Mind Your Medium
Getting into a flow state has never been harder with the constant noise of notifications and overwhelming algorithms. These Winnipeg artists take “unplugging” to a new level by removing digital elements of their lives wherever possible.
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The clicks of a tape recorder fill the space on the second level of Kris Ulrich’s home studio. Kris, a Winnipeg-based musician, producer, and writer, writes and records music for himself and other artists out of his studio, tucked away in St. Boniface. Kris sits in the centre of the studio with a boxy silver tape recorder on his lap, playing with the levers. Behind him, the sun shines onto a desk where his recording equipment surrounds the black screen of a computer monitor, reflecting his movement as he fidgets with the knobs.
Despite having a powerful computer and desk filled with expensive new recording accessories, why is Kris is using analogue devices, like an 8-track tape recorder, to record his music? Kris says it all comes down to the creative process.
Begin with Ritual
Many artists find their way into their creative process through hands-on rituals. For Kris, this includes cleaning and repairing his gear. He has recording devices in a range of sizes from handheld to his Tascam 388 that takes up his whole desk and looks like a control panel with over 100 dials and buttons.
Kris uses his Tascam from the ’80s to record music. It has eight different tracks to record audio on.
“It feels like I’m caring for something and trying to keep it happy and alive,” said Kris. “Every time I use my Tascam, I put rubbing alcohol on the heads to clean them. I’ve reconditioned the rubber on the pinch rollers, and I’ve reseated the cards in the board,” said Kris.
Fellow Winnipeg artist Liam Duncan, also known as musician Boy Golden, has his own creative rituals. Over the past five years, he has started every day by writing “morning pages.” Before he does anything else in the morning, he writes three pages in cursive.
“It’s a stream of consciousness,” he said, a way to pull out lingering thoughts and start the day in a neutral mindset. This is the first step of his creative process. As a full-time musician, songwriter, and record producer, his morning pages sometimes lead to a melody or line that he develops over the course of the day, occasionally resulting in a new song.
Liam also uses an 8-track to record. His relationship with his gear comes from a connection to recording history; some of his greatest musical inspirations like Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers used recording set-ups similar to his.
“They did all that shit on tape. All of it, and they’re doing it until it’s perfect because it’s on tape,” he said. Liam cares deeply about the legacy behind the devices he uses in his work.
Material Matters
Zoë LeBrun is a process-based artist who works out of a shared studio space in Winnipeg’s Exchange District. One of her motivations as an artist is to capture invisible touch — the touch we can’t see and don’t often think about, like light touching everything we see, or sound waves hitting our eardrums. Her work is a reminder that snow is touching the Earth and atoms are constantly bumping into one another everywhere we look, whether we see it or not. Though Zoë works with a range of mediums, developing and shooting film photographs has become her go-to format to experiment with because of the ability to manipulate light and the way it touches the things she photographs.
In Zoë’s three-part mixed-medium piece Phantom Pain, she stitched medium format film photographs to the edges of thick wooden frames. Medium format is a larger size of film that retains more details than the popular 35mm film. She layered strips of fabric and gloss gel image transfers to create dimension. The transfers are a way for her to use digital photos but still physically alter them by transferring the picture onto another surface. They look distorted and unnaturally shiny, almost like they’re wet. The piece exudes discomfort and a sense of loneliness.
Zoë describes her art as a labour of love. “The process of developing your own photos is such an intimate process. You cut the paper, handle the machine, and then watch the image appear,” said Zoë. “You can spend so long trying to perfect one print. This level of intimacy is much harder to reach with digital photos, unless you image transfer like in Phantom Pain.” The intimacy she describes is achieved from spending hours on one project, developing a connection to it.
She created the piece for a film class she took while studying fine arts at the University of Manitoba. Her work is rooted in curiosity about the elements that light is connected to.
“If light is touch, and sound is touch, how do we bring the human hand back into it? A collage is a perfect adjacent medium because it can encapsulate a lot of things that are going on all at once,” said Zoë.
