Disappear Here: Hybrid Returns With a Stunning New Album
Download Hybrid's Exclusive Sinning in LA Score/Alternative Mix
Picking up the ticket shows there's money to be made
Go on and lose the gamble, that's the history of the trade
You add up all the cards left to play to zero
And sign up with evil
Angeles
Elliott Smith
"But this road doesn't go anywhere," I told him.
"That doesn't matter."
"What does?" I asked, after a little while.
"Just that we're on it, dude," he said.
Bret Easton Ellis
It’s approaching dawn here in Hollywood. The world has stopped moving outside, but it still breathes. People are waiting for the sun to push just a bit higher so they can stimulate their synapses with caffeine and get on the move. They make movies here, and we’re all in them. Some of us play the grifter with the greased handshake, some are hapless characters in expressionist pieces, some are lovers lost or found, and some are all grace. But as the roles change, the scenery darkens or moves around, or the director seems to have wandered off forever, what gets us through all of this is something to keep us grounded. Something to lift our spirits or give meaning where it’s needed.
And the soundtrack for this year and this place is Hybrid’s Disappear Here.
The last time we saw Hybrid, they were playing at the Avalon, kicking live instrumentation along with their music and burning themselves firmly in to the memories of the entire crowd. In fact, they still talk about the gig themselves.
“We got tattoos after that show, actually,” said Charlotte James, who has been working with the band for the past three years. “In fact, next time we’re in town we should all get tattoos.”
If you haven’t heard Hybrid before (and shame on you), it’s “a combination of indie-rock melodic esthetics with electronica and a deep-seated love of cinematic sounds all wrapped up in to one, really,” said Mike Truman, one half of the original Hybrid lineup. The other, Chris Healings, you can read our interview with here.
The title track is a nod to Bret Easton Ellis’ novel about Los Angeles, Less Than Zero. The words hang on the page, and now you’ll have Charlotte’s intoxicating voice dripping through your ears and across your brain as you try to figure out whether you’ll become Robert Downey Jr., Andrew McCarthy, or James Spader.
“Chris actually bought that book first,” said Truman, “and then gave it to me and because he’s just got that phrase that pops up and I know it’s quite a famous phrase now but we couldn’t get away from it really and it’s such a fantastic book. It’s our homage to it. We’ve spent an awful lot of time in LA, we’re huge fans of the city and it’s kind of our second home.”
“We’ve had so many great experiences in Los Angeles,” he continued. “When we first did the Moby tour in our early years of touring it was one of the most wonderful experience of the whole tour. We’ve met so many great people and it’s a very eclectic kind of city.”
Though they met in an odd way (rumor has it that a social network might have been involved), in listening to the album, it’s hard to imagine them without Charlotte’s influence.
“I’ve been a struggling musician soloist for about ten years,” she said. “As I met Mike and Chris prior to this foreign place, basically they asked if I wanted to write some songs for I Choose Noise, but I didn’t get around to it because I didn’t actually know who Hybrid were at the time. I kind of ignored their emails for a little while.”
“We took her clubbing,” said Truman, “because she had never been before and we gave her the baptism by fire of dance music and showed her how this all happens and took her a little deeper. Poor girl stuck with it and it worked out really well.”
“It’s like a little melting pot with everything we love and we really like,” echoed James. “I don’t know why, but it just works. Chris’s sound side and everything he does and Mike’s production and all the live bits and pieces from my background, it just all fits together really well.”
“We all complement each other,” said Truman. “When we first started working together, we had some great evenings playing Charlotte some Squarepusher and she’s like ‘that’s wicked.’”
“We’re coming from different musical angles but it’s like if PJ Harvey met The Prodigy or something along those lines.”
If that statement alone doesn’t motivate you to listen to this material, I don’t know what else to say. The foundation for the album is the aforementioned title track, which they said was the turning point for the whole recording.
“Chris came up with an effect on some strings that he had done,” said James, “and basically I took that into my room in the studio and wrote a song over it and then it bounced back into Mike’s room and it basically grew from there. It’s a fantastic track that we all feel is the pinnacle of the whole album and sums up everything we’ve done and was a starting point for everything afterwards.”
“We don’t really have any constraints like we do sometimes with dance music,” said Truman. “On this one, we just wanted to breathe ourselves and see if we cold go somewhere a bit peculiar,” said Truman.
They’ve done a lot of film scoring work in the past, and as you listen to the mix they’ve compiled for Sinning in LA, you’ll hear pieces of that. But as you play the mix and the album in your car, as you work, and in your head as you sleep, you’ll find yourself in new sonic territory.
“It’s nice to surprise the listener as well,” said James. “When you think you’re in one place and you’re sort of getting comfortable with it because you think you know where the song is going, and then it ends up somewhere completely different... that’s a good thing.”
As you become familiar with the material, they’ll be gearing up to bring it to you live, as only Hybrid can. “We didn’t want to go out and do the same thing again,” said Truman. “We’d be horrified if somebody went to our shows for the I Choose Noise tour and then saw us three years later and nothing had changed. It’s gotta step up a gear, so we’re going into live rehearsals soon in about three weeks. We are looking at it more like somebody going to a concert as opposed to going to a nightclub where there happens to be a live band playing. We’ve always been in the dance and electronic scene and now we’re going into a bit more of a rock category, so we want to bridge the gap between the two.”
“I think the album isn’t too hung up on being the latest sound or the minimalist movement,” said James. “I think what we’ve done is what we’re all good at and we’ve used all of the experiences from our past, present and what we hope to do in the future into this one album and I think that’s what people would expect.”
“It’s not necessarily the newest sound but that’s not what we were going for. We wanted to get the greatest sound we could possibly find with what we really love, so that’s what we’ve done.”
The sun is soon to come up on the city, and with the new day, the release of Disappear Here. The film of your life just got a much better score, and with any luck, it might have just changed reels entirely.
Disappear Here.
Sinning in LA Mix Tracklist
1. Hybrid - This Is What It Means (Rewinded Edit)
2. Hybrid - Disappear Here (Armchair Mix)
3. Hybrid - Snyper (Transmigration Edit)
4. Hybrid - True To Form (Acoustic Instrumental)
5. Hybrid - True To Form (Soundtrack Edit)
6. Harry Gregson Williams - Evacuating London (Hybrid's Beatless Mix)
7. Hybrid - Just For Today (Hybrid's VIP Beatless Mix)
8. Hybrid - Altitude (Red Square Reprise)
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