Ed Handley (Plaid)
Ed Handley is one of those figures from the story of electronic music whose footsteps we hear on the decks. As we found out at the 2003 Red Bull Music Academy, he enriched the atmosphere of electronica as Plaid and Black Dog during the early ’90s, an era that was characterised by their 808, DX7, 101, BBS, Old Street, poverty and love. The Black Dog were an enigma. For six years, they rarely gave interviews and refused to be photographed. With the split of the Black Dog, Plaid reactivated and began to once again mix fractured street beats with melodic bursts.
Hosted by TORSTEN SCHMIDT Welcome here. We have a man by the name of Ed Handley. He used to be in projects like Black Dog Productions and Plaid, however you pronounce that with a German accent. What’s the proper pronunciation of that? ED HANDLEY We say Plaid. TORSTEN SCHMIDT Plaid? ED HANDLEY Plaid. TORSTEN SCHMIDT It’s a Gaelic word, eh? ED HANDLEY If you say that with a Gaelic accent, you’d say “pla-eed,” which means “party” in Welsh. TORSTEN SCHMIDT How were your initial reactions when you learned that people were calling what you’re doing “intelligent”? ED HANDLEY It’s weird because I’ve never heard music that isn’t intelligent. I mean, if you have intelligent music, therefore you must have dumb music and maybe dumb music is some type of pop music. I don’t know. But I never hear music and think of intelligence anyway. It’s not really something to do with intellect anyway. There’s definitely academic music that is perhaps more about intelligence and intellectualism than most types of music, but I don’t think this kind of music that we make is intelligent, and I don’t think it’s dumb either. It’s just music. TORSTEN SCHMIDT When you guys came out, those thoughts were kind of prominent in doing music. You wanted to have people to listen to the music as such and not be distracted by Egyptian numerology or whatever. ED HANDLEY No, we fell into the inverse image where people had this esoteric kind of knowledge, and we tried to project a mysterious kind of image. But when we were Black Dog, we used to host a lot of websites and things to do with those kind of Egyptian cults and things like that. So, there was just an association, but the music didn’t have anything to do with it. We weren’t using formulas or special kinds of equations in our music. It was just the association, and it was sort of the early days of the internet where it was bulletin board systems. And we used to host the Pagan Federation site as well. TORSTEN SCHMIDT What were the associations you had when you were doing the music, because it is fueling imagination to a certain extent? What were the imaginary parts that led you to do this kind of stuff? ED HANDLEY I think mostly… Especially then, it was escapist music for us. It was sort of typical “sit in your bedroom for hours, don’t ever go out, lead a completely introvert life and just write music constantly.” I think it was escaping from fairly dull jobs. TORSTEN SCHMIDT What dull jobs were these? ED HANDLEY Computer programmer. Andy was a shipping clerk and Ken was a caretaker. So we all had these jobs that weren’t that fulfilling. They were really just to pay the rent. Certainly at that point, the music was to express some desire for freedom and to escape that mundane life. TORSTEN SCHMIDT So, let me get this right. You were trying to fight the devil with Beelzebub. You were escaping your programmer job and the downers by going into your bedroom and closing off from the world and finding some inner space by doing more stuff on the computer because you haven’t done enough all day? ED HANDLEY Well, I was using the computer for something much more enjoyable. So in a way, I think it made my job easier because I started to see computers as a friendly thing rather than just this thing that’s for making money and working for a boss. TORSTEN SCHMIDT What sort of computers had you been using then? ED HANDLEY We started off with Amiga and using a program called Dr. Tease, which is quite famous for the Amiga Commodore. And then about six years ago, we got Macs, so we’re fairly new to Macs and Logic audio and all that stuff. TORSTEN SCHMIDT So you got the ST still lying around? ED HANDLEY Yeah, we still use the Amiga for some stuff. It’s got a very crude, dirty little sampler on it, which still sounds better than most samplers. TORSTEN SCHMIDT Where is all the fascination with odd time signatures and all that kind of stuff coming from? ED HANDLEY I think it’s just because you can do it. It’s easy enough just to set up a time signature, and you don’t really have any idea what a time signature is when you’re setting it. You just work it out and you set a loop up and you start to do something in 9/4 and think, “Wow.” It’s just to try something different. I don’t think there is anything more to it than that. And actually, slowly sort of educating ourselves with music that does use different time signatures rather than everything being 4/4. It’s just that we grew up listening to so much 4/4 music that at some point you crack and go, “It’d be nice to hear something that resolves in a different way and just has a different groove to it.” TORSTEN SCHMIDT Obviously, drums and all these things sounded kind of different. Was there any sort of special motivation apart from just the difference or where did that love for the oddness come in? ED HANDLEY I think originally we didn’t set out with the aim of making anything particularly odd. You just write what you think is music, and you write to the extent of your capability. And at that time, the originality comes out partly because of your lack of knowledge, and you don’t have any reference points. You’re not referencing yourself. Whereas now we’ve been doing it for so long we can perhaps reference it to ourselves, so it’s a lot harder to be original and to have the intention to be original. It’s a bit of a contradiction, really. Because that means you’re actually trying to be original, which