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”.

The Juan MacLean

Still riding the wave of his excellent The Future Will Come, The Juan MacLean was in town to grace the Heineken Expressions tour and show the masses at Tripod what disco sounded like before nu-disco. Having spent much of the year touring with his live show, and then took off across Europe on a two-week DJ tour. All of this travelling might get a little dull, but he has ways of keeping himself occupied. “That’s how I spend most of my time, reading. My favourite thing of the year is probably The Road, the Cormac McCarthy book. Right now I’m reading a book by James Ellroy. His newest book just came out, called Clothes Like Blood or something [Blood's a Rover], it’s like 1000 pages or something. It’s part of a trilogy that started with American Tabloid, it’s in the late 60s.” For the uninitiated, have a look at this clip of Ellroy on Conan O’Brien a decade ago.

Juan had just come from playing Manchester’s Warehouse Project alongside Erol Alkan, Aeroplane and more, a popular fixture on the UK clubbing calendar. “It was good. I think there was like 1800 people. It was just rammed with people, big huge space packed with people. I asked to be in the small room actually. I hate those big main rooms. It’s not as fun.” I asked him how that show compared to April’s gig in The Deaf Institute. “I thought they were pretty similar. That show at The Deaf Institute was good. Just really packed with people who seemed really into it, having a good time. I like smaller places better, but it’s hard because they want you in a bigger room a lot of the time. I think it’s so much more fun playing in smaller, like 500 capacity is nice. When you get up to big huge empty room, well, not empty, spaces that are more wide open, sometimes it doesn’t sound very good.”

The Future Will Come, as is probably clear from my many posts on the subject, is my favourite album this year, but it works just as well on club speakers as it does on headphones. Making an album and directing it towards one particular experience is obviously something that requires very careful attention. “It’s a big issue that I think a lot about. It comes down to making in album, I don’t really about dancefloor atmosphere. I’d rather make something that you could listen to at home. So on my album there’s a lot of shorter, more pop structured songs, and then I think 12″s are the best to reserve for longer, loopier, more dancefloor-friendly things. That’s always been my philosophy.” The Future Will Come works best, in my opinion, because of the balance between short and snappy songs like One Day and dark, twisted, eight-miunute burners like The Simple Life - but not everyone can get that balance right. “I think it’s always the downfall of electronic musicians - some of my favourite 12″s of all time, like those artists will go on to make albums and they just don’t work very well at all. I think 12″s and albums are two entirely different things, albums that are just collections of instrumental tracks are really hard to do. Like the first Field album [From Here We Go Sublime] I love, I think it’s great. But a lot of the time it just doesn’t work.”

One aspect of the album that is most interesting is the lyrical interplay between Juan and DFA stalwart Nancy Whang. Happiness, heartbreak and every emotion in between feature in songs that seem to catalogue the peaks and troughs that affect every relationship. “That was pretty intentional. I think in dance music when people do have lyrics they tend to be throwaway, either party lyrics that are really meaningless, or really ironic things, or just really clever things, and Nancy and I sat down and just decided that we would try to write as personal, keep it very personal and honest as we could.” As far as Juan’s lyrics are concerned, they often seem to come from the point of view of a humanoid creature, devoid of emotion. “I think that’s kind of a stereotype that has a lot of truth to it in relationships in general. The guy is the one who more robotic and reserved and it’s always the girl who wants to be more emotional or something. So that’s why I’ve always used robots as a metaphor for that.” This robotic trope is turned on its head by Human Disaster, a bleak, desolate song that bares every hidden emotion, which precedes the epic Happy House. “Originally we had a sort of narrative arc to the album that we got away from for sequencing, but it was really a progression of two people coming together and growing apart, and coming back together again. I feel like it sort of getting bookended, in terms of vinyl, side one ends with the song Tonight, which is much more upbeat, happy, optimistic, and it was definitely ending with Happy House, to leave it on a positive, upbeat note.”

