Michalis ‘MSM’ Michael in his North London studio.
Casisdead’s Famous Last Words may be one of the best British rap albums ever made — but actually making it was an epic challenge!
“When it first came out, I was surprised that I could listen to it,” says MSM. “I thought my PTSD would have been stronger!”
The ‘it’ in question is Casisdead’s debut album Famous Last Words, which MSM was initially hired to mix. His role gradually expanded until the project took over his life completely — for eight years. “It was the most intense project I’ve ever been on in my life. I don’t think there’ll ever be an album that could ever top it for me. I was recording, mixing, editing, changing sounds, calling people in to do things. There was always a layer of: ‘Can it be better?’ in the back of our minds.
“I reckon I tried to quit the album at least five times. I remember being like, ‘I literally cannot do this any more.’ On one of the songs, I did 500‑plus mixes. Not different mixes as in sonics, but comps, vocal edits, changes with breakdowns. I mixed the whole thing, but that happened as we were making it. I’d mix a song, think it’s all done and good and gravy, then he’s gone to re‑record the vocals. And I’m trying to explain to him the amount of automation work I’ve done, and how it doesn’t just work like chopping it in and replacing it. I have to redo all that work. Those are the parts that sent me crazy.”
Behind The Mask
MSM (Michalis Michael) would eventually be credited as Executive Producer on the album, more than a decade after he first became a confidant of the secretive rapper. “I knew of Cas from when we were younger, he was just a local MC. Castro Saint was his name at the time. I was a fan, but didn’t meet him. Then he just kind of vanished from making music.
Casisdead’s perfectionist art is as much visual as it is musical.
“In 2012 I got a phone call from a friend of mine, and he said ‘Have you seen this?’ The video was what got me first. I was like: whoever’s done this is cinematic. Someone’s thinking. I recognised the voice, but the name was Casisdead. I’ve rung around a few people that I knew and I was like, ‘Is this who I think it is?’ And they were like, yeah. And then somebody said, ‘Oh, he’s a good friend of mine. I can I can put him in touch with you if you want.’
“I didn’t know he was this MI5 secret squirrel. But he jumped on a three‑way call with us and you could tell he was hesitant. He was just like, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ And I was like, ‘I just want to help. I just want to be involved.’ I was working out of Britannia Row at the time and we just met up and played music to each other. From there I set up a studio in my house, and he’d started to transition from the place that he was working to mine. And I was basically picking up the pieces of what he’d been working on, which was a mixtape, The Number 23.
“So he was like, ‘Look, I’m gonna get you all these files, do what you can with them’ — and they were a mess. It was like MP3 instrumentals, vocals recorded on different days with different mics. It was a salvage job. But that’s also what I was used to for like nine or 10 years before that. It’s not what I wanted it to sound like, because now I’ve developed, but I know I can do it. And I was just interested in it. I wasn’t gonna be a snob and be like, ‘Unless you get me the parts...’
“We carried on working, and then around 2015 we did a song called ‘Pat Earrings’. When they brought me the demo of it I knew something was special. I heard it and I was like ‘Well, this is good. I want to work on this but now I’ve got the access to parts. We’re gonna change this for the better.’ And I think by now he’d learned to trust me. So he was like, ‘OK, let’s go for it.’
“The before and after in that song is one of my proudest things because it became the start of the ‘exec production’ thing with him. From what it started as compared to what was finished was night and day. But the idea and song was sick and was always there. It just needed to be pushed in the direction Cas wanted. Once it was released it just started going everywhere. It was getting sync’ed in places, there was a lot of labels talking, and then XL [Recordings] picked him up. And then from 2016 to end of 2023 we were working on what became the album...”
Coming Together
“I didn’t even know it was going to become an album until a few years in. We would just go to the studio and make songs. We’d put together a setup for him too, because I realised that he’s so particular and pedantic about how his performance is. He’s a true perfectionist. I couldn’t physically carry on mixing for everybody and maintain the recording relationships, so he got a vocal chain consisting of a Neve 1073, 1176 and two microphones of different flavours along with a set of [Neumann] KH310s for monitoring. I said to him ‘Look, you should be able to record these vocals at home.’ He would send me ideas and there was not a day that I didn’t speak to him. It was a constant thing. ‘Here’s something new, what d’you reckon?’
