Headliner Magazine Issue 38

ISSUE 38 / JULY 2021 SUPPORTING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY

MAGAZINE / 38

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EUROPIANA

JACK SAVORETTI GLASS ANIMALS

TAPPING INTO THE PAST AND FUTURE

GARY KEMP

ON WRITING HIS NEW SOLO ALBUM

MARTA SALOGNI

BEST PRODUCER NOMINEE TALKS NEW PROJECTS

“Lose your dreams and you might lose your mind.”

— Mick Jagger

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EATIVE C CR

SU P

TING TH R E PO

UNITY MM O HEADLINER MAGAZINE

38 This month, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee released the findings from its inquiry into the economics of music streaming, and did not mince its words when it came to the inevitable conclusion that even successful artists see “pitiful returns” from streaming, adding that some performers are frozen out of payments altogether. Gary Numan raised eyebrows earlier this year when he revealed that he had received just £37 for a song that had been streamed more than a million times. Music-consumers wondered, could this really be true?

Likely, yes. While streaming now accounts for approximately 80% of music consumption, the issue lurking over the streaming world continues to be music royalties.

UK Music’s most recent annual economic study reported that the UK music industry contributed £5.8 billion to the UK economy in 2019, the recorded music sector contributing a hefty £568 million (GVA) towards that, while the BPI’s annual report into the UK’s year in recorded music in 2020 highlighted that music consumption was up for a sixth year, with streaming racking up a staggering 139bn audio streams, and nearly 200 artists streamed over 100m times.

The increase in consumption translated into recorded music revenues rising 3.8% to reach £1.118bn, however it is clear that these figures do not reflect the financial struggles of many music creators.

Determined to make sure that they get fair rewards for their content and are

not ripped off by streaming giants and record labels any longer, the committee has concluded that artists must be given a legal right to a fairer share of revenues from streaming, calling for a “complete reset” of the market – taking evidence from the UK’s independent music sector, as well as Sony Music, Warner Music, Universal Music, Spotify, Amazon, Apple and YouTube.

It remains to be seen whether a comprehensive reform of legislation and further regulation is put into effect to redress the balance, (which would also take a stab at tackling fundamental problems within the recorded music industry), but in the meantime, the committee’s recommendations will be a step in the right direction for all songwriters, performers and composers who until now have felt exploited by streaming platforms, major labels and other internet giants.

Headliner welcomes anything that puts the value of music back where it belongs – in the hands of music makers.

Alice Gustafson Deputy Editor, Headliner HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

18 / NICS 14/ MR JUKES & BARNEY ARTIST 08 / NAGYEDi

34/ AL VAN DER BEEK

22 / DAVID PRAMIK

26/ JACK SAVORETTI 38 / MARTA SALOGNI

42 / LIVE SOUND

46 / SIGURDÓR GUÐMUNDSSON

52 / GLASS ANIMALS 58 / CATHERINE MARKS

48 / IMMERSIVE AUDIO

64 / STERLINGWINFIELD 62 / KEVIN ANTUNES

80 / AUDIO PRODUCTION 74 / WAYSTATION STUDIO

70 / TOM ASHBROOK

92 / SPOTLIGHT REVIEWS 100 / RAPHAEL REED

84 / GARY KEMP 88 / LISA FERRANTE-WALSH

110 / DARKWOOD STUDIOS 106/ ELIZA SHADDAD

116 / NEIL COWLEY

8

NAGYEDI

Out Of This World

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

ASPIRING HEADLINER

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OUT OF THIS WORLD

NAGYEDI NAGYEDi (real name Edi Nagy) moved from Hungary to London two years ago, and is something of a defining figure in the alternative music scene in her home country. Although her music could be loosely described as an elusive, unique mix of alternative pop, she finds it hard to pin down just what it is that inspires her experimentation with jazz, pop, trip-hop, downtempo and tribal rhythms.

“I have always felt a little bit embarrassed because I actually stopped listening to music, because there’s always some kind of music – be it vocal melodies, lyric ideas or even beats in my head,” she confesses with a laugh. “To be able to focus on those, I need silence. So when people ask me, ‘what music do you listen to?’ I’m like, ‘well, actually, nothing!’ I still like music, of course,

and I listen to other stuff, but when I’m writing something or if I’m waiting for some idea to pop up, I prefer staying in silence because for me, there’s always music somewhere in my head. So I’m kind of inspired from the inside! Those unique vocal melodies I write, those come from the silence, actually. I’ve stopped feeling embarrassed now, because that’s me,” she shrugs, grinning.

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NAGYEDI

Out Of This World

“I used to listen to jazz,” she volunteers. “I was a big fan. I still am.

I like Portishead, Nine Inch Nails, Nina Simone, big pop classic divas like Whitney Houston, and when I was a teenager I totally fell in love with Alicia Keys. When people usually ask, ‘what kind of music do you play or create?’ I’m like, ‘have you got half an hour?’ It’s a mix of everything!”

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Since moving to London a lot has changed for the singer-songwriter, meeting her now husband and welcoming a baby boy into the world in May of 2020. Joking that she’s “a witch” after sharing that she once wrote a song about being tired of being alone, only to meet her now-husband two days later, (“I think my words can be super strong, or my thoughts!”)

NAGYEDi says that the circumstances that saw her move to London also seemed to stem from her putting the right energy into the universe:

because of the pregnancy anyway, so it wasn’t as painful to skip gigs and not being able to stand up on the stage and play live. But now I’m missing it – now it’s becoming painful again.”

“I was like, ‘maybe I should go to the UK, but there’s no jobs’. I’m not kidding, in 10 minutes I received an email from an agency in the UK offering jobs. I’m sitting there like, ‘oh my god, that was fast!’ I thought that maybe this was a sign that this idea was something to follow. I actually always had a feeling that London is a calling for me, and that I had to come here.

As a refresher, an NFT is a unit of data stored on a digital ledger called a blockchain that certifies a digital asset to be unique, and therefore not interchangeable (thanks Wikipedia).

The technology is a growing trend in the digital art world, and recently has been branching out into the viral video and meme worlds; you probably heard about the ‘Disaster Girl Meme’ selling as an NFT for £341,000, and 2007’s ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ video (formerly the most viewed YouTube video) selling as an NFT for £500,000. Not bad for 56 seconds of work.

“Moving to London was one big change in my life, and then becoming a mother was another big change, and then this whole pandemic was a worldwide, giant change for everyone,” she reflects.

“I feel like I was one of the lucky musicians in the lockdown because I probably would have stayed at home

NAGYEDi’s recent song, Out Of This World was released as an NFT (nonfungible token), making her the first Hungarian artist to embrace the format, although she’s the first to admit that it took her a while to get her head around the concept, which is understandable.

ASPIRING HEADLINER

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“WHEN PEOPLE USUALLY ASK, ‘WHAT KIND OF MUSIC DO YOU PLAY OR CREATE?’ I’M LIKE, ‘HAVE YOU GOT HALF AN HOUR?”

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NAGYEDI

Out Of This World

“The idea came from my husband; he started talking about these NFTs, and I was just looking at him like, ‘what’s this? I didn’t understand the word!’ After doing research, I kind of liked it actually – it’s a new way to mix visuals and audio. It’s still something that I’m sure that other musicians are experimenting with as well. You can spend a lot of time improving your skills, writing a song, releasing it, and sometimes nobody will hear it. Artists can do all this and then still starve every month, so this might be a good opportunity to be paid and be appreciated as much as an artist deserves to be appreciated.

“The way we look at making music has changed a lot,” she considers.

“We all have to find a solution to make music and to stay connected with our fans from our living rooms or from our bathrooms, or whatever we have.”

Out Of This World is the second single in which NAGYEDi not only appears as a songwriter and lyricist, but also as producer, and directly addresses themes of birth and her own experiences of becoming a mother.

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

“I’ve noticed that my songs are not as depressing as they used to be,” she notes. “I usually write songs about hard situations and emotions caused by hard situations. But they’re not as depressing anymore.

It’s not depressing,” she corrects herself. “Actually, I used to call them bittersweet because the lyrics are always about: this is the trouble, that’s the problem, that’s the thing it caused, and this is the way you can climb out of the depths. They always have some kind of life lesson at the end, and that you should never give up, and go on to be happy.”

NAGYEDi recently participated in QSC’s initiative to support lockeddown artists by taking two K12.2 active loudspeakers and one KS212C subwoofer through their paces at home, which with no gigs in sight, was a tonic: “I loved it! Those speakers made me feel like I was having a gig. I felt like I was on a stage. It was super easy to set up, the biggest problem was to decide where to put them! It was really good to finally sing – I’ve got this very strong, loud voice, which, when I was a kid, I felt ashamed

of. I sang in a school choir, like [she sings very quietly], because I knew that if I sing like, [she suddenly belts out a loud ‘aaaaaaaahhhhhh’] then everybody was gonna look at me like, ‘what’s going on? You’re louder than the whole choir!’ But you have to let it out, and when I got the speakers, the task was to let it out. I felt I was setting myself free again.

That was the coolest part of the whole thing; when I let my voice out I forget about everything surrounding me. It’s been held back for a while, and when it comes out...oh, wow.

That’s what I’m missing, because you have to be 100% on stage. You can’t hold yourself back from being who you are, because otherwise nobody cares, you know?”

You do you, NAGYEDi. SPONSORED BY

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MR JUKES & BARNEY ARTIST

Good Vibrations

GOOD VIBRATIONS gustafso

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Mr Jukes (aka Jack Steadman of Bombay Bicycle Club) and East London rapper Barney Artist bonded years ago over a mutual love of the ever-changing landscape of modern hip-hop, and taking the piss out of each other.

Headliner catches up with the pair as they are gearing up to release their collaborative album, The Locket, preceded by the breezy, laid back single, Vibrate.

Jack – why did you focus on making this album instead of say, another Bombay Bicycle Club record?

JS: I’d always been making that kind of music on the side, and I think it was slowly feeding more and more into Bombay and affecting that kind of sound, which was cool, but eventually it got to a point where I just wanted to draw a line in the sand and separate the two and really make an album that wasn’t just little bits of that sound. I wanted to dedicate years to it and put a real effort into making it as good as it could be, and this was the result.

Tell us about discovering Barney Artist on a Spotify playlist. Why did his music make such an impression on you?

JS: I just really liked Barney’s flow, and it made sense when we met – the people we were talking about in terms of our influences and our favourite groups, unsurprisingly, turned out to be quite similar. When I heard him rap, it was very familiar to me, but with this London thing, which was perfect because we both love a lot of very classic American hip-hop. I wanted it to sound like where I’m from as well, even though we’re from different parts of London. It’s got an American feel but with a very British twang to it.

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MR JUKES & BARNEY ARTIST

Good Vibrations

“VIBRATE IS KIND OF SPEAKING ABOUT THE MUSIC INDUSTRY, AND ABOUT BEING CAREFUL AND AVOIDING SHARKS.”

Barney – what’s your side of the story?

What did you think when Jack got in touch?

BA: Well, I think I was living under a rock. I didn’t have a clue! I didn’t know what a Bombay Bicycle Club was, or a Mr Jukes. So I think when he met me, it was love at first sight... on his end [laughs]. We just really hit it off. The first one we made together was Blowin Steam, and the song was done in a couple hours. From there we made another song and then he decided that he wanted to do some Take That-style reunion with Bombay Bicycle Club, so there was about a two year gap of not making music and then obviously lockdown happened and they couldn’t go on tour. So he was like, ‘we should probably finish this album’!

What is it about both of your styles that work so well together?

JS: The music is something I never really worried about, but what really galvanised the whole thing was more the personal relationship; if you’re going to spend all this time together you have to get on really well. As soon as I met Barney, we were just taking the piss out of each other and and also taking the piss out of ourselves, which is almost more important because if you’re HEADLINER MAGAZINE

going to be being creative with someone, you have to be secure in yourself to be able to laugh at yourself and take criticism and jokes.

As soon as I noticed that, I was like, ‘this is gonna work really well’.

indicator of what the album is like. Jack decided that he wanted to sample a lot of the tracks, which made us have no money, so I was like, ‘let’s make a song with no sample,’ and we made Vibrate!

Vibrate was the last song you made for the album; why was it the perfect track to introduce listeners to the Mr Jukes & Barney Artist sound?

INSTA: @MRJUKESMUSIC / @BARNEYARTIST

JS: Because it has a bit of everything and it wears our influences on its sleeve a bit. The sound of the album sounds a bit like A Tribe Called Quest, with that kind of flow and beat. It’s quite summery, hopeful and optimistic, which is kind of perfect timing.

BA: Yeah we’re massive A Tribe Called Quest fans. A song of theirs that always rang true to me was Check The Rhime; there’s this line that goes, ‘Industry rule number four thousand and eighty, record company people are shady,’ and I always found that really interesting. Vibrate is kind of speaking about the music industry, and about being careful and avoiding sharks and whatever, but with a happy, energetic vibe. So it’s kind of like putting the medicine with the sweets and trying to mix it in, and you won’t even notice it. If you listen back to the lyrics now, you might go, ‘oh, hang on a minute!’ I think it’s a good

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NICS

The Tottenham Dynasty

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NICS

When it comes to the UK rap game, people often have artists in two camps: the creators of grime such as Dizzee Rascal, Skepta, Jammer, and then almost everyone who has come since is classed as the new school. Only thing is, the newer artists are often accused of jumping on sounds that are just seen as trends and compromising what made grime so exciting and original in the first place. Not an argument you could lay at Nics, who is every part worthy of North London’s rich heritage within this scene. Very quickly picking up support from Kiss FM and GRM Daily, this genre-fluid rapper and producer is proof there are characters the grime forefathers can proudly pass the baton to.

Nics helps to distil the unfortunate stereotype that grime is all about aggression and gritty-living when he tells me he’s spent the afternoon “at a rollerskating event with my cousin and my brother. It’s been nice vibes today!”

But with that said, Headliner is keen to know his thoughts about his native Tottenham being such a rich source of talent for UK rap throughout the years, and how he feels he fits into that (no pressure). “Yeah, Skepta, JME, Chip, Wretch 32, quite a few names,” he concurs. “Chip is a big inspiration for

his versatility, and the way Wretch tells a story and conveys his message is a big influence for me too.” And does he feel like a baton is passing between them and him? “I’m gonna say yeah, in a sense, definitely. Especially when my sound is very unique. I definitely have some sort of responsibility to elevate the sound a bit more from where they’ve left off.”

And while these kinds of artists are lauded for their ability with a microphone, Nics has quite a few things to put on his CV — he is also a

producer, mixing engineer, a DJ, and a video editor and animator; the latter two skills have seen him employed

by Universal to work on music videos.

This multi-talent certainly helps to explain why he is among a very select few to have been accepted into South London’s (very) prestigious BRIT School, with such alumni as Adele, Jessie J, and Amy Winehouse to name only a few. It was his skills on the piano, however, that saw him passing his audition.

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NICS

The Tottenham Dynasty

“I DEFINITELY HAVE SOME SORT OF RESPONSIBILITY TO ELEVATE THE SOUND A BIT MORE FROM WHERE THEY’VE LEFT OFF.”

“I’ve always wanted to pursue rapping,” he says. “But I didn’t think rapping was something you can necessarily study. So I auditioned piano to get in and studied it there.

