Unity Gain
Unity Gain: L-R Iain Mackay, Luke, myself and Dylan Gilliland.
Unity Gain had it’s beginnings late 2004, myself having met Iain Mackay and expressing interest in jams. Iain, previously leading geek-hop political music group Audio:LK-da got my attention because he was doing stuff with live electronic drums and samples (not to meantion being a terrific live-personality). Soon enough Iain hosted a few jams at his place where I met bass player Luke, as well as keys player Becky (Iain’s better half). With myself on guitar, heavily effects oriented like my Pnuematic Bell days, we created some rather loose and interesting jam sounds.
These continued on and off throughout 2005, though really never taking off into consistant motion due to lack of a core-idea and noise restrictions placed upon Iain’s abode.
During early 2006 Luke’s persistant idea of doing groove based music live for people to dance to started to really click with me. This was also fueled by the positive reaction we both got from hosting the ‘mini art doof’ live electronica event The Arc a few months earlier at the Armidale Club. Also, brilliantly typified by Australian band The Bird, there is a new growing live underground music movement happening through Australia’s now established doof-party and smaller Festival roster. The Bird have arrived at a live music style that blatently emulates the tunes spun by 90’s dj-culture, e.g. groove electronica (d’n'b, dub, hiphop, etc). Their crowd interaction is entrirely uplifting. There are bands surfacing (e.g. Alter Native) that are using this rough template of emulating electronica with live performed grooves and sampling. Luke and I both went and saw The Bird play at Stockwood which envigorated our desire to attempt the same live approach.
Iain also had being saying he wanted to perform live dance music using a hybrid setup of his electronic drums and acoustic percussion such as hats, cymbals, snare, tamb, and whatever else he can throw together. I remember Iain saying he wanted to do ‘live house’, and I took that as a cue to meld that with what Luke wanted.
Having a goal in mind we were keen to start jaming a little more frequently and more seriosuly. We almost resurected usage of the old UNE Union Creative Arts College (where 2 years worth of Pneumatic Bell noise took place), but because it didn’t have the power switched on anymore we quickly relocated to Luke’s place, now out of town on a farm locally know as “Wood Park”. This place has seen some pretty loose and wild jams over the years, due to different local personalities being associated with it. Now both Luke and keys player Dylan Gilliland lived there: so it only seemed natural to sit Dylan in front of the Rhodes and let him twinkly his blues-influenced melodies with his dub skank with new found interest.
For those first few jams I had conciously made a choice to play guitar differently. At home I play lead a lot, which is consistant to the Pnuematic Bell style, but this time I decided to keep things higher energy with repetitive rhythms and echoy chordal textures (rather than metal sludge, or Vai like solos). Seeing the other guys were already in the groove headspace something all clicked and had the feeling that the goal of the hybrid electro-acoustic groove was reachable, and quite fun to play.
Now, having two technology obsessed audio geeks in the band (Luke and I) as well as Iain’s creative ideas, we quickly came up with a very convoluted approached to creating the live sound. Luke brought his G4 laptop into the mix, allowing us access to the world of VSTis and Reason via midi. So in front of Dylan there is both his Rhodes, and my DX9 acting as a midi controller (giving Dylan whatever sound he likes, with effects).
Luke has access to a smaller midi keyboard which he’s been using for real crazy sample triggering or drum loop triggering (note: not synced to any sequence, all live). He also has in front of him a Juno synth which he mostly uses as a very very fat bass machine. But sometimes he goes for the warmth of his beautiful fretless electric bass, just to keep the low end all slidy and melted.
Iain, as previously mentioned, is using his electro-kit with an additional series of condenser and dynamic microphones capturing his acousitc percussion. Iain, Luke and I also have dynamic vocal microphones allowing us to rap or sing, most of which is being done by Iain at the moment while he plays drums. The mics are running through two different rack-efx units (mostly for verb) and the global mix through a digital compressor unit.
I have my standard Zoom4040 setup with a few new amendments: my output is now full stereo (making for great verb, delay and chorus sounds), utilising the fact the the mixers we’re using are stereo (two daisy-chained Behringers, soon to be three) and the PA we’re developing is like a very big 2.1 setup, almost Hi-Fi. I have the Crybaby before the Zoom, and now I also have an authentic Talk-Box post-Zoom, which sees the output tube tapped to my vocal microphone. I’m still learning to use it, but some interesting sounds are coming out of it.
Over the last months since May we’ve been jaming up to two times a week, anywhere between 3 and 9 hours a go. Using Luke’s laptop we’ve been using Cubase to get a live dump of the jams, so we have an extensive recorded archive.
Our style is very diverse, and I won’t spend time going into that here. I will state, though, that our main goals at the moment are twofold: to tighten our rhythm, and to continue to build a flexible arrangement method that works for all of our approaches. As we now have our first gigs booked, the pressure is on and we’re well on our way.
The gigs are:
- Friday 15th of September at Bellingen Memorial Hall, with Alter Native and DJ B9
- Saturday 16th of September at The Armidale Club, with Alter Native and DJ B9
If you’re around we hope you can make it, it’ll be a very fun event. There’s something there on both levels: you can get up and dance to the groove, or you can sit down and get lost in our upper textures, sounding so much more smooth, lush and interesting compared to your local punk band through a bad PA.
Unity Gain: L-R Dylan Gilliland, myself, Luke and Iain Mackay.
More updates to come…
Soltronics, Unity Gain, Sickness, Arc and Perth! | mmd says:
October 16th, 2008 at 12:11 am
[...] a month ago now things were cooking with Unity Gain – we were pacing ahead with two weekly sessions, and starting to slowly zone in on some [...]