Anthony Baldino's Beautifully Sad CONVEYOR: Grief, Granular Noise, and a 1973 ARP 2600

Composer Anthony Baldino is a dear friend, brilliant composer, and a big part of what makes Newfangled Audio tick. You've certainly heard his work in Tenet, or the Marvel, Star Wars, and Transformers franchises. His 2019 release Twelve Twenty Two is a staple of modern modular IDM. He recently released CONVEYOR and took the time to tell us about where he's at and how he got there. (With some music production and Newfangled Audio specific tips along the way.)

This is your first solo release since Twelve Twenty Two, what inspired you to release a new record?

After Twelve Twenty Two, I knew I wanted to do another record but it initially wasn’t this record. Originally I had set out to do something really beat-heavy with insane sound design in the IDM world. But after a while of navigating a series of personal losses, the writing and production shifted to something much more emotional and cinematic.

Anthony Baldino - CONVEYOR

I know you’ve been scoring movies in Hollywood, am I allowed to ask about that? If so has that work influenced this record at all?

You’re definitely allowed to ask about that! I’ve been working as a score sound designer to Ludwig Göransson on films like The Odyssey, Wakanda Forever and Tenet as well as doing additional music for films such as Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts and others. There’s this constant feedback loop of my solo artist work feeding into my film work, and the film work feeding back into my solo work. When you’re steeped in a genre of music for long periods of time, it’s hard to unlearn those lessons and not have them influence you in some way.

Convey is a word with two meanings: both to move and to impart meaning. What is this record trying to convey?

There’s a really long version to this answer but the shortest version I can give you is that this record is trying to convey a space to step away from life for a moment and exist within to process any emotional weight you’ve been carrying.

Man, that feels like permission I need sometimes. CONVEYOR strikes me as both bigger sounding and more cinematic and less overtly industrial or IDM than Twelve Twenty Two. I love it, and I wonder if there’s anything you can say about that?

You’re spot on. Twelve Twenty Two was written from a place of excitement and pushing boundaries within eurorack systems. Since CONVEYOR was stemming from a more emotional place, I really wanted to borrow a lot of those IDM and sound design techniques from Twelve Twenty Two and bring them into a more cinematic world not only compositionally, but also from a mix perspective. I tried to make the sonic characteristic of CONVEYOR really vast so I was doing as much detail work on atmospheric elements as I was micro-edits and sound design as well as mix and low-end choices.

The opening to this record is intense. It’s very ominous, were you trying to establish a particular setting?

This track originally started as an audio visual collaboration with one of my dearest friends, Tom Hall. (If you don’t know his work, be sure to check it out after this.) Tom had made this visual in Max/MSP of morphing spherical objects. To me, they looked like black holes morphing into these vast, overwhelmingly huge caverns you could exist in. Watching this, mixed with processing some emotional stuff inherently pulled something darker out of me than expected so I was trying to create an equally vast and overwhelming sonic landscape for the other elements to live within.

Your work always brings us otherworldly textures. There’s an alien intensity to it that is both disorienting and mesmerizing. How do you create that feeling in the production?

Great question! To me it sounds normal…not sure what that says about me, haha. I use a ton of granular processing to make things either completely insane sounding or to make them like a mostly recognizable clone. Familiar but somehow not quite right. I also work almost exclusively with audio which, at least for me, helps me make tighter edits, detail the variation in sounds, approach reverbs differently in terms of where they cut off or even fade in etc. Nothing too ground breaking, just how I approach DSP, I suppose.

One of the things I love about your compositions is that they always have a range of elements that demand your attention, but never seem to fight for it. How do you think about space in your compositions?

There’s so many different ways to approach this question. From a purely compositional point of view, I try to make sure the “boring details” are interesting and always evolving. Every moment is a chance for something to happen, even if it’s just changing up the delay settings throughout or making sure the space that the instruments live in is changing slightly. So for example, in “Holding, Waiting” the opening drum pattern is very simple but the snares have a ton of variation in them. And from a timing perspective, some of those snares will cut out on the beat so that even the absence of sound is in time and, in a way, gives some additional motion to the ambience that’s floating in the background.

I love the bassline in Dark As Sleep, it feels like it’s fighting to evolve into something else, but it stays constant and steady until it eventually gets destroyed, is there meaning in this?

Maybe not so much meaning in it as a reflection of a feeling. I set out with the intention of doing something fairly minimal on a lot of these tracks but kept finding myself fighting things just staying minimal. Later on I made the connection that sitting with a lot of the events I was processing was often too much and I needed to fight feeling those things through building things up until they felt abrasive or like they were crumbling.

Those feelings come through the music for sure. How did you achieve the distortions and destruction in Dark As Sleep? It sounds like the whole world falling apart.

The distortion is actually granular white noise that I slowly fade in until it takes over what it’s mimicking and then compressing everything together heavily, borderline incorrectly. But pushing some of these compressors into territories they weren’t meant for sometimes sounds really good, like on this track.

I know you have a massive synth collection. Did you find yourself focusing on any in particular for CONVEYOR? Why did you choose these?

