Song Exploder - Anamanaguchi - Prom Night

Episode Date: September 2, 2014

In addition to guitars, drums, and bass, the band Anamanaguchi makes their music with the 8-bit sounds that were built into Nintendo video game consoles made in the 1980s. They use software called a tracker to meticulously sequence and produce those sounds. Most of their music is instrumental, but in this episode, they break down one of the first times they’ve incorporated vocals, for the song Prom Night, which features singer Bianca Raquel. Prom Night is from their most recent album, Endless Fantasy, which debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart when it came out in 2013. 

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. This episode contains explicit language. In addition to guitars, drums, and bass, the band Anamana Gucci makes their music with the 8-bit sounds that were built into Nintendo video game consoles made in the 1980s. They use music software called trackers to meticulously sequence and produce those sounds. Most of their music is instrumental, but in this episode,

they break down one of the first times they've incorporated vocals for the song Prom Night, which features singer Bianca Raquel. Prom Night is from their most recent album, Endless Fantasy, which debuted at number one on Billboard's Heat Seekers chart when it came out in 2013. Here's Anamonaguchi on Song Exploder. Yeah, I'm Pete, and I'm Ari. There's two other boys who could not be here. Their names are James and Luke, and we're on Managuchi. There's a big community of people who would take old Nintendo's from 1919.

and use them as synthesizers, people in Sweden, New York, Japan, London, taking apart these old video game consoles and old home computers and using them as since instead of game consoles. They'd write software specifically for producing music on them. We all just kind of met under the umbrella of like music technology and formed a band around this kind of fun concept. The appeal isn't necessarily using the actual console for me. the appeal is the limitations. You get such a like shortened language of electronic music.

It really simplifies the idea of how to build the sounds that you want from the simplest building blocks. It's kind of expanded to using this language of simple digital music, but applying it to everything else as well. So the song idea started. I was really, really down. I had just heard this group capsule. This guy from Japan. Yasu Taken Akata, he put out this album in 2010.

It was just some of the most exciting music I'd ever heard. I was like, shit! Like, I can't write anything like that. Like, I feel like such a noob. I just, like, put my headphones on and wrote the chorus to this song, and it's completely inspired from that. So here's the lead of the track for the chorus. These plucky square waves since...

I wanted Tokyo neon lights, like, late night technology city to evoke that kind of stuff. The cool part about the NES as a sound chip thingy, you get all this bit quantization which means like it has 16 values for volume. When a note fades out, it doesn't go like, la, and like goes into nothing, goes like la, blah, blah, like it looks like stairs instead of a diagonal line. There's also these like chord pads, these little guys. Ari taught me about side chaining, getting that like pumping sound.

And in the same way that the fades quantized, the side chain is quantized. It's like, it's saying play volume 4 at this tick, play volume 10 at this tick, and then volume 16 at this tick. So yeah, it's fun. That's like the kind of emergent fun that comes from doing stuff on a simple program. You have to find fun workarounds for things. It also allows you to get this saw wave that is this really rippy, cutty bass. It's got a very weird quality to it. I'm not thinking about my melodic choices in any kind of space.

I'm just listening to the sound and deciding what I like. That's kind of what I like about programming electronic music anyway is that kind of note selection process with melody. Our brains are a lot more creative than our hands. Instead of, whoa, that's a big leap, that interval on, like, piano or something like that. In tracker space, they're all the same distance away from each other because you're just filling in a text box, basically. The guitar came pretty early on, actually.

It was what kind of helped define what I wanted the track to be like band-wise. I needed this track to kind of have this like shimmer to it where it's just like sounds sunny and sounds like positive. So yeah, with the chords, like that were a bit melancholy, like the chord pads. I like this chord arrangement because it kind of balances that out. I'm going to play them together. I'm happiest when I'm writing music and so I tend to write happier music. I'm much less interested in expressing myself when I'm upset. dead in-dwelling in that space than I am getting out of it.

I just couldn't find anyone to sing on my fucking songs. But a month before we were putting this album out, we found Bianca through a friend Leah, and she was interested in doing like stranger stuff, and she's like an R&B singer, and I was like, well, that would be perfect. So a lot of the interesting part of this track for me was being able to blend a melody,

like a square wave melody with an expressive vocal. So this is what the hook that I played earlier sounds like with that thing. The bridge of the song has this kind of like very choppy, vocal, processy part that was a lot of fun to do because I love messing with that kind of stuff. Like the synthetic vocal stuff is very, very, very interesting to me. Just chopping up the way of finding fun syllables, affecting them. And then I did like the choppiness stuff in virtual DJ, just free DJ software. I just did like weird like chopping stuff. And then handed that over to Pete and then he did a bunch of like select.

like specific syllables and pitches and repitching them. Yeah, like I took the acapellas of the new version, took specific syllables, pitch them up, down, put different effects on them. It was basically like having a dueling guitar solo but with vocal samples. So the first half of this is me and the second half is Ari. Like they might as well not be a vocal, they might as well just be a synth. It's much more like an instrument. Like it's auto tune, it's all that stuff.

And that was definitely one of the funest parts of working on this song for sure. Yeah, for me, like, lyrics, especially in pop music, it might as well be anything as far as I'm concerned. It's like, it's not what you say, it's how you say it. Or maybe it's just weird that there's a song about prom night and like, I didn't even go to prom. It's not like we like care about prom night. It came instantly from the melody. I was just like, this song is called prom night because it's sassy and like it's a place where you can like show yourself off and like your best clothes and be like, I'm never going to see these people again.

It's the American idea of like prom is important. But for you, it wasn't? No. I played Resident Evil 4 in my basement, I think. And now here's Prom Night by Anamonaguchi in its entirety. Visit SongExploder.net to learn more about Anamonaguchi, including a link to buy the song Prom Night, as well as the capsule song that influenced it. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th.

It's been about 15 years since I last put out of full ink. And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Weinrobe.

I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Malina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage. and then I'll play with my band.

The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. You can find all the past and future episodes of SongExploder

at SongExploder.net or on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. Find the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary, story-driven shows. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. My name is Rishi-Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.