Satellite Turntable Orchestra, Behind the Scenes

Hello Patrons,

I got a request to do a post about the inner workings of The Satellite Turntable Orchestra tour.  

This tour was designed as kind of a companion concert experience to launch the Music To Draw To album series.

(Photo by Christopher Edmonston)

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the album Music To Draw To: Satellite, it was the first in the series and featured Iceland's Emilíana Torrini on several tracks. 

The album was made over the course of several winters. On many of the tracks I recorded several layers of turntable harmonies. When it was time to release and tour the record, I had to think about a way that we could recreate all those layers live. And as I only have two hands, I figured out the best and most fun way to do it would be to task the audience to create the harmonies during the show as an ambient vinyl orchestra!

The idea was that audience members would be seated at individual turntable stations. Each station was equipped with a turntable and a set of color coded tone/harmony records.  I recorded the sounds and effects for these records in my studio in Montreal.  And we got them pressed to vinyl for the audience to use at the show.

This first series was a set of 3 records, with different colors on each side.  Here's the orange record where I recorded tones of wine glasses going through a tape delay.  It also lists the pitch/note/frequency information that it will play at 33rpm and 45 rpm.

I then sent a set of these records to Jamie Stillman, who is the pedal designer genius at Earthquaker Devices. We thought it would be great if he could design a pedal for the audience to use that could further allow people to sculpt the sounds at their turntable stations.

A few weeks later, he came up with an idea for a dual filter effects pedal called an Interstellar Orbiter. 

I was invited to draw some artwork for the pedal!  So I did some scratchboard art à la Space Cadet. Because, well, I love space!

Jamie's pedal is a dual analog resonant filter that has an LFO that sweeps the resonant frequencies of each filter in opposite directions.  

Huh?  

That's exactly what I said when he explained what it did over the phone.  

Although it was preliminarily designed for use in the Satellite Turntable Orchestra, it can be used to great effect on vocals, bass, guitar, drums, and it can be externally controlled via an expression pedal, but I'll have to do a demonstration of that at a future Pizza Break hangout to really get into it.)  For now, just know that it provides the player with a multitude of sound sculpting and modulation effects from subtle to reeeeeally far out! 

So we had these three components, the turntable, the records and the pedal, but how were we going to tour with all of this?  In order to streamline the load in/set up/soundcheck time we decided to bento box the components into one station. We hired my friends at Robocut to build us some box enclosures so we could tour with the stations.

Here are the sheets they cut for us

And here we are assembling the stations.  The robocut enclosures allowed us to store the power bar and all the fiddly instrument cabling needed to connect the pedal to the turntables and speaker.

This is what it looks like when it's all together.  We also wired a slow slope fader inline so that the audience could play with volume dynamics of the entire station.

You'll notice that there is a round light in the top left corner of the station. These are multicolored LED lamps that we can control wirelessly. It is what we use to "conduct" the vinyl orchestra. 

So how does it work?

Our maestro is Felix Boisvert, an incredible artist, composer and performer. Felix accompanies me on guitar and keyboard on the Satellite tour. Incidentally, he is also one of our lead puppeteers on Nufonia Must Fall.  AND he is also an amazing conductor at the Satellite Turntable Orchestra!

While conducting the audience for technique and volume, Felix can also illuminate the lights at the turntable stations in infinite combinations.  ie.  back row stations turn green, front row stations purple, every other row of stations turns off, checkerboard, he can even just highlight one station so they can take a solo.

When the light at your station illuminates a certain color, you find the corresponding color coded record and play it, further adding dynamics and shape to the sound from your station via the Insterstellar Orbiter Pedal, volume fader, and of course... the occasional scratch or two!

But how does it sound?  

Well, do you know those moments at a rock concert, where they ask everyone to hold up a lighter or phone light? And it looks like a venue full of starlights?  Where everyone's contributing a little point of light, but altogether it's a glimmering sea of lights. 