“Since 2016, this is what I’ve known in the background. I think the reason I stuck it out the way I did was a testament to myself, to say ‘I don’t give up. I’m not going to quit anything.’ But also I respected his work ethic. He seemed to enjoy the art of perfecting things. Some of it was neurosis. Some of it was him being mental, in my opinion. Like I thought he was overthinking some things and I would have to be like, ‘Bro, relax. No‑one can hear the difference between these two words. This is a decision that you need to make on your own and commit to it.’ He would commit to it — and then a week later change his mind again because he could get it better. And did.
“It got to a point where I was in Cyprus on holiday and I was basically having a panic moment, because he wanted something doing and I didn’t have my rig. I rang a friend of mine, Felix Joseph, to get involved and he ended up producing a few of the songs on the album. I was like, ‘Bro, I really want you to help me on this album.’
“Initially, he was gonna do exec production on it because he’s more of the writer and producer than I am. They made some of the best songs, in my opinion. But Felix’s work is very different to mine. He takes on sessions that maybe would last a week, two weeks, whereas I’m doing a mix a day, two mixes a day. There are gaps in my projects quite often, especially when it’s in a single‑based culture. We all kind of fought quite a bit about who’s doing what, who’s picking up the pieces, and at a certain point Felix was done writing and producing and sent me all the files... So I stepped in and was like ‘Right, I’m gonna pick up where I left off.’”
MSM accumulated a lot of high‑end analogue gear during the making of Famous Last Words. He is also, by his own admission, obsessive about headphones!
Grand Plans
“When I started the album, I was giving it all the big talk and saying ‘We’re going to use all analogue. We’re going to be summing everything.’ Mike Skinner [The Streets] gave me his Anamod tape simulator. I said ‘What!? Why are you giving me this?’ And he’s like ‘I’m not using it. If I ever call you from jail, just answer the phone.’ And I was like fair play, that’s a good deal!’
“I didn’t do the analogue side of life just for my sonics. It was more to encourage him. It was to give him a feeling of like, ‘We’re using all the proper stuff.’ It was an exec producer trick that kind of backfired on me, basically, trying to lift his morale while mine was getting robbed. I rang Cas. I was like, ‘Bro, I’ve got this tape simulator, we’re gonna use that on all these songs!’
“I don’t know how I feel about it at the moment, but I learned a lot about what I love. I looked at these boxes as things that would get me way closer to ‘Let me get the mix out the bloody way, because I know we’re about to spend two months comping, changing, editing.’
“The album started with an analogue master chain. All the lead vocals were getting printed through things. I ended up getting a few [Chandler] Curve Benders at one point, because one was just glued on a certain couple of settings and I needed another one to experiment with. When I say it to myself now, that’s crazy. It has stepped controls, so you can just put it back where it was. I just couldn’t be bothered, because I was losing my mind.
“The Avalon 747 hasn’t moved since 2016. It’s just set. It was used on the mix bus on quite a few songs. And on stems. I just liked this one setting one day and I was like, well, because of the way the sliders are, the risk factor in moving them is ridiculous. I did send sweeps through in Room EQ Wizard so that if someone does move it, I can match it.
“A lot of his album had similar boxes used. There was a lot of 747, there was a lot of Curve Bender, SSL Fusion, Lavry Gold [MkIII] and a lot of Anamod. The SPL Iron didn’t end up being a mix bus processor, it ended up being a vocal processor along with my Phoenix. They’re my two favourite vocal compressors as of late. Very expensive for vocals, but... It just does something. It’s like an energiser. It gave life to things.”
