Analogue presents ZOMBY

ZOMBY

Never one to be tied down by the boundaries of any scene or genre, Zomby’s catalogue so far has unfurled in all sorts of weird and remarkable directions. From the dark bubbling atmospherics of his early Dubstep releases on the influential Hyperdub label, through the twisted, molten klaxons of his hardcore-influenced “Where were you in ‘92” album on Werk, to the serpentine psychedelic chip-tunes woven through his recent output on Ramp, Zomby has defiantly marched to the two-step beat of his own drum.

While Zomby chooses to cloak himself in anonymity - notably obscuring his face with the pyramid eye of providence in his most used publicity shot - his musical output has created serious ripples both inside and outside of Dubstep circles. His album and EPs garnered rave reviews on websites such as Pitchfork (who describe him as “one of those crucial producers who can trace his lineage back though a youth of garage, jungle and rave”) and Resident Advisor (who proclaim that he “blew the bloody and stumped doors off the dubstep rule book”). It’s no surprise that every forward-looking new release from the influential producer is leapt on by a legion of DJs and dance music fans alike.

It’s not only critics who’ve taken notice of Zomby’s singular talents. Sharp-eared festival goers would have heard the unmistakeable bomb-scare sirens of ‘Euphoria’ dropped into Aphex Twin’s live sets last summer, and, more recently, none other than a certain Lady Gaga has blasted a cut or two during the interlude of her recent ‘Monster Ball’ tour.

In spite of the white-hot hype surrounding his musical output, Zomby only rarely makes live appearances. ‘Where were you in ’92?’ Zomby asks in his giddy love-letter to the mashed up days of hardcore; where will you be on Friday March 19th?

Analogue Episode 2

Analogue Episode 2 from Analogue on Vimeo.

Analogue is proud to announce the launch of Analogue Episode 2, the second installment in a bi-monthly web series that brings together interviews, music videos, short documentaries and live performances. Following the successful release of Episode 1(Kronos Quartet, Patrick Kelleher, So Cow) in 2009, Analogue returns with a brand new episode featuring the dark electronica of Irish artist Angkorwat, a short mini documentary style piece on fishing in Ireland soundtracked by the brooding music of Irish electronic enigma Hunter-Gatherer and an interview with recent Matador Records signee, psychedelic rocker Kurt Vile.

With each episode Analogue aspires to use an innovative visual aesthetic to explore the diverse spectrum of music we love (from indie and folk to classical and electronic) from both local and international talents. Analogue’s aim is to break from the traditional approach to music television and starts afresh with a progressive format applying diverse cinematic techniques.

The Analogue web series is Directed by Graham Seely & Tim Gannon and produced by Brendan McGuirk.

the Analogue Hour no. 53

The Analogue Hour on 2XM
Wed 7 - 8pm, repeated Sunday 12 - 1pm

16/12/09 Show no. 53 Playlist

1. Norway - Beach House - Teen Dream
2. Islands - The XX - The XX
3. Chase the Tear - Portishead
4. Cryptograms - Deerhunter - Cryptograms
5. Left For Dead - Hunter-Gatherer - I dreamed I was a footstep in the trail of a murderer
6. Fostercare - Burial - 5:5 years of Hyperdub
7. The Splendour - Pantha Du Prince - Black Noise
8. Down is Up - Moondog - The Viking of Sixth Avenue
9. Stick to my side (ft. Panda Bear) - Pantha Du Prince - Black Noise
10. Love Cry - Four Tet - There is Love in You
11. Hyph Mngo - Joy Orbison

FEEDBACK Festival 2009 - This weekend in Whelans

8 bands and 2 DJs for €10 with all proceeds going to the Peter McVerry Trust, sounds good to me! As per the PMV website. “The Peter McVerry Trust supports young homeless people to break the cycle of homelessness and move towards independent living through the provision of a continuum of care services.” So needless to say, it’s a very worthwhile cause.

I’m particularly looking forward to catching Cap Pas Cap as hopefully they’ll be playing some new material from their as yet unreleased album, which is due out early next year I think. So pop along this saturday, enjoy some great music and support a worthy cause.

HEALTH

Jake Duzsik of noise band HEALTH talks to Analogue about their new LP ‘Get Color’ and more.

