Interview: Synth Wizard and Producer Danalogue
The Comet is Coming, Soccer69, new music and what's next
Hello dear readers. Another Sunday, another interview! This time with the amazing Dan Leavers, ⅓ of The Comet is Coming, ½ of Soccer96, and 100% Danalogue.
First of all, I would like to thank you all for being here again. Da Rabbit Hole is a Sunday newsletter where I write essays, poems, and interview the persons who have inspired me, where I explore the creative journey as a destination, a space for whoever feels a calling to cultivate the imagination.
Photo by Yukitaka Amemiya, courtesy of Danalogue.
I first saw Danalogue playing with The Comet is Coming at a music festival. I’ve never heard their psychedelic, electronic jazz from outer space before. That was my fault, since Danalogue the Conqueror (Dan Leavers-keyboards), King Shabaka (Shabaka Hutchings-saxophone), and BetaMax Killer (Max Hallett-drums) have a solid 10-year career and have toured the whole planet, adorning the stages of Glastonbury, Coachella or the Central Park Summer Stage. Dan and Max have been playing together for even longer under the name of Soccer96, and after inviting Shabaka to improvise with them, the comet was first envisioned. The British trio released an EP in 2015, Prophecy (Leaf Label), which was widely praised by the audience. One year later Channel the Spirits (The Leaf Label) received a Mercury Prize nomination. They got signed by Impulse!, and released Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery in 2019 and Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam last year.
Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam, cover art by Daniel Martin Diaz.
During their almost year-long and final tour, the night they played at Primavera Sound Barcelona, I had a hard time gathering the energy to watch them perform a 4 am gig. However, a friend of mine spoke highly of them and I decided to stay. I’m so glad I did. Two minutes into the show I was dancing and jumping around to their intergalactic funk. I really enjoyed the show, but also I was very inspired by them, especially by Danalogue. As a person who is trying to develop a steady relationship with a keyboard, watching someone as passionate and energetic as Dan playing completely changed my relationship with my piano. Then I realized he is also a producer and I found his Dear Danalogue series on YouTube, “the brainchild of Jordan Copeland”, as he described it, where we can see Dan and his beloved Roland Juno-60 and SH-09 in all their glory building up sonic explorations of questions as deep as what is the source of consciousness or what sound does Donald Trump’s hair make when he wakes up in the morning? How could I resist reaching out? Here is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Da Rabbit Hole (DRH): So Dan, you are getting close to the end of your tour. How are you feeling about it?
Danalogue: We still have a few more shows with Soccer 96, which is me and Max, and finally Bratislava with the Comet. But the feeling is nice because we picked up this year on February the 29th and that week you saw us playing at Primavera, I think we did something like six shows in seven days. And right after the show you saw, we had to be in Switzerland the next day for an early show. So we played at 4 am in Barcelona and we're at the airport at 9 am. Then we went to Switzerland almost straight onto the stage and started playing. A few weeks before Barcelona we did nine countries in ten days. So there was stuff like that going on all year and in the middle of it, you're aware that it's never-ending. There are no breaks. Maybe one day here, two days there. But now it is such a relief we can actually have some time to sleep and do things like go to the dentist.
DRH: What happens if you get sick in the middle of it?
Danalogue: Well, in Amsterdam one of my teeth fell out and I had to get a root canal on my day off. So just for our humanity and our mental and physical health, I think it's good for us to rest.
DRH: Mental health in the music industry is not talked about enough. From the outside, it all looks like so much fun and glamorous with all the traveling, but it also sounds stressful. It sure takes a toll on your health in general, and the health of everyone who is involved in the show. We see three people playing there, but not every band is a three-person operation.
Danalogue: We actually have one of the smallest crews in rock and roll, we're very frugal. It's just the three of us and we have a sound guy out front and one on the stage, and both of them together also act as a tour manager because they're very experienced. At home, we have our managers, but they're not out on the road. From September 2022 on we toured Europe, America, Japan, Australia, the UK, and all the Summer festivals, plus some extra stuff thrown in as well. At the end of the day, I’m happy we didn't cancel any shows for health issues. We fulfilled every single show*. I'm very proud that we managed our energies and no one went too crazy.
