Launch of Analogue Episode 1

Analogue presents…
HUNTER-GATHERER

THE GREAT LAKES MYSTERY

ANGKORWAT

Screening of Analogue episode 1

Dj Karluss

@ the Joy Gallery, Rutland Place, Dublin 1
Thursday November 5th
Doors 7.30pm
Entry €5

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Analogue is proud to present of a screening of Episode 1, a brand new online music tv show featuring the Kronos Quartet & Wu Man, Patrick Kelleher and So Cow.

Following the screening Angkorwat, the Great Lakes Mystery and Hunter-Gatherer will perform.

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You can check out the pilot episode featuring Adrian Crowley, Jimmy the Hideous Penguin and Final Fantasy here.

Atlas Sound to play Whelans Nov 21st

Foggy Notions have just announced that Atlas Sound will be playing Whelans on November 21st with support from Hulk.

The last time I saw Bradford Cox play Whelans with Deerhunter was a bit weird. The setlist and performance was great, much better than their previous Andrews Lane show. What was weird eh? Just Bradfords between song banter, he seemed to be tripping balls. “Mellow yellow… I feel like I’m floating down a waterfall of pink candy floss” or something to that effect was proclaimed from the stage at one point. Then at another point Bradford seemed to get pretty irate when the audience wouldn’t describe their bedroom walls to him. It was a sunday gig, I wouldn’t have expected much in terms of crowd participation. Still a brilliant gig all in all.

I’m looking forward to hearing material from his new album ‘Logos’ live. I haven’t got the album yet but I have heard two or three songs from it. The title track and the track with Laetitia Sadier, Quick Canal are both perfect specimens of lush laid back indie. Oh and his collaboration with Panda Bear on Walkabout ain’t half bad either. You can download Walkabout over at the 4AD website.

Tickets for the Whelans gig are €13.50 plus booking fee from WAV Box-Office, Tickets.ie, City Discs, Road records, Sound Cellar, and Ticketmaster outlets nationwide. Logos is out on 4AD / Kranky now.

Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy’s long awaited third record was finally announced last month, to shouts of joy and murmurs of amused interest. It’s something of a concept album, based on a world where the sole deity is the violinist, singer and loop-pedal genius himself, and it does, admittedly, sound rather odd. Yet for Owen Pallett, a man who named his music project after one of the nerdiest of video games, such imaginative underpinnings might not be too out of character.

More interesting, perhaps, is the scale of the record. Unlike his hastily put-together debut, Has A Good Home, or its follow-up, the gloriously-titled He Poos Clouds, Heartland is a more ambitious endeavor. I wanted to know about Spectrum, the fictitious setting for these songs, and how he ended up there. Thankfully, Owen is the obliging type, and was ready to answer various questions on the album, his literary pursuits, and his work elsewhere.

Okay. Some of these questions are a bit nerdy.
No sweat, Shane. I prefer the nerdy questions to ones about “classical background”, those ones really get on my tits.

You’ve been a bit ill lately - how are you doing now?
As of this morning, I am feeling 100% better, which is a relief. Saturday night, I literally thought I was dying. I lay on the floor of the tub, with boiling hot water pouring out of the shower head, shivering and crying. My advice to you: B supplements. Don’t stop taking them, for any reason.

Heartland has been a while in the making. Now that it’s finished, was it what you wanted?

Hard to say, really. I had a goal of creating a turgid, non-wimpy, non-blasty orchestral record, something really full of blood and guts. Not ten horns a-blazing nine harps a-swelling eight timpani pounding. Just dense and mechanical, as if a piece of orchestral music could sit next to a Gang Of Four song. And I think I killed it, in that regard. Like, I got it right.

But it did take way more out of me than I thought it should. I realized–too late–that with the orchestral albums I love, typically, the exec. producer, producer, songwriter, singer, arranger, conductor, engineer, mixer and so forth, they’re all different people. I really should’ve hired some interns, cause this record… well, it took a lot out of me.

The new material references characters from the EP like Blue Imelda and No-Face - What can you tell us about their backgrounds? What’s Lewis’ story?

I’d rather just let the album speak for itself. I listened to “Ziggy Stardust” and “Outside” hundreds of times, trying to connect the dots, unlock the secrets. Those songs hit pretty hard, but the concept part never really panned out for me.

Where did you get the idea from, of making an album of a place where you are the deity? Did Flann O’Brien play a role in it?

Actually, I got the idea from “The Lover’s Discourse”, of all places. That book is all about interpreting Barthes’ passions, and how the signifiers of a courtship can affect them. I started thinking about what role the “other” played in those dialogues, how she felt, what her interpretation might be. Barthes’ essay “The Death Of The Author” figured into it as well.

Some of the new songs seem a little different from those of He Poos Clouds - when listening to Lewis Takes Action or The Great Elsewhere, I’m partly reminded of Destroyer’s ‘Your Blues’… Did you feel any particular influences while you were writing?

