Plaid’s Reachy Prints

Text and Interview by Michael Arias

My first official contact with Plaid’s Andy Turner and Ed Handley began with a 2003 email (little more than a fan letter really) from me to Plaid, begging them to score my first feature film, Tekkonkinkreet. But their music was part of my life long before that first contact. Five years earlier, while I was working with a small team to develop a CG-animated Tekkonkinkreet pilot film, the young carpenter building furniture for our studio (yes, really) handed me a pair of tickets to a local Plaid gig and a copy of Plaid’s first full-length effort, Not For Threes. And, though this first incarnation of Tekkonkinkreet eventually fell apart, Plaid’s music remained embedded in me and woven deep into the fabric of Tekkonkinkreet.

Over the last ten years Plaid have supplied me with music for two feature films (Tekkonkinkreet and Heaven’s Door), a handful of shorts, and a couple projects that have never been seen or heard, despite Plaid’s contributions. With the exception of the excellent sound designer Mitch Osias, Plaid remain the only collaborators I’ve been able to work with on all of my directing projects, whether live action or animation, and I consider their music an essential feature of my filmmaking. Conversely, I’d like to think that Plaid’s work on my films is an essential component of their own oeuvre, occupying a place in the continuum of their projects, right alongside their standalone albums. Certainly, while directing Tekkonkinkreet and Heaven’s Door, I saw Plaid’s scores as working in the service of the storytelling, filling a crucially important but necessarily subordinate role. But now, years later, I can listen to Plaid’s entire catalogue from start to finish and enjoy these soundtracks simply as Plaid albums, first and foremost. In my mind at least, 2003’s Spokes led to the music of Tekkonkinkreet, which in turn begat Heaven’s Door, and so on, until Scintilli in 2011, and finally their latest, the superb Reachy Prints. I see each album, including the two film scores, as another distinct step of Plaid’s artistic evolution.

My professional relationship with Plaid aside, Andy and Ed have become good friends to me, part of a small circle of trusted family and comrades whose opinions and ideas I value dearly. But, as is so often the case, one can spend years with friends or colleagues, and yet so much about them remains a mystery. So interviewing Andy and Ed seemed a good way to shed light on their methods and creative process, and perhaps fill the gaps in my own knowledge of Plaid. We spoke via Skype, voice-only, me in Tokyo, with Ed calling from the English countryside and Andy from London. Plaid speak as one person, finishing each other’s sentences and interrupting each other frequently, so I’ve made no attempt to separate their individual responses.

• Michael At one point, if you mentioned Plaid or Warp records, the first word association would be “IDM” (intelligent dance music)—that’s still the genre named on Plaid’s Wikipedia page. I never thought of your music as belonging to a genre, and much of your catalog isn’t even danceable. Your work seems to me more like film music than dance music, because your songs evoke such powerful moods. So does the IDM label bug you? And what does genre actually mean to you?
• Plaid We’ve never really liked the IDM label, and we certainly don’t write with genre in mind. Genre is more a factor in marketing, a convenient way for the press to categorize. These days, with so much good music available, genre labels are helpful in getting listeners’ attention, and filtering and categorizing tastes. In our case, we’re probably associated with IDM because of the Artificial Intelligence albums that Warp brought out in the early 90’s and also the Black Dog Productions work from the same period. The term IDM seems to have fallen out of favor, and these days we’re more often labeled “electronica.” “Intelligent dance music” actually seems something of a contradiction in terms! Originally, IDM was probably meant to categorize a specific subset of dance music created by artists who one supposed were using the latest software and techniques to create music that defied existing genre formulas (hence the “intelligent”). Perhaps what one thinks of as IDM now is more of the glitchy, fractured beats and very synthetic sounding stuff.
• Michael So how much of your music actually is driven by technology? If I get a new piece of gear—a camera, for example—the new toy can send me down a real journey of discovery. There’s just something about getting your hands on a new toy and experimenting with it, and seeing where that leads you. Do you ever find the toys pulling you along?
• Plaid “Toy” is definitely the right word. Of course, there’s an aspect of child-scientist in us that’s attracted to new devices, investigating and exploring them, playing with them. You can produce so much just experimenting and coming up with new ways of working. The technology has been part of the attraction since we started. And particularly now that most of the “devices” have become internalized to the computer, it’s quite practical to experiment with new tools. In the old days, when the tools were all hardware-based, getting one’s hands on a new synth involved a major investment. On the other hand, one had far less stuff and could devote more time to mastering a particular instrument. Even now though, there’s really not that much great technology coming out, and only a few outstanding new devices emerge each year. There’s no doubt that a new instrument can be a huge creative force and allow you to do things in a unique way and influence the way you create. Of course, it’s fun just to tweak. Sound design is a crucial element of electronic music and can really bring the songs to life. There’s no point in doing electronic music unless you’re interested in the sound design.
• Michael So you keep the songwriting separate from the sound design?
• Plaid We write mostly using just piano to start with, because if a piece works with piano, you can be pretty certain of your foundation. Some of these synths allow creation of amazing textures, even just using presets, but we don’t want the music to be just a showcase for sound effects—sonic fireworks, as opposed to coherent compositions. So our tendency is to start a composition with melody and harmony and chord sequences, and then tailor sounds to fit those. But we’ve had success working the other way as well. Sometimes you come up with an incredible sound that can lead the piece. The analogy of music to cooking really fits: A piano will give you a really clear representation of the notes—your meat and potatoes—and then you add spices to create new flavors that make those basic ingredients taste completely original. (And then those spices can be applied in other dishes.)
• Michael I remember the first time I saw you play live, in the late 90’s, you actually had keyboards on stage, and the show seemed much more of a “traditional” band performance than the laptop gigs you do these days. I don’t really know how much of the sound is played live (now or then), and actually I don’t care. But what does live performance in front of an audience mean to you? Was there ever a time when getting up there with just your laptops felt weird?
• Plaid It still feels weird sometimes. It all depends on how much you’re able to do on stage. It’s certainly no fun to just press play and let tracks go by themselves and, frankly, there’ve been gigs where we’ve had to ask ourselves, “why were we even there?” So the challenge is to engage with the audience, be in the moment, and allow yourself to improvise and reinterpret the music for that particular context. It’s essential for the performance to be an immersive creative experience and for the music to be unique to that moment—a “one off.” And it’s important to take risks, to rearrange the performance on the fly, and to think like a performer. And then, ultimately, there’s the experience of the interaction with a large group of fellow humans listening to loud music. Electronic performance has evolved now so that there’s plenty of ways to restructure a piece as you’re playing it. So much of the work is in the preparation, in setting up controllers that influence on the performance.

