…
Metal is not sports. Despite the head-scratching fan base rivalries that can be unearthed in any of the web’s wonderful metal forums, love for a particular genre of music should have little do with rooting interest or feats of strength. Yet as a PED-ravaged athletics landscape has forced us to question who we can believe on the field of play, so too has a sizable contingent of metal fans spent the last decade and a half growing suspicious of the true physical abilities of the musicians they love.
Accusations of auto-tuned vocals, click-tracked drums and computer-enhanced riffing have all been commonplace in conversations about metal in the post-Bonds era. Hell, there was even a rumor in my high school that Yngwie Malmsteen had the spaces between his fingers surgically widened so he could‚ shred better? Anything to get an edge, I suppose.
And look, I get it. Feeling cheated is the worst aspect of any kind of fandom. If it came out that Tim Duncan was lording over an international doping syndicate or chasing his red wine with deer antler spray after dinner every night, I’d be crushed. As with sports, there are plenty of occasions when it’s right to demand physical excellence from metal musicians. But there are far more occasions when physical excellence is totally unrelated to how those musicians are hoping to affect us, rendering such inquisitions ridiculous. It’s time we stepped back and drew a line between the two.
Rings of Saturn made certain corners of the internet implode when it came out that they may have recorded their most recent record at half speed and sped the tracks up to the desired tempos using editing software. Commenters agreed right away that this was problematic, but there was little consensus over exactly why. (Before we delve any further, it should be noted that the controversy in question stems from what are still only allegations. Rings of Saturn have not confirmed nor denied that these allegations are true, but our discussion of the fan reaction is almost entirely ancillary to what actually happened in the recording studio.)
More than almost anything, people hate being lied to, and that’s where the Rings of Saturn debacle cut fans the deepest. This is a band that sells itself on dizzying technicality, breakneck speed and little else. If those two traits are proven inauthentic, nothing is left. If the allegations are true, it means the members of the band and the studio engineers who helped them pull off their trick are unethical, and the controversy alone probably means their next record won’t sell well. But they didn’t break any laws, and they won’t be called before Congress to testify on ProToolgate. A little outrage is fine, but a little perspective is even more important.
Now imagine the same accusation being leveled against Cannibal Corpse, whose chief aim is brutality rather than technicality. Doubtless the same outrage would ensue, but in this case, it wouldn’t be warranted. The end result of Cannibal Corpse’s music would be the same, and they would have marketed it the exact same way. Learning they used some studio cheats to sell it to us would be completely ancillary to the actual quality of the record. This matters.
Ultimately, it’s still a little bizarre how inextricably the accusers in the Rings of Saturn controversy linked the members’ physical abilities to their own sense of betrayal. Think of all the bands that have released “live” records over the years that are probably more like studio albums with some crowd noise. Slayer’s Live Undead is a lie. Judas Priest’s Unleashed in the East is a lie. Type O Negative’s The Origin of the Feces is a lie, and we think it’s hilarious. KISS lied when they put out Alive, and it’s arguably the greatest live rock record ever made. But these records all came out in the pre-steroids era, and their dubious live-ness has little to do with the capabilities of the performers. These dudes definitely played these songs. They probably just didn’t play them when they said they did.
We’re also shockingly fine with the use of computers when we’re told computers are supposed to be there. Take Genghis Tron, whose three members all use some form of electronics to enhance and alter their brand of highly experimental grindcore. I remember being surprised when I saw them live in 2008 just how much of what I heard on record was being created with something other than a conventional musical instrument, but because I already knew they used synths and drum machines, the grind-by-AppleTM approach didn’t irk me. Today, people look at doom-dub producer Author & Punisher and Pig Destroyer noise merchant Blake Harrison the same way. This isn’t how metal is supposed to be, perhaps, but at least all parties in question are transparent about it.
As much outrage as instrumentalists can engender, it’s nothing compared to the amount of disdain the metal community has for vocalists they believe to be “cheating”. Bands in the more melodic subgenres regularly boast that their singers are “classically trained” which makes it fun to picture Leopold Mozart not letting them go outside until they can nail every note in “Aces High”. For more extreme bands, being accused of mic cupping, whisper-growling, or using digital effects is a fate worse than death; Arch Enemy frontwoman, Angela Gossow, famously had to let out an a cappella scream at a German press conference when journalists wouldn’t stop hounding her about whether she was using a workaround to produce her recorded growl. And don’t even think about using Auto-Tune, the torches and pitchforks are already out.
