CHPTR is a musical conversation between two strong characters. A dialog between friends who don’t need words to interact. The ongoing jam session was documented on 5 records so far and an album is on its way. My pleasure to chat with the guys and find out some of the news they have to share…
J: Your first 12” appeared In autumn 2015, followed by 4 others until today. How would you describe the development of the project musically during that period?
D: I think we were all about just making music that we liked but was different from our solo projects. We both are very critical in developing our sound and therefore CHPTR developed rather naturally also without overthinking any of the aspects regarding it.
R: Of course, we are always looking ahead within the concept so it had a consistent progression between the ep’s which for us was important and we always had clear picture of where we wanted to go with the music.
J: How do you separate work in studio and during your live sets between you guys?
R: Work in the studio and the performance are really two different things. In the studio we don’t separate the work. As it is is a joint process in creating we rather leave things flowing as it comes. Usually we fire up the machines and start jamming and recording a lot of crazy shit. Darren for example, initiates a bass run and tweaking the sound until we have something going. In parallel I will work on some soundscapes or atmospheres. From there we keep adding layers of sounds which will become the base of the track.
D: For the live performance it’s evident to split the elements. Reggy takes care of the low end, scapes, effects and changes, mainly keeping the overview while I build the melodic structures, percussive elements and pads etc when performing we must work together to keep the momentum of everything on point throughout the set which is the nicest part as we do not always know what the other will do.
J: I know that your tracks happen “kind of being played live”, so how’s that captured and after processed into an arrangement?
D: When we start a track we basically know how we want it to sound but the way to get there is almost always different. This is the reason most of the work in the studio start as “live jams”. We just start recording elements, sometimes up to 30 minutes long which afterwards we cut to loops (especially in the low end). When we have, for example, a nice sub bass line we will add 1 or 2 bass lines on top to make it something more interesting for us. Same goes for the pads, out of the recordings we take the parts we think can be useful at a later stage. Most of the scapes appear using a lot of fx chains which makes it come alive. From there it just comes together quite easily.
R: The processing part and arrangement is another thing. Basically it depends on the decisions we want to make. If you have 20+ recordings in a mid to high frequency you need to cut what’s not needed and add details that brings up each single element. The quality of each individual sound is important to us so for sure this is the part we spend most of the time on.
J: I heard rumours that you are working on an LP, is that right? Can you tell something about it and also when it will be out ?
R: Yes that’s true. We are currently in the final processing stage which means paying attention to the fine details before mastering. After the first five releases we wanted to focus on a full body of work. We’ve both enjoyed producing albums and we wanted to take the CHPTR concept and push it as far as we could take it. This for us, meaning to stay true to the CHPTR sound but bending and tweaking some soft boundaries within.
D: I feel we stayed true to our characteristic style while pushing towards where we want to go with the project in the future. It has been an amazing journey recording the the LP and we look forward to sharing it. It will be released on our own CHPTR imprint real soon.
Joachim Spieth 