Autopsy Of A Mad Scientist
So, all your work on this record is linked to the sound textures?
Yes, I really wanted to make a record that would be a sound experience for the listeners. I wanted the music to put them in a trance and enter their subconscious, that all the sounds mix together and bring them to another world. Just before, I talked about an effect on “Stadium arcadium”, and I’m trying to remember another song on which I did the same... “C’mon girl”. On those two songs, I turned the band upside-down. We had that old numeric reverb of 1976, the MT250, the very first one created actually. We passed my guitar in it, before sending it in a high frequency filter. When everything was at its maximum, the sound of the guitar was inaudible. Then, when I turned the frequencies button to the left, the sound of my guitar came back, starting by the most high-pitched frequencies. I recorded several tracks and I only kept those that sounded the best.
Did the idea of these experimentations appear when you jammed with the band, or did you find all these ideas on your own?
We composed and recorded the base tracks all together, then I worked alone. Anthony worked with Rick Rubin to record his vocal parts, I did my overdubs on my own, with a sound engineer and an assistant. I got all the time I needed to experiment, and I did so 12 to 14 hours a day. I love all those songs and I wanted each of them to be perfectly completed. At the same time, my challenge was to create something I had never heard before. For that, my solo albums enabled me to use the studio in a creative way. The fact I used the same sound engineer who worked on my two last records helped me. He also mixed the Chili Peppers album. We gained by an experience we got working together, and we’re faster today, cos we know how to get some sounds. There are only two songs on the album with keyboards. On every other one, it is guitar. When it sounds like a mix of melotron and mandolin, it’s actually accelerated guitars. I did a lot of things by changing the speed of bands. On songs as “Dani California”, “Turn it again”, “West sand”, “Hard to concentrate”, “Stadium arcadium”, there’s a guitar or a group of guitars that are accelerated on the band. Actually, I recorded those parts with the song played slowly, then I put back the band at its normal speed. When you listen to it after that, the guitars sound completely differently.
There are also many great solo on Stadium Arcadium...
Thank you! I’d like to precise that every solo was played at a normal speed.
There’s stuff that reminds of Hendrix, others Santana, or even Led Zep or Neil Young. Did you want to pay homage to them?
I think weird things happened with the guitar years after years. It seems that after the guitarists you’ve mentioned, everything fucked up. Even if I’m a big fan of Van Halen, Randy Rhoads or Steve Vai, I don’t think their way of playing guitar helped things along. Today, I got the feeling that people rebel against the playing of those masters, because now they all play very simply, and honestly, I think it was horrible when everybody wanted to play quickly. I’m tired of hearing all the guitarists playing basic stuff. I am inspired by Hendrix, Beck, or Page because they came from the right place. They tried to improve music, to go forwards. Time doesn’t work in their favour, but I think they had good intentions. I think that if we want to forge ahead, more than those guys did, we have to come back to the essence, to the substance of their playing: emotion. With Van Halen and Randy Rhoads, the idea was to surpass oneself with speed and neatness of performance. But how far can we go? Van Halen himself said in a 1979 interview: “I couldn’t play faster, that’s it.”. So this is not the way we must follow. Consequently, I come back to people who played in the 60’s and 70’s because there was more heart in their playing.
Do you see your playing on this record as a kind of musical testimony?
I’m a very serious musician. I don’t play solos to satisfy my ego. I decided to play some, and it was a well thought out choice. My reasoning is to take that kind of playing guitar from the 60’s and 70’s and to use it in a context of songs coming from a new place, a place that is mishmash of all the influences I got from the music of the 80’s and 90’s. I fit it to a new environment, by using a sound those guys didn’t have at that time. For example, I learnt a lot from the techniques of production of people as George Clinton and Brian Eno. In the early 80’s , Eno treated guitars and the other instruments with new synthesizers. Today, I make things with my guitar. My state of mind is to say “what would Clapton have done with Cream if he had had a modular synthesizer?”, I try to think in that perspective: “Let’s try to make an interesting thing, in a sound point of view, but with a range of sounds they didn’t have in the 60’s”.
