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In these times of “press play” superstar DJs and retina searing pyrotechnic displays, Facebook and Twitter likes seem conversely proportional to the talent or effort put into musical production.n Soundcloud has made overnight millionaires out of once unheard of Dutch bedroom producers, and yet, with all this cash and success floating around, outside of the likes of The Prodigy, Orbital and the like, creativity seems to be at an all time low for stadium dance music.
So when a group who have have been producing music long enough to remember what it was like to learn to DJ on vinyl and continuously play to stadium sized crowds are willing to put their musical credibility on the line by producing an acoustic album – and a great one at that – it's a very big call. The task of taking a DJ sound to a live setting is a big enough risk in itself, so to totally re-imagine your back catalogue is something that should make the most experienced producer's palms a little sweaty. So whether an ardent fan of Above & Beyond, or only learning now that trance and EDM are not, in fact, the same thing, the group’s journey from flames and lasers to plectrums and pianos is one worth hearing.
In order to find out more about this unique project, modestly dubbed “Above & Beyond: Acoustic,” which saw Above & Beyond play four sold out shows at London's famous Porchester Halm, and two more sold-out nights at The Greek Theater in Los Angeles, I caught up with Tony McGuinness from the group while he was in the studio working on material for the next Above & Beyond electronic music album, due out this summer.
You guys have been playing together acoustically for a while now, right? Well to be honest, we haven’t done that much acoustically. We did do a live gig in Beirut. We did have big plans to do a live electronic show, but to be honest, we didn’t really enjoy it that much (laughs). Because we’re all musicians, and want to perform properly, it’s trying to find the balance between doing something that feels comfortable for musicians to do, and giving the audience what they want.
We tried to reproduce the records, but some of them are extremely loud – extremely loud and extremely electronic. There’s a lot of stuff that you could play, but trying to play a sequenced arpeggio or the bass line with a machine is kind of a thankless task. So it begs the question, how much live do you want to put in there? We tried to use samples in a drum kit, but when played by a real live person, they don’t have that machine-like monotony that you know from electronic music. So it was kind of a slightly disappointing thing.
A lot of people do live shows and just mime basically. It’s a bunch of lights and people feigning keyboard finger movements, but we don’t really don’t want to do that.
So we had this opportunity where we had an album (Anjunabeats, Volume 6) with balloons on the front. And we were thinking about what we could do to make the campaign more fun. So we decided we would do a little gig in a hot air balloon. Obviously there’s no room to do anything electronically, so we just strummed a couple of acoustic guitars. Zoe (Johnston) sang, Paavo played the piano, and it was amazing. We didn’t know what to expect, but we thought, “That’s interesting. Maybe we should do something like that but more full on.” And that’s where the germ of the project came in.
The next important part of the process was being our own musical director, or three musical directors. For the Beirut live show, we had all decided it would be simpler to have a single, outside-looking-in source to worry about the nature of the arrangements and everything else. So we employed an old friend of mine, Bob Bradley. He sort of knows our music, but more importantly, I know what he does to my songs. He’s got a very particular sound palate.
We had a number of very beautiful collaborate meetings. The process was originally to make an album in order to decide what we played on stage, and we ended up with a studio album, which is why there’s a studio album now. In order to arrange it to everybody’s happiness, we needed to hear what it would sound like. So we went up and recorded all our bits, and Bob jig-sawed it all together and arranged it so we could hear what it sounded like when we played it on stage. That was a way of signing it off, and then we did the gigs.
It was an exercise of sorts. It was something we really wanted to do, but not for any other reason than that we wanted to do it. So once we had done it, we were thinking those four gigs we had in London would probably be it. We’d film it for posterity, then we’d see if there was any demand for doing it. But half way through the week, we were so excited by our enjoyment levels and the enjoyment levels of the audience – all of whom are hardcore, Above & Beyond, electronic music, raver fans that came along. But to see them all in tears and so enthralled by the whole thing, we just thought, “This thing’s maybe got more legs than we thought.”
So we had a couple of dates on hold at the Greek Theater already where we were going to do a couple small shows. And James said, “Well why don’t we do the Greek as acoustic?” And I of course said, “Yeah!” It’s so much fun to play. But I think that’s it for now, we really need to concentrate on our day job if you know what I mean. So it’s back to electronic beats. But it’s lovely. It was and is hugely enjoyable, the whole thing – the video editing and the finishing of the album – it’s a very fond memory.
Was it difficult to choose which songs you wanted acoustic versions of? Well to be honest, with this first wave of songs, we tried to pick the ones that we felt were the most popular, and laid over that was a desire to make it an interesting show where all the singers got to do an equal bit. Originally we arranged it to be four songs each, and then Zoe decided she didn’t want to sing “Cant’ Sleep,” so it ended up a little lop-sided in terms of the numbers, but that was the thought process – we needed four Zoe songs, four Alex (Vargas) songs and four Oceanlab songs.
There are others we would have liked to have done. When we played in LA, we thought the album would be out by then, so we thought we better do something additional so it’s not just London re-done. We actually rehearsed three songs – “Black Room Boy,” “No One On Earth,” and a new song called “Blue Sky Action.” They weren’t recorded for the album, but we did those in LA. We nailed “No One On Earth,” but I think the others still need a lot of work in order for them to be up to the standards of the others (laughs).
You said in the Thump video preview that the process behind making a dance music track was strangely impersonal and inorganic. Can you explain a bit more what you mean by that? Most of the world spends their working day staring at a computer screen moving blobs around. That’s what we do. Back in the day when you used to make a record, you’d stand in the studio with your guitar, keyboard, whatever it might be, you’d play, and somebody would put it on a tape. Now, we’re constructing stuff in the digital domain, using software that can manipulate and change and repeat and correct everything you do. So there’s a lot less time spent actually performing. Even if you’re doing some singing, you can change the melody of something you’ve sung rather than singing again. You can check the timing of a bass part rather than play it again. So the amount of time you spend actually playing something, and the amount of time you spend moving coloured blobs around in some sophisticated software – you know, it’s kind of moving towards that. And while it’s fun in sort of a nerdy, kind of, Excel spreadsheet excitable kind of way, it’s not really very human.
It’s probably a different part of your brain involved – the logical part of your brain – to decide whether that thing should be 16 or 16a or 16b, in terms of the groove of it. Where as when you’re singing or playing, I think a whole other process is involved that is involved in your physical being; your fingers, and the years you spent playing, and if you squeeze this fret, that will happen. That’s organic music. It took maybe 2 hours to work up “No One On Earth” in rehearsals with the band that we had. When your making a track, in can take weeks of pushing blobs around the bloody screen. It’s a weird thing. It’s the nature of electronic music that you’re writing and performing and mixing and mastering all at the same time. There’s so many other things, engineering things, involved. Where as, with a band, you just go “one two, three, four,” and it starts, and all these able bodies and voices and singers, old bits of wood, and catguts and whatever else are in play, make the sound happen with real people.
In that same regard, playing live instruments and putting your songs together on stage like you guys did for the acoustic show must have been miles away from DJing...
Continued in Part 2 of our interview with Tony from Above & Beyond>>>
