News
- Our biggest tour yet –March 11th, 2005View
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Our biggest tour yet — it may seem small to you, but it’s our biggest yet! Starting… now.
Schedule. - THE FINAL DAYS: A WRAPFebruary 23rd, 2005View
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THE FINAL DAYS:
A WRAP UP — PART II
You curdled minds,
It is time. You have reached that age. It is time that you know what went on during the dark final day at that recording studio…
CLICK - THE FINAL DAYS:A WRAP UPFebruary 17th, 2005View
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THE FINAL DAYS:
A WRAP UP — PART I
You cackling warlocks,
We wrapped recording last week, and the results, from what we can tell at this stage, will probably alter the world as we know it, one child at a time. It’s come time to append a satisfying conclusion onto our MacArthur grant-winning news coverage of the recording process, with all its hills and valleys, its hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cans of beer. Said conclusion will comprise two parts, the first of which you’re already 0.002% finished reading. Press on, loyal reader! And later this week you’ll be rewarded with Part II, which unlike Part I is guaranteed to contain at least one true fact. But now to digress.
The old days when records were recorded using little more than an acoustic guitar, some wax, a “microphone” (really just a coffee can on a wire), some beans, a top hat, a meter stick, a working knowledge of the calculus, and a drum — those days, for better or worse, are over. Nowatimes we have a quiver of high-tech tools and droids to assist us in sculpting the sound we desire; the thought of having to do without this army of wonderful assistants is enough to make a modern band queazy.
In this news update, then, we’d like to introduce you to our crew of digital henchmen, our infinitely helpful electrical aides de camp. For those of you who are in bands or like to geek out on musical equipment, this will add another dimension to your picture of us as a band. For those who aren’t super knowledgeable about this stuff, consider this a crash course.
Let’s start with maybe the single most important piece of equipment you’ll find in a modern studio. It’s called the Fidgeter.
Keeping guitars, vocals, and even drums in tune over the course of multiple takes is a tedious task, yet failure to do so can set a recording back hours, even days. Enter der Fidgeter.
We practically consider this device a god. What it does is this: say you’re singing, you’re singing along, and you’re really belting it out and the tape is rolling, but guess what — you’re singing out of key. Bam. The Fidgeter starts fidgeting. Like fucking crazy, truth be told. He shimmies, he squirms, he rattles and bucks, shivers, lunges, wheels, and jumps. It’s not the sort of thing you can ignore; the Fidgeter’s signaling is adamant. Thanks to the Fidge, our record is in key.
But what if you need to know not just when your junk is out of tune, but when it SUCKS, when it’s really actually junk. Introducing The Skunk Trunk.
Here’s how it works. You see the tape spools? Okay, well when you’re playing or singing and what you’re bringing into the world is junk, The Skunk Trunk spins those wheels and shoots tape out onto the floor. Imagine giving a roll of toilet paper a good spin on its spool and you’ve got a solid idea of what this looks like. You can’t ignore it! What’s more, it makes you feel terrible. It’s way worse than getting shocked with electricity. It makes recording a pretty dreadful process; you just stand there playing very mechanically as your mental attention glares anxiously at the The Skunk Trunk — Is Skunk Trunk about to vomit its awful brown spit into the air, signaling my suckiness? Does Skunk Trunk think what I’m doing is junk? Will he sound the alarm? This is what you’re thinking about instead of playing your part well for the kids in China. J.C. Chasez won’t work with a Skunk Trunk in the building, he fears it so. TV personality Bill Maher refers to himself, perhaps presumptively, as “Society’s Skunk Trunk”. It’s known that Dick Cheney calls himself that as well. Does Dick Cheney also recognize Bill Maher as Society’s Skunk Trunk? What about the inverse? Does Cheney refer to Society’s Skunk Trunk, the abstract concept, as Bill Maher? Unknown. All unknown, and perhaps unknowable. This machine, though, the Skunk Trunk, is GREAT.
Hey, here’s another gadget:
What’s that you say? You say that’s not a gadget at all? You say it’s nothing but a bag of average everyday totally un-exotic pencils? Well, wrong. First of all, they don’t even look like pencils; if anything they look like cotton swabs. Pencils? Jesus. Sometimes you can be really thick. Goddamn. Can’t believe you said that looks like a bag of pencils. It seems to us maybe you don’t even deserve to know what exactly these special guitar pics do. Well, we’re feeling generous, so we’ll tell you; in the future maybe just try to think for five seconds before burping out a word that appears in your head. So here’s what these guitar pics do: they allow the user to very gently pic the strings of his guitar. And yes, they’re roughly the size and shape of pencils, but how you failed to take in anything about them beyond their rough size and shape… sometimes you baffle us. Not in a good way.
