Jinx Lennon - Trauma Themes Idiot Times

One of Ireland’s less grumpy musical poets Mumblin’ Deaf Ro once talked about disrupting the small set of perspectives that music deals in, by writing from new perspectives. The idea was that breaking up the cosy relationship between the self-regarding “I” and the imaginary female “you” would help little-respected song lyrics move forward, and be a little more like literature. On his fourth album, Jinx Lennon goes a way towards fulfilling that mission. Over beats that are sometimes surprisingly catchy, he writes songs about the Other side of modern life - not so much angry complaints, which are plentiful and pouring out of everyone from Green Day to Lily Allen, but “awkward and real” criticisms. Rather than shouting nihilistically, Lennon seems to simply shine a light on things-as-they-are and say “see for yourself”. It works.

Some of the “trauma themes”: The fact that a football team is not a satisfactory replacement for actually living a worthwhile life, in ‘The Men Who Saved The Face of Football’. A study of the “don’t get involved” phenomenon of the unconcerned modern world in the particularly Fall-like ‘Taxi Man Face’. Sticking a knife in the eye of a house invader in ‘Protect Thyself And Thy Home’. Anything is potential subject matter.

It’s also a little refreshing just to hear the voice of the towns - a guy who speaks in a fairly thick Louth accent and makes no apology for it. There is no secondarity about it, no effort to squeeze through some sort of US/UK/urbane mould. Who else would bother with ‘Folk Music For The Midlands’, as Lennon does on the tenth track of this album? Where else are you going to hear about places like Oriel Park, Dowdallshill, Delvin Co. Westmeath or the De La Salle school from Ravensdale Forest? Or “mormons on bikes and in pairs” or even “some bollocks from Jonesboro I did an electronics course with”?

I suppose part of Jinx Lennon’s project is to make poetry out of those places and those people. There’s nothing that says they’re not worthy, and Lennon follows in a proud line of Irish poets and writers from Patrick Kavanagh through to John McGahern and Patrick McCabe by writing about them. That’s the way to get to “modern Ireland”, you see. You can’t just work in generalisations. You have to dig a little, notice things outside Dublin 2. Jinx Lennon, as much as anyone else, is writing the story of this country. Romantic Ireland is long gone and all but forgotten. What’s there now is a “tape recorder/answering machine/type voice”, a blankness with “rusted Pope’s medals” and memories of Italia 90 keeping people linked to a time long ago, but little else to permeate the bullshit of housing estates and “selfish stupid automatons”.

It’s not just a gloomy State of the Nation address though. It’s also incredibly funny, in a very dark way. And its songs, some of which come complete with potentially shout-along choruses, are eminently listenable. Which is convenient, because it’s almost important that people listen to this record, so that they can have the proverbial “one good look at themselves” in Jinx’s nicely polished looking glass.

Women

Women
Women
JagJaguwar

From Bret ‘The Hitman’ Hart’s hometown Calgary, Canada comes this frequently intriguing slice of obscurant pop-noise. Women co-opt freak folk rhythms, but their lo-fi style of presentation keeps everything distinctly claustrophobic. Given that the record was recorded in the “basement, outdoor culvert and crawl space” of fellow Calgarian Chad VanGaalen, it’s not surprising that the overriding mood is close and pressured.

It’s an oeuvre that is never adopted for its own sake, however, and the ominous closeness serves the set of songs exceedingly well. The guitar motif in Lawncare is hypnotic and almost reassuring against the harsh, unfamiliar, reverb-soaked background of insistent drums and hidden vocals that spans the whole album. Black Rice, conversely, lands somewhere between Liars and Jefferson Airplane, and the echoes that obscure its melodies simply add to their mysterious charm.

It’s not a stretch to say that Women synthesise the wildly differing elements of the contemporary sphere of indie-and-beyond. There are elements of things in play here that couldn’t but be the result of a vast record collection taking in everything from 1950s melodrama to the latest Deerhoof record. The breadth of styles that appear under the common theme of the claustrophobic make this an album that diffuses its charms slowly but surely over multiple spins.

Merriweather Post Pavillion

Animal Collective
Merriweather Post Pavillion
Domino

Chemical or natural? There is a single moment on Merriweather Post Pavillion, after a few lush, watery minutes of introduction, where the music reaches out of the speakers and cracks open reality so that you can see inside, in a way that only Tibetan boddhisativas and LSD-devoted professors usually experience. That moment, called forth with an invocational ‘if I could just leave my body for a night…’ is a genuine landmark in the winding path of music’s history. There is a level of transcendence, of originality, of genius present in that moment on In The Flowers, and on Merriweather in general, that elevates it instantly to the realm of hushed tones. So, is it chemical or natural?

