COMPRESSION RECORDS presents SIMONEX

In His Own Words

The main concept behind "Sample This" is to start from sonic source material and then over-process it until it loses its original musical or contextual features. Maybe the keyword for all this is "fractioning"... In fact (as opposed to traditional composition, where the piece originates from a theme that then develops into a larger form) I based the sound on a single familiar riff taken from fragmenting and deconstructing 70's icon songs, edited and repeated over and over.

All of the sound processing has happened through the use of computers and dedicated software and the songs themselves have been deformed and purposely misshaped. Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" becomes a rap/reggae track, Queen's "We Will Rock You" is turned into a contemporary rock/rap mix where the computer itself sings the hooks, and Bob Marley's "Get Up Stand Up" evolves into an electronic metal/reggae arrangement featuring a sort of lecturing preacher coming from a broken radio. The high guitar sound over the riffs in "Smoke On The Water" or in the verses of "Anarchy In The UK" is spliced, gated, passed through a fast auto-pan filter and finally becomes closer to a tremolo part played by the Venus Philarmonic Orchestra. Or the sample of a lucky girl reaching an orgasm is repeated and used as a rhythm pattern over the riffs in "Walk This Way". In general, I treated the lead vocal sounds worse than how an evil sound engineer would treat a Hollywood drummer: over-compression, pitch-shifting, distortion, massive delays are just gentle ways to describe their brutal deformations! The lead vocal part of "Imagine" is pitched down to where you would guess the singer is a bear. On the other hand, the vocals we hear on "Barracuda" have never been sung: they come from the harmonics added by a computer plug-in on top of the single note, almost whispered voice.

Still, I do look for certain specific sounds and characteristics in my main instrument, the guitar. I played a handmade one I have had for ten years on 90% of the CD, tuned one fourth below. Most of the distortion is obtained with a Pod, along with traditional tube amps. But then again, even the guitar sound is often redirected somewhere else, sometimes far from where it started (e.g. during the choruses in "Get Up Stand Up"; the theme of "Do You Feel Like We Do"; Billy Sheehan`s bass in "I Was Made For Lovin' You").

None of this would have been possible without the use of such programs as Steinberg's Cubase and Digidesign's ProTools (where the CPU becomes a whole recording studio) or Bitheadz' Retro and Native Instruments' Reaktor (which turn the computer into a virtual synth). In general, I used whatever I found creative and coherent with the nature of this project: aggressive but ironic, anti-musical and yet well-crafted, and finally a lot of fun.