With TV On The Radio, you were in a band where the producer, Dave Sitek, was one of the members of the band. How did that effect your approach to recording?
TV On The Radio started pretty shortly after I met Dave. We met because I was living in Brooklyn in an old cheesecake factory that – after having been abandoned for 75 years – was turned into artist lofts. It was 2,600 square feet – bare, raw space, and I was among the first residents there. It didn't have a bathroom and barely had lights. There was plywood on the windows. I and a few other artist friends moved in there; ten of us moved in and made these rooms, and the rent was a $100 a month. It was like a shantytown; it had rotating roommates and one of the people who came in – about two years after I moved there – was Dave. He was a musician and had a recorded a few bands. Dave and I started hanging out because one day I walked past this room, and inside Dave's room was a bunch of acrylic paint tubes, packs and packs of cigarettes, a 4-track that had a bunch of cassette tapes stacked all around it, and a few keyboards, a guitar, and a sampler. The reason I stopped and stared for a bit was because, "Oh, that looks like my room." [laughter] I also had the 4-track Tascam, a bunch of instruments – noisemakers, samplers, and some toy instruments – and I was also surrounded by paints. We started hanging out, making art together, and trading 4-track tapes that we had. That's where our camaraderie started, as far as music making goes. The first thing that we ever put out was a compilation of songs from those 4-tracks called OK Calculator, a weird, silly homage to Radiohead's OK Computer. It was this compilation of the 4-track tapes that we traded before there was even an idea of becoming a "band" or whatever. David is more a musician – more of an instrumentalist – than I am. We went from trading tapes to developing songs, where Dave would take a song that I had written – with whatever rudimentary keyboard on it – and then he would flesh it out. That's how it would go; I would record on a 4-track and leave it to my instrumentalist friends to bring it around into being a song that other people would want to listen to, as opposed to just me. [laughter]
When you were recording on Tascam 4-tracks they were already "vintage." Most people had moved onto [Alesis] ADATs and other developing digital formats.
It's funny, because I started recording on Tascam 4-tracks as a result of being into the whole system of indie recording, where people were tracking in their bedrooms. I came to that in 1994 and 1995, in the punk tradition of, "Anyone can do this. You don't have to know an instrument. You can do whatever." So, I did a bunch of a cappella or beatboxing. I was not a technical person back then at all. I'm barely a technical person now! [laughs] But something that recorded individual tracks on a cassette tape, that was something that worked for my brain.
You were influenced by artists like Sebadoh and early Liz Phair?
Yeah, exactly. Eric's Trip and a lot of K Records artists.
You started as an illustrator and ended-up sonically building montages. I wonder how the visual played into that approach of recording?
I feel it's always been soundtrack-y sci-fi. That's the way that I've always seen it. When we started doing it, we recorded our EP Young Liars in 2002. This is after 9/11, after Y2K, and all of that shit. It was really fucking disturbing; especially that winter and into the next year. Listening to those songs on Young Liars now, it's a vast, dystopian, science fiction soundtrack to me. It's like the process of laying out a frame for an expansive outer space scene in a science fiction movie. You have the first sketch on a notepad, which is a demo. You take that sketch in and start layering washes of color on it, making the stars shine a little more; but I'm also adding layers onto this to turn it into an engaging panorama. It's all come from that single idea, but the more you layer on it – just like with painting – it becomes more and more expansive and more immersive.
I visited Chalice Recording in Hollywood with Kyp Malone [TV On The Radio co-singer, guitarist, and songwriter] when Dear Science was being mixed. Dave was showing how many of the songs had over a hundred tracks.
Yeah. A little excessive! [laughs] One thing you will notice about those records is the track count. There's been an arc. The first EP was actually not a bunch of tracks. On the first album [Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes] there are more tracks; ones that don't really need to be there. On the third record [Dear Science] there are plenty of tracks. They all fit where they should be. It sounds good, strong, and different. It sounds like us. On the next record all of that is refined, but we were starting to subtract instead, not putting as many tracks on. Writing stronger songs and not having to dress them up. That's what the arc has been. If you listen to our first EP and our last album [Seeds], they have more in common, sonically, than those in-between, in terms of a clarity of instrumentation serving a song. In between we got to a point where sometimes the ability to add more tracks could take away from other stuff. I don't know. Sometimes the simpler something can be, you can still occupy a nice vast territory, but not have to fill it up.
Negative space and restraint are highly undervalued.
You don't have to layer so much on top in order to make it present.
At what point does something stop getting better and possibly becomes worse?
It's kind of like you wrap it in plastic.
That is what a lot of pop music sounds like.
This thing in so much plastic. It is shiny, though!
What's a favorite vocal microphone?
I'm very meat and potatoes about it. It's Shure Beta 58A.
Do you like to hold it when you track?
I will usually have it on a stand, as I like to stand up when I'm singing.
For energetic reasons?
Yes, for energy. If I'm sketching something out, I'll be sitting. And I do sometimes have a mic sitting on a little desk. But if I'm doing something that's more final, I want to free up my arms and put my body into it.
You are expressive with your arms when you sing live.
In a more formal studio, the Neumann U 47 is something that seems to work pretty well for me. And I also like the [Shure] SM7. But what I use the most is the Beta 58A.
Do you have a piece of studio equipment that you like to use?
I'm sitting at my desk right now, so I can tell you exactly: a Line 6 delay pedal – the DL4. It's a simple guitar pedal. There I can do loops, and I can lay out long, long melodies and chord progressions, a cappella, to make sketches on. I will go through that into the [Universal Audio] Volt interface, and I'm using Ableton [Live] to record.
That's how you write a lot of the songs?