I was still using a ton of modular synths on this record but took a slight step away to incorporate more mono and poly synths. They just felt a bit more emotionally in line with what I was trying to achieve. I used my ARP 2600 a lot for both bass and melodic stuff. It’s a 1973 2600 and it has all these imperfections that I just love. I was also using the Black Corp. Deckard’s Dream for chords and melodies and then about 90% of the way through writing the record, I got a Macbeth Elements which is just a beast of a synth. Amazing bass and lead lines out of that thing. I also used a Roland HS60 which is just a Juno-106 with built-in speakers. You don’t see many of those around so I’m guessing maybe it didn’t perform the way Roland has hoped. Anyway, I chose all these because they each have a personal story behind them and they also sound different from one another and while that is obvious, it really helps in getting that huge sound when layering in all these different synths.

Anthony's 1973 ARP 2600 Was Used Heavily on CONVEYOR

How do you get your tracks so immersive and big at the same time? I’m listening to Holding, Waiting; do you mind sharing which reverbs you are using here? You have layers of elements all sharing the same space, but they still feel distinct.

All comes down to mix tricks and orchestration in the writing process. As for reverbs, I’m using a lot of different reverbs here. For instance, on the melody synth I’m using Altiverb to place it in a scoring stage setting so it feels big but close. I’m also sending that to LiquidSonics’ Cinematic Rooms with a really long decay time but it’s important to note that I’m using the melody synth as a key signal to duck the Cinematic Rooms reverb. This way, it’s way upfront when it’s playing and then becoming part of the atmosphere when it’s not. I also make sure to EQ my reverbs and often times saturate the sides. On some other voices, I’m using Arturia’s Intensity, I don’t love all their plugins but that is a really great and unique reverb. I’m also a massive fan of the Eventide SP2016 reverb. It just has such a unique characteristic to it.

That's a lot of good advice packed into one answer. Honestly, the record feels realllllly big, both spacious and loud, which can be hard to do. What’s your loudness target on a record like this? Do you master yourself?

I owe a lot to Shawn Hatfield at Audible Oddities on this one. Part of it feeling so big is the amount of sustained sub information which is not easy to get a loud master from. If I’m being honest, we did multiple rounds of masters on this record. Shawn’s work is incredible and often has this way of making the areas where I’m messing something up really obvious in the best way. This record is really important to me so I wanted to do it right which meant I kept changing things in the mix or swapping out sounds and then we’d master it again. Endless thanks to Shawn for being a mastering wizard and the most patient human on earth.

What is your writing process like? Do you compose separate to your recording, or do you build up the song as you go, part by part?

It depends on the track. For example, the second track on the record, “Leave The Reminder”, started as one giant modular patch that I could perform. I multi tracked that into my DAW, swapped out some snares and then layered in other synths. But for the rest of CONVEYOR, I would build the song up part by part whether that was harvesting drum sounds and patterns from the modular and arranging them in Logic, sending MIDI from Logic to a certain synth or playing in a part on the 2600.

I love the arpeggio in Live Forever, which really holds the whole thing together, while also working against the main time signature. How did you come up with that and how did you develop it?

Thank you! I think since everything was either this really massive gesture or a somewhat dissonant floating synth, both asking for a lot of your attention, I just wanted something to propel the track forward a bit that was simple but slightly off kilter. It loops every bar but the top note in it being so high creates this other syncopated rhythm. It started as just a simple sine wave out of the modular and then I layered in other versions of it so it would evolve over time. I also layered accents on top of that high note so the syncopated rhythm was more the focus than the fast running notes at times.

In addition to being an amazing friend, you’ve been a great help to the development of Newfangled Audio plug-ins over the years. Did you find a use for any of those plug-ins on the record?

I love our friendship and am always sad we don’t live in the same city. We’ll always have The Mermaid! But yes, I used several Newfangled Audio plug-ins. I used Invigorate on a lot of the drum busses. Great tool for the subtle to the extreme. I also used Articulate a lot. That plug-in seems so simple but it is so powerful in shaping both individual drums, drum busses, synth pulses / arpeggios. Just a brilliant tool. I also remember getting to this point in “For Death To Come” where I was stuck and frustrated because I felt lost creatively. I remember asking myself, “What would 2019 me do?” and I was going through old recordings and then had remembered that I did those Generate presets. I started going through a few and they layered in nicely and were an incredible complement to the orchestration of the back half of that track. I also used Punctuate a lot. I just love how detailed you can get with it.

Is there anything you find missing from the current Newfangled Audio lineup? Anything you’d like to see going forward?

I’d like to see a multi-band version of Articulate and some mid-side or L/R processing tools. It’s hard to think of anything specific because everything you’re doing is so good already!

Ooooooo, good ideas, thank you. Anthony, thanks again for telling us about CONVEYOR. Everyone else, listen to CONVEYOR here, and if you want to hear Newfangled Audio for yourself, grab a free demo of Invigorate, Punctuate, Articulate, or Generate for yourself.

Thanks for listening,

Dan