Chosen One: The Gentleman Losers
“So we had a feeling of being stuck in this insane limbo, this quicksand, where no matter how fast we run, we don’t make headway.”
— Samu & Ville Kuukka
Words: Mark Carry
Last winter saw the highly anticipated return of Finnish duo The Gentleman Losers with their sublime third studio album ‘Permanently Midnight’ (released on Estonian boutique label Grainy Records). With the addition of vocals (on several tracks) and synthesizer instrumentation, the band’s unique sound world has further evolved, producing a rejuvenated, cathartic and deeply bewitching sonic experience.
The Gentleman Losers consist of brothers Samu and Ville Kuukka from Helsinki, Finland. The duo’s immaculate instrumental music first surfaced in 2006 with their universally acclaimed self-titled debut full length, followed by the equally exceptional ‘Dustland’ in 2009. Looking back, the band mapped magnificently the gorgeous ambient and modern classical recordings of the 00’s. The duo’s first two records capture a fragile beauty of long-lost folk relics, forever filled with cinematic wonder and a lyrical quality is forever inherent in their stunningly beautiful musical works. In fact, many conversations with musicians over the years has seen the name of the Gentleman Losers pop up – often with a flood of excitement and a warm smile. A remarkable band whose return last year was akin to the return of a longtime friend to grace your very presence.
The long hiatus in these intervening years saw the Kuukka brothers form a synth pop outfit Lessons (with extensive touring in addition to the band’s debut album release) and film scores and other commissioned music. Says Ville, “We were really itching to get them out”. The album’s immaculate ten tracks contains a bold spirit that resonates powerfully throughout the quiet bliss of synthesizer-layered opener ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ right through to the closing harmony-laden opus title-track.
As ever, keen attention to detail is clearly evident across the mesmerizing sonic canvas. Gorgeous harmonies are intricately placed on the late night bliss of ‘Swimming After Dark’ while the closing two tracks (forthcoming single ‘Rising Tide’ and ‘Permanently Midnight’) merges Memphis soul and 60’s/70’s Americana to magnificent effect. A healing quality prevails throughout the sumptuously layered creations.
The album’s towering centerpiece ‘Wintergreen’ epitomizes the visionary nature of the duo’s latest sonic jewel. Cinematic strings and brooding synthesizers are effortlessly fused with clean guitar tones and a plethora of pristine instrumentation, radiating a deep catharsis as a result. ‘Occultation Of Hesperus’ is a live jam, bustling with hypnotic guitar riffs and pulsating beat. The range of the band’s sound is widening yet their trademark ambient aesthetics remain beautifully intact.
‘Permanently Midnight’ becomes an experience of in-betweenness. Says Samu, “Permanently Midnight explores the idea of liminality, of being stuck in a stage where the old has ceased to exist, but the new hasn’t yet begun”. A timelessness spreads across ‘Permanently Midnight’ like the impending light of dawn.
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‘Permanently Midnight’ is out now on Grainy Records.
The Gentleman Losers’ upcoming single “Rising Tide” will be released on June 22nd on all major digital services.
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https://www.gentlemanlosers.com/
https://thegentlemanlosers.bandcamp.com/music
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Interview with Samu & Ville Kuukka.
Congratulations on the utterly compelling and stunningly beautiful new full length release “Permanently Midnight”. I just love how on one level, it’s unmistakably the unique sound world crafted by The Gentleman Losers but also there is many new elements inherent in your sonic oeuvre in this newest chapter (particularly, the use of voice and harmonies and more heightened use of synthesizer in places). Firstly, please discuss the primary concerns you both had for this new record (from the outset) and indeed the conversations you must have been having concerning the desire to add these new colours to your musical language?
Samu & Ville Kuukka: Thank you so much! I have to say, whenever we set out to make new music as TGL, it’s always very, very hard to meet the standards we’ve set for the band. We’re not happy with almost anything that comes out of our fingertips. I don’t know how many times we’ve cursed ourselves for being so demanding. I mean, who needs this kind of madness in their lives? Sonically, stylistically, and emotionally, we’ve set these boundaries, more or less strict, within which we operate. The world is very finely tuned, and it breaks easily, so each note and idea and sound needs to be carefully chosen to preserve the magic. That said, we felt that, since the gap between the releases ended up being so big, it was time we brought new elements to the sound. The expectations were high, I suppose, from our fans, to come up with the goods again, but at the same time, we’re not the same people as we were eight years ago. So it would have felt a tad disingenuous to keep making the same music we were making then.
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There has been quite the hiatus from the second Gentleman Losers record (“Dustland”) and last year’s eagerly awaited follow-up. I get the impression your involvement in the synth pop band Lessons (and particularly the numerous live shows) helped inform the sound of what would become “Permanently Midnight”? The ambitious scope of the record is what strikes you immediately where the glorious compositions inhabit this remarkably empowering and cosmic spirit. During these years of allowing the new compositions to bloom naturally – and gradually I presume – there must have been a proud moment for you once the album finally came into being?
SK & VK: We never meant to take a break from TGL.”Dustland” materialised rather easily, so it wasn’t a question of being fed up with the band or anything. What did happen, was in fact our “side projects” – seeking film music commissions, then getting them, and the Lessons band – ended up taking way more time and energy than we had thought. Lessons in particular turned out to be much more demanding than we expected, much of it owing to the fact that the third member of the band, our singer and co-writer Patrick Sudarski, lives in Germany. But then Lessons got signed to Sinnbus records and there were releases and tours and interviews and the lot. Which was all lovely, obviously exactly what we wanted to happen! But when there are people involved in your endeavours, like label folks, PR people, booking agents, radio promoters, and what have you, it sort of becomes more serious. It’s a job then, really. There are people expecting things from you. With TGL it as just the two of us, more or less, especially after our label City Centre Offices decided to call it quits, after which we in fact had no outlet for the music. But certainly it was writing synth pop songs for Lessons that got us thinking that we might write vocal songs for TGL too. It was a very natural progression, too.
It wasn’t like we were working on the album all this time, but there were long stretches when it in fact was all we did. The film music stuff and the synth pop band were helpful in opening new creative doors for me personally, but I think there were times for Ville when he felt the opposite to be true. And at some point progress on the album got mired down. Those were difficult times for us, I can’t deny it. There was depression, a feeling of futility. The growing panic of having wasted years on a project that might not ever see the light of day, and if and when it did, would we even be on anyone’s radar anymore. And as always, the question of making enough money to pay for the rent. Which, of course, is a real struggle for indie musicians. It’s genuine poverty; there’s no nice way to put it. Ville had a serious bout of burning out and it took him a long time to recover. I was getting serious physical reactions from the constant stress of years on end. I was actually in physical pain for months, and no cause was found.
So we had a feeling of being stuck in this insane limbo, this quicksand, where no matter how fast we run, we don’t make headway. This is what the album came to be about at some point. We kept working on it, because it was already way past the point of no return, and we knew it would be great eventually, because the songs were there. Then we reached the moment where we thought the album was finished. We were in Berlin, and we played that version to some musician friends – Nils Frahm, FS Blumm, Takeshi Nishimoto, Martyn Heyne – and they all liked it. But for us, this was an ear-opener. We somehow heard the thing with fresh ears, and knew that it wasn’t anywhere near finished. So from that moment on, we got back to the drawing board and after some serious reworking, we finally found the right approach and the album became what it is.
And I need to point out that in spite of all the struggle, we love the album now. Once we had conquered the biggest issues and things started moving into the right direction, we knew that we had a great record in our hands.
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In terms of the musical set-up and equipment at your disposal (and particularly your home studio set-up in Helsinki), I’d love to gain an insight into your studio set-up and the many innumerable instrumentation and analogue gear that were vital to “Permanently Midnight”‘s enchanting sonic canvas? Following on from the first two albums, were there new musical discoveries (instruments, gear, pedals, production tools etc) that served significant foundations to this latest release?
SK & VK: What has happened is that over the years, we’ve lost access to a lot of excellent gear! On our first album we had what was probably our best-sounding set-up. It was really a matter of serendipity. We just happened to have at our disposal pieces of equipment that, when combined, gave us a gorgeous sound. Often some important pieces of gear have been on loan from other people, so we’ve kind of lost them from our arsenal since then. Over the years we’ve always kept some key pieces that we own, such as our Telefunken mixing console from the 1950s, a Studer tape machine, a tape delay, some choice mics.
Among the new stuff on this record there’s the Roland SH-101 synth, which is mainly appreciated in dance music circles, but is a really lovely instrument. Another unique thing was the kantele, which is a traditional, zither-like, Finnish instrument. It was used for some colours on ”Night Falls in Nowhereland”. Other things included boring, technical stuff such as some Neve mic preamps. And towards the end of the mixing stage we got a pair of these most amazing speakers called Kii Audio. Those things are like the first real major development in speaker technology in decades. Absolutely groundbreaking stuff.
What we hope to achieve is a certain level of randomness and happy accidents. Things that we don’t have total control over. Which is why we like analogue gear, all things lo-fi, and even malfunctioning units. It’s a matter of letting chance take its course, and then editing the results in the digital domain. We do use digital stuff too, Pro Tools and such, and recently, Ableton Live.
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The gorgeous soulful americana, neon-lit lament “The Good Bird Singin’ In The Twilight Tree” represents one of part A’s deeply enriching moments. The meticulous layering of the pristine sounds emits such a vivid warmth, particularly the heavenly harmonies atop the warm percussion. Can you talk me through this song’s construction and how it blossomed over time? Did you envision this composition to turn out in this way (or rather, you may never know until much later in the recording process)?
SK & VK:”Good Bird” was a relatively late addition, and one that, thematically, tied the album together. It was a song that came very easily. The music was somehow just waiting to come out. I lifted some of the lyrics from another, unfinished, song, and with minor alterations the song was there. The album’s main theme is sort of condensed in the words of ”Good Bird”. The production side took much, much longer. We knew we wanted this soulful sound for it, but it took a fair amount of experimenting. It used to have just the drum machine as the rhythm section. Then we wondered how it would sound with an acoustic drum kit. We didn’t want a regular-sounding drum kit, so we recorded it with a plastic toy mic onto this 70s cassette deck we had – and voilà! Mixing the song was pretty hard, mostly because of the terrible-sounding mix room that was our bane back then. But once Ville had the mix down, we knew we had a centerpiece track for the album.
