Let's clear one thing up, right here, right now. Contrary to popular belief, KMFDM does
not stand for Kill Mother Fucking Depeche Mode. Sorry, Mode haters. It's actually a German acronym for "Kein
Mehrheit fur die Mitleid," which roughly
translates to "no pity for the majority." Since the late '70's, KMFDM has been true to their acronym. Fist-in-the-air
head-in-the-speakers industrial-techno-metal isn't exactly the stuff of pop radio or MTV playlists. But the
revolving collective, anchored by
keyboardist/singer/songwriter Sascha Konietzko, has produced nine high-impact records that
have earned them a large, loyal fanbase across the planet.
The band's latest, &*%#$ on Wax Trax/TVT, is an all-star affair, teaming Konietzko and
core members Gunter Schulz and En Esch (Einsturzende Neubauten) with Tim Skold (Skold), Ogre (Skinny Puppy), Raymond
Watts (Pig), Abby Travis (Beck,
Elastica), Willian Rieflin (Ministry, RevCo), and Michel Bassin (Tremponem Pal). Don't
look for any secret meanings in the unpronounceable title. "No messages", says Sascha about the symbols. "It's
just . . . that was one of the first ideas for a
KMFDM album title that we ever had, before we even had and album out. But then the idea
got lost for years." KMFDM rolled through town late last year, and Keyboard was there. Here's what Sascha had
to say about the making
of &*%#$.
You've been at this for over 20 years. Are you still as buzzed today
making records as you were in the beginning?
Probably even more. The experience sort of re-establishes itself every time. I mean, in
the beginning it was more, "Yeah,
whatever. I don't really know why we're doing this, but we're doing it anyway." Now
we know damn well why we're doing it.
How did the making of &*%#$ differ from the making of
Xtort?
The difference was the approach. I started Xtort after coming off two pretty extensive
tours in '95. What I did was, sat
down and totally re-did my studio. I switched all my sampling stuff from [E-mu] Emax II to
Akai [samplers], I started using
the Doepfer MS-404 [analog synth module], and various kinds of things. I ended up spending
a lot of time working with
Gunter [Schulz] and F.M. Einheit; working without a real musical direction in mind, but
more like, "What can we do now?"
And so on this last record, everyone came to Seattle for a couple of weeks, and we just
started recording. Everybody put in
as much stuff as they had, and then afterwards we sorted through all the stuff and
assigned everyone a couple of things - a
couple of tracks or rough ideas. Then everybody went back into their own studios and
started working. They came back to
Seattle frequently, and we worked together and developed the whole thing. So at some point
we had about 17 tracks that were
all potentially going to be overdubbed on, sung on, and so forth.
They were all instrumentals at that point?
All instrumentals with rough sketchings on guitar, and rough vocal ideas sometimes. Then
we got together for a month,
started overdubbing and mixing. And then the whole [Iomega] Jaz drive scenario happened
when we were trying to mix the
first version of the album. My idea was to drop everything that was in the computer,
audiowise, onto formats like [Alesis]
ADAT's and 24-track tape, and then use the computer timecode-locked to mix the tracks
down. So basically, the mixes could
be edited with a quantized cursor and that kind of stuff. And in order to store the
massive amounts of data mix after mix
after mix - you know, vocal only, guitar up, guitar down, and all that kind of stuff - we
figured we needed a good, fast,
reliable storage media cheap. And that's when the Jaz drive scenario came into play. At
that point, there were a couple of
people I'd worked with who said, "Oh, yeah. Jaz drives are doing miraculously well
for us." They weren't audio people,
though, mostly graphics and video. [Ed. Note : To make a long story short, the Jaz data
went belly-up. Sascha and company
lost all of their mixes, and had to start over.]
Was there a premeditated sound you were after on this record?
No plan, really. We just assembled a shitload of gear, and everybody just hacked away as
good as they could. Bill Rieflin,
for example, would go into his rehearsal room, and just record some stuff on his drum kit
to DAT. Then he'd go into his
studio, put it in the Akai, mess with the 404, and come up with these out-of-this-world
things. They were just one-or
two-bar loops, and we'd work with those, program some different drums to go with it, and
then we'd send that off on disk to
Gunter in Canada, and he'd write stuff to it and send it back. Then Bill and I would sit
down and work with that, then send
it off to En Esch, who would do vocal sketches. So the stuff was put together in a very
modular way.
When you said "send a disk," what format was that?
SyQuest disks with AIFF, WAV or SDII files on it; floppies with MIDI files or [Opcode]
Studio Vision sequences; and then
maybe ADAT tapes.
This record turned out to be less guitar-intensive than previous
efforts. You're quoted in the bio as saying: "Personally,
I was tired of having to deal with a barrage of guitars and having no room for any other
frequencies coming through. We
wanted the guitars to be more of an accompaniment and less of a driving force throughout
the record."
Historically, Angst is my least favorite KMFDM record. It was done in an almost similar
fashion, where we all sat down in
the beginning and started writing material, but we had two guitarists. Every song was
really centered around guitar riffs,
and in the end, the stuff became so massive there was hardly any room for other
instruments to get through it. So ever
since then, I've tried to work on the balance between having a lot of guitars yet at the
same time really letting my kind
of stuff come through a little more. I think Xtort and this album are definitetly steps in
that direction.
Having done the record modularly, where data was shuttled around to
various home studios, do you think you'd do it again
that way in the future?
