String Theory

Written by Liz McLean Knight Sunday, 07 September 2003 06:26

I met up with Nate Tucker and Josh Davison of String Theory early at Danny's on a Monday night before the usual crowd started arriving for Play.

LIZ: Why did you choose the name "String Theory"?

JOSH: It's is a theory in physics that has to do with theoretical structure of subatomic particles. When you start going down to these smaller levels, you get down to this theory of "strings" which are loops of energy that vibrate at certain frequencies and beat patterns, and when they vibrate in different ways they take on different characteristics. When one of these vibrates in a certain way, it takes on the characteristic of an electron. When one vibrates in another way, its a quark. So they think the lowest level of sub atomic particles is, these vibrating groups of energy called strings.

LIZ: How did you get started with electronic music?

NATE: Our first electronic experiments were with the Mac II. Josh was playing loops out of Sound Edit 16 and I was playing drums and he was playing my bass. Later, Josh bought an early Akai sampler, which wasn't very useful at first because we didn't have anything to control it with, so we just pushed the buttons on it and used it to trigger applauding sounds and fart noises.

JOSH: We got this loft in Wicker Park, and the landlord explicitly told us that there was to be no drums, so we set up this Yamaha PSR-400 and this cheesy Akai sampler, it had no user interface, just some matrix-programming thing--

NATE: And 6 seconds of stereo and 11 seconds of mono sampling time.

JOSH: Needless to say, pretty useless to do any production with.

NATE: Then Josh got the Roland R-70 Human Rhythm Composer drum machine, which was basically our first set, we played at 60dum with Joan of Arc (which was one of their first shows also)...for that gig we had the Akai sampler wired to this little metal TV stand, the Yamaha keyboard, the drum machine, and I played bass over all of our stuff at that point. It was fairly well recieved for how primitive it was.

JOSH: That was the "Shizaus" / "Joachim and the Professor" show in 1997... a friend of mine had built us these robot sculptures made out of 1950s household appliances, including one of them that had a functioning toaster as the head. At one point during our set we came up and put bread in the head of the robot and pushed down the lever and made toast.

NATE: It was perfectly timed with this one song we had called Uns which was about 45 seconds long... it was actually pretty forward-thinking of us...

JOSH: We had the Cologne-Minimalist sound before Cologne even knew it had a Minimalist sound to be sounded.

NATE: From there it evolved into more and more gear-acquisition, technological refinement, and more gear...

LIZ: So are you suggesting that your sound and process is related to the kind of equipment you're using at the time?

NATE: It was much more arbitrary back then because we were just learning how anything was done in terms of electronic production. I think our composition style was a lot more musical then than now because we were relying on piano-playing and bass playing... a little bit of programming here and there, but it was pretty limited as to what we could do with the R-70.We would program some simple melodies into it, but it was kind of...

JOSH: It sounded terrible. It was a horrid mish-mash of clatters and really lame drums and other cheesy stuff... thankfully we didn't record much of it.

LIZ: So when did you start recording as "String Theory"?

JOSH: It was when we were getting ready to shop our demo in 98, we had three new songs that were actually pretty good, we recorded those ourselves, put them on a cd-r and started sending them out all over the place.

NATE: We finalized the name String Theory because we needed a name for the demo, and then that turned into the SMAK 12 inch in 1999/2000. It took them three months for [Skam] to call us back after the demo, and then a year and a half to actually put out the record.

JOSH: We were very ambitious, we sent to to Warp, Ninja Tune--

NATE: Mo'wax, Matador...

JOSH: We even sent it to Astralwerks, even though they didn't even put out records, they were just a distribution company, but we didn't know any better.

NATE: Also Thrill Jockey, and they were the only ones who sent us a rejection letter.

JOSH: Oh, also, we sent it to Grand Royale... [laughs all around] We didn't know!