More on human ability and its perception within heavy music continues…
awesome post Brad
Well said, Brad. A couple of things crossed my mind while reading this:
when Mutt Lange produced Hysteria (Def Leppard), he was reportedy so obsessive that the band didn’t record takes as much as one bar or even one note at a time. The difference between that and using ProTools is the amount of money involved.
I enjoyed the Rings of Saturn album and I don’t care if they recorded it at half speed at all. If I recall correctly they had just a few days to get the album done. With so little money and time, in a sense, if they did record at half-speed, it was a justifiable decision. If they’d put out a sloppy mess with errors everywhere I think they’d just be criticized for that rather than being praised for their honesty. Live, however? They’d better be able to deliver the goods.
What if a band records entirely in a home studio? They could literally do hundreds or thousands of takes to get something nearly perfect. that’s not outright cheating, but it really bends the rule of “only record what you can play.” We’d still never know if they could play the material live.
Great comment, Jammer. You present an interesting argument/apology for why RoS MIGHT’VE faked it. I missed the chance to see them live a few weeks ago cuz I had work, so I can speak to the authenticity, but I do really like the new record a lot.
This was an interesting read, too.
Oh! and I wanted to say that I have seen Royal Thunder, twice, and the singer definitely pulls it off live. Both times were with Pallbearer, and that dudes pull it off live, too.
Regarding “Unleashed in the East”: I’ve got a Judas Priest biography written by Martin Popoff, where he states that although Halford admittedly did overdub a few lines in post-production (on account of doing the entire Japanese tour with a sore throat), the album wasn’t as augmented as most people assume.
For a start, what sounds like “canned cheering” because of its awkward placing in the set was, in fact, apparently real. Japanese crowds at that time, with less experience watching hard rock, did tend to be more “traditionally Japanese” and polite, which might account for the subdued response (this might tie in with something similar I think I read in the Motley Crue biography; where a muted reaction from the audience was explained to the band thus: in Japan, profound silence is the deepest respect an audience can extend to a performing artist – though whether the Crue warranted that is another matter entirely!).
Popoff also mentions the existence of a bootleg from the same tour that reveals largely similar performance and audience reaction to the supposedly overdubbed “official” release.
It should be pointed out that very often, canned applause is added to live albums simply because somebody forgot to set up an ambient audience microphone on the night – there will never be enough crowd noise coming through just the mics on stage. So in that sense, the “cheating” is intended to capture the atmosphere that was actually present.
As to the sped up drumming, in which I’ve got some personal experience:
It doesn’t really work unless you’re playing on a completely electronic kit (including cymbals – no microphones or acoustic instruments at all). That way, you’re able to record a MIDI performance rather than audio signals, and the sequencing data can be sped up, quantized, microscopically edited etc. without also affecting the pitch or sonic integrity of the actual sounds (which are just samples used afterwards).
Essentially, such an undertaking is just like programming a drum machine, but with the sequence “composed” by a drummer. (If that’s what Ring of Saturn did, somebody could prove it by obtaining a MIDI file from the studio which plays out the same performance as what’s present on their record.)
The barrier you then have to authenticity, of course, is that the samples have to be very convincing ones, particularly where cymbals are concerned; because in real life, they sound different every time they are hit (real snare drums, by contrast, tend to be so heavily processed and made “consistent” in metal that the casual listener can’t really tell what s/he’s hearing, so using altogether fake ones isn’t so much of a dilemma). The sound quality of cymbal samples is getting better all the time, but you’d be surprised how often it falls short of reality even in some of the high-end applications. Keen listeners can definately spot it, which is why most bands I’ve read about usually resort to real cymbals even if they’re using fake drums.
As for recordings of real, acoustic drumkits: the most sonically foolproof way of speeding them up is to raise the pitch, just like on an old tape machine. You can only alter the pitch of drums about a semitone before it becomes noticeable; so even if the drummer went out and bought an entire kit of larger-than-usual pieces and tuned them lower to preempt the trickery, you wouldn’t actually yield that much of a tempo rise; it’s not like you can take Dave Lombardo and speed him up to Pete Sandoval convincingly using this method – the “slow motion take” can’t be slow enough to be very advantageous.
And yes, I know there are algorithms which speed up the tempo while retaining the pitch, but they don’t work properly either, in my experience. These things compress the time by removing fragments of it, which means you get snare drums with their attack randomly chopped off, cymbals that make unusually smeared sounds, and so on. Plus, in a multitrack recording, since a little of all the instruments is spilling into all of the instrument microphones, those artefacts for each instrument aren’t consistently applied across all the channels it’s present on, which makes them even worse. And again – the higher you rev the tempo up, the more noticeable glitches there will be. (Of course, these algorithms are getting better all the time too; so maybe I’m naive.)