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Recording over several years and in many cities across Europe must have been a very interesting experience. I wonder would you have been working very specifically on certain songs in these various recording times you had together? Looking back on the album’s inception and creation, did certain tracks bloom much quicker than others? I’m very curious to know how late in the day (so to speak) did the composition (such as “Swimming After Dark” for example?) tell you to add vocals?
SK: The multitude of recording locations was not something we planned, or meant to happen. It was just a fact of life then that we were moving round a lot. For example Ville was living in Paris with his girlfriend Kaisa Ruotsalainen for a while, and he had set up a little studio around a laptop and Ableton Live. So stuff kept coming to me from Paris, and then I worked on those ideas, and some of them went somewhere, and others didn’t.
Some of the songs really took forever to find a final form – most of them did, I suppose. Good Bird, like I mentioned, was an exception. Some other didn’t require that much work, if you count the hours we put into them in the end, but they were recorded in a few sessions that were far apart in time. I think ”Soft Rains” was started in this lovely old house in Switzerland and finished years later in Helsinki.
“Swimming” is a song we had lying around for years. If I remember correctly, a version of it was left off ”Dustland”. It didn’t have vocals then, and it wasn’t at all the way it turned out now. Once the decision was made to have vocals on the new album, we found that song draft and fooled around with. That’s when it really came to life.
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A snippet of “Wintergreen” was heard first on the band’s album trailer in the weeks leading up to its release. I feel this piece is one of the album’s pinnacles (and the band’s songbook thus far) with luminescent beats, smoky jazz flourishes and beguiling cinematic soundscapes. It’s clearly demonstrated that as brothers, each of you informs the other – as a near telepathic connection forever connects the pair – where a certain electronic beat or synth line informs the following vibraphone passage (and so on). Please shed some light on the creative process inherent in your work and indeed has the process remained the same or changed in any way from your early days?
SK: Ville has this favourite quote when talking about the way we play on a song like ”Wintergreen”: Keith Richards talks about the ”ancient art of weaving”, which is what he does with Ronnie Wood. The players listen to each other and just trade licks and lines, and the fabric of the song comes out of that. Certainly Ville and I have a wordless understanding when playing music, most of the time, at least. Which doesn’t mean that we always exist harmoniously in the studio! There have been some major shouting matches over the year, that’s for sure.
When we start writing new material, it’s always a very intimate process. It’s rare that we sit down and write together starting from scratch. Usually each of us brings something to the table that we’ve written alone, then see how the other one responds. So it’s this two-part filter always at work on the music. There are so many rejected ideas as a result that I can’t even guess at the number. But it means that only the strongest stuff gets a green light. This process has remained the same over the years.
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“Permanently Midnight” encapsulates this in-between state, so it’s as if the immaculate sounds capture precisely this feeling of tension, despair and melancholy but therein also lies burning embers of hope within the darkness. Please talk me through the album’s title and the themes central to this latest journey of yours? The accompanying photobook (beautifully depicting “pictures from the in-between”) offers another perspective on this striking narrative built. Can you recount your memories of taking these many photos – the places you were, the feelings you were striving to capture – and the visual nature of your music (and the undeniable cinematic quality to the band’s sound)? The relationship between sight and sound must forever serve undying fascination and inspiration for you?
SK &VK: It was something that dawned on us as the recording process dragged on, and, in essence, took over our lives, that we were living in this weird place, or non-place, outside of time. We had the feeling that our lives or careers hadn’t really progressed much, in spite of our ceaseless work. We were working on something new, a piece that was to redefine us as artists to a great degree, but the work wasn’t finishing; we were stuck in a moment of transition. In anthropology, this is called a liminal state. In a broader sense, liminality has always been recognized as special, even dangerous state. In folk magic, certain places and times have been considered liminal, and therefore supernatural, such as a crossroads, a place between the worlds, so to speak. Think of the myth of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads at midnight in exchange for superior guitar skills. So for example, the twilight is a time that is between day and night, and, of course, midnight is a time that is no longer the day before, nor yet the next one.
We then realized that we weren’t alone in feeling this. Many of our friends were feeling this in-between-things state as well. Culturally, politically, and technologically, so many things have changed recently that it has left us all reeling. The whole world is in a state of transition, but not really moving on into the future. Technology seems to have altered, in a profound way, a whole generation’s perception of the world, and what it means to be a human being in the world. The world as we knew it has vanished, seemingly overnight, because of technological progress running amok, this inhuman greed setting the pace, and people as the body politic behaving like idiots. Things are changing, but there is nothing in anyone’s field of vision to replace the old. I certainly don’t know what to expect from the future anymore. Like they say, the future ain’t what it used to be.
The photos were something that just happened on the side. We have both been avid photographers for years. So we always go everywhere armed with a camera of some sort, at least a compact 35mm. We shoot a lot of pictures, and at some point near the completion of the record, we realized that we have actually been sort of documenting the process all along. Not really capturing the actual work, but rather our lives, and how the world looked like to us during the recording. And turns out that many of the pictures can be seen as a visual continuation of what we were trying to put down in the music. I guess we tend to have a similar approach to taking pictures, where it’s a mood that we’re capturing, and the mood we’re in ourselves defines the subjects and the approach. So it’s really about this mental and emotional free association. You see different things depending on you’re feeling. The pictures in the book have been shot in many places, from Helsinki to Paris, and Tallinn to Leipzig. To put it in grand terms, I suppose we’re trying to capture how it feels to be alive at this particular time in history.
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What also strikes me is the sequencing of the album and how the gorgeous celestial harmonies ascend into the atmosphere, towards the album’s close? It almost feels as if the crystal light of the impending horizon is nearing us. The meticulous attention to detail abounds at each and every turn. Is the sequencing a significant challenge?
SK & VK: We’re happy that you appreciate this! The sequencing is indeed an essential part of our art. We give it a lot of thought and go through endless permutations before find the kind of dramatic and emotional arc that delivers the kind of feeling that we’ve been looking for. We’re big fans of the Album as an art form, and it sort of baffles us that, really, very few artists seem to be interested in offering a good album, a whole, instead of a random collection of songs. I know this is very old-fashioned in this age of throwaway singles, but this is in fact a great loss that albums aren’t appreciated anymore, or supported (or even acknowledged) by many digital platforms. Mainstream music, of course, has never been about the album as a thoroughly thought-out piece of art, the label people just want to have the most obvious hit song to be first, then the next best song, and so on, until there’s the godawful side B. But if done well, the music album can be a unique form of expression. And the vinyl record, by its physical attributes, becomes a two-act show, which is a splendid way to present a suite of music. For the listener, there is a physical and psychological aspect to it as well, getting up, walking up the record, and flipping it over. It’s like reading a book. You have to do something physical to find out how the story continues.
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The album’s final harmony-laden gems “Rising Tide” and the gorgeous title-track really conveys just how far the band has come and this sense of a journey – undoubtedly one of rejuvenation – that this music takes the listener on. Recount your memories of writing the lyrics and the various musical layers to these beguiling creations? Were there reference points (certain albums or films or books even) that you turned to throughout ‘Permanently Midnight’s album making process?
SK: The song ”Permanently Midnight” searched its form for a good while. Again, the demo had been around for a couple of years, sans lyrics, but it wasn’t until the phrase ”permanently midnight” came to me, and we decided to do something unexpected with the vocals, that the song found its form. It’s a very sweet tune, but we didn’t want to go too far in that direction. It was another song that was essential to our rebirth. The lyrics are really simple, to drive the point home. And the phrase ”all dressed up and nowhere to go” felt like a good way to describe what we were feeling.
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Lastly, I must ask you about the menacing, seductive groove of “Occultation Of Hesperus”. It feels this glorious cut saw the light of day from a jamming session one evening? There is a live feel to this recording, which I love and a charged immediacy and rawness. It must be an exciting prospect for the pair of you to be touring the new record, will you be expecting new versions to evolve as a result of the chemistry of live performances?
SK:”Hesperus” was indeed a live jam, back in our dingy studio in the Punavuori neighbourhood of Helsinki. The basic track was just a drummachine, Ville on the electric guitar, and me on the Rhodes. It’s relatively rare for us to record like that, but it’s something we enjoy doing, and, indeed, will be doing on the road! We just recently played our first live show in many, many years. The reception was amazing and it really left us wanting to do it more.
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‘Permanently Midnight’ is out now on Grainy Records.
The Gentleman Losers’ upcoming single “Rising Tide” will be released on June 22nd on all major digital services.
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https://www.gentlemanlosers.com/
https://thegentlemanlosers.bandcamp.com/music
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Time Has Told Me: Jan Van den Broeke
“Life passes, and the heart is beating, determined and free. And this heart is bringing us to many different places. Until it falls silent.”
— Jan Van den Broeke
Words: Mark Carry
Last year’s treasured re-issue ‘11000 Dreams’ by Belgium’s Jan Van den Broeke documents 80’s DIY, lo-fi wave outfits Absent Music, June 11 and The Misz. The essential tracks encompass sublime ambient, synth and minimal wave sonic creations: ‘11000 Dreams’ feels like opening a vast treasure chest of scintillating sounds from an entirely forgotten space in time.
Covering over thirty years of music, the ever-dependable Ghent-based Stroom label delivers yet another essential musical document, or moreover a lost relic of hidden depths and magnitude. Van den Broeke effectively bridged the gap between ambient and song; feeling at once beautifully familiar and yet mysteriously unknown.
The Belgian artist’s music is assembled in intricate layers, utilizing electronic and acoustic instrumentation and samples from radio, TV, field recordings, old tapes and movies. ‘11000 Dreams’ is just that, a truly transporting, ethereal sound world of immense soundscapes, spoken word passages, intricate harmonies and synth elements.
