Posted Date: November 2006

Onbeat corners Underworld’s ever busy frontman Karl Hyde to find out how much he’s been blinded by science.

Interview by: Thomas Cesa

To many music listeners, electronic artists are studio freaks who reside in underground lairs, surrounding themselves with wires, flash tubes, microchips and monitors. They prefer the warmth of a hard drive to the sun, communicating with the outside world in coded inscription and abstract visuals. Rather then attempt distancing themselves from this, Underworld’s Karl Hyde and Rick Smith embrace all the tools which compliment the geeky-scientist image of the electronic artist and turned them around to create an organic, cultural movement. From their own recent downloadable musical output (the brilliantly epic Riverrun series) to the award-winning art collective Tomato, the duo has proven that technology is not a stake in the heart of our music industry. Rather, it affords them the ability to take on outside projects while staying connected to their fans and even members of their extended creative family.

Onbeat: Hey Karl, how you doing?

Karl Hyde: I’m doing good man, how are you?

OB: Good.

KH: Where abouts are you?

OB: New York, and you?

KH: Somewhere in the wilds of Essex.

OB: Ah, must be nice. “Freedom” seems to be a word you’re using lately to sum up Underworld. What does freedom mean to you these days?

KH: Choice to release material when we feel it’s right. The choice to keep doors open and work with other people...the flexibility to work on several projects simultaneously, because of the new team that we work with who understand what Rick and I have been going on about for years. More than anything, the Internet and facilities given to us to publish work from music to books and all the other stuff we do everyday…that is the greatest freedom, really.

OB: You have always been ahead of the curve when it comes to online presence. Has your activity come out of necessity because of the [music] business or from a general curiosity of pushing existing technologies?

KH: I think both—more necessity, because we were feeling on a trajectory to end up on a treadmill. Up ahead, we could see ‘make an album, promote an album’ was becoming repetitive and we needed a sense of fear back in our lives—‘the safety net gone away.’ We were coming to the natural conclusion of our contract with V2 and it was a great opportunity for Rick and I to go it alone.

Our desire, our intuition…was born out of a frustration that everything we did was part of someone else’s schedule. We needed to subscribe to another way of working which we could bring to a new business partnership. We wanted to expand the ways we could work, from the physical ways of releasing a record to all the things we are doing on the Internet. No matter how much success we’ve had in the past, if we sat down at the meeting table and described the kinds of things we have been doing in the past few years to a label—without having done them—they would think this is really stupid.

OB: What are the Riverrun recording sessions like?

KH: We were discovering things during our web radio shows. Rick was pulling versions out of the archives that had not been released, but were credible and beautiful—yet they were never going to be heard. So we played this stuff, giving it away over the Internet and it occurred to us that we had a very strong desire to release material soon after it had come to fruition. Or even release it in progress. So, we started to put together this idea of a continuous project, some of which would come out on the Internet.

In the case of the three downloads from the underworldlive.com site, we wanted to explore a different shape for a record. Why does a record have to be seventy, eighty minutes—however long a CD is? Why can’t it be like an old piece of vinyl, 20-minutes each side? Why can’t one be four hours long and the next be 20-minutes long? Like jazz, it should be as long as it needs to be—that was always dear to our hearts in the early days.

Tracks should be dictated by format or by what’s scheduled on a radio show. We just like to put out material that didn’t conform to the traditions that have become the CD format. That was where the Riverrrun project started. Now it has taken us to the five 12-inches out now. It will be the next studio album. It will be books. It will be webfilms. We still jam everyday with our dear friend John Warwicker from Tomato. He lives in Australia now.

OB: Oh jeez…

KH: We work closer with him now than when he lived in London. Thankfully, because of the Internet, we are sending things back and forth, making books and a film we screened during the Tokyo show last year. He created in Australia, fired it up to us, we applied the sound and screened it for 25,000 people in a room in Tokyo. It’s exciting.

He’s already preparing films for our next webcast, which will be this televised webcast from the Cocoon club on October 12. QuickTime have offered us unlimited bandwidth and HD [as well as] put a team behind us to do a three hour web TV cast, incorporating Tomato art work. We are going to jam with our friend Sven Väth at the Cocoon club. We go back a long way. We were at the first Cocoon event and we’ve talked about this for a long time. We are going to do what we do during our radio webcast, except in front of an audience, jamming it up with Sven on stage.

OB: It’s great to see that while you guys and Sven have had great success, that you can still all get together and do this.

KH: For me, the success is that Rick and I are still together after twenty six years. We still really enjoy working together and shaking hands and smiling at the end of most days and going, ‘I like my work.’

OB: How important is it for Underworld to keep your music in the clubs?

KH: It’s the backbone of what we have done for the last sixteen years. It’s still a great source of energy for us. Since we’ve started the web radio show, we have been in touch with an increasing number of small labels and artists that are putting out all genres of music. In the last six months, we have been refocusing on what is happening in the clubs, a refocusing on where our roots are. Of course, there will always be film music and world music, the blues and all the other things that influence our music. But the core of what we do is in the clubs.

OB: Touching on film music, soundtracks. You’re working on two right now right?