It doesn’t matter. It’s easier for once to talk about this album in terms of what’s it not, rather than what it is. It’s not a retread of anything that has come before. It’s not difficult to engage with, but it’s also not populist in the least. It’s never dull. In fact, over eleven tracks, it comes off as almost too short and leaves a small but inescapable feeling of disappointment that it’s over, in the way that all great albums should. But that’s not to say that it’s unfinished, or imperfect. It’s not. This is Keats’ well-wrought urn manifest, an album genuinely without low points or flaws.

But even out of this consistent brilliance, there come peaks. Besides the aforementioned In The Flowers, My Girls is stunningly beautiful and layered in Panda Bear’s signatory reverb-drenched harmonies, erroneously attributed to the Beach Boys. Lyrically, it’s an affectingly earnest account of the responsibility of providing for family. The evident singalong qualities of the refrain create a strange feeling of intrusion into Panda’s ‘four walls and abode slats’, but the ability to get such basic, instinctive emotions into a song this catchy without coming off as cheesy must be marvelled at.

Summertime Clothes recalls the lyrically-evocative Animal Collective of the days before Panda Bear was a significant songwriting influence, painting a picture of happy and naïve summer days over a seriously danceable pulse. But the next track proves exactly why it was a good idea to give Panda equal air-time. Daily Routine grows out of individual organ squeaks into an arpeggiator-based piece of everyday escapism that dissolves eventually into a slow repetition that’s almost shamanic in texture. Which then gives way to the golden melodies of Bluish. Which then give way to… you get the picture.

It doesn’t let up. The album closes with Brother Sport, tropical and trance-inducing in a way El Guincho could only dream of. After a mid-section of ever-building rhythms and a screaming Avey Tare, the tumult reaches saturation point. The clouds part and a new day dawns. With one of the most smile-inducing melodies you will ever hear, Animal Collective give you two minutes to dance and forget your troubles before the album finally ends. Merriweather Post Pavillion is an album that effects emotions in a very real way, pulling you headlong through nostalgia, hope and the forty shades of joy. I can’t think of another album that is as perfectly executed, as plain perfect as Merriweather Post Pavillion. I would be extremely surprised if this didn’t turn out to be the best album of the year. Or the decade. I’ll stop at that before I say something I might regret later.
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Wavves

Illustration by Amelia Braekke-Dfyer (also in a brilliant band, Pens).

“It’s the only way I knew how to record the songs basically. I liked the way it sounded when I first did it, so I just kept doing it.” Nathan Williams, aka Wavves, will not be drawn on the topic of a ‘lo-fi aesthetic’. Based in San Diego and aligned with the all-ages noise/punk scene out of LA’s The Smell venue (answerable for No Age and The Mae Shi amongst others), his music is of the blown-out speaker variety. The guitars and drums are as distorted as each other, and when the fuzzy vocals pop out of the mix for long enough to be audible, the words belie a particular type of skater/stoner nihilism. On Beach Demon, a recent 7” single, the chorus consists of the phrase “going nowhere” repeated. The flipside of that disc, Weed Demon, is much along the same lines, as the title suggests.

Not for him the sunny outlook of some of his fellow Californians either. “It’s actually all pretty depressing,” he says, “but that’s kind of what I wanted to do, write depressing pop songs”. That’s as good a description as you will ever hear of Wavves, skirting the line between the noise-pop of Times New Viking and other, gloomier reaches of the lo-fi world.

And, much the same as Times New Viking, Wavves are currently basking in the radiance of critical praise, in print media and on blogs alike. At times, the positivity has been effusive, even overblown. I ask if he has ever read anything particularly ridiculous about himself. “People say stupid shit all the time, that’s just what happens. I don’t really dwell on that stuff because you just gotta have fun, you know?”

