“Naturally it’s all those nuances you can’t properly describe that he does so well. I was combining things usually done in the electronic world - like looping whole sections of the mix while leaving others unlooped on top, and filtering whole sections - but at the same time trying to get the drums to sound classic, awesome, and Dave Fridmann-y.”įridmann-y is a difficult adjective to describe, says Parker. “Because of the sound and the way the songs were coming together, it felt like an altogether different way of mixing anyway. Even as I was doing it myself I found that I was pretending to be him. I just wanted to see if I could do it myself. “It wasn’t even really confidence,” said Parker. He’s mixed his own music before, and done the same for Pond and Melody’s Echo Chamber, but taking over after such success with Fridmann must have required a newfound confidence. When Parker handed the mix for Tame Impala’s second album, Lonerism, to Fridmann, that combo became the benchmark for this crowd.įor his latest album, Currents, Parker decided to take back the reins and do the whole thing himself play, record, and mix at home. Probably most well-known for producing and mixing The Flaming Lips, he’s also leant psychedelic weight to Mercury Rev, Sparklehorse, MGMT, Mogwai, and so many more. Fridmann is the hero of indie psych-rock mixing fearlessly experimental and not afraid to go for colour. While flying completely solo looks nice on paper, for this generation of psych rock-acquainted bedroom producers, one name (outside their own) they’d be happy to see on the mix credit is Dave Fridmann’s. But it hasn’t stopped leagues of musicians trying to emulate his every sound, image, and pedal board purchase. The demo-in-a-day deal market has shrunk with the rise of a growing contentedness to wile away at the process rather than feel forced to produce in a short window. Just like those ‘lucky’ electronic producers, he justified the case for aspiring rockers to forgo the usual band-in-a-studio route, and play everything into a DAW themselves. The ideal for a lot of bedroom producers who like the idea of rock ’n’ roll, but don’t necessarily want to deal with band politics when it comes to writing songs. Parker is the modern home studio poster boy. Now they’re going to have to contend with an inflated market for Roland JV1080s. It’s a tough break for those young producers who’ve toiled over their Tame Impala emulations: Tea towels on kits, saving up for Juno 106s on eBay, and asking forums whether a dbx 160A would substitute for a dbx 160VU. There’s a lot of that on the album, glistening FM synth electro Rhodes, like a digital clav.” Even though they’re sort of cheap sounds, they sound deeply fulfilling. Those plasticky sounds are far more nostalgic and hit a deeper spot for me than hearing a vintage Fender twin. “That’s the truest kind of nostalgia I can find. The sounds that remind me of something I heard on the radio in the car. Because they’re the sounds I remember from when I was growing up in the ’90s. But for me they’re so romantically nostalgic. An audiophile would think some of the patches are the cheapest, plasticky sounds. I’ve got a Roland JV1080 synth module you can plug a MIDI keyboard into. “I fell in love with those naff ’90s-sounding keyboards.
#TAME IMPALA LET IT HAPPEN ACTOR PRO#
All I had last time was a Roland Juno 106 and a Sequential Circuits Pro One,” said Parker. You can hear it in the hard-ended repetitions of a scratched CD stuck in a loop on lead track Let It Happen, the Boyz II Men R&B drum machine and ’verby claps on Love Paranoia, and the chiming clarity of digital synths throughout. The latest album, Currents, trades on a newer sort of nostalgia, one that - as a teen of the ’90s - resonates more personally for Parker. And even though the second album Lonerism felt harder to lump in as psych rock, the legacy of Tame Impala continued to be built on that specific kind of nostalgia. Aside from those catchy psych-pop melodies, Lennon-esque dreamy falsetto, and Dunlop fuzz guitars, the sound of lo-fi, squashed drums was probably the most identifiable part of Tame Impala’s breakthrough album Innerspeaker. “Decompressing… no pun intended.”įor anyone that’s followed Parker’s trajectory, compression is no joke. “Just got back from tour,” explained Tame Impala frontman, Kevin Parker, settling in for a chat.
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