But enough about that glorified sack of pencils! Let’s have a look at the g-damn motherload! The guitarist’s PEDAL BOARD…
Okay, so number one up there, that’s the Scum Puppy; it gives the guitar a really clean, pretty sound, like a harp. Number 2 is, as you can see, the Memory Man. It’s a voice recorder, like you might carry around in your jacket pocket to record song or business ideas, but this one is right there on the pedal board so you can bottle ideas that come while you’re shredding. Number 3 is an extension pedal. Let’s say you have a ten foot cord and a 12 foot cord but you need 20 ft. of cord distance. All you gotta do is plug the cords into either side of the extension pedal, you’re done. Number 4 is called The Tug Boat; it’s an effects pedal that gives your guitar sound a very subtle, very mild tugging sound. Just a minor tug; you almost don’t notice it. Now, number 5 is obviously a FULL-DRIVE 2 pedal, which basically drives the signal that’s coming through a cord from your guitar, drives it into another cord. So it’s sort of the ‘Kleenex’ of extension pedals. It’s a great extension pedal. What else is there?
Okay, pedal 6 there is what’s called an ‘MD3′, or a ‘Metal Detector 3′. This baby detects metal, detects it big time. You play a metal riff, the little red LED light lights up; you play non-metal — nothing, no light. Can be very useful. And then number 7 is obviously a little power station for all your pedals, but since it’s made by the dark-minded folks over at Voodoo Labs, you know there’s something special about it. And indeed there is: this pedal has the same power as, like, a charm or a talisman. Finally you have pedal 8. Alternately known as The Green Goblin, The Green Machine, The Greengrocer, The Thing of Green, Old Green Eyes, The Shrub, Soylent Green, Green Gourd, and Gourd of Green, is this pedal.
Have you ever seen one of these?
Sure? Take another look:
It’s a lamp. A common house lamp. Some call it a ‘lantern’. Some call it ‘boy’. Embarrassed? That you didn’t recognize a lamp, as common a household object as you could ask for? Get out of here. We can’t bear the sight of you. Go — just go. Click here and be gone. - DAY 22 You single-chambered revolvers,January 31st, 2005View
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DAY 22
You single-chambered revolvers,
It’s Monday, but this is the music world. That means that instead of coming out of the bullpen with sleep in our eyes, our limbs half-numb from a weekend of hibernation and recovery, and determining that a bunt is the only reasonable way to meet the workweek’s opening pitch — instead of doing, in other words, what the rest of you did today, we decided to step up to the plate and swing. GodDAMN it went well!
Rob was in rare form, which he managed, paradoxically, by acting normal. Here he is a couple of hours into the afternoon, a few seconds after his third or fourth wind deserted him:
Okay, Rob just saw us creating this post and requested that no more pictures of him drunk ‘n’ passed out appear on this website, or at the very least on today’s post. We explained to him that for reasons of osmosis, his wish is unlikely to be granted: there are only a couple hundred pictures of Rob passed out drunk on the internet right now, but there are thousands, thousands, on our computer. Those pictures are bound to find their way from this cramped harddrive into the spacious fields of the world wide web. Nevertheless, a promise was made, and we will of course abide by it.
Here is a picture taken at the studio about an hour after the last one, but this is maybe some other guy :
We’ve never formally introduced Ariel Rechtshaid, our producer, to you guys, so we’d like to do that now in the form of a short but comprehensive pictorial montage:
Ariel’s showing you his favorite column from Big Black Butt magazine there: “Ms. Powerbosom BUTTS IN”. Here’s a good quote: “Those of you who follow my adventures monthly know that my hearty appetite for sex has gotten me into quite a few interesting situations. [paragraph break] Last night, I was hungry and ordered a pizza.” Needless to say, shit gets CRAZY from there. Fast-forward a couple of paragraphs: “I opened my eyes to find the window washer in my room, kneeling between my legs.” And from there, you must believe that shit just gets absolutely crazy.
Okay, sorry for that tangent. Seriously, we’re a bit fascinated by Big Black Butt right now. It’s pretty amazing. But we totally realize that it has nothing to do with the new We Are Scientists album, which is what we’re supposed to be dishing about here, so, y’know, sorry. Let’s get back to the important stuff.
