SOUND ON SOUND

Anyone in any doubt as to the popularity of Depeche Mode should see this man's studio. Alan Wilder, formerly the programming powerhouse of the group, and now striking out on his own, has poured the profits of his years with the Mode into his astonishing new set-up.

Here he talks to Bill Bruce about his new album, and his days with Depeche.
 

Sound On Sound, January 1998
 

For many of us, a home studio is a loft or bedroom crammed - if we're lucky - with a sampler, synth, computer, some effects and a DAT player. Alan Wilder, late of Depeche Mode and currently working on a studio-based recording project entitled Recoil, may have a home studio somewhat grander than most, but he maintains that his set-up is surprisingly simple. The main work area was actually planned by a interior design company, and consequently exhibits the same exquisite, minimalist, open-plan design as his family home.

Admittedly, since his well-documented split from Depeche a couple of years ago, Recoil has become the focus for Wilder's creative energies, becoming a one-man musical melting pot which has so far managed to mix blues, rock, electronics, classical elements, ambient and rap (and that's just for starters). But in the beginning, there was just a collection of tracks released in the '80s, entitled (with typical minimalism) 1+2, which was just a home demo which hadn't even been intended to lead anywhere in particular.

"I certainly didn't feel a pressure to make it more conventional, but I did feel that I couldn't just keep producing experimental instrumental music all the time. I'd quite often get to a stage where I thought the music lacked something, and reasoned that if I was to progress with it in any way, I would have to bring something else in - be it vocals or whatever to enhance what were basically backing tracks. 'Bloodline' was a halfway-house between the early stuff and what I'm doing now. I brought the vocals in, but I didn't really see it through in the way I should have. I think I lacked the energy. I had Depeche Mode commitments, and I was really fitting 'Bloodline' into the first real break the band had taken in 10 years. By the end of that year - while also producing a Nitzer Ebb album - I'd just run out of energy. I think Bloodline suffers a little bit because of it, especially the vocals. They're there as almost last minute atmospherics rather than to make real songs."
 
 

And so, on to this year's 'Unsound Methods', which continues the collaborative style of 'Bloodline'. Douglas McCarthy returns on the Apocalypse Now-inspired track 'Incubus', as well as the sinister 'Stalker,' and Alan has also roped in his partner, Hepzibah Sessa, formerly of Miranda Sex Garden, on backing vocals. In addition to Hepzibah, other vocals are supplied by Hildia Cambell, a session singer whom Wilder previously worked with on his final Depeche Mode album, 'Songs Of Faith & Devotion'.

Two complete newcomers, New York spoken-word artist and poet Maggie Estep, who brings her own unique slant to the narratives of 'Luscious Apparatus' and 'Control Freak'; and a young singer named Siobhan Lynch, whose demo was passed on to Wilder, and who guests on the tracks 'Drifting' and 'Missing Piece'. However, Wilder explains that many of these collaborations are born of necessity rather than through any great desire to have anyone else involved.
 

As I've said, on 'Bloodline', I almost purposely held the vocals back. At the time, I wasn't so interested in the words, only the textures. This time around, the words were really the top line. I'm very careful about the placement of everything, since that's the part of the process I enjoy. For me, this process is crucial to provide an overall continuity, so that I can use four completely different vocalists without the record sounding chaotic and unfocused."
 
 
 

At no time does Alan snipe at or carp about his former bandmates. Aspects of the split make him uncomfortable, yet he will quite cheerily reminisce about a particular tour, party or recording session.At no time does Alan snipe at or carp about his former bandmates. Aspects of the split make him uncomfortable, yet he will quite cheerily reminisce about a particular tour, party or recording session.

When he is asked how it felt to listen to 'Ultra', Depeche's most recent album and their first without him, he admits it was a weird experience.

With 'Songs Of Faith & Devotion', the songs seemed to lend themselves to a more aggressive, looser feel. 'Violator' (1990) had been a more precise record although there were a lot of guitars on there as well. Yet somehow it was still very programmed and rigid. 'Songs Of Faith & Devotion 'was much less inhibited and dynamic, but far from being a rock album."

This process of disinhibition has continued in Wilder's work with Recoil, and is clearly something he welcomes. Alan is the first to admit that in the synth and sampler dominated early and mid-'80s, Depeche Mode sometimes went very overboard to get a sound.
 

"By the time we came to record 'Some Great Reward' (1984), we not only had the Emulator, but Daniel Miller had invested £60,000 in a Synclavier which rarely worked - although when it did it sounded great. I think there was a time when Daniel got too involved in the technology, in fact I can remember one particular sound we created for 'Shake The Disease'."
 

These days I can still use 40 or 50 sounds per song, but somehow there's still space in the music. To me, the details are very important, and I'm not content with guitar, bass and drums as my only instrumentation. If you've got the possibility to refine your music by bringing in a variety of atmospheres and textures, then why not do it? You can draw people into the music even though all the little details don't really make themselves apparent right away.
 
 

Depeche Mode spent a lot of time farting around, possibly with too much equipment. We also tried too many ways of doing something that was really very simple. I think one of the benefits of working on my own is I don't have to go through everybody's ideas. I don't have to answer to anyone."
 

It's easy to assume from looking at Alan's amazing studio that he's a technology addict, especially when he presses a button and part of the studio floor slides away, James Bond-style, to reveal a basement 'store room', housing a host of older samplers, amongst them an E-mu Emulator II, and an original Emax. But, in fact, Alan has a cautious outlook when it comes to purchasing gear, and though 'Unsound Methods' is a dense, dark album sonically, it belies the actual amount of equipment used to create it.
 

