Q&A: Selling

Two electronic music giants collide, as Gold Panda and Jas Shaw of Simian Mobile Disco collaborate under the name ‘Selling’. Danny Turner visits their recording space to learn how they were inspired by each other’s gear

use noise to make emotions, and there’s no clear language for that.”

Presumably, you developed a language with James that sped up the whole process?

JS: “Over many years, James and I built up a language that enabled us to quickly affect things. When you don’t have that, it’s not obvious how things are going to work. It’s like building a brick wall, it could all fall into place or you can take months banging your heads against it. Working with Derwin was slightly nerve-wracking, but because all the gear I have is quite fun to work with and we didn’t spend too long on any one thing, it made the process fun. Plus, we didn’t have any pressure to come up with anything – there was no goal and we didn’t think it’d turn into an album.”

With all collaborations, there will be moments where someone has an idea and the other person doesn’t like it for whatever reason. How do you deal with that?

JS: “You just have to come right out with it. Fortunately I know Derwin well enough that I don’t have to tiptoe around him. If you’ve got someone in who’s a bit highly strung, then I agree that can become difficult if something’s taken the wrong way. What you’re doing is criticising someone’s idea, which is probably not the spirit it’s meant. I guess the best thing is to create loads of ideas and not get bogged down. When you’ve spent ages working on a sound or melody you become emotionally attached to it and there might not be any correlation between that effort and how good it is.”

DS: “The last time I came to the studio, which was quite recently, Jas had a certain setup and we went through some of the sounds he’d made. We got about 11 things together in a couple of hours. They were just starting points, so we weren’t sitting there and worrying about whether a kick drum sounded good, we were just being surprised about what the gear gave us. We ended up making four or five tracks that day.”

JS: “It might seem like we don’t give a monkeys, but that’s not true at all. The music is obviously important to us, but in making it quickly and not labouring over everything we avoid making the process too stodgy. When an idea appears, it often has its own momentum, and when you start applying the musical screwdrivers you can drain all the fun out of it.”

DS: “It’s really important to capture those moments that you feel arrive by magic. That’s where we made the right choice to record bits and move on, because they always sounded fresh when we came back.”

Although you both have your own studios, you recorded everything at Jas’s location. Is that because he has all the good gear?

JS: “Derwin’s got a bunch of gear, but I’ve got loads of space because I live in the middle of nowhere. There was enough room for him to bring over a pile of synths, stick them on a table and not be bumping into each other. Whenever I’m here alone, I feel like the space is utterly wasted. It’s not Abbey Road by any means, but it’s too big for one person making techno. At least having another person here makes me think I’ve not squandered loads of money.”

The studio is a converted barn, right? How did that come about?

JS: “Initially, we were looking for a place in town but everything we looked at was pegged to be luxury flats or offices and I couldn’t afford to buy a studio in London outright. Everytime James and I moved studios we went into a long let room that’d take two to three days to get rewired. Rather naively, I thought converting the barn would take about six to eight weeks to get done, but it took a year. Mixing in other people’s studios is great, but to replicate that in a home studio you realistically need the same space but 50% more room due to all the acoustic treatment. It was a very interesting process, but not one I’d want to do again.”

Derwin, what gear did you bring to Jas’s studio to complement his setup?

DS: “I brought a weird Nord Lead rack, an MPC and a modular case that has some ADAT WAV players and a good kick drum in it. Oh, and I also brought along my Korg 03R/W rackmount synth; it’s annoying to programme but sounds amazing.”

Did you set yourself limitations in terms of generating ideas and where to source them?

DS: “No, but we quickly found things that worked for us. Jas has a modded Roland TR-606, which was really nice to use because it trundled along and kept everything in tempo, even if we took some of the sounds out later. We clipped it quite hard through one of the channels to make it sound a bit fuzzier.”

JS: “Doing that meant we could get on with making patterns without having to think about the drums. I wouldn’t say we were jamming – you couldn’t compare what we do to a bunch of people playing 12-bar blues; we were winging it, but the key was that we’d fiddle with the sequencer and synths until we felt something worth recording appeared. At first, we did these huge long takes to document what we were doing and edit it up later, but we quickly realised that’s not fun; no one wants the gargantuan task of editing a 40-minute track. So we ended up going back to doing fairly concise 15-minute takes; the key was to make decisions as early as possible.” You’re both pretty familiar with modular gear?

JS: “Yes, I’ve got loads of modular tackle. For a long time it was my default way of understanding music. My modular stuff runs back to before proper Doepfer analogue systems. Derwin could have just come over and used my gear, but part of it was that I wanted to be using gear that I didn’t know that well because – and this going to sound unromantic – a new piece of gear is always full of songs. You seem to turn it on and there they are.”

DS: “For example, Jas has this small Yamaha TX81Z synth that I hadn’t used before and was sitting on the bottom of his rack. I sat on the beanbag, started mucking around with it and a lot of that ended up being on the record. I really liked the sound of everything that came out of it, which is ironic because Jas hadn’t used it for ages.”

JS: “Shamefully, I’d only used it for this one classic, house sound, which is the most conservative bass preset you could possibly imagine. The thing about the TX81Z is that it’s full of those big glassy ’80s FM sounds that you either love or loathe, and a tiny

frequency change turns something from being really smooth into absolutely horrible, but in a potentially nice way. The interface is like a membrane keyboard-type thing that’s hideous, so by the time you make a change, you’re sick of the whole idea of using it. But Derwin’s made of tougher stuff, and now I’ve gone and bought a controller for it.” We understand the Sequentix Cirklon played a big part in the creative process?