“Art can emerge from scratch” echoes powerfully throughout the gorgeous spoken word ambient song cycle ‘A Peaceful Vale’ by June11 (a project which began in the 2000s). A heartfelt lament rises gradually into the atmosphere: “Happiness comes unexpectedly when your name is unveiled”. Somehow the worlds of 60’S French chanson and fourth world ambient are merged together.
Some of the most groundbreaking moments captured on ‘11000 Dreams’ are dotted throughout Van den Broeke’s June 11 project. ‘Memories’ is a heavenly, soul-stirring composition built upon an elderly lady recounting her most cherished memories, drifting beneath illuminating synth soundscapes and beautiful reverb. Elsewhere, ‘White Bird’ contains cinematic spoken word passages that drift majestically beneath ethereal soundscapes, encompassing new age and ambient spheres. “I began to float,up and away from my body / A snowflake, weightless” are the opening words softly uttered; the listener is drawn into a wholly other dimension. A white bird sailing with no plan.
‘Who Is Still Dreaming’ is one of the album’s most captivating moments, which contains the gradual bliss of cinematic strings and 80’s minimal wave components, masterfully embedded beneath layers of deeply affecting spoken word.
The earlier recorded output is equally illuminating. Absent Music’s DIY, lo-fi wave creations remain as timeless as ever. ‘Akahito’ is a glorious post-punk odyssey with intricate harmonies and seductive bass groove. ‘My Lesbian Girlfriends’ is a shimmering synth pop gem with compelling drum machines and warm pop hooks aplenty.
The Misz reveals more artistic brilliance and another chapter in Van den Broeke’s immense songbook. “11000 Dreams” is a divine record that hits you hard and pulls you in deeply: through the act of listening, Van den Broeke’s deeply personal and unique sound world permits an “escaping from darkness”. Timeless.
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‘11000 Dreams’ is available now on Stroom.
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https://stroomtv.bandcamp.com/album/11000-dreams
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Interview with Jan Van den Broeke.
It’s such an honour to ask you some questions about your incredibly inspiring and stunningly beautiful music. The “11000 Dreams” vinyl – a timeless treasure released by Ghent label Stroom – is one of those rare jewels in music, a unique, shape shifting and mesmeric world unfolds before your very ears. Being part of this re-issue must have been a very rewarding and enjoyable process for you. What were your feelings and impressions of this (timeless) music as you revisit these important chapters in your life?
Jan Van den Broeke: I was of course honoured and delighted when the people from STROOM came up with the idea of a compilation album – capturing more than 30 years…. At the same time I was rather sceptical, having doubts, it seemed like an impossible blend to me. I must admit it’s not easy for me to listen to some pieces I made 30 years ago. I was young then, I didn’t think then, I never thought of a career, I just did something…
For me it was important that the June11 project would be presented on the album. After all Ziggy Devriendt has done a wonderful job, by bringing the right tracks together. There were so many tracks to choose from… Ziggy made a quirky selection and it seems to work.
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Please take me back to the early 80’s in Ghent, Belgium. As a teenager, I presume you began your fascination with sound and music? I wonder at what point did you begin to record your own music and begin on your music path?
JVB: In 1980 I had moved from the countryside to Ghent. I became an art school student by then, and a whole new world opened up for me. I discovered how different art forms can influence each other: painting, poetry, film and video, architecture, theatre, performance… It’s all one piece.
In the evening I used to listen to a local alternative radio (Radio Toestel), and I heard all those new records from Crammed and Les Disques du Crépuscule…. That was the point where music became more than just songs for me. Music appeared to be also sounds, and awe and experiments and wonder….
In 1980 I bought the cassette From Brussels With Love, and a few months later the eclectic double lp The fruit of the original sin, both appearing on Les Disques du Crépuscule. These were really of huge significance. I played them to death….
Spoken Word, Modern Classical, New Wave, Art Rock, Interview, Acoustic, Experimental, Leftfield, Abstract, Ambient…… Harold Budd, Brian Eno, Jeanne Moreau, The Names, Richard Jobson, Peter Gordon, Wim Mertens, Claude Debussy, Arthur Russel, William Burroughs…. So many significant names, all on one album…, this was so new to me, it was incredible but true, and some kind of relieve also…. I discovered Holger Czukay, Eno, Steve Reich and the American minimalists, I even listened to John Cage, I became a great admirer of Tuxedomoon, I went to see Laurie Anderson in Amsterdam….
My all-time favourite album – Benjamin Lew & Steven Brown – Douzième Journée: Le Verbe, La Parure, L’Amour – was released in 1982.
In 1983, I started to record my own music.
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The minimal wave and post punk music of this time must have served huge inspiration. What were the records, for instance that would have been present when growing up back home (or perhaps older siblings or friends had playing on their stereos)?
JVB: I didn’t start listening to the radio before I was 12, from then on I enjoyed discovering all kinds of music: folk, rock, soul…, I liked soul music, strange but true. Minimal wave wasn’t born yet.
These were the 70s. I was lying on the carpet with my headphones on, while my parents were asleep. They didn’t have any records themselves, they were always working and always very serious. I was the only music lover in my family.
I bought my first guitar when I was 15 years old, wanting to become a new Bob Dylan (the idea of becoming “a protest-singer” must have attracted me…) I learned his songs, before I got to know Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen … from some friends older siblings.
Their music was more complicated, bluer, darker… Gloom has always attracted me.
While in cities, and in other people’s heads, punk was around in the late 70s, I kept on listening to these mesmerizing and blue voices. I must admit, I saw a Pink Floyd concert also with some friends, after all this might have had a bigger influence then I thought then.
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The wonderful aspect with “11000 Dreams” is the multitude of ideas, artistic creation and sense of transcendence that fills these seamless tracks. A hugely organic and DIY ethos forever permeates these recordings. Can you talk me through the equipment and recording equipment (which I presume was a 4-track of some kind) and those early days of self-discovery through the art of sound?
JVB: I started to record music in 1983 with Dries Decoker, we really had little money in those days.
I owned a cheap Aria acoustic guitar, Dries owned an Ibanez electric Guitar and a bass guitar, and that was it. We tried to beg and borrow all the rest: a drum machine, a cheap microphone…. After a while I bought myself a 2nd hand Fostex 250 4-track cassette recorder. From that day, the Fostex was always at the center of the circle.
The music was made while recording, no need to rehearse for days… We could use a Roland TR 606 and a Bass Line for a few weeks, we used toys, we used whatever we could find. In the beginning we didn’t have any synths. We had just enough money to buy a Casio PT20. We mangled the sound trough various third-hand guitar effects and we loved it.
My first synthesizer was an old monophonic one. There was a rusty stain where the brand of the synth was supposed to be, so I never knew what kind of synth it was….One or two years later, I bought a Roland TR-909 drum machine (that was soon replaced by a TR-505), and a KORG Poly-800 II with a simple sequencer onboard. I remember I liked to experiment with the Fostex 250, using it as an instrument – turning buttons while recording, adjusting the recording speed, playing tapes in reverse, cutting and splicing them….
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You formed The Misz with your friend Dries Dekocker in Gent around 1983. This must have been an incredibly exciting period in your life, where prior to this, you were making music alone (I presume?) in your room and to suddenly share and collaborate with someone else, the possibilities must have felt endless? Listening back to the tapes of The Misz, you must still get that feeling of awe and surprise hearing your younger self express emotion through this special music?
JVB: The Misz was a strange symbiosis of 2 different characters. Dries and I both lived in the same street in Gent. The music that we made came naturally into each other’s doors and brought us together. For me it was exciting, because I had never played with 2 or more different instruments.
Dries was more the rock musician type, while I liked less noise, and less notes…
I felt like a musical director, a producer for the first time. I liked experimenting. Friends who came by were dragged behind the mic. Listening back to the tapes, I hear that I was very young and immature – but we had good intentions… we were bold and fearless, which is good.
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You described your Absent Music project (which you began almost like a solo side project in the mid-80’s) as “my private minimal-wave-and-other-experiment-like-project”. Please talk me through the beguiling minimal wave track “Akahito” which is included on “11000 Dreams” and your memories of witnessing the song bloom? I just love how a tapestry of Japanese poetry is masterfully interwoven inside this post punk creation. Lyrically, the song must have painted the sense of despair being felt during the 80’s?
JVB: I guess you know “Akahito” is the name of a Japanese poet, who lived in the 8th century in Japan (700-736). I learned to know him from my teacher in English when I was 17. I was blown away by this short poem:
I wish I were close
To you as the wet skirt of
A salt girl to her body.
I think of you always.
From the first time I had heard his name, Yamabe no Akahito walked with me as a guardian angel through an evil world. He stood for everything that was good, that was love, that was longing, that was inexpressible…I called his name so many times. Some might think I am nostalgic about the 80s, but I remember these years especially as cold-hearted and depressed. Young people were singing: No Future…, there was not very much hope.
We had little money, we lived in Belgium, we had difficult girlfriends, we didn’t like working, we had to deal with our catholic education and the world was filled with disasters. The time coloured black….
Little by little there appeared to be some kind of future, be it a dark one and not for everyone. Out of despair comes the will to create they say – but at the same time I have always realized that we, westerners have always lived in “the first world” – the richer one. I will never forget that.
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‘Chez Renee’ (1988) was one of two cassettes released by Absent Music, which was a soundtrack for a video, exhibition and performance by Renee Lodewijckx. Tell me about how Renee and how her artistic work helped to shape the music you, in turn, captured on tape? I can imagine this must have been quite a liberating and fun process and to be channeling your music through these different art mediums?
JVB: ‘Chez Renee – ik en erotiek’ was a project with drawings, paintings, video and performance. It premiered on the 19th of March, 1988. In the video, you can see Renee’s version of a make up ritual.
No cheap eroticism, but going past the temptation, past the attraction, with a direct pose, intensely physical, even intrusive. Overwhelming, disarming. Renee showed me her work, explained about the project, and gave me some fragments of a text by Nancy Friday to read.
The first thing I did then was to collect some “primitive” sounds, like from animals in the forest, rain and thunder… I also recorded Renee’s voice. These were the basics. Musically, I worked a lot on “contrast”, soft and loud, sweet and threatening, voices and instruments, beat and flow…I think that was the right thing to do, to interpret the eroticism and contrasting colours in this peculiar art project.
