Legendary Melbourne producer Plutonic Lab is gearing up to unleash Deep Above the Noise his highly anticipated forthcoming album.
Out June 17, via Wax Museum Records, the release of Deep Above the Noise will be the Australian Music Prize nominee and Mercury Music Prize winner’s first solo album in 11 years!
Drawing inspiration from iconic producers such as Black Milk and El-P, Plutonic Lab has utilised abrasive electronic textures throughout the record to create a futuristic, space-age hip-hop sound.
His new single ‘Sliced Bread’ was added to full rotation on triple j, and praised by Zan Rowe as “two for two with Plutonic Lab’s new songs, love both of ‘em.” To celebrate the upcoming release of the track, Plutonic Lab has kindly penned for us a track by track run down of the forthcoming record which you can check out below, along with the singles stream.
Deep Above the Noise is out this Friday the 17th pre-orders available now.
Out of the Night
The intro to the album. I don’t really get on the mic and I’m an introvert, so to make something braggadocios (which is how I wanted the track to be) I have to get creative. I sometimes start ideas at the drum kit and record weird grooves and snippets with the intention of chopping it up later.
Drums were the first things down, then the bass guitar. I’ve been playing around with punk(ish) sounds on the bass and that lent itself nicely here. I make most of my music when most people are asleep, the ‘Out Of The Night’ part, is a reference to that.
Pushin
I had this vocal sample for a while, the beat is squared around that and the bass line, and I wanted to make a kind of dance floor dub track but kind of futuristic, without really using a traditional dub bass line.
I used this as a chance to really have fun with it and stretch out like a jam of sorts, even though everything is programmed. A few DJs I gave this to early on said it was a favourite and that they got a good response from ‘Pushin’ when they played it out.
Sliced Bread ft. Notes To Self BBRC
One of my favorite tracks in recent years is Notes To Self’s ‘All Of The Above’. Dialectrix showed the video to me when we were making a record together a few years back. It’s killer! I got a chance to meet the guys backstage when The Hilltop Hoods toured through Toronto in 2014. It was destiny!
A lot of the time you don’t get features that really want to work “with” you on something, they just want to send you something and that’s that.
But Bronze sent files back and forth and really developed ideas with me.
It’s one of my favourite things on the album and we’re developing more projects together. So expect more things from this collaboration. Shout to Bronze, Roshin, Arowbe, DJ Dopey and Swamp.
Flex the Complex
This track was one of those great puzzles to put together, sometimes a good arrangement is like that, and you have to unlock it somehow. I wanted to merge two beats together using different time signatures across each other.
The first beat went through some pretty drastic changes before I found the right groove. I had a lot of fun laying down the gliding wah guitars on this…. Some one foot on the foldback speaker, wind in the hair shit! Ha.
Signals ft. MoMO (IAMMXO)
I’ve always been heavy on beat concepts, it comes naturally to me and this has become an unexpected favourite.
I knew I wanted a lot of the album to be instrumental and you could argue that arranging instrumental music is a little harder than if you have a vocal to carry it.
Finding all the samples for this track was a lot of fun, everything from records with recordings of U.S. missile launches to sci-fi library records, anything with a radio, buzzer or communication reference. But when it came time to find vocal sample to tie the concept together I was getting frustrated.
MoMO was on my wish list for features from the start, we had worked on a track together on Dialectrix’s Cold Light Of Day LP, and I wanted to get him in the studio again. He’s one of the most versatile MCs out there and he totally nailed it, he wrote and recorded his parts in one afternoon session. I treated his vocals just like samples, which I do a lot. His writing took the concept up several notches here.
The Crib ft. Guilty Simpson
Another wish list feature that I was lucky enough to have happened. Sometimes timing is everything, Guilty happened to be touring through Melbourne with Katalyst just as I was trying to wrap up the all the music for the LP.
I’ve known Ashley for quite a while now and we always have mutual respect and good conversation… Guy from Wax Museum put the session together and made it all work for everyone. I picked the guys up from the airport and smashed this out in an afternoon. It was great to just hang and really get to vibe instead of just dialing in a vocal.