JS: “It couldn’t have happened without the Cirklon. James and I bought one for the Whorl album, but now Derwin’s bought one too. It’s just a MIDI sequencer that has a CV break out, but it’s brilliant. We’d swap all the synths in and out, but the Cirklon was the clock for everything.”

DS: “It felt so nice to use, very tactile and grabby. It’s got those old computer keyboard buttons that you get on a 909.”

JS: “It also has a useful level of programmability. It’s not like Max/MSP where you lose three days making a sequencer that crashes, but neither is it a sequencer that just goes round and round. The sequences can knock against each other and you get these strange fractal interferences where one sequence affects another. You’ll have an idea and set a couple of sequences going, but before you know it it’s doing something unexpected.” You’re both using modular gear, where you can choose to play the role of curator. To what extent do you think that’s a way of passing off the creative process?

JS: “The thing about modular is that it’s sort of like Lego. You’re not building something from nothing, you plug it together and each bit has enough of its own built-in intention.”

DS: “But then the Nord was also doing really weird stuff. I don’t know if all of it ended up on this record, we used it on a lot of tracks that don’t appear. What people assume with modular is that it’s going to go off and do its own thing, which it can do, but lots of equipment can do that, without being modular.”

JS: “At this point in time, I don’t think using modular gear is a particularly esoteric decision. It’s a bit strong to call it mainstream, but most people who make music these days are aware of it, might have some or are angry about the fact it’s quite expensive. It’s really fun, but you really don’t need it to make music. The bulk of the interesting sounds on this record came from a synth you could buy for £40, so I don’t think anyone should feel they’re selling themselves short by not having it.”

DS: “Besides, you can do so much with audio in Ableton now it’s crazy. That can also be set off on a path towards doing its own thing if you have the right plugins generating sequences for you and assign MIDI parameters to control them.”

JS: “So many producers create something amazing using Ableton and a couple of built-in effects. You’re right in that the gear or systems you use colour your decisions and the results of what you put out, but you can’t get away from what you use being part of the artistic process anyway.”

So what role did the computer play over and above simply recording?

JS: “I’ve got Pro Tools here and I don’t have any soft synths. Pro Tools is rubbish for soft synths anyway. It really was about patching everything into a sub mixer or separate channels before going into the DAW. We’re using it more like a tape machine, and during the editing process we’d just group all the tracks and cut or shuffle sections out until the track was a length we didn’t feel bored listening to. I’d say, to be honest, that you could do that in literally any DAW. I’m quite fast at editing on Pro Tools, but if you gave me a few months with another DAW I could have done it.”

Would you agree that a person’s familiarity with a DAW trumps anything the software can do?

JS: “In most cases that’s true of gear too. If you’ve got a bit of gear that you’re really proficient on, the process of going from A to B is shorter. There’s that trade-off between being able to use something intuitively and being ever so slightly bored with it. Even with modular gear, which is so open to being re-patched, you kind of know what it’s going to do.”

Luke Abbott mixed the album. What did he bring to the table?

DS: “Jas is used to mixing his own records, but I worked with Luke on my last album and thought he’d be a good fit for this project. He’s really good at mixing and it’s something he wants to do more of.”

JS: “Luke was a perfect fit and it’s not as if he came into it cold because Derwin was already sending work-in-progress cuts of what we’d been doing. It was nice, because we were working in a vacuum yet always had Luke’s encouragement. Sometimes when you’ve made stuff you’re a little bit blind as to which bits are best because you’re too close to them, but we have a lot of respect for what Luke does artistically and technically. It’s not that our demo mixes were bad, it was more about whether he could take them a bit further. He did a few and they all had something extra about them that we both liked.”

Is it possible to put into words what people can expect from this collaboration?

DS: “Oh man, you’ve asked the two worst people to describe it. It relates to what we both do. It’s quite melody heavy and quite notey [laughs]. The more music I make the less able I am to describe it, especially now I’m making so much different stuff. We didn’t get any vocalists in. Not that we couldn’t, but neither of us wanted to sing and it seemed like we had enough material.”

When the album was finished could you hear your identities coming through?

DS: “Other people tell me my music always sounds like me. They’d say it’s great and different but still sounds like you. I used to think that was awful – I always wanted to make music that sounds like the musicians I admired – but now I think it’s good I have my own sound even though I can’t hear it in my music. For this album, I couldn’t tell you how I hear it, but I’m excited to work on the next one.”

JS: “I can hear the Panda in it for sure, but I don’t think it sounds like a Panda record. We’re the wrong people to ask – the authority would be somebody who’s not been involved in it.”

DS: “Once a record is out there it becomes its own thing and the relationship you had with the music while you’re making it mutates. But it’s definitely made me open to collaborating with people more, and Jas. The new stuff we’ve started is fun, although we can’t say whether it will get released. I’ve got another project coming out in a few months under a different name; I don’t just want to be known as Gold Panda because I’m nearly 40 [ laughs].”

What else are you up to, Jas? JS:

“James and I often do other things. He does stacks of production, and although we’re really loyal friends, we’re not in each other’s pockets. Despite working together for 20 years, we always bring contrary elements to everything new we create.”

want to know more?

Selling’s new album, On

Reflection, is available now via the City Slang label. To purchase, visit selling.lnk.to/ OnReflection

“Most interesting sounds on this record came from a synth you can buy for £40”