Moose Mastering’s main room is another world; isolated, surreal. Narrow blocks of white light punctuate the spaces between speaker towers and a large television screen on the front wall; tilted columns seem to emerge from and disappear into the black walls. At the rear, a square blue couch sits across vertical strips resembling an organ’s pipes, facing onto a desk, a couple of computer screens, and a pair of minimal-looking mixing consoles.
The effect is not an accident. The room is intended to remove its occupants from the outside world and its associated distractions. The only nod to life beyond the studio is the natural light filtering in through the slices in the front wall – otherwise, the aim here is to create a clean slate. Acoustically designed by Chris Morton and styled by Martin Gill, the room was intended to be as neutral as possible.
Franc Tétaz, who created Moose a decade ago from the shell of an old chocolate factory, elaborates: “What I was after in a studio was to have it as a thing that, when you’re working there on a day to day level, you actually don’t notice anything else around you. So you don’t get distracted by your surroundings. It should have quite a kind of meditative sense, so when you’re working there’s just the feeling of the music and there’s nothing else around you. I didn’t want something where you’d walk in and you’d say, ‘Wow! Feels like a country studio! Wow! Feels like a commercial studio! Or a metal studio.’ I’m into heaps of different music so I wanted something flexible – I just wanted to minimise distraction – that’s it.”
Tétaz occupies a unique position in the Australian musical landscape. His career includes time spent in 1990s ambient/industrial outfit Shinjuku Thief, a growing list of iconic feature film scores, compositions for theatre, dance and installation, countless mastering credits, and meticulous production work on some of the country’s finest albums of recent years. In conversation, Tétaz comes across as both methodical and intuitive in his approach to projects – but beyond this, his great strength is flexibility. It’s a quality which runs through everything he’s involved in, from the construction of his studio to the work he does within it. A phrase which every so often bubbles to the surface of our conversation is ‘different for different projects’, and it resonates with the modular nature of Tétaz’s knowledge and equipment.
Rather than studying music at university, Tétaz studied with individual teachers. Initially a percussionist and violinist, he extended his musical and technical knowledge step-by-step in the directions he wished to develop – which, it turns out, would lead him to having his own studio.
“When I was in my early twenties, I realised the sort of thing I was wanting to do meant that I needed to have skills in the studio – I’d need to understand the studio inside out. That’s when I spent a lot of time learning that stuff. I got to the stage where I needed to have really good mix skills. I was working with a couple of people remixing stuff, and then from there I decided that if I really wanted to do what I wanted to do, I needed to not be working in other peoples’ studios; I needed my own studio, so what’s when I started Moose.” The studio has been in the same location – the inner-Melbourne suburb of Richmond – since its inception.
Throughout this time, Tétaz honed his compositional skills alongside his production knowledge – a combination which now affords him great advantage as a soundtrack composer and record producer – two roles he finds very similar to one another.
“I use all those skills when I’m composing. Working as a producer, a lot of it’s arranging, so it means you’re using a lot of compositional skills. It’s like an improvisational composition session when I’m producing. Then you have all the skills of recording and production that go along with it. So when I’m composing it makes it a lot easier to render the idea that I have. I don’t have to take it to somebody else and translate that – it’s one thing that I know is very frustrating for a lot of composers when they’re recording.”
Indeed, Tétaz’s most recent soundtracks – for Australian director Greg McLean’s films Wolf Creek and Rogue – are filled with a telling level of texture and finesse. Wolf Creek’s final 35 minutes are entirely devoid of dialogue, adding weight to the moody pull of Tétaz’s compositions. For some pieces, he drew upon the unique, evocative harmonics of Alan Lamb’s ‘wire music’, capturing the sound created by long stretches of telephone wire in the West Australian desert. At other times, deep, almost majestic rumblings underpin pensive strings and prepared piano. Rogue, he explains, is “more full on” and “much lusher” – utilising brighter, more explicit sounds. On both films, Tétaz has also headed up the sound team, working with a sound designer to create a cohesive sonic environment. The broad scope he’s given suggests that McLean has a lot of faith in Tétaz’s ability – a point which Tétaz confirms.
“As long as you’re working with people who you have a really strong creative link with, then you sort of have that freedom. I’m starting on a film in a couple of weeks with Nash Edgerton, his first feature film The Square. Ben Lee’s written a bunch of songs inspired by the film and I’m doing the score for it. Nash’s whole take in terms of what I’m doing is that he likes my work and he’s really happy for me to bring to the film what I think the film needs.” It’s clear that trust is an essential ingredient to a productive relationship with Tétaz, and it’s also something upon which he truly thrives: “We discuss it along the way, but that’s my brief – ‘Come on, what can you do? Thrill us! Do something that’s amazing that makes my film come alive!’ Any project you’re on that’s like that is a really great project. It’s great for the audience because everyone’s trying to do something that has a real thing about it.”
“That same role in composition I think is very similar in production. It’s exactly the same; you really need that trust.” It must be said that from the enthusiasm with which he discusses his projects – and his intimate conceptual understanding of each – it would be very difficult not to allow him the freedom to explore his ideas fully.
