hand to mouth

OFF THE CHAIN

In Livaudais’ Brooklyn apartment (which doubles as Telepathe’s rehearsal space) there is plenty of traditional musical equipment—drums, large speakers, old guitars—but Livaudis and Gangnes focus on the iBook on the coffee table. They have an M-Audio keyboard hooked up to it and are running the program Logic. That combination gives them, essentially, access to every synthesizer ever, and as a companion, various filters to bend and pitch each note. They have a myriad of different drum options (including, through a connection, a bank of samples from a well-known Southern crunk producer). All told, each Telepathe song has about a hundred different tracks of squawk and smack, tirelessly tested through trial and error. After the basics of a song are mapped out in Logic, they bounce those files into Ableton Live, where they double all the drums so they sound less computer-generated. Then they triple them by recording live ones atop the finished electronic files. It’s modern band practice—seated in front of a laptop with braids of tangled wires, each connecting a new possibility—because, really, does Brooklyn need another regular rock band?


I don’t really do it song by song, and even though I knew there was obviously an underlying concept occurring, it was very much just whenever I had time to write I’d just quickly steal a moment. I usually write at home, in my bed with my headphones, and I have a sequencer machine. So, I do, like, “Daniel”, you know, I start with a beat, and then the DO-DO, da-DO-DO, da-DOO-DO, da-DO-DO [singing], like the bassline, put the choir part in, then I’ll work out the vocal melody. And so I either write on piano or on my little machine where I’ll do all the elements of the song. So what you’re left with is a mixture between kind of piano-based songs and then like more electronic-based songs. And then we flesh those out and work on those and I’ll bring people in to play certain aspects of them, but I have a really strong kind of vision and idea just from the demo stage. By the end of it, when I looked at it, I was like, “Ah, OK, there’s like a story here,” which I kind of knew would be there, but I didn’t realize it was such a concept album.

I don’t really do it song by song, and even though I knew there was obviously an underlying concept occurring, it was very much just whenever I had time to write I’d just quickly steal a moment. I usually write at home, in my bed with my headphones, and I have a sequencer machine. So, I do, like, “Daniel”, you know, I start with a beat, and then the DO-DO, da-DO-DO, da-DOO-DO, da-DO-DO [singing], like the bassline, put the choir part in, then I’ll work out the vocal melody. And so I either write on piano or on my little machine where I’ll do all the elements of the song. So what you’re left with is a mixture between kind of piano-based songs and then like more electronic-based songs. And then we flesh those out and work on those and I’ll bring people in to play certain aspects of them, but I have a really strong kind of vision and idea just from the demo stage. By the end of it, when I looked at it, I was like, “Ah, OK, there’s like a story here,” which I kind of knew would be there, but I didn’t realize it was such a concept album.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Bon Iver

—Wisconsin

Well, I went up there, because I absolutely needed it. Things had been chasing me, and I had been chasing too far from the things that I wanted in my life, in my cradle, my mind. I got up there to the space and the peace, the silence, and felt as if those voices you hear in your head had much more time to work themselves out. They aren’t distracted by the doorbell, the phone, or your roommate walking in. You get to hear them out. I unraveled up there. I unraveled a lot of shit - from a long, long time..

I had a very light set-up, a basic small recording set-up: an Sm57 and an old Silvertone guitar. I had my brother drop off his old drums… some other small things - things I would make or find lying around. 

Well, I think I’m a pretty overt emotional person, and I think I get addicted to emotion and emotional context. So, if I have an idea… I usually am too quick to get to the point if I go in the conscious way. I usually set the song up, go in and try and get lost somehow…. in it, in sounds, and vocal shapes… And, I usually end up extracting some kind of lyrical idea, that is more folded and obscure but somehow gives ME even more meaning to what I am feeling about a subject. I really actually learn a lot about myself writing in that way.

Treble: So all you used was a four-track and basic equipment? 

JV: It was mostly an old-model Macintosh and ProTools LE. 

Treble: Because I’d heard there were some overdubs later on, but there were also a lot of tape-splice sounds like you’d tinkered with them for hours and hours. 

JV: Yeah, it was labor-intensive. I spent a lot of time recording each individual part over and over again until they were all smoothed out. On many of the songs, there’s a minimum of eight vocal tracks, so to get them to blend and do the right thing, I just went over and over it until it sort of smoothed out. 

Treble: You were able to capture a wide vocal range in very little. 

JV: Yeah, exactly. 

