It has been 20 years since the original release of Underworld's ground-breaking album dubnobasswithmyheadman, and the anniversary was marked with a remastered release, accompanied by a tour that showcased the band's legendary live work. For this and the subsequent global festival tour founder member Rick Smith's new instrument of choice was an SSL L500 console, allowing him to combine old-school dub mixing techniques with the best in performance technology.
To Smith, live performance is about "being in the moment and having absolutely no choice about that fact . . . Whatever your state of mind is, this is it . . . This is the moment that matters."
To bring the 'moment' to the audience and shape the Underworld sound, Smith uses a wide variety of dynamic mixing techniques - cuts, solos, automation snapshots, faders, effects, and so on: "It's about deconstruction and construction and reconstruction and rearrangement," he explains. "That to me was always the best kind of dub, that so excited me back in my twenties."
Smith was heavily influenced by the reggae /dub genre and saw a link between that and the output of early electronic acts like Kraftwerk. He developed this crossover in Underworld and as such, the mixing console is an intrinsic part of the performance: "It's an instrument," states Smith. "It's absolutely an instrument right at the heart of the stage."
On the L500, Smith notes: "There are new ways of working with Dub, and with arrangements, that are possible with the console. You've literally got seconds and everything has to happen so fast - very different from front of house. The console is just an extraordinary thing, and extraordinary for what I know we're going to do with it over the next couple of years as well - we've just started."
Smith can spend anywhere between six months and a year preparing for Underworld live shows, and he was as careful in choosing the console as any professional touring musician would be in choosing their instrument: "The mixing desk is an instrument and is at the heart of what Underworld can and can't do on stage," he states. "It was tricky because I knew I was looking for a console that was going to sit in a performance aspect on stage as opposed to purely front of house.
"Very quickly it became no choice; everything about it started to slot into place - the capabilities of it, the idea of SSL . . . It made me feel confident about something that I knew would take me some time to explore."
(Jim Evans)
