Behind the Scenes #2 - Anti-Human Nous
This song is one of a few written immediately before I began recording ‘Battletech’. Many of the songs were penned long before the album itself came together, and never recorded through a lack of the right technology - ie. real-enough-sounding drums without getting a guy, paying a different guy, and feeding them both beer - and being stuck with the results.
But this one was originally written for a band I was in at the time, KittyHawk. Early 2008, or late 2007, I can’t recall. In one of my ‘get out the gear, muck around, and see what comes out’ periods, I went in with the intention of writing music for the band; which at the time played mostly material written by the singer, Kent, with input on arrangements from the drummer, John, and I.
Kent wasn’t so keen on it (other stuff I had he liked, so it wasn’t time wasted, not at all), so it went in my big pile of ‘unused songs that rock’. Soon after, when the concept of Radio Over Moscow came to me (then as ‘Raid Over Moscow’) Anti-Human Nous was top of the list of songs to try out.
I took the original demo, and literally just transferred the demo drums onto the newer samples, tweaked them a bit of course, threw in some synthetic samples in the choruses, and pretty much had the drum take ready. It was one of those songs were the structure was already in place from the get-go, like magic or something.
It was one of the first songs recorded for the album, and I had my distorted bass sound going, in an approximate replication of what I used live in KittyHawk. It’s a lot simpler to play than it sounds - a few people have commented it sounds like a synthesizer - or thought it was one. Nope, it’s just a quickly-picked bass string, mostly on the A-string.
The actual synths though are played mostly on the Yamaha PSS-460. It’s an old keyboard I used a hell of a lot in the past, but have kind of ignored recently in favour of softsynths. Anyway, nothing does a good ‘beerougnh’ sound like the PSS-460, so I pulled it out of retirement for Anti-Human Nous.
It also makes a really cool sound when you’re recording it live, and you suddenly kill the power - but when you do that, you lose your slider settings, which sucks. So don’t do it unless it’s your final take, and the overpaid producer is giving you massive thumbs up through the studio window.
As for the lyrics, well… they’re gibberish. Completely. If you don’t believe me, listen to them. People often take meaning from um, words. In this case, don’t. At all.
Right, I’m back to watching the train wreck, with a good cause, that is Telethon. Or as it’s known in the Twitter world, #telethon.
LINK: BUY ‘ANTI HUMAN NOUS’
Tags: battletech, behind the scenes, recording
