We continue our conversation (check out part one here) by digging deeper into the nature of collaboration, Laurie Anderson, hip hop, and more.
PostGenre: So, it was very important to you that Ultra Resonance not be effectively a sequel to The Hard Way?
Steven Bernstein: There are so many records out in the world. There’s no reason at this point in my life to make one that has anything to do with another I’ve already done before. I love to create things. Creating things is what we artists do. And if you are just doing something you have already done, that is not exactly creating. You’d better create something that you haven’t created before.
Scotty Hard: What’s the point? That’s always my attitude about revisiting almost anything. I was already a convert to the view that Ultra Resonance had to be different the The Hard Way before Steven and I had even discussed it. And it was a challenge to make something different. I had a very hard time getting my head into it. But, Steven was incredibly patient. He came over to my house one night and was like “I’m here to inspire you.” And he did.
PG: How did he do that?
SH: We listened to some music and he put on a record that I love. He had never heard it on vinyl. And I had heard it only on vinyl. I told him it was one of my favorite records and how I bought it in 1983 in Vancouver, at the High Life Record Store, the cool record store in the east end of Vancouver. My friend owned it and he said it was a cool record. It’s one of my favorite records and Steven told me it is one of his favorites too.
And then Steven said, “What if you could make the trumpet sound like that?” I told him it was a synth. And he said, “Yeah, but make the trumpet sound like a synth.” I had just got a drum machine back from the shop. It had been broken and was still not working. I was testing it and recorded it into Pro Tools. It seemed like it was in an odd time signature and then I figured it out and it was in seven. It was cool to me, so I started playing it for him, desperate to say, “yeah, I got some ideas.” He listened and went, “Yeah, we could use that. We could definitely use that. That would be great.” And we went from there.
After we were done, Steven gave me the CD for ResoNation Trio and I listened to it. He had decided not to sequence it until Ultra Resonance was done. And it was really cool to hear the parts I was working with used in a different way with the trio.
PG: It is very cool how it all came together. Especially by the time you get to the last track, “Niobium,” with Steven on Electronic Valve Instrument (EVI) taking the album in a whole wildly different direction.
SB: Well it’s the way we do everything, me and Scott. We like to try many different things and see where they go.
SH: As for the EVI specifically, I’ve been working on a record for the last two years that is of a live show with Marshall Allen. From that, I’ve been hearing the EVI a lot. But even with being exposed to it a lot, I wasn’t sick of hearing it. So, I said to Steven, “I gotta hear what you’re gonna do on the EVI. Bring that thing over, we’ll do a track with it.”
I had made an ambient track at the very beginning of the project, when I was failing to actually prove that I was getting anything done on this record. And I took that, asked Steven to bring a bunch of different trumpets and mutes and stuff, and just play individual notes on different horns and on different mutes. By the time we were done, I had sixteen different instrument tracks of long notes that I was able to make, basically, sound like a crazy monophonic synthesizer. I would just grab notes from the samples.
At one point, Steven and I were talking and he said something about an Ethiopian scale and how he had rearranged an entire body of work overnight by changing it to the Ethiopian scale. I asked him what the scale was and he told me, so I made up a bunch of chord clusters using the Ethiopian scale over a span of four or five trumpets. Then I made a stereo blend of them. I recorded those and then found ones that I wanted, grabbed them, and put them in the sampler to make little horn stabs and textures. I put four or five of them together and made this oozing, weird, transforming “cloud” as Roswell Rudd used to call it.
SB: The cloud, yeah. We had made a list at the beginning of the project of some general ideas we wanted to explore. Basically different zones for the record: an ambient track, a meditative track, a groove, a hip-hop track, and something a little punky. I brought the EVI and recorded through it. Then Scott took the recorded pieces of it and replayed them. So what you’re hearing on “Niobium” is not me playing the EVI live over the track. You’re hearing Scott picking certain things I’ve played and then replaying them over the track.
SH: Yeah, initially I was going to leave it so it is Steven on one track where he actually plays against the track. We did that and when I heard it, I realized it was not abstract enough. So, I decided I might as well instead put it in the sampler and play it, because that’s what I’d done with the rest of the record.
