IPOD
RADIO
Ladytron's Reuben Wu
By Erin Broadley
Aug 4, 2008
Ladytron is the last band one would expect to see wandering through the haunted shacks and abandoned junkyards of California's high desert. But in the video for their new single "Ghosts" there is a sun-drenched sinister nature to that environment that suits the British band perfectly. Shot entirely on film, the video follows the impeccably dressed quartet through a dusty landscape of weather worn pianos and broken down vintage cars; a surreal place inhabited by oversized rabbits and where cars speed down the highway with no driver behind the wheel. It’s the video that Ladytron’s Reuben Wu considers his favorite the band has done thus far.
"Out in the desert shooting that was probably my favorite time out in North America. Ever. I’ve never been out there before. I’d driven through Joshua Tree, just exploring by myself, but I’ve never actually been to the high desert," Wu told SuicideGirls. "We were out there or three days and it was so beautiful, the sunsets. It was so cool. The crew were really pro, everything was all shot on film, lots of ideas. It's definitely our favorite video so far."
Recorded in Paris, France, the band's newest album, Velocifero, is an extraordinary collection of dreamy, complex pop songs. SuicideGirls woke up Reuben Wu from a nap to talk about why Velocifero (which means "bringer of speed") is Ladytron's most diverse and cohesive album yet.
Erin Broadley: How are you?
Reuben Wu: Uh, just waking up [laughs]. It’s about 5 pm.
EB:
You lucky bastard [laughs].
RW:
I’m a lazy bastard. This is my second day at home after being on tour.
EB:
Decompression mode?
RW:
Yeah, it’s like coming back down from space; your bones are all fragile, you can’t do anything for yourself, you’ve got to phone your tour manager, “Where’s my lunch?” We were out since May. We were basically rehearsing down in London for a whole month before as well, so I literally haven’t been in my own flat for quite a long time.
EB:
Good thing you didn’t come home and find squatters living there.
RW:
Oh yeah, in fact, where I live it’s quite easy for that to happen [laughs]. I was quite pleased to come back and find everything where I left it.
EB:
How have things been going with Velocifero? It’s been so successful I’d assume it’s been a bit of a whirlwind. I know you worked with Alessandro Cortini of Nine Inch Nails and Modwheelmood on this album. He and I have worked together before so that was awesome to hear.
RW:
Oh, cool. He’s a really cool guy. I think out of everyone in the Nine Inch Nails camp he was probably the one who shared the most with us, I suppose, because his solo stuff is really breezy. It was quite important to us his contribution did a lot of stuff we can’t do, which is mess with all these modular synths. I just don’t have the attention span for that. I like to make nice sounds but it has to be relatively easy. When you’re surrounded by a big wall of sliders and knobs [laughs], the passion kind of gets lost within the technology. But Alessandro seems to be able to do it easily and naturally. So it was cool to be able to work with him. We’ll probably work with him again on the next album.
EB:
You’ve said before that Ladytron started initially as a studio project, a part time gig. At this point, four albums in, doing these long tours, how much of a challenge has it been to bring that studio element to the rowdiness of the road?
RW:
It’s been getting a lot easier. At first it took us a couple of years to get the live performance of the music up to scratch. The studio album was all well and good but playing it live was difficult because there were so many layers and we didn’t have a drummer or bass player. Once we added the drummer and bass player it suddenly became this new level of where we were, which is what we tried for in Witching Hour. The Witching Hour studio album caught a lot of the live performance – a lot of live drums and energy we learned about from on stage. What we’ve done now is we’ve been able to expand the whole studio aspect of the thing by getting more into the production. We’ve been able to take a lot of detail and quite a lot of the subtleties of the production in the live show and, even though we’ve got a quite polished live performance now, I think it sounds a lot more like the record than ever, [while] retaining quite a lot of the live dynamic that you want. We still play everything live. Which is kind of why we don’t and can’t move about on stage that much. It’s always difficult trying to get into the thing while you’re playing three quite cumbersome keyboards. You can’t really move around, which is a problem because you really want to get into it.
EB:
Unless you have a keytar.
RW:
Yeah, but we will never, ever, never, ever stoop to that level.
EB:
[Laughs] I support you on that. You have a love for vintage analog equipment and a lot of what Ladytron does comes down to this mix between using these vintage analog sounds and modifying them with modern technology. What are some of the coolest vintage instruments you’ve found or tricks you’ve picked up through this process?
RW:
Our trick is always to patch everything through pedals -- guitar pedals, overdrive pedals, reverb pedals, all sorts of just weird shit really -- because we don’t really like clean sounding synths. We just picked up these Boss space echo pedals and they’re amazing. They’re based on the old, rolling space echo from the ‘70s. They were basically quite big, cumbersome boxes with tapes inside them so it was like analog tape delay and had real spooky qualities to it. These are like the modern versions of those, the digital versions, so they’re pretty good but they look like the old cool equipment, made out of metal and none of this plastic stuff. There’s a lot of feedback going on now. It’s quite a nice piece of gear to use.
