Exclusive Interview: Production Techniques Of Infected Mushroom Sound Alchemy

AF: At 1:00, you have some effect on the voice. How do you make that kind of sound on the voice?

Listen to Sa’eed Vocals

Eisen: Basically, we cut every syllable of the word. Let’s say “I feel ashamed”, we cut the “I” and then in the word “feel” we just cut the “f”, the “ee”, and then the “l”. For example, only the “ee” of the “feel” we trigger that one. A really small trigger until we get the pitch, the note that we want.

AF: Yes. Because when you do a loop on it makes special harmonics.(Editor’s Note : the sound is tuned depending on the length of the loop : frequency (in Hz) = 1 / period of the loop (in seconds) – example : To reach a 440 Hz “A” , your loop has to be a multiple of 2.2727 milliseconds.)

Eisen: Yeah. When it’s really short you get these special harmonics. So you need to know the length of the loop that you are doing until you get the right pitch. Basically we do this on every syllable. On “ashamed” there are a lot of them. Usually, on the “s”, the “t” and the “d”, the beginnings of words, the consonants, we keep, we don’t touch them, and only harmonics sound we trigger. It takes a lot of time.

AF: I thought it was a plug-in that was doing that. So you are doing that manually.

Eisen: I hope there is a plug-in. Please give it to me. This is what we do. We did it a long time ago on a track called I Wish. This was the first time we tried doing it – on the album Converting Vegetarians. We did it here again, but only difference is that we put this one through a small distortion. We actually did it because we didn’t have the time to remove all the clicks. We were lazy. When you sample a voice with clicks through distortion, it doesn’t sound like with clicks anymore.

AF: You know Depeche Mode, right? Do you feel some cross influence sometimes?

Eisen: Of course. Listen, we are big Depeche Mode fans. We are very influenced by them. Even from Cities of the Future. It’s very, umm, trying to be Depeche Mode in a way. Sadly we are far from that.

AF: It’s really creative, very different, but we can feel the influence somehow.

Eisen: We like the chord changes of Depeche Mode, and also the way they do stuff is really unique and nice. So we try to do it in our own way but obviously everybody can hear that it’s, you know, stolen from Depeche Mode.

AF: Not stolen but influenced. Now on Project 100, there is a very nice Rhodes piano. Is it a plug-in that you are using?

Listen to Project 100 Piano

Eisen: No. It’s just the Motif XS.

AF: And do you play any specific effect on it? Like an AM/FM modulator on it?

Eisen: There is a fast LFO, I think the LFO is on the panning, if I am not wrong.

AF: OK, so once again it is manual work on the sound, as opposed to a preset. On (the song) Franks, in the beginning there are some really cool chords, like some mean EQ and some overdrive. Let’s listen to it.

Listen to Franks Intro

AF: So once again, what instrument and what effect do you use?

Eisen: I think it’s also the Motif XS going through distortion. This distortion is not that great. Actually it’s with the Cubase amp simulator. I added this onto the Motif sound, but I don’t remember what style of sound it is.