is very hard with the human mind because all you really have to reference is your past. Most of the things I hear that are original probably have been arrived at by accident or through a group. I think when there’s a group working together, it’s far easier to be original because then you have all the conflicts and compromises of a group. When you’re working by yourself, you end up falling in the same routines and formulas. Working in a group as musicians anyways, especially when you’re not players. If you’re working with computers, the idea of doing a jam together is... it’s getting easier now because of the software and the speed of computing, but in the old days it was very difficult unless you had a huge kind of analog system, an old modular system where you could all get in and patch things. TORSTEN SCHMIDT So how do you keep the egos in check in such a situation? Obviously the world is full of stories with people fighting about who did what on a particular track because there’s not always good times, especially in a band. How do avoid these sort of traps? ED HANDLEY It depends. If it’s a commercial endeavor, if you’re going into this with the idea of releasing it, then you probably sort it out beforehand. Whereas when you’re doing it just for the fun of it, then it’s just not really an issue. And if you are really friends with these people, it’s not going to be an issue. I’ve never worked on anything where there was anything contentious at the end of it. It’s always been straight. If it’s four of us, then it’s a 25% split. There is no, "I did this, or I did this." There is not enough income to get into that. If we were talking about millions of pounds, then maybe it would be more contentious, but when it’s like five hundred quid, then you’re just happy for your hundred quid and that’s it. TORSTEN SCHMIDT Obviously, your music attracted a lot of followers from academia – people with glasses and beards and that sort of thing – but a lot of that music somehow has a certain fear of melody and beauty and you guys absolutely did not seem to have that at all. ED HANDLEY I think we grew up listening to electro and hip-hop as it was developing in the early ’80s and mid-’80s because we were breakers, we were dancers, really. The idea of academic music was just laughable to us. It doesn’t make sense. It was all about basslines and beats. The idea that something was atonal or didn’t have a melody would have just been fairly nonsensical as well. Our idea of music was almost of a pop format, it’s got to have its drums, it’s got to have its bass, it’s got to have its melody. I think we still have that to a point, and I think we both get moved by melodies. So I think it’s a love of electro and a love of pop music as well. TORSTEN SCHMIDT What sort of pop music? ED HANDLEY Well, I mean, early early sort of electronic music, really. People like Visage and Human League and things like that were definitely influencing the breakers, were a sort of minor influence. We wanted it to be from America, we wanted it to be from New York, and therefore it’d be legitimate. But those people were influencing the electro producers in New York and LA. I think a lot of the European electronic music via the sort of American producers who we were getting influenced by. (music: Unknown) AUDIENCE MEMBER Can I just ask what time signature that was in, and did it change in the middle? ED HANDLEY Yeah, there is no overall time signature in the track. It was made with lots of time signatures overlapping. So it sort of mutates throughout the track. AUDIENCE MEMBER But it ended up 4/4? ED HANDLEY Yeah. TORSTEN SCHMIDT You said earlier you’re incorporating old analog gear in your live gigs. How do you manage with both of them, because obviously they’re even more unstable than this one? Are there any sort of rules to go down to get it to working set up? ED HANDLEY This is normally really solid. I’ve had this PowerBook for ages. I think, especially with computers, it’s all about keeping the hard drive defragmented. So many of the crashes and problems I had was just because of something as boring as defragging the hard drive. There is almost not much more to it. And with analog gear, it’s just making sure it doesn’t get bashed about too much. TORSTEN SCHMIDT But how do you connect the both of them, especially with the non-MIDI-fied ones, like 303s and stuff? ED HANDLEY There are loads of boxes you can get that send a sync24, which is the old way of synching 303s and 808s together, so it just does a MIDI clock to sync24. TORSTEN SCHMIDT You said that this music is for a DVD project, so you take it in 5.1 at some stage? ED HANDLEY Yeah, we’re trying to learn 5.1, but it seems like not that much music has been written specifically for 5.1. TORSTEN SCHMIDT But isn’t it kind of crap on the other hand because the hearing situations will be kind of different for everyone with the way they set up the speakers and this kind of stuff? ED HANDLEY I mean, you could say the same about stereo speaker configurations. A lot of people will be losing the left or the right, or they’ll be sitting more to the right hand or more to the left hand. Yeah, that is a problem, but if you say that, then you just limit yourself to stereo. I think it’d just nice to do some stuff in 5.1. It’s just going to be different. And it is pretty amazing to have sound coming from the back. TORSTEN SCHMIDT While you’re restarting your laptop, did you remaster old stuff already in 5.1? ED HANDLEY No, it’s just the new stuff that we’re doing in 5.1. We are not going to go back and do everything in 5.1. TORSTEN SCHMIDT When you got stuff that can be remixed in 5.1, which is originally done on one simple stereo recording track, you’re obviously changing the nature of the sound very heavily. ED HANDLEY Yeah, I think that’s a mistake. I think if it’s stuff that specifically done for 5.1, then it makes sense. But to remaster everything is just a ploy to sell more DVDs, really. I’m sure they will