Name: Martin Rott
Nationality: German
Occupation: Composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist
Current Release: Martin Rott's Utopian Traveller is out via FerryHouse. Order the vinyl here.

If you enjoyed this Martin Rott interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram. 

For an even deeper dive, we recommend our earlier Martin Rott interview about Sonic Utopias and Negative Realism.
 


From the earliest sketches to the finished piece, what did the production workflow / process for Utopian Traveller look like?

Most of the initial sketches happened while I was inmidst of working on something else or when I wasn’t able to work on anything else (“A Geeks Lullaby” for instance happened during a power outage, short after my grand piano was delivered). This kind of interruptive ideas gathered over time, until I felt the urge to actually actively start working on them, with a finished product in mind.

The first thing I did then in the days intentionally reserved for this work, was to clean up my studio and setup everything ready to go. For some reason I don’t mind my studio being a mess when I’m on a TV deadline as much as when I’m working on solo stuff.

The first steps then were to create a beat using a combination of simple, soft and short classic electronic kicks and foleys as percussion, then cutting a quick arrangement, adding more tracks, till it was early in the morning and I was tired and deaf, but had achieved a layout I felt confident enough to listen to in my car and show to my wife, my brother and some of my close friends.

Another big step was arranging the strings as mentioned and then, after taking a step back through a listening break, working on the final arrangements and mixes, which sometimes meant re-recording the piano or adding performative elements on a drumkit or elements thereof.

Mixing is part of forming the sounds, thus always being part of the artistic process. But to really seal it off I wanted another pair of professional ears in the mix. So I took it over to my studio colleque Johann Seifert’s crib, open to his suggestions on what to feature more or less and run it through analog summing.

In particular the piano and strings benefited from some really nice EMI Zener Limiter and STA-Level compression, to throw tech-nerds a little treat …

How did you go about putting together the sound- and equipment palette for the album?

To help create a shoebox to work within and not loose focus, I wanted to restrict myself to using the favourite all non-digital instruments in my studio: The felted Yamaha Grand, Juno 60, a bit of Moog Matriarch, my 60s Slingerland band set drumkit and string orchestra, which is the only instrument I had to use in digital form while composing.

[Read our feature on Roland Juno 60]
[Read our feature on the Moog Modular]

I knew it had to be chamber size (14 players) because I arranged a lot of divisi parts and I didn’t want to have to do overdubs. Also I was curious whether my arrangements would work in a single linear performance by the orchestra.
 
The piano seems to work as a symbol of tradition on Utopian Traveller. Why so?

Though the popularity of felted (grand) piano seems fairly modern, the piano works as a connection between tradition and utopia.

I believe it will always be a popular instrument, it’s such a timeless instrument, capable of displaying the entire range of the composition.

For me it’s the strings which express the hereditary colour of Utopian Traveller.

One of the aspects I really enjoy about the album are the many different ways you recorded the piano, including a really close-miced version on "A Geeks Lullaby.” Tell me a bit about how you approached this, please.

My main mic-setup on the grand is a pair of Coles ribbons above hammers and a pair of late 70s Neumann KM84s in the mid-range running into very clean open sounding Earthworks preamps. This setup rarely changes, (although I remeber I was still searching for the best midrange mics for my situation and I may have kept some recordings on the album from before I bought the KM84s) - so much for the nerdy part of it.

The most radical sound differences are "felt moderator on" or "off" and I have to admit I actually fitted two more pianos in that shoebox. A really short swedish pianino, wich I like to prepare with masking tape and use for percussive elements - actually the idea for "Ascension" was born here - and my studio partner’s Burger and Jacobi upright, sitting next door.

After multiple attempts on the grand, I decided to move "A Geeks Lullaby" over to the upright, set up a bunch of mics and decided for a mix of Coles, 414s and a mono AEAr84 if I remeber correctly.

Meanwhile I’ve learned about more interesting micing techniques and plan to explore them on the next record, but the placements here again were much standard.

The orchestral arrangements are wonderful and not just a mere sonic support for the rest of the material.

Thanks!

Tell me about your work on this and the interaction with Hugh Brunt and the musicians to achieve these results.

Many of the leading piano or synth parts were written with the strings already in mind, as one would sing the melody of a song, accompanied by piano, I mostly sing the strings lines over the first tracks I’ve recorded with piano and synth. Then I add textures and chords, decide where the strings should lead and where to accompany.

I love the sound of unisono resolving into dense chords including options and suddle tensions and vice versa. So I knew I needed more than an octet to cope without doublings.

I had worked with the LCO Strings sample library for a while and used it to arrange some of the string parts in addition to Spitfires Chamber Orchestra and solo string library, because it includes some articulations, "standard" libraries don’t offer.

Already a fan of the LCO sound and the amazing artists they had worked with, I saw how the LCO was doing remote sessions for an artist I follow on social media.This inspired me to look up their website and ask for a session. As Hugh asked me for some demos first and reacted with compliments, I was glad they also wanted the work to be a good fit, before offering a session.

By the time I sent the demos, I already had programmed my mockups fairly detailed, but I asked Hugh for suggestions on ensemble size, agreed on the exact setup, took it from there, revised the exact orchestration and added notes and marked parts, where I wanted to try stuff that went beyond my mockups but knew the players were well capable of, while creating the sheet music. (I even used their notation house style.) Hugh and his team worked highly professional, everything was prepared to last detail.

When I arrived at Empire Recording, Hugh and I had a brief run through. We layed down the basics and "musts" and still had time to try things out on a couple tracks. Everything was recorded in half a day in 2 3h sessions - the British Union referres to them as "long" sessions. All the while the orchestra was open even to marks expressed in none-musical terms, wich I left to Hugh to translate to the orchestra.

Already as a little kid, I was drawn to all aspects of electronic/electric music but I've never quite been able to put a finger on why this is. What's your own relationship to electronic sounds, rhythms, productions like – what, if any, are fundamental differences with "acoustic" music and tools?

Though I was fascinated by 90s synth workstations as a teenager, I believe, at first it was mainly because they made me capable of arranging songs, rather than just playing one part. I loved some of the warm synth patches, but wasn't enculturated with truly electronic music.

It was 2006 Justice’s "Cross" and Jon Hopkin’s Insides and all his later work of course, where I could really feel the music being expressed through a specific way of production rather than the linear performance on instruments.



I believe the main difference isn’t the sound in itself (as electronic music also can be purely made of acoustic samples and jazz can be played live on electronic instruments), but the rhythmic approach one has using quantizing, looping and slicing. The turning of knobs or certain transitions can be improvised, yet the groove that defines most electronic genres is seldom an instantaneous performance, but a programmed one.

We are working and playing with machines and digits in our everyday life, so I believe for many of us our love for these rhythms is a projection of that reality and we expect art to reflect some of it.