Greg Stomberg & Dan Susnara
Prequel: The 1st Annual Trips Festival

Jeremy Gluck & Dave Fuglewicz
Sleep on the Edge

Various Artists
godspunk volume ten

Interview by Bryan Baker on 9/8/2010

What is a remembering machine?
The title comes from the Mortal Engines series of books by Philip Reeve, set in a distant future when cities are wheeled and roam the Earth according to the rules of Municipal Darwinism, eating each other and hunting for usable materials from old Earth. The Remembering Machines were twelve men and women who were resurrected and turned into machines, history recorders, built to remember all that had gone before. They were hidden in a temple 'so far north you started going south again'. I read the books about the time I wrote the album and I liked the imagery.

Did the concept for this album develop over time, or did you have the idea worked out before composing these tracks?
Mostly I write tunes and then figure out what their titles are, based on what they come out feeling like. Sometimes I have an album title and concept in mind but I didn't with this one. It came afterwards. Usually, our releases are team efforts but, on this occasion, we'd spent ten years working on our previous release (Babylon Halt) and I wanted to move a little more quickly for the next one! Other band members weren't available at the time so I wrote, recorded and released this one on my own in two months. It happened that I'd just discovered dubstep and this made me completely revisit how I worked with drums and bass in particular. It's not a dubstep album but you can hear the influences. Babylon Halt had taken so long that the tunes were no longer representative of what we were currently listening to or writing, so Remembering Machine was an attempt to explore some new sounds, new rhythms.

Is composing/recording a percussion track a methodical or intuitive proceess for you? Or both? Tell us about creating the title track.
We use loops from sample CDs, some loops built from recording our own percussion and some stolen from commercial releases. We rarely record actual live percussion parts. The track Remembering Machine is a mix of a programmed main drum line based around a traditional Arabic rhythm but using Western drum sounds, and loops acquired from various sources.

Tell us about your recording studio.
The studio is based around a Soundscape RE.d 32 hard disk system and I have a Mackie D8B digital mixing desk. The desk has a great Massenburg EQ plugin and a Drawmer compressor plugin as well as its own EQ and compressors on each channel; it's capable of utterly professional results. I have a Novation Supernova, various Proteus modules and various soft synths. I have a couple of decent microphones. We use Sonar for MIDI work and Kontakt for samples. All of this has been acquired over a very long period of time by various miracles of financial provision! It lives in my home so I can't really record anything live that's very loud but I can get great guitar sounds using either my Roland VG8 or by playing through a Pocket POD. A couple of the other band members have Sonar and Kontakt in their computers too so we can do basic writing separately and then bring the tracks into the studio for final work and mixing, mastering etc.

Tell us about the album artwork.
The artwork was created in Photoshop from a photo I took in a shop of a life-sized model of a computer game character. I changed it somewhat and did some digital drawing and painting on top to create what you see.

OTHER COMMENTS -- E-MAIL US YOUR COMMENTS!
Tell us what you think about this artist and album.
If this is your album, please share your thoughts about making it.