Your sophomore album is called ‘Get Color’, I read in another interview that you took the title from a craft show of some sort or was that you winding an interviewer up?
I think that might be a bit of a misnomer. I think someone else might have said that, I don’t know anything about that one.

It’s funny because I was doing research for the interview and I think I saw it on Drowned in Sound. I can’t remember which one of you did the interview but it was like ‘ yeah we took the title from this TV craft show’ and then all of a sudden there’s a link to this TV craft show called Get Colour!…

Oh yeah I don’t know.

I presume there’s a meaning behind the title?

Yeah, we kind of wanted to think about it as sort of a slogan in the way that we’re trying to be, at least in our estimation, as close as possible, something that resembles a rock band in a modern sense. Not that we play like rockin’ music with riffs and solos but the way we associate rock music with aggressiveness, physicality, edginess, things that are really important to us when discovering music and we all have that bond as musicians and music fans. Like all of us can agree that Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin are some of our favourite bands ever. Or for me and John, Punk Rock like Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys and stuff like that. So in a way, it’s kind of like, our modern not cheesedick way of saying get ready to rock or like get rockin’. You know if you say ‘get ready to rock’, you’re a fucking douchebag.

And you’ve got the devil sign in the air…

But the devil sign, all that stuff, it still comes from… even if Black Sabbath fans were like dunces or if you look at that music , it’s still progressive in a very aggressive way and that’s sort of part of our, I guess, mission statement as a band. So Get Colour for us is our way of saying ‘Let’s rock’ but without doing it in an antiquated irrelevant way.

That’s a bit of a bold statement.

Yeah a statement of purpose.

So it’s been about two years since your debut album came out, a lot has happened in that time. A lot of touring,
supporting NIN, the world finding about the smell and going apeshit about it, your remix album and then more touring… After all this, did you go into the studio with a clearer vision of what you wanted to do?

Definitely. I mean we also went into a proper studio so we had more of a crunch time . There were certain things in the first album that were also figured out, because it was the first time we ever recorded an album, that were figured out while we were recording. Especially because we were doing it ourselves so there was more time for experimentation that can be both a burden and a blessing, but for me vocally the first album was, the early tours, the early shows were all places you know you’d play an art gallery or someones basement or a warehouse, and our stage volume was such or just how hard our drums are hit, I never had monitors so i couldn’t hear myself or anything like, so what the music was live, especially figuring out the balance and mixing of the instruments and adding things that maybe wouldn’t be done live or layering, and especially vocals was just a learning process. Since we’d already done that and we already knew. Like track-listing for the first album, we had to decide what order the songs went in we had to figure it out whereas with the second record we already knew before we even started recording. It’s like this is the first song, this song is going here, this one is last. I already knew all the harmonies because I already had prerecorded them, rather than coming in being like I’ll just do this on the day. Everything was worked out. So it was much more of a cohesive kind of thing. I think that’s something that just happens. To reiterate all the things you just asked me about as far as writing our first record, releasing it, having a remix record, touring, writing a new record, like there’s more of a solidarity that starts to form around your band, an understanding, just this cohesiveness you get with becoming more comfortable with each other as musicians and what your band is.

You mentioned that you recorded both albums yourselves…

The second one we produced ourselves, the second one was engineered by someone else whereas on the first one we did everything ourselves.

That’s pretty hardcore.

It was more out of financial necessity at the time.

It seems like there’s a lot of bands these days, I suppose just independent culture in general, recording and doing stuff their own way instead going ‘OK we want this legendary producer to come in and do it’, it just leaves a lot more room for yourselves to change it afterwards.

I think a lot of the revolution in recording technology is allowing people to make to make albums, for better or for worse, because obviously a lot of people are making albums in their bedroom studios that just sound like shit and even worse, big studios or big producers are using… just the way records sound are changing now. There’s always like an ebb and flow of technology, there’ll probably be, i think already is, starting to be a reactionary sort of feel to everything sounding so plastic and digital and auto-tuned and whatever. But I think for a lot of bands like us, not being able to work with a legendary producer or something, it’s a financial reality of the music industry. Doing it yourself is more viable now than it ever has been and you can, with know-how and some luck, you can make an album sound great without having to go to a big studio.