Your Blues was 100% the inspiration for He Poos Clouds. That record made me feel like I could sing anything, do whatever, and it would be fine. Heartland, though, I don’t know. None of the songs on the record were inspired by other people’s songs. I did listen to the a cappella tracks of Pet Sounds a bunch before recording the vocals, but that was about it.

Huh. That’s funny about Your Blues, it really does come to mind when I hear the new songs, and that’s an album I adore. I think Destroyer’s influence on everybody is non-erasable. He really is something special.

What is your favourite song on Heartland?
I don’t have a favourite song on Heartland, they’ve all been my favourite at one time or another. Rising and falling in the polls. “Oh Heartland, Up Yours!” is a really good one, though, I sang it drunk in a single take, in Nico’s walk-in closet, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of nylon drapings and capes.

What do the Czech Symphony add to Heartland?

Everything, really. The record sounds nothing like Song Cycle, but like Song Cycle, it’s an orchestral record. There was nothing there until the orchestra laid it down.

What was it like playing with the Vienna RSO? It looked fun.

They are a world-class orchestra and the conductor was brilliant. I didn’t get any sleep the night before, and as a result, my voice was timid, so it didn’t go exactly according to plan. But yeah, it was fantastic. I want to write only orchestral songs, forever.

You’ve done some work on the forthcoming Luyas record - what was it like? From what I’ve heard of it it’s gorgeous…

I didn’t do much on the record, it was already smoking hot. Just added some bassoons and cellos to compliment the horns. A few violin ideas. I played my ARP 2600 on another song. I love that band, they are actually my favourite. Watching them play is fantastic. You’ve got Jessie with her polarizing singing voice, coupled with terribly non-intuitive instrumentation… moodswinger + french horn + kit? Difficult one to make it work. But they do make it work. Hearing them puzzle through it over the last couple of years has created some of the most affecting music I’ve heard.

Excellent news. What is the score for The Box like? It sounds like a really interesting project… Will the music get a release of its own?

The music from The Box is beautiful, if I may say so. It sounds like an old-fashioned recording… we used a small string ensemble and Win and Regine have a real Mellotron that they used to do a lot of the tracking with. It would work well as a score to “The Conversation” or something. Or “The Tenant”. It works great in “The Box”, too. I haven’t seen the final cut of the movie, I’m looking forward to its premiere.

Last time round you were reading Ulysses - did you finish it? Is it good?

While working on “Heartland”, I was getting this strange feeling… seeing videos of The-Dream making hits in a manner of hours. Hearing about Jona Bechtolt programming songs in 20 minutes. Meanwhile, I was taking a full eleven months to produce this record, and working on it day and night. The very nature of it, featuring a fifty-piece string section, full percussion, winds and brass… it seemed so preposterous, especially given that 80% of the people who’ll hear it will be listening to freely downloaded MP3s on laptop speakers.

One of the things that kept me sane about it, was to read all these gigantic, overblown classics of literature. Ulysses, sure, but also Complete Proust, Moby Dick and Gravity’s Rainbow. I’d read one of those National Geographic style “anatomy of a whale” chapters of Moby Dick and feel like Herman was holding my hand, saying, “There there. It’ll be all right.”

Win tickets to Heineken Expressions in Tripod tonight

Heineken Expression Dublin kicks off in Tripod at 8pm tonigh with In Flagranti, The Field, Sarsparilla, Donal Dineen and The Juan MacLean (DJ Set) all providing quality music. Visuals on the night come from TADO, Serge Seidlitz, Phil Dunne, Steve Simpson, Chris Judge, Gaetan Billault, BRENB and danleo. (You might remember Phil Dunne from the excellent Animal Collective illustration he did for Analogue at the beginning of the year.)

The event is free and you can register for tickets here. Heineken also gave Analogue 2 pairs of ticket to giveaway, so to avoid the hassle of registering and printing out tickets. The first two people to mail info at analoguemagazine.com with Heineken Expressions in the subject line will have to their names on the guestlist plus one for tonight. Winners announced by 5pm.

The Subs

Analogue spoke to The Subs ahead of their Halloween performance at Transmission in Dublin next week.

Your sound has been described as “Boys Noize brutality and Wagnerian rave drama” - how appropriate do you think that description is?

Well, we can live with that. I guess the brutality and rave because we simply cannot leave a sound sweet and cosy, but it’s the contrast of emo-kitch with beats that are pounding like a motherfucker that does the trick for us. But we’ll take any influence and rape it. In fact, our sound is called Belga Trance.

Ghent is home to yourselves, Soulwax, The Glimmers, I Love Techno…. What is it in the water there that such a seemingly quiet place is home to such crazy parties and DJs?

Belgium has always been good at beats. Remember Telex, Front 242, Technotronic, the whole new beat period, cult labels like R&S… Why? Because we’re not the best songwriters, English not being a native language? Because we are good at stealing? Belgium, geographically at the heart, played an important role in bringing dance to Europe. And in Ghent The Glimmers started this eclectic way of DJing, followed by 2 many DJ’s…

The video of Fuck that Shit from Pukkelpop is pretty insane - how did you go about getting all the footage together?

