Trey’s Little Friend
12/4/99, Cincinnati, OH, Firstar Center
SET 1: Heavy Things, Simple > Ya Mar, Guyute, Tweezer > Dirt, Loving Cup
SET 2: Down with Disease > Split Open and Melt, The Moma Dance > Farmhouse, The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday > Avenu Malkenu > The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday > When the Circus Comes, David Bowie
ENCORE: Julius > Tweezer Reprise
We’ve danced around it enough – It’s time to talk about Trey’s keyboard. For TAB tour back in May, Trey added a Yamaha AN1x synthesizer to his rig, occasionally featuring it on some silly, self-indulgent keyboard solos. But like a lot of TAB novelties, the keyboard transferred over to the Phish setup for the rest of the year, playing an increasingly prominent role in several landmark jams. I’ve lauded the Yamaha’s role in Columbus and Memphis, expressed annoyance with it in other shows, and declared the Auburn Hills 2001 its definitive performance. But tonight’s Melt might be the most prominent usage of Trey synth in a month that represents its peak usage.
By the late 90’s, synthesizers were often used by rock bands for their vintage aesthetic. But the AN1x was fairly current technology in 1999, manufactured by Yamaha from 1997-98. Most of its Wikipedia entry is a foreign language to me, but I gather that it’s an interesting object, falling somewhere between the analog and digital eras and running on a library of 128 preset patches.
Thanks to the insane dude devoted to recreating Trey’s 1999 guitar rig, you can hear some of those familiar samples and how Trey manipulated them. They all seem to have actual names in the AN1x, but here’s how I’d describe the most commonly used:
The Squeaky Toy: A high-pitched squiggle of noise that sounds somewhere between a flock of excited birds and a dog going to town on its favorite rubber animal. (Example: the Camden Melt)
The Slot Machine: An 8-bit style flurry of notes that Trey liked to run through his loop pedal and let cycle around the edges of a jam. (Example: the end of the Columbus Ghost into the start of the Free)
The Space Invaders: Eerie, sustained theremin-style notes well suited to cosmic excursions. (Example: the Palace 2001)
The DIE-DIE-DIE Chant: A demonic voice reciting intrusive thoughts to spoil any unsuspecting fans’ trips (Example: the Memphis 2001)
What all these settings share is that they’re not using a synthesizer in the classical sense of “let’s make a keyboard sound like other instruments” or even the secondhand nostalgia sense of using the poor imitations of early synths as a distinctive sonic palette itself. Trey’s more interested in the textural possibilities of the keyboard, and plays it more like a rhythm instrument than a melodic one. Just as he loves to set up bweeoooos and other guitar loops that are intentionally out of sync and look for those spontaneous accidents when they fall into phase, he often deploys his synth sounds as additional rhythms that antagonise the song as much as they complement it.
There are practical reasons for this choice; it keeps him out of Page’s turf, for one. It also marks Trey’s keyboard as a clear successor of the mini percussion kit he used in 1995 and 1996, as it helps satisfy Trey’s drummer side without displacing Fishman*. But the mini-kit was also actively intended to get Trey out of the driver’s seat and let the other three steer jams, an experiment that didn’t exactly work out – it took the stylistic shift of 1997 to push Phish towards true improv democracy – but one with its heart in the right place.
Trey’s keyboard feels much less collaborative in nature; it’s often featured in jams where he has gone deep into his stage-left lab, layering guitar and keyboard loops and not particularly receptive to what the rest of the band is doing. The keyboard provides more improvisational fodder than the dull “bum-tick, bum-tick” of his mini-kit in ‘95 and ‘96 jams, but the chaotic anti-rhythms he prefers are much more likely to trip up Mike and Fish’s efforts, often boxing them into a static pattern. Still, there are moments where the extra instrument works – all four of the examples provided above are standout jams, shoved into exciting new territories by Trey’s favorite new toy.
Tonight’s Melt is a worthy member of that club as well. The highlight of an otherwise pedestrian show, it’s a fully unique version of a song that never shies away from the experimental. Tonight’s stays in the jam’s usual pattern for a good four-minute stretch despite an assault by a barrage of asteroid loops and other assorted noisy effects. But as with many 1999 jams, the loops eventually win the tug-of-war, and by the 9th minute they’re in control as Trey moves to his keyboard and rolls through almost all of the above list.
Early on, it’s a testament to how far Mike, Fish and Page have come since 95-96 in terms of playing when Trey abandons his guitar. Page moves right into the foreground, multi-boarding on piano and droney organ, while Mike and Fish sharpen the Melt rhythm into a shiv. Then Trey’s patches grab the spotlight back – first The Slot Machine, then The Squeaky Toy, then a sci-fi pitch-shifted tone that echoes Mike’s bassline, then The Space Invader. They’re all layered on top of each other, which threatens the jam’s structural integrity a couple times, but it hangs on for dear life and sets up a triumphant return to guitar and the usual Melt jam structure.
It’s a jam that highlights all the best and worst parts of Trey’s keyboard era, creating a sound that is unique to 1999 while also dancing along the edge of the bandleader’s worst ball hog tendencies. It’s also strangely prescient about Phish’s future – from the perspective of 2024, Trey’s use of the Yamaha AN1x sounds most like how Page uses his Nord Stage 2 in the modern era, triggering samples from the Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House set. Both are elements of Phish’s sound that I generally love, adding a strain of Plunderphonics pranksterism to their sonic mix. But it’s best used in moderation, which was not exactly Phish or Trey’s strong suit in 1999, making one of the defining sounds of the year also one of its most controversial.
* - In this sense, the closest 3.0 analog of 1999 Trey synth is when he ran over to use Fish’s marimba a bunch in the mid-2010s.