GOING LIVE - HYBRID'S EPIC SOUNDSCAPES ARE NOW MAKING WAVES IN HOLLYWOOD

Having conquered the dancefloor, Hybrid’s epic soundscapes are now making waves in Hollywood. Ian White caught up with them en route from Heathrow to Swansea.

Hybrid’s journey to fame in the world of dance music started when Mike Truman introduced Chris Healings to a Korg PolySix synthesizer he’d bought in a secondhand shop in Swansea during 1993. Fast forward to 2007 and, after touring the globe for over a decade, Hybrid have notched up three acclaimed albums and over 120 remixes, for everyone from Carl Cox to Radiohead. The epic, cinematic scope of the duo’s music (they’ve used a full orcheatra on each album) has led to them to work with Harry Gregson Williams on scores for such major Hollywood films as Kingdom Of Heaven, Man On Fire, Domino and Déjà Vu.

The duo have now composed their first solo score, for a horror/thriller entitled Catacombs from Twisted Pictures, due for UK release later this year.

Truman and Healings have become increasingly interested in playing live, adding the likes of Alex Madge (drums), Tim Hutton (bass and acoustic guitar), John Graham aka Quivver (vocals), Charlotte James (vocals) and Porno For Pyros’ Peter DiStefano (guitar) to their line-up.

This summer saw the expanded Hybrid play a host of high profile clubs and festivals, including Turnmills, Glade, Audio River and Glastonbury.

We caught up with the duo as they touched down at Heathrow, after playing a handful of US dates and meeting film executives in Hollywood.

Korg Magazine: How was playing live with a bigger line-up this summer?

Mike Truman: Great! I think we had nine people on stage for Glastonbury. We’ve always lent towards using real instruments on our tracks, whether they’re vocals, bass, guitars, drums, strings, or whatever. We wanted to make a point of using the same instruments in the live show and having the involvement of a group of musicians, rather than a pure electronic show.

Chris Healings: The electronics are still the backbone which everything else is hung on.

KM: Will it stay that way?

MT: With the next album, we’re much more into the idea of using mostly live instruments, but processing them very heavily and then surrounding them with synthetic sounds.

KM: When you’re starting a new project, who does what?

MT: Chris generally does most of the sound design. We always start with a large pallette of noises. Chris ploughs away through bits of vocals and anything he can get his hands on, to make new patches in Native Instruments’ REAKTOR or ABSYNTH. Then I’ll do a lot of the beat programming and get a skeleton structure. After that, we work out an arrangment. That’s for an instrumental track. If we’re doing a vocal track, we’ll sit down and write with John Graham and Charlotte James – they’ll come with an idea for a song or we’ll come up with an instrumental idea and they’ll write something to go with it.

KM: How do you recreate the lush, multi-layered sounds of your albums and blend that with the non-electronic instruments you use live?

MT: The drummer has the hardest job because our beats are quite chunky. Alex has learned how to get round that.

CH: Also we have a great front-of-house engineer. For our first big tour with Moby, seven years ago, we thought we’d take everything we used to create the music on the road. So we had two sets of keyboards and two racks with word clock, MIDI and timecode going across the stage. It was a logistical nightmare and stuff would be breaking down all along the chain. It works better now, with a band. It’s sometimes easier to beat information into a drummer than into a drum machine.

KM: So what keyboard and computer set-up do you use for live performances?

MT: We have two Korg TRITONs. Then we have three stereo channels coming out of an iMac, containing bits of the backing with Pro Tools effects and a couple of drum loops here and there. They go into three Korg KAOSS pads, and then to front of house, where we can control them. We’ve been using those for sweep effects, delays and all kinds of odd things. I love playing with them.

CH: Yeah, and it can sound really good on a 60K system!

KM: Which is your favourite keyboard?

MT: I think the TRITONs are my favourite, we’ve had a string of them - they get used for absolutely everything...

CH: And they take a hammering. The small TRITON we have was used on the Moby tour and it still works fine.

MT: It’s on our tour rider that, if we have to have keyboards hired, they must be TRITONs...

CH: You can always get them, whichever country you’re in. The bottom line is that Korg stuff doesn’t break down. That little TRITON is all greasy and covered with Glastonbury mud but it still works.

KM: How about the new Korg M3?

CH: I haven’t explored it thoroughly yet but I know it’ll be great for samples. It’s good to have a keyboard you can put your own samples into because we run some tracks that can’t be played from an iMac. For live work, the less load you can put on the computer, the better.

MT: At the moment, we use Apple’s Logic for live. If you’re using the M3 then you could create more complex patches and have a load more effects.

CH: You could have it as a controller and still use its internal sounds. I could have that keyboard full of the samples I need.

More at www.hybrid-group.com