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Has there been moments in your life that you feel were pivotal moments for you, when it came to your own musical path, Jan? In terms of the music-making process, I love how imaginative and deeply personal these recordings captured on “11000 Dreams” (incidentally a title which serves a perfect embodiment to the music) it feels like you never had any rules or boundaries, you simply followed your heart? In this regard, can you share with me some of your favourite sonic sources when it came to incorporating samples from television, radio, old tapes and field recordings?
JVB: I can’t think of extremely pivotal moments – life is just a long walk.
“You’re walking. And you don’t always realize it. But you’re always falling. With each step, you fall forward slightly. And then catch yourself from falling”(Laurie Anderson said that).
Musically I just followed my heart – and many things arise by chance. From the moment I was thinking about recording music, it was obvious that I would use samples and sounds I came across.
In the 80s, I guess I was more politically interested – I followed the news, the cold war, all the disasters that took place, …. – I recorded the news right from the radio or TV, and used some fragments. I also bought used tapes on the flea market, and sometimes found strange sounds on them. I wrote songs about religion, Lech Walesa, the Bhopal tragedy, the sinking of The Mont Louis, the Chernobyl disaster….
Later, I had less fear and was more interested in letting ideas and voices in from people from all over the world. To broaden my world, to give other people a voice. I was never really into what is sometimes called “world music” – but nevertheless exotic and mysterious voices and sounds have always intrigued me.
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Take me back to 2003-2004 when you resumed your work under the JUNE11 pseudonym. You write in the liner notes, “one of my dreams was (and still is) to try fill the gap between ambient and song”. It’s clear that this dream of yours is fully realized on tracks like “White Bird”, “Who Is Still Dreaming?” and “Memories” (for example). I get the impression your production skills and musical language had developed and evolved when it came to making music as JUNE11? How did you change as an artist – and perhaps as a person – during this creative time?
JVB: In 2003-2004 I resumed my work, with new skills, new tools, new friends.
In the 90s, I had sold almost all the gear I used in the 80s. In a way this was very sad of course. In another way, I was forced to go and look for new tools – and these turned out to be even more interesting…I started working with Cubase, midi, vst softsynths… the possibilities were endless.
I was older and wiser then, and for the first time I was able to take some kind of distance. I pursued my own musical and personal path, letting intuition more and more dictate my music, helping me to find aerial calm and dissolve in the moment. The 80s had long gone, angst and fear had more or less disappeared, I finally allowed some sunlight to come pouring in….
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I can imagine that the source material (sample of 93-year-old Olga reminiscing about her youth, for instance) must have served huge inspiration for you that in turn, triggered music deep within you, to come to the surface? You must have such strong memories of first hearing Olga’s voice (from a cassette?) and your desire to then paint her words to music? It’s such a divine, momentous piece of music that moves me in such a profound way.
JVB: I am also very happy with this piece. I had the idea then to release an album titled “7 pulses”, I don’t know why.
I came across Olga’s voice on freesound.org – a collaborative database of sound for musicians and sound lovers. I owe a debt of gratitude to “acclivity”, who uploaded 8 minutes of Olga’s voice. I don’t know really who recorded it, and I don’t have to know either….
I think I was attracted by the title “Olga’s India Memories”, making me think of Richard Jobson’s track “India Song” – that owes debt of gratitude to the 1975 film by Marguerite Duras and its soundtrack by Carlos d’Alesso…I thought it would be a good idea to combine Olga’s old but vivid voice, with a pulse, like it was her musical heart rate.
Life passes, and the heart is beating, determined and free. And this heart is bringing us to many different places. Until it falls silent. That was the basic idea.
Memories ended up on a compilation of the seriously underrated EE Tapes label, in the CD series Table for Six, all quiet. A large amount of thanks owed to Eriek Van Havere from EE Tapes (www.eetapes.be). He was the first one to give me chances, when I wanted to release new music in 2006. Eriek has become a friend of mine since then.
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Some of the never-released-before recordings contained on “1100 Dreams” are some of the finest moments of the record: “White Bird” (the perfect opening line) and “Who Is Still Dreaming?” with its text-to-speech application. I wonder did you hear these particular tracks in a very long time (when it came to compiling tracks for this special compilation)? These tracks must surprise you – to this day – and where you may ask yourself, how exactly did I create this?
JVB: I think I started working on “Who Is Still Dreaming?” in 2006. Musically, it was inspired by “Åses død” – from Peer Gynt suite by Edvard Grieg, 1875. It’s a sad and sweeping piece that I have always loved. Textually, I try to “digest” 9/11, by asking who, despite all strain, is strong enough to keep dreaming, to keep living without fear. There are special moments in life when things come together. I think the most interesting things happen when 2 or 3 ideas, thoughts come together.
“Who Is Still Dreaming?” should have been on the first JUNE11 album (Matter is Alive – 2008), but we never found the right place on the album for it, so it was left unpublished, but I never forgot about the track…
“White Bird” I started to work on in 2011. I remember I wanted to create a piece of music, without using any instruments. 95% of what you hear here are samples of monks singing, I had to pitch and edit them to make them singing in the same key, and to make them singing in some kind of endless sky….
The track was left unfinished for about 5 years, until I finished it in 2016 – to be the opening track of the 11000 Dreams album. I was surprised to hear when “White Bird” was also used by HUNEE as the opening track of his “Essential Mix” radioshow on BBC on April 29th 2017.
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As you still make music today and also looking back over your work thus far, what do you feel have been the guiding principles for you and your own artistic creations? Do you see a common thread that connects all these recordings captured on “11000 Dreams”?
JVB: I watched Daniel Lanois ‘Here Is What Is’ documentary again recently, and I would like to answer this question with a Brian Eno quote from this film, expressing best what I have always done, what I have always believed in: DIY, experiment, don’t be afraid, be authentic, start something….
Beautiful things grow out of shit. Nobody ever believes that.
Things evolve out of nothing. You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that’s how things work.
If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but and you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life where you could say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.’
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‘11000 Dreams’ is available now on Stroom.
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https://stroomtv.bandcamp.com/album/11000-dreams
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Chosen One: Actress & London Contemporary Orchestra
“…but I do love the meshing of beautiful sound ideas, textures and tones. I like the idea of running them through a computerised process without it seeming as if it’s been touched.”
— Darren Cunningham (Actress)
Words: Mark Carry
‘LAGEOS’ is the utterly compelling, shape shifting debut full length release from renowned electronic producer Darren Cunningham (aka Actress) and the London Contemporary Orchestra. At the heart of this captivating record is both artists’ ceaseless fascination with sound wherein new pathways of discovery are forever attained.
The first traces – committed to tape at least – was last year’s beguiling ‘Audio Track 5’ EP. The divine title-track (which is also found halfway through the record’s second half) comprises of beautifully drifting strings that float amidst crunching percussive rhythms and piano patterns. The splicing of the various components creates a shimmering odyssey of rapturous, luminous soundscapes, where the abstract techno sphere is masterfully blended with modern classical elements. Importantly, lines become blurred throughout ‘LAGEOS’, one cannot pinpoint to any one musical landscape, for it is a far-reaching kaleidoscope of timbres, textures and tones.
LCO’s Hugh Brunt has described the collaboration as being “about exploring an ambiguity of sound that sits between electronic and acoustic spaces.” The new co-write ‘Galya Beat’ embodies just that as majestic violin lines are blended with rippling percussion and intense electronic passages: a rich new musical language is formed before your very eyes.
The gorgeous opener – and title-track – ‘LAGEOS’ opens with a gentle crackle of electronics which feels akin to a magical fireworks display dancing across a night’s skyline. Chaotic string patterns ascend into the mix like shooting stars with glorious illuminations of mind bending sounds. The near-choral bliss of ‘Momentum’ follows next with dazzling pulses of achingly beautiful sound waves (precisely orbiting the ether of unknown dimensions).
It is a joy to discover new contexts and insights into the cherished Actress discography as classics such as ‘Hubble’, ‘N.E.W’ and ‘Voodoo Posse, Chronic Illusion’ become a deep stream of consciousness and energy flow. The meditative bliss of ‘N.E.W’ with an endless array of enchanting instrumentation, supplied by the LCO, flows deep into your veins. The irresistible cosmic groove of ‘Voodoo Posse’ serves the record’s fitting penultimate track before the joyously empowering ‘Hubble’s techno fuelled odyssey maps one’s innermost fears and dreams.
Alice Coltrane once said “I just go within” and this echoes powerfully throughout this incredibly inspiring collaboration between Actress and LCO, the sumptuously layered tracks come from deep within one’s soul, heart and spirit.
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‘LAGEOS’ is out now on Ninja Tune.
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https://ninjatune.net/artist/actress
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Interview with Darren Cunningham (Actress).
Congratulations Darren on the utterly captivating new full length ‘LAGEOS’; a glorious collaboration with LCO. Please take me back to the process by which you received the individual LCO recorded instrumental parts and, in turn, your manipulation of these sounds? It feels like such a fascinating sound experiment, and I wonder how your approach varied depending on the nature of the music you got hold of?
Darren Cunningham: Tar thanks 🙂 It was a split process of sorts really. The process of recording the instrumental parts were organised separately in a different acoustical sound environment in the UK. This process layer was then moved to another sound environment in Berlin. It was at this point that I started to receive stems from the first process, and from that point created a demo of what the album could soon like based on what id heard from outside of the recording process, so at each point there’s a flow of information that can be reorganised and captured in the studio.
At the final point I receive the stems created for each instrument and begin the electronics process in my studio. Dipping sounds through chromdioxid super II at different frequencies and layering sound oscillations via subtle modular relays. Some were layered chaotically within the framework of orchestration, or in some cases specifically mapped to expression.
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The classical world combined with the electronic sphere conjures up such a shape shifting, mind bending experience. Can you discuss your desires and hopes for this project (from the outset) and your love of classical music (I believe your first musical instrument was the clarinet, so ‘LAGEOS’ is almost like the completion of a full circle for you)?
