Je n'ai toujours rien trouvé de mieux sur le nouveau rack à ch'ti pépère Matthew, en attendant, je suis tombé sur cette interview relatant l'enregistrement d'Absolution. Désolé c'est un peu long, je n'ai pas trouvé le lien avec l'original, je l'ai recopié depuis un forum.
Citation:
Guitarist Jan 04
INTERVIEW WITH MATT BELLAMY (RECORDING OF ABSOLUTION AND THE RECENT TOUR)
Facing out over the wreckage of the city's historic West Pier, the Brighton Centre, a multipurpose venue situated midway along Brighton's busy promenade, will tonight play host to chart-topping rockers Muse. It's certainly an odd venue for a heavy rock act. By day the Centre holds record fairs, beer and cider festivals and other specialist interest conferences - teddy bear lovers will be congregating there the following Sunday for the British Bear Fair - while at night a bizarre range of musical acts head through its doors. In December these were set to include indie dads Blur, cod-reggae giants UB40, ska-popsters Madness and rhythm and blueser Jools Holland. Somewhat akin to a very grand school hall, what the Centre lacks in character it makes up for in size. While it may not seem like the perfect place for Muse's theatrical rock pomp, the capacity (around 6,000) does at least reflect Muse's current status as one of the country's top-selling arena rock acts.
The fact that the Teignmouth three-piece shift serious unit despite the complex, brooding and often uncommercial nature of their work — 2003's Absolution was surely the year's most challenging number one album - is a triumph of talent over trends. And there are few rock musicians around now as precociously talented as Matt Bellamy. Dominated by his impassioned falsetto and mind-blowing musical acumen on both guitars and keyboards, Absolution's bold experiments paint Bellamy as some kind of crazed Dr Frankenstein character, cackling away in the studio through the dead of night, blending musical instruments like bubbling potions.
It's an impression that's reinforced when Matt greets Guitarist a few hours before the Brighton show. Sweeping in to the room
dressed head-to-toe in black, his outfit is topped off by an elegant pianist's tailcoat that, together with his scrawny features and rapid-fire articulation, gives him the demeanour of a slightly mad 18th century Count. After strapping on his stunning new chrome Manson guitar and posing for photos, we stroll through the venue's catering area and on to the band's comfortable and spacious dressing room, further confirmation of their newfound standing. Matt grabs a bottle of water and settles himself down. Despite the fact that the band are approaching the end of a gruelling two-month long tour, he looks surprisingly fresh.
"As a group, we've learned to control the on-tour partying and enjoy other aspects of life on the road," he admits. "I love travelling, so I'm in the right job!"
The last time we met Matt, in the summer of 2002, the band were about to release a live/b-sides album, Hullabaloo, and head out on the European festival circuit. Best we pick up the story where we left off and find out where the seeds of Absolution were sown...
WHERE DID THE recording process for Absolution start?
"The second album, Origin Of Symmetry, was made pretty much while we were on tour. We'd been on tour for around four or five years straight. After we did the Reading Festival last August we decided to take a break, at least six or seven months away from touring. That was the first chance we had to really think about what we wanted to do with this album. We had a rehearsal room down in Brighton, which used to be Winston Churchill's house, and we stayed down there for a while, getting a few song ideas together. Then we ended up getting a warehouse-type place in Hackney, which we kind of converted in to a flat - a rehearsal room where Chris [Wolstenholme, bass] could come up and stay (both Matt and drummer Dom Howard are based in London). It was the first time we'd been able to sit down and make music in four or five years without having to go and do a gig, and that was a good environment to write an album in."
WHAT WERE THE main benefits of writing in that way?
"This time we weren't writing songs specifically with the live environment in mind, and it was also the first time we started making demos as well. We noticed we had three different types of song and we originally thought of working with three different producers. We were going to use someone to deal with the more classical sounding stuff, with the strings and pianos, someone to do the rock stuff and someone else on the more electronic-based stuff. We did the first sessions with Paul Reeve and John Cornfield, who we've worked with before in different ways; we recorded songs like Muscle Museum from the first album with Paul Reeve, while John Cornfield mixed our last album. We knew Paul was really good at recording groups of acoustic instruments (piano and strings) so we started the process off with him in AIR Studios in London."
WHICH WERE THE first songs that you recorded?
"We started with Butterflies And Hurricanes, Blackout, Apocalypse Please and Eternally Missed, which was recently a b-side. But we struggled with Apocalypse Please; it sounded weak with the strings on it, whereas the other songs sounded really good. We did that session and came out with two and a half songs, if you like, as we knew that we'd have to re-record Apocalypse Please. We then went to work with Rich Costey."
