The Music Is the Movie - 10/26/2006

Breakbeat duo Hybrid's epic new album takes its cues from film scoring

By Dennis Romero

This is shaping up to be the year of thinking outside the record box in electronic dance music. The cult of the DJ had already been knocked down a peg by the mash-up artist, the live e-music act, and the VJ. But 2006 really put the nail in the turntable coffin. Trance pioneer BT served up an ambient symphony with his ambitious This Binary Universe. A motley array of club artists - including the Scumfrog, D:Fuse, Static Revenger, DJ Skribble, and Kristine W. - formed a live crew called DJs Are Alive. Song-spinning software from Ableton Live to Serato Scratch stormed clubland. And now Wales-based breakbeat duo Hybrid has reached out to a rock star, a Hollywood film composer, and a big-city orchestra to produce one of the finest electronic dance albums of the year, I Choose Noise, due in stores next month (and available now from iTunes).

The record is like IMAX for your ears, surrounding you with broad, elegant, and shocking emotional visions, all the while staying composed and organized around the mechanized, frenetic structure of e-music. While it has a little something for everyone - block-rockin' frat-rock, nu-skool breaks, ethereal mood music - I Choose Noise also has a beginning-to-end cohesion that is epic, progressive, and metaphysical. Hybrid's Mike Truman and Chris Healings have clearly been influenced by the part-time life they lead in Los Angeles, producing music for movies (Man on Fire, the forthcoming Déjà Vu).

"The stuff we've done for film, we've come in knowing no boundaries," says Healings, sitting in a Venice Circle studio that's a "home away from home" for the duo. Truman chimes in: "A lot of stuff in Hollywood is sound-effect or sound-design driven, and that really influences us. When it's atmospheric, that's what appeals to us. It can be different to put those textures against something that's aggressive, like a breakbeat. It's not the normal kind of architecture."

The pair frequently works for film composer Harry Gregson-Williams (The Chronicles of Narnia, Shrek, Phone Booth), and the score-meister returned the favor, helping to organize movements recorded for I Choose Noise by the 36-piece Seattle Orchestra. Pal Perry Farrell, who the Hybrid boys met backstage at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival a few years ago, often drops by the Venice studio after breakwater surfing sessions. Perhaps more urgently than ever, the Jane's Addiction leader contributes lyrics and his telltale raspy vocals to the moving, cathartic break-rock number "Dogstar." Farrell brought along fellow Porno for Pyros alum Peter DiStefano, who added some simpatico guitar chords. Dance family royals Kirsty Hawkshaw (of BT fame) and John Graham (a.k.a. remixer Quivver) also lent a hand (on "Just for Today" and "Until Tomorrow," respectively) on the new album. And thus, from the baggy-jeans b-boy breaks of their younger days as super-club heroes, the men from Hybrid have evolved into pop visionaries.

"We've been very lucky," says Truman. "We've snuck in the back door of Hollywood to work on some really cool projects. It's the more esoteric use of orchestral sounds that excite us. Philip Glass excites us - using things in tonal ways."

Hybrid got its big break when DJ Sasha picked up its "Symphony" for the influential Northern Exposure mix-CD nearly 10 years ago. Since then, the duo has been a staple of the remix scene (taking on Alanis Morissette, Radiohead, and Sarah McLachlan, to name a few) and the hip-hop-on-speed "nu skool" breaks genre, where the name of the game is "my break is bigger than yours," says Truman. This might explain the rockist flavorings of I Choose Noise, but it doesn't explain the expanse and imagination of the Hybrid tech-opera. The pair has always reached higher, producing two long-players (1999's Wide Angle and 2003's Morning Sci-Fi) that bounced off the dance floors and onto the airwaves of college and public radio. They give credit to the rolling, pastoral moorlands of their native Wales, and to the progressive notion of sonic storytelling they picked up as fixtures of global DJ culture. As they get deeper into film work (they showed us a chase scene in the forthcoming Déjà Vu, agonizing over transitions unperceivable to the amateur ear), they get further from the DJ booth.

"With electronic music, you have to use the hard drive as the main machine," says Healings. Truman adds, "It's about taking the best of both worlds, digital and live, and combining them. It's important to have a live input - it gives spark and magic."