But it turned out that rapping is very much accepted there. So I was able to do lots of performances as a rapper. It was a really nice balance HEADLINER MAGAZINE

between both, and I learned to mix my tracks there as well.”

After releasing six singles in 2020 (and he feels he could have done more), Nics kicked off this year with Vision 2021, a huge statement single which, while having grime elements within the music and Nics’ flow, is certainly

not a track you could pigeonhole into just one genre. On the strength of the song, it’s hardly surprising that it’s had support from GRM Daily who premiered its video, a veteran grime channel of over a decade that has been so key in helping break UK artists.

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the mix a bit better, which is so nice.

Then my soundcard is the Focusrite 2i2, which I just upgraded to last year.

Before that, I had the 2i4. It gets the job done! Definitely very easy to use and simple. So it’s nice, and it’s not huge. It fits on my desk nicely.”

And as Headliner tries to squeeze some teasers for the future from Nics, his vision for 2021, all we can ascertain from him is that “I’ve got lots of new singles ready to go. A ridiculous amount! I’ve been working crazily hard on them. Hopefully, we get to put all of them or at least half of them out this year. But we’ll see what happens.” And with his speedilygrowing fanbase, Nics certainly won’t be the only one waiting to see.

INSTA: @NICSMUSICUK

Nics explains that the single is “basically me reviewing my 2020 year and thinking, ‘okay, I’ve had a good year, but what can I do better?’ There’s a lot of things I didn’t do. I set myself some personal goals that I didn’t accomplish, even though I accomplished a lot and I’m very grateful. I felt like there were little bits I didn’t do and it was me channelling that frustration, putting it into a song. I wasn’t where I expected myself to be at the end of 2020. So asking why is that? Maybe I didn’t do the promotion that well. So in 2021 we’re gonna properly knuckle down.”

If you’re wondering how Nics gets such crisp and high-quality vocals,

it’s his “Audio-Technica 8405 — it’s discontinued, but it’s such a good microphone. That would be the one I use for pretty much every song. Then when it comes to producing, Waves, definitely Waves. They are incredible.

I use them to mix all my vocals. Been using their plugins for two, maybe three years — they had Waves at BRIT School.

“My favourite reverb is probably their Renaissance Reverb. It’s really easy to use and it looks very simple as well.

And TrueVerb actually is something I’ve been using often lately as well, which is really good. It allows you to push back the vocals and sit them in

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DAVID PRAMIK

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

The Full Menu

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DAVID PRAMIK For L.A.-based songwriter and producer, David Pramik, each day at work is never the same. Here he reveals how receiving multiple Grammy nods opened up a host of new opportunities, and the interesting ways in which he uses oeksound plugins throughout his creative process.

Fortunately enough, Pramik has had a very busy year so far. Despite having written and produced songs for a number of big pop, R&B and hip-hop acts, including Selena Gomez, Bebe Rexha, Rag’n’Bone Man and Machine Gun Kelly (his work has reached a combined one billion streams across major platforms), he was in fact a rock and metal head growing up.

“I’m a guitar player too, so rock music is a very comfortable place for me to work in,” Pramik admits. “I’ve had a lot of success there, and I’m thrilled about that, but what I love about being a producer is that I can really span genres.”

And impressive that success has been; Pramik’s first Grammy nomination came to fruition following his work with the band Nothing More, on a song called Go To War. The song hit No.1 on US Rock Radio for a few weeks, and while it was still very early in his career, a number of doors soon started opening: “The song was nominated for three Grammys - Best Rock Song, Best Rock Album and Best Rock Performance. I think it was actually the morning of my birthday when I received a bunch of texts from my manager; he sent me the screenshots of the nominations and we were just going crazy!

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DAVID PRAMIK

The Full Menu

“When I’m in the room with a band or artist, I’ve learned that the most important thing is that I need to know who they really are,” he adds.

“If I don’t already, then I make a point that morning, maybe while I’m getting dressed or whatever, to play a lot of their music or similar artists to just try to understand what kind of meal I’m going to be having that day.

“I try to find the core of something, which is usually just a loop, some chords, or an 808. It’s very minimal, but once we have that little cornerstone, and once the room is moving, from there I try to make it sound as great as possible as quickly as possible.”

To help him achieve that speed of service, Pramik utilises oeksound’s soothe2 plugin, which he describes as a “game changer”.

“I’ve been working with a country artist called Tenille Townes, who has an incredible voice, and I’m just such a huge fan of hers. She has this amazing power behind her vocal, and that’s like her superpower, but power can be a little unwieldy sometimes in the session,” he explains. “I actually have a whole template set up for her vocal that includes soothe. Every once in a while she’ll get on this specific vowel, and there’ll be a really resonant spot in

“It’s just been lovely to be able to achieve these weird sounds that I could not create any other way; it’s exciting to have access to a whole new landscape of sound.”

there, but soothe simply fixes those resonant frequencies. Sometimes it just feels like cheating!”

Pramik also uses soothe very frequently on guitars, especially in the lower-mid range to take care of some unwanted thumps and bumps. His favourite feature however is the Delta button, which isolates whatever it’s working on and helps him to further sharpen his focus.

“It just works and works quickly,” he adds. “With soothe, if you go really aggressive, it produces this weird squeakiness which is generally considered undesirable, but there’s definitely some application for that to be cool, and it’s also a fantastic de-esser.”

Pramik has also been getting creative and experimenting with the “really interesting” presets within spiff, oeksound’s transient processor: “It’s just been lovely to be able to achieve these weird sounds that I could not create any other way; it’s exciting to have access to a whole new landscape of sound,” he ponders. “I have a whole bunch more music that’s been waiting in the wings, and it’s going to start rolling out this year.

“I can be really aggressive and toothy and snarly and rockish one day, and then I can go into a completely different palette of poppy, clean, fresh the next, and that is without a doubt my favourite part of this entire thing.”

DAVIDPRAMIK.COM OEKSOUND.COM

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Photographer: Chris Floyd

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Euro Vision

JACK SAVORETTI

JACK SAVORETTI

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EURO VISION The words ‘lockdown record’ conjure a certain type of imagery. A solitary figure, most likely hunkered down in a bedroom or basement, perhaps hunched over an acoustic guitar or piano, tinkering with minor chords and mulling over themes of isolation and solitude. It was precisely this figure that singer songwriter Jack Savoretti cut when the Covid-19 outbreak first started to spread in early 2020. Yet before work could begin in earnest on what would be his seventh record and the follow-up to his first UK No.1 album Singing To Strangers, he had a change of heart.

Rather than dwell on the darkness of unfolding events, he sought solace in a psychological state of his own creation: Europiana - a celebration of the European music and culture that shaped him as an artist, and, indeed, the title of his new album.

“I went down that dark road, and very quickly it felt too indulgent,” Savoretti confesses as Headliner chats to him over the phone from his Oxfordshire home. “I sat at the piano and picked up a guitar and started writing songs about loneliness, fear and anxiety.

But then I thought, I’m not going to want to sing any of this stuff, and I don’t think anyone is going to want to hear it. I knew if I went down that route that would be how I’d take this experience. It would be life imitating art. We’ve all been there. We’ve all looked for trouble in our life so that we can write about it.”

Crucial in carving out the path that would eventually lead to Europiana was Savoretti’s family. At the close of a tour that proved to be something of a victory lap after the breakthrough success of Singing To Strangers, he returned home with no idea that he wouldn’t be leaving again for months.

With the UK under its first lockdown, he knew that the tone he set for his children would be not only a defining feature of the foreseeable future, but one that could remain with them for a lifetime.

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JACK SAVORETTI

Euro Vision

“I wasn’t going to put them through a year of the unknown and a year of me being a miserable bastard singing about it,” he laughs. “I decided, I’m going to put the red nose on and jump on the table and open champagne every Friday night.

And we’re going to get dressed up and have the most glamorous year of our lives. I was thinking, ‘how are my kids going to remember this’? Everybody will look back one day and think, ‘what did I do in lockdown’? I really embraced it and it definitely comes across on this record.

“We did this thing called Fabulous Friday, where every Friday we would have a party so there was something to look forward to all week. There would be different themes and the kids would spend all week thinking about what they’ll eat on Friday, how they should dress and what music we’ll play.”

Though unaware at the time, it was these Fabulous Fridays that would set the sonic blueprint for Europiana.

“We had these amazing summer evenings and I started playing a lot of music that I connect to the

summer, from Daft Punk and Giorgio Moroder to Julio Iglesias and Gypsy Kings - all this stuff which I now call Europiana. My kids who were like, ‘Pops, why don’t you make music like this? You like it, it’s so much fun’.

And it’s true. I was missing the sense of occasion and fun of a night out in the summer, by the sea, when you’re on holiday and have those little moments that are only temporary and won’t last forever. I wanted to bottle that feeling.”

In order to bottle that feeling, Savoretti set about creating it in abundance. Writing sessions, held at home between lockdowns, would double up as long, sun-drenched lunches in the garden. Dress codes were introduced to help generate just the right atmosphere. In the absence of travel, he left no stone unturned in transporting his merry cohort. In spirit, at least.

“I was bringing my band into this world,” he says, sounding as infectiously enthused by the prospect today as he evidently was during the sessions. “I let them know that when they walked through my front door we were on holiday - we were going to live this. They were coming here

dressed up as if we were going out on a yacht. That was how we were going to live the day and we’d write about it until the early hours of the morning.”

As the boozy lunches and long summer nights that made up Europiana’s writing sessions drew to a close, the inevitable hangover presented itself in the form of some serious question marks over how the album would be recorded. With Autumn on the horizon and new lockdown restrictions impending, capturing the sonic essence of the record posed something of a conundrum.

“There was this whole argument about recording it, Savoretti recalls.

“I really didn’t want to record it virtually - it had to be real. If we’d done it remotely it could have fallen into pastiche and imitation, rather than perpetuating what we loved from the past and making it relevant.

So I waited and waited - we had the songs written quite a bit before the album was done. And then I thought at the end of last year, ‘this isn’t going to happen, let’s just wait until 2021. Maybe 2020 just isn’t the year to be recording, it’s too complicated’.”

“WHEN WE GOT INTO THE STUDIO, THE EMOTIONS OF ALL OF US BEING TOGETHER AND THE EXCITEMENT OF SEEING EACH OTHER WAS MAGIC. IT WAS THE MOST EMOTIONAL FEELING I’VE HAD IN MY CAREER.”

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

COVER STORY

Fortunately, a long planned (and almost canned) session at Abbey Road Studios was able to run as scheduled, adding a sparkle of prestige to proceedings and that sense of occasion he’d been so missing.

“There was a gap before Christmas where everything became unlocked and we booked 10 days at Abbey Road Studios, which I was about to pull two days before we went in,” he explains. “I just wasn’t sure everyone was in the right state of mind to go into Abbey Road and be in that place

where we could give these songs the energy they needed. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. All of the guys working on the record were desperate to do it. And when we got into the studio, the emotions of all of us being together and the excitement of seeing each other was magic. It was the most emotional feeling I’ve had in my career when it comes to making a record. We all had tears in our eyes the first day, trying to keep it cool, but it was very emotional.”

It’s testament to Savoretti, his band and producer Cam Blackwood

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(George Ezra, London Grammar, Florence and the Machine) that the sense of time and place they were attempting to capture is done so with truly unerring detail and accuracy.

One can almost feel the heat of the Mediterranean sun and taste the salt of the sea, such is the warmth and richness of the synths and rhythm section that underpin its 11 tracks, while the Nile Rodgers-featuring lead single Who’s Hurting Who? sees the legendary Chic man’s unmistakable guitar tones shimmer through the track like disco lights bouncing off a mirror ball.

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JACK SAVORETTI

Euro Vision

Their success in this regard is due in no small part to the experience they all shared on Europiana’s predecessor Singing To Strangers, an ode to Italian music and cinema recorded at legendary composer Ennio Morricone’s Rome studio.

“This wasn’t our first rodeo, in the sense that the last album was the first time I really indulged in a concept consciously,” says Savoretti. “All of my albums have been concept albums to some degree, but I’ve fought against that, whereas last time I really dived into it. And the fact I chose to make it in Rome at Ennio Moriccone’s studio was a real learning curve.

We learned together as a band how important an idea is rather than just a sound. Making great music isn’t just about playing the right notes, it’s about understanding why we are doing this and what the point of making this album is.”

On working with Rodgers, Savoretti fulfilled something of a lifelong dream.

“That was possibly the coolest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he beams.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in the studio and said it would be cool to put some Nile Rodgersstyle guitar on this. It’s an expression I use a lot as it’s a guitar sound I love.

I was working with [producer and mixer] Mark Ralph and he said, ‘why don’t we ask Nile’? Next thing I knew, Nile had agreed. Not only did he agree, but he’s been such a mentor.

He’s had me on his podcast and has just been very supportive about the whole concept. When he sent his stuff we listened to it in the studio and I was like a little child jumping up and down. I couldn’t believe it. When you hear that guitar you know it’s Nile, and to hear it on my song was so cool.”

While first and foremost a celebration of the European music and culture that Savoretti has loved throughout his life, was the title in any way HEADLINER MAGAZINE

a reflection - or rejection - of the political divisions that have splintered the UK’s relationship with its European neighbours over the past five years?

Born in England to an Italian father and half-German, half-Polish mother, he identifies unequivocally as a European, which he considers his

place of birth a quintessential part of. As he sees it, Europiana is far from a political record, but he was determined to make an album that celebrates the culture that unites us all as Europeans, wherever one may stand on the dreaded B word.

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Photographer: Carsten Windhorst

COVER STORY

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JACK SAVORETTI

Euro Vision

Photographer: Chris Floyd

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“This is not a political record,” he states firmly, “but I think what unites Europeans culturally isn’t spoken about enough. I think that’s been a big mistake of the whole European project - our culture and identity has really been put on the back burner, and that’s a recipe for disaster. If we talk about being European as only political or financial, my goodness, we could talk all day and point fingers. But if we talk about culture and identity, it’s magic. It’s incredible that such a conflicted part of the world can still have so much respect for one another’s culture, music, art, the way we eat, dance, dress and act. It’s so strong, that connection we have in Europe. This is a fun way of looking at it, don’t get me wrong, I’m not over philosophising about it, but it’s just a way of saying, come on, look at what we have in common. Even the strongest Brexit voter will play ABBA at their wedding and love it!”

Though clearly intended as a feelgood, summertime record and not a political missive, was he concerned that given today’s highlyHEADLINER MAGAZINE

charged, polarised climate, some may jump to conclusions upon seeing its title before even hearing a bar?

“Some people have been defensive about it,” he half laughs, half sighs.

“Some have said, ‘what is this? Should you be doing this after Brexit?’ Well, I’m half English. I consider England part of all of this as well. I’m half English and still fully European. And we’re so European. The Bee Gees have such an influence on this record.

That was such a European sound. It was European artists trying to absorb so much of what was happening in Philadelphia and New York, and when it came over the ocean, Europeans took soul, funk, disco and added this European tradition of songwriting, which is melancholy, storytelling, melody and suddenly you have the Bee Gees and ABBA and Julio Inglesias. All of these were so influenced by what was happening on the east coast of the US, and that was happening in England too.”

