Knowledge _ Interview with Dadub

So, do you sit down and make music together then?  Do you guys live together as well?

Daniele: No, it’s enough to work together haha. No, even now, working together, it’s completely natural. After all these years, the sounds and all the loops that we have, we can’t say whose work it is. Giovanni might have given it to me and I worked on it and gave it back. I think each track has its own history. There is never a precise path.

Giovanni: At the beginning of the composition or when we are making loops, we don’t work together. If we were together in the moment of inspiration maybe I would see things in one way and Daniele would see things in another. The middle point doesn’t work. So we try to put down ideas separately and then sit down in the studio to try and bring this core idea together but without  destroying the good parts.

Daniele: It took time. We were quite stressed on one track and I wasn’t understanding the work Giovanni was doing..

Giovanni: haha

Daniele: The wisest thing to do was for me to leave the studio. When I came back, I heard an amazing track. I wasn’t feeling the global view of the inspiration that was happening within Giovanni, so recognising this was precious.

And it keeps you friends as well haha

Giovanni & Daniele: Yes hahaha

Giovanni: When you feel inspired, you have something in your mind, a feeling that is not always easy to translate into words. If you have to work with someone else, the only way you have to share this feeling is through words. The moment you try to put your vision into words you are already changing it. In a way you are diluting it or wasting time trying to express something that is in one domain, by translating it into another. The translation itself doesn’t work, so what you communicate is not what you really had in mind.

Daniele: hahaha

Giovanni: The chain all fucks up then haha. I think music should speak for itself. The words that we use to describe it are not natural. It’s like trying to put a triangle into a square or dancing with architecture.

Just moving on to something else.. I know you come from a programming background. Will we ever see a plugin from you guys? I’m thinking about The Waves Dadub Mastering Suite Collection? haha

Daniele: The Dadubizer. Hahaha

Haha – or you were talking before about Max – maybe something in that?

Daniele: Hmmm.. Well, there is one plugin in Reaktor that we used in a few tracks that is available online. Giovanni is the man to talk to about Max though..

Dadub’s Reaktor Ensemble is available to download here

Giovanni: The chain of effects that I use when I play live is in part a consequence of the software that I developed for my university thesis. At the beginning it was real time noise masking software. I was putting microphones on the street to capture the noise of traffic and then analysing the noise with psycho-acoustic functions. I was getting numerical values that I was feeding to reverbs, delays and to meta compositional algorithms. I had an archive of hours of music.. and I was getting samples from it and they were arranged in real time depending on the values extracted from the analysis of the noise. At the same time, the sounds were processed through a chain of effects. The sound was continuously following the noise of the street and then played back onto the street. So it was a layer of music that was covering the traffic noise. The way I conceived the software, you could throw thousands of sounds into a folder and the software would choose them depending on the qualities of the traffic noise.

I was working for a company at the time and the chief stole my software and sold it to another company. He didn’t want to pay me anything for it.