But yeah, the thing is the fans see the shows for around one hour and 15 minutes, but some days you don't have more than 20 minutes to yourself before you get on stage because you're all together in the van traveling, and then you're lifting the gear out of the van. Put it all on the plane, and check in. Who doesn’t hate checking in at airports? We do it every day, and then there's the going into the festival every day as well. So the mechanics of the day are actually quite stressful. And luckily we have a great team, our tour managers are chill and professional, so we try to have a laugh but sometimes it dies on the backdrop of only having four hours of sleep. Sleep is very important, and that's something you're missing. Another stressful factor is that you’re in no control. You follow the schedule, but after months of doing it, you're basically like this kind of cattle being prodded around from one thing to another. There really is no glamour. Also, we don’t have time to get to know the cities, we have 20 minutes to ourselves and I'm going to have a nap right there. So you see the airport, the hotel, and the music venue and if you're lucky, a nice bar at the end of the night.
But having said that, it's still amazing. The gig is where you get your energy and your adrenaline and your connection with people, and the fans are so happy that you come and that honestly makes it all worthwhile. I'm not complaining at all, but just to give the backdrop of what it’s like.
Photo by Fabrice Bourguelle, courtesy of Danalogue.
DRH: Thanks for sharing. I have this idea that you're very energetic, at least you are on stage, playing with all your body. Are you like that when you are creating your music too?
Danalogue: I have to admit, it's not very conscious. It just happens and I feel like I get very excited when I'm playing, I just love the physicality. I love the moment of performing. There are some cool keyboard players out there, like Nancy Whang from LCD Soundsystem, she doesn't move at all. She doesn't even smile, she’s super still. And when I watch her I'm just like, “Oh man, she's so cool”. I wish I could be like that.
DRH: I agree. She’s the coolest! I’ve recently watched their Maddison's Square Garden 2011 concert, the one before they took that long break. I’ve watched them a couple of times live, but this show has this last-time vibe and lots of nostalgia, and she actually looks very excited. Anyway, I got carried away. What is it like for you in the studio?
Danalogue: We improvise a lot. Imagining what I'm going to play and also playing two keyboards takes a lot of focus, so sometimes in the studio, I'm more still. Live I already know everything I'm going to play, it's all in the fingers. And then I just get totally encapsulated by the sound and the excitement of our music. I love the old rock and roll bands whose performance is a lot of that. And still today, guitarists are normally jumping around and doing stuff the keyboard players might not, but I never really felt like sitting down and playing a concert piano or anything like that. There are a few extravagant synth players, like Keith Emerson from Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, but most players sit down and it's very like classical. Yeah, I always think synths are different.
Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
DRH: I was very inspired by that. I always thought learning to play the piano had to be very by the book and classical, and there are certain things you are expected to learn and I don't identify at all with it. So when I saw how free and energetic you are while playing, I understood I was treating my keyboard with an unrequested solemnity and I needed to stop. It was liberating. So, thank you for that. We were talking about the studio. What is it like for you to create a song?
Danalogue: I guess this takes a different modality of thought or engagement with reality that… sometimes I connect my ears and my brain right into the sound. And sometimes I'm hearing things that come to me and then I'm trying to channel the sound. It's quite like using your imagination. But sometimes you can feel like a cut-off of a message or something from outside the planet even, and then you're just trying to give it a voice. It's somewhere between a dream state and a psychedelic state; you still have the analytical part of your brain, but that's more to the mechanics of your hands, the chords, and the notes. And hopefully, if you practiced enough, that stuff can just be in the background of the engine. I like creating more subconsciously, and I don’t like to sit down and be like, “Right, so A minor to D minor”. I normally create by channeling all of this improvisation and later on in the studio, I use technology to reconstruct what I played a little bit, which enables you to be creative, to let it all flow, and then later you can bring in the discernment and understanding when you don't need that beat. And what that means is when you're creating, you can just let it all flow and you do not have to worry about anything, even your performance stuff because if something is bad, you can just alter or edit it. So it's a really nice yin and yang process. You just play everything you want and then later you can be a bit more discerning and make some difficult decisions.
