Subdermal, my first full length CD release, released under my Xyn project, came out in April 2001. We’re over halfway through May now… the anniversary slipped by me. I was just putting together the reviews page and noticed the dates. Wow. Ten years.
The tracks on Subdermal were produced between 1998 and 2000. The first track to be completed was Deified which started from sessions I did in Albuquerque, NM during a year I spent living there. The version of Deified on the CD was remixed and completed after I got back to Michigan.
Most of the CD was produced when I was living in a less-than-good part of Ypsilanti, MI. I can still picture the studio setup I had (which I moved between a few locations in Ann Arbor and Ypsi). I went through some gear changes during this period, adding a Roland JP-8000 and Akai S3000xl to my setup which really gave me a lot more possibilities. Prior to that I had been mostly using drum machines and synths… and I didn’t have a lot of effects units. What I could produce was fairly well constrained prior to this. You can still hear some audio defects and noise in Subdermal, but I think that adds to the handcrafted, personal sound of a lot of it. I still had to spend a lot of time working on tricks to wring out more from the limited gear I was using, especially compared to today where I’ve got an effectively infinite studio residing within my MacBook Pro.
My production method at that time was to jam on a track in loop form onto 2-track DAT, then take those sessions into an audio editor and edit them into the final released track. I might have 20 to 30 mins. of a live take which would get trimmed down into three to eight minutes of finished track. That’s one reason for many of the reverse edits on the CD.
In the case of Stimulus, the track that came out was just the intro to a longer piece. The longer piece wasn’t working for me, but I liked the intro. With input from Ian MacLachlan (whose studio I used to master the final release) I removed everything but the intro and extended the intro into the track that appears on the released CD.
The CD came about because Rob at Component was looking to expand the label from the two Codec releases he put out in 1999 and 2000. Xyn seemed like a good follow up. The label would go on to focus more on leftfield “IDM” styles, but this really helped open up doors for Xyn and what I was doing at that time.
I tend to think of it as a fairly primitive release compared to what I was doing on Output Square and where I headed with later releases. I still occasionally listen to it and am pleasantly surprised at how much of it holds up and how listenable it is. Xyn was often too Techno for the IDM crowd and too IDM for the Techno crowd. I think this album remains an interesting fusion of those two esthetics.
June 8th at 6pm – Vancouver Ableton Users Group meetup