Engineering 'Emotional Technology'
Dance whiz BT's obsessively crafted new album is designed to make him a pop star
BT is lost in his little silver PowerBook, launching a sequencing program called Ableton Live that will allow him to perform pretty much his whole new album using just his laptop. He begins to demonstrate his own proprietary "stutter edit" plug-in program, which he co-wrote specially for his new CD, Emotional Technology. It makes a vocal snippet bounce like a ping-pong ball on its way to rest. "Fucking amazing," he says, sitting on a vanilla-colored couch in his panoramic Los Feliz home studio. "This is way, way cool."
No one is more enthusiastic about Emotional Technology, released this week, than the man born Brian Transeau himself. At home with his Boston terrier Tootsie and his pug Presley, overlooking Griffith Park and gazing at an array of dream gear - two Mac G4s, flat-screen monitors, three racks of processors and effects - the 32-year-old is like a kid in a candy store. He explains how he'll control the stutter edits by using an infrared beam that will respond to his body movements.
"I'm going to sing into the laptop and with my hands go like this" - he karate-chops the air - "and be able to stutter-edit the music live."
The album is just as ambitious as BT's worldwide tour, set to begin in October. It's a showcase of out-of-this-world production techniques that should make the world's top pop studio artisans - Timbaland, the Neptunes, et al. - take notes. The razzle-dazzle array of nu-skool break-beats ("Knowledge of Self"), lush trance lullabies ("Force of Gravity"), and sassy pop-rock ("Superfabulous") features celebrity voices - rapper Guru of Gangstarr, singer JC Chasez of 'N Sync, and actress Rose McGowan of television's Charmed, respectively. But the biggest star of the CD is BT, who finds his voice somewhere deep down on the optimistic "Somnambulist," and on the digital, throwback-to-hair-band ballad "Dark Heart Dawning." The collection reaches for the heavens like a progressive-rock opus, but it retains focus and soul even as it showboats with layers upon layers of digital sound editing, amazing effects, and punchy stops. After working the studio with 'N Sync and Britney Spears, perhaps Transeau wanted to make the statement that he can create the hits on his own. Following a decade-long career of pushing forward new dance-floor genres ("epic" house, progressive, trance, nu-skool breaks), BT is leaving it all behind to become a pop star. Few, if any, of Emotional Technology's album edits will appeal to underground DJs.
"I wanted to make some really personal music and showcase how diverse my influences are," he says. "The intention was to up the bar on a production level, too. There are a couple songs that are melodically simple, but the production is sophisticated.
"I don't have a problem with pop music," he continues. "I want people to hear what I do."
Like crabs in a bucket, some dance critics are griping about Emotional Technology's mainstream aspirations. Despite the clawing, the record is already crossing over, with "Somnambulist" debuting in the Top 40 of Billboard's singles chart. The single has also received airplay on pop station KIIS-FM (102.7) and alt-rock station KROQ-FM (106.7). "We've been banging 'Somnambulist,'" says DJ "Swedish" Egil Aalvik of grooveradio.com and Sirius satellite radio. "We've been playing five tracks off the album. They're all awesome songs."
BT, whose last album was released in 2000, describes spending hours and hours fine-tuning bits and pieces of each track on his Mac G4 just to get the right sound for Emotional Technology. He says he started with a song in his head - often just a melody - and composed around it, frequently with a virtual, MIDI-controlled synth. "While I'm walking or driving, a melody or a lyric comes to me and repeats itself," he says. "I sing it into my cell-phone voicemail or a ghetto tape deck I keep in my car. I never just program beats to write songs. The production process always starts with a completed idea for doing a song." It sounds a bit advanced for a dance artist, but, then again, BT has always been a prodigy, having started playing piano at age two, learning classical licks at 13, and ultimately attending Boston's Berklee College of Music, only to drop out to chase his California dreams. These days, his production schedule is so intense - he's scoring the soundtrack to the forthcoming Charlize Theron film Monster - he's hired a full-time assistant and an intern to help with the more mundane duties. The two young men slice and dice sounds from a downstairs office in BT's home studio, sending strange loops and phrases resonating through the modern box of a home (which has corrugated metal siding). "This sound editing is really extensive," says assistant Mike DiMattia as he sits in front of a Mac.
BT is proud of the extra work put into every note on the new album, too.
"Every single 64th note has been intently combed through, sometimes 50 or 100 times," he says. "There's a lot of attention to detail.
"Music based on technology should be the most cutting-edge music there," he continues. "Everybody in the dance scene is trapped under their own little rock, scared to do something. The people stepping out and thinking outside the box are the ones exciting me right now."
Those people must include BT himself, indeed.
Published: 08/07/2003
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