INTERV IEW: Dusky The London duo give us the lowdown on Outer which features collabs with Gary Numan and Wiley
Known for producing some of the biggest House anthems in recent years, Dusky broaden their horizons with a much-anticipated second album featuring collabs with Gary Numan and Wiley. Danny Turner rummages through the duo’s London-based studio
Initially known as Solarity, the last five years have been plain sailing for Alfie GrangerHowell and Nick Harriman since rebranding themselves as Dusky. Their debut album,
Stick by This (2011), was endorsed by superstar DJ Pete Tong and the duo were voted Best British Producers by DJ Mag in 2013 following the No 1 Beatport tune
Careless. Alfie and Nick have continued dropping stellar tracks, carving a niche within the House world and asserting themselves on the underground club scene. New album Outer sees them delve deeper into their sophisticated production style, absorbing influences from the past with numerous collaborations, to create what is arguably their most accomplished release to date. FM: It’s taken you five years to follow up your debut album Stick by This. Why the delay? Alfie Granger-Howell: “We were busy touring and making club tracks. I think the albums we’ve done have been led by the music itself. We didn’t want them to be a collection of functional drum tracks; they’re not just designed for the dancefloor, but listening to at home or on the train as well.” You were relatively unknown back then, but now have a completely different stature. Has that changed your approach to making music or your reasons for making it? AG: “We had a previous project called Solarity, but when we made the jump to Dusky people didn’t really notice at first. We hadn’t been doing many gigs either, but one thing that changed our creative process was the opportunity to test out tracks at our DJ gigs. That affected things a lot because we started writing tracks for our DJ sets and music for clubs.”
Nick Harriman: “When we’re doing more club-focused EPs, there’s definitely a pressure there because of how our name’s grown over the past few years. People expect us to put out club bangers, whereas with an album there’s not really that kind of expectation. If they listen to our first album, they’ll understand that Outer’s not just going to be a collection of club tracks.” It does feature some clubby tracks but also quite chilled elements, not just from track to track but deep within the production… NH: “I think that element’s probably been there in quite a lot of our music. It’s part of what I, and maybe Alfie as well, enjoyed about going to Drum ’n’ Bass, Garage and Hardcore raves – that moment of euphoria in the middle.” AG: “It’s also linked with the feeling of wanting to be a bit more cinematic. Writing for film is something we’ve always been interested in outside of Dusky. That’s actually what I studied – music for film and TV. I was paying the bills doing that and working with other established composers. It’s hard to know what came first. You could argue that I got into the cinematic side because a lot of stuff in the ’90s was very cinematic – LTJ Bukem, and also artists like Underworld and Orbital who have this expansive, ambient influence.”
Talking of influences, Gary Numan appears on the track Swansea, which is a strange title for an electronic Pop song?
AG: “There’s not really any rhyme or reason to it, we just have a habit of starting an idea and thinking of random word associations, then saving it in case it crashes. We often think of renaming them but kind of get attached to the titles. There’s no connection to Swansea, although there must have been something [ laughs].”
NH: “It’s the traditional thing to take a section of the lyric and name the song after that. That’s what they did back in the day, but it’s a bit boring innit? With Gary Numan, it was more about what he’s already contributed to electronic music. Obviously, we wanted to get him involved because he’s a legend who’s written so much influential music. We also thought he’d suit the tune because it was very influenced by that era and his voice is so iconic.”
Was it the same with Wiley – you wrote the track and felt he could do the track justice? NH: “Yeah, and I don’t think it would have worked with anyone else – it had to be Wiley. The instrumental had a lot of Jungle influences from Belgian-style Techno. He started out as a Jungle MC and developed that into Grime, so it kind of made sense for him to be on it and we were really pleased when he said he was up for it.” Does it set the mind whirring about who you could collaborate with in the future?
NH: “Whenever I get asked I always say Quincy Jones, just so I could watch him in the studio. Also, Brian Eno. I’d love to be able to watch how he works without necessarily even collaborating.”
AG: “Bjork comes from that Dance music world, but is so creative and out there – she could definitely bring a lot to the table. With both Wiley and Gary Numan, we put the word out but didn’t think they’d be up for it in either case. So it does make you think about the possibilities of collaborations on another album or even vocal EP tracks.”
Did you work alongside the album’s numerous collaborators or was it all done remotely?
AG: “I don’t think we’ve done much collaborating in terms of production; it’s more about wanting them to bring something to the table that we don’t have the skills to do. All the collaborations have been vocal, and in every case the vocalist has written the top lines and the lyrics. Some have been a joint effort here in the studio and others sent stuff back and forth. We find it hard to write melodies on our tracks; especially lyrics, they’re just not our territory.” Do you think songwriting is an instinctive talent or something you can learn? NH: “I think there are plenty of people trying to learn how to be songwriters, but not many can actually do it well. As Alfie says, we did work with quite a lot of songwriters and tried to collaborate with them in the studio, but a lot of it was quite contrived – or it felt like that. Compared to the amazing songs of someone like Gary Numan, or
other people we have listened to in the past, why even bother? Just let someone who knows what they’re doing do it.” Is the end result likely to be better if you work with an artist in person rather than online?
