Here is the interview with Leeb and Fulber from the May issue of Future Music: Main Body SINCE HE FIRST FORMED Skinny Puppy with Nivek Ogre and Cevin Key in Vancouver in the early 80s, Bill Leeb's uncompromising music under the name Frontline Assembly has both delighted and appalled electronic-music fans. The ferocious beats, rocket-powered basslines and downright evil- sounding vocals made the band one of the most attention-grabbing industrial acts around. However, projects released under the names Intermix, Will and Delerium have shown alternative sides to Bill and partner Rhys Fulber's music. 1995 has seen the emergence of the first fully-fledged commercial Delerium record, Semantic Spaces, which softens the abrasive Frontline edge and moves closer in style to bands such as Deep Forest and Enigma. "In Canada it's really become a hit for us," says Bill, sounding rather incredulous."I think it has something to do with the girl on the vocals. We've been getting top-40 radio play and the whole 'heavy rotation on MTV' thing - our first video that's ever done that - so it's really taken off." Bill doesn't think of Semantic Spaces as a compromise, despite its radio-friendly sound and chart success. "Well, I actually put out a Delerium record after I put out the first Frontline record," he points out, "and that had Middle-Eastem voices and was also ambient, but nobody cared back then. It just wasn't hip music. I mean, Gregorian chants - we were using them in Skinny Puppy. Now, all of a sudden, Enigma release one record and people say, 'Oh, you must have been influenced by that,' so we say, 'Well, we were using that stuff eight or nine years ago, but people thought it was too weird.' I guess those people just use the same elements that we're using." A trawl through earlier Frontline albums confirms this - aparticularly fine example being the Eastem Voices track from the album State Of Mind. "Granted, back then things were a lot more primitive," says Bill, "but samplers weren't even invented yet. You just had to take a record and play a Gregorian chant. Even if it was out of tune and out of time it had to work because that's all you could do." These days the Frontline programming centre, dubbed Cryogenic Studio, is a lot more sophisticated (see opposite for a full kit list). It boasts three Akai S1000s stuffed with extra RAM to handle the sampling duties - an unusual choice, since most American and Canadian bands favour E-mu machines. "I'm not a big fan of the Emax," Bill confesses. "The Emulator is kind of neat - we use one once in a while - they've got their own sound. But we've always liked the Akai. I guess it's just whatever you're used to. There's the new Emulator IV, though, which I think is the machine to get now. It's expensive - it's something like $8,000 here - but I think it's the first sampler to come along in four years to rival the S1000 and actually surpass it. For us I think it would be a worthy investment for the next Frontline or Delerium album, because I'm sure all those other guys like Enigma and Deep Forest are going to get about three." Layering it on thick One of the main characteristics of Frontline's music is the sheer size and power of the instruments used. Getting things to sound that big takes a lot of time and effort, but Bill feels that it's time well spent. harder "Basically, what I like to do is load up a bunch of sounds and put them all on to a keyboard until I have 30 in front of me. I'll usually do a bassline first, then come up with a rhythm track. We'll even get intense about the drum sounds - we like to take three or four combinations of kick drums, EQ them and make a sound out of it. We'll faithfully do that with every song. We never get lazy and use the same idea twice." Time spent programming, layering and editing samples contributes both to the creation of the sounds themselves and to the practicalities of transferring them to a sequence. "Most of the synths we have are old analogue pieces that don't have any MIDI," explains Bill, "so, basically, for all those we have to sample each note. After that we double everything and put different parts of a sound behind it until we get a real punchy one that we like. We can spend half a day just getting a sound that we're happy with. The more you do, the more you look for perfection and the more you look for that the harder it is to please yourself kind of like being a drug addict, I guess - you always want more." This type of drawn-out process could invite accusations of Bill and Rhys being 'techno knob-twiddlers', which is something they try to avoid by making sure that their song structures remain firmly in place. "Sometimes you hope that it doesn't take away from the song-writing," agrees Bill, keen to stress the importance of the song as well as the groove. "We get so technical, whereas a guy that writes a song with a guitar concentrates more on the song - he doesn't have to worry about sounds and stuff. We actually have to do both, so in some respects it's a lot more like hard work. It's kind of a weird, slow, building process. We don't just sit there and jam out songs and put them together afterwards. We usually have samples and sounds and one ffiffig will inspire