Martyn Ware: The Clarke & Ware Experiment (2024)

From his early days as apioneer of British synth-pop, Martyn Ware has forged acareer on the cutting edge of electronic music. Andhe is still innovating today — in 3D.

Martyn Ware is perhaps best known as one third of Heaven17, although his career as an artist, producer and songwriter stretches back over 20 years. One of the founding members of seminal electronic band The Human League, he later enjoyed success as amember of electronic collective the BEF, having ahit with acover version of the Motown classic 'Ball Of Confusion', before the BEF mutated into Heaven17. The new outfit hit the big time almost immediately with their debut album Penthouse And Pavement, and with The Luxury Gap delivered one of the timeless albums of the '80s. Heaven17's hits include 'Temptation', 'Come Live With Me' and '(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang'.

Recently, Ware worked on aproject initiated by the National Centre For Popular Music, which is located in his home town of Sheffield. The idea was for alocal artist to compose apiece of music to demonstrate the state-of-the art Ambisonics 3D surround sound system at the NCFPM. Enlisting the help of an old friend, Erasure's Vince Clarke, Ware has created acollection of musical pieces which push the boundaries of sound and production into the 21st century. Most notably, they were unique in being mixed to be heard in full 3D Ambisonic surround sound, in order to create adistinctive, futuristic listening experience. The same pieces of music have since been assembled to form an album called, with more than alittle irony, Pretentious. Although the full 3D experience obviously could not be recreated on aconventional stereo CD, binaural processing was used to preserve at least some of the same feel.

"It all seemed simple at first," says Ware. "It became clear early on that it was going to take alot more work than anticipated, because no-one had really thought about how to make popular music work in 3D. They wanted me to do the test piece, Iwanted to do it in aclassical form with different sections and moods to suggest the different aspects of the auditorium and Iwanted to do it all electronically. After that, it was on six times aday at the Centre and we got alot of requests to put it out as arecord. So we did an album's worth of music in about amonth."

Erasure: Rewind

The idea of bringing Vince Clarke on board stemmed from amutual admiration which stretched back to early in both men's careers. "Ihad worked with Vince on the Erasure album ISay, ISay, ISay and we became great friends. We'd never met before but it was while making that album he told me the first single he ever bought was 'Being Boiled', which was the first record Ihad ever made. He made it clear he thought it was unlikely Depeche Mode would ever have existed without the example of The Human League. So there was amutual respect from the word go, and Idecided that if Iwanted to do something very electronic, Ididn't want to just use the standard presets you get on every instrument.

"Vince has the most amazing collection of instruments, with sounds on them he never gets achance to use. He jumped at the idea, especially as he was taking ayear's sabbatical from Erasure at the time. He decided he wanted to do interesting things during that period of time and it was agiggle for us. The whole experience was an absolute pleasure."

Martyn Ware's home studio.

With both Clarke and Ware preferring to work from their own well-appointed studios, the immediate task was to find away of working which allowed flexibility during the writing and recording stages of Pretentious. Ware describes how the working relationship developed: "Vince has avery well-trodden path using his BBC Micro computer and the UMIsequencer, which is an ancient piece of software, now being updated specifically for him. He's probably the only person in the world still using it. It's just aprocess of entering numbers. You'd give him an idea of where to start from and leave him alone for acouple of hours, and he'd have sketched an idea without any particular structure which we'd knock into shape. Then I'd use samplers to edit and move around sections of these ideas. Vince is using an Otari RADAR at his place, which did cause afew technical problems because transferring from the RADAR to Logic should have been easy, but it wasn't. Ineeded to get it onto Logic because that's the format Iuse and Iwanted to have access to the vast number of plug-ins at my disposal."

Added Dimensions

With the unique brief to create music that worked in afully three-dimensional environment Ware had to alter his own methodology, which meant helping to develop an almost completely new technology: "We would get about 80 percent of things done at Vince's studio and then do apre-mix in my studio before going into the National Centre For Popular Music's off-line production facility in Brixton."

It was here that Ware produced all of his 3D surround mixes for Pretentious, using acustom system comprising aLake Huron DSP processor (made by Australian DSP and psychoacoustic wizards Lake Technology) and a3D graphical user interface, Animix, supplied by an Irish R&D and design company, Cuan. This allowed Ware to place up to 16 tracks from Logic Audio in avirtual space, and make his sounds appear to move in any direction or rotate in any plane with the aid of a3D joystick. The Lake Huron processor would then convert the commands from Animix into perceptual reality, storing the completed surround mix in a4-channel matrix, the so-called 'B' format. Huron could then decode this for playback on avariety of multi-speaker surround systems, including the NCFPM's Ambisonics system, or binaurally encode it (see the '3D From Stereo' box later on). At least, that was the theory...

"The amazing thing was that it all worked for long enough to complete the album, because all the software, apart from Logic, was in development and kept crashing alot.

"In an ideal world, before Iactually started recording all this, Iwanted to have the 3D part of it as an integral part of the recording process — to be able to do arough mix and be able to put it into three dimensions — but there just wasn't the time to do that. Ieven asked if they could make it into aLogic plug-in, because then the whole thing could have been integrated into one box, but the timescale was just against us.