SB: I think that’s really good you did too, because it keeps everything on the album in that same mode of having it simultaneously being me playing while also me not playing, The drums and the bass are a different story. I thought Scott Colley would hate me when he heard what we did, but he actually loved it.
SH: There’s some really cool bass playing on it.
PG: Changing gears a little, Sex Mob recently released a record with Laurie Anderson, Let X = X (Nonesuch, 2026). Steven, what do you enjoy most about working with Laurie?
SB: Man, what don’t I?
I have worked with some of the coolest people in the world. Sam Rivers, Roswell Rudd, Levon Helm, Alan Toussaint, Dr. John, Robert Altman, Hal Wilner, Nick Cave, Henry Butler. I’ve worked with them all. And if all those people are the moon, Laurie is fucking out there on Jupiter. I have never been around anyone else even remotely like Laurie. She is pure creation. All the people I mentioned are musicians. Laurie plays music, but I wouldn’t define her as primarily a musician. She is an artist who also happens to play violin and uses sound. She also uses her poetry or writing as lyrics. But they’re lyrics unlike anybody else’s, that’s for sure. She just turned seventy-nine and her desire, her fearlessness in creating, and her openness to creating are infectious. My life has been better since I’ve had Laurie in it. That’s all I can say because when you’re around someone like that, it rubs off on you. She really believes that you can do whatever you want artistically and create things you’ve never heard before. She embraces creating things without…
PG: Limitations.
SB: Right, limitations or preconceptions of what you might like or how you thought something would sound. And that is our job as artists. And we’re good at it. We know how to do it. We work hard at it and trust it. It’s been very freeing to work with someone like that.
Of course, it also helps that Laurie’s open to being an entertainer too. She would say that we’re entertainers too. The way she uses her voice and the way she presents herself to the world doesn’t shy away from entertaining audiences.
SH: People want to enjoy themselves and have fun. They want to be entertained. You can entertain someone and still leave them thinking and learning something. You can still make them have a revelation or make their life better. Entertainment is an active thing.
SB: It’s also really cool to work with Laurie because people pay attention to her. Sex Mob has been around for thirty years. I gave up a long time ago on being famous, but we’ve never stopped working. Sex Mob is still together and suddenly your name’s on Laurie Anderson posters. And a lot of bookers see that and say “Oh yeah, Sex Mob we should book them for our thing.”
The worst thing was when we put out the record on Corbitt vs. Dempsey. I didn’t even really know about the label before we worked with them for The Hard Way. They had re-released Hal [Wilner]’s Nino Rota record [Amarcord Nino Rota (Hannibal, 1981)] and also re-released the first record Hal ever did, Well Kept Secret (self-release, 1984) by Beaver Harris and Don Pullen, which was previously impossible to find. I thought that was so cool. Then I went to the label’s website and saw albums by Don Cherry, Van Dyke Parks, Sun Ra, Olu Dara, and Lester Bowie. All my heroes. All are people I love. That’s my life. But I had never heard of the label before. So when Scott and I finished The Hard Way, we sent it to a few people and they were one of them. We ended up releasing it with them but the problem is that if you put out a record on a label that you’ve never heard of, chances are most other people have never heard of it either. But, you know, if your name is on Laurie Anderson posters around the world, people definitely are hearing about you. So, that aspect has also been very helpful. After thirty years, we’re still here. We’re still making records.
SH: Steven tells me that when you’re working with Laurie, you’re constantly in motion. Things are never played the same way twice. And, to me, who is better to do that than him?
SB: Every soundcheck is full-on. We go through every single song. It’s not like a soundcheck at all but more like a rehearsal of every piece. She’ll constantly find ways to try things differently and to bring new ideas into the performance. As I said, it’s all about creation and that’s incredibly refreshing. It’s very cool, man.
SB: I hated you.
PG: As a concluding thought, and going back to our first question. Given that the two of you have worked together for such a long time now, what do you enjoy most about collaborating?
SB: You go first, Scott. [laughing]
SH: No, I was gonna bust out to say the same thing. [laughing].