Having released Europiana on June 25 via EMI, Savoretti will be taking

the record on tour around the UK in 2022. In the meantime, there may be some live announcements in the not too distant future, but for now, details remain under wraps.

“We will try to do a few things over the summer, although I hate to say what because these things keep coming and going overnight, and what we think we’re doing keeps changing,” he says before retiring to his Oxfordshire garden. “We’re going to be touring in February and March 2022, which I can’t wait for. We’re just taking each day as it comes. It’s very different to how things were the last time I put out a record, so we’re learning how this all works and seeing what the best way is to get music to people and have fun doing it.”

If anyone knows how to do it, it’s Jack Savoretti.

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Divine Intervention

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PRODUCER

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What do you get when you combine a marketing genius, a studio engineer, a pianist and a cellist? The answer is The Piano Guys, “a bunch of ordinary guys” playing classically influenced instrumental music in viral Youtube videos. The band’s music producer Al van der Beek talks divine intervention, ‘the Disney test’, and Cubase.

The Piano Guys is made up of pianist Jon Schmidt, cellist Steven Sharp Nelson, videographer Paul Anderson, and music producer Al van der Beek. How did you all meet?

AV: Paul wanted to start advertising his piano store in more unconventional ways, and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter were barely starting to get people’s attention at the time. He thought, ‘maybe if I harness the power of social media, I could sell tonnes of pianos!’ He approached John and said, ‘let’s showcase the pianos out in fields or on top of mountains, and together we’ll start a channel called The Piano Guys, and we’ll sell tonnes of pianos’. Steve would perform at John’s concerts, so that’s how they knew each other, and then Steve moved into my neighbourhood, and as a good neighbour, I helped them move in. I noticed a lot of cellos, percussion instruments and guitars, and I said, ‘I’m a musician as well; I have a studio in my home. Let’s get together and jam sometime’. Then Steve, John and I were working on this original song, and John started telling us about Paul and how they’re going to film a video to showcase his Yamaha pianos. All four of us got together and filmed this video, put it up on YouTube, and a week later it had a million views. Fast forward to today and we have seven million YouTube subscribers, almost three billion video views and 10 albums with Sony. We’ve been all over the world, and the irony is we haven’t sold one piano!

We don’t believe in coincidences and happenstance, it’s just divine

“I HAVE TURNED A LOT OF PEOPLE ON TO CUBASE BECAUSE IT’S HANDS DOWN THE MOST POWERFUL, MOST INTUITIVE SOFTWARE IN THE INDUSTRY – I USE IT EVERY SINGLE DAY.”

intervention. The only explanation for it was that God orchestrated all of our lives in a way that when we met, we were all ready and had those skills and could hit the ground running.

The band covers songs by everyone from Ed Sheeran to Coldplay, One Direction, Selena Gomez, to the Jurassic Park theme; how do you pick songs?

AV: One of the benefits of all being dads is that we’ve got lots of kids – we’ve got 16 or 17 kids between the four of us, so a lot of the ideas come from our kids! The most important thing for us is if we’re going to cover a tune, we want to make sure it’s

something that we feel comfortable listening and watching with our kids.

We call it the Disney test!

Why is Steinberg’s Cubase your DAW of choice?

AV: Every one of our songs on our 10 albums with Sony have all been recorded, mixed and produced in Cubase. It is so intuitive and jam packed full of tools that help you instantly be creative. It’s a tool that helps me stay in the zone; I don’t ever get distracted by the software, and I love the stock plugins they have.

They just came out with this new tool in one of the latest software updates called Imager, and it’s such a cool tool because it helps make your mixes HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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THE PIANO GUYS

Divine Intervention

sound really big and wide by panning within a specific EQ range instead of just panning left and right; it actually takes the audio into consideration.

I have turned a lot of people on to Cubase because it’s hands down the most powerful, most intuitive software in the industry – I use it every single day. I feel like it was created by musicians. John – he’s the pianist in the group – him and technology don’t get along. Recently I set up a little studio at his house with Cubase, and literally within 30 minutes he knew how to use it and was recording tracks. I have his home studio connected with my home studio, which is also connected to The Piano Guys’ studio, so he starts on songs HEADLINER MAGAZINE

and piano compositions and I can open them up in Cubase on my end.

It’s just incredible because now he doesn’t have to come to me – he can just do it in his house using Cubase.

He’s like, ‘man, this has opened up my whole world!’ It’s no fun when you’re trying to be creative when you have to rely on someone else.

I’m actually doing that with Steve the cellist too – he’s also up and running on Cubase. He just dived into it head first. Now, Paul, the videographer – a business guy – wants me to set up a studio for him because he’s seeing how it opens up so much more creativity. We’re dividing and conquering, and that’s how in the last year we’ve been able to have

a backlog of songs in the queue because everyone’s been working on music at the same time, and then we come together and we polish it. I’ll take the final product and produce, mix and master it and all that good stuff. But we wouldn’t be able to do it without Cubase; it’s been the heart of our composition.

STEINBERG.NET THEPIANOGUYS.COM

Destino, Ibiza with the d&b GSL System

N E X T X N O W

At home in the most demanding club applications, a d&b system brings market-leading software and hardware to every performance. Night after night, this easy-to-use audio toolkit helps bring dancefloors to life. And, as d&b works hand in hand with the industry on innovative, patented technologies, the boundaries of what’s possible evolve. So, in shaping what’s coming next, the now becomes even more exciting. More than a sound system.

See what’s possible at dbaudio.com/club

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MARTA SALOGNI

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INTHEZONA Award-winning engineer, mixer and producer Marta Salogni was recently shortlisted for the 2021 MPG Best Producer award, having spent the past 10 years establishing herself as one of the industry’s most talented – and, indeed, sought after – studio professionals in the business. Here, she tells Headliner about her latest award nomination, recent projects and the “life changing” Genelec monitors she has added to her East London facility, Studio Zona…

“It’s a huge honour because it’s peerto-peer recognition, so the people who think my work is good are people I call friends, colleagues and role models,” Salogni tells Headliner after congratulating her on her MPG Awards Best Producer nomination. “I deeply admire a lot of them and to be recognised for my work feels like a huge honour. It’s very special, and I

know how much it counts, and I know how high these people’s standards are.”

Despite the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic that has blighted so much of the industry for the past 16 months, Salogni has remained busy.

During this time she has provided sound design for the critically

acclaimed Sisters With Transistors film, which celebrates the unsung women who pioneered the electronic music scene, as well as adding her production skills to new records from the likes of Daniel Avery and Black Midi. Each of these projects, she explains, have been special in their own unique way.

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“Working with Black Midi was really fun,” she says. “The guys are just so brilliant and such amazing players. That was last summer – I produced the track John L. They are so well rehearsed. They make it sound effortless. We work hard to make it look easy, and when it sounds so effortlessly brilliant, that’s when the magic happens. That’s when you can enjoy things and push things further and have some fun. When the playing is brilliant you don’t have to worry about the performance – they have it nailed from take one. There is no greater joy than having great material to work with and then being able to take it to the next level.

“GENELEC HAVE ALWAYS BEEN MY FAVOURITE MONITORS, THEY ARE SECOND TO NONE.”

“I also worked with Daniel Avery, finishing off his next record,” she continues. “I always love mixing his music, it’s a conditioner for my brain! I feel like we are on the same page and my instincts are the right ones for him, and I can use the desk in a musical way. We are really pushing sounds sometimes, up to the point that it breaks, and that allows me to learn a lot about my own way of working.”

As for the Sisters With Transistors film, Salogni became involved with the project after working with one of her idols in the form of Grammynominated composer, electro pioneer and artist Suzanne Ciani.

Salogni worked with Ciani on a 2019 project entitled In Kolab, alongside composer and producer (and In Kolab founder) Katia Isakoff and visual artist Anil Aykan. The project was centred around an audio visual piece called Making Waves, which caught the attention of Sisters With Transistors director Lisa Rovner.

“We did a playback of this project at British Grove Studios and Lisa Rovner was there and was really impressed,” Salogni elaborates.

“She approached me and said she was working on this film about the unsung pioneers of electronic HEADLINER MAGAZINE

music and asked me if I’d like to do some of the sound design, but on a more musical and conceptual level.

It’s a film about women making music, so I felt the soundtrack itself shouldn’t take over the narrative – it should be about the sounds that the protagonists of the film are making.

That’s how I approached the soundtrack – linking the stories and amplifying them. That film includes a lot of my heroes, it was really special to me.”

The past year or so has also allowed Salogni to upgrade Studio Zona, most notably with the addition of some new Genelec 8350As. “Genelec have always been my favourite monitors, they are second

to none,” she concludes. “I love them, and these specific ones come with the GLM technology that allows you to tune them to your room. That has been life changing for me.

“They are calibrated for the room, and they come with a sub, which is also a life-changing factor for me.

It’s really important for me to be able to hear all of the frequencies when I’m working in the studio.

It’s absolutely vital for modern standards of music to be able to hear those frequencies. This technology makes these monitors very flexible and unlike anything else I’ve used.”

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LIVE SOUND

d&b audiotechnik’s new D40 mobile amplifier boasts reduced size and weight, advanced voltage management and increased system performance, while significantly reducing power consumption for improved environmental friendliness. d&b product manager, Wolfgang Schulz answers Headliner’s burning questions on the mobile version of the manufacturer’s 40D installation amplifier.

What makes the D40 amplifier innovative?

WS: The D40 has been tailor-made for mobile applications and incorporates comprehensive loudspeaker management, switchable filtering functions and uses advanced Digital Signal Processing (DSP) to incorporate loudspeaker-specific configurations and user-definable setups, equalisation and delay. The D40 represents a significant progression in mobile amplification, inheriting benefits from advances made in high efficiency loudspeaker design.

What are ideal mobile applications for the D40 amplifier?

WS: The unit’s small 2RU size, reduced weight and connectivity flexibility makes it a perfect choice for mobile applications. The unit’s powerful signal processing extends the level of functionality of the onboard features.

These include a range of loudspeakerspecific filter functions plus two user-definable 16-band EQs, which facilitate system tuning. The delay capability covers a range of up to 10 seconds, designed to drive the d&b KSL medium to large format threeway line array loudspeakers to their full performance potential.

The d&b audiotechnik approach is to build integrated sound reinforcement systems that are more than the combination of parts. Every element is tightly specified, precisely aligned

and carefully matched to achieve maximum efficiency. All user-definable parameters are incorporated for ease of use, allowing adjustment – either directly – via remote control surfaces, or integrated within wider networks.

Why should someone invest in the D40 over the 40D installation amplifier?

WS: The 40D/D40 are the installation and mobile versions of the same amplifier. They are based on the same technology – a new amplifier DSP platform, but they play very different roles. The 40D is the most powerful amplifier in the d&b installation range. It was initially launched with the KSLi System as none of the existing installation amplifiers were delivering the necessary output voltage and management to drive the high-performance, high-efficiency loudspeaker systems.

While the 40D features Phoenix Euroblock, 4 x AES and 4x analogue inputs with Phoenix Euroblock outputs, the D40 features XLR, 4 x AES or analogue inputs, with NL4 plus central NL8 outputs.

Both the D40 and 40D access the d&b remote network via an Ethernet connection using the Open Control Architecture protocol (AES70 / OCA).

The D40 is controlled using the integrated web interface, enabling access via a browser or using the d&b R1 Remote control software.

The D40 enables up to eight input channels and provides four analogue inputs, as well as four AES3 channels with corresponding link outputs.

Each input channel can be routed to any of the output channels. The amp combines advanced voltage management to drive systems that demand less input power as a whole.

The D40 includes enhanced energy-saving features, power

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efficiency, Automatic Wake up for environmentally responsible and sustainable green building requirements and a touchscreen and data wheel for fast, easy adjustments, while the 40D LCD touchscreen is for general setting and status monitoring.

Is significantly reducing power consumption in your products becoming more important to the company with all new launches?

WS: Yes. Respect for our planet and its resources is the responsibility of every enterprise and individual. d&b is committed long-term to far-reaching principles of sustainability and helping create a greener entertainment industry. d&b is a signatory of a WIN-Charta, showcasing its clear commitment to economic, ecological and social responsibility. This promise makes sustainable management a permanent part of d&b’s mission statement and develops reliable and effective structures for it.

At all levels of the company d&b encourages incentives to rethink and act, and involve employees and all other stakeholders in a constant process to increase corporate sustainability. d&b is proud to support ecology, sustainability and environmental responsibility, working with international and local organisations to supply employees and partners with the information and empowerment they need to make a real and positive difference.

The amplifier works with ArrayCalc, ArrayProcessing, NoizCalc and the R1 Remote control software; is it intuitive for the user?

WS: The D40 is very intuitive to use.

The amplifier’s user interface consists of a 4.3-inch (480 x 272 pix.) colour touchscreen and a digital rotary encoder, providing comprehensive HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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More Power To You

device configuration information and enhanced status monitoring. As part of the d&b family, the D40 benefits from the full range of d&b technology software solutions, including ArrayCalc, ArrayProcessing, NoizCalc and the R1 Remote control software.

These elements all come together in the highly efficient d&b workflow, maximising the performance, usability and value of d&b systems.

Why is advanced voltage management a key feature given today’s power requirements?

WS: The D40’s voltage management allows it to drive a modern, highefficiency loudspeaker design where maximum output voltage is more relevant than output power, and this results in less power consumption, infrastructural benefits for the dimensioning of mains supply, air conditioning and capacity of the UPS to save on resources and meet environmental responsibility requirements.

The D40 utilises a switch mode power supply with automatic mains range selection and active Power Factor Correction (PFC) to produce a clean HEADLINER MAGAZINE

current draw and ensure stable and efficient performance under adverse mains conditions.

What kind of applications do you envisage the amp being used for as we come out of lockdown?

WS: A d&b system is much more than just equipment. It’s a longterm relationship with genuinely enthusiastic individuals, ready to listen and share their experience and expertise in application support, education, training, service, sales and finance. The d&b teams develop technology to meet market needs, supported by people who know and love the industry.

From theatres, to stadiums, to corporate and industrial rental companies that serve an almost unimaginable range of applications, the D40 is a powerful, flexible and very reliable amplifier for almost any mobile sound system.

Audio engineers, consultants and contractors of all types will quickly recognise the quality and flexible user benefits of having a set of D40 amplifiers within their system.

DBAUDIO.COM

SIGURDÓR GUÐMUNDSSON

The Sculptor

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Sometimes, sticking to what you know isn’t such a bad thing. It’s a philosophy that teacher, bassist and mastering engineer Sigurdór Guðmundsson has upheld for a while now since moving from his native home of Iceland to Denmark, and having worked out of his very own Skonrokk Studios - mostly in audio post-production, mixing and mastering - since 2010.

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

Despite the success he has enjoyed at his current locale, Guðmundsson begins by eagerly revealing his plans to design and build a dedicated listening room and mastering studio in a disused barn on the grounds where he lives (which is on an old farm).

“I’ve been playing the electric bass in soul, funk, fusion, folk, reggae, jazz, pop and rock styles with various projects and as a freelance musician

since I was a teenager,” he tells Headliner. “I’m basically exclusively mastering these days, and most of the projects I do [which are also incredibly varied in genre and style] actually come from Iceland. The obvious advantage there is that I can communicate in my own language!

