eMusic Selects: Altair Nouveau
Featured Album
Altair Nouveau is one Brandon Mitchell, a young producer of disco-tinged instrumental dance music as in love with 20th-century minimalism as he is with the sound of a blurting Lindstrøm synth. Mitchell grew up with plenty of music around the house, and with plenty of encouragement: His father is an electronic music teacher at a community college, his mother plays the oboe and English horn in an orchestra.
Mitchell’s main love, however, is dance music, and you can hear it plainly in his eMusic Selects EP Dark Energy where he uses machines to construct epic stories, coaxing narratives out of wordless music. With titles like “Street Thunder II” and “Dark Energy,” it’s hard not to build epics in your mind as the tunes pour out of the speakers. We tracked down Mitchell via phone at his home in San Francisco to talk about movies, high-school ska and being mustache-less.
On his upbringing:
My dad is an electronic music teacher at a community college in San Jose, so there were always synthesizers around. He was really into minimalism — people like Philip Glass. That’s one place where I really relate to him. But as far as pop music goes, he doesn’t really respond to it. He doesn’t quite know what to do with it. Whenever I play him pop music he’ll say something like, “Huh. It sounds like they’re trying to do minimalism, but they don’t quite get it.”
On his high school listening:
It was pretty dorky stuff. Either the sort of stuff that my parents listened to, whatever was on the radio or — because it was San Jose, the late ’90s and a suburban high school — a bunch of ska. Yes, I was in a ska band. But it didn’t have the word “ska” in the name. The band’s name was Bob. I’m waiting for the reunion so we can put that on eMusic.
On studios:
I recently moved to San Francisco and was moving from temp job to temp job, but have gotten one where I’m going to stay as long as they’ll have me. I haven’t really been making music since I’ve been here, though, because I’ve been unsettled for much of the time. I haven’t gotten things set up. Right now, I have to take a synth out from under the bed and plug it into some stuff. It’s a little inconvenient, and I’d like to get back to where everything is at my fingertips. Otherwise it’s just a chore to get started.
On musical aims:
When I started making tracks they sounded exactly how the software sounded. Once I got the hang of things I was able to have a phase where I tried to make things that sounded old — that analog, fat, warm tape-saturated sound. I think maybe I’ve finally gotten that out of my system. I want every track to have a melodic or harmonic hook, and not be such a straight-forward dance floor frenzy. (Not that there’s anything wrong with a dance floor frenzy.)
On being a gear-head:
I used to be way more into gear a few years ago. I was always looking to buy a new synth and upgrading my software. But in the past few years I’ve gotten rid of a lot of it, aside from the Juno-106 synth, which I find to be a reliable workhorse. Part of that is not having a lot of space, but I think nowadays that the fewer things that I have, the easier it will be to get to work without spending forever plugging in cables….It’s kind of like if you were in a band and each year you decided that you needed to completely reorganize the drum kit or started to play guitar with your left hand. Why do you want to switch it up so much and make it hard for yourself?
On what he’s been listening to lately on eMusic:
I recently downloaded something from Oblio, which is an In Flagranti side project. And I just downloaded Carl Orff’s Schulwerk which is the music used in [the movie] Badlands. It’s got marimbas, xylophones and sounds very 20th century minimalist, but it’s by Carl Orff. The guy who did “Carmina Burana.”
On DJing:
I haven’t DJ’ed in a little while because I haven’t found any regular gig down here in San Francisco. I used to play disco at a regular party in Seattle every once in a while, but at the big party that I played at down here I started out playing disco and Italo and I was really proud of the fact that I could just switch it to classic rock — because I was playing “I’m a Man” by Macho, and then followed it up by “I’m a Man” by the Spencer Davis Group. The crowd went crazy, so I just continued playing classic rock for the rest of the night.
On soundtracks:
That’s the one thing that’s been constant with me musically. I remember watching Star Wars as a kid, and loving the soundtrack. A major section of my record collection is devoted to people like Ennio Morricone. John Carpenter is one of my favorites as well.
On song titles:
The track “Cosmos” was named for the TV series of the same name with Carl Sagan. “Lawrence of Arabia” is kind of obvious. “Street Thunder II” was named for the gang in John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13, and “Death on Four Wheels” was originally written for a documentary that a friend of mine was making. It was about roller derby, and called Death on Four Wheels on Two Feet but she decided not to use it in the movie, so I just shortened the name to go from roller skates to cars.
On the moustache:
I need to get some new pictures up somewhere, because I don’t have the moustache anymore. I need to get the word out about that. I was starting to think that it was becoming like a novelty character in a ’70s movie. I shaved it off once before, but then I started worrying that I didn’t look as good without it, but this second time … I don’t know. I think it might be gone forever now.