EB:
Is there a lot of room for experimenting with you guys in the studio?
RW:
Well, there’s a lot of playing around in the rehearsal room. Obviously the album is the definitive version of the music, the one that you’re most happy with in the studio, but you’ve never played any of it before, you’ve never gigged with it. Once you actually start playing the songs in front of an audience, day in and day out, then you kind of start learning about bits and pieces of which songs work the best. For example, there was an old song called “He Took Her to a Movie” which we did a live version of and it just became a real dirty, organic rock thing going on, very different from the original which was very sort of delicate, fragile electronica. Everything develops quite a bit.
EB:
Daniel has said that Ladytron is “about songs, not just churning out electronic club tunes.” Have you found it difficult to keep that dialog going with the press or with audiences when it comes to talking about your music in terms of songwriting?
RW:
I think our fans are quite patient… they have quite a lot of attention span. The reason why they’re into us is because of the songs so they’re more likely to sit down and actually listen to it from start to finish. We’re lucky to have this really strong fan base who really understand us. But there are a lot of bands out there that suffer from just having a sound bite or a riff that people listen to… and then they’ll move on to something else. On an iPod you’re just shuffling through… It’s shuffling and it’s surfing and it’s really bad for the brain. I think that should be a setting on the iPod where you have to listen to the whole song before you go on to the next one.
EB:
There should be a class in school where they make kids actually sit still with headphones on and listen to an entire album from start to finish. Just spend some time with it.
RW:
Yeah, exactly. I very rarely just put music on and have it go on in the background. I like to sit down and work through it, really. But I think everyone has understood that we actually have songs from start to finish. Even though we’re seen as an electronic act, I think a lot of people who aren’t normally into electronic stuff are into us because it’s not just about the instrumentation, it’s about actual songs and lyrics.
EB:
Let’s talk about remixing. You’ve said before that remixing other songs is a real creative trigger for you. And that it helps you get going to come up with your own interesting stuff that you can incorporate into your own songs. How did you discover that you liked that about remixing?
RW:
We’ve done [remixes] since we started because we’ve always been a very technically sufficient band. We’ve always produced our stuff, even from the very start. Remixing is like someone giving you a song and you’re just putting some decoration on it or just rethinking something. Most of the time we have a lot of fun. Remixing is almost like you have more freedom to work on it just because it’s not your own song. You don’t feel precious about the music as much. I think we’re getting better and better with remixing as well. The last one we did, I think it could have been the Nine Inch Nails one. We did two for Nine Inch Nails off Year Zero and they were really good.
EB:
Alessandro is great at remixing as well.
RW:
Oh, his remix of “Ghosts,” our new single, is awesome. It’s so cool… really good. It’s not like a banging remix or anything. It’s nicely chosen. Remixing is nice. Obviously it helps when you like the track, when you feel passionate about it.
EB:
Well, hopefully. I couldn’t imagine you going out of your way to remix something you hated. Because then it becomes a situation where you’re trying to “fix it” or something.
RW:
Uh, yeah, we’ve been in a couple of those situations.
EB:
Really? How do you tell someone in that situation that you can’t work with their song?
RW:
Well, I never say no. I always have a go. Obviously when you’re working with music, or anything, not everything is amazing. Sometimes you do a really great track and sometimes another track is so-so. I think we’re quite lucky in that we’ve had really good offers. We’ve been able to do Blondie and Gang of Four and Nine Inch Nails.
EB:
Those aren’t so bad [laughs].
RW:
It’s not everyday when you get to remix artists that you really, really like.
EB:
To wrap things up, you called this album the most diverse and cohesive record you’ve ever done. Why do you think that is? Diverse and cohesive at the same time, that’s hard to do.
RW:
I know. The album works really well as a collection of songs because it was written in a solid working period. We’re basically writing it in breaks, in time off between touring. It’s hard but we were touring for such a long time that we really wanted to sit down and work on new material. We actually came up with about 30 songs so we were able to just like pick the best out of those, the ones that made the most sense in an album, and just work on them. So in that sense, the songs really fit together as a track of 13 but also I think as an album, there’s more within this record than any other album. Very different from what we’ve done in the past. A lot of the new stuff, if it wasn’t for Helen and Mira’s quite signature vocal sounds, people probably wouldn’t recognize this as us. I think in that respect, there’s a pretty diverse selection of songs.
Velocifero is out now. For more information on Ladytron go to www.myspace.com/ladytron and http://ladytron.nettwerk.com/.
