Headliner Magazine Issue 46

ISSUE 46 / MARCH 2023 SUPPORTING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET UK £3.95 / USA $6.95 / CANADA $7.95

MAGAZINE / 46

INTO SPACE

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE TINA WEYMOUTH

ON TALKING HEADS AND TOURING

VOLKER BERTELMANN

SCORING ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

STEPHANIE ECONOMOU

ON HER GRAMMY-WINNING ASSASSIN’S CREED SCORE

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SUP P

IVE C EAT O CR

ING THE T R O

NITY MU M HEADLINER MAGAZINE

46 At the time of writing, awards season is in full swing. We’ve had the Grammys, the BRITs, the BAFTAs, and the Oscars are a matter of days away. And while there will always be debate over who should have won what, and which performances were best on the night, such ceremonies can certainly provide an opportunity to celebrate many of the great achievements and innovations taking place across the worlds of music, TV, and film.

Of course, there are certain names and titles that will dominate proceedings, such as Harry Styles’s domination of the BRITs, and All Quiet On The Western Front’s seven-gong-haul at the BAFTAs, but it’s always good to see those behind the scenes receiving some well-earned recognition for their considerable efforts.

Indeed, Headliner’s pages are graced

by Volker Bertelmann, the composer behind All Quiet On The Western Front’s award-winning soundtrack, as he discusses the art of bringing images to life through sound. His creative and compositional skills, as well as his vast technical expertise, have also found additional outlets in the form of solo records and original new music. Meanwhile, Stephanie Economou reflects on winning a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarök.

Similar qualities can certainly be attributed to this issue’s cover star, the one and only Jean-Michel Jarre.

In a Headliner exclusive, the French electronic music and production

pioneer invites us into his personal studio for an in-depth chat about everything from his ever-evolving creative process and approach to work in the studio, to how he is reinventing his live shows from the ground up. Such commitment to innovation in any artist would be admirable, but for a musician to still be flexing their creative muscles to this extent some 50 years into their career is quite remarkable.

And on the subject of trailblazers, these pages also find Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club co-founder and bassist Tina Weymouth opening up on a phenomenal career to date, as she gears up for an ‘in conversation with’ tour alongside her husband and fellow band co-founder Chris Frantz, in which the pair reflect upon a lifetime together in music.

Elsewhere, we also shine a spotlight on some of the most exciting new aspiring and emerging talent on the scene, as well as the people and the technology shaping the industry of tomorrow. And from what 2023 has served up so far, it looks to be in safe hands.

Daniel Gumble Head of Music, Headliner HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

08 / JAKEHUFFMAN

22/ COMPANY PROFILE

14/ JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

28 / TINA WEYMOUTH

34 / RECORDING ROBBIE 38 / IMMERSIVE AUDIO 44 / RICK MAGUIRE

48 / 100 YEARS OF THE BBC 62 / VOLKER BERTELMANN

58 / INSTALLED AUDIO

54 / GRACE GAUSTAD

68 / KEVIN PAUL

72 / STEPHANIE ECONOMOU

78 / NIC HARD 84 / WEEKENDS WITH ADELE

100 / JUAN CARLOS SOTELO

90 / EGO PLUM

96 / AUDIO PRODUCTION

108 / LIGHTING 104 / SOWETO KINCH

112/ LUKAS GRAHAM

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JAKE HUFFMAN

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

Down The Rabbit Hole

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LBY RAM CO Y SE

RDS b Wo y

ASPIRING HEADLINER

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

JAKE HUFFMAN Multi instrumentalist and indie pop rock artist Jake Huffman chats to Headliner about discovering his musicality as a solo artist, his impressive songwriting credits, and his new single Martyr, which he wrote, recorded and produced at the famous PowerStation New England Studio and is a nod to his upcoming EP.

Despite having only relatively recently embarked on a solo music career, Huffman was busying himself with show rehearsals and a brand new release when he joined Headliner on a Zoom call towards the end of January. It had certainly been a productive start to the year for the singer-songwriter, who tells Headliner with a wry smile, “it’ll be nice to get a little bit more sleep next week.”

Huffman began his journey as the lead vocalist and drummer in rock band McLovins, who’s video cover of Phish’s You Enjoy Myself went viral on YouTube

overnight in 2008 and catapulted them firmly into the spotlight.

“All this stuff makes me feel so old now, because it was so long ago,” Huffman laments. “I was 14 at the time. Me and my two other buds, Jason and Jeff, threw that cover up for our friends and family, and lo and behold, we woke up the next day and the video had gone viral with 10,000 views overnight. With those 10,000 views came about 300 emails from promoters asking us for gigs. That video really changed the trajectory of my life, and solidified the fact that I wanted to be a musician.

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JAKE HUFFMAN

Down The Rabbit Hole

recalls, “We would just end up going down rabbit holes.”

Huffman admits that the catalyst for him going solo was undoubtedly the pandemic. As many struggled to make ends meet as the live touring world diminished, he used it as his opportunity to “go back to school”, enrolling in a production certificate program at Berklee Online.

It was pre-pandemic however when Huffman initially discovered his love for music production. In 2019 he went to L.A. to work with a producer and songwriter named Andy Seltzer, who inspired him to dive in head first.

“We built a great team, we went on a bunch of tours and made a bunch of records. It was an amazing jumping off point for us. I kind of think of it like I got a doctorate degree in being in a band, by being in the band!”

Inundated with an amalgamation of various musical styles, Huffman’s main musical influences in his teens came in the form of renowned rock and jazz drummers like Stewart Copeland, Max Roach and Art Blakey, who made him think about drums melodically, and less as a rhythmic instrument: “We were just trying to find weirder, and more,” Huffman HEADLINER MAGAZINE

“I got Ableton, but decided that I want to be taught this stuff from the ground up,” he recalls. “For a year and a half I stayed in my studio and started producing for my other bandmates. We operate almost like a band ecosystem; I started putting my energy into the group, and now I have a stable of artists that continues to grow. That’s the newest flower in my garden.”

Huffman’s own artist material is all entirely written, performed and produced by himself in his home studio. His most recent EP however was finished off at Power Station New England, a professional recording studio based on the exact design and acoustics of the original, iconic Power Station in New York City.

“You can do anything in the box with drum sampling and stuff, but there’s nothing like recording real drums in an acoustically accurate room with the right mics,” he says. “Not all my productions need that treatment,

but this EP needed that extra polish, especially because we’re taking it to radio; it needs to be able to properly compete.”

At Power Station, Huffman partnered up with studio manager Evan Bakke and audio engineer Trevor Okonuk to utilise the studio’s impressive live room, and mic’d up “every single instrument that we could think of.

We would do 12 hour days of me just bouncing from instrument to instrument, and really experimented with the vocals and percussion.

“It was the best week of my entire life,” he adds in earnest. “It was surreal, but just being able to have that freedom of not wearing both the artist and producer hat was great.

It’s tough when you’re doing it all yourself because you have to be a little schizophrenic about it!”

In a nutshell, Huffman’s latest release, Martyr is about not dying on a hill.

“These days people are just all about making an opinion, and then changing it three weeks later when that opinion isn’t popular anymore,” he says. “Everybody’s just going through life like a robot with a screen, and I also find myself getting sucked in. I see a negative comment on Instagram and then see there’s 300 responses to that one comment, which is just like a wall of shit of people yelling at each other. It’s so easy to watch that unfold, kind of like trash TV. But life is outside of the box; I think Martyr is one of those tunes where I was just a little bit upset at the time and wanted to find some crazy shit to say.

ASPIRING HEADLINER

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“I KIND OF THINK OF IT LIKE I GOT A DOCTORATE DEGREE IN BEING IN A BAND, BY BEING IN THE BAND!”

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JAKE HUFFMAN

Down The Rabbit Hole

“Saying this stuff is kind of cathartic though, especially when we play it live. We end up screaming the hook – if you know what’s good for you – and it feels really good to do that.”

Speaking of performing live, Headliner is impressed to learn that Huffman – while still part of McLovins – has shared the stage with the likes of Blink-182, Foster The People, The Flaming Lips and BB King, to name a few. Right now though, he’s rather preoccupied with the release of his latest record.

“When you’re actively promoting something, it’s hard to switch back to the songwriting side of your brain, which is when you start over analysing yourself,” he says. “You start asking, ‘What is my sound?

What am I supposed to be writing about?’ And then you just go down weird rabbit holes.

“For me recently, it’s just been about going down rabbit holes. It’s a bit like HEADLINER MAGAZINE

Whack A Mole, but I’m the mole,” he adds with a chuckle.

Headliner also discovers that Huffman’s work as a composer and lyricist for popular US children’s TV series Sesame Street helped shape him into the artist and producer he is today.

“That gig definitely helped me become a producer in terms of just getting to the point, and led me to start working with other people,” he explains. “I ended up writing a song that was originally for Mumford & Sons, and then The Lumineers, but they both passed on it. But Leon Bridges and Ed Sheeran did go for it.”

Huffman’s main focus at the moment is the recently launched 10-week radio campaign for Top 40 and Hot AC, for his track Martyr.

“It’s out there in the world now, so I don’t exactly know what happens next,” he admits with excitement in

his voice. “I really would love to play internationally this year. I look at my streams on Spotify and Apple Music and my listeners seem to be very much global, so I’d love to be able to connect the dots from the streams to bring that into the physical.”

So if his global streaming figures and ever increasing popularity is anything to go by, Huffman looks to be well on his way to a successful solo career.

Headliner will certainly be keeping a close eye and ear…

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JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Into Space

S by PA RD U o

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WATSON

INTO SPACE One hour outside of Paris, somewhere on the Seine, stands a chateaux which boasts more Moogs and Mellotrons than you can shake a stick at. But that’s not even the half of it. As I step foot into this electronic music haven, I reflect on the first time Jean-Michel Jarre and I met, almost exactly 10 years ago - in his green room at Wembley Arena in 2013 where, unannounced, I wandered in and asked him for an interview. Somewhat surprised to see me sat on his sofa before he made it from the stage, the electronic music pioneer was a true gent, and gladly gave me 15 minutes.

I asked him what his vision was for the future of electronic music, and will always remember his reply,

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

and how true it became: “In my opinion, the next step [for electronic music] is to mix analogue synths with digital equipment. We have already carried out a number of experiments such as comparing new ‘virtual’ Mellotron sounds against the original, and the difference was amazing. It’s like playing a Stradivarius and having the sound of a violin on a virtual synth; two different worlds.”

As I sit down with Jarre today, this time in his beautiful studio, he smiles as I remind him of that moment. I ask him if he has a habit of making such profound predictions.

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JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

Into Space

COVER STORY

“[laughs] Well, maybe… It’s kind of a living animal, this place, with all the chaotic vibes that it defines,” Jarre reflects, waving an arm towards the control room which houses an abundance of analogue kit. And that’s not including the ‘museum’ of equipment I’ve been gawking at in the adjacent room prior to this interview. “I always thought of this as a place of constant mutation and change; soon I’m moving into another studio quite close to here, and re-designing and repurposing the old cabin.”

Conversation turns to Oxymore, Jarre’s latest project, which is based on an idea he had to pay tribute to the roots of electronic music and the continental European way of doing electro acoustic and electronic music.

“Everything in these genres started in Continental Europe - in Germany, France, and Italy; it was nothing to do with the jazz, rock or blues from the US,” Jarre insists. “We have this heritage from classical music where we were not trapped into the pop format of three minutes, and with this kind of approach – especially in France – people such as Pierre Henry are in my opinion the real pioneers.

“The way we are doing music these days is actually directly linked to what they did in the late ‘40s, where people suddenly felt that it could be cool to introduce noise into orchestral sounds and combine that with the field recording process – mixing sounds of nature or the city with orchestral sounds or electric sounds.”

So some of these classical composers were way ahead of their time, then?

“Indeed. In the late ‘40s they created more or less everything we are doing now,” nods Jarre. “For example, Stravinsky was avant-garde, and then 30 years later his music became

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“WITH 360 AND MULTI-CHANNEL, YOU CAN GO INSIDE THE MUSIC…” classical. While their music is maybe not that popular these days, the way that they defined the grammar and vocabulary of contemporary music, and the way we’re producing music now, is the key.

“Whether it’s hip-hop or rock or electro or techno, we’re all integrating noises into our music. These guys were at the origin of all this by saying ‘okay, we could mix the sound of a bird with a clarinet, or the sound of a washing machine with percussion’.

This was totally crazy back then, and nowadays it’s a common approach to music production.”

Oxymore - which has been cut in stereo, binaural, and Atmos - comes from the word oxymoron: the idea of joining two elements which have nothing to do with each other to create something unexpected; that, Jarre insists, is what the roots of electronic music is all about.

“Electronic music started with people like Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany stealing some filters off oscillators from radio stations made for maintenance, not made for music, and making music with them. The same goes with recording – noises from nature, cities, or the human body have been mixed with orchestral sounds or electric instruments. This is an oxymoronic approach in itself, so I thought it could be quite cool to conceive an entire album around this concept.

no references because electronic music was really only just beginning.

My references back then were more linked to movies or paintings than music. With Oxymore it was the same; I composed music for the first time not in stereo, but in multichannel 360.

“I learned from studying some of these great pioneers that stereo doesn’t exist in nature. When I’m talking to you, I’m talking to you in mono, or when a bird is singing it is mono; it’s the environment around us and our human ears which create our perspective of the audio, and ironically the audio technology today is allowing us to go back to a very natural way of listening to music.”

So we’ve essentially been compromising, listening to music in stereo for so long?

“For centuries, we have had a 2D relationship with music. When you are composing for a symphonic orchestra you have the violin on one side, the percussion in the centre, and the winds on the other side,” Jarre explains. “In a studio, we’ve had two speakers in front of us; at concerts, we’ve had the stereo PA system in front of us. It’s the same relationship that a painter has with a canvas. But with 360 and multichannel, these days you can go inside the music – it’s almost like the difference between a painting and a sculpture, in a sense.”

“When I did Oxygène (Jarre’s third studio album, released in 1976), I had HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Into Space

We chat about the challenges and indeed trends in releasing new music today. Although this isn’t yet the case across Europe, certainly within the major labels here in the UK, after completing a stereo production and mix (as standard), that song or piece of music will more than likely need to be re-mixed and released in an immersive format. Universal Music Group has been a huge adopter of this process after partnering with Apple on its Spatial Audio initiative.

As forward-thinking - and successful - as this has proven so far, there is still a long way to go: on the one hand, there is a huge demand for these mixes, but on the other, there is a serious lack of education in immersive mixing full stop, and there are very few ‘great’ Atmos mix rooms. It ultimately means that immersive mixes can differ in quality in sometimes volcanic proportions.

Jarre acknowledges this, pauses for a few seconds, and offers a creative curveball: “For me, that process [of taking stereo and making it immersive] is a little bit like putting colours on a black and white movie. The game-changer is actually to conceive and compose the music from scratch in 360, which

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

is of course something totally different in terms of the composition and production process, because suddenly you have to deal with a completely different space. I’ve always been obsessed since my early days with the relationship between music and space, and suddenly to be able to do an orchestral arrangement in space is like putting audio planets around your head. This is what Oxymore is all about.

“With 360, we as musicians still have a lot of limitations: Dolby Atmos, for example, was designed and developed as a device for the movie industry. Spectators can have the dialogue in front of them with the music and sound effects on each side and at the back. As musicians, we are much more egocentric; we need to have an equidistant relationship between everything, so actually even Dolby Atmos these days is not made for us.

“So for Oxymore, we actually had to adapt a technology not made for us. We’ve seen this never ending story of musicians hijacking technology which has not necessarily been developed for them, but then creating their own style from happy accidents that occur as a result of this ‘hijacking’ approach.”

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THE IMMERSIVE ROAD AHEAD

COVER STORY

Jarre says that 2023 is going to be exciting with regard to immersive performances due to a unique relationship he has built with CODA Audio, utilising its bespoke SPACE HUB technology for his live shows.

clicked with a shared ethos in that music is ‘not flat anymore’, and that we as an industry must try to create a different relationship with listeners, even if it’s with just one speaker.

