Star Apps: The Glitch Mob

Glitch Mob members Justin Boreta and Josh Mayer chat about their new album, "Love Death Immortality," their international tour, Mirrorgram, and favorite mobile apps.

Electronic trio the Glitch Mob's sophomore album, "Love Death Immortality," lives up to its epic title. The 10-track recording's grand, encompassing sound was honed onstage at some of the biggest worldwide venues over the past couple years, and the themes explored -- captured in the title -- are universal. In contrast to the group's debut album, "Drink the Sea," "Love Death Immortality" is richer, with real instrumentation, and more robust, with strong female guest voices. The band's live show is equally massive, with spectacular interactive concert visuals that the musicians control on the fly via apps. I chatted with Glitch Mob members Justin Boreta and Josh Mayer as they prepared to embark on their international tour, which runs through summer of 2014.

 After founding member Kraddy left the group back in 2009, how did you move forward?

It sounds like a cliche, but there really were creative differences. Josh, Ed, and I all had the same creative vision, so when [Kraddy] was no longer a member of the group, it really freed us all to focus on our own thing. We went up to Joshua Tree to really figure out how to redo our whole aesthetic and the story we wanted to tell, and then we went to work on the new album.

Your music often deals in dark themes, and this album is no exception. 

There are definitely some dark themes on this record. We just make music, and it just comes through us. When we decided to sit down and write the album and let it naturally progress, there's something about the palette of darkness, visually. We like the juxtaposition of things, so although the music is dark, it has a hopeful and emotional edge to it at the same time, so it doesn't go to full violence. It's dark and heavy contrasted with hopeful and triumphant. I think that in that juxtaposition and in that balance between dark and light and happy and sad, we find our creativity.

We do like to write music that's happy and hopeful and uplifting, but not too obvious. The happiest moment for us is when somebody hears a song of ours that we think is happy, but they think it's so sad, or the opposite. By leaving it vague and open-ended, it's an exciting way for us to have our music out there.

The "Can't Kill Us" video is a technical masterpiece. Who gets credit for that?

We didn't actually direct or edit this video ourselves. We collaborated with this guy namedBeeple. In the video effects world, he's a legend. He makes a video a day, and he's open source about everything he does. He posts his project files online. If you're a VJ, you learn from him, because of the way that he's transparent about his whole process.

So, we made these extensive mood boards on Tumblr and Pinterest to give him an idea of our palette, and then he gave us feedback, and we went back and forth for a while. I know how to use Final Cut Pro and After Effects when I need to. But we're music guys, not video.

As far as mobile apps, there's this app called 8mm, which is fun for shooting and gritting tour videos, and there's an app called Game Your Video, but the interface is confusing. But it's an interesting space right now, because there are not a lot of awesome video-effects apps. There are a handful of cool editors, but iMovie for iPhone is fine. That's what I use to edit clips together, but those are two go-tos.
What videos are you editing?
Video for tours, and also we're involved in our social media, so we do it all ourselves. We put videos on Instagram. We'll shoot footage, take Snapchat videos, so it's just different ways of creating art and sending it to our fans. I have an app that I developed called Mirrorgram, which is a photo-effects app, and we've been using iPhone photo-effects apps for a long time and were early adopters of Instagram. So it's a way for us to create art and pass time on the road and interact with our fans.
Is Mirrorgram a must-download?
Mirrorgram is fun and really tapped into the trend of symmetry. I do think that's part of it. I think there's something about symmetry, psychologically, where it's satisfying to look at a symmetrical image. There's something calming about looking at something artistically symmetrical, in a way.
Do you have any special tips for new users of Mirrorgram?
People don't know this, but when you open the camera, at first you can open the button up top, and the camera will have the Mirrorgram effect on it, so it's really fun to go out in your yard and point it at plants or walk in the city and point it at buildings. In spaces like that, you can create some cool effects. There's the added function there called Fuse, which allows you to take a picture, render it, and then flip it over and over again. But to make cool mirrorgrams, play with the live camera stream, because that's where my coolest stuff comes from. You might see things there that you wouldn't normally have seen by just twisting it around.
Your tours are always technically impressive. Which software do you run onstage?
Our show feels like a live rock show, with the drama and the energy, but still has the pristine sound of a 100 percent electronic song. So it sounds like the record with room for improvisation.
The main brain of our operation now is Ableton Live. And we use MaxPro, which lets you build custom plug-ins and software within that framework and other computers that run MaxPro, which is a music programming environment that allows us to do customized systems to do what we do. We have one MacBook Pro laptop that has 25 controllers connected to it, and they're all routed and managed through Mac Minis running max specs and one computer running in parallel that is the backup system. That's just the audio set of things, but Ableton Live is really the brains of the music.
For video, right now we send Open Sound Control [OSC] to a touch server, and the lighting board is called a Whole Hog, and so the content will be played live and dynamically and affected by what we're doing onstage and everything synced through OSC, so the show is very alive.
What are your top five apps?
1. I use Uber all the time to get around LA and everywhere else I am.
2. TweetBox for Twitter, 'cause the main Twitter app is kind of a mess.
3. Shazam for finding music when traveling around.
4. For listening to music at home, I use the Sonos app a lot.
5. Reminders keeps my life together when anything comes up. I have a lot of different lists for Glitch Mob, Mirrorgram, and more, where I stick it in there and set alarms to organize my life. Once you get in the habit, it's a major time-saver, and it syncs well between devices. I like how easy it is -- much easier than e-mailing myself all the time.

And Josh, what are yours?
1. I'm really into that new Fragment app. I'm a geometry shapes kind of nut, so Fragment is cool to psychedelically triangle out your image.
2. Yelp is probably one of my most favorite apps. I use Yelp all the time, because on tour you're in random places, and it's fun to search out some really good food. You can also thumbs-up the restaurant. It's a cool way to share great restaurants.
3. Waze we use a ton, being Los Angeles residents. It's a great way to avoid heavy traffic and crucial for living in LA.
4. The Dropbox app, which we do a ton of stuff on. Our sessions will live on Dropbox, and anytime we render a song, we'll put it in a custom folder on Dropbox. The app is so dope, and it's a great way to sync your phone and computer world without having to think about it. It will just automatically live in both places. Anytime that someone did something, it was there to listen to wherever we were. We never had to say, "Yo, can you send me the MP3?"
5. Spotify is a no-brainer, because of the access to music all the time.