Younger Brother

Benji Vaughan is best known for his footstomping trance identity Prometheus, although his long list of credits includes performing remix work for EMI and Jive, scoring an advert for Sony and producing electronic funk band The Egg. Benji and Simon work together as Younger Brother, a partnership characterised by high production values, lush melodies and intricate arrangements. As their second album, The Last Days Of Gravity, was released in October 2007, we thought it high time we floated on down to see them.

Seeing his unhappiness, Stent took him aside and told him that the producer Martin 'Youth' Glover was looking for someone to work for him at his Butterfly Studios. The offer was sweetened further as it offered the opportunity to work on some of Posford's own musical ideas. "The urge to make my own music was just too strong and so, wondering who this mad hippy Youth was, I went to work for him in 1991 or maybe '92. Prior to that I'd learnt a lot from watching these top engineers like Spike, Dave Bascombe, people like that, but now I had hands on — I was the engineer.

"Apart from sessions with the KLF, I hadn't really seen much electronic music at Virgin, it was all bands. But now I was starting to go to acid parties and it was from there I got into electronic music. I remember getting my hands on a sampler for the first time — an Akai S950. The very first sample I took was this 30second chunk of Ozric Tentacles. I simply tuned it down two semitones, slotted it into a tune I was working on and it fit perfectly. If only all samples fitted in so well!"

In contrast, Benji Vaughan found he preferred the otherworldly tones of Aphex Twin and the Orb to the music he was hearing at acid parties. It was only after a trip to Goa that he threw himself fully into trance. Those early experiments were with basic equipment — an Alesis SR16 drum machine and an Akai S01 sampler — but they paved the way for his first release, the trance classic 'Clarity From Deep Fog' with Sean Williams. More collaborations followed, including Process (with Williams), Citizen Kaned with Nick Doof and Cyber Babas with Raja Ram. He met Simon Posford while delivering essential 'studio supplies' and has been associated with the Twisted Label (formed in 1996 by Posford and exDragonfly manager Simon Holton), ever since.

"I haven't mastered this mixinginthebox thing. I love mixing desks, I love the feel of them, the touch of them, feeling the faders. When something needs a bit more top, you reach over and the knob's there and it's done quicker than I can say it. On the computer you've got to find the right page, you've got to select the thing, you do it with the mouse or even a controller, and by the time you've actually done it, I could have done 10 other things on a mixing desk."

Ergonomics aside, though, Posford has no objection to the sound of software processors. "In the last two years, plugins have really started to come on. I mean the SSL stuff in Waves would take some beating in the analogue domain — you'd need a pretty serious desk. And a lot of stuff coming out on the UAD card, the Neve stuff, is absolutely fantastic. So in the end we use both plugins and hardware. Even though on this mix we EQ stuff with SSL plugins, it comes through the Mackie, where I might EQ it again. The desk is still a tool — and a valuable tool."

Benji Vaughan, by contrast, has been thinking of getting rid of his desk. "The thing that gets me most is when I'm working on a few things at the same time. I hate that feeling when I've committed to the desk. There's 32 outputs and all these outboard effects and you have to pull it all out to work on something else. For the last few months we've been editing this band, so I've been bringing it down here without committing to any outboard because I want to pass the files over to Si. I'm doing it all inside my laptop with the Waves stuff. The trouble is it never comes up right, to be honest. We both use Logic, we have the same plugins and still it doesn't come back correctly. Who knows why but it just doesn't copy plugin settings; all the SSL EQs come up but they aren't set to anything."

Simon Posford: "Logic is our main workhorse. The main feature we still want, and we hear people bang on about it all the time in Sound On Sound, is 'bounce in place'. So many times we've set up edits of audio on a track with loads of plugins and we want to bounce it to an audio file and use that in our arrangement. I counted the amount of clicks you have to do to achieve that in Logic and it's over 30 or something — utterly ridiculous! You bounce it, then import it into your audio window, then drag it out of the audio window back into the arrange, make a track for it, delete all your plugins, delete the old track that was there, take the parts off, you know... I'm falling asleep just talking about it.

"Every time a new version comes out it's got new graphics, which I really don't care about. I'd love it if, instead, they spent their time updating the timestretch algorithms. In each version there's all this stuff that seems to have been there for 10 years but now has a new interface.

"You'd think that by now they'd incorporate some way of quantising audio that wasn't a complete disaster. Ideally you'd click on an audio part in Logic and it'd bring up a matrix like a MIDI part and you could move it around. It's key to music to be able to take audio and put it in time efficiently without cracks and clicks everywhere. If Melodyne can do it, if Ableton can do it..."

