Very well written.

……Touring behind their most recently released 2007 disc Synthesizer, Information Society received a hearty welcome from the San Francisco crowd, who was eager to cheer from the very first thumping beat of the set. Kicking things off with â�?��?Peace & Love, Inc.â�?� (from the 1992 album of the same name) Harland Larson, in pigtails and a leather jacket, waved a magic wand-type instrument, striking a synth pad as images of various members of the Bush administration blinked behind him…….

[[ FULL REVIEW ]]

“Whats on Your Mind (Pure Energy)” and “Running” are just some of the dance floor classics by the seminal synth-pop band Information Society, back for 2007 with a new release paying homage to their roots – the Synthesizer. Producer Paul Robb spoke with us about everything from freestyle and changing lineups to free software and the internet. Paul is the kind of witty guy you want to chat with for hours at a pub and new tracks like “Baby Just Once” and “Back In The Day” would be the perfect soundtrack.

Check out the full interview

“Whats on Your Mind (Pure Energy)” and “Running” are just some of the dance floor classics by the seminal synth-pop band Information Society, back for 2007 with a new release paying homage to their roots – the Synthesizer. Producer Paul Robb spoke with us about everything from freestyle and changing lineups to free software and the internet. Paul is the kind of witty guy you want to chat with for hours at a pub and new tracks like “Baby Just Once” and “Back In The Day” would be the perfect soundtrack.

Check out the full interview

Click here to be taken to the original page for this interview

I had been a fan of Information Society since the release of their self-titled LP in 1989. But it was their follow up release, Hack, that propelled them into the forefront of my favorite recording artists, a spot that they have remained in ever since. The original line-up of the band [Paul Robb, James Cassidy and Kurt Harland] dissolved shortly after their third release, Peace and Love, Inc., and was continued solely by lead singer Kurt Harland on the incredibly atmospheric Don’t Be Afraid.

Information Society had not recorded any new material since that 1997 release and I had begun to give up hope of ever hearing anything new until last spring when it was announced that Paul Robb was working on a new record [Synthesizer] with James Cassidy and newcomers Christopher Anton and Sonja Myers and would soon be playing select cities. I was lucky enough to catch the reunited Information Society last summer [see my coverage of the show here] and had an amazing time. Information Society has been on hiatus for almost a decade but has not missed a beat.

Paul Robb graciously accepted an invitation to participate in an electronic interview for the Plaza of the Mind. It was conducted over the past month and I am happy to present it here today as it coincides with the internet release of the band’s new EP, Oscillator.

[The Plaza of the Mind quotes appear in Bold-type, Mr. Robb’s in normal-type]

Information Society have announced new material and live performances from a reformed line-up which does not include founding member and vocalist Kurt Harland. Recently courted to reform the bandâ�?��?�s original major label line-up on VH1â�?��?�s â�?��?Band Reunitedâ�?� reality show the core trio of Kurt Harland, Paul Robb and James Cassidy played a one-off show as part of a radio station sponsored concert in New York last summer sparking rumors that a reunion was in the works. Harland, who has recorded and performed solo as Information Society, released a statement on his official website confirming a new incarnation of the band:

After several years of discussions between Paul and me, I decided to pass ownership of the name back over to him and let him go ahead with some new material without me. I did strongly consider doing it with him, but in the end I felt it was better to let him go ahead without meâ�?�¦ Paul’s got some new songs, and he’s hired a new singer… should be cool.

: The new Information Society line-up is Paul Robb, James Cassidy with new members Christopher Anton (vocals) & Sonja Meyers (keyboards).

An email from the band���?�s primary songwriter and studio presence Paul Robb, who was interviewed for synthpop.net in 2002, sent to fans explains his intentions with the new group:

Dear Information Society Fans: About six months ago, after Information Society played a show in New York, I became excited by the idea of reforming the band to tour and record a new Information Society record. I felt the world had been without Information Society long enough. I spoke with James Cassidy who was very supportive of the idea. Kurt Harland expressed a reluctance to make a time commitment due to his demanding job, and the impending arrival of his new baby. After friendly discussions, Kurt gave his blessing for James and me to carry on Information Society with out him. So now we are moving forward with our new singer, Christopher Anton, who has already made a positive contribution to the group. We’ve also added keyboardist Sonja Myers. We are very excited about the new songs, and we can’t wait to share them with the world. We are also currently discussing plans for live appearances. We value our fans very greatly, and we are grateful for all your support over the years. We will let everyone know the minute anything happens.