On national radio we asked the audience to film us during the show with whatever cam they had, including cellulars, iphones etc… Then they sent the footage to us. It was a very bumpy road, getting all that different footage into one format. And also, I had a camera glued to my microphone, but during the show I got carried away (as usual) and I constantly blocked the view of the cam with my hand. You can catch a few shots of my mouth delivering the screams though…

Since Pukkelpop takes place so close to your home town, is that a special show to play?

It’s one of the best festivals in Belgium, so it’s special. Great line-up cause it’s a good balance between established and upcoming talent. We always try to come up with something special.

What’s been the craziest thing to happen at one of your shows? Apart from getting a few thousand people to scream “Fuck that shit!” of course…

Life is wonderful and magical, but at the same time it’s so dreadfully banal and full of boring patterns. Live we try to break the rules. This gives you momentarily the feeling of breaking free, which is delightful, but it is only a temporary illusion of course. But it can linger on for a while though… The craziest thing is when you realize thousands of people are feeling the same thing at the same time. A collective musical orgasm so to speak. But having literally more then 200 people from the audience on stage is quite crazy as well, with us in de middle of that turbulent frenzy trying to carry on playing…

I noticed some similarities between From Dusk Till Dawn and the music of Joe and Will Ask? - so it’s funny that they remixed the track. Apart from these guys, who do you see as your musical peers, on the same wavelength as yourselves?

That’s difficult to say, because everyone has his own sound. But Fake Blood, Simian Mobile Disco, Yuksek, Justice, Boy 8-Bit, Crookers… Too many to mention… They all have a few tracks we wouldn’t mind if they were made by us, hahaha!

Trance is a dirty word nowadays, yet you made a hit called Kiss My Trance - which found favour with Tiesto of all people. Do you think, with the right people, that style could be given any respectability? Surely it’s no more cheesy than the disco sound that’s rife at the moment…

Oh man, that whole thing about what’s hot and what’s not, I won’t say I couldn’t be bothered, but it’s a bit tiring if it’s about chewing on styles that have been. You know what I mean? The whole fidget thing was in a way interesting because there was something fresh about it, Africa trying to make club music, and at the same time artists like Santigold, MIA, Buraka Som Sistema in the picture. It was/is something that transcended the pure clubbing genre… So we liked what was happening but didn’t participated because it is simply not our thing. Disco on the other hand is the root of dance music, so for me, everything is disco… I mean, we absolutely adore the old Italo Disco, and Disco will always remain an influence, but we’re not intending to make some really disco sounding thing, unless we, there we are again, find a way to rape it with love.

The video for that track was pretty interesting - for example juxtaposing cooking and DJing was a nice touch. How involved are you guys in the videos for your songs?

We always work closely together with the guys from The MKR, who are really good friends (they also made some videos for Das Pop). But all of a sudden the Kiss My Trance video was just lying in our mailbox so to speak. Some young talent from the southern part of Belgium simply gave it to us. This was particularly pleasing since there’s a lot of political nonsense between the north and the south.

But our video for My Punk we practically made ourselves. We drove on three mopeds from Ghent to Paris with three cameras on our head. After like 10 hours or something, we got so bored we started to drive into shopping malls and stuff and eventually got busted… Well, it’s a long story to tell everything, but if you check out the video, you gotta know everything is 100% real. We even still got a lawsuit pending…

You’ve had a lot of releases on Lektroluv’s label - what’s it like working with such an elusive character?

He eats a lot of spinach.

What are you working on right now? Are you concentrating on shows, or is there new material in the background?

Doing a lot of shows (10 years of Fabric, I Love Techno) but spending a lot of time in the studio as well. We’re releasing a new clubber called Mitsubitchi, which will be available first on Fabric’s label.

The Subs play the Transmission Halloween Party at The Button Factory in Dublin on October 31. See here for tickets.

Analogue Hour no. 42

Here’s the playlist from last night’s show on 2XM. If you missed it you can tune in to the repeat on Sunday at noon. Heading off to Health now in the Village, should be earbleedingly good.

The Analogue Hour no. 42
Rain (live) - Woods - Play the Live Woods
Society Jam - Lovvers - Society Jam 7″
You’re a Target mp3 - No Age - Losing Feeling EP
Swords - Leftfield - Rhythm and Stealth
Die Slow - Health - Get Color
Deadbeat Summer - Neon Indian - Psychic Chasms
Psychic City (classixx remix) - YACHT - See Mystery Lights
Let the Right One in - Becoming Real
Saga (ft. Santigold) - Basement Jaxx - Scars
This New Technology - Midnight Juggernauts
Black & Blue - Miike Snow - Miike Snow
Ghostwriter - RJD2 - Dead Ringer
Rome (Neighbours ft. Devandra Banhart remix ) - Phoenix
Where is my mind - Pixies - Surfer Rosa

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