Tomorrow: amps and guitar tone! As addressed covertly in the pages of Big Black Butt! - DAYS 14-20 You expanding polarJanuary 29th, 2005View
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DAYS 14-20
You expanding polar ice caps,
The recording of the guitars has begun, and sweet merciful mephistopheles is it ever going well. After hours and hours of tinkering with the set up, we’ve hit on a simple, elegant way of getting gorgeous guitar and bass sounds.
Guys, this album is going to sound amazing! But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. You, the uninformed, are desperate for details, so let’s back up a bit and make with the play by play.
On Saturday Keith and Chris got the hell out of NYC like a couple of majorly sane dudes. As they threw — literally threw, as hard as they could — their guitars into the back of a cab in the popular Brooklyn neighborhood known affectionately to locals as Williamsburgle, The Confetti That Requires No Clean Up began falling. Two hours later, they managed to tear away from tiny seat-back televisions long enough to wink at the blizzard-engulfed runway with a camera.
Pity darkened Keith’s face while disdain flashed briefly across Chris’s, then the two returned to the second Predator film, the one starring Danny Glover, Maria Conchita Alonso, Bill Paxton, Gary Busey, Meryl Streep, Christian Slater, River Phoenix, and Stephen Colbert.
The little red line didn’t have to crawl far across Mapquest-sponsored America before views improved. And of course by Saturday late afternoon We Are Scientists’ premier only two guitarists were neck deep in LA sunjuice.
Studio work began on Monday, and there was great excitement when we arrived to find that Mr. Rob Brill, who had done such excellent work with our drums during week one, would be working the boards to match our Ultimate Drum Sound with an Ultimate Bass Sound. Rob got right to work.
No but seriously, after a couple hours of tinkering with amps and pre-amps and after-amp effects and cables in a variety of colors, we hit upon a terrific bass sound and laid down a few miles of track.
With Ariel, Rob, Lewis, and Chris’s fingers — the fingers of a working pickpocket — aligned in cause, we skated through the bass with few setbacks. Now it’s Saturday and guitar tracking has begun after two days of messing with amps and EQ. So many amps. Maybe on Monday we’ll bring you a photo expos - DAYS 4-6 You Blind Filmgoers,January 16th, 2005View
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DAYS 4-6
You Blind Filmgoers,
Day 4 saw the number of band members doing absolutely nothing skyrocket from two to a one-week high of three (out of three!). Since Michael got all his drums done in the first three days, this day consisted of Top Gun Drum Engineer Rob Brill and Producer Ariel Rechtshaid editing and cleaning up tracks, loading everything off the studio’s computers, etc., while the gentlemen of We Are Scientists concentrated on breathing 70 degree air and sitting up straight. Here’s a shot of Michael passing the time while Rob toils away in earnest:
Actually, we did accomplish something on Day 4 - DAY 3 You Pleasant Dirtbags:January 13th, 2005View
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DAY 3
You Pleasant Dirtbags:
Michael nailed song after song after song over the last 48 hours, and at 6:29 p.m. on this, the third day of recording, all the drum tracks are in the basket. “In the basket”, by the way, is a music industry term that means, basically, the stuff is now inside the basket. Still not clear? This pictorial essay should explain everything:
Michael does his thing, which all the pictures and words in the world couldn’t explain to you. Best for you to think of it as magic. As you can see, there were many mics on the guy; all told, 126 mics. Yep, 126 mics. No, you credulous idiot! But seriously, there were 17 mics on the guy, which if you think about it is a lot of mics. You, for instance, will never have more than one mic recording anything you do, maybe. But history cares quite a lot about what’s going on in that sound room when Michael’s rapping out his rhythms, and so the government has asked that we have at least 17 mics recording everything he does.
Rob Brill, Master of Drums, sits next to the highly nuanced, incredibly sensitive, massively articulate, infinitely scalable mega-soundboard that mixes all those mics, and puts his feet up on it.
Producer Ariel takes a five and a half hour time-out on the couch with Rob’s birthday champagne.
The whole gang. From right: Chris, Michael, Ariel, Rob, and, on the far left, some random dude who wandered in from the parking lot and started drinking Rob’s birthday whisky (Johnny Walker Black). And since there was a big swath of bare wall in the picture, you’ve also got Lewis’s head up there peering down on us benevolently, wondering where’s his whisky.
