The Trip Towards Dusk
By Richard Thorne, NZ Musician Jun/Jul 1999
Given the organic nature of the production process it is quaintly appropriate that the launch pad for Trip To The Moon is a garden shed! The 7m x 4m model to the side of Tom Ludvigson's home in the Western Springs suburb of central Auckland houses plenty of tools, but there's not a home handyman or garden implement in sight - these tools are all for music making.
Keyboards, drum machines, mixers, processors and computer equipment, old and new, line one side of the shed. Filing and storage media, a desk, table, upright piano, large 3-way monitors and an assortment of chairs fill the rest of the space.
Step carefully inside on a Saturday or Monday afternoon (their current twice-a-week recording schedule) and through the smoke haze you'll find Tom and the other half of Trip To The Moon, Trevor Reekie, at work on their latest cut. This is where their soon-to-be-released album 'Dusk', and its predecessor 'Jazz Hop' were born. Hang around for more than an hour and you may even witness the outline of a brand new song materialise before your ears - they take shape remarkably swiftly.
It's the freedom of a well equipped home studio which allows this pair to create the many layered electronic soundscapes which are the trademark of TTTM. The self-descriptive 'Jazz Hop' debut has sold rather fewer than 1000 copies, and while Trevor owns the Antenna Records label on which it was released in June '97, you can only imagine that earnings covered little more than the power bill over the year that it was conceived. With the luxury of no-charge studio time tracks can be manipulated and reworked to their satisfaction.
The TTTM musical gestation is a constantly surging blend of computer manipulated samples to be later topped, more often than not these days, with a tastefully understated vocal track from 20 year old newcomer Rachel Weatherley, pictured with them on our cover. When not involved in one of many different collaborative music projects, and left alone in his studio, Tom routinely identifies sound bites and rhythms that may provide starting points for future tracks, creating loops and musical stabs, cataloguing them in his head and on a variety of computer storage media.
Tom (the Ludvigson belies his Swedish birth) has been an exponent of electronic music since he bought his first synth, an Electrocomp EML500, some 20 years ago, about the same time Split Enz also bought one. He has been making and recording music with the aid of computers since the days of the Commodore 64 (!) and Internet's predecessor Compuserve.
"The multitrack software I use is called Samplitude. It's a German programme which I bought four years ago through a company in the States. I've had some upgrades since, but I understand it is still one of the most versatile programmes around. Somehow I've got really good, I can work it very fast."
Tom and Trevor have been musically linked for a decade with Trip To The Moon growing from Tom's contributions to Trevor's solo - with friends - ambient project called Cosa (Nostra). Tom recollects back to 1984 when they were competing for public recognition. Trevor was guitarist in the seminal electronic Car Crash Set, releasing their album 'No Accident', at the same time Tom was in Snap with Graham Gash and others, releasing a 12" single called Sidewalk City which reflected the break dance phenomenon of the time.
They met formally some years later through Auckland jazz/blues outfit Bluespeak which just this month released its third album on Trevor's Pagan Records label. Tom played on both Cosa albums which led to the forming of TTTM in 1996.
By now their working relationship is seemingly effortless—a nod, a glance or a half framed question is all that is needed to gain (dis)approval, or to set either off on a new creative course. For two such accomplished, respected and opinionated musicians it is remarkably free of conflict - creative ideas and roles are swapped without either seeming to notice or care. Their communication at times appears telepathic, ideas often come simultaneously. "I'm always two or three seconds ahead of Trevor" quips Tom.
"We've got good enough to know when we are wasting our time now," says Trevor. "It took us a while to sort that out. We tend to fill up, cut down, bring it back, fill up, prune back... and then other things develop - but eventually it can get to be an indulgence. When you've been through all the cycles you've got, and without becoming repetitive you could only start it again, give up - though, I s'pose, you could dub it up at that stage!"
Sounds a little formulaic perhaps but Tom points out that it is just one way of approaching this type of composing.
