspiration and a challenge to Tim’s productivity. “2012 was full-time touring, with a couple of breaks — a month here, a month there. I naively expected that I’d get more done on tour than at home, but it turns out when you’re in Paris, or London, or Dubai, there’s a lot to do! It’s fun to hang out in a hotel room and play with beats, but if you’re hanging out with 20 of your closest friends in Paris…”
Despite the distractions, Tim summoned the discipline to work a three-day lock-in at a London hotel: “The third time we got to London we had a four-day break. I had a few songs and ideas kicking around, and I knew if I just sat down and concentrated I’d get a lot done. And I did. As part of it, I got on Twitter and asked people to send me sounds and ideas. I got a lot of files from friends and random people who follow me. I was posting the results as demos to Soundcloud as I finished them. A lot of the ideas and demos I cooked up in those three days I’m still working on now and will form a major part of my next release.”
A FAUX PAS
Tim’s releases as a composer and producer over the last eight years, including the critically acclaimed albums Entropy Begins at Home and Noiseworks, have been under the moniker Faux Pas. However, he’s retiring the name to mark the beginning of a new phase in his career. One of the major changes to Tim’s musical landscape has been his recent forays into collaboration. “It’s really good and really challenging — it’s a completely different skill to anything else I’ve taught myself over the years. It’s a really interesting way to learn about and develop your own ideas; essentially by getting other people to explain what they think music is.”
Tim’s new collaborators include Sydney-based folk singer/songwriter Caitlin Park, and Ben Abraham, a songwriter who splits his time between Melbourne and Nashville. The partnership with Ben, under the name Telling has already spawned a release in the form of a cover of Bertie Blackman’s Stella, available as a free download from the duo’s Soundcloud (soundcloud.com/tellingmusic/stella). “Ben and I met at a festival in 2011,” said Tim. “He has a very friendly and open nature, and also an incredibly expressive voice. I’ve also gotten to know Bertie Blackman recently through working with some of the same people — Gotye’s drummer Michael Iveson played on her record and Franc Tetaz produced it. She heard some of my work as Faux Pas and asked me if I’d do a version of one of the songs from her album. I thought it’d be a good opportunity for Ben and I to work on something together. I didn’t realise at the time how deeply personal the song is. Bertie wrote it for some friends who were dealing with a very deep loss in their lives — it was a daunting prospect to do the song justice.”
Telling’s output is being created with Tim and Ben working both together and independently. Stella’s vocal was recorded in Nashville, while Tim orchestrated and produced the track while on the road. “We ended up recording Ben’s vocals in Nashville because he was in town when the Gotye tour rolled through. Some of Ben’s friends found us a recording space that ended up being opposite Ben Folds’s studio, which is the historic RCA Studio A. Thanks to the guys we were recording with, we managed to talk our way into getting a tour of Ben’s studio. It was a beautiful space; a grand old room. So many pianos! I took Ben’s vocals with me and he went back to Melbourne. I went on to Europe and continued to piece the song together, mostly in backstage areas and hotel rooms.”
Working with singer/songwriters is changing Tim’s perceptions of his own music, as well as showing him a way forward: “A lot of the music I’m working on now is vocal based. I’ve realised it was what I was trying to do with Faux Pas — a lot of those tracks are one hook or vocal line away from being conventional songs. It took me a while to realise that was what I wanted to do.”
I don’t know why, but I take it personally when people are anti-computer in a live setting
TIMELY INTERVENTION
While the now-departed Faux Pas was firmly a studio creature, when Tim wants to present his music live, he takes to the stage as Time Shield. A Time Shield show begins with Tim hanging a large white sheet in front of his performance space before unleashing a deep sub bass drone on his unsuspecting audience. Video is projected onto the sheet, which Tim manipulates live with Vidvox’s VJ software VDMX via his MIDI controllers and Ableton. The swirling, psychedelic results are created by ingenious mappings of audio functions to video parameters — a filter sweep controlling opacity, a pad triggering a new clip. Tim, behind the sheet, blends with the images as he plays, sings, manipulates and controls his way through a totally immersive set.
It was an encounter with Vidvox’s VDMX that first brought Tim out of the studio and onto the stage. “My VJ friend Sean Healy (aka Jean Poole) was asked by The Australian Centre for the Moving Image to do a live performance as part of the Tim Burton exhibition they were running. He suggested we do it together, so we set up side-by-side and he improvised Tim Burton-style visuals while I improvised Tim Burton-style music. I learnt so much from him about his software and his processes that I bought VDMX and took it from there. Before that experience, I’d never thought it was possible to improvise audio and video and work them together.” Time Shield was born.
Tim has thought deeply about the challenges of presenting electronic music created by a solo musician to an audience whose primary experience of live music is rock bands. “I want to have something to look at when I’m seeing a band,” Tim explained. “I want to have some idea of what people are doing to generate the sound that’s coming off stage. If you’re tweaking knobs and pressing buttons, that doesn’t make sense to most people. Finding ways to do things physically so that people understand it’s having a direct effect on the sound has been really important for me.”
CONTROL WITH X-FACTOR
This basic principle has led Tim to investigate a range of exotic control and instrumentation solutions, including repurposed XBox controllers, DJ Hero turntables and the MIDI Theremin; “With the Theremin, you can move your hand up and down and a big filter sweeps across the whole show — people see that and think, ‘Oh, that’s what that thing does.’ You can then go on to use it in more complex or subtle ways in the rest of the show and people will pick up on it because you’ve made it obvious.” And the XBox controller? “Microsoft sells a USB wireless receiver designed for using the XBox controller with a PC, but you can install a script on a Mac that converts that into MIDI. A couple of times I got my friend Galapagoose (electronic artist and producer Trent Gill) to play a drum solo on it. It’s wireless, so he wandered around the crowd.”
Time Shield also sees Tim deploying an array of more standard MIDI devices including a Korg nanoKontrol, Novation Launchpad, Roland GR-20 guitar synth system and an Akai MPK Mini. “The MPK Mini is my favourite compact MIDI controller,” said Tim, “It’s got keys, pads and knobs, all of which I use for various things on various songs, including video manipulation.” All of Tim’s devices connect to a Macbook Pro running Ableton and VDMX.
To date, Time Shield has played in very different environments to the Gotye tour. “Most of the shows I’ve done have been in local venues, 100 to 200 capacity, playing on bills with regular bands. When I’ve managed to look out from behind the sheet, which can be difficult, the audience has looked a bit stunned — hypnotically staring at these unfolding psychedelic visuals, just trying to take it all in.” The thrill of live solo performances has given Tim a taste for it, and we can expect to see more. “I had one show at The Buffalo Club where people really got into it and started dancing; that was a great experience. I miss it a lot. I’ll do it again.”
RESPONSES