Aviram Barath: “Technology is often used to mitigate risk and to try and make things perfect. This creates situations where everything is fully homogenised and we lose individual expression and restrict human creativity."Photo: Morgan Sinclair
Aviram Barath’s musical direction inspired rapper Loyle Carner to work with a live band for his hit album hopefully!
“There are many ways in which technology can facilitate human expression,” says Aviram Barath. “We just need to find more ways that open doors for human creativity. Instead, technology is often used to mitigate risk and to try and make things perfect. This creates situations where everything is fully homogenised and we lose individual expression and restrict human creativity. The challenge is to tame technology, to use it in a way where we don’t become slaves to it.”
Loyle Carner’s fourth album hopefully! was co‑produced by Aviram Barath.A large part of Barath’s job consists of supporting artists and musicians in maintaining their freedom of human expression, and helping them learn how to avoid control freakery. Barath has been doing this behind the scenes as a musical director for a number of years, but recently stepped into the limelight as the executive producer and one of the main songwriters on Loyle Carner’s third album hopefully!, and also while directing and performing with him on stage at Glastonbury this year.
Loose Directions
A multi‑instrumentalist who started out playing trumpet in orchestras, Barath graduated from Goldsmiths College in London in 2015 with a degree in Popular Music. Not long afterwards, he joined the live band of singer/songwriter Rae Morris, who asked him to become musical director for her live shows. While Barath always had a parallel practice working in studios as a songwriter and producer, his initial recognition and success came as a musical director for live performances.
“Electronic sound walls and technologies have become a big part of recorded music, and there is this tension as to how we carry the sonic identity of recorded music into a live performance. One danger is to lose some of that sonic identity, the other is to be so dependent on technology that it doesn’t really feel like a performance, because musicians are working with rigid elements that don’t allow for free expression in the moment. The art of balancing these two is at the core of my musical direction practice. How to maintain the vision that the artists have created for a record, and yet make sure that the technology is in a supportive role on stage, rather than becoming a hindrance. There are various ways to do this, and over the years I was lucky enough for artists to ask me help them achieve that for their shows.”
Barath’s credits as musical director include Jai Paul, Pa Salieu, Girl In Red, Arlo Parks, Glass Animals, Obongjayar, Rachel Chinouriri, Lola Young and Loyle Carner. Unlike many musical directors, he often does not tour with the artists any more, other than currently with Jai Paul and Loyle Carner. In the latter case, Barath’s musical direction ended up informing much of how hopefully! came into being.
World Building
“Usually I spend around two or three weeks creating a show,” explains Barath. “This could involve anything to do with arrangements and the use of technology, creating sounds and patches, and building a few alternative set list options. Many times, we leave room for decisions to be made during the performances. For instance, there may be songs with an open‑ended outro, and it’s undecided exactly how to get to the next song. The keyboard player or guitarist or someone else can improvise a transition. I try to help musicians create moments that are unique to each show. I want them to go on stage every time disregarding the fact that this is the 100th time they’re playing this show.
“I’m aware that having moments where you don’t know exactly what you’re going to do, in an arena in front of tens of thousands of people, sounds risky. But when something is purely safe, we run the risk of it not communicating emotionally. For example, many performers depend on in‑ear monitors. The initial technical idea was that they make it easier to hear things and to control anything that risks feedbacking. But because they are there, it’s also very convenient to add in what are called ‘cues’. In a lot of shows, you have a voice in the musicians’ ear saying, ‘Chorus coming in in one, two, three, four.’ This is pretty common. But I try and avoid that.
“Technology allows us to mitigate risks and make things supposedly more perfect. But that’s completely missing the point of what we’re trying to do. The structures of the songs need to be so internalised by the performers that they’re able to bring the vision that we worked on for those songs to life. They don’t need me, or an electronic version of me, in their ears saying, ‘Now we go to the chorus.’ Not doing that changes the whole mindset of the show. Otherwise people effectively start a show with 100 points, and from there can only lose points every time that they do something that is supposedly a mistake. Instead I want them to go on stage thinking ‘I’m going to be listening to what my fellow musicians on stage are playing, as we’re together working towards the same vision. And I have such a deep understanding of this music that I can focus on that, rather than worry about doing something wrong.’”
Across The Universe
Barath says that playing with freedom is a particular challenge for younger musicians. “It can be very overwhelming for them. They’re surrounded by people who constantly tell them how things are meant to be done. So I have conversations suggesting that there’s more than one way to approach a performance, and sometimes that’s enough for someone’s mind to be set free. But this doesn’t mean that shows are completely improvised, far from it.
