Further Into the Alias Zone
with Chris Meyer

Q: What does the music sound like?

A: It's always tricky to use words to describe music - especially when you don't fit neatly into a nice, neat style box. Read our reviews to get an idea what others are saying. The main page has MP3 previews of each of the songs; click on the song titles to play.

As for other genre references, Alias Zone is heavily in the ambient groove/dub vein, with a stronger world beat component than typical electronica. There are also vocal drops and spoken word passages, although they are almost as likely to be in Swahili or Urdu as in English. Flashes of reggae, jazz, rock, illbient, drums & bass, Berlin Movement and new age also make their appearances.

Of course, defining the term "ambient" alone is difficult. Brian Eno is often credited with releasing the first consciously ambient music album in 1975: Discreet Music. In his liner notes, he defines ambient as "...a new way of hearing music - as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of the ambience."

Another view comes from David Toop in his book Ocean of Sound where he takes ambient to more mean environmental:re-presenting the sounds (and by tangent, cultures) around you, perhaps in new contexts. From the back cover: "(a) work of sonic history that travels from the rainforests of Amazonas to virtual Las Vegas... Ocean of Sound begins in 1889 at the Paris Exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed. As ethereal culture absorbed in perfume, light and ambient sounds - developed in response to the intangibility of the 20th century communications. David Toop traces the evolution of this culture...from new rhythmic and tonal influences to the sounds of war, machines, and the new digital revolution."

Extending Toop's take on ambient is his recent tome Exotica, which traces the history of the "space age bachelor pad" music of Les Baxter, Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman up through modern cross-cultural efforts by YMO, Ornette Coleman, and Bill Laswell. In many ways, exotica was the beginning of "world fusion" in music. Alias Zone can be thought of as a 21st century update on exotica, in that we include environmental sounds (natural through industrial), voices, and rhythms from Western through African to Eastern cultures.

In you're more into listening than reading, here's some links to Amazon.com pages (which often have audio previews) that are good reference points. A strong influence is Bill Laswell's recent dance/world hybrids - especially the Sacred System releases (Chapter One/Book of Entrance, Chapter Two, and especially, Nagual Site, pictured left). Whereas these albums feature sax, trumpet, and cornet as a lead instruments, Richard Bugg's oft-processed flute serves the main melodic role for us. Richard's harmonized flute will also remind many of the work of Jon Hassell.

Other great data points in the "world meets west" vibe we strive for includes Laswell's Imaginary Cuba and Tabla Beat Science's Tala Matrix (pictured right), as well as State of Bengal's Visual Audio. The brilliant urban cultural collision that is Elixir's Hegalien Zone (featuring Laswell, DXT, Sassan, JP Sluys and Umar Bin Hassan) is also a great companion to our work. In a more relaxing vein, Loop Guru is a reference, as well as Quango's excellent Ambient Dub and Dubmission releases. Our use of ethnic voices will also remind some of Deep Forest, although our music is a touch heavier.

Now that we've cleared that up...

Q: Is this a band, a studio project, or what?

A: More of a "what", although there's certainly a group effort at its core. Indeed, all of the tracks on this album originated as live group performances.

As opposed to being a normal musician, I'm more of a sound designer or textural arranger who dabbles heavily in loops and dub remixing. I use for my sources ethnic, techno and trip-hop percussion loops, as well as (legal) samples from musicians such as Bill Laswell, David Torn and Peter Maunu. I throw into this mix found ambiences and voices, plus a variety of primitive hand percussion instruments I've collected over the years. Most of these get extensively processed by a rack of signal processing gear I tote with me called The Mojo Rack. (Side discussions on philosophies of sampling, as well as exactly what those weird percussion instruments are, will be added to this site later.) The goal is to create a certain vibe or atmosphere, including juxtapositions between elements you might not have heard together before.

For several years, I conjured these atmospheres live as part of Richard Bugg's group Cosmic Debris, which included Lucky Westfall, Richard Zvonar, Keith Snyder, and Blake Arnold. The band was heavily improvisation-based; every gig was different. Richard recorded virtually all of our performances. I selected tracks that best fit the vibe I was trying to create in my own music, and further edited, mixed, overdubbed, and processed them into the final tracks that appear on this album. So, this is sort of a "dub tactic" version of Cosmic Debris performances.

Q: Where did you find all of those samples from other musicians and countries? They're not legal, right?

