Disappear Here Part II: Hybrid Showcase Their Naughty Side And Set Out To Dominate Dancefloors
Download: Hybrid's Sinning in LA Club Mix
On Hybrid’s dynamic new album, Disappear Here, the trio of Mike Truman, Chris Healings and newest member Charlotte James have created a musical melting pot of cinematic songwriting mixed with electronic music that is the very essence of everything that’s best about the band itself. While Hybrid have certainly crafted some potential crossover songs here on the new album, they’ve also always been a band that knows how to move a dancefloor. Whether in the form of their genre-defying DJ sets or now legendary live band gigs, Hybrid is able captivate a crowd like few electronic acts can.
“We wanted to do an album first for our live show and for our fans really,” said Healings. “Something new that was gonna push people into listening to something different that has a bit more substance to it."
We wanted people to really listen to us on Disappear Here and then we’ll flip it on its head and pull out all our new remixes and show ‘em what we can do in the clubs as well!
It’s Chris who is not only in charge of creating the band’s trademark “noise” but also keeping up with the ever-evolving tastes of today’s modern electronic music lovers in nightclubs all over the world. It’s a role within the group that is extremely vital and one that Chris clearly relishes taking the reigns of and representing the Hybrid Soundsystem in Clubland.
“Oh yes,” he devilishly laughed. “We’ve kind of been working that way for a while now. Mike does a lot of the mixing but we all sit down and arrange everything together. I try to push things with a lot of sonic implements. Basically all the noise really. So all the electronic noise in each track is basically me trying to push things as far as I can sonically without it sounding stupid.”
“That’s my sort of thing, trying to do something that nobody else is doing and trying to cram all these crazy noises into some of Charlotte’s beautiful songs and then she does the same for some of our sounds. Just basically doing things different like Hybrid is supposed to do and putting stuff together that’s not supposed to go together.”
For over a decade now, Hybrid’s trademark has been the band’s original brand of “cinematic noise” that has captivated not just club-goers but also big screen cinemas after plenty of recent forays into the film scoring world here in Hollywood. While Disappear Here should certainly see some of its songs soundtracking movie scenes soon, it’s also got several sure-fire floor-fillers as well, such as on standout “Original Sin” (a personal favorite and featured on Chris’ mix). It’s these imaginary movies for the mind that the band creates nightly in a club that has Chris excited to test-drive all the new material they’ve amassed and further add to Hybrid’s already impressive arsenal of dancefloor destroyers.
“We’ve really got some proper naughty stuff coming,” Chris sinisterly said. “We’ve done so many different styles over the years but we got kind of known for doing the Hybrid bassline."
There’s some real, stinking, like techno-dubstep stuff that we’ve done that is completely new and unexpected.
“These new remixes are called the Kill City Sounds mixes basically,” he further explained of the moniker which is a nod to longtime fans of their timeless track “Kill City” from their debut album, Wide Angle. “So we’ve done them designed to be played out but still the production values are very deep in it.”
Despite breaking through over a decade ago with a slew of remixes, the band has remained relatively immersed in the studio and focused primarily on their original productions and flourishing film composing career. That’s all about to change now as the mad scientists have emerged from the lab with re-imagined versions of many of Disappear Here’s tracks all in the Kill City Sounds vision.
“We got known for doing our remixes years ago and that’s how we established ourselves,” Healings recalled. “We haven’t been remixing for quite a few years now so it’s exciting to have a big catalog of remixes that are going to start leaking throughout the year. But we’re gonna keep going, because I want to have fifteen or twenty new Hybrid mixes from this album.”
He further added, “On iTunes we found that people would mostly buy the Hybrid remixes of our tracks so that is why we’ve invested so much time in doing all these new mixes so that we can have a lot of them to offer to our fans.”
As the trends of Clubland have shifted towards a stripped back and minimalistic style in recent years, which is a stark contrast to the epic sounds of Hybrid’s productions, Chris has noticed that a lot of big-name DJs like Dubfire (of Deep Dish fame) and the fast-rising Henry Saiz are strongly supportive of the new Kill City remixes and are able to incorporate them into their sets, but just don’t ever expect to see Hybrid making (or playing) minimal music themselves.
I still like to see a dance floor bounce. Not shuffle or groove. So that’s why we’re still doing what we do in the club style.
With Disappear Here, Hybrid have finally created the album that stems from the sounds that that they’ve had swirling around in their heads. They’ve also found the perfect multi-instrumentalist muse in Charlotte James and she’s even found a way to make the band’s sound even more cinematic, such as on the ode to the Los Angeles literary classic Less Than Zero that also serves as the album’s namesake.
“It’s a funny balance really on every track,” Healings explained. “This album started like two years ago and we recorded everything live. The drums, the guitars, strings, vocals and we were kind of doing it as writing tracks and jamming as a live band but it just didn’t sound like us at all. So everything got pushed through the computer and the electronic world. We twisted and sound designed it and we ended up with Disappear Here and that track was really the turning point of the album.”
“It’s got all the ingredients. It’s electronic enough. It’s band enough. It’s song-writing enough. It’s contemporary enough. It’s classical enough. When we wrote that one, we knew that’s the way to do it.”
As a long-time supporter of the band’s ever-evolving styles since the release of Wide Angle over a decade ago, the new album marks an exciting new evolution for Hybrid. Disappear Here is the kind of album that is best served from start to finish just like any Hollywood film would. The twists and turns are ever apparent and there’s many a new adventure to uncover with each passing listen.
“We wanted to make an ear candy sort of sound. Something you can listen to again and again and again,” Chris proudly proclaimed. “I kind of think with this album that we’ve really stepped off somewhere this time from the last three albums that we’ve done."
I’d say it feels like an album that somebody does after they’ve done everything they can do in dance music but I think it’s a bit more than that.
Much like the band itself, there’s always more to discover. From film scores, to adventurous albums and mix compilations and of course their deadly DJ sets, the Hybrid Soundsystem will be unstoppable not only in 2010 but for hopefully decades to come. While we eagerly await their inevitable return to their second home that is the City of Angels, check out this ‘naughty’ new club mix that Chris has prepared where he finally gets to test-drive some of that exceptional new material.
Did you read Part I? Click here to read more about Hybrid and our favorite new album Disappear Here!
Hybrid‘s 'Naughty' Sinning In LA Mix Tracklist:
1. Hybrid - “City Siren (Reprise)”
2. Hybrid - “Numb” (Hybrid's Kill City Sounds Mix 03)
3. Hybrid - “Break My Soul” (Hybrid's Kill City Sounds Dub 01)
4. Hybrid - “Original Sin” (Original Mix)
5. Hybrid - “Can You Hear Me” (Hybrid's Kill City Sounds Mix 02)
Surf: Hybrid Soundsystem
Follow: twitter.com/hybridsound
Buy: Disappear Here
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