When Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay recorded an instrumental improv album in 2023, they had no intention of performing it live — let alone in a cinema, through an immersive Dolby Atmos sound system...
In late 1971, nascent art‑rock group Roxy Music placed an ad in Melody Maker seeking “the perfect guitarist for avant‑rock group: original, creative, adaptable, melodic, fast, slow, elegant, witty, scary, stable, tricky. Quality musicians only.” When a young Phil Manzanera applied, he fitted the description so well that, half a century later, the same qualities still drive his creative endeavours.
“What we’re doing as AM/PM really does describe the kind of music that Roxy was trying to do,” affirms Manzanera today. “It goes back to that original mission statement for Roxy, which was to do interesting music and perform it in a visually entertaining way.”
AM/PM is the instrumental and improvisational outfit Manzanera formed with Roxy Music saxophonist Andy Mackay, the first fruit of which was a self‑titled album, issued in 2023. March 2024 saw AM/PM, along with another Roxy stalwart, drummer Paul Thompson, perform three sold‑out shows at All Is Joy, a venue located in the old Warner Brothers’ De Lane Lea building in Soho, London.
“How we ended up doing those shows all happened by chance,” explains Manzanera. “The AM/PM album was mainly done by a series of improvisations, which I did in my studio, and then sent to Andy asking him if he could put something on top of it. I had no thought of ever playing it live. I thought there’s no way I could learn what I did because it was so random, it would take me forever to learn, so there was no chance of doing any live performances. Then Andy suggested doing these gigs, and I thought that it would be a terrible idea, because how the hell could we do it because a lot of it was meant to be sort of improvised and just on the spur of the moment. I was concerned it was going to be a disaster, but Andy insisted.”
Phil Manzanera: “The AM/PM album was mainly done by a series of improvisations, which I did in my studio, and then sent to Andy asking him if he could put something on top of it. I had no thought of ever playing it live."
Just Like In The Movies
The venue’s intimacy and sound system allowed the pair to perform concerts that were totally immersive in every sense of the word. “So, we decided to do it in a very small space, a 75‑seater screening theatre in Soho, which had a 7.1 Dolby Atmos speaker system, and a huge screen,” says Manzanera. “I took advantage of that, making special videos that were going to be projected onto us. And then the whole sort of thing started developing into what Andy used to do at the end of the ’60s in the arts labs with Brian Eno and stuff before he joined Roxy, and before they became Roxy. So, it was a bit like going back to that time period, but with modern tech.”
The performances were also to be recorded, and later mixed in Dolby Atmos. But with the original AM/PM album very much an improvised affair, showcasing the interaction between Manzanera and Mackay, one of the early challenges the project faced was finding a strategy that would keep true to the album’s improvisational spirit and inherent electronic elements without becoming a static backing track.
“To solve this, we made small loops of elements from the multitracks that were then loaded into Ableton, using an Akai APC Mini,” explains Mike Boddy, AM/PM engineer, mixer and co‑producer. “I was then able to trigger loops live and create evolving electronic arrangements for the show. Rehearsals started at Phil’s Gallery Studio with Phil, Andy, Lucas, [vocalist] Sonia Bernardo and myself ironing out technical issues and getting a feel for the set. Paul Thompson didn’t join any of the rehearsals until the day before the first live show, due to him living over three hours away in Newcastle, so realistically he probably had only two hours of rehearsals before having to perform. This really highlighted what an incredibly talented drummer he is. Despite the lack of rehearsing and having to play to a click sent to him from the Ableton rig, along with having improvised electronic elements going on around him and no structure to follow, he never missed a beat.”
Any initial concerns Manzanera may have had quickly dissipated upon completion of the first song on the inaugural night’s performance. “After we played the first number, we looked to each other and went, ‘This is pretty good!’, exclaims Manzanera. “I then told the audience I had no idea what we were doing, but hope that it was going to work. And it seemed to work, and they seemed to enjoy it. Luckily, we recorded it because the thing with live performances, especially if you’re improvising material, is that it could all go horribly wrong as it depends on the moment, the atmosphere, and the audience.
“The shows were a very collaborative effort with Mike Boddy as part of the band up at the mixing desk with his Ableton, and moving stuff around the immersive speaker systems, and [guitar tech/guitarist] Lucas Polo fulfilling the sort of role Eno used to do for me in Roxy Music, by treating my guitar using my pedalboard. So, the combination of that, along with Mike treating it again, and sending it around, influenced the way I played and the way I left spaces, in turn leading to Andy and I being able to have a musical conversation with sound.”