NH: “It depends on how it’s being recorded. If someone records it really well and sends it to you then it’s fine, but if they send a rough demo then you might have to ask them to re-record it. If you’re doing it remotely and not sitting in the room with them, you’re not getting that personal dynamic, but then again an artist might come down and you both end up feeling really awkward. You never really know until you get someone in a room; we’ve had some awesome singers come in but if you’re not clicking musically or personally you’ll know it’s not going to work straightaway.”
Is it fair to say that some artists simply don’t feel comfortable in the presence of others and you’ll get more out of them by never meeting?
NH: “Definitely. Musicians can be very sensitive people. That’s why bands break up, because there are a lot of egos and people have social anxieties. With the song Tiers, Ed from Friendly Fires sang the vocal. We sat in the studio with him and worked out what we wanted but then he wanted to go away and sing it at his house because that’s where he felt he would give his best performance.”
What’s your gear journey been up to this point ?
AG: “I was lucky because my dad’s not a professional musician but an amateur jazz pianist and also a bit of a nerd. For some reason, because he never really used it, he bought Logic in one of its very early incarnations – might have even been the first version after it was called Notator. He showed it to me when I was a kid and I got quite into it, making loops, and a bit later, playing piano and using it to record strange MIDI tracks. I studied music at college, although Nick’s more of an expert on the engineering side than I am.”
NH: “I started DJing when I was 12 or 13 and it became the thing that to get any gigs as a DJ you had to be a producer as well. So I started messing around with production software and used Fruity Loops on my mum’s PC. Eventually I realised you couldn’t do much with it so I moved to Logic around version 5.0. It took me about a year to get a sound out of it [ laughs]. You had to build the environment yourself, you couldn’t just open it, load up a plug-in, press the key and a sound came out. The internet had only just started and I didn’t know anyone who was producing, so I was on the phone to the Emagic guys the whole time. I was just messing around, making Drum ’n’ Bass, Breakbeat and Hip-Hop tracks. I went to University to do a sociology degree but spent the whole time making music; so I quit and did music production instead.”
With both Wiley and Gary Numan, we put the word out but didn’t think they’d be up for it. It does make you think about possibilities
And you’ve both stuck to using Logic?
AG: “We’ve used Ableton a little bit, particularly for the live show, but not so much on the production side. The trouble is, we’re so fluid with Logic and all its shortcuts that it would be a bit of a frustrating process to learn something new even though Ableton is intuitive. Logic does have functionalities that I prefer over Pro Tools, which is amazing for audio editing, but for MIDI stuff I prefer Logic.”
Will you always work together here in the studio or do you come up with ideas independently? AG: “These days, we do a lot of stuff on the road so we start a lot of ideas on our laptops. That’s probably one of the reasons we’ve kept doing pretty much everything in the box because it’s so easy to go back and forth with it. We’ll often flesh out ideas together, but now we’re usually only together in the studio at the very end of the process.” Do you tend to play off each other’s strengths and weaknesses?
NH: “There are definitely defined roles, but the more we’ve worked together the more things cross over and we’ll lend our expertise to whatever the other person’s doing. So, for me, Alfie will help tweak any melodic stuff I’ve written as he has better ideas on how to keep it more interesting, whereas I’d help Alfie make something sound a bit nicer or tweak sounds from an engineering point of view.” What synths do you tend to use the most? AG: “We go through phases, but Spectrasonics Trilian, Trilogy and Omnisphere have been real staples. I’m also always using Native Instruments Komplete and Reaktor.”
NH: “You can get user-built synths off forums, so we use quite a lot of those things as they’re often a bit more interesting. For all the dynamic processing, we pretty much use Waves, the Abbey Road stuff and Sonnox VST plug-ins. Waves sounds really good; if you have the whole bundle you’ve got such a variety of different things. We did consider getting some UAD stuff, but we’ve been working with Waves for a while so why bother changing? You can get any sound you want using Waves.” Do you layer sounds to get the power and intensity you achieve or use a lot of processing? NH: “It’s a bit of both. We use a lot of auxiliary send, so if we we’re using reverb we’ll have it on an auxiliary, EQ that, compress it and use other various tricks to make everything sound more cohesive and glued together. Also, things like using longer attack and release times on compressors. With analogue gear you can only ever get those long attack times, whereas with digital you can have them super-quick,
which makes everything sound a bit more analogue without being analogue. Lots of little things build up to make the whole sound more powerful.” Do you have any tips on creating a big sound while retaining dynamic range?