"Obviously, I do embrace technology, but I never spend a lot of time researching all the latest equipment. I'm like most people, really. I get something that works and I stick with it. Occasionally, I update when it becomes obvious I need to, but basically I like to act a set-up that works for me, then I don't think about it too much. I can't stand equipment manuals, so I never even read them. I just find it boring. If you really get too involved in technology you go crazy, because there's too much choice. I try to use tools to their optimum, but if I really took time to fully explore the technology, I would never get any work done!

My studio now is made up of bits and pieces I've acquired over the years. I always had things like my Minimoog anyway, and then I'd bring keyboards like the Emulators home. In fact, I was working with the internal sequencer in the Emulator for a while, which wasn't very good, but it was all I had around. In terms of recording, everything was going onto a 4-track reel-to-reel, so it was a very basic set-up to begin with.

The Minimoog is a machine I return to now because there are sounds in there I particularly like for a certain job. I use it for sequencer-type basslines or for a mid-range parts - sort of bubbly synth sounds with a wide dynamic range, using velocity sensitivity. That doesn't mean it's not capable of doing other things, of course.

Most of what I'm doing at the moment is very sample-based, with an original source sample providing the sound. I then use the samplers as a tool to manipulate that source sound, and in that respect I always look for an instrument which has really good filtering, time-stretching and lots of possibilities for stacking sounds on top of each other. Those kind of facilities are what interest me. Consequently, I end up using Akais. I prefer them to my Emulator III, mainly because of the Akai's better output assignment facilities, and also the fact that you can stack more sounds on top of each other. The E3 actually sounds very good, but is a bit limited in that department.

I also got fed-up with Emulators because I would purchase one for a lot of money, and then six months later they'd bring out an incompatible new model that rendered mine redundant. I got very angry about that, which is another reason why I ended up with these Akais. They seem to do what I want, so I stuck with them."

Alan also finds it important to have easy access to the equipment in his set-up. To this end, a Mark Of The Unicorn MIDI Timepiece AV is invaluable.
 

"I use a Korg O1/W ProX as my master keyboard. All the other keyboards and modules run through the MTP AV. Then I can assign parts to any machine. I've just got one patch on the MTP which allows me at least 64 MIDI channels. I can have 8 or 16 MIDI possibilities via the MTP, which is easy enough."
 

The heart of the Recoil set-up is Alan's Power Mac running Cubase XT v3.0. His ultimate aim is to run all the tracks, his effects and acoustic parts from the computer, without laying anything to tape at any stage.
 

"I've always dreamed of being able to have everything immediately accessible and totally flexible. In the past, there has always been some limitation or other. I've had to commit my work to a format which allows no room for change later, like tape. Now-everything is flexible - including the vocals. I'm able to restructure what someone has given me, such as a lead vocal, and pick pieces up and move them around.

If you want to go to the chorus it's simple, there's no spooling of tape or syncing things up. It's just there. That's why I really love Cubase's Cycle Mode. If I want to work on a two-bar sequence in the middle of a chorus, I can go into Cycle and repeat it over and over, making adjustments as it goes. You just couldn't do that in the '70s!"
 

Despite the freedom technology offers the modem musician, it also brings it's own unique problems, as the average SOS reader will be aware, and, like everyone else, Alan suffers the occasional technological irritation.
 

"I do find there are drawbacks with Cubase sometimes, in terms of 'syncing over MIDI. Sometimes my drum loops aren't tight enough, but at the end of the day, if it feels good, things like that don't bother me, although by the same token, slight timing discrepancies can be crucial to the 'feel' in a track, and in that respect I often want to put them right. If that makes me seem like a trainspotter then I would argue against that - I'm very conscious of the feel and the groove of music, to the point where I am almost obsessed by it. Not because I want everything regimented, but because I want to optimise that aspect."
 

Although the developments in direct-to-disk recording are the best thing to happen to the recording studio since the invention of the tape-based multitrack, Alan is aware he still hasn't put together his ideal set-up.
 
 

I'm not that far off having that capability, but I do need to refine my set-up a little bit, so that with the next album I won't have to pick up my studio and transport it to a 'not-very good' commercial studio with an automated desk and a more controlled sound, spending lots of money in the process, which was what I had to do on this particular album."

"Martin always thought there was a lot of humour in Depeche Mode's music. I didn't think so particularly, although the people themselves were funny and humorous. I don't understand why it is you have to be like your music, or why making music which reflects your own personality is important. The darker sides of people's characters are much more interesting than the side they let you see. I heard a member of a particularly well-known band ask recently why it is that people always assume that just because you're in a band with two or three other people, you must all be great buddies?

It doesn't necessarily follow that you have to be great friends to have a good working relationship. And you don't have to be a certain kind of person to make a certain kind of music. What's wrong with being observational? A filmmaker can tell a story, he doesn't have to live the life. Mike Leigh observes the entire class system; he doesn't have to put himself on the screen. I was in a band that wrote melodic pop songs - if I don't do that, is everything I do now a failure?"

The darkness at the heart of Unsound Methods is almost relentless, which seems to be exactly what was intended. Alan agrees with this heartily.

"In the end, it's a solid body of work that has a continuity and seems to subconsciously deal with the same thing over and over again; this idea of obsession, no matter how that manifests itself. I'm not an obsessive character, so it's intriguing that I should have an interest in subjects which revolve about that." 

He mulls this over for a second and adds:

"It's obviously something I need to act out somehow, bearing in mind I don't write the words to these songs. Nevertheless, the atmosphere and subject matter still comes from me. It's just a side of life that interests me more than writing about having babies."