The point I’m trying to make is that even today, the amount of effort you have to put into cheating with drum tempos involves so much work and outlay that you really would be economically better off just hiring a good session drummer who can play it for real – that probably happens more than people realize.
I spent years trying to program drum machines to fool the listener into thinking it was a real drummer: I even programmed in tempo lapses, sloppy galloping double-kick runs, timbral variation, etc. I was very good at it, but the amount of time it took just to program one song (usually a month or so) convinced me I’d be better off learning to play drums myself; so I did.
In conclusion, the less time Rings of Saturn had to do their record, the less likely I believe they would have been to cheat on it. Working a minimum wage job mightn’t make you rich, but planning a bank robbery’s not easy, either.
Your closing remark – “All I want to hear is something real, even if it’s fake” is probably the only helpful thing that anybody can say about rock’n'roll in the age of commercial production.
Although I’m pretty sure the RoS controversy was to do with guitars and not drums… here are my thoughts.
In many modern metal recordings, drum sound replacement is very common. Indeed with quantisation, beat slicing and the rest, it is quite easy to slice up a drummer’s performance into easily editable parts and re-arrange them. I know, because I am a terrible drummer and do it all the time.
Similarly, with a little effort different hits and can be sampled and replaced and even put on separate audio tracks so reverb and resonant tails are not lost.
Once that’s put into a mix with guitars bass and vocals it is indiscernible to all but the most discriminating listener.
I’m not saying that you’re wrong or that this doesn’t involve hard work, but with advances in software and skill levels among users these days, it may not be as difficult as you say.
In terms of guitars, as above. Very fast phrases played at half speed are still very fast. Speeding them up even with dreaded time stretching compression algorithms doesn’t have such a negative effect, especially if you’re using good equipment.
Furthermore, if the guitar lines were composed as midi files and played back with a solid sample set, again what’s the problem? It returns to the original author’s critique of physical bias. As I said in a post below, to me it doesn’t matter whether a piece was authentically played (though authentic performance is a category of significant value) for me to be moved. I’m an ideas man and I impressed with the possibility of what others can think and create with boundaries removed.
Well, I certainly won’t argue with you about the quality of the time-stretching software nowadays. Most of the stuff I fooled around with is now a decade old; so I’m hardly an authority on what’s possible or how much easier it’s gotten.
Nor will I argue about “authenticity” or the validity of what people do to achieve their artistic vision in the 21st century. As you suggest, technologically-advanced and decentralized working methods in audio creation are probably the best chance we have to move music forward into uncharted territory.
Hell, I long for the day when an audio creation program can just read inspiration straight off my brain when I’m out shopping. We’ll be in for some truly wild rides when that happens. And it’s no secret that plenty of our favourite artists of yesteryear would clearly have preferred the means we have today over the frustrations of inter-band politics, label interference and the pure logistical hassle of analog record-making. Brian Wilson once said that he could never have finished his aborted ’60s album “Smile” hadn’t Pro Tools come along. So, bottom line: I’ll take the current and future situation over the so-called “golden years” any day.
I will ask this though:
Let’s say two rhythm guitarists, in two different bands, both play in the same tuning, since they’re both influenced by the same celebrity shredder.
Both rhythm guitarists’ bands decide to cover the same song for a tribute album, at – or close to – the same tempo as the original song.
Working at different studios and being unaware of each other’s activities, both guitarists play their takes into MIDI arrangement programs (at half speed, if you will) and interpret the original riffs fairly faithfully – allowing for individual human nuance, of course.
Each engineer in each studio runs the performance through the quantize, pitch-correct bum notes, etc. routine, in the MIDI domain.
Each engineer then runs the performance into a widely-used, MIDI-accepting guitar amp simulator plug-in employing a preset of the celebrity shredder’s signature rig, as requested by the guitarists.
How much of each individual axeman’s technique, do you think, would survive the process; and if the engineers secretly swapped the guitar tracks for the final cuts on the tribute album, would the artists be able to tell the difference six months later?
I know it’s a loaded question, but I do think it’s worth asking; because the main criticism I always seem to read about music nowadays involves the encroaching level of homogeneity, particularly in the recording process. In rock, the limitations of musicianship were always a sure way of demonstrating artistic distinctiveness, for better or worse. Signature sound was another; but with all the gear-worship in musical and audio circles, that horse has largely already bolted.