On Stage
Boddy was tasked with engineering the sound for the live performances and recording each night’s set. “As the original album had a very electronic nature to it, it was helpful to keep the stage quieter,” explains Boddy. “Paul used a Roland V‑Drum setup for the kick, snare and toms but had a real hi‑hat and some real cymbals. Keeping the stage quieter massively helped with Sonia’s vocals for the recordings and meant we could get away with a Shure SM7 on the sax. We had AKG C414s on the drum overheads, AKG C451 on the hat. Phil had his amp in a box, also, helping keep the stage nice and quiet; inside the box was an SM57. For the recordings the audience were captured with a pair of KM184s and a pair of Audio‑Technica AT4051s.
“Rehearsals were in stereo, but as the venue had a d&b Soundscape Dolby Atmos system, along with a cinema screen, the plan was always to try and make the experience as immersive as possible for the audience. Phil made videos/visual treatments for each song, which for the shows were projected onto the stage, musicians and screen. For the shows themselves, these were loaded into [AV playback software] QLab and triggered via a Stream Deck from there.
“On the original album I had used guitar pedals to create ambient textures within the tracks, so to help with creating a soundscape for the Dolby Atmos setup I was taking sends from the Yamaha CL5 front‑of‑house desk and sending them to an Old Blood Noise Endeavors Sunlight reverb pedal, a Chase Bliss Habit, and a Chase Bliss Mood. I’d either have vocals or the saxophone and violin as well, going into the pedals, and they would create soundscapes that would then end up going into the sides and rears of the room.”
Phil Manzanera: "We didn’t quite know what we were doing. Yet it combined so many technical innovations that have happened in the last 52 years to enable us to do this kind of gig."
“It was all about sound textures and silence and listening to the space and to each other,” adds Manzanera. “Because Andy and Paul and I have played together for 52 years, we have an intuitive sort of understanding of tone and space and groove. So, in effect, the technical side of the gig was something totally new for all of us. We didn’t quite know what we were doing. Yet it combined so many technical innovations that have happened in the last 52 years to enable us to do this kind of gig.
“We also had a particular challenge, in that for the people who had the AM/PM album, it had to sound vaguely like the tracks on that album. So, we triggered off certain minimal bits from the original: not the toplines, but the groove and some key elements so that we could improvise on top of them. And it was different every night, so we had three goes at it. It was almost like recording a live album with an audience there, as if you had written some stuff and then went in and performed it in front of a live audience, which people have done historically. That would be the equivalent of what we did, but using a different amount of colour palettes.”
For The Record
To record each night’s performance, Boddy relied on a Sound Devices PIX 270i to capture proceedings onto disk. “For recording the show, I was lent a PIX 270i by my good friend Kev at Amos Audio Ltd,” says Boddy. “It is a super little box to record the gigs. As I was mixing the show, doing the backing track live on Ableton, doing the monitors as well and recording it on top too, this box was a life‑saver. I literally plug the Dante in, the Yamaha immediately sees it, so it’s almost hard to get it wrong. It’s such a simple box. It’s like one of the best hard‑disk recorders ever made, really.”
When it came to mixing the live recordings, the project translated to Dolby Atmos incredibly well. “The stereo mixes of the live album were made at my home studio, but for the Dolby Atmos, mix sessions were held at Phil Manzanera’s Gallery Studio using the Airsound system for monitoring,” says Boddy. “With a lot of the material having an ambient nature, it meant it was easy to create an interesting space. The audience mics were used more towards the rear to middle of the space, to make it feel like you are in the audience. I had recorded all of my guitar pedal effect returns and these were used in a similar manner to how I’d used them live. And it was all mixed in the box, where the FabFilter plug‑ins we found out all worked with Dolby Atmos as well. I think they might have been the only plug‑ins we had that did that, so the Fabfilter Pro‑Q 3 and Pro‑L 2 limiter were very much in use.”
Dolby City
Manzanera questions whether only audiophiles will be the ones able to enjoy the immersive experience that Dolby Atmos has to offer. “Who knows how many people can actually listen to Dolby Atmos at the present time, because you need a certain amount of gear,” Manzanera says. “Although, having said that, if you play a Dolby Atmos through a Blu‑ray player into your television, though you don’t actually get the full Dolby Atmos effect, you do get a much better‑quality playback than a normal CD player, which I was amazed by.