If I can get someone in the studio I’ll always do that if possible, you can work so much quicker if the artist is right there to bounce ideas off. The beat began its life as a few bars in a jam with friend and collaborator DJ Danielsan (Koolism). Shout to Guilty for being a true professional and chill human.
Sirens
I would describe this as making trap without making trap, or making grime without making grime, it’s just really my sound filtered through those music styles.
You don’t have to jump on a trend train or re-invent the wheel, but you do need to be progressive in some way, even if it’s just pertaining to your own individual sound or style, just push a little, just push enough.
I think some of the most interesting music is where someone has kinda fucked up a style unintentionally. A friend described this track as “really beautiful”… that’s good enough for me.
Cold Light
One of the first contenders for the album, I really wanted to play with orchestration, whether it be with realistic sounding strings of totally artificial sounds (carrying on some ideas from tracks like ‘Black and Gold’ or ‘Yesterday’s Basement’ and others). There’s a lot of it on the record, but perhaps here it’s most striking.
The other thing that pervades the whole album is lots of me just playing instruments that sound like samples. I’ve been doing that for a long time, but I think I achieved a consistency with this one.
Originally I really wanted vocals on this, but in the end I figured it would probably diminish whatever it had going on. What I’m trying to say is I like it just how it is, so here it is.
Do More ft. Miles Bonny
The last piece in the puzzle. The beginnings of this beat I made while hanging out with Katch and Dave at the Resin Dogs farm in Mullumbimby. It stayed on the back burner for a while.
Miles was touring Melbourne in the last days before submitting the album and I wanted to get him in the studio, but time was tight so we got him to record his feature in the U.S. and send it through. As a consolation, what he gave me we could probably not have done in my studio together, so it was a lucky turn of events really.
He recorded piano, horns, xylophone, vocoder and his other stacked vocals, so much material in fact that it was a hard task of what to keep and what to cull, an epic puzzle.
Put it this way he vibed the fuck outta this track and it turned out dope… Shout to Miles Bonny, sometimes it’s good to let an artist go wild with it, you gotta respect that.
Boom
I’ve always wanted to compose for film, but the time frames they push on composers is mental. So I figure I’d just make cinematic sounding beats and maybe some hip and savvy music editor would give me some silver screen attention (shout to Native Tongue Music Publishing)!
I see this as part John Carpenter part something more modern like Disasterpiece, well I hope that’s how it comes across. One of my personal favorite indulgences on the album.. it’s mostly all just an overdubbed Roland Rs09, I think it’s good to give yourself limitations in a world where you can literally just dial up any sound you can think of.
I made good use of my Soviet psychedelic fuzz pedal on this record too and this track features another “Mano Cornuto” guitar moment.
Stray Cat
Originally made for the abandoned fourth Muph & Pluto LP back in 2011, I always loved it and knew it would make a great instrumental. I multi tracked myself playing the acoustic guitars directly onto different pads on Native Instruments Maschine (my beat making weapon of choice) then added layers of synths and drums.
The arrangement and enhancements all came together quickly, I guess because I was really familiar with the beat (as it was) in it’s basic form, like I had all the parts in my head and it really was just a case of getting them down.
I see this as a bit of a road trip anthem of sorts, for me it conjures up images of the Great Ocean Road in winter or driving back roads to who knows where – take it for a spin, see for yourself.
Path to Satori ft. COMA-CHI
I met Coma-Chi in 2013 on the last show of a tour in Tokyo and talked about doing some kind of collaboration on my next visit, and eventually “Tyme” (a Japanese producer) let us borrow his studio last year out by the ocean in Chigasaki. She wanted to sing in English and rap in Japanese, so part of our session was translating and re-writing her English parts.
The great thing about that was she got to really explain to me her intentions in the lyrics. Coma-Chi lives a beach lifestyle and really is “Natures Daughter” as she describes, so she wanted the track to be earthy and spiritual. I made it as lush as I could, kinda jazzy but tough, grounded yet ethereal.
I love the way the strings and overdubs work in the intro. I also managed to get Chris Weber of Shaolin Afronauts to lay down some pretty amazing trumpet! Definitely one of my favorites on the album, for the song and the experience of recording it. Shout to the great Coma-Chi, Tatsuya/Tyme and Senshi for being so accommodating and providing me the experience.