"Three months before Itook this job on Iattended aseminar at Strongroom studios in London, where Ido alot of my mixing, which was about Dolby 5.1 surround; they have just installed the new 5.1 monitors in all their studios. They had an engineer over from America who had used the system to explain the differences of mixing for surround sound and mixing for normal stereo. What it boils down to is very simply that because each individual instrument is separate you don't have to compromise so much in the actual sounds, because you're not trying to cram alot of sounds into anarrow bandwidth of perception. You don't have to tailor sounds using EQ and compression so much. This gives you atremendous amount of creative freedom — for instance, on the first song on the album it allowed us to have extremely loud and soft sounds running simultaneously, without the old worries of mistracking, aliasing, and general problems to do with mixing. You can keep elements metres apart in perceptual terms — it's much easier and quicker.

"This is like apiece of hi-tech equipment in the hands of acaveman though, because Idon't begin to understand why or how it does this," laughs Ware. "If you go onto the Internet there are some very dry and dusty papers on the subject, but Igot bored after one paragraph. Mixing on this system is an absolute pleasure to be honest with you — for someone who spends their life sitting in front of NS10s or whatever it was just adelight. To mix with four subwoofers and 16 equally paired speakers in two rooms of eight meant being surrounded by sound, and then being able to manipulate it in three dimensions is almost messianic. Iwas doing mixes which would normally take me eight or nine hours, in about two hours. Even though the techniques involved were more complex, the clarity and definition and the separation of everything was so staggeringly beautiful there wasn't much you had to do to it. Instead of having to turn apart down you could actually place it further away, whereas perceiving distance in astereo field is avery difficult thing to do."

With so many new possibilities open to him, Ware had to resist the temptation to over-indulge when assembling the final mixes: "The test piece, 'Music For Multiple Dimensions' got all of that out of our system early on. It became clear that you can only amaze people so much without actually making them sick through the movement of the sound. Ground rules began to emerge: the movement of the sound had to fit the mood of the piece, and the intention of the original sound. If you had aloop running through arotating 3D environment, and you wanted to have akind of rollercoaster effect then that makes sense, because you want to draw the listener's attention to that particular sound, but if you're trying to mix something and blend all the parts together it makes more sense to have them all moving in the same direction even if they're at different velocities, or have them static — there's no rule which says everything has to move, anyway. With this system you can actually have apart sound as if it's sitting on ashelf 30 metres away; it's alot to wrap your mind around because it's not simple surround sound.

"Ibelieve this album engages the autonomic part of our brains which isn't normally engaged when listening to arecord — it presses akind of subliminal reality button. The reason we encoded the album in binaural was so that people could get ataste of what it might be like, but if there had been the demand to do it in 5.1 then we would have done that as well."

While surround technology is still beyond most home recordists, Ware believes it is only amatter of time before everyone is working with this technology or avariation of it. "Surround sound is finally taking off thanks to DVD and Digital TV, so obviously it will become alot more common in the future — it's not afad. It's becoming more and more common to have 5.1-equipped systems in America, so it's asituation we'll have in place in this country, probably within the next five years.

"3D surround sound could work brilliantly in aclub environment. It would be relatively simple to import asimilar setup to the one in Sheffield into anightclub and actually mix things for that particular system. Ithink the dance fraternity will be the first people to embrace this technology. I'm excited to do more of this kind of music: the only disappointment with the setup in Sheffield is that in Ambisonics you have asweet spot where you get the full 3D feeling. Unfortunately, against my advice, they set up the seats around the walls facing inwards, rather than in the centre facing outwards, which meant nobody is sitting near the sweet spot."

Beyond Pretension

With Pretentious completed, Martyn Ware has been hard at work on his next round of projects. These include areturn to working with Heaven 17 and the release of anew single, are-working of the Human League classic 'Being Boiled'.

"Heaven17 is the core of what Ido," insists Ware. "Itook acouple of years out when Ihad afamily, because putting in 60 hours in the studio aweek isn't conducive to having children. We've got alive album out now, which was actually recorded acouple of years ago when we were touring with Erasure. We've been writing anew album for the last two years, and because we want it to sound as contemporary as possible we keep getting distracted by all the touring we've been doing. Hopefully the new album will be finished by April.

"The reworking of 'Being Boiled' was Glenn Gregory's idea, because he's always liked the track and he sings it really well. It goes down astorm live — I'd forgotten of all the tracks I've done how timeless that one is. The new version sounds not dissimilar to The Chemical Brothers and Parliament/Funkadelic, which was the original intention. We have reworked all our songs, basically, because some songs adapt to new treatments. We are selling ourselves to anew audience who maybe haven't heard us before."

Although Ware clearly enjoyed the possibilities afforded him by the developments in 3D sound, he's unconvinced that all technological progress leads to better music-making. And he should know: "Heaven17 have probably wasted more money on equipment than any band on earth! It's getting to the point where you switch on amachine, press akey, and you get something which is better than what you could buy on awhite label. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but there is adanger that in doing that, you use up all the colours of your palette.

"The equipment you have governs the music you make. But the limitations you have are as important as the freedoms."

The Pretentious album is available on Mute Records.