First Play: Daniel Lanois, Flesh and Machine plus track-by-track guide

Published: October 20, 2014
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Daniel Lanois
Flesh and Machine
Stream until Oct. 28

There are many creative sides to Daniel Lanois producer, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, author, filmmaker but in all he does, sound is at the centre.

The 63-year-old Canadian musician has been creating, bending and exploring sound since he first started looping in his Hamilton, Ont., studio in the mid-1970s. His soundscapes can be heard on work by U2, Bob Dylan and Neil Young, on his own solo records and through his groundbreaking electronic music collaboration in the 1980s with his mentor, Brian Eno.

It's those albums with Eno that provide the closest relation to his latest work, Flesh and Machine. Building off his cherished steel guitars and the stick work of the great Brian Blade, Lanois built an album that meshes physical performance with electronic manipulations, creating an album with no singing and no real songwriting but a whole lot of sounds you've probably never heard.

"I wanted to get back to the values I operated by when I was working on those ambient records with Brian," says Lanois on the phone from his home in Los Angeles. "It's not specifically the sounds, but the devotion we had to the direction. I like this record because it's sonically bold."

You can listen to Flesh and Machine in full above, and read Lanois' track-by-track guide to his new record below.

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1. "Rocco"

"This started out as a Bach piece of music the piano part is following the chords of a Bach piece. I added my Taurus bass pedals, which is a Moog synthesizer, and has a deep, soft cinematic bottom end. My friend Rocco DeLuca, who lives across the pond here in Silver Lake, he's a good friend, and a great singer. I asked Rocco to ad lib on top of the pedals. He did 10 tracks and went home, and I combed through and compiled what I thought was his best moments. A few times it touched on a sound I love the sound that I remember from a Bulgarian women's choir that I was exposed to by Brian Eno many years ago. I was very excited when I heard those collisions of harmony. And I named it after him. There's something very deep and emotional about that one."

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2. "The End"

"A sort of protest instrumental. A piece responding to all the headlines we need to endure these days it seems to be non-stop war across the planet and people need to live through atrocities. It represents the crying voices of war zones as we get to talk comfortably on the phone. There's a lot of anger in there sounds of war and people suffering. It really sounds like the sky is falling down. It's not meant to be peaceful listening, it's meant to be a challenging piece, that causes people to stop in their tracks and make people wonder what's happening in the parts of the world that don't have our comforts."

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3. "Sioux Lookout"

"'Sioux Lookout' is my idea of a contemporary native cry a cry for balance, for us to live in balance with our relatives. It's an ancient native philosophy, we need to respect our relatives: the sky people, the four-legged people and the water people. I made an attempt on mixing human sounds with animal sounds. I touched on this with Brian Eno back in the day on a record called On Land, and I see this as a continuation of that way of looking at music."

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4. "Tamboura Jah"

"I keep a house in Jamaica, and this was a drum track I already had in my library and I manipulated that track in Jamaica through a couple of processing boxes. But I was so limited with my equipment, I only had one little mixer and two boxes. The signal is going through the box, and not even going through the mixer. I was so limited that results turned out to be very radical. The drums suddenly become like they are coming from another dimension. I think it's a very fine example of a lot of depth of feel to be had out of very little equipment."

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5. "Two Bushas"

"'Two Bushas' started out as a Rocco DeLuca song that I was mixing for him. I processed and sampled my sounds and created two tracks that were meant to be ornamental sitting in the distance behind Rocco's song. But then I stripped away the song and featured the processings and I found that they were fascinating in themselves and quite orchestral. I started to see the future of symphony the results very symphonic but the sounds are not recognizable. I played it for Rocco and he got very excited about it. I asked him if I could put it on my record, and he said, 'Of course.' It's a deconstruction where only the hidden components are heard and brought to the forefront."

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6. "Space Love"

"This features my steel guitar, very manipulated. It goes very electronic, where the electronic components sound like little animals whispering. There's something very touching and romantic about it, like two little muskrats making love in the bushes [laughs]. It's one of my favourites actually. What's in the foreground is so far away from the source, it really appeals to me."

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7. "Iceland"

"I sat at the piano, and Brian Blade sat at the drums. It's a very pure form live performance. When [Blade] left the studio, I then carried on with my manipulations and processing. Everything you hear is piano, but I overdubbed a nice dulcimer a dulcimer that I used on Emmylou Harris's Wrecking Ball and that dulcimer plays the lead, and there's something very touching about the pure sound of that. A nice combination of nice acoustic instruments, but very electronically processed."

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"My First Love"

"Again features my steel guitar. This one is very much a throwback to the early '80s when I was working with Eno because I used this little toy instrument called the Suzuki Omnichord, it's like an electronic autoharp. It was only meant to be a toy instrument but there's something sweet about it when you slow it down. So I played it fast, slowed it down and did all the overdubs on top. And a nice drum performance by Brian Blade as simple as it might seem, it has a lovely zip and lilting effect. If you ever heard Esquivel he was a Mexican orchestrator from the '50s who did very cinematic music that always had a little humour in it this is as funny as I get on this record."

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"Opera"

"'Opera' is very high speed, very electro. The basis of it is this drum machine, a famous drum box called the Roland 808, and I found a complimentary echo to the 808 beat. So that became the spine of this. It has a curious personality trait: halfway through it goes off into melody and the bass part follows the melody line, which is a very unusual thing to do but it feeds quite well."

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"Aquatic"

"A solo steel guitar performance, with a very overdriven sound. I hit on this sound putting it through a couple of overdriven Fender amplifiers that I used on Neil Young's Le Noise record that I made a few years ago with Neil. So I used the same Neil Young setup and I put my steel guitar it has a very cavernous and sometimes submerged sound. It reminded me of some of the sounds I heard coming out of San Francisco in the '60s. It always felt it was underwater. I created this image in my head of a character let's say me floating at the top of the St. Lawrence all the way to the open mouth to the Atlantic, and the characters I bump into along the way. It's constantly unfolding, a very lonely journey, but a beautiful one."

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"Forest City"

"'Forest City' started out as one note on my Les Paul guitar. I have a little sampling device that I use as part of my Les Paul rig so I pushed sample, pushed hold on it. It had this beautiful mantra-like tone and personality, so I carried on with it. I just kept adding on to that, so that whole five-minute journey is built from one note. It's very textural. I played it for [filmmaker] Terrence Malik, and he fell in love with it. He said, 'This is exactly how I see life.'"

Follow Brad Frenette on Twitter:@bradfrenette

Daniel Lanois' Flesh and Machine is available Oct. 28. Pre-order it here.

Indie / Progressive / Jazz
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