“I’m trying to put things in place that define the universe of the artists’ art and vision. In our universe there are laws of physics, and we can operate in them as our own individual character. This is how I want a guitarist or drummer to feel on stage: they know the boundaries of the vision of this show, and within these boundaries, they can be themselves. That’s where there is a chance for us to create something with human expression that leads to real engagement with the audience. We all want to feel a part of a community with other humans, but if a person in the audience experiences a laptop playing the show, they haven’t interacted with real humans.
“Lola Young is a good example. Part of her vision is to communicate imperfection. I think what people find so exciting about Lola is that she is a real human. There is nothing about her that is put on. My role as a musical director is to help build a show that allows for her personality to shine through. That means allowing room for unexpected moments, when she can just sing what she likes, and make sure these moments can be extended if she wants to. So you create options for the musicians on stage to react to what she’s doing, and for her to react to what they’re doing.
“We can’t just play the record, that would feel really stale. There are artistic choices that are right for the record, but don’t necessarily work the same way in a live performance. So with the Lola show, we push a slightly edgier, rockier sound than the record, because it feels like the show wants to go to this slightly punkier place. Another unique situation are Tiny Desk Concerts [Girl In Red performed one], where there’s no monitoring. This limitation forces the performance into a much more intimate place, with everyone listening to each other acoustically in the room. The result is arrangements that have to be sparser, allowing more freedom. This is why we get all those really beautiful alternative versions from Tiny Desk.
Aviram Barath: The art and the fun is to find the right balance between technology and human performance for each project.
“It’s not that I’m against computers or other technology. Technology plays a vital part in being able to create the sonics that are on records, and in translating them to the stage. For example, a big part of sonic identity can come from vocal production. People can stack 100 vocal tracks on their records. Sometimes it’s a big part of the sound, and it can be a big part in what makes someone’s voice iconic or recognisable. Those vocals will have specific effects on them, specific delay throws or reverb settings. Live, you can just use the effect audio from the record on a backing track. Or, you can recreate some of the effects chains, and draw specific automations, and use those on the performer’s live microphone, so it still reacts to what the performer is doing on stage. It’s similar to combining a live kit with a drum machine on stage. The art and the fun is to find the right balance between technology and human performance for each project.”
New Words
In 2022, Barath’s talent for finding that balance inspired Benjamin Gerard Coyle‑Larner, aka Loyle Carner, to invite him to become his musical director. “I’d played on Ben’s third album, Hugo, contributing some piano, and we started talking about the way he wanted to perform that record. Up until that point, Ben had always performed in a classic hip‑hop way, mainly him with a DJ. To tour Hugo, he wanted to perform with a band for the first time. There are lots of nuances that come with performing hip‑hop music live, because it is so rooted in repetition or looping, things that we associate with technology rather than human performance. So we went through the process of finding the right people. We found brilliant musicians. For example, Richard Spaven is a legendary hip‑hop drummer who understands how this kind of music works. It’s very subtle. It’s about milliseconds in the way the groove sits.
“On tour with Ben I play keyboards, a bit of guitar and bass, trumpet on a couple of songs, and I sing. We toured the album for two years, and during this time Ben fell in love with live musicianship. Spending time with live musicians on the road meant that a whole new musical vocabulary entered the conversation. And when the time came to work on his next album, Ben wanted it to be focused on live performance. So we started with the touring band in a studio, trying stuff out and seeing what sticks, with Ben reacting to what’s happening in the room in real time. I think this was a revelation for him. As a hip‑hop artist you’re used to receiving beats via email, and if you like one, you put your verses on it. But the ability to go in a really nuanced way and say, ‘Oh, I really like this part, but I want that to swing a bit more,’ or ‘I want that note to come a bit later,’ opened up a whole new set of possibilities for him.
“In the beginning, sessions were dotted around the Hugo tour. If we had a few days off somewhere we’d go into a studio. A lot of those initial sessions were in Premises Studios in Hackney in London. Their Studio A is a great room. We continued in Urchin Studios, another studio in Hackney. By the time we had something that felt like a record, we went to LA and spent two weeks in Larabee Studios. I guess what we were doing was blowing the songs up as big as we thought they could be. After Larrabee we spent a few days in New York. We wrote the last song that came onto the record there, ‘Don’t Fix It’, with Nick Hakim. We finished that song in Electric Lady Studios.