While computers have seemingly unlimited options when it comes to altering and editing images, Zoë does the distorting by hand. Purposeful distortion can happen at any stage throughout the photography and development process, from playing with the shutter speed and lighting, to tearing up negatives and chemically altering them during the development process. By keeping an open mind and paying attention to the process, she says she follows the materials, listening to what they want from her.
Zoë’s mission to capture invisible touch aligns well with the film photography and development process because analogue mediums can be physically manipulated in various ways. This type of experimentation would be difficult to re-create on a computer. Working with computers involves more control. Each change is a mindful decision, whereas physically altering elements has a greater margin of risk and surprise.
Kris also likes to use older technology in his creative process. He records on tape machines because older tape recorders and synthesizers echo the sounds he’s attracted to, and he’s drawn to the craftsmanship of each tool.
“I like old guitars versus new guitars. I like quirky drum machines or synths because I feel like they just fit my aesthetic of what I would like to hear,” he said.
Kris bought his first analogue synthesizer — an electronic instrument that generates sounds — while he was working on his friend FONTINE’s first record. FONTINE is an Indie-folk/pop artist from Winnipeg. Kris always used a synthesizer plugin, a software that works through a computer, and a controller to change characteristics of sound during and after the recording process. While the two of them were recording, FONTINE was turning the knobs on the synthesizer to make the changes they wanted to hear, but when Kris played it back, the sound of the nob moving wasn’t recorded. They wanted to capture that sound because it’s a reminder of the human touch that goes into each recording session.
“I was just really bummed. I was like, ‘oh, well, that sucks.’ That was a live performance that was really cool and now we have to go back and recreate that,” he said. This got him thinking about the physicality of the materials around him. Soon after, he set out to buy a pile of analogue gear, including synthesizers, old tape echoes, and analogue spring reverbs.
“They’re noisier and they’re more maintenance to fix, but sometimes they surprise you,” said Kris. Their shared desire to recreate the sound of FONTINE turning the knobs helped him realize how much he values adding in elements of authenticity wherever possible. The idea that a machine could surprise him shifted his perspective.
Time for Play
Kris has been recording and sampling since he was just 14 years old. He recalls figuring out how to record the sound of a camera shutter opening and closing with his SM57 microphone hooked up to a computer running Windows 98.
No matter the software or the gear in his studio, Kris has always had a natural curiosity of how music is — or could be — made. The core of his recording studio is still his computer. He does his final editing there, and not all projects can be recorded on tape because of time constraints. “There can be stressful situations where you really have to do a good job because someone’s paying you to do it,” said Kris. Sometimes a computer can provide more of the control he’s looking for.
“But at the end of the day, having a pedal steel guitar, a synthesizer, a drum machine or a tape echo, is all just because it’s fun,” he said with a grin. “It makes music feel like play and that is really important to me.”
His favourite part about recording in an analogue medium is the accidents that happen in the process. “I find when you’re recording on digital, you can still obviously create happy accidents, but there’s less machine failure, which can sometimes be the absolute sauce on something that leads you somewhere,” he said.
To play is to be open and curious, making it easier to see the “happy accidents” when they present themselves.
In Focus
Liam also takes a hybrid approach to recording and feels the same deep sense of play when he records on his 8-track. For his creative practice and Boy Golden projects, he primarily records on his 8-track because it helps him focus.
“I don’t like having screens in front of me,” said Liam, explaining that when he leaves his phone outside of the studio, he doesn’t get interrupted by notifications.
“It’s a very immersive experience, and it’s really, really fun,” he said. “It feels like you’re playing with a toy. All the stuff is hooked up, and you just get to twist the little knobs and move things around.”
Liam will bring his phone into his studio when he has a specific reason, like recording a video.
“When I’m just in there making stuff and experimenting, I just want to be by myself. I don’t want to think about an audience, or about anything besides what I’m doing,” he said.
Recording on tape machines helps Liam get into a flow state. Despite the efficiency of computer software these days, Liam says he’s still faster at recording on tape because he’s spent so much time on his Tascam 388.