SB: Okay, what I love about it is that there’s a lot I can do. I have a lot of skills. That’s why I work all the time. I can play many different kinds of music. I can play the trumpet in many different ways. I can write many different kinds of music. But I have no fucking idea how Scott does what he does. All I know is that he always makes things that sound very cool. And I always want to make very cool sounding records. I always tell people that I like working with my friends. But I don’t hire them because they’re my friends. I hire them because I think they’re gonna make music that sounds very cool. So, aside from the fact that Scott and I are great friends, I love that he makes records that sound amazing. No one else’s records sound like my records. But that’s not necessarily always because of me. The people I work with are a big part of it, especially Scott.
SH: Yeah, I mean, we weren’t really friends when we started working together. I hated you, actually.
SH: I’m sure you did. But the thing that I love about working with Steven is that he’s so open-minded. You can throw anything at him and he’ll find something great in it. Many musicians are very literal about things, focusing on elements like chord changes and how loud a beat should be. They look at the little things. But Steven hears the whole thing. Though one time, I sent him a brilliant track that I was so excited about and he said he didn’t like it. And then I realized that he didn’t like it because there’s no trumpet on it.
SB: Right, exactly.
SH: But the other thing that I love about Steven is that he always considers what I do as not just being an engineer but as being his second favorite arranger.
SB: Right, and I’m your second favorite arranger.
SH: No, you’re my first favorite arranger.
SB: Oh, come on.
SH: But I see mixing as being a lot like arranging. I could just put the faders up and push “record,” which is the stereotypical jazz way to mix a record. But it can also be something very active, interactive, and improvisatory. Pretty much this whole record, Ultra Resonance, is all improv. It is the trio improvising and then me taking and playing these samples completely spontaneously. I didn’t really keep in mind specific notes or phrases. I’m a musician and studied music, orchestration, and composition but I don’t focus on what key I’m in. I just play things and get very intuitive with it because I feel like that’s the best way to make something fully expressive. Bernstein will hear things back the same way I do. That’s what makes our working together easy. And you don’t work with someone for as long as we have if you don’t hear things in at least a complementary way.
SB: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t think it’d be possible for most other people to hear things the same as each other. But our ideas are definitely complementary. We both appreciate the same things. And I gotta say, if you think about Scott coming through Teo and me coming through how I did, we have a heavy pedigree, man. I’m proud of it.
One last thing is that – and I always tell people this – I’m not from the hip hop generation. I’m from the funk generation. But I was there at the beginning of hip hop. I moved to New York in 1979. My oldest son was born in the summer of ‘81. When hip hop first became big, I felt like I already knew the music. I couldn’t understand why people were making such a big deal about it. And, at some point, I realized, that Afrika Bambaataa used to spin at Danceteria when I was hanging out there in ‘80, ‘81, and ‘82. So, I did know this music.
SH: Incredible.
SB: So, Scott and I both came really early into the world of hip hop. I did a lot of early hip hop records just because I knew people who knew hip hop and who needed musicians for their records. And that’s how I ended up on things like the first Digable Planets record [Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space) (Capitol, 1993)]. I’m proud of the fact that influence is also on Ultra Resonance. I’m not trying to make a hip-hop record, but that language is in there in an honest way.
SH: Definitely, because hip hop, in a very abstract way. Also completely influenced the way that I compose music. Back in the day, we used to build tracks up from nothing with a single sampler that had nine seconds in it. You’d have to piece one or two things together at the same time. Nobody had audio files or an MPC or anything. Not even a drum machine. Someone would just walk in with a record and you’d have to take it, sample it, and chop it up to make something out of it. That experience has heavily influenced how I think about creating music and making sound. And Ultra Resonance is the next development upon that idea, using modern technology. It will be interesting to see where we go next.
‘Ultra Resonance’ and ‘ResoNation Trio’ are out now on Royal Potato Family. They can be purchased on Bandcamp. You can also learn more about the albums from Jim Hynes’ review. More information on Steven Bernstein and Scotty Hard is available on their respective websites.
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