RS: So it's not like a bunch of loops going on behind you, what
you hear is what you guys are playing on stage?
Gareth (of Pendulum): Yes, literally. It took a year to develop the
ability to do that.
RS: The twelve computers going on stage, what software programs
are you running on them?
Gareth (of Pendulum): It's one piece of software that's running all
the different things to process the sound, it's a computer but it's a
stripped down PC that's been modified to run completely stably. It's
by a company in South California called News Research and the box is
called a Receptor. It runs computer plug-ins that we would use in the
studio but run them live and without crashing. People ask if we could
trust the computer and stuff like that. We've had broken strings,
broken drum ktis, we've had two broken ankles and we bash into each
other and all sorts of things, but the computer's never gone down.
RS: When you're in the studio making the music, what programs do
you use to make your music?
Gareth (of Pendulum): Hold Your Color was done on Nuendo 3 and Cubase
FX3, but then towards the end of In Silico we moved to Nuendo 4. We
also use a lot of ProTools for recording.
RS: That's really cool. Listening to In Silico, it's quite an
experience. When you all wrote this album what was going through your
heads?
Gareth (of Pendulum): With the previous album it was strictly dance
music and we were in a place where we were concerned only with dance
music and I guess in a way it was a bit stifling because we love all
sorts of music. We weren't particularly making our first album for a
particular audience but we stuck to the guidelines of drum and bass
and we weren't going to step outside those guidelines. Other than
that, we sort of did what we wanted.
After we did that album everyone was saying that it sounds like a band playing it and I can hear these rock and metal influences in it. We were like really, did that sneak in? We tried not to let that sort of stuff in to it, because we wanted to make it strictly dancy. Since the album did so well and everyone could really hear this kind of rock influence and rock kids were starting to come to our shows and moshing to the tunes, we thought that gave us a creative license to let our influences get in on the music. The idea of the second album was to let whatever we're listening to influence the music and to take it in to any direction. We were all listening to a lot of surf rock and roll and blues and Led Zeppelin, Queens of the Stone Age, and Rage Against the Machine, as well as really heavily electronic music like old Prodigy and drum and bass. We let all those influences just steam in there and affect the music.
RS: Some of it is instrumental, some of it has lyrics – who
writes the lyrics to the songs?
Gareth (of Pendulum): Rob writes the lyrics and does the vocals as well.
RS: I notice most drum and bass music doesn't have vocals to it.
When you have vocals with drum and bass music does it react
differently?
Gareth (of Pendulum): No. I think probably the lack of vocal in drum
and bass tunes is probably because that would affect the way people DJ
it. We play the songs live so it doesn't really matter. Another
thing is putting vocal in tunes like drum and bass tunes, it would
probably be a very difficult thing from a mixing point of view because
the vocals would be kind of lost behind such big instruments like big
sub-basses and big drums. We've got a good enough blend there so we
can still haveafull force in the music and the vocals sitting on top
as well.
RS: And usually in drum and bass you have an MC up there with the
DJ kind of thing, right?
Gareth (of Pendulum): Yes, yes.