Fun is something the twenty-two year old has down to a science on his singles, but on his self-titled debut LP, there is a surprising amount of breathing room between breakneck surf-punk lo-fi trash songs. “I think the songs connect in a really interesting way. It’s not what most people would expect, but if you actually listen to the album front to back, some of the atmospheric or spacey more textured tracks add so much to it.”
Even so, the album flies by almost in a blur. And there is another record due in March, bearing the same title as the first but with one extra v (‘Wavvves’). With a full-length cassette already in the catalogue and a whole bundle of 7” singles due, Williams is proving impressively prolific. Does he work very quickly? “It’s always different. I try and fool around with the guitar as much as possible because songs just come easier that way. Then when I actually record the song I kind of mould it a little more. “

Aside from being Wavves, Williams maintains a blog and a label under the name Ghost Ramp. Ghost Ramp the label was set up to release the music of Wavves and friends, but it has been discontinued due to being “a burden on relationships”. The blog, however, is alive and well, functioning both as a tour diary and news site for the band, as well as a place to collect YouTube videos of Sonic Youth, ECW wrestling, Billy Corgan and an ever-building amount of classic hip-hop. If an encyclopaedic knowledge of rap music is a something you would not expect to find in a purveyor of trashy lo-fi, maybe it should not be so surprising. The dusty, distorted aesthetic is something that has found much more mainstream acceptance in hip-hop circles than in guitar music. And, truth be told, it doesn’t seem like Nathan Williams puts a lot of thought into what he should and shouldn’t be doing. He just does it if it seems like he should.

One final question then. Why two Vs in Wavves? “Just because.” There you have it, ladies and gentlemen.

Wavves plays upstairs in Whelans on February 11th, Tickets €10 (+booking fee).

Jeremy Jay

“I’m living in Paris at the moment. I took up a flat here for the time being. I’ll be splitting my time between here and L.A. I’ve put on my list to go to all the 1970s disco clubs here. There’s a really cool one called Le Regine that I already went to. It has these prism-style mirrored ceilings that are amazing!”

Jeremy Jay, California native and K Records doyen, is a living anachronism. He’s from the Pacific coast of America, but he grew up in a Francophone household (his mother was French). It makes sense then that’d he’d divide his time between the centre of the Old World, lavish with art and… retro discos… and the most boisterous representative of the New World, slick and image-driven. What was it like, growing up like that?

“It only broadened my awareness that there was something other than MC Hammer. We were listening to Francois Hardy, Edith Piaf, Jacque Brel…”

Two worlds means two different sources of inspiration, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for Jay, whose sound spans and transcends 1950s teen melodrama, 80s pop, anti-folk and the aforementioned French singers. But then, it’s not only music that can provide direction.

“Everything inspires me really. In my next video for a song called Lite Beam off of the Love Everlasting 12” single, there are neon lights from the Parisien Pharmacie lights. Anything can be inspiring.”

Jay’s last record, A Place Where We Could Go, emerged midway through 2008, produced by K Records founder Calvin Johnson. The reverb-soaked work with a monochrome cover photo was every bit the embodiment of French film noir. Even so, songs like the title track and ‘Heavenly Creatures’ had an approachable, human quality to them, and the album was one of the sleepers of the year. This April, however, Jay releases the follow-up, Slow Dance.

“Slow Dance is a winter-themed disc. Filled with romance in ‘Winter Wonder’, super-tuff R ‘n’ B in ‘Slow Dance’, hanging out with the pizza club gang in ‘In This Lonely Town’, lost love in Breaking the Ice and night escapades in ‘Where Could We Go Tonight?’ It’s about the possibilities of being human and also love and life. Very, very wintery. A lot of ice and snow. A Place Where We Could Go is more mid-tempo whereas Slow Dance is more up-tempo in general. ”

Jay is perpetually touring, and still remains pretty prolific in the studio, with a 12” single accompaniment to Slow Dance due to appear this year as well. Being on the road’s not a strain, however.

“I am constantly touring the world and recording. Last year I toured the USA, UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. I love travelling, so it fits in rather nicely. I love exploring and meeting cool people, seeing what people in the world are into and excited about.”

Slow Dance is out April 6th on K Records. Find Jeremy on MySpace.

So Cow Greatest Hits committed to wax.

This is directly from the horse’s mouth, and all very thin on details at the moment, but it has come to Analogue’s attention that genuine national treasure So Cow is about to release a compilation featuring the best of his work to date.

The LP is going to print in Brooklyn as we speak, and looks to be for the benefit of America, where These Truly Are End Times and I’m Siding My Captors were only available through mail order. So Cow’s reception in America has been reasonably warm to date, with a successful WFMU session and Nobunny tour this year potentially acting as precursors to a longer (semi-permanent) sojourn there in 2009.