Of course, as a producer, it’s not only his ideas which demand attention, and it’s something he’s very aware of. In this capacity, Tétaz eagerly admits to being very “hands on,” encouraging a strong dialogue between artist and producer. It’s a style which has reaped rewards for artists such as the ARIA-nominated Lior, with whom Tétaz produced and co-wrote the recently released Corner of an Endless Road. That particular project saw Tétaz arranging Lior’s songs for different instruments and voices, and tweaking arrangements. On the whole, it was harmonious, though he happily confesses that occasionally the role makes him temporarily unpopular: “There are lots of times on recordings where you hear people swearing at me, because you make them play so many things over and over again. It’s all about motivating and getting people to do that, but it’s really hard work – rather than going ‘Yeah, that’s fine, that’ll do – cool.’” He considers himself a facilitator, as somebody there to help to evaluate and develop ideas. “You need to know and understand what the song’s about and what they’re trying to do with it, so your vision of it doesn’t take away from that,” he adds.
When producing records, Tétaz approaches recording from a number of angles. Generally, for a band, he’ll hire out a studio for the initial tracking. Beyond this, it varies – for some projects, he’ll record overdubs at Moose, which he tries to limit to parts best suited to the space. But rather than ignoring the huge shifts toward home recording, Tétaz capitalises on the extra scope this can afford some projects, particularly when the artists themselves are suitably au fait with the technology: “If you’re on a project for months and months and months, it costs a huge amount of money, so it’s good to be able to use those skills on the things that the music really benefits from. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money to do that,” he says, adding that it also means band members become more responsible for their performances, and can spend more time in a relaxed environment honing them. It sounds a little like Tétaz sets homework assignments – but in a sense, what better way to immerse artists in the recording?
If it seems unusual for a discussion about Moose to bear so little focus on equipment, it’s because Tétaz repeatedly steers away from the topic. It’s not that he isn’t interested. “I don’t have any favourite equipment. I really like particular microphones for particular sources that I find work really well; otherwise I don’t have any favourites. I actually find almost every piece of equipment I work with incredibly frustrating. Almost every designed piece of gear is really dumb! There’s virtually no piece of equipment that I really like. They have things that are good about them, but then the whole logic of how they work is built on the idea of audio from the 1930s.”
One thing he will say is that he enjoys working in digital audio – particularly given the budgetary constraints of both his studio and his projects. (Moose runs on a trio of Apple G5 Power Macs loaded with Pro Tools, alongside Digidesign Command 8 consoles.) “When you have a system that you can pull up a session and turn it off again, it enables a greater amount of flexibility which enables me to work in the way I like to work. I may be working on a track for two hours, and I’m actually bored of it, you know? I’m not listening to it musically any more, so I want to work on something else for a while.”
As somebody so tied up with sound, it’s refreshing that Tétaz distances himself from the tired old ‘analogue vs digital’ debate; instead, his primary concern is how far he can take the music given the resources available to him. “When you’re working in an analogue studio and you’ve got a whole lot of stuff patched in, you don’t really have the choice of going, ‘well, I’m just going to change tracks now.’ That takes hours, so you don’t do it. I think that sometimes that can be detrimental to your working process. It’s not bad if you’re in the same studio all the time and you know it like the back of your hand, but not for the way I work.”
“With that time that you’re able to put into it, it doesn’t mean you’re going over the same thing; it means that I’m able to get to a point in a track that I would never be able to get to if I had to do it in the one session. That’s a very powerful tool if you use it like that in an efficient way. It enables you to take more risks, basically. It’s not that I’m actually against analogue studios in any way; I actually love them. And ideally, I’d love working in an environment where I have both those things together. But from a practical point of view – I’m talking about music, you know what I mean? Not so much the flavour of some compressor, although you could define that as being musical. I find that if I worked like that, I’d actually be compromising the creative potential of the music.”
Another benefit of Moose’s digital focus is the great flexibility available to Tétaz and fellow engineer Lachlan Carrick (a man known for unlocking the secrets of mastering floor-shaking doom, and who produces music with electronica outfit Velure). In creating a second, more casual production space (in the front section of the space), the pair have devised a way to optimise their workflow: “[The front room] is linked so you can do the same things – it’s got exactly the same setup as the main room, and it’s on a network, so you can pull up all the same sessions. It works well; Lachlan could be working at the same time as me and we don’t step on each other’s toes that way.”
With his attention freed from equipment fetishisation, what is it that ultimately makes Moose an ideal and unique working space for Tétaz and his multitude of exploits? It may seem a little too uncomplicated, but much rests on the room itself. “It doesn’t sound like most studios,” he admits. “It’s acoustically very accurate, but it’s quite reverberant. What I wanted was something that was acoustically flat, so things would translate well outside the room, but it doesn’t take all the space away from it. It’s really great for translation into spaces. A lot of the time when you hear music, it’s actually not in headphones; a lot of it’s in an ambient setting, or there are a lot of other noises around it. The amount of air in a room affects the amount of separation you have between things when you mix, so I would define things more, which means when you got into another environment, you would be able to hear the music a lot more clearly.”
Evidently, hearing music clearly isn’t a problem for Tétaz – a statement affirmed by his concurrent role as A&R director for Rubber Records. If you think he multi-tasks relentlessly, you may be right – but in his typical style, he sees things much more simply.
“I go between doing soundtracks and making records – that’s my thing.”
More information is available from www.moosemastering.com.
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