Check out the video for “Ghosts” below:
Ladytron is the last band one would expect to see wandering through the haunted shacks and abandoned junkyards of California's high desert. But in the video for their new single "Ghosts" there is a sun-drenched sinister nature to that environment that suits the British band perfectly. Shot entirely on film, the video follows the impeccably dressed quartet through a dusty landscape of weather worn pianos and broken down vintage cars; a surreal place inhabited by oversized rabbits and where cars speed down the highway with no driver behind the wheel. It’s the video that Ladytron’s Reuben Wu considers his favorite the band has done thus far.
"Out in the desert shooting that was probably my favorite time out in North America. Ever. I’ve never been out there before. I’d driven through Joshua Tree, just exploring by myself, but I’ve never actually been to the high desert," Wu told SuicideGirls. "We were out there or three days and it was so beautiful, the sunsets. It was so cool. The crew were really pro, everything was all shot on film, lots of ideas. It's definitely our favorite video so far."
Recorded in Paris, France, the band's newest album, Velocifero, is an extraordinary collection of dreamy, complex pop songs. SuicideGirls woke up Reuben Wu from a nap to talk about why Velocifero (which means "bringer of speed") is Ladytron's most diverse and cohesive album yet.
Erin Broadley: How are you?
Reuben Wu: Uh, just waking up [laughs]. It’s about 5 pm.
EB:
You lucky bastard [laughs].
RW:
I’m a lazy bastard. This is my second day at home after being on tour.
EB:
Decompression mode?
RW:
Yeah, it’s like coming back down from space; your bones are all fragile, you can’t do anything for yourself, you’ve got to phone your tour manager, “Where’s my lunch?” We were out since May. We were basically rehearsing down in London for a whole month before as well, so I literally haven’t been in my own flat for quite a long time.
EB:
Good thing you didn’t come home and find squatters living there.
RW:
Oh yeah, in fact, where I live it’s quite easy for that to happen [laughs]. I was quite pleased to come back and find everything where I left it.
EB:
How have things been going with Velocifero? It’s been so successful I’d assume it’s been a bit of a whirlwind. I know you worked with Alessandro Cortini of Nine Inch Nails and Modwheelmood on this album. He and I have worked together before so that was awesome to hear.
RW:
Oh, cool. He’s a really cool guy. I think out of everyone in the Nine Inch Nails camp he was probably the one who shared the most with us, I suppose, because his solo stuff is really breezy. It was quite important to us his contribution did a lot of stuff we can’t do, which is mess with all these modular synths. I just don’t have the attention span for that. I like to make nice sounds but it has to be relatively easy. When you’re surrounded by a big wall of sliders and knobs [laughs], the passion kind of gets lost within the technology. But Alessandro seems to be able to do it easily and naturally. So it was cool to be able to work with him. We’ll probably work with him again on the next album.
EB:
You’ve said before that Ladytron started initially as a studio project, a part time gig. At this point, four albums in, doing these long tours, how much of a challenge has it been to bring that studio element to the rowdiness of the road?
RW:
It’s been getting a lot easier. At first it took us a couple of years to get the live performance of the music up to scratch. The studio album was all well and good but playing it live was difficult because there were so many layers and we didn’t have a drummer or bass player. Once we added the drummer and bass player it suddenly became this new level of where we were, which is what we tried for in Witching Hour. The Witching Hour studio album caught a lot of the live performance – a lot of live drums and energy we learned about from on stage. What we’ve done now is we’ve been able to expand the whole studio aspect of the thing by getting more into the production. We’ve been able to take a lot of detail and quite a lot of the subtleties of the production in the live show and, even though we’ve got a quite polished live performance now, I think it sounds a lot more like the record than ever, [while] retaining quite a lot of the live dynamic that you want. We still play everything live. Which is kind of why we don’t and can’t move about on stage that much. It’s always difficult trying to get into the thing while you’re playing three quite cumbersome keyboards. You can’t really move around, which is a problem because you really want to get into it.
EB:
Unless you have a keytar.
RW:
Yeah, but we will never, ever, never, ever stoop to that level.
EB:
[Laughs] I support you on that. You have a love for vintage analog equipment and a lot of what Ladytron does comes down to this mix between using these vintage analog sounds and modifying them with modern technology. What are some of the coolest vintage instruments you’ve found or tricks you’ve picked up through this process?
RW:
Our trick is always to patch everything through pedals -- guitar pedals, overdrive pedals, reverb pedals, all sorts of just weird shit really -- because we don’t really like clean sounding synths. We just picked up these Boss space echo pedals and they’re amazing. They’re based on the old, rolling space echo from the ‘70s. They were basically quite big, cumbersome boxes with tapes inside them so it was like analog tape delay and had real spooky qualities to it. These are like the modern versions of those, the digital versions, so they’re pretty good but they look like the old cool equipment, made out of metal and none of this plastic stuff. There’s a lot of feedback going on now. It’s quite a nice piece of gear to use.