Phil Manzanera: "if you play a Dolby Atmos through a Blu‑ray player into your television, though you don’t actually get the full Dolby Atmos effect, you do get a much better‑quality playback than a normal CD player, which I was amazed by."
“The whole experience has been a real learning curve, especially when it came to mastering, as finding places in London that could actually master Dolby Atmos proved challenging. At the time we rang around, there were very few solutions. All the big ones like AIR, Metropolis and Abbey Road, none of them were able to master Dolby Atmos. So luckily, I was friendly with Steven Wilson, who does a lot of Dolby Atmos mixes for everybody, and he suggested a guy who does stuff for films in Soho. There was just like one guy. So, there’s a big gap in the market there if Dolby Atmos continues to be a format that has legs.”
Immersive audio might be a novel way to perform and record music, but it seems it’s here to stay: since the mastering of AM/PM, all the studios mentioned above are now equipped to master in Dolby Atmos.
The Atmos Pedalboard
Guitar tech Lucas Polo discusses Phil Manzanera’s guitar effects rig: “The pedalboard itself was originally created for Phil for the Roxy Music 50th anniversary reunion tour. Because they hadn’t gigged together for over 10 years, a new rig was needed. As his guitar tech, it was my role to design something that was suitable for the tour. That took a lot of investigating, and trial and error. Thankfully, I had lots of help from Javier Weyler and Jake Elsegood from 5dB, and also from Daniel Steinhardt at GigRig, who were integral in putting it all together.
“On the Roxy tour, I was on the wings of the stage as his guitar tech, and because the setup was fairly complicated, the stage pedalboard’s GigRig unit was connected via MIDI to another GigRig controller, placed in a tray on the guitar rack. So not only I was making the guitar changes, I was also changing the pedals from a distance so Phil could focus on playing.
“Phil is a master of tone and texture, and his work with Roxy is so varied. We knew lots of different tones would have to be accessed very quickly, but didn’t want to sacrifice the quality found in analogue circuitry. That’s how we arrived at the idea of having a MIDI switcher operated remotely, masterfully executed by Dan and the GigRig team. When it got to AM/PM shows, the setup had to shrink a little bit because of space. With Roxy, they were in big arenas, so we had a lot of room, but we just didn’t have that luxury at AM/PM live as it was an intimate venue. So, we decided that instead of me controlling the pedalboard remotely, I would just do it on stage.
“Instead of the traditional thing where the pedalboard is in front of the guitarist, the pedalboard was in front of me on a table at a height where I could use my hands to treat the sound in real time. Originally when I designed the pedalboard, they gave me access to the 1970s multitrack recordings from Roxy Music so I could solo all of Phil’s guitars and all of Eno’s treatments and figure out a way to do it in the 21st Century with current technology.
“When we did AM/PM, it was also a tip of the hat to Eno, who used to be on stage treating Phil’s guitars live. Back in the ’70s, Eno would use his VCS3 synth and a Revox A77 tape machine to achieve all the crazy effects you hear on Phil’s guitar [as seen on the ‘Ladytron’ performance on The Old Grey Whistle Test]. To replicate that, I used a combination of the DigiTech Whammy, Eventide H9 and Strymon Timeline pedals, as well as a Jam Pedals Wahcko wah‑wah as a filter, always tweaking the pitch and delay time with my hands to mimic the behaviour of tape and an analogue synth.
“When making the original recordings of the AM/PM album, they quickly realised it was very immersive and quite an expansive sound. When they decided to perform it live, Andy’s idea was to stage it in a cinema because it had surround sound. And the Atmos mix was a way to replicate that live experience, as the original AM/PM album was only mixed to stereo.
“I think it’s worth mentioning the fact too that we had an almost silent stage, meaning we had electronic drums, both my guitar and bass were DI’ed, and Phil’s guitar was going from the guitar to the pedalboard and then to a head placed on stage behind me and on top of a Grossman Fat Box isolation cabinet fitted with a Celestion G12M speaker, and miked with an SM57. It meant that we could have the guitar really loud and yet completely silent on stage. And it sounded so clean at front of house because the microphone is inside the box, so the microphone is unaffected by the sound on stage. It wasn’t getting all the noise of the drums, the bass, the rumble. So, when I was using those effects, the effects were only affecting Phil’s guitar, and it was a very clean sound, which allowed us to make a much cleaner mix.”