ON STAGE WITH: Maribou State

Electronic duo par excellence, Maribou State, follow up 2015 debut, Portraits, with stunning new album, Kingdoms in Colour. Hamish Mackintosh caught up with them to talk tech, new studios and the lost art of pedalboarding

UK electronic duo show off their impressive live rig and tell us about new album Kingdoms In Colour

Chris Davids and Liam Ivory went to the same school in rural Hertfordshire though barely noticed each other. It wasn’t until attending the same university that the pair became friends over a shared passion for music and thus, Maribou State was born.

After a slew of EPs, 2015’s excellent opening album salvo, Portraits, was assembled in The Shack studio, a home setup in Liam’s back garden, which garnered the duo not-inconsiderable plaudits and attention. Several tours and notable remixes down the line, Davids and Ivory decided Maribou State needed to decamp from The Shed and seek larger recording premises in the more club-centric locale of London. With a bunch of new ideas and new equipment to realise them on, Kingdoms of Colour, is the sublime fruit of Maribou State’s labours and showcases another leap in the duo’s songcraft skills while keeping an eye firmly on the club dancefloor. Indeed, first single, Turnmills, goes as far as to celebrate the legendary but now defunct London dance shrine while next single, Feels Good, sees them collaborate with American friends Khruangbin, on a funky, beat-ridden adventure.

Future Music seized the chance to catch up with Chris and Liam in a break from sound-checking with their newly expanded five-piece live band (and impressively spec’d synth collection) at London’s Rough Trade East, prior to a joyous live outing of some of the highlights from the rather wonderful

Kingdoms of Colour. Let synth-envy commence…

Was leaving your old studio, The Shack, and coming to London a wrench or has it opened a new door of creativity?

Chris: “Initially it was definitely a bit of a wrench. We’d become really accustomed to the quiet life in the village we were in, which also meant having very few distractions around us. So, coming into London and trying to settle into the new warehouse space was a bit of a tough move for us at first. It took us a good six months to start finding our feet and get inspired again by the change of scenery.”

Liam: “As Chris says it was a big change and coming into the city meant we had so many distractions around us. Lots of friends and a bustling night life! We did initially find it hard finding the time to get in the studio and get focused.”

Chris: “It’s odd because, as we’ve found our feet with it all, those distractions have become the things that now inspire us… going out to lots of different clubs and hanging out with lots of new people all feed into it now. It just took a little while.”

Does that explain the homage to clubbing track, Turnmills?

Liam: “It was from way back, before we lived in London, really. Being back in London, running some club nights at Turnmills and DJing at those parties gave us the inspiration to write that track. It was the club where we really had our awakening to dance music.”

Has your gear collection grown much since Portraits and since leaving The Shack?

Liam: “It has, yeah and that was also part of the slow move into London as we had to get it all to work. We had quite a few problems early on with things not working, didn’t we?”

Chris: “Yeah. It’s also that classic idea of working with some limitations. We hadn’t set ourselves that rule working on the first album, but we just didn’t have a lot of kit at that time as we didn’t have a lot of money. Also, we only had so much space to work with as it was just a shed! Coming into a big new space we felt almost obliged to fill it with lots of new stuff but excited to do that too.”

Liam: “It was a hindrance at the start as we were just spreading ourselves too thin. We thought we needed to get a Moog, so we went out and bought a Moog Sub 37 and it just didn’t get used at all. It just sat, untouched in a corner and we thought ‘it’s an awful synth’…(laughs) pretty much until recently when we realised it’s actually an amazing synth we just hadn’t spent any time on it! So, it took a bit of time to warm to all the new equipment.”

You definitely don’t always appreciate what a handy thing limitations can be in the studio.

Chris: “Absolutely and it’s something we’ll learn from for making the third album and start actually setting more parameters about what kit we’ll allow ourselves to use. Otherwise you could find yourself with endless possibilities.”

Liam: “… that’s the thing that became timeconsuming towards finishing the album. We’d hear a bass part or a top-line and think ‘let’s try it on the Juno or on the Prophet’ and we’d spend so much time on things. It was a bit overwhelming until we started figuring out how to use things and sussed out how everything sounded.”

Chris: “It was a strong point for us in the end just being able to generate so many different sounds and process things in different ways, which allowed us to get our ideas down in a much stronger way.”

Is it sometimes a bit of a mixed-blessing suddenly acquiring lots of new gear?

Liam: “Absolutely. We also found that, every time a new bit of kit was introduced, there’d be a sound or a preset on it that would immediately spark a new idea. You always get that initial buzz to write something with it.”