EB:
Is there a lot of room for experimenting with you guys in the studio?
RW:
Well, there’s a lot of playing around in the rehearsal room. Obviously the album is the definitive version of the music, the one that you’re most happy with in the studio, but you’ve never played any of it before, you’ve never gigged with it. Once you actually start playing the songs in front of an audience, day in and day out, then you kind of start learning about bits and pieces of which songs work the best. For example, there was an old song called “He Took Her to a Movie” which we did a live version of and it just became a real dirty, organic rock thing going on, very different from the original which was very sort of delicate, fragile electronica. Everything develops quite a bit.
EB:
Daniel has said that Ladytron is “about songs, not just churning out electronic club tunes.” Have you found it difficult to keep that dialog going with the press or with audiences when it comes to talking about your music in terms of songwriting?
RW:
I think our fans are quite patient… they have quite a lot of attention span. The reason why they’re into us is because of the songs so they’re more likely to sit down and actually listen to it from start to finish. We’re lucky to have this really strong fan base who really understand us. But there are a lot of bands out there that suffer from just having a sound bite or a riff that people listen to… and then they’ll move on to something else. On an iPod you’re just shuffling through… It’s shuffling and it’s surfing and it’s really bad for the brain. I think that should be a setting on the iPod where you have to listen to the whole song before you go on to the next one.
EB:
There should be a class in school where they make kids actually sit still with headphones on and listen to an entire album from start to finish. Just spend some time with it.
RW:
Yeah, exactly. I very rarely just put music on and have it go on in the background. I like to sit down and work through it, really. But I think everyone has understood that we actually have songs from start to finish. Even though we’re seen as an electronic act, I think a lot of people who aren’t normally into electronic stuff are into us because it’s not just about the instrumentation, it’s about actual songs and lyrics.
EB:
Let’s talk about remixing. You’ve said before that remixing other songs is a real creative trigger for you. And that it helps you get going to come up with your own interesting stuff that you can incorporate into your own songs. How did you discover that you liked that about remixing?
RW:
We’ve done [remixes] since we started because we’ve always been a very technically sufficient band. We’ve always produced our stuff, even from the very start. Remixing is like someone giving you a song and you’re just putting some decoration on it or just rethinking something. Most of the time we have a lot of fun. Remixing is almost like you have more freedom to work on it just because it’s not your own song. You don’t feel precious about the music as much. I think we’re getting better and better with remixing as well. The last one we did, I think it could have been the Nine Inch Nails one. We did two for Nine Inch Nails off Year Zero and they were really good.
EB:
Alessandro is great at remixing as well.
RW:
Oh, his remix of “Ghosts,” our new single, is awesome. It’s so cool… really good. It’s not like a banging remix or anything. It’s nicely chosen. Remixing is nice. Obviously it helps when you like the track, when you feel passionate about it.
EB:
Well, hopefully. I couldn’t imagine you going out of your way to remix something you hated. Because then it becomes a situation where you’re trying to “fix it” or something.
RW:
Uh, yeah, we’ve been in a couple of those situations.
EB:
Really? How do you tell someone in that situation that you can’t work with their song?
RW:
Well, I never say no. I always have a go. Obviously when you’re working with music, or anything, not everything is amazing. Sometimes you do a really great track and sometimes another track is so-so. I think we’re quite lucky in that we’ve had really good offers. We’ve been able to do Blondie and Gang of Four and Nine Inch Nails.
EB:
Those aren’t so bad [laughs].
RW:
It’s not everyday when you get to remix artists that you really, really like.
EB:
To wrap things up, you called this album the most diverse and cohesive record you’ve ever done. Why do you think that is? Diverse and cohesive at the same time, that’s hard to do.
RW:
I know. The album works really well as a collection of songs because it was written in a solid working period. We’re basically writing it in breaks, in time off between touring. It’s hard but we were touring for such a long time that we really wanted to sit down and work on new material. We actually came up with about 30 songs so we were able to just like pick the best out of those, the ones that made the most sense in an album, and just work on them. So in that sense, the songs really fit together as a track of 13 but also I think as an album, there’s more within this record than any other album. Very different from what we’ve done in the past. A lot of the new stuff, if it wasn’t for Helen and Mira’s quite signature vocal sounds, people probably wouldn’t recognize this as us. I think in that respect, there’s a pretty diverse selection of songs.
Velocifero is out now. For more information on Ladytron go to www.myspace.com/ladytron and http://ladytron.nettwerk.com/.
Velocifero is out now. For more information on Ladytron go to www.myspace.com/ladytron and http://ladytron.nettwerk.com/.
Check out the video for “Ghosts” below:
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