Interview: Clarian
Working alongside the enigmatic ‘Spaceman’ at Montreal’s Lost Star studios, Clarian North has engineered for Tiga, Felix da Housecat and The Martinez Brothers. Danny Turner locates him at ‘The Spaceship’ to talk tech… and more
Although initially affiliated with Montreal’s folk scene, Clarian North was introduced to local after-hours clubs such as Quebec’s now-defunct Sona, igniting an interest in electronic music, Mute Records and associated sounds. To feed his new-found obsession, North helped launch Lost Star studios under the tutelage of the mysterious ‘Spaceman West’.
2008 saw North release his first full-length Folk LP So It Goes under the pseudonym Maurice Benjamin, before joining forces with Adam Weitzman as synthpop duo Footprintz, later signed to Seth Troxler’s Visionquest label. The nomadic sound engineer then took off to Mexico’s BPM festival, before being exiled to Berlin where he began work on his soon-to-be-released solo debut album, Television Days. It’s a long story…
You initially started as a folk artist. So what sparked your interest in electronic music?
“It’s a pretty random story. I liked alternative rock in the ’90s and was playing in guitar bands. It was easy to pick up the guitar and drums from playing piano, because you can get an idea of rhythm and structure, so it’s more of a question of getting your fingers calloused and practising technique until your wrist no longer hurts.
“I got involved in the Montreal folk scene as a teenager and was playing in a folk band, then a friend of mine, Footprintz, who I did a synthpop project with, told me about his cousin ‘Spaceman’, who had just bought this studio above a garage. At the time, we were all getting into drum machines and synths, listening to electro music and going to cool Montreal clubs like Area and Sona. Even though I was doing folk and rock stuff, I found a really cool vibe with all these mysterious DJs playing weird, pornographic, dark electronic music.”
After Spaceman bought the studio, what was your involvement?
“He had this space to do whatever he wanted and already had some cool equipment, so he designed and insulated this studio. I thought that was really cool, and because he’s such an enigmatic character, I started hanging out there, which evolved into an unhealthy obsession with all the equipment. Later, we started slowly adding different elements to the studio. It was a learning process. I remember trying to boost the guitar signal through a box amp, but it took three years before we realised maybe we need to have a preamp. Then we got ourselves an EMS Synthi, but all the stuff we needed to patch it properly was missing, so we had to go on eBay looking for each piece. Now the studio is pretty damn cool.”
Was the studio created for your own benefit, or always with the intention of hiring it out and working with other producers?
“It’s an interesting question that we still ask ourselves today. We could have taken that studio and done so many different things with it. Spaceman’s driven by art and things that make him feel interested and fascinated. For me, I just got obsessed with all the synthesisers and patch bays. I fell into a lot of ’80s music once I saw all the connections between the gear we had and Mute Records and Depeche Mode. We always wondered how they made these records and what equipment they used to make all those cool, interesting sounds. That was the pulse behind it.”
While Lost Star was being assembled, you went off and did your own thing for a while…
“I went to South Africa to make this ambient field recording project that I had in my head. It was influenced by David Attenborough, and I wanted to write about human evolution over the past 100,000 years and turn it into dance music made entirely out of samples from the West Coast to the East. At that point, I was really lost in that whole world and became disconnected from the studio in Montreal for a while. Little did I know that while I’d been building my own microphones and trying to record bacteria, Spaceman had become friends with Felix da Housecat, who wanted to find a studio setup in Montreal and was looking for a production partner and engineer.”
So you took up that role?
“I suggested working with him at the studio, and we created the label Founders of Filth, but I’ve also been working as an engineer with Tiga on a lot of his productions. Now, people like The Martinez Brothers and Seth Troxler have come in and out, so it’s been really cool to see the studio come back to life. In my mind, it’s more like a vibe. I love the Factory Records idea, and producers like Martin Hannett. I’d really like to create that with Lost Star in the sense that everyone makes the music collectively in a chilled atmosphere where you can push the boundaries yet work in a professional capacity.”
Is that how you become A&R manager for Troxler’s Soft Touch label?
“Well Seth introduced Footprintz to Visionquest and put us on the map by putting a synthpop band on his Detroit techno label. In that sense, he changed the course of my life and we became pretty close friends. Then Seth wanted to start a label of cool indie stuff and asked me to be a part of it. I did some A&R, but had some differences of opinion with the label manager there and didn’t want to tread on any toes.”
