PlanetNotion: How’d you get involved with Sunday Best?
Rob has been a big supporter of my music from the outset – he gave me my first national radio play and he’s championed my remixes. We met up one day for a coffee and talked about putting out my album. I’d not been comfortable signing to quite a few other labels but everyone at Sunday Best is great and gets what I’m about.
PN: How have the recent gigs and tours been?
I have two different live shows: one where I play solo with some synthesizers and computers and one where I play in my band as a three piece. The solo electronic shows have been great recently – the shows are very interactive as I’m essentially remixing myself live and the audience are able to influence where we go in the set. I largely play this sort of stuff at club nights and it’s a great chance for me to test out new productions and ideas as well as to go off on one with the crowd into some bouncy stuff. Sometimes the whole thing can fall apart as I’m trying stuff out but largely I’m in the pocket. The other show is with my band, a couple of my friends who are seriously good players. We are performing a more classic version of the new album and have been playing together for ages so we are super tight. The crowds have been receptive with more people singing along each time at these shows. It’s been great to be out on the road playing which feels like I’m going back to my roots as I started as player and guitarist.
PN: Any particularly brilliant/awful moments from the tour?
Kind of the normal ups and downs on this last tour: Fire alarms at 5 am, eating badly, drinking too much, sleeping at weird times. We have a few bits of unique equipment that we take out on the road – one of which includes a modified telephone that acts as a microphone. The poor darling has taken a beating over the recent tour and got smashed up on a number of shows, it’s now being held together by reams of gaffa. Steven’s keyboard stand collapsed during our first number in Liverpool so he had to play it on the floor for a while. Some guys tried to buy drugs off us in Nottingham and when they discovered we weren’t drug dealers they tried to beat us up. It was fine though because I found some great deck shoes in a charity shop there. Talking of which I also found some great royal memorabilia mugs in Leicester, I collect them so I’m hyped about the royal wedding.
PN: What are the five artists/songs last listened to on your iPod?
1. Talk Talk – I’m mostly listening to the Colour of Spring album; it’s really interesting pop music, with great hooks but a sense of confidence in the writing that doesn’t feel the need to harass you into choruses. They make those huge key changes all through the album that no one does anymore. I hear the producer of this record has tinnitus which is a shame as sonically it’s so rich.
2. Of Montreal, mostly been listening to the Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? album. Simply brilliant ideas on arrangement, sonics and melody on this record – each track is like watching a rubix cube being accomplished.
3. Wish, this is a new project of mine, it’s all instrumental and a cross between techno and progressive rock, I spent a long time alone with a drum kit, a bass, a guitar, an sh-101 and a moog – I’ve just finished the first album and am listening over it a lot at the moment.
4. Arthur Russell, one of my favourite artists who has an extremely deep and varied body of work, from modernist cello pieces to folk pop to mutant disco. I’ve mostly been listening to the track Janine and the album World of Echos.
5. Life Without Buildings, a Glasgow indie band from a while back.
PN: How would you describe your music?
Somewhere between Talking Heads, Hot Chip and Tom Vek. I think this new album draws on some my earlier art rock sensibilities and interests but continues the accidental path I’ve cut for myself within electronic music. It’s kind of an indie record but it’s really not as I take a much more focused approach to rhythm and in fact this is how I wrote this album – starting with bass and drums.
PN: Tell us some more about Chiptune how has it influenced the new record?
Chip music was something I spent a lot of time on a while back. It involved using 8 bit technology to make new music. A friend of mine in Sweden created a program that turned the gameboy into a synthesizer and sequencing software, which I used to write music. I was involved in putting on parties in London and playing round the world – for me it was about the inherent punk attitude of all these seriously switched on people taking a piece of old corporate technology and writing music with it. The aesthetic has been swallowed up by the mainstream more recently but for me it’s was about the methodology not the novelty. I’d say that chip music hasn’t sonically influenced the record at all as this album comes from a while after this – but the focus on tight arrangement and limited space has played a big part in the way I write.
PN: What would you say is the biggest Party Killer?
Violence.
PN: What’s been exciting your eyes and ears the most in the last month?
Muybridge at the Tate, a very influential early photographer who proved that horses fly and killed a man that took a photo of his wife. Lost London by Philip Davies, a book released by English Heritage of lost buildings from London. Hellboy by Mike Mignola, really fun pulp fiction which are great visual story’s based on folk tales. I just finished reading Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada and started reading the White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov. I’ve been enjoying this new band Ivans XTC who sound like they should be soundtracking a Lynch film. I went to a great talk on fanzines recently, I love fanzines and anything DIY.
PN: Anyone you’d really like to collaborate with in future?
I just did this thing with Jimi Hendrix record so I’ve been thinking I’d love to record some stuff with him. I’d also like to record with Arthur Russell – but these guys are dead so I’ve missed the right decades for this. I’d like to work with James Murphy I guess, mostly to see how he mixes his drums, Brian Eno would be interesting but the power balance in the studio might be a bit awkward. I’m not sure really, it’s a hard question because when I like another artist I often feel like I want to stay away and not interfere, plus I don’t really have any illusions about people.
PN: What can listeners expect from the album?
I approached writing songs differently on this album than I have in the past. I spent a long time playing bass to a simple four to the floor beat and creating melodies out of basslines. I was listening to a lot of underground disco and proto house records at the time and assumed this is how these tracks started. This then made me put my guitar playing in a more rhythmic place – i kind of liked it following the high hats – although some of the tracks i pull it out to follow the bassline but as i said earlier the melodies are bassline led. I don’t think this is very common anymore, if it ever was? Lyrically I keep a lot of notebooks but never simply sit down and wrote out a whole song, like I might have done before. I tend to try and make myself as unconscious of writing as possible and this comes from working quickly and constantly – from there I create lyrics in an automatic writing mode. So the lyrics are a collision of a few things – I find myself understanding the tracks differently after they are written. Music is a mysterious thing and lyrics shouldn’t be literal – there’s no excuse for rhyming ‘love’ and ‘above’.