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Electronic Music Duo 'Plaid' Talk About the Future of Software and Sound

With their new album 'Reachy Prints,' Plaid rides the curve of technological evolution.

Warp Records stalwarts Plaid have been cutting some of electronic music's finest tunes over the last 20 years. By turns warm, angular, and chopped up, their style is almost instantly identifiable but never predictable. Whether other artists or listeners properly understand it, Andy Turner and Ed Handley's sonic presence looms large. They've done this by riding the curve of technological evolution. For them, it's the only way electronic music evolves.

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On Reachy Prints, their tenth album, Plaid split the difference between their past and future selves. The rhythms and melodies, all branching in unexpected ways, are there as expected, but the tools and sources used to build the familiar Plaid sound are new. This is by design. Not only does it affirm that Plaid are as technically savvy as their labelmates Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and Boards of Canada, but it proves that laptops and music software are every bit as legitimate as room full of vintage hardware.

It's this interest in the future of music and technology and their various intersection points, that Plaid spoke about in a recent phone conversation. Handley and Turner also talked about using the sound generation gadget Mogees, and how their approach to live performance is evolving to become physical.

Motherboard: Warp described Reachy Prints as a "journey into a subterranean world." I'm curious how you two think of the record?

Andy Turner: That wasn't something we directed. Obviously, putting music into language is problematic, and it depends on your personal references. But, you know, it's an evocative image.

Ed Handley: A friend of ours actually described the album like that. If you listen to the album, there's quite a lot of scratchy, scrapey sounds in it, which we haven't really used before. We generally have a clean sound. So, the point our friend was trying to make is that it's a bit more dirty sounding than some of our previous material. It makes sense in that way. We used quite a lot of vocoder on the album, but not with voice. We ran other audio into the vocoder, and you get this quite detailed, scratch sound, which could sound subterranean.

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That's cool that you're running other instruments and sound sources through a vocoder to create these more abstracted, subterranean sounds. 

Handley: Yeah, you get a very particular effect. There are a few new types of vocoder that are out at the moment. There is one called Razor, which has a very particular and quite unique sound, and it uses a new method for vocoding, which is very nice.

You guys make a lot of field recordings. Did you do the same for Reachy Prints?

Handley: We generally gather a few sounds before we start compiling album tracks. I live out in the country now, and there are some local sounds that we used in the recordings. But, as I said, they've been run through vocoders, so you can't really make out what they are, and they've also been treated and sequenced.

In the past, you've said that "electronic music tracks technology… if there's no innovation, then it kind of dies because there's no new way of generating sound." Is that still an operating principle in how Plaid makes music?

Turner: Yes, I think that's the case. We have a situation where it's actually very easy making a competent-sounding piece of electronic music if it follows a traditional form, because you'll find preset rythyms and melodic patterns. It's all available as clips to put together quite simply. I think in order to keep things moving, as one of us said before, keeping up to speed with technology is a way to do that just in terms of finding new textures to use in writing. You just hear a lot of clone tracks these days, and it seems kind of pointless to emulate a piece that someone has already done really well. I don't really get it.

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Handley: If you look at the history of electronic music, it's often been about trying to find new sounds, techniques or methods for making music. And that's part of the excitement of it for us as well. There was a certain amount of techno-lust with us, where if there is a new piece of technology it kind of excites and attracts us to play around with it. But, I think it's still fundamentally about music.

Speaking of which, you collaborated with Bruno Zamberlin in creating music on his Mogees device. Did you use a Mogee on the new record?

Handley: Yeah, there are a few bits that use the sound generating device behind it, which is a type of physical modeling synthesis. We still like the quantized accuracy of sequencers, and obviously Mogees is a conventional instrument in the sense that you can sit down and play it, and you have to be competent at percussion to play something in time. But, the sounds you can get from it are also very interesting from a non-performance point of view, and we have used it on a few bits and pieces.

If you want to use a sound from Mogees, do you just export that sound onto a computer?

Handley: Well, we've got a sort of special version of it that runs inside Max for Live so you can use it inside Ableton. It's basically the sound synthesis part of the Mogees, and you can run any audio into it. So, again, a bit like a vocoder where it reacts to audio.

