How were you involved in making music before you started Solex?
In my first band I was a singer, and I've been a singer in a few bands and a drummer in one band, an all girl band. I did play guitar for a while but I've never played guitar in a band. I had classical guitar lessons, with a Spanish guitar, but it's not really used if you're playing pop music, I'm afraid.
You just happened to get a sampler at an auction?
Yes, that's correct. I went to that auction to buy CDs for the shop, because we only sell second hand CDs, so the first year we had to go to a lot of auctions. They sell a lot of stuff at this auction, they sell refrigerators, and drum sets, you name it they've got it. They had this sampler and an 8-track tape recorder, and I already had a 4-track tape recorder at home, so I knew how to work with that and I got it on the first bid, so it was really good.
How has your studio set up changed since then?
It was a very old sampler, it was only an 8 bit sampler. So the first Solex record, Solex vs. the Hitmeister, is made with that old sampler, and you can hear it a little bit because the sound quality isn't one hundred percent. After that I thought I might want to use a better sampler, so I bought a new sampler and I bought a digital 16-track recorder. I made the second record with that stuff and also the third record.
Now that you've bought a Macintosh G4 are you going to be using it for recording?
I'm not sure yet. Actually, when I started playing live with Solex I used backdrop projections, I went on my bike through Amsterdam with a camera on my shoulder and filmed the whole ride and I projected that during the show. Then my camera broke down and I didn't do it for a while, but now I really want to get into that again. I want to use Final Cut Pro, that's a video editing program, and so I want to use the computer more for film than music. I might use it for music as well, but I'm still very happy with the 16-track digital recorder.
And what kind of recorder is that?
It's a Roland 1680, it's one of the first 16-track digital recorders, and now they have only 8 tracks and 18 and 24 tracks. But it's very handy and it's got a lot of effects in it and I know how to work with it really well now so I've gotten used to it.
Is your approach when you're learning a new piece of gear to jump right in and play around with it?
Most of the time I just try to work with it immediately but then I have to get the manual after fifteen minutes anyway because I bump into problems. So in the end I read the whole manual, but I don't really start by reading the manual. It's also too abstract if you just read the manual and you're not working with it at the same time.
I read that you wrote forty songs for Low Kick and Hard Bop, is that right?
Yeah, I thought, "Well I'm really going to take my time for this one," because I didn't have much time for Pick Up, so I wanted to have the luxury so that I could make songs to fill the record. The idea was that I had a lot of options. And also I really wanted to add something with a new record. So you need a lot more songs so you can choose.
That's a lot of songs! Do you have a regular schedule that you follow to write that much music?
I don't really have a schedule, but I just go to the studio every day and so some days are really productive, and other days I don't manage to get things done, but every day I go to the studio and try to work on songs.
Your studio is still in the basement of your CD store?
Yeah it is. Lots of material to sample from.
Tell me how your sampling has evolved over the past three records.
For the first record I had the most pleasure in finding really terrible CDs, which were also the cheapest CDs in the store. They were very unknown or just very badly recorded or very bad songs, and the challenge for me was to find really good segments on these terrible records. And I still kind of have that approach. Because for one thing, the thrill is bigger when you can find a good fragment on a lousy CD. If you go to make a sample from a CD that's already really good, there's not that much fun in playing around with something that's already good. So it's nice to make something good from something bad. For the second record I also made recordings on the street like street noises, and I also wanted to sample from bootlegs and I made a lot of bootlegs myself. I just went to small venues in and around Amsterdam with a DAT recorder. So the second record is more or less a "live" record — although it's a studio album, of course — because most of the sounds come from live recordings. And on the third record, I didn't want to limit myself or conceptualize the source of sampling, so I thought, "Okay, I'm going to sample everything I can get my hands on." I still want to have bad records, but I also used street noises and bootlegs. Lately I've also been listening to a lot of hip-hop. I never really wanted to sample human voices, but I tried to rap myself but I didn't really do a good job, maybe because I'm not from a ghetto or something. I thought maybe I can get a solution for that by sampling a lot of voices and cut and paste them together in a way that you could get a rap. So I tried that, but it didn't really work the way that I hoped it would work, because you completely miss the flow, of course, if you take fragments of words and glue them together. It became more like a sound effect instead of a rap.
How about the noisy deaf people mentioned in your press info, are those people you know?
I also took a lot of voices from TV and from radio, and so I just watched programs where there was a lot of talking because I needed to sample voices. I didn't want to have any voices of well known people, because you can recognize it immediately, which makes it harder to use if you don't want to pay clearances. So I ended up using words of people that were in quizzes [game shows], like they were only once on TV as contestants. I also bumped into an English documentary about deaf people, and they were really noisy and rowdy and I don't even know what they were talking about anymore because I was so focused on the way their voices sounded. I thought it sounded great.