A: Actually, I made a point of using just cleared, legal samples. I used to be a sound developer myself, and have even fought in court for the legal protection of samples. Little known to many listeners is that a good number of musicians (or field recordists) are making dedicated sampling CDs just for other musicians to use. It's like having them in your own session, or as a songwriting partner - in a virtual, disembodied kind of way.

Here are links to most of the sample developers (or places that sell their sounds) that were used on Lucid Dreams, including the songs they appeared in:

Bill Laswell/Sample Material : Phunque, Sunday 2AM (Driving), Towards the Dawn
Bashiri Johnson/Supreme Beats : Phunque, Towards the Dawn, Dervish, Nayeem, Dust
Chris Lang & Eric Cunningham/LA Riot : I Have Stopped Dreaming
David Torn/Tonal Textures : I Have Stopped Dreaming
XX-Large/Classic Drum Loops : Sunday 2AM (Driving), Without a Prayer
Steve Stevens/Guitar Collection : Towards the Dawn
Mark Pickup/Fields of Motion : Towards the Dawn
Joseph Stock & Mark George/Jungle Warfare : Dervish
JC Sharp & MS Letts/Heart of Asia : Nayeem, Without a Prayer, The River
Peter Maunu/Bizarre Guitar : Dust

To find sound effects recordings, including those from the BBC, Sonic Boon, Sound Ideas, and The Producers, check out Gefen Systems (Search for "sfx") - the most comprehensive collection I've seen by far. The newscasters in Swahili and Urdu were downloads of Voice of America (VOA) shortwave broadcasts from VOA's internet "gopher" site. Unfortunately, I've lost the URL; if anyone else has it, please email me.

Q: Have any stories behind the creation of these songs?

A: Every song has at least one story behind it... We'll be adding to this list of stories as time goes on.

I Have Stopped Dreaming

Blake actually conceived the words to this piece on the fly, which I feel was quite a feat; I really like the deadpan delivery as well. Rhythm-wise, I was in a "trip hop" phase at the time, and running a lot of loops through various filterbanks (Korg MS-20, Sherman Filterbank).

A rhythmic cousin to this track - "Urban Garden" - was performed live by the Cosmic Debris at the Equator coffee shop in Pasadena back in 1996, as part of an art event going on in the Old Town district. This was a relatively rare configuration of the Debris, in that it consisted of Richard Bugg, Richard Zvonar, and myself (Blake joined us later for stories); the result was a cross between Trip Hop and Illbient, including a "noise solo" by RZ. Loops are from Eric Cunningham and Chris Lang's sampling CD "LA Riot 3", same as on "I Have Stopped Dreaming".

Click here to download an 8+ minute (5.7 Mb) MP3 of Urban Garden.

Sunday 2AM (Driving)

The mental scene here is a salesman who has to drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco, who has just left an all night diner well past midnight and is trying to make time up the backroads - his only company being radio stations that keep fading in and out of audibility. This was inspired by our own visits to and drives past the central California town of Harmony, which boasts a population of under 20. The djembe loops were the last addition to this track; their gentle knocking sound reminded me of the engine of a car knocking.

By the way, no one played guitar on this track; we have no idea where the "wakka wakka" sound at the end came from - I suspect this was the Mojo Rack (see below) left to its own devices. We may release an actual guitar version of this song later.

Dust

One of the highlights of this song is long, tape-feedback-style delay the trails after some of the keyboard lines. Keyboardist Keith Snyder commented on that technique:

"Most musicians think of a delay unit as a way to make notes repeat, so they don't use it in any other way. To me, that's like laughing at someone for using a tool labeled "pasta spoon" for draining green beans. It's not really a pasta spoon; it's a thing for taking stuff out of boiling water, including pasta, and they had to call it something on the packaging. Similarly, a delay isn't really a way for making notes repeat; it's a way of altering time, which means altering both pitch and rhythm. On Dust, I used a "prosumer" and "outdated" Boss delay unit to turn captured sounds into something I thought sounded like a picture of a dust storm overtaking the desert. To get this effect, you can't just set the knobs and forget them; you have to keep your fingers on them and ride the levels so the music isn't ruined by unwanted feedback. I'm now using the same techniques (and the same Boss unit) with a saxophone and a bass clarinet in a concert theatre piece. "

Q: The liner notes credits the musicians playing instruments like "hyperacoustic flute" and "live sampling and signal processing" as well as unspecified sampling drum machines, digital recorders, and signal processing devices. Can you give any more details for us gearheads?

