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Ben Allen ![]() Mixing R&B ![]() Babydaddy • Dan Grech-Marguerat The Scissor Sisters' first album, recorded in a Manhattan apartment, sold 3.5 million copies worldwide. The follow-up sees them expanding their horizons, while keeping their DIY ethos very much intact. Artist/Producer ![]() Writing & Producing With Robbie Williams Despite his best efforts, Stephen Duffy's solo work never quite made him a superstar — but it did get him one of the best co-writing gigs around. Producing Kasabian & Arctic Monkeys ![]() Yellow Magic Orchestra goes Latino Yellow Magic Orchestra helped pioneer the use of electronic instruments and sampling. Now Uwe Schmidt, aka Señor Coconut, has used the same techniques to render their greatest hits as Latin dances, with contributions from all three original YMO members. Recording Morph The Cat ![]() Folk Music For The 21st Century The idea of bringing folk music up to date is not a new one, but few people have taken it quite as far as Jim Moray. His material may be traditional, but his approach to music technology is as modern as it gets. Andy Jackson David Gilmour's chart-topping solo album was recorded on his own Astoria houseboat, a floating slice of studio heaven. Engineer Andy Jackson describes the making of the album. Mike Elizondo ![]() The Current State Of Affairs What can we, as engineers or musicians, do to prevent our recorded legacy being lost? Record Producer ![]() Richard Aitken of Nimrod Productions ![]() Writing & Producing in LA The success of Avril Lavigne's debut album Let Go catapulted The Matrix to the front rank of songwriters and producers. Since then, they've moved in ever wider musical circles, culminating in their work with nu-metal pioneers Korn. Producing Hip-Hop Miami is now a hip-hop centre to rival New York and LA, and Cool & Dre are two of its most active beatmakers, songwriters and producers. Craig Bauer Craig Bauer has been part of Kanye West's career from the beginning, and as a mix engineer on the smash hit Late Registration album, he had to marry West's artistic perfectionism with his own technical standards. Roy Thomas Baker ![]() John Fryer ![]() Harry Gregson-Williams ![]() December 2009
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Other recent issues: | Brian EnoRecording Another Day On EarthPublished in SOS October 2005 People + Opinion : Artists/Engineers/Producers/Programmers For his latest album, Brian Eno has returned to the world of songwriting. But his ideas about music are as radical as ever...
Unlike many rock and pop musicians, Brian Eno enjoys theorising about the creative process, especially when he can offer a new perspective on established ideas and working practices. On composition, for instance, he opines "It's intuitive to think that anything complex has to be made by something more complex, but evolution theory says that complexity arises out of simplicity. That's a bottom up picture. I like that idea as a compositional idea, that you can set in place certain conditions and let them grow. It makes composing more like gardening than architecture." These kind of statements have earned Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (no less), born in 1948 in Suffolk, the title 'Professor Eno'. It was once a joke, but Eno now wears the 'Professor' tag proudly. "I'm happy with that title," he remarks, "because it says to people: here's someone who is coming from a different direction. He doesn't bring all of the baggage that comes with expressionistic rock music. It's something else. It's another art form." Eno's bright and airy workspace offers several more clues about his "different direction", most notably a dozen or so identical Phillips ghettoblasters suspended from the ceiling by wires. One imagines them to have some sort of decorative function, but it turns out that these low art objects are part of Eno's high art generative music making experiments. Ever since hearing minimalist composer Steve Reich's cut and paste tape piece It's Gonna Rain (1966), Eno has been fascinated with music that generates itself in semi random fashion -- resulting in "complexity arising out of simplicity". And so Eno has made several pieces consisting of disparate elements spread out over several CDs, played by a batch of ghettoblasters in 'shuffle' mode, leading to endless never before heard variations of the pieces in question. "It's Gonna Rain was one of the most important pieces of music in my life," Eno comments, "and the whole idea of generative really came out of that. With a generative piece you set a machine going and it makes itself, and you as the composer are also the listener. The act of listening is the act of composing. When you're hearing these complicated shifting patterns going on, it's the aural equivalent of Moire illusions, and that very much impressed me. What also impressed me was how different the composer's role is from the old romantic idea that the composer pours out these wonderful things to the passive you, the listener -- with art as a kind of tube that the artist shouts down to the more or less thick listener at the end."
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