Eschewing the looped baselines and thundering rhythms of old, Nitzer Ebb have provided yet another twist to the electronic music theme. Maff Evans talks to Ebbhead Bon Harris about spontaneity, jigsaw puzzles and striking guitars.

Since the release of the sequencer-and-percussion-fired That Total Age in 1987, Nitzer Ebb have been shifting through various electronic music themes. Coming from the Mute stable at a time when 'electronic body music' was big in the clubs, the duo found themselves lumped in with bands such as Front 242 and Depeche Mode. However, 1989's Belief, l990's Showtime and l991's Ebbhead albums have made distinctive steps in different directions, enabling the band to shake free of the shackles placed on other industrial outfits. Each album was a milestone in its own right, unleashing classic singles such as Control I'm Here, Lightning Man and Godhead.

The latest album, Big Hit, moves even further from their previous looped-bassline material, with Ebb members Doug McCarthy and Bon Harris bringing in producer Flood and drummer Jason Payne to add a live element to their sound. Future Music caught up with Bon just as the album was completed to find out about the ideas and techniques used on Big Hit.

FM: The album has a very much rockier feel. Was that intentional?

Bon: Yeah. I think what we tried to do is get a more living and fluid feel, and to blend certain elements of live playing and electronic music. It seems the way we'd composed stuff before was very much a standard way of doing it on a computer. You have small fragments of stuff that you like and you kind of glue them together--working with individual patterns. We wanted to get something that felt a little bit more spontaneous and fluid than that--also, to get away from the pre-packaged sound that you can get sometimes working with electronics.

FM: A lot of the guitar effects are very twisted, like those on Depeche Mode's last album. Is that a lot to do with Flood's influence?

Bon: Yeah. Flood's very guarded against anything conventional. If you just sit down with an idea for him that's on a bass guitar, piano or guitar, he's very loathe to just leave it as that unless its simplicity is a good idea in itself. Often with guitars, because certain approaches to them are so over-used, Flood deliberately throws in a tangent to mangle the sound.

FM: So when you write, is it guitar-based?

Bon: It has been on this album. The album started off pretty much as all the others did. We just have an idea, then we probably turn to the synths and start working up some sounds, but halfway through Douglas was getting more and more proficient on the guitar and began to write standard chord progressions, and we'd work from there. That was quite exciting because it gave him a very simple musical backdrop. I think it developed his vocals and lyrics a lot further, being able to accompany himself.

FM: So you came to playing live instruments later on?

Bon: Yes, kind of. We started off with the idea of having the live instruments involved, but they were used more like synths. We'd use the guitar, play one bar of it and have that looping in a sampler, or have a direct-to-disk recorder and chop the bits out that we liked and start treating them. So it was a very jigsaw-puzzle process to begin with. But the album took a long time to make, and we found that as we were going through we gradually got proficient enough on the instruments to be able to communicate our ideas well enough without having to resort to programming techniques at the writing stage.

FM: How has the programming side changed?

Bon: We've got a live drummer now who predominantly plays an acoustic kit and hadn't had that much exposure to sampling and programming before he came to us, so we kind of turned him on to that a bit. But not much of that found its way on to the album, just simply because he was new to it and was picking that up. He was kind of going in the opposite direction to us: he was extremely proficient at playing an instrument already and was learning about programming; we knew a lot about programming and were learning more about playing live.

I was looking more at doing things in real time, doing a whole performance and then sorting through the performances, rather than in the past when we may have got a two-bar pattern and that would be used as a block. We're kind of getting away from that. We're doing whole takes and then just cutting out the mistakes, rather than building up from a very small thing and repeating it infinitely with a few variations.

FM: What equipment do you use for that?

Bon: We still use sequencers a lot. It became a bit of a thing for me to search for the ultimate way of doing it, but I still haven't found it. I'm currently scouring all sorts of obscure software developers and manufacturers to try and find the things that I want. Older analogue synths are always good because you've got all the controls in front of you. Anything where you have to deal with a multi-page environment is probably out, because you get an idea and you just want to be able to reach across and get exactly the sound that you want. Unfortunately, there were certain technologies that weren't available then that have since become available and would have been perfect. One of them is the Lexicon JamMan, which is a very simple little device, but for what we were doing it would have been perfect. Things like that. Things that are really simple, without many functions, that are geared towards you just being able to get your hands on them and change them on the fly.

FM: What do you use now? Do you use a lot of old analogue gear?

Bon: Yeah. My two predominant synths are an old Roland System 100M--a modular analogue thing--and an Oberheim Xpander, but I use various monosynths--like I say, just because they're so instantly programmable. I've got a Roland SH-101, a Korg MS10, and an old ARP Axxe--just very simple monosynths.

FM: Do you still use a lot of sampling technology?

Bon: We'll use samples, but a lot of the time they're used for quite mundane things--if we want a drum loop or backing vocals that we don't want to put down on tape--pretty much for loops. If we get something good on an analogue synth, we'll write down the patch but then sample a couple of bars just to have a representation of it on the track. Quite often the samplers were relegated to being multitrack recorders more than anything else--until we got our hands on a Kurzweil K2000, which we got near the end of the album so I didn't have that much time to experiment with it. That's an excellent sampler. You can go crazy with that thing, so probably we'll be seeing more of that later on.