SPACE HUB makes it simple and straightforward to tailor sound to any space, and has a focus on time coherence as well as improved localisation of sound sources and spatial stability. According to CODA, immersive is only truly possible with phase-aligned sound, and SPACE HUB makes it possible to reproduce the sort of detail needed for human ears, which are perfectly equipped to detect spatial differences. If the phase-alignment isn’t precise, your ears and your brain know something is not right in the immersive sound system.

“CODA is in sync and in phase with not only my expectations, but my opinion of the way we would like to receive and enjoy music these days: not being in front of the music, but being inside it,” declares Jarre. “To share with the audience this idea that when I’m composing, I’m actually inside the music, is a feeling and an emotion I’ve always hoped to convey.

I’ve been really quite impressed by the fact that every piece of equipment in the CODA range is based on the idea that you forget the technology, and you forget where the sound is coming from – because this is the true magic of music.

When Jarre was first introduced to CODA and its people, he instantly

“With CODA, even with just two speakers, you don’t feel like you’re

trapped by the limitations of stereo.

I think the company has a vision that’s very in sync with current times, and the conversations we’re having about immersive worlds and VR and the metaverse are testament to that.

We forget that sound is much more important for human beings than visuals for giving the true feeling of immersion: the visual field is 140 degrees, and audio is 360 degrees, so when you’re in the middle of the metaverse, sound is crucial.”

Jarre recently performed a show at MIDEM in Cannes which I was fortunate enough to witness: a 16.1 CODA N-Ray system immersed the audience ‘in the round’ quite spectacularly. This was achieved using CODA Audio’s SPACE HUB immersive processor, and was the first major performance using the manufacturer’s latest technology.

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JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Into Space

“IN THE NEXT 10 YEARS, WE’LL SEE IMMERSIVE BECOME THE STEREO OF THE 21ST CENTURY…”

Jarre sees CODA as a very interesting company because of its creative approach to loudspeaker technology.

CODA’s SPACE Panels - which were recently showcased to great effect

by Jarre himself at the ISE Show in Barcelona, are a great example.

The speaker setup offers CODA’s signature linear-phase and precise transient response, as well as embracing time alignment to provide a complete 360-degree soundstage.

Or in simple terms: the movement between the speakers is smooth and realistic, with no audio hopping around or audible phase issues which might ruin the experience.

“For Oxymore, and for future projects, I’m actually inviting the audience to be inside the music, and trying to create environments where listeners are surrounded by speakers. I’ve been working with CODA to follow up a number of ideas and to develop this ecosystem, because it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight. My priority as a musician is to share my music today, and so we have to find some tricks or hijack again in order to push our creativity. I’m very enthusiastic about being able to share my music in such an efficient way emotionally.

“You have lots of people justifying what they’re doing by the technique they are using, but at the end of the day the only thing that matters is the resulting content, which is completely dependent on the technology you’re using.”

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SPACE Panels provide immersive 3D audio within customisable 4K screens using ultra-flat speaker modules, which fit within the 70mm-deep design. They also incorporate acoustical treatment within, and paired with CODA’s LINUS amplification, can provide a top notch 3D audio experience pretty much anywhere - including a tricky demo room, as proven at the ISE Show, where the panels featured projections as well as artwork from Jarre’s Oxymore album.

“CODA believes that in the future, loudspeakers should be part of our day-to-day life, and one way of doing this is making the technology invisible,” Jarre says. “This fits into this idea in modern times where we’re thinking about purity, and respecting the environment. CODA’s SPACE Panels sound absolutely fantastic – as good as the most sophisticated sound systems available, and they also have built-in absorption. The panels are so thin, making them nearly invisible; you can even project visuals onto them, and they really do have amazing acoustic properties.

“My dream for my next video is to have this kind of equipment in my own environment. I don’t think it should necessarily replace the fact that speakers should be visible, because it’s nice to have a visual

reference - but then sometimes it’s not, and with this technology CODA is unique in offering me as an artist the choice between both. Being big and being ambitious is not the same, and CODA is a company that is ambitious with the concept of ‘less is more’, which is what I really like.”

Jarre is clearly still as much a pioneer now as he was at the start of his career, and this new CODA relationship looks set to keep him at the absolute forefront of audio technology. I am about to put my final question to him, asking what the next technological trends may be, but he is already one step ahead of me: “[smiles] I’m convinced that with the emergence of the metaverse and the development of VR and XR (Extended Reality), this is going to be the the way of producing music in the next few years; I think we’ll look back at stereo with the same nice feeling we get when we see a gramophone, and the mono technology that our grandparents had. In the next 10 years, we’ll see immersive become the stereo of the 21st century. And once again, a company like CODA is totally in sync with modern times and requirements in that respect, technology-wise but also with ecology in terms of our relationship with energy. That will be the next game-changer.”

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NEW AUDIO FRONTIERS

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The Finnish Line

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ords by W

COMPANY PROFILE

THE FINNISH LINE

NEW AUDIO FRONTIERS Based in the small Finnish town of Iisalmi, Genelec’s HQ is located in a place of picturesque beauty, which is not a thought that typically abounds when visiting such sites. More typically, facilities of this kind are set to the functional, concrete grey backdrop of an out-of-town industrial estate. In this case, we are met with a modest – externally at least – building nestled amongst tall, lush spruce, birch, aspen, and pine trees. To the rear, the land gives way to a vast blue lake that extends almost as far as the eye can see. And at the time of Headliner’s arrival, the town has been subject to a couple of days’ snowfall. As such, the ice white of the sky and the surrounding environs bleed into one – still, silent, and creating a glacial, almost otherworldly vista.

After venturing inside and warming ourselves from the sub-zero temperature, we’re joined by Siamäk Naghian and Aki Mäkivirta, Genelec’s managing director and R&D director, respectively. From the moment we sit down with them for a chat about the state of the market and all things Genelec, it is immediately apparent that they are a great foil for one another. Mäkivirta speaks eloquently and in detail about the practicalities

and challenges of leading R&D at a market leading brand, while Naghian, usually deep in thought, is more sparing with his words, often speaking philosophically about the evolution of the business and the importance of holding onto the family values that have been a constant at Genelec ever since it was co-founded by the late Ilpo Martikainen and Topi Partanen in 1978.

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NEW AUDIO FRONTIERS

The Finnish Line

Of course, the company has grown significantly over the past 45 years. In turn, those at the helm are constantly towing a line between consistent growth and remaining true to those long-established brand values.

Central to that has been the decision to keep production and R&D in Iisalmi and resist the temptation to relocate to more cost-effective locations.

“For some companies there has been a race to the bottom to keep the price as low as possible, but there is a sacrifice when you do this,” Mäkivirta elaborates. “You sacrifice the possibility of creating new things you cannot afford to do the research you need to do to create great new things. You are giving up a lot of what you could potentially be doing.”

“If you look at the last 20 years, the trend has been to move production elsewhere,” Naghian says. “This has not been a question for us. It’s so important that we look at R&D and production as an integrated process.”

This notion of combining production and R&D as an integrated process is, the pair inform us, a crucial strategic decision, and one that has been central to the firm’s success.

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“One of the most important things is that we can be sure of the quality of the products leaving the factory,” Mäkivirta explains. “If there is a large distance [between R&D and production], and we don’t have daily contact, anything can happen. And if you have a big surprise, then fixing that surprise later can be very difficult.

But if we develop the methods we can talk daily and understand how things are working.”

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“IMMERSIVE PLAYBACK IS CREATING ENTIRELY NEW DIMENSIONS. THERE IS NO DOUBT IT WILL BECOME MAINSTREAM.”

“Another very important reason is that it’s the only way to ensure the long lifetime of the products,” says Naghian. “If you look at products like the S30 from ’78 they are still in use today. I haven’t seen a single one that is not working or couldn’t still be serviced. If we didn’t have R&D and production integrated, it would have been impossible to maintain this kind of heritage.”

While aspects of the past punctuate and inform the course of the conversation, we turn our focus to the trends of today, particularly immersive audio.

“Immersive listening is the natural way we hear,” Naghian says. “When we talk about immersive audio, we have to keep in mind there are two parts – production and consumption. We have been focusing on the production side for many years. We have been looking to bring that experience closer to people by building experience centres around the world, as immersive audio is something people need to experience… And what we offer is a total system solution, the network of the system, the calibration. It makes things really easy for people who want to have a multi-channel immersive system.”

you,” Mäkivirta comments. “So if we can bring the experience of that to people when they are listening to recorded audio then that is the way to go. It means that people are in need more than ever of accurate sound reproduction systems so that they can engineer the experience they want to create.”

Essential to Genelec and the immersive movement as a whole is the continued education around what exactly the term immersive audio means. Often described as 3D, spatial, or object-based audio, it is vital that the concept is fully understood before it can be adopted as the new norm.

“We are going through a collective learning process,” Mäkivirta explains. “In terms of production styles, think of cinema - there is an established way of using immersive audio. They have a frontal main sound image, then sound moving in different directions around you. In productions like music and drama, people are continuously inventing new ways of expressing the space and creating atmospheres. Immersive playback is creating entirely new dimensions. There is no doubt it will become mainstream.”

“People want to have an experience that is similar to the daily experience you have of hearing audio all around HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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NEW AUDIO FRONTIERS

The Finnish Line

Beyond the subject of immersive audio, Mäkivirta notes that the company is always monitoring the market closely, keeping its ear to the ground for new developments in what its customers demand.

“If you think of the R&D effort and how we want to focus it, we want to be able to provide solutions for what the customers are asking for,” he says.

“And that is very much associated with the method of working that people are using and will be using in the future.

We want to understand how working methods will evolve so we can provide solutions for them. We always have this challenging question of, ‘how is this going to change?’ It could be to do with connectivity or system integration, and we must be following these developments continuously.”

This, says Naghian, is an integral part of the company’s DNA, prompting him to reflect on the values that have shaped Genelec over the past 45 years. And, he elaborates, these values extend not just to the pro audio market, but right across the firm’s staff and the town that spawned it.

“There are certain values that have been so strong,” he states. “A lot of the staff here have been here a long, long time, so there is a great working environment and community which is a huge part of why we have been successful. And we will base the company’s next 45 years on these HEADLINER MAGAZINE

foundations. There is a very strong emotional connection between the company and the community. We feel very responsible for the impact we have in the local society and that is a mutual responsibility - if society is doing well then we are doing well, and vice versa.

“And there are things like sustainability,” he continues. “From day one sustainability has been a vital part of the company. We don’t look at it as being in conflict with the business we do - it actually supports the business that we do. Practically it has meant that we design and manufacture products that live for a long time – still we have S30s in use.

Like quality, sustainability should be part of the people’s mindset. That is what I see at Genelec. So starting from R&D, people are looking at the components they choose with this in mind. They aren’t looking at what is the cheapest component but what is the best component.”

At the time of our stay in Iisalmi, the tail end of 2022, Genelec is planning a series of yet to be confirmed commemorative events to mark its 45th anniversary in 2023. And while the pair refuse to be drawn on what the industry can expect on this front, they are more than happy to cast an eye back over what they consider to be some of the most pivotal moments from across its first four and a half decades.

“From the beginning, Genelec has represented a type of disruptive active technology, and that was arguably the most important breakthrough,” says Naghian. “But when you look at the R&D side of product development every project has been very valuable as an experience. And when it comes to the business side and the company growth, I would say that we can take some milestones that are really important, like 1031. It represents a certain time in the ‘90s and what was happening in the audio community.

We were the first to bring something to market that changed audio monitoring.

That was a very important moment.

And then later, the 8000 series and some of our smaller products were a bridge between the old time and the future, so I see that as a very important milestone. And more recently I would say The Ones.”

As we bid our farewells and pay a visit to the onsite Genelec museum before heading back outside and into the ice, the pair take a moment to ponder the past and the quantum leaps that have been made by the company and the world of pro audio in general over almost half a century. Where it will be in another 45 years is impossible to predict, but you wouldn’t bet against Genelec playing something of a similar role to the one it occupies today, rooted in its native Isalmi, but very much leading from the front.

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TINA WEYMOUTH

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

A Lifetime in Music

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TINA WEYMOUTH Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club co-founder and bassist Tina Weymouth talks to Headliner about her and husband Chris Frantz’s upcoming Remain In Love tour, her incredible life in music, and how she became one of the most iconic and influential musicians of the 20th century…

She may be best known as a founder member of one of the most inspirational bands of the 20th century in Talking Heads, but Tina Weymouth is one of those unique talents whose influence extends far beyond a singular guise. A trailblazing bassist who emerged at a point when rock was an almost exclusively all-male affair, she not only paved the way for a new generation of women in bands, but also went on to co-found another hugely significant act in the form of Tom Tom Club with her husband Chris Frantz. The couple also produced records down the years for the likes of Happy Mondays and Ziggy Marley.

And, as we quickly discover, she’s an incredibly captivating storyteller.

What was initially scheduled to be a 20 minute chat about her and Frantz’s upcoming Remain In Love tour – a

run of ‘in conversation’ sessions taking place across the UK in May following the launch of his memoir of the same name in 2020 – turns into a two-hour sojourn through early-‘70s New York, a remarkable lifetime in music, and how it has felt to have the love of her life by her side through each and every twist and turn. “I’ve had the gift of living with the happiest man in the world… what a gift that is,” she beams.

Remain In Love is a joyful reflection on a hugely successful career, made all the more unique by his and Weymouth’s 45-year marriage and musical partnership. For two people to stay so happily married for so long while working in music is a rarity. To do so while in the same band/s is unheard of.

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TINA WEYMOUTH

A Lifetime in Music

“We became friends in art school and I knew his dream was to form a band, which he did with a band called The Artistics, with David Byrne,” says Weymouth, taking us back to their first encounter. “I would drive the band everywhere. Then one day, the band had just started doing shows, and David came to our painting studio and said he’d written a song called Psycho Killer. He had a title and part of the chorus, but he needed more words. So, we sat down and we wrote this song. That was our first song, in January ’74.”

Before long, Weymouth, Frantz, Byrne, and the newly recruited Jerry Harrison,

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were looking at ways to evolve what was already a sound quite unlike anything else coming out of the city.

The band’s first two records Talking Heads ’77 and More Songs About Buildings And Food were scratchy, twitchy post-punk affairs that had their roots in the CBGB, Mudd Club scene of the late ‘70s. The following album, 1979’s Fear Of Music showcased a more experimental rock side.

But it was 1980’s Remain In Light that saw Talking Heads elevated from innovative post-punk icons to bona fide musical pioneers. Free from genre, convention, or any obligation to commercial success, despite spawning

arguably the band’s most famous song in Once In A Lifetime, Remain In Light represented a seismic leap in what a ‘guitar band’ could be and what could be achieved in a recording studio.

Before sessions began on the record, Byrne, whom Weymouth suggests was essentially on a ‘sabbatical’ from Talking Heads at the time, started working with Brian Eno on what would become their joint album My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. However, knowing that Eno was in NYC, and with Harrison in the midst of making a solo record, Weymouth and Frantz invited Eno to their studio for a jam.

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“DAVID AND CHRIS WANTED TO MOULD ME. I WAS LIKE A LITTLE MACHINE.”

“In 1979, David and Brian had been making My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, although that came out after Remain In Light,” Weymouth explains. “We ended up not knowing what was going on between them, but we knew Brian was in town. So, we told Brian we were jamming in our loft, and Brian said, ‘I don’t really play any instruments.’ We said that’s OK. Chris and I are just having fun. We have decided we’re just going to play each other’s instruments and try to be like children who are excited again and not take ourselves too seriously.”

Having worked ostensibly within the confines of a traditional rock band setup prior to Remain In Light, how did they find the process of adapting not just to a new way of writing, but a new way of recording?