However, we do use a lot of English slang, because it’s such a big part of the technical language in the songs I work on.”

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“IT’S OUR RESPONSIBILITY TO USE THE TOOLS AS WE SEE FIT, AND TO LET THEM BENEFIT THE PROJECT AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.”

When it comes to his setup, Guðmundsson likes to keep it relatively simple, using Pro Tools for audio playback and capture and with a few nice bits of outboard on standby, including a GOLY Stereo Dynamic Shelving Equaliser and two EQs: Kush Audio’s Clariphonic MS Parallel EQ and a Creme unit from Tegeler Audio. He’s also a big fan of the “fantastic” Gyratec G22 Vari-Mu Tube Compressor from Danish manufacturer Gyraf Audio, and Handsome Audio’s Zulu, which is a passive analogue tape simulator.

One set of tools he finds himself relying on more regularly however are Leapwing Audio plugins, and he’s a particular fan of DynOne 3 - the latest version of the company’s very first plugin.

“I use it in a similar manner on a lot of different things, so it’s definitely a versatile tool,” he shares. “At the end of the day it’s our responsibility to use the tools as we see fit, and to let them benefit the project as much as possible.

“As a multiband compressor and expander, DynOne does a great job of controlling things, but I generally look at it as an overall sculpting tool for tonal shaping, control, and imaging.”

Guðmundsson’s process starts with him understanding and analysing what’s going on in the music, in terms of where the main frequency areas are and the best place to have the crossover points: “Identifying the sweet spot from which to split things is a must,” he adds.

“Typically in pop and rock music, for instance, DynOne leaves the bass and low part of the kick in the same band.

There’s the Band Compensation Gain feature, which I wasn’t a fan of in the early days because it changed the tonal aspect of the EQ in my opinion.

But then I think it was after DynOne 2 came out, I started to experiment with it more, and started to find it really useful for sculpting things a little bit faster, and sometimes in a more creative way.

“I’m almost always using it in parallel; it allows you to create space to open things up, and very often it does it in a beautiful way. Having used it for four years, it is now a very essential part of my toolkit. Leapwing plugins in general are easy to use, and they sound absolutely fabulous. And the Leapwing team is fantastic - they’re great people and are very approachable, so I can’t really praise them enough.”

When it comes to workflow, Guðmundsson is a firm believer that the faster you can get to a great monitoring situation in an acoustically treated space, the better.

“I think that is way more beneficial than having a certain piece of outboard gear or whatever, because it eliminates the blind spots and allows you to work faster and with more confidence.

“I’ve worked on albums that have been amazing from start to finish,” he reflects. “Great production, great recordings, or excellent composition.

And sometimes, you get pleasantly surprised.

“It might sound a bit romantic, but I’m basically just a music fan at my core.

I thoroughly enjoy music and good quality sound; I try to let the music guide me and then it’s my job to make things sound better, and to bring out the best in every project!”

INSTA: @SKONROKK_MASTERING LEAPWINGAUDIO.COM

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Garden of Eden

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

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GARDEN OF EDEN Since 2005, London’s Kensington Gardens’ Serpentine Gallery has hosted its live programming in The Serpentine Pavilion, a temporary outdoor structure on the grounds that is redesigned each year by some of the world’s most promising talents in design. For its 20th Pavilion, the gallery will be playing host to In A Garden, a new generative music installation by famed musician, producer and activist Brian Eno. To bring his multi-layered sonic vision to life, Eno has utilised L-Acoustics L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound to mix the new piece with the aid of the L-ISA Studio software suite at L-Acoustics Creations immersive sound space in Highgate.

In A Garden is Eno’s contribution to Back to Earth, a multi-year project at Serpentine Galleries involving more than 60 leading artists, architects, poets, filmmakers, scientists, thinkers and designers, who have been

invited to devise artist-led campaigns, protocols and initiatives responding to the environmental crisis, with the support of partner organisations and networks.

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According to Eno, “This piece started life two years ago as what I call ‘country music’. In my use of the phrase, that doesn’t involve banjos and cowboys but is intended to be music that is an evocation of being in a landscape, in a place. This piece is what I call a generative piece: it’s a set of procedural rules allowed to work themselves out. Usually I do this in such a way that the piece changes all the time. In this instance however, because I wanted to take advantage of the L-Acoustics L-ISA spatialisation technology, the piece is essentially a long recording, looped.”

Eno notes that if a visitor arrives at midday two days in a row, they will hear almost the same music, which is described as a layered, stratified construction of sonic material. “Not exactly the same, because there are some random elements within the spatialisation itself,” he adds. “If it were a garden, it would be as though some of the plants had moved a bit during the night…”

The speakers for In A Garden were colour matched and hidden within the structure so as not to distract from the immersive experience.

“It’s a really impressive and beautiful building, but when you’re considering speaker placement - unless you’ve got pillars in useful locations - it can get hard spacing speakers out enough on the horizontal axis to HEADLINER MAGAZINE

give you that high resolution,” says Stephen Hughes, account director for L-Acoustics Creations distributor Delta Live who designed the L-ISA system for the Serpentine Pavilion. “As we were mixing on one of the nights, Brian heard a motorbike go past, so he suddenly wanted to add the sound of that motorbike to the mix so that it comes once every 20 minutes.

We had it moving around slowly in the distance; we wanted to help blur the image so there’s no separation between reproduced sound and the sound of the environment itself.

“I’m not quite sure that there’s another system out there that has the same kind of workflow, or is able to achieve the same result quite as smoothly and quickly as we did, especially given the fact that we have a grid of 12 overhead speakers as well.”

Eno suggested a number of interesting techniques to make In A Garden as immersive an experience as possible. One such technique was a rainfall sound, starting directly centre overhead and then using multi-tap delays to create a slow descent of sound, starting from the very top and eventually falling all around the listener over time.

“You’d be hard pressed, without the kind of processing power or even the user interface, to achieve that as quickly as we have,” Hughes suggests.

In the program notes for In A Garden, Eno writes: “People tend to imagine that making art is like making architecture — that you have a ‘plan’ or a ‘vision’ in mind before you start and then you set about making it. But my feeling is that making art can be more usefully thought of as being like gardening: you plant a few seeds and then start watching what happens between them, how they come to life and how they interact.

“It doesn’t mean there’s no plan at all, but that the process of making is a process of you interacting with the object, and letting it set the pace.

This approach is sometimes called ‘procedural’. I call it ‘generative’. Just as a garden is different every year, a piece of generative art might also be different each time you see or hear it.

The implication of this is that such a work is never really finished — there is never a final state.

“I wanted to think of the music that I installed in the new pavilion as a sort of sonic garden — a concentrated park within the real park,” he concludes.

SERPENTINEGALLERIES.ORG L-ACOUSTICS.COM

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GLASS ANIMALS

Photographer: Pooneh Ghana

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Riding The Wave

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GLASS ANIMALS Like Headliner, upon first hearing the slickly-produced Your Love (Déjà vu) pumping out of the radio, you might be forgiven for assuming that Glass Animals, with their polished, Timbaland-esque hip hop-infused bouncy beats, are an American outfit. Take one look at their balls-tothe-wall, surreal (and recently, DIY for covid reasons) music videos and there is no question that a wonderfully British sense of humour lies behind this exciting electronic pop band.

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GLASS ANIMALS

Riding The Wave

Photographer: Elliott Arndt

The band’s singer, songwriter and producer, Dave Bayley is getting his first ever tattoo on his bum, he tells Headliner on a Zoom call, where he’s sporting round glasses, a thick, retro-looking red knitted jumper with a flamethrower on it that you’ll recognise from Glass Animals’ Space Ghost Coast To Coast music video –“my mum knitted it,” he jokes – and possibly pyjama bottoms.

“I live right above the studio; I put on trousers today, but quite often I don’t,” he admits. “I just wake up, get some cereal and come down to the studio in my pyjamas and work. I never have to leave.”

The reason for the tattoo traces back to a time when Bayley promised to get a tattoo in said area if the band went to number one on the Triple J Hottest 100 of 2020. Sure enough, the band’s sleeper hit, Heat Waves secured the coveted No.1 spot, and with it the future of Bayley’s as yet un-inked body (again, see the Space Ghost Coast To Coast video).

“It’s happening soon; I’ve actually just booked my tattoo appointment today! I promised that I would get the outline of Australia tattooed on HEADLINER MAGAZINE

my bum if we got a number one in Australia, and it happened! I asked fans to submit designs and got so many it was actually really hard to choose. This is my first tattoo. Sorry, mum. But it’s happening. I might have to get a tattoo for my mum as well...I won’t put that one on my bum. I think she wanted me to never have a tattoo and to be buried ink-less.”

Speaking of Heat Waves, the blissed-out, woozy tune was actually released in June 2020, but only made its debut in the UK top 40 in January 2021, and has been on heavy rotation on radios ever since. Bayley is as baffled as anyone as to why the song suddenly blew up.

“I have no idea! I’ve been trying to pinpoint an exact moment. It’s just been such a gradual growth, although we did get used in the FIFA 21 soundtrack, but that was a long time ago so I don’t think that was directly related. It’s pretty weird. Ultimately the song is about missing people, and maybe everyone’s just missing people.

Maybe it’s resonating, but whatever is happening, it’s really heartwarming and lovely. We’re very lucky.”

Dreamland was written after band member Joe Seaward was involved in a serious road accident in 2018.

Unable to look forwards, Bayley delved into the comfort of the past, which resulted in the album being heavily tied into ideas of nostalgia; perhaps one of the reasons this record has resonated with so many during the isolation of the global pandemic.

“I seriously tapped into that! I ended up tapping into all that stuff when writing the album initially back in 2019, and it all came flooding back in the pandemic. I guess when there’s nothing to look forward to, you end up looking backwards. You’re trapped indoors, you can’t go out and create new memories, so you basically relive the old ones in a new context. I found that I was going back and eating the food that I used to eat when I was a kid and trying to recreate those meals, and I watched the entire Karate Kid series, the Terminator series, Robocop – I basically went back through all my childhood films.

I’ve got really into cartoons too – I went way back.”

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“ULTIMATELY THE SONG IS ABOUT MISSING PEOPLE, AND MAYBE EVERYONE’S JUST MISSING PEOPLE. MAYBE IT’S RESONATING, BUT WHATEVER IS HAPPENING, IT’S REALLY HEARTWARMING AND LOVELY.”

Photographer: Pooneh Ghana

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Riding The Wave

“I JUST LOVE OLD STUFF WITH A BIT OF CHARACTER AND NEVE CERTAINLY HAS THAT.”

Dreamland is undeniably futuristic, yet at the same time is drenched in nostalgia and personal experience – (what is it about the opening notes of the song, Dreamland that pulls at some long forgotten memory that isn’t even yours?), and this fusion of old and new is reflected in Bayley’s choice of studio toys.

“I love Neve!” he says, grinning. “I just love old stuff with a bit of character and Neve certainly has that. I don’t have a desk in my studio. We did actually go through a big Neve in The Church Studios, and obviously that sounds absolutely incredible. But here in my little room where we recorded some of the drums on the record, we used a very simple setup of four microphones. I’ve got one, two, three, four Neve 1073s,” he says, glancing around and counting them. “I’ve actually got the new Shelford channel as well. I’ve really been enjoying that; that’s what I’m going through right now through this microphone.

“I find myself using those 1073s as it’s nice to just have it all set up and not mess with it ever,” he adds. “I find more and more that I’m just using those spontaneous recordings rather than trying to really perfect things and go back and do multiple takes, so it’s nice to have the Neves set up. Everything sounds good through them, even if it’s a slightly rubbish mic technique,” he laughs. “Neve will help polish it out just enough to be usable!”

Bayley shares that he has one setting on every Neve channel: “So one of the 1073s is a Mellotron, one of the 1073s is a random synth...I have a Roland Jupiter and a couple of other synths, and that’ll go through the other 1073, and one just goes through a Shure SM57 on a Fender. I tend to just use the SM57 on guitar amps – that’s going through the other Neves. And then there’s another Neve and I use that for vocals a lot. I have a DPA d:facto handheld microphone that I use for sampling things, and I used that to sample a lot of the drums and stuff on the record, like claps and mouth pops, and me hitting things with spoons.

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I record vocals through that mic when I want to put down an idea really quickly.”

Glass Animals’ second full album, How to Be a Human Being won in two categories at the 2018 MPG Awards for UK Album of the Year and Self Producing Artist of the Year, and Dreamland earned Glass Animals a Self-Producing Artist Of The Year award this year. Bayley wrote and produced all three Glass Animals albums, and says that being nominated never gets old.

“It’s wonderful. It’s an honour to be on a list with some great friends of mine. I find with producing, you don’t need loads and loads of gear. It’s really good to just have a few things that you really like, and know your way around. I get almost all of my synth sounds out of the same two synthesisers because I can hear the sound in my head and just go to it and play with it. You just need to know how to bend the stuff that you have to work, and you can do anything with a computer nowadays. Our first album is entirely made on a laptop. Some people also think you need loads and loads and loads of analogue gear, and I’ve just spoken about analogue gear for ages,” he realises, laughing, “but I also do love the digital stuff – it makes things so quick and easy. Don’t be afraid of that.”

With that, Bayley’s dog, Woody makes his presence known, and gives away another of his owner’s recording tips: “Sorry if you just had a weird noise there, my dog is quite a strange character. He’s...groaning? He just basically lounges around the studio chewing on wires that he really shouldn’t be chewing on...I don’t know what he wants, he’s just looking at me, groaning. He likes to sit on my lap; I actually do a lot of recording with him just sitting on my lap,” he grins.

OPENSOURCE.GLASSANIMALS.COM AMS-NEVE.COM

CATHERINE MARKS

Five Albums That Changed My Life

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CATHERINE MARKS Over the past decade, producer Catherine Marks has become one of the most in-demand talents in the business. Here, she takes us on a guide of five records she has worked on that hold a special place in her heart and have been pivotal in shaping her into the award-winning producer she is today…

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MANCHESTER ORCHESTRA, A Black Mile To The Surface There are so many reasons this has been an important record for me. I love it so much not just because it’s beautiful and brilliant, but because of the relationships I made with the band.

We are now collaborators for life.

This was the first time I’d worked with a band that wasn’t at the start of their career, they’d had lots of experience making records. But they talk about this as a new beginning and it certainly was for me. I’d been working with much younger artists at the development stage, whereas they were well versed in what it was to make a record. I expected it would be a different experience but wasn’t expecting how difficult it would be. I have high expectations in the studio, but I was used to being the only one, then I was confronted with their next level expectations and demands. It was a real challenge and made me work harder and draw on all my knowledge.

Before it had been about the psychology of working with younger artists, but here it was also about the next level sonic quality of an album.

THE AMAZONS, Future Dust

I worked with The Amazons on their previous record and on an EP. We recorded it at Monnow Valley and spent a lot of time on pre-production.

We’d grown separately in the time between records and both our abilities had improved. Their vision was clearer.

We wanted to make a record that sounded like it took two years to make in the space of about three weeks! The band wanted big riffs, big melodies, and we definitely achieved that. The funny thing was, on the first album I did a lot of guitar layering to make these impossible guitar sounds, whereas this time they gave me a rule that only four guitars could be playing at once – that could be two parts doubled and that’s it.

