Today we catch up with the El Paso-based musician/producer/engineer Ross Ingram as he discusses his 2021 solo LP Sell The Tape Machine. Ingram co-owns the cities’ full-service recording studio Brainville and plays in the Texas shoegaze band EEP, as well as being a solo musician. Discussing his recent effort, he explains:
“The record is built around balance: lyrically, musically, and sonically. Balance between texture and melody, structure and experimentalism, lyrically trying to find balance in reality and optimism, dreams and reality, life and death, love and indifference. The recording process was a mixture of home and studio recordings, with portions of every song recorded at both of those locations (my home and my studio, Brainville).”
While all the songs on Sell The Tape Machine were written, recorded, and mixed by Ingram at his studio and home, the record also finds the musician joined by a host of backing vocalists, including Nathan McGehee, Sebastian Estrada, KT Neely, and Rosie Varela. With all the additional parts recorded at the various musicians’ home studios, Ingram’s experience as a producer and recording engineer were crucial in bringing the project together.
Live Eye Tv recently had a chance to catch up with the artist to discuss the album. Along the way, he goes into detail regarding his production decisions as well as his creative process. Below, you can read a transcript of the discussion and listen to the recent release.
LETV: I’m interested in the meaning behind the title “Sell The Tape Machine,” could you elaborate on that?
RI: The title comes from the song of the same name, which is about the never ending back and forth of being a lifer in any creative pursuit. Creative work can be really unstable, and it’s pretty much the norm to find yourself questioning your decision to pursue that life on a fairly regular basis.
The first line comes from a real conversation I was having with myself around the time I started writing the song. I co-own a recording studio in El Paso called Brainville, and our tape machine was down, the repairs weren’t going well and it was looking like we’d have to spend an exorbitant amount of money to get it running again, so I was really tempted to throw in the towel and just sell it as a parts machine to some other studio in some other city.
Fortunately, we have two excellent techs that we work with who were able to get it back in fighting shape and we didn’t have to sell it, but that conversation is just one more version of one that I think every creative person has all the time. It often feels like it’s time to just stop and go get a real job, but then when I imagine what that would be like, I think about how if I had a nice stable job with a decent paycheck, I could buy some really nice music and recording gear and then I’m just back to making records again, back where I started, minus a few years of wishing I was making records instead of working at the stable job.
You can also look at it from the standpoint that, even if you did end up in a position where you have to stop creating for awhile, you can always pick it back up in the future. I went over ten years between releasing records I had written or co-written at one point. I didn’t quit, but I spent several years staying home with the kids while my wife finished her medical training and then several more years rebuilding the recording side of my career, spending so much time recording other people’s music that I didn’t have time to record my own. So, basically, even if you have to sell the tape machine, you can buy another one when things come back around.
LETV: There’s a bit of a pacific northwest sound to this, Ben Gibbard or Elliott Smith come through on first listen, especially with some of the production that harkens back to the glory days of the mid 00s (another band that comes to mind is Idaho if you’re familiar). Who influenced you the most on this record?
RI: I definitely have listened to a LOT of Ben Gibbard and Elliot Smith in my life and they are big influences on my songwriting. I’m also a huge fan of Chris Walla’s production, which has probably just as profound an impact on how my music sounds. I’ve probably watched the series of videos about recording Tegan and Sara’s “The Con” (another very big influence on my music) a dozen times, trying to glean every last bit of information I can about the recording process (and about Tegan and Sara’s writing).
I tend to listen to a pretty large amount of music, both because I love hearing new songs and new sounds, and because it’s part of my job as a producer and engineer to at least be somewhat aware of what’s going on out there in music so I can be prepared to help artists realize their vision for their music. If I don’t understand their reference points, it makes it very difficult to communicate creatively in the studio.
As for specific artists I’ve been listening to a lot lately, I’m a big fan of Beauty Pill, who really set the standard as far as being creatively open and flexible and making really interesting and detailed records. I’ve been a big fan of 90s era electronica like The Chemical Brothers and Orbital, as well as more drum and bass artists like Squarepusher and Photek, since I was a teenager, and I think that really informs my production style.
There’s a freeform percussion thing in the sound collage at the beginning of “Home” that was directly inspired by a performance Claire Rousay did at our studio. She’s an old friend from San Antonio and is doing some pretty incredible experimental music. Other new things: Bartees Strange, Rosie Tucker, Jhariah, Deep Sea Diver… there’s so much great music coming out that I can’t really keep track of everything!
LETV: What has living in El Paso been like the past few years and how does it leave an impression on you musically?
RI: I grew up here and never really expected to come back, to be honest, but it really did feel like home again as soon as we moved back. My wife is also an El Paso native, and her parents still live here, so we visited frequently after we had moved away, and the more I came back, the more I fell back in love with the city.
It has a reputation as not being much of a music city, but that’s not really fair. There is so much music here, there’s just not a ton of infrastructure. That was a big part of why we moved back. I wanted to open the studio somewhere where it was needed, where we could price it in such a way as to make studio recording more accessible for artists that otherwise might not have access to it.
The music and art culture is really deep here, and there’s more and more happening every year. I also get to work with a really wide variety of artists here, which of course has an effect on the music that I make. Being here also forces me to get out and get involved, if I want to see good touring bands as they pass through, so I help set up a lot of shows for out of town bands. I really enjoy getting to show touring bands and visitors how unique and beautiful our little city is.
LETV: “Come Sunlight” has a great mix of lo and hi-fi vocals, is there a cool story behind recording this one?