Here’s the tracklist:

A

Casablanca
Moon Guen Young
Greetings
So Cow Vs. The Future
League of Impressionable Teens
Outskirts
One Hundred Helens
Halcyon Days
Oh, For Fuck’s Sake*

B

Exclamation Mark
Shackleton
Ja Ju Ah Pa Yo
Normalcy
Bat Toes*
Choh Ah!
Ping Pong Rock
I’m Siding With My Captors
To Do List

*Re-recorded from original, pre-These Truly Are End Times demos.

Drag City

A Short History

Nearly twenty years after being founded by Chicago independent distributors Dan Koretzky and Dan Osborn, Drag City is one of only a few labels dating from the great DIY boom of the late 80s and early 90s to have survived with its independence and credibility intact. Beginning in 1989 with a Royal Trux release, soon followed by Pavement’s Demolition Plot J-7 EP, the earliest Drag City releases were characterised by the messy but intelligent sound of those two bands. With Pavement’s departure to Matador and the Royal Trux’ eventual shift towards coherence, the label kept its ears open and ended up with a who’s who of everything interesting and non-grunge in early 1990s America. Bands such as Smog, Stereolab and the Silver Jews held the middle ground, while DC explored alt-folk with Will Oldham (Palace Brothers, Bonnie Prince Billy) and pretty much everywhere else with Jim O’Rourke (Gastr Del Sol, Sonic Youth, producer, mixer, avant-garde composer). Towards the present day, Drag City retained their ear for something new and different. They continue to release the multiple albums a year Jim O’Rourke thinks up on various subsidiaries, as well as picking up on the Bay Area’s only surviving fairy minstrel, Joanna Newsom, arranging her marriage with Beach Boys string-arranger Van Dyke Parks for her 2006 opus Ys. With their twentieth anniversary coming up in 2009, Analogue turns the spotlight onto Drag City.

So what does Drag City mean?

One of the reasons for their longevity and growth into something of genuine importance is the chameleon characteristic. Drag City started out with similar enough music to most of the DIY labels starting up in cities around the US at the time, but by ten years later the music was unrecognisably eclectic. They will literally put out anything so long as it sounds good to them. A recent example: in Drag City’s latest newsletter, they put some effort into promoting a re-release of an album by Suarasama, a pair of Sumatrans with ethnomusicology degrees. It seems far-fetched for an American indie label to be promoting that, but they are, because they want to. And though they are commonly thought of as economical (i.e. cheap) by many of their artists, as Joanna Newsom says, “they’ll spend money on things if they believe in it”. Recently, they made the news on the blog circuit by pulling their catalogue off emusic.com, an mp3 site, because it wasn’t worth their while to have them there. This created a new round of debate on the future of the indie labels, with the received wisdom that paying for cheap downloads (without manufacturing costs) is just as good as buying CDs coming into question. Really though, the way to enjoy Drag City releases is to sit back with a copy of a zine, drop the needle on a 12″ and remember that there would be no Label Love features if it wasn’t for the common identity forged by record labels like these.

The Savant:

Jim O’Rourke - Eureka (1999)/Insignificance (2001)

Chicago’s dizzyingly prolific O’Rourke has been one of Drag City’s most important artists of the past twenty years. 1999’s Eureka is his most perfectly conceived record from start to finish, channelling Bacharach in a stab at inventing experimental lounge pop. Certain moments, including the mantric ‘Prelude to 110 or 220/Women of the World’, are sweet enough to jerk tears. Others are simply mood-lifting pop, but Eureka remains one of O’Rourke’s finest moments.

Being the chameleon of the underground music world, it was only a matter of time until O’Rourke tried out the rock and roll robe. 2001’s Insignificance shows the results of hanging out a lot with Thurston Moore, packing messy riffs and blue-collar drums alongside the zephyr-like qualities he perfected on Eureka. Having left Chicago for New York, O’Rourke lyrically burns his bridges with his former scene-mates, especially on the opener ‘Downhill from Here’. However much less likeable this may make him seem, it helps to drag him out of his aggregated “experimental” mythos and into the real world. Add to this the fact that the album is of course sonically gorgeous and even occasionally quite catchy, and you have the perfect introduction to one of the most intimidating back catalogues in modern music.

