The Glitch Mob :: Interview [exclusive]

9:56 am 1 Comment

The Glitch Mob are a 3 man electronic group (edIT, Ooah and Boreta) based up the West Coast of America who have made a name for themselves as front runners of progressive music; specifically glitch-hop. Their style is hardly categorical or generic but they have been able to take the genre of Glitch-Hop, to which they loosely subscribe, to a world platform.

Undoubtedly one of the most intriguing aspects of The Glitch Mob is their live show. A combination of technology, instrumentation and energy combine to create a unique performance package that echoes throughout global music followers.

Don’t Party was lucky enough to get the opportunity to have a short Q & A with the Mob in order to gain a little more insight into the minds of these amazing musicians…. and here is what transpired:

Don’t Party presents

The Glitch Mob Interview

San Francisco seems to be the epicenter of the glitch-hop scene at the moment. We recently interviewed Ill Gates [click] and he was telling us how glitch-hop, and music of the sort is noticeably blowing up in the states (we’ve certainly noticed it here!). Is the community of alternative ‘glitch-hop’ artists really tight knit? Is the glitch scene in San Fran like a family?

San Francisco is a great place to be an artist of any sort, and especially in electronic music. The intersection of like minds, lots of talent, and SF’s wild underground scene make it a very unique fixture of the West Coast music scene.

Does the semi-new, wide-spread acknowledgement of this scene affect your perception or feeling about the music you make? Is there any added pressure now as opposed to when you were just jamming tracks at your home studio because you loved just making music?

We are really just doing the same thing we were in the beginning — we are making music because we really love doing it. We also love playing and performing it. It amazes us every time we play a show to a large crowd! We’d be doing it even if there weren’t people there so it’s an honor every time we get to play to our fans.

The ‘Live’ element of music seems to always be in debate between classically live bands and electronically based artists. Your performances definitely undoubtedly puts you at the very forefront of what a live electronic group is or can be. But what is your opinion on ‘Live’ electronic music, do you guys consider yourself as live musicians, and can it ever be as ‘Live’ as traditional band? What would you say to the dude who says electronic music can never be ‘live’?

We are interested in finding new ways to perform music. Whether it’s a new tool, a new sound, or a new instrument, these are all exciting to us. To us it’s about the music more than the technology. It just so happens that technology allows us to do perform in ways we could not do otherwise.

Animus Vox – DRINK THE SEA – Out Now by The Glitch Mob

I don’t think we fit into the same category traditional live musicians. We are practicing a very different art form than someone who goes on stage and plays a something like trumpet or a set of drums. I think new definitions will emerge as the technology progresses and becomes more accessible.

How has the advancement of these technologies, such as Ableton, traktor, Jazzmutant Lemur’s, APC 40’s etc, affected your performances? Has it changed them and is there anything that you can’t currently do that with all this tech that you want to on stage?

The way we perform on stage would not be remotely possible without Ableton. There’s absolutely no other piece of software out there that could allow us to do what we do. Before when we were only DJing songs there was lots of software that could get the job done. Now that we actually play each note from our songs on various controllers, we need something as vast and powerful as Ableton to handle it. When we were creating the live set, we bounced out every single note from Drink The Sea and ported it into Ableton so we could perform it mainly on the Lemur. The Lemur allows us to get the crowd involved with show because of the fact that it’s a touch screen and we tilt it towards the audience. It’s also completely customizable so it’s easy for us to program interfaces to our liking.

‘Drink the Sea’ is amazing, and is definitely one of our top albums of the year! But the name, the Glitch Mob, insinuates a strong force of glitched/ tweaked out music, but the new Album ‘Drink The Sea’ seems to have shed the ‘glitch’ image, wherein music is cut-up and effected, and the tracks are really strong musically. Do you guys still see yourself as part of the glitch scene/ movement or have you traversed its boundaries?

When writing Drink The Sea our focus was to make an album that was a journey. We aimed to use our sound and music to paint a picture and tell a story. The way the album was engineered and mastered was meant to support the narrative of record. It was important for us to allow the listener to really dive into the sound and get lost in it. That’s not to say that we’ll never use our hyper-chop glitch tricks again! I think of it like a painting that we just wanted to look a certain way to get the point across.

When I listen to the album (for example tracks like ‘a dream within a dream’, ‘between two points’ and ‘bad wings’) I feel as though I am listening to a live, instrumental band: Was this a conscious decision, like let’s make this album as live as possible, and does the construct of doing live electronic shows have a strong influence on how songs are written and sound? In other words does the premise of performing these tracks live in any way dictate how they sound in the studio?

The way this album was written was very introspective for us. It was more about us putting ourselves out there and really being true to how we felt when writing the music. Everything else you hear is really secondary to that for this album.

Take us through the process of stripping a track down to recreate it live as the Glitch-Mob does. Is it kind of like edIT you take drums, OOah you take guitars, Boreta grab the effects, or do you mess around with the midi, splitting it into sections until it feels right?

We split the entire song into bits and pieces first. Every note gets bounced out from Cubase as audio and imported into an Ableton Sampler instrument. Then we lay everything out in the arrange and recreate all of the filtering, automation and compression using the Ableton tools. The goal of this is to have the song be playing as close to the recorded version of possible but out of Ableton, and with no effects (so that we lessen CPU/HD load). Once everything is in we decide who wants to play what and we’ll map things to different controllers. We’ll play around with Lemurs, keyboards or V-drums and see what feels right for that sound. Once we decided on that, we automate all of the samplers so that they automatically change throughout each song depending on what part each person is assigned to play. For instance if your part in a song starts off as drums, then changes to a synth, then goes back to drums we will automate the samplers so that you can just stay on one controller. This allows the focus to remain on the performance as the computer does the work of choosing the sounds for you.

What studio gear do you guys favour to create your tracks? Are you outboard junkies or do you rely more on VST stuff?

Right now we are mainly software based. We use Cubase 5, Ableton, Native Instruments software, Arturia, and UAD.

You guys always seem to be pushing the boundaries whether it be marketing (taking it so the streets in san fran), music, music videos or live performances. So what comes next for the Glitch-Mob?

Lots and lots and lots of touring!