James Plotkin Meets Gliss

James Plotkin makes extreme sounds. From his beginnings as a thrash and grindcore musician in the 80s in Regurgitation and OLD through his time in the legendary doom band Khanate, he has carved out a career making things sound bigger and louder by pushing electrical systems to (and beyond) their limits. Despite his outsized reputation as a heavy metal pioneer, James does a lot of experimentation and composition using modular synthesis, still always reaching for something he hasn’t heard before. After making some videos showing us how he integrates Gliss into his own system, we sat down with him to discuss his history with electronics and heavy metal, the elusive noise he’s always searching for, and his favourite ways to chase it.

When did you start making music, and did you start off with metal? Or did you arrive at metal through another path?

I got my first electric guitar when I was about, I don’t know, like maybe 11, 12, 13. My father was a musician–a jazz drummer–and he started me off early on a musical path. I was taking piano lessons at four or five and I joined the school band. I played saxophone for about five, six years before getting into my early teens, which is when I started getting into hard rock and heavy metal, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, and then, you know, the typical trajectory: Iron Maiden, Metallica, Slayer, and then way off into the underground. So yeah, I guess I started with heavy music. The first band that I started was called Regurgitation. It was thrash metal, but a little bit faster.

It eventually became the band OLD, or Old Lady Drivers as it was known back in the day, when we were kind of a grindcore band. But it had this trajectory of just getting more extreme, faster. There wasn’t a lot of that music happening at that time, and we were always looking for something. Me and my friends were just looking for something… more. It was always: What’s the next level? And so we started trying to create that next level with a couple other bands around at the time like Napalm Death, Carcass, Intense Degree–stuff like that. Repulsion was a big influence. So it all started in a pretty noisy, chaotic, heavy way.

That opened up a different way of searching for music. You’re not listening to the radio, trying to find out what kind of new music you want to listen to. So the underground became the main venue for finding interesting music, tape trading, fanzines – photocopied fanzines from Europe were a real big window into stuff we would never know existed otherwise.

So I guess the bridge between the typical guitar, drums, bass, vocals formula into synthesizers for me was when OLD started as a band and we sort of shifted over to a more mechanical approach to making music. My first synthesizer was a Korg Poly 61M. I guess it had to be mid-‘80s when I had that. My father was always interested in synthesizers, so he bought a “family” synthesizer in the Korg 61M and he dicked around with it a bit. I moved it into my little workstation at that time and was messing around with that and it just developed naturally from there. When OLD started to get budgets for recordings the first thing I would do would be to go to the local Sam Ash music store and see what kind of affordable synthesizers they had.

We ended up picking up a Roland R-8 drum machine, and that’s what we used for all of the drums on all of the OLD records. You can program it for grindcore drumming. It’ll go as fast as you want it to. And then I found an Oberheim Matrix 6R, and that kind of changed everything for me because it wasn’t like a typical keyboard synthesizer. It was just a rack unit, and I didn’t really have any experience with MIDI or menu-diving kind of programming.

You’re forced to go into menus with the 6R, and that’s when I started to understand synthesis a little bit better and what could be done. I was still young enough where I didn’t have a full-time job at that point, so I had tons of free time to explore that particular synthesizer. We got into sampling shortly afterwards. I think the first sampler I had was a real crappy Roland sampler. I think it had something like three seconds of sampling time. We used floppy disks, and then we graduated to an Ensoniq Mirage.

Once you start dabbling with that type of gear, it either weeds you out really quick or you just become obsessed with it. I obviously became obsessed with it over the years.

Using drum machines to program in grindcore drums is a good hack if you don’t have a grindcore drummer.

Yeah, it’s cool – but we took so much abuse when we would try to play live. It was the late ’80s, and industrial music hadn’t reached metalheads at that point. There was still a pretty good divide there.

We’d be at a show, and the first thing that would happen, before we’d even get started, there’d be some punks or skinheads in the audience that would just start screaming about the synthesizer and the drum machine and throwing stuff. There were a couple of shows where we wouldn’t even start our set before a couple of people would end up onstage trying to push our gear over.

I remember once having to grab a chair in self-defense and hitting some guy with it before all of his friends jumped on me and started beating me up on a stage in a club getting ready to play our set. So it was in retrospect not a good time for it. I don’t think they were ready to hear electronic instruments in a metal or a punk or hardcore situation.