Hi Max,
Thanks for the reply, always happy to talk about metal, music, technology. I think you and I are of similar mindsets. On one hand the usefulness and potential of modern technologies offer a an evolving range of musical possibilities that we would be stupid to deny/ignore. On the other hand, the “magic” of performance, the capturing of a particular articulation of music by particular musicians in a specific time and place is a truly splendid thing.
Some of my favourite ever liner note photos are on COC’s Deliverance. The jam space with hanging mics, amps, the Persian rug, the placement of the amps just lends an additional analog vibe ambiance to that album. Whether or not that’s how they actually recorded not is another thing entirely.
As for your question I suppose I’d have to answer it in my typically contrarian way: the engineers play an integral musical role in the recordings.
In my opinion, the rapid equalisation taking place between performer and producer (engineer, recorder etc) as a result of technological development is creating a situation in which compositional ownership is no longer necessarily clearly in either the performer or the producer.
Additionally, your question raises further, (IMO interesting) questions to do with authenticity and ownership. Especially if we take into account the context of production.
After all, if we start to think about why the guitarists are recording for a tribute album at all: for love or money, etc we have to start thinking about monetary arrangements etc. Is the engineer you mentioned getting paid an equal share in his/her work? I mean his/her contributions are essential to the final recording, right?
Anyway, probably getting off track but it is all interesting to me.
As for the issue of homogenisation… Perhaps rock and metal performers are increasingly utilising certain production aesthetics, but again, that’s nothing new, right? If you listen to various eras in any (sub)genre you can start to pick trends (and often ask oneself, why?). The HM-2/Sunlight sound, hyper compressed thrash guitars etc…
Again, as far as I can see there are also as many exceptions to the rules. There are those bands who whether recording digitally, in analog or some mix of both are clearly interested in creating a signature sound. These are the ones worth watching.
The only real complaints I have of modern recording aesthetics though is the dreaded “zero preset” mentality (scroll through plugin preset bank, choose the first one) and the tendency toward loudness.
Perhaps some of these young uns have just had their hearing damaged by too many loud earbud sessions but what seems to be lost on both the pros and aspiring alike is that a quieter recording with a greater dynamic space (headroom) sounds so much better at a loud volume than an over-normalised, compressed one.
Have you ever cranked Pantera’s Vulgar Display through a good hifi, that baby has click and thump kicks, smiley faced, super compressed EQ’d guitars and yet you can still hear the bass grinding underneath.
Now what was I talking about again?
I would watch webisode after webisode of you two guys, Max and 6810, hang out, drink beer and talk about this kind of stuff.
Great article. This is an issue that has interested me for a while. I am a metal head from a young age but long before I ever picked up a guitar I was sequencing using one hit samples with OctaMED on an archaic Amiga 500 back in the day. Inspired by early Ministry, PWEI and Public Enemy, I was a rabid sampler, pinching things from all manner of sources. As I got older and technology improved I often imported audio from CDs I owned, chopped, spliced, filtered, time stretched and rearranged remixes of some of my favourite songs (this was during NIN’s Broken/Fixed EP cycle).
Ironically, as technology improved, so did my musicianship, I became more competent, better able to play what I could hear and compose in my mind. Now a fast forward to the near present.
A while back on my own blog, I sung the praises of Engine Ears, Foreign Beggars and Disfigure the Goddess. I’ve always liked remixes (NIN’s Further Down the Spiral LP, March of the Pigs and Closer remix EPs are great , parts of Fear Factory’s Re-manufacture were rather good and Front Line Assembly always managed to mangle metal into their aesthetic rather successfully). What interests me about excursions from electronic music into metal in the present is that (a) genre boundaries are as equally hotly defended as they are transgressed and (b) how do non-metal people and non-musicians (in the sense they may not play traditional metal instruments) interpret metal and finally (c) how might these interpretations contribute to the evolution of metal as a whole.
