By Keith Walsh
Ricardo Autobahn and Jenny McLaren of Spray have taken full advantage of a digital/analog setup to make their latest album, the remarkable Ambiguous Poems About Death, on the Analogue Trash label. With skillful songwriting, masterful female vocals, and lots of synth wizardry, the 12 track set pulls off the impressive trick of evoking both ABBA and Kraftwerk while giving listeners something to dance to.
“That’s actually very true, in fact,” said Autobahn, in a phone call from Lancashire, England. “The idea of trying to make an ABBA sounding harmony, but with Kraftwerk features is very Spray. It’s a very Spray thing that, yes.” As for McLaren’s wonderful soprano voice, it gives Spray a unique focal point. “Because we’re brother and sister, we have been singing together since we were kids and I’ve always insisted since we were children that she should sing an English accent, because everybody sings the American accent and it’s a blurs into one after a bit. If you keep your accents, you’ve got this sort of uniqueness about you that will always be pinpoint-able.”
I asked, what’s the secret of Spray’s glossy sheen? Turns out it’s all about the bass–and layers, according to Autobahn. “We do like a glossy sheen don’t we?” he replied. “Layers–it’s all down to layers. Don’t just put one synthesizer on when you can layer five. Don’t get Jenny to sing two harmonies when she can sing four. We don’t have to worry about using a tape anymore these days. It’s all digital. Let’s just put as much as we can and worry about the mix later. That’s how Spray ends up sounding so glossy.”
Knowing that Spray use a fun gadget, the Behringer TD-3 for bass, I told Autobahn that I appreciated the heavy low end of the mix, where you can feel the beats. I asked him about how he used this Behringer copy of the famous Roland TB-303 “Bassline” from the early 1980s. “This is our top tip, “he said, “for using the TD-3. Program (your bassline) into the TD-3. Then record it into the audio of your computer –do it twice. Do it once as a square wave and once as a sawtooth, and then mix them together and the imperfections that you get from your twiddling your dials all blend together nicely and you get this really fat sound. It’s a really funky idea.”
Brushes With Fame
Autobahn has been making electronic since at least the 90s, with a few close brushes with fame, including a performance at Eurovision in 2006, where he played for tens of thousand of music fans in a massive stadium in Greece — and millions of European TV viewers — with the project Daz Sampson and the song “Teenage Life.” And though Eurovision is largely unknown in the United States, it’s been a big deal in Europe since the 1950s.
Another adventure was with his project with McLaren, called The Cuban Boys, with the remix of the already famous “Hamster Dance” song. “We got this sampler for our Atari ST In about 1998,” said Autobahn, “and we were just messing around with it. We accidentally started making these really, I like to call them avant-garde novelty records. Whatever we could find, because this is before YouTube or Spotify. So the only things we could sample were the things we actually have on hand. So it was our dad’s old jazz records and things like that — and the “Hamster Dance” record. We were the first people to sample the “Hamster Dance” and make a hit out of it. So we did it in a very oblique avant-garde kind of way. And by some bizarre fluke, the public really took it to heart and it became a huge hit.”
I told Autobahn that “The Hamster Dance” song held great memories for me. He said: “I remember when I heard it the first time on the ‘Hamster Dance’ website. I was crying with laughter. It was so brilliant. Then we sampled it and put the drum beat behind it and it was such a perfect thing — the perfect moment.”
Computer Love
For their latest work with Spray, Autobahn and McLaren achieve their unique sound with a somewhat unexpected DAW first used on a trial run that turned out to be permanent. “I use FL Studio and used to use Cubase for years,” said Autobahn. “But then five or six years ago, there were all these tutorials popping up on YouTube from like twelve year old thirteen year old kids showing you how to make dance music, and they are all using FL Studio.. So I thought, you know what? I’ll try and get in with the mainstream. I’ll see what the kids are doing, in my decrepit old age. So I transferred over to FL Studio ‘temporarily’….We find it very flexible and quite nice to use.”
Autobahn said he remembers his Casio CZ-1000 fondly, and his latest faves are a bunch of soft synths, including Ana 2. Of the Casio: “It was a really chunky digital keyboard, and the fact that it said Casio on it was quite bad, because if you have anything of Casio, you think it’s terrible. But it was this really brilliant digital synthesizer. I’ve got some so many fond memories of it because it was just a beat-up old thing and it just made these great crazy sounds that we did a lot of Cuban boys stuff on it.”
Autobahn started using virtual synths a couple decades ago, but is still obsessed with hardware synths as well. “When we started the Cuban boys in 99, 2000, that was when soft synths are coming in. So we never really got a lot of gear. It’s only recently, we’ve started playing live, really started buying gear, and I bought one of the new Korg Wavestates. That’s an incredible machine. It’s like, it’s like a NASA spec synthesizer. It’s brilliant, I absolutely love it. You just tinker about with it for ages. And you never know what you’re going to come up with, you never know what sound you’re going to find or what sequencer pattern you’re going to come up with. So great.”
I asked Autobahn what drum sounds he used on the album. “It’s basically just computer (sounds) — Vengeance samples and things,” he said. “There are loops in there, but it’s mainly some kick hits and snare hits and things that we’ve just collected over the years. We do have an Alesis SR 16 kicking around which we’ve used since the Middle Ages, to be honest. Yeah, and that’s mainly for live stuff. If it seems a bit faff to get it involved in studio production when it’s all there on the computer.”
I asked if he had any other Behringer gear aside from the TD-3. “I I bought one called the MS-1, that’s the SH-101 ripoff. Yeah, mainly for live stuff as a keytar to play live, but it also looks kind of old school and chunky and 80s. Yeah, we use that in live a lot. It’s quite heavy as well. The TD-3 is a very flimsy light piece of kit, but the MS-1 is very heavy, very sturdy and very impressive. I’ve plugged in a few times in the studio just to get a few sequences going. It’s a lot of fun to just mess around with to be honest. I never had an original SH-101. So I’m sort of living the childhood that I never had.”
The Mix
The mix of Ambiguous Songs About Death makes it perfect for the dance floor. And that’s by design, according to Autobahn. “I think a lot of there’s a lot of synth music nowadays,” he said, “and people don’t really care about the bass anymore. The bass frequencies — it may because people are listening on their telephones, I don’t want to sound like I’m 100 years old, but maybe because people are on telephones. Bass isn’t so important anymore, but I do like to get the lower frequencies dancing a bit.” As for the arrangements: “It’s always a very pop arrangement we try and come up with – a vocal and musical accompaniment that’s always in our mind, like there’s a sheet music arrangement.”
Another secret of Spray’s sound is that they make music that’s proudly weird, and not like everything else. “Everything’s become very homogenized of late,” said Autobahn, “and I think it always has been . And I always like the bands who managed to make pop music but make it unique and different so it stands out. The KLF springs to mind and Sparks who are big these days. They always try to make melodic mainstream music, but at the same time it’s very unique and very you can always tell it’s them. And we’ve always tried to do that…you know, we don’t like blending off the rough edges. We’d like to leave in the mistakes and things like that.”
Spray On Bandcamp
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Analogue Trash
(Featured photo by Phil Fletcher.)
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