Chris: “And then you over-saturate it! For example, we got an old reel-to-reel tape machine when we first moved in and we just ran everything through it… every part of a song, every snare drum, everything! The whole thing ended up sounding like it was underwater. So, we spent a lot of time cleaning things up again. I guess that’s probably the same for a lot of the new kit we bought – it’s just about learning about how to be a bit more delicate with the amount you use something.”

You’ve got some lovely kit in your live setup now… are you excited by the resurgence of good hardware synths?

Liam: “Yeah. We’ve bought Moogs and gone to town on the Dave Smith stuff for the live show.”

Chris: “We bought an OB-6, the Prophet 6 and a Prophet 8. That was exciting towards the end of the writing process.”

Liam: “We got the mini MS-20 then too. I do want to get an original one but the mini sounds huge. You don’t really have to do anything to it… the sound’s just there!”

Did you have specific synths in mind when you got the new ones?

Liam: “We were turned on to the Dave Smith stuff ages ago seeing the Prophet 8 and since then we’ve always really trusted them. We bought a Tempest drum-machine too, so we’ve always been into the Dave Smith stuff, really. Seeing the old Soulwax shows inspired me to want an MS-20 and our friend Jack bought one initially and we had a play on it and thought it was amazing. So, pretty much everything has been inspired by seeing other artists use them… we’ve got an old Korg Delta, which we initially saw Mount Kimbie using.”

Chris: “It’s pretty much on everything you hear on the album.”

Is everything working well with everything else within the live setup?

Chris: “Yeah, luckily everything we use live is either new or a new version of an old synth. The functionality of the synths, 90% of the time, they’re just played by us or receiving clock-time and we’re just playing arpeggios. They don’t need to do too much to function properly. We do have a lot of tuning issues with the synths.”

Liam: “Things like the Delta we didn’t want to take out live. Even though it’s across the album we just thought that the Prophet’s such a tasteful synth that we can just use those.”

I bet you could be driven to violence if someone accidentally dropped a pint on something as precious as the Delta!

Chris: (laughs) “Exactly – at least with a Prophet you can just SysEx it, sort it out, then you’re back to normal. Yeah, I’d be pretty gutted if we took the Delta out and it didn’t turn up after a flight or something like that.”

What’s underpinning all the clock and MIDI information? Ableton Live?

Liam: “Yeah there’s a laptop onstage running Ableton… 90% of the file is MIDI so Ableton’s basically our MIDI-horse. We all play a couple of different instruments so there are a lot of program changes and MIDI firing stuff just to make things easier. So, Chris can play one part and there will be MIDI going to his Prophet 6 and he can control the sound of it. It’s mainly a functionality thing.”

Chris: “There is a little bit of audio on there too, bits that we wouldn’t be able to recreate live but it’s essentially just MIDI.”

Has expanding the live group to a five-piece given you any new technical headaches?

Chris: “No, it’s only really benefitted us as it’s meant that we could pull a lot of stuff off-track. We can have someone purely dedicated to playing bass, which is important because before Liam would play bass alongside keys and, again, it’s that thing of spreading yourself too thin. Having live percussion is so important as it was just our drummer before and it was very one-dimensional.”

Liam: “Percussion has become a huge part of this show to the point where we all play some percussion at some point. When you’ve got this many synths onstage, you need to keep that human balance too.”

Was there was a fair bit of pre-production required to get everything prepared for touring?

Chris: (laughs) “Yeah… and it’s ongoing! It’s never been a simple thing for us because even with the band learning all the parts beforehand and me and Liam knowing all the parts, it still took us six weeks to get the first show together. To a lot of people that might sound like an insane amount of time. Liam does a lot of the back-end prep before that too; getting all the files prepared and stuff. So it’s quite a long process.”

Was there anything you learned as a result of the pre-production?

“When you’ve got this many synths onstage, you need to keep that human balance too”

Liam: “Definitely. Not trying to shorten the prep time but sitting down and going though everything to make sure you’ve covered every angle and bouncing out every sample you need. What we found was that, the minute you stop rehearsing to tinker with Ableton or change MIDI settings, you just completely lose the flow and your rehearsal is out the window. Taking the time to prep properly is really important.”

Chris: “We didn’t do that the first time and we found when we did it recently that it would take a whole day between us to prep the songs. But that meant that when we all got in to rehearse it would get done so much quicker whereas, before, we’d spend an hour or so doing it then it would end up taking two days to put the song together in rehearsals. So, it does make a difference just putting in that time and making sure that all the samples are loaded up and everything’s ready. Now we’re not worrying about things going wrong. Losing that pre-show anxiety is a big thing.”

Is there an in-built opportunity for you to take the songs to new places live?

