making the rythyms

I started doing upbeat stuff [on computers], but it wasn’t until the end when I managed to make a family out of all the beats, unify them. Then I asked Chris Corsano and Brian Chippendale to play [drums]. They spent a day each improvising on all of the tracks, and I then spent a month editing and looping [parts] into the final stage. We used most of the beats. The ones we threw away were the white noise, static. ... They sounded too pretentious for this album. The beats weren’t meant to be too clever. They had to be impulsive. So they ended up being a mix of tribal acoustic rhythms and lo-fi drum machines.

metromix.com, May 2007