WHY DID YOU choose Costey?
"He was the man we originally thought of working with for the rock tracks. He'd previously mixed some great rock records -Audioslave, Rage Against The Machine's Renegades, The Mars Volta - but in the meantime he'd been sending us discs of other people he'd worked with like Philip Glass and Fiona Apple and was trying to convince us that he should do the whole album. We reworked Apocalypse Please with a more aggressive sound, without too much over-production, and it sounded better. In the end he did do pretty much all the album, and mixed it as well. He understood what we were trying to achieve."
YOU RECORDED PART of the album in Ireland. Why did you go there?
"We carried on in AIR Studios until the beginning of January. It was around the time that the protests were going on in London and it was pretty hectic. Also, working in a London studio we found ourselves getting quite restrictive hours and when we started moving in to the more experimental songs we felt we needed more time. We moved out to Ireland, to a new studio called Grouse Lodge in County West Meath, and the majority of the album was done there. It was like a big old converted farm and we had access to all sorts of old bits and pieces that were lying around, a few of which we ended up recording."
WHAT KINDS OF 'bits and pieces'?
"There were some big old barns and a big swimming pool as well which we used to record in to get some different reverb and percussion sounds. We did a fair bit of work on percussion on this album compared to the previous records - Time Is Running Out and Apocalypse Please have lots of layers of percussion as opposed to layers of musical instruments.
"We found an implement that was used for turning up corn I think - if you turned it round you got a weird metallic sound from it. Oh, and old wagon wheels, the second verse of Time Is Running Out has got a fair bit of wagon wheel work going on!"
DID YOU EMPLOY any unusual recording techniques?
"The main thing with Rich was that his mic'ing technique was pretty precise. Every cab would have about 10 microphones on it and they would all be placed with mathematical precision. I remember spending a whole day playing the guitar and seeing Rich outside with a measuring tape and a spirit level! He was making the slightest adjustments, millimetres at a time to get it so there was perfect phase."
COULD YOU TELL the difference?
"I could actually. The thing that shocked me the most was how unbelievable a difference it did make. I got the chance to go in the control room for a little bit and listen to what was actually going on as I was playing the guitar. The slightest millimetre of movement radically changed the tone. I think it was because he was going for two or three mics set up at the same time and when you do that you have to be very careful with the phase. I don't know exactly what he was doing but it definitely worked."
WHICH GUITARS DID you use in the studio to record with?
"I used mainly my Manson guitars. The black Manson was the one I used the most. I only use - it live on a couple of songs but in the studio it seems to sound the best. It's got a proximity wire in it which, when you switch it on, gives this really cutting edge tone as your hands move. It was mainly that guitar, but I also borrowed a semi-acoustic guitar from Rich for a couple of mellower tracks -1 can't remember^ the name of it but it was the type Kurt Cobain used in the video for Come As You Are. I used that a bit on Falling Away With You and Sing For Absolution. I also used a Parker Fly for a couple of the guitar solos - Thoughts Of A Dying Atheist and TSP - because it was the only guitar I had with a whammy arm on it. I rediscovered using the whammy arm on this album; I hadn't used it for a fair few years."
YOU HAVE A rare Aloha Strat [a mid-nineties aluminium/chrome bodied beauty]. Where did you get it from and did that get used?
"I do have an Aloha Strat, which may be slightly hot property! It's my old guitar techs. He had a mate who had a load of dodgy guitars in a basement and I went down there once and offered him a few hundred quid for it and got away with it. It's worth at least 10 times what I paid for it. It's very difficult to keep in tune though because it's pretty old now, but it's got a good sound, really glassy. I think I used that on bits of Falling Away With You and a bit on the verses to Thoughts Of A Dying Atheist."
YOU'RE USING DIEZEL amps for the first time on this tour. Were they used to record with?
"I had a lot of amps set up, though I did mainly use the Diezel. I'd never come across one before and I borrowed one for the album and eventually decided to get one. It doesn't work very well with Diezel cabs though so I ended up using Marshall and Soldano cabs. But the actual head is really good; the most saturated valve sound I think you can get. It doesn't sound like a fake digital thing yet you can get very extreme distortions out of it for a valve amp. As I said, I used that most of the time but I also had a Matchless combo which I used a bit and a fair amount of different cabs."
SING FOR ABSOLUTION has a powerful delay effect on the verse - how was that created?