Treble: Well, what parts of the album were overdubbed? What did you go back and include afterwards? 

JV: Everything was overdubbed to a certain degree. One guitar part was taken from a demo, just a once-recorded idea I had laid down in North Carolina … so that was still on my computer. I just opened it up one day and finished it as is. But other than that, all the guitars, singing and drums were all recorded up north. And then in early February [2007], before I went back to North Carolina to tour, to go to Russia with The Rosebuds, I got my friends Randy [Pingrey] and John [Dehaven] to play trumpet and trombone on “For Emma.” They came over for a day and we drank some whiskey, and I had them write some parts for me … And then probably in April, after I got back from Russia – this is back in North Carolina – I had to bring my computer back down because I wasn’t done mixing. At that point, I thought the songs were just demos. I was only trying to mix them really, really nice to send out to a few labels to see if they would give me money to record a “regular” album. But I handed my couple buddies a copy of the CD, and literally, after handing those out, it never slowed down. It started an avalanche and I had no choice but to put it out as a record. 

Treble: The first thing I thought of, probably even before hearing For Emma when I was just reading about you, it reminded me a whole lot of what Sub Pop did with Sam Beam of Iron & Wine. How they released it as-is from his home recordings in Florida. Do you prefer that method? Do you like that things worked out this way, where the record is exactly what you did in the cabin, instead of having to redo it again? 

JV: I think so, if for no other reason than when you try to re-record something, it’s like trying to re-acclimate yourself to a certain mood after the fact, and you just never get it again. I’m a pretty worrisome dude, so the only reason I thought [the originals] were demos was because I was insecure. I still, to a certain degree, will be insecure always, but I think that I’ll continue to make records like this. I’m not going to hire engineers; I’m not going to hire producers. I’m fully capable of doing all that stuff, and I’m just going to keep it within myself, under my control and surveillance. 

Treble: Just out of personal curiosity, how did you make the vibrating string sound on “Flume”? I ask because I used to record my own music and had tried to make a similar sound, but kept breaking guitar strings from using handheld buffers and things. 

JV: It’s a magnetic field you put over the strings called an E-Bow that’s been used in a lot of different genres. It creates a magnetic field between the strings and the magnet, so it gets the string vibrating really, really fast. And then if you slam the magnet against the string, it gives it a break sound. The string itself doesn’t break, hopefully. It’s a very light vibration, but it sounds very violent. 

Treble: In another recent interview, you mentioned a unique method you had of coming up with your vocal parts – how you would not come up with the lyrics first, but the actual vocals, which you would then “interpret” into words. 

JV: It’s exciting for me. It’s a new thing. Basically, I had a lot on my mind, but it was stuff that I had tried to write about. I would get so tired of it and get to where I was kinda giving up trying to make music a career. I thought maybe I could record bands, but I had run out of things to write about. But I still had all these things on my mind that had been unexpressed, like un-extracted, I guess you’d say. I’d record a line in “Lump Sum,” then I’d go back and record a melody, and then if I liked the first line but didn’t like the second line, I’d go back and record syllables of a melody. So I’d have the melody, then I’d double that with the new syllables. And it kinda sounds like jargon: two people saying different things. 

Treble: Uh huh … 

JV: And I’d do that for all the songs, then I’d go back and listen to them about 20 times and write down what I thought I heard. It would be different every time. I compiled them and, at the end, it was very interesting for me; it was very freeing. I found all this shit, all this grudge and meaning in what I was singing, these syllables. It was weird to put them together and match them up to the sounds that I was hearing. I was able to get every sound and nuance of the voice on a musical level, with phrasing and the way words sound natural going after each other. Good lyricists are also people who just put words in good order ‘cause they sound good together. So I was able to do all that completely unhinged, instead of having to make words that rhyme or whatever, and I was able to get lyrics that were born and meaningful to me in a way that was distant and new. It wasn’t like I was pulling them out of my heart and putting them on a piece of paper. It was a roundabout way of doing it and I ended up writing some of my favorite songs that way.  

Along with privileging the percussion parts in this new album, he performed, recorded and produced everything on it.

Asked whether he comes up with lyrics or music first for his songs, Nick explains “Because I play lots of different instruments I usually come up with a melody then come up with a bass part. I sort of write it in my head then I record the drum part first, while I’m recording the drum part I’ll be thinking where the bass parts go. then I’ll do the lyrics. Sometimes I’ll write lyrics and then write the song around that but usually I’ll write the music and put the lyrics on top of it.”