From the earliest distortion pedals, heavy metal has always been on the bleeding edge of music technology. And the first time I ever saw a modular synth played on stage was actually at a metal festival. Even so electronic music seems to be an uncomfortable bedfellow with metal, but now it seems like everyone’s got a modular synth in their set-up. What’s your take on that?

I’m not really a purist when it comes to sticking to the genre formula. Personally speaking, I’m more interested if a band is experimenting a little bit with their instrumentation and their process and their music writing. I know a lot of people that don’t want anything to do with it, and they want to stick to their tried and tested formulas and everything, and that’s fine.

I enjoy a purist metal or hardcore record just as much as anybody else. But it seems like they come from two different perspectives: you either want to belong to some sort of scene and you can build within that scene and reinforce it and come up with really great music that will please a lot of people. Or you want to push things forward, just push the envelope a little bit, try new things – how else are new genres of music created and developed? It’s usually by pushing that envelope and doing unorthodox things with instrumentation and composition. So, I see both sides of it, but I think I’m firmly in the camp of “let’s try something new”. When people are doing that, that’s what gets my interest.

I work on a lot of music for a living. I’m constantly exposed to new releases of different genres. The ones that really grab my attention are like–“Oh, wow, that was an interesting choice, I never thought of doing that before”. It’s to the point where it’s no longer taboo to do that kind of stuff. I just want things to be interesting. It’s hard enough to sustain your interest with the mass volume of music that’s being released these days. Everything’s become extremely affordable to the point where anybody can do it. So naturally there’s going to be so much more content out there to wade through to get to the things that interest you.

When we think about modular, for instance, it’s often such a studio heavy practice. Do you agree?

Yeah, I think so. People are using it for live performances all the time, but it takes a certain type of skill, I think, to even be able to piece together a full live set with modular equipment.

That’s an entirely different part of the format that I don’t really mess with, or at least at this point, the most I’ve done was just figuring out how to use a small modular setup to take care of tasks in like Khanate, for example, where I’m doing it out of necessity more than doing it for creative reasons.

So your stage setup is more like a subset of what you’re usually using?

Not at all. I had to source specific modules for Khanate that I never would have bought. I really don’t have much interest in sampling in a modular format, but it was absolutely necessary for Khanate. It was either build a small setup that I can build into a small Pelican case that’s no problem to carry around or bring a sampling keyboard, which I have absolutely no interest in. I’m really trying to build a system that saves my lower back at this point. As small and functional as possible.

So what do you think the relationship is between modular and things that you make for audiences?

That’s a good question. The modular format is just so ambiguous that you can do almost anything with it. But from where I come from, I use it as a tool for experimentation to come up with sounds that I haven’t heard so much before. It’s definitely more of a studio or even a compositional tool for me.

If I’m just doing it for fun, which is really most of what I do with synthesizers and modular systems these days, it’s more of a hobby than anything else, I just kind of like to create these sort of self-generating compositions that when I’m done with it, I can just sort of step back and let it run itself. It’s almost like an electronic organism. It’s not based on complex mathematics and there’s no concept to any of it. It’s almost like I want it to just be like a creature that’s just flailing its arms around like an idiot, basically. You know, it’s alive, it’s functioning. I no longer have anything to do with it. I’m just standing off to the side, watching it just throw a fit. That’s how I basically look at modular systems these days.

I appreciate avant-garde music, musique concrète, and electroacoustic music. And it’s played such a huge part in the development of my own tastes. At the same time, I don’t have much interest in working on a conceptual level when it comes to patching or electronic composition. I hear so many recordings that are so high on concept and just completely boring to listen to. It’s like, oh, there’s… a 400 hertz tone. I’m sure you have a really big concept behind it, but it’s not exciting to me to listen to. I understand its place in music and art, but it’s just not the way I work, I guess. I like strange sounds. I like the “a-ha” moment when you’ve created some kind of sound.

When was the last time that happened to you?

I tend to come up with things that make me feel like that the most with the Buchla system that I use. And I listen to a lot of Buchla music on YouTube or the classic composers that we all know use Buchla stuff. And as capable as these systems are, I don’t hear a lot of stuff being made with it that makes me turn my head. I mean, everybody uses it a little bit differently, but I don’t hear a lot of people using Buchla to just make completely fucked up sounding patches. Maybe I’m just not hearing the right artists.

