Fairlight
programmer, producer and half of the Art of Noise, JJ Jeczalik was
involved in the early use of sampling in recording and the controversial
Frankie Sessions". Interview by Paul Tingen.
"ACCORDING TO LIPSON", wrote the Daily Mail of
the court case between Frankie's Holly Johnson and record label ZTT,
"the record was put together by himself, producer Trevor Horn, keyboard
player Andrew Richards and Fairlight programmer JJ Jeczalik - a man of
no musical experience."
Jeczalik groans and puts the
newspaper down. He reaches for the telephone, telling the other side in
no uncertain terms that he wants a lawsuit brought against the Daily
Mail for defamation of character.
We are in The Townhouse
studios in West London, where Jeczalik is cutting the new Art of Noise
single 'Dragnet', which will he making its bid for a chart placing by
the time you read this. He appears in a less joyful mood than when MT
last interviewed him, some two-and-a-half years ago. He clearly does not
welcome the shadow of his past involvement with the first Frankie Goes
To Hollywood album crossing his path now. It's understandable, as he and
keyboard player/arranger Anne Dudley have established the Art of Noise
away from Horn's ZTT umbrella. Jeczalik has also enjoyed success as a
producer with Stephen Duffy's 'Kiss Me' and the Pet Shop Boys'
'Opportunities'. On the other hand, two -and-a-half years ago he took
pride in his own musical ineptitude. I confront him with the
observation.
"There was an element of naivety about anything I did then", he agrees. "That's the same for anyone starting on a new career."
So what has the intervening period taught him?
"I've gained an insight into the extraordinary machinations of the record business", comes the reply.
"Music remains an intuitive
thing, that doesn't really change, but I've discovered the ways in which
record companies sell their products, which is what it's all about.
It's a throw-away industry, where things are not designed to last for
longer than three months."
Would he call himself a musician? Jeczalik's sense of humour, very
apparent at our last meeting, breaks through: "No I wouldn't. I would
call myself a man with some musical experience."
The Daily Mail seemed
to think otherwise in their reporting of the court case between ZTT and
Johnson. This court case will probably be the first contact for much of
the general public with issues concerning hi-tech equipment and the
making of music. Johnson's former producers argued that they actually
did all the work while the band were puppets on hi-tech strings - the
role of performers being taken over by machines, giving producers more
control than ever. As one of this country's Fairlight exponents, the
issues must lie close to Jeczalik's heart. Strangely, he doesn't believe
that recent technical developments have given the producer more power.
“I think it's always been a
producer's world", he comments, "it's just that the emphasis on that
area is being overstated at the moment. There's always been a
professional person guiding and organising recordings; the fact that
producers now apparently have the ability to radically change things
makes their role and influence no different from 10 or 15 years ago."
Yet the case of Johnson and
Lipson suggests a far more dictatorial approach was adopted by the
producer, courtesy of hi-tech equipment. Lipson claimed that he did the
work himself on the Synclavier - including reworking Johnson's singing.
Jeczalik, present at the sessions, doesn't want to elaborate, instead
muttering: 'It seems that a few people are getting carried away by it
all. They've forgotten the simple truth that all those machines do
absolutely nothing unless they're operated by somebody, and unless
there's an interaction between that person and somebody else who is
creating the racket in the first place - whether it's singing, playing
the bass guitar or the piano. Making a record is an interactive process.
He's forgotten that he could not have done it without Frankie."
Yet the band's demo of 'Relax' sounded completely different from its vinyl result. Jeczalik sighs.
"There's no doubt that the
master recording and the demo were entirely different, but the idea of
the song, and the original performance, inspired the record. The record
would never have happened were it not for the demo."
Jeczalik's involvement with
Frankie Goes To Hollywood and ZTT dates back to '84 when he was involved
as a Fairlight programmer in the making of 'Relax', and subsequently
Frankie's first album, Welcome to the Pleasure Dome. Jeczalik
entered the music scene as a roadie for the group Landscape back in the
'70s. He quickly swapped Landscape for The Buggles when offered the job
of supervising Geoffrey Downes' keyboard gear. And it was through Downes
that Jeczalik came into contact with the Fairlight; unable to
communicate with the machine, Downes handed that job over to Jeczalik.
After The Buggies split, the programmer worked for Trevor Horn, the
other half of the group, as well as doing a lot of freelance programming
work. Consequently, he worked with artists like ABC, Paul McCartney,
Kate Bush and Dollar at a time when the Fairlight and sampling itself
were still used for effect.
