Les Yper Sound presents an all-instrumental journey through the many worlds of drums and saxophones. In early 2016, New York session musicians Miles Arntzen and Jas Walton-who both currently play in Afrobeat ensemble Antibalas-began experimenting with their respective instruments in Miles's Greenwich Village basement. They composed demos that were made up of Miles's percussion, Jas's woodwinds, and the sounds of everyday objects.
The style of recording and manipulating everyday 'non-musical' sounds was born in Paris during the 1940s and dubbed "musique concrète." This revolutionary process seeped into pop music in the mid-'60s, and now-due to ever-advancing music technology-it is a staple of mainstream music. Explorations in Drums & Sax is a hat tip to the novelty of recorded sounds back when they were still weird and way out.
As well as experimenting with the early laboratory process of musique concrète, Miles notes, "usually one of us was coming from something else, from a rehearsal with so-and-so right to my basement and just jumping right in. There was no time to think about what might be seeping in influence-wise, but it was always related to all the other things we were doing." The duo began working together in 2009 when they started the band EMEFE in jazz school. Between each of their sidemen gigs with other artists, they steal time to get together and spin their own creations.
While touring with Luaka Bop's William Onyeabor supergroup Atomic Bomb!, Jas met Beastie Boys' synth master Money Mark and Sudanese-pop artist Sinkane (Ahmed Gallab). In March, the four of them convened in Brooklyn to record under the project name Les Yper Sound, titled after Pierre Henry's 1967 musique concrète EP. This studio-oriented team of multi-instrumentalists-who are all producers in their own right-digested Miles and Jas's original basement demos and began improvising new works during sessions at Shahzad Ismaily's new Figure 8 studio in Prospect Heights.
The process-based sessions were engineered and mixed by tUnE-yArDs mastermind Eli Crews and produced by Lily Wen. During these spring workshop days, the group built new songs from found objects such as a coins, pickups, a coffee maker, and a tape head stylus.
The group picked up and played whatever was lying around, found a groove together, and sometimes recorded only one take. Other times they looped a small caught moment and layered other elements on top of it. The field recorder and vocoder from a previous band session were put to good use, and the group stayed inspired thanks to donuts and Shane's restaurant around the corner.
On November 4, Figure & Ground releases its sophomore album Explorations in Drums & Sax comprised of 14 original tracks by Les Yper Sound. The album pulls from the group's eclectic influences and showcases the drums and sax surrounded by an array of acoustic and electronic sounds all rooted in rhythm and pop melodies.
"It's all about finding that starting point," says Jas, "and everything blossoms from there." As Miles puts it, "we would just start with an improvisational sound, do that for three minutes, build a song around it, and then maybe at the end of the whole thing, you can't even hear that first thing anymore but it's a part of everything else that happened around it. When you play a rhythm on a cool-sounding prepared piano, you don't know what genre you're in. Maybe it will become a Brazilian jam or maybe it'll become a soulful groove-and all that happened in the studio. You're letting the sound of something dictate and inspire you."
Money Mark, who studied with the early electronic instrument pioneers, revealed some of his 'recording hacks' and found the musical in non-traditional objects. Miles recalls: "We went out to lunch and Money Mark was missing somewhere, and he comes back with two TV speakers and says: 'We could just plug these into an amp and hit them with your fingers-one's a little broken but maybe it could be the snare,' and that's is exactly what happened. We come back from lunch, plug them into a bass amp, and sure enough it's perfect."