JOSH: So when Skam called, needless to say there was rejoicing all around. We were both big fans of Boards of Canada and Gescom and all of the stuff they had done. The whole process took about two years, and then when the record came out it sold out in within a month or something, which was pretty remarkable.

NATE: Oh, and two days ago [August 20, 2002] they just released the cd, featuring songs we wrote three and a half years ago.

JOSH: The sound that we had then is so far removed from the sound we have now. I suppose there are some similarities, but the techniques have changed completely, the styles that we even work in have changed completely.

NATE: Well, there's still a large melodic element.

JOSH: Actually a lot of the Skam stuff, which was an abberation at the time we did it, the 4/4 kickdrum, etc, just happened to be on two of the tracks that we sent to Skam and were only the two songs we had ever done like that.

NATE: We were more into breakbeats.

JOSH: And jungle, too, but we were never any good at jungle, thankfully [they laugh]. I did these two kickin' jungle tracks, but I think that would fall outside of the realm of String Theory. That was more my DJ Magunk solo alias.

NATE: Right now Josh is also Touchmaster Infinity.

JOSH: Touchmaster Infinity is my producing name, but I come up with aliases all the time and use it for just one thing. When I DJ, I'm DJ Egon Spengler [Liz laughs. The resemblance is uncanny]

NATE: [to Josh] Oh, what's that other one, you geeked out about it and called me on the phone and were like "Dude, I have the best fucking name..."

JOSH: Oh, that's for the jackin' house project I'm doing with my friend Jessica, it's gonna be so kickin' you won't even be able to stand still the second the laser hits the cd. I called Nate while I was walking from work to my car. The name of it is "Imperial Jackmaster Barlow," which on the face of it sounds pretty cool, but when you find out where the name came from, its even cooler. It's actually the name of a pocket knife made by the Imperial Knife company.

LIZ: [Laughs] it sounds like the resident house DJ for that bar in Star Wars.

JOSH: Well, Jackmaster is a very traditional Chicago house name. There was Farley Jackmaster Funk, Jackmaster Silk, and hundreds of other Jackmasters... I found it looking on the web for "Jackmaster."

NATE: ...and Touchmaster Infinity got his name from a poker machine at the Empty Bottle next to the ladies room.

JOSH: It's really great, if you watch it long enough it has this logo that paints out the words "Touchmaster Infinity" on the screen, and "Infinity" is like this laser that shoots across the screen.

LIZ: So can you talk about what your live process is like?

JOSH: Well, depending on how energized we are, we'll try and come up with some good stuff to perform live. I mean, electronic music performance is not exactly the most easiest thing to do in terms of the word "live" and "performance" actually applying. If there's a show we're excited about we'll actually break out the gear and haul the gear down and do mostly pattern-based knob twiddling stuff, but generally speaking, our live preparations are essentially the same as our recording preparations, which is basically assembing sounds in the studio, recording them to a hard drive...

NATE: and figuring out interesting ways to mix them live. At more ambitius shows I'll bring out the MPC-3000 [a sampling workstation] which has 10 outputs and just mix live. [The sampler] is kind of a standard in the hiphop industrys

JOSH: Dr Dre's weapon of choice.

NATE: Our live setup usually consists of three Moogerfooger pedals, a lowpass filter, a ring modulator, a delay, two laptops...

JOSH: Sometimes we play live keyboards over the top of the sequenced stuff and do some knob twiddling... first of all, there's a lot of work just to get it to sound good in a live setting so it keeps one person busy just EQing, and then making sure patterns get played in the right order and parts drop out when they're supposed to drop out.

NATE: Actually, the drum solos is the hardest part [laughs]

JOSH: Yeah, right, that really long drum jam that we do towards the end of the set when the lights go down and all the people are tired out from twirl-dancing [laughs all around]. But for the most part, live electronic music is a big joke, its some dork sitting up there with some sort of mystery gear and software that no one can see.

LIZ: How do you feel about having a projection for the audience of what's going on on the laptop screen?

