Claude Speeed and Anenon: A Conversation

Claude Speeed: I saw you perform last year at Sonar and I remember your live show having pictures that you’d taken when you were in Japan. I noticed a couple of the track titles on your new album mention Japan, like “Shibaura.” From speaking to you briefly about it, that trip seemed to be an important one.

Anenon: Yeah, for sure. You talk to anyone making electronic music and Japan is the holy grail of tour destinations, right?

Claude Speeed: Yeah, I’d love to play Japan.

Anenon: It’s like that and it’s almost like the more and more I think about that trip, it’s harder for me to even be objective about it. It’s just one of those exoticized places that everyone dreams about going, so when I was there, I was in this dream-like state the whole time. Part of that was due to jet lag admittedly. [laughs]

While I was there, I got really obsessed with taking photos and took this little photo book and put out a release that was based around that. The recording for the new record started quite a long time after that, but basically on that track “Shibaura,” every sound you hear on it is pulled from a live recording in Tokyo, at this place called Shibaura House.

Claude Speeed: Did you have approaches like that across the record, going into a track with a clear concept in mind?

Anenon: I’m not really a rule guy so much. When I sit down and make music, I’m very impulsive, and with for this one I was just going through files and reminiscing. There are a couple tracks on the record that are pulled from live recordings and that was one of them. I was listening back to the recording and having this nostalgic moment, like, “Oh, what if I ripped this nostalgia part and made something new with it?”

Claude Speeed: To what extent is that part of your working process, mining the past or mining bits and pieces that you’ve got? Is that pretty frequent?

Anenon: I’ll just have these binges where every three months or every six months or something, I’ll go back and listen to old files of mine and just spend an afternoon or an evening just doing that. I think it’s important to just remember where you’ve come from and how far you’ve come as a musician and as a person. I think of it like postcards. It’s nice to revisit and you listen to a song and you remember exactly what you were doing when you made it. Maybe not exactly, maybe some made up augmentation of that but yeah, it’s nice to do that.

Claude Speeed: It’s funny you mention that idea of remembering something exactly and then correcting yourself, because I wrote a short explanation or story of sorts for every track on my record. I realized afterwards that I believed all of it when I wrote it, but reading it, how little relation this stuff actually bore to the truth. I think that’s actually a cool thing though. I read once that Alejandro Jodorowsky either had made or was making a film based on what he remembered of a play that he heard about, or something like that. That made me wonder to what extent that’s totally natural. I think maybe all artists do that.

Anenon: Yeah, I think that’s probably true. This record for you is a long time in the making, am I correct?

Claude Speeed: Yeah. The initial mixes were done at the end of 2012. There was more work that went into it after that but the bulk of the writing was 2012. Then I mixed it early last year. Then we decided for various reasons we actually wanted to master it again, which gave me the opportunity to change quite a lot of things – mistakes, basically.

Anenon: What is a mistake to you?

Claude Speeed: I mean technical errors, and things that I’m not sure that listeners would even notice but things that once I noticed them, started to drive me crazy. There were some phasing issues across all of the tracks, just as a result of the way they were recorded. I didn’t think I was going to be able to do anything about it, but then I figured out that it was actually easy to do something but would require the record to be mastered again. I’m really grateful that the label didn’t just say no, because they probably could have just done that.

Thinking about influences more specifically than travel or places, or stuff like that, were there any records that you were thinking about or listening to a lot when you were writing? “Lights and Rocks” for example really made me think of the Warp and Planet Mu, Rephlex IDM that I’d been into since the ’90s basically.

Anenon: Yeah, it’s funny. “Lights and Rocks” and the title track were the first two tracks I made. When I first started working on it, I just had this idea of, “Oh, I want to make an IDM record.” I think the stuff I’d released before mostly had a very soft touch on the drums and everything. The drums were very simple, not too technical. With the earlier stuff that I was making, before I released anything, the drums were always very present and a lot more technical. With this record, I wanted to get back into that a little bit. So I think that has something to do with me thinking about IDM.