"The first album was more centred around making a sound, then basing the song on that. When it was complete we found we wanted to do a proper album, without worrying about whether it was trance or whatever. We had a vibe and a direction and created sounds to fit in with that. We went back to our band roots — something we could do because the technology had changed so much. It's extraordinary to think that when we started Younger Brother, we were still using Akai samplers, which made putting on big chunks of guitar much more complicated. Now, years later, the whole process has changed and the dividing line between an electronic album and a band album has completely broken down. We now can be a band, just two people."

In his band days, it was always Posford who wanted to have a go on the others' instruments. "That's how I learnt everything. Back when we started, if you put in a slightly dodgy guitar part then it remained a dodgy guitar part. Yes, you could edit it, but it took hours. Whereas now you can get ideas and emotions down from an instrument and then fix it up a bit with audio quantise, without killing it.

"One of the rules for this album was, where possible, we wanted to do it all ourselves. We got in Gerry Hogan to play slide guitar and Ruu Campbell the singer, but otherwise we played the drums, the bass, the guitar, the keyboards."

From its wistful opening track, 'Happy Pills', with its lush pads, driving percussion and swirling synths, to the New Orderesque guitars and deeply processed vocals of 'Psychic Gibbon', The Last Days Of Gravity is varied beyond my ability to categorise. Its unusual time signatures and shifts of perspective suggest progressive rock at its most imaginative, and I reckon there's a spacedout indie band tucked away in there too. Most surprising is the lack of any obvious dance tracks, perhaps because the drumming — although tight and effective — never loses its natural, human feel. And, as ever, the synthesizers are splendid throughout.

"On the album we used [Native Instruments'] Reaktor, the Roland VSynth, the Korg MS20, Roland SH101, a Mellotron, Macbeth M3X and the OSCAR — there's OSCar all over it!" says Vaughan. "And the M3X — Ken MacBeth makes crazy stuff. The sound of it is just gorgeous, so warm and silky and creamy, plus it's got that heritage; you want to buy it because you know he's some crazy guy up in Scotland knocking it together.

"Whenever fans get in touch they always ask if we use a Virus, as they say their dream is to have one. I've had two of them and neither worked. The potential is very good; as a synthesis engine it is quite powerful, but the TC Powercore one didn't work and the Virus Indigo crashed, which is the last thing you need in a keyboard."

By contrast, Posford's enthusiasm for the M3X nicely sums up Younger Brother's approach to music creation. "What we're after, and what musicians should strive for, is uniqueness," says Posford. "That's where hardware scores. You're getting a bit of uniqueness, a bit of character that software can't give you. Look for those weird old effects, guitar pedals, old synths, things that don't work properly. Or circuitbent stuff. We've sent quite a bit of gear to CircuitBenders.co.uk for modification. Take the Alesis drum machine: it is quite uncontrollable, unpredictable and has these unlabelled sockets that you patch together so it glitches up in different ways. Some of the options decrease the bit rate or mix the samples so it gets really crunchy. Sometimes it totally crashes the machine and you have to power off and start again. We used it on the tracks 'Psychic Gibbon' and 'Elephant Machine' for that really dirty, lofi sound."

"As much as software is brilliant and clever and can do fantastic things, I just find hardware so much more inspiring. It's like when you sit at a piano, it makes you want to play and write songs. I never think of sitting down at a controller, loading up a soft synth patch and playing. You don't feel like reaching for the mouse to select a new sound when you can reach over and grab a knob instead. Hardware is more fun but you get the uniqueness too.

"In the early days of software instruments you could say hardware always sounded better. I don't know if that really applies any more, but hardware certainly sounds more unique and characterful. With software generally it's good that you can get so much — a compressor on every channel or whatever — but with synths it's best when they stop trying to emulate. Something like Reaktor is absolutely fantastic, but when you go through magazines and see what's coming out, it's page after page of emulations, even of gear that's already been emulated by somebody else. Another Minimoog, another Odyssey."

Warped and often outrageously timestretched vocals are a Simon Posford trademark, and I confess one of my ulterior motives for nabbing this interview was my desire to uncover these secrets. As is so often the case, it turns out that these effects are not attributable to any one, easily lifted process, but are the result of painstaking work with accumulated plugins.

"Sorry, but there's no secret formula. You might use something to get it in tune, then something else to fuck it up; then you might change the formant or something like that, then chop it up to get it in time. It's really all about editing and graft. We often employ lofi solutions such as putting it into the [Korg] MS20, which has a frequencytopitch converter, so you can add some analogue into the equation and mix it together."