DC: Hmmm “love of classical music” I wouldn’t technically describe myself as someone who “loves” classical music, but I do love the meshing of beautiful sound ideas, textures and tones. I like the idea of running them through a computerised process without it seeming as if its been touched.
I came across and begun to appreciate classical music by chance, having heard Gabriel Faure’s – Requiem, but I was exposed to a classical instrument when i was about 10 and that was the clarinet. I committed to the ritual of practice for a reasonable amount of time (2)years. Brief stint in orchestra (2hrs), and that was it. So definitely the clarinet forms some sort of symbolic reference, but ultimately for me this was just an exercise to learn more about music.
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This project began with the live show in the Barbican back in 2016. I’d love for you to discuss the source of inspiration that this space and its architecture has had on the music making process and the resultant recorded output?
DC: I’d say the Barbican is a great space for capturing a sort of introspective analysis.
Amped up isolation
An exchange of communication
Like a friendly council estate for the arts
Enriching lives
community
and waterfalls
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‘LAGEOS’ gives beautiful new insights into several classic cuts from the cherished Actress back catalog. In what ways do you feel these tracks (such as N.E.W. or ‘Voodoo Posse, Chronic Illusion’) have metamorphosed given this new classical context?
DC: They’re just so weirdly inverted its endlessly fascinating to me.
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Lastly, the immense detail and intricate layers – forever colliding particles that feel a distillation of endless moments within moments – of the vastly compelling Actress sound unleashes such a timeless, far-reaching state. Please shed some light into your compositional approach and your fascination with sound? Are there certain musical philosophies that you feel have been central to your artistic creations
DC: DISCOVERY
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Interview with Robert Ames (co-Artistic Director of LCO).
The forthcoming Actress & London Contemporary Orchestra ‘LAGEOS’ record is really quite special. Firstly, I’d be very curious to learn how this particular collaboration was conceived and to bring me back to the original live Barbican show in 2016?
Robert Ames: So about a year before we did that show at the Barbican, we sat down to have a think about who in that world we’d really love to work with (it came out of the meetings that we had with Boiler Room; there was a bunch of us there) and we all agreed that Actress would be amazing for it because he’s got such an incredible ear for the detail in the music and there’s so many layers of interest as well. So it would be really interesting to give him orchestral instruments as a palette to play with – just like he works when he’s creating his tracks with a load of found sounds to create his music before; it would be interesting for him to treat out orchestral instruments in the same way. So, that was about a year before the Barbican show. We had a long process of introducing instruments to him; we were all hitting ideas off each other and then we got the Barbican show.
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The classical world and the techno/electronic world really complement each other, it just combines so well.
RA: Yeah, it’s a really interesting time at the moment where – I’m trying not to use the label contemporary classical music because it doesn’t make so much sense – there seems to be a really interesting natural cross-over that’s happening quite a lot between genres and particularly electronic music producers and composers in the world we work in more it seems to be a lot more fluid now and ideas seem to be flowing between each other and it’s hard to pigeon-hole the music in a specific genre so much. And I think that’s something that really exciting about the LCO is finding those ambiguous spaces where it’s really exciting in to make it happen and try to facilitate that and facilitate recording and the live shows. Actress is one of the most exciting examples doing that and we’re really looking forward to the Barbican show that’s coming up and for everybody to hear that album.
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I was very curious to hear how much a source of inspiration the Barbican itself was in terms of the space and the architecture?
RA: That’s right, the architecture – especially for Darren more than anybody else – was a big influence in his thought process for the initial show: that brutalist, concrete architecture I think you can definitely hear that in some of the music.
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‘Audio Track 5’ was the first taste of this collaboration when it came out last year. Again, it’s the organic feel to it and very distinctive timbres happening like these found sounds etched in the detail somewhere. You presumably had good fun putting a track like this together?
RA: It’s an interesting one that one (I’m just trying to remember off the top of my head). Of the specific instrument or sounds you hear on that; you hear that kind of low crunching sound and that’s a prepared piano and stuff that is going on high up, you get a lot of plucked harp sounds that have obviously been treated by Darren as well as violin lines (which are played by our lead violinist Galya Bisengalieva).
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For these live shows, is it a case of rehearsing a lot in advance or is it an intense short burst of a period?
RA: It’s a fairly intense process. The really nice thing about these shows – we’ve played a couple now and have more planned and obviously they’re all happening in different places but they happen in very different atmospheres as well. So for example we played the Barbican in London last year, we did a show in Moscow that was more of a club venue and it was a standing capacity. We haven’t had a set-list (like bands would have a set-list): we go into the space, we see how we all feel and how the musicians feel and think what audience we’re going to get and we chop and change the set-list depending on that so it’s got a nice programming behind it depending on the space, the atmosphere, the audience and the musicians.
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Thinking about your other collaborations, Mica Levi is another person who really typifies this sort of uncategorizable sound and someone who is so unique in the current music world.
RA: That’s really interesting; we’ve just been working on something new with her at the moment. So, Mica Levi and another musician called Koby Sey and a visual artist called Hannah Perry and some musicians from LCO. And so far that’s been four days: very open, work shopping and improvisation and throwing ideas out. So the work we do with her ranges from that all the way to a very specific commission to write a string quartet and we just performed that at the opening of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, we performed it at the Roundhouse as part of Ron Arad’s Curtain Call. And we’re just about to fly off to Salzburg to perform that and that’s a much more standard process where she writes a piece of music, she comes and she presents it to us; we work on it a bit with her, share some thoughts and then we enjoy performing her work.
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Does the LCO change or alter in size depending on the nature of the project or time and other constraints?
RA: Yeah it does. I started the orchestra with co-founder Hugh Brunt in 2008 and it started off being large orchestral but we’d like to think of the orchestra as a collective of musicians as opposed to something that’s really inflexible. So, in one concert we could have like a solo piece of music all the way up to a ninety piece orchestra all the way down to a string quartet; so we do a massive array of different types of concerts and different line-ups of ensembles. We record a lot of stuff as well, so something like ‘Alien: Covenant’ which we recorded with Jed Kurzel (and that was a 90-piece orchestra) and we just did a string quartet concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and we’re going to be doing a massive orchestral show in October at the Barbican called Other World which is the amazing batch of shows, eight of our core musicians that we work with a lot. So it’s really changing all the time and it’s nice to be able to do that; it means instead of going to a composer and saying ‘this is what we’ve got, you’ve got to write this’, we can say ‘this is what we’ve got, enjoy it and we can be flexible to what you want.’
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There is a wide range of found sounds on ‘LAGEOS’. So, as a listener you’d be asking ‘what is this sound?’ and I just love how all these elements are spliced together so brilliantly.
RA: Yeah, that’s right. A lot of the sounds on there are devised by the musicians themselves so instead of being standard classical sounds, there is a lot of extended techniques on there you especially hear that on the violin, viola and cello. Then you hear a lot of great, interesting percussion techniques like the Marimba’s with blankets thrown over them; plastic bags being used; the clarinet being used more of a percussive instrument. So it’s these very well-known instruments that are being explored throughout their whole sound world. So that’s coming from Darren first or wanting to find out exactly what more instruments can do, the musician having the technical ability to create all these sounds and show them to him.
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The studio itself that you record in, is this a space that you all would be familiar with?
RA: This was a slightly different recording process to what we’d usually do. So, although we perform and rehearse together, we actually recorded the stem – the stem being we recorded every single instrument independently and built them up so we could give Darren control over the individual lines and so Hugh and I would have control as well. And the mixing stage we did with our friends at Spitfire Audio Studio: they are a really amazing company; they make sound library store for composers so we recorded in their studio which we recorded our sound library we did with them and we had a great engineer called Harry Wilson.
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Was the process itself a short intense period or more lengthy, gradual stages?
RA: It was quite intense, it happened over two very, very long days of each musician independently and obviously each track has a different amount of musicians; some of them have scores and some of them don’t so some were quicker to record than others. So I think safely to say by far my favourite track on the album is a track called ‘Galya Beat’ and that’s not scored at all and that’s written by Galya (the violinist), Sam Wilson (the percussionist) and Darren, so that’s a pure co-write between those three guys and for me is what the collaboration is al about. And there’s elements of improvisation in the writing of that, so something like that was really quick and fresh to record because they performed it so much. The other ones which are a little bit more notated took a bit more time.
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One of my favourites at the moment – and it’s where it’s placed as well – is ‘Voodoo Posse, Chronic Illusion’and that groove that goes on throughout.
RA: Yeah it’s a great one, I mean it’s one of his classic tunes, it’s really amazing. It’s fun exploring that groove and it’s fun exploring the darker sound worlds of that piece. And the nice thing about that is the way we perform and the way the music is notated it doesn’t have a set duration, so if we see the audience is enjoying the groove we’ll keep it going for longer.
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I gather it’s these live performances would be the most fulfilling or rewarding parts of it all? You’re so deeply involved with everything from composing and writing to arranging, recording and so on, is the live performance the ultimate part of it?
RA: Yeah, the live performance is the really, really fun bit. But it’s actually just being in a room with Darren and just working through sounds has been an incredibly rewarding experience because we’ve learned so much from him and his process; the way he works so it’s been really fulfilling the whole thing.
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‘LAGEOS’ is out now on Ninja Tune.