FM: Some of the guitar parts sound sampled and affected. How were they done?

Bon: We just use a lot of effects processing and unusual treatments on the guitar. If we've got a standard chord progression we'll think about how we can present that in a different way. We've used Ebows and gone through the song a string at a time, and built the chords up that way. We've done other things, like finding out what the chords are and, if there are five chords, just do five passes through the song in open tunings relevant to the chords. At one point we had the drummer hitting the neck of the guitar in an open tuning. We'd go all the way through the song on A and then all the way through on G or whatever, then we'd use a series of mutes on the mixing board to get the actual arrangement of the chord. We'll usually shove them through a Zoom or an H3000 or an SPX90--they're probably our favourite effects units.

FM: So it's all done in real time?

Bon: Basically, yeah. We'll have about five takes of guitar and then just do an arrangement off the board with cuts. Flood's got ProTools for the Mac, so if it was just four tracks we'd stick them into ProTools and cut the performances up and make them into one track. So it's kind of like going for it, doing a bit of a jam and doing lots of editing afterwards.

FM: Does that affect the structure of the songs?

Bon: Not really. It didn't on this album, because we'd have a good idea of intro-verse-chorus-break or whatever, and we'd perform with that in mind. Quite often the arrangements didn't change. If you want another chorus, with hard-disk recorders it's pretty easy to blow all the tracks into a disk editor, edit them up and add another chorus.

I think the watchword with this album generally was a lot of experimentation--we were feeling our way through new methods. I think that on the albums to follow the actual performance will dictate the structure of the songs a lot more. We were trying out new pieces of equipment, digging out really old pieces of equipment that we hadn't used for ages, and using our normal equipment in ways we hadn't used it before. It was pretty much trial and error. I don't think we'd perfected the method by the time the album was finished.

FM: There seems to be a lot more of a natural system on the album--more so than on Ebbhead.

Bon: I think what's basically happening is that Douglas and myself are trying to get more versatile, we're trying to get to a stage where if we want to do a track that uses just looped basslines in the old style then we can do that, or if we want to do a take with absolutely no sequencers in the room and just a tape machine running, we can. Some synths on the album--which is more or less a first for us--were just played. They weren't sequenced. It's played for four bars, then we shove it in ProTools and repeat it. The Korg MS10, for instance--I can't sync it to anything, because I haven't got any CV converters or anything that can do the Korg triggers, so I just had to play it. Flood's got an EMS Synthi, things like that. It can be interesting that you can't do the normal things with it, so you just have to play it by hand and see what happens.

FM: How does this process affect playing on tour?

Bon: The band level is going to be--at a very basic level--extended. We haven't got into the final format yet, but obviously we'll be introducing the acoustic kit, probably bass guitar and guitar in places. Whether we'll draught in individual musicians in addition to us to perform those parts or whether we'll do them ourselves is pretty much a matter of practicality. If it's practical to keep it within a three-piece, we probably will.

FM: Does this mean that you'll be moving away from stuff like That Total Age and Belief?

Bon: I don't believe so. I don't think the time is right to discard those things completely. It's a question of context. I think a lot of these songs still work remarkably well if you look back over the other things we've done, and I think the live show will be more interesting as a record of our progress if we do have the really early basic sort of things in there. I think it's kind of unfair to exclude them for whatever idealistic reasons.

FM: Is there anything that you've got your sights set on for the future?

Bon: I think it's just really making sure that we don't settle for the status quo. We've got kind of a distinctive sound and it could be very easy to get in that trap. I think we've always got to stretch ourselves and take a few risks. We have a bit of a reputation that every album is very different from the last and it takes people a while to get used to them, but when they get used to them they've got more of a long life because it's constantly changing. I think we owe it to ourselves to keep up that tradition.

FM: Do you listen to any of the new industrial crossover bands that are coming up now?

Bon: I do. I spend a lot of time in Chicago, and that's quite a big centre for that sort of thing, so I get exposed to quite a lot of it. A lot of people regard my opinion as important enough to give me tapes and things, so I get to hear a lot of it.

FM: What do you think of the stuff that's happening in that area now?

Bon: One thing that always astounds me is how good a lot of the musicians are--or whatever they are, if they're programmers. I get a lot of young people giving me tapes of stuff and, when I think about how sorted out I was at that age, it's quite frightening how much they know and how good they are. But what always comes through is a slight lack of stepping outside and seeing the big picture and being a bit more inventive. You can see that they're probably imitating a band that they've really looked up to, and unfortunately some of the musical content doesn't go much further than that.

FM: What kind of stuff would you like to see appearing to help your musical direction?

Bon: The main thing on my list of priorities at the moment is sequencing software that is very much performance-based. I'm getting more towards that with all sorts of equipment--samplers that you can drop in and drop out of recording mode without going through separate pages, and sequencers that don't force you to go through editing processes to get the results--basically, fast, hands-on stuff which is immediate to use.

FM: Big Hit (catalogue number CDSTUMM118) was recorded over the last two years in the United States with producers Flood and Al Clay. In Decline is typical of Nitzer Ebb's new direction on Big Hit; it manages to satisfy the hardcore fan element while at the same time demonstrating a mature approach to songwriting.