Speaking of Lewis, he continues to kick the ass of all comers. One of the best games to play with Lewis is to take him up to the top of the stairs and set him down and then return to the bottom of the stairs and crouch down and wiggle your fingers around on the lip of one of the lower stairs like a pack of small crazy worms here to threaten Lewis’s territory. Lewis responds with maximum brio: he launches himself down the stairs at a speed three times too fast to be safe, knowing that the mad invading worms can’t possibly deal with such a high-speed assault, not one brought to the table by a little tiny cat. In conclusion: Lewis is going to be a tremendous addition to our nation’s military.
- DAY 1 You Lemon-Flavored Canaries:January 11th, 2005View
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DAY 1
You Lemon-Flavored Canaries:
Today begins one month of recording on our new, yet to be named, yet to be declared “monumental” full-length record. How many songs will it boast? Which will they be? Will the sound be ‘raw ‘n’ ragged’ or ‘polished ‘n’ drained of life’? Even these things are not yet known. We intend to keep you up to date on them and many other often totally irrelevant pieces of information as they develop over the next thirty or so days, in what will surely be an unprecedented level of activity on this, the freqently ignored, typically disdained News section.
So you’ve just learned — if you were paying any attention at all to the words and their order and, in turn, their meanings — that today is the first day of recording. But what, you are right to ask, the hell was yesterday and the day before that and so on going back five days or so? Your instinct for a story is uncanny. We were doing “pre-production”, which ostensibly involves solidifying arrangements and deciding tempos, but which actually amounted to little more than this:
That’s Producer Ariel Rechtshaid there on the left with Baloo, dog and jedi. On the right, Keith eases into his third straight hour of watching Spats and her 5 tiny kittens lie there and sometimes worm around a little. We also recorded some scratch tracks and stuff, but that doesn’t make for very good pictures — animals do. People want to see animals; as long as the We Are Scientists are in charge of this page, that’s exactly what you’re going to see.
Okay so then, yesterday (Monday) night we flew into Long Beach, and went directly to W.A.S. patron saint Greg Fishbein’s house in West LA, where we’re staying while we’re out here, and guess what, there was an animal at Greg’s. It was this guy, Lewis:
What a little hero Lewis is, and what towering rages he visits on the apartment, like a squirrel possessed by Dionysus. Lewis is made of elastic. Anticipate regular Lewis updates here for the next month.
And today we hit the studio to begin a week of drum tracking. To all you poor bastards who don’t live in LA, eat your goddamn hearts out cuz this is the weather we’ve been presented with:
That first shot’s Sonora, the studio where we weave the magical music capes. Then there’s Michael Tapper pondering the LA river, which is quite a sight to see right now for Los Angelinos, who have seen water in the ocean and in bottles but never splashing all over the land like this. The volumetric abomination has been caused by many weeks of unceasing rain here in LA, a series of highly-uncharacteristic tempests that ended hours after we arrived at the airport last night. For this, LA owes us and they know it. Everywhere we go people are recognizing us and saying thanks. We’re just like, “No big deal: it benefits us, too.”
No pix of recording today, no lusty equipment shots; there’ll be plenty of that in the days to come. Just to give you an idea of what Sonora’s innards look like, though, here’s a shot of Chris in the bathroom posing with a neon cactus:
So you see, there’s a neon cactus in the bathroom, which augurs very well for this recording. - You iron-jawed romantics, She lovesNovember 26th, 2004View
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You iron-jawed romantics,
She loves me, she loves me not; she loves me, she loves me not; loves me, loves me not, We Are Scientists’ new EP has arrived. Never was a more encouraging petal plucked. Get a look at this thing:
God it’s beautiful. The Wolf’s Hour is our favorite child. It’s not only forward-thinking, it’s charismatic. It not only smells good, it tastes like s’mores. It not only kicks ass, it’s also a phenomenal kisser. Gaze on the tracklist:Inaction
Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt
The Great Escape
This Scene Is Dead
This Means War
Callbacks Under the SeaThat’s right, CALLBACKS UNDER THE SEA
- You who wheeze when youOctober 14th, 2004View
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You who wheeze when you walk:
There’s something borderline paradoxical about having a News page when you’re a Top Secret Rock Agency like the We Are Scientists. So few details are cleared for public consumption, so little of what we do would be excused by mainstream morality, that nearly everything we end up feeding you is a lie, a fetid, fly-swarmed lie. Just once, we’d like to tell the truth. Of course most of what we tell you will just be hinting