Claude Speeed: There was a certain strand of IDM that had specifically this sixteenth ride cymbal, where you take a sort of real-sounding ride cymbal but then make it faster than a person can play it.

Anenon: Yeah, I love that sound. Last year I had this conscious obsession with ride cymbals where I was just making a million demos with ride cymbals. I was ride cymbal-obsessed for a good six months.

Claude Speeed: I was also thinking about the saxophone on the record, because obviously it’s quite prominent. I think saxophone’s somewhat of a loaded instrument sometimes. I think that it can have a group of different connotations. For me, the main connotation probably isn’t the same as for everyone else. Mine is Sweep the Leg Johnny, which was a ‘90s post-rock band or math rock band that had sax in it. I guess there are more prominent saxophone connotations, jazz specifically. There were parts of this record that in a light way reminded me a little bit of Colin Stetson.

Anenon: Yeah, he’s a highly impressive dude. I do like that music. I have one of his records. But yeah, I have this weird thing about contemporary saxophonists. I wanna be aware, but I don’t wanna spend too much time worrying about that sort of stuff.

I do have pretty specific jazz influences. Dewey Redman, Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett as well. Lots of people don’t know that he played sax but there are a few records where he’s on soprano. You can find some live recordings and stuff on YouTube where he’s just ripping it on soprano.

I like how these guys coming out of the ’60s were working with pre-existing compositions as jump-off points for going into zones of free improvisation. I’m really interested in that, the push and pull of completely free and improvised, moving alongside pre-written material and how that can generate new material.

That’s how I work in general, even if it’s just me sitting and moving wave forms around. I try to bring this improvised energy. A lot of it is maybe just me picking up my sax and playing for ten minutes or something like that and then picking apart the session and finding these weird in-between moments of when you’re going from one idea to the next. I find a lot of interesting material to generate just from things like that.

Claude Speeed: It sounds almost like creating your own sources for sampling.

Anenon: That’s what it is. I come from a sampling background. I was sampling things before I was playing the piano or playing saxophone or anything. It was the first thing I did production-wise, stealing my dad’s Stevie Wonder record or whatever and sampling that on a little Gateway PC. That’s how I got started, hip hop DJing and turntablism.

I still believe in sampling. I think sampling is a powerful tool. I think just purely writing it off like, “Oh, I didn’t write this material. I can’t sample that,” I feel like that is in a way shortsighted. I also like to generate my own material. I like to own it fully but to admit that “I’m just self-sampling,” I think that’s completely fine. I was wondering… When I heard “Tiger Woods,” I remember hearing that and thinking to myself, “Damn, did Claude hire a bunch of fucking clarinetists or something?” That track blew me away right away.

Claude Speeed: Cool, I guess in a formal sense it’s quite different from anything else that I’ve done. It was a total sitting down and trying to distill this very basic Steve Reich, Philip Glass influence that absolutely everybody seems to have right now. It was written in 30 minutes tops, maybe slightly less. It basically started as a practice beat. It was an exercise.

Anenon: Yeah, but there’s no beat though.

Claude Speeed: No, not at all. But at one point it had a 4/4 kick in it. That was a terrible idea.

Anenon: You’re like, “Let me just see if this works.”

Claude Speeed: It’s the law in Berlin. You’re not allowed to make a track without at least trying a 4/4 kick.

Anenon: “Field” is pretty heavy on the crash cymbals though.

Claude Speeed: Yeah, I tend to snare back and then crash super loud.

Anenon: There’s no crash cymbals on electronic music, ever. [laughs]

Claude Speeed: That’s the thing. I’ve never met anybody else who wants the crash cymbals as loud as me. I went for a hearing test to make sure that I was hearing it right. I was getting earplugs made because I was playing in a rock band. We had six-hour rehearsals and so I needed earplugs and I had a hearing test. There’s nothing wrong with my hearing whatsoever. I got a perfect score. I realized that it might just be that I like the crash cymbals so much, because in the rehearsal space, I stood near the drummer. For me, that’s what a band sounds like. When the crash cymbal sounds tiny, it drives me crazy but I know that it drives everybody else crazy for the crash cymbal to be that loud. If I work with a mixing engineer, they’re always looking at me like, “What are you doing? What a stupid mistake this is, what a beginner’s mistake.”