I mean that’s the thing, Metallica releases whatever album, what’s that one? St Anger, with the fucking snare drum that sounds like a calypso drum. I mean how much money was spent on that record, whereas not talking the music one way or another, those Grizzly Bear albums that were self recorded sound incredibly rich and sound more like the old fashion of recording things in a space, where you feel the space, you hear the space, it’s just a different style. We’ve learned more and more too, because we recorded this album analogue rather than digital. Most musicians who are even slightly geeky about engineering technology or history are going to have sort of a, like a hard on for recording something analogue because it’s like every great record that you love recorded on analogue technology. Like two inch tapes, it’s like something you either just go with and get out of your system or you’re going to end up talking about it forever. And the reality is that analogue tape certain components that just are amazing and makes things sound warm. The natural compression is just like the way you compare digital technology and photography. You can have a beat up manual 35mm Nikon camera and take photos and it just looks magical, and you can have someone take photos on a ten thousand dollar digital camera and technically speaking, there’s higher clarity in the image and the same thing can be said for digital technology and analogue technology in recording but there’s something about the older one. That’s the thing, whether it’s photography or music, a record is not what a band sounds like live, it’s an approximation of what that band sounds like, it’s actually symbolic. You’re taking technology and trying to translate to exist in another medium so making that sound good is not a question of what is the clearest representation in terms of ‘oh the sample rate is much higher on this digital technology so it must be superior’. In a roundabout way of getting to what I’m saying is like, as far as bands recording albums themselves, the one thing no matter what, how much gear you have or whatever, there’s just no accounting for taste. It’s like the number one thing. So it’s like if you go record an album with a great producer but he’s lost his fucking stride in his step, if you don’t know what’s up you don’t know what’s up. Or if something is not right for that music or whatever. That coupled with us being incredibly neurotic about everything we do…

It’s another sense of control, creative control.

Yeah absolutely.

Although you’re sometimes classed in the experimental genre bracket, ‘Get Color’ seems quite measured and balanced, quite thought out, with melody and noise in a shifting equilibrium. Did that come during the song writing or the recording?

Song writing process yeah, I think like I said it takes any band awhile to sort of come into their own and figure out, and hone in on what their sound is. And that’s true of any band, especially with a band as weird as we are where figuring out our sound was like this bizarre process. It wasn’t like we were ‘we’re going to be this type of band!’. It was just like this strange evolution of not wanting to sound redundant or to recapitulate to whatever was going on at the time but still wanting to be heavy and structured so not wanting to just make, no offense as far as the monarch that people apply, “experimental music”. Mostly if I hear experimental before some type of music, I’m like ‘ah this is going to be boring and just a waste of my time’, just masturbatory.

I think we are experimental, absolutely but I don’t want to be associated with most of the things I hear as “experimental”.

Grizzly Bear at Vicar Street November 1st

Analogue managed to blag the wonderful Cáit Fahey a photopass to Grizzly Bear at Vicar Street a few weeks ago. A little of the magic of that gig is bottled below… Highlights of the night for me included ‘Ready, Able’ and ‘He Hit Me’.

Analogue Episode 1

Analogue Episode 1 from Analogue on Vimeo.

Analogue is proud to announce the launch of Episode 1 of a new bi-monthly web series featuring interviews, music videos, short documentaries and live performances.
—
Episode 1 running order:
Kronos Quartet & Wu Man interview
Interlude: Music vid for ‘Finds you’ by Patrick Kelleher
So Cow interview and performance of ‘Bat Toes’
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Directed by Graham Seely & Tim Gannon and produced by Brendan McGuirk
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All feedback welcome.

Hipster Youth

Nope this isn’t another blog post obsessed with laughing at or glorifying hipster kids. Hipster Youth is the re-incarnation of Porn.exe, a gameboy infused one man electronic outfit. Dubliner Aidan Wall is on a mission to reinvent the way in which we think about the modern 8 bit aesthetic. Crystal Castles it ain’t but there are some parts that I could see Timbaland potentially shoplifting for his next producer gig. Hipster youth is fun, intricate and at times emotive music. Hearse Road Trip is a free 6 track Ep that’s well worth checking out.

Download Hearse Road Trip

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.

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