Larvae playing at Eyedrum for the 404noise Fest in 2006

For the "Turning Around" half of Loss Leader, I played all of the guitar, even on the song "Heavy" where there are probably six or seven layers of guitar tracks by the end. A lot of the weirdness of those songs comes from the fact that I didn't know how to tune my guitar and I have no technique to speak of, so most of the guitar was chunked down to tracks in Cubase and then hacked into time with digital edits.

Randy once mentioned that he liked the uniqueness of this sound and I suppose that's a plus--it's certainly born from a near complete naivete and lack of motivation to actually learn the instrument. In fact, when I DO tune the thing, I have to look up what note each string is supposed to be on Wikipedia because I can never remember.

Fast forward to Exit Strategey and I knew that the guitar was once again going to be an integral part of the songwriting process. As with "Airplanes" and "Heavy", many of the songs on this new record were written on the guitar, banged out one note at a time, and then augmented in the computer. While the sampler is still my instrument of choice, I found that I was able to get at the emotinal, melodic core of what I was doing much more quickly with a guitar than with synths or samples.

Luckily when I moved to Austin, I reunited with the guitarist from a previous band who had a beautifully clean amp that I could borrow. I recorded a handful of songs with the guitar running direct into my audio interface until I got the amp from Eric and realized that the amplified, mic'd sound was about a million times better. I had to re-record those first songs (no easy feat since I do it all by ear and have no idea where to put my fingers to make any of the notes,) and once I did, I realized that I needed to go further in this direction.

Guitar courtesy of Amber, Amp courtesy of Eric

So Exit Strategy is heavy on the guitar. Most songs have at least a couple guitar parts, while some have half a dozen layers of different guitar sounds, parts, and textures. I still can't really play a chord to save my life, but I can pick at the strings and play very simple melodies, then strum open strings or wail on the thing with an ebow to get textures. The result is a batch of songs that I'm incredibly proud of and happy with, even though I know that they could sound better if someone like Eric was laying down the tracks.

For all of the Larvae material after Monster Music, everything has been sequenced with some version of Cubase and my primary instrument has been Native Instruments' Kontakt sampler. I've dabbled with plugins and other soft synths, and for a while I actually still kept some outboard gear that I synched up with MIDI and mixed down to audio tracks from an external mixer. But all of that got to be too cumbersome. Cubase never kept up with my computer upgrades, and it seemed like even fresh installs, upgrades, patches, and new hardware never solved the problem. I lost countless creative hours and motivation that I will never get back trying to get software and hardware to work.

With Exit Strategy, I finally decided to take the plunge and write everything using Ableton Live. I have used Live to perform since 2004 and it's always served me well on the stage, but I had never quite wrapped my head around composing in Live. For one thing, the way external instruments and MIDI trakcs work in Live has never been that intuitive for me. Then, the tension between Live's different views always made it hard for me to figure out how to approach structuring a song. I used to hear songs that people wrote in Live and I could tell right away how the songs were composed because they had that additive loop sound where I could picture the composer stepping through scenes.

It took me about a week to get into the swing of writing with Live. The first couple of tracks were witten in the scene view and based around building up loops into something organic. After a while, I realized that I needed to go back to the standard Left-to-Right timeline approach so that I could see where the songs were headed as they developed. I'm not much of an improviser, so I like to lock down a structure rather than have scenes that can play for indeterminate lengths.

So Live replaced Cubase, but I still used Kontakt as my primary instrument. Like a songwriter who bangs out a melody on a piano only to develop it into a fully-orchestrated piece played by a band, I tend to work from samples in Kontakt to build a foundation that I then flesh out with other instruments. Bass came almost exclusively from the Novation V-Station (as it has for every Larvae record) but I played around with Massive, too, and used that on a couple of songs. Synth sounds came from Absynth, Massive, and a hanfdul of free or cheap plug in soft synths that worked to fill in gaps. I also swear by the Audio Damage fx and I used them on every song!

I am not a tinkerer or knob-twister--I don't have the patience for building synth patches or tweaking complex LFO patterns. I tend to prefer out-of-the-box sounds that I can get some emotional content from in minutes rather than hours. As a result, the studio setup looked like this:

Sequencer and FX: Ableton Live 7
Sampler: NI Kontakt
Bass Synth: Novation V-Station
Synths: NI Absynth 5 & NI Massive; Tweakbench Padawan, Minerva, Peach and others; Glue Reeds, RIP, Majken's Chimera
FX: Audio Damage Dubstation & EOS
Guitar Processing: NI Guitar Rig 2 

Now, a handy infographic made in Ableton Live that shows the history of my studio setup, as best as I can remember. (You can open it to make it bigger.)

Make with the clicking!