It was a challenging record – the drummer’s wife was about to give birth, so we had to get all the drums done in the first group of sessions; the guitarist chopped off the tip of his finger in a kitchen accident before the solos were finished, so he had to complete his solos with three fingers! It was one thing after another and a real lesson in working to a tight deadline.

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THE BIG MOON, Love In The 4th Dimension

This was so much fun to make. Prior to the record, we worked on four songs that were going to be singles and they really wanted me to make the record, but I didn’t know if I would be able to do it. I was working in the US and was supposed to be going on holiday afterwards. So, I said that I would cut my holiday short, but we’d only have eight days to make the record. I said I think we can do this, but we have to be really well prepared, which they were.

We recorded it at Eastcote Studios and we turned it into a holiday; we brought in blow-up palm trees and flamingos and we took our shoes off and had a party for eight days, but we worked really hard every minute of every day.

We recorded it live, which allowed us to overdub fun stuff and random instruments that were lying around.

The point was that we were going to have a good time making it, and that album is a great example of what can be done when everyone is on the same page, and you have a really clear brief. It was easily the most fun I’ve had making an album.

“WE WANTED TO MAKE A RECORD THAT SOUNDED LIKE IT TOOK TWO YEARS TO MAKE IN THE SPACE OF ABOUT THREE WEEKS! THE BAND WANTED BIG RIFFS, BIG MELODIES, AND WE DEFINITELY ACHIEVED THAT.”

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CATHERINE MARKS

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

Five Albums That Changed My Life

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“WE KNEW WE HAD CREATED SOMETHING SPECIAL. I HAD THIS SENSE THAT I’D BE LUCKY TO WORK WITH THEM AGAIN BECAUSE THEY WERE GOING TO BE HUGE.”

THE WOMBATS, Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life I wanted to work with them for so long. I knew a lot of their songs and I thought the previous album was amazing. I was surprised that they were looking at me to make the album. Mark Crew produced the previous album and it sounded amazing, so I thought, ‘why not work with him again’? But we ended up working on the album together as coproducers.

He’s a genius and I learned so much from him. There was a lot of sonic exploration on this album but also restraint. I enjoyed sharing the responsibility with another producer I really admire. I enjoyed the tussle of co-production - there were never any arguments and if anything, we

had each other’s backs. I felt very supported by him. There were things I wanted to achieve that he was able to help me with. We all had the same goal but we were coming at it from different angles, which was really fun and interesting.

WOLF ALICE, Creature Songs

This was very early in my career. I’d only been producing for a couple of years, and I had this opportunity to work with the band. We went to Belgium to record for seven days at ICP and the song Moaning Lisa Smile had been earmarked as a single. That first day it did not come out right. It wasn’t sounding how any of us wanted. I was like, ‘shit, what have I got myself into’.

We were all inexperienced and there’s an element of unintentional mistrust.

You don’t know what they are thinking; I’m worrying about how to make this good, they are doing the same.

I remember the drummer playing with a lot of cymbals and I had to teach myself how to embrace recording cymbals, which I then applied to the first Amazons record. We recorded a song the next day called Storms and the day after that we had another crack at Moaning Lisa Smile and it came out brilliantly. The feeling of achievement from all of us… we were dancing to the songs together in the studio. We knew we had created something special. I had this sense that I’d be lucky to work with them again because they were going to be huge.

You can hear an extended version of this interview at Headliner Radio.

CATHERINEJMARKS.COM

HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

KEVIN ANTUNES

The Show Must Go On

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KEVIN ANTUNES Kevin Antunes’ work as a keyboardist, musical director, audio producer and mix engineer has seen him curate live shows for some huge names in the world of music and showbiz, from Shakira and Madonna to Justin Timberlake and Cirque du Soleil. Here he tells Headliner how he’s been staying productive of late, and why he couldn’t do any of it without his JH Audio in-ears...

“It always starts with making the artist feel comfortable; you have to make sure you know who you’re speaking to so that you can eloquently translate their sonic needs,” offers Antunes, who at the moment is gearing up for the HEADLINER MAGAZINE

reopening of Michael Jackson: One at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay, as the show’s musical director/designer and audio producer.

“Everybody knows Michael’s music, but when you see and hear it in this

particular theatre, it’s something else,” he adds. “There’s a set of stereo speakers in every seat by your head, there’s a mono speaker on the back of the seat in front of you, and speakers above and around you. I had 32 different

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outputs on this custom built matrix that I made in Digital Performer, where I could mix the songs and really do something creative and artistic that hasn’t been done before with an artist of this stature.”

Antunes is incredibly hands on when it comes to supervising in-ear mixes during rehearsals, so naturally he needs gear that he can rely on to a tee. As it turns out, he has been using his JH Audio Roxannes for the past few minutes during this very interview...

“The overall effect that you’re looking for is to make sure the singer can hear what they’re doing to the nth degree, because when an artist can hear like that, they can perform better,” Antunes shares. “Having something like JH, that gives me the highest audio range and fidelity so that I can also hear all

the parts that I do, is absolutely game changing.

“Luckily for me, JH Audio is right here in Orlando, so I enjoy going there and looking at how they make everything.

It’s quite incredible. Not only do they sound good, they incorporate that true quality, craftsmanship, and attention to detail.”

During lockdown, Antunes has also kept himself busy working on his own music project, which he compiled primarily from the bountiful archive of songs that he’s created for numerous shows over the years. The album was released in February earlier this year, and while quite clearly a labour of love, Feels Good is a thoughtful, seamless blend of pop, R&B, dance and soul that does exactly what it says on the tin.

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“The goal was to write something that could stand the test of time, because the way it’s put together is a lot of live feel, some programming, and some if I do say so myself - catchy hooks,” he reflects. “It’s like if Bruno Mars, Prince, Michael Jackson and David Bowie got together and jumped in a time machine through different decades, and wrote a record.

“It’s art, and as songwriters and creators, if we start treating our music as disposable, because we want it to be the next big TikTok thing, the audience is going to treat that music as disposable too. It starts with us; we have to put the art back in artistry.”

INSTA: @KEVINANTUNESOFFICIAL JHAUDIO.COM

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Sterling Sounds

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American music producer and engineer, Sterling Winfield is a go-to guy in the hard rock music scene for his heavy sounds, which traces back to the early ‘90s when he first worked with Pantera. He shares his top production tricks and explains why Waves plugins help him rock on.

You’ve said before that heavy metal and hard rock music is not just a wall of sound and that there’s actually a lot of intricacies to that style of music; would people be surprised to learn about what goes on behind the scenes when creating music like this?

SW: I would think they would be hugely surprised how intricate it is and how bad ass some of these musicians really are! I think heavy metal musicians are some of the finest in the world, period. They are incredible musicians and the amount of practice and work that goes into playing some of this music is insane. So for some people to turn their nose up at it and dismiss it as noise, I think is uninformed and pretty ignorant, actually. I think

they would be really, really surprised at the musicianship that some of these dudes have. Yeah, we’re a little cuckoo, we’re a little crazy, but I don’t know an artist that isn’t, you know? They are some incredible musicians and a lot of them are amazing human beings and not at all what you think they would be like. When I’m working with King Diamond everybody’s like, ‘does he come in the studio with his makeup on? I bet he comes in there, lights candles and is worshipping the devil’ [laughs]. I’m like, ‘no, he’s the sweetest man in the world’. He’s so cool – such a nice guy. I know that people only see the surface. These are salt of the earth, grounded human beings.

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Sterling Sounds

You’ve been using Waves plugins for about 15 years and use them on every project; why are they so well suited for the heavy rhythmic sounds you work on?

SW: I guess you could say it’s like my favourite hammer. I don’t go to work without my favourite set of tools.

I’ve been using them a long time. I know what they’re capable of, I know what they do, and I know what they sound like. When I reach for a Waves plugin, it’s me not worrying about what it’s going to do to something, or if it’s going to butcher it, or if I’m HEADLINER MAGAZINE

going to sit there and mess around with the sound on something for 20 minutes before I figure it out. They help me move quickly; It’s like a painter using his paints. I’ll be sitting here going, ‘well, do I want to use the Renaissance Compressor, or do I want to use the CLA-76?’ They all have certain sounds and I just know what they’re gonna do. With Waves, I will hear a sound, like say somebody sends me a guitar or a vocal or whatever, and I’ll go, ‘I know immediately what I want to do with this’.

How are you using the StudioRack plugin chainer to stack everything and do a lot of parallel processing within one plugin?

SW: I’ve got a signal chain that I have saved with Waves, especially with their new StudioRack. I love that thing because you can stack all these plugins in one plugin and just put it on there and it’s done, and I love that!

It’s easy and it’s a really good place for me to start and then tweak later.

I’m doing that especially with vocals. I like to do several things there where

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I’ll have several compressors on one vocal, and then I’ll have one that’s off to the side on a parallel thing where I can turn the volume up and down and not have it affect the original clean vocal, but I’ll have a little distortion on it to smooth it out. Or I give a little bit of really, really high end EQ just to give it that air on top and just to have that parallel thing on the side. All of my parallel drum stuff is Waves. I like the SSL G-Master Buss Compressor for my overall kit parallel compression, so I’ll have that stacked into my drum buss, and I’ll have the Waves StudioRack on my stereo drum buss acting as that parallel compression that sits under everything. This is along with a little bit of limiter and a little bit of EQ, just to brighten the whole kit up. That is paramount to my drum sounds that I get, because I like big, huge drums that fill up everything and that cut through and that you can feel – that’s huge for me.

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One of the things you get asked most about is mixing drums as people tend to find it quite tricky; what Waves plugins are you using to get this mix right?

SW: Drums are pretty much the foundation of rock, hard rock and heavy metal. I think it was Jerry Gaskill from King’s X who said, ‘if you’ve got a shitty drummer, you got a shitty band’.

That’s kind of where I’m at with it: you’ve got to make those drums speak, and they have to be one of the big focal points of any mix. Whether they’re loud in the mix or not, they need to be heard and felt. That being said, I am a huge fan of really severe compression on drums, especially on room mics and things that create space and depth.

I really love the SSL compression on that; I love cramming room mics into the CLA-76 as hard as it’ll go just to get that really nasty, gritty sound – you know that it’s not the feature, but it’s

that glue that holds it all together. For kicks, snares and toms and stuff like that I really rely on the Renaissance Channel Strip; I use that on kick snare and on the toms to really get them to speak, and I do a lot of that in line with some of their transient stuff. I’m really impressed with some of the newer things that Waves has too, like the Infected Mushroom Pusher, which is really, really good at shaping transients on drums, especially toms – I love that thing! It’s crazy. And believe it or not, it’s killer on guitar too and on distorted guitars when using it as what we call a clipper.

“I LOVE CRAMMING ROOM MICS INTO THE CLA-76 AS HARD AS IT’LL GO JUST TO GET THAT REALLY NASTY, GRITTY SOUND.”

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Sterling Sounds

Can you explain about your preset (Renaissance EQ into Renaissance Vox, into CLA-76, into Renaissance DeEsser) that you call ‘No Mashed Potatoes’ that you use to start mixing all of your vocal tracks?

SW: When you get a vocal track from most people – and I say this with a wide, general, very broad brushstroke here – they don’t have a $20,000 Telefunken mic going into a $10,000 vintage Fairchild limiter, going through a $300,000 Neve console that The Beatles worked on. No one has that.

Most people have a run of the mill condenser mic going through a decent channel strip, and their whole signal chain probably costs about 500 bucks.

That’s the reality of bedroom recording.

So what you’re dealing with is a signal that is usually covered-sounding; it’s kind of bloated in that low-mid area, and it’s still kind of stuffy-feeling. So when you get that track, it’s flat and there isn’t a whole lot of treatment done to it. So to me, untreated, it HEADLINER MAGAZINE

sounds like whoever is singing has a mouthful of mashed potatoes. So I’m using the EQ and the compression to suck all that mashed potato out of there and get rid of it. It clears the way so that I can tighten it up with some some nice EQ on top and some compression. As I’m giving that EQ on top, it tends to really accent those ‘s’’ and ‘ts’ and stuff. So I’ll just put a little light DeEsser on the back side. So that’s where that ‘no mashed potato’ came from – it’s just a humorous look at what I usually receive when I download stuff into my DAW. How have you been experimenting with Waves’ OVox Vocal ReSynthesis plugin?

SW: Well, there’s not a lot of call for it in the music that I work with – it’s really kind of an EDM thing. It’s lots of cool vocal vocoder stuff and robotic stuff, but I’ve snuck it into some people’s mixes – I’m not going to tell you who, but they don’t know it’s there. But it’s

there. It’s a really, really cool toy to throw things through – even drums.

I’ve got some really weird drum sounds with this thing. I love it, it’s a really fun toy to just go through the presets. I guarantee you can find something on this thing that will make you laugh, but at the same time, you’ll go, ‘Whoa, this is actually pretty cool! I bet I can sneak this in here’. So that’s what I’ve been doing.

Listen to the full interview on Winfield’s career at Headliner Radio.

WAVES.COM INSTA: @STERLING3WINFIELD

Evolution Wireless Digital

Evolving with you.

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TOM ASHBROOK

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

A Klass Act

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A KLASS ACT

“I’ve been here over 10 years,” Ashbrook says of his adopted home of Liverpool.

“I went to Paul McCartney’s Institute (Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts) to study music and I’ve just been happy

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It’s a sign of the times that we discuss an emerging artist’s success in terms of Spotify playlists, but Yorkshire-born and Liverpool-based composer Tom Ashbrook has already clocked an eye-watering seven million streams, and he only started releasing music two years ago. This is in part thanks to the critical placing of his tracks like his well-known Klass on some of the biggest playlists in the neoclassical world, such as Spotify’s Atmospheric Piano and Not Quite Classical.

Ashbrook chats with Headliner about making music from Liverpool rather than London, letting his introspection run wild in lockdown, his stunning Solitudes series of singles, and why he raced against time (and several other bidders) to collect a second hand Roland Juno from an elderly gentleman.

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to stay here. It’s a nice middle ground between family in Yorkshire and working and recording in London. And of course, it’s super cheap!”

was willing to miss the start of his best friend’s stag do to get his hands on a vintage Roland Juno (which, second hand, often cost around two grand).

Having also auditioned to study music in Salford, Manchester, the LIPA choice eventually paid off big time.

“The first time I heard Nils Frahm, I just loved the layering of acoustic instruments with synths,” Ashbrook explains. “Plus it really started me getting into the Juno synthesizers [Frahm has hugely popularised the instrument]. And then one day I was getting ready to go to my friend’s stag do, and a Juno cropped up on Marketplace!

“I was lucky enough to start a Pink Floyd tour almost straight out of university! Their offices are based in Liverpool. So I did five or six years of full-on yearly touring straight away and I was replicating note for note all the Pink Floyd albums and synth solos. That definitely got me into the synthesizers — I really grew to love the Moog stuff and that world of creating, especially after six years of playing Shine On You Crazy Diamond!”

With Ashbrook’s background in learning composing, keyboards and a burgeoning interest in analogue synths, it makes sense that his head turned upon hearing the neoclassical maestro Nils Frahm for the first time, and why he

“I picked it up and drove up to Leeds and missed the start of the stag do. I could see five other people were going for it — it was such a good price that I thought this can’t be real! It was this little old man in Leeds who’d had it in storage for 15 years. I got it home and it was in perfect working condition, which is amazing because you just can’t emulate it, and I’ve been so into the arpeggiators, the LFO and everything ever since.”

