Alan Wilder: Reviving Recoil
Stir some swampy blues vocals into a boiling pot of sonic stock. Mix well, season with samples and simmer for about a year. This is Alan Wilder’s recipe for Subhuman, the latest album release from the labs of his electronic music project Recoil. Wilder is an audio alchemist of legendary proportions, a former and influential member of Depeche Mode whose signature sound has shaped electronic music for more than two decades.
Recoil was silent for five years — Wilder shelved the project to take some family time. When he revived it, things had changed. “I had to get my head around using the new equipment and software that had been developed during that time,” he says. “I chose Logic right away, invested in new Macs and started making the album.” He concocted his tracks using an impressive ingredient list of samples dating back to Depeche Mode’s early years. He recruited bluesman Joe Richardson and singer Carla Trevaskis to whip up some vocal tracks, then remixed the whole thing in 5.1 surround sound using his Mac.
Weaving Atmosphere
Wilder cranks out precise electric beats and heavily tweaked instrumentation, but to him music making is organic, not digital. “There’s no master plan at the outset of a project,” he says. “Really I’m just trying to create instrumental pieces of music that have some kind of atmosphere, quite often without any kind of focus to them.” The musician fleshes out a feeling, then lays it down in a loosely structured track. He’s not thinking in bars or traditional song structures. He’s striving to create an overall mood for the song.
Those moods may sound like they emerged from silicon chips and synthesizers, but most arose from analog instruments. “People have the idea that I am very into electronics and I use a lot of synthesizers,” says Wilder. “That’s actually not true. Most of what I do is based around performance. I take performances, chop them up and restructure them.” To do it, he uses Logic Pro. “As a musician, I find Logic to be very friendly for what I do,” he says. “I can compose, cut up and restructure quickly and easily in Logic. And it’s an empowering feeling to juggle all the elements and pretty much do what you want with them.”
The process isn’t just aural, it’s visual. “With Logic, you can color code passages, pick up multiple parts and really easily play around with your song structure,” he says. “I usually build until I have lots of dynamic sections going, all the time thinking about vocals or other things that will be needed to finish off the song.”
Wilder doesn’t compose with a particular vocal style in mind. He lets the music dictate timbre and then seeks out a vocalist to fit. Subhuman was mired in bluesy bayous from the start and Wilder knew that he would need some swampy vocals to fit. He found them in Joe Richardson, a down-and-dirty bluesman from Austin, Texas.
Getting the Blues
Finding Richardson wasn’t difficult. “It seemed obvious to me to just go via Google and search for the singer I needed,” says Wilder. “Fairly quickly, it pulled up Joe Richardson, who ended up being the main contributor.” It didn’t take very long for Wilder to strike a deal with the musician and within a few weeks, he was on a plane to Austin. “I thought it was better to be in his territory and so we booked a local studio,” says Wilder. “Luckily, we hit it off like a house on fire. Joe was very open-minded even though he hadn’t really worked on something like this before.”
Richardson belted out some muggy blues and strummed a few chords using Wilder’s tracks for inspiration. “Recording with Joe and his band was the most exciting part of the project,” says Wilder. “We did it all very ‘old-school style,’ using a lot of valve equipment and beautiful vintage gear, all laid down to tape. The sound was superb.”
The composer needed to balance the humid bluesy sound with some fresh vocals. He turned to singer/songwriter Carla Trevaskis, who provided a clean sound for a few of the tracks. “I wanted to intersperse her vocals throughout the album for variety, to give the listener some sonic relief from the heavier blues sound,” he says. “Something about the tone of her voice just suited two or three tracks on the album and we were off and running.”