Next time: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Guitar 

I've had a fairly dogged system for coming up with titles and even themes for Larvae records so far, and Exit Strategy falls right in line with the rest.  For the most part, the Larvae discography is broken up into full length albums that reflect relatively serious and sometimes personal themes, and shorter EPs or Singles that work to lighten things up a bit. Monster Music was a goofy homage to Godzilla, but Fashion Victim was written as a sort of culture critique. Empire was once again a fun way to explore movies through music (this time, Star Wars,) followed by Dead Weight, a moody record written at a time when I felt the need to make Larvae more personal again.

As I was preparing to leave my home of Atlanta after 12 eventful years, potential song titles seemed to pop up everywhere. I kept a running list of titles on a scrap piece of paper in my kitchen as I went through the motions of packing up and closing the door on a major chapter in my life. Eventually, many of the preliminary titles made it to final songs on the album. But like the previous LPs, I wanted the album itself to have a very specific name.

I think that I learned this from KMFDM of all places. Say what you will about KMFDM, but they went on a run there for a while with incredibly consistent titles and album covers and I always thought it helped to distinguish their work (since the music itself didn't help much.) I admired their ability to stick to those one-word, five-letter titles for so long, something they did mostly to sell t-shirts, I think. UAIOE, NAIVE, MONEY, ANGST, NIHIL, XTORT, etc.

All of the previous Larvae albums had two-word titles that could be interpreted in a couple of different ways but always included a word that made them sound kind of melancholy or even harsh: Fashion Victim, Dead Weight, Loss Leader... so I knew that the next Larvae record needed to fit in. I take a certain comfort in the fact that these things have some continuity. Fashion Victim - two words that mean completely opposite things depending on the person using them. Dead Weight - two words that refer to a very real, literal problem in my life and also hint at a more metaphorical one. Loss Leader - two words that evoke sadness but actually come from the world of commerce (some might not see the tension there.) Now, Exit Strategy - two words that point to a way to leave a situation, though they don't necessarily explain who is leaving and from where.  

I like this symmetry, and it's honestly been a conscious part of my game plan from the beginning, but I don't think I've ever wanted to explain it to anyone until now. I don't know how most musicians come up with titles for their work, but now you know a little bit about how I come up with the titles for mine.

I have traveled beyond the borders of my own web domain from time to time, keeping a film blog at CHUD.com, writing about my early musical exploits in GOG, and coughing up various other thoughts on Posterous. Now I'm coming back to Zeroplate.com to share a little bit about the making of the new Larvae record.

This Liner Notes section has a little bit of everything from straight-up tracklistings and credits to rememberances of records past and the people who helped to make them a reality. With the newest album, Exit Strategy, I plan to run a series of articles here that dive into some depth about the process of making this record. If that sounds interesting to you, please do bookmark this page, set up an RSS feed, or just check back when you get a tweet about it. It's a long story, and I have a lot to say.

1.Refuse
2.Turning Around
3.Solo Shoots First
4.Snowday
5.Bubastis
6.Blunt Force Trauma
7.Warding
8.Hayden's Ghost
9.Nation of Bling
10.Crazyeye
11.Empire
12.Near Miss
13.Heavy
14.Oxygen Destroyer
+Special Features

This white label DVD was the response to many requests at shows for Larvae to produce a DVD of the videos that are projected during gigs.  Over the years we have produced videos for about 20 Larvae tracks to be performed live.  This disc collects the best of those.  Each video is accompanied by an audio commentary track.  The special features include a behind the scenes look at Larvae video production, a promotional trailer, and a clip of Larvae featured on a BBC morning kids' television program.

Tracklist :
A: Double (Miles Tilmann)
AA: Seclusion Dub

Seclusion Dub was written as a response to the Miles Tilmann track Double that features on the A-side of this split 7" single. Miles sent us his track and we essentially broke it into 3 pieces, locked it to a tempo, and then wrote a new song on top of it at half the speed. The idea was to have a 7" with two perfectly compatible tracks that djs could spin together to make on-the-fly remixes. While the bass in both tracks together gets to be too much to handle, it's definitely possible to use Seclusion as an accented beat to Miles' track, or to mix Double under our track to give it more movement. Both tracks stand alone as well, of course.

Tracklist :
A: NEAR MISS
B: THE END IS NEAR

This was the first Larvae song ever written way back in 1997. It was originally called Near and was later remixed in 1999 to be Near Miss. In the two years between the first draft of this song and the final, tempos had been creeping up and up and the original 160 of Near didn't seem so fast anymore, so we bumped it up closer to 180. The B-Side was remixed by Jeremy of underwater, but kept with the original song's tempo. This record was pressed very badly, and consequently we have never tried very hard to promote or sell copies of it. The track lengths were just too long to fit comfortably on a 7" so in the end, the record plays about 6db lower than it should. Near Miss was also featured on the first sub:marine CD compilation in 2001, and the 7" was later given a sub:marine catalog number once the label had been established.