New Electronic Musical Directions from and Old Master – Graham Grieves and MindKontrolUltra
By Keir Nicoll
An electronic musician with decades of experience behind him, including throwing raves back in the 2010-2014 era, Graham Grieves, aka MindKontrolUltra, is an old master, with new directions in electronic music. Below is a description of his music, followed by a two-part interview and run-down of his work. Grieves originally hails from Calgary and now resides in East Van.
On MindKontrolUltra's Recordings….
From a vinyl release: MindKontrolUltra with Holzkopf. Tracks – the story – elevens – stillsuck – cryptoeugenics. This music is driving and forceful and carries you into a different dimension or domain. As you experience the propulsive beats and sawing bass and timbral accents, you are escalated up into a sky-like level. There are strange vocal of the rap-culture samples – black voices. There are woomps and scraks and the overall guiding force is the aggitational energy of the songs inner thrust, as it carries the music forward in a measured and intense cadence. There are shooting synths sounds that come straight at you, as the rhythm metrically pulses in the background. The the bass comes in, all squooshly, into the foreground, even. And the electric-sounding perforations continue onward. One is reminded of a future-scape sonic-sphere, like in Blade Runner, or Brazil, or Dancer In The Dark, if one must. The beat lags at some particular moments, when it stalls a bit and lets the rest of the song catch-up. Then there are moments of space, where the pulse continues but the dark empathy empty hollow-space, where time teams up with spaciousness in the mix and the beat drives on a different shape. Then the moment moves to another rhythm, as it poly-rhythms-up, again. Then the beat drops out. And then it picks up again, with a wailing vocal sample, after one bar, distorted, a classic. And the beat-percussive-pulses, drop in again. So there are multiple approaches to this sound, as there is even the sound of tin or steel-drums, in the sampled back and foreground. And the beat dances around your maypole. Like ribbons in the night, or the late evening daytime, when the sun is on the setting and the moon is already in the sky. Or, at least that. Because it may be the day-to-nightime, gloaming, evening-time. And now there are cold-vocal samples, that turn to heat. And the aggressive distortion of the underground-pipe-like synth-sounds, are totally driving the overall beat-percussive. The beat then doubles-down on double-time, at the end of the day-to-night. “Whooooaahhoooaahhh.” And then the dropping bass comes in again and stirs up with the echoing of the driving synths again. Then there is a stratosphereing sound at the end.
Holzkopf is on the other side of this album. His work is equally questionably exploratory and experiential.
If you listen to his CD LP, Just Say No, you will find more of the same outlandishly textured beats, with asymetrical beats laid out with interpolating high-pitched timbral-notes. There is a continuously arduous approach to the definitions of the music, as it is approaching you from out of the speakers. High and low explorations of the driving electronically definitional sound. There is more of the sawing and lumbering bass-beats. Wobbling bass abounds here, too. Reaching out through the inner-spaces of massive elecgtronic DJ-ism. There is more drum-slamming, further into the album. There is a tearing of the whole hole of Metal music, as it drives from a sort of altered-dub-steppy-kind-of-approach. There are many drum parradiddles, as they come in from the cold of the outer-reaches of human perceptions. So there is another kind of instance here, as the shouting vocals of an avoidance beat implies. There is a kind of steppy vibe here, as the drum and bass slam in together.
Grieves has a number of more tracks on SoundCloud, as MindKontrolUltra, that challenge the tempo and rhythms of modern electronic-DJ music. Slow to fast and laying down different multiplicities of poly-rhythms. Check this shit out!
