The Dust Brothers

SUMMER OF HIP-HOP

During the many years since their 1989 breakthrough, Mike Simpson and John King have remained relatively publicity-shy, sometimes not turning up for interviews and, if one goes by the printed results, often only offering a few lines of explanation. Since few people know exactly how and why they do things, a certain mystique has begun to surround them, threatening to make them almost as legendary as the classic albums they’ve been involved in.

It was therefore with some excitement and amazement that yours truly spent almost three hours on an international phone call with the duo. One reason for their openness may have been that the interview was, in part, set up to focus on another successful Dust Brother’s venture, The Boat. This state-of-the-art recording facility was opened for commercial use in 2003, and, based around a vintage Neve 8028 desk from 1969 and a ProTools HD3 system, it has become one of Los Angeles’ most happening studios (see box item).

The studio may have provided the occasion, but King and Simpson were also comfortable reflecting on their sampling and producing activities, as well as on the long way that they’ve come, given that neither originally considered themselves musicians. Simpson once studied philosophy and took computer-programming classes; King studied computer science and played the trumpet in his high school band. Neither man identified very much with the traditional practice-your-instrument-hard approach to music. Instead, both were interested in DJ-ing and music technology.

“My musical background came from collecting records,” recalled Simpson, “and studying the sounds and arrangements and the way they were recorded. I grew up in New York listening to black music, and I was there for that famous summer in the mid ’70s when hip-hop started. When I moved out to California in 1978 there was no hip-hop or rapping culture here, so I lived on cassettes sent to me by friends. In 1986 I enrolled in a local community college, where I did a class in electronic music. That was my first opportunity to really do computer sequencing and work seriously with samplers. I’d been doing a college radio show since 1983, during which I played hip-hop music, and I began playing the music I was putting together in class on the radio show. I met John in 1985, and he joined me in putting on the show and putting together tapes.”

DUST IT OFF

King and Simpson’s hip-hop radio show caught the ear of rapper Tone-Loc. He had just signed to the newly formed record company Delicious Vinyl, who in turn were busy setting up their own studio. Tone-Loc and Delicious Vinyl invited Simpson and King to help out producing records and setting up the company’s studio.

During these first years in the recording studio, The Dust Brothers were predominantly engaged in dusting down, or perhaps dusting off, old records, and giving them new leases on life. They applied their sampling skills with considerable success on Tone Loc’s Loc’d After Dark (1989), and Young MC’s Stone Cold Rhymin’ (1989). Then they hit upon a project that became the landmark Paul’s Boutique. Did the duo actually set out to change the music industry, or did they just stumble into prominence? “The latter,” claimed Simpson, with estimable modesty.

“Sampling was just a hobby for us – something we did for fun while we were in college. John was destined to become a genius computer programmer, and I was going to enrol in law school. We never had any intention of making records. I didn’t even know what record producers did at the time. In the course of doing samples for Delicious Vinyl Records, every once and a while we put something together that seemed just too dense and too busy and too crazy for a rapper to rap on, and we put these tracks aside as instrumental Dust Brothers tracks. Then the Beastie Boys wandered into the studio, and heard one of these tracks, and they loved it. That’s how the album got started.”

“Up until that point in hip-hop, people had been using samples very sparsely and minimally. If anything, they would use one sample in a song and take a drum loop and that would be the foundation. But what we were doing was making entire songs out of samples taken from various different sources. On Paul’s Boutique everything was a collage. There was one track on which the Beastie Boys played some instruments, but apart from that everything was made of samples. But we never had a grand vision of trying to make groundbreaking music. We just enjoyed making music in a way that was an extension of our DJ-ing, combining two to three songs, but with greater accuracy than you could do with turntables.”

UNDERSTAND THE MEDIUM

Most samples used on Paul’s Boutique were cleared, easily and affordably, something that would be “unthinkable,” stated Simpson, in today’s litigious music industry. Paul’s Boutique will therefore always be unique. In the early 1990s, with anti-sampling legislation and attitudes tightening, The Dust Brothers busied themselves with re-mixing and cutting their teeth on engineering, composing, and producing. Their increasing fame offered them lots of opportunities to apply these skills, but Simpson admitted that they spent several years climbing a steep learning curve.

“It was tough. People asked us why our stuff from the late 1980s sounded so good, and we said that it simply was because the original recordings that we sampled sounded so good. After Paul’s Boutique we signed a publishing deal that gave us some money to live, and we took the opportunity to buy a house and build a home studio. We spent three to four years there learning how to record and engineer stuff. Paul’s Boutique and Odelay were sort of the crowning achievements, but there were a lot of lesser records in between.”