“The songs were not constructed normally. We were almost limited to two chords, but like jazz you can take two chords and put things on top and create new dimensions on top of that. That was an eye opener for us, and we worked that way again on Speaking In Tongues. It would always start with drums and bass until we got to the albums that David wanted for his True Stories movie (True Stories and Naked). He went to a very old-fashioned pop format of songwriting. He had these sketches in mind for his film. We did those albums back-to-back, one is the songs from the film and the other album is the outtakes, but they worked very well in their own right, but very differently.”

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TINA WEYMOUTH

A Lifetime in Music

Photographer: Liz Wendelbo

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It was after these two records that Talking Heads came to an abrupt and unexpected end, when Byrne reportedly announced that he had left the band in an interview with the Los Angeles Times before informing the group.

“We weren’t prepared for it at all as we’d just signed a big contract that had taken six years to put together - a five album contract,” Weymouth says, still with a hint of incredulity.

“So we were not prepared and we were not told. It wasn’t right the way it was done, it wasn’t the proper way.

And that’s about all I have to say about that.”

Despite the unexpected conclusion of Talking Heads, the body of work they amassed continues to stand as one of the most formidable and influential of the past 50 years. To this day, echoes of the sound they spearheaded all those years ago can be heard in the work of new artists, HEADLINER MAGAZINE

not least on account of Weymouth’s instantly recognisable bass playing style and her interplay with Frantz’s beats. At once minimalist and highly inventive, her sparse bass parts are not just crucial in anchoring the oftenfrenetic nature of the Talking Heads catalogue, but regularly serve as the lead instrument – think Psycho Killer, Once In A Liftetime, Pull Up The Roots, Warning Sign, the list goes on.

“It was always about adapting,” says Weymouth of how she developed as a bassist. “And it was thanks to both Chris and David. They knew I shared their sensibilities and they wanted to mould me. But after six months of jamming and rehearsing for four or five hours every day of the week for five and a half months, it just gelled in my mind.”

Despite feeling that we could continue comfortably for another two hours, the clock finally catches up with us, and our conversation draws to a

close. If the time we have spent here is anything to go by, the Remain In Love ‘in conversation’ sessions with her and Frantz promise to be every bit as joyous, insightful and entertaining as one would expect from a couple who have not only spent their lives making music for the ages, but, evidently, have had so much fun doing it.

Remain in Love tour dates: May 25th Shelodian Theatre, Oxford May 27th Electric Ballroom, London May 28th Brudenell Social Club, Leeds TALKINGHEADSOFFICIAL.COM

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THAI LONG LY

Recording Robbie

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“THE 1073 HAS A RICHNESS AND ROUNDNESS THAT REALLY PAIRS WELL WITH ROB’S INHERENT GRAVEL AND TEXTURE.”

Robbie Williams’ vocal engineer has opened up about the secrets used to create his record-breaking new album, as Headliner recently discovered…

Music producer and audio engineer, Thai Long Ly was part of the team of engineers working on the production of XXV - Williams’ 14th solo album, which dropped in September.

The album shot straight to the top of the charts, and helped Williams

become the solo artist with the most UK Number 1 albums.

“Working with Robbie is a treat,” says Thai. “I was recommended to work with him a few years ago on a project and I’m honoured he keeps calling me back.”

Two channels of Neve 1073 were used as part of a signal path to track half of the album, and to Thai, the results speak for themselves.

“The 1073 has a richness and roundness that really pairs well with Rob’s inherent gravel and texture,” he adds. “Plus, they’re great at handling his extreme dynamic range. His vocals come out large and clear with no sibilance and they capture his low end with authority.”

Typical recording sessions for Williams and Thai have developed to become simple and may only require a couple of takes per song.

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THAI LONG LY

Recording Robbie

“We’ve developed a good communication system whilst tracking and are able to capture great performances in an efficient manner,” Thai explains. “The sessions are always respectful and low-key, and good people surround him. I enjoy it because he’s real.”

Before working with Williams, Thai’s introduction to the 1073 came from various studios in L.A. that were equipped with 80 Series consoles packed with Neve 1073s or 1084s. He continues: “Once I understood what I was hearing and how to gain stage for the amount of character I was after, I realised nothing else does what a 1073 circuit does.”

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The Neve 1073 uses a discrete class-A circuitry throughout which is entirely free from crossover distortion and produces a subtle warm and musical analogue hue to any line or microphone source.

Thai favours analogue gear, using it as the centre of his tracking and mixing workflow, and there is rarely a session that doesn’t involve Neve equipment.

At EastWest Studios in Hollywood, California, he uses the custom Neve 8078 or 8028 consoles and personally owns the Neve 1073DPX and 33069/N. Meanwhile, his two Neve 1073OPXs, two additional 1073DPXs and one

8803 will be used in the PMJ Nashville studio for all Postmodern Jukebox videos starting in spring of 2023.

“The Neve sound is the sound of a finished record,” he concludes. “It’s only when you start to push the inputs and drive the circuits that you find out what separates the good from the greats.

“This is where all the character and tone lives and this is where Neve begins to shine.”

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MOONBATHING

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King’s Place

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MOONBATHING An audience of approximately 50 people lie down on mats and bean bags, with a huge moon replica hanging above them – its lunar cycles, shadows and physical characteristics are replicated by the lighting around the room. All the while, a soundtrack is provided by electronic composers including Rival Consoles, Oliver Coates and Tim Exile, utilising immersive sound technology provided by d&b audiotechnik’s d&b Soundscape. In other words, just your average night out in North London.

This all takes place at King’s Place, the cultural hub located next to The Guardian newspaper’s headquarters in the sprawling transport metropolis that is King’s Cross, the gateway to the rest of the country and mainland Europe.

The attendees, however, aren’t headed to Paris tonight, but rather the Moon.

With the Regent’s Canal to its left, King’s Place is the area’s premier multi-arts venue, self-referring as ‘the cultural pulse of King’s Cross.’ Its vibrant music programme welcomes many genres and genre-crossing artists, and such composers as Alexandra Streliski and Lambert have performed on its stages.

Tonight’s Moonbathing event, however, is a performance of light and sound, a

deeply immersive experience – hence why the audience are encouraged to lie down and gaze up at the Moon, as it were.

There are three Moonbathing sessions on this frightfully cold January evening; the second session’s audience shuffles out, seeming noticeably nourished and refreshed by their experience. The third and final audience show their tickets and head into Hall Two, which on this occasion is almost pitch black.

Despite the darkness of the room, there’s no missing the giant replica moon hanging from the ceiling. The King’s Place staff ask everyone to find a bean bag or a space on the mat and advise people that the nearer they are

to the moon, the more immersive the experience will be.

With everyone settled, the darkness lifts somewhat. Not via the lights coming back on, but because the sun appears to start shining on the moon above.

The way in which the lighting around the room replicates day and night across the moon’s surface, its lunar cycles, and all its stunning details which appear and disappear throughout the evening as the moon makes its orbit is quite breathtaking – this aspect of the evening is worth the price of admission alone.

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MOONBATHING

King’s Place

But with that said, this is a deep listening experience also. The 360 degrees immersive sound from d&b is so potent, you often find yourself suddenly looking behind you to see if something is there that isn’t. There are seven tracks in the evening’s programme, and London-based electronic artist Rival Consoles’ Pulses of Information sounds quite magnificent.

Coming out of the d&b Soundscape technology, the titular pulses can be felt all around the room, almost giving off physical bodily sensations as you lie and listen to this expansive electronic composition.

Another piece, cellist Oliver Coates’ Caregiver Part 2, with elements that you’d never guess came from his instrument, also sound uniquely

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superb, and gives the urge to dart your eyes around the room in a futile attempt to spot the sound source.

worked closely with King’s Place to help make Moonbathing as immersive as possible.

The audience as a whole seem to have collectively gone through a beautiful shift after this simple act of parking their busy lives at the door and enjoying a very special evening of light and sound.

Regarding what d&b Soundscape offers as a relatively new technology, Powell says: “These immersive technologies have been around for decades. I think what d&b have done is they’ve made it a usable tool. It would usually take someone very clever to hand code DSP to achieve a spatial design. Soundscape is made up of two main parts: one is channelbased object mixing, and the second part of it is a room emulation or reverb emulation engine. So between those two things, and the matrix, it’s more of a toolkit. It gives us the ability to sit down with an artist and say, ‘what would you like to do? What’s in your head?’”

In a world that makes it increasingly difficult to simply be present with music, nowadays often treated in a disposable manner as we commute to work or rush around, all credit to King’s Place and d&b audiotechnik for facilitating an event of much-needed deep listening.

Headliner spoke to Wayne Powell, who has worked in leading roles at d&b audiotechnik for over six years and

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“IT GIVES US THE ABILITY TO SIT DOWN WITH AN ARTIST AND SAY, ‘WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO? WHAT’S IN YOUR HEAD?’”

Powell then talks about the collaborative experience of bringing this tech to Moonbathing and King’s Place.

“Spatial experience designers Loss><Gain, David Sheppard and John Best, who worked on this event, would have used many iterations of spatial technology prior to Soundscape being available,” Powell says.

“For Moonbathing, they chose to use Soundscape. Not just because of how it sounds, but also for the toolkit it provides them for their work on the event. And because Soundscape was going to be at King’s Place for several months, it gave them a location in London to present their work.”

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MOONBATHING

King’s Place

The d&b Soundscape system in place on the night was mostly their T series, E15 and B2 subwoofers, with Ds100, using en-scene and en-space software. The system uses the ‘in the round’ configuration for Moonbathing.

“There’s a ring of speakers, about three and a half metres high, a variety of d&b speakers sitting up in that ring. And there’s a cluster of speakers in the centre of the room for when people want to do performances in the round. Or in the case of Moonbathing, when they need some audio to come HEADLINER MAGAZINE

from the moon, there’s a cluster of speakers in the middle which facilitates that.

“This might sound unusual coming from a speaker manufacturer, but for Soundscape, the speakers don’t become as important, the amplifiers don’t become important, because it’s all about that spatial design toolkit that’s a big part of the Soundscape system. It’s more about what you want to achieve.

“It’s really important that the speakers disappear and that the audience sits in the room and looks

at the moon or the cellist or whoever the performers are and just forget that there’s any technology there. The aim is to increase the audience’s engagement with the music and appreciation of it.”

So there you have it, if you’re interested in spatial design and creating an immersive music experience, the moon is the limit, especially with d&b Soundscape now a leading player in the field.

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RICK MAGUIRE

Inside All Fiction

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ARTIST

Rick Maguire, the singer and creative driving force behind experimental US rock outfit Pile, speaks to Headliner about the making of the band’s new album All Fiction, why it was the most challenging record he has worked on to date, and how it left him wondering where to head next…

“There was a sense of finality that extended beyond the record itself,” says Pile’s Rick Maguire, describing how he felt when work on All Fiction, the band’s latest opus was finally complete. Some 15 years and eight albums into their career, Maguire felt that he had finally made the record he’d been itching to make since the release of their 2012 album Dripping.

With each and every album since, the cult Boston band have cultivated a sound that not only evades categorisation, but sees Maguire continue to tread an emotional tightrope stretched between pillars of fragile, introspective melancholy and scorched earth riffs and pulverising beats. Yet All Fiction somehow sees those extremities pulled tighter than anything that has come before.

Take lead single Poisons as a case in point. Over the course of

four minutes, we hear Maguire deconstruct, reconstruct, and then take a wrecking ball to Pile’s creative building blocks. A couple of times over. The loud-quiet dynamic sees Maguire speak, sing, and bellow his way around a drum beat that veers between pulsating rhythm and the sound of a planet sliding off its axis.

A piercing, staccato guitar section somehow knits the chaos together to create something blisteringly thrilling and utterly compelling. Elsewhere, the record incorporates synths and samples to generate sonic textures not previously present in the band’s work.

It is unarguably the most ambitious addition to the Pile catalogue.

“This morning I’m looking at our setup for the tour,” says Maguire, joining us over Zoom, filling us in on what he’s been up to since finishing the album. He’s in a bright, talkative mood, almost slightly at odds with what one might expect given the intensity he has always channelled into his music. “Historically we’ve been two guitars, bass, and drums for live performances, and it is changing.

The record is very different from that - there are a lot of synthesisers, auxiliary percussion, so there is a lot

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of experimentation going on with loading samples and doing as much as we can without bringing a laptop onstage and figuring out how all that works. We are working in a way that I’m just not used to.”

The technical challenges and unfamiliarity of the process are, however, something he is very much enjoying.

“It’s exciting,” he says, “and It’s a little bit scary. I did a solo tour early in 2022 and in that I had my synthesiser and a MIDI controller that I controlled with my feet, so I was able to play guitar and activate bass notes through that.

So I’m applying some of the things I learned from that into this, but there are a lot of things that are still very different. It’s a bit of an overwhelming process, but it’s been an interesting process. It’s a challenge and we’ll see how it goes. It is nice to try different things out and not just be doing what we’ve always done. I assume there will be more challenges along the way but I’m looking forward to it.”

“THERE WAS A SENSE OF FINALITY THAT EXTENDED BEYOND THE RECORD ITSELF.”

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RICK MAGUIRE

Inside All Fiction

There are moments on All Fiction that can be traced back to sessions from many records ago, Maguire explains.

But it wasn’t until 2020 during lockdown that he had the opportunity to fully explore their potential.

songs that had been lingering around since 2015?

“Since then, I had been wanting to make a record that was different texturally and sonically, and these songs have taken a number of different shapes. After Green and Gray in 2019 it was going to be split into an album that was heavier material and quieter material. Then in 2020 we didn’t know if live music was ever going to be a thing again, but I still wanted to create, and it seemed like a good opportunity to make that record I always wanted to make.”

“I think as far as the tracking process goes, I was pretty certain when it was over,” he recalls. “We were in the studio for three and a half weeks, then took a week off, and then came back for five days. Once we got to the mixing process it became a bit more confusing with knowing where everything was meant to sit.

I devoted a lot of time to that, and once it was done there seemed to be a finality that extended beyond the record itself. With previous records we would finish and then I’d have an idea for the next one, which would contextualise the previous one. I’d always be thinking about the next record, but with this one I’m like, I

Having waited over 10 years to fully sink his teeth into such a project, how long did it take to complete the record? And how did he temper the urge to continue tampering with

Photographer: Emme Rovins

“Some of these songs are pretty old,” he says. “So even while working on the last full length album Green and Gray I was working on some of these, but they didn’t seem to fit. I wanted to make a record like this since after Dripping in 2012. We did that rock record and I wanted to switch to something else, but recourses, time and other restrictions led to exploring songwriting more through those means, and by that, I mean that arrangement of two guitars, bass drums, vocal. We were trying to tour, so to all of a sudden start

incorporating other instruments would have been beyond our resources.

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“I HAD BEEN WANTING TO MAKE A RECORD THAT WAS DIFFERENT TEXTURALLY AND SONICALLY.”

don’t know if I have any gas left in the tank. I have since started working on other things, but it was nice to know that I had given all of my energy to this one thing. I have listened to the record since, which is not something I can ordinarily do once it’s done, and I still enjoy it, so that’s cool.”

With a line now drawn under what could arguably be described as

Maguire’s biggest artistic undertaking to date, does he feel as though he has turned a corner of sorts?

“It marks a significant change for me personally,” he says thoughtfully. “I accept I have no control over how anyone else perceives it, and I fully accept some people might hear it and think, ‘they’ve lost it’. But I was able to explore a lot of the things I’m curious

about, and to know that’s something I can do and come out of the other end of it will encourage me to push things further. It feels like an achievement, and I’m happy with that.”