Grahm Greives Interview- Up Close and Personal
I talk to Graham Grieves about his mixes and beats in his home-studio, where there are multiple monitor speakers, mixing and triggering devices and other computer electronics. He shows me some of the inner workings of his trigger device with Ableton Live in his computer. This is fascinating, for the amount of instantaneous beat generation he is able to do with this setup. I am enthralled for an hour as he flips between beats and rhythms. He has a FirePod with many lines, and classic MPC for triggering. He has KRK monitor speakers, one of which is “a little buggy.” He is worried about crashing Ableton but it does not, so things are going alright. As we start talking and playing with his gear, the cat, Langs, makes a meowing cameo into the interview, just before Graham starts introducing sound samples and drum-beats into the mix. From old-school break-beats on snare, to even older African rhythms on percussion. The cat walks across the gear, obviously striving for attention. We shoo him away. Grieves starts triggering beats individually, repeating them more and more rapidly. There is the drive, the propulsion, the hang before the beat drops in again. He plays a tone that sounds like a robot's voice, screaming from it's rusted-out hell. Then super-fast jungly beats and sounds. “Samples that I like,” he intones, as he bends his mind to the gear. He explains how the program interprets the bpm, through its settings. Propulsive, driving, highly-percussive beats issue forth from the speakers. He repeats drum-lines with a DJ's intuitive precision. He altiers the cadences of the beats slightly, to achieve a subtly-different effect. The cat caterwauls in time with the dopest beats. Super-clubby meets festival vibes. He now exchanges the beats generation for a vocal sample of David Lee Roth. “Nothing says party like David Lee Roth,” he says, as he cuts up and mashes the vocal sample, so that is both instantaneously recognizable and also abstracted into obliteration oblivion. There is a sort of humour to this. Then he splits, between one vocal sample and another, creating a strange combination, then with dropping beats in behind it. The vocal samples are now stabbing through the propulsive drum-line. He's “chopping shit up,” as they say in the digital-DJ world. He maps an APC 40 to Ableton, keeps it simple for his triggering. I ask him, “In songs like 'Error Wrist, where do you get your bounce?” He says thoughtfully, reflecting, “I made that in Renoise. It's a really old song...I used delay, every time with the bouncing sound.” He continues to trigger David Lee Roth. I continue to ask, “In 'Pax+Dad1', how did you get the drive behind it?” He changes tack, stating, “That was made on gear, for the most part. It was made out of vocal feeds and the bass has got a lot goin' on. It's kind of generative, instead of a bunch of arpeggiators. It's not random because I'm controlling the range via midi controls. So it goes through an arpeggiator, that inserts some random notes. I have some midi controllers that control the range of the random notes, you know, how far in the scale, they're not random, they spit out in the form of a scale. There's a bass pattern, there's a midi effect, inserting different notes in there. I used to have a DX-7 I'm pretty sure I played on that and a TX-7.” Continuing on with the technical details of his musical approach and life, I ask him, “How many layers would you say you have per song?” He responds, “I don't know – as many as it takes. You know, sometimes, elements can turn into lots of track, depending on technical reasons for it, like this track's going to have some reverb on it and then they all get grouped into a layer. It's hard to say. It could be a lot. It could be very little, depending on the track...Probably 20 or more...You put the kick in its own track...you see how it could become a lot of tracks. Bass can be split up, you want to access certain frequencies. You want to keep the really dry sub-bass, you want to muddy-up the upper frequencies, to make it dirty. There are some times that I would duplicate and distort just this range, this band, on it, or something. It depends on what's called for.” So I say, “'In A Day In The Fuckin' Life', you use a wobbly-bass that is the sort used by artists like Bassnectar. This seems like a pretty classic sound in electronic-music now. Is it somewhat aggressive? How did you come by this sound and how do you use it to effect in your mix?” He immediately responds, “It's a tempo-synched LFO, the filter and I kinda came at it as a way to insert some rhythm, instead of just using a note-restart, in a midi pattern. Instead of being from the volume, it's from the filter. I thought of it kind of like Metal riffs, like the way that Metal bands chug. There may only be a single note but there can be something interesting going on...different shapes have different effects, so the wobble's probably a sine-wave in shape. There's different ramping up that makes it sound like it's sucking-out, or creepier, or somethin'. Definitely really effective to put some rhythm in your bassline.” He starts dropping a square-wave, changing the settings of the oscillators. It surges through the speakers abbrassively and decidedly outside electronic. He increases the intensity of the wave and drops the Roth sample again, to great effect. He wobbles some bass, changing the filter over it, so the pitch rises and falls, expands and contracts. “It's got some script,” he says. He continues. “You could do a better groove,” he reflects. “Nice Beatles sample in there, by the way,” I say, sort of getting the joke of doing so. “Yeah, I hate the Beatles, man,” he retorts. “This is basically just how I chop shit up and make it into jamming because a lot of the songs you've heard are painfully entered click-by-click and that is just no-way to make music. I can no-longer do it that way.” He continues to throw down the Roth and some punchy horn samples, over a break-beat. “Yeah, it's pretty funky, man,” he concludes. So I say, “So, some of your music, like 'White Jesus Poison', is so hammering. Where do you find the time to program all of this. It sounds like it's coming out of a churning digital machine!” He thinks, “White Jesus Poison is some Naz samples – it's just distorted. I think, back then, you kind of just take a sound...” He works at finding another vocal sample. He makes it a midi-file. A low, rumbling sound begins to emit from the speakers. Then a yelling vocal sample. “This one sounds gnarly,” he says. He loops it. The vocal tumbles over itself into digital distortion, sounding a bit like a police-siren. It almost creates an echo-effect. Clicking away, he turns the vibrations of the sample into a smoother dimension of sound and it becomes more like a textural background, and 'It gets to be more granular,” he says, as the sound becomes less recognizable and more audible as an instrument-sound of its own. I have one more question. “So, the MindKonrolUltra album, Just Say No, is so much more low-key and spacious. It seems to dive with a still less-focused and more dispersed sound. How do you create that sense of space? Also, how do you segment your beats and place your samples?” “Yeah, tuff-one,” he says. “Yeah, I should release more songs, because I make a lot of songs with space, and I'm just sittin' on 'em. There's the start of a track, which could be an instrument, it could be a drum and then you just write everything around it. So, one of those songs is built around a drum-break. Was made around basically a bass sound and a sample from a documentary. One song is based around a metal song. Yeah. Yeah-man. It kind of goes from there, you see what's going to compliment whatever you start with. You know, whatever's in the theory of the song,” he finishes, as he goes to let the cat outside.