COOKING IN THE LAB

The Dust Brothers’ created their studio in a spare bedroom in their house in Silverlake, Los Angeles and called it PCP Labs. The studio existed from 1991-2001, and sported a 24-channel Soundcraft Spirit desk (Simpson: “We loved this board. We tracked a lot of great songs through it, including all the songs from Odelay”). The studio was later split into two control rooms in 1996, with two Yamaha 02Rs in King’s room and a 64-input Amek Einstein in Simpson’s section.

Despite the legal issues, substantial aspects of the Dust Brother’s college-era collage approach to music continued to survive, and with Beck’s Odelay they finally found the perfect marriage between this and their newly acquired engineering and production skills. Beck’s attitude and way of working gave them a perspective on an additional reason why previous efforts had met with such variable success. The Dust Brothers found that musicians who were not familiar with the new technology often approached recording in a manner that was at odds with their way of working.

“We would sometimes record musicians the way you would traditionally record a live band, and then added samples,” Simpson explained. “Not very successfully I would say. To some of the more traditional musicians we worked with the idea of sampling was foreign, and they wanted to play things right. But we don’t necessarily want you to play things right, we want you to play things cool. You play over a groove until you have a good bar, and then we take that bar and loop it. I always say that our best music comes from mistakes that happen. Sometimes mistakes end up being ‘the hook’ and the coolest part of the song.”

“Beck really understood the benefits of sampling from the beginning, and understood what our goal was. It’s a different mindset for a musician, and Beck really got that. He’s totally uninhibited, and not necessarily trying to play it right. He’s just trying to play it with attitude and flavour. That makes it easy for us, and it’s why we have had such great success in working with him. He hand-delivers us these great out-of-control performances that leave us with tracks that we can draw all these great loops from.”

BECK – MEANS DICTATE THE END

The Dust Brothers’ latest release is Beck’s eighth studio album Guero, which has been eagerly anticipated, in part because it’s been three years since its predecessor, 2002’s Sea Change, but also because the artist has tended to rather dramatically shift artistic direction with each release.

“Beck wanted to do more of a contemporary R&B record this time. To me Guero picks up where Odelay left off. There’s a little bit of everything: some rock songs, great hip-hop songs, some great blues-inspired songs, 1980s dance-inspired songs, and so on. It’s a melting pot of all the types of songs Beck loves.

“In a sense Guero started back in 1999 when we worked with Beck on some songs for Midnight Vultures. At that time only two of the tracks we were working on were finished in time to make that record. There were six other songs that were pretty well developed, some only needed Beck to finish his vocals and some sprucing up here and there. Beck loved those songs, and wanted to revisit them. So we pulled them up and took some of them apart and reconstructed them for the new album. Pretty much the moment we came into the studio and heard the stuff, the feeling was, ‘yeah, let’s do new stuff too.’ We began this the way we did with Odelay, pulling up loops or samples, pulling out records, saying, ‘oh yeah, I want to do a song that sounds like that.’ But whereas Paul’s Boutique was made from samples, a lot of Odelay and the new record is more based on sound than on the samples themselves. We were after the sound and the vibe more than anything else.”

“Our [non-record] samples come from years of tracking,” Simpson elaborated. “Everything we ever tried or worked on, apart from the Stones’ material, which we were forced to turn over, has ended up on hard disk. At one point we had one of our employees compile all the samples from throughout our history, and we now have one huge sample library called Dust Beats, containing all the beats in one folder, and there’s a folder with bass grooves, and guitar grooves, and so on. Using Ableton [Live] you can easily scroll through these sample libraries, and see whether they fit.”

John King agreed that “the creative process in making the new album was very similar to the making of Odelay,” adding, “it was about Mike, Beck and I in a room, having fun, coming up with ideas, then embellishing and finishing them.” Yet King quickly went on to elaborate on the dissimilarities. Interestingly, they were to a substantial degree the result of advances in technology in between the making of the two albums. Guero was created and recorded during 2004 at the Dust Brothers’ The Boat studio, using its 24-in/32-out ProTools HD3 system. Odelay had come into being almost 10 years earlier, during 1994/5, at PCP Labs.