AFTER LEAVING ZTT ("They
forgot to renew our contract, otherwise we'd be where Holly Johnson is
now.") the Art of Noise produced In Visible Silence, an album many critics considered to be inferior to their ZTT debut, Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise.
They needed Duane Eddy's 'Peter Gunn' to revive what seemed to be a
flagging career. Last year saw the release of a third LP, In No Sense? Nonsense!,
and again it took an artist from a past musical era to help them with a
hit. Although Schumann isn't around to pass comment, their rework of
one of his themes in 'Dragnet' is the Art of Noise at their best: a
bizarre collection of samples and effects, carried along by an
infectious sequenced beat and, best of all, a main theme you can hum.
In No Sense? Nonsense! is a departure from In Visible Silence
in that it's more offbeat, or "wacky", as Jeczalik would have had it
two-and--a-half years ago. At times it seems to do away with song
structure altogether and leads you through a land of delirious sound
effects, crazy rhythms, church choirs and environmental samples -
trains, motorbikes, helicopters… What about those environmental sounds?
"Basically they just sound
great", explains a bemused Jeczalik. "It's like anything else which
attracts your attention, and about which you get excited - you use it.
The fact that they ended up as linkage between the tracks slowed the
album down and made it more like a journey."
Heavy treatment of sounds has
always fascinated Jeczalik. It was what he called the "rock 'n'
rollness" of the Fairlight which attracted him to the machine.
"It's very rock 'n' roll,
because everything gets very dirty and gritty, as if it's been through a
Marshall 100W amplifier. I developed this idea that if that's what it
is like, then I should make it sound worse, so that it stands out."
In No Sense? Nonsense!
involved both Series II and Series III Fairlights, the latter being the
first machine which, in Jeczalik's opinion, plays its samples back
without any loss in sound quality.
"That wasn't the reason I used it - I wanted to get involved in making
longer samples. The series III has a sample time of 85 seconds stereo,
and that enabled me to work with all those environmental things."
The Fairlight III used for the
recording was on hire; since then Jeczalik has decided to buy one: "I'm
ordering it with 600 Megabytes of memory. It will have four monitor
screens because it's so powerful."
Staying on the subject of
sound sources, Jeczalik adds that his most important recent purchase is
not the new Fairlight but another far more unlikely machine.
"I bought a Minimoog", he
reveals, "and had it modified to accept MIDI. On the version of
'Dragnet' we're cutting now, the bassline is a combination of samples
doubled with the Minimoog. The sound of the Minimoog is very definitive,
there's nothing to replace it really."
Pursuing the subject of keyboards, I mention the ubiquitous DX7. Jeczalik nearly chokes.
"Did you say DX7? What's the point in buying a DX7? It's the biggest load of shit ever made."
The temperature rises: "It's
like the D50, very good for a kind of immediate usage - very fast and
very functional and probably worth around £200. It's the same with the
D50, people use them so much because initially they sound good. But
really under the microscope of a 24-track situation, they are useless.
They sound cheap, and all they are is a very, very good piece of
marketing."
In No Sense? Nonsense! carries as its motto: Ars est celare artum,
which can loosely be translated as 'the art is to conceal the art'. I'm
here to uncover the art, so we move on to the conception and recording
of the latest AoN album. How does Jeczalik work out his ideas? Somehow
it's hard to imagine someone programming a sequencer, without having
played, however inadequately, on some instrument first.
"The ideas come from the
individual sounds and the moods they imply, when I play the keyboard.
That immediately means something to me. If it's a sound of a train going
by or a helicopter, when I play that on the Fairlight, that will imply
something completely different than the sound of maybe a door being
slammed."
JECZALIK'S PRACTICE OF
treating his sounds is a remarkably similar approach to that of Daniel
Lanois (interviewed in MT, October '87). But there's another similarity
between the two: they both avoid using studios for laying down basic
tracks. Lanois records in castles and basements and brings in hired
equipment, Jeczalik and Dudley retreat to remote places with their own
portable setup.
"We often go to a place called
Palé House in Wales, which is a hotel. We'll have weeks of writing and
discussing in an environment of opulence and luxury. I bring my
Fairlight, Anne some keyboards and we've got a four-track cassette deck,
on which we record the audio tracks. We put on some headphones and off
we go.