Yeah. I would absolutely do it again. It worked really well. You don't get the aggravation
of hanging together all the
time, and you don't have to compromise so much. I think the first draft of this album
suffered most from too many cooks.
One guy would say "kick up" and the next guy would say "kick down."
One guy would say "more compression" next guy would say
"less compression." So in the end it stayed like it was, which wasn't so good.
As you were preparing to mix a song, how was the data organized at
that point?
I only have a 4-track [Digidesign] Pro Tools system that's compatible with Studio Vision,
so I usually have four tracks of
audio coming from the computer, or sometimes I just share outputs with stuff that's
obviously not in each others' way.
Everything is virutal up until the point when I'm, like, "Okay, now the sequence is
definitely ready." Then I dump it all
to ADAT at my home studio through a Mackie 24 channel 8-bus console. Then once it's on
ADAT's, we'll lock my ADAT system up
via the AI-1 [ADAT digital interface] and a link to the 24-track, and that's when we go
into the studio and do the guitar
and vocal stuff. Then what usually follows is a pretty extensive amount of resampling the
vocals and guitars into the
computer, layering the stuff, building choruses, building guitar tracks out of 20 or more
takes, and then everything turns
into samples and gets tracked back onto either ADAT or Studio Vision or whatever. The
advantage of not mixing onto DAT or
1/2" tape but back into the computer is that we can run all these different mixes one
under the other, completely locked,
and you can switched between however many mixes you have. You can take one chorus mix, and
a verse from another, and
crossfade them into each other, and....
Your gear list is extensive. Are there any particular pieces that
were essential to the sound of this record?
The MS-404 is definitely one of my favorite boxes, 'cause it's just so handy. Send it any
sort of MIDI triggers, and it
just goes on and on. When I'm doing the initial programming for bass and so on, I'm
finding myself more and more using the
[Clavia] Nord Lead. It's so handy when it comes to syncing the arpeggiator and those kinds
of things. I would say that a
good part of it is vintage synths, like mainly the [Sequential] Pro-One and the [Korg]
Mono/Poly. Other than that, it's
mostly studio hardware. Everything goes through compressors and Neve 1081s [EQ/pre-amps],
and that really defines most of
the sound. I've got my favorite settings on the Manleys that I hardly ever change, and
everything pumps right through it.
What settings are those?
With the compressors, I look for a fast release, fast attack, and medium threshold, so you
don't really suck out too much
of the low end, but it still gives a punch. It really pulls stuff together, especially
when you work with strange loops,
like the stuff Bill would come up with . . . stuff that was recorded with a [shure] SM58,
mono, on a portable DAT machine
or something. I would, for example, take that, copy it, and then run the whole thing
through [Eventide] H3000, harmonize
each side up eight or nine cents, and of the stuff i've been shooting for is making
three-dimensional or stereo-type
images. Like, i'd always go for a stereo bass, even though it might not be totally
obvious. But it comes from both sides
and hits you right in the chest.
How are you recreating this music live?
What I'm doing today is putting in ADAT tapes of tracks on this record, and lifting off
some of the audio via the AI-1 onto
the computer. I'm going through and taking the smallest common denominator of each part.
So, in other words, the drum track
might consist of a 4-bar loop and two 2-bar breaks. So I transfer those into the computer,
copy them back to back, and once
I find that they work well with no pops or clicks, I bounce them into the Akai MPC2000s
via S/PDIF, and I recreate the
sequences. Since the sample data takes so damn long to load on the 2000s, we've decided to
use them to fire the sequences,
and only the sequences, and all the sound data will be in the two [Akai] S3000XLs.
Who's doing what onstage?
The drummer is John DeSalvo from Chemlab. I'll be on percussion and the keyboard rig, with
the sequencers on the side. Tim
skold will be playing bass, percussion and keyboards. We're basically trading off. Gunter
plays guitar. En Esch plays
guitar, keyboards, and sings. Orge will be doing vocals mainly.
How will the band sync to the sequences?
We're gonna have eight of nine submixes onstage. Greg Dean, our production guy, has cooked
up some infernal-type monitor
scenario for us. John will hear the central part of the sequences. So we'll have eight
tracks of Akai for stereo pairs of
various loops and bass-type things, going through the house and monitor positions. Then
we'll use the [Roland] JP-8000 as
both a keyboard and a MIDI controller. The drum kit is completely electronic, except for
the real piccolo snare and a
couple of cymbals and hi-hats. He'll be triggering sounds in his [Kurzweil] K2000. There
will be a second K2000 for backup
purposes, and there will be an ADAT for both backup and recording purposes, The hard part
is condensing the stuff down to
four stereo pairs. Typically we have atleast two or three, if not more, kick drums going,
so we have to determine what
patterns John will be playing, and whether or not he'll be firing off loops or playing the
full kit. Then we have to group
the stuff together. The JP-8000 comes in quite handy, 'cause you can do this RPS
[interactive sequence] phrase stuff and
just fire it off from one key. Also, the idea is to bring a small setup onto the tour bus
consisting of a Powerbook running
Pro Tools and Studio Vision, and that kind of stuff, so we can edit sequences and audio
that doesn't seem to be working
onstage. Change MIDI files and so forth.
How do you determine what songs you'll play on tour?
Usually we play more or less a greatest hits kind of show. I counted the number of songs
we have so far today, and it's 122
songs. So to pick an hour-and-a-half selection is quite hard.