“The major difference,” King explained, “is that we’re doing everything with ProTools now. For Odelay we used [Opcode] Studio Vision software and Digidesign hardware, with a two-channel interface, so we could only record or play back one or two tracks of live audio at the same time. I had to take everything that we did and convert it into samples that could then be played back with the SampleCell card, and make Midi notes that corresponded with wherever I wanted the samples to happen. But for the new album we had many inputs and outputs and as many tracks as we wanted. We don’t even use a sampler anymore, because there are so many tracks. That’s also allowed us to layer more vocals and have multiple mics on instruments, which we couldn’t do before.”

“For this new album we began songs written from scratch in Ableton Live, running with ProTools. I love Live. It’s a quick way for me to get the ball rolling, and quickly make ideas happen that Beck likes and then plays over. I get that going and then set up microphones, like the [Shure] SM57 combined with Neumann U47 or 47 FET for electric guitars (I tend to use 47s on almost everything), sometimes a Royer 122 ribbon mic, using an [Teletronix] LA-3A compressor on acoustic guitars, and so on.

I record all that stuff into ProTools, and pick out my favourite things and cut and paste and create verses and choruses. Then I see what Beck likes and start some arrangement. We continue to go back and forth with each other until I feel the song is there, at which point I hand things over to the studio’s ProTools assistant, Danny Kalb, who continues to work with Beck on overdubs.”

“On one of the songs,” King enthused, “I think it was called Emergency Exit, there are all these strange digital artefacts and stretching noises going on that Ableton was making. I think the song has some loops that went at half speed. The average person would say, ‘that sounds horrible, they need to improve their stretching algorithms,’ but Beck was like, ‘wow, that sounds amazing.’ When he says that I just go with it. A lot of the exploratory nature of the work we do with Beck comes from his open-mindedness and eagerness to try new things. The same happened with several effecty plug-ins, like SoundToys and some of the GRM Tools stuff, which I used for creating crazy, freaky effects. Beck always wanted me to record while I was doing that.”

GOLDEN MOMENTS

While King and Simpson are quite happy to see their old sampling and sequencing gear relegated to the dustbin of history (see The Future Now & Then box item), a whiff of nostalgia crept in when they recalled how they went back to their bad old E-mu Emax HD during the making of Guero. “Beck was into a song that I had carried around on a cassette since 1989,” King elaborated. “It had been composed on an [Akai] MPC60 and the Emax sampler, the same one we used on Paul’s Boutique. At the time I had just bought some new records and had pulled a few things and programmed this beat. It was very hip-hop.”

“Beck and I decided to use it, and started working with it from cassette, while my assistants and I were frantically searching all storage areas for the original discs. When we finally found them I had to contact the Experience Music Project Museum in Seattle, because we had donated our Emax sampler to the hip-hop exhibit for its grand opening. They sent the sampler back to us, and I popped in the disc and lo and behold, it worked! We also managed to load the MPC60 disk into Mike’s MPC2000, so we were able to get a more pure sound than we had from the cassette, which had a lot of hiss on it and didn’t have a lot of dynamics.”

The title of the song on which the material was used is Hell Yes. Sonic considerations aside, returning to Emax’s “punchy and raw” sounding 12-bit/22k samples was also a consequence of The Dust Brother’s recording ethos. “I certainly know better than to try to re-record or re-create things that sound cool,” King commented. “Record companies used to do demos, and that’s something Mike and I always fought against early in our career. When something sounds great, it’s done. You don’t want to repeat golden moments. We always felt like, ‘we don’t do demos, we only do finished product.’”

FIRST RULE OF THE FIGHT CLUB SCORE…

Dreaming about his future, John King, meanwhile, sees himself improving his studio skills – “I’m still a student of recording and producing and I’m still hungry to learn all kinds of things” – and would love to see the realisation of a Dust Brothers album. The duo have been writing music for various media, such as television (MTV Sports & Music, Grammy Awards, X-Files), individual tracks for feature films (Dead Man on Campus, Muppets From Space), TV commercials, and the Microsoft ‘Welcome to Windows 98’ theme. One soundtrack album was released under the Brothers’ own name, Fight Club (1999).

The ambition for a genuine Dust Brothers album nevertheless remains. “Fight Club is not a Dust Brothers album, it’s a Fight Club album,” stressed King. “It was music done for a film and not meant to stand alone. We’ve been working on a Dust Brothers album since 1987, but songs continually get given to artists we work with. And now we’re both so busy with things we’re working on, and we both have families, that it’s hard to get round to doing your own thing…”

A sentiment that will be echoed by many readers, I’m sure.