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TOM ASHBROOK

A Klass Act

Ashbrook’s music streams are already in the millions in the tiny two-year space of releasing music. He even released his debut album Sensibus early last year, containing his highly popular piece Klass. The pandemic has seen him strip his music back even further with his Solitudes series, which demand attention, followed by ensuing calm. Solitude III is a wonderful example of his approach, and something perhaps only the neoclassical genre can achieve — a far-reaching, stunning melody worthy of any of the world’s top singers, but in the very sparse world of piano, and the most delicate of synth pad sounds providing the comfy bedding.

Ashbrook is in the process of upgrading his studio as he moves house.

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“I’m getting the Universal Audio X4 sound card, because we use all their plugins, like the Curve Bender and the Pultec EQ. And a lot of the Slate + Ash stuff, their textural synth plugins. They really help me get some ideas going if I have some of their sounds in my headphones while at the piano. I’ve got a simple pair of condensers from Audio-Technica also. And I’ve been lucky enough to get some bits like the Moog.

“If I’m doing a little film idea I’ll use Spitfire Audio. Their stuff is great. The strings just instantly sound really lovely for a library, and it’s not thousands of pounds like LA Scoring Strings used to be — it works and it sounds nice, and I use the Evolutions to get those things down. Then I get the real strings

recorded or I might keep those little textural things in and then put them through a tape delay or something and pan it around and use it with the real strings. I use Spitfire’s Albion One, which is so nice for the violins and cellos.”

As the world steadily comes out of this extended solitude of the last year, don’t let that be a reason to not check out Tom Ashbrook’s Solitudes (Vol 1 and Vol 2), worthy of listening and (deeply) relaxing to, whatever may be happening in the world. It’s wonderful to see a Brit mixing into the world of euro-composers like Nils Frahm and Olafur Arnalds, so here’s to his continuing success.

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Inside Waystation Studio

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INSIDE WAYSTATION STUDIO Grammy-winning producer and engineer Dave Way was a little skeptical when he first heard about Dolby Atmos. It took Elton John to change his mind.

While at the 2019 NAMM Show in Anaheim, Way ventured by the PMC booth and heard a Dolby Atmos demo of the 1972 classic, Rocket Man, and was forever changed.

“I said, ‘wow, this is different’. It really gave me chills!” he recalls. “I knew this was a trip I needed to be on, and my mind started racing with possibilities for employing Atmos on different projects. I was with Michael Marquart of A Bad Think at the time, and we agreed that when we work on his next album, which ended up being the recent release LifeLike, we would create it from the very start with the knowledge that it would be mixed in Atmos.”

Way’s resume to date is impressive to say the least – he’s worked with everyone from Christina Aguilera to Paul McCartney, but it’s only in recent years that he made the switch over to immersive mixing. His efforts have been well received: his most recent Grammy nomination was for Best Immersive Audio Album for his work as immersive audio coproducer on the 2019 album The Savior by A Bad Think.

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Inside Waystation Studio

Like many working in the world of immersive audio, Way’s attention inevitably turned to the Dolby Atmos format, and in 2020 he made the leap and upgraded his personal facility, Waystation Studio, to be able to mix in Atmos.

Since last year, he has been settling in with the new setup, mixing several projects and even recording an entire album specifically to be mixed in Atmos – helped in no small part by his arsenal of interfaces and a Focusrite Pro RedNet R1 controller.

His first Atmos recording and mixing project was an album of traditional Hawaiian music for a label in China.

“This was before I got my own Atmos setup at home,” he points out. “I sought out advice from my friend Steve Genewick, who has a lot of experience with the format. He really helped guide me and shaped my approach

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to Atmos, showing me the holes in the road to avoid, so to speak.

“So for this Hawaiian group, we set up the players and had everyone play live in a circle with no headphones, like a jazz combo. I had a great time experimenting with different room mics. It was a great first project for me with Atmos because the music was so straightforward. It was a matter of taking a stereo mix and expanding it out into this kind of circle that I had recorded it in, and it worked great.”

Way’s new 7.1.4 Atmos monitoring setup at Waystation includes seven KRK V8 speakers for the L-C-R and around the sides, along with two KRK subwoofers, in addition to four KRK V6s as the height speakers. An Avid S4 serves as his mixing console, and a Marantz Dolby decoder receiver allows him to stream Atmos releases from Tidal.

Tying the setup together are a Dante network infrastructure and a Focusrite Red 16Line 64-in / 64-out thunderbolt 3 and Pro Tools HD-compatible audio interface, two RedNet A16R 16-channel analogue I/O interfaces, one RedNet R1 desktop remote controller, one RedNet HD32R 32-channel HD Dante network bridge, and one ISA 428 MkII four-channel microphone preamp.

“The fact that it’s got two headphone outputs is key for me,” he notes on the Red 16Line. “They each have separate input capabilities, so I can have one headphone output with my stereo downmix from Atmos, and then I can have the other one with the binaural fold-down of Atmos – so I can basically check them both at the same time, which is great.”

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Way notes that the setup process was rigorous, but that he’s got everything just as he likes it now: “I’ve got things dialed in, like set-it-and-forget-it,” he nods. “Things are perfectly calibrated and it’s all there at the click of a switch thanks to these interfaces. The R1 is great for monitoring multiple sources, so I’ve got my stereo world, my Atmos world, my Tidal playback and my computer audio playback, all at the switch of a button. And I have my trusty ISA 428, which I love, and which pre-dates the Atmos system.

“Getting familiarised with the Dante network format a few years ago, of course the Focusrite Red and RedNet interfaces were part of that conversation, and it all made a lot of sense to me. And of course, the sound quality is always on-point, which is the most important thing.”

With his new Atmos setup, Way shares that he is able to devote extra time and energy to his mixes, and he feels fortunate to work on music across a wide range of styles and genres.

“After the Hawaiian record, we jumped into the making of the new A Bad Think album, which is very different because it’s a highly layered and overdubbed sound with lots of ear candy, so my two first Atmos projects represent opposite extremes for me. Additionally, Atmos has been my mixing format for an R&B artist named Victoria Monet and a hip-hop artist named Starrah. And recently I completed an Atmos mix for one of the most anticipated annual sporting events in the world: the UEFA Champions League Final opening ceremony, which featured Marshmello and appearances by Selena Gomez, Khalid and others. Additionally, I’ll soon be using the format to mix a new folk record from X frontman John Doe that I recorded recently. And I just mixed a Maroon 5 single in Atmos too. Being able to work with this really broad palette is a blessing, and it’s something that I can apply to any genre or project that comes along. I’m getting to try all sorts of different approaches, which I love.”

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Inside Waystation Studio

“CREATING A RECORD FOR ATMOS IS AN INTENSIVE UNDERTAKING WITH A LOT OF PREP, BUT LIKE ANYTHING WORTH DOING, IT IS HIGHLY REWARDING.”

As the music for A Bad Think’s LifeLike took shape, Way and Marquart used the opportunity to prepare for the Atmos mixing process by relying heavily on the use of room mics.

“Definitely more room mics than I would have used if we didn’t have Atmos in mind already,” he stresses.

“In particular, we used the Neumann KU 100 Dummy Head microphone and the Sennheiser AMBEO VR 3D microphone, which are both great tools for capturing immersive audio. Getting the result you want is a matter of placing these mics in multiple spots in the room to give you a broader sense of room miking. And HEADLINER MAGAZINE

I’ve found myself thinking about the mix decisions in terms of placement during tracking, which is earlier in the process than I would normally consider those aspects of the mix.

Creating a record for Atmos is an intensive undertaking with a lot of prep, but like anything worth doing, it is highly rewarding.”

Reflecting back on his decision to transition to Atmos at Waystation Studio, Way says that it has been well worth the upgrade: “The Atmos setup is definitely complicated and complex,” he acknowledges. “And it took me a

while to understand how everything is being routed and where everything needs to change. It can get pretty, pretty deep. But now that I’ve got the understanding and it’s all set up and bulletproof, it’s super quick and easy, and I credit a good portion of that to Focusrite.”

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COBRA KAI

The Art Of Fight

Image Credit: Curtis Bonds Baker/Netflix

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COBRA KAI Fans of the Karate Kid films welcomed the return of arch-rivals Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence in TV series Cobra Kai, which reunited the characters 30 years after the events of the 1984 All Valley Karate Tournament. Production sound mixer Mike Filosa explains why season four of the popular show relied on Lectrosonics’ wireless chops.

In the highly-anticipated return of the original films’ two iconic characters, Cobra Kai catches up with LaRusso (now leading an enviable life and running a successful string of car dealerships) and his school adversary, Lawrence, (whose life has taken a rocky turn), leading him to seek redemption by reopening the infamous Cobra Kai karate dojo. Their lives inevitably become intertwined and the rivalry is swiftly reignited, setting forth the next generation of karate kids. The series proved to be a runaway hit for Netflix, and has been viewed by over 73 million subscribers so far.

Filosa has used nothing but Lectrosonics kit since around the time the fourth Karate Kid film came out in the early ‘90s.

“I chose a quad-pack of 185 systems,” he remembers. “I continued to grow with this very solid brand – 195s, then 200 and 400 series. I still have all of it!

I’m not using them currently, but they still work, and very well.”

These days, Filosa uses a mixture of new and legacy Lectrosonics wireless gear, including SMV, SMQV and SMDWB transmitters, HMa plugon transmitters, a pair of original Venue VR Field systems fitted with VRT tracking receiver modules, and IFB-T4 transmitters for comms – although what works for him on set has been changed slightly by Covid-19 precautions.

“We’re shooting the same number of pages per day as under normal circumstances,” he shares. “I have a face shield and a mask because I’m in what’s called the A-zone, which is closer to the talent than most of the rest of the crew. But because Lectrosonics is so dependable, I don’t often have to penetrate the set. I can stay well-distanced at my cart. The features that help me do this include the smart tuning and the dweedle

tones we can send to make remote settings on the transmitters. The T4s live on top of my VR Field, so I can pop the whole thing off the cart for use in vehicles and still communicate with my people.”

The HMa, which plugs into any XLR output, also helps Filosa and crew socially distance – often accommodating three cameras of various frames and widths.

“We can’t always get as close as we need with the boom, which is where the SM series comes in,” he explains.

“I have never had a range issue with Lectro. We do use shark fin antennas – the Lectrosonics ALP 650L/E series – but most of the time they live right on my cart and don’t need to be closer to the talent. Many of our 16 SMs can go up to 250 milliwatts [output power] but we’re pretty much happy with them at 100 milliwatts. Buried in costumes, far away, and with lots of action, there has been no fallibility.”

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COBRA KAI

The Art Of Fight

Image Credit: Tina Rowden/Netflix

“IT’S AS THOUGH LECTROSONICS IS ANOTHER CREW MEMBER, BECAUSE WITH THE WAY PRODUCTIONS HAVE TO BE RUN RIGHT NOW, SOLID WIRELESS SIGNALS ARE THE KEY TO SUCCESS.”

In fact, the SMs have proven so rugged that Filosa reveals that they recently made an unprecedented cameo:

Filosa is also evaluating Lectrosonics’ latest-generation all-digital wireless with an eye to ever-contracting available frequency spectrum.

“Cobra Kai has a couple of big fight scenes every season. I can’t really reveal the one we just shot for season 4, but it’s major! Normally, stunt people perform these scenes but this time, the actors wanted to do their own stunts.

We’d usually take the wireless packs off them and post would work on the fight sounds, but this time, we left the packs on. We ran mics into various SM-series transmitters, and everything worked perfectly.”

“I’m very happy with the reliability of what I have right now, and I’m sure it will be in many mixers’ kits for many more years,” he says. “But with the new digital stuff, the idea of being able to squeeze more functional channels into a given bandwidth of spectrum is very appealing.”

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While rigid protocols are in place and have to be dealt with, production expectations have not been affected.

For this reason, Lectrosonics is more than just equipment for Filosa: “I’m lucky to work with two of the best sound techs in town: Boom op Matt Robinson and sound utility Rachel Smith,” he points out.

“But it’s as though Lectrosonics is another crew member, because with the way productions have to be run right now, solid wireless signals are the key to success.”

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GARY KEMP

Past, Present & Future

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GARYKEMP “I’m old enough to bear the truth, but bear it well?” sings Gary Kemp midway through the opening track of his new solo album In Solo, the follow-up to his 1995 debut Little Bruises. It’s a line that lays bare the central themes and questions that reside at the heart of a record whose focus on the future can’t help but intertwine it with the past.

The quarter of a century that separates the two records is a long stretch by any measure, but in the life of such an artist as Kemp it represents an ocean without beginning or end. To contextualise, the past 25 years have seen the Spandau Ballet founder and songwriter reunite the band for a greatest hits tour; join Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason as the singer and guitarist of A Saucerful

Of Secrets, which performs a range of material from the band’s early years; and take on numerous acting roles for stage and screen. As such, In Solo sees Kemp plant his flag as an artist in 2021 firmly in the sand, whilst directly acknowledging the historical lens through which many in both his professional and personal life may view him.

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GARY KEMP

Past, Present & Future

“I felt an urgency that was partly to do with age,” Kemp says of his decision to write a new solo record so many years after its predecessor, his demeanour warm yet steely and piercing as Headliner chats to him in his home studio via Zoom.

“And there was a sense of me that had completely said goodbye to Spandau. There’s a part of me, a younger version of me, that is so apparent in my day-to-day, in people’s recognition of me and it’s hard to shake off. The idea of moving away from that took quite a few hammer blows. A lot of the album is about that, songs like I Am The Past and I Remember You are about me as a younger man, and how I connect that with the person that I am today.”

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Much like the record’s lyrical content, In Solo delivers a potent sonic and musical distillation of its creator’s aesthetic. Each track radiates with the cut glass production values that have always typified Kemp’s work, while the instrumentation demonstrates the kind of classic pop-driven precision that only an artist of his calibre and experience can command. It’s far from a hark back to Spandau, but undeniably recalls the era with a contemporary twist.

“I felt there was a distance between me and [the older] version of me because of being embraced by the Pink Floyd fraternity,” he explains.

“There was definitely an attitude shift to what I was doing which allowed

me to make music on this record that was a little bit out of the box from what my regular fan base would have expected. There are things like Ahead Of The Game, straight up pop, which I can’t resist. But I also allowed myself to be more instrumental, which is what I am. I’m a theatrical person, I’m an actor, I like character roles. I like making drama and I can put some of that in my music. When you’re in a band you’re narrowed down to what people expect from that band, and you’re writing for someone else to sing. I think a lot of these songs were exercising difficulties that I was having at this stage in my life.”

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“THERE WAS DEFINITELY AN ATTITUDE SHIFT TO WHAT I WAS DOING WHICH ALLOWED ME TO MAKE MUSIC ON THIS RECORD THAT WAS A LITTLE BIT OUT OF THE BOX FROM WHAT MY REGULAR FAN BASE WOULD HAVE EXPECTED.”