You also spent time in Mexico, which somehow led to you making a solo electronic album in Berlin…
“I’d been living in Toulon, Mexico, where I used to go every winter for the BPM festival. I’d always stay for a few months, eat mushrooms and walk around the ruins hanging around with ex pat bikers. I saw the town gentrify, which was almost sickening. It didn’t even have a road, then within a few years it suddenly had $2,000-a-night hotels. It was like ’70s
Harlem turning into Williamsburg. There was this nice little place I used to hang out at, but it was inhabited by this sketchy cult who tried to inaugurate me. Everything was spinning in different directions, so I moved to Berlin. You can imagine the contrast. Lots of sun, and now I’m in dreary Berlin where it’s like Dark City.”
I understand you wrote and recorded your debut Clarian album Television Days up in a loft studio there?
“When I was in Mexico, I had a Zoom and a soundcard and would go into the forest and record different things. I recorded the environment around me, ran it through a sampler and phased the sounds and different textures to create tones and generate synth sounds out of them. Then I went from all the rush of Mexico and the pressures of a consumer society to Berlin, where I could walk around in a bathrobe if I wanted to because it’s less judgmental. I had a minimal studio setup in a beautiful old, non-gentrified loft in Stralauer Aley. My basic setup was a MOTU interface, a couple of synths, a microphone and a little sampler. Synthpop and new wave music was my love, so I was partying and DJing with friends and then I’d come home, feel inspired to write music and started creating
Television Days. We’d blast bits of it when we came back clubbing from Berghain, and within two or three months the album was done. When I came back to Montreal, I did some tweaking and final mixing in my home studio and at Lost Star, which, for me, is the pinnacle of everything.”
What’s the album about?
“I created this world about this guy Kevin Jones – an LA-based sci-fi writer from the ’90s living in Toloun who gets sucked into writing a TV series. Then it turns out that there’s an iguana that starts talking to him. I can’t even tell if I invented him anymore, because I went to a couple of street bonfires at abandoned parking lots in Berlin with some German friends who were really cool. I didn’t really understand them because they spoke German all the time; and they were probably fucking with me. I was telling this guy about my trips to Mexico, my love of sci-fi and my EP on Kompakt, and they were telling me this story about Kevin Jones, which was a pretty sad story about a down-and-out paranoid guy, obsessed with Carl Sagan. It stuck with me and I kept thinking about him. Eventually, it became one of the central themes when I was writing Television Days.”
It’s an unpretentious record in that its underlying influences, both artistically and technologically, are very clear and obvious…
“That’s a nice thing to say. I didn’t overthink the record or try to reinvent anything. It wears its heart on its sleeve and I just wanted to create a world around the things that meant something to me and express that. It’s the texture of the synths that draws me to science fiction and surrealism. I’m a huge David Lynch fan. Twin Peaks is quintessential. A whole episode could be two people drinking coffee with no mention of future civilisations or ancient astronauts, but the subtlety of the music creates this dark, brooding atmosphere. Along with the camera slowly moving from one character to the next, you get these weird moments that alienate and disconnect you, turning everything into some super-next-level dream logic. So I wrote a song like
Under the Gun, where the lines are kind of blurry. I’m singing about someone who’s under pressure or feeling remorseful about a certain situation, but you get the sense that there’s something else happening, like some aliens hanging out and laughing at the whole scene.”
The title track certainly has that element too. It’s a pop song, but some of the sounds are pitched in a way that makes it feel quite surreal and disconnecting.
“Cool. I love using lo-fi synth sounds where if you detune the under-chords you can create a beautiful sound and layer a detuned sound next to it. It creates an eerie atmosphere and you can do that with these older ’80s analogue synths because you can fuck with all the wave circuits and get some cool oscillators to sound off. You can probably do it with the newer emulations they’re making too, but I don’t know if it’s quite the same feeling as when you’re touching the keys or messing with envelopes.”
Lost Star studio contains a lot of hardware, but you feel the environment you work in is equally vital to the creative process?
“100% – that’s the whole point. It’s a zone, you know? With songwriting and producing, it’s so helpful to be in a place or environment where you can actually connect to what you’re doing. I really do think that you feed off your environment, which doesn’t mean there’s a good or bad place to write. That always comes from inside of you, but Lost Star has a theme. For every record we’re making, whether it’s for Felix, Tiga, The Martinez Brothers or an indie rock band, I want them to be able to zone in contextually to bring the best out of them and create a Lost Star ‘signature sound’. Obviously, the studio is a key component of that. It’s about what you feel when you come in and how the gear inspires you. That whole energy is definitely fundamental to the music-creating process, and takes it from being just another record made in another studio to something that has an authentic personality.”
Which hardware synths stand out for you?
