Pell Mell
The Tchad Blake Way To "Star City"

Spalding in the amp bathroom PHOTO: GREG FREEMAN

by Adam Beyda and Anne Eickelberg

Long before the much-abused, catch-all label "alternative" proliferated, Pell Mell were making forward-thinking and melodic all-instrumental records. The band started in 1980, and for a few years all the members lived in the same state. Then everyone scattered, and Pell Mell reappeared only sporadically--when they felt the urge, the musicians would gather for a few weeks of jamming, then make DIY recordings. They released one EP and two LPs on the SoCal indie label SST before the post-Nirvana signing frenzy landed them a deal with Geffen. The resulting album, 1995's Interstate, made the band a college radio staple. They'd recorded the album mostly with engineer Tim O'Heir at the Boston studio Fort Apache but also did much of the recording themselves in bass player Greg Freeman's 16-track San Francisco studio.

In fact, both Freeman and keyboardist Steve Fisk (based in Seattle) are professional recordists. Fisk has produced and/or engineered for Screaming Trees, Beat Happening and the Geraldine Fibbers, and Freeman's engineering credits include Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Faust and Royal Trux. With this background, it's no surprise that Pell Mell's records, on top of their musical interest, are loaded with imaginative and provocative sonics.

Their gorgeous recent release, Star City, is a treasure-trove of strange atmospheres and driving grooves, loaded with both ringing and noisy guitars, scintillating keys and an array of multisource analog bleeps and warbles. It's suggestive of everything from surf to old-school ambient, and it manages to be simultaneously a sound bonanza and a model of restraint.

Yet even for a band known for exceptionalism, Star City was an anomaly. For one thing, it was recorded for Geffen, but soon after it was mastered, the band's major-label love-affair came to an abrupt end, when, as part of a recent wave of purges, that company dropped them. ("It happens at every major label," Fisk smirks. "It's as if all of a sudden all the bands you signed are like a drunken weekend you want to forget.") New York City indie Matador Records came to the rescue, snapping up the masters and getting the record into stores. And although in the past they'd done the majority of their recordings themselves, on Star City Pell Mell entrusted the producing and the lion's share of the engineering to Tchad Blake.

It was a pairing that made a lot of sense. Blake began his career as a recordist close to 20 years ago, making field recordings with binaural mics (work he still actively pursues--check www.binau.com for more on this). It wasn't long before he began working in studios, and he soon formed a fruitful and ongoing partnership with producer Mitchell Froom. Over the years, Blake has amassed a string of credits (both with and without Froom), engineering, producing and/or mixing for artists such as Crowded House, Los Lobos, Bonnie Raitt, Richard Thompson, Cibo Matto, Wild Colonials and Soul Coughing. (He and Froom joined members of Los Lobos to record a critically acclaimed, edgy CD under the name Latin Playboys--a project particularly admired by members of Pell Mell.) These days, Blake has become something of an engineer's engineer; he's highly regarded for his inventive and unusual sonics and spare, yet highly textural recordings. The instrumentals of Pell Mell--uncluttered, yet full of sound effects-type tones--really lent themselves to Blake's approach.

A couple of months in advance of the sessions, the band (which also includes drummer/guitarist Bob Beerman, based in Boston, and guitarist Dave Spalding, living in New York City) gathered in San Francisco. They spent a week woodshedding at Freeman's studio, Lowdown (since vacated to make way for the city's new baseball stadium). They generated some rough song sketches and a lot of ideas, then reconvened in early '97 in Los Angeles, where they spent three weeks recording and mixing with Blake and assistant S. "Husky" Hoskulds at Sunset Sound Factory.

Freeman (foreground) and Beerman, getting into their role as musicians PHOTO: S. "HUSKY" HOSKULDS

Blake regularly works in Sunset's B room, which features a vintage API, modified and fitted with Neve Flying Faders automation. "Once we were [in L.A.]," Freeman says, "we just turned it all over to Tchad, completely. And my mind was just blown 18 hours a day. We'd go in and set up for a basic track, with all four of us playing live. We'd have a headphone mix that was pretty normal, but he runs everything in mix mode from square one, as if he were mixing from the very beginning. We'd listen to the playback, and we'd be speechless because it was so incredible-sounding."

"One thing I really don't like is recording without knowing how things are gonna sound in the end," Blake explains. "So I've always tried to record with, say, the drum sound being the [final] drum sound we want. I'll get a drum sound while the band's playing up the song, put it on tape, listen back, and more times than not it's fine. It's all done very quickly. I try to hear everything at once--not just drums, not just bass--and I like it to be spontaneous."

And indeed, the sessions were freewheeling. Freeman says that the material the band brought into the studio was rough and that a lot of fleshing out happened on the spot. While the band tracked, Blake would be doing his thing and sending lots of compression and effects to the studio's Studer A827 (at 15 ips with SR). Fisk says that Blake would create keyboard themes via editing. "He would fall in love with some detail or something I'd do in between one thing and another--real 'Eno card' kind of stuff, where you accidentally do something that's much cooler than what you could ever think of."

