production

When we took the album to be mastered by the talented and very helpful Steve Turnidge, mastering engineer extraordinaire, he asked us if we were able to do this stuff live. I think the actual phrasing was "can you guys pull this off live?"

I think Joel was the first to respond: the question should be inverted. We do this stuff live so often, we weren't sure if we could translate it to a studio recording (my worry was always that it would end up one of those flat, lifeless records that never lets any of the band's live energy come through).

But the more I think about the question (and the more I listen to a few albums and compare them to their live counterparts), the more I realize how valid it really is. ubik. actually took the songs, as we play them live (which includes timing changes, large dynamic shifts, effected vocals, big flourishes of reverb and echo, one-beat gaps of silence, sound-design style screeches, etc), and just taped it. The sonic identity of our songs was not done in post-production: we didn't really add much after we finished taping the instruments live in the room.

...but those sounds happen on a lot of albums (especially now, in the land of plug-ins and pro-tools). It's not uncommon to hear distorted vocals on one verse or an wash of echo or some strange sound effect on any random album-- it's just not that common for those things to have anything to do with how the band actually sounds when they play.

shitty music

And here's a quote...

Does anybody really listen to that shitty music they play on the radio? FM radio music... What's it called- adult contemporary? classic rock? urban R&B? You know what the official business term for that shit is: Corporate Standardized Programming. Just what an artform needs... corporate standardized programming, derived from scientific surveys, conducted by soulless businessmen.

Here's how bad it is: one nationwide chain that owns over a thousand radio stations conducts weekly telephone polls asking listeners their opinions on 25-30 song hooks they play over the phone, hooks that the radio people have already selected ("hooks" are short, repeated parts of pop songs that people remember easily). Depending on these polls, the radio chain decides which songs to place on their stations' playlists. Weeks later, they record the hooks of all the songs they're currently playing on their stations across the country, label them by title and artist, and sell that information to record companies to help create more of the same, bad music. They also sell the information to competing radio stations that want to play what the big chain is playing.

All of this is done to prevent the possibility of original thinking somehow creeping into the system.

Let me tell you something-- In the first place, listening to music someone else has picked out is not my idea of a good time. Second, and more important, the fact that a lot of people in America actually like the music automatically means it sucks... especially since the people who like it have been told in advance by businessmen what it is they're supposed to like.

Please save me from people who've been told what to like, and then like it. In my opinion, if you're over six years of age and you're still getting your music from the radio, something is desperately wrong with you.

I can only hope that somehow MP3 players and file sharing will destroy FM radio the way they're destroying record companies. Then, even though the air will probably never be safe to breathe again, maybe it will be safer to listen to.

--George Carlin