"That was a combination of things. I think I was using the Strat or the semi-acoustic with a Voodoo Vibe, probably running in to the Matchless. We also mixed it up with a piano so it's a guitar part mixed with a piano - with the piano put through a whammy wah pedal with an octavia effect on it and a one or two beat delay. They're mixed so they're almost morphing in with each other so you can't tell the difference."
HOW ABOUT THE compressed wah sound in the solo?
"That was a pedal that I can't remember the name of - a fuzz wah pedal. I think it's an old pedal from the sixties that's something to do with Jimi Hendrix. It's pretty cool, it's got red fur all over it, a real cheesy looking pedal [probably a Foxx Tone Machine - Ed]. I went from the guitar in to that, then in to a stereo delay going out to two different amps with different distortions on each delay. I used a similar set-up for the guitar solo in Hysteria."
THE OPENING RIFF on the song Stockholm Syndrome is a good example of the futuristic Muse sound. What's the secret?
"Richard found out about this programme, which I'd heard about as well, that can morph two sounds together. It's got a weird computer name like Windows 4.3, something like that. It's a computer programme that is basically banks and banks and banks of synthesisers within a computer generator where you can put any sound in, like a voice or a guitar, and it will recreate that sound using all its internal synthesisers. Once it's done that you can decipher it and break it down in to anything you want. You can put in the sound of a car engine, for example, and then the sound of a guitar and then morph them together to create an exact middle sound.
"What we did on Stockholm Syndrome was, I think, a mix between a synth keyboard going through a wah pedal and the guitar playing straight through a normal amp and then morph them together to create a slightly synth-sounding guitar.
THERE ARE ACOUSTIC sounds on Blackout. So did you actually use any acoustic guitars?
"I used a mandolin on Blackout. I think it was written with that in mind. I spent a fair bit of time in Italy last summer and I think that track was influenced by some of the sounds I heard there - a combination of some of the folk music and some opera. The mandolin is a very traditional instrument there and it seemed like the right thing to go on that song."
THERE'S ALSO AN extremely distorted/ compressed sound that flies over the top of that track...
"Yeah, that was the scratched aluminium Manson guitar DI'd without any amp, straight in to the desk. I think we might have put a bit of delay on it or something, but because it's got its own fuzz distortion built in, when you DI you get a really unusual compressed sound."
ABSOLUTION IS A very dark, desperate sounding record. Did that sum up your mindset at the time?
"I think it was a combination of a few things. I was in a relationship for a while that came to an end a couple of years ago and I'm sure that had an influence. That, in combination with the protests that were going on at the time of writing the album, that whole feeling in London of mistrust in the government and a mistrust of what's going on around the world in general. I had moments where I felt panic about that - and also powerlessness. All these factors created the theme of things coming towards their end and ways of trying to deal with that idea, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. The first song is a very theatrical song and it kind of sets the stage for the rest of the album. It's the most over the top gesture, saying that the world is coming to an end or that you want the world to end. The rest of the album is a bit more down to earth. Falling Away With You talks about past relationships, Thoughts Of A Dying Atheist and Blackout deal with your own death or mortality."
SO WHERE IS the hope?
"There's an inevitability that everything's going to come to an end. The reason I hang around that subject is because I think if you find a way to deal with that truth in a positive way then that is important for life. But there are some songs on there that are positive, honestly! Like Endlessly, which is a basic love song really. Butterflies And Hurricanes is about hope, about trying to find the strength to get through any given situation. Blackout talks about life being too good to last. So I think there is hope in there, even though I'm dealing with generally dark subjects."
FINALLY, DESPITE YOUR success in Europe you've still not broken America. Do you have any plans to?
"Definitely. We had a deal with Maverick over there for our first album, Showbiz, and we went over there before we'd really done anything here. We did a short tour of the Midwest with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Foo Fighters, but we never really got the chance to play any of the major cities there on the west and east coasts. Then Maverick didn't like the second album and we fell out with them."
WHAT DIDN'T THEY like about it?
"They were looking for a radio hit, basically. First they asked us to re-record the album, then they asked us to remix it, but really it was an excuse because they were too lazy to do any work. We fell out with them in the end, which was probably a good thing because we were too busy touring in Europe and Australia at that time. But now we've got a new deal with Warners in the USA, who by a strange twist of fate now own Maverick, so we've got access to that album anyway. We could release it there at some point in the future, but we're more interested in getting this album out there, which I think we're going to do in March or April next year. We've developed as a live band and I think that being a good live act is really important over there. Now we feel more ready than we ever have done to get out there and start playing."