Com Truise

The Com Truise (Ghostly International) release In Decay is an 80’s viewfinder to a time of great 8-bit sprinkling. Com Truise sounds are a mood ring. Put the mood ring on. Let it read your body-temps as it morphs into a shade of aqua marine. The slow-mo breaded, synth-loped funk will plant enchanted cathodes in your Casio’s womb.  

“Open” opens with a cloud of velvet synth combing down over a Synsonic kick-snare footprint. Then the grandest of a tom fill finds a secret passageway.

Think of it – Thriller was in the charts, Flashdance with Jennifer Beals (and her body double) were out. The He-Man cartoon grazed on latchkey children’s minds. Kajagoogo happened. Mario rescued a princess in Donkey Kong. Martina Navrátilová dominated women’s tennis. James Bond was Octopussy.

1:50 of “Open” is where its links come together. Hi-hats and ride sounds stamp out a Cruising speed icebreaker. Momentum chunks through a delayed Technicolor pattern until washing out in a light blue, amorphous conlusion.

Mr. Truise (Seth Haley) spoke:

What is your oldest memory? Scan back. What’s the first thing in your life you remember, ever.

That’s hard [pauses]. Let’s see [pauses some more.] In first grade, one of my classmates lit his desk on fire. The teacher had to throw it out the window. That’s probably the first thing I can remember.

What do you have to say to Tom Cruise?

I’d say thank you for putting up with my shenanigans. And I’m a big fan of your work, I guess.

Good job in Top Gun.

Yeah. Definitely [laughs].

Does Tom Cruise know about Com Truise?

I don’t know. I’ve heard he has a son who is really into electronic music. There’s a slight possibility.

Tom Cruise seems like such a freak, with the whole Scientology thing, and interviewing for wives with his “people.” And how Katie Holmes had to basically escape the marriage, like she was escaping from Communist Russia in the 1970s. What do you think about him screening and interviewing girls to potentially be his next wife? No offense if you’re a big Scientologist.

No [laughs]. You know, I don’t really know too much about it to be honest. Last time I was in Tampa, FL on tour, I met up with some friends. We went to a bar, and it was across the street from one of the headquarters for Scientology. There were guards and stuff. So we took a picture in front of it. I’m not too familiar with the ins and outs of the practice. It seems pretty crazy to me, but hey, too each their own.

What is your favorite Tom Cruise movie?

It’s probably a toss up between Risky Business and Top Gun.

They’re coming out with a sequel to Risky Business. It’s hidden camera footage from the Scientology compound of them interviewing women to be Tom Cruise’s wife. Crazy shit.

I’d watch that.

Musically, where do you come from. What did you listen to growing up, as young Com Truise?

I’m definitely subliminally inspired by the 80s. When my mother was pregnant with me, she went to a Culture Club concert with me in her womb. I saw, or should say heard Boy George as an unborn. I think that affected me somehow [laughs]. I remember riding around in her car, and listening to Billy Joel, and Bette Midler, Tina Turner, Kenny Loggins, and Michael Jackson.

It never really hit me until like four years ago. I was working in advertising. Co-workers always used to push synth pop on me, and 80s stuff. Not in a bad way. They’d send me things, and I’d say, “Yeah yeah, I’ll listen to it.” But then the folder would just sit there in my download files forever. I was more into drum n bass, and ambient stuff. I can’t remember exactly when I let my wall down, but at some point the 80s music hit me. And I completely saturated myself in it. And was baffled at how I hadn’t gotten into before.

So much music came out of that period, and the equipment, and everything. I’d research and research, and surf and surf and surf. And dig. And look through the liner notes of albums to find out what synthesizers these bands would use.

How was it remixing an orchestral score for the Tron Legacy soundtrack? How did that land in your lap?

The guy that did the music supervision on the movie is a DJ in California for KCRW. He knew Sam Valenti. My remix was last minute. They were looking for another one, and Sam thought I would be good for it. They sent me all the stems, it took like three hours to download them all. Three gigs of stems, all this orchestral stuff. I maybe used 100 megabytes of them.

It was my first major instrumental remix. Definitely a challenge, because I was used to vocals. The Tron song was amazing, but it was a score song. I wanted to make it sound like me, but how do I tie it in. I found strings that happen at the end of the song, and was able to make them work.

Time signatures for scores aren’t forgiving, very weird stuff. I basically had to restructure the entire thing, which was big learning experience for me, to make into a semi-dance music format.

How do you find your sounds?

I’ve always been kind of a drum nerd. From starting out as a drum n bass DJ. I was interested in where sounds came from. What machines make what sound. I did lots of research. I’m a fan of the Oberheim DMX drum machine. And Sequential Circuits Split 8. It’s a very simple synthesizer. There’s a unison mode on it that I like. There’s just nothing else that sounds like it.

You’re able to hit moods. From the technical side, what do you do to make electronic music have a mood? 

I think maybe it’s how I sequence. The way I cue things and compress things as a whole, and separate the instruments in the mix. I’ll do different things with compression.

What’s an example of being different with the compression?

I’ll mess with parallel compression. It’s a lot like maximizing, but it makes it punchier. I build plug-in chains, and I mix a track in the main mixer, and there will be two channels. One channel is the drums, the other channel is the bass, and everything else that falls beyond the drums.

Everything would run through these two, I basically consider them line mixers. Dial up the EQ, and noodle till I find the sound I want. There’s also side chain compression, the bumpy house kind of compression. I found a final output tone that I liked. It’s polished but still has some roughness. Not sure if noodle is a technical enough term here [laughs].

God I love it when you talk gear to me.

Anytime.