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That Human Touch

Electronic act PVT move from cult label Warp and head to a country manner to inject their new record Homosapien with a breath of fresh air.

25 June 2013

PVT’s writing process is a finely-honed intercontinental square dance between London and Sydney, where files are swapped between band members like partners on a dance floor. The electronic band is made up of frontman Richard Pike (living in London), his brother Laurence and Dave Miller (both in Sydney). PVT recently left cult electronic label Warp Records, home of Aphex Twin, for Create Control to release their latest record Homosapien.

Music can be a rough cycle. After sweating over an album, it’s not just a matter of washing off, rinsing and repeating. It’s straight into the tumble drier of a tour — a similar machine, just hotter, and prone to meltdowns.

The cycle usually ends in post-tour blues. Exhausted, summoning up the effort to go round again can be tough. The force required to drag each other out of the post-tour blues helped shape Homosapien, it was like starting all over again. “We took a little break, a deep breath and tried something different again,” said Richard. “The record felt really fresh in that regard.”

A little break, deep breaths, and fresh air were exactly what PVT found in a country manor in Yass, a small town just north of Canberra. It’s a place not unfamiliar to Australian bands. Both Jack Ladder and The Drones’ Gareth Liddiard have recorded there before, the common link being producer Burke Reid, who had worked on PVT’s previous record. Even DZ Deathrays (a band Richard is producing an album for) are writing at the mansion. It’s buzzing by Yass standards.

“We liked the idea of getting out of the city,” said Richard. “We’ve always done concentrated recording sessions that are on the clock in nice studios with nice gear. It’s a good process if you’re on a budget. But this time we wanted to do the Rolling Stones thing. Go away to a mansion in the countryside and turn it into a record. It was exciting for us to discover a new way to make a record.”

PVT hired Gareth Liddiard’s mobile recording setup for the sessions (whose latest album serendipitously happens to be the feature of another piece in this issue, check it out for more info on his gear). “It’s funny, his town is like where the Sims Brothers live in Chris Lilley’s We Can Be Heroes — one main drag and two pubs. We met him there in his ute looking like some kind of modern Henry Lawson and then we drove the gear back up to Yass — that was a cool process in itself.”

LEADING WITH VOCALS

One of the main differences between Homosapien and PVT’s previous albums is this is the first time Richard has truly embraced the lead vocal role start to finish. “It was organic,” said Richard. “We started doing it live more and more. Dave was taking live samples of my voice, pitching things and doing dubby delays with it. It seemed like the right time to sing again. We feel more mature as songwriters.”

Relying on vocals to lead the way meant another change to PVT’s songwriting regime. Taking 2010’s Church With No Magic as an example, the songwriting process was primarily studio based, where the band would come in with vague ideas and loops, then jam on them in a Can/Krautrock cut-up method. The obvious problem to the approach is trawling through countless hours of material trying to find 10 songs worth of gold. “It becomes a lot of post work,” said Richard. “And it mainly ends up as my job. So this time we wanted to have about 20 solid-ish ideas to choose from. And a record came out of that.”

Richard-on-the-EML100,-for-'Ziggurat'-pichi

VOCALS

Richard used either a Bees Knees Arabella large diaphragm condenser, Rode K2 or Oktava ML-52 ribbon mic through a Golden Age Pre 73 preamp for vocals.

BASS

Richard’s inspiration for bass is a guy called John Mouse, who does really lo-fi recordings — usually a drum machine, some New Order-sounding synths and a really pumped DI bass. Richard selected between a ’70s Fender P Bass with flatwound strings and a warm-sounding ’60s Rickenbacker depending on the song. His secret weapon was a Bixonic Expandora distortion pedal. Richard: “It’s just got the most bizarre, cutting, feedback distortion that works nicely on bass.”

