By Jacob Connor, photo by Tony Nyberg.
The Pitch Black catalogue, already bulging with four albums and four remix CDs as well as compilations, and inclusions on international movie, TV and game soundtracks, is about to be further inflated. I catch up with Mike Hodgson and Paddy Free at Kog Studios in Kingsland where they are close to finalising their fourth, an album they have in typically esoteric fashion coined 'Rude Mechanicals'.
Kog's master of ceremonies Chris Chetland who is wandering around in the background with a rag and a bottle of Windolene, kindly offers my interviewees and I a polish. He would have added his rather more technical polish to the tracks with mastering over the weekend, after which the 'Rude Mechanicals' files headed to the Stebbings plant, just a few suburbs across central Auckland, for manufacture.
We warm up with a preview of some of the tracks. South of the Line is an atmospheric slice of the delicious deep dub that Pitch Black have made their domain. The title track begins with processed beatboxing and some staccato wordplay from Sunshine SoundSystem's KP on ecologically-themed rhyme. Please Leave Quietly is a heavy ambient track intended for that final slot of the evening - "you could definitely drop it as the final let-go after a night of hard out Drum n Bass" says Mike. The new album includes guest vocalists on three of the nine tracks, a trend that they began on 2004's 'Ape to Angel.'
"It changes the rules," says Paddy, "the voice is 50% of the song. The music is only half what it is when you're making an instrumental."
Despite the vocal contributions from KP, Brother J, and Tracy Z (apparently, Pitch Black only work with people with at least one initial in their name) and the occasional inclusion of live instruments, 'Rude Mechanicals' is predominantly technologically based.
"If anything, this album is bent a bit more towards technological sounds. Possibly slightly less organic and a bit more gritty," offers Paddy.
The tracks were devised over a week at a bach in Whangapoua, Coromandel about a year ago. Then more work was done this year out at Piha and in Mike's city studio. They spent a few days in the mountains in Japan working on more tunes and the final session was in Venn Studios (David Holmes' space) before finishing at Kog.
This work was cross-pollinated with music from the Pitch Black-soundtracked Sony PSP game 'Cube', which was developed by NZ company Metia Productions. Mike explains, "We made new original material for the main game and remixes of old material for the Rhythm section of the game. The deal was a basic fee and a percentage of sales, plus we were allowed to develop any of the ideas for our album. Two of the tracks from the game ended up being developed further - Rude Mechanicals and Harmonia."
Oddly, as he points out, neither of them are gamers. "Gaming is so far from either of our realities that we really have no connection with it at all."
"It's got a good trippy visual," adds Paddy of 'Cube' which is a puzzle/strategy game. "That's the thing that hooks you in, the little world inside."
Pitch Black music has also found its way to television's CSI:Miami through the group's publisher Native Tongue.
"The music placer for CSI loves our music, so I'm looking forward to sending this new bunch over," Mike enthuses.
Pitch Black have been a bankable international act since 2001 and around the planet distribution of their music is handled by a patchwork of companies: Rhythmethod in NZ, Vitamin in Australia, Arabasque in Europe, Wayko in Japan and a status-pending agreement with Waveform in America. Even so the initial pressing for 'Rude Mechanicals' will be just 2000 copies.
Their latest non-remix album, 2004's 'Ape to Angel' sold 5000 copies but the back catalogue keeps ticking along and their debut album 'Futureproof' (1999) has sold close to four times that amount. Previous releases are regularly re-pressed, but as Mike reflects, have witnessed considerable changes.
"Looking back at '98, it was a time where proliferation of music suddenly became really easy. Everyone was becoming a label. Then, with 'Ape to Angel' we hit a moment where CD sales in shops were starting to go down but the download thing hadn't come in."
Pitch Black have an international agreement with San Francisco-based aggregator Ingrooves, who place tracks with other download sites, including iTunes, Napster, MusicMatch and Virgin Digital. Last year, the group sold 6000 downloads, ranging from 10c on a subscription service to $1.99 for a standalone track.
The download income has not replaced the loss of CD sales income," says Mike, "but it's there. There's so much noise now, everyone's got a MySpace page and loads of people are giving away their music for nothing. It's still difficult to get a major label deal, as it always was. We just carry on in our electronic way - rise in and out of the cycles."
The duo's forthcoming jaunt through the US, Japan and Europe will be their seventh international circuit. Paddy comments that the music finds a different audience across various territories.
"It's funny how you're perceived, you can be a different thing in a different market. In the States, we're regarded as the chill-out end of the trance scene."
I ask if there is any identifiably Kiwi element to the music and Mike theorises that New Zealand music is it has more space in it.
"Even the most hard out drum'n'bass here isn't that hard out. We actually tend to play overseas more than we play in New Zealand. We're now so used to playing to the Japanese and the Americans, maybe our sound has changed because our audience has changed."
The pair use Ableton Live for both live performance and studio work. As a contributing forum member for the German software, Paddy was invited to Berlin last year for a brainstorming session about the product. The advantage of Ableton Live is the ability to instantly beat match and pitch shift anything in real time off the hard drive he explains.
"We looped and chopped up our three albums' worth of stuff, so we have this resource of things we can plunder. It's made the live set a lot fresher. Now we just drop a clip in a slot and assign it to a MIDI note (and) it's done."
Their touring hardware has steadily reduced over the years (along with prohibitive excess luggage charges), from 250 kilos in 2001 to 75kg now. Live is run from two laptops synced to a MIDI clock keyboard. One computer handles the drum and bass, the other the instruments. Paddy offers the analogy of a twin engine plane - if one side cuts out, the remaining computer has a muted stereo rough mix which is pressed into service to cover the loss while the machine is rebooted. There have only been three such meltdowns in five years, one nerve-wracking, but mercifully near the end of the set.
"We had one where there was only a hi-hat, a snare and a stuck note. Paddy was scurrying around and I was doing everything I could to eke a dub vibe out of three noises."
I wonder about the potential for confusion, with all the drop beats and delays involved. "It's more confusing that I tend to add an extra beat every few bars," Mike admits. "I torment poor Paddy with my concepts of where cycles fall."
Paddy agrees. "Mike isn't locked into fours, eights and sixteens as much as I am."
A large part of what makes the Pitch Black live experience so unique is the video that Mike mixes simultaneously alongside the audio. Every song has a dozen or so patterns, each with synched video. Mike has strong preferences as a VJ and likes to keep things as unpredictable as possible. Speaking of a recent visit by Hexstatic, he was circumspect about the static nature of the presentation, the VJs playing finished edits. "As an AV crew I felt they had succumbed to a linear pathway rather than the sheer madness of having it all happening in real time."
I had long wanted to ask Paddy about his recording session with punk pioneers Killing Joke for their 1994 opus 'Pandemonium'. The session was inherited from keyboard mentor Stuart Pearce, who found Killing Joke bass player and producer Youth somewhat intimidating face to face. Not surprisingly it turned out to be a pivotal moment.
"It was quite life changing, actually. Before then I was a quiet suburban lad, dabbling in TV and cover bands. It really changed how I approached music, from being performance to being expression... also getting spiked with acid possibly helped."
Mike remembers the pre-production as well. "The funny thing is, I was living in a warehouse next to where the session took place. I'd never met Paddy. One day I was woken up by the loudest band that had ever gone into that rehearsal space. The only way we could deal with it was to go out and buy a Killing Joke compilation and play it quietly in the background for the next month, just to even out the rumble. It's quite funny they were there and Paddy and I came that close to meeting."
And the rest, as they say, is their story.