"Actually, we often master on
that machine. It's a modular prototype developed by Nakamichi about
which I can't say too much here. All I know is that it will he aimed at
the Portastudio end of the market when it comes out. It runs its
cassettes at normal speed.
"We wrote a lot of the album
as demos first and then took it elsewhere to master and overdub. In that
process a lot of things changed completely, like the Ely cathedral
choir replaced things we'd done before on series II and the S900. That
then led to new ideas which ended up being nothing like the original
recording. But with other tracks we just did some overdubs and finished
off, using the original cassette version.
"Sometimes we master straight
onto ½” or ¼” sometimes we only use the cassette deck, but we hardly
ever go to an official studio to lay down tracks. Of course, I've always
got 16 tracks on the Fairlight, although I never use more than eight or
nine tracks. When we need more audio tracks we record at Anne's
16-track home studio, which consists of a Fostex B16, Soundtracs
24-channel desk, Quad amplifica-tion, NS10 monitoring and ½", ¼” and
digital mastering."
Another thing which makes In No Sense? Nonsense! different
from previous albums is the use of other musicians, in this case
members of their live band. Jeczalik explains how that came about.
"We got fed up with. using
sequencers all the time. Anne got fed up with playing and I got fed up
with programming, so we thought we'd let some other people do the work
for us for once. It wasn't really for conceptual reasons, apart from
helping to create a human feel, but of course, whilst working with
people you get a melting pot of ideas."
But why are Jeczalik and
Dudley reluctant to lay down basic tracks in the studio in the first
place? The answer is definitive: "They're too expensive. The SSL desk
for example, is largely responsible for the massive costs of making
records today. They're a complete con. It's all brilliant marketing and
indicative of the fact that the making of records was suddenly seen as a
market which was able to absorb massive price increases. And that was
covered in the idea of digital technology. 1 don't think that the sonic
improvements there justify the costs. Really, all the gear, digital or
analogue, SSI, or not SSL, is of no relevance. All these things, like
the producer, the engineer, the programmer, the sampler, the desk, are
all there to assist making records. It's that simple. That's always been
the case, although the emphasis is changing at the moment. There's too
much marketing now, people should go back and use their ears and listen
to what really matters. The gear is only there to assist recording a
performance - end of story. You can quote that."
Of course, I'm not complaining. But does this leave a place for studios at all in Jeczalik's mind?
"Yes, of course. They're vital
for making master recordings and mixing. You do need a certain level of
technical exactitude, though the engineer who's responsible for the
sound is probably more important. A good studio and a good engineer will
offer you many varieties of tone and colour that you can't get
yourself. But for recording tracks, studios aren't that valid. You
should have most of it sorted out by the time you get to a studio."
Getting back to the subject of
sampling, what are Jeczalik's views on the controversy currently
surrounding the theft of other peoples sounds and music that samplers
have made commonplace? The last time we spoke he wasn't afraid to admit
that there were samples all over the Who's Afraid of the Art 0f Noise
album which left him open to lawsuits of one sort or another. Thanks to
the 12-bit Fairlight though, the sounds are all but unrecognisable.
Today, probably with the impending court case between M/A/R/R/S and
Stock, Aitken and Waterman in mind, he is more cautious.
"I have very ambivalent views
towards it. On the one hand you have fantastic access to all sorts of
sounds, on the other hand it might not he very fair to use something
which cost somebody else two weeks of work. Perhaps one might quote a
famous saying: 'A work of art is never finished, it is abandoned'. When
people abandon sounds and samples they're not finished, and when other
people pick them up and rework them that's fair enough."
Drawing the interview to a close I ask Jeczalik what he is up to at the moment.
"I've set up my own publishing
company. I'm looking for more regular music, good songs, good melodies -
the rest I can take care of from a production point of view. What I'm
particularly looking for are demos that haven't been overworked. Some of
the best demos have been made with somebody singing at the piano, or
with just acoustic guitar and voice. It's a plea to people not to overdo
demos and just get the mood right and get some interest in the song."
He addresses the microphone: "Please send your tapes to Polar Union in London." He said it, I didn't.
Another of Jeczalik's plans
turns out to be a solo album: "I'm doing demos at the moment. There are
no scheduled plans for release, but it's underway, the boat has just
been pushed out."
I've already got my ticket, this is one boat I don't want to miss."
Demos should be sent direct to JJ Jeczalik, c/o Polar Union, 119-121 Freston Road, London WFL 4BD.
