Joss's music is a lush, beautifully textured tribute to 60s and 70s dance music. There is so much ear candy on Spiked that it's easy to miss a good half of it unless you use headphones. What sets Joss apart from some of today's sample-loving artists is just that; Joss makes 60s and 70s get-down music packed with his own ideas rather than artfully arranged snippets of other people's songs. Not that there's anything technically wrong with that as long as the royalties are paid, but you can definitely hear the difference.

There's a strong Chris Joss contingent among the Gearwire staff, including Editor Joe Wallace, who put the questions to Joss about his recording techniques, life in the studio, and why Chris Joss won't be going on tour any time soon to support Teraphonic Overdubs.

Joe Wallace: You've got tracks preloaded into Sandisk MP3 players, your work is appearing in film soundtracks and you've got an AOL DJ session under your belt, but for those in America still unaware of your work, how would you describe what you do?

Chris Joss: Mainly instrumental music influenced by 60's and 70's vibes for the melodic parts, and an emphasis on funk and breakbeat rhythmics. Almost everything is played rather than sampled and sound production is an important part of the tracks. I just finished my fourth album, a three-year affair with some more or less pleasant interruptions.

You are being released by ESL Music, the same label that does Theivery Corporation and Ursula 1000. How did you get hooked up with ESL?

My three first LPs each came out on different labels, things didn't work out with the first two labels...so my publisher's French record label Cristal Records, mainly a jazz label, released You've been Spiked. While prospecting for export we sent it to ESL, they'd heard my first album in 2000 and nearly licensed it then, (but) it didn't happen for different reasons. ESL liked Spiked and signed it, they'll also release this new one, I'm happy to say.

On Spiked, what kind of recording setup did you use? What kind of digital workstation do you have in the studio and what plugins helped you get the album done?

I recorded the whole album on a 1GHz PC with an eight-in/eight-out ST Audio soundcard using Cubase SX1 monitoring on NS10s, five mics on the drum kit - SM57& 58, one Milab and a couple of Schoepps - going through a Spirit Soundcraft. I have a background of "classic" methods of recording and mixing, and I really appreciate having everything in one place with immediate totall recall which suits perfectly my working methods.

As I play several instruments, I need to have a fresh ear when recording and I can only get that with time in between sessions. Before that, like everyone with hardware mixing desks and outboard effects, I had to write down all settings to go back on a track, which was always long and tedious and I was never getting the same sound somehow, always forgetting something.

Certainly my favourite "effect" has to be compression, I've used SX plugins for that, the Quadraverb is all over the place as well. The new album was made on a 3Ghz on SX and Ableton Live monitoring on a pair of Adam A7s.

There's a big sonic pallete on Spiked, including horns, xylophone, Hammond B3 sounds, etc. Where did you rely on samples and virtual instruments and where did you find the "real thing" more suited to what you wanted to achieve?

All drums, guitars, basses and light percussions are real instruments. Organs and pianos are whether multisamples or virtual instruments, synths are all virtual except for the bleeping sounds coming from a drum synth from the 80's which is on the back of the LP. Horns, strings, xylophones, harpsichord, dulcimer and sitar are multisamples from my "old" hardware sampler library. The "dirty" sounds are usually sampled from movies, often I play them on keyboard too rather than sampling whole phrases.

Now I find it impossible to do without real drums, but I imagine I wouldn't do without real horns and strings if I had some players around. I've bought a sitar, a flute and congas these past 6 months and they're everywhere on the new album, it'd be hard going back to a multisampled sitar for example. Using multisamples to emulate real instruments has always been the cheapest, although not the quickest, way to have orchestra instruments in my tracks, in fact the only way until now. But with costs diminishing in all sectors of music making, I may be able to use more real instruments in the future, and using samples as composition tools.

On the subjec virtual instruments, what do you like to record with?

B4 & Lounge Lizzard for the sound and I don't know where would I put the real ones if I could afford them. I try a lot of virtual synths, but I often come back to VAZ which I know well and sounds like I want it to, I just tried the Minimonsta and like its fatness.

The bass playing on Spiked is a major part of the sound. What's your bass setup like? Do you go direct or do you mic a bass cabinet? The bass is a Jazz Bass, like guitars and all the stuff that sounds like going through an old plate reverb, is recorded through a Boss SE70 multieffect. I've set a bass preset with light compression and a bit of enhancer. On some occasions like the intro of Discotheque Dancing I plug the bass on my shabby Marshall Valvestate guitar amp and mike it up to get a thin-but-warm sound.

In part two of our interview with Chris Joss, we learn how he uses compression and limiting, plus we learn the reason why Joss isn't touring to support his new album.