Artist Interview: Philip Glass Producer Kurt Mankacsi
Interview by Marsha Vdovin
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Kurt Munkacsi
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What is your background? Were you trained as a musician?
Well, I was graduating high school, and like everyone else at the time I decided to start a rock band and play rock 'n' roll music. I got together with a bunch of friends and I ended up being the bass player. Along the way, I started taking bass lessons. I discovered that I was actually more interested in taking the bass and the amplifier apart than I was in playing them much. I got more interested in recording and recording technology, and there was a school starting up called the Institute of Recording Engineering. I actually took the first or second class they ever gave, and I took an audio engineering course. My background is really more as an engineer than as a musician or a producer. Even though I still play bass to this day, I'm really more of a trained engineer than anything else.
How did you hook up with Philip Glass?
Let's see. The way I hooked up with Philip Glass is...I think it was in the late '60s. I was living with my girlfriend in an apartment in Greenwich Village and she was studying with some Indian guru, and this Indian guru was also teaching an avant-garde musician named LaMonte Young, one of the original minimalists. My girlfriend knew LaMonte Young through the guru, and because I knew how to wire speakers and hook up hi-fi amplifiers and all that stuff, I started doing odd jobs with LaMonte. When he would do a concert, I'd hook up his speakers and I'd go to his house and hook up his gear. LaMonte was very much part of the downtown New York scene called Fluxus at the time. LaMonte, Philip Glass, Steve Reich were all part of it. Rauschenberg, and a lot of visual artists were part of it too. I got hooked into the cause. I did audio and I worked cheap; I did all these various projects with various artists. That is how I met Philip. At the time, Philip needed help hooking up his sound system and he wanted to make a recording. I was also working as an assistant engineer at a studio called Fine Tone, believe it or not, in Times Square in New York City. I didn't know much about recording, but I could use the studio after hours and it seemed like a good project. So I started recording Philip and the ensemble at night at Fine Tone recording. Our relationship grew from there.
Wow, so that is a really long collaboration.
I've basically engineered and produced all of Philip's recordings. I've always approached production from the engineering point of view rather than the songwriting point of view.
“Orchestral recording is traditionally always done with the orchestra in one room: a symphony hall with a conductor. But we always broke them up because I wanted the separation.”
It seems to me that all the productions are really a collaboration between you and Philip. Do you feel that way?
In a certain sense. Philip is a very traditional composer and he writes everything down on a piece of paper in regular music notation. When Michael Riesman [music director and conductor] and I start recording something, we just have pages of music in front of us and we need to translate that to a recording.
I noticed that in the program notes for live performances you are listed as Sound Designer. Can you explain that?
Sound design for a live performance refers to mostly sample and synth sounds. For example, a few years ago Phil did a piece called Monsters of Grace. It's based on the poetry of the Persian poet Rumi. I was the one that decided to use samples of Persian instruments for the piece. I found the Persian musicians, recorded them, created the samples, and Michael mapped them to the keyboards.
Is Philip's studio, Looking Glass, open to other artists?
It has always been open to other artists to help offset the costs of running it.
Right now, do you own vintage gear or the re-issued gear?
I own a couple of original 1176s and an 1178, the stereo unit, which I've actually had almost my entire career. I have the reissued LA-2As. I kick myself every time I think about it: I had a vintage pair at one point. In the late '70s, the tube gear wasn't really worth that much, and I traded them for a pair of JBL monitors. Now they are worth a lot more than JBL monitors.
I got a pair of the new reissue LA-2As, and they are great. When we got the LA-2As, David Bowie, who uses our studio a lot, was in the studio with Mark Plati, who had rented a pair of vintage LA-2As. I opened up the box and here was a brand new LA-2A, and I said, "Hey you guys, do you want to try it and see what you think?" They tried them out and sent the old ones back and never went back; they just liked the new ones so much better than the old ones.
Philip's work has such a distinct sound. Do you have a standard signal chain for recording the piano?
Very often we use a stereo Neumann mic, an SM69, going through an old Neve console. We have a Neve BCM console. Then from the Neve, through the LA-2As, and through a Neve compressor, and into Pro Tools from there.
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Philip Glass and Kurt Mankacsi in the Apollo Hotel, West Africa, in 1985 during a research trip for the Powaqqatsi soundtrack.
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For chorus work, we generally use the Neves. For solo work, we often use the UA 2-610 preamp.
Philip's been doing a lot lately with world music. We did this project with Mark Apkins not so long ago, the didgeridoo player from Australia. We used the Universal Audio 2-610s almost exclusively to record the didgeridoo tracks. I think when we did Kundun, we used it a lot on the Tibetan instruments, as well.
Do you track everything at Looking Glass, or do you sometimes go to larger rooms?
We do go to larger rooms sometimes, but we track a lot at Looking Glass. In the past year, we've recorded a lot in Europe. It's unfortunate that American orchestras are almost impossible to deal with. So we are forced to go to Europe; it is the only financially feasible way to record symphonic art.
In the end, we are still doing art projects; a big-selling record for Philip is only about 20,000 or 30,000 copies. He has a lot of them, so it adds up. I'm not complaining about anything, but the fact of the matter is we do serious art music. We don't really do pop music.
What about your signal chain for recording piano? Are there any specific settings that you usually use?
I'm a big fan of the Neve highpass filters. Whenever I do a session, I always use EQ; I very seldom record anything flat. But the things I always reach for are the Neve highpass filters. The first thing I do is cut every bit of bass coming out of an instrument that doesn't actually affect the sound of the instrument. I trim as much low end as I can off the thing so as to not muddy up the mix. The next control I reach for is the 10k shelf and turn that up.