RI: I’m a big fan of records that mix hi-fi and lo-fi elements, and I like to have a few elements in a mix that are a little messed up or distorted. I wrote “Come Sunlight” one night during a bout of insomnia; one of those nights where I actually managed to recognize that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep and so might as well get up and be productive.
The song came together very quickly, starting with one of the synth loops. I was just noodling on a new patch I’d made earlier for the Korg Prologue, a sort of piano-ish sound, and I came up with a little melodic loop. The majority of the basic instrumentation and the lo-fi vocal part came very quickly after, and I recorded those vocals in one take on an SM58 through a little Soundcraft Notepad mixer with the preamp cranked, which is where the distorted, lo-fi tonality comes from.
I was also recording it late at night while everyone in the house was sleeping, which helped dictate the delivery. I’m actually singing really quietly on that part. I pulled in the “I can’t sleep / You can sleep through anything” melody and lyrics from another demo that never really made it past the initial writing stage and then wrote the call and response vocals that same night.
All of those vocals ended up being re-recorded at the studio later, because I wanted a nice contrast between the more reassuring, calming vocal parts and the lo-fi repeated phrases. I think those vocals were tracked on a Blue Kiwi through a Burl B1D mic preamp and Western Dynamo 1909 compressor.
One of the “I can’t sleep” lines and the harmony on “I can try again” came from my friend Nathan McGehee, who did all the album design and artwork, and provided vocals on five songs. He recorded all his parts at his home in Mount Vernon, WA. Once all the vocal parts were collected, I loaded them into my MPC Live and worked out the structure of the song, which I reworked a few times before arriving at the version that’s on the album.
LETV: There’s a nice balance between the acoustic and electronic, the analogue and digital throughout the album. Is that something you set out to do, to make something both tangible and computerized?
RI: I love sound, just all sound in general, so I love to use whatever options I have available to make music. Plus, the most interesting music usually comes at intersections: between genres, between tonalities, between dynamics, so I love to mix organic and electronic sounds. I think it also really can add weight to some of the more anxious themes in the lyrics to have this sort of push and pull between these rigid programmed elements and the more loose live instrumentation. The outro for “Walled In” sort of plays off that idea, with the layers of guitar that come up under the “Wake up” line and break up the more rigid drones and drum machines feel of the rest of the song.
LETV: “Marionette” is a different kind of punk number, the blip beat in the beginning of the track especially sticks out and your vocals reach a new level. Did high energy numbers like this come as naturally as the more low key ones?
In general, I think it’s easier for me to write mellow, midtempo songs than high energy or really soft songs. I have a harder time finding good melodies when the tempo is too high or too low. The extremes are usually the harder ones to get right for me.
LETV: There are a lot of cool synth choices throughout, the middle portion of “I Like Having You Here” especially stuck out. What gear did you use to get those sounds?
RI: All of the synths on “I Like Having You Here” are internal software synths on my Akai MPC Live, which is a sampling drum machine/workstation. I love it because it’s a very powerful and intuitive machine that lets you create quickly without being tethered to a laptop. I wrote on a laptop for years, but I felt like a lot of the time the songs ended up a little too rigid and overworked. I also really got tired of having to bring and set up a laptop when I performed live.
That song is the oldest on the record, by far, and had actually been relegated to the B-side scrap heap, but then, after hearing Fanclubwallet’s “Car Crash in G Major,” something shook loose and I wrote a new arrangement for it, mostly in a single afternoon, which is why most of the instrumentation was done inside the MPC. The original version was an overly dense arrangement in 6/8 and there was something in the tempo and feel of that Fanclubwallet song that led me to the new, more stripped down 4/4 version.
The main kind of slidey-floaty synths are the MPC’s Bassline synth, as is the bass. The chords and the little “doot doot da da da da doot doot” thing between the verses is all a Wurlitzer-esque patch on the MPC’s Electric piano modeler, with a bit of overdrive and tremolo. All of those instruments kind of hand the melody back and forth for that middle section.
The MPC Live is definitely the centerpiece of this record, gear wise, with many of the songs written and sequenced almost entirely inside the MPC’s internal sequencer, but I did use a decent amount of other gear. I have a Korg Prologue that’s all over the record, and an old ARP Solus that provided a lot of the bass sounds and the soft strings in the background of the title track.
Some of the other sample-based sounds were done on one of two hardware rack samplers: an Emu E6400 that I used for a lot of the drum loops and bass lines (using bass sounds sampled from the ARP), and an Akai Z4 that I used for pianos and other more hi-fi sampling applications. The intro to “Walled In” comes from the Z4. That sampler was previously owned by Weezer, which is kind of fun. There’s a sample of Rivers singing an “Eeeh” sound that I want to eventually do something dumb with, but I didn’t find a spot for it on this record. I also used an Empress ZOIA as a synth on “Ashes.” We have a nice assortment of guitars in the studio that I took advantage of on this record, too.
LETV: Is there anything else you’d like to add? What else is going on in your world in 2021 and beyond?
RI: Things have picked back up at the studio, as everyone gets vaccinated and comes out of hiding, so I’ve been relatively busy with that, which is a nice feeling. I missed being in the same room with people and making music together. I also play in a shoegaze band called EEP, and we are finishing our second album right now.
We started a label (Hogar Records) to put out EEP’s records and to help put out records for all the band members other projects, so there’s a lot of work going into building that right now. I’m slowly pulling together songs for my next record, while also trying to get back into playing shape so I can start playing shows again, both locally and out of town. I’m hoping to travel a little in the next year to make records with other people, too, but none of that is set in stone yet, so we’ll see.