NH: “Start with all the levels really, really low. Treat Logic like you would an analogue mixing desk, but imagine it not having any issues with a noise floor. You want to keep as much headroom as you can, so by the time you get to the end of the track you have much more dynamic range to play with. It also means the mastering engineer can do their thing properly. And there’s slamming stuff in a creative way and slamming stuff unnecessarily; you have to be conscious of the distinction between the two.” Are you careful not to over-compress? NH: “We don’t use compression at all, apart from a bit of sidechain compression or maybe on a vocal, but even then it would be very slight and we’ll automate the volume manually to level it out. By doing that, you’re not effecting everything in one go and it’s specific to whatever the phrase is. You don’t need to use much compression. Unless you want a really slammed sound, it’s totally unnecessary.”
AG: “It’s also about what works on big sound systems. We learned early from DJing that sometimes the tracks that are really loud work quite well because there’s a sense of this power when the track drops, but it’s actually very fatiguing on the ears and you do lose that dynamic range; whereas if you keep that range in then the big moments really pump through.”
How do you approach EQing the bass?
NH: “We’ll layer bass sounds and EQ them based on what part of the track we want them to occupy. We generally don’t EQ the sub at all, and it’s the same with the kicks. We layer stuff up and try to match the attack, delay and release on all the bass synths so it sounds like one sound, but it’s actually three or four sounds playing with different EQs on each to make the whole sound really tight. You don’t want anything stereo below about 150Hz for the bass, so we have a BX control plug-in to make everything
There’s slamming stuff in a creative way and slamming stuff unnecessarily; you have to be conscious of the distinction
below a certain frequency mono and above stereo so it gives the impression of a really wide bass.” Do you still use your hardware synths?
AG: “They’re just MIDI controllers. I’ve actually got a new keyboard recently, a Roland RD-800 Stage Piano, but it’s amongst all our live stuff because we’re touring with it. I’ve got to play piano and I like having weighted keys and the full 88 keys too. The live show is a big part of our schedule at the moment and it’s an opportunity to showcase some of the stuff on the album that we wouldn’t play in our DJ set, so that encouraged me to replace the old Alesis QS8, which I’ve had since I was a kid.”
And you’ve got a Novation Ultranova?
AG: “When we first got it we used all the sounds off it, but now it’s more hassle than it’s worth so it’s easier to use as a controller. One of the tracks on the album, Ingrid, we did in another studio with a producer and used the Roland SH-101 for the sub. Perhaps we’ll get more gear, but the way we work, going back and forth between laptops on the road, it’s quite nice having that compatibility without the hardware set-up.” Did you use a producer for the whole album? NH: “Just on certain tracks because Polydor suggested that we do it. Basically, all he did was tweak the arrangements a bit, run everything through an SSL desk, replace a couple of the bass parts and put a new stab in. I think he also did a bit of vocal comping on the Tiers vocal because he’s worked closely with Ed from Friendly Fires. It was more like a traditional producer role than an engineering role, helping with the songwriting process, but we couldn’t really avoid him having some impact on the engineering side because he ran everything through his desk, which changed the sound slightly.”
Did you notice a big difference between the output from an SSL desk and the way that you engineer things in the box?
NH: “His style of mixing is much more Poppy and mid-range, so when I brought it back here I actually had to reel some of it back to fit in with everything else, but the top-end sounded really nice for sure so I think that an SSL hardware channel is definitely something I would consider getting. It would be especially useful because when we get stuff mastered the mastering engineer always adds a really high top-end at around 16,000Hz to give it that bit of air that you can’t always get with software.” How are you getting on with the Prism Sound interface you’re using? NH: “We have everything coming out straight from the computer into the Prism, and then from the Prism through the Coleman, which is a passive, high-quality monitor controller running into the speakers, so there’s actually no noise floor at all – it’s a completely clear signal path. We use a pair of Auratones speakers for checking the levels on mid-range stuff like vocals and Dynaudio BM5A speakers for general referencing.”
How will you go about incorporating elements of the album into your DJ sets, what with it having so many vocal contributors?
AG: “Some of the tracks from the album are already staples in our DJ sets, but we’ll be playing the whole album at the live show, interacting much more with the music and triggering samples with a light show and stuff. One of the reasons for doing a live show, as opposed to a DJ set, was to create a context to play some of the slower tracks, and I think people are a bit more open to hearing things like that if they’re presented in the right way.”
NH: “It’s just the two of us, so we don’t want to have anything that feels pub cabaret or karaoke with guests wandering out, singing a song and disappearing. A lot of the live show will be quite Ravey, so it will be more of an Orbital-style, two-guys-on-stage-with-the-gear-playing-thetracks. The live set-up is basically Alfie with a full-size keyboard on MainStage with an MPD MIDI controller, then we’ve got two Novation XL launch controllers, which act like a MIDI mixer for Ableton, and on my side we’re running the show off Ableton with a Roland XI mixer, a TB-3, TR-8, BigSky/TimeLine effects and another MPD to trigger drum samples and vocal samples.”
AG: “Probably the biggest influences on our show are people like Chemical Brothers, who have a big light show, visuals and lots of gear, and Moderat – their use of visuals has had a big influence on us because they’re really cool, trippy and quite cinematic as well.”
Probably the biggest influences on our show are people like Chemical Brothers, who have a big light show, visuals and lots of gear