Graham Massey (808 State): Using The Internet For Communication

808 State have seen the future — and it's called the Internet. You can now contact the group via the net thanks to their new information service, State to State. 808 mainman Graham Massey explains the idea to Matt Bell.

Although currently locked away in the studio working on their next album, 808 State are at the moment anything but removed from the general public. August 4th saw the launch of their new information service, State to State, which combines a postal address with a permanent address on the Internet, giving email users worldwide the chance to communicate directly with the group. Additionally, the group have plans to publish a quarterly State to State magazine, which will contain information on the latest in music and technology from 808 State's perspective, as well as advance warning on releases by the group. Subscribers to this magazine will also receive a State to State CD, containing previously unreleased 808 State material.

State Of (Pro)Motion

The band appear to be making themselves accessible in a new way, and this coincides with a new approach to their music and self‑promotion. Press releases introducing the new information service have made reference to the group's 'new sound for a new scene' and 'the 808 State philosophy of never repeating yourself'. On the promotional front, the recent single, 'Bombadin', has already been used as the theme music for a New York fashion show, and was played on Virgin Airways flights all through the summer. Furthermore, the State to State service was launched live on MTV, at midnight on August 4th, with the group co‑hosting the regular 2‑hour Saturday night dance music program 'Party Zone' — a first for MTV. The group have followed this up with DJing stints at Glastonbury, in Manchester and Verona, Italy, and are now set to play a forthcoming Club Megadog night in Manchester. By means of the State to State service and this new wave of promotional activity, 808 State seem to be challenging the traditional faceless, unreachable image of the dance artist. But as they themselves have put it: "How can artists produce music for the people if they create barriers to keep them away?". Whilst he took a quick break from the control room, I asked Graham Massey to tell me more about the ideas behind State to State and the forthcoming album.

On The Stateline

First of all, I wanted to ask why you're doing this — why you're exposing yourself to your fans in this way. You might get a lot of complete weirdos contacting you.

"Well, that's one of the things about opening yourself up like this — it's a bit like giving your phone number away. But basically, we're unhappy with the lines of communication that are available to a group like us. I think we're very misunderstood — even now, people think we're a hardcore techno group, because of one record four years ago, when we've been doing this for eight years now. And even now, the amount of information that people have about us is very patchy — they might see us in the charts occasionally and know the name, and then they don't look any further. But there's a lot of interest in finding out more about us. There was an article about us in Record Collector last year, which gave a full discography and history of the band, and we got a lot of feedback from that. Some of the people who worked on that article are now helping us to run State to State, because we were impressed with the amount of research that they'd done — we'd never put it all together in perspective ourselves, you see, we'd just been trundling on trying to get on with making music! But sometimes you need someone who's not from the Warner Bros press department to gather it all together...

"The problem essentially is that what we're doing a lot of the time is quite underground music for a major label. We produce a lot of music, and maybe only 10 percent of that ever gets put on an LP. So here we have an opportunity to gather together all the other material."

Is that the ultimate idea behind State To State, then — to use it as an outlet for your unreleased material?

"Yeah. It's the CD that gets me most excited — the idea that we'll have an outlet where you haven't got the record company high pressure, demanding that everything's perfect."

But in order to obtain that CD, you have to pay a subscription fee, right?

"Yeah... basically, you're paying for a CD — or that's the way I'd look at it, anyway. You're getting a CD, and also getting additional advance information on when things are happening. A lot of the time people say to us 'oh, you did a gig? Nobody told us!'."

So, you can leave messages at the address in Hook in Basingstoke — and you can do that without paying the subscription fee?

"Yeah, for now. And we'll be putting the Internet number on the next bit of product."

Electronic Fan Mail

How does this really differ from a fan club? Fans won't be able to talk to you directly over the phone. You said earlier it was like giving your phone number away, but it's not really like that, is it?

"You've got to define 'fan'. When you go out touring, you get a lot of valuable information and stimulation yourself from meeting people out there. Sometimes, when you're stuck in the studio doing music all the time, you're just not getting enough feedback from yourself to keep your creative momentum going. Maybe that's why there's been a lot of collaborations happening in the last few years. When we first started, it was almost like a novelty to work with another group. Now it's something that's widened out, especially in dance music. And I think that's a direction that's going to continue. Collaborations are much easier to do now, too — you don't have to get together in the studio to collaborate. When we did some work with Jon Hassell a few years ago, no tapes exchanged hands — it was all disks. The email service will make that sort of thing faster still — you'll eventually be able to send digital sound information across the world to each other, rather than waiting for crunched‑up DATs from Japan, like I got the other week..."