The last thing I do when we do have our bass instruments right, I'll put the lowpass filter one click--I think it is 40 cycles of cut-off frequency. Then I'll end up boosting the bass 40 to 60 cycles with the low frequency shelf. My other standard EQ is I cut around 1 k. It's 1.6 k, I think, on the 1073s. I usually end up cutting that by a few dB just to take a bit of the midrange. So basically I'm boosting the highs, cutting around 1 k or 1.5 k. You know, cutting the bass but also boosting the bass at the same time to get a nice phat low end without any rumble or anything. I'm usually very careful, especially these days with digital technology, to make sure there is no subbass going on. Very often, you start seeing the woofer cones going in and out, you know, a 2- or 3-Hertz signal getting through, and you really don't want that in your mix at all. It really mucks everything up terribly.
So you go into Pro Tools. How do you mix the final product?
We usually come out of Pro Tools and mix on an SSL, actually.
I'm really a fan of using the actual analog gear. When you use the analog gear you get all the other artifacts that aren't in the digital signal, like the capacitors have a changed value and the resistors have a changed value, or the tubes are getting a little weird. You get all those analog artifacts that you don't get with the digital processors. Of course, it is not repeatable because it is stuff that is wrong with the gear in reality, but it gives it a character that you can't get otherwise.
If you could have Universal Audio design a dream product for you, what would it be?
Well, I guess it would be tube gear, like reproductions of tube equipment, but stuff that is aged as tube gear does. So the sound would change over time and it is not static. Part of the problem with all this digital stuff--which is why we use real instruments all the time, you know--is you have the perfect snare drum sample, but you don't want the same snare drum sound. You don't want every hit to be the same every time. You want that variation that drummers put in there. Sometimes they'll hit the head a little off-center and it sounds a little different, and you want that. That is my problem listening to this digital recording, a lot of the technology today: Everyone uses samples so much that it is all too predictable and all too repeatable. So [I would ask for] plug-ins that add a bit of randomness.
That is really interesting because, in a sense, sometimes Philip's music is so mechanical. It sounds like it is being made by a computer. I remember on the "Bang on a Can" tour I was thinking, how can they do this? How can they keep the timing?
I'll tell you an interesting thing. When we were doing Philip's music and we started using the computers and sequencers that first started coming into play, we all thought, oh this is great, we only have to record one phrase and we can repeat it 50 times. When we got into really densely analyzing Philip's music, it turned out that you couldn't really do that with Philip's music because, even though it doesn't sound like it, it is changing and evolving constantly. It used to drive the sequencer programmers crazy because they thought they could sit there and program the phrase to sequence over and over, but they found out that they'd end up playing virtually every phrase anyway.
It does change constantly, because it builds.
There are even more subtle internal changes. It sounds like it is static, but it is really not static at all.
Do you have a favorite recording, a favorite project?
I guess with Philip, I have a couple of favorites. Mishima and Powaqqatsi would be my favorites. Also a piece called Music in 12 Parts, a big monumental early work that I really like. It is one of his early minimalist pieces. It's a three-CD set or something. It's that steady-state music, so you have to really like that stuff to get through it.
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Toho Film Studios, Tokyo, Japan 1984
King Kong, Godzilla, Kurt Munkacsi and Philip Glass at Toho Film Studios during a pre-production trip for "Mishima" soundtrack. |
I like how Mishima and Powaqqatsi came out as productions. And I like what 12 Parts does; it's hard to get it off the recordings, but in the early days I used to really turn it up. When we played live, it was really loud. And in the beginning it was really interesting; the way we'd set up is we didn't play in traditional theaters, we played in art galleries and things like that. We'd sit in a circle in the center of the room, and the audience would sit around us. And then in the periphery there were speakers in the four corners of the room. So it was a similar to Quadraphonic sound, so the performers and the audience were all on the same sound field, and it was loud. What would happen is, we'd be playing his classic minimalist stuff and his pieces would go on for like 20 or 30 minutes and his music just stops. You know it ended and the reaction of the audience when it ended was amazing. That is why I knew Philip was going to be really successful because I saw how the listener reacted to his music. We'd be playing really loud solid-state arpeggios for like 30 minutes, and then it would stop dead. There would be this echo hang over, this incredible echo hang over, the room would be like reverberating. Then the audience just sat there for like 20 to 30 seconds, in complete silence, they just didn't know. Then they'd get to their feet and cheer wildly. It was great!
It is also because the music is so trance-like.
I think it actually does put you into a trance state.
And then the dramatic end. You are thrown back into consciousness or something.
Yeah, whatever it is. His music really touched people, and you could see that very clearly. Even in the early days when it was really far out. We'd play for like 15, 20, 30 people sometimes, and you could still see the reaction was there.
What a rewarding career and collaboration!
It's been fun.
Do you listen to pop music? What do you like?
Oh, Led Zeppelin. I'm a '60s music fan. Early this year, I went to London to see the Cream reunion concert.
I was going to ask if you listen to Cream.
Yeah I went to see them in Royal Albert Hall; they were great. You know, it's funny. I probably have sold as many classical music albums as any classical music producer in the world, but I don't listen to classical music at all.
Well Phil's work is so different. It is so extraordinary.
I always approached recording Phil's music from the pop-music point of view, never the classical point of view.
Can you explain that?
Here is one way. We'd do all the operas and everything. What we would do is break up the orchestras into sections, so we would do all the strings by themselves, the brass by themselves, the woodwinds, the percussion. Orchestral recording is traditionally always done with the orchestra in one room: a symphony hall with a conductor. But we always broke them up because I wanted the separation. I wanted to EQ each section on its own without having to worry about affecting any leakage or anything. I wanted to be able to alter the reverb on the strings and not have to alter the reverb on the brass. It was always approached as a pop recording.