When it came to writing In Solo, Kemp approached the proceedings in a very different way to how he had written previously. Once finished, it was a case of balancing remote working due to the pandemic with the high-end production values that were essential to the record’s sonic DNA. “I was constantly on my iPhone writing lyrics, and I enjoy writing lyrics first,” he says. “If you get the lyrics done, the music’s easy. If you write the music first you get trapped and it’s hard to find out what this song is about. When I wrote with Spandau, I always wrote music first and the lyrics mattered less in a way. But at this age, I want to know what the fuck I’m singing about,” he laughs.

“I started to demo it in 2019 using Logic, I don’t use Pro Tools. I do quite good sounding demos, but I never go to my computer without knowing what my song is. I might have some lyrics still to polish up, but I’ll have the song finished on an acoustic instrument, then it goes on to the computer and I can work out what sort of instrumentation I’m after.”

worked together on numerous occasions throughout his career, Kemp knew that Chapman would be just the right person to have by his side in the studio.

“I’m a control freak, I know what I want,” he states. “The reason Toby and I work so well together is we have a very similar ambition, sonically. There’s no point in me going to some indie guy who wants to make a crunchy, dull sounding record.

Toby knows I can’t do that, and I find indie-sounding stuff sometimes a conceit in itself. Throughout the history of music until about 20 years ago, everyone tried to make the best sounding record they could. They didn’t say ‘let’s make a grungy sounding record’, they will always try to make great sounding records. Toby can always find what’s in my mind, as abstract as my thoughts might be.

“The new idea of a producer as someone who sets up beats, that’s not my world.

That’s not what I do. That’s not even a songwriter.”

With venues fully booked for the rest of the year and an upcoming Saucerful Of Secrets tour, it’ll likely be 2022 before Kemp performs his latest solo material live.

And it isn’t something he is overly concerned about. In essence, In Solo can be viewed as something of a therapeutic exploration of identity, artistry and history, existing purely as a piece of art for art’s sake, as opposed to a vehicle from which to announce a new tour and plough through the hits.

“I really had carte blanche on what I wanted to do,” he concludes. “I made this record completely under my own steam. And as for the future, it’s impossible to make plans. There’s not a venue available for the rest of the year. And come December, I’m touring with Nick through to July. So I just don’t know how I’m going to squeeze it in!”

GARYKEMP.COM

Co-produced by Kemp and Toby Chapman, the album was recorded at RAK and Metropolis. Having HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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LISA FERRANTE-WALSH

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Embracing The Future

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LISA FERRANTEWALSH As the senior director of engineering at iZotope, it’s Lisa FerranteWalsh’s job to set up the perfect conditions that enable free-flowing creativity. With the pandemic running rampant on best practices and processes across the board, Headliner spoke to Ferrante-Walsh to find out how she continues to nurture innovation at the company, and ultimately help creatives tell stories through music.

Coming from a musical background, Ferrante-Walsh rounded out her studies by completing a masters in computer science, eventually falling in love with the scene in Boston. Her most relevant job pre-iZotope was actually at Avid, where she worked within its broadcast news division.

point, and found that I was always gravitating toward these roles,” she recalls. “A friend of mine who used to be on my team at Avid happened to be working at iZotope, and I was ready to make a change. I saw an open position, reached out to him, and the rest is history.”

“I transitioned from being a software developer to a manager at that HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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LISA FERRANTE-WALSH

Embracing The Future

While she accepts that she’s not an expert in audio engineering per say, Ferrante-Walsh’s focus at iZotope is an equally important people-centric one, fostering technical innovation and extracting that from its teams.

The other side of the job, she explains, is more around the engineering processes and practices; looking at how the company develops and releases products, manages its code base, and implements quality control.

“One of my favourite quotes is from the movie Hidden Figures,” FerranteWalsh shares. “There’s a manager who basically describes his job as being: ‘finding the genius in the geniuses’. That’s exactly how I see my job; I set up the right conditions so people can feel the most motivated and be as innovative as they possibly can. In turn, I’m helping people make products that enable creativity, and helping people tell stories through music.”

So how exactly has the pandemic affected the company? And how smooth a transition has it been adapting to this ‘new normal’?

“I think we were all pretty surprised at how easily we pivoted into this mode without missing a beat,” admits Ferrante-Walsh. “I really want to give credit to Mark Ethier [iZotope CEO and co-founder] for that. He really believes strongly in this idea of selfdetermination theory, whereby people are motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose. I think the fact that we already had a pretty cohesive and very transparent culture made it easy to transition.

“We’re building more of a relationship with the customer, so it’s not just transactional anymore. In addition to product content, there’s opportunities to add other types of content to this membership, whether that be educational, third party, or presets for our products.”

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“ONE OF THE DEVELOPERS ON MY TEAM EARLY ON DESCRIBED IT AS A KIND OF EXOSKELETON THAT WE’RE BUILDING AROUND THE DAW.”

From an engineering perspective, it’s really about transitioning from a mode of working on very large projects, to working much more incrementally, embracing the concept of what the company calls ‘test, measure, learn’.

“The idea is, instead of locking in a whole bunch of content and working on it for six to nine months to then release it into the world, we’re now going to work on smaller releases, which might be a new feature on one of our existing products for example,” she adds. “We have usage analytics built into all of our products, and we’re trying to lean more into being much more data driven; seeing how things resonate and then adapting accordingly.

“A plugin is very constrained, and I think breaking out of those constraints is a big opportunity. In our case, IPC means Inter Plugin Communication.

This means we still work within the process space of the DAW, but it allows two different instances of our plugin that are sitting in your session to talk to each other and share information.

One of the developers on my team early on described it as a kind of exoskeleton that we’re building around the DAW.”

The cloud is another more obvious example of an area that iZotope is currently exploring: “Right now we’re desktop software mostly, but wouldn’t it be awesome if the plugins could talk to a machine learning algorithm running in the cloud which is just getting smarter and smarter because we’re feeding it more and more data in real time?” FerranteWalsh ponders as the conversation comes to a close. “You don’t have to go through that process of updating your product and reinstalling; we’re trying to remove as much of that friction as we can.”

Ultimately, it’s all about being nimble and being able to adapt to change, she suggests: “I think that’s something that we’re very good at; migrating to the remote world is just one of many incarnations of having to adapt in this way. Keep an eye on the space - there’s a lot of fun stuff to come…”

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HOTONE SOUL PRESS II

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HOTONE SOUL PRESS II The Hotone Soul Press II is a wah/volume/expression pedal that represents a significant revamp of the Soul Press I, adding sonic versatility and greater economy when it comes to floor space…

Hotone first became known for its broad series of compact, affordable yet authentic-sounding pedals.

More recently, it has branched out into multi-effects and amp modelling hardware that competes with the beloved Kemper Profiler and Line6 Helix.

I first became aware of the original Soul Press when searching for a multi-purpose wah/volume pedal.

For about a year I was using a Cry Baby wah and a volume pedal that looked almost identical. I only had enough space on my pedalboard

for one and had a couple of gigs that demanded heavy use of either one or the other. After a few nights that involved a lot of hand stretching to reach the volume knob for swells on my Gibson 339, or trying to make a phaser sound like a convincing wah, I decided to finally put a label on one of them to avoid mix ups. I also decided that my life would be easier if I could have both effects in one pedal.

The first thing that struck me about the Soul Press II was the sleek new design; the metallic blue sparkle

looks great, especially under lights, and the metal casing seems robust.

This pedal is still smaller than most units of similar style, but due to the wide top and the grip tape-like surface it feels easy to use and the rocking action of the pedal itself feels comfortable and familiar. Of course, the other main feature is the strip of LEDs on the side of the unit that turn on and off in real time to indicate the position of the pedal; this not only looks cool but is very practical. If you’re not a fan of the LEDs, you can simply turn them off.

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“THE SOUL PRESS II BELONGS ON THE BOARD OF EVERY GUITAR PLAYER.”

meaning that there’s no loss of tone that you might experience with a typical passive volume pedal. The volume control feels natural and smooth, so it’s perfect for swells.

If you like to back off the volume to clean up a more driven sound, the LED strip is a useful visual cue.

When the V/W setting is selected you can switch between wah and volume by pressing down at the top of the pedal - an LED on the side of the unit will flick between green and blue to indicate which mode you’re in.

The separate expression output is another great feature, providing the option to connect to any effect with an expression pedal output; you can control parameters within that pedal using the Soul Press II. When the pedal is deactivated, you can use it just as an expression, but you can also use the expression function and the wah or volume simultaneously; this gives potential for some very interesting effects. I used the expression output of a Line 6 Dl4 to manipulate delay speed alongside the wah mode of the Soul Press II – this, combined with a fuzz, led to some amazing extraterrestrial sounds.

The wah-wah section of the pedal has two tone options – warm and classic. To activate the unit, press down when the pedal is at the ‘toe position’ – just like a standard wah.

The ‘classic’ setting is suited to the more traditional wah user and has a similar response to classic effects such as the Cry Baby. The ‘warm’ setting occupies a slightly lower range in the frequency spectrum and is perfect for less abrasive sounds. These two modes, combined with the Q control knob (which controls how high the HEADLINER MAGAZINE

peak of the boosted frequency is), provides a variety of tones.

With the Q control at around 8 o’clock on the ‘warm’ setting you have a smooth and subtle effect; using the ‘classic’ setting with the Q at 12 will give you the familiar sound of a classic wah. A favourite of mine is on the ‘warm’ setting with the Q pretty much cranked – full harmonic resonance but never really venturing into brittle, high frequency territory. The Soul Press II has an active volume circuit,

This pedal has been designed with a lot of thought and care. It is so easy to set up quickly with a very usable sound, yet it allows you to go relatively in-depth if you wish.

That, combined with the fact that it’s affordable and well-built, leads me to believe that the Soul Press II belongs on the board of every guitar player - I certainly will be getting plenty of use out of it.

HOTONEAUDIO.COM

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Los Angeles

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URBANISTA Billed as the world’s first ever self-charging solar-powered headphones, the new Los Angeles range from Swedish lifestyle audio brand Urbanista promises to be something of a game changer for the industry.

headphones aim to provide users with unlimited playtime due to their solar-powered charging technology, which continuously charges the headphones whenever they are exposed to light both indoors and outdoors.

Designed to “revolutionise your listening experience”, the Urbanista Los Angeles noise-cancelling wireless

An accompanying mobile app for iOS and Android is also set to launch imminently, providing user

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information on how to maximise the product’s playtime, as well as visual indicators for solar charge levels and usage. Furthermore, the app will enable users to customise the headphones controls. It will later become available for other products in the Urbanista product range.

Anders Andreen, Urbanista CEO, commented: “We’re really excited

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to announce the pre-order of Urbanista Los Angeles. The response to the launch earlier this spring has been nothing short of amazing, it’s obvious that this kind of headphone technology is a welcome shift in the industry. It has also been an important step forward for us to launch our Urbanista mobile companion app.

“The app will be available when the product ships and will really enhance the innovative features of Los Angeles, making the interaction with the self-charging element effortless and engaging,” he continued. “We also have some impressive features in development, which we will look to launch in the near future.”

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The Urbanista Los Angeles range is currently available for pre-order, with a precise on sale date yet to be confirmed at time of publishing. At present, two colour options will be available – Midnight Black and the brand new Sand Gold finish.

Key features of the range include up to 80 hours of battery reserve, hybrid active noise cancelling, on-ear detection, USB Type-C charging, Bluetooth 5.0, Siri and Google assistant and compatibility with iOS, Android and Windows.

Since launching in Stockholm, Sweden in 2010, Urbanista has introduced a wide range of headphones HEADLINER MAGAZINE

named after cities across the globe, including lines such as Madrid, Berlin, Stockholm, London, Paris, New York, Miami and Athens. The brand also produces a range of Bluetooth speakers.

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100 RAPHAEL REED

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RAPHAEL REED If there’s one time you know a social issue has really blown out of proportion, it’s when a new Hollywood movie covers it, particularly when A-listers like Gary Oldman and Evangeline Lilly are attached. The opioid addiction crisis in the USA rages on, and with no end in sight, this year saw the release of Crisis, which covers the topic in thrilling fashion. Headliner got to chat with Raphael Reed, who provided the film’s blistering score, about the project and his gradual transition from Canadian cinema to this big-name release.

Reed is most proud to be among the very first French-Canadian composers to find success in Hollywood. He has diligently spent his almost decade-long scoring career working his way up on indie flicks and French-language films to get to this point.

“I pretty much started composing on the guitar when I was 14,” he says, speaking from his home in Montreal.

“I was mostly in punk bands and we would cover bands like Blink-182. I did a degree in classical guitar, and then

went to the University of Montreal to study music composition. Lots of John Cage and Stockhausen!

“And all the while still playing in the underground Montreal music scene with friends doing some pop and experimental music,” he adds. “I ended up doing music for advertisements, and eventually got my first big gig for the Champions League in 2014, where they had the final in Portugal. I made the music for the opening show, which was about eight minutes long. It needed to be

Hollywood style; big and orchestral, with Portuguese lyrics.”

Headliner ponders whether or not Reed’s music inspired Real Madrid to score three goals in extra time and win the trophy a record 10th time...

Headliner then proceeds to ask Reed about the film industry in Canada and particularly the French-speaking parts of the country, knowing that the film industry in France has such a respected output internationally.

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“We have a good movie culture in Montreal,” he says. “In Quebec, the province where we speak French, I think we have something particular which makes the movies different from let’s say American movies or European movies and the music is pretty different also. It’s not as orchestral-based usually, because we don’t have the same budget that you might have even in Britain or places like that. So usually we tend to go more folk, recording solo violin, or perhaps more electronic.”

Oldman, Evangeline Lilly, Armie Hammer, Lily Rose-Depp, Luke Evans and Michelle Rodriguez.

Crisis, a film that explores America’s opioid crisis in blockbuster fashion, is most star-studded, featuring Gary

“We talked a lot and had a big discussion about hockey. And Michael tells me about this movie

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Reed tells Headliner about how he landed the gig, and how it possibly makes him the first FrenchCanadian to work on a major Hollywood feature.

“I met Michael Perlmutter (the film’s music supervisor, and a fellow Canadian) who was scouting for some new talent,” he says.

that he’s working on about opiates, and the music might be electronicbased. So right away I tell him that’s the music I’ve mastered the most.

He tells me he’ll send my music to the director, who is Nicholas Jarecki.

I had seen Arbitrage ( Jarecki’s previous film) in the past, so my heart started pounding. Then he tells me Gary Oldman is going to be the lead star, so I’m losing my mind!

It felt too good to be true.”

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“HE TELLS ME GARY OLDMAN IS GOING TO BE THE LEAD STAR, SO I’M LOSING MY MIND! IT FELT TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE.”

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“IT WAS VERY IMPORTANT TO CREATE AN IDENTITY FOR THE MOVIE AND TO HAVE SOME THEMATIC ELEMENTS FOR THE MAIN CHARACTERS AND ALSO FOR THE DARKNESS OF THE OPIOID CRISIS.”

The film follows the three individual stories of the characters (which eventually intertwine): Oldman is a research scientist who discovers devastating implications about a new painkiller about to be released to the public. Hammer stars as a DEA agent who has infiltrated two drug cartels running the opioid fentanyl, and Lilly is a recovering oxycodone addict whose son dies from an overdose but she begins privately investigating, suspecting foul play.

