SOUNDS OF FAITH & DEVOTION
For years, Alan was happy to take similar care over the production on Depeche Mode's albums, but when he split from the band in the mid-'90s, the press release he issued to explain his reasons for leaving stated that he felt his work was being take-en for granted. Though reluctant to discuss this subject in too much detail, he is, at least, keen to stress that it wasn't the amount of work that made him leave: "I wouldn't say the workload soured me in any way. I enjoyed being involved in production and programming; it was something I was good at, so I had no resentment about that. I just felt that it was taken for granted. It's not something I want to dwell on, I just wanted to put a lid on it all. "I feel I'd gone as far as I could within the group. Now, I think im in the ultimate position to work with different people at different times. I've gained the experience and the rewards of being in a successful group, which has enabled me to do exactly what I want now. I've done very well out of the music business, and I don't mean that in boastful sense, but rather that I value it and the advantages it can offer."
       At no time does Alan snipe at or carp about his former bandmates. Aspects of the split make him uncomfortable, yet he will quite cheerily reminice about a particular tour, party or recording session: "I don't mind talking about the Depeche Mode connection at all, because it's obviously relevant to where I am now. However, in two or three years, when I make another Recoil album, it's going to become more tedious to me. I would hope by then that most people will leave it alone."
       When he is asked how it felt to listen to Ultra, Depeche's most recent album and their First without him, he admits it was a weird experience: "I can't hear it in the same way as any record I was involved with, but I certainly don't feel a yearning to be involved again, and I've no regrets about leaving at all. The album is difficult for me to comment on, though I do have something of a stock answer, which is: you can probably work. out what I think about it by listening to Unsound Methods and then Ultra, because the two records tell you everything you need to know about what the musical relationship was between myself and Martin [Gore]. It's almost as if we've gone to the two extremes of what we were when we were together. What the band had before was a combination of those extremes. It had run its course for me - and that isn't me sayin the group itself has run its course. What I mean is that I didn't have anything else to contribute within the band."
       Alan Wilder's time in Depeche Mode saw the band's sound mature into an organic, atmospheric blend of electronics with elements of pop, rock, blues and experimental music. This obviously still appeals to him: "I love that hybrid mixing of styles where you blend electronics with gospel, for example. One reviewer compared Unsound Methods to Paul Hardcastle, saying it was Electro-nonsense or something. This album is so un-electro, that's the thing. There is much more of an organic slant on this than on anything I've done before. To dismiss it as electro-Paul Hardcastle is disappointing, lazy journalism. I think, in fact, it has more in common with Songs Of Faith A7u] Devotion than it does with Bloodline. I always felt that using electronics had some great advantages, but usually at the expense of a certain groove. So I don't want to get sucked into that again. I want to keep the electronics at the appropriate level, Makino sure they have something 0 to contribute, but also Makino sure the sound and atmosphere has a feel and a roundness."
       By the time Wilder left Depeche Mode, after the Songs Of Faith & Devotion album, the ,group had moved firmly away from what had been described as 'plink-plonk' synth pop. Strangely, this led to the band receiving flak- at the other extreme, from synth purists. Alan nods, "There was a criticism levelled at Songs Of Faith & Devotion, that it was somehow a rock album. Yet if you listen to it, it's so far from a rock album, it's untrue. Okay, so there's some live drums and guitars on it - so that somehow makes it a rock album? In the early days, we had silly rules about not using guitars, and then we realised it was ridiculous to have any rules about instrumentation. You could use any instrument if it works. I mean, there are guitars on 1983's construction time Again. With Songs Of faith & Devotion, the songs seemed to lend themselves to a more aggressive, looser feel. Violator [19901 had been a more precise record, although there were a lot of guitars on there as well. Yet somehow it was still very programmed and rigid. songs Of Faith & Devotion was much less inhibited and dynamic, but far from being a rock album."