another. We always try and come up with the main groove, like a drum pattem with loops and a bassline, then we start thinking 'maybe we should have a chorus' and things like that." The key elements of early Frontline releases (stark, rigid beats and doomy, minor chord shifts) have influenced many later bands, not least the industrial acts appearing today. However, many of these newer bands are strin stuck in the style of 1988, hammering the same thin-sounding, looped bassline over some songs and a repetitive, rigid beat. Frontline Assembly push the envelope a bit further than most, adding new components and shifting styles to keep things sounding fresh. "We always try to come up with two or three different drum loops to really fatten the sound and give it more of a swing feel," Bill stresses, "because the days of that rigid beat have gone - I don't like it any more, either. Getting that stuff down with the bassline on top, that's pretty fat already - but then we add the keyboards. Usually, with the main groove, we'll write four or five sequences on top of the bassline and drum parts... that's more than most people have going in four or five records." Once a lot of the main programming has been put together by Bill, Rhys comes in to work on the song's structure and chords, creating the massive, dramatic shifts found on Frontline, Delerium and Interinix albums. "Rhys is really Mister Chords," jokes Bill. "He's into the whole jean Michel jarre scenario, so he comes up with the big chords and I come up with the rhythms, basslines and sequences." The next plan is to take the new Delerium sound on the road: something that doesn't fire Bill or Rhys with too much enthusiasm. "For us it's always been a big nightmare," complains Bill. "We have a lot of stuff on stage and getting everything to work takes a long time, whereas with a metal band it's just guitar, bass and drums - you just plug in, sound check and it's over. For us there's more to go wrong. After a while you get used to it. It's like, 'Okay, what's not worldng toriight? Who do we have to phone in the next town to borrow one of these?' We're going to try and make it more of a rock thing this time. With the Delerium thing, we thought all the vocals should be live and Sarah McLachlan's drummer has offered to play. So we would have a real drummer and we thought we'd have a real bass player so it could be totally live - it could almost be acoustic, which would be a real switch." That's certainly true, and it would throw many people's perception of Frontline/Intennix/Delerium into chaos, something Bill would probably enjoy. After all, when did they last take the safe route? Hint: think of the word 'never'. The art of turning a guitar into a real live wire It's the live guitar parts, along with the more familiar stacks of synths and samples, that differentiates Millennium from previous Frontline albums. This involved the band using different techniques from their usual synth layering methods.'Recording guitars is so different from recording electronic gear," Bill emphasises. "it was a real learning experience for us in the studio, because guitarists sound so different and we knew we wanted it to sound a certain way. There's a real art to getting that big Pantera sound, but we think we got there in the end. First you need a good guitar and a good amp, then you have to play each part perfectly four times, run it through a really good console, like an SSL, and through compressors and reverbs. Getting the tone for the guitar can take up to four days." In this situation, it's not just a case of tuning and layering several samples as you would with synths - it's a lot more complex. "If you sample a guitar riff, to make it perfect you have to time-stretch it, but when you do that it means you're changing the pitch and when you change the pitch to correct it you get more noise. It's quite an art, and a lot harder than people think." Nostaigia ain't what it used to be Frontline Assembiy's punch is gleaned from a room full of analogue gear. Bill believes that this type of equipment is essential for the huge wall of sound that characterizes the band's work. 'If you walk into a music store now, most keyboards suck,' complains Bill. "Everybody's got the same sounds. We've got a couple of [Kurzwell] K2000s which I think are very good, but all those keyboards are only good for strings and a few other little things. I think all the digital bass sounds are horrible. The only time you hear that stuff is on really bad techno compilations where you think, 'Jeez, you could have at least changed the preset a bit.' 'I think Oberheim is trying to Put out a few new things, but there's only that one with two voices at the moment. You have to Pay $1,000 to get another card for four voices, so that makes the machine worth like, $4,000. That's just ridiculous. " At the moment, Bill is embroiled in negotiations 'in an attempt to get his hands on a real classic synth a Moog Modular. "There's one we're trying to buy from a school. I've gone there a couple of times, but because it's a school, it's a real nightmare. You have to go through this person then that person. it's a real pain in the ass, but you've got to go and look for it." End E-mail