Mark Bell

Mark Bell
I’d been watching him since 1990, when he was doing LFO, because I like the pioneers who have stayed faithful to techno. He did several remixes for me—for example, he did the first remix of "Telegram." He played with my voice, adding effects. That’s another thing I’d never done, which I’d love to try more. That’s one reason why Mark and I work so much together ; I trust and respect what he does for me. If I were to say who influenced me most, I would say people like Stockhausen, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, and Mark Bell, because the work Mark did when he was nineteen proved to our generation that pop music is what we...

Musician, december 1997

Mark Bell
I really like working this kind of session. It’s more open-minded. You can sometimes get locked into things, like with these guitar groups who are so prejudiced, like you’ve got to study gui-tar for ten years before you can make a blues album. But with Björk, if it sounds good, it’s good. She’ll go, ’Can you make the bass line more furry ?’... It’s always poetic, which is good, because if she tells you exactly what to do, you’re more like an engineer. This way, you get to create atmospheres too.

Musician, december 1997

Mark Bell
How did you meet Bjork, and how did you wind up working with her ? Bjork rang me when she was in the Sugarcubes, to talk about doing something on ’Debut’ we met and really got on, but I just wasn’t ready to do anything like that, I was too busy breeding exotic monkeys... What was different about working on Bjork’s "Selmasongs", which was obviously influenced by the movie "Dancer in the Dark" that it accompanies, as compared to "Homogenic" ? With ’Selmasongs’ it was really fun, the narrative of the film dictated a direction, we took a different route and ended up with ’Selmasongs’ ... We had a tap dancing instructor wired up to trigger synths for our amusement ... we mixed it in Pro Tools 5.1 which is really confusing especially when you’ve got joysticks for panning, and you can’t stop...

Grooves Magazine, 2001

Mark Bell
I really do think she’s the best singer I’ve ever heard. Even live. She can sing it every single time, and it’s just perfect. She really understands everything about music.

unknown

Mark Bell
How did the Björk collaboration come up ? I met Björk when she was playing one of the last Sugarcubes concerts, she really wanted me to contribute to her solo album Debut but I was to busy fannying around with my own beats. She then rang up when she was doing Post but I was still fannying. Then she was doing her third Album and she asked if I’d come to Spain to work with her for a bit, I ended up staying for 5 months and then we did Homogenic. Working with such an unconventional artist must have been a bit of a challenge. How did you work with her ? It’s more fun than challenging, similar things move/excite us, it’s more of a team thing. I could do whatever with the music and she can sing over it straight away without hearing it once. We captured some beautiful moments like that....

www.themilkfactory.co.uk, June 2002

Mark Bell
In 1990, when the LFO album came out, I was very excited - this is when I would meet up with Mark Bell & Graham Massey in Manchester. After this, me and Mark would stay in touch and have occasional nerd phone calls where we would play each other impossible stuff to find - labels, over the phone and have a freeform about how to fuck up the human voice and use certain effect units and that sort of stuff. Mark did some remixes for me on the Post album and later in 1996, I asked Mark to come to Spain to experiment with me for the beginning of Homogenic. He said he would come for a couple of weeks but stayed for six months, and we’ve since worked together for four years. We completed each other’s ideas like this for years. I guess what is kinda exciting about Homogenic and Mark Bell...

David Toop Interview, 2002

Mark Bell
Me and Mark have a gorgeous music relationship which comes from a lot of trust . I am very grateful to him on albums like Homogenic , Selmasongs , Medúlla he has had little ego enough to come into songs of mine that are almost complete , I have even programmed some of the rhythms , he has then come into it and added just the rhythm that was needed to complete the track . That is a very generous thing to do and not a lot of electronic artists are that flexible . They wanna storm into your song and change it all and make it into their own environment . Sometimes also he will let me listen to tons of beats of his and i will pick one take it home and edit to a track of mine ( like for example “Wanderlust“ ) But there are also songs me and mark have done where he brought the music and i then...

www.brooklynvegan.com, April 18 2007

working with Mark Bell
Mark Bell and I sampled a lot of Japanese shakers, bells, and wood blocks that we picked up in Japan. So to start, I might record a track of me playing shakers, and then I would edit that in Pro Tools. I would try to keep longer regions, with movement in the sample — not just a single hit — so it sounds more organic.

The Winter 2006 edition of DigiZine