An aside: The films I make are for the most part narrative—what I’m really doing is nothing more than storytelling. I deploy abstract visuals, sound design, and also music in telling the story, but the goal is always to tell the story. Sometimes I’m loading the plot with atmosphere that might be difficult to put into words, and sometimes I deliberately inject ambiguity, but I still have a very clear idea of the impression I want to convey to the audience and the emotions I want to evoke. Working in in a purely instrumental mode, without the aid of vocals and lyrics (for the most part), Plaid can’t possibly hope to control an audience’s reaction in the same way. But still, I can’t help feeling that they’re also telling stories with their music.

• Michael Most of your music is non-verbal (or non-lyrical), but I’m wondering if you think in specific thematic terms that you can articulate? The soundtrack work you’ve done is obviously led by the films’ storytelling and visuals, but what about with your standalone albums?
• Plaid Well, musical experience is all escapism, isn’t it? Listening to a piece of music is like entering a fantasy world. So maybe creating music is like creating some kind of illusion of another world and then inviting the audience to explore it. (Or is it really an expression of emotion? Or is it the same thing?)
• Michael But music is so open to interpretation. It’s all abstract to a certain degree, isn’t it? Most film, for example, is narrative and usually very unambiguous. But it seems that with music, even if you have something very specific you’re trying to express, your listener may be taking something very different away from the experience. The music is going to transport your audience somewhere, but it may not be where you want them to go.
• Plaid It’s said that music is like a landscape. Each song can be thought of as it’s own universe. So within each universe, you can look in any direction, but what you see is still going to be colored by specific emotions. That’s true whether you’re creating or consuming the music. But you also have to consider that songs are often made over a very long period of time, and the results may have very little to do with the original ideas. Interestingly, by the time we’re finishing a song, we are participating in the piece not only as it’s authors but also as listeners, reacting to some sounds that we may have made many months prior. There’s a really interesting feedback loop there. Sometimes you actually end up fighting what you originally created! For example, if something’s overly sentimental, you might start to inject elements that are in opposition to the original theme. That kind of conflict within a piece can produce some very interesting and complex results.
• Michael Scintilli and Reachy Prints seem like companion pieces to me. Maybe it’s something about the production—so consistent in both albums—and the really wonderful use of quasi-vocal textures. Even the sequencing of the albums seems to have a lot in common. And whereas the songs on Spokes had so many layers of texture that listening to them was almost exhausting, Scintilli and_ Reachy Prints_ tracks seem relatively stripped down, almost minimalist.
• Plaid That’s probably what links Scintilli and _Reachy Prints_—the desire to minimalize. In retrospect, we might have stripped even more away. But when you’re actually making it, each song only satisfies at a certain point and you tend to add more until you reach that point. More than we’d like, honestly. But for some reason, the songs don’t feel right when we strip them down further. But somewhere, there’s an idealized version of each song which is actually simpler than what we finish with. This is partly because we’re spending days and days listening to each song over and over again. The music isn’t just made all at once, it’s listened to and each detail adjusted thousands of times. That’s just the way electronic music is: There’s not just “one take,” and you can always go back and tinker more.
• Michael So why the desire keep strip things down with these albums? Was there something between Spokes and Scintilli that got you thinking of more minimal arrangements?
• Plaid Actually, working on film music made us more aware that you could do less and still create strong music. “Less is more”—you hear that everywhere, the notion that you can strip things down to their essential elements and arrive at something better. So we put more effort into identifying those essential elements and making those stand on their own without additional layers. The process of writing for film and working with visuals definitely made us feel that we could refine without “adding more layers of paint.”
• Michael I remember after Scintilli you spoke of doing an album entirely of dance music. Obviously, that idea didn’t make the cut, but was there a goal in particular with this album? (I mean a goal, in the practical sense, like this time we’re going to do a “…”) Or do you not usually work that way? Do albums just emerge from all the songs you wrote over a particular period? Once an album is done do you forget everything and then start from scratch or do you build on the last one?