remaster every single CD that has ever come out as a DVD. TORSTEN SCHMIDT So it’s just another sad attempt of the industry? ED HANDLEY Well, it is a little bit. A lot of the DVDs that come out are just music that you have heard before with some live footage chopped on top. There is very little stuff that’s specifically made for DVD. And I think they will eventually phase out CDs, and they will expect us to buy all our music on DVDs. AUDIENCE MEMBER What is your guys’ musical background? Because I was always pretty impressed by your melodies and harmonies. And have you played any instruments? ED HANDLEY I didn’t. Andy learned how to play the flugelhorn, which hasn’t come in that handy. But I think it has given him some grasp of musical theory, whereas I didn’t and Ken didn’t have any training. AUDIENCE MEMBER So do you have any structured approach when you’re going to write a melody or harmony, or do you just click and fiddle until it sounds good? ED HANDLEY I think you sort of discover what works and what doesn’t work over time, really. So I think you just instinctively learn music theory, and you start to realize five up it sounds good and seven up sounds good and things like that. But, yeah, the way we write is all improvisational. I don’t think we have a theoretical start point. So it’s just bashing the keyboard until it sounds good, really. AUDIENCE MEMBER I have one more question. You often have a lot of elements in your mix, but it always still sounds clear or even quite spacious. Do you have any tips on keeping your mix clear while you have so many things going on, a lot of it arrhythmically? ED HANDLEY Yeah, it’s just trying to keep a certain sound to a certain frequency as much as possible. Every sound has its key frequency, and you don’t go too much outside of that range, really. TORSTEN SCHMIDT How would you find out which frequency the sound is? ED HANDLEY You could do it with an EQ where you just sweep the EQ, and wherever it starts to sort of resonate, you find its key frequency. It’s the main frequency within that sound. TORSTEN SCHMIDT So you got to have a proper kit for that, too. ED HANDLEY You can do it on almost any computer and you can do it with a graphic EQ at home. And also, you can just completely do it by ear. I think you can hear some things. You can hear the EQ. Basically, so you know what the main component of the sound is. [Laptop screen shows a full arrangement of a song] TORSTEN SCHMIDT Let’s go through this then on a quick tour. ED HANDLEY Well, this is a track that was on one of our albums called “New Family,” and this is quite a melodic track. Most of our tracks are melodic, really. It’s just so you can see the component parts of the track and the basic structure and how the track started. It basically started with a chord pattern, which was this. (music: Plaid – “New Family” / applause) And the beats in there were all kind of made by hand. We tend to write quite a lot of beats nowadays using Logic environments and just generate a kind of spew of MIDI output and take the best bits out. So we’ll record ten minutes of this generative drum output and then cut up the best bits and make a track out of that. We quite like the idea of sort of random elements in the music. And that is basically how that track was made. It started out with a chord and then everything else followed. And then right at the end of the track, the chords basically reverse in time which gives it a different feel. Yes, the chords at the end are just really a reversal of the opening chords, a time reversal, which in Logic is really easy to do. That’s the beauty of computers because if I had to do that by hand on a keyboard, I’d have real problems. AUDIENCE MEMBER Can I just ask a quick question about the break? It obviously sounded a bit sped up, but how did you process it or EQ it? ED HANDLEY This track was written when we weren’t doing everything inside the computer, so it would have been processed through a EQ compressor box called a Kerouac, which is like a channel strip from a desk. But it really is a sort of lovely old English EQ sound. It’s very warm. But nowadays, it’s just using Logic’s own internal compression and manually cutting up the breaks a lot of the time. I know there’s a lot of software now that will cut up the breaks for you and do a lot of that, but it’s much more fulfilling to do it by hand and slice it up and jiggle it around like that, and sometimes doing that generative thing with Logic environments. AUDIENCE MEMBER Would you cut the break up into individual sections, like the kick and the snare, put it on a keyboard and then replay it the way you want it to sound? Or would you just rearrange it? ED HANDLEY Yeah, I think with that one it sounded like the original break form, the sort of basis of the rhythm, of the syncopation. But then we just cut it up, so it’s a bit more versatile and a bit more flexible, you can do variations, like fills and things like that. So if you’ve got a rhythm that you’re happy with, I think just cutting it up. This is the way we make some beats. There’s a track on our last album, which came out in October. It’s called Spokes, and there’s a track on it called “Cedar City,” and this is where the drums came from, and this is the sort of randomizing drum environment, which creates or throws out syncopation. We made it, and it’s pretty clunky, it’s enormous, but it sort of does the job. But it takes quite a while to actually set it up because there are just so many buttons. But the basic principle of it is, it does create “and / or / if” probabilities on each beat, and you’ve got sixteen steps. So it’s fairly simple what it does, but it does what computers do well, which is I think probability and randomization, which is hard for us to actually work in that way. I know my mind doesn’t work randomly on purpose. It works randomly quite a lot of the time, but not intentionally. I think computers can do it well and this is a good way of exploiting that, really.