Noise

Electronic duo MSTRKRFT talks live performance, custom modular synths and more

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MSTRKRFT plays the Bunkhouse on September 2.
Deanna Rilling

The Canadian duo of Jesse F. Keeler and Al-P, better known to electronic music fans as MSTRKRFT, narrowed down hundreds of hours of jam sessions over the past couple years for their latest offering, Operator. They’ll re-create it during a live, intimate show at the Bunkhouse on September 2.

The Bunkhouse is an unexpected venue for MSTRKRFT to play. Al-P: That’s the closest thing in Vegas to the type of venue that we’ve been playing everywhere else—places like the Double Door in Chicago or the Horseshoe [Tavern] in Toronto. We’ve been trying to play atypical places because what we’re doing is not what we were doing in the past.

JK: We are playing live in Las Vegas, so it would make sense that we are playing at a live music venue. Some nightclubs have the capacity to make space for us and what we’re doing right now, but many do not, so it sort of makes more sense to play a venue like that rather than cram all our drum machines and synthesizers and everything into a DJ booth that was never intended for that or big enough.

I played the new album Operator and had to make sure it was the correct album because it’s got such a throwback analog sound.

JK: I won’t ask how old you are, but maybe we grew up at the same time and maybe it’s the same inspirations and we’re just doing it rather than remembering it. There’s a lot of new ways to accomplish similar things, but there’s no new way to accomplish the same thing. So we’re just reverting perhaps. But it’s much more enjoyable than playing off a computer.

Al-P: That sound comes from the fact that we’ve really simplified the instrumentation on the record, and intentionally, when we were recording the record, we chose all of our gear up front before we started. … A lot of the stuff that we’re using we have used in the past on records, but [with] much more [of a] studio approach where we’re doing a lot of manipulation in the computer. Whereas with Operator, we’re recording raw chunks and doing broad edits of pieces that we had recorded. The fact that you weren’t sure that it was the right record, I take that as a compliment because being away for so long, we needed to come back and do something not the same and I think definitely we achieved it with this new setup. The ability for us to take the setup we used to record on stage to perform the record is amazing and satisfying.

Do you feel playing live is important now that many DJs are criticized for pushing buttons during their sets?

JK:What we’re doing is in no way to be construed as a commentary on what others are doing; it’s not disparaging to any other way of working. It’s just, for us, we are musicians first and we needed to be more musical than the computer stuff was allowing us to be.

You recorded hundreds of hours of music. How did you narrow it down to the finished album?

JK: It might sound ridiculous, but we listened to it.

Al-P: Honestly, in this day and age of instant everything and immediacy, it was a bit of an arduous task. What it started with was finding the theme that we were after. We would record an idea for maybe 20 minutes and then do several of those within a recording session. When we found an idea that we liked, we really started by just taking away moments that were static or boring and identifying the moment where the idea crystallizes into something that sounded like a song, then backfill from there and build up to that idea using bits and pieces that evolved into where we wanted it to go.

But yeah … we found it enjoyable to experiment and let unexpected things happen and feed off of that. Getting it down to three or four minutes was another job in itself. When we say we recorded hundreds of hours of music, some people have questioned that, but there is hundreds of hours of music—not to say that it’s hundreds of hours of three-minute complete songs. It’s raw material.

What is the specific gear that you used on the album and are bringing along for the tour?

Keeler: The 909 is our main drum machine. We also have an 808 and a 707. We each have our own modular-synth set up and a mixer, a couple of different sequencers to control the modular and that’s it. That’s all we need. There’s processing gear we plug in just so that it will sound as good as the record and it’s basically our present studio on the road with us.

Al-P: Jesse really plays his modular like he’s playing lead guitar. I’ve never heard anybody else use a modular in the same way. So a lot of the sound on the record and what we do live comes from the modular passion and curation.

Keeler: We’ve gone so far as to design a modular piece that will come to market soon—we’re just not 100 percent sure what the date is, but we’re already using it and it just went into production. Being able to do that is really cool, like a guitar player having their own model guitar or something. Being able to contribute back into that world and having an effect on the equipment that’s available, not just using what’s available, is pretty exciting.

MSTRKRFT with Woolymammoth, Midnight Affair, DJ Wizdumb, Personal Touch, Astrogold. September 2, 9 p.m., $15-$20, The Bunkhouse.

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