'Workshop2' by Eva Vermandel

Apart from Mogees, are you using any other new hardware or software?

Handley: We definitely stay current on software, but not so much on hardware. The problem we have with hardware is that we live in different locations. We'd either have to buy two of everything, or we'd always have to work in the same studio every day. We're out of touch with hardware, but there is a massive resurgence of new hardware synths. A lot of that comes from the homemade, build-your-own-synth movement, and also this euro rack movement, which is like a modular system that has really taken off in the last 10 years. For $200 a piece you can get these units. I dream of that, but it's not practical for us to have loads of hardware.

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Do you feel a kinship with glitch or algorithmic artists, who aim to subvert software like hackers, though they also see it as an unconscious collaborator? Or do you really just want to totally control software for your own musical ends?

Turner: Sure, software can do a lot of the work for you, but ideally to free you up to be more creative in other areas. We want to be able to manipulate the sound in a live environment as much as possible. One area of hardware that we have got into a bit is in using it to interact with software. Mogees is something we will be using, and we've got a bunch of Keith McMillen controllers that are very sensitive. It's hardware to control the software.

Handley: You could look at software as kind of an assistant, and you can get them to spew out data for you, especially things like rhythms. I think it's harder with harmonic generation, because it's always going to be something to do with taste, and it's going to be a lot harder to make something original with generative harmonic stuff. But, I think "let computers do what they do well" has always been the thing in electronic music, which is to play incredibly fast rhythms very accurately, and introduce levels of randomness which would be tedious for us to do. I've heard a lot of generative music, but a lot of it is not inspiring. Software still needs human input.

Did the collaboration with Felix's Machines rewire your brains at all as far as writing and recording?

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Handley: I think Felix has got some great ideas about what he described as "acoustic synthesis," where you basically build synthesizers but with huge, moving mechanical components. So, you'd build a filter with something that will mask the sound physically from a speaker or something. That's one of the more interesting ideas behind what he's doing, which obviously isn't necessarily to do with electronic music. That was the one thing that inspired us, but I don't think it directly changed how we make music because we're not very good at mechanical engineering.

I think it made us think about sound generation and what you can do with physical things. And, again, with Mogees it's a very physical interface. We're sort of mouse and keyboard-based, and we have been for 20 years, and I think we're sort of enjoying breaking out of that a little.

"The dream is to be able to think a piece, and for a system to somehow translate your ideas directly."

Did you write Reachy Prints with the idea that you would be performing in a more physical way than before?

Handley: To a degree. We certainly want the performance to be a bit more fun and improvised, because on occasion it's been quite static, where it's been us and a couple of laptops. Introducing more physical controllers and a more physical aspect to the performance is good for us because it puts a bit more risk in there, and makes it a bit more fun. And I think that translates to anyone watching the performance. That's something we had in mind, but I don't think you can necessarily hear it on the album, though the technology behind the album is there.

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Do you really try to mess with and rearrange songs live, or do you try to give the audience a more faithful rendition of the tracks?

Turner: I'd say that it's a mixture of both. Some pieces definitely need a structured form to work. So, if we perform songs like that we would try to retain the core, the builds, etc. But, as much as possible, we like to allow flexibility to create a different experience. Quite a lot of that is for us because we're playing the songs a lot. For an audience, it's nice to have a familiar melody somewhere, but people are quite happy to hear that in a different context. We don't get demands for completely accurate album replication.

Looking into the future, is there any piece of technology that would inspire you in the studio or in a live setting?

Turner: There are some incredible possibilities. The dream is to be able to think a piece, and for a system to somehow translate your ideas directly. We're obviously a little way away from that, but it will happen in a decade or a couple of decades.

Handley: The idea of involving the audience in some of the music-making process would be interesting. It wouldn't necessarily sound good, but I think it's going to happen more and more. I'm not sure what technology will be used, but everything is networked now so it's much more of a possibility. Everyone has these devices in their pockets that can join up to a network. We won't be doing that, but it's interesting.