Getting back to the live show, Juan recently went into great detail about his setup for Resident Advisor’s Machine Love. I asked him to break that down for a layperson. “It’s hard, how much of a layperson? I think the best way to put it, now, most people in electronic music work entirely inside a computer, using software, synthesisers, all the sounds come from inside the computer, and everything I do is outside the computer, starting with live drums, and actually big collection of synths, and live playing of the instrument, I think that’s the most identifiable quality to it.” Bands like Holy Ghost! have talked about how difficult it’ll be for them to start touring, with the extensive setup they use, but they’re not the only ones. “It’s a big issue because it’s very expensive, especially when you start flying, it’s hard to get all the gear around. We’re in the same boat. Because we actually play all these synths and instruments, there’s a lot of stuff to carry around. Basically it’s a lot more engaging, a live show, than people getting up with a laptop and turning it on.” I recounted to him an experience last year when I saw Ulrich Schnauss start a show only for his laptop to crash within seconds of starting. “That’s embarrassing too. There was a Junior Boys show in New York, in Webster Hall, really big, like 1200 capacity place, and after the first song all their stuff crashed and they had to cancel the show. That terrifies me, I don’t ever want to have that happen. But everyone on DFA, LCD Soundsystem, you know, Hercules and Love Affair, we all carry around all this gear. I think it’s a standard at DFA that’s been established, you’re going to have a proper band.”

All of his recent singles have featured what can only be termed glorious remixes - Surkin, Matthew Dear and The Emperor Machine to name but three. “I usually try to go off the beaten path a little bit. I do so many remixes myself as well, I like the idea of having different things for DJs to play basically. Which is always what I think the point of any remix is, to have something for DJs to play.” And his favourite? “God, that’s a tough one. I think surprisingly it’s the One Day remix by Mark Romboy, which was really, people think of as a weird choice, but I thought it was amazing.”

A recent interview revealed a past spent teaching teenage delinquents in detention centres. Is this something that could follow a successful music career? “I don’t know, I think about it all the time. It’s so hard to say. Some days I think I’ll do it till I’m like 60. Then other days I think I can’t do it anymore, I don’t know. I played with Alexander Robotnick the other night, he’s like 68 or something. He’s 68 and he’s jumping around and going crazy! And I thought “Wow, that’s pretty amazing”. I don’t know. It’s one of the things with electronic music, like dance music, as opposed to rock music, like when I played in an indie rock band, I was like “I definitely don’t want to be anywhere the age of 30 and doing this”, like I found it kind of embarrassing. But with dance music I think there’s a tradition of people being revered as they go on.” Why not instruct kids on how to make a break into the music industry? “I could, I’d like to, when I was teaching I set up an electronic music programme, that was really fun. In the United States it’s looked at as a luxury kind of thing, there’s never money for it.”

I guess all that can be said to that is that, well, the future will come…

The Heineken Expression tour continues at The Classic in Cork on November 13, with Shit Robot, Dancepig and more. See here for more details.

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.”

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.

Joe And Will Ask?

Joe And Will Ask? have been making noise across clubland with their melodic yet heavy techno, while at the same time baffling bloggers and writers with their typographically nonsensical name. I recently spoke to them as they found themselves booked between a series of dubstep wizards at Beats of Rage in Preston’s Coda. “It was basically anthem bashing,” said Will. “It was kind of an introduction to techno to a dubstep night.” They were a little uneasy following a DJ playing 140bpm at midnight, so they played harder and faster than usual. “We played at 130bpm which is not normal for us,” said Joe, who dropped a stripped down version of Angello, Ingrosso, Axwell & Laidback Luke’s Leave The World Behind. “I love the Swedish House Mafia attitude to music, fuck it we’ll do what we want, if people think it’s cheesy they can piss off or whatever, but the vocal is too much, so I just scrapped it and made some kind of rearrangement of it. I’m kind of obsessed with that big piano chord thing.”

This euphoric big room house isn’t quite what they’re known for, but that’s not to say they won’t find themselves next to Angello and friends on the next Clubber’s Guide CD. Finding themselves hassled by Ministry of Sound to make something radio-friendly, Joe and Will hooked up with Becky Jones, also known as Saint Saviour of The RGBs. “She’s an awesome dance music writer, she does it in a kind of cool, edgy way, it’s not bland or boring, like let’s just stick a blonde babe singing something about the weekend.” That’s not to say the boys are stepping outside the deep and trippy techno that’s made their name. They’ve also been working on a track with Micachu, something Joe describes as the polar opposite of what they’ve done with Saint Saviour. “The instrumental I gave [Mica], it’s by a long way the most deep thing we’ve ever done, it’s like techno before techno became this kind of minimally, skippy, melodic thing, it’s techno techno. I can imagine someone like Adam Beyer playing it.”

