Please give a brief introduction to Modulate?
Modulate is the hard industrial project of Manchester based DJ Geoff Lee. Geoff is one of the resident DJ's at alternative/industrial club night, The Wendy House, in Leeds on the Mutate industrial/hard dance floor.
The project went through various sounds before streamlining the hard electronic sound it now has, taking in elements of EBM, electro, noise, techno, rave and hard dance.
After putting some initial MP3's online and sending out some early demos the band saw the release of their first tracks on compilations in 2006.
Ronan Harris (VNV Nation) chanced upon Skullfuck during his DJ tour of the USA in the summer of 2006. After watching it detonate a dancefloor at the Castle club in Tampa, Florida, he contacted the band. The resulting flurry of emails led to an introduction to Infacted records of Germany, one of the biggest electronic/industrial labels in the scene, home of Soman, Grendel, Reaper, Heimataerde etc, with a recommendation from Harris which eventually led to them signing to Infacted in December of that year. The band also signed with LA based Sistinas Records for the North American market.
The band supported both VNV Nation in Europe as part of the 'Judgement' tour and Combichrist around America during the 'What the Fuck is Wrong with You?' tour, playing over 50 dates in 8 countries to over 35'000 fans from March through to September 2007.
The Skullfuck EP became a staple floorfiller at industrial clubs worldwide, later joined on the play lists by the hugely successful Modulate remixes of Faderhead's Dirty Grrrls, Dirty Bois and Soman's Divine.
Their debut full length release, Detonation, was released on the 23rd September 2008 on Infacted Recordings (Europe/Rest of the World) and Metropolis Records (North America).
Detonation has been winning rave reviews around the world, hitting #7 in both the Dutch Underground Chart (DUC) and the German Alternative Chart (DAC).
Before you started Modulate you were a well respected dj already, why start Modulate?
Because I wanted to make my own tunes that fitted in with the style of music I wanted to play in my DJ sets. Sometimes I had an idea of the track I wanted but that track didn't exist, it was just in my imagination so I had to create them. Often something like, “I love this tune and I love this other tune, I love the sound of this bassline, but I love the sound of the riff on the other one and the drum sound from somewhere else”. So I can take inspiration from elements of tracks I love and put them all together to make something new. That way you have the tracks exactly as you want, but also fresh new tunes nobody else has.
So that was the main idea behind Modulate. Why wait for other people to write tunes for you when you can write your own and have something unique? Being a DJ and a producer seems a very natural combination. Many of the top trance or techno DJ's produce their own music so why should the hard electro/industrial scene be any different?
A good track will connect with the audience. The overall sound of it, a riff, an idea, a groove. Something. It could be a big kick drum or a great vocal sample for people to sing along to or a clever idea, something that does the unexpected. Whatever it is, it needs to demand the audiences attention. If a track can just wash over the audience without standing out it's no good. There must be some kind of stand out element to it, something to make it memorable.
I also like tracks that are designed to be mixed by Djs. Sometimes tracks are 3:30 long or something. That is fine, but in a club I want something longer, something I can mix and blend into another track. It's like painting a picture and each track is a different colour. You can use them as elements in a set and the set is greater than sum of the individual parts. Even an iPod can play tunes at random but a good DJ will take you on a journey throughout the evening, making the songs flow together to create a seemless whole, building the atmosphere. Knowing when to drop the right tune at the right time.
For me a tune has to have that uniqueness to it. Just one element that stands out. A good strong beat. A hook. Some form of dynamic too. You can't go along pedal to the metal all the way through a track, your brain will get used to it. If you change the dynamic, quiet, LOUD, quiet, LOUD, the loud sounds sound even louder than they would otherwise. The brain picks up on changes, we live in a dynamic world and our brains quickly adapt to the things that remain static around us to enable us to focus on the things that are changing. So to make something sound really loud, have some quiet before it. The best tracks always have that ability to get to you listen to them. Your mental focus shifting onto every new layer that enters the track, every subtle production twist.
So that is what I look for in a good club track. That indefinable something that makes it stand out, a riff, a bassline, a hook, a beat you cannot resist...tracks that you simply can't not tap your foot, nod your head or dance to. The tracks that you find yourself humming the riff from days afterwards without even realising it.
Definitely my DJ experience was a benefit. I've spent years watching crowds dancing and reacting to music to the point I can hear a new track and know how they are going to react to certain elements. Eventually it becomes innate, you just know when something needs more cowbell. And of course you can play new/part finished tracks in the club, test them on a club PA, test the audience reaction, make refinements.
Modulate kicked off really well with the EP “Skullfuck” How do you look back on this track and what has it done for Modulate?
It was the track that started the whole process. I got signed, released the EP, did the VNV tour, did the Combichrist tour, it turned into a huge huge club track worldwide so it was like riding a firework. Light the fuse and hold on tight. For that to happen with your first release was pretty crazy. We went from unsigned to huge club hit and a 55 date world tour under our belt in 6 months. Ronan said “You've just done with your first release what most bands spend their entire careers trying to do”. So yeah, I totally struck lucky with that one. It was like the distilled essence of all my experience up to that point in one track.