"The formula is only in the description - it's different every time. The software and using the mouse forces you into a way of working, but within that it's really different I think. I'm so used to recording like this I can't imagine any other way. I watched that 'Get Your Act Together' programme with producers still working with tape and thought 'I could never do that again'(unless I was paid to) - it just seemed so old fashioned."
The TTTM recording process involves several distinct stages and various collaborations. Overlaying a rhythmic bed with selected samples to shape the verse/chorus groove of a track is stage one. Before the song is too shaped however it is burnt to CD and given to Rachel (or in some cases Bobbylon of former Hallelujah Picassos fame) for vocal interpretation. They are left entirely to their own devices to conjure up the vocals.
"It's a nice open process", enthuses Tom. "Part of the trick of our collaborative process is to not put in too much harmony early on. The one voice can be harmonised in many different ways, leaving scope for creating a chorus out of something that wasn't a chorus initially."
A week or so later Rachel visits the tiny recording studio at Pagan Records in Parnell which Trevor and his partners in Media Music also use to record radio shows 'Counting The Beat', 'Kiwi Chart Breakdown', 'Rock Your Radio' and 'The Beat Files'. There engineer David Rhodes records her vocals, dropping them onto DAT to be imported onto Tom's computer. Layers of sound are added and subtracted at every listening.
"Depending on what comes back from Rachel we may re-arrange it or perhaps cut it into a different structure and then she might possibly sing it again with more lyrics. It's a real process thing of giving the music back and forth. If there is a section of four or eight bars that are unexciting then we cut them up!"
Tom continues. "Our composition is so interactive which makes it impossible to separate the contributions. It's very collage... very post modern. Actually Trevor plays all the guitar - I don't think he'll let me! And when he plays keyboards he has a different approach to me - some really good synth lines have come out of his playing. "
The new 11-track album 'Dusk' was 2 1/2 years in the making, though it really came together since the beginning of '98.
Tom: "Fifteen months ago we had a finished album, but it was an instrumental album with only Tuffy's Dub vocalised (by Tuffy Culture and Dubhead). After that we started working with Bobbylon and only nine months ago with Rachel."
Trevor: "Dusk Falls Into Me was the first one that Rachel did for us - it's a killer track and a big part of the album."
Tom: "I was impresed by that. She came up with the vocals then some crucial things in the harmony were added afterwards because of what she had done."
Trevor: "When I Can Change (TTTM's first single release, featuring the voice of Bobbylon) started to get radio airplay we cottoned onto a new thing - that it is achievable! Suddenly we had a yardstick to measure everything else we were creating. That's probably what we lacked on the first album. We've got it sussed now and are moving into a project with Rachel and we've already found our yardstick song for that."
Tom: "We'd done an instrumental album and started another with a few vocal tracks. Then it became a vocal album with a few instrumentals! At some stage we crossed a threshold between the old project and the new project, and knew what we were doing. My vision is in terms of songs and radio play at the moment, I'm not thinking weird and peculiar as much as I have at other stages - I'm saving that for the Workshop."
Trevor: "We put the old stuff to one side and thought 'we can do something better'. The last six months were the fastest creativity that we've done for ages, so we could afford to throw things away. For instance I said to Tom that I loved the groove on a song by Everything But The Girl. In the process of almost mimicking it Tom made a mistake and put it into half time and we discovered the rhythm for Catch My Fall."
Videos of Catch My Fall and I Can Change (both directed by Peter McLennan) as well as remixes by Alan Jansson, DLT, Chris Van de Geer and Joost Langeveld have helped build a profile without TTTM having played a gig. With the album's release soon through Antenna/Virgin, and a series of TTTM gigs now planned (one small step for man, one giant leap etc!), Rachel has effectively become a card carrying member - providing not just the voice but some much needed glamour to what has to date been a studio-only project. Not to imply that Trevor and Tom lack glamour, but with close to a century of years between them they'd probably be the first to admit they do! The pair discovered Rachel through engineer David Rhodes' band Cosmonaut in which she was vocalist.