This process of disinhibition has continued in Wilder's work with Recoil, and is clearly something he welcomes. Alan is the first to admit that in the synth- and sampler-dominated early and mid-'80s, Depeche Mode sometimes went very overboard to get a sound: "By the time we came to record [1984's] Some Great reward we not only had the Emulator, but Daniel Miller had invested �60,000 in a Synclavier which rarely worked - although when it did it sounded great. I think there was a time when Daniel got too involved in the technology: I can remember one particular sound we created for 'Shake The Disease'. The part itself was virtually moronic. It was so simple it was unbelievable; a two-note riff. And we ended up using 24 sounds layered on top of each other, every sound in the orchestra! These, of course, all then cancelled each other out, and the end result sounded like a sine wave! That epitomised how far up your arse you could go.
       "These days I can still use 40 or 50 sounds per song, but somehow there's still space in the music. To me, the details are very important, and I'm not content with guitar, bass and drums as my only instrumentation. If you've got the possibility to refine your music by bringing in a variety of atmospheres and textures, then why not do it? You can draw people into the music even though all the little details don't really make themselves apparent right away. "Depeche Mode spent a lot of time farting around, possibly with too much equipment. We also tried too many ways of doing something that was really very simple. I think one of the benefits of working on my own is I don't have to go through everybody's ideas. I don't have to answer to anyone."
       It's easy to assume from looking at Alan's amazing studio that he's a technology addict, especially when he presses a button and part of the studio floor slides away, James Bond-style, to reveal a basement 'store room', housing a host of older samplers, amongst them an Emu Emulator II, and an original Emax. But, in fact, Alan has a cautious outlook when it comes to purchasing gear, and though Unsound Methods is a dense, dark album sonically, it belies the actual amount of equipment used to create it.
       "I've never really had a particularly complicated equipment set-up," he explains, "Obviously, I do embrace technology, but I never spend a lot of time researching all the latest equipment. I'm like most people, really... get something that works and I stick with it. Occasionally, I update when it becomes obvious I need to, but basically I like to act a set-up that works for me, then I don't think about it too much. I can't stand equipment manuals, so I never even read them. I just find it boring. If you really get too involved in technology you go crazy, because there's too much choice. I try to use tools to their optimum, but if I really took time to fully explore the technology, I would never get any work done!"
       A staple of Recoil's output is the re-use of familiar sounds from Depeche Mode or previous Recoil albums. For this reason, a lot of Recoil's equipment has been around since Alan first started with Depeche Mode.
       "My studio now is made up of bits and pieces I've acquired over the years. I always had things like my Minimoog anyway, and then I'd bring keyboards like the Emulators home. In fact, I was working with the internal sequencer in the Emulator for a while, which wasn't very good, but it was all I had around. In terms of recording, everything was going onto a 4-track reel-to-reel, so it was a very basic set-up to begin with. "The Minimoog is a machine I return to now because there are sounds in there I particularly like for a certain job. I use it for sequencer-type basslines or for a mid-range parts - sort of bubbly synth sounds with a wide dynamic range, using velocity sensitivity. That doesn't mean it's not capable of doing other things, of course.
       "Most of what I'm doing at the moment is very sample-based, with an original source sample providing the sound. I then use the samplers as a tool to manipulate that source sound, and in that respect I always look for an instrument which has really good filtering, time-stretching and lots of possibilities for stacking sounds on top of each other. Those kind of facilities are what interest me. Consequently, I end up using Akais. I prefer them to my Emulator 111, mainly because of the Akai’s better output assignment facilities, and also the fact that you can stack more sounds on top of each other. The EW actually sounds very good, but is a bit limited in that department.
       'l also got fed -up with Emulators because I would purchase one for a lot of money, and then six months later they'd bring out an incompatible new model that rendered mine redundant. I got very angry about that, which is another reason why I ended up with these Akai’s. They seem to do what I want, so I stuck with them." Alan also finds it important to have easy access to the equipment in his set-up. To this end, a Mark Of The Unicorn MIDI Time Piece AV is invaluable. "I use a Korg, O1/W ProX as my master keyboard. All the other keyboards and modules run through the MTP AV. Then I can assign parts to any machine. I've just got one patch on the MTP which allows me at least 64 MIDI channels. I can have 8x 16 MIDI possibilities via the MTP, which is easily enough."
