EQ Magazine - February 2008 - (Page 20) A MOTLEY CREW BY MERRICK ANGLE Above: The Book of Knots (from left to right)—Matthias Bossi, Tony Maimone, Carla Kihlstedt, and Joel Hamilton. Below: A tasting of some of Studio G’s outboard arsenal. “With this band, we try to do everything wrong, proclaims guitarist/producer/engi” neer Joel Hamilton from the confines of his control room at Studio G Brooklyn. An established sonic wizard in his own right (his résumé includes everyone from Tom Waits and Elvis Costello to Sparklehorse and Unsane), Hamilton is speaking to the subject of practicing chaos theory in the studio with The Book of Knots—a collective that’s highly regarded in underground circles for its highly experimental and hardedged style. While based around Hamilton and core members Tony Maimone (Pere Ubu), Carla Kihlstedt (Tin Hat Trio, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum), and Matthias Bossi (Skeleton Key, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum), the “band” is a seemingly endless revolving door of guest musicians—all of whom are subject to Hamilton’s admittedly reckless tracking techniques. “I love sabotaging myself by limiting my choices to just one or two microphone makes for the majority of sources on an album, ” he says. “I think it gives each project a fingerprint. And I’m not afraid of using mics that are less than ideal on a session, either. I’ll toss in some crappy mic that I don’t mind dropping. I’ll throw it behind the piano, or put it behind the floor tom. Mic placement is not premeditated. I won’t sit there listening and scratching my chin while the drummer is playing in the room. I will literally walk in and drop a mic on the floor, just to see what I get in the mix. ” Harvesting spontaneous sounds is the name of the game on TBOK’s newest album, Traineater [Anti-]. But, according to Hamilton—who produced the album entirely at Studio G through his newly acquired Neve desk (“Thirty-two Neve 33114s in a 5316 frame, eight buses, and two channels of 33314 compressors built right in”)—gear-geekery is also a vital component in achieving The Book of Knots sound. “The more obscure the gear, the better, ” says Hamilton. “I love using pieces that distort the incoming signal until it’s almost unrecognizable.Take the McMartin limiter, for instance. It’s this incredibly strange piece of equipment that was manufactured in the Midwest in the ’70s. I don’t know whether the person who made it actually liked audio, because it seems to destroy everything it touches!” A good example of this unit in use is on the intro of “View from the Water Tower” where the music sounds “broken. ” “The speakers just shake with this insane amount of intermodulation distortion—like somebody hit a gigantic vibraslap in the room, says Hamilton. “That’s the McMartin ” limiter coming up to speed on a parallel bus across the drums and bass. It sounds as if the whole recording system is just reeling from the impact of that downbeat. I wanted to give the impression that we were so huge that recording technology 20 EQ FEBRUARY 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.