With Dave and his studio, everything is exactly the same as it was the second we walked in in I mean everything … the same mugs in the kitchen, same sticky note on the microwave. We can get there and get right into the work, rather than spending time adapting to the environment. How do you stay efficient and productive working with creative partners who are also close friends? He helped to push us and encourage us to finish ideas.
When Ben and I get together sometimes, we end up just getting coffee and talking about how weird everything is, and then get down on ourselves. Ben: We always get excited about making a new record right after we finish a record. Andrew: Working with Ariel [Pink] and Patrick and seeing how both of them can take any idea, like a voice memo or something they were just humming on the street, and turn it into something… or at least finish it out as an idea, was something we picked up from working with them.
Hopefully we keep those wheels spinning. How did you manage to collaborate and make an album without actually working in-person?
You have to send us something. Does anxiety about how people will react to a new release affect how you approach making work? Andrew: Making an album or just the creative process in general always goes all over the place.
It can be really intense, and it opens up parts of your brain that bring with it scary thoughts or anxieties. Even coming off of the first album and making a second album, we would have to be superhuman not to have that influence our brains at that point.
How would you define success, and how would you define failure in your creative career? Andrew: I can say more easily how we would not define it, which would be in terms of financial success. I think that for me, success is getting as close to expressing yourself in a true way, with as few filters or things that tear that down, as possible.
Ben: Yeah. Because you make something, and then you have to completely redesign your brain to think of it in this different way. It's really musical and you can get so many tones from it really easily. We used the 'Clav' sound and it was really thick through a guitar amp. It's pretty responsive. The strings are plastic and pretty loose. It's kind of hard to figure out how to play but it's pretty cool. It's those effects set into a pedal. So we got to play with this holy pedal.
I was just making the weirdest noises. He's had some work done on it, a couple of the kind of common modifications. It has a soft sync built in, so you can get the type of oscillator sync sounds the Cars used all the time.
But it's like it gets halfway there but it needs to catch up with itself, and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't, so it does this kind of throaty thing that sounds like a voice. So that's what that screaming thing is, this weird function of the soft sync. I was just doing it for hours, over and over. Impressed by the studio, the duo asked him if he could replicate the setup for them in their own space.
In October, the pair's studio, Blanker Unsinn, was completed, just in time for the final recording work to be done on Congratulations.
He kind of built a miniature version of his studio. He took an acoustics class, and he knows a lot about proportions of rooms. We didn't have a desk, we just run things straight into Pro Tools. We just recently picked up a Neve Kelso console so I think in the future we're gonna use that for recording drums. But other than that, we're not planning on getting a big desk in there, because the control room's fine, but it's not completely ideal for mixing a record. So we did those two songs there.
We did 'Brian Eno' as a live take with four of us. It was one of the first times we even played through the whole thing. Before they could start, however, VanWyngarden had to complete his lyrics and record his final vocal takes. There wasn't one way that worked every time. We liked trying different stuff. MGMT settled into a very definite modus operandi in working with Fridmann this time around. VanWyngarden and Goldwasser met at Wesleyan University in the early s and connected instantly as genre-jumping, performance art agitators.
But the album lacked singles with radio staying power, and by the time MGMT came around , both critical respect and commercial appeal appeared to be firmly dimmed, the album reaching a No.
After Oracular, MGMT toured non-stop for basically two years, riding the rise of festival culture to incredible cache. If this is going to be our last big statement, why not make it about things we like? We're trying new things and we hope people follow us, but if they don't, we're not going to get upset about it.
It's not like we're entitled to have tons of people care about our artistic vision. And if it isn't, he has other plans: Goldwasser has apparently been reading up on sociology with a view to an alternative career — "I was thinking of something like social work, if music didn't work out" — which suggests a certain fatalism.
VanWyngarden is more upbeat: "I'm pretty confident this album's going to do well, as naive as that may sound. We're still not at that point that we talked about since we were 19, where we push the big red button and self destruct.
You know that? With the toilet on the front full of shit and puke? So, you know, please don't see this as that attempt. MGMT: 'We got a glimpse of fame and shrunk back'. From college pranksters to indie-disco stars — and back again? But if MGMT's new album really is commercial suicide, they swear it's unintentional. Photograph: Graeme Robertson.
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