Made on a Mac: M.I.A. Captured Global Sounds for “Kala”

British-Sri Lankan rapper Maya “M.I.A.” Arulpragasm’s last album, Kala, was made on a Mac.

Her second album, called an “international block party” by Rolling Stone, Kala is full of ear-wormy music that includes samples of Pink Floyd, gun shots, digeridoo riffs, cash register ca-chings and kids on backing vocals. (Give a listen to “Mango Pickle”.)

She traveled with producer Dave Taylor to India, Australia, Jamaica and Trinidad to record it.

Taylor traveled with minimal equipment:

A MacBook Pro, Logic Studio, the Apogee Duet and a set of Adam S3A monitors.

Taylor’s mic’d MacBook Pro captured open-air, off-the-street vocals, instrumentals and serendipitous “noise.”

Some of the “promising accidents” Taylor describes having with M.I.A. : recording the voices of children they’d asked to sing hooks, hairdressers they pulled out of a barbershop and a group of disbanded Cricket players.

“We were just there to collect ideas,” says Taylor, “but the songs would progress as we’d stumble across something, or something would jump out on us.”

While still on the road, and later in his home studio, Taylor produced most of the songs for Kala entirely in Logic Pro, running Logic’s host plug-ins and virtual instruments on the same well-traveled laptop.

“Pretty much everything on Kala was done within Logic,” says Taylor.

More from Taylor on the making of Kala on iTunes.

2 comments »