PROPHET OF RAGE
Jun 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy
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Engineer Chris Warren made his own plug-in he calls "Disarray Delay" using Cycling '74 MAX/MSP that he used on Sage Francis's vocals. Get it here by downloading the disarraydelay.dll file. A couple of instructions for using it from Chris himself follow. He has more plug-ins available for download at his Website, alloyelectric.com.
1. The (free) Pluggo Runtime MUST be downloaded and installed before Disarray Delay will work (just like your browser needs the Java Runtime in order to run Java scripts). It's available directly from Cycling 74 at http://www.cycling74.com/download/pluggoruntime361.zip.
2. Most of what you need to know to work the plugin is embedded as mouseover hints. The rest can be read by selecting "Disarray Delay Info" from the View menu at the top of the plugin.
“There's this big misconception that I started out as a spoken-word artist and then decided to rap,” Sage Francis says with a rueful chuckle, his mood darkening as he recalls past interviews gone awry. “That grinds my gears pretty fuckin' heavy. I didn't just get into this shit last year — I mean, Wu-Tang didn't start my rap career, you know what I'm saying? I always like to reflect back and show people that there's been a progression, and some of the tracks on this album are part of that.”
Human the Death Dance (Epitaph, 2007) marks a definitive leap forward for Sage (né Paul Francis), whose rep as a redemptive force in alternative hip-hop was officially etched in wax with his humor-laced yet broodingly introspective Personal Journals (Anticon., 2002). And while that album might have been a wake-up call to the asleep-at-the-wheel sloth of the hip-hop “industry,” Sage had already laid the groundwork years before with his own unofficial Sick of Waiting series — begun in 1999 on a shoestring budget that has since sparked the growth of his unyieldingly indie Strange Famous record label.
FINDING YOUR VOICE
Like Sage's more recent solo releases — A Healthy Distrust (Epitaph, 2005) in particular — Human the Death Dance is, from a musical perspective, cobbled together from a wide-ranging mosaic of beats and soundscapes created by some familiar faces (Alias, Ant from Atmosphere, Buck 65, Odd Nosdam, Reanimator, Sixtoo and Tom Inhaler) and relative newcomers (most notably, Grammy-winning film composer Mark Isham). But what really unifies the whole is Sage's daunting display of verbal pyrotechnics, along with a mix aesthetic — brought to the fore by studio engineer Chris Warren — that has one ear orbiting firmly within the gravitational pull of lo-fi ingenuity and the other careening off into deep stereophonic space. Overall, the album flows with a more smoothed-out sound than the distortion-fueled heat of A Healthy Distrust — but it's a move that seems to make Sage's toothy rhymes stand out in even starker relief.
“That might have been part of it,” Sage qualifies, “but for every album I do, I need to mix it all in the same place because it has to have a unifying sound, and there has to be some cohesion involved. With the aesthetic that Chris brings to his mixing style and his EQing and everything else, that's where it all comes together. This record doesn't just sound like a mixtape. It has an album feel to it, which is what I've been chasing from the beginning.”
Back in early 2006, Sage began work on what he calls the “mothership” of Human the Death Dance when he conceived and recorded “Hell of a Year” — a brutally personal tale of a busted relationship. Like most songs that find their way onto a Sage Francis album, the beat originally materialized via the sprawling network of fans, fellow travelers and like-minded beatmakers that Sage has carefully cultivated over the years.
“I have an open invitation to producers to send me music,” he explains, “so I keep a huge catalog of CDs in reserve. A producer named Kurtis SP [based in the UK] sent this beat to me a long time ago, and I really liked it, but I didn't have a place for it right away. When I started writing for this album, and I had the lyrics to ‘Hell of a Year’ worked out completely, nothing I heard was fitting the mood that I was going for. I finally dug out his beat, and it most closely captured what I was after. The [Fender] Rhodes is what really sold me on it.”
The loping, hypnotic funk beat is the perfect backdrop for Sage's remarkably subdued delivery — and it's one instance among many where his deft microphone technique serves him well. By subtly and precisely doubling up his vocals during key moments of the song, he captures a fleetingly slight delay effect that, according to engineer Warren, isn't easily duplicated with outboard gear or effects plug-ins.
“Sage has an unusual voice,” he explains. “It's not a bark that cuts through — he doesn't have that big voice that sits in the 1.2 [kHz] range. But the thing that he's learned how to do very well is layer, and since day one, he's always wanted to put as many things dead center as possible. We do some panning here and there — definitely more for effect on this album than on previous ones — but for the most part it's a straight vocal stack dead center, so you don't even notice just how layered it is. And he can get separate passes so close that they don't have that robotic sound of a delay. They just sound big.”
Virtually all the vocals are recorded at Warren's studio near Sage's home base in Providence, R.I. [see the “Right Coast” and “Left Coast” sidebars, which profile Alloy Electric Studios in Newport, R.I., as well as the recording setup in Oakland, Calif., outfitted by Brendon “Alias” Whitney, who contributed beats and music to three tracks on Human the Death Dance]. While Sage insists he has no preference for microphones — he's more intrigued by the Drawmer 1968 tube compressor he experiments with on his own Pro Tools/Digi 002 rig — one in particular has risen to the top.
“There's one at the studio that we've been using,” Sage says, referring to the CAD Equitek E200 that Warren has modified with various Neumann diaphragms over the years, “but I even like to grab junky little mics like an old Shure SM57 and just get a good EQ on it. I want a more raw sound — I don't want a pristine sound. I don't even like low end on my voice; I'd rather remove a lot of that and just have it be mids and highs. For hip-hop, it just helps the words pop out more, and I think it's more true to my actual voice. I think it's okay to show a little bit of a flaw in the voice.”
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