When I get the system running, it’s like the first thing I want to do is just – it sounds so immature – but I just want to make completely fucked up sounds with the thing. I just want to create a patch or a generative system where it just sounds like a monster flailing its arms around like an idiot.

So what’s the process there? Like, turn all the knobs to the right, or…?

A lot of FM, I guess. A lot of modulation sources, modulating other modulation sources before it even gets to an oscillator. For example, I’ve always wanted one of the 296E, the spectral processors. Every video I’d see on it, it doesn’t sound great. I know this thing is capable of more than I’m seeing in these videos. But none of the demos or any of the actual real-life use situations I’ve seen made it sound interesting or even good. I plugged it in, and I started FM-ing some stuff, and then ran it through that, and it sounded fucking fantastic.

Why haven’t I heard this from someone else? Is it an immature sound? Is it beyond the highbrow concept that most of these people like to work with? I’m more interested in creating things that aren’t necessarily a cohesive composition in the traditional sense. There’s so much functionality being discussed and features and this and that that you never actually get to the music where it’s like wow that sounds incredible. It’s always something else. It’s always talk talk talk or you know, like and subscribe and I think, “just make some fucked up sounds already”.

One thing I really like about synthesis personally is the opportunity for accidents. How do you deal with that? Like, if you like “fucked up” sounds, is it a process of finding something unexpected and going, “Oh, that’s cool,” or is it just messing around? Is there a formula to it?

Both, really. I’ll be lying in bed at three in the morning, unable to sleep, thinking, “I want to try patching this chain and see what it sounds like.” And then the other half is just happy accidents. Especially with random-based, generative-based modulation and gates – you don’t really know how something will affect the patch until you start patching with it. I think random elements are probably my favorite building block when it comes to modular systems. Most of the time when I come up with something and go, “Wow, this sounds great, I’m really happy I spent the time on it,” it’s usually a combination of both. I’ll start with a set idea, but nothing ever really turns out the way I planned. It starts relatively according to plan, but then once I start experimenting — trying things I hadn’t thought of before, or things where I’m not sure what’s going to happen — that’s when a lot of the magic happens.

Is there an example where you completely surprised yourself?

Yeah, there was a patch I was working on recently with the 200e system. I had a lot of random events in it, but it just wasn’t coming together. So I decided to slave everything to a single randomized clock. I tried it out, and suddenly, this patch that had been stuck for days just locked in. It was almost done at that point. I think if I had thought about it more, I probably could’ve figured out what the results would be. But a lot of the time, I don’t want to overthink it. The idea just pops into my head — “Try it, see what happens” — and boom, sometimes it all falls into place. With that particular patch, the reduction of random elements pulled everything together. I usually introduce more chaos rather than pare things down, but sometimes, simplifying does the trick.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is how chaotic systems need some kind of regularity to give them meaning. Do you ever feel the need to anchor things with something like a clock? Or do you just let everything be completely freeform?

Yeah, I like having some kind of anchor in there – whether it’s a sequence or something else. You can start with a sequence and then introduce variations through modulation. I think my favorite approach is having a theme but introducing permutations within that theme. If everything is completely randomized to the point where nothing repeats, it just becomes noise. That has its place, but I like having something that sticks in your mind. Something that, hours later, when you’re walking down the street, will still be playing in your head.

Do you ever get anxious about unplugging everything?

Oh yeah, absolutely. But it’s also kind of cathartic. So many people start compositions and never finish them, and that’s a common pitfall with modular synthesis. Unfinished music drives me crazy – I have tons of it myself. But at a certain point, you have to accept that a patch is done. Either because you need the cables or because you want to start something new. I’ve had patches sit on a system for a month or two just because I wasn’t sure if they were finished. But at the end of the day, I can step back and remind myself: it doesn’t matter. No one’s going to notice one way or the other. It might just sit on a hard drive until the hard drive dies and it’s gone forever. There’s something temporary about modular compositions. Once you unpatch, it’s gone forever. You better have a recording of it. And even if you do, it’s not really the same. So I live with patches for a while, make the obligatory video, and then when it’s time to unpatch, it’s almost like a ritual. I put on the right music, make sure everything is properly stored, and then stand there looking at the unpatched system. And then, inevitably, an hour later, I’m messing with a new patch.

Do you have an unplugging playlist?

Yeah, certain types of music. Nothing too emotional. Maybe some early R&S Records, turn it up, slowly unpatch everything, put the cables in their right spot.