       The heart of the Recoil set-up is Alan's Power Mac running Cubase XT v3.0. His ultimate aim is to run all the tracks, his effects and acoustic parts from the computer, without laying anything to tape at any stage: "I've always dreamed of being able to have everything immediately accessible and totally flexible. In the past, there has always been some limitation or other. I've had to commit my work to a format which allows no room for change later, like tape. Now-everything is flexible - - including the vocals. I'm able to restructure what someone has ,given me, such as a lead vocal, and pick pieces up and move them around.
       If you want to go to the chorus it's simple, there's no spooling, of tape or syncing things up. It's just there. That's why I really love Cubase's Cycle Mode. If I want to work on a two-bar sequence in the middle of a chorus, I can go into Cycle and repeat it over and over, making adjustments as it goes. You just couldn't do that in the '70s!"
       Despite the freedom technology offers the modem musician, it also brings its own unique problems, as the average SOS reader will be aware, and, like everyone else. Alan suffers the occasional technological irritation. "I do find there are drawbacks with Cubase sometimes, in terms of 'syncing over MIDI. Sometimes my drum loops aren't tight enough, but at the end of the day, if it feels good, things like that don't bother me, although by the same token, slight timing discrepancies can be crucial to the 'feel' in a track, and in that respect I often want to put them right. If that makes me seem like a trainspotter then I would argue against that; I'm very conscious of the feel and the groove of music, to the point where I am almost obsessed by it. Not because I want everything regimented, but because I want to optimise that aspect."
       Although the developments in direct-to-disk recording are the best thing to happen to the recording studio since the invention of the tape-based multitrack, Alan is aware he still hasn't put together his ideal set-up: There is so much technology out there which is better than what I'm using at present. This is probably because I haven't got the patience to explore it all. My ideal set-up would be if I could do everything with just the computer as long as it could still give me the sound of all that brilliant outboard gear, the valve compression, amplification, and EQ... but in software, in a computer based format.
       I'm not that far off having that capability, but I do need to refine my set-up a little bit, so that with the next album I won't have to pick up my studio and transport it to a 'not-very good' commercial studio with an automated desk and a more controlled sound, spending lots of money in the process, which was what I had to do on this particular album."
       Later in the evening, as Alan Wilder stretches out on his living room floor, relaxing with his family, I beam to wonder if this is the same man responsible for an album full of darkness and barely concealed violence. But he shrugs this off: "Martin always thought there was a lot of humour in Depeche Mode's music. I didn't think so particularly, although the people themselves were funny and humorous. I don't understand why it is you have to be like your music, or why making music which reflects your own personality is important. The darker sides of people's characters are much more interesting than the side They let you see. I heard a member of a particularly well-known band ask recently why it is that people always assume that just because you're in a band with two or three other people, you must all be great buddies?
       "It doesn't necessarily follow that you have to be great friends to have a Good working relationship. And you don't have to be a certain kind of person to make a certain kind of music. What's wrong, with being observational? A filmmaker can tell a story, he doesn't have to live the life. Mike Leigh observes the entire class system; he doesn't have to put himself on the screen. I was in a band that wrote melodic pop songs - if I don't do that, is everything I do now a failure?" The darkness at the heart of Unsound Methods is almost relentless, which seems to be exactly what was intended.
       Alan agrees with this heartily: "In the end, it's a solid body of work that has a continuity and seems to subconsciously deal with the same thing over and over again; this idea of obsession, no matter how that manifests itself. I'm not an obsessive character, so it's intriguing that I should have an interest in subjects which revolve about that." He mulls this over for a second and adds, "It's obviously something I need to act out somehow, bearing in mind I don't write the words to these songs. Nevertheless, the atmosphere and subject matter still comes from me. It's just a side of life that interests me more than writing about having babies."

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