“It went through multiple stages. The biggest thing was us planning to record in the studio where we finished all the mixing for Max Payne 3,” he says, referring to the videogame the band scored in between albums. “We were on tour with Crystal Castles and found out that fell through due to scheduling. So that threw us for a loop. It all ended up being for the best, but it’s highly unadvisable for bands to wait six years between records.
“The biggest thing for us with this record, with having more experience and perspective, we weren’t going to put it out unless it sounded right to us. The first record [2007’s Health], logistically, we had no resources and did it ourselves. It was trial by fire. Second record, we worked with an engineer, and it came out sounding like a noisy, punk, fucked up record, and I think people liked that about it, but that wasn’t our goal. We wanted it to sound like Dark Side Of The Moon or something. It just didn’t happen. But it was the first time we worked with anybody, and we just didn’t know better.
“We’re obsessive with getting it to sound right. It can be about getting the right people to work with. Once we found that, it went pretty quick. There were things where we said, ‘We’re not doing that. Fuck it. Start over.’ We worked with Andrew Dawson, who did a lot of stuff with Kanye. Then we finished it with Lars Stalfors, who was in The Mars Volta. It was just finding people that understood what we were going for. People who worked in hip hop or pop made sense to us. If you look at what happened in the interim since our last records, the production from FKA Twigs and Arca – all this really interesting music. There’s so much interesting stuff being made by kids with laptops. We just wanted to make a record we felt was sonically relevant today. We’re not interested in putting out a record with our same aesthetic. It would have felt like a ‘Fuck you’ to fans, even though we’re asking them to come with us in a different direction. It would have been worse of us to ask them to wait six years and put out a record that was recorded the same way as Get Color.”
Not only did the task of scoring Max Payne 3 provide a paycheck far beyond what independent outfits typically receive from album sales, but the process facilitated an artistic growth that shaped the direction of Death Magic.
“It did allow us to live, for a while, as far as making money,” Duzsik says. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh we don’t have to work anymore’. People get the wrong impression. What it did do was force us to write hours and hours of different types of music. You’re trying to aid what’s essentially analogue to scoring a film, trying to cinematically bolster the viewer, or in this case, the gamer’s experience. There’s different settings, different plotlines. So we had to generate albums worth of music. We put a soundtrack out, but we made four to five hours of music for the game. That forced us to broaden our sound palette, and that really helped the record. We had to figure out to use sounds that would help the scoring process, and when it was all over, we had this whole new bank to use in the studio on the new record. Added to that, the score is much more melodic. Albeit mostly instrumental, but that also influenced the record.”
Death Magic embraces higher fidelity than Health’s previous effort, which brings a renewed clarity to Duzsik’s vocals – a process that ostensibly seems like a big leap. “It was actually really natural,” he says. “We already made a conscious decision that’s how the record would be. On the past records, we used vocals almost like an ambient component, an instrument that just aided the composition of the song. But no real punchy vocal lines that really go places or anything. With this one, it would have been frustrating if the vocals were buried in that way. The way a My Bloody Valentine record is mixed with Bilinda Butcher’s vocals is in line with the aesthetic. In this case, there are a lot of songs with a lot of vocal and melody. Sure it sounds cool as fuck to have vocals drenched in reverb, and you might be safer that way – you raise the vocals in the mix, you kind of put your balls on the line. But it was a natural accompaniment to the way the songs were written. It was something we didn’t even think twice about.”
BY LACHLAN KANONIUK