KH: Yeah, the first one is Anthony Minghella’s new movie Breaking & Entering. Anthony approached us to score his movie because he was listening to our music while he wrote the screenplay. He asked us if we’d be interested in collaborating with Gabriel Yared, who scored many of Anthony’s movies. Of course we said yes because right now Rick and I feel like the doors are open for collaborations. In walks Anthony Minghella and says, “Would you like to work with this fantastic composer?” It’s a no brainer.

We had a wonderful time. We moved into Abbey Road studios, into the old Beatles studio there. We set up all our acoustic instruments and all our electronics, jammed and improvised. I think the staff at Abbey Road is used to Gabriel coming in as the great maestro, his sheet music under his arm for the orchestra. We’re astonished to see him sit down at the piano or synthesizer or whatever we stuck in his hand.

OB: Yeah, just like Anthony, Danny Boyle also listened to your music while he was developing Trainspotting right?

KH: Yeah. Danny and we come from very similar sides of the tracks. When he comes up to the studio, and we are playing stuff, he’s writing it all down. “What’s that? Who’s record is that?”

OB: And you are working on the soundtracks to his next film Sunshine?

KH: We had just come to the conclusion of the Breaking & Entering project, which had taken-up a big chunk of our time. We stopped working on the studio album to focus on Anthony’s film. Danny said, “Would you come and have a cup of coffee?” and we were like, “Oh Danny, yeah, but we can’t. Please don’t ask us to be involved in your film.” He understood and we said, “We really want to get back to making the studio album” and, “Another time, it would be fantastic.”  He said, “That’s great. Just come and have a look at the rushes.” Well there you go [laughing]! The rest is history.

When we left the screening, we were cursing him because he hooked us. Then he came to the studio and gave us free reign to do whatever we wanted to do to respond to his movie, which we did. The first part of that has happened and we are waiting to get back what he is using on the film and to continue the dialogue and jam from there on. That’s due for release somewhere around March of next year. There’s far more electronics, more beats in there and we are also working on sound design as well, because it’s a science fiction movie. We thought we could get into a dialogue with the Foley guys.

OB: Your music has been in so many of Danny’s films, I guess it was a matter of time before you scored one. Will you ever say no to him?

KH: It’s not likely [laughing]! That’s the thing with Danny. When we meet, it might be several years, but we just pick up the conversation like we just popped around the block for a newspaper. It’s very easy working with Danny.

OB: With Tomato, you are always involved with the creation and coupling of your visuals with music. Do you find it challenging to put your own music to someone else’s visuals?

KH: Very much. It expands your head. It challenges your thinking, to work with pictures and try and understand, appreciate and support. We are playing a supporting role to enhance the movie, and the vibe that the director is trying to convey. That’s our job. We love it. Rick and I are steeped in movies. That’s the one thing. That and dub reggae, we have always had in common.

When we had no money and were on the Dole, we always managed to scrape enough together to rent a video and sit up and watch it again and again. The band used to rehearse to movies with the sound down and record to them, using them as inspiration. It’s always been a significant part of our sound. So when working with a director, we spend time with them and try and understand the vibe they are wishing to convey. We read through the scripts. We listen to the music that they are listening to and we start by sending them new, unreleased music that we think might be the kind of thing they were talking about.

OB: There’s a rumor going around about another live album, this time maybe a 2-CD collection…

KH: I don’t know yet. We did the 3-CD one out in Japan. We are off to South America in the next couple of months and there is talk about doing something down there. What’s really likely is that we are going to focus on finishing the studio album…continuing to put out 12-inches. The studio album will probably not accommodate all the material that we try to release at that time.

Our intention is to have parallel releases on the Internet so that the shape of that CD doesn’t constrict the current material. If there’s stuff the spills out beyond the CD, we should be able to release it on the Internet as well. That’s going to continue. Next year, who knows? We might look at another DVD. I might have to look at Rick’s mental health [laughs]. Not drive him into an early grave. Right now, we have some much going on with the studio album, the Internet releases, the web TV—which is something we’ve wanted to do since the early 80’s—and Danny’s film.

OB: With the new studio album, will any tracks overlap with what’s been released through Riverrun?

KH: We are not planning to release any of those on the next CD. You never know…their might be ‘versions’ that we decide on. Like, “You know what this album needs? It needs a version of ‘that.’” In terms of duration, we have more than enough for the studio album. We decided that we want to carry on writing. Until we assemble it, we don’t know if there are any bits missing. Right now, we decided not to think about the Riverrun series as a resource for the album. There might be a time when we release the Riverrun on a HD CD, but right now we are trying to release brand new material.

OB: Keep releasing new stuff.

KH: We have been publishing a diary on underworldlive.com everyday since it began in 2000. And with that, we are getting into e-books and little movies. All that stuff…freedom, it all comes back to that again. I want to tell people that I’m playing Nina Natasia’s album everyday. I want to share with the people, or show them a picture of some stuff that we saw. And Rick is the same. He finds a mix or a version of something we are doing and goes, “I want to put this out—give it away for free, because I do.” That, in itself, is a great freedom. It means that we have balance in our lives now.

You can download the Riverrun series at: http://www.underworldlive.com/

On October 12, 2006 check out Underworld and Sven Vath live from the Cocoon Club    on http://www.underworldlive.com/