Grieves and I return from outside to continue to consider the inner-workings of his domicile and domain. He starts dropping a sick break-beat with horn and vocal sample continuation again. He re-runs the beats. He clicks between starting and stopping the beats – staggering them. It is sick and groovy. The propulsiveness of the beat continues on. He adds some wobbly bass. “That's not drums I would use really, I would put it through midi,” he infers. He slices through the midi track, into quarter-note cuts. He puts in a snare. It gets badder. He restarts and staggers the beat. He continues it on and then takes it and then he uses the midi. He drops out some of the beat, then puts it back in again. It gets more sparse and then more dense. He then does a trappy-style percussive-sound. He then inserts some hand-clappy sounds. Then throws some high-timbral samples over it all. “Basically, you can turn these off now,” he says, dropping out some more of the beats. He drops the vocal samples for a while longer. “David Lee Roth never lets you down – he's a partying animal.” Then he starts up some drum-and-bassy and jungly tracks. It starts going really fast, now. Bass drum pulsing in-and-out. He starts afresh with some wobbly-bass, triggering it kind of randomly but still rhythmically. Then he drops in this sick staggered, cool-housey, or trip-hoppy beat, with the wobbly-bass pulsing beneath. He does this for a while longer, the beats, stringing themselves out, here and there. There is more vibrato in some of his inclinations for pulsing beats. He continues to change the frequency of the wobble, as the track is playing. The wobble gets more edgey, as he makes more modulations. “So, you can just record all that,” Grieves says, as he describes the ability of Ableton to take in the 'jammin' that he is doing, live, in his studio. He continues to interlace the vocal samples and jungly beats. He uses the horns sample chromatically. “That's where it's at,” he says, finishing-up. “That's how you get shit goin,” He then continues the track with a very-fast high-hat sound, that is very inner-city urban-sounding. Then silence. Then an explosion of distortion. Then silence. Then a beautifully-undulating woman's voice, singing. He warps this a bit. “You can pack up a second of the sample, and make it a track,” he says. He plays a guitar-line and says, “That's pretty corny but you can chop it up into little bits,” as he proceeds to do so, replaying the samples one after another. Then he throws bits of the stacatto guitar-chords over the preceding jungly track he had been playing. It's catchy and has groove, with the guitar-line, now. Then the vocal sample again, with this bit used more punctuatingly in the mix, up and down in register and very fast, of just this one or two split-seconds. The electronic collisions conclude for the moment. “These sample packs always sound like shit,” he says, then starts playing it again.”Yeah, just goofin' around. Nothing really cohesive,” he says, dismissively. Then starts playing the guitar-chords rapidly. Then stops the tracks again. He then plays a track he had composed earlier, this one with slowly entering synth washes and a beat that starts spare and slow and then picks up again. The music is moving, as it plays. There is a vocal sample and then the track kicks in more, with a melodic-sounding over-layer. It is quite beautifully rendered. Then he starts with a brief timbral beat and the vocal sample. Now he puts a ghostly synth wash over a high-velocity, Squarepusher-sounding crunched and distorted drum-beats. Now he has a housey-sounding beat, followed by some breaks into other rhythms. House bass-mentality free-flow electricality. Grieves talks about John Cage and 'music concrete,' the early electro-acoustic music, that is musical sound from the surrounding, in this case urban, environment. Now he plays a faster, more driving pulse, with pinpoints of high-pitched sound, coming through in the mix. He plays some melodic alterations of this. “I think I have this on SoundCloud,” he says. He stops that track and starts up one with some aggressive wobble and yelling vocal samples, with crashing drums. “This is pretty old,” he says. It sounds very 90s outside electro-clash. It is very driving, too. There are even some video-game noises. “That's old Renoise stuff. Renoise is dope. It's not as jam friendly.” We end the interview there, with the tones silencing from out of the monitor speakers. The jam is finished for the day and the evening has come to a close.
Of particular note right now is that Grieves has also collaborated on a track from Corinne Mundell's upcoming release, Barefoot In The Grass. This track, “Dreamin',” is a beautifully impressionistic piece of dream-time work and Grieves has taken it to another level with his sampling and then reworking in a re-mix of the original song. From granular moments to deep-drops of vocal samples, over a deep and intricate “bed,” this track is an incredible and indelible use of electronica to reform and re-sample organic, live music. Mundell will be including this track on the B-Side of her debut. Grieves has lent his long-form mastery of the electronic music-form to its sonorousness with great originality and also, for those who know the genre, some familiarity.
Graham Grieves can be found as Mindkontrolultra, on SoundCloud and also on BandCamp.