How did you come up with the sample, most bands use horror or sci-fi movies so it really deviates from the majority?
I was trying to write something to play instead of My Rifle or Soilbleed because both those tunes were huge for me but they were getting overplayed and I wanted something similar but fresh (the irony that Skullfuck is now just as overplayed isn't lost on me). Both those tracks feature samples from Full Metal Jacket. It is a hugely sampled film, so nothing original there really though oddly I'd never heard that line sampled before, and certainly not chopped up in the same way I did it. What can you say? People love to shout fuck!
And DJ sets! Every night, “Can you play Skullfuck?”. I don't play it in clubs very often now but live, sure, you have to, it's the song most people want to hear more than any other. It has a life of it's own now! There is nothing I can do about it. It is our anthem and the crowd go absolutely batshit crazy. Looking out from the stage seeing a sea of pumping fists, everyone screaming along, is an amazing experience. Every time it just blows the roof off. We absolutely love playing it. We call our fans 'Fuckers', in a nice way of course. It's obvious why if you've been to a show!
A couple of months ago you released “Detonation” your first full length, how are the first comments on it? Is it the album you had in mind while making it?
The feedback so far has been really good, most of the reviews have been great, 8 weeks in the Top 10 of the DAC chart and we've had over a quarter of a million hits on MySpace, so we are doing something right! There have been a couple of reviewers not get it, but I expected and wanted that. If everybody likes something it's got to be a pretty bland affair, it's confrontational music, it's going to rub some people up the wrong way. You don't get it, fine, we'll stand over here with all those that do. It's not futurepop, it's not noise, it's not EBM with some generic distorted vocal. Someone described it as a “trancedancepunkstompy thing...lets call it Modulate”. I thought perfect. That's exactly it. It's a mixture of lots of things and some people aren't sure how to react to that so they clutch to the only points of reference they know. They don't have any frames of reference in the dance music scene and a lot of where we come from is influenced by that. It's a mixture of things I love, dance, industrial, electro, big stompy beats, big riffs, big hooks. Nobody ever says, “It sounds like Public Enemy mixed with Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers, Motor and Mantronix” yet they are as big an influence on it as Combichrist, Grendel, Soman, Noisuf-X, Reaper etc.
It changed from what I thought it would be in the beginning and I think a lot of it ended up being influenced by playing live or by DJ'ing. There were definitely tracks written with a view to playing them live.
Between the EP and full length was a long time, did you do this on purpose, is there a reason behind it?
Partly I scrapped some of the album I had already. After the success of the EP and playing some of the songs live I wasn't happy with them, the success Skullfuck had raised the bar and it did add a certain amount of pressure, how do you follow up Skullfuck? The EP came out at the end of March...we ended up on tour pretty much until October. By which point I needed a break...touring is amazing fun, it can be mentally and physically tough to give a high energy show every night, the partying, the traveling, sleeping on a bus living out of a suitcase for weeks on end, you need some decompression time to adjust back to normal life. So I didn't really start writing again until Nov, things were pretty much finished around April time. The mixing and mastering took a lot longer than I anticipated. I'm happy with the result but the anticipated 1-2 weeks probably took about 6 as we were firing big files back and forth across the net every night. Some things worked great, others took version after version. We couldn't get the samples cleared so we re-recorded the vocals on No Good with Liz Green from Swarf. There were delays with the artwork, moving labels in the US etc so all these little things kept adding up. It was a learning process for me. We signed to Metropolis in the US and because they are a much bigger label with a much bigger distribution network they needed 3 months from delivering the album to release. So if you take out the touring and the lead time, it actually took 6 months, which isn't that bad really. It probably seems longer from the outside, for me it seems like no time at all.
I think that was the era I grew up in, that whole fertile period of 90's dance music. There were a lot of ideas being thrown together around then and that time period was a big influence on me and subsequently Modulate. It's something of a tradition for bands to play a cover at a festival show just for fun and I thought why not cover No Good? I finished it at something like 5am the day of the show. We played it and the crowd went crazy. When we hooked up with the VNV tour again I played it to Mark and Ronan and they loved it, so we played it at a few shows there and then on the Combichrist tour. People kept asking me every show where they could get hold of it and it made sense to include it on the album. If you don't know Modulate, maybe you know The Prodigy and might check us out because of it.
As a band, definitely. I love their use of sound, their energy. I love hearing songs where I can't tell what instrument is making a sound. I love going “What the hell is that, is that a synth or a sample or something played?” and I think The Prodigy are fantastic at doing that. Tracks like Breathe or Firestarter...it's hard to tell what the hooks are, are they guitar? Synth? Samples of something? I don't know but they are unique and original. The Chemical Brothers too are great exponents of that. What is that sound on Setting Sun? A synth through a guitar pedal being piped through a vacuum cleaner? I have no idea. Their sense of musical imagination is something I aspire to.