PILEMUSIC.COM

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VOICELINE

100 Years of the BBC

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VOICELINE To mark the 100th anniversary of the BBC’s first radio transmission, audio artist Nick Ryan was commissioned to create an innovative sound installation in one of London’s busiest and noisiest locations. Headliner sat down with him to find out more…

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VOICELINE

100 Years of the BBC

The Strand, one of the capital’s most bustling, congested, noise-polluted thoroughfares, may not seem the likeliest of locations for a sonic art installation. But for sound artist Nick Ryan it was the only location for his latest project, celebrating the centenary of the BBC’s inaugural radio transmission. Though the majority of the millions who pass through it daily may not be aware, The Strand is regarded by those in the business of broadcast as the birthplace of radio in the UK. Indeed, The Strand’s Marconi House was the very first place in which radio was transmitted in London, while Bush House was the home of World Service for some 70 years.

With this “hidden history” in mind, Ryan set about creating VoiceLine - an ambitious and extensive piece that would pay homage to The Strand’s past and raise awareness of its place in broadcasting history.

After four years of development, Ryan conceived a vision whereby a linear sound array featuring 39 L-Acoustics 5XT coaxial speakers — each located three and a half metres apart and HEADLINER MAGAZINE

set along a path within the newly pedestrianised quarter — would play sounds throughout the day celebrating the culture and heritage of the area. Powering the array are 10 L-Acoustics LA4X four-channel amplified controllers, each connected to an AVB network where they can be independently controlled.

“For people around the world, The Strand is a recognisable landmark, but a lot of people in London have no idea that all of these voices emerged from these buildings,” Ryan tells Headliner.

“I discovered that the very first radio signal came out of the seventh floor of Marconi House on November 11, 1922 and it had this very long wavelength of 350 metres, so I wanted to reimagine that wavelength in two dimensions along the street as a line of speakers, like an invisible pathway of sound where you could retrace this geometry and experience all sorts of different sound worlds that would change from moment to moment.

“Some of those sound worlds would be taken from the BBC audio archive.

Some are from local communities, like the tap-dancing studio at Pineapple Studios, the cast of Mamma Mia!, and even a quadraphonic recording of a family of whales made by my colleague Michelle Fournet, a leading marine acoustic ecologist. I‘ve spent a lot of time researching and getting sounds, and I’ve also worked with historians to tell the story of the site going back 800 years. It’s a 12-hour programme every day of sound collage. The first thing in the morning is the dawn chorus, then it could be Woman’s Hour at 10am which is much more narrative.”

For Ryan, VoiceLine has been an enormously rewarding but challenging undertaking. From developing the physical speaker structures, concocting a 12-hour audio programme, and helping people understand the concept of sound art, it has pushed him creatively and practically like no other project.

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“ALL OF MY WORK IS ABOUT TRYING TO PUSH THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT SOUND CAN DO.”

“I started about four years ago but I was commissioned a year ago,” he elaborates. “And it has been a real joy. It’s a real challenge making a public piece of work, especially one with such a big footprint, and it was very important to me that we involved people in the local area and community groups. So, we had to explain this idea to them that is quite alien – the concept of sound art. And it was technically very challenging – 39 channels delivered to speakers and programming all the content so it is continuously evolving. Some of it is non-linear, and it’s always programmed at particular hours to change its sequence.

“The eventual aim is to explore whether this could be a permanent instrument for London. At the moment it is temporary, and as such, we had to design a structure which was temporary. That was interesting. I wanted it to look really beautiful, even though it’s a sound work, and because it’s above ground it had to have a structural aesthetic. It’s inspired by radio technology from the early last century.”

Crucial to the success of the project, Ryan continues, was a partnership with an audio brand that could match the scale and ambition of his vision.

“I’ve been involved with L-Acoustics for a number of years now,” he says, explaining how the French pro audio giant became involved with VoiceLine.

“They are very nice people and I consider myself to be part of their HEADLINER MAGAZINE

family. All of my work is about trying to push the boundaries of what sound can do, either the way it is made or the way it is listened to. I know about the quality of L-Acoustics speakers, and I love that their founder, Christian Heil, is a physicist, so all of their technology is based on known quantities, so not only are their speakers very good but it is also possible to start from a quantifiable baseline. So, when it comes to putting them in a public space you can tune them in a really precise manner. And their Soundvision software helps you do that.

“While the speakers we are using, the 5XTs, didn’t have a huge amount of bass, they have a tremendous fidelity and frequency range, so they fitted very nicely in the form factor we were looking for. They also pair with these amps, the X4i, which are networkable, so I can output up to 128 discrete channels from a single RME ABB interface, which makes it very easy. I don’t have to have loads of different interfaces; I can just go straight into the network and address all of these separate amp channels.”

The company’s L-ISA Studio technology has also played a major role in bringing VoiceLine to fruition, says Ryan.

“L-ISA Studio is the thing that connects it all. In my studio I have a Neumann setup of 12 channels; I laid those out to represent a section of the VoiceLine and I have EQ’d those to sound like the 5XTs. I’m using L-ISA Studio to prepare content, and one of the amazing

things about the L-ISA panner is that it is genuinely a spatial environment.

When I take a sound out and move it along the street, there is no home filtering at all, even though I have unfolded the surround into a line. I can use the surround reverbs in L-ISA Studio to create this incredible sense of depth, and I can basically see it as a linear sound stage of 40 speakers in front of me. I can then use the reverbs to move things away or towards the listener. It’s amazing and I can automate all of the panning.”

When he is composing and mixing some of the more challenging pieces broadcast across VoiceLine, Ryan also uses L-ISA Studio to add space and dimension.

“I love the immersive reverb,” he says. “If I had time, I would use that reverb for everything because it gives this incredible richness to any sound source. It is genuinely modelled, and it sounds so different. Movement from one speaker to the next is seamless, and the rotation function can be very useful when you want to move an object a full 180° — this capability doesn’t exist in other immersive tools.”

The VoiceLine runs through April 17, 2023 and is free and open to the public between 8:00am and 8:00pm daily.

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GRACE GAUSTAD

Nothing To Me

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GRACE GAUSTAD Non-binary singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Grace Gaustad visits the JBL L.A Experience Center to talk about the meaning behind their brand new single nothing to me, taken from the PILLBX: whts ur fantasy? album, viral internet stardom, bringing the BLKBX concept to life and being a voice for the LGBTQIA+ community.

Gaustad has been steadily building a loyal fanbase since 2017 with numerous spellbinding covers. Fast forward to 2023 and the rising star is making worldwide headlines for their monumental Gen Z audience and music that explores mental health, gender, sexual identity and self-esteem. Gaustad’s discography has captivated fans worldwide thanks to an undeniable penchant for unflinching lyrics and a raw ability to convey the joy and pain of the human experience, with songs focussing on topics ranging from anxiety to trauma, sexuality and depression.

What’s the inspiration behind your new single, nothing to me? nothing to me is the eighth single off of my album PILLBX: whts ur fantasy? nothing to me is a song about when someone’s done something a little wrong to you, and you’ve got to reclaim your power and get rid of that person in your life – get rid of that negative energy and come back to yourself. So you’ve got to own that you mean nothing to me – you’ve got to let them go. The song is about regaining your power as an individual.

Where were you able to get the insight to be so clear about your intentions so early in your life?

I’m an only child, so I grew up with a lot of adults. I spent a lot of time with my mum and watching her work and interacting with people all the time.

I think that I learned some skillsets much earlier than a lot of people just because I really did spend a lot of time with mostly adults! And also, I’ve been working on music since I was in my first studio when I was probably eight or nine years old. I was writing my own music by age five or six. I didn’t

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Nothing To Me

have a very big vocabulary to write music, but I did my best. So I’ve been around a little longer than people would think!

Your music videos are incredibly cinematic; are you behind the entire concept for each one?

I do a lot of thinking in my bedroom in the middle of the night. My first album, BLKBX was conceptualised at two or three in the morning. It was three days before Christmas and I didn’t have a present for my mum. I was like, ‘What am I going to do?’ I put together this whole album and book and I spent three days painting all these pictures. I handed her a stack of work and I was like, ‘Merry Christmas! This is your Christmas

gift.’ Then I’m like, ‘I need you to help me turn this into something real.’

We put our heads together and brought in some wonderful creative people like Van Alpert, my director – who is incredible. And Jo Baker, my makeup artist who helped design all the crazy looks from the videos.

We also have a makeup line coming out called Bakeup, which is super exciting. Then again, in the middle of the night I was thinking to myself about PILLBX and I started sharing with everyone the vision for that. We all put our heads together and made something super magical.

have a pattern or a process. I’ll write stuff down all day long or I’ll pick up my phone and hum five seconds of something into it. And all of a sudden, you have this well of information and ideas, so then when I do go to write or produce a song, I’ve already got all these teeny starting points. I’ll go back and I’ll say, ‘What was that that I sang in the car earlier? Let me grab it and then turn it into a full song.’ So it’s all very, very chaotic! I try to keep it fun. I don’t believe in rules when it comes to songwriting.

What does your songwriting process look like?

It’s very chaotic. I’m one of those musicians where I don’t necessarily

“TIMES ARE CHANGING: I SEE A LOT OF YOUNG PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT NECESSARILY CONFORMING TO THE THINGS THAT SOCIETY HAS KNOWN FOR SO LONG.”

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EMERGING HEADLINER

Your gender identity is a big part of your music and who you are. Were you always as comfortable with embracing that?

I was very lucky in that I had a mum who was very supportive of me when I was very young – she wanted me to be educated about anything and everything. She never really kept anything off limits, she just wanted to tell me the truth and tell it like it is. She did such a good job raising me; I never felt like it was unsafe to be myself. I never felt like I couldn’t share with her things that I was feeling or dealing with. I was able to find myself through music and find myself through art; it was always a huge place of expression for me. It all stems from there. Now, as times are changing, I certainly see a lot of young people who are not necessarily conforming to the things that society has known for so long. It’s really important to be a representation for the next generation of kids that are going to come up. You’ve got to be who you are, and that shouldn’t bother anybody else. As long as everyone can love and respect each other for whatever those choices may be…I think

that’s very important. I hope that we as a society, in the next however many years, can get there where we just love people for who they are and how they want to present themselves.

Your work with trans activist and influencer Dylan Mulvaney is very important to you. Why do you complement each other so well?

Dylan is a great friend. She’s had a major success story on TikTok and she was in my video for Like A Person, which is a song that is for the LGBTQ+ community. It’s a song to say, ‘We welcome you here, you’re safe here.

We want you to feel like you have a place to belong.’ Dylan and I are very similar in our messaging, and we really believe it’s time to lose the labels, drop all the chaos. She’s Dylan. I’m Grace. That should be it. It should be enough that we’re just two creators, two people. We might not look exactly like everybody else, and that’s totally okay. I’m really happy that someone like Dylan has grown quite a large platform, because it’s really important for young kids to have

all sorts of role models from all walks of life. I love to see representation for everybody in the media.

What can we hope to see from you in 2023?

PILLBX, my album, will continue rolling out in 2023. We’ve got a tonne of songs left still, and a tonne of videos – a lot of storyline and plot still to uncover. I’m one of those people that keeps releasing things, so I’ll never stop. Into 2023 we’ll go and we’ll go into 2024 and more songs will come – I can’t stop creating!

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Don’t Stop The Punk

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ANTIKNOCK Antiknock in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo has become the first venue in Japan to install Martin Audio’s new TORUS constant curvature array, as Headliner recently discovered…

artists and patrons who volunteered to sell T-shirts and make donations to keep the venue alive during the Covid pandemic.

Since opening in 1985, Antiknock has become a hall of fame for punk and hardcore bands.

“This was my first thought when trying to thank them all for their cooperation during those difficult times,” he comments.

Speaking of the installation, Mr. Sekikawa, CEO of Hardaway Corporation, which manages the venue, says the renewal of the sound system was a gift to the many

The system previously installed had been huge and featured old longthrow cabinets. Their disproportionate size not only made the stage look small, but the clarity of the low end

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during live performances left much to be desired.

When seeking a replacement system, there were several key criteria that needed to be met: these included being suitable for multi-genres, with a reasonable size footprint, and offering good stability.

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Mr. Hashimoto, CEO of Enter Sandman, who designed the new system, gives his rationale: “Having had a relationship with Antiknock for 10 years, I was able to determine several important factors,” he explains. “One was the theme of the venue, bearing in mind the type of bands who perform there. Another was the physical shape of the venue and the construction of the building, as well as the size of the loudspeakers.

And finally, of course, there was the capability of the loudspeaker itself.

“A speaker with medium-throw capability would fulfil the demands of this venue and match the concept perfectly, and the new TORUS was the obvious solution.”

As a result, he specified a pair of T1215 onto two SXCF118 subwoofers per side, in a simple ground stacked configuration. Mr. Hashimoto confirmed that the height of the system had been carefully pre-arranged so that the size issue was resolved while achieving the optimum quality of sound.

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As TORUS has three compression drivers which have 35mm voice coils, he knew it would be sufficiently powerful for loud bands performing at Antiknock, while rasping lead vocals could be reproduced in the mix with vastly improved intelligibility.

One challenge was the siting of the PA itself. Since sight lines on the audience floor are obscured by columns and joists, and the floor level increases at the rear, the loudspeakers needed to be set inside the stage area.

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However TORUS can be flown from the T12GRID inverted, to allow stereo arrays to be mirrored with the high frequency horn either to the left or the right. This would maintain both the intelligibility, and the wide Left/Right separation.

During the initial simulations, Martin Audio’s DISPLAY3 – its proprietary 3D prediction software – was used to great extent by Mr. Hashimoto.

“TORUS has a unique feature in that we could easily change the waveguide’s dispersion between 30-45 degrees,” he explains. “We could also change the dispersion, setting the horn asymmetrically to avoid unnecessary reflections from the wall.”

“Due to Antiknock’s unique shape this solution worked well, as DISPLAY3 can simulate different settings of the horn graphically,” adds Takahisa Ota, Martin Audio Japan.

The multi-genre mode could be achieved by using the Lake controller to tune the system, by engaging the relevant saved presets to easily change the tuning.

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“Antiknock is the venue where loud rock bands choose to perform, and this is reflected in the high SPL,” furthers Mr. Kunii, the venue’s operator. “However, the sound from the new system is always clear and transparent, and I have never felt tired. The audience also tell me that despite the volume, they feel comfortable and excited.”

‘Excitement’ and ‘clarity’ are two features that don’t usually coexist comfortably.”

The final word comes from venue manager, Mr. Yanagisawa: “A live venue such as this cannot survive on reputation or culture alone. The sound system is a good additional solution and we believe TORUS can adapt to the many demands placed on it. Consequently, we believe it will help us rebuild the live scene.”

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VOLKER BERTELMANN

Scoring All Quiet On The Western Front

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Volker Bertelmann, who lives the parallel lives of film scoring under his own name and under his artist alias Hauschka (more on that later), has recently completed writing music for one of the biggest German films of all time, Netflix’s seven-time BAFTA award winning (not to mention nine-time Oscar nominated) All Quiet On The Western Front. The Oscar-nominated composer talks to Headliner about creating a score that works alongside the film’s huge battle sounds and that supports its gritty, anti-war message, working with the London Contemporary Orchestra and also at his studio in Düsseldorf.

Prior to becoming a prolific film composer using his given name for films such as Ammonite, Lion (earning himself and Dustin O’Halloran an Oscar nomination), and Netflix’s The Old Guard, first came Hauschka. It’s the artistic alias he created for himself that he felt was fittingly ambiguous on many levels to go with his music on his solo albums which are mostly characterised by prepared piano techniques (which refers to creating different sounds from the instrument by placing objects like ping pong balls on the strings).

After two decades of struggling to create a career in music, in 2009 his album Salon des Amateurs saw him HEADLINER MAGAZINE

touring the world and spoken of in the same sentences as fellow composers such as Max Richter.

Bertelmann had been scoring since 2007, mostly on smaller German projects, but it was Lion in particular that led to all sorts of opportunities arriving at his door.

The 2016 film stars Dev Patel – alongside Rooney Mara and Nicole Kidman – as an orphaned boy in Australia attempting to locate his childhood home in India that he was plucked away from.

