Machinecorpse began as an idea—a nameless conglomeration of noise and guitars—inside of Chris Barton's head five years ago. The idea soon evolved into an all-consuming quest to get "that sound” that he heard in his mind into the real world. In that time, Barton chose to turn away from conventional songwriting guidlines and just play what he wanted to hear.
As a one-man band, all of Machinecorpse's instruments and vocals were performed by Barton. His early recordings were humble—just a few sound modules and a digital four-track recorder—but after working at a recording studio in Washington, he decided to put out his first CD. That was his first experience using a Mac. "Needless to say," he recalls, "I bought an old PowerMac 7200 with a Sonnet G3 upgrade and an old Pro Tools interface."
Now four years later with CD number two, Machinecorpse has doubled in size to a whopping two people in the studio. Rob Romo shares much of the vocal work, and sings on this featured song, “Believe.” According to Barton, "He’s incredible."
Barton's Mac hardware and software collection has also grown substantially. He currently uses a 466MHz G4—"It’ll be a 1.33GHz soon," he says, "thanks to PowerlLogix." His Mac is stockpiled with 1 gig of RAM, a stock 30GB hard drive, a SCSI card, a few SCSI hard drives, and two monitors. Barton recorded the latest album, Machinecorpse:Reconstrukt, on his Mac, using Logic Platnium 4.8.1 for the tracking and sequencing, and numerous audio plug-ins and apps to round it out—some of which he got from various MacAddict CDs, including VSamp, SFX Machine, and SndSampler. "I really like the TC Spark plug-ins, and Reason—what a great program."
According to Barton, his purpose for putting out the latest CD wasn't necessarily to "get a record deal" anymore as much as it was to showcase his multimedia "buisness card." Reconstrukt is a 14-song enhanced CD, but when you put it into your computer, the CD features an interface that takes you to 12 more songs from Barton's other side projects, song remixes, and songs originally cut from the CD (so were they really cut?), plus Machinecorpse's entire first album. You'll also get a bunch of desktop pix. And, of course, the CD's interface and all artwork were created by Barton with Photoshop and a few other trusted programs on a Mac.
To get Machinecorpse:Reconstrukt, see more of Barton's industrial artwork, download bonus tracks, get song lyrics, read a few words about each song (explanations and apologies), and get the scoop on Machinecorpse's history, check out their Web site or drop them an email.
