Maserati brings hard rock to a different level on it latest album, Maserati VII (Temporary Residence). So we asked the band’s Matt Cherry to make us a mix tape, and what he came up with is below. Cherry also sent us the following note: “Picasso once said, ‘Good artists borrow, great artists steal.’ Maybe that quote is too highbrow for a rock band like Maserati, but I do think it says something about what it’s like to make ‘new’ music in 2012. I guess some bands write songs by going in a room and just jamming in a certain key or whatever, but that’s not how we work at all. We talk about records we like and usually have an idea of a song before a single note is ever played. A long while ago, my bandmate Coley sent me a text message that said something like, ‘Check out Ash Ra Tempel. I want to do a long guitar intro with no drums like the first song on Inventions For Electric Guitar.’ A few years ago we were watching the Michael Mann film Thief, and our drummer Jerry said, ‘We should totally steal that synth line from Tangerine Dream.’ And we did. So this mix “tape” is a rundown of some of the songs/bands/records we borrowed/stole ideas from when writing our new album. Hope we don’t get sued.”
“The Eliminator” (download):
Ministry “Breathe (Live)”
The intro to this live show from 1990 is sick. We probably watched this 15 times in the studio. Love the man-vs.-machine interplay between the live and electronic drums, which we took cues from on our song “Flashback.” Yes, that’s also the name of a Ministry song. And that’s Martin Atkins (from PiL) playing second drums, too! Video
Tantra “The Hills Of Katmandu (Patrick Cowley Remix)”
Tantra was an Italian disco group with weird prog tendencies. Patrick Cowley was a dude from California who produced and wrote disco songs. Both artists collide in this stellar remix—possibly better than anything either did on their own. This was pretty much the palette for our song “The Eliminator.”Audio
Suicide “Touch Me”
The skeleton of one of our new songs started with a loop I made of electronic hats and kick drum. The lo-fi, pulsating quality of it reminded me of something Martin Rev (one half of the band Suicide) would write, so I called the song demo “Martin Rev,” which ended up being the final name of the song. Video
Sparks “Beat The Clock”
Love, love, love this record. It’s glam rock through the lens of Giorgio Moroder. We totally ripped the drum beat from this for our song “Abracadabracab.” We also took the idea for the chord progression on the chorus, changed it a little and made it about twice as long.Video
Cerrone “Supernature/Sweet Drums/In The Smoke”
French disco at its finest written by a guy who plays live drums on all his stuff. These three tracks make up the a-side of this record, Supernature. What’s awesome is how this whole side of the record goes from straight disco to a drum solo to a dark-side-of-the-moon synth outro. It’s included here because we got the idea for the live toms in the middle of “Abracadabracab” from Cerrone’s drum solo.Video
Steve Reich “Piano Phase”
I got really obsessed with Reich for a couple of months and spent way too many hours watching YouTube performances of “Piano Phase.” I can’t play the piano worth a damn, but I tapped a similar progression out on my sequencer. We changed the key and slowed it way down, and it ended up as the intro for our song “Solar Exodus.”Video
Cymande “Dove”
They were a British funk group. The whole record is badass. I took the bass line from this song, tapped it out on a step sequencer, sped it up, changed the key and ran it through a delay unit. hat became the backbone for our song “San Tropea.” Video
Angelo Badalamenti “Twin Peaks Theme”
We talk about this song all the time. Arguably the most beautiful and iconic piece of any TV/film score in the ’90s. We tried to write our own intro to a non-existent David Lynch series. I guess our version, “Lunar Drift,” ended up somewhere in outer space. Video