Chris: “Yeah. From the very first tour, for Portraits, everything was glued to backing tracks but this time round we chopped it up into scenes, so those changes can come as and when. There is an opportunity to go off and freestyle, but the scenes are there to make sure nothing goes horribly wrong… the chorus doesn’t come until we tell it to come, that kind of thing.”

What do you usually use to control the scenes? Ableton Push?

Liam: “It’s just a Novation Launchpad, super simple. It’s basically just to start and stop songs and jump between scenes amongst them. Myself, Chris and Jonjo have all got an Akai MPD226. Essentially, they’re just MIDI controllers and we built samplers within Ableton so we’ve each got a drum-rack with all the samples for all the songs.”

So, you’re well covered for every eventuality live, then?

Liam: “Definitely. We were lucky to be able to build on the first tour as we challenged ourselves at that time with quite a lot of kit on stage and we’ve learned from that.”

Was there anything that had to be taken out of the live rig?

Liam: “That’s a good point but nothing that we can think of. Something we have done recently is to remove the bass-amp and we also just started using DI’d stuff.”

Chris: “Not running so much track stuff too, although that has started to creep back in a little. The last few songs we’ve added to the set we’ve put a little bit more back in. At first, we literally set out to have nothing on the backing track, which was a good target to set ourselves, but it was to the detriment of the show, so then we had to bring a bit back in.”

Cutting back to that lovely Tempest drummachine, do either of you use that to make beats on the fly during the gigs?

“It makes a difference just putting in time and making sure everything’s ready”

“I guess I’m a bit of a Luddite, in that way of wanting full control”

Chris: “It’s all pre-programmed as it’s basically just to give the whole drum side of the show another edge. Again, it’s to help avoid having things on backing-track – I’d more trust an Ableton file that just has a few bits of MIDI and telling it to start/stop rather than running big .wav files with those beats on them. The Tempest goes through a bunch of guitar pedals and stuff, which means Liam can manipulate the drum sounds and put big reverb tails and delays on them. I guess we could’ve done that from sending out an audio track from Ableton but there’s something nice about having a bit of kit onstage that does it.”

There’s still something cool about seeing a pedalboard stuffed with nice Strymon pedals and the like. How did you choose what goes in there?

Chris: “That’s actually been a fun process over the course of the past few years. We had some pedals for the first record as we use pedals a lot in the studio and we’d been recommended bits and pieces. We like going to Wunjo Guitars in Tottenham Court Rd as they’re so good in there for letting us have a play around with new pedals. So, the collection has just built up incrementally over the years and we realised that we had to make a lot of the weird guitar and synth tones we’d made on the album in the live show, so we found a great delay/modulation pedal called a Rubberneck by DOD.”

Liam: “We had to put the GigRig G2 switcher in the setup as each tone changes between so many different pedals. We saw a YouTube video of Radiohead using one and it’s an amazing bit of kit. It’s super simple and doesn’t do anything in terms of sound but it’s so essential on that board.”

Chris: “Liam was really into the idea of getting it, but I was dead against it as I liked the idea of being able to turn everything on and off by myself. I guess I’m a bit of a luddite in that way of wanting to have full control, but we got it and used it for the six weeks of rehearsals and thought ‘How the fuck would I ever have done this without it?’!”

There’s also that ‘modular’ type thing with chains of effects pedals, isn’t there?

Liam: “Yeah and, again, that’s why the GigRig is so good as you can reorder the pedals and the signal path without changing any pedals, which is handy.”

Anything you use a lot in the studio that wouldn’t make the cut for the live shows?

Chris: “I guess the tape machine, really as it’s more of a processing thing.”

Liam: “We used the Juno-60 a lot on the album but, as with the Delta, we just decided it was easier to leave that at home and recreate patches on one of the Prophets.”

Chris: “There are all the tuning issues with using them live and it would’ve been nice to have it out live. It would also have meant having to have three or four keyboards in one setup.”

Is everything done in Ableton Live when you work in the studio too?

Chris: “It has been for a long time. Originally it was Logic, in the very early days, then we made the switch to Ableton 5 and we’ve been with it ever since and never used anything else. Since Ableton has become so popular I don’t actually understand how some of the other DAWs are still around. Ableton is just so intuitive and well laid out.”

Has success taken some of the pressure off for writing the next album or does it add even more pressure?

Liam: “We haven’t got around to writing anything new since the album’s been out, but I like to think it’s going to alleviate a lot of pressure. Especially if we don’t leave it too long. I think this was quite a difficult album to write purely from the pressure of the second album being such a big thing. Now it’s going well, we’ve maybe proved ourselves a little more and we might have a bit more of a free rein with what we do next.”