DOWN TO BUSINESS

To go with this fresh start, and the new vocal approach, the aim at Yass was to get as much recorded live as possible in three weeks. “We didn’t want to spend too much time bogged down in electronics,” said Richard. Which seems odd for an electronic band. “We wanted to get as much live stuff as we could. We brought all the synths we could. We put together a little workshop upstairs so we could work on any keyboard stuff while the drums were being tracked in the main room. We were also in quite beautiful bushland, so if you weren’t tracking you could go for a walk. It was a perfect scenario in a lot of ways. That feeling was nice to be around, rather than having to worry about where you’d park your car every morning when you’d go to the studio in Surry Hills.”

Each morning, everyone would congregate for a meeting and go over the plan for the day. A bit business-like for a creative enterprise, but an organisational necessity that kept the self-production on task. The danger of whittling away the days without getting anything done was one they were keen to avoid.

“We didn’t want to walk away and go, ‘You know what, we really should have… or, this song isn’t cutting it,’” said Richard. “When you’re in that situation you’re isolated and every day you’re getting up and doing the same thing, there’s a concern that you’ll lose focus. It becomes like Groundhog Day. It was important to us to keep a routine and then smash it out and walk away with all the material we wanted.

“I’m of the belief these days that less is more. When we were younger we’d layer the hell out of everything, but these days we’re more impressed with ourselves if we can make a song sound fantastic with less tracks, and make every track count.”

Cutting down on tracks is one thing, but it also means you have to cut the crap. “A lot of it is saying no to bad sounds!” said Richard. “It’s a mistake a lot of young producers make. They think it sounds good just because they programmed it, when really they should be replacing it with another sound. Having said that, sometimes we’ll use a sound that’s not necessarily sonically rich, but you still like the sound because it has a certain grit, air or weirdness that you can’t fake. It’s a constant experimentation and your ears are your best friend in that situation — you’ve got to be discerning.”

These days we’re more impressed with ourselves if we can make a song sound fantastic with less tracks, and make every track count

SYNTHS

Richard: My go-to live keyboard is a Roland Juno 106. I write with it a lot but I don’t feel the need to keep it on everything because it has a limited sound. We used a Moog quite a bit for bass lines on this record, but I’m not a huge Moog guy. We use Moog soft synth’s as well as a real one. I love the Arturia soft synths — they’re incredibly convincing. We had a Korg MS-20 and a Yamaha DX7. We also had a Roland Juno 60. Ivan, who engineered the record, brought down a Waldorf Blofeld synth module. But it was far too digital for me. We had a Moog Slim Phatty we used for bass on one song called <Announce> and we ended up putting it through the bass amp to give it more punch and warmth.

“We tend to move towards those kinds of sounds. We’re not really heavy into bright rave synths or ‘wub-wub’ dubstep sounds. We’re more into the ’70s Cluster school of ambient.

GUITARS

Richard’s main go-to guitar is a Fender Hot Rod Tele, though he also uses a couple of Jazzmasters.

View-of-Control-Room-(in-converted-living-room)-pichi

PRODIGIOUS TALENT

Ivan Vizintin engineered the sessions at Yass. He used to front a band called Ghoul, and is in a band with Laurence from PVT and Alex from Seekae. So he’s connected. Richard calls him an engineering prodigy, which Ivan laughs off… but at just 24, he pretty much is. As well as engineering and producing, he has a Masters of Music from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and has composed music for the film Animal Kingdom, and Mimco and Bonds TV campaigns. When I catch up with Ivan, he’s just finished an EP for a Sydney band called <Bearhug>, and mixed an R&B album, which was a first. Next, he’s working on a record with a garage trio, and later in the year might be doing a record with disco funk-inspired Donny Benét… at the very least, he’s got a diverse resumé.

Ivan: “At The Con they had a creative production program where they teach you to record jazz groups, big bands and orchestras, and I did a short internship with ABC Classic FM. I had known Laurence for ages, so I suggested we get a room at The Con and record some solo drums. And that went really well, then I did a record with him and jazz pianist Mike [Knock], and he asked me to come and engineer down at Yass.

