Sure.
[Note: forgive me as this has gotten a tad long-winded. . .]
Here’s a partial gear list that includes I think pretty much all of the pieces of gear I used other than some of the eurorack modules that were used for modulation and utilities and such and other than some delay pedals:
SAMPLR
Herbs & Stones Pathways
Retro Mechanical Labs Jekyll n Hyde
Retro Mechanical Labs Electron Fuzz Custom
OTO Machines Biscuit
OTO Machines BAM
Orthogonal Devices ER-301
Whimsical Raps Three Sisters
Erica Synths SYNTRX
Rabid Elephant Natural Gate
Make Noise Mimeophon
Mutable Instruments Beads
Korg KAOSS Pad 3
16n Faderbank
Expressive E Touché
All of the sounds in the performance were sourced from Low’s HEY WHAT, I did not use my gear to provide any sound sources outside of a little white noise that snuck through while being used as a mod source.
For some insight into the process, when I was asked by Alan Sparhawk of Low to do this live “remix” set of HEY WHAT for a film premier of a visual component to the album itself I asked him about getting some stems. Al told me that the producer BJ Burton is super protective of his processes and wouldn’t want to give stems out, but when I reached out to BJ he said that isn’t correct but that he just simply doesn’t make stems because it’s too much work for him to do so, and his processes aren’t really conducive to it.
I ended up trying an Izotope plugin and a couple other online AI tools to try and pull the songs apart into stems that I could use, and I ended up using one of the AI tools. It worked pretty well to generate stems, but like all of the other tools I found this one also worked with a paradigm in which it was looking to generate four stems: drums, vocals, bass, guitar. If you’ve ever listened to HEY WHAT you’ll understand that it’s an album that is not at all that clear cut with it’s instrumentation. You’ll also know that it’s an album that absolutely revels in texture, distortion, drive, etc.
Thus, the results I got with the stems generated by this AI tool were already imbued with a rather uniquely pronounced and driven textural profile.
I then loaded up three iPads all running SAMPLR and the ER301 (running a dual granular/LPF/HPF/noise mod script) with the stems that I created, and I ran those iPads through various chains in my rig, with two of them going through the Herbs & Stones Pathways matrix mixer the stems through different chains made out of the Jekyll & Hyde, Electron Fuzz, Biscuit, BAM, SYNTRX, Beads, Three SIsters, KP3, etc, along with some other boxes (delays, verb, etc).
For the performance I was intending to do something loosely inspired by an old-school dub performance (in practice, not so much in sound) in which I’d feed sound sources (3x SAMPLR) through multiple parallel chains of effects and processing, while using the matrix mixer to really have some flexibility and some overlap in what sources were going through which chains. I also had the the ER301 running a fourth instance of the same stems.
For the performance I chose to use footage I captured here in my city of Minneapolis in the days immediately preceding and following the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police Department, as I’d heard Mimi (of Low) mention in an interview that those events in our communities really informed the feel and the content of HEY WHAT.
I had stems prepared for I think all but one of the songs on the album, and I went through and made a preset or two on SAMPLR for each song in which I loaded up the stems I wanted and configured everything as I wanted it for the performance, and then I shared those presets across all three of the iPads. I had a list of which songs I wanted to hit, and the order that I wanted to do them, but beyond that very minimal framework the performance was entirely improvised. In the end I fucked up and didn’t think that I’d need to check off which songs I’d done, thus I quickly got to a point where my list was essentially useless and I just kind of went entirely by feel. I also quickly settled into a position in which I was loosely scoring the visual content, and I leaned pretty hard into that to keep things moving and growing, and to keep things on time. If you watch the video you can see towards the end where I get somewhat surprised that the final shot has arrived, at which point I had I think about 15-20 seconds to take it home and close it down.
The final track on the release is actually a second set that I played that evening, which is why it’s not in the video portion. I did a long set to open the night, the “HEY WHAT // A VISUAL FILM” premiere was screened, and then I did another short set to close the night.
I think that it is worth mentioning some of the context through all of this. For those who don’t know, Low was a band out of Duluth MN who were together for 40+ years, and who very sadly ceased being a band when Mimi Parker passed away just a few weeks after this performance. Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk (drums and vox, guitar and vox, respectively) were the two primary members of Low, along with I think 5-6 bass players who would complete the band as a three piece. Mimi and Alan were married all those years as well. We knew that Mimi had cancer, and that she was not in a good place with it, and we were all very worried that her time was short.
I had spent many long nights in the studio preparing the stems for the performance, and whether it was the AI algorithms or HEY WHAT itself almost every vocal stem strongly favored extracting and emphasizing Mimi’s voice over Alan’s, thus I was spending a whole hell of a lot of time alone with Mimi and her voice. I chose to dedicate the performance to her, and I just miss her so much. Between the impending loss of Mimi, and Low, and the act of revisiting the still very raw memories of the Minneapolis uprisings this entire performance was as deeply emotional and moving an experience as I’ve ever had. It took me months to get out from under that emotional weight enough to even listen to the performance.
I’ve been a massive fan of Low and have been very deeply inspired by them for 20+ years, and in the end I’m super proud of this work, and I’m super happy to be able to share it with you all. I hope you enjoy it.