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https://ninjatune.net/artist/actress
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Mixtape: Fractured Air – May 2018 Mix
Our May mix features: Actress & London Contemporary Orchestra’s essential “LAGEOS” album (Ninja Tune); new releases from the forever dependable Berlin-based Sonic Pieces label (Rauelsson and Tatu Rönkkö); Seattle-based composer Benoît Pioulard’s new self-released EP entitled “May”; Italian electronic producer Caterina Barbieri; Philadelphia harpist Mary Lattimore’s breathtaking “Hundreds of Days” (Ghostly) and much more…
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Fractured Air – May 2018 Mix
01. Actress & London Contemporary Orchestra – ‘Galya Beat’ (Ninja Tune)
02. Tatu Rönkkö – ‘Olio’ (Sonic Pieces)
03. Copeland – ‘advice to young girls’ (self-released)
04. Autechre – ‘Flutter’ (Warp)
05. Michal Turtle – ‘Are You Psychic?’ (excerpt) (Music From Memory)
06. Lloydie Slim & King Tubby – ‘State Dub’ (Record Smith Production)
07. Anna Domino – ‘With the Day Comes the Dawn’ (Les Disques Du Crépuscule)
08. DJ Koze – ‘Music On My Teeth’ (Pampa Records)
09. Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids – ‘Message To My People’ (Strut)
10. Miles Davis – ‘Sur L’Autoroute’ (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud OST, Fontana)
11. CZARFACE & MF Doom – ‘Astral Traveling’ (Silver Age)
12. Little Ann – ‘Deep Shadows’ (Ace)
13. Sarah Louise – ‘Bowman’s Root’ (Thrill Jockey)
14. Alice Coltrane – ‘Om Shanti’ (Luaka Bop)
15. Xylouris White – ‘Lullaby’ (Bella Union)
16. Gwen Raymond – ‘Sometimes There’s Blood’ (Tompkins Square)
17. Aisha Burns – ‘Would You Come To Me’ (Western Vinyl)
18. Birds Of Passage – ‘Modern Monster’ (Denovali)
19. Caterina Barbieri – ‘Glory Bitch’ (Bandcamp)
20. Nils Frahm – ‘Kaleidoscope’ (Erased Tapes)
21. Arvo Pärt – ‘De Profundis (Psalm 129)’ (Paul Hillier, Dan Kennedy, Theatre of Voices & Christopher Bowers-Broadbent) (Harmonia Mundi)
22. Benoît Pioulard – ‘Sixth Hour Bloom’ (Bandcamp)
23. Grouper – ‘Blouse’ (Kranky)
24. Mary Lattimore – ‘Hello From the Edge Of the Earth’ (Ghostly)
25. DEEPLEARNING – ‘Freedom Of Things’ (Salmon Universe)
26. Lucrecia Dalt – ‘Luminalidad’ (RVNG Intl)
27. John Hassell – ‘Dreaming’ (Nyeda Records)
28. David Toop – ‘A Cartographic Anomaly’ (Barooni)
29. Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois – ‘Mag11P82′ (Timesig)
30. Rauelsson – ‘Map Of Mirrors’ (Sonic Pieces)
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Guest Mixtape: Paul de Jong
We are thrilled to present to you a special guest mix compiled by Paul de Jong (The Books), entitled “A Pond That Knows When To Ripple”.
Last month marked the eagerly awaited release of Dutch composer – and co-founder of the beloved collage pop duo The Books – Paul de Jong’s sophomore solo full-length “You Fucken Sucker” (via U.S. independent label Temporary Residence). As ever, a myriad of ideas, inventive pop structures, electronic instrumental excursions, and poetic prose are masterfully etched across a sprawling canvas of genre-bending sounds.
A mantra of “almost doomed” is repeated beneath a meditative acoustic guitar line on the short interlude of ‘Almost Doomed’, reflecting the darkness that envelops the sound world of the Dutch artist’s latest solo work. The deeply personal songs envelop the rawest of emotions. The soft guitar tapestries fade into ‘Doomed’, with echoes of guitar noise and a garage drumbeat before a hypnotic guitar line ascends beneath a poignant vocal refrain: “I can do anything I want/It’s up to me”. The song develops into frenzied rhythms amidst a fury of rage, highlighting the entire spectrum of moods that engulfs the music’s headspace. These songs become more like coping mechanisms – the source of survival and hope – as the outro of gospel-like voices rejoice “you can be anything you want to be”.
The frantic screams that ascend on album opener ‘Embowelment’ reflects the anger and confusion that permeates within “You Fucken Sucker”s rich tapestry. More lyric-based songs are masterfully created: the soul-stirring americana lament ‘Johnny No Cash’ sings of lonesome blues and the empowering psychedelic pop sphere of ‘Dimples’ is yet another crowning jewel. “I think that all you have to do is do whatever you can do” is spoken beneath a haze of psych pop harmonies and jazz piano inflections.
One of the album’s lead singles ‘It’s Only About Sex’ shares vintage Books-esque pop collage spheres as gorgeous pop motifs, electronica and celestial harmonies blend with divine spoken word passages. Timeless pop music for the 21st century. “You Fucken Sucker” is the latest master work from the peerless Dutch composer.
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Paul de Jong – “A Pond That Knows When To Ripple” (Fractured Air Guest Mix)
- Abdul Wadud – “Oasis” (By Myself)
- Aphex Twin – “Cliffs” (Selected Ambient Works Vol 2)
- The Soft Machine – “Carol Ann” (Seven)
- Butthole Surfers – “Kuntz” (Locust Abortion Technician)
- Casiotone For The Painfully Alone – “The Subway Home” (Young Sheilds)
- Loren Connors – “Here, I’ll Whisper It To You” (Sails)
- Sun Ra Arkestra – “A House Of Beauty” (Heliocentric Worlds Vol 1 and 2)
- Es – “Surullisill, Onnettomille…” (Keikkeuden Kauneus Ja Käsittämättömyys)
- Flim – “Hell” (Given You Nothing)
- Otto Luening – “Low Speed” (OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music, Disc 1)
- Fred Frith – “Domaine De Planousset” (Speechless)
- Paul de Jong – “It’s Only About Sex” (You Fucken Sucker)
- Califone – “Sunday Noises” (Roots & Crowns)
- Moondog – “Fog On The Hudson (425 W 57th Street)” (The Viking Of Sixth Avenue)
- Paul de Jong – “Age Of The Sea” (IF)
- Paul Wirkus – “Déformation Professionelle” (Déformation Professionelle)
- Pierre Henry, Pierre Schaeffer – “Symphonie… – 4. Erotica” (Pierre Schaeffer, L’Œuvre musicale (Volume 2)
- Popol Vuh – “Aguirre I” (Perlenklänge – The Best Of)
- Paul de Jong – “You Fucken Sucker” (You Fucken Sucker)
- Little Willie John – “Fever” (All 15 Of His Chart Hits (1953-1962)
- Ry Cooder – “Paris-Texas” (Paris, Texas)
- Vladimir Ussachevsky – “Wireless Fantasy” (OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music, Disc 1)
- 23 Skidoo – “G-3 Insemination” (The Culling Is Coming)
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‘You Fucken Sucker’ is out now on Temporary Residence.
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https://www.facebook.com/TheBooksMusic/
https://www.facebook.com/temporaryresidence/
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Chosen One: Örvar Smárason
“A lot of it depends on letting myself get into the situation where I can let things happen on their own, if that makes any sense.”
— Örvar Smárason
Words: Mark Carry
‘Light Is Liquid’ is the gorgeous debut solo album from one of the key musical figures in Iceland’s music community over the past two decades (with his bands múm, FM Belfast among others).
The lead single ‘Photoelectric’ begins with irresistible electronic pop hooks before guest vocalist Sillus further heightens the transcendental pop dimension. “Tell me a story” are the first words uttered; Örvar Smárason’s debut solo album feels like eight scintillating folk pop songs for the modern world. The myriad of warm textures and luminous beats evokes a dichotomy of worlds wherein radiant light and shimmering darkness become effortlessly fused across the record’s sublime sonic tapestry. Later, hypnotic vocoder processing ascends onto the infectious chorus (with the gorgeous refrain of “I’m not in love”) that conjures up the timeless ambient pop creations of French duo Air in all its glory.
‘Tiny Moon’ serves part A’s defining moments with elements of Italo, 80’s synth pop and minimal wave to masterful effect. The luminous ballad – and duet with JFDR – seeps into your veins and very being. The meditative chorus refrain of “light is liquid/ when you are young” serves the record’s fitting prologue, in many ways,as the listener is transported to astral planes of new horizons.
The duo of ‘The Duality Paradox’ and ‘Flesh & Dreams’ offers ‘Light Is Liquid’s pulsing heart. A hypnotic vocoder line flows throughout the electronic pop flow of enchanting soundscapes; belonging to some otherworldly, mysterious android music. ‘Flesh & Dreams’ (featuring Sillus) is an utterly bewitching, precious pop gem, reminiscent of Smárason’s FM Belfast project and the leading lights of the Icelandic community as a whole. An achingly beautiful soulful dimension lies in the foundations of the synth pop lattice. Joyously uplifting.
The epic closer ‘Cthulhu Regio’ chronicles the exploration through the depths of darkness to find the eternal light of hope. The deeply affecting chorus refrain of “There will be light in the end” – which drifts majestically amidst the shimmering darkness of synthesizer oscillations and computerized vocals – enables oneself to find your way once more in this world.
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‘Light Is Liquid’ is out on 18th May 2018 via Morr Music ( available to pre-order HERE).
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https://www.facebook.com/OrvarSmarason/
https://www.facebook.com/morrmusicberlin/
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Interview with Örvar Smárason.
If ever a title reflects the music captured on it, it is this one; this collection of beautiful electronic pop songs feel like shimmering rays of light: an array of particles that navigate the human heart and mind. Can you please take me back to the album’s inception and indeed the writing process of these songs? I wonder did you approach this record in a new light in the sense that it was to be your debut solo record?
Örvar Smárason: The title actually came before the album, I had been walking around with it for a while. I was originally going to use it for something else, but when I started gathering my ideas for this album I instantly felt that it fitted perfectly. I wrote and produced the album in a few intense bursts I guess, but I honestly can’t even remember anymore. I was working on a lot of different projects at the same time, so I kind of had to keep this one on the sidelines for a bit.
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In terms of the album production, these eight sonic creations float magnificently into your consciousness. The songs are at once timeless and almost belong to some future world, not quite yet arrived upon. I’d love to gain an insight into your processes and methodologies as a producer (and creating these contemporary pop spheres must almost be second nature to you at this point)?
OS: Like with the múm tracks, the process here isn’t very controlled or pre-planned. A lot of it depends on letting myself get into the situation where I can let things happen on their own, if that makes any sense. And after that it’s just about putting the work in.
