Channel Pressure is the debut studio album of electronic music duo Ford & Lopatin, consisting of producers Daniel Lopatin ( Oneohtrix Point Never) and Joel Ford. Following the group's abandonment of their previous name "Games" for legal reasons, they recorded the album at Gary's Electric Studios in Brooklyn, New York. It was released on June 7, 2011 as the first album to be issued on Software, Lopatin's own label under the Mexican Summer imprint.
Channel Pressure is a concept album about a teen named Joey Rogers who is brainwashed by voices from a supercomputer. Musically, the album draws on an eclectic variety of 1980s music styles, including electropop, white soul, R&B, jazz fusion, and new age, as well as cluttered and improved quality production techniques than heard on their previous releases. It features production and vocal contributions from Al Carlson, Autre Ne Veut, and Jeff Gitelman.
The album was promoted with two singles, "Emergency Room" and "Too Much MIDI (Please Forgive Me)." Channel Pressure garnered favorable reviews from professional music journalists upon its release, and was number 18 on a year-end list of the best albums of 2011 by Gorilla vs. Bear.
Background and production Ford & Lopatin formed in 2009 under the moniker Games. Their debut record That We Can Play (2010) was an extended play that was produced by recording and editing one single stereo Pro Tools improv jam.Friedlander, Emilie (February 11, 2011). "Games' Dan Lopatin Talks New Label, Name Change". Altered Zones. Pitchfork Media. Archived from the original on February 14, 2011. Retrieved July 31, 2017. In an August 2010 interview, Ford said that he had recently met in Brooklyn with Jan Hammer's son, who was a fan of the Tigercity project, so he could talk about recording the synths for Games' first full-length album at Hammer's studio in upstate New York, and announced they would begin recording the LP at the studio in December: "We're on the concept still, but it definitely involves athletic cuts and smooth jazz-fusion."
In the fall of 2010, Keith Abrahamsson and Andres Santo Domingo, founders of the imprint Mexican Summer, had a conversation with Ford and Lopatin where they suggested that the group form a new label and studio under Mexican Summer.Beta, Andy (June 10, 2011). "Q&A: Ford & Lopatin On Playing Together And Playing With Studio Toys". The Village Voice. Peter Barbey. Retrieved July 31, 2017. In February 2011, the duo changed their name to Ford & Lopatin, reportedly to preempt legal issues with the Interscope Records artist Game, and started the label Software under Mexican Summer; Channel Pressure was Software's first release.Fitzmaurice, Larry (February 9, 2011). "Games Change Name to Ford & Lopatin, Start Mexican Summer Imprint Software". Pitchfork. Conde Nast. Retrieved July 31, 2017. Like That We Can Play, Channel Pressure was produced with the software Pro Tools. However, it was recorded in a much bigger studio with more advanced equipment, meaning the recording of the jam sessions involved instruments that were signaled to multiple channels instead of just one track all together like That We Can Play, which led to many more possibilities in how each song would be crafted and edited.
Lopatin said his use of the program for making Channel Pressure increased his comfort and familiarity with the program. He described the development process as "kind of a White Album thing going on where some songs were more driven by Joel, some by me. But whatever ideas were on the table, both of us were kind of throwing a lot of stuff together." The Gaia synth by Roland was used to achieve what he called "the weird scat dad sounds": "It's definitely like we wanted to do almost this J-pop, cartoony thing and to have this overload of interesting synth moments, Thomas Dolby style, where he's showing you all these little strange [...] but in a fun way that's not wanky, being a zoo of little synth emotions and shapes."
Composition The style of Channel Pressure was described by Beats per Minute as a mixture of "80s throwback electropop, happy hooks, new-aged tinged video game overworld themes, Rhythm Nation-era industrial R&B, and a liberally applied layer of synthy cheese" and by Spin magazine as pastiche in the vein of Ariel Pink. Some critics noted the record's glitchy and hectic arrangements and sound structures. AllMusic described the album as "blurring the boundaries between brittle digi-funk, gooey, soft-focus R & B, wonky fusion jazz, noodly electro-prog, and chintzy new age." Scott Morrow of Alarm magazine categorized the album as a "modern and experimental twist" of 1980s music and described the sound as "Prefuse 73 twisting around the Miami Vice theme." In the words of Patrick Hajduch, another Alarm magazine journalist, Channel Pressure is a "jittery, looped amalgam of trashy ’80s vibes" where instrument and vocal recordings are decreased in sample rate, "deconstructed," and "smashed back together;" the record has a "smooth ’80s sound and quasi-R&B song structures" that contradict its "crazy programming."
The hectic sound editing is most prevalent in the instrumental facet of the album, where, as Conrad Tao of Sputnikmusic explained, "layers build upon one another and drop out without warning, beats appear out of nowhere, and flangers are employed liberally." PopMatters critic Richard Elliott noted a "stutter of the past" in the album's drum parts which was a symbol of the "general battle between analog and digital, “real” and synthesized, that occupied so much of that era’s aesthetics."
