Bill Laswell Quotes

I am a sound freak. I could play around with sound forever.

I'm into sounds, man.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

I like to explore a lot of textural, arrangement aspects in the studio.

I was completely fascinated by the studio process and layering sounds and creating soundscapes out of layering massive squalls of sound.

I like to create a sound and then leave it behind.

Throughout college I was getting better and better at making recordings, producing songs, making different kinds of beats.

I just tend toward more lush, full sounds in my productions. I don't have any preference when it comes to analogue versus digital; I use what's best for the application. Analogue synthesis is nice, but it's just one tool among many, and it has its place.

To me, finding sounds, or even recording, is a compositional process. The studio is kind of an instrument.

Analog, electronic, whatever it happens to be, I simply love and adore literally every aspect of making music.

I just love crafting and shaping sounds. Actually, many of the sounds that I work with start off as organic instruments - guitar, piano, clarinet, etc. But I do love the rigidity of electronic drums.

I hated science in high school. Technology? Engineering? Math? Why would I ever need this? Little did I realize that music was also about science, technology, engineering and mathematics, all rolled into one.

Our job as producers is to make the music sound as good as possible.

I'm interested in creating a little sound world for songs, really crafting it, building it, and making it like a little doll's house with little things inside it, staircases and rooms and everything kind of relates to everything else. I've never seen it as drums, bass, guitar and vocals in very separate spaces.

The studio that we mix in is still in Chicago.

I love being in the studio.

My producer, HH, makes sounds, so I'm writing to his beats.

I got tired of different drum sounds so you buy different effects for more manipulation.

I like to use effects, but a lot of the time I just can't deal with these tracks with all these artificial sounds.

I always created things, layered things on top of each other. That hasn't changed at all. With this first album, it was basically a celebration of that process of inventing and building sounds.

I sequence during the entire recording process. The sequencing changes as I'm recording and as I'm listening. From when I'm, like, four songs in, I start trying to figure out which song should come after which. Which is important, and it changes as the album goes.

You have to have a certain amount of grit in your sound, and having real synths and talking certain elements outside your computer can help with this.

My tools are musicians, effects, things like that.

We spend a lot of time with MIDI keyboards and various processors, and we just figure it out. And all those things you hear in our songs work as submelodies and countermelodies, and everything has to fit.

My dad used to do a lot of music when he was young, so he had an 8-track MiniDisc recorder, and when he realized that I was getting on with it, he brought it upstairs to my room and showed me how to record and how, once you finished eight tracks, you can cut it down to two and have another six tracks to play with.