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Can you talk me through your studio set-up and the recording sessions themselves for ‘Light Is Liquid’? You have a stellar cast of close musical collaborators from the Iceland music community. Did you envision all these musical guests and voices would make such a vital part to these sound worlds?
OS: I was actually in the middle of changing studios while I was making this record, but that’s actually fine with me because I think I work better when my set-up isn’t too rigid or nailed down. I use a a lot of smaller electronic instruments, samplers and synths on this record, so a lot of it was made by just playing around with them. And while making the record I didn’t really think about which singers I was going to collaborate with or if I was even going to have vocals on the album at all. And outside of the vocals and drums on one of the tracks, there aren’t really any collaborations on the album. It’s pretty much only electronic stuff I programmed myself. In fact, I think I have never worked on an album with so little collaboration with other musicians.
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The magical centerpiece of the record I feel arrives with the formidable duo of ‘The Duality Paradox’ and ‘Flesh & Dreams’. The warped voice captured on ‘The Duality Paradox’ emits such a soulful, heartfelt and cathartic release; almost belonging to some Utopian world. Can you recount your memories of writing this and indeed how you must see a song such as this gradually form – with each carefully sculpted layer – before your eyes?
OS: The computerized vocals on these two tracks (as well as on ‘Photoelectric’), the ones that sound like a vocoder…. weren’t really planned. To begin with I was just trying to devise a way to write vocal melodies and lyrics in my songs without having to sing them in myself. I have a very difficult relationship with my voice and I have a difficulty listening to it too much, so I was just trying to find a way so I wouldn’t have to. But when I started hearing these songs again and again with these haunting computer vocals, I knew I couldn’t ever have these songs come out without them.
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The dreamy female vocals of the irresistible pop gem ‘Flesh & Dreams’ is another defining moment. For the guest vocalists, how much of the songs were known to you prior to their arrival on the album? For instance, did you find that the guests brought their own ideas and helped shape the songs or did you have a certain vision for what you wanted to create?
OS: Sillus and JFDR kind of ended up on the album by chance, which is amazing. I had already pretty much finished all the tracks before we added any vocals on them, but they just added a whole new dimension to them. And then Sóley did some of the backing vocals and it’s amazing to have someone you can trust so well for something as delicate as singing. I’m not sure I would have trusted my own voice there without her backing vocals.
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Sin Fang mixed the album. Can you describe in what way did the album change as a result of this mixing stage? Also, in terms of the various takes of songs (and studio sessions in general), do you find yourself continually revisiting songs where you end up with large library of tracks and moments to choose from, so to speak?
OS: Me and Sindri have been friends and worked together for a long time, so it makes things very effortless and easy. And he really helped me through the difficult phases like the vocals. We were working on out Team Dreams project with Sóley at pretty much the same time so there was definitely a feeling of the projects spilling a bit into each other. But in the end there is not that much similar between the two albums. And mixing the album with him was great. Sindri is very methodical and focused on details in his work and hears stuff my mind doesn’t compute. So Light is Liquid would probably just be a bag of unfinished chaos if it wasn’t for him.
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The album closer is another very powerful moment of ‘Light Is Liquid’, illustrating the more ambient and textured dimensions. I’d love for you to recount your memories of writing and composing ‘Cthulhu Regio’? Please shed some light on the song-title and lyrical content of the song. As a listener, it feels that hope and survival have been arrived upon at the end of this musical journey. How do you see the album’s gripping journey resolve itself?
OS: Cthulhu Regio is a dark area on the planet Pluto in a shape that looks something like a whale. It was first identified just a few years ago and having been very much into HP Lovecraft and his mythos as a teenager, the name really spoke to me. But since then they have actually changed the name to Cthulhu Macula. The song in itself is about working your way through some dark areas, but in a detached agnostic kind of a way. If that makes any sense. It was an accumulation of a few different things I was going through.
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As a writer and poet (alongside your musical creations), is there a particular technique to your writing that you feel is almost constant (or relatively similar) across your different bodies of written work?
OS: Maybe. I think a lot of creative ideas come when I think I am completely switched off, either when I’m out running, cooking food or half-asleep. But actually sculpting something out of these ideas requires very conscious work. That might not be a technique, but it’s a way of living.
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Lastly, looking back over the cherished discography of Múm, can you share with me some of your most cherished moments or memories that you feel very strongly?
OS: A few days ago I was thinking about the very first trip we went abroad playing as múm in ’97 or ´98 and we were playing in Cambridge of all places. There were only the two of us in the band back then and we didn’t really have a clue what we were doing. And neither did the promoters of the show, because when we came to the venue we saw they had written „drum & bass” under múm on all the flyers for the concert. We spent the next half hour crossing out all the d’s and b’s and thinking we were pretty funny.
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‘Light Is Liquid’ is out on 18th May 2018 via Morr Music (available to pre-order HERE).
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https://www.facebook.com/OrvarSmarason/
https://www.facebook.com/morrmusicberlin/
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Chosen One: The Sea and Cake
“When you hear something come about like that they’re instantly recognized as potential as a song and it took like a few minutes.”
—Sam Prekop
Words: Mark Carry
This week marks the eagerly awaited new studio album from beloved Chicago indie pop luminaries The Sea and Cake. ‘Any Day’ showcases a band at the peak of their powers, conjuring up an abstract canvas of bewitching and absorbing song cycles wrapped in sublime beauty and poetic expression.
Following on from 2012’s ‘Runner’ LP, The Sea and Cake continue to explore new sonic terrain with a renewed clarity and rejuvenated spirit. ‘Any Day’ is the first album recorded as the trio of Sam Prekop, Archer Prewtitt and John McEntire; the result is a wonderful minimalism running throughout the ten compelling sonic creations, with a rich, organic feel emanating from the breathtaking musical landscape.
A charged immediacy is enveloped within the glorious album opener ‘Cover The Mountain’, conveying a deep, near-telepathic connection between the poly-rhythms of McEntire and intricate guitar interplay between Prekop and Prewitt. Chris Abrahams (of Australian jazz trio The Necks) once said “there’s something balanced about a triangle” and this rings true for the Sea and Cake’s latest sonic venture: a state of equilibrium is forever attained as the dynamism and ripple flow of textures, nuances, timbres, colours ascend beautifully into the pools of your mind.
Prekop sings “I had to follow the moonlight, follow it against the ocean” on the song’s opening verse. Rich poetic prose is masterfully etched – like a painter’s deft touch of hand or a photographer’s innate vision – across the sprawling canvas of rhythmic pulses and gorgeous guitar textures. Equilibrium or furthermore, a kind of liminal state is somehow attained with no trace of effort or conscious thought.
The abstract, non-linear nature of Prekop’s songcraft is one of the great hallmarks of The Sea and Cake’s immaculate songbook – and ‘Any Day’ conveys the Chicago songwriter’s finest lyrics to date. ‘Cover The Mountain’ invites the listener on a journey: to follow along the waves of the ocean. A heartfelt lament packed with an array of immense beauty at every turn, with Prekop’s moving vocals on the song’s moving rise: “Waiting here with nothing to say” with Prekop’s delicate vocal refrain before pristine synthesizer flickers like stars dotted across a night sky. “Crooked smiles are broken” resonates powerfully amidst the charged electric guitars and thundering polyrhythms of McEntire’s trusted brushwork.
The achingly beautiful melancholic lament ‘Any Day’ – the towering title-track – seeps through your every heart pore with its gorgeously floating spell and early 70’s kaleidoscopic pop splendor. The intricate arrangements is a joy to savor (each and every divine moment, from the captivating woodwind arrangements to the airy melodies and jazz inflections).
‘Occurs’ displays the masterful inner dialogue that ensues between Prekop and Prewitt’s soaring guitar lines. Prekop yearns to “hold on” on the song’s deeply affecting chorus. The phrasing is sublime, especially on the verses, with the syncopated rhythms forming the gripping foundations. “I’m beginning to trust in getting nowhere” is yet another immaculate turn of phrase. An extended jam – from African sunsets or the Brazilian tropicalia movement – serves the track’s fitting outro.
The rich aesthetic flow is integral to any record, and ‘Any Day’ epitomizes just how feel flows (to coin a Beach Boys creation) throughout. For instance, the soothing guitar instrumental ‘Paper Window’ invites deep reflection of the innermost kind with gorgeous, clean electric guitar tones interwoven with warm percussion. The synth effects and soaring melodies of the pulsating post-rock indie gem ‘Day Moon’ with its infectious chorus refrain “Seal the night / Not just anyone”.
The tempo is slowed down on the heartfelt acoustic ballad ‘Into Rain’ with masterful addition of layered organs on the song’s soul stirring rise. Perfect pop songs such as this make you think have you known these songs – at once beautifully familiar and mysteriously unknown – your entire life, like remnants of a faded dream.
‘These Falling Arms’ is one of the band’s strongest songs thus far (a songbook which spans over two decades and eleven vital albums). Prekop asks to “follow my thoughts” amidst the warmth of floating guitars and gentle beat. It is just how each of the music’s elements is melded together so effortlessly, from the beautiful Americana lead guitar lines to the deeply moving poetic prose of Prekop’s near mystical vision. ‘Any Day’ is another timeless odyssey of meticulously crafted, singular pop songs from one of independent music’s most beloved bands.
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‘Any Day’ is out on Friday 11th May via Thrill Jockey Records.
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https://www.facebook.com/TheSeaandCake.0
https://www.facebook.com/ThrillJockey/
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Interview with Sam Prekop.
Congratulations, Sam, on the latest Sea and Cake album; it’s another incredible release from a very special band. I’d love if you could go back to the making of the record and your memories of the particular recording sessions? It’s interesting how you found yourselves with a new challenge of the core group being a trio during this time?
Sam Prekop: Well, thanks I’m glad you like the record. It was quite a bit different making this record than earlier ones. I mean in a weird way it felt the same and completely different simultaneously. So, the big changes were John McEntire moved to California, which he’s been thinking about doing for quite a while and he finally did it but he did that [laughs] while making this record. We recorded the basic tracks all together in the studio and stuff but after that point I worked solo for a month on the vocals and stuff like that. And we actually mixed it over the internet as well which wasn’t the optimal situation but that’s how it came to be. We were really hoping to be able to get together but with John in California, the logistics didn’t quite work out. We were so late meeting the deadline anyway but I think it came out pretty well.