: Information Societyâ�?��?�s initially penetrated cultural awareness with their dance staples â�?��?Runningâ�?� and the â�?��?Star Trekâ�?�-sampling “What’s On Your Mind (Pure Energy)”. They recorded three albums as a group working before singer Kurt Harland took over the rights to the name in the mid-90â�?��?�s producing the industrial-flavored â�?��?Donâ�?��?�t Be Afraidâ�?�. Most recently the band has had success with two remixed tracks achieving top five US dance chart positions in 2001. The new Information Society have set up an official site and a myspace page that is currently streaming two new songs from forthcoming album â�?��?Synthesizerâ�?�.

Paul Robb is no stranger to fans of electronic music. After quite a few succesful years in Information Society together with vocalist Kurt Harland, Paul now spends his time scoring movies, and working on a myriad of different projects…

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Jenz Merril caught up with Paul on the web, and had a little chat with him about his current situation, the future, and … well .. what basically has happened since he departed from InSoc!

Find out more about the mysterious guy behind the machines of InSoc, the soundtrack of "Orgazmo" and more, as Synthpop.NET takes you beyond society into the world of Paul Robb…

(yes .. i know … it sounds cheesy, but i needed someting more to fill out this space with …

Jenz: At SynthCon 2001, Kurt expressed his opinions about the music industry and his career with Information Society, what are your feelings about the same subject?

Paul: Well, that is a rather large question, isn’t it? I think the "music business" per se is definitely in flux these days, but I disagree with those who think that distribution changes (i.e. downloading) will tell the whole story. It will still fall to large corporations to promote and market the music, and that has always been the crux of the business anyway. How people get the music is somewhat incidental; it’s all about how will they know what to buy?

Jenz: What were your feelings about Tommy Boy’s release of Information Society remixes? Did you like what was done with the material?

Paul: I did very much like the new remixes. It was great to see "classic" Insoc back on the charts. Both "Running" and "WOYM" made it back into the Top Ten on Billboard dance charts, you know. "Running" actually got higher this time around than it did originally. Don’t recall the exact positions, though.

Jenz: After InSoc parted ways, you went on to release two of my favorite electro albums under the name "Think Tank." Why were fans of this project never given any another release?

Paul: Mostly because I had gotten over my industrial fetish, and had moved on stylistically. I was very busy with Brother Sun Sister Moon for a few years and Think Tank had to step aside.

Jenz: What prompted your move to LA and why does it seem that Hakatak Records got lost in the move?
Will there be a resurfacing of your label in the future?

Paul: I moved to LA from Minneapolis, and was mostly in response to getting signed to Virgin. Virgin was in LA, BSSM’s management was in LA, and I just felt I had a better shot in general of re-igniting my career in LA than in Minneapolis. I still miss Winter, however.

Jenz: What prompted your decision to move to making music for commercials and soundtracks rather than staying with you established career and fan base? Was it a desire to have a steady income or was it more of a desire to move to a different field of the same industry?

Paul: Well, it wasn’t so much a "decision" as it was a necessity. After the whole BSSM/Virgin records debacle, I was (once again) disgusted with the whole music industry, and "music for picture" seemed like a nice quiet place to hide out, lick my wounds, and yet still continue to practice my craft. Also, the money is really, really good

Jenz: Of the movies you have worked on, "Broke Down Palace," "Orgazmo," "American Psycho," and "Deceiver," which was your favorite?

Paul: Well, actually "American Psycho" is my favorite of the films I’ve had music in. Not only because I loved the movie and the performances, but because it really perfectly encapsulated a perfect time-period in New York City during which Insoc was there.

Jenz: What are some of the differences in approaching a movie soundtrack and recording an album?

Paul: Too many to mention really, but the main one is that a soundtrack is intended to serve the picture, whereas an album serves only itself.

Jenz: What can you tell me about Bleep Records and your involment with them?

Paul: I am the founding partner of Bleep Records, and you can think of it as the new, improved Hakatak.

Jenz: After previously working with Barbara Cohen as, "Brother Sun, Sister Moon," the two of you have again started working together as, "Luminous." What makes this project different from the previous one?

Paul: It’s not different, it’s just four years later. We decided to change the name only because BSSM sounded a little too "new age" for us.

Jenz: What can your fans expect from you in the future?

Paul: I have a new record in the can, under the name of "Bitcrusher." If all goes according to plan, it will be out on Bleep in August or early September.

Jenz: How can you fans keep track of your future projects and releases?

Paul: www.bleeprecords.com and www.facethemusic.com
Nice chatting with you, Jenz. Let me know if you have any follow up questions…
-PJR

InSoc Interview: 12/88 – Music Technology magazine.

A co-founder of US electro-pioneers Information Society, Paul Robb recently scored the new movie from the creators of South Park. He has a new band signed to Virgin and a dance side-project, yet still manages to write award-winning music for TV. Sam Molineaux joins him and his various alter egos in his new Los Angeles studio, Digitalis.