DRH: I heard in an interview that you guys tape-record basically for 30 minutes. Do you plan what you're about to do or do you just go there and go with the flow?
Danalogue: Pretty much we go with the flow. In the last couple of albums with The Comet, Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery, and Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam, there was no pre-production, but I did have a rough idea of ‘The Universe Wakes Up’, ‘Unity’ and ‘Summon the Fire’, and on the new album ‘Technicolor’, ‘Code’, and ‘Pyramids’. So I brought some things but I was just waiting for the right moment to drop them. I didn't want to stand around and be like, “Hey, everyone, we get to play this song and this is how it goes”. I hate bands like that. So I just start playing whenever I want and I know the guys are going to play something cool with it anyway, so we just trust each other. I'm sure Max and Shabaka had a few beats in the back of their head and they just played them at some point. We just kind of work it out by ourselves and then trust the others to play something good. It's as simple as that.
Photo by Anna Mitchel, courtesy of Danalogue.
DRH: And what happens during the production phase?
Danalogue: Well sometimes you listen through and you didn't play very well, or maybe it's a bit low-energy, boring, or cheesy thing, and then sometimes we hit the top of the waves by playing nicely, with the right intensity, or it's just cool. And that's fine; you can't be amazing all of the time. Then we chop something out and it becomes a song. Or we just play the same track idea for about 10 to 15 minutes because that gives you enough material to choose from. The production phase is divided into three: One is chopping out, putting back together, and assembling the structure. The second is adding overdubs, like an old classic rock record, you have one guitar on stage, but on the record, they do two to get sounds bigger, and more fun. I do that with the synth. With Max, we do percussion shakers tambourine, claps, or whatever, just cool percussion sounds. And then the third stage is the mix, running things through echoes and reverbs and just enjoying the studio as a new kind of instrument. So that's how you do stuff on tape. But then at the end, all of the tape stuff is on the computer because I don't know if you ever tried cutting tapes, but I feel like that would make the process even longer.
DRH: A long time ago I interviewed R Stevie Moore. He was one of my first interviews. This guy is a genius at DIY, home recording; he’s been doing it since the seventies. I wish I knew then what I know now. I would love to ask him so many things. He told me how he would cut his tapes and create a whole album in one day. He has released over 400 albums, a pioneer of lo-fi. Cool guy. His work is fascinating. Ariel Pink was influenced by him. I think you’d like him.
Danalogue: That sounds incredible.
The Comet is Coming by the great Rubén Marquez
DRH: I follow you guys on Instagram and I saw this very beautiful post by Shabaka saying that he had to learn to listen to other musicians while he was in the studio or playing. And now that you mention that you just get in the studio and play a new record, of course, you guys need to be very mindful of what the others are trying to transmit, and it shows.
Danalogue: Shabaka is great at picking up the tonality and the essence behind what Max or I are playing. And we might be playing something very different from what he's listening to, or what he studied in the past, or not, but he usually plays the right thing at the right time, and it sounds cool with what we're playing. That's a talent, not everyone has. You can be amazing at the saxophone and do an amazing solo, but can you play the right thing for that piece of music? That's much more difficult. It's about taste and having the sensibility of knowing when to play, and when to not play, especially on the saxophone. That's one of his very strong talents. Sometimes it is about not playing. For example, our track ‘Lucid Dreamer’, is very emotionally charged, and slightly dramatic, very sweet compared to a lot of our songs. But Max's beat on it is tough, so our record label asked if we could turn that beat down, and we're like, “No!”, we like it because it has a slight cognitive dissonance providing an edge...
DRH: You are a producer, you know how important it is to respect the artist's ideas and efforts. How do you do it when you are producing someone else?
