Interview from the-raft.com:

IMA ROBOT Interviewed!

JUSTIN
BASS PLAYER AND BACKING VOCALS FOR I’M A ROBOT

What’s it like to be in London?

It’s great! I have been here a bunch of times before but never in the context of being on a mission for my band and it’s exciting and really fun.

How does it compare to back home?

The musical energy is a lot more pervasive you know cause you feel it everywhere you go. And contrary to what you may think of LA, cause it’s a big music place, it really is a lot more visible here. It’s more apparent and the music fans are more ubiquitous in music as a cultural phenomenon and it’s way more present here. It seems a lot more vital and all off your own back you can tell.

Do you think that is because there is more of a movie scene in LA and there isn’t in London?

There are a lot of reasons for it in my opinion but I would say that it’s because LA doesn’t really have a centre! LA is like this spirit of there being a collection of cities and there’s no congregation point for all these bands and there’s a lot of great bands and artists to do their thing. It’s not so readily apparent and there’s no place to go where you’re simply going on. The club scene isn’t as vital and it never has been! That’s not what people do when they go out and it’s there but you have to search. It’s this thing where you have to be well indoctrinated to like get into a scene or go out and have a good time. We were in Paris last week and we’re in London now and you arrive and feel like an instant link up with something that is occurring. It’s make you want to participate!

How was it for you last night, supporting Blur?

It was a shock and it was incredible. We were very fortunate and lucky to get it. We don’t have any record or anything out and we managed to get this opportunity which was incredible. I have been in London before and played with bands in London but for an opening band in London to get a nice reception like that and to get some applause, nodding heads and even a little moving around - you couldn’t ask for more! It was ecstasy for us and it was so great.

What is going through your head when you are playing live?

When I actually play a song or two and just start to relax and get into the vibe of the room that you’re in. I then get into a playful mode of checking the people out who are in front of me and checking out what they are feeling and then you start to relax more and get out of your own head. You start to do this sharing thing with the people and there’s this bit where they are just trying to suss you out and check out what you’re doing. They’re thinking are they cool and what are they about, then they start to get the aesthetic and start to participate in it. Then you can play forward and kind of do this little cat and mouse game of interacting with the people in front of you. It’s just all kind of a game really.

What’s it like being in IMA Robot?

It’s like an army that has five different generals. The people are so unique to themselves and we’re individuals and there’s always a lot going on with a lot of different opinions. We’re conceptualising from everybody, which is fun so there’s no people in the band who ever get demure so it’s really full-on all the time. Like when we want to talk about a concept it’s very vociferous and it’s great. This entity has been together for about a year and it feels exciting all the time that way and there’s always something you can bounce off someone else and get a real reaction. It’s an honest band you know and we’re not afraid to speak our minds. People are forthright with their creative concepts.

You were saying it’s exciting and the sound is very exciting but where would you say that came from?

Well Alex is the kind of singer who gets off on traditional music support so he can kind of groove with the most primal weird jerky monotonous thing and be really melodic on it. And as musicians a lot of us have played music for a while and now it’s almost like it’s revolving back to square one and it’s come around and we have this fun and excitement in all these details like experimenting of things like monotony or really toxic caustic sounds. Meanwhile he is singing over that stuff and it’s great cause a lot of singers are limited cause they require standard rock n’ roll tools in order to do their thing. Alex has the freedom that lets the whole band not be restrained by what the singer requires so that’s one thing that is really noteworthy about that!

I come from a pop background and developed a musicianship from there and everyone else has a different background and someone even has a jazz background and someone has a straight hip-hop background. This is the meeting of the minds for all these different things and I don’t know what it is but this is where it has evolved . It’s kind of elusive but when we write songs or record music, everybody is really doing what they would naturally do. The kind of stuff we jam to and the kind of stuff we write or the way we act in the studio is a really natural thing even though it may not seem so from the outside but it’s really natural.

It seems like there’s a coherence in sounds.

Yeah but that’s almost surprising but we’re disparate and we have very different things but what we come up with together is unique to what the five of us will create in a room together. So in other words, I rely on all of them and they rely on me. It’s all symbiotic!

Can you talk about what ‘12=3’ means to you?

Everyone has a different interpretation of what it means lyrically and we don’t sit down and go to Alex break this down and what does it mean - we don’t do that! We want to react to it naturally. So what that song means to me is that it’s a story on paralell lines like it starts off with a guy who is in school and his teacher is trying to explain some advance concepts to him and he is not getting them because he’s distracted by being a teenager and the girls.

Then in the chorus you have this bit where he realises that the reason why he is not connecting with the world around him is because he is an alien and he’s not really from the planet. He’s discovered as teenager that he’s not from earth and so he’s walking around and he’s an alien. He’s trying to figure out his place in the world and he saying goodbye to his love because the doctors are going to take him away cause he’s not from here after all! So it’s kind of mad but that’s what I think it is. For me that’s what Alex is saying and I get off on that. We’re not afraid to be fantastical and I think that’s fun!

