Many thanks for this.

I'm a big fan of Echospace / Deepchord etc.
These guys are true production masters.

Have a search for the Textura interview Deepchord did - some of the production techniques will blow your mind!

Here's some excerpts



6. The aforementioned “Aequinoxium” is thirteen minutes but could seemingly go on forever. What is it that dictates how long a particular track should be? Also, what prompted you to opt for the maximum 80-minute running time for the CD presentation rather than a more svelte 50-minute suite?

ROD: If it were up to me, every track would be six hours long. I'm a big fan of long players. I like to sleep to my music. With many Deepchord tracks (Deepchord 10 comes to mind), I would drop out the percussion, and let the loop go for days around the house. I love this. I need sonic ambience around me all the time. I have Marpac white noise generators throughout my house, and constantly play stuff like Brian Eno's Neroli or Distant Rituals by Chris Meloche. Steve is the sensible one who will let me know when a track has gone on long enough.

7. Rod, you've been producing music since the mid-‘80s and have a discography that lists as many as sixty releases. It's also known that, in the earlier years of production, your music leaned towards electro-acoustic, musique concrete, and field recordings. Can you highlight some of the ways that the Deepchord sound has evolved over time?

ROD: I learned quite a bit from making the earlier electro-acoustic stuff. I learned to listen well. This is very important. There is a lot about this in my favorite book, The Mysticism of Sound by Hazrat Inayat Khan. So much music seems rushed. I like music that unfolds in slow motion, so the listener doesn't miss anything. I like to show my listeners a frame-by-frame scan. Time-stretched to see the details. Pull apart the fabric of sound so you can see what's in between the grains, and zoom into (normally) unheard realms. Musicians like to play it safe and stay in familiar waters. I've spent many nights sitting outside with my eyes closed, DAT machine running, dummy head mic off in the distance. Sitting and listening to the air moving. Feeling the pressure zones shift. When you listen deeply, you can start to comprehend a world of sound beyond typical reality.

The Deepchord sound has evolved over time. The atmospheric elements have become more important. In later Deepchord records, I moved away from synthesizers and more into sampling because I was having a difficult time getting the otherworldly sounds that I was seeking out of synthesizers. I was sampling strange cosmic sounds, like those of the sun, and strange atmospheres of places that people rarely go (like Turkish bat-houses and metaphysically-charged forests). You can't get sounds like those from a synthesizer. You hear bizarre stuff like that in later period Deepchord (deeply mixed in and processed). In the beginning, it was more about making a groove. I don't really care about that so much anymore. I prefer to concentrate on emotional charge. A chord should drive an emotional thunderbolt through the listener's heart. It's about raw mood now.

Steve brings strong musicianship to the table. He's an exceptional musician who has played in jazz bands for years. I consider myself more of a producer. I understand the science of sound. Steve can blow you away playing the piano. It's a great combination at the end of the day. The Deepchord records are a little more experimental. I try to make endless loops, and with Steve we make songs. The Deepchord sound is like watching a film that's out of focus, but has really bright, fascinating colors moving around the screen. Still very nice to watch. In this context, Steve focuses the projector a little. Deepchord is a very dadaistic art form. Echospace isn't. It may be difficult to believe it when listening to drift-tracks like “Aequinoxium,” but Echospace is far more focused than Deepchord: more clearly defined lines; more of a defined sound in mind prior to hitting the record button.


ROD: Much of the sounds in The Coldest Season are sourced from my midnight recording sessions: running around with a portable DAT machine at 2 am in the drizzle. I take many non-musical sounds and tune them into a musical tone. It's all about the sounds that I use, and how they're manipulated. The sounds are taken out of context, and (during mixdown) are removed from the mix before anyone can determine their origin. Every sound that we use has a very specific shelf-life, the amount of time that the sound is allowed to live in the mix. Some more obvious sounds are only allowed to swim around for a second or two; others are allowed to breath longer. But every sound has a very specific life cycle. Synth tones help to glue it all together; synths are the bonding element that turns these abstract sounds into songs.

Also, sounds in my library are graded in terms of brightness and color. I have files of green sounds, red sounds, brown sounds, etc. Sometimes the mix will call for a green sound with a brightness rating of three, sometimes a green sound with a brightness rating of nine is necessary. Sometimes I listen to a mix and need a red four to complete it. Friends who see my system are always freaked out. Sound isn't always sound. It's floating globs of sensory-manipulating dark matter. It's all about the overall physiology of tone and understanding how to assemble the pieces into a psychotropic highball.

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