Danalogue: I produce other people the way I produce my stuff: I only pick artists whose music I love, and I just pretend I'm in the band, like Lunch Money Life or Snapped Ankles. I love the music already, so I don't want to change stuff. I'm not being paid by a record label as a superstar producer; on the whole, they normally approach me to mix the album and make it sound cool, but the way I work is I'm going to get my hands quite dirty and cut around some of the tracks a little bit and maybe add and change some things. I try and hear the heart and soul of the music.
There are different kinds of producers. Some people are like, “Oh, you have to put your sound on it”, like try and make it sound like my music. Those producers have a really strong identity. And then there’s someone like Rick Rubin, who will see between Rage Against the Machine, Kate Tempest, and Jay-Z, but it doesn't sound like Rick Rubin. It sounds like he's trying to hear the heart and soul of the artist and turn it up to ten. That's why I try and hear the heart and soul of what they're trying to do and then try to maximize that as far as it can go. Snapped Ankles’ music is lo-fi, home-recorded, and cool, so I’m not gonna ask them to go to a nice studio as some people might…
DRH: Get into a studio to get this kind of surgical sound.
Danalogue: Yeah. And maybe they do that and they get number one. This is just my opinion, but their home recording sound is really cool, and then I can maybe leave certain elements out, and make it even dirtier, with more distortion, more spring reverb, and more space echo. I don’t want to get in the way of the intentions of their art. If you love a song, then you can normally make a relationship with the track.
Photo by Fabrice Bourguelle, courtesy of Danalogue.
DRH: Is there anyone you'd like to produce?
Danalogue: I know this sounds weird, but at the moment I don't want to produce anyone because I'm making two albums of my own. I want to produce Danalogue, but sometimes it's hard to make time and space for yourself. I love collaborating and working with other people and the camaraderie of it. One thing I find quite difficult is to spend time completely on my own and try and exact my musical vision. But I do have that as a dream in my mind. And because I fear it or find it difficult, that's why I need to do it. I had two people approach me recently to produce records and it would be nice to say yes, but part of that reason would be putting off what I need to do. Subconsciously I was thinking, “If I work on this album, then I can legitimately give myself two months without facing myself directly in the mirror”. So at the moment, I want to meet myself. Having said that, there is a great band in London called Mermaid Chunky, and maybe we’ll just do one single together.
DRH: I'll check them out. Thanks. What can you say about the Danalogue albums you are working on?
Danalogue: I've kind of half-finished one of them. I want to use only synthesizers. It's not a big reveal, but I'm trying to make a record where there's no organic sound, so I have a few rules in place. If there's any voice, it has to be run through this old Roland vocoder that I've got. It has all kinds of drum machines, and essentially I'm trying to make a headphone album that has kind of psychotropic or nootropic qualities to it. I want it to feel like a psychedelic trip. So I'm finding specific sounds in the mix to try and make your brain go into some crazy places. Instead of songs, I'm trying to think about it in terms of trance and then moving from one room to another using frequency, which is the great thing about using synths, it’s all frequencies, and you can pick different placements, and ways to make contact with the ears. Live we have so much energy and it's so propulsive that there's a creative need for me to make something that's very still and hypnotic in a different way.
DRH: Have you heard Jon Hopkins’ Music for Psychedelic Therapy?
Danalogue: Yes. I listen to it a lot on the road. It made me very relaxed on that terrible travel I was telling you about. That's one of the albums that has really helped me.
DRH: I listen to it a lot too, that album changed my life. I'm looking forward to listening to your new album. I’d like to know where the names of your songs and albums come from. Certainly outer space.