So another reason for the service is to make potential collaborations easier?

"Basically, it's to open yourself up to people who are not necessarily famous, but have potential. And the only way to gauge that potential is to engage in this sort of communication with them."

I think we're very misunderstood — even now, people think we're a hardcore techno group, because of one record four years ago, when we've been doing this for eight years now.

OK. But the point that I want to make is that fans have been able to get that close to their favourite groups with letters in the past — there's often a publicity office that you can contact, but it's a passive thing — you can leave a letter for someone, but they won't ever necessarily get back to you. And the email is just an electronic version of that, as far as fans are concerned, isn't it?

"Yeah, but it's a lot more direct. For instance, take the amount of times we've been advertised as doing a gig when we're not doing it. We've had so many complaints — when, sometimes, other people have done a gig under our name. This happens a lot on the dance scene — a lot of misinformation goes on, a lot of moneyspinning, and when we're misrepresented like that, it's very frustrating. But this service will be a lot more direct — we could announce a gig within two weeks of playing it through the service and get enough people there, because there are enough people interested — we just need to let them know. We'll be able to be more spontaneous."

Do you have any previous experience of the Internet? Are you a user yourself?

"I must admit that I'm pretty new to it — I'm learning as I go along. It's the people who'll be running State To State who are more into it. It was more the idea that appealed to me — the potential in using it in this way."

The New Album

How far are you through working on the album? I know you have a tendency to release singles quite a long time before albums come out...

"Yeah, well, again, that's something to do with being on a major label. We're sitting on about 40 finished tracks at the moment, and we'll select ones from them for the album. We were hoping to get it out in August, but it's been put back to January now. It might be out earlier in America though; I'm not sure. We're getting much more of a positive response from them, actually. But anyway, whenever the album appears here, it'll have changed completely by the time it comes out, because we won't stop making music between now and January, or whenever!"

You remixed Gorgeous a lot between completing it and releasing it, I remember.

"Yeah, there were a lot of different versions of that. I'd really like to be a lot faster at putting albums out, but we are dealing with a major label, and in order to get your music across, it does have to be sold in a certain way. I'd like a lot more immediacy — because the music we do is about immediacy. Very often, I think the sketches leading up to a finished piece are sometimes more interesting than the final piece itself — and this CD outlet with the fan club will allow us to get more of that out. There'll be lots of mixes of tracks out of our own small studio, which in some ways have a vitality about them that you don't always get in the big studio. It's not that working in a big studio kills a piece, you just get a different vibe on it. It's a bit like the difference between a full‑blown painting and a sketch. There'll also be a few live tracks on the CD — we've not put out a live LP before either. But there were these interesting moments at live gigs which we've got on DAT, and we can put them out now — the sort of stuff that used to be considered B‑sides, you know, when you would get away with all the interesting stuff on the B‑side..."

Your publicity manager has made reference recently to 'a new 808 State, with a more accessible, singles‑orientated approach, and more vocal hooks'. And this ties in with the reference made on your press releases to the 'new sound for a new scene' for this forthcoming album.

"Yeah... well, obviously, we've changed an awful lot, because we're dealing with dance music, which moves all the time, and we've hit a point where we're bored with certain aspects of what we've been doing for years, so we're trying to change what we're doing... Actually, our approach is more to do with the abuse of technology now — when the technology for making music was new, it was all exciting, but we've had it for a while now, so we're trying to find out new ways of twisting it. So the sound coming out has changed — I think it's a lot more organic, actually, and has got a lot more 'scrappiness' to it."

'Organic' is a term you used around the time that Gorgeous came out — I remember you said then that your aim was to make organic‑sounding music with electronics, and cited jazz as an influence. Tracks like 'Black Morpheus' from Gorgeous did seem to try to fuse dance music with a very jazzy feel. Is this new album a move away from that, or are you still striving for dance music with an 'organic' feel?

"Yeah, and I think we've done it a lot better this time. I think we were at the early stages of it when we did Gorgeous, and we're more advanced with it now."

Do you really see a new scene emerging in dance music?