Joe, who got his first set of decks at the age of 16, was already releasing electronica under his own name on the Sound Artillery label when he met Will, who grew up on a diet of Godskitchen and Sundissential. Out of boredom they started DJing together two years ago, and already they’re set to play Ibiza alongside 2manydjs, and Aeroplane. “Neither of us have ever been before,” says Joe. “When we were told we’re playing Ibiza we were like yeah! And when we were told it’s Ibiza Rocks we were like, oh. Cause we’re not really into the whole rock and dance mix.” Not that they are ungrateful by any means: Joe appreciates the stark contrast between the superstar resident DJs of the white island and the tireless blaggers who spend seasons just trying to get one gig. “For us it’s a real promising sign.” It all came about after a remix for Eskimo Twins, an act on the Wax:On label. The Leeds-based outfit were roped in to promote Reclaim The Dancefloor, a weekly night at Eden, and they were so impressed with what Joe and Will did for Eskimo Twins that they invited them along. Following a spate of unofficial remixes for the likes of Marc Houle and Ellen Allien & Apparat, as well as releases on Kitsuné and Gulp Communications, they’ve been approached by acts as diverse as The Subs and Kris Menace. “It’s quite nice to be asked to remix Kris Menace, he’s a fucking legend,” says Will.

Inspired by the current crop of forward thinking techno producers like Popof and Style of Eye, the Joe And Will Ask? signature is a characteristic cheekiness that shines through their melodies and sounds. “I’d like to think it nods to Orbital, people like that, you know the quirkiness, slightly kind of odd and funny,” says Joe, while Will tells of a tribute to their favourite person in the world: “We named one song after our friend Chris, who’s a bit weird, it’s kind of a weird glitchy song, and he kind of has a twitch, so we named it after him.”

They are excited about playing Dublin for the first time, as they headline Transmission at The Button Factory next week. Unlike Will, who spends time in Kilcock every year, Joe has never crossed the Irish Sea so is finally making up for lost time. “It’s actually really embarrassing, I’ve lived in England my whole life and I’ve never been to Ireland or Scotland.” Unlike their techno DJ set in Preston, they will be bringing their live show to The Button Factory, a venue which will no doubt suit their in your face live performance. “I think to do live it has to be amazing or not at all, to showcase your music, throw it everyone else’s face, whether they want it or not, you need an amazing sound system. We’ve got so many songs now we could probably play for two hours. But live we want to leave people wanting more, leave people wanting to see us again.”

And as for their name? “It was meant to be a joke,” says Will. “I think it’s cool cause it’s memorable, and nothing is similar to it. It’s not like a cool word.” Joe meanwhile accepts that there’s nothing they could pick that could top it. “We’re the most cynical, self-judging people in the world, so if we were to ever come up with a dramatic kind of name, we’d just say only a dickhead would have that.”

Joe And Will Ask? play Transmission at The Button Factory, Dublin, on June 13

Dan Deacon

The first thing I want to ask about is your compositional process. As far I know ‘Bromst’ is the first record that you’ve had other musicians (drummers etc.) other than singers on your records, or at least aside from vocalists it was just you playing on ‘Spiderman Of The Rings’. How did working with people change things for you and at what stage did you begin to bring people in? Did you start by jamming with people from the off and seeing what happened, did you bring demos to people and work from there trying out different things or were your ideas pretty much fully realised when people came in and you just told them what to play? How did you find working with people as opposed to your previous solitary process?

The performers were brought in as the recording process went along. The parts were already written and in most cases sheet music was printed out and given to the performers. There are only a few sections in the drum kit parts that were structured improvisations (the fills in ‘Woof Woof’ and the b section of ‘Of The Mountains’ has a few layered drum solos buried in the mix).

Working with people is great. It was a really good re-learning experience and taught me a lot. I definitely approach composing a little differently now. After years of writing for a computer I had to relearn how to write with in the restrictions of human abilities, which is a lot more fun and a