Danalogue: It depends. They've come from different ways. During our 12-month tour, just before we went on stage, we just said a word for the gig, and then combined them into a sentence. We've just forgotten some we never wrote down; now they’re just gone in the sands of time. Sometimes it might be a word that we want the other people to arrive at the concert with the right intentionality. Sometimes we say a word if some stuff's been going wrong to make each other laugh. You say something like obliteration, determination, focus, or explosion. It's something just to get us excited. And then whichever the other person says kind of affects what you say. It creates this togetherness if you consider our collaboration as three men combining into whatever that combination is. And sometimes it's similar to making music. I just like listening to the sound of the song after you've made it. The song has its own personality and identity, and then you listen to it and wonder what is this song trying to say. For example with ‘Summon the Fire’, I just felt it is a song for getting ready to face the difficulties in your life, just like that kind of thing. Sometimes you just need to summon this energy, the fire you need in your belly, to meet challenges in your life.
It's like synesthesia, some people can hear colors and sometimes I can hear words that match the sound of the song. Sometimes just intuition, or what’s going through your mind. We named ‘Code’ because I was looking at the art of the guy who eventually made a record sleeve, Daniel Martin Diaz. He's incredible. And I was just reading a lot of stuff that he'd written that goes for his art and just talking about this idea of like DNA, which runs back billions of years down, going backward through evolution, and how we've got such a complex code within us just running in the background that we're not even aware of. We're just so blessed to have it, it's a foundational coding underpinning everything we're doing, whether it's your culture or your community, your language system. You feel like an individual, but you're all of these. So we try to involve the listener with these little clues of what we’re thinking about.
Photo by Franco Rodi, courtesy of Danalogue.
DRH: Another thing I find quite interesting about your music journey is that you are not encapsulated into any genre. What would you like to explore next?
Danalogue: Music is slightly reflective of society and context. If you look at music from decades ago, it would normally fit into different boxes. But now, as a society, due to technology the number of different genres has bifurcated into many different avenues. So now it's more normal for an artist to be touching upon multiple genres. It's fractured into many more complex splinters. And in the same way that so many things in parts of the world right now are becoming more fluid, less regimented, less traditional, and less conservative, music is also doing that. We can enjoy so many more people's voices, different philosophies, and cultures. Via the internet, you can explore every avenue of human nature.
There are genres out there that you've probably never even heard of that have millions of followers, like Dungeons Synth, which is these big metal band members playing some strange, almost like medieval synths.
I still respect and love music that sounds very much within a genre, but now there are different ideas out there. I feel we've been lucky with The Comet or Soccer, I just used the same keyboards and synths, and Max on the drums and Shabs on the sax. So our sounds aren’t defined by the genre but by our personalities and the sonic palette. That gives us such a dexterity to move into different types of composition very easily and fluidly. I also have different passions, like the early techno Detroit stuff that uses the same equipment I use. But then I'm also super passionate about punk rock, rock, psychedelic and krautrock music. It all feels exciting to play to me. So I don't see any reason to not express that.
DRH: By the way, have you heard there's a Comet coming today (September 12th)? It's called Nishimura and it's going to cross the earth from today to the 17th. So in some parts of the planet, people are going to be able to watch it. I just thought it was really fun talking to you the day the comet was coming. (laughs).
Anyway… I’ve read that Shabaka is not playing sax anymore. So what's going to happen to The Comet is Coming now?
Danalogue: I think after Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam came out and we started the second half of the tour this year, some talk about making a new album came out, like “Oh, what would you do on the next album?” And I wasn't feeling in a creative headspace really, our most recent album took quite a long time to make, so I just wasn't super enthusiastic about making a new album. And then we kind of stopped talking about it. I think we all had come into this notion of what we're going to do next and maybe try something different.
But if Shabs is just playing the flute, nothing stops us from making a flute album as well. The possibilities are endless. Or it might be that after a few years of us all exploring other creative avenues we decide to pick up the phone and get together again. So who knows? But one thing worth mentioning is we have been playing together for ten years. And if you think of your whole life span as a human being, that's quite a big investment of time that we put in to make four albums together, three EPs, and we've had a lot of output too. It's one thing being the Rolling Stones and still playing at eighty, but they lived in a period where record sales generated income whilst for us, we can have millions of streams and we can sell loads of records, but that does not generate income, so we still have to tour all the time to make money and to keep the machine of our band alive, which is huge now. And I think for all of us this decision is wise in our life span. Max has young children whom he needs to spend time with. So there are many reasons why it's fantastic that we will explore different creative avenues and make new albums. And also it's fantastic that Shabs is learning a new instrument, which is very nice to see.
