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.

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.