The track “Raising Lucifer” is the only track that has vocals done by you, is it your goal to keep Modulate mainly instrumental or can we expect more vocals of you in the future?
Possibly. But I like instrumental music. I'm not afraid to do it and perhaps with our style of music it sets us apart a little. There has been plenty of great instrumental music created over time so I don't feel the need to add vocals though I might try some more vocal tracks on the next
album. Or work as a producer and draft in other vocalists on a per track basis.
I do have a few rough outlines of tracks for the next album already so I suppose I'll see how they develop. I don't really plan things in the sense of “Oh, I must do a vocal track”. I'll let things progress organically, if a track needs vocals I'm sure I'll add some. I think being a producer I'm free of the normal constraints of a band. I don't have to fit 'the singer' into a track if I don't feel it warrants it. People like Daft Punk, Justice, Chemical Brothers, Prodigy etc use vocals but they don't necessarily have a singer or a front man as such, so I would say they are probably my lead in terms of how they use vocals in the music.
How do you feel in general about vocals in electronic music?
Depends on the vocal and the track entirely. I love Depeche Mode, Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, Combichrist, Rotersand, Gary Numan, VNV, Covenant, Ladytron etc and they all have very different styles and vocal deliveries. I'm not averse to vocals, but it's not really something I feel the need to do all the time. I like the abstract sense of music on a direct emotional level, by leaving it open to interpretation the listener can take from the music what they want. I've had people tell me they find something like Skullfuck or Buzzsaw really cathartic because it just captures their anger and aggression. They can put it on and shout their head off, or stamp around a dancefloor and release all that pent up emotion. Modulate tracks are not poetry set to music or some other form of song, they are emotional snapshots. With song type vocals you are communicating to somebody on a higher mental level than we operate, and if not telling them literally, you are certainly communicating what it is you want to convey to them by the words, lyrics and emotion of your vocals, and that is fine, but Modulate works on a far more primal/base level. It's beats and riffs and raw emotion. Take from our music what you wish. Through it's abstraction it can be more personal.
Why do people like shouting fuck? Why not shoe or elbow? As a word it is imbued with deep significance and linguistic power. About as violent or aggressive a statement as you can make in the English language is “fuck you” or “fuck off”. It is exactly that extreme that Skullfuck taps into. It's a very pure emotion.
There is no back story to why somebody would want to “Skullfuck You”, no reason given, no real explanation. It is just there, in the moment, a raw outburst. So by keeping the vocal content to snatches of dialogue without too much higher level thought or comprehension required you can convey emotion in a very primitive and direct manner.
Modulate in the studio is essentially me. I will play the guys tracks in progress and they can give me feedback, but by and large the writing/studio process is a solo one until we come to rehearsing/working out the live shows.
Then live: me on keyboards/Kaoss Pad, Gregor Beyerle on keyboards, Rhys Hughes triggering the laptop/live loops/samples etc. So that is our core lineup, though for some shows we have Owen Brown on stage as our VJ.
Rhys I have known from the scene around Manchester/Leeds and various clubs/gigs etc. Rhys was a DJ at a club called Implant that I used to go to. Greg I actually met in Berlin on the VNV tour when we had a day off and met up with the Combichrist guys...he also plays keyboards for Reaper who were supporting. He then played keyboards with me on the Combichrist tour and he's been playing with me ever since.
Your remix for Faderhead also turned out to be a real big hit, do you like to do remixes, do you always try to give them a Modulate feel?
I do like to do remixes, but it depends on the source material. If I can highlight the elements that are going to make a track work as a club track then they are really enjoyable. Most of the best tracks and mixes I've done have just fallen out of the sequencer in a matter of hours and the Faderhead mix was exactly like that. Either they happen very quickly and they are great or they take ages and they are never as good.
I threw most of the original track away in the Faderhead mix and built the production up from scratch because I had such a clear idea of what I wanted to do with it. I really wanted to remix that track and put my club spin on it so I asked Sami if I could do a remix. He said with complete honesty, “I don't really like Modulate, I will probably hate the remix and I probably won't use it, but if you still really want to, ok”. So I did the mix, he loved it and the rest you know.
What’s next for Modulate?
We are currently gearing the live bandwagon up again now the album is out so we are hoping to play as many shows as possible in Europe over the next year. We are playing some dates in the UK and Belgium in Dec. We are heading to the US for a headline tour next year and we are playing on board the Gothic Cruise sailing from Tampa in October 2009.
I've already started work on the next album so I'm hoping that will be ready by the end of 2009.
Any last words for the readers?
Thanks for your support, we look forward to seeing you at a live show soon! Our album, Detonation, is out now on Infacted/Metropolis and is available on CD from all good electronic music sellers and online via iTunes.
Pictures are made by Rhona Mitchell