Surveying his 15 years of experience,
Busdriver decided to up his own
ante. Listening to Four Tet, Portishead,
the Olivia Tremor Control, Brian Eno,
My Bloody Valentine—all records
washed, bleached, rinsed, and softened
with psychedelic minor chords—
Busdriver invested in texturing and
layering. He called on production associates
from L.A.’s avant glitch-hop Low
End Theory weekly—including
Nobody, Nosaj Thing, Omid, and
Daedelus, as well as long-time engineer
Daddy Kev—to corral tracks over
which he could look at the malleable
underpinnings of his life. The result is
Jhelli Beam [Anti-], the follow-up to
2007’s RoadKillOvercoat. Busdriver
oddly describes the 14 tracks of his
latest as “Tuberculosis plus.”
“Sonically, it’s everything wrong
maxed out and treated as if it was
right,” he says.
Demoing in GarageBand and Reason,
Busdriver shaved off the odd
sample and chord, banged on hardwood
floors for rhythms, modulated the
pitch of vocal takes, and re-configured
sequences.
“For the most part, the methods I
use I internalized and applied in my
own way from watching someone like
Daedelus in Pro Tools,” Busdriver
says. “When working alone, I spend
most of my time messing with performances,
bouncing things down, and
chopping them. Some of that will get
used, but the real production is by
more gifted folk.”
Moving on to Daedelus’ Pro Tools
rig, the production was ratcheted up
a couple of notches with attention to
the beats on “Scoliosis Jones,” “Do
the Wop,” “Happy Insider,” and
“Fishy Face.”
“I find that a short delay with low
feedback on a minimal hi-hat pattern
can be enough to give a sampled
beat some swing,” says Daedelus.
“Another trick is to automate the
delay time on straight-forward patterns
to inject some changing
textures by moving the delay signal
in time to rhythmic changes.”
For the track “Fishy Face,”
Daedelus worked with both his own
sounds and some provided by John
Dieterich of the playfully jagged indiejangle
band Deerhoof. Dieterich’s
synth and guitar parts were
recorded both direct and through a
Studio Projects C mic through the
preamps on a Digi 002 interface. The
takes were then blended, reamped,
and re-recorded in the room with
stereo mics. Similarly, Daedelus opted
to reamp portions through his Event
PS8 monitors to give the electric bass
extra thump.
Busdriver’s high-tenor vocals—
which cram in more words-per-minute
than the USPS receives manila
envelopes on April 15—are often
recorded through a Shure KSM44.
“I treated the vocals as any instrument,”
Daedelus says, “but I pushed
them slightly harder, and sat them in
EQ zones relatively free of drum clatter
and low-mid synths.”
Most of the final vocal takes were
recorded with Daddy Kev at his
Echo Chamber studio, using a Great
River MP-500 preamp, an Avedis E27
EQ, an Apogee converter, and Pro
Tools. The main mic was an M-Audio
Sputnik, chosen for being “clean,
pristine, and crisp.” For vocals used
more as musical devices, they ran a
Shure SM57 through a DigiTech
Vocal 300 processor, using a heavily
saturated, slap-back delay.
Busdriver’s vocals were recorded
with no compression and low gain to
compensate for his loud delivery,
and Daddy Kev also used an unusual
EQ trick up.
“The Avedis EQ is one of very
few EQs that allows you to boost
frequencies as high as 28kHz,” Kev
says. “So I add a high shelf at
28kHz to the vocals when recording,
and I boost around 3dB. This
adds a nice sparkle without
hyping—truly a magical effect.”
As a whole, Jhelli Beam features
slippery riddims that play more naturally
next to TTC, Hot Chip, and edIT
than boom-bap hip-hop, offering
assertive and speed-driven freestyles
over veering drones.
“This is message-oriented rap
music, but a lot of the effect is to
underline musicality, and to throw
some dissonance and humor in the
midst,” Busdriver declares. “This isn’t
indie rap as statement against the
establishment—it’s just glorifying
inventing, and going in new directions
from where I’ve been before.”
What? You Boosted 28kHz?
Boosting frequencies at 28kHz, as Daddy Kev does with the Avedis E27 EQ,
might seem strange considering the range of human hearing is said to end
at 20kHz. But an FAQ answer from Avedis’ website ( www.avedisaudio.com )
explains: “When you boost or cut a chosen frequency, it is shaped like a bell,
unless you push in the shelving button. Then, it’s half a bell, where the top of
it extends beyond the selected frequency. The top of the bell would be
28kHz, for example, but the curve leading up to the top starts at frequencies
within the fundamentals, or within 20kHz. So you will easily hear the effect
at the very tail end of the audible spectrum without accentuating sibilance
or already aggressive high frequency in the source.”