In the same vein, I also touched on the Rings of Saturn controversy.
http://post-zeitgeist.blogspot.com/2012/11/rings-of-saturn-controversy.html
I quite like Dignir my only criticism being that the kick drum sound is overdone and is too dominant in the mix. Frankly, I couldn’t care less if the entire thing was composed and played back as midi files with some guitar sample packs. What is massively interesting to me if this was the case is this: tech death can be sequenced/composed by people without the appropriate coordination to play traditional instruments. The digital age is giving people without the physical attributes the opportunity to make into reality the sounds they hear in their hearts and minds. More music the better I say.
http://post-zeitgeist.blogspot.jp/2012/04/engine-ears-and-foreign-beggers.html
The final point that I have also made elsewhere about the physicality of music is race (a point I want to return to at a later date). It is no news that music is raced, that is, there tends to be socio-cultural common factors at work for each genre of music. Metal tends to be white, hip hop tends to be black. Naturally, exceptions occur. One of the things that interests me is what happens when musicians/songwriters foreign to the traditional genre cultural context interpret the genre through their own socio-cultural matrix. Different coloured bodies tend to exist in different social realities thus when they engage with a genre typically foreign to their dominant context they bring new insights and interpretations. With the internet and information speed what it is these days, I can’t wait to see how far this goes.
Thanks again for the article.
Fucking rad!
(6810, I have to reply to your latest response via your original post here, since I can’t see an I.O. Reply link under your most recent post. Hope it’s not confusing.)
Those two objections to modern records you nominated – ie: default preset mentality and hypercompression – are the only two objections I would nominate as well. As to the latter, I firmly believe the tide is just starting to turn in the loudness war; so no worries there, I hope. For the former – it’s an issue; but as you say, there are at least as many artists who don’t succumb to it as those who do. My hypothetical situation was totally skewed to demonstrate my point about expressive individuality being compromised by the capability to “fix” things; but to be honest, I doubt such a situation would ever occur.
And even if it did, that just brings into play a question you touched upon about the producer’s role: when listening, are we critiquing the guitarist’s performance or the engineer’s editing skills? Either way we might be impressed. Actually, since I’m guessing that in much of the music available on the Web today, the artist and the engineer are the same guy, it’s probably a moot point.
Nobody would deny it’s been a long, long time since recording music had a purely mnemonic purpose; these issues didn’t just come along with Pro Tools. I got into death metal more than 20 years ago, and already the murmurings about Morrisound/Sunlight generic-ness were well under way. And not without good reason: not only were these bands all working with the same producers and getting recorded with the same microphones etc.; we’ve since learnt that very often they were actually plugging into the same backline, often a day after the last band had vacated. No wonder they sounded similar! And yet, today, these are the albums we marvel at for their impact, and deservedly so.
I guess the only argument I’ve really got is that maybe today it’s just TOO easy to emulate your heroes sound-wise, and that if performance can be so easily doctored as well, I fear there’s just not much left of the artist.
After all, like so many others, I tried emulating the sound of Uffe Cederlund like you mentioned. Except that by the time I learned that he’d used the HM-2, it’d been discontinued and I had to settle for the MT-2 Metal Zone – similar, but different. I certainly wasn’t going to swap my 100-watt Trace Eliot for a 40-watt Peavey, and let’s not forget – I’m not Uffe Cederlund. So in falling short of the ideal on all levels, I came up with something my own – exactly as happened when Hellhammer tried to emulate Venom. They didn’t succeed in re-creating Venom, but they did create Hellhammer.
I sometimes suspect that the straight-out-of-the-digital-box era makes those happy accidents of creativity a bit less likely. I recently read of a mixing guy (not a metal one) who doesn’t even bother considering the recorded kick drum sound on the sessions he’s commissioned for; he just always replaces it with his preferred sample. No choice of samples, no blending it with the real signal; nothing – just always the same one, every session, every band. Ya gotta wonder.
Wasn’t this argument resolved in, like, the year 1917?
“Whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”
What are talking about?
Cheating or not, the end results matters the most. If the bands cheats, you’ll hear it onstage anyway. Most metal bands working with digital recording are cheating, in a way or another. Editing is cheating, a little.
Musicians recording music are cheating because they rarely sound like they do on record. This is called ‘production’. Drum kits rarely sound ‘live’ on records (a shame); it became an enduring trend to make drums sound bigger than they are, more thunderous and more precise. Same goes to the vocals being layered with reverb or delay. Same goes with EQ and compressors: it,s all about enhancing a recording which, at its base, isn’t really an exact representation of a live performance. When bands record live and sound a little too organic, they get accused of sounding like crap or lo-fi. Get into a rehearsal room and tell me your favorite band sounds the same there than on its records…
Cheating? So what? Really!
Fascinating article. While I still need to finish reading /digest the last few posts from 6810 and Max, I’m finding that exchange fascinating as well. Thanks for taking the time to explain things so clearly.