• Plaid We generally set deadlines for finishing albums, though we often don’t meet the deadlines. The writing process is very enjoyable and could go on forever. On the other hand, the process of recording and finalizing is a lot of work. We did in fact have the idea of doing a dance album, and tried a few tracks, but the goal evolved as we wrote, and we abandoned the idea of a dance album fairly quickly. We often play dance tracks live—pieces that never get released—and in a way that’s a good place for the them, to add something unique to the live shows. But they’re not necessarily what we want to put on the albums. Yes, w do often sit down and theorize about what the next album should be and how it should sound. But it’s important to shut that off, and just be free and see what happens. The result is a more sincere expression. We write better when we’re writing what we’re actually feeling.
• Michael Early on you did some really memorable collaborations with vocalists—all women, I think (Mara Carlyle, Björk, Nicolette)—but, for whatever reason, you stopped working with “live” vocals. Why?
• Plaid It’s just happened that we got along well with certain musicians (some of them singers) and that’s led to some collaborations. But we never actually sought out a vocalist to be our front. Perhaps we just haven’t been spending much time with singers lately.
• Michael In filmmaking you always have bad takes and scenes and even characters that don’t fit or don’t make the cut, for one reason or another. How much of Reachy Prints got thrown out in the making? All the pieces here seem so well formed.
• Plaid It goes both ways. There’s so many tracks that we lost interest in along the way and discarded. But then there’s pieces that we had started and abandoned years ago, only to have them re-emerge here. It’s so often the case that you stop working on a song just because it doesn’t feel right at that moment, but then years later, you rediscover it, reinterpret it, reimagine it.
• Michael So what music are you listening to these days?
• Plaid There’s someone called Flint Kids doing some really interesting stuff. The production and the way he works with his sequencing are really appealing. Good stuff and very sound-design oriented. Also The Mast, who create some very nice mixtures of acoustic and electronic textures. And a South African group called John Wizards. Their stuff is very interesting too; live sounding with nice electronics.
• Michael You have an interesting relationship with Japan (and not just because of our work together). Many years ago you made a track called “Zamami,” that I would guess was inspired by a visit to Zamami Island, Okinawa. Actually, I heard about you from Japanese friends before anyone in the US seemed to have noticed you. But at this point you’ve done really quite a bit of work here, so I’m wondering if there’s anything in particular about Japan that you feel strongly about or any experiences here that have influenced you.
• Plaid We’ve been very lucky to experience so much of Japan. Our experiences in Japan have been thrilling and, even now, having visited many times, we feel like Japan has a very magical quality that we haven’t found anywhere else. Not quite sure what it is: the people, or the culture, or perhaps the light...

I feel the same way about Japan myself, despite having spent half my life in Tokyo, so it’s no surprise to me and Andy and Ed are at a loss for words when it comes to describing this country’s effect on them.

How appropriate then that I am also unable to neatly sum up my feelings toward Plaid’s music. Their sound is truly sui generis (easy to recognize, and yet so difficult to define). Comparisons of Plaid with their forerunners, contemporaries, and Warp brethren are little help in pinning them down. Their music always reminds me of one of those magnetic pendulum desk gadgets, oscillating unpredictably between extremes: From the moody to the whimsical, the dynamic to the soothing, the goofy to the cinematic. The only constant in their work—the “Plaid-ness” or “Plaid-ism”—would have to be the uniquely evocative quality that only their music possesses. I’ve been listening to Reachy Prints for about a month now and am finding its tracks as beguiling as any of their work. But this time around, Andy and Ed seem to have really perfected the art of making a Plaid album. Of course, that’s a ridiculous statement; Reachy Prints is no more or less a Plaid album than previous collections. What I mean to say is that they seem to have worked out the “formula” and distilled their music down to its essence. I had hoped my questions would reveal a bit more of the science behind Plaid’s formula. But I fear that I’ve just ended up back where I started, and their talent remains as much a mystery to me as ever.

Michael Arias, April 20, 2014, in Tokyo