“As far as I know, James, the guy that owns the place in Yass, has only rented it out to four or five bands. It all started when Jack Ladder did his record there, and the only reason they chose that place was because it was a midpoint between where Gareth’s gear was in Melbourne and where they were in Sydney. It’s a great solution because it’s so isolated. You can get up at seven, start recording and go until four in the morning and no one’s going to stop you.

“The house has so many nooks and crannies that you can put a guitar amp in, or Richard could sing in. When I was doing drum tracking, I left five or six channels free just to put room mics in nooks around the house. Because Laurence was hitting so hard, the whole house was reverberant with wooden floors. So on the record, I can hear spaces; the little room upstairs, or the broom closet under the stairs. It has so many different options.

“The main overheads were a pair of Coles 4038 ribbons, I had a small Beyerdynamic hypercardioid on the hats, a Shure SM57 on the snare, an EV RE320 under the snare, a Neumann U87 on the kick out.

“Because the mansion is big enough to house wedding parties, there are a lot of mattresses. So we tried to enclose the drums with mattresses and behind them I put an XY pair of Oktava MK-012s pointed toward the ceiling. They weren’t getting a lot of direct sound, mostly room reflections. And there’s a huge staircase that runs three floors. So at the top of the staircase I put a Rode K2 tube mic, and down a tiny box of a corridor I tied a crappy boundary mic to a wall. I also stuck a Rode NT2 in a dining room next to the main hall that must have been 12m by 4m wide with 3m-high ceilings. I knew I wasn’t mixing the record, so I was just trying to give Ben hard and soft options and varied spaces that might work for different songs.

“And Laurence doesn’t like the sound of too much close-miking, he thinks of his drums as more of a textural thing. When we were tracking, the more of the rooms I could feed into his headphone sends, the more relaxed he would feel and hear the dynamics of his playing better.

“On each tom I had a Sennheiser MD421. I also put up a Bees Knees Arabella up high a metre above and behind Laurence’s head, and that was used as the sound on one of the tracks.

“Gareth had a bunch of API 312 clones, which I thought sounded a little woolly, but the JLM preamps were clear and beautiful and we ended up running everything through them.

“The main room is great for recording anything in. The surrounding area is so quiet, the only thing you can hear are sheep ‘baah’-ing. And it’s also very inspiring to open the door and see a giant mountain.”

METHOD OF EVOLUTION

Richard gives an example of this newfound approach with one of the simpler tracks on Homosapien called Evolution.

Richard: “Essentially I made an arpeggiated MIDI track using the Arpeggiator plug-in in Ableton Live and sent that out to the Juno 106. It’s the reason I still love the Juno. It’s digital [with an analogue filter] but it sounds analogue and you can use MIDI, you can play it live if you want, and you can mutilate it on the spot. It’s not too difficult to use.

“So it started with the arpeggiated brass synth sound that I tracked a Roland TR-606 drum machine along to. I didn’t sync up the 606, I just played it in and used the warp function in Ableton to drop it in time. The synth pads were done on the Arturia ARP 2600 soft synth, fiddling with the filter. That was the basics of the electronics on that — dead simple.

“Then it’s just about getting the nuances right, being really specific about where we want it to ebb and flow, where we want the filter to come out, and when we want the notes to be short or long. Those things are what makes the arpeggiator really organic and expressive.”

It sounds like PVT have grown up — moving to the country, taking a ‘less is more’ approach. They’re an electronic band that’s maturing with age, slowly adding more of that human touch.

MIXER BY THE POOL

Ben Hillier mixed the album at The Pool studios, which he co-owns. It’s part of the Miloco group of UK studios that also includes Flood and Alan Moulder’s Assault & Battery, as well as Craig Silvey’s base, The Garden. In the past, Hillier has been involved in building two different studios for Blur (one when he produced Think Tank), a studio for Doves and a studio for The Futureheads.

He found that bands got used to the idea of playing together in rehearsal rooms, so creating a live room where everyone could hear each other was paramount. While Miloco restructured The Pool to incorporate a control room, when Hillier records there he prefers to turn the space into an advanced home studio, with the control room gear in the live space, and using the control room as another booth if required. Once the initial tracks are recorded on headphones, he figures everyone prefers to overdub in the control room anyway, so may as well have a nice big space to feel comfortable in.

