[Electro House] - Birdy Nam Nam - Manual For Successful Rioting [2009] - Fresh Records

13.01.2009, 17:37

Код:

Artist   : Birdy Nam Nam
Album    : Manual For Successful Rioting
Genre    : Electronic
Source   : CDDA
Label    : Sony Music
URL      :
Date     : 01-12-2009
Encoder  : LAME 3.97 / -V2 --vbr-new
Quality  : 198kbps    44100  kHz    Joint Stereo
Tracks   : 11
Time     : 47:57 min
Size     : 68.86 MB



     1   Red Dawn Rising                                         4:51
     2   Trans Boulogne Express                                  3:27
     3   Love Your Enemy (Kill Your Friend)                      4:05
     4   Bonne Nouvelle                                          4:09
     5   Manual For Successful Rioting                           3:45
     6   War Paint                                               3:33
     7   Worried                                                 4:40
     8   Space Cadet Apology                                     5:00
     9   Shut Up...! (Featuring Newcleus)                        4:39
     10  Homosexuality                                           3:58
     11  The Parachute Ending                                    5:50

Интервью

Brendan McGuirk chats to DJ Need from the French turntable crew about their beginnings, working with Yuksek & Justice on the new album and why they “want to create a riot in the crowd”.

How did the four of you come together to form Birdy Nam Nam?

Before, we were all competing in a DJ competition (DMC), so we were doing the world championships as individuals and a team as well. We formed a team in France and won the French title and in 2002 we won the DMC world title. That’s about it. We were competing before and after winning this championship in 2002, we stopped doing battles and did the album. That was released late 2005.

Did you find it hard for the four of you to come together and find a middle ground between each of your styles and influences to enter the competition and work together?

The first thing that Birdy Nam Nam is about is that we have a lot of different influences but the point where all our influences are linked together is Birdy Nam Nam. We know that we can’t use all of our ideas in Birdy Nam Nam, but like any other band, some ideas can’t be used. So they can be used in a solo project or on another side project. It’s mainly kind of a democracy, everybody has to be ok and sometimes three of us are ok and the one who is not sure at the time is ok.

Do you find sometimes you’re fighting your corner for a little more jazz or hip hop in the mix or are you all pretty much on the same wavelength?

No, no… at the moment we are pretty much all on the same wavelength. After doing the first album, which was mainly downtempo music, we toured a lot. So we only played the tracks that had some kind of energy. After that we also did new music for the live versions and played that because we wanted people to enjoy it; we weren’t on stage just to play jazz music. We wanted that kind of energy. Now with the experience of doing a lot of concerts, we did a new album that is more electronic in its sound and there are also a couple of dancefloor songs on the album.

With your new album, Manual for Successful Rioting, are you still working from the traditional point of view with turntable as before? Nowdays a lot of people are using Ableton. One thing that is very distinct about Birdy Nam Nam is that you haven’t done that before.

On the first album, we did it with only turntables and a multi track recorder, recording on pro tools. The moment the first album was finished we already knew that the next album would not only be turntables, we knew we wanted to use synthesizers and program the beats and that’s what we’ve done on the new album. I guess most of the songs begin from samples manipulated or played on the turntables, but most of the beats are programmed on a computer. Some are played live, some hit hats, some effects are played live to keep that human groove, but there is a lot more programmation [sic] and we also created our own sounds, recording synthesizer.

So the album definitely has a lot more composition to it and is a little less sample based than your debut album…

Yeah we tried to make our own sounds with the drum machine and stuff like that.

Earlier you mentioned that you couldn’t play a lot of songs off your first album when you were playing live because they were too downbeat. Is the new album taking a more electro approach? Is there a slightly more upbeat electro feel to it?

Yes but the goal was not to do electro music - it’s to do modern music. Music that adapts to this time, we did the first album in Crazy B’s place and we were using only records, most of his records and we also brought our own too. He has a record collection of 10,000 - mainly jazz, soul, disco…mainly black music. That’s why the first album has a lot of sax, contra bass and flute samples. After that, we realized playing live that we wanted the kind of energy that’s in rock n’ roll music and electro music. We used vintage synthesizers and drum machines [on the new album], so now the sound is more electronic. We didn’t want to do electro music, we just wanted to have a modern sound and powerful sound and a lot of energy in the music.

Yuksek has been producing the album. Is that right?

Yeah.

Has that helped to bring things forward a little more and make the sound more modern like you spoke about?

Yeah, we tried to mix it on an analogue mixer in the studio with only analogue things and the sound was not what we were looking for. Because we’re on the same label and Yuksek did a remix of “Trans Boulogne Express”, we asked him - because we weren’t happy with the first mixes of the album - if he would be down for trying to mix some of the tracks. And after he had done a mix, we gave him the right to touch things. When you are always working on the same songs, you don’t really know what is good and what is wrong. That’s what Yuksek brought, a fresh point of view. Sometimes he changed an intro or an outro, or structures. He also mixed the thing and sometimes he added one or two melodies or arrangements. So we can say he produced it but most of the songs were already done when he arrived, but he changed enough things to be considered a producer.

After working on the album for however many months, are you content with it?

Yeah definitely, before we weren’t feeling that we had an album but now for us it seems like being an album from beginning to end and it’s telling something [sic].

Just to go back to the title of the album, Manual For Successful Rioting. Could you explain what the concept behind the album is and where you got the title from?

We liked that word, “riots”. We have this energy when we are doing the music and playing the music live. I guess we act like a rock band, jumping on stage and giving it a lot of energy. That’s how we see ourselves playing on stage, we want to create a riot in the crowd. That’s also how we want people to hear the music so it’s logical to have this word [in the album title] because it’s the kind of energy we want to give on stage. At the time of the first album, a lot of people were telling us that they weren’t finding the same energy on the album compared to the live version. We hope for new album that people find that energy on the disc itself.

You also worked with Justice on a song for the album. How did that come about?

The last song of the album is produced by Justice. At the time of our first album, they weren’t as known as they are now and we were talking about doing a remix already and we didn’t, unfortunately. This year we played on the same stage a couple of times and the first time they saw us, they told us they liked the live thing. And at that moment we were thinking about finishing the album with Yuksek. They told us one or two songs that they liked and they were two songs that we didn’t plan to add to the album. We gave them the separated tracks, mainly the live version where a lot of elements were played live and they produced it their own way and added a melody, an electric piano melody. We were really happy, it’s the last song of the album and it’s a great outro for the album. A great ending.