Retro Reverb

AM & Shawn Lee Do Things the Old Fashioned Way, Then They Send It Across the Atlantic Digitally

I have been groovin’ lately to the most recent music by bi-coastal collaboraters AM & Shawn Lee, La Musique Numerique, which rolls off the tongue nicely to mean “digital music” in French. Testament, AM says, to the beauty of the French language, which makes anything sound romantic.

AM & Shawn Lee play Soho in Santa Barbara Thursday, Sept. 26; the Glass House in Pomona Friday, Sept. 27; The Independent in San Francisco Sat., Sept. 28; and the Abbott Kinney Festival Sunday, Sept. 29. They’re also hitting San Diego, Phoenix, Austin, Dallas, Tulsa and Denver.

AM and Shawn Lee met because of their shared influences, Italian and French soundtrack composers from the 1960s who were fairly prolific through the 1980s, particularly Giorgio Moroder. This led to a lot of researcher on my part about Moroder, who is fairly fascinating, as well as Library Music, something I had never even heard of before but had definitely heard it. I just didn’t know what it was called.

The results of the union are sexed-up scene-stealers, reminiscent of the disco-era soundtracks by their idol Moroder for movies like Foxes, Flashdance, Midnight Express and sultry hits written for Donna Summer. (Moroder’s profile is becoming more mainstream thanks to a recent spoken word cameo on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories called “Giorgio by Moroder.”)

Because Lee lives in London, the two record independently and send a work-in-progress track back and forth digitally, one of the only modern digital age methods they employee. “I think it’s amazing because what it allows you to do is each person fully realizes their parts before they hand it off to the other person,” he says. Gone is the vulnerability of presenting an idea on the spot before it’s fully developed.

It usually works out that Lee sends an instrumental track to AM, AM writes all the lyrics and then Lee and his engineer Pierre Duplan handle the mixing. “But Shawn and I both play a bunch of instruments, and we’re not really ego driven on who does what. It’s more like who does it first. It’s a nice balance.” They use unmodified vintage equipment, the kind that is picked up cheap because most people view it as clutter. “We use them as they are,” AM says. “I actually get annoyed when people ‘circuit bend’ old keyboards. No need to modify what already sounds great and has tons of character.” Lee has been making instrumental music this way for more than a decade. Recording under the moniker Shawn Lee’s Pink Pong Orchestra, he’s put out tracks that become infamous for hip-hop sampling. And his song “Kiss the Sky” was recently handpicked by George Clooney for his new film The Monuments Men, out December 2013. The movie also stars Bill Murray and Matt Damon, two of my favorite leading men, so count me in. “We definitely embrace the convenience of digital recording,” AM says. “After all we are trading files between LA and London.” But we use vintage analog and early digital technology a great deal. We almost always tend to get the sounds we want with that equipment going in. We don't rely on the computer so much for getting our sounds. It's more there for the convenience of trading files and slight editing. Check out the video for "Replay":

And here's the music video for "Two Times":

For more info about the band, visit http://amandshawnlee.tumblr.com/, or check out the OC Weekly article here: http://www.ocweekly.com/2013-09-26/music/am-shawn-lee-la-musique-numerique/ Or just read below:

AM & Shawn Lee Transport You Back to the 20^th Century

By Arrissia Owen

OC Weekly

Sept. 26, 2013

If AM & Shawn Lee's newest release, La Musique Numerique, transports you to a time when kitschy 1960s, '70s and even early '80s movies with partying and humping as central themes ruled, then consider it mission accomplished.

Their latest offering is an ode to the libidinous hip-grinding music by Italian and French soundtrack composers such as Giorgio Moroder, Ennio Morricone, Stelvio Cipriani, Sauveur Mallia, Piero Umiliani and more­—godfathers to today's bands, including Air and Daft Punk.

The bones of any AM & Shawn Lee song are period drum machines and keyboards, the same vintage Moogs and consumer-model Casio and Yamaha rigs that ruled when digital technology was just starting to woo the music industry. The duo's synth-heavy disco and funkified electronic music is reminiscent of those film scores, not to mention gobs of library music by even more obscure composers.

Song sorcerers in their own right, AM and Shawn Lee were each successful solo musicians with parallel influences when their musical worlds collided. The resulting collaboration takes over the Glass House in Pomona on Friday, delivering hypnotic, slinky cosmo funk.

La Musique Numerique overflows with come-hither infatuation on songs such as "All the Love," "In the Aftermath" and "Replay," which are sure to plunge your mind right into the gutter. Even songs about breaking up, addiction and a depressing economy manage to sound racy.

AM & Shawn Lee record the way the composers they emulate would have while exploring the simplicity and sounds of the retro equipment, such as the Roland SDE 1000, an early-'80s digital delay unit. "The record [is] a very big tip of the hat to the early digital age of recording technology," AM says.

"The tone—people who know that equipment will hear it in the record, this early turn-of-the-digital-century sound, before digital got kind of cold and metallic-sounding," he continues. "Some musicians seem to be simplifying their set-ups, relying heavily on the computer, but analog and early digital technology had warmth and grittiness. You will definitely hear that all over our recordings."

AM fans from his early years shouldn't be surprised by the artist's interest in soundtracks. His songs have set scenes on TV shows including Grey's Anatomy, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Big Love and various Real World seasons. Every track off his first album, 2005's Troubled Time, made it to the small screen; the album also helped to earn him LA Weekly's award for Best Singer/Songwriter.

While AM's early folk-rock garnered comparisons to Wilco, his third studio recording, 2010's Future Sons and Daughters, featured ethereal tunes pulled from disco, Brazilian Tropicália, psychedelic rock and '70s funk. This emerging sound garnered him invitations to tour with French luminaries Air and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Enter Shawn Lee, a Kansas-born ex-pat living in London. The award-winning video-game composer and multi-instrumentalist's work has been featured in movies, Oceans 13 and The Break-Up among them, as well as various snowboarding videos. Under the moniker Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra, he has become one of the most sampled artists in hip-hop and is known for his innate ability to make everything from a kalimba and ektar to a charango sing.

The two became friends in 2008. They bonded over shared influences, and in 2010, AM sat in with Lee at an LA show. They started working on their first recording, Celestial Electric, and played their first show as a band at the 2011 South By Southwest music festival. "It makes sense that someone like me, being a freak about that kind of music, would reach out to him and create a bond," AM says, adding that Lee has been producing instrumental soundtrack-style music for more than a decade.

The transatlantic alliance works well, with Lee starting a song by sending a rhythm groove with drums and percussion to AM in the States. AM then writes a song based on the preliminary recording, adding guitar, bass, synth or whatever strikes his fancy. The track then makes its way back to Lee for a little glockenspiel or what-have-you, and finis.

Recording independently works well because both collaborators fully trust what the other brings to the table, AM says.

"I think funk music is inherently sexy," AM says about the description popping up in nearly every review of La Musique Numerique. "That's probably the best possible description that music can have."