The Story-Teller:

Silver Jews - American Water

Plagued by the shadow of his own rhythm guitarist for most of his career, David Berman waited until 1998 to make his confession, thereby delivering the greatest opening line in singer-songwriter history: “In 1984 I was hospitalised for approaching perfection”. Berman’s songs are rife with these types of lines, single sentences that stand out and make you go “hah”. He’d been doing this for a while by the time American Water came out, but nothing before or after is as consistent as this. With Malkmus in tow, Berman explores the gauntlet of styles between Pavement and honky-tonk without submitting to either, while his untrained (i.e. occasionally flat) voice sings with the uncanny ability to sound like it’s on auto-pilot until the sixth listen, when a line will come out of nowhere and grab you. His other trick is managing to sound completely sincere without ever actually giving anything away. Fill in the meanings yourself.

The Anarcho-Hipsters:

Royal Trux – Twin Infinitives (2000)

The third Drag City record ever released was Twin Infinitives. On it, Royal Trux come off as a sort of Times New Viking left in the womb, rearranging the component parts of rock music into arrhythmic noise, and only occasionally breaking into something approaching an actual song. It is difficult to listen to and vaguely disgusting. But somewhere in the muddle of noise and silence, there lays an absolutely captivating thing: the sound of being really fucked up. The Royal Trux climb into your head and play the sound of the head cold, the hangover or the heroin addiction back to you. They did eventually calm down and come out with something approaching coherent indie rock, but on this formless double-LP, that was nowhere to be seen. It has been argued that the album is merely a group of substance-abusing art-schoolers ripping the piss out of a scene that celebrates disaffection. This is entirely possible. Listen to Twin Infinitives more as a historical artefact than an actual album.

The Fairy Maiden

Joanna Newsom: – The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004)

The best thing about The Milk-Eyed Mender is that, with a little added vinyl hiss, it could’ve been recorded any time in the last fifty or even hundred years. And it would still sound different. Rehabilitating the harp as a serious instrument with a greater purpose than new age esotericism, Newsom’s unclassifiable folk-classical style is so enchanting that it makes it seem like being enchanted is a reasonable thing to happen. Songs like ‘The Book of Right On’ and ‘Sprout and the Bean’ are profound and playful, beautiful and basic at the same time. The lyrics are sharp, sometimes funny and always delivered in a little girl’s voice that divides everyone who hears it. Newsom was lumped in at the time with ‘freak folk’ artists like Devendra Banhart, but The Milk-Eyed Mender is more timeless than anything that scene produced. The follow-up, Ys, is conceived on a much greater scale, with orchestral arrangements and ten-minute-long songs. It is incredibly impressive in its own way. But not as enchanting.

Port O’Brien at Crawdaddy

“Um, I guess I’m going to play a song.” The fantastically named Zebedee Zaitz, guitarist of Port O’Brien, steps forward to the main microphone with a mixture of sheepishness and good-natured enthusiasm. “We’re having a little banjo trouble”, he explains. That’s a glossy way of putting it. He has bumped into Cambria Goodwin’s banjo whilst they were both tuning, and knocked the head off it. Literally. Surreal.

Cambria and singer Van Pierszalowski run backstage to try to reattach the headstock of the banjo to the neck by tension or sellotape, and Zeb plays two songs in the mould of Neil Young. They’re more than competent efforts, but it’s not really the start people might have been expecting. Eventually, Cambria re-emerges with an intact instrument, whispering “it’s not your fault” to Zeb as she passes him. Van follows, and with drummer Josh and red-haired bassist Ryan in tow, they get to it.

‘Don’t Take My Advice’, a slow-builder from All We Could Do Was Sing, served as Dublin’s first real introduction to Port O’Brien. They’ve been here before, supporting Tapes ‘n’ Tapes and Sons and Daughters (whom they described as “like Cassandra’s band from Wayne’s World”) in Tripod, but this is their first headline set. It’s also towards the end of a very long year of touring, and that seems to have taken its toll.

For one thing, Van’s idiosyncratic voice is close to collapse for much of the second half of the set. Some of their instruments, as mentioned, are not in the best of condition. They were robbed in Sheffield. And a lot of their set seems to be non-album material, a possible symptom of tour-sickness.

But they bring the fabled energy nonetheless. Songs like ‘Fisherman’s Son’ are imbued with a fresh energy for the live setting. Drums and bass become heavier, and everything is sped up a notch. It suits them, especially this late in a tour where vocal chords might not sustain a folkier vibe as well as would be ideal.