Mix & Match
Central to MSM’s approach to using analogue gear was his SPL Hermes mastering router, which allows different chains of stereo processors to be stored, recalled, and used in parallel configurations. “I’m sending out, on an insert in Pro Tools, into this. Then you choose the box that you want it to go on. Then you have a wet/dry, which is analogue, and then it prints back a stereo stem. So, a lot of the time I’ll do drastic EQs on things like a Curve Bender. Even my NTI here, you could use a super drastic setting, almost distorting slightly, but then you just blend five percent of it in with the original signal.
The SPL Hermes mastering router is key to MSM’s distinctive approach to working with analogue gear.
“Pultecs were on kick drums most of the time, but printed. I used to run them through this Hermes and wet/dry it, just to bring in some real bottom end on a kick that he had. I’d print it back in and he always used to say to me ‘How did you get so much life out of these poxy drums I’ve sent you?’ I know that works. The only thing I need to worry about is how much of it I add in to the dry signal, print it and move on.
“There was a period on the album where I had two master busses, and all my auxes that would normally be going to my summing mixer, I would have them going to two outputs. One would be going out analogue, one would be going to an in‑the‑box mix bus. And so I would then flick between the two mix busses comparing the two, like: is analogue summing doing anything for me? That was fascinating. I also did that with different A‑D converters, changing the input as I mixed to see which I vibed with.
“The process is where the difference happens in summing. I think of it like this. You can go to a restaurant that Gordon Ramsay runs, and you’ve given him shit knives versus good knives... both meals in the end are going to be great, but ask him how he felt when he was making the meal. If I’m gonna spend eight years on an album, let me enjoy it, please. Let me have some fun!”
MSM kept records of the complex analogue processing chains for each track in Session Recall.
Back In The Box
As the revisions mounted up, though, the analogue approach eventually became a millstone. “That kind of died out, I’d say, three‑quarters through the album. I was like, ‘No. The last couple of songs we’re gonna do in the box, and we’re gonna use this as an experiment to see if you can match them to the other ones and have it cohesive.’ I still took his vocal and would print it through things, but it wasn’t all being summed and it wasn’t all going through an analogue chain. And that’s literally because, if we’re changing the vocal comp after the mix so many times, it just was too much for me, even in the amount of time it takes to live bounce five versions of it before you go home.
“I could have just programmed Bounce Butler to do all of this and not have to worry. But I like to see that everything is exactly where it is, because he’s so particular. He could hear the difference in mixes. He pulled me up quite a few times, like ‘Version 1 and version 3, something’s different in the kick.’ And I would come in and I’m like, ‘Yeah, he’s right.’ You can’t bullshit him, so at a certain point I was like, ‘Let me just go in the box and then there’s no room for this error whatsoever.’
“Because he’s hearing in minutiae. The only other person I know that can hear like that is Dappy from N‑Dubz, but his thing is more timing of vocals. Cas can hear flies fucking. He hears the two mixes and he’s like ‘Version 3 does not sound like version 1. What have you done?’ And I’ve got to come in here and be like ‘Why the fuck did I do analogue? What am I doing?’ His ears are annoying!
“There was one day when I begged my manager, give him the money back for what we’ve started! We argued so much. Like there was points where we were not talking. No‑one knew who’s responsible for what. At one point Felix handed the project back to me, let’s say, and my approach was to just match Cas’ work rate. So what I would do was like, if he had a change, I would do the change instantly. I wouldn’t question it. I would send him the two versions. I’d be like, ‘Right, you’ve got to let me know by this time.’ I’d put the pressure on him, so it was like passing this hot potato constantly between each other. And then, towards the end of it, we realised that we’re allies in this. And it kind of got a bit more like, ‘Do you know what? We’ve got to finish this. Otherwise we’ve just wasted years. Let’s, you know, not kill each other.’
The success of Famous Last Words was reflected at this year’s Brit Awards, when Casisdead was voted Best Hip‑hop/Grime/Rap Act.
“I didn’t know I was exec producing when I started. I fell into that by the fact I just kept finishing things and doing things. If you’d have asked me at the end of last year, I’d have said never again. But these are the projects you’re proud of the most. The reward for me is stuff like seeing him win a Brit Award after all this.”