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For the title-track – which was the first taster of the new album – the arrangement is wonderful and how intricate all the components are but it still very much has this minimal framework to it.
SP: Those are my favourite kind of songs. So I spend a lot of time just playing the guitar and coming up with ideas and they become pretty solid and have parts that changes and all this stuff. And for that song ‘Any Day’ Arch and I spent quite a bit of time just playing together and that is one of those songs that sort of happened while we were sitting around playing. When you hear something come about like that they’re instantly recognized as potential as a song and it took like a few minutes. All the work beforehand went into like to make an effortless, instant composition; I wish all of it was like that actually. But anyways the basis of that track is born out of improvising situations like on the side, here’s a handful of chords and rhythms that we like and we just made something out of it. But it’s just one of those that wrote itself and took on from there. And it is quite minimalist really, it’s really only two parts and it depends more on the feel than anything else (than any overriding structure). It felt like the right thing to do. And to have that gliding, floating arrangement keeps it wide open for me to try a bunch of different vocals: not just ballad singing but also nice rhythmic punctuation phrases. When a song like that is so open I’m able to take different tacts on different parts of the song so it’s a nice pay-off for the open type of arrangements.
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I love how the album opens with ‘Cover The Mountain’with its immediacy and really feels like that perfect opening line.
SP: That song was probably the complete opposite from ‘Any Day’ in that it went through many iterations quite laboured over. My initial idea I threw out half of the song just because it wasn’t working, it was like two songs put together. So that was a pretty major transformation from an initial impulse. I will say I was quite happy with the vocal hooks and lines that I came up on that one. I think lyric-wise, it’s some of the more pointed, visual lyrics that I was able to conjure up; I like that song as well.
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I’d love to gain an insight into your songwriting process and whether the process itself has changed in any way over the years? It’s this beautifully abstract nature of your lyrics and with the phrasing, how it melds with the different parts of the music.
SP: I think my technique and strategy I don’t think has really changed with how I get started going and approach it. But I feel like I’ve gotten more refined with it. It’s very particular and how I write it’s a very personal technique and strategy. I don’t think anyone else would come up with anything remotely like it [laughs]. I don’t know if that’s good or bad but it’s worked for me. I’m not entrusted in narrative songwriting; that’s not my strong point . So I think I figured that out early on so I could find another way of writing interesting songs without having to convey a narrative or typical content. I don’t think the way I arrive on something has changed but it’s become more refined over the years.
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I love the placing of the songs and the flow with how each one comes into the next. For instance, the placing of the instrumental ‘Paper Window’ in the middle of the record. You already touched on how some songs are formed without much effort; I can imagine how you and the other members have this really deep chemistry between you that things just naturally occur while you are in the room together.I wonder would you have many conversations in terms of direction and so on, or is it more just to leave the music do the talking?
SP: It’s a combo of both. So that instrumental is another one of those like automatic happened at rehearsal songs. So there’s three on the record: ‘Any Day’, ‘Paper Window’ and the last song as well was also another, ‘These Falling Arms’ was another written in the moment and it just stood out instantly. And it’s really simple and straight forward. Other songs, despite our long history and naturalness with just hanging out and working together, some songs posed different challenges. I would say ‘Occurs’ was definitely a hard one to pull off somehow and I’m not exactly sure why but I think it came out fine in the end. It was a struggle; mainly with the bass stuff and so not having a bass player posed some exciting possibilities but also some difficulties and that was an influence on that song I think. Whereas John was doing most of it but he’s not really a bass player; of course he’s a really fine musician but sometimes you need someone who has years of experience of playing bass to pull it off.
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With regards to your solo work, I love your synthesizer-based music you’ve been creating. I wonder was it a conscious decision you knew from early on that you would step away from adding synthesizer to the album (or a very minimal amount) because there is mainly organic elements to these latest songs?
SP: It was a bit. I mean I recognized that the record was going in that direction so I was following it as it was leaning more that way. I’m still really active and involved with making the synthesizer music with the modular and all that stuff. But I think I just felt like I should focus as much as possible on the singing rather than augmenting or decorating the music with added on stuff so I just felt that if I could get it strong enough where I didn’t feel like I needed to do that kind of stuff, it would make for a better record. So when I started writing the record it wasn’t neccessarily the case, I just recognized that that was the direction it was taking during the process and I just stayed with that concept basically. Normally, I think if we had mixed it together that’s when we really like to come up with stuff in over-dub situations. So I think had we done that it’s possible that there may have been more organ and synthesizer types of things but since we weren’t able to do that it didn’t quite happen. I don’t feel like it’s missing anything though.
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The Sea and Cake typify this, in the way there are so many wonderful off shoot projects and releases from each of the band members (in between the band albums). I wonder do you see things all in the one way or is each one a separate entity that you find is linked to each other?
SP: I guess a little bit. I work a lot on photography and the synthesizer music so I think it’s a case that all the different projects feed off each other and inform the other one and so on. So I feel like if I hadn’t made those solo synthesizer records, the latest Sea and Cake record would be different. I can’t help but believe that would be the case; that everything is a part of a big puzzle and it all adds up. So had I not been making these modular records, with the latest Sea and Cake record I probably would have tried to get [laughs] more of that into it (perhaps, I don’t know). I think it all feeds off each other, enhances and interplays between all of the disciplines.
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The music community of Chicago is obviously synonymous with so many great bands and musicians and you’ve been involved in different collaborations with other musicians over the years. I’d love to gain an insight into the nature of the music community in Chicago and how it has thrived so much (and continues to do so)?
SP: I think being in Chicago is really important, more so when I was starting out. The community aspect of it and there were plenty of places to play and to build an audience; enough people to pay attention to what was happening (that was super important I think). I think that’s a benefit of the size of Chicago; it’s a big city and cheaper than New York or LA so that combination makes it a very good music town. But I’m from here so I didn’t come here from somewhere else. And I don’t know if that’s a benefit or not but Chicago is where I’ve always been so I don’t have any outsider looking in perspective. I mean it has worked out for me but I don’t know anything else [laughs]; I don’t know how bad it could be if you lived in St Louis or somewhere. But I will say now that I’ve been doing it for so long I’m less active on the scene than I used to be – not entirely but somewhat – I have two little kids that I watch all of the time so becoming a father has changed my hanging out at rock bars and stuff like that. And another thing is I feel like I don’t collaborate with a huge variety of people as much as other people. I mean it seems like it but I feel like I’ve got a pretty solid close-knit stable of people I work with over the years. Other people are really good at collaborating on the spot with a wide range cast of characters and that’s never been quite my thing.
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Going back to the formation of The Sea and Cake and the early days, looking back on things as a group, would you have had defining records or certain people who you felt were hugely influential and that led to your overall sound?
SP: When I was starting with my first band Shrimp Boat; big stuff from that time was like the Velvet Underground and Tom Waits was an early influence on that music which carried over into the Sea and Cake stuff as well. For The Sea and Cake, I think a big part of it was that I was always interested in a pretty wide variety of music, so I wasn’t exclusively only into rock bands. At that time I think it was somewhat perhaps unusual like I listened to a lot of improvised music, jazz and soul (of course this is completely commonplace now but back in the early 90’s things were more compartmented like if you were a rock band, you listened to other rock bands [laughs] and that’s what you did). So for Shrimp Boat and Sea and Cake that was not the case and we were a rock band basically and we attempted to play jazz or improvized music and we were also influenced by Brazilian stuff and electronic stuff. With the Sea and Cake, Stereolab was a big deal I think for me during that early time, it was quite influential along with a lot of Brazlian stuff (like Caetano Veloso) and even The Velvet Underground and all that kind of stuff. I’d say though in terms of influences it’s never a straight line. I get into some record and it would immediately inform my music, it’s more lke an osmosis process; it warms itself in without me knowing it.
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Did you have any important musical discoveries or personal favourites that you always come back to in the past few months or so?
SP: What’s wierd is while I’m working on music I don’t listen to much other music, so the whole year has been quite bankrupt of new music [laughs]. I find that I listen to a lot of techno and electronic stuff (more so than singer-based stuff which people might find unusual). My tastes for listening are much more experiemental and electronica. I guess one recent band – well they are a duo – that I like quite a bit is Visible Cloaks and through them I got interested in a lot of this 80’s fourth world Japanese stuff. It’s not vocal-based, it’s instrumental; I guess ambient (for lack of a better word). But I go back to all kinds of stuff… I really got into that Popol Vuh re-issue from two years ago (on Soul Jazz Records). One thing that I’ve been into though – and I’ve always really liked her but never had been in constant rotation – has been certain Joni Mitchell tracks which I think is more than I’ve recognized before has been quite influential in what I try to do. I think her singing and phrasing is quite amazing; rhythmically along with melodically.
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With the new album and the touring it must be exciting, again with a band armed with such a great back catalogue; and the chance to mix new songs with the older ones? Would this be an aspect that you would relish in the sense of how the new songs translate to the live setting and how they combine with the older songs?
SP: Yeah, so that’s what we’ve been working on lately is bringing together the new show. And I’m excited about playing most of the new record I think will be part of the set. So there’s a handful of older songs that we’ve played for years and years and we’re planning on changing that up a bit so that’s exciting to pull out some older songs from the catalogue. One that I’m working on now is ‘Four Corners’ from ‘One Bedroom’ and that’s always been one of my favourite songs from our back catalogue but we’ve never been able to really pull it off live for some reason – I mean I don’t think we tried much, maybe one or two times and I’m excited about getting that one up to speed. So there’ll be some different selections from the back catalogue like we always have to play ‘Jacking the Ball’and stuff from that record; so it’ll be like twenty years of songs I guess [laughs].
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‘Any Day’ is out on Friday 11th May via Thrill Jockey Records.
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https://www.facebook.com/TheSeaandCake.0
https://www.facebook.com/ThrillJockey/
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