NATE: I hope that doesn't happen, because at its most exciting you've got some plugins up on the screen and you're twisting "knobs," everythings' automated....

JOSH: I mean, we do some improv stuff, but its so hard to do a dynamic live performance of any structured musical thing, when its only two people and you're dealing with prerecored tracks...

NATE: The one elements that is nice about Logic, which Josh uses a lot, is that you can create an environment where you can pick a scale to work with and you can move that scale around and improv like that.

JOSH: You can set up a loop on the screen and draw notes in, and it loops indefinitely and you can create the song as you go. The results aren't as interesting as the process going on with the performer... at its best it can sound good, but at its worst it can sound wanky, though I suppose that's true for any sort of improvisation

NATE: I think we're still trying to find the sort of audience that's into us -- because if we play here [Danny's] its people who are interested in the gear and the process, and then the rest of the people are there to talk to their friends. But if you're playing at a place like the Hothouse, where people are encouraged to focus on the stage, where people are expecting to see a band, its a little harder to feel ok about just going up there with a laptop...

JOSH: On one hand [with a laptop performance] you don't have to focus on whatever the performer's doing on stage and you can focus more on the music. It's really great when you're seeing someone like Ryoji Ikeda [who performs with Dumb Type] who does a lot of stuff with his music that's just amazingly intricate and insane to the ears.

But then there's a lot of people who perform with their laptops who are not really doing much sonically, and they're not really doing much physically, and there just isn't much to pay attention to at all

NATE: I think we fall into that category now and then.

JOSH: Yeah, I think sometimes we bore the shit out of an audience, and I wouldn't go as far to say that we're a good live band. I kind of feel guilty sometimes when we play shows and people are paying to see us and we're just sitting there with our computers and our knobs and we don't do anything.

NATE: Well, one thing we do when we're trying to appease the crowd a little more (which is rediculous to try and do in Chicago) is to make "dancier" music. People don't dance, but they nod more, I guess!

JOSH: People will dance in Chicago, it just takes a certain atmosphere and a certain...

NATE: intensity to the music

JOSH: ...that I don't think we have. But I think that eventually what you're going to see is that the bands who are going to be more successful with computer-based music will incorporate other instruments into it...Like Telefon Tel Aviv is a good example of this, because they use laptops when they perform, and also have piano, two guitars, there's a lot going on on stage, and I think people respond really well to that. They make really good music, and its interesting to watch.

With any sort of live instrument, if someone can see the action and the result of that action, its much more effective in getting that person in the audience involved with the performance, moreso than watching some pasty, skinny white guy sitting there with his mouse going "click" "click" "click." You don't know what motion of my wrist made that noise happen, or, if really that noise came from a motion of my wrist made two weeks ago in my basement.

NATE: We did bring out an oscilloscope when we played live here a few weeks ago...

JOSH: Though we didn't really excite anyone but the five geekiest who were sitting up in the front ... but that was an attempt to give a visual correlation to the music, because you could "see" the music that's coming out of the speakers...

NATE: And that's one area where Pulseprogramming is really successful, because they have a member of the band who just does video, and they wont perform without him because they consider it to be part of the music, and it gives the audience something to focus on.

LIZ: Have you thought about using video?

NATE: We had one show at the empty bottle where we brought in Kelly Hicks who did some nice Super 8 stuff...

JOSH: We were very much into analog at that point, so we thought we should use 8mm film for that performance, and she did some really nice black and white films, but it didn't turn out that well because we hung the screen in front of the exit sign, and it was lighting up the screen so much that it washed out the film...

LIZ: What was the obsession with analog?

JOSH: Analog circuitry will give you much thicker sound... a lot more solid bottom end to it. .

NATE: And analog is an infinite amount of information, where digital is finite... if you listen to a digital synthesiser, say the Roland JP-8000, if you have a patch on its that's a sawtooth wave and then you have a Moog next to it, they sound similar, but there's something more there with the Moog... [you can notice it more] when you sweep a filter...

