Track By Track: MSTRKRFT – OPERATOR

The full tale of their visceral return...

That rumbling in the distance?

MSTRKRFT are back. The Canadian duo – Jesse F. Keeler, also of Death From Above 1979, and Al-P – reconvened at the tail end of last year, vowing to produce the most visceral, blood-curdling, unhinged record of their career to date.

They might well have succeeded. New album 'OPERATOR' raises the ante still further, with Clash reviewer Josh Gray opining: "Do you feel like stamping your feet just to kick the world in the face? Well, this is probably for you."

Full throttle electronic punk music, 'OPERATOR' is the sound of machinery being pushed far beyond breaking point.

Clash was determined to find out more – check out MSTRKRFT's track by track guide to their new album below.

– – –

– – –

Wrong Glass Sir
This track happened in the first week or so of getting all our gear together and figuring out all the sync issues etc. Without the reverb and delay, there’s almost nothing happening apart from the bass and drums, but you can hear how we arrived at the different bits as the song progresses. I don’t think there are any actual notes in this song, its just a bunch of modulated stuff drifting around. The high pitch sound is actually a chord that’s too high or fast to hear. Good thing JFK spent all that time tuning three oscillators for nothing.

Runaway
We had a number of different names for this one as we were working on it. Initially someone told us it sounded like “spirit in the sky”… which really doesn’t make sense, but I appreciate how far they were reaching there. The bass line is two different sequences being fed to the same oscillator, and what it decided to do was somewhat random. This is the only track on the record that has any sound added apart from the modulars.. just a single chord on a mellotron. Trivia.

Little Red Hen
Three tracks: 909, DISTORTED 808, AND A MODULAR SYNTHESIZER. BOOM. This was made at about 11am one day and it's pretty much unedited since that morning. We didn’t have a good clock distribution system set up yet, so this recording started out as a sync test.

Priceless
This track started out as just a drum beat and the synth part is a gate sequence with the pitch info mostly coming from the make noise maths. We had actually been playing the instrumental of this song out for awhile when DJing and people would always cheer when the baseline came in… like they knew it already. Not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.

Anyway, Sonny Kay did the vocal on it, and according to him, he wrote the vocal while driving across the desert between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. We really like how he’s bragging about knowing pantone numbers just by looking at a colour. Impressive.

Playing With Itself
No song on the record has less of us on it than this one. The main chord part was actually created by one of the modulars when we were outside having beer on a picnic table. It was a great day. Not too hot, and with a slight breeze. We had left the recorder on while we were outside, and when we came back inside, we stopped everything and listened to what the machines had done while we were out.

We started everything again and tried to steer the ship, but that attempt crashed and we ended up just going with what the machines did on their own. Hence the title, although it’s probably funnier when you don’t know its a literal description of how the track was made.

Party Line
This song started with a really strong and musical modular synthesizer sequence which we thought sounded like a party. Hence the title. An interesting thing to note is that when we sent the instrumental song to Ian Svenonius for a vocal, we didn’t give him any direction beyond “Hey man. We just want you to be really psyched about what you do in the track…” When he sent back his vocal we edited it down slightly but really didn’t change the content.

I guess he had latch on to 'PARTYLINE' as a theme in some way because he managed to work the word LINE into his classic Svenonius styled miniature manifesto. It was a real trip to hear his isolated vocal track after listening to his records for years.

Death In The Gulf Stream
Some people think we sampled the soundtrack to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. We didn’t. It’s actually a very brief bit of guitar we put on the mpc, inspired by something we heard on the Melt Banana record 'Charlie'. The track is pretty much unedited apart from just truncating for length, so you can hear the full evolution of the synth parts through the track.

The song is named after a drink ALP was making a fair bit at the time. It’s a drink that renews your interest in food, companions, and life. Its very good, but there are a lot of bad recipes online. He should probably publish his. Maybe we can do that today, or make a how to video.

World Peace
We wanted to have a track on the album that was JUST DRUMS. This track was created with a Roland TR-909 a TAMA TECH STAR which is a multichannel analog drum sound module, not dissimilar to the SIMMONS drums. The TECHSTAR was processed through an Ibanez stereo chorus into a dual channel RAT distortion pedal. All the bass notes and progression come from the tom channels. There is a hint of pad in that track which is actually the noise floor of the tech star being brought up to what normal engineers would consider an unacceptable level.

Taking inspiration from Blawan, we added an abstract cyclical vocal sample… pitched down, which also provided some harmonic content from the background noise in the sample itself. The progression and arrangement is based on multiples of 3. Working without looking at a computer screen liberates you from reconciling ideas visually to a grid. We use a computer as a multi-track recorder.

Morning Of The Hunt
We wanted to have a track on the album that had NO DRUMS. In the end, there was some light 808 programming that made it into the final production, but compared to most of the bombastic 909 programming on the rest of the album, it really just services the main synthesizer elements. The top sequence is a 5 step loop that is being modulated by something else so it appears to never loop properly.

Go On Without Me
Germans find this track hilarious. This was the last track we produced for the album. The concept to do something really heavy came to us after we had taken stock of what was already there, and felt like there was something missing. The core of the song is a sampled guitar being pitch shifted through a lexicon 480L, in realtime, using the slider to perform the “chord progression”. We asked Jacob Bannon to write a vocal on it and he gave us something we fell in love with instantly.

– – –

'OPERATOR' is out now.

Buy Clash Magazine

-
Join the Clash mailing list for up to the minute music, fashion and film news.