“If you don’t have to buy something new, just don’t.”

JONO: There’s a radio show in Barcelona called Störung, and they asked Metamono to do the station ID, and they said, Do whatever you want, but it has to contain the name Störung. I said, How the fuck we gonna do that without a microphone, within the manifesto? So I built each of the little sounds, the bits that made up the word Störung, from our synths, and then edited them together to create the word. [laughs] It took ages, but the result is something spectacularly different to someone just saying the word Störung into a mike and putting it through MAX/MSP [effects software] and sittin’ in front of their laptop for half an hour.

Spontaneity and immediacy must be crucial as well.

MARK: Yes. When you’ve got to mike up the drumkit and tweak the mikes to get them the right sound, all those problems that come with the technical part of recording all this stuff, they’re just gone. You can just jam.

JONO: The other thing with spontaneity, with a mouse you reduce the action down to one finger. If you reduce down to just pushing around the cursor onscreen, there’s a lot of options but you massively reduce this creative entity. When we played a gig the other week, we were literally all hands on deck, all hands running around making the music happen all the time.

Meanwhile, you are playing and recording in mono. Why? What’s your beef with stereo?

JONO: I don’t mind stereo, but stereo is a bit of a con. The reason why stereo became so popular was because it was basically twice as loud as mono –– with the players at the time you had two amplifiers and two speakers, so it was twice as loud. And one of the things I found playing our stuff out is, on multiple speaker systems in spaces where you have stereo in one room and stereo in another room, the sound moves around the space anyway, even though it’s mono, because the different speakers pick up different aspects of the music. So it’s a peculiarly sort of spacial listening to our stuff in a performance situation. It’s very liberating.

Again and again, we come up against this argument that there’s something about analog sound that’s just plain better than digital sound. Any thoughts on why or how analog recordings affect us so profoundly?

JONO: It’s a bit of a holy grail, isn’t it?

PAUL: The depth, it’s definitely there.

JONO: I’ve had a lot of discussions with people on one side and they say it’s just reference –– you know, we’ve grown up with analog sound, we’ve grown up with having a noise floor to our recorded music, so that makes it easier for us to judge relative levels. And the other extreme where people spray CDs with a layer of carbon to make them sound better –– and that’s equally fucking bonkers. So between the two, between the real hard, sort of atheistic end of it, and the esoteric end of it, there is truth there.

Something I’ve just been doing is cutting all the old Can albums back onto vinyl, because they went through digital remastering and they became digital, but now we’ve cut them back onto vinyl, and vinyl sounds fantastic, because they’re back on an analog medium.

PAUL: That’s got to do with what we were just talking about, about this digital compression thing. Everyone’s got this fetish about hard, and louder than the other record. In an analog format, you don’t need to worry about that so much, because it does have that natural saturation when you get it onto tape, as tape is your final format.

There’s a lot of theorizing about how the audio frequencies blend when recorded or played back on magnetic tape; that what we’re hearing and respond to is actually a pleasing form of harmonic distortion.

JONO: Yeah, but if it goes into the next step, then it goes into real distortion...

You’ve been making a lot of your own instruments. What have you hacked up and reassembled?

PAUL: Mine are a massive community of things I got off the internet; it’s all modular stuff, and most of it’s pretty old circuitry, schematics from the ‘70s, Moog oscillators and Russian Polyvox filters, and so you can mix ‘n’ match all this technology and just build your own.

JONO: That’s the advantage, really, of keeping things modular –– lots of little boxes that do little jobs rather than buying synths, unless we can pick them up secondhand.

Is it sometimes the case that you’re throwing a bunch of things together not knowing what the results will be?

[gales of knowing laughter]

JONO: I think you just found our Achilles heel there, John! Well, this is the thing, the conflict between digital and analog: With the digital computer world, it’s all extremely reason-based –– if a computer behaves it’s because you or someone else has told it to. When your analog gear starts behaving and stuff is coming out of it, it’s sometimes because it’s just behaving. There’s one point in the day whenever we play, we all look at each other and say, “Is that you?” There’s something going on, but none of us know what it is; the relationship of all these analog systems is as unpredictable as reality is, it’s not like an imaginary world inside a laptop.

