Reading about Janet Jackson's breakthrough album Control was particularly interesting and appealing. They didn't record during the day because the weather was too nice, they stayed outside. Then they'd work from 5pm-midnight. In fact the first week they just "hung out". Eventually Janet says "when are we going to start the album"? To which they said "we have started". They wanted to see what she was about. After an incident in a nightclub where she got unwelcome attention from "nasty boys", guess which song they came up with afterwards. The attitude of that album is everything, and they had no clue going in what they were going to go, it came from where she was - she's the star, they wanted to platform her.
Of course it's the tech I'm fascinated by. The used the cheapo Ensoniq Mirage for much of the album. Further, they are dismissive of programming their own sounds, which is nothing less than heresy. But here's an example of their genius, how they can use a stock Oberheim preset in such a radically different way (34:47 if the timestamp doesn't work)
I mean, the sheer joy of that. It's a pretty lousy sound, but in their musical hands...
And that is what has struck me the most about them. They are the epitome of "it ain't what you use its the way that you use it". What on earth is that metallic graunch sound that underpins the rhythm of Nasty? An Ensoniq preset probably, pitched down in crunchy 8bit glory, but the syncopated groove they get going with it sounds amazing and unique even now. Starts at 18s:
Or how about the cheap brass samples that they made sound so great in When I Think Of You? The total memory of the Mirage was 128k. ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY EIGHT K! A stock DX7 bass too.
Another thing that appeals is the casual disregard for basic recording techniques. Listen to Jimmy Jam here:
More luck than judgement perhaps, but their musical intent is behind everything. And that's perhaps their philosophy. They're not big on programming or engineering, but know how to make something sound great, using stock sounds as wild jumping off points. Wish I had a bit of their talent is all.Terry and I’s inexperience showed on Control. We engineered it ourselves, and we recorded everything in the red. When you used to set up a tape machine, you could set it up where on a VU meter zero meant zero. You could set the machine to +6, meaning that when it said zero on the meter, it was actually six DB’s louder than what the meter was showing. When we recorded the album, we were recording at a +6 and we were recording in the red, so at that point, it was at a +12. We were totally doing it wrong.
When we asked Steve Hodge to mix this album, he came to the studio and put on the first song and said, “Oh my God.” We were like, “Yeah. It’s good isn’t it?” He replied, “No. Who engineered it?” We got really scared. We asked him, “Are we going to have to do the whole thing over again?” He replied, “No. No. No. I can work with it. I can save it.” What this accident ended up doing was it created a sonic that had never been heard before. It led to the aggressiveness and loudness of the record.