"Well... we went to Glastonbury, and it is interesting that the so‑called alternative scene have latched onto dance music in a big way — interesting to see Orbital headlining on the Saturday. Dance music is firmly established now, and it's just a matter of people being able to find artists they can trust within that genre. Because it is a very mistrustful genre — there's so many people doing it, and so many people can do one good record, but who do you trust as artists in the long term? Hopefully, people will trust us in that way, because we've been established for so long, and because of the quality of the work, and so on. We do gaff up once in a while, of course... It's strange, though, because a lot of those bands like Orbital are very much 'NME bands' now — whereas even when we had eight hit singles in a row we didn't even get on the cover of the NME, because we were 'dance', and not considered a 'proper band'. That attitude has changed."

Not Making Waves: 808 Gear

Just a brief question about gear — you've had enormous gear lists on your last two albums...

"Yeah, well, they were a bit tongue‑in‑cheek, you know, but the joke backfired on us, because they meant that about 90 boffins turned up backstage at every gig..."

I know you use the Waldorf Microwave, as it was in the equipment list for Gorgeous, but are you interested in the Wave keyboard at all?

"Er... it looks good..."

Oh... not actually had your hands on one yet, then?

"No... I did have a go on the VL1, though."

Very often, I think the sketches leading up to a finished piece are sometimes more interesting than the final piece itself — it's a bit like the difference between a full‑blown painting and a sketch.

How did you find that?

"Mmm. I think it'll take a bit of getting used to — there's a lot of technique you'd have to learn in order to get something good out of it. I expected something absolutely revolutionary to come out of it, but it's the person behind the gear that's important, you know. Sometimes we like to limit ourselves — you can have too much gear, and vanish up your own bum with it, you know. On this album, there's more of a blend of technology and real instruments."

That's something else that started on Gorgeous, like with the acoustic guitar on 'Plan 9', I suppose.

"Yes, but there's a lot more of that, and we're not frightened to use those instruments, whereas once we were — we definitely wanted to be a techno band. But when you're doing that repetitive stuff with no accidents in it, your brain doesn't get stimulated as much — we like to put in those accidents."

Have you got into hard disk recording at all — obviously, you're not generally a vocals band, except for the occasional collaboration, but how about for editing?

"No, we haven't got one of those systems, but an editing system is something I think we could use really well. On our first albums you can actually hear the tape edits going on — it was something very interesting to us then, the idea that you could bring some music really to life by just a few cuts in tape. When we're putting an album together we always Sound Tools it with somebody. But, unless you learn to use a system yourself, you can't abuse it properly, and the people we've always used have done it really neatly. That approach doesn't interest me so much — so, yeah, it's something I'd like to get into, but haven't done yet.

"With this album, we've done maybe three mixes of each track, and then lots of little sections ready for editing. We want to merge the whole thing, and have lots of reprises, that sort of thing, make the album one long piece. There's lots of sub‑mixes that we could make something really interesting out of. I like the idea of using music as raw material to create a bigger picture. And that is something that this new album will definitely show. I love the Beastie Boys' new album, the way they've structured that — you might get a little groove for just a couple of minutes, then off into a real hardcore song, then into a really sleazy song. It's a total hotch‑potch, but it works."

Cajun Techno? No Thanks

Any idea how many tracks the album'll have yet?

"I don't want to make it too big — I think it gets a bit indigestible for people. They always end up big, though, because we always do a lot of music, and you end up thinking 'God, I can't leave that out! Or that!'. But with this CD outlet, we could get some of the more... uncompromising tracks out. I mean with some stuff, you dump it on the record company's desk, and it's brilliant, but you know they're never going to release it in a million years..."

Are you generally happy with ZTT?

"I think we're pretty much brutally honest with each other... I think they've got our best interests at heart, but it's just difficult out there at the moment — for any kind of music. People are buying less music, and we're not the easiest kind of music to sell. It's good to have other people on your side — like the sort of people who will be helping us run State To State."

Will you answer everyone who contacts you through the service?

"Well... I imagine there will have to be a bit of filtering going on. The response could be quite small, or massive. If you have a hit, too, it could all change. It's like the Grid now. I mean, the Grid have been ticking along, doing really interesting stuff for ages, and then they have a hit, and it all takes off."

One hit like that and suddenly everyone was talking about a 'Summer Of Cajun House'...

"Oooh, I tell you the most annoying thing — we had done about three tracks like that before 'Swamp Thing' came out, and we were listening to them, going 'this is gonna be massive...' — but the record company was saying 'Cajun Techno? Sorry, can't see it happening'."