Owen Pallett Experiments With Analog Synths on 'Heartland'

Calling Owen Pallett a talented guy would be an understatement. On top of his own career under the Final Fantasy moniker, the Canadian orchestral-pop mastermind has written and arranged for Arcade Fire, Beirut and the Last Shadow Puppets. But for his new record, 'Heartland,' Pallett seemingly works to infuse a bit more electronic influence than he has in the past, a notion that he says stems from working on the 'Plays to Please' EP, which was an homage to Alex Lukashevsky's group, Deep Dark United.

"It was a really hard time," Pallett tells Spinner of that project. "I was on the road when they asked me to do that. I tend to obsess over the details and I spent two weeks working on the road, in the car. Ever since that thing, as I've gotten more into analog synthesizer, I got really into the patterns and the composition that analog synthesis create."

On the track 'Lewis Takes Action,' Pallett describes the process of infusing his compositions through a ring modulator, a signal effect that distorted the sound he was looking for. But it doesn't stop there. "I recorded my violin through a ring modulator, then I sat down and figured out all the frequencies that were being generated," he says. "Then I scored what you're hearing as an orchestral recreation of a ring modulator sound."

For the average listener, this level of specificity is tough to pick out throughout 'Heartland.' While it's safe to say that the music within is quite intricate, you'd think that it each little part was composed in this ring modulator fashion, but not so. Pallett says that this record was a "massive coming together" for him. "The lyrics, the songs, it all just kind of happened at once," he says. "There definitely was a period where I was working on getting all the arrangements done and a period when I was really focused on writing the songs, but it kind of all just happened over a long period of time."

'Heartland' is out Jan. 12 via Domino.