There is a decidedly anti-consumerist aspect to all this kind of art-making, and environmental-impact issues, of course. How big a part do these things play in your thinking?

MARK: Completely, down to the energy we use. It’s all found: radios that have been found, new instruments and boxes are found, and that’s all building as well on the look of the thing. But one of our ruling principles is, if you don’t have to buy something new, just don’t.

Okay, since all sound is in theory now available to musicians –– you can make real art with the crudest of tools and materials –– then why not use digital means, too?

JONO: When we were setting up Metamono, I was working on a big project of my own, Horrorshow, and I’d also just worked on this enormous project with Irmin, Axolotl Eyes [Spoon Records 2008], with the film that went to it, and I was constantly finding myself in the position of saying, Okay, I want the sound of Castilian gates opening –– and if I fuckin’ tried hard I’d be able to download it. And that is in one way enormous liberation. But what I found was that it was becoming less and less creative. So I just thought, I’d like to completely restrain that, completely get rid of that, and have to work where I have to make everything from the grassroots up. We have to make every sound. And that of course adds into the rest of the aesthetic, the way everything looks, the way everything feels, is handmade and individual.

It’s too easy to make music now.

JONO: Too easy to make shit music.

One can simply press a button and make very complex harmonies and melodies, badass beats, whatever you want. Yet the physical and mental effort required to do what Metamono does seems important.

JONO: The process is enormously important. But with the liberation of having some restraints like that, it’s made us more creative. By limiting ourselves we’ve ended up making much more music.

PAUL: The recording and the writing process often happens at the same time, which is kind of unusual these days; there’s no sitting around thinking about it, it just happens, and that’s it. And we’ve got a mono recording –– unedited, of course.

How much editing are we hearing?

JONO: Sometimes it’s as little as editing out the bit where it was sort of shaky at the beginning. Sometimes it’s a bit baroque, and the editing is in quite little chunks. I’ve also done things where I’ve put it back on tape and vari-speeded it and then edited the vari-speeded version, and things like that. But they’re all analog stages.

“Back on tape?” I thought you recorded on magnetic tape.

[huge outburst of shame-faced mirth]

JONO: Sadly, we have a poverty issue. We’re recording digitally.

PAUL: We have a multitrack mono machine, but it’s broken. That’s the ideal one, it’s a full track of mono for everything.

JONO: The thing is, we don’t have a machine to master onto, so we’re having to record digitally, and then do all the processing analog after that.

Well, no one’s going to condemn you for working like that. By the way, working with analog tape is interesting for another reason, which is that you have to put a lot of time into it, and the time spent itself becomes a vital part of the compositional process. Also, working with the tape, you’re literally cutting and gluing and taping the sound together. You have to be a very pure soul to devote your time that way.

JONO: We will do that, we’re just trying to source the gear to do it at the moment. I’ve got an editing block and my razor blades waiting here, ready to rock –– look at that, pristine condition, it’s been kept in its box since I stole it in 1984. [laughs]

What’s the plan? Are you a touring entity?

JONO: We’ve had three releases, played one gig. And the idea really is to approach performance with the same spirit that we’ve approached recording, and also the business side, of actually saying, well, there is no other way of doing this.

How do mono or analog aesthetics figure into your live performances?

JONO: Playing in mono is a completely liberating thing. The gigs, you don’t have to stand on the stage with two pillars of stupid speakers on either side of you. The gig that we did, we had speakers spread all over the room that we were in, and it was a massive success in terms of the spatialization of the sound, it was so much more exciting. And also because we’re creating room and our gear is such a part of it, we’re thinking more in terms less like classical gigs and more like installations. So I’ve been tenuously getting in touch with art galleries and spaces and saying, okay, we’ll install the gear, we’ll dress the room, create the space, we do a live performance but we do recordings, and recordings from that event are our next release. So in the way that we’ve rethought the actual generation of the music, we’re trying to rethink the live aspect as well.