A: Richard Bugg uses the term "hyperacoustic flute" to describe him processing a variety of flutes through Lexicon and Eventide reverbs, harmonizers, and delay lines. He also played an Emulator II sampler and an Oberheim Xpander. His Arp 2600 and Moog/Emu modular tends to stay at Tone Studio Chaos, his own studio.

Richard Zvonar is a master of sound manipulation using Eventide Harmonizers; he even sells special software he created to control them. He processed various band tracks live. He also used to play guitar in bands decades ago; we dragged his fingers out of retirement for some overdubs here (including electric sitar on Nayeem).

Lucky Westfall plays a circa '65 Fender Jazz Bass w/ Seymour Duncan pickups plus a J.K. Lado Fretless, both usually processed through an ART Nightbass SGX (although I also ran him through a Lexicon MPX100, Zoom 1204, and Next REZ-30 for this album).

Keith's setup included a Roland Juno 6, Sequential Sixtrak, Kawai K4 and K5000S, Kurzweil MicroPiano, and a Boss delay (the latter was put to particularly good use on Dust - see above).

Blake Arnold has stated a preference for #2 pencils. (In real life, he's a writer and actor.)

The sampling drum machine I used on this album is a Sequential Studio 440, which I designed when I worked for Sequential Circuits in the late 80s. The live and studio versions of my "Mojo Rack" have evolved over time, and have included an Alesis Midiverb and 3630 compressor/limiter, Lexicon Vortex and MPX100, Zoom 1201 and 1204 multiprocessors, a Roland analog vocoder (courtesy of Richard Bugg), Sherman Filterbank (most prominent on Phunque), Korg MS-20 (filtering the drum loops on I Have Stopped Dreaming, as well as providing various white noise sweeps and percussion), Next REZ-30, MAM Warp 9, moogerfooger 12-stage phaser (used on Richard Bugg's Xpander bass drones), DACS FREQue and ColOSCil ring modulators, dbx 563x Silencers, SPL Vitalizer (a temperamental psychoacoustic equalizer which I love), ART Nightbass SGX, and nondescript cassette and CD players.

Richard Bugg recorded the live performances to a Tascam DA-88 digital multitrack. We then bounced the raw tracks down to a ProTools system (originally an 8-track Project, now a 24-track 001). In the computer realm, I've used Waves plug-ins, Alchemy and Peak sound editors, and a granular synthesis program called Thonk for the Poltergeist-like voices on Dervish and Nayeem.

Details on the recording and editing process of Lucid Dreams are due to appear in the May 2001 issue of Recording magazine. In the meantime, more info on our instrumentation can be found on the Cosmic Debris website.

Q: What do "Alias Zone" and "Lucid Dreams" mean?

A: Aliasing is a technical term for an artifact of sound sampling, where displaced copies of the original sounds reappear in new forms in different parts of the harmonic spectrum. The Alias Zone is the area where these artifacts overlap with the original sounds. It was also intended as a reference to the fact that these recordings are "aliases" of original Cosmic Debris performances.

Lucid Dreams are what happens when you dream while still awake. You are able to then control the direction of these dreams. This is a good analogy for the alternate realities we created while improvising these songs. (The 9 tracks on Lucid Dreams can also be thought of as a song cycle of 24 hour dream period, starting at dusk near a tropical port with Phunque. More clues later...) I first heard of it from composer Robert Rich (Rick Davies, an employee of Sequential Circuits, was a member of Pacific Rim, and is currently a member of Amoeba with Robert), from his work with the Stanford Sleep Lab. (I only became aware of an album by e:mt by the same name after our CD was already off to duplication, and apologize to e:MT for any confusion this may have caused.)

Q: Where can I buy a copy of Lucid Dreams?

A: Lucid Dreams was released by Valley Entertainment in February 2002 - UPC 618321515921. It can be ordered from Amazon.com and most other major online retailers, or special ordered by virtually any physical record store.

Q: So - when's the next album coming out?

A: After a long hiatus, pre-production of the next two(!) albums has started as of the summer 2004. We'll post more details as we get closer. If you want to be added to our mailing list (or have any other questions to ask or thoughts to share, send us email. In the meantime, thank you for your interst and support!

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