Headliner asks Reed how he sought to approach all of this musically: “It was very important to create an identity for the movie and to have some thematic elements for the main characters and also for the darkness of the opioid crisis. And my focus was to have the themes intertwining throughout the movie.

For example, Tyrone’s (Oldman) theme, which is a melody with some textural elements of the opioid crisis – interact together. And when you add Evangeline Lilly’s character, it’s a more pattern-based theme, from a three-note chord. And ultimately adding in Armie Hammer’s character’s theme, and they all begin to interact and intertwine with each other.”

Knowing Reed loves to use a broad electronic pallet for his music, Headliner asks which of the analogue and digital characters from his studio came into play for this project, and how in or out of the box he opted to be in his approach.

“I actually avoided as much as possible going in the box,” he says. “I felt the music needed to reflect the greed seen in the movie and also, its authenticity. So I created my own textures to add some uniqueness and the only way to do that was to avoid using the virtual instruments that everybody uses.

There’s a lot of guitars that I’m using, a lot of delay, sampling

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them and pitch-shifting them. Also violin and cello.

“I would then pass the instruments through a programme called Cecilia, which has been developed in Montreal. It’s an electroacoustic programme that helps you create some very weird textures with anything you record. For example, there’s a voice that I’ve sampled, but I’ve stretched and granulated it, getting this windy kind of vibe that has a lot of darkness. The pulse and rhythm of the movie are coming from analogue synths; I got to use a lot of my Prophet, Moog and Blofeld.”

For mockups though, Reed does need to go a little digital now and then, and for that he opts for Spitfire Audio.

“I think Spitfire is a very good company. I’ve been using a lot of their string samples in particular. Especially when I need a bigger, wider sound. A library that one of my friends told me is very good is the BBC Symphonic Orchestra. A real classical orchestral sound. I’m probably gonna buy this one soon!”

With Reed having made this well-deserved breakthrough into Hollywood, it will be very interesting to see the next film his name is attached to. Will it be another larger-budget film from the south of the Canadian border or a return to a French-language film? To ramp up the tension of this question, don’t delay in listening to his excellently crafted music for Crisis, available to stream now.

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106 ELIZA SHADDAD

Photographer: Jodie Canwell

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LEAVING THE FUTURE BEHIND

ELIZA SHADDAD There’s a moment in Waiting Game, the centrepiece of Eliza Shaddad’s new album The Woman You Want, when the various strands of her artistic evolution over the past three years are audibly woven together.

Just as the familiar shimmer of chorus-dipped and reverb-drenched electric guitar intertwines with Shaddad’s delicate vocal, waves of synths and frenetic electronic beats splinter what has come before and reveal a sound unlike anything that has graced her already eclectic output; the post-grunge influences of previous records dashed and replaced with something more akin to Björk in her mid-nineties pomp.

But Waiting Game isn’t the only example of Shaddad as an artist in creative transition. Since the release of her 2018 debut Future, she has released a clutch of singles and EPs that have hinted heavily at a move away from the early ‘90s musical blueprint upon which her inaugural outing was founded. On 2020’s Sept ~ Dec EP, the track One Last Embrace saw Shaddad at her heaviest yet, while recent single Blossom is positively pastoral. Indeed, there are plenty of moments on The Woman You Want that see her flexing her sonic extremities.

“There were a couple of things on Sept ~ Dec that were ready for this album but didn’t quite make it,” Shaddad says, explaining the themes and sonic qualities that anchor each song to their respective releases.

“Future was about one situation and all the ramifications and perspectives that I had or imagined around that situation. And a couple of the songs on Sept ~ Dec didn’t fit conceptually or musically. After that EP came out, I felt like I wanted to push these different aspects that hadn’t found a way onto the album.

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“I started out in traditional folk, natural sounding instruments and as I grew up I wanted to delve more into grunge,” she continues. “I fought hard to get from this folk singer-songwriter space into this alternative indie space.

Future was my statement and I fought to stick to that vision. I’m happy I made that statement, but now I feel like I can do whatever the hell I want!”

In contrast to the boundless artistic spirit that shaped the album, the recording process was heavily encumbered by lockdown restrictions, drastically transforming the production process from Shaddad’s initial vision. Still, after revising her approach, she was able to make the record she originally set out to make.

“My hopes for this record were that I would take my live band into a big studio,” she says. “Previously, it’s just been me, a producer, maybe an engineer, thrashing out from the demos that I come to the studio with.

I thought it’d be an amazing direction for me and the music, to really get the feeling of us playing live into the records. So, I was disappointed not to be able to do that and I worried about how it was going to affect things. I wondered about the song choices and the things I was writing.

But the more I wrote, I felt like it could be a slice of time kind of record; it will be a lo-fi, minimal production bedroom record to reflect the times we are in.

“But, as soon as we started recording with the track Heaven I felt really free to experiment. There was no pressure, no outside interference, I wasn’t working with old management or label; I had free rein, and I was working with the person I pretty much trust most in the world [producer Ben Jackson]. As soon as we started adding instruments, I knew it wasn’t going to sound like a small bedroom record. There was no way that we HEADLINER MAGAZINE

were going to come out with nine lo-fi, miniature songs - there’s a lot of power in there. And I feel really proud that we managed to achieve that in this exact room from which I’m speaking to you.”

So how did she achieve such a vast sonic scope for the record from the confines of her bedroom?

“I have to give a lot of credit to Mr. BJ Jackson, who produced the record and has done so much on things like drum sounds,” she says. “For most of the record, we programmed drums. There was a lot of hard work to get it to sound like we’d recorded it in a massive studio. Also, opting for more classical instruments that have more harmonics and more natural reverberating sounds, give that sense of weight and space.

“When we got to the end of the recording process, I knew that I wanted it to be mixed by someone other than ourselves. In the end, six of the songs were mixed by a guy called Sam Okell who works at Abbey Road.

He does a lot of film scores and really big projects that need a lot of space and are very lush and hi-fi.

His mixing was the final step in giving it the space it needed to breathe and the weight and impact I wanted it to have.”

Shaddad is now counting down the days until she takes The Woman You Want on tour in November. Like so many artists whose live plans have been on hold for almost a year and a half, the prospect of returning to the stage is one she cannot wait for.

“There has been an element of perspective; so many people have been so badly affected,” she states.

“It’s always hard as a musician or as an artist… it’s a tricky balance between how important your art is to you and how important it is in the context of the universe and everyone else’s lives. There’s been a lot of, ‘you don’t have it that bad’, ‘you can’t complain’.

But I’ve missed it and I really feel the weight of relief and excitement that it will happen again. November cannot come soon enough.”

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“I KNEW IT WASN’T GOING TO SOUND LIKE A SMALL BEDROOM RECORD. THERE WAS NO WAY THAT WE WERE GOING TO COME OUT WITH NINE LO-FI, MINIATURE SONGS”

Photographer: Flore Diamant

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DARKWOOD STUDIOS Tucked away in the beautiful Hertfordshire countryside, yet still only half an hour outside of London, the recently opened Darkwood Studios is something of an artist’s haven. Situated on a working farm, it is overlooked by an ornate, centuries-old house that is patrolled by a pair of peacocks. Evidently a popular spot for local entrepreneurs, Darkwood also finds itself nestled amongst a brewery, a blacksmith and a clutch of other small businesses. As well as a dry hire studio, it is also the beating heart of the 3Ms record label, which provides label services – and of course the studio – on a single album release basis. So how did this venture come to arrive here? Studio co-owner Malcolm Scott picks up the story…

“We set up 3Ms Music in 2014 essentially because we had Smokehouse Studios in Wapping, which is a well-established old studio,” he explains. “We came up with this idea that we would do one album projects with well-known musicians who weren’t of much interest to the majors anymore but still had a following and young, hard-working bands. We started

with Hamish and Molly from Average White Band, then we had Jah Wobble and The Sharks, so we would record a single album and promo it. Essentially, we made the label to match the fact we had the studio. The problem was we didn’t have a very secure lease on the place, so we were turned out with two months’ notice.

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“We had to dismantle the place, which was really tragic. They didn’t give us enough time to recover most of the gear, so we sold a lot of it. We had an enormous Cadac desk and various nice bits of kit that were sold because we had nowhere to put it and we were out on the street. The label worked on the basis that we had a studio ready to bring these people into, so we had to start looking for somewhere to replace the Smokehouse.”

After two years looking for the perfect spot, Scott and the Darkwood team decided that the best approach to creating a studio to fit their precise needs was to build one from the ground up, rather than take on an existing space.

“It was an empty tin shed at a 45-degree angle with its roof, with nothing inside except a concrete floor, so we decided to take it and see what we could do,” says Scott. “I’m lucky in that the singer in my band and the bassist are builders. So, between them they constructed Darkwood Studios from scratch. From that point we got Studiospares to kit it and wire it. It’s taken us 18 months to get here.

“We looked at a lot of places where we would have had to build around existing structures and make compromises,” he continues. “It gave us the capacity to do it exactly as we wanted to. It made our job simpler in some ways. It’s been a very easy place to work in. It’s a nice community of people. We all like being in the country, and that sense of being in the woods without actually being in the middle of nowhere just seemed perfect.”

Inside Darkwood, the décor is just as striking as its exterior. The wood finishes, forest green walls and coffee

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“EVEN THOUGH YOU CAN DO GREAT THINGS DIGITALLY, I STILL DON’T THINK ANYTHING COMPARES WITH RECORDING DRUMS PROPERLY.”

bags lining portions of its perimeter provide a sense of the outside being brought in with you. However, the rustic feel is offset by a high-tech spec, featuring a selection of mics from the likes of Neumann, Shure, Audio-Technica, Beyerdynamic and Sennheiser, along with monitoring options comprising KRK 9000bs, Yamaha NS10s, Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pros and a Viscount V18 E Speaker.

“Because we are all musicians and have done a lot of recording, we wanted to make somewhere that we’d be really comfortable coming to, without the stress of some of the more industrial spaces available,” Scott says. “We want it to be as friendly and welcoming as possible. I’ve been in studios that were basically tragic pits, where you didn’t even want to make a cup of tea or use the toilet. We want this to be comfortable, friendly and allow people to record without any pressure.”

With lockdown now beginning to pass, Scott also highlights the appetite that still exists in the music making community to get together and play in a room, in person.

“People of all ages love playing together,” he adds.

“Even though you can do great things digitally, I still don’t think anything compares with recording drums properly and having your drummer there, playing. I have my own home set up and can make a perfectly good rock track, but I know it can be so much better with someone actually playing the drums.”

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At the time of Headliner’s visit to Darkwood, the studio had quite literally just opened for business. So as day one in their new home commences, what does Scott consider to be the biggest opportunities and challenges for the new venture?

“It’s about finding the conduits to potential clients; understanding the ways we’ll make contact with the people who want to use the studio,” he posits. “With the Smokehouse a lot of it was word of mouth. We’re setting out to establish a set of people who will also want to bring people into the studio. We’ll make a fuss on social media, and I suspect there are studio directories, but beyond that it’s about contacts and opportunities. The way the whole

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industry works is based around contacts, rather than a straightforward retail or business proposition. It’s much more complex than that.”

For now, Scott is simply brimming with excitement about the completion of the studio and the journey that awaits.

“I feel stunned and excited and anticipatory in a very happy way,” he beams. “The last bit of the build seems to take forever. To look at it now and know it’s ready to go and that anything else we do can only make it better is very exciting indeed.”

DARKWOODRECORDINGSTUDIOS.COM

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NEIL COWLEY

Daytime Television

Photographer: Gray Lee Brame

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NEIL COWLEY Many musicians would be content being credited on Adele’s recordbreaking albums, but British pianist, composer and producer Neil Cowley was never going to be happy just as ‘Adele’s piano player’.

Instead, he has veered from seasoned session player to the jazz world in the Neil Cowley Trio, to his new and exciting neoclassical solo endeavours. We speak about his rocky relationship with the piano, and his astonishing new album Hall Of Mirrors.

“I was playing the Southbank halls with orchestras at 10 or 11,” Cowley tells Headliner, remembering his beginnings on the piano. “It was down to my piano teacher, Mr. Eric Stephenson. He was on a crusade to find classical talent where you wouldn’t usually find it. He went into my grotty little borough of Hillingdon, Middlesex, where I was brought up.

He’d heard about this kid who was playing hymns in school assembly because none of the teachers could play piano. He approached my mother and said, ‘I’ll teach the boy for free, and my aim is to get him into the Royal Academy’. So this kid from the wrong side of the tracks was nurtured into a classical pianist.”

Cowley would then reject the classical world and pursue playing keyboards as a session and touring player.

And he has an impressive CV which includes the Stereophonics, Zero 7, Emeli Sandé, Gabrielle, and also one of the worlds all-time best selling artists…

“I’d washed my hands of playing on other people’s stuff at this point,” Cowley says. “It was only because a friend told me a girl was going into the studio and the piano player had just quit the band. She turned out to be Adele, before she was worldfamous.

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“THE NEXT THING I KNOW IS I COULDN’T GO IN A RESTAURANT ANYWHERE WITHOUT HEARING MYSELF. AND THAT HAS FOREVER SINCE BEEN ONE OF THE MOST RIDICULOUSLY SUCCESSFUL ALBUMS OF ALL TIME.”

“I agreed to help out, and the next thing I know is I couldn’t go in a restaurant anywhere without hearing myself. And that has forever since been one of the most ridiculously successful albums of all time [her record-breaking 19]. It equates to about five hours of my life!

Then I did 21 as well, so Hometown Glory, Rolling In The Deep. It was all a case of, turn up, play a few piano chords and then sit back and watch the show, really.”

Next came the much-loved jazz group, the Neil Cowley Trio, who appeared on Jools Holland and garnered a big following. But Cowley recently encountered yet another itch to do something different. Hence his debut

solo album this year, Hall Of Mirrors.

Bringing to mind the likes of Nils Frahm and Dustin O’Halloran — you may notice all the artwork and promotional material revolves around old televisions, and Cowley explains why…

“I have a studio space at Metropolis Studios,” he says. “And I asked one of the tech guys one day, ‘do you think pianos could ever play televisions?’ He said ‘well, not really. But let me think about it’. I’d bought all these old ‘70s televisions off eBay, mainly black and white. And he managed to create this lead which goes from the pick up on my piano, which I can connect to the RF aerials on these televisions with static on the screens! We plugged them all in

and I’d play a note, and that static just formed into little waveforms. When it was a low note, there were big forms.

And when it was a high note there were really high forms. We jumped around giving each other high fives saying ‘eureka!’ And that’s become my live show for Hall Of Mirrors! I’ll be bringing all of the TVs with me.”

And with Cowley being a resident at the legendary Metropolis, it makes sense that his latest pair of speakers are from Genelec, specifically The Ones.

“Genelec has quite a big presence at Metropolis too. I do like them a lot, they’re really reliable. It has this tool where it sends out a signal all the way through the octaves to work out what settings the speakers should be in for the space they’re in, all done within its own technology. Anything that takes the engineering know-how out is a huge bonus for me!”

Photographer: Gray Lee Brame

Hall Of Mirrors is out now — equal parts adventurous, expansive and calming. Headliner doesn’t recommend seeing what happens if you plug your speakers into a vintage television, however. Let’s leave that to the pros.

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