Rachel's atmospheric, almost eerie vocals bring to mind Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval. Born in Suffolk, England, she came to New Zealand seven years ago and is in the third year of a Bachelor of International Communications. Her vocal training, she says, extends to her church school choir, songwriting experience to "little poems", and apart from Cosmonaut she has only been in bands that lasted about a week. Her spartan lyrics come easily, too much time spent, she says, and she loses continuity.
Trevor: "Rachel has something very original going for her and we needed a vehicle for what we are doing. It wasn't ever a decision to make her a regular fixture, it evolved."
Tom: "We have a greater emphasis on process than on product. That's how we make our product, by just tinkering with the process. We have always allowed our guests the freedom to choose what they wanted to say and then ourselves the priviledge to edit it. Just as we have cut and moved around Johnny (Fleury)'s bass lines and Greg (Johnson)'s trumpet, so have we cut and moved around Bobby and Rachel's vocals. They were a contribution that's going to be mucked around with - at the same time they have the freedom of a partly painted canvas. Not everybody rises to that occasion."
An idea hits Tom and he starts pulling out cables from one piece of equipment to patch in another. His parent's engineering background endowed him with not only the operating skills, but an interest in and understanding of the workings of the equipment he now commands without hesitation. There's no patch bay or mixing desk and little that could be considered 'state of the art', but its modular nature allows him to harness the best aspects of the different equipment to create individual effects.
Tom: "For instance I often play natural instrument sounds of the T1 (itself already a decade old) but I play it using the arpeggiator on the little Prophecy One because it's got a great programmable arpeggiator, and once you let out your samples you can get percussive effects as if you are playing them. It's the same with a lot of these things, they all link up and I know what I want to utilise from each of them."
Trevor's guitar effects stretch to the diminutive Korg ToneWorks Pandora multi-effect processor (as used by Darcy Clay), an e-bow and a wah wah pedal. Apart from a more powerful computer Tom surprises himself by acknowledging there is nothing else he desires at the moment equipment-wise.
"There's always things that would enhance, maybe a pair of Technics 1200 turntables instead of this borrowed Garrard that I use sometimes. All of the resources that we need we have here. If we want exotic percussion I just pull out the sample library. A lot of the new stuff is software anyway, and much of it is just downloaded from the Net."
While Trevor heads Pagan et al,Tom has a Ph.D in Social Anthropology and occasionally, in among the music projects, he is employed by local bodies and overseas groups as a consultant to make social impact assessments of proposed developments.
An extraordinarily talented multi-instrumentalist, Tom is credited as co-writer (with Greg Johnson) on most of Bluespeak's new self-titled album which, in stark contrast to 'Dusk', was recorded over just two days. He also heads the experimental Inner City Jazz Workshop along with Chris Webb, Peter Scott and Paul Hewitt, who visit his studio every second Friday to do "whatever we feel like - it doesn't always end up sounding like music in the conventional sense."
"I also get fed a steady stream of techno by Mike Weston and Jed Town, and perform my own stuff under the name Alloy. Then there's occasional gigs with Rick Bryant as The Squares...
"I'm a musician at heart and it just pokes out in all different kinds of ways. To me there's nothing strange about it, it's just different kinds of discipline and focus - and it's great fun."
Tom's looking forward to taking 'Dusk' outside of the studio.
"I can't wait, I like performing - I'm not doing enough at the moment. Why not do a tour?"
To which Trevor, drawing on his many years of gigging experience, instinctively replies, "God forbid!"
Moon Gear - a brief checklist
Etherwave Theremin
Electrocomp EML 500 synthesiser
Sequential Circuits Pro One, Drumtraks, Prophet 2002
Korg Poly Six, Prophecy, T1 Worksta-tion, Pandora
Boss SP-202 Dr Sample
Roland MC-303 Groovebox, SVC-350 vocoder, Juno 60, MKS-20 digital piano
Yamaha RM602 mixer,2 x KM802
Waldorf MiniWorks
Morley Pro Phaser pedal
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