“Well first, I eat and breathe these synths, but the Roland System-100 is my favourite in the whole studio. I use that on everything. We have the vintage one with the reverb expander, which I love, the mixer and the sequencer. Basically, the Roland TR-808 is the master clock for my rig setup. I’ll use that to trigger the sequencer, either on the System-100, the EMS VCS3, Minimoog, Juno-60 or the Roland TR-303, 606, 707, 808 or 909. I have that little pool set up in a circle and I tend to get stuck in phases where I’ll build a little rig and use it for a few months until I get tired then switch it up.”
Do vintage machines like the System-100 often need repair? And, if so, where do you go?
“If it’s an easy repair like changing batteries or soldering, we’ve found a few technicians in Montreal that can help, but it depends on the value of the machine. If we need a special LED light, we might look on eBay, but if a circuit breaks or it’s something irreplaceable, Spaceman will go to the end of the universe and back to restore the machine. He even got in touch with the original guy who made the briefcase EMS Synthi models to talk to him about getting it fixed correctly. He was emailing this total legend that lives in a cabin in the woods. I mean, who would manage to get in touch with this guy and learn the intricacies of the design? It’s next-level stuff.”
The Calrec mixing desk looks like a nice piece of kit – an analogue hybrid with a digital display?
“It still has the old faders and buses that you’d normally find on an analogue desk, but it has a really sick compressor that you can run off any of the channels. It sounds as good as a Neve. The design and look is incredible, but it’s a really expensive mixer. It was a big deal when we swapped it for our Tascam 24-channel desk, but getting the
Calrec was the missing link and took everything next-level. It’s custom-made to an extent, because some of the outputs were outdated, but all the synths, drum machines and patch bays are set up through the channels on the Calrec, so you can easily switch between whatever an artist wants to use to get a jam going.”
What about the Yamaha CS-80 – a huge synth with a huge sound?
“The most incredible part is how we got it up to the studio; it must weigh 1,000 pounds. We had the CS-60 before, but unfortunately a lot people are destroying these beautiful machines and selling them out part by part. When you have one of them, it’s like having an endangered species – like an elephant or something. It’s a beautiful, angelic, dystopian synth that sounds insane. It’s hard to use at first because you have to learn how to play with the envelopes, but when you do it’s extremely rich and powerful. The tremolo is incredible, the touch tone is insane and the portamento felt ribbon and glide is the best. You can do it with the hand and feel the tone moving like a Theremin.”
You have some nice drum machines, including the Roland TR- range. Although it’s hard to tell these days, it sounds like you’re happy to embrace these sounds on the records?
“For beats, I always prefer to use recordings of drum machines, but I’ll also use Ableton to layer and splice them up. On Television Days, I used the Sequential Circuits TOM, which Prince used to have, and layered it with a TR-808 underneath and some heavy digital compression or flatline digital compression. When you create flatline compression on analogue drum machines and put a digital flatliner on it, you can get these incredibly lush, saturated tones, but with a punch. I really do believe in combining the technology we have now with older stuff, but when it comes to writing, recording a beat from an old drum machine gets me more excited.”
You touched on Ableton. What part does software play in your production process?
“For me, you make sounds, and as you’re doing so tweak them in your head to try to find new ways to create different tones. If I’m working on a track and have an idea, for example, I might want an angelic, dystopian portamento synth to come in. Although it might sound really cool at the time, it’s usually been done too many times before. In that case, I’ll try to push the sound a bit further by adding one of the UAD plugins, like a chorus effect, to make it brush through the side of my brain.”
So, for you, effects processing is more likely to be done in the box?
“It depends on whatever final sound I’m looking for. As an engineer, suppose an artist comes in who really loves the Roland Space Echo and prefers to sing a note in a certain way through it, I’ll start prerecording through that and won’t even go dry because that’s how they’re going to kill it. But if someone’s really into laying something down and doesn’t need the effects, I’d rather record it dry and make changes in post-production. For me, there are four processes: recording, mixing, post-production and mastering. Each one has its own technical journey, and each artist tends to work with a very specific set of utilities that they’ve created over the years.”
So you tend to find everyone has their own bespoke way of working?
“That’s right. If I’m working on an EP and going for a particular vibe, I might run some gear through the Ursa Major Space Station SST-282 into a UAD digital compressor plugin and go through the compressor on the Calrec to create my own specific effects chain. But the beauty of all this stuff is that you can create your own rules for each project you’re working on, and that’s what we like to offer the people we work with at Lost Star.”
“I really do believe in combining the technology we have now with older stuff”