JOSH: Also, analog circuitry can run at a higher voltage that digital circuitry, so you get much more power behind the sound, and a Moog synthesizer will always have more kick to it.. but now we pretty much only use digital circuitry and try to make up for it with the EQ... but really I like digital now because you can take a sound and reprocess it over and over, and you can always revert back to the original sound on your hard drive, the data isn't lost... there's more flexibility using digital software... also, its a lot less expensive. But the analog-digital debate will never be solved, they both rule.

LIZ: How would you know when you're finally "successful?"

JOSH: I don't think we'll ever get to that point where we could say "yes, we're satisfied, this is where we want to be."

NATE: And I think that's pretty analogous to our song writing process too, because a song in its finished state is never really finished...

JOSH: But there's a certain point where you have to draw a line at some point and say "this is good enough, I'm ready to put my name on it," because or else we keep pushing it to the point where it all falls apart in a terrible mess, or we get so sick of listening to it that we have to stop.

NATE: It's a shame because we've lost so many songs doing that... I think now we've gotten really good about recording almost everything we do though.

JOSH: Its nice to have that kind of "safety net" so if you fuck something up you can always go back to another version... which also is why I really like the computer now more than hardware and samplers, because I've worked really hard on things and then lost an entire disk of samples... but that's actually a really good filter for your material, to trash everything, because then you're faced with asking yourself "Is that really worth re-creating?" If yes, then, chances are when you re-create it you'll do a better version of it the second time, because you'll have learned from your mistakes.

LIZ: Any thoughts on filesharing?

JOSH: I think its a really good distribution medium for exposing your work to more people. We have a lot of mp3s on our website and encourage people to download it, because any exposure that we can get is a good thing.

But I think filesharing of mp3s needs to be approached in a responsible manner by those sharing the mp3s. If you listen to something repeatedly you need to ask yourself the question of "Would I buy this record if I didn't have the mp3? Is it worth supporting the artist?"

Also, artists like Joan of Arc put out an album that is, start to finish, a work of art. If you download the mp3 version its not the same presentation as when you buy the real album. I would hope that someone who really likes Joan of Arc would go out and buy the album because there's so much more to it.

NATE: I really prefer having the artwork in front of me and be able to read liner notes. There's a presentation aspect to it, that its a piece of art that you're holding in your hands. Especially with vinyl: the sound of vinyl, a good, thick record...

JOSH: 180 grams of virgin vinyl

LIZ: What are you both listening to now?

JOSH: I've been listening to early house stuff., like Adonis. By today's standards it has a silly sound, but in terms of historical perspective its very important. Jeff Mills, The Dabrye stuff is really nice... there's this band called the Ural 13 Diktators, they put out this cd called Techno is Dead and its really hilarious. Ellen Allien did a good mix cd that just came out, and Justus Koehncke did a really good album on Kompakt that's almost disco. Actually, pretty much anything suggested by Jim at Weekend Records rules!

NATE: I'm really inspired by Brian Eno's ambient work, pretty much his stuff in the 70s. For the longest time he was immortal, he could do nothing wrong... up through Another Green World, then things started going awry. I also really like this band called Blind Idiot God, also Tarbabies have a record on SST. The last record by Ryoji Ikeda with Carsten Nicolai is a really great record, its a white album with white writing, and you can't read it very well unless you hold it up to candle at an angle or something, but its a really amazing record, really abrasive at first, but after a while you begin to see the textures and what they were going for. Also, Kevin Drumm's Sheer Hellish Miasma: its pretty brutal, but depending on the volume you listen to it you can gain an understanding of what he's going for, you can compare it to Merzbow or other noisy stuff, but he really has his own sound.

The new cds coming out, Smak CD 1 and CD 2 are a re-release of what originally came out on vinyl. It comes with a fancy carrying case too. You can get them in Chicago at Weekend Records (1919 W. Division) or Hardboiled Records (Roscoe at Damen). .

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