For my part, I draw a distinction between records and live performances. When I listen to a mid-period Melvins record–_Honky_ or _Stag_, for example–or a good-period Butthole Surfers record–e.g., anything before they started to sound like Beck–I’m aware that much of the weirdness I’m hearing is likely the product of studio fuckery. When I see the Melvins live though, I expect them to produce the sounds they’re making more or less by playing musical instruments in real time. Is that fair? I don’t know. But it’s what I expect from a “rock” band, and I’d feel cheated if everything were just being piped in.
Even that can be complicated though. Lots of guitarists process the sounds they make during a live performance through racks of analog or digital effects. Is that cheating? What about using something like a boomerang? I’ve seen that several times, and I can’t say it’s ever bothered me. On the other hand, I’ve also seen noise artists on stage who looked like they were checking their email on their laptops the whole time, and I find that makes for a boring show. I’d rather see someone like Matthew Bower torture his guitar into making weird noises, even if those noises are being processed through lots of pedals.
Anyway, unless someone is just on stage strumming an acoustic guitar and singing (not into a microphone), there’s probably a kind of enhancement going on.
Well, there’s no right or wrong answer to it in every context; nor even an agreement that we should be discussing “cheating” in relation to art, as others have already (rightly) stated in this thread. I take your point that it would be a bit harsh to accuse live guitarists of cheating just because they’re making sounds that would be impossible to generate if distortion pedals weren’t invented – that’s like accusing poets of cheating by speaking English when they didn’t invent the language.
If I could be bothered to draw any line on the subject – somewhere between Buzz Osbourne playing in real time and Britney Spears miming her songs (and justifying it by arguing that the elaborate choreography makes it too difficult to sing; even though it’s her backup dancers who are doing most of the moving), I guess it would be: use whatever means you wish, provided only you can use them quite that way. The Butthole Surfers mightn’t be able to replicate live what they do on record, but in either situation, they’re still the Butthole Surfers and we’re not. Their live show doesn’t look quite like anybody else’s, and their records don’t sound quite like anybody else’s; so that’s what makes the Butthole Surfers the singular artistic entity they are.
Probably that’s the closest I can get to ruling on the concern I’ve expressed earlier about MIDI performance editing in conjunction with pre-packaged sounds. A triggered snare played by Pete Sandoval is still played faster than I can play, or in John Stanier’s style rather than mine. But quantizing combined with sampling – well, how much of the artist’s individual delivery survives? In some cases (like dance music) plenty. In rock? Perhaps less – perhaps.
It should be added that equivalent things happen in modern visual art all the time. Jeff Koons pays craftsmen to build his sculptures and installations. He’s more like a film director. The “artist” tag comes about because what to build was his idea. I don’t have a problem with that.
I should add too that the snare sound on Helmet’s _Meantime_ is one of my favorite sounds in recorded music, and knowing that it was triggered doesn’t change that. Plus, John Stanier is a badass drummer live, so who cares? (Steve Albini does, apparently, but he subscribes to a punk ethos that places more value on supposed “authenticity” than I do).
Saw Royal Thunder live recently, and regardless of any accusations to the contrary, that woman can sing. No doubt there. She has a hell of a voice.
As a black metal aficionado with a lot of love for studio-only projects like Deathspell Omega, Blut Aus Nord, etc., this is an issue I’ve wondered about. Of course, Blut Aus Nord just used programmed drums, for everything from black metal blast beats to spacey electronica beats. No doubt there. He gets such a raw guitar sound on some albums, but other albums have a lot of synthetic layers. To me, it all sounds amazing, and I don’t care in the slightest how he makes it. It is the product that matters. Clearly there is a lot of artifice involved.
I have to admit, though, with Deathspell Omega, I have a hope, and I would be slightly disappointed if I found out otherwise, that they are able to pull off what they do in a relatively straight-forward fashion in the studio. Their work is so intensely technical that I like to picture musicians who are actually capable of the super-human feats necessary (indeed, infused with the power of the devil, probably as a result of a soul-transaction) to make that music work. I never would have imagined that the drumming on their newest album was possible, but a video did surface on YouTube of a drummer covering “Abscission” and playing it note-perfect. So I know that it is at least physically possible. And their drums sound so alive. Anyway, no doubt there are plenty of studio tricks going on there that we’ll never find out about. Thank goodness for anonymity.
Reminds me of Beyonce singing the National Anthem for Obama’s swearing in his second term. I don’t undersand one bloody thing: why all the whining about supposedly unethical doings, then one simple test could resolve the issue at once – the live test.
Just go and watch the band play its stuff live, and then make up your mind once for all that one band is taking shameful shortcuts or not.