As South Park fever approached its peak on both sides of the Atlantic in the late Autumn, some sort of spinoff other than the passé "Oh my God, they killed Kenny!" T-shirt became inevitable. I had my money on a Christmas duet between sexy soul crooner Isaac Hayes and Les Claypool of Primus, but those marketing guys at Comedy Central went one step further with Chef Aid — The South Park Album. This 21-track collection of tributes not only features Hayes (aka Chef in South Park, most notably on the UK New Year number one smash ‘Chocolate Salty Balls’) and Claypool, but the king of tribute songs himself, Elton John, alongside a whole host of other musical collaborators such as Ozzy Osbourne, Joe Strummer and Rancid. (Rumour has it South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone turned down 200 interested bands — look out for the sequel, folks.) Undoubtedly one of the album’s most vital tracks is Paul Robb’s Think Tank remix of British group Vitro’s offering, ‘Mental Dull’. A rip-roaring hard techno number loaded with samples from various South Park episodes, it has all the makings of the world’s hippest novelty single.

"It was all just a bit of a lark, silly really. But it was fun to do, and the record is huge," assures Robb, treating me to the ‘alternative’ version, which he’d completed earlier that day, in all its foul-mouthed glory. "I thought I’d finally waved goodbye to it, actually, but then a couple of weeks ago Matt and Trey sent me a bunch of profanity and said ‘Now we want an uncensored version!’"

Paul Robb’s association with Parker and Stone goes back to their pre-South Park days, when the pair were putting together their very first pilot for Fox Children’s Network. Fresh out of college, they were also developing a feature film, the one musical directive of which was apparently ‘Music like Information Society’ — Robb’s ’80s electro-pop outfit (see ‘The Rise & Fall Of America’s Depeche Mode’ box). Although the TV pilot ended up being scrapped, the film project continued. After two years, in which the whole South Park phenomenon took root, Parker and Stone’s first movie Orgazmo finally saw the light of day last October, complete with Robb’s soundtrack.

"It all came about in quite a strange way. They literally just contacted me out of the blue one day," remembers Robb. "When we first spoke, Trey was very impressed to be talking to me, he was kind of a fan

"I like doing remixes, because somebody’s already written half the song for you and you have the luxury of messing it up."

I suppose. It took a couple of years for them to get the funding and to get everything together, and in the meantime we became friends, through meeting at various industry events."

In the five years since his departure from Information Society, Robb has composed a substantial amount of television music (most notably for MTV’s Real World and Road Rules and a string of cutting-edge TV commercial spots, of which more in a moment) but Orgazmo marks his first movie score. Being that the film is a spoof on the Los Angeles porn industry, complete with Church of the Latter Day Saint-turned-pornstar superhero Orgazmo (played by Trey Parker), it wasn’t exactly your average soaring-strings type of movie score.

"There are some parts that are standard faux orchestral-style film score — for which I made extensive use of the Peter Siedlaczek orchestra disks and the older ProSonus orchestra library — but other parts were a little less conventional," explains Robb. "There was a disco scene, for example, which I actually used a Think Tank track for, and a few techno sections where I was free to use more of my synth arsenal. The worst part was that some of the cues were supposed to sound deliberately cheesy, which isn’t easy when you fancy yourself as a composer, to take that sort of direction. I’d be saying ‘Yeah — but I don’t want people to think that I actually compose like that!’"

The whole project was not without its problems, it seems, particularly since Robb’s previous music-to-picture experience was confined to his previous work for the small screen. On a couple of occasions with the film work, he admits, he felt like he was flying by the seat of his pants: "My TV work definitely led me astray on the film score. For example, there was this one repeating cue, a kind of tacky wah-wah guitar part that came in every time there was a porn scene — it’s exactly the same piece of music each time, that was part of the joke. So I just recorded it the once and wrote on the master ‘Use cue number 2 on reel 1′, which is normal practice in TV, but the dub stages where they mix films are so horrendously expensive that they don’t do anything that’s going to hold up the recording process like that. It was causing eye-popping, steam-rising sort of sessions and I wasn’t popular for a while!"

Nevertheless, everything came out in the wash, the movie was well received, and Robb claims to be somewhat the wiser having successfully completing his first movie project.

"We spotted the film quite extensively. There was a lot more direction than I’ve been used to with TV projects, but virtually all of my score survived to the final mix, which isn’t always the case. Since I had no-one to tell me how to do this and I was working a lot of it out as I went along, I’m surprised it turned out so well."

Robb-A-Job

Robb’s involvement with the Chef Aid album came about largely from having worked on Orgazmo. "I think they thought they owed me a favour," he laughs. It was originally planned to include a Think Tank song, but they ended up doing a Think Tank remix of a Vitro song instead.

