Artist: OOOD

Rotwang · January 8, 2014

Artist: OOOD

Date: 2014-01

Hello Colin! Many thanks for sharing your opinions with us. Okay, let's start as there are many things I'd like to ask.

1. I need to admit that your discography is pretty impressive, however let's concentrate on biography just for now. I know that when you were 16 y.o. you have purchased your first sampler, that was in 1986 and it was an Akai, right? Can you shed a little light what motivated you to do so?

The Art of Noise! I was already playing keyboards in bands but soon as I heard their first album I was fascinated by the idea of recording a sound and messing with it. I read a description of how one of their snare sounds was made by recording two planks of wood smacking together in an empty warehouse, and I wanted to do that kind of thing. I also loved their use of non-musical sounds in a musical context, and a sampler was the only way to do all that. I never got round to smacking two planks together and the Akai S612 was far too basic to be able to make whole tunes with, but I got good use out of it with the bands I was playing in and had some of the funniest moments ever with just the sampler, a microphone and a bottle of vodka.

2. Where do you see yourself in next 5 years time? I honestly doubt it, but is there anything else connected with psytrance scene that you would like to achieve?

I just want to carry on making and playing good music with OOOD and others and by myself, and to try in my own way to bring something new to it; it would be great to play more outside the UK and if the foundation is good it can only help get the music in front of larger crowds more often. I want to continue improving my engineering skills, equipment and environment; maybe build a dedicated studio where I can produce with the band or whoever, and master in comfort - somewhere big enough for a grand piano. I'd also like to expand the non-psytrance side of my mastering work, and maybe revisit the song-based styles I was writing in before I found dance music all those years ago. That should keep me busy!

3. What do you think about current psytrance scene? Many people are saying that it has already commercialized itself in a bad way - I mean music has lost it's spirit, and all we have that's left is simple electronic trance without the "psychedelia" in it with much more drugs being ingested by people than even a decade ago. What are your thoughts about that?

Self-medicating to alter consciousness has always been associated with dancing, and I don't think the amount being consumed has changed much in the history of the scene, although the world has changed a lot since the 1990s and I can see how more people might want to escape everyday reality through altering their consciousness that way. As for the music losing its spirit, I think many producers have the best of intentions but the experimental spirit that characterized the early scene has had to give way to the need to produce a recognizable sound in order to get gigs, and this can sometimes lead to producers writing what seems like the same track over and over again. People find their winning formula and stick to it. There is also a rise in collaboration projects being booked alongside the artists' individual projects, which can lead to relatively large chunks of festival lineups being performed by the same few people. Despite the undoubted talent of those concerned, sometimes I wonder if festivalgoers are actually getting to hear the full range of what psytrance is capable of. I don't think this is that surprising; travel costs are expensive and the entertainment industry is built on personal networking so once you're in, you're in!

4. On your website I've found information that you were producing music for computer games, including one of the first PC CD-ROM games. Do you remember which game titles you have been working on exactly? You must be veeery old btw.

Careful what you say now or I'll smack you with my zimmer frame! My involvement with computer game music came through a friend I made at university named Jon Stuart, who was (probably still is) a programming genius, guitar hero and wannabe Formula 1 race driver hahah. The first game I worked on for him, in 1991, was an SNES conversion of an arcade game whose name I don't recall; I was given a recording of the existing music and had to recreate it in a format that the SNES could use. After that I wrote the music for another of his SNES games called Space Football One-on-One, which you can see here. In fact you can download the entire soundtrack here - don't expect too much, the SNES was limited in its capabilities and it's very basic stuff. Then came C.I.T.Y. 2000 (City In Trouble Year 2000), in 1993. It was indeed one of the very first CD-ROM games and had several full CD-quality audio tracks in it, which I think was a first for a PC game of its time. I haven't been able to play it for 20 years but I just found the intro sequence online. I made all the music and sound design (and radio voices), apart from the guitar solo at the end which was played by Jon. I also wrote a track for his DOS game SuperKarts with Duncan Morrison, who 12 years later mastered OOOD's third album. It's funny how things turn; Jon now runs a betting website and I recently mastered some tracks by oldschool game-music superstar Alistair Brimble.

5. Are there any disadvantages when working as a sound engineer? What is the most challenging part when doing a mastering for a new artist?

I guess the main disadvantage is the one all freelancers find, which is sometimes not knowing where your next job is coming from. But that's an advantage too, because there's always something fascinating to work on just round the corner. It can be a lonely job working on your own in the studio for extended hours, and the internet is therefore a perpetual temptation. As far as mastering for a new client goes, the main challenge is to find out exactly what they want from the process and the beginning of an album project often involves doing the most remastering as we work our way towards a sound that both I and the client are happy with. Mostly this isn't too time-consuming but I'm currently working on a project where I've had to master the first track 9 times so far! I thought my first version was pretty good so it took a while to figure out where the client was coming from, but having nailed what he wants it all makes sense now... should be a good album, the bass is going to be immense.