Taken from Justin's February '04 interview with Bassplayer Magazine:

Gibson Thunderbird, natural (“My main live bass with Ima Robot. It’s got a nice growl and it’s very loud. T-birds have thin necks that are a lot of fun.”)


Justin uses D’Addario chrome flatwounds on the Fender Coronado and 50th Anniversary Precision, Gibson RD Artist, the Lakland Duck Dunn Signature and Hollowbody, the Ovation Magnum, and the Guild Starfires and M-85; he strings the ’75 Fender Precision, Fender Mustang, and Guild Jazz 100 with D’Addario Half Rounds, and uses D’Addario XL 160 .050–.105 nickel roundwounds on everything else except for the Hofner, which has its original Pyramid flatwounds.

Live, Justin uses two Ampeg SVT-4PRO heads; one drives two SVT-410HLF cabinets, while the other runs bridge-mono into an SVT-18E cab. He goes direct to the house mixer with an MXR M-80 DI+. “That DI is the first one I’ve used with a musical-sounding EQ, which is very handy, especially in sketchy venues.” Justin has a pile of amps and cabinets and a rack full of effects he takes into the studio for recording. They include:

Amps & Cabinets
Ampeg B-15R flip-top tube combo
Ampeg B100R solid-state combo
Ampeg SVT tube head
Ampeg SVT-810 cabinet
Aguilar GS 112 cabinet
Mesa/Boogie Walkabout amplifier
Mesa/Boogie 1x15 cabinet
SWR Redhead combo

Studio Rack
API 560 graphic EQ
API 525 compressor
API 312 mic preamp/DI
Empirical Labs Distressor
compressor
Line 6 Bass PODxt Pro
Moog Three-Band Parametric EQ
MXR M-80 Bass DI+
Tech 21 SansAmp Bass RBI

“I just bring everything down to a session, unless someone has a specific request. Generally, my sound is based on the Ampeg B-15, which does everything just right. [Producer] Nigel Godrich likes to record that amp with no DI, and it comes out nice and big. On other occasions I use my rack as a sort of overblown DI, which lets me get very specific about carving up the tone; the approach can range from a heavily altered sound to a simple and organic one. On Ima Robot I used the B-15 along with an MXR M-80 Bass DI+ and a Marshall JTM-45 head feeding a Fender ToneMaster 2x12 cabinet. Those three sources were mixed together in various combinations, depending on what the song required. During the mixing, the tracks were time-aligned to take care of the inherent phase problems between the DI and two amp tracks, since the amp tracks always went to tape a number of milliseconds more slowly than the DI.”

Onstage or in the studio, Justin pushes more pedals than the Tour de France. Here are three of his favored pedalboard setups:

Ima Robot (stage and studio)
Tech 21 SansAmp GT2, Boss HM-2 Heavy Metal distortion, Krauser Audio Prunes & Custard harmonic generator/intermodulator, Boss OC-2 Octave, Guyatone PS-3 Phase Shifter, Guyatone MD2 Digital Delay, Boss TU-2 tuner/mute, Z. Vex Wooly Mammoth fuzz, ’80s Ibanez modulation delay, Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler

Beck (live setup)
Tech 21 SansAmp GT2, Boss HM-2 Heavy Metal distortion, Krauser Audio Prunes & Custard, Boss OC-2 Octave, Guyatone phaser, Guyatone MD2 delay, Boss tuner/mute, Z. Vex Wooly Mammoth fuzz, ’80s Ibanez modulation delay, Line 6 delay, MXR Auto-Q, Electro-Harmonix BassBalls (“a fixture on Beck records”), Tube Works Blue Tube distortion, Boss GE-7 graphic EQ with presets (“great w/multiple basses”)

General studio setup
SansAmp GT2, Boss Heavy Metal distortion, Krauser Audio Prunes & Custard, Boss OC-2 Octave, Guyatone phaser, Guyatone MD2 delay, Boss tuner/mute, Z. Vex Wooly Mammoth fuzz, ’80s Ibanez modulation delay, Line 6 DL4 delay modeler, Electro-Harmonix Bass MicroSynth, Moogerfooger ring modulator, Z. Vex Fuzz Factory distortion, Ibanez Bimode chorus, Roger Linn Adrenalinn II
“In the studio, the problem with using all these damn pedals is they really affect your sound. They take away gain and strip away low end and on and on. It’s bad. So a lot of people use expensive, Bradshaw-style switching systems—but I had the folks at Pedal-Racks [www.pedalboards.com] build me a box that has ten effect loops in it, with hard-bypass switches. It’s about an inch thick and three feet across, and has all of these switches and LEDs. It’s a godsend! You just plug each pedal into a different loop, stomp on each of ’em so the lights are lit, and then you can activate them individually via the loop box. You don’t deal with the pedal itself anymore, and the bass isn’t running through every pedal all the time; you’re sending your signal only through the pedal you’re using at the moment. Also, there’s a mute switch for tuning and one button that bypasses everything, so you can still get your perfectly clean sound. It’s great for session work especially. I was always envious of guys with crazy racks and switching systems, but this box does the same thing, in a much more budget-conscious way.”