One of the more interesting things about playing bass guitar in Echo Monster is how non-traditional the whole thing is. I’m not just talking about the actual setup of the project (it’s the first band I’ve ever been in where live performance was not a priority), but in the way I actually play my instrument. I’ve played mostly in traditional band projects where everyone in the band played their parts in support of the vocals. Additionally, my role was always that of a more traditional rock bassist; that is, I played the root notes locked with the kick drum with little room for melodic experimentation.
What makes Echo Monster so amazing for me is that I don’t have to play by those rules anymore. In dub, the drums and bass are it; anything else on top is just seasoning. Traditional song structures go out the window, and the imperative is to create a deep groove for the listener to fall into; I like to call that the “dub”, but that’s my name for it. I get into a trance when I get my dub groove on, focusing so tightly on hypnotizing the listener with the dub that it affects me physically.
When I’m in the lab by myself playing a dub line on the bass, I channel every bass influence I have through the lens of the old dub masters. It’s kind of marvelous to take my bass influences (Eric Avery, Peter Hook, Bill Laswell), my ambient/electro influences (Boards of Canada, Sigur Ros, Aphex Twin), stick them in a blender and pour them into a Scientist-shaped cookie sheet.
The best part comes when I bring my dubs to David. When David starts to saturate the mix with echoes, reverbs, and his expansive percussive toolkit, our songs really taken on a life of their own. They have such a thick groove down the middle, but David makes everything dance in your headphones. Snares and hats come from everywhere the stereo field, making the listener really pay attention to the details while under the spell of dub. Because it’s such non-traditional dub, there’s no elements to distract from the deepness of the dub; the spacedub really comes into its own in our songs.
I think where I was going with this was that when David and I are dubbing, there’s a ton of stuff going on that may not be immediately evident on first listen. But with every passing play, the tracks reveal something new to me, something that wasn’t evident to me even as we were playing the song the first time. It’s amazing how one’s subconscious reveals itself in the technique of the musician.