Photo of The Comet is Coming by Luke Dyson, courtesy of Danalogue.
DRH: What have you learned from working with these guys for a decade? With Max for even longer than that, with Soccer96.
Danalogue: Well, personality-wise I always enjoy working with BetaMax because he's got this kind of freewheeling creativity, a tap that is always on. When we're producing and mixing The Comet records, Shabaka is normally on tour with his other bands (Melt Yourself Down, Sons of Kemet, Shabaka and the Ancestors), so it's basically me and Max in a studio from the beginning to the end. He always has a crazy idea, and that's really inspiring for me, just to be next to someone who's just continuously coming up with quite radical ideas, always pushing things to be a little bit weirder, which is why some of the coolest parts of the record happen. He’s also very patient… you definitely learn about patience while making a record.
On the other hand, I'm fairly direct: I know what I want and how to make it sound like that. I'm fairly confident in my decision-making and also is Shabaka, so he kind of amplifies that within myself. If I'm playing a cool riff, he might play the same riff at the same time, or vice versa. Or if I'm like, “I think things should be like this”, Shabaka would say something like, “Yes, definitely” and boom, conversation done. I enjoy that. The double confidence amplifies itself into a super certainty, which I think is reflected in our sound.
For me having the opportunity to work with these two guys has allowed me to grow and to keep creating. We haven’t had to quit because no one's listening to us (laughs). Every time we make a new album there is an opportunity to keep learning as a composer, a producer, and a mixer. When I look back on the first record, Chanel the Spirits, which I was making in my bedroom in Brighton, mixing on a pair of old rubbish speakers, and just recording into a little cheap audio interface on my bed, it's been interesting having the opportunity to learn how to mix records semi-professionally and work in proper studios. We recorded in Real World Studio, Peter Gabriel's studio. Now I can make albums in a different way, it’s great spending a few months on it rather than working a job or two and then doing it for a few hours at night. A lot of young musicians would love that opportunity. I'd encourage new artists to keep going and make sure you do find the time. I also had to work and in my spare time, I wasn't going to the clubs and having too much fun. Or I was having fun but playing music at home and trying to make albums, learning as best I could. Now we take it for granted, having a studio and making these albums, but it came from years and years of work. So that's the main thing I feel like we've learned together: becoming what is now considered a band. We were just three individuals looking to collaborate. When you're working with three people like that, you're all responsible for each other, so you take it seriously, you work hard, you don’t mess around. Learning how to be responsible for each other is interesting too.
DRH: That's very beautiful. Your words resonate a lot, I needed to hear them. I’m working to pay my rent and on the side making this newsletter and learning to make music, and sometimes it's hard to find the time, the energy, or the motivation. We're out of time, but I really, really appreciate your time and being so open. I’m looking forward to listening to your new records and projects together and apart.
Danalogue: Thank you so much. Thanks for listening and talking. And I've really enjoyed it too.
* This interview was meant to be published on October 22nd, in honor of the date that would mark the last show of The Comet is Coming before they split. Their last show was supposed to happen that Friday, October 20th, in Bratislava, however, it was canceled in solidarity with Radio Alhara’s Global Strike for Palestine, an initiative to demand a Cease Fire. So respecting the band’s wish to go silent (I cannot imagine how difficult it was for them to make that decision), I respectfully held the publication until today.
Finally, although I strongly believe a writer’s work must be valued -think about it, subscribing to my Sunday newsletter costs less than an overpriced coffee-, I am not using paywalls in my newest content. I trust that, if you appreciate my work and you are in the position to do so, you will upgrade to paid. Thanks a lot to all of you for being here, and for your amazing e-mails, comments, likes, sharing, and reading! I read and cherish them all.
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