The true Port O’Brien moment, though, whether on record or live, is always the same. The box full of pots, pans and utensils is passed around the crowd, the drums start and fatigued voices prepare themselves for the first “WOAHHHHH” of ‘I Woke Up Today’. It’s a celebratory moment, and the only set-closer possible. There will be no encore, but that doesn’t matter. We’re all in it together on this Tuesday night, and we clatter our saucepans judiciously. Very few bands ever write a song this good, and there’s nothing for it but to enjoy it.

VAMPIRE WEEKEND BUST UP!

VW, reeling from the Deerhunter singer’s vicious diatribe against them on the pages of Analogue magazine, say: “Bradford was nice to us in person.”

More on this in the next issue of Analogue. Keep it tuned here folks.

(Sincere apologies to our readership for this post).

M83 interview

Nostalgia is a more potent drug than novelty. It doesn’t matter how good, how exciting, how different a new album is, it will never take you by the shoulders and bring a tear to your eye, as it projects grainy old camcorder videos of the mind onto your bedroom wall. Everything is a little hazy, a little more perfect than it was in reality. But that’s the whole idea. You don’t love those teenage records because they really were that good (for the most part). You love them for the memories, for that feeling. For Anthony Gonzalez, also known as M83, his own very specific experience of being a teenager in the 1980s became the main influence for his most recent album, Saturdays=Youth.

“I think that 80s music is such a brilliant period for music history. It was the occasion for me to do a tribute to this 80s music, but also a tribute to my teenage years. Because the main theme of the album is being a teenager, and being a teenager means a lot to me.” A passing listen to Saturdays=Youth will reveal the heavy influence of bands such as Tears For Fears, Ultravox and Cocteau Twins. The areas Gonzalez mines aren’t what would be conventionally thought of as cool, even in as revisionist a decade as ours. But that’s not the point. This is pure liquid memories. “I had… no, I still have a lot of good memories of me being a teenager. The album was just a way to do a tribute to this period of my life that was so important to me.”

Beneath the surface, the central influence is the work of filmmaker John Hughes (The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink). It’s not unheard of for bands to cite filmmakers as influences, but not so many manage to recreate the feeling of those films musically. Gonzalez, it has to be said, gets it to a tee. “My music is very cinematographic”, he says, responding to a question about the shape-shifting quality to his music that helps it defy categorisation. “Because one of the big influences for me is movies and cinema. And I like to change directions each time. I like to make my music evolve and to experiment with new sounds. I like to propose something different to people each time.”

When M83 first appeared on the scene in 2003 with Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts it was their shoegaze aesthetic that gained attention. Tracks like ‘Run Into Flowers’ (“Give me pills and chemicals/I wanna run into…”) combined the blissful joy of drug experiences with the trick of building everything up until it all just came together into one mesh of volume washing out of the speakers. But as time went by, M83 left MBV behind to an extent, changing from album to album, with 2007’s Digital Shades, Vol 1 providing quiet, ambient sounds. Genre-hopping is the order of the day for Gonzalez. I wonder if it’s as pre-meditated as could seem to the casual listener. “Not really. What I usually do is I first compose a lot of songs, maybe twenty or thirty songs. I just pick the ones which I think can be very close in terms of atmosphere and ambience. Really, I just create songs, and then after, I pick the songs I love for the album.”

Being an electronic artist from France, you would think Gonzalez would be more involved in the scenes that appear and recede periodically from the main cities, particularly Paris. He seems to prefer working in isolation however, in his own studio in his home-town of Antibes on the Mediterranean coast. “I just tried five years ago to move to Paris for two years and I didn’t like it. It was very difficult for me to create music in Paris. When I came back to the south, it was directly easier to do music. I don’t know, maybe it’s the atmosphere of the city, and I like to feel that the sea is close to me. I like the sun, and I like when it’s shining, I like the landscapes in the south of France, and I feel confident enough to create music here. It’s a strange thing to say, but that’s my place to make music.”

“It’s not a problem if you’re living in a small city, as long as you do what you want to do, and as long as you are honest with yourself and with your music I think it can work.” Stifling himself musically is not something that Gonzalez is likely to do any time soon. With skills capable of turning everything from My Bloody Valentine to Ultravox into immediate, compelling and profound music, it’s a given that M83 aren’t going to stop experimenting with sounds any time soon. Here’s wondering what colour the chameleon will turn next time.

M83 plays as part of DEAF in Vicar Street on the 24th of October.

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