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Tough enough

How a flaming synth, witchdoctor weed, gear lust and garbage-dump grooves gave birth to Megasoid

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

If Rob Squire, aka Ninja Tune beatscaper Sixtoo, had displayed George Washington’s sense of honesty when he first interacted with Hadji Bakara, their friendship, and thus the Megasoid project, might never have been. Sixtoo was babysitting a vintage synth of Bakara’s while his band Wolf Parade were on the road. “It actually caught fire,” laughs Sixtoo, “because I didn’t know how to use it. I never told him, I went and got it repaired, and it was sorta swept under the rug.”

Something else ignited too. “Our friendship has been based out of a mutual gear lust. It’s mostly a love for analog stuff, although we do implement a lot of digital stuff into the Megasoid thing—digital samplers and laptops sometimes, maybe an occasional digital synthesizer. Whatever sounds tough, basically.”

Sixtoo attributes the birth of Megasoid to two specific things. “One was the infamous batch of shaman weed that everybody in Mile-End got through the delivery service one time,” he laughs, “so the vision for the big modular processing mixer sorta came from that. And then, one specific patch we accidentally wrote one afternoon has sorta become the basis of the main Megasoid sound, which is taking samples and then processing them in real time and cutting them up, using analog equipment.”

The samples in question come from some surprising places. “Some of it is straight-up jacks, same as anything else. If a song’s really hot, maybe we’ll loop a couple of bars up and mutate it from there. For the show we played with Mouse on Mars, it was all records that our friend Sam gave us, which he got from the dump. Then we played with Subtle, and that was mostly ’60s Italian soul stuff, so it was that aggressive lounge sound with really danceable synth stuff that we programmed along to it.”

The jams-from-the-junkyard angle is one familiar to fans of Toronto’s trash-o-tronic danger-dance unit Holy Fuck. No surprise that Megasoid have already collaborated with them. “We’re gonna do a Megafuck record at some point. We’ve got four songs that we recorded, one of them has Subtitle on it. It’s definitely the same approach, having jams and then fucking them up live.”

Scrounged sounds offer certain creative benefits, limitations forcing a more-from-less approach, but Sixtoo sees irony there. “The thing that’s funny is that we’re limiting ourselves with $10,000 worth of equipment on stage—and then taking dollar records and running them through. I guess on one hand, it’s really DIY, and on the other, it’s super bourgeois.”

With Sixtoo and Wolf Parade both gearing up for new albums in ’07, Megasoid looks to remain largely live, and a lark. “The only thing that’s not fun is that there’s so much science on stage that we can’t get trashed before the show, because we’re operating 150 patches at once and sequencing live, so it’s a lot of science to get behind. But that’s half the fun—you patch one thing in and it’s not like software. One thing affects everything, and that’s the beauty of it. We stumble onto things in our live show that we could never reproduce in a studio or, arguably, ever again, if we wanted to.

“It’s not a jam band, it’s responsive improv music with very definitive anchors behind it.” Translating that to layman’s terms, Sixtoo states, “more than anything, it’s just tough dance music.”

With DJ Mehdi, Ghislain Poirier, Hatchmatik, A-Rock, Maysr and Rhys Taylor at Centre Fractal on Sunday, Dec. 31, 9 p.m., $35