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VOLKER BERTELMANN

Scoring All Quiet On The Western Front

It was a wild success, and suddenly the English-speaking world of TV and film was opened up to Bertelmann; shortly after he was scoring projects like the Kit Harington-starring Gunpowder for HBO and the BBC, and he once again teamed up with friend and co-composer Dustin O’Halloran to work on Netflix action flick The Old Guard, a fresh challenge for both who are known mostly for scoring understated indie films.

And while Bertelmann has been busier in recent years using his own name than as Hauschka, life opening up in these post-pandemic times means he certainly isn’t hiding in his studio. “Work is requiring that I travel quite a bit at the moment,” he says.

“I’m slowly starting to do concerts again. Which is great as I can play in front of audiences, and we can have conversations after the concerts. I’ve also been travelling to do Q&As for All Quiet On The Western Front. We had a BAFTA screening in London, and we’ve also been doing smaller screenings with the cast and crew. It’s been great, especially to see the reactions of English audiences to this film.”

And while he is keen to release his first full-length Hauschka LP since 2019’s A Different Forest, Bertelmann acknowledges that being able to work from home over the last few years, and also as a respite from relentless touring, has certainly had its benefits.

“In 2016, after I worked on Lion, my life changed because I was getting more offers to do film music,” he explains.

“Looking backwards, it maybe was exactly the right time, because I could establish a workflow for myself before the pandemic happened.

“When you tour over 10,15 years, and I played mostly 100 shows every year, at some point you feel a little bit worn out and you wonder if you can deliver the best work you can, rather than just working because you HEADLINER MAGAZINE

have to. I think with art, it’s a little bit necessary to step back every now and then, to do something else and then go back to what you want to do after some reflection.”

Which is all very interesting, because there’s no denying that he works as a media composer with a very similar fervour. After a quick scroll down his IMDb profile, you get an idea of just how prolific he has been in recent years; in 2022 alone, he wrote the music for four films and two TV series.

Even Hans Zimmer, the most indemand composer working, doesn’t fit this many projects into a single year.

“I’m somebody who’s very trusting of first ideas and instincts,” Bertelmann says of this seemingly superhuman ability. “That’s not to say I’m not shaping the work afterwards, but that trust and working on instincts is very helpful when you have a lot of projects melting into each other.”

That hard work has undoubtedly paid off – Bertelmann was an absolute shoo-in for All Quiet On The Western Front, one of the biggest Germanlanguage films yet released, based on the equally famous novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque.

He is arguably the biggest German composer still based in his homeland, as Zimmer has spent most of his career in California. Since its release, it has broken BAFTA records with 14 award nominations for the 2023 ceremony (winning seven on the night including Original Score), also racking up nine Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best Original Score for Bertelmann’s efforts.

And each one is richly deserved. This is no barnstorming, dopamine-inducing take on the First World War, but one of the grittiest cinematic retellings of either twentieth-century world war thus seen.

Photographer: Reiner Bajo

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“I’M SOMEBODY WHO’S VERY TRUSTING OF FIRST IDEAS AND INSTINCTS.”

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VOLKER BERTELMANN

Scoring All Quiet On The Western Front

Having worked together on Patrick Melrose (which stars Benedict Cumberbatch) and All My Loving, Edward Berger and Bertelmann’s early conversations for this film set a different tone to previous collaborations. The latter explains that the director said, “I want something from you that you’ve never done.’ So I thought, ‘Okay, thank you. I’ll go back home with a big package over my shoulder,” he laughs.

“But it helped me think about my approach, and I decided to work with an instrument from the 1915 time period. I remembered I had an old harmonium from my grandmother, which I’d never really used. (A harmonium is similar to the accordion in that sound is created by pumping air into the instrument, only it is much bigger and heavier). I rolled it into my studio.

“I remember realising the bass on that instrument is so humongous, when you mic it up properly, it felt like a big war horn. I went with little mics inside of the harmonium to record all the sounds it makes. I sent the first idea to Edward and the next day, he called me and said, ‘We’re sitting here together, and it sounds like Led Zeppelin!’”

Anyone who knows of Bertelmann’s work either for film or as Hauschka would have been confident in his ability to work on this film respectfully of both the subject HEADLINER MAGAZINE

Photographer: Reiner Bajo

In English-speaking countries, at least in the mainstream, we’ve had plenty of films telling the allies’ side of the story, but in All Quiet On The Western Front we see how young German men were convinced by very powerful propaganda that going to the trenches in France was a cool and exciting thing to do, but both the audience and the film’s characters quickly learn how unbearable it was in reality. It’s mostly a very young cast for the soldiers, who give incredible performances alongside veterans like Daniel Brühl and Thibault de Montalembert.

matter and the diegetic war sounds which are so key — this wasn’t the film where he was suddenly going to start using big bombastic brass, percussion and dramatic strings.

real ensemble. It also has a lot of earthy elements, like the sounds of the air hitting the bow in there, which you would normally use when using samples, and I really love that.”

“The important thing is the conversation with the director,” he says. “It’s important that there is a common sense of how music is to be used. The minimal approach is one thing. I think what also was very important was for me to record the whole score with the London Contemporary Orchestra. Because of their work with other indie artists, their sense of sound is different from a lot of other ensembles.”

And when it comes to the nitty gritty editing of All Quiet On The Western Front, he went for “a lot of distortion, so a lot of Eventide plugins, and also for all the weird delays on the drums. Eventide delay plugins are really good because they create this interesting stutter effect, but they are very precise and rhythmical. I also use their Blackhole reverb and Mangledverb constantly.”

Despite the fact Bertelmann would have a violinist and cellist visiting his studio to help develop the score in the very beginning, he still gladly called upon Spitfire Audio samples to help in the early stages.

“Spitfire is always somehow making it into the final score, even if only for a few moments,” he explains. “My hard drive is full of their libraries and they’ve become a major part of my creative work. For this film, I felt very good with the Abbey Road libraries, particularly Abbey Road Two, because it has a very ‘chamber orchestra’ feel to it. When you use the Spitfire controllers like the dynamics and vibrato, you can get really close to the sound of a

We end with Bertelmann transforming into Hauschka, as he gives a mere tease of the much anticipated new Hauschka album. “I started working on it last week,” he reveals. “All I can say is that it will be very different to my last album, A Different Forest. It’s going to be more in my favourite place: the electronic, experimental club music kind of scene.”

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KEVIN PAUL

Bowie and the Bad Seeds

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“I DIDN’T REALLY LIKE MUSIC AS A YOUNG PERSON. IT JUST SEEMED TO CONSIST OF MIDDLE-CLASS WHITE PEOPLE COMPLAINING ABOUT HOW CRAP THEIR LIVES WERE!”

David Bowie, Adele, Nick Cave, Calvin Harris…Kevin Paul’s list of clients over the years is quite outrageous.

Originally finding his first passion as a graffiti artist in London, this led Paul to getting a pair of turntables and DJing. But as soon as he learned about the art of recording and mixing music, it was a done deal. He chats about some of the unbelievable moments in his career, and why Waves plugins have always been there throughout.

During his teens, Paul’s first love for music came hand in hand with him being one of the UK’s original graffiti artists, an underground community intertwined with the electro and hiphop genres of the time. As a love of house music blossomed, he got into DJing, which is how he discovered the world of sound engineering and quickly realised this was to be his true passion.

Paul went through an alphabetical list of the UK’s recording studios, and was thoroughly rejected by almost all of them until reaching the letter ‘s’. The ‘s’ in question that gave him a shot was none other than Soho Studios in London.

working relationships is with Australian trailblazer Nick Cave, frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Headliner asks what is the secret to an ongoing collaboration with such a lauded artist (surely the dream of many aspiring engineers around the world).

“I didn’t really like music as a young person,” Paul says. “For me, it just seemed to consist of middle-class white people complaining about how crap their lives were. The Cure, The Smiths, bands like that, I didn’t like them at the time at all. And then one day a boy at school was playing pirate radio, with a young Tim Westwood DJing, and I was immediately captivated and became obsessed with hip-hop culture, graffiti, DJing and that whole world.”

“The secret of working with Nick, and probably most artists, is to make sure you’ve hit record when he’s doing something fantastic,” Paul says.

“Because you never know what’s going to happen with someone like him. When I first met Nick it was before digital, so we were working on tape.

And it was far different from today, when you would have all the tape ready, press play and leave it running for three hours. So I guess the reason why I’m still there when he needs me is I capture what needs to be captured.

That’s essentially what the job of the engineer is – to make sure that when the magic happens, you’re ready.”

Of all the aforementioned, gamechanging superstars, one of Paul’s most enduring and long-term

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As if Nick Cave alone isn’t a big enough name for one career, Paul is also among the lucky few engineers who got to work with The Starman himself, David Bowie. They worked together around the time period he first worked with Cave, on Bowie’s Hours album in 1999.

“You just don’t realise how an artist like him affects so many people,” Paul says. “I’ve worked with some artists of considerable stature, but he affected probably everyone at some point in their life – whether they’re 65 years old, or six years old. You can’t let that affect you too much when you’re working with them, because you just become overwhelmed. I try to switch that side of me off. Particularly with David Bowie, I was only about 28.

But he was a great guy to work with in the studio and immediately put me at ease, cracked a couple of jokes.

He helped me and the team realise we could relax and not overthink the recording.”

Paul’s career has seen the first-ever use cases of digital technology in the music industry. And regarding a certain plugins company being there at that time also, he says, “Waves have been around since the advent of digital recording. And their L1 Limiter, I used that then and I’m still using it today in almost every mix. If I need a limiter to do a certain job, the L1 is there for me. So Waves are absolutely synonymous for me with digital mixing. “‘I’m a huge fan of the Non-Linear Summer, the NLS. I use it pretty much on every single mix I’ve ever done over the last seven to eight years, since it came out. I talk about it a lot when I lecture students at Westminster University as a go-to plugin for what it does. And all the others: you’ve HEADLINER MAGAZINE

got the H-Delay, the H-Reverb, the DeEsser. I couldn’t mix records without Waves, basically.”

There’s also a range from Waves that helps Paul in situations where a part has been recorded poorly, and he needs to work his magic on it.

“If I go back to when I speak to students at university, one of the Waves plugins I consistently talk about is the CLA range,” he says. “I think they’re underrated. And the CLA bass plugin I find is very good if you’re looking to get something from a bass which isn’t that well recorded. I always find that the CLA can rescue it nine times out of 10. Particularly if you’re working with bands who have recorded themselves. It’s not that they don’t know how to, but they may not have the nice mic amps, DI boxes, or bass cables to record their sound. So you know, when they give me a DI of the signal, I can always use the CLA bass to make a decent sound out of it without having to use reamping or anything like that.”

How lucky those music students are to learn from a true legend of the world of audio. Not only due to Paul’s own set of skills that have placed him firmly at the top of the industry, but as someone who has soaked up some of the glory of the likes of Nick Cave and David Bowie.

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Scoring Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarök

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SCORING ASSASSIN’S CREED VALHALLA: DAWN OF RAGNARÖK

STEPHANIE ECONOMOU Fresh from her Grammy win for Best Score Soundtrack for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarök, L.A based composer and BAFTA Breakthrough Artist Stephanie Economou explains how System Of A Down inspired the score…

Congratulations on your Grammy win! How was the ceremony? Was it a surprise to win?

Yes! I am still recovering from the hangover [laughs]. Emotionally, it was a big day and I’m still reeling, truly!

I really did not go in with very high expectations. I think I was certainly the underdog in that category, because I am newer to games. I did not expect to win – my fellow nominees in that category are titans in the video game music industry, so I was just happy to be there. I was insanely surprised to be nominated! Especially because Dawn of Ragnarök is technically a

DLC or an expansion, so it’s a smaller game compared to some of the other ones that are in there. I’m thrilled and super honoured. When I won, I think I blacked out a little bit. I couldn’t remember anything that I said or what happened. You can tell how surprised I was given how far back in the auditorium I sat, because I was like, ‘I’m not winning, we should just sit back here – there’s more space.’ When I was backstage and I had a moment to myself and I was like, ‘What the hell happened?’ It was very surreal.

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STEPHANIE ECONOMOU

Scoring Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarök

“SOMEONE CAN JUST SAY ‘BLACK METAL,’ AND THEN YOUR WHOLE LIFE CHANGES.”

This year the Grammy Awards introduced a brand new award category, the ‘Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media’, which you won for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarök.

Considering that the gaming industry is bigger than the film and the music industry combined, why do you think it took the Grammys so long to catch on and formally recognise game composers?

It’s wild how many people I’ve spoken to who are basically like, ‘Oh, that’s so cool that there’s now a separate video game category – it’s really a sign of the times.’ A sign of the times? It’s been decades and decades that this music has been a big part of people’s lives! It means a lot. I don’t know what took so long. Video games operate very differently on a musical spectrum.

They’re interactive, they’re responding to a player, they’re immersing a player on a totally different level. So to have those soundtracks recognised on their own just validates that we have a big part in connecting with people in a visceral way. All over the world the impact of games is staggering, and music plays a big part in building those worlds and establishing those memories for players.

We’re all thrilled as game composers to be recognised and it means a lot to gamers too, who have loved this music for so long, to see it on its own on the stage.

Personally, there’s just something that happens when I listen to the music from games that I love that does not happen with other forms of media. It’s this indescribable

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thrill that washes over you because it’s tied to a moment in time where you were playing the game, where you were living and breathing these stories. It transports you; that’s a really special thing about game music.

You’d already scored the Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla DLC The Siege of Paris before Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarök.

How different was your approach for the latter?

The soundscape for The Siege of Paris was rooted more in the historical landscape of Paris – the fun thing about Assassin’s Creed is that it is rooted in a lot of history. When it came to Dawn of Ragnarök, that’s a story that is purely mythological so there really were no rules. There were no rules in The Siege of Paris either, which I thought was really fun of Ubisoft to be like, ‘You don’t need to be precious about what instruments you’re using and how you’re composing the music, feel free to experiment.’ But for Dawn of Ragnarök, all bets were off.

How did black metal come into the picture?

In my early conversations with the developers, one of them said, ‘We’re listening to black metal. Do you want to look into that?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, that sounds amazing.’ I loved metal music growing up, but I never really knew the specifics. I did a bunch of research and I was connected with someone called Wayne Ingram, who is the guitarist for a band called Wilderun – they are an amazing Vikingesque black metal, cinematic folk band, and we

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immediately unlocked something with them. We started composing together and I was basically arming myself with this whole toolkit of black metal sounds, like growly vocals and distorted ostinato guitars. It was really fun and we got to lean into something that I didn’t know that I would be able to discover within myself. What I love most about working in media music is that someone can just say ‘black metal,’ and then your whole life changes. That’s the beauty of it – you’re challenged and pushed stylistically all the time.

Headliner saw that System of a Down played a big part in your influences for the game’s music…

Yes! Toxicity is one of my favourite albums of all time. When I think about the music I listened to when I was a kid, I went

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from Bach to Blink 182, to Led Zeppelin to Backstreet Boys; Christ in heaven, what was happening? [laughs] But it’s all part of it. It’s what shapes us. System Of A Down creeped its way into this album, and Ubisoft said ‘This is sounding a little bit too much like System Of A Down. Can we bring it back to black metal?’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s a huge compliment!’

We know there are cliches in horror film music; does that factor in at all in the same way with epic fantasy games? Are there things that are expected of the genre, or things you try not to do?

When I read the story synopsis for Dawn of Ragnarök, I was like, ‘Oohh, mythology. Cool. There’s all of these realms, it feels very fantasy-driven.’ My first stab was too HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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Scoring Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarök

“WITH CUBASE IT JUST COMES OUT. IT’S THE MOST NATURAL WORKFLOW, IN MY OPINION, FOR ANY CREATIVE PERSON.”

a big sound in the score. I also used some other string instruments which gave it a nod to Nordic music, and those great, catchy melodies – in a primitive way, coupled with these distorted guitars and punchy drum kit.

That brought the whole environment of Ragnarök into colour.