Blake's spontaneous approach was complemented by his innovative methods and use of unusual gear. For instance, a huge part of the drum sound on Star City came from the overhead mic, a Neumann binaural head dubbed Gongoli. ("It was named that by S.E. Rogie, a guitar player from Sierra Leone," Blake explains. "I put it in front of him as we were getting ready to record. He looked up, his eyes went wide and he said, 'Oh, Gongoli!' A friendly spirit from his village was named Gongoli, and I guess Gongoli looked like the Neumann binaural head! So it sort of stuck.") Blake placed Gongoli at just above cymbal level, in front of the kit (see photo below). "Then one snare mic, a kick mic, sometimes a hat mic and a floor tom mic, and usually the [binaural] head picks up the rack tom, the cymbals and the hat. But I always put one mic in the center of the kit, fairly close to the kick and snare, that goes through a pretty radical compressor that I'll mix in." On Beerman's kit, Blake used a Shure Level-Lock. "It's a mic-level podium compressor, and drums drive the thing so hard it distorts and compresses like crazy. You can actually make it sound like a backwards drum kit if you turn it all the way up. That's just nice to mix in a little bit. Then I also use SansAmps on the drums; a little bit of distortion on the kick and snare goes a long way."

Fisk at the keyboard com PHOTO: S. "HUSKY" HOSKULDS

Apart from Gongoli, Blake's mic choices and placement tended to be fairly straightforward. He'd get sounds by using unconventional sources (such as cymbals from Toys R Us) and effects or processing. On guitars, for example, Blake would just use either a 57 or a KM84 on the amp, sometimes a Coles, rarely using more than one mic. The B room at Sunset has only one small iso booth (where the kit was set up), so Blake ran a line out to the bathroom, where he placed the guitar amps (all small ones, including Whites and Alamos). He'd run Spalding's signal through a compressor direct to tape, "or if he wanted a phaser or vibrato, that'd be in his guitar line. I usually don't like chorus much. If somebody wants a chorus, I'll break out my vibrato box."

Generally speaking, Blake eschews reverb, preferring a more dry, in-your-face kind of sound. He'll often create ambience using compression. "I almost never record room or ambient mics," he says. "I'll send the head to compressors and then go to two other tracks of the tape, and those'll be my ambient mics--basically compression. I just mix them in slightly. The compressor I've used the most in the past ten years is the Spectrasonics 610. They're solid-state compressors that distort a bit--even at their lowest setting they're compressing more than you can imagine! I'm not sure what they're doing, but whatever the EQ curve is, it's wild." Blake also has some old broadcast compressors that he'll use occasionally for a kick, a snare effect or a guitar. "My favorite compressor that I use on everything is the Distressor," he adds. "It's amazing. It's great on vocals, and a lot of the guitar sounds for Pell Mell were through the Distressor."

Some of the keyboard parts were replaced during overdubbing, when a lot of percussion and unusual sounds were added, as well. ("Part of the philosophy of the recording is just to have a bunch of junk around at all times," Blake says, "a lot of stuff that can be inspirational to everybody.") Fisk played an array of instruments, including a Compact Fast Two Combo Organ. "It's a non-collectible dinosaur gaffe from Farfisa," Fisk says. "It has its own elliptical speakers, which we miked to get the key click." He played a Baldwin Fun Machine, which he says is "a home organ, probably mid-'70s or later. It has auto-accompaniment universes like Habanera, Waltz, Rock 1 and 2. It has a little interactive bar that you can tap to switch it from major to minor. The rhythm machine is gorgeous; it's all white noise."

Beerman in the booth with Gongoli PHOTO: S. "HUSKY" HOSKULDS

More conventional keyboards got a lot of unconventional treatment. "We did a thing on one song where I was playing a Celeste through a SansAmp," Fisk says, "and the SansAmp was going through a wah-wah pedal that Tchad had up on the console; I don't know if he was using both hands or one, because I was in the other room playing, but he was making it sound like this insane Miles Davis fuzz Rhodes at double speed. There were like three or four tracks of it. That was kind of cute."

Leaving the recording to Blake gave Fisk a chance to focus on his role as a musician and to get a wholly different angle on his sound. "It's a matter of trust," he says, "it's a free-fall: I didn't look at the knobs, I didn't ask what compressor he was using. When he would say, 'Oh, I don't want to put it through an amp, a DI would be great,' I'd think, 'Okay, Tchad says a DI is fine. Don't worry about the keyboard sound; don't worry about what I know from my experience as a producer and engineer; this is Tchad doing it, and I love what Tchad's aesthetic is.'"

Freeman also concentrated on being a musician (his bass was recorded direct, with a SansAmp) but paid a little more attention to Blake's machinations and style. "I've never seen anyone apply really basic stuff as well as Tchad," Freeman says. "If something like the bass or a tom or kick is in a certain range, nothing else goes in that range. It's the kind of stuff that, when you read the book, it's chapter one: Keep the frequencies and the instruments separate. He was totally aware of that at all times and took great pains to make space for everything." In the mix, Freeman was jazzed by Blake's sense of arrangement, "like when a part would come in or go out. It wouldn't always be on the one or the change. Things would drag in or tail over or stop for a little bit for no apparent reason, then come back in. That sort of thing was pretty impressive."

"As far as arrangement goes," Blake elaborates, "I rely quite heavily on mute-button arranging--I love it, it's really fun. We all seemed to be into the slash and burn thing when it came time to mix, which I'm happy for."

Sure, it was a fruitful collaboration, but with so many engineers in the house, wasn't there a lot of dissension? "No, not at all," Freeman replies. "We wanted Tchad to do his thing--just sitting back and going for the wild ride was the whole point. I mean, there's like half a dozen people I could think of who I'd enjoy working with like that, and he's definitely the number one guy. It was phenomenal to be able to watch him. I learned tons."

For his part, Blake says that working with musician/engineers didn't pose any particular problem. "Everybody had something to say, but the best ideas won out, whoever's they were. The process was really fun; everybody seemed to be on the same planet. It's one of the most fun records that I've done."