“When we came back from the States, we realised we did not actually want the songs to be that big, and we went into a process of stripping some things back and navigating to the place where those songs started, rather than where they ended. With a lot of this record, when we had a choice between being more hard‑hitting or gentle, we took the more gentle route. We had a lot of conversations about leaving spaces for the audience’s imagination. As soon as we felt a song had an identity, we were like, ‘OK, now let listeners paint the rest of the picture in their own minds. We’ve drawn the lines, now the colouring in can be done by the listeners.’ We hoped that this makes people feel like the record is also theirs. We did this stripping back, as well as more overdubs, and finishing the album, at either Urchin, Premises or Strongroom Studios. Then we mixed with Lexx at his The Barn studios near Hastings.”
In The Room
Nick Mills (left), Aviram Barath (centre) and Loyle Carner at work on a song from hopefully! in Los Angeles.The core group consisted of Loyle Carner, Nick Mills and himself. “We were involved in everything. The band consists of Richard [Spaven] on drums, Harvey [Grant] and Finn [Carter] on keys, and other friends came in to play instruments on specific songs. Nick played guitar, co‑wrote and co‑produced, and engineered the whole record. Ben also co‑produced and of course co‑wrote the whole record.
“Many of the songs started as improvisations by the band in the room. By that point we had a strong understanding of each other, having toured together for two years. With band sessions, all the musicians were usually together in a room, no partitions, with only Rich, the drummer, behind glass walls. Nick and Ben would be in the control room, and I was moving between that and the live space. Someone would come up with an initial idea, for example a chord progression, and the conversations in terms of how to move forwards with it happened really quickly.
“For example, the first song written for the album was ‘In My Mind’, at Premises Studios. We played the basic idea a few times, talked for 10 minutes about a structure that we thought would work, and then we played the song twice. The second take is what’s on the album. Ben was in constant communication with the live room. After that second take, he said, ‘I have an idea, but it’s kind of sung, and I’ve never sung on a record.’ We encouraged him to put down the idea, and not to overthink things, and the take he did that day is what’s on the record.
“Another example is the song ‘Lyin’. I wrote the initial musical element on a synth, and the song was written to that. Then Ben said, ‘Actually, I want this to feel like a lullaby.’ So the image we were trying to paint is Ben sitting playing a guitar next to his son’s bed, singing the song. We took the synth out and replaced it with an acoustic guitar. But you can kinda hear it’s not written for guitar. It’s not very smooth. It feels a bit like you’re listening to something that someone is figuring out, rather than that they know what they’re doing. This kind of roughness, almost lo‑fi‑ness, is what we were after for the whole record. This record is not a straight down the line hip‑hop record, but instead a lot of it is inspired by bands Ben would listen to as a teenager, or that we would listen to as a teenager. The Smiths and In Rainbows by Radiohead were big talking points.
“The whole process of this record, for me, was chasing Ben’s musical instincts. It’s about him feeling something. My role was to try and facilitate that musically, and to communicate that to the musicians in the room. ‘Horcrux’, for example, is a song that was fully built around the interaction between the drum groove and Ben’s rap flow. They came together. All the decisions about drum rolls and specific breaks happened in relation to things that Ben was doing in his rap, that Rich, the drummer, is reacting to, and with Ben reacting to Rich as well.”
Man & Machine
As well as 10 co‑writing credits, and co‑production credits on all 11 songs, Barath also has an engineering credit on hopefully!. Because he started out his career as a musician, Barath didn’t start to get involved in the recording and production side of music until his time at Goldsmiths College.
“During my teenage years I studied classical music, but I also had a deep love of all other forms of music. I was in various bands doing popular music, playing guitars or keys, as an autodidact. Later, at Goldsmiths, I fell in love with electronics and synthesis, and when I had to submit my work, I had to find ways of recording it. That was my first experience trying to produce things with a sonic identity. So I got into production, and now I have my own studio with my dear friend Dave Okumu in Deptford, South East London, called Unit 9. There are tons of beautiful guitars, basses and keyboards. The Roland Juno‑60 is still my favourite, as well as a Yamaha VSS‑200.
Numerous hardware synths were used on the Larrabee Studios sessions, including a Roland SH‑101 (left) and a portable Eurorack modular system.
“In terms of synths, on Ben’s record I played mostly the Juno‑60 and the Juno‑106, as well as a Moog Sub 37. Finn [Carter] played some Prophet‑6, and Harvey [Grant] played the Roland SH‑101. There’s also some Ableton Analog instrument, using sounds that I make running through a bunch of plug‑ins, often by Soundtoys. On ‘Time To Go’ Finn Carter played these sounds, and I was moving knobs around, because we wanted the sound to be in constant change. There’s also a lot of modular synthesis, mostly Eurorack, with different modules. A lot of the piano that was played on the record went through a modular synth, and we’d add several layers. In ‘About Time’, for example, you can hear the piano with all kinds of artefacts that come from the modular.