In terms of the music production kit you use to record and edit these scores, what couldn’t you do without?

fantastical. It was too mystical, and that wasn’t right. They were basically like, ‘Yes, it’s mythological but we want to keep it grounded…and big…and personal.’ So, back to the drawing board. I found something that works better, and that was black metal and the more Nordic folk side. The marriage of those two things really seemed to get that scale, sense of wonder and the beauty of these realms, but also the danger and the fact that this is a very heartbreaking story for Odin. Honestly, Nordic folk and black metal – there’s so much overlap between those two genres.

I ended up acquiring and collecting a bunch of instruments, one being a Tagelharpa, which is a Scandinavian box with a couple of strings on it, and they’re floating. That ended up being HEADLINER MAGAZINE

I have been using Steinberg’s Cubase as my DAW for about 10 years. I started using Cubase when I began working with composer Harry Gregson-Williams, who has been using Cubase pretty much his whole life. I saw the way that he was harnessing the technology and that this is the most intuitive tool for composers. It just makes sense. When you’re writing music, especially in this industry where you’re up against crazy deadlines all the time, you just want a tool with no hiccups where you go, ‘I have this idea. How do I get it down?’ With Cubase it just comes out. It’s the most natural workflow, in my opinion, for any creative person.

I’ve been using it for about a decade.

There are lots of tools in there that I really, really love. I’ll never compose using anything else – truthfully. It’s like I’m not looking at a screen. For some people, composing just comes out right on sheet music. For me, it’s sometimes sheet music, but really I’m just sitting in front of Cubase and that’s how I’m expressing the music.

Most of us would be nowhere without

Cubase and it continues to evolve to great places. I love Steinberg because they really listen to their users and they create things that they know are going to be groundbreaking for the composers that use the software. I’m a big fan!

The Ragnarök score was very collaborative and you intertwined different soloists with layers of guitars, drums and strings – how did Cubase help with this?

I love the audio manipulation features in Cubase. I am pulling in a tonne of soloists from everywhere. There’s so much to be done and bringing it all under one roof in Cubase just made it so easy. When manipulating audio, it’s fantastic. Their VariAudio feature is one of my favourites, whether it’s going in and timing a performance of a guitarist or something to make sure it’s spot on and really tight, or if it’s manipulating pitch – it’s something that I could never live without, and they just make it so easy. It’s so visual, too. It’s all crucial. For me, mixing is not a separate thing. I’m mixing as I’m composing to make it all sound how it should sound and the workflow allows for that. I also often use the Steinberg plugins that come with Cubase to harness the sound and make sure that it’s how I want it to be, so it encourages a lot of exploration and experimentation, but also, you can be very precise with all of the tools that Cubase gives you.

STEPHANIEECONOMOU.COM STEINBERG.NET

Photos: Thomas Peham (background), Alexander Popov, Benjamin Child, Donny Jiang, Hulki Okan Tabak, Marcos Luiz, Pablo Merchan-Montes, Rodan Can, William White (all unsplash)

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The art of creative engineering.

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NIC HARD

Learning the Hard Way

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LEARNING THE HARD WAY

NIC HARD Three-time Grammy winner Nic Hard has garnered a reputation as one of the most talented and versatile studio engineers in the business over the past two decades, not least for his work with US jazz fusion outfit Snarky Puppy. Headliner caught up with him for a chat about working with one of the world’s most demanding acts, his path into music, and how Merging Technologies has become a central part of his work in Atmos…

Two days prior to our conversation, Nic Hard was collecting a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album for his work on Snarky Puppy’s Empire Central. It’s his third Grammy win to date, his previous two being for his work with the same band in the same category. Over several years, Hard and the band, particularly its founder and leader Michael League,

have struck up a hugely successful partnership that was, and continues to be, forged over a set of shared values. Of course, there is a steadfast commitment to quality with regards to both performance and sonic sensibilities, but central to their working relationship is a work ethic that few would be able to match.

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“I was introduced to Michael through a mutual friend,” says Hard of how he entered the band’s orbit. Joining us over Zoom he is an engaging presence, serious in his demeanour, yet generous with his time and happy to talk at length about various aspects of his life and career so far. “I began by mixing things for Mike, not Snarky Puppy, as they had another engineer that was doing all of their stuff. He passed away around 2015 and at that point I took over doing all of their live stuff and studio albums. Initially one of the things that gelled us was work ethic.

Mike is a very hard worker and we would do sessions that were 20 hours long. And basically, I could keep up with him.

“On the first studio album we did together, the way I mixed and engineered the album was very new to Mike. The previous engineer was more about capturing the natural sound of the instrument, whereas I’m more about manipulating things and that was new for them. I think it has helped develop the sound of the

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band. They are all great guys and I’ve done some of their solo records as well. We all get along and have a good time doing it.”

Having mixed both studio and live records for Snarky Puppy, Hard explains that he has adopted subtly different approaches to each format.

He also describes how the workload that has come to define studio sessions is no less intense when mixing live shows on the road.

“My feeling about studio albums is that there needs to be more going on at a sonic level to capture the audience, so I’ll spend a lot more time being creative with effects and making sure that the sonic scope is deep,” he elaborates. “With live it’s a little more straightforward.

The second time I mixed a tour for them I went with them on the tour, recorded a show, and at night mixed it so they could release it within 24 hours. Which was hellish, in a way! It was a six-week tour and for the first two weeks I was barely sleeping at all until we figured out a sleeping

schedule, which was basically between 7am-10am and 3pm-6pm!

“There were other challenges as well.

The lounge where I had my setup was above the engine of the bus, so it was rumbling the whole time. But basically, I had to go on instinct with a lot of it. The different venues sounded different, but it was at least the same mics and console. So, I’d listen in the morning, make some adjustments, and then hope for the best!”

Today, he says, things have calmed somewhat, even if the technical aspects are no less challenging.

“As we’ve gotten older the schedule is more reasonable,” he notes. “We aren’t doing 20-hour days anymore and it’s best to be well rested and clearer. But it seems like every Snarky Puppy record we do gets a little bit more complicated each time. Empire Central was not just three drummers but 128 channels of basic recording.

Mike comes up with these ideas each time just to make it a little bit more difficult [laughs].”

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“THE ANUBIS IS A VERY, VERY POWERFUL TOOL AND THERE ARE A LOT OF DIFFERENT USES FOR IT.”

Another long-term relationship cultivated via his work with Snarky Puppy is Hard’s connection with studio kit specialist Merging Technologies. Since being introduced to Merging products via League, Hard has come to rely on them as a staple part of his setup, particularly in his Atmos workflow.

“Snarky Puppy were playing a show and someone from Merging met them and was talking to them about them trying out the Anubis interface as a home recording thing, and Mike passed it on to me to see if it was something that could work,” Hard recalls. “The context I’m using it in now is in Atmos, so I’ve just installed a bunch more speakers and a Merging Hapi in my studio in Spain. It’s amazing.

There are only one or two other interfaces that are capable of doing the Atmos setup with Sonarworks incorporated into it, and that really drew me to it.

“The initial learning curve on it is pretty steep because it is so powerful and it can do a lot of different things,” he continues. “But in order to use it properly it takes a little bit of time. Initially Merging was asking me what I thought about it in regard to people in bands for their home recording setup, and it’s a little bit complicated for some people. That’s not because it’s a bad interface, it’s because those guys need ridiculously simple things. But with this interface the options available are incredible.

“I had a lot of ideas for different uses for it, one them being that the next Snarky Puppy record is going to be live in the studio with an audience, but we are going to be travelling around the world doing it in different cities, so I will need to fly with all this gear. And if I had 10 Anubis’ they would function not only as mic pres and an interface to get into the computer, but also as the headphones station for the guys.

The Anubis is a very, very powerful tool and there are a lot of different uses for it. The thing I am most excited about with it at the moment is the monitoring function with Atmos.”

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Learning the Hard Way

Which brings us neatly onto the subject of immersive mixing and how Hard has been implementing his Merging kit into his Atmos setup.

“I have the Anubis and the Hapi in my Atmos setup,” he says. “The Hapi is almost completely transparent in that I don’t have to touch it or mess with it, and I can change all the setup with anything I need to do on the Anubis, HEADLINER MAGAZINE

which is amazing,” he concludes. “The Anubis is where I can control all of the calibration and everything else. I’m relatively new to Atmos mixing and the setup is recent.

“One of the things the Anubis has allowed me to do is incorporate Sonarworks directly into the interface. My setup is at home, not a commercial studio, so the ability

to calibrate an Atmos system in 20 minutes was invaluable. I got it set up and working in almost no time, so that is an incredible feature.

And creatively, as far as Atmos is concerned, it’s a new format and there aren’t many rules, so I’m having as much fun with it as I can.”

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WEEKENDS WITH ADELE

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What Happens In Vegas

LIVE SOUND

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WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS

WEEKENDS WITH ADELE Ten months after tearfully confessing “my show ain’t ready” just 24 hours before the opening night of her Las Vegas residency, Adele has been making up for lost time with a five-month series of Weekends With Adele shows at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace…

The reviews have been phenomenal – clearly postponing the show was worth the wait – giving diehard fans a chance to see the formidable vocalist up close and personal, dressed to the nines in a series of exquisite floor length black designer dresses (although she will gladly reveal her cheap socks from Amazon underneath). Her voice – sublime as always – effortlessly fills the 4,000+ capacity venue with her biggest hits, but it’s the personal touches that are

also a draw for fans. Between belting out emotional ballads, the 16-time Grammy Award winner effortlessly pads out the show with her trademark self deprecating banter; she swears, cries, pauses the show for proposals, blasts merch into the crowd with a T-shirt gun, takes selfies, wanders into the crowd to chat to fans, and regularly moves people with “the worst f**king seats in the house” to sit right by the stage.

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What Happens In Vegas

But when it comes to the vocals, she really delivers. With past residences being held by intimidating vocalists including Celine Dion and Mariah Carey, Adele had some big shoes to fill – and the sound, especially after the 10 month delay, had to be pristine.

“Adele is very aware of the importance of sound quality – it’s always been a high priority on her earlier tours,” nods Johnny Keirle, the production’s system engineer. “We began the conversation about using L-Acoustics’ L-ISA early on with Adele and her management team.”

Production manager Paul English very quickly decided that the immersive environment that L-ISA brings would add a valuable and unparalleled sense of intimacy to her performances.

“With tight load in and out times of only 72 hours, this production is quite literally a 40-truck stadium show being staged in a remarkably intimate 4,100-capacity theatre each weekend,” reveals English. “But the size of the room is only part of the equation. L-ISA gives us the best quality sound for this show and perfectly helps foster Adele’s personal connection with her audiences.”

Supplied by Clair Global, Weekends With Adele’s L-ISA Scene system, which comprises the body of the mix and the focal point of the performance, features L-Acoustics K2 loudspeakers configured in seven arrays. Kara – in two hangs – make up the Extension arrays and out-fills.

KS28 subwoofers – in two columns – are hung directly behind the centre K2 array, and more ground-stacked subs are deployed in a distributed line across and underneath the downstage edge. Compact 5XT spatial fills are distributed across and in front of the downstage edge, along with larger X8 that are deployed as out-fills. All are powered by LA12X HEADLINER MAGAZINE

amplified controllers, and the system is managed by an L-Acoustics P1 processor and L-ISA Processor II units. The signal is distributed over a Milan AVB network via a combination of L-Acoustics LS10 and Luminex AVB switches.

Keirle and FOH engineer Dave Bracey quickly established a workflow for themselves: Keirle created a combination of automated and manual movements for each song in the processors, while Bracey concentrated on perfecting the mix of the vocals, band, and orchestra.

“Johnny and I collaborate through L-ISA in a very unique way – it’s not the typical relationship between a front-of-house and system engineer, and he’s not doing a typical system engineering role,” Bracey points out. “He has creative input into the show’s sound. We discussed how we should approach every song in the set, and he created a series of automated and manual snapshots that fit the song and the production. He takes my mix and places it into the Scene, creating an immersive template that I’m mixing into. It’s a very new way to approach a live music mix, and it’s thrilling.”

Keirle adds that the mixing and system engineering roles are distinct but integrated into the immersive L-ISA environment. “We haven’t worked in this kind of environment before, so we developed our methodology as we went along,” he says. “It needs people dedicated to each role. I’m focused the entire time on the processing and positioning of the sound – taking 96 post-fader feeds from the FOH console and determining parameters like depth and width – while Dave is completely focused on the console and the mix, not worrying about the processing behind it. It’s a workflow we established during rehearsals, looking at how L-ISA befitted each individual song and building around that.”

DiGiCo – in the form of two Quantum7 consoles (supplied by Brit Row/Clair Global), are also integral to ensuring a flawless show every night. “It’s Vegas, so it has to be more magnificent than the other shows, right?” smiles Bracey. “The Quantum7 lets me handle it all without a problem. It’s so easy to create an elegant workflow on this console, which lets you concentrate fully on the mix,” he adds. “I make good use of the Mustard parallel compression I’m using on her vocal and the FET Compressor on the bass, for instance. The Spice Rack also has some very nice tools, such as the dynamic EQ that I apply to

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Photographer: Stufish

LIVE SOUND

“L-ISA GIVES US THE BEST QUALITY SOUND FOR THIS SHOW AND PERFECTLY HELPS FOSTER ADELE’S PERSONAL CONNECTION WITH HER AUDIENCES.”

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What Happens In Vegas

her vocal. But what’s amazing is that anything I’m using is with a very light touch; if you were to look, for instance, at the channel EQ on the screen, you’d have to squint to see any deviation from flat. That’s how good the vocal chain in the console itself sounds.”

Bracey adds that the infinitely variable image the L-ISA technology loudspeaker system delivers across the stage means he can keep Adele’s voice very much in a place of its own in the soundstage, lessening the need for processing.

“I’ve barely mixed on anything other than DiGiCo since I first used a D5 in 2002, but the Quantum software is just wonderful,” he says. “But the new software takes it even further.

I’m looking forward to diving in even deeper during this residency.”

Meanwhile, monitor engineer Joe Campbell, who has worked with Adele for 12 years, was also pleased to have the Quantum7 in front of him again. “I’ve been using the SD7 for years, and I went with the Quantum upgrade as soon as it came out,” he enthuses. “It’s just a natural progression.”

Campbell cites the console’s routing and work surface flexibility, but emphasises that it’s the Mustard processing that’s become particularly useful for him. “Especially the Mustard optical compressor, which I find I’m using all the time, on vocals especially,” he enthuses. “This HEADLINER MAGAZINE

console allows me access to parallel compression on every input and output channel. What that can do for dynamics is amazing.”

While he’s using the Quantum7’s onboard processing, such as reverb and dynamic EQ, for virtually every channel, Campbell still brings his favourite outboard pieces (four Bricasti Design Model 7 stereo reverb processors) with him, for use on vocals and acoustic guitars.

“It’s easy to integrate external processors into the Quantum7, just like it’s easy to do almost anything on this console,” he shares. “If someone on stage wants an extra mix and wants it now, I can do it. There is nothing else like the Quantum out there.”

Like Bracey, Campbell sings the praises of the Quantum7’s sonics: “I’ve got virtually no EQ on her vocal in the monitor mix for her IEMs,” he says. “She sounds fantastic, and the Quantum7 doesn’t put anything between her and the monitors. It’s about as transparent as it gets.”

In terms of philosophy, Keirle and Bracey follow Adele’s dynamic cues, generally starting songs quietly – often with just a solo piano and voice – keeping the immersive soundstage relatively tapered and focused centre stage.

The soundscape then widens and deepens as additional musicians and sounds are introduced and revealed.

“This is something we discussed early on: the key to making an immersive mix effective is using the technology sparingly and subtly,” Keirle explains.

“You allow the audience to get accustomed to one level of it, then you increase the intensity, changing and broadening the image. Once the audience’s ears and eyes are settled, they’ll notice the slight changes you’re progressively making to the sound, moving her voice back into the instruments and then pulling it forward. Even small moves can make for a very emotional and effective contrast.”

