John Payne

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  John Payne
  

The Most Recent stories by John Payne

• Analog and Digital Worlds Collide on RTX’s Western Xterminator  January 2008

  RTX’s newest release, the aptly titled Western Xterminator, is not designed to be easy on ears. That would defeat the band’s belief in a kind of ugly beauty to convey the harsh, yet fantastical realities of vocalist Jennifer ...

• Caribou’s Dan Snaith and the Artfulness of Muck  December 2007

  Electro-music superpower Caribou’s new album, Andorra, is mastermind Dan Snaith’s latest salvo in a series of works that start somewhere along chilled ambient (and even chillier IDM), and stroll down a path cobbled with pure ...

• An Evening With Phil Ramone  June 2007

  Setting out to put in perspective veteran producer-engineer Phil Ramone’s achievements in the music industry is, frankly, an impossible task. There’s an almost ludicrous number of technical innovations that he’s brought to the industry ...

• An Evening With Mark Linett  June 2007

  Like a lot of us, engineer/mixer Mark Linett (www.ypomr.com) always wanted to be in showbiz. And he started early. Forming his own lighting company in high school that provided psychedelic backdrops for many of the biggest acts of the ...

• The Mars Volta  June 2007

  Casting off the punk-rock neck irons that they’d worn as At the Drive-In, guitarist-bassist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and singer-guitarist Cedric Bixler-Zavala emerged, following a brief respite, to form the Mars Volta — inarguably one of ...

• The Red. The Hot. The Chili Peppers  June 2007

  It’s been four years. A lot can happen in four years. You can graduate from any decent university in four years. You can get ready for the Olympics or run for president. Or you can write an ambitious, new double-CD set ...

• The Software Chronicles  June 2007

  EVAN BROOKS, DIGIDESIGN I started out as a musician and technologist, studying electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley. I’ve been playing in bands since I was 13 or 14; Peter, who I started Digidesign with, we’ve ...

• They Call Him...Swedien!  June 2007

  What he knows, what he does, and who he’s done it to telescopes through the last significant half century of music production before landing squarely in the halls of the greats. Ladies and gentlemen: Bruce Swedien.