“The Moog Sub 37 is doing a lot of the sub stuff on the album. There are also some 808s; for example on ‘All I Need’ there’s an 808 that supports the more melodic electric bass part that happens in the choruses. So there’s a lot of interplay between electronic bass and live bass. On ‘All I Need’ and on ‘Horcrux’ I programmed drums, mainly using samples of the Roland CR‑78 in Ableton. Rich, the drummer, locks in with the drum machine part. On ‘All I Need’ you can hear the drum machine, and then the live kit on top of it. There’s a constant tension in the song between Rich pushing his snares, whilst the drum machine is playing straight snares.”
Dry Cleaning
With regards to the recording process, Barath reveals that the team went for “a pretty dry vibe. So we did not have many room mics. The drums are a good example. I guess it’s more of an indie‑sounding record, but it’s processed and mixed like a hip‑hop record in the sense that the drums are very much centred around the kick and snare. The overheads are far back. At moments they are pushed up, but almost as an effect, when we wanted a more overbearing toppy sound. Usually the overheads would be side‑chained quite strongly to the kick and snare, so the overheads would duck, and the track is still anchored to the kick‑snare group.
“In terms of the electric guitars, we often went with two mics on the amps, and when we recorded the room it would not necessarily be very big. The acoustic guitars are mostly recorded in the control room. Sometimes you can hear noises of people walking around or a chair squeaking or something. We were into leaving all of that stuff in. Ben did his vocal takes in a vocal booth. We mostly used a Neumann U67, with a classic vocal chain of a Neve 1073 mic pre and a UREI 1176 compressor. He normally did two or three takes, and we’d then choose the take with the best feeling. Ben writes and records extremely quickly. Almost all of the vocals on the record he put down when something was first created. And ‘About Time’ he did actually record with his son on his shoulders in the vocal booth. The conversation you can hear between them is real!
“Nick recorded everything into Pro Tools. A lot of the time, we would bounce some things out, and work on it in Ableton, or run it through some samplers, and then send it back into Tools. There was a lot of back and forth between different machines. So there was a lot of AirDropping. We did this with the idea of committing to things. For example, for ‘Horcrux’ we were tracking the drums one day, and then printed a stereo bounce of the drums, I did some things to it in Ableton, and we bounced it back to Tools. That stereo bounce back became the drums of the second half of the song. What we printed was what we stuck with. In the same spirit, any comping was done immediately after we recorded something. The whole idea was to try and react to things in the most instinctive way, and as close as possible in time to what happened, so we could retain whatever the energy or the feeling was when we were making it.”
Instant Reaction
The album was mixed by Lexx on the 48‑channel SSL 4000G console at his own The Barn Studios.According to Barath, the team tended to record on Thursdays and Fridays, and revisit those recordings a week later with overdubs, often from guest musicians. “We didn’t replace things. We were trying to create opportunities for ourselves to react to things in an instinctive way, rather than lose sight of what we were trying to do. We would throw stuff at the songs, to see what felt good. And then at the end of the day, we’d again comp pretty quickly. The overdubs were done after Ben had put down his vocals. They would be in reaction to his performance. For example, ‘The mood in this verse needs to feel a bit different because of what Ben is saying, so let’s put a slightly different colour in.’
“At the end of the process we went to Lexx, who is a big inspiration for me. He mixes on a 48‑channel SSL 4000G console, which sounds great, with the computer with Pro Tools behind him. So he’s facing the desk while mixing, and not looking at a screen. Working with DAWs can be amazing, and for example Ableton is my home in many ways. But the relationship is less physical than when working with hardware synths, or a desk. When you’re watching a screen it pushes you into making choices in a more calculated way. It’s more surgical and less instinctive.”
Conducting the final mixes on a desk fitted Carner’s aim to, as Barath put it, “make a record that’s more about vulnerability and imperfections. It was always our hope that the record would make people feel something. Ben talked about wanting this record to be a companion that people can listen to and feel like they’re spending time with a friend. That’s a really interesting way of looking at what you want your art to be. This was part of his lyrics, and also the sonics. The record is not afraid of not being polished. It’s almost a celebration of imperfections, and the joyous nature that they can bring to music and to life.”