Together, Keirle and Bracey form a model of a workflow that will likely become increasingly common in the live sound industry for immersive productions, particularly for highprofile events such as Weekends With Adele. “Once you’re comfortable with the technology, you find that it’s an easier way to mix music,” says Bracey.

“It’s easier to place a vocal in with instrumentation instead of using EQ and dynamics to try to squeeze it in.

In fact, with L-ISA, it’s easier to find a place for everything,” he smiles.

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EGO PLUM

The Cartoon Composer scores The Cuphead Show!

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THE CARTOON COMPOSER SCORES THE CUPHEAD SHOW!

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EGO PLUM When it comes to The Cartoon Composer – aka Ego Plum – the weirder the cartoon, the better. Just as well, as for a musician with credits including zany projects set in the Spongebob Squarepants universe, The Cuphead Show! might just be the most off-the-wall yet…

Set in the 1930s-style world of the Inkwell Isles, Netflix’s The Cuphead Show! follows the misadventures of Cuphead and Mugman, a pair of cup brothers (stay with us now) that are hunted by the Devil, who seeks Cuphead’s soul – believing it to be rightfully his after Cuphead lost a soulharvesting game. So far, so weird…

“I gravitate towards surrealism and absurdity,” smiles Plum from his home studio in Silver Lake, L.A. “I specifically seek out projects that are completely off the wall, and they in turn, find me.”

Born and raised in East Los Angeles by immigrant parents, Plum rushed home from school to watch Looney

Tunes reruns, immersed in the worlds of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and later, the more gross-out Ren & Stimpy. The worlds were absurd; the music for a young Plum, mesmerising.

“I was making cartoon music before I ever worked on cartoons,” he shares. “In my teens and early 20s I put out a CD of instrumental music for non-existent cartoons. That’s how I essentially got my first job in animation, because I was just wired for that. I was meant to do this. It’s really weird,” he shrugs.

Plum was finally able to put his music to a cartoon that did exist in 2008 with his unabashedly original score for Amy Winfrey’s

series Making Fiends, going on to score SpongeBob Squarepants’ prequel/spinoff show, Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years and The Patrick Star Show, and later, Disney’s Star Vs. The Forces Of Evil and Nickelodeon’s Welcome To The Wayne and Harvey Beaks. All this, and with no formal training.

“I describe what I do as punkjazz because, frankly, I don’t have any proper musical training in jazz, or anything really! I have my own version of what jazz is: it’s unschooled, unlearned, a bit more raw – even in the way I write or record,” he points out. “I welcome mistakes and accidents.”

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The Cartoon Composer scores The Cuphead Show!

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As well as absorbing the styles of Raymond Scott’s ‘descriptive jazz’ and Looney Tunes’ musical director Carl Stalling, Plum’s more fluid interpretation of jazz weaves in the chaotic styles of punk rock.

“I admire people that don’t know how to play as well,” he clarifies, dead serious. “A lot of the groups that I admired were guys that picked up an instrument the week before and formed bands. One of my personal favourite albums is the first EP by the Buzzcocks. There’s an innocence and a naivete to their playing. They don’t know the right way to play these instruments yet, but there is a brilliance in what they’re writing. The ideas and the emotions are all there, but the ability is not there, and it’s wonderful.

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When I hear the original recordings I did when I was 16 or 17, I wish I could recreate that sound, but it’s hard because I’ve already learned too much,” he explains. “I have recordings of me struggling to play guitar and I wish I could play like that again, but I can’t. I’ll never be able to again. I love mistakes! I love urgency.

A lot of jazz guys are phenomenal players, but I love the ability to not play as well as a trait in my music, which sounds kind of insane. But it does make sense to me.”

Plum’s distinctive approach to writing music goes hand in black and white glove with The Cuphead Show!, which revives rubber hose style animation made popular in the 1920s and ‘30s. Google it and you’ll likely recognise the vaguely

unsettling style of animation from some long forgotten vintage cartoon you watched as a kid.

Rubber hose characters defy the laws of physics (more than your typical cartoon, anyway): characters with lifeless blacked-out eyes clad in white gloves stretch their spaghetti limbs, body parts suddenly double as instruments, or inexplicably morph into another character entirely; they might remove a limb, use the moon as a rope swing – a door could swallow a person.

With rubber hose, the pencil’s the limit, and the elastic nature of the animation in turn informs the music.

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“I LOVE THE ABILITY TO NOT PLAY AS WELL AS A TRAIT IN MY MUSIC, WHICH SOUNDS KIND OF INSANE. BUT IT DOES MAKE SENSE TO ME.”

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EGO PLUM

The Cartoon Composer scores The Cuphead Show!

“I LIKE THINGS TO BE A LITTLE OFF. I LIKE HITTING THE WRONG NOTES AT THE RIGHT TIME.”

“Animation gives you this freedom that you don’t get in any other kind of medium, I believe,” Plum considers. “It relies heavily on surrealism. It’s all over the place, and it really fits my short attention span. I’m good in short spurts of 22 seconds of some sort of nonsense!”

Cuphead the video game was released in 2017, and is noted for its animation and lively jazz soundtrack by Kristofer Maddigan.

“I had seen the game maybe a year before I was asked to work on it, and I thought it was gorgeous,” Plum says with genuine enthusiasm. “I had never seen anything like that: a game that essentially looks like you’re playing a 1930s Max Fleischer cartoon – down to the grain – it’s like a moving 1930s cartoon. The music was amazing, so when the opportunity came up, it was daunting and a bit frightening because the bar was so high with the music. I had that question of, ‘What do we do? Do we do something similar to this? Do I copy the music that Kristofer Madigan did? Do I do my own style? How do we give ourselves an identity while still staying true to what Cuphead is?’

“I thought it was important for me to try to create my own identity within the Cuphead universe,” he says. “The TV series lives in parallel to the game, it doesn’t have to be exactly like it. I went to the same well of influence as Kristofer did, and tried to create my own thing that felt very similar, like we could have existed at the same time in the ‘30s writing music together. But that being said, I also did include several easter eggs for fans of the game where you can hear little bits of Kristofer’s music in the cartoon. That was a lot of fun to do, because he’s a really fantastic composer, and the fans are rabid. They notice everything!”

Just like the elastic cup-headed characters in the cartoon, Plum wanted to also push the limits of what his instruments could do: “On one hand, we were using very traditional instrumentation that you would use in the ‘30s, but at the same time, I was trying to do very different things with it.

I found a great group called Moon Hooch and they stick traffic cones at the end of their saxophone, and it creates this weird lower tone – bordering on the sound of dubstep music, but out of saxophones.”

He gives another example where he took a trumpet player and had him dip the bell of his trumpet in a bucket of water and play: “So it’s kind of gurgling as he’s playing,” he laughs.

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“So I would hit these different ideas to make the music a little more unusual, a little bit more surreal – a little bit more animated, in a sense. My musical choices are also a bit unusual. I like things to be a little off. I like hitting the wrong notes at the right time, or vice versa. That goes back to surrealism and absurdity. I love being able to work in animation because I can do these silly and unusual things with music. And especially in the case of The Cuphead Show! where the rubber hose style is so surreal – everything defies logic. There’s room to be extra experimental with the music, while still being true to this 1930s jazz sensibility.”

When work sees him pulled away from his home studio, Plum works on the road, and thanks to his Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 portable interface, is ready to record anywhere, should inspiration strike. “The beauty of the Scarlett unit is that it’s something that I could take with me if I’m in a hotel or if I’m working remotely somewhere,” he says. “It’s in my bag, and the quality is great. Technology has advanced so much to the point where this little unit that you can fit in your backpack can record world-class broadcasting-quality stuff.

I could do vocals, I could do guitar parts, record musicians, and people will be hearing it around the world – they wouldn’t know that it’s recorded through a tiny little box that you can hold in your hands. I’m not a very technical person, but I trust my ears and having this Focusrite unit and taking it with me has been very useful. There’s always times where I have to be working remotely, and for that it’s good to have that little red box with me.”

Plum wouldn’t be The Cartoon Composer if he didn’t have another obscure animation project in the works. He can’t talk about it yet, but his next project will be an animated feature that will see him bringing his unique musical perspective to the superhero universe, and after that, a cryptic project involving a theme park. “I won’t say if it’s Marvel or DC, but I’m going to be working on a project in that world,” he says carefully. “Another thing I’m doing is something that relates to a theme park. That’s really unusual, but also perfect for my sensibility. It’s strange, fun pieces of music, and this is something I absolutely embrace. If all I get to do is cartoons, and strange ones, I’ll be satisfied for the rest of my life. I don’t need anything else. It’s a wonderful world to be in. I’ve always identified with absurdity and surrealists – I gravitate towards it,” he smiles.

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EXPEDITION UNKNOWN

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Extreme Adventures

AUDIO PRODUCTION

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EXPEDITION UNKNOWN Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough – a phrase that’s taken literally when shooting American reality television series Expedition Unknown…

Expedition Unknown follows explorer and television presenter Josh Gates as he investigates mysteries and legends in faraway lands. One moment he could be trekking through the remote jungles of Cambodia to find a 1,000-yearold relic used by the God King to incinerate his enemies, the next,

unearthing mummies buried in 4,000-year-old tombs in Egypt, plunging into the depths of the ocean to investigate the Bermuda Triangle, or scaling an ancient mountain top shrine in Japan.

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EXPEDITION UNKNOWN

Extreme Adventures

“A LOT OF CAMERA OPERATORS DON’T CARE ABOUT THE SOUND – IT’S THE SOUND PERSON’S PROBLEM – BUT NOT ME.”

It’s all part of a day’s work for the Expedition Unknown team, which includes cinematographer Evan B. Stone. “I’m a DP who really cares about audio,” he shares. “My life is a series of sound bites and each one needs to have quality sound. I ‘listen’ to a story as I shoot. It is possibly the most important element for telling stories. A lot of camera operators don’t care about the sound – it’s the sound person’s problem – but not me. I always have my buds in my ears, listening. It gives me a lot of confidence.”

To that end, Stone and his sound mixer Mike Curtis rely on Lectrosonics gear for capturing production audio.

Their kit includes the WM watertight digital hybrid transmitters for the talent, four MTCR recorders, LR digital hybrid receivers, SMQV digital hybrid transmitters, an LT transmitter for the camera hop and a legacy UM400A transmitter and R1A receivers for IFB. The show’s Siberian episode took Stone, Gates, Curtis and the crew to investigate the mysterious Dyatlov Pass incident, which Stone describes as “Russia’s equivalent of the JFK assassination,” in which nine polytechnic institute students on a winter hiking expedition died under bizarre circumstances in 1959. He describes the shooting situation as “really severe weather, and I had [the receiver] just freestyle on the camera.”

However he’s happy to report that even in the freezing temperatures of the Ural Mountains, the Lectrosonics systems HEADLINER MAGAZINE

kept working reliably, capturing highquality sound.

True to the show’s name, shooting Expedition Unknown involves shooting in wild, inhospitable, and sometime hazardous locations, like searching for El Dorado – the legendary Lost City of Gold – in a Colombian jungle, or scuba diving to look for the alleged treasure of New York bootlegger and gangster Dutch Schultz.

Stone and Curtis both praise Lectrosonics’ durability, toughness and consistency of quality throughout these challenging filming conditions. “The gear is top shelf,” Stone enthuses. “The best professionals use it, and there’s a reason why.”

Expedition Unknown also sees Stone appear on camera in many of the adventures, during which himself and Gates wear WM watertight transmitters – they find themselves in filming situations where they are getting wet a lot. Meanwhile, local experts including historians, geographers and librarians get fitted with the SMQV transmitters for their on-camera appearances.

For back-up or out-of-range shots on motorcycles, in airplanes, in tunnels, etc., they use SPDR personal digital recorders. The belt-pack units are all used with Sanken COS-11 lavalier mics.

A mini season of Expedition Unknown called Search for the Afterlife saw Gates travel to remote corners of India and Turkey, an ancient Roman ‘Gate

to Hell’, visit a tribe in Indonesia where people live with mummies, a cryonics lab in Russia and the Amazon river to meet a shaman.

“For one of the segments Josh (the host) and I had to go solo (no crew!)

– just him and I – up the Amazon on a three-day journey to visit a tribe living in the jungle,” Stone recalls. “Due to the nature of the location and access, the production could only send a shooter and the host. I still needed to timecode-sync audio without a sound mixer/recorder, so I used the output of the camera’s timecode-out to sync the Lectrosonics PDR recorders and ran sound for two days on these – swapping batteries every four hours and SD cards twice a day.

“I had to rely on the Lectrosonics PDR recorders (self recording devices) that run on AAA batteries,” he points out. “It is something we do only in emergencies but I was really surprised at the sound quality and the resilience to the moisture and elements. I was diligent about making sure the PDR was recording and I frequently checked the audio for quality. Every time it was $$$!”

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Work Smarter, Not Harder

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ENGINEER

Mix and mastering engineer Juan Carlos Sotelo recently joined Headliner for a chat about his work with independent artists in his native Mexico City, and why Leapwing Audio plugins have been with him every step of the way…

Tell us about the kind of work you do, and a bit about your musical background and early influences.

I’m an educator, professor and producer, with my main gigs being mixing and mastering. I’m mostly working with independent artists in Mexico City as an engineer or coproducing songs for rising producers.

I’m also a Member of the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee of the AES, trying to provide a platform for

people that are under-represented as well as improving accessibility, embracing emergent audio fields and research and radiating inclusiveness to all races, genders, physical abilities, ages and nationalities.

All of my social media channels are dedicated to audio education in the context of music production. Recently I started an English speaking YouTube channel to share my perspective, and to highlight some of what’s going on in the Mexico City music scene.

It was a serendipitous encounter that really got the ball rolling for me. I learned Audio Engineering at the SAE Institute here in Mexico City in 2014, as I don’t come from an artistic family as

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such. I was into DJing, and eventually found myself working at a club with another DJ who happened to be a really big front of house engineer in Mexico. Then we started doing alternate nights with a live band that did covers, and that was the way that I really started getting into it.

When I was younger I was listening to the likes of Plastilina Mosh, Control Machete, Babasonicos, Amigos Invisibles, Cradle of Filth, Moby, Foo Fighters, The Strokes, Spanish hiphop and everything in between, so I had quite a broad, and slightly strange repertoire!

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Work Smarter, Not Harder

Can you tell us about your studio space and some of your recent projects?

My studio was built with monitoring in mind first, and I wanted to make it a comfortable space for songwriting, studio hangouts and client reviews.

One of the main aspects that sets my not-so home studio apart is that all the acoustic design is mine, with a modular mentality and flexibility in mind. I have developed great relationships with some brands that I really believe in what they are doing and the way they are doing it, like Genelec, Focusrite, Focusrite Pro, Arturia, Novation and Ableton.

Just like my personal taste, the roster of clients I have is also extremely broad.

For example, I’m currently working with a Romanian artist that does old school metal. Around four years ago I recorded an album for one of the big, next generation jazz artists in Mexico, and I’ve also mastered an album of generative, dark techno music. Simply put, I like sound, and music is just one of the forms that sound takes as it’s presented to us. I’m not fussy about the genre, the era, or whether it’s mainstream or not.

I’m working with a great project called Black Hippo, a band that combines

jazz and hip-hop, along with another much larger band called Soultik, who have this big brass section and a psychedelic 70s rock vibe. They’re so developed on the lyrical and harmony side with these big structures, and are just a bunch of really skilled musicians.

I’m also working with an artist called F-Mack – he comes from Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world, so has this amazing backstory. He recently played at a couple of big jazz festivals and is making all the right choices at the moment, so I think we’ll see some interesting stuff from him in the near future.

“EXPERIMENTING WITH ALGORITHMS CAN GET YOU TO SOME REALLY INTERESTING PLACES IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR.”