The point of this show was to create the audio equivalent of that feeling. Same theory applies here, everyone is contributing a little bit of sound in the song. As it mixes in the room, it becomes a kind of sparkling ocean of harmony. There are always a couple of stations that are going extra hard on their effects filters, or scratching off beat or playing the wrong side of a record during a cue. But Satellite was all about the sum of the parts.  And those rogue elements actually make the sound more alive in a way.  Like imagine a 50 oscillator synth where some of the voices are wiggling around the pitch. We've found on tour that enough people play pretty tastefully. The audience turntable orchestra does indeed create wonderful dynamics, swells and crescendos in the music during the concert. 

Felix could cue half the room to play the purple record and the other half the yellow record at a different speed, and they could complete the chord at that specific moment in the song (the other instrumentation is coming from our equipment on stage).   

You'll see turntables, loopers, drum machines, analog card readers, guitars, keyboards and effects.  We use this stuff to recreate tracks off the Music To Draw To albums.  

Okay, but what does the show look like?

Ah!  Yes, we save the best for last.  When it was time to create some music videos for the tracks from the albums, I played the record for Karina Bleau. Karina is a wonderful artist who was also one of the lead puppeteers on Nufonia.  When she heard the music, she said "Hey Eric, I work on this other kind of art work that may fit this musical aesthetic. It's with light and matter."  

Huh?

She showed me some pictures of her work and I was completely taken aback by how extra terrestrial it all looked. 

I would describe Karina as bit of a "chemical visualist".  

And when I say chemicals, I don't mean crazy laboratory type chemicals, but just mixing simple household ingredients like salt, water, vinegar, molasses, sugar, cabbage juice.  Part of her tech rider is that she have access to an induction stove element in the dressing room.  She needs this to boil red cabbage to make one of her special visual mixing liquids, or what I call her "space broth". 

Suffice it to say, her work is extremely captivating and otherworldly. If you don't believe me check out the beautiful videos she made for the album tracks Adrift, Fallaway, Collapser, All For You, and Lost At Sea.  

I asked her if she thought she would be able to create these visuals live on stage. 

She thought about it for a second and said she would give it a try.  Here she is during rehearsals at our workshop. Look at all those visual ingredient bottles!

Here we all are on stage at the shows at Phi Center in Montreal.  From L-R, Felix Boisvert, Me, Brian Neumann (our tour manager and camera mixer) and Karina Bleau.  You can see the light table that Karina is working on which has cameras focused on it and are projected in real time onto the screens behind us. 

(photo by AJ Korkidakis)

Here's another view of Karina's set up, this time at OZArts in Nashville, notice the aquarium tank she uses for her visuals for the song Adrift.  

This is  a close up of the tank from our rehearsals at our workshop.

Here's Karina and I during one of the shows.  It looks like we're actually synchronized swimming or something. LOL

The fun audience playing at the Phi Centre in Montreal. 

Here, Karina and I are zoning at another show.  It's amazing how beautifully she can make the visuals move in time with the music.  She's like the Bernard Purdie of chemical visuals!

Bring your kids to work day.  LOL.

Here's a pic of Felix and Karina.  I introduced them to Beard Papa cream puffs in Vancouver which are delicious by the way. 

Here we are setting up at The Art Institute of Chicago before the doors opened.  The moment known on the Satellite tour as "The calm before the calm."  

Gee, writing this post has reminded me just how much I miss touring and working with friends out in the world. The adventures we had playing music together with the audience. Hearing some of the audiences "first scratches" and seeing all the smilies on their faces. This touring concept had really just begun and we had only visited a handful of cities with plans for many more. Looking forward to a time when we can all play together again.

We just need a little patience, I guess.

Stay safe everyone! And thank you for your continuing support.

When we finally get through this pandemic, and the venues can safely reopen,

I'll personally save a turntable station for you...

E

(photo by Sandra Larochelle)