Alan Wilder: Reviving Recoil
Wilder works more like a director than a dictator. The musician coaxes great performances from his collaborators and then sculpts them to fit within his tracks. “I’m trying to get as much source material together as I can,” he says. “I’m looking for performers who can provide as many alternatives as they are able to give me. Rather than getting people to do something exactly the way I think it might work, I let them indulge themselves. I soak that all up and take it home with me. Then I edit it all together. I suppose it’s at this stage that I exercise complete control.”
Revolving Loops
Wilder weaves the performances together in his home studio using Logic Pro and Pro Tools hardware. He adds Logic Pro software instruments and conducts the outboard gear using the application. “I run Logic as my main sequencer,” he says. “The arrangement page in Logic is very friendly and it lets me do everything I need to do with loops and hardware.” Samples include recent work — snips of blues riffs and vocals from Richardson, for instance — and bits and pieces dating back to the Depeche Mode glory days.
“I have a library of stuff that would go back 20 years,” he says. “From basically when we first started sampling for Depeche Mode. I will turn to them if I want a particular noise, something that’s got that dirty, early low-bit quality to it.”
Then Wilder puts it all together with Logic Pro. “When I’m putting my structures together I’m really just experimenting with many pieces of audio,” he says. “I need to cycle those loops continuously and bring stuff in and out. Logic is perfect for that, along with Ableton Live, which runs as a slave. Logic has the tools I need to nip out all the great bits and put them together in a new way. Then I can apply them to my overall piece in a way that I think works best.”
That means creating a fusion of analog human performances and digital instrumentation. “For the last 10 or 15 years I have really enjoyed taking sections of performance and mutating them into something else,” he says. “But I still strive to retain that inherent human quality. Quite often I combine sounds. If I need a bass part for example, I might combine a synthesized sound with a real bass guitar and stick the whole combination through an amp to see what we get.”
Surrounded
In a little more than a year, Subhuman was fully formed. Wilder had the stereo mix locked down and ready for publication, but he wanted to take it a step further. The songwriter had recently finished working on the surround sound remaster of the Depeche Mode catalog. He decided to work the same magic on Subhuman. “It just seemed the obvious thing to do,” he says. “My music is very layered and it feels natural to break it out into different channels.”
Wilder didn’t radically alter the composition. “We just split up the stereo mixes and placed the elements around the surround so you get much more space to it,” he says. “It’s a different concept than stereo, obviously. It requires the listener to be very much in the right spot to fully appreciate it.” To break it all up, Wilder used his Mac and Pro Tools. “We ran the mix out of Logic via stems and into Pro Tools. From there it was a simple matter of assigning the various stems to different channels and automating pans where necessary.”
The result, while virtually identical to the original, has a depth that stereo simply can’t deliver. “My favorite albums are always those that, each time you listen, you discover something new,” says Wilder. “That’s what I want people to experience with this. You have to learn it and discover the subtleties of the arrangements over time. Surround sound is an obvious way to expose those subtle elements.”
Wilder plans to keep Recoil alive in the coming years and his surround sound mix of Subhuman is only a glimpse of what the future holds. “I’ll definitely use new technology to make my music,” he says. “Apple and Logic will be part of that process. They give me all the creative freedom I need to make new, exciting music.”