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

ENGINEER

What kind of advantages do Leapwing Audio plugins bring to your workflow?

Leapwing really changed my game everytime I got a plugin from them.

In 2018 I was lucky enough to win a big bundle of plugins that Pensado’s Place was giving away, and in that bundle was Leapwing’s DynOne. The precision of the filters on that plugin are second to none, and it’s a tool I find myself using a lot. It’s helpful for doing some parallel mix buss heavy lifting if you have something that’s not pumping up, and sometimes I simply use it as a tone controller.

The centre-side function is really useful for preserving depth, and for making things sound wide when

it’s necessary. In conjunction with StageOne, you can really do some amazing tricks with these two plugins alone.

Their Signature series plugins especially are so unique, and they polish everything you’ve done in such a classy way. I’m using the Joe Chiccarelli Signature plugin on a fresh album that I’m mixing, along with UltraVox which is an entirely different way of treating lead vocal stuff. I’ve found that experimenting with algorithms which aren’t purposely made for certain instruments can get you to some really interesting places, if you know what you’re looking for.

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Some of their plugins are so well thought out; RootOne for example can easily be overdone if you don’t have the best low end reference.

Their solutions represent great combinations of processing with amazing filters that really stand out, and have a really unique kind of finesse to them.

INSTA: @SOUNDSHUMAN_BYJUANCHIS LEAPWINGAUDIO.COM

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104 SOWETO KINCH White JuJu

PROTZ

WHITE JUJU

SOWETO KINCH HEADLINER MAGAZINE

COMPOSER

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There are musicians who are hard to define, and then there’s Soweto Kinch.

Composer, saxophonist, emcee, hiphop artist, and an Oxford University graduate to boot. Kinch has surely now created his masterpiece in White JuJu, his latest album which is a live recording taken from its premiere at the London Jazz Festival at the Barbican Hall. This orchestral jazz and hip-hop opus tackles a lot of ground, inspired by his experiences during the global Black Lives Matter protests, and his observations of British culture and society. Kinch chats to Headliner about how the music and thematic material all came together in this vast body of work…

As you might expect from one of very few Modern History degree-holding graduates from Oxford University with a foot in both the worlds of jazz and hip-hop, Kinch’s music has always been utterly unique in both his approach and its sound.

Born in London, his family moved to Birmingham when he reached primary school age, birthing a close relationship between the young musician and ‘Britain’s second city’, where he still hosts events, including the Flyover Show beneath a major Birmingham motorway.

Upon leaving arguably the world’s top university, Kinch’s love for jazz took a firm hold on his life (meeting trumpeter Wynton Marsalis as a youth left a huge mark on him earlier), his discography kicked off with Conversations With the Unseen in 2003, earning him a Mercury Prize nomination. The nominations wouldn’t end there; he’s the winner of two MOBO awards, the second of which saw him up against his great inspiration Wynton Marsalis. As a jazz musician, he has many admirers, including Amy Winehouse who once stated she would love to work with him.

Kinch is speaking from his home in Birmingham and is reminiscing on his early days of studying: “I’d been encouraged to not see those creative

“I THINK IT’S HARD TO CONCEIVE OF A CAREER UNTIL YOU SEE OTHER PEOPLE LIKE YOURSELF DOING IT.”

pursuits as something you study. I was just looking to get good grades and excel in my education as much as I could, and then see what I felt like doing afterwards. I think it’s hard to conceive of a career until you see other people like yourself doing it. It wasn’t until I met people like Wynton

Marsalis, and having people around me like Tomorrow’s Warriors, having a family around me – that gave me the hutzpah to pursue it.”

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Photographer: Mark Allan

106 SOWETO KINCH White JuJu

The new Soweto Kinch album follows on in a relatively linear way from his previous LP, 2019’s The Black Peril.

His gargantuan latest effort, White JuJu, also delves into topics of culture, identity, society, and race, albeit massively shaped by the many events crammed into the year that was 2020.

And simply put, it’s a magnificent artistic achievement that is fully worthy of having The London Symphony Orchestra attached to, as was its premiere at the London Jazz Festival at the Barbican Center, London. A sprawling mixture of jazz, orchestral music, rap from Kinch himself, interspersed with soundbites from the likes of Boris Johnson, also including some dreadful racist commentary from talking heads like historian David Starkey.

“The title itself is hopefully quite provocative and thought-provoking,” Kinch says. “There’s no set answer to what White Juju is. I think that anyone who’s grown up in this country, who is acquainted with witchcraft or voodoo, would imagine West African or Haitian witch doctors sacrificing chickens. Well, what’s the white establishment version of that? And if I flashback to current affairs news HEADLINER MAGAZINE

programmes when I was a kid, I remember the loud brash timpani and acerbic strings are supposed to grab your attention when programmes like Newsnight start.

“There’s a piece towards the middle of White JuJu where there’s a sort of military snare, and high Anglican, national anthem-esque music is played. And whether you’re rich, poor, black, white, northern or southern, you know exactly what to do when you hear that. Arch your back slightly and be on the lookout. And it’s those sorts of barmy things I wanted people to look at through a different lens.”

And of course, what better time to compose 72 minutes of orchestral music than when you’re stuck at home during 2020?

“This piece began as a commission,” Kinch recalls. “I’d always planned to do an augmented version of The Black Peril with the London Symphony Orchestra. We performed and actually debuted it with a string quartet and hoped to augment it to a full symphonic adaptation. But given the circumstances of the lockdown, I had a radical rethink. I thought, when am I going to get the chance to be at

home with so much time to write for such an incredible orchestra?

“I especially thought about what I wanted to say in that moment of 100 years since the race riots in Britain.

And even before George Floyd was murdered, with increased police hostility and harassment towards black people in the UK. I felt that I needed to have an archive about what I was really thinking and feeling at that time. Because historical records can be misleading.”

If you’re completely gutted to have missed the premiere of White JuJu at The Barbican, don’t worry, because this dazzling opus is set to return to London. Kinch and The London Symphony Orchestra will form their stunning partnership once more at the brilliant events space of Printworks, in South East London.

“There will be a lot going on! I’ll be emceeing, triggering samples and loops, playing sax. I’m looking forward to just floating in the music; sometimes emceeing, sometimes conducting, sometimes in the orchestra or soloing.”

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108 THE 1975

At Their Very Best

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AT THEIR VERY BEST

THE 1975 Now approaching a decade of designing concept light shows for Manchester-based pop rock band The 1975 – earning him a prestigious KOI award in the process – Tobias Rylander once again delivered an inspired and original look for the band’s current world tour, with assistance from over 100 of GLP’s impression FR10 Bars.

After completing a handful of late autumn dates in the USA, the band headed back across the Atlantic for the start of the new year for arena dates in the UK and Republic of Ireland, before taking on Europe and other parts of the world.

Aptly named At Their Very Best, the ambitious live show combines imaginative story-telling with choreography, wrapped within a set design centred around a sprawling two-storey house.

According to Rylander, lead singer Matty Healy has always had a clear vision for the band’s albums and tour campaigns, dating back to the beginning: “They have come a long way since we first met in L.A. during their ‘black and white’ era,” he reflects. “Matty and I challenge each other in a deep and creative way – he always pushes me beyond my comfort zones and

sometimes over the edge. I feel like he trusts me to understand where he is going with his ideas, his references and his way to communicate his art to the concertgoers.”

In support of their first album, Rylander conjured up a show with graphical ‘volumetric’ aerial effects, which is where the band’s preference for using video as the main lighting source began. But all that has now changed – the monochromatic art installation-style canvases of old being replaced by more traditional theatre mood lighting values in a minimalist setting.

Having long been a fan of GLP’s impression X4 Bar 20, the lighting designer jumped at the chance to replicate lines and curtains with the brighter FR10 Bar, where he could use the individual pixel zoom creatively.

These were supplied by Christie Lites, which has supported Tobias and the band over many tours.

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THE 1975

At Their Very Best

Photographer: Jordan Hughes

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Each Bar contains 10 60W RGBW LED sources that colour match to GLP’s X4 and FR series. With limited truck space, Rylander’s choice of fixture also needed to reflect sufficient versatility to fulfil a number of functions, including framing the entire stage.

“I wanted a background and silhouette to the main theatrical set, but also a fixture that would work as an effect light, and give us movement and beat when needed,” he explains, “so we are using the FR10 Bar in all ways possible.”

A row upstage covers the full width of the stage, both at floor level and in the flown truss above it, continues Rylander: “This is replicated on both sides so that the set is completely ‘boxed in’ with light, especially when we tilt out the upstage truss line to become HEADLINER MAGAZINE

a kind of ‘ceiling’ when we are able to produce sky and cloud effects in a theatrical way.” The interplay of these linear light curtains expertly articulates the roof and walls.

Commenting further on the impression FR10 Bar’s multifunctionality, Rylander notes that “the sharp layer of light cuts through smoke and haze like a blade”, while in a separate mode, they can then be zoomed out as a full colour wash for the backdrop drapes.

“With this fixture you can just do everything brighter and bigger, while the individual zoom makes it perfect for larger venues and stadiums,” he enthuses. “I have always liked to run video or bitmaps through these battens to make them look really organic.”

The designer was assisted by regular creative collaborator, programmer Michael Straun, who built the show in Depence² while Tobias was designing it. Straun worked with the band’s long-term LD, Darren Purves, to set up the show file, based on Purves’ inside knowledge of an ever-changing setlist.

The pre-viz system duly moved to Rock Lititz where they met touring LD Frankie McDade, who constantly keeps the show file updated in Depence² to handle any changes along the way.

“The FR10 Bar is a glorious effect,” smiles Rylander. “I have nothing but praise for it.”

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LUKAS GRAHAM

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

7 Years Later

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7 YEARS LATER

LUKAS GRAHAM Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Lukas Graham recently unveiled his long-awaited full length album 4 (The Pink Album) via Warner, and having spoke to the Copenhagen native about his 2020 track Share That Love at the height of the pandemic, Headliner thought it the perfect opportunity to catch up with him about the new record, getting sober, and his refreshed perspective on songwriting.

The world was a very different place when Headliner first interviewed frontman Lukas Forchhammer nearly three years ago, and a lot has changed in the talented vocalist and multi-instrumentalists life since.

Coming out of the global pandemic, and since starting a family of his own, he made the decision to go clean and sober, which, besides becoming a parent, marked the best decision he has made in his adult life so far.

Realising that his habits had changed simply from social settings to pursuing them alone, he decided

to make a change for the better.

Two years and four months later, his addiction has shifted to more wellness-centric activities: “I just came from a swim in the ocean, which was a fairly invigorating experience,” he says. Headliner feels cold just thinking about it…

This decision to put a greater focus on his family and own personal wellbeing, he says, has undoubtedly helped spark the next phase of his musical journey. Now, he is back in the right headspace and has rediscovered his songwriting flow.

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LUKAS GRAHAM

7 Years Later

“This album has been on the way for four and a half years,” Forchhammer tells Headliner. “It’s as if me getting clean brought me back to the old school way of writing songs like I was doing before. It’s an album I needed to release for myself, and I’m very proud of it. I’m getting back to songwriting, touring, and basically my job as I like it. I’m really looking forward to what’s going to come up next in my creative process, because when I handed in the album so that we could print vinyl in the summer, I was on a roll – I just kept writing songs that I felt were so good, but I couldn’t put them on the album!”

HEADLINER MAGAZINE

Forchhammer grew up in the commune of Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark – 34 acres of army base that was squatted in 1971.

Born on a couch in a house without a bathroom or toilet until he was the age of six, he was exposed to his father’s “immaculate” record and CD collection from a young age.

A self-confessed album boy – and one who is very much involved with his tight-knit local community – every year he still partakes in Christmas for the Christmas-less, an initiative that sees him cook meals for all the local volunteers during the festive period.

“My dad got me into it,” he recalls fondly. “We bring the whole PA down and select something like 50 vinyls so that I can make a playlist, which is always great fun. When I’m at home doing my thing though, I always put on full-length albums.”

Speaking of which, 4 (The Pink Album) sees Forchhammer reflecting on many aspects of his life, and ultimately represents everything he’s been working towards on his journey of self-discovery.

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“I LOVE THE EXCHANGE OF ENERGY THAT HAPPENS WHEN AN AUDIENCE SINGS ALONG TO SOMETHING THEY LOVE.”

“After my father died a little more than 10 years ago, I became a very autobiographical songwriter, so to speak,” he reveals. “A lot of it I guess is rap music inspired – I write about the things I do, and the life I live and the experiences I go through. I’ve written about my father’s death, about travelling all over the world, and now I’m writing about having my kids and getting clean and sober.”

Never Change, one of the album’s beautiful piano ballads, talks about wanting the love in a relationship not to change despite its struggles: “Usually when I talk to my younger friends about relationship issues and they ask, ‘why is it so tough?’

I say, the real work isn’t at your work, the real work is at home. You go to work, then you go play, but then you go home and you work your ass off to make sure your relationships work.”

Despite working on a lot of the album tracks during the pandemic, Forchhammer reveals that the only song on the record that was written exclusively over Zoom is Say Forever, an energetic guitar-driven anthem that he finished with Scottish songwriter Dave Gibson, who he previously collaborated with on Share That Love.

“I didn’t really enjoy writing over Zoom, so I actually went to London to write with some people there, which was amazing,” he says. “Phil Cook, Joe Kearns, Nina Nesbitt – we had a wonderful time and wrote three songs together, one of which is the opener on the album, Stay Above. It was amazing just getting to know more songwriters, because my guys – the original collaborators of my music – were stuck in L.A. I think there’s more songwriters and producers on this album than there’s ever been, because I usually work with one team to finish my projects. So it was a very different creative process for me this time.”

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LUKAS GRAHAM

7 Years Later

Image Credit: Petra Kleis

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Returning to his songwriting roots, one variable that didn’t change this time around was the location at which he wrote and recorded the majority of the album – the same rehearsal space just 10 minutes from his house where he crafted all his earlier projects. For Forchhammer, it made sense to return to a familiar environment to get the creative juices flowing again.

“I think it is what it is,” he proposes.

“I like writing lyrics on the road or at home. I ordered some gear that I missed working with from the States – a few compressors and a microphone and basically redid the studio space that I used to work out of, which was a very nice, natural decision for me. I never really stopped working there – I had just stopped working there as much, and now I’ve made it into a space where I can bring in songwriters and producers from around the world and work from there without really needing anything else.”

Incredibly, it’s been seven years now since Forchhammer released 7 Years, his now iconic pop anthem that catapulted him to stardom and topped the singles charts in a number of territories worldwide.

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Last year saw him release a spinetingling live version of the track, 7 Years (Later), so how was it to revisit his biggest hit, and to see how much the fans still love it?

“It’s the song that changed my life, so I also love it!” he admits with a chuckle.

“I have a very dogmatic approach to releasing songs in that I don’t want to put out songs that I don’t want to sing. I’ll always bring new material on stage, and sometimes perform an unreleased song or a cover once in a while. I love performing, and the exchange of energy that happens when an audience sings along to something they love.”

With a tour of Scandinavia and Northern Europe about to kick off at the time of interview, Forchhammer’s excitement to get back out on the road with his band occasionally bubbles over: “Just to be getting on a tour bus next week with my guys is going to be amazing, and hopefully getting back to something that resembles normality. Last year we did six big shows in Denmark – one of which where we recorded 7 Years (Later) – but the last time we were on a

tour bus with a band and crew was November 2019 in the US. We’ve got a new bass player, guitarist and piano guy; the only original members of the band are me and the drummer Mr. Lovestick, so we’re going to get out there and build a great bond between the five of us.

“People always ask me, ‘why didn’t you move to L.A. or New York?’ And then I say, well, my songs don’t come from L.A. – my songs come from here.

I think I need a bit of real life in my songs, because realness is what I like.

I drop my daughter off at the same school where a lot of my friends drop their kids off, and that’s it. I think they deserve a normal life even though dad has an extraordinary job.”

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