"I like doing remixes, because somebody’s already written half the song for you and you have the luxury of messing it up," says Robb, not unhappy with his remix credit. "The song came to me on DAT and I basically tore it apart, broke it up into loops, rearranged it, added more drum loops and the South Park character samples, then some bass and guitar and pretty much undid everything they did on their original song!

"So over the top of Vitro’s basic tracks I layered a number of loops from different sources. Some of them were from the Best Service sample library, which I use quite a lot, and I also did some of my own drum programming. The bass line was from the humblest box in the entire world, the Alesis Nanobass, which I just love. I have all these $2000 synthesizers, and I went with a little $100 box! I also used a couple of guitar samples, sort of anonymous ones that I don’t really know where they came from, and that was about it on that song. It wasn’t the most intricate arrangement I’ve ever done."

Robb explains that the main divergence from the norm on this particular remix was the sheer number of vocal samples he had to work with; four of his five samplers were taken up with South Park character samples and their widely varying levels posed some technical problems.

"Generally I work completely tapeless, where everything is virtual until I mix it to stereo, but because there were so many samples this time I had to lay some parts down to Tascam DA88. I wish I’d had Pro Tools for this project because adjusting the sample levels is exactly the kind of thing Pro Tools is good for, but instead I just had to compress the hell out of the vocals so that they came out at roughly the right level."

For Robb, working tapeless means doing everything on a Windows PC running Voyetra’s Digital Orchestra Pro sequencing package. "The reason I use Digital Orchestrator Pro is because I used its predecessor, Sequencer Plus, which was the first DOS-based MIDI sequencer. It was such a powerful program, not just for its day but even now, that I couldn’t give it up. I only switched to the Windows version recently because people were laughing at me for still using an old DOS-based 286. I tried Logic Audio and I have to say it totally defeated me. The thing is, I’m not dumb, it’s just that Sequencer Plus on a DOS computer was lightning fast and very powerful and I got used to that. The Windows version is basically the same thing."

One frustration Robb finds with working with so many samples is the amount of physical space needed to store them — he keeps everything on Syquest disk, having long ago filled up his CD3000′s hard disk capacity. Like many programmers he has been waiting for the happy day when Akai’s new S6000 sampler was available, so he could organise his samples more efficiently. Now it has arrived, and is sitting in his rack, but at the time of our interview he hadn’t yet pressed it into service.

"One of the things that brought about the downfall of Information Society was that we were trying to write songs based on marketing, instead of writing songs based on what we wanted to hear."

"The good thing about the S6000 is that it has no upper limit on the size of hard disk you can use, and it stores everything as wave files. You can buy a 9Gb or 18Gb hard drive and finally put all your sounds in one place. Until now, I have them organised by physical object, by disk, which works okay but it’s expensive, and takes up far too much room. Plus it’s clumsy to keep having to load in Syquest disks all the time. I’m looking forward to putting all my sounds onto one hard disk on the new 6000, and cataloguing them with directories in a sensible way."

Informed Choices

Since leaving Information Society, Paul has kept a reasonably low profile with regard to the music business; he’s done a few remixes here and there, but has otherwise worked largely in the realm of television. The balance began to shift last year, however, and confident of having learnt from the mistakes of the past he’s now preparing himself for a second crack at the fame game. But this time, things will be slightly different.

"One of the things that brought about the downfall of Information Society was that we were trying to write songs based on marketing, instead of writing songs based on what we wanted to hear," says Robb. "Even after I’d left I kind of continued that way of thinking. But after a while I came to realise that that wasn’t the way I wanted to work, so I decided to just start writing songs how I wanted them to be, without worrying about what would happen. That’s how Think Tank came about, and subsequently Brother Sun Sister Moon."

The latter, his contemporary sample-heavy duo with folk-blues singer Barbara Cohen, is due to release its first album in the spring on Virgin Records. The male programmer/female singer combination against hip-hop beats is sure to draw stylistic comparisons with British trip-hop but, as Robb explains, his was more an outgrowth of his experiments with American musical styles than any conscious assimilation of what was happening in Britain.

"I was actually trying to find a rapper to work with, but after several experiments it wasn’t really happening. I knew Barbara Cohen from high school and she’s always done folk music, but with a really bluesy inflectedvocal style, which I thought would make an interesting coupling with the kind of hip-hop music I was writing. We started writing the material back in 1995, and then suddenly Portishead came out. Somebody stole my idea!" he jokes.

Nevertheless, they forged ahead and along the way one of their songs, the haunting trip-hop power ballad ‘Bangkok’, attracted the attention of film director Jonathan Kaplan (The Accused) who cast it as the signature tune for his forthcoming Claire Danes-starring movie Brokedown Palace. "I heard that the director fell in love with the song, so we’re really hoping that it will be released as the single from the soundtrack," says Robb. "The film is set in Bangkok but our song was chosen before they knew what the title was!"