Plaid to the bone

: How do you write a Plaid track?

EH: “We tend to start it in isolation, so we work as individuals initially, as that’s the nicest way to get things started, really. It’s like a personal thing, and then at some point we’ll generally get together on how the mix sounds, or we’ll play each other tracks and give each other feedback on stuff like that. Occasionally, we’ll sit together in a room

– we don’t really have an active studio at the moment. So it tends to start with one person’s idea, and then we collaborate.

“We’ve written a lot with our friend Benet Walsh, who plays guitar and various other instruments, too. We just ping-pong ideas – much of it is just sending either Logic projects back and forth, or occasionally working in studios together. As it often is with electronic music, it’s a sort of solo thing initially, and sometimes right through to the end, but we mostly collaborate on mixing, and we share ideas about technique and production, and different bits of software and plugins.” cm After 30 years working together, how do you keep things exciting and fresh in the studio?

EH: “A lot of it is new technology and new techniques, and collaborating with people who have very different skills. We work with a lot of players – Andy and myself are not particularly great performers on any instrument, so it’s always refreshing to work with a player like Benet, who’s really proficient on a lot of instruments.

“We try and learn new synth techniques, and we use [modular instrument/effect design software] Max quite a lot for various bits, either inside Ableton or as standalone applications. Doing video stuff as well – recently, we’ve created our own video patches to play with live that are synchronised to the music. So it’s kind of all of those things that keep it fresh and keep the brain working a little bit. It just means you can imagine an interesting future in music – if you’ve been doing it for so long and you just keep doing the same thing over and over again, it can get difficult to be inspired and motivated.

“Often, it could just be a new plugin that you can play with for a month or something, that can just help you get back into it. I find that if you’re away from music for too long, that can be a bit dangerous. If you don’t keep your hand in, you come back to it and it’s a bit of a wall to climb to sort of make it natural and fun again. So in a way, it’s also about keeping your hand in as a way of keeping it interesting. Then it doesn’t become this alien thing, this weird activity. Because making music on a computer is quite a weird activity; it’s quite a strange thing to sit down and move these blocks around on screen, or do synthesis. If I haven’t written for a while, the first few things I write are generally not great. It’s kind of going through the motions again, and then you get rid of those average things and hopefully write something better.” cm What’s next for Plaid?

EH: “We’ve got an EP that we’ve nearly finished that will probably come out on digital towards the end of November, and then an American tour through December. We’re working on a few possible film ideas, but they’re early days at the moment. We’ll do some more work with Benet, undoubtedly, and we’ll continue honing our live show a little, trying to get the music and the visuals interfacing better, and trying to evolve how it works.”

AT: “There’s an old Peel Session coming out as part of the Warp 30 releases. There’s a kind of ambient hour that was also played on the NTS take-over as part of the Warp 30 thing that’s coming out in digital form. And yeah, a new EP, as Ed said – we’re working on some more pure dancey material. And we’ll hopefully continue gigging off the back of Polymer through until next summer, then start to write for the next record. At the end of the day, you want to be dealing with less in the mix and making everything sound really good.”

“Making music on a computer is quite a weird activity”