What was the raw state of the tracks when Moby came to mix at Chung King?
Everything was pretty dialed in to where he wanted it. I think he wanted to send this stuff into the Neve VR desk to give it some character, depth and dimension. I cleaned up some lax edits and made things seamless where he might have initially hodgepodged them together.
Were you surprised to see that Moby's editing work was less than perfect?
No. When you get the spark of an idea, you just want to get it down and start building upon it without worrying, "Is that exactly right?" There were a couple of those moments. Ken Thomas wouldn't enter the room until everything was prepped and ready to be looked at, as opposed to coming in and having to say, "Take that blip out." I was setting up mixes and applying compression where needed — just worrying about the peaks and balances, so Ken could approach it from a more creative perspective. There was a lot of drum layering.
That's surprising to me, because it sounds very stark and personal.
Some of the drum tracks are just one ribbon mic in a room. Ribbons have a good way of mellowing the transients out so we could blend a couple of different drums together without compressing the individual tracks. We'd layer a few live drums on top of one another. To make it sound like one cohesive piece, we'd run the drums through a [Neve] 33609 compressor at 4:1, just dialing the attack and release time according to the track. Moby had a tape delay that he ran things through while tracking to get a kind of grittiness. I'd go in to take out a guitar buzz and he'd say, "Can you leave that in?" Ken would want to fix these flams between a live kit and electronic drums, and Moby would say, "Oh, I like how those rub. Let's not delete that." He didn't want to hide behind perfection — he wanted warts and all.
Were there deceptively a lot of tracks?
