Erik Wiegand
Erik, how does your work in MMM differ or relate to your work as Errorsmith and in Smith n Hack?
Erik: “For Errorsmith, my solo project, building synthesizers is an integral part of music-making. I develop and customize them while working on tracks. In collaborations this side of me is more in the background, as it would bore my colleagues to death if I spent our precious studio time programming synthesizer details…So [in Smith N Hack and MMM] we mostly use commonly available tools for production. But I also contribute some sounds that I developed on my own – like this classic ‘mentasm’ or ‘hoover’ sound that I recreated and which you can hear in ‘Nous Sommes MMM’.
“The differences between the projects simply come from the different combinations of individuals as they have their own tastes and preferences. So it feels very natural to make more disco-influenced music as Smith N Hack, and to have a strong affinity with rave as MMM.
“The similarities between the projects are that we work slowly! We take time to really finish a track in the hope that at the end it will good enough to stand the test of time. I think another similarity is that our tracks have an openness to them: I mean, although you can put our tracks in genre boxes, at the same time they defy that, because they have many different references.”
“It’s like the track itself guides us through the process.”
The MMM sound aesthetic is a very particular one – your tracks are instantly recognisable. When you’re making music as MMM, do you enter the studio with a special mindset or methodology that you stick to?
MMM: “It’s not that we have the big picture in front of us in the beginning. We start with a small idea, then we develop this idea until the end. In each step the track reveals some path options that we can take or not take. It’s like the track itself guides us through the process.”
“To give you an example: The ‘Nous Sommes MMM’ track was born with us reprogramming this nice brass hit sequence in Cerrone’s ‘Je Suis Musique’, and using the aforementioned mentasm synth as a sound source. But we altered the sequence so much that it only has remote resemblance with the original.
MMM – Donna (from MMM 2)
“When structuring a track we often have a jam approach: we are turning knobs to modulate some synthesizers, transposing the pitch of a sequence on the fly, switching between variations of a pattern, and so on. We record these parameter changes to get a first arrangement. Then we develop the track by editing, adding more sounds, finding a nice intro and outro, et cetera.”
MMM seems to take the tropes of rave, and to exaggerate or intensify them to the point of abstraction. Do you think of MMM conceptually, or is it more intuitive than that?
MMM: “No, there is no concept. The sound of MMM is the result of our working method. We like to restrict ourselves to only a few ideas or elements in a track and find ways to get the most out of these. Exaggerating and intensifying are good words to describe it. Plus we like to achieve a kind of raw, imperfect quality.
“Isn’t club music always loop-oriented? The art is to keep a loop interesting!”
What equipment do you build your tracks on? Or is that a secret?
MMM: “Nowadays we produce only on the computer. We use Ableton Live as sequencer. NI Reaktor and Massive are some of our favorite plug-ins.”
The art of looping seems to be such a huge part of what you do, not only as MMM and Errorsmith, but also Smith N Hack and Frank Timm’s work as Sound Stream and Sound Hack. Where does this interest in loops stem from…?
MMM: “Isn’t club music always loop-oriented? Loops go well with dancing. The art is to keep a loop interesting!”
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jackmaster