Zoë often sinks into a flow state when she’s making her art. She described this state as an encompassing meditative and relaxing experience where she can think very clearly. Many of her projects involve physically working with tactile items, like the cross-stitching pieces she’s been working on recently. The consistent rhythms of puncturing the fabric and pulling the thread through really draws her in and stimulates the part of her brain that keeps her dialed in.
“I love hearing the methodical sounds that come with each process of art making, like feeling the different textures, pulls, and pushes,” said Zoë.
Many creatives feel more in tune with their gut feelings when they are in a flow state. However, Zoë connects it to listening. She gets to a place where she can ask the piece what else it needs from her.
“You’ve been slogging through the beginning fumblings of an idea and then all of a sudden, it’ll just be there,” she said. “Until that one vital step happens, it is just a pile of parts.” Being present during her process allows her to feel her way to the next step.
On a cold February night just off the Seine River in Winnipeg, Roman Clarke’s small house overflows with laughter, friends, and the sounds of local musicians at an afterparty. At the centre is a piano with a full stereo system on top. Roman is another Winnipeg musician and producer who often collaborates with his friends, Liam and Kris, on projects. The noise in the room softens as he trades his April Wine CD for an Ego Spank disc.
Though Roman records music digitally, he has incorporated many analogue practices into his life that impact his music career. “I listen to the radio. I don’t even use Spotify anymore,” said Roman. He’s been minimizing his phone usage over the last few years and now only uses it for phone calls and messages.
He felt like social media was taking more than it was giving him. He described it as an energy leak. “In the spare moments where I wasn’t focusing, it felt like I was dripping energy in a wasteful way,” said Roman. “When I’m not constantly opening up my phone to look at something, there’s a lot of energy saved for my own ideas.” He said using social media is like having the world reflected back on him, leading him to spend more time focused on what others think of him.
Right in the Gut
Kris compares analogue versus digital recording styles by thinking of it in terms of limitations versus control. With a computer, you have infinite control and can completely remove errors from audio. This also means you can scrub all the character from a sound. Analogue devices have many limitations and give users less control than their digital counterparts, but they become a part of the product.
“I reach for something that’s analogue because I’m looking for it to impart itself onto the recording,” said Kris. Knowing when to scrub and when to let the machine do its magic comes down to trusting yourself as an artist.
“Sometimes I just know in my gut that this is the version of the song that should be pulled down and channelled into whatever medium,” said Kris. “You just suddenly know it’s done. It’s right.”
Liam explains his creative process is like meditation. “It’s just paying attention to the things that come up. When you invent a new melody, pay attention to how that melody makes you feel,” he said. Liam described these “gut feelings“ as knowing something without knowing why you know it. He said it’s a comparable feeling to when you’re full after a meal or you need to take a nap. “Sometimes your body just knows things that you don’t know intellectually,” he said.
Recording on tape is like recording live. If you’re unhappy with the way something turns out, you have to leave it or do it again. He said this brings a different feeling to the recording process. “It requires an extra level of musicianship and commitment, which are the only projects I’m willing to do,” said Liam. Tape machines force users to record a faithful representation of their skills on that day.
Art in the End
When Roman invited a handful of his closest friends to play, engineer, and mix his 2022 album I Think It’s All a Dream, his riverside home was once again filled with talented local musicians. Nine of them squeezed into the living room scattered with equipment, instruments, and cables, to digitally record the album live. Liam and Kris nodded along to the beat on each side of Roman while he strummed an acoustic guitar and sang.
In a digital world where it’s increasingly difficult to sift through algorithms to find authenticity and connection, each of these artists gravitate toward analogue devices. Whether it’s adding the sounds of a turning knob or primarily consuming analogue entertainment, these creatives are drawn to things that have traces of humanity.
Kris compares humans to tape machines: Sometimes we don’t work right, but we are authentic creators of art, which is the one of the most genuine and human things we can be a part of — no matter the medium.