One thing I’ve actually been dying to ask you for ages and I think about that every single time I open up the AVerb in Logic: I remember over-hearing you speaking to Robin Hannibal about reverb and you said something along the lines of “bad reverb forever.” I didn’t know what was behind that. Firstly, what’s your stance on bad reverb, like where did it come from and how do you feel about it now?

Anenon: That’s really funny that you ask that. I think it just comes from me not being able to afford nice plug-ins at the time. I just said, “Fuck it.” I’m a big proponent of just working with what you have basically. To me that’s the beauty of electronic music. You don’t really need that much to get crazy results. I think that’s an amazing thing. That’s why the playing field’s been so leveled. For reverb I used to always use the stock reverb. I do have to admit that I bought a $50 plug-in recently. I still think there’s nothing wrong with the stock Ableton reverb or the stock Logic or the stock Pro Tools. It’s what you do with it. There’s this rampant gear fetishism going on right now in the electronic world. I don’t buy into it. It’s getting crazy. If you don’t have the gear, then you’re not legit.

Claude Speeed: I think for certain people that’s their social capital or their cultural capital, knowing what the best thing is and then having it. I have a knee-jerk reaction to that. I’ve been toying with the idea of having some hardware recently but that’s coming from when I was younger, just assuming the hardware was great. I wanted it because I heard it was good or whatever.

Then, going through an explicit rejection of hardware because I felt it was an expensive bandwagon and partly perpetuated a ridiculous market in second-hand stuff that I just didn’t know enough about it to feel that I could justifiably spend money on it. You also got to carry it around forever. I think owning stuff is a complete burden.

Anenon: Yeah, I’ve been using the same Event monitor speakers since about 2003. They’ve just been with me. It’s like I just know how to make stuff sound good on those speakers. Why deviate? I do buy gear but when I do, I’ll make maybe one substantial purchase a year and it’s very informed. I spent three months looking at a picture of this keyboard online. It’d be like, “Yes, no, yes, no,” and then I finally pull the trigger. For this record, it was spurred on by buying a Korg Polysix. I made that track “Lights and Rocks” immediately after getting the Polysix and that was basically the starting point for the record. I also have a Juno, a Rhodes and the sax. That’s it as far as analog gear. I keep coming back to this idea of contrast and push and pull. I think digital and analog can co-exist and live next to each other, and create interesting new textures together.

Claude Speeed: You brought up Event monitors and that made me think about Yosi [Horikawa]. I don’t know if you saw them, but he built these tiny little monitors that he take with him when he goes on tour.

Anenon: It’s funny you mention that because he actually stayed with me for one night a month ago or so. He played Low End Theory here in L.A. and then we played a show together in New York. He came in and saw my Event monitor. He said, “oh, Event! Good monitors!” I was like, “Oh, yes!” He’d show me those little speakers. They sound incredible. I basically asked him, “how can I be your apprentice? How can I come to Japan and intern for you?” I wasn’t even joking.

Claude Speeed: I told him to start a speaker company and he said something along the lines of, “You know, well, probably one day.” He also did an amazing job with the mastering on your record.

Anenon: I am floored with how it came out. I think it’s one of the first records he’s mastered for anyone else besides himself. That same week he also mastered Daisuke Tanabe. Yosi’s just one of those guys who have an ear for everything. You completely trust him to do what he needs to do to your record.

Claude Speeed: Yeah, he was staying at my house when he was playing in Berlin. I showed him the room that I record in and told him it doesn’t sound great. I asked him if he had any tips for how I could treat it. He did a proper survey of my room. He stamped on the floor to see how hard it was. He’s hitting the walls to see if they are hollow and whatever. He’s looking into the window casing and seeing how much the sound would reverberate, looking at the window, checking it, opening and closing the curtains and everything. I’m like, “So, what’s your advice?” He said, “Hmm. Change rooms.” I did just that.