I love cassettes, I own thousands of them, and I still listen to them. And the reason they’re in a way better is that you have to fast-forward, rewind if you want to find the good part or whatever, or you just let it play and dedicate yourself and your time to whatever is on there. In other words, you have to put a bit of work into it. So I like the idea of this analog music of yours being on cassette –– although it’ll be available digitally as well, right?

JONO: Ssssshhhhhh!!

You’re not going to do digital downloads?

JONO: No. We’re not releasing anything in digital format. There’s no money in it! In terms of the volumes that we’re doing, it’s just not worth it. The way we’re doing things at the moment, which is small, high-quality runs of analog stuff that we can do ourselves –– this is one of the few bands I’ve ever been in that’s in the black! You know, most bands, they may have hundreds of downloads and lots of digital products, but that involves being involved with lots of companies who are basically taking that money from them.

The sound on the cassette is great; there’s a warmth to it that draws one in.

JONO: It’s quite shocking how nice and natural it sounds listening to music off a cassette. I was at a party the other night where I played the cassette –– they didn’t have a cassette player, so I had to go there with my Walkman and a cable, which everyone thought was the coolest fashion gesture they’d ever seen in their lives. It was, like, the first time in trendy East London I’d ever been respected in a fashion sense. [laughs] And what was fascinating was, the dynamics of the music are very different from all this digital stuff that’s very heavily compressed, so there was space for conversation for the first time in the evening; everyone seemed to be getting on much better, basically, because they could talk to each other without shouting into each other’s ears while the music was playing.

And the other thing was that I was almost a standup comedian; when one side finished I stood up and said, “Should I put the other side on?” And everyone fell around the floor laughing ‘cause they hadn’t heard anyone say that for 20 years! It was the sort of thing your dad says. [laughs]

Cassettes are good for social gatherings, because there’s less high end spearing through the room, which relaxes the ears. Digital sound can be so hectoring and harsh and insistent.

JONO: That’s part of the technical methodology of mastering, where everything has to go through a limiter, everything has to be as loud as possible to be able to compare to the previous track. And that’s particularly with American music, it’s all being so pushed now, it’s all 12 dB, heavily limited, and it’s that last step in the production chain that’s killing all the dynamics. Another problem is, with dance music being what it is, the drums are the loudest thing, and the drums start at bar one and they end at the end of the tune. So it’s loud all the way through.

I guess part of the point here is that Metamono are a real band, who play real instruments, er, albeit electronic ones.

PAUL: We’re like a traditional three-piece guitar band in a way, ‘cause you haven’t got that computer. We listen to each other in that natural way that musicians ought to.

JONO: That’s another thing, it’s in the mixing process; this all goes into one mixer, with a mono output; but we’re using the mixer so that everything can get sent out to everything else, and this is where the complexity starts happening: Paul’s sound of just one module of his machine will go through the reverb of my Arp and then through the ring modulator and then get sent back to the MS-20, and then you’ve got the radio on top of that and nobody really knows what’s going on! [laughs]

Do you have discussions about the musical plan before you play or record?

JONO: There is a kind of conceptual aspect to each of our sessions before we get together; we have a name for each of the sessions, just to explore a different character or to explore a different musical idea that we haven’t so far covered. Four of the six pieces on Band Theory come from a session where we were concerned that the vibe of everything we were doing was too heavy and dark. And we didn’t know whether that was because of the equipment or because of us. So we said, Okay, let’s try to do the happiest music we possibly can with this gear that pumps out this bizarre stuff. And that’s been some of our most successful material. We found out, if you put your mind to it ––

MARK: You can be happy.

JONO: Yes, you can be happy!

A photo gallery devoted to Mark Hill’s recycled house: http://www.charliepinder.co.uk/gallery.php?id=The%20Recycled%20House Read all about Mark's work: http://socialismmagazineonline.blogspot.com/2007/10/recycled-house.html