Apogee Ads, Cool Remixes and Unprecedented ’70s Drum Sample CD, Multitrack Murderer, Help to Make it a Good Year for God Lives Underwater’s Jeff Turzo.
PR Newswire, Sept 24, 1999
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 24 /PRNewswire/ — It’s not enough for producer and mixer Jeff Turzo to sit around his elaborate home studio in Los Angeles creating tracks for God Lives Underwater’s forthcoming LP. The 1500 Records/Interscope recording artist, who co-founded the group with fellow Pennsylvania native David Reilly, is now the youngest and first-ever musician to lend his image (and home studio!) to Apogee Electronics.
Turzo is currently featured in print ads for the esteemed digital audio company’s new Rosetta AD (analog-to-digital) converter, a moderately priced piece of equipment designed as the ultimate tool for home recording studios. “This is Jeff’s year,” says Apogee’s spokesperson Mary Anne Campagna. “He’s so completely well-rounded as a musician, producer, mixer and songwriter. He is the kind of guy who is the future of the music industry and his attitude is great.”
Through Turzo’s association with Apogee, God Lives Underwater also had the good fortune to work with legendary producer and mixer, Bob Clearmountain (The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, The Pretenders, Roxy Music, Tori Amos). Clearmountain produced one of his signature remixes for the band’s new track, “1% (Long Way Down).” The hard-driving tune will first appear on a new 1500 Records sampler disc, Evolution (due out this fall) that will also include a demo version of Clearmountain’s SessionTools studio management software. It will then be included on God Lives Underwater’s fourth album due out in the year 2000. On the flip side, Turzo has been dabbling in a few remixes himself by recently working on tracks for Rob Zombie, Bloodhound Gang, Lords of Acid, Korn and Smash Mouth.
In God Lives Underwater, Turzo and Reilly display a unique ability to combine organic instrumentation with electronic production to make a contemporary and hybrid sound. It is no surprise to 1500 Record’s President Gary Richards to see them at last come into their own. “I met Jeff and Dave in 1991 and they were the first guys I knew who used samplers and sequencers and mixed that with guitars and drums. They started in the woods of Pennsylvania and didn’t really have a way to record beats and drums so they developed a make-shift way of putting their music together. They were way ahead of their time and really haven’t gotten their credit. I mean, how many people do you know in their late twenties who have been sampling and sequencing since they were 14?”
In addition to working on tracks for the upcoming album, Turzo and God Lives Underwater drummer Scott Garrett just finished production on a ’70s drum sample project, Multitrack Murderer. As a sample CD, it is the first in a series featuring drum loops taken from hours of live drumming recorded at Hollywood’s classic Grandmaster studio (a virtually unchanged spot from that era). “It reproduced a sound people don’t get today,” explains Turzo. “And there’s only a finite number of those old ’70s loops so it’s pretty much to the point where every loop has been used and over-used. That’s why we set out to make a CD that sounds like that but it’s all new playing … it sounds really old in a good way.”
Look for God Lives Underwater’s new material to embrace more guitars, metal roots and Turzo’s ever-evolving production skills. “Our new material sounds harder to me,” he concludes. “The last record was more keyboard based because it was a new source of inspiration. Now, I think the guitar is starting to sound good again. It goes in cycles.” Fortunately, this cycle is a damn good one.
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Original Date: 1999-09-24
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