6. Which album of O.O.O.D. you like the most and why?

I'm very proud of all of them to be honest, picking one out as 'the best' is like, "Why? They're all perfect!" My favourite at any given moment tends to be whichever one we've most recently finished, and we're all really pleased with how You Think You Are turned out. However if I take a look back at progress so far I think the album that showed the biggest improvement in our sound and writing was Free Range, our third album. The first two albums were MIDI sequenced with no multitrack recording but Free Range - 6 years subsequently - was OOOD's first long-form release after we'd grown into the whole virtual studio thing and was much more polished. BTW if you missed the original release or want to support us directly you can now buy Free Range directly from OOOD at Bandcamp.

7. Obviously I've had to ask this one - when we can expect next, full-blown album from "Out Of Our Depth"?

We've discussed the idea and right now our plan is to concentrate more on just writing music and getting it out there whenever we can. Our focus over the last 20 years on releasing albums has meant that despite the large amount of music we've released and the amazing reviews we've had, we haven't had the constant 3-monthly drip-feed of releases that an act needs to keep their name in the public consciousness. We're not organized or formulaic enough to be quite that clockwork about it, but we're going to see how it goes just writing and releasing for a while. The first fruits of this are an EP on Phantasm which will hopefully be out before the end of 2013. Having said that it's our 20th anniversary in 2014 and that has to call for some kind of 'Best Of' compilation...

8. Any advices for new artists? What do you think makes a decent sound engineer and do you need to be one to be also a good psytrance music artist?

The most important attribute of a good sound engineer is the ability to truly listen, and to listen analytically. I think it's also necessary to have an understanding of just how easily our senses (eg. hearing) can be tricked and to bear that in mind when deciding if we can actually hear what we think we can hear. The final element of a good sound engineer is a thorough knowledge of the tools at their disposal; the development of all these attributes takes time and practice and are very much interlinked.

However it's my opinion that being a good sound engineer per se doesn't make you an artist. It's like saying that being a good brush-maker makes you an artist; you might make fantastic brushes but they're still only tools for painters to use to create the actual art*. For me, art comes from having something inside that needs to be externalized somehow; an idea, a feeling, a concept, and I believe that that 'something' should be unique to you, because once you start to be consciously derivative then the idea of artistic integrity becomes problematic. Obviously it's not as black and white as that - we're talking about genre music after all - but I would definitely encourage new artists to do what they can to stretch the boundaries of the genre rather than be a part of its stagnation. Production skills are necessary but not sufficient for this, so by all means learn analytical listening and the tools of sound engineering, but more importantly learn what makes your music an expression of your own individuality and develop that.

Speaking of stagnation and artistic integrity, I think it's a bad idea to change what you write because of what other people write. Sure, be influenced by things that tick your personal bounceboxes, but writing music that holds no intrinsic interest for you, its creator, is no way to create something of value. That is, assuming that creating value is what's important to you rather than jizzing your ego all over the dancefloor - but then, saying you've created something of value is an expression of ego too, so who's to say? Personally I find it a minefield of motivation, but having been in this game for a while I've seen many things come and go, and there are two main things that stand out:

1) there is an enormous difference between a musician/composer of music and a sequencer programmer, and

2) the basic attributes which define 'good music' do not change with fashion. My advice is to write the music that's in your heart; write it well and fuck what anyone else does. In the middle of a full-psy live set we dropped a 135 BPM breakbeat track at sunset on the last day of the main stage at Universo Paralello and it went off - 'critical mass'. There are no boundaries, definition is limitation, change is the only constant and the only person you really have to please is yourself. Do what's in you to do to with integrity and to the best of your ability, and even if you can only afford to eat ramen you'll be eating with kings.

*unless you make an actual art of brush-making! I'll stop here before it all gets too meta.

9. How long it took to build a Stooodio?

It depends when you start the stopwatch. 25 years if you count from when I was born, 21 years if you count from when I started playing piano, 8 years if you count from when I started using synthesizers and sequencers, 6 years if you count from when I started working in other recording studios, or 2 days if you count from when the three original members of OOOD first all met each other. The current version of the Stooodio, with the acoustic treatment and all, was built in 2 days with fantastic help and advice from my old friend Grant Collins a.k.a. Darshan, and Mark Kerridge, my partner in Kleesh.

Finally, can you share your three favourite albums that you are listening to recently? Might be something other than psy, though.

Almost all my listening these days is around the music I make or the music I master. The three albums that have crossed my desk most recently and which I think are really worth listening to are 'Magnitudes Of Order' by Globular, 'That Moment' by Slackjoint (out soon on Amplidudes Records) and 'The Journey From Babylon' by Flux Natura.

Thank you so much for your time and all the best!

You're welcome Thanks for asking. And thanks to you, dear reader, for indulging my waffle!

www.facebook.com/OOOD.music

www.mastering.OOOD.net