As Becker analyzed, the use of vocals on Channel Pressure makes the album "a collection of pop songs rather than yet another instrumental so-old-it’s-new electronic album." Joel Ford sings in a falsetto in the style of Green Gartside, Jimmy Somerville, and Lewis Taylor, and his vocals are filtered with auto-tune. Tao described the singing as "creepily emotionless" and "purposefully robotic, acting as the voice of God if God sounded like a male version of GLaDOS;" he analyzes that the robotic aspect of the singing gives "the knowingly cheesy melodies a welcome (if superficial) feeling of gravitas."
Concept Channel Pressure is a concept album imagined as a retrofuturistic story that takes place in the year 2082. Combining elements of the plots of WarGames (1983), Tron (1982), and Donnie Darko (2001), the story involves a "mild-mannered" teenaged antihero named Joey Rogers who is brainwashed by several voices transmitted to his subconscious by a record industry-controlling supercomputer named System II from a television while he's asleep."Ford & Lopatin – Channel Pressure". Mexican Summer. Retrieved June 8, 2015. The voices control him to break into a music equipment store. Rowan Savage found this story similar to Victor Tausk's concept of the "influencing machine" that controls the human. He explained that the frequent number of references to television in the lyrics "locate the album somewhere between the technology of the past and that of the future, between 1984 and the virtualized separation of image from machine." Ford & Lopatin conceived the idea of the Joey Rogers character while riding a bus to Boston, Massachusetts.
Tracks Channel Pressure opens with "Scumsoft", where Rogers, while clicking through channels on the television, is possessed by snippets of demonic shows. The track is a montage of samples from randomly-chosen YouTube videos Lopatin played through Al Carlson's tape echo filter. Lopatin jokingly described YouTube as the "second-best synth" used for the making of the album, being topped by the Roland Jupiter-8. Heems from the alternative hip hop group Das Racist recorded a full verse for the album, but only a part of it was used and was featured near the end of "Scumsoft". Channel Pressure's title track, described by Lopatin as "one of the more developed Jupiter 8 MIDI jams", introduces the supercomputer System II that brainwashes Rogers throughout the album. In this track, the computer is voiced by Mexican Summer staff member Julia Krivonos. The Omnisphere strings that play during the song's chorus were added by Ford and Lopatin after the mixing was done, which angered Guillermo. Dried, ominous dub-esque soundscapes, a ska-influenced guitar played by Jeff Gitelman, and a repeating flute trill riff performing a riff a la the theme for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly are also present in the instrumentation.
"Emergency Room" was Channel Pressure's lead single, released on April 25, 2011. It's a joyous track that Pitchfork's Zach Kelly compared to "forgotten B-movie soundtracks from the decade of excess" and Ken Taylor of XLR8R the works of Oingo Boingo. In the middle of the track's running time, Gitelman's jazz metal-style guitar solo is performed with inharmonious vocal stabs in the background. All of the sporadic instances are calmed when Ford sings "Although I'm dinged up, voices are going away." The song's Roland D-50 bass riff was compared by Kelly to that of the Gary Numan song "Cars". In "Rock Center Paranoia", which Lopatin called a "fake metal jam," Rogers has an anxiety attack in a music equipment shop. The song features a Minimoog the duo bought from the door next to where they were recording Channel Pressure, as well as another guitar part from Gitelman where he is "shredding seventh-grade style."
"Too Much MIDI (Please Forgive Me)" was Channel Pressure's second single; it was the first of ten tracks to be issued under Adult Swim's 2011 Singles Program. Upon its June 13, 2011 release under the program, it received the label of "Best New Track" from a review of the track by Kelly for Pitchfork. The track depicts Rogers as excited to record an album in his own dreamland while riding in a hatchback on an elevated interstate. It starts out as a lament sounding like what Lopatin described as a "subterranean S&M steam world", musically arranged with "alien-sounding" synthesizers and sounds commonly found in Industrial music. It then turns into an "archetypal synth pop banger" with synth stabs reminiscent of those in Prince and The Revolution's "Purple Rain" and "deliciously cheesy guitar wailing," Kelly analyzed. Savage compared its instrumental to New Order's "Blue Monday", and noted its "fretless bass aesthetic characteristic" similar to that of musician Mick Karn.
As Ford and Lopatin's "secret recipe", most of the songs written for Channel Pressure, started out as smooth jazz songs before Ford and Lopatin began experimenting with them. The making of "New Planet" is the best example of this process; Ford and Lopatin built the track around fretless bass guitar lead melodies and synth pads, and Prefuse 73, in the duo's words, "took this one above the clouds." Jokingly described by Ford and Lopatin as "our sweet ELO ripoff jam," "The Voices" lyrically has a double meaning; the song is about Roger hearing voices, but at the same time it also talks about earworms the narrator hates to have in his brain. Despite the track's glitchy sound, the song also contains elements of pop music that gives it a mournful, scented tone. It is followed by the theme song for and named after Joey Rogers, which is about needing System II to produce the record he wants make that, in Ford's words, "dominates his dreams."