Hillier has an EMT A100 30-channel console, but relies mostly on a diverse collection of outboard preamps for tracking, as well as outboard dynamics and effects gear. His in-the-box component is Reaper, which he uses mainly to interface with his outboard gear.

Because The Pool is so busy, he also has another room down the road where part of Homosapien was mixed. It’s based around the same principle of using Reaper as a hub to interface with his outboard gear.

Ben Hillier: I tend to use the insert plug-in quite a lot in Reaper. It’s an easy way to set up a hardware insert on a digital track, and most importantly it ‘pings’ the chain to work out the latency and then adjusts accordingly. I’ve found it’s accurate enough to use on individual drum tracks without upsetting the phase. Although once you get a few of them running, the computer tends to struggle a bit so I usually end up bouncing them back in. There are two main reasons I use this, firstly it means I can do rides and effects sends from within Reaper and they are post-insert (as they would be on an analogue console), and secondly, I usually prefer the sound of the hardware processors, especially compressors.

Mark Davie: What’s drawn you to Reaper specifically?

BH: I think it sounds better than any other DAW I’ve tried. If I play back the same files at the same levels through the same interface they sound better if I use Reaper than if I use any of the other DAWs I have previously used — though I’ve not tried them all, so it isn’t a completely exhaustive test! Reaper deals with latency correctly, so if you route tracks through several different process chains you don’t get phase issues. Its offline file processing can sound great (if you have it set to the highest quality). The routing is very flexible and I find the whole program really quick and reliable.

MD: Richard used the soft synth version of the ARP2600 on the record, but he mentioned you use the real thing for effects. How do you use the ARP2600 in your mix?

BH: In a mix a I mainly use it for the input section (drive and distortion), filtering and spring reverb. Although I will sometimes sequence these (especially the filter) using the 1613 sequencer if I want to get a certain rhythm into a part.

MD: There’s a fair bit of bass guitar on the record. What differences in low end are there between a track with bass guitar vs another with a synth bass line? And how do you work with that?

BH: On this record we were going for quite an up-front bass sound so I was generally compressing the bass guitar a lot more than the synth stuff to get the presence I needed, I was also driving my Chandler mixer pretty hard, which helps with that.

MD: Some tracks have live drums and other are programmed, is there a tendency to make either sound closer to the other?

BH: I like my live drums to sound live and my programmed drums programmed. We wanted to make the most of the great room sounds on the live drums and Laurence is a great drummer, his timing’s bang-on but not at the expense of the feel. I had to make sure close mics on the live drums were punchy enough to match up to the bass sounds on the record but otherwise we wanted the live-ness to be heard. With the programmed stuff most of the effects used were tight and short so as not to get in the way of the live drum rooms.

MD: What are some of the ways you created depth and width in the sound stage for this record?

BH: A lot of PVT’s tracks have a big lead sound (the bass in Casual Success, the guitar in Homosapien, the sequence in Nightfall) or a few parts that combine to define the sound of the song (for example, the woozy synth and bright snare in Vertigo). So I’d try to balance and EQ the other parts around that and the vocal so as to not get in the way. I also don’t mind the less important/immediate parts being a bit hidden or panned wider, it gives the mix a greater sense of depth and you don’t always get everything on the first listen. Maybe it encourages the listener to keep coming back to the song.

MD: How did you process Richard’s vocals?

BH: A lot of the more extreme or audible effects the band had already done themselves (the delay in Vertigo, the multi-tracked harmonising in Homosapien) but I really like short single delays and harmonisers on Richard’s voice, so I used quite a lot. I also found that more standard reverbs tended to soak up a lot of space so I generally avoided them. I also like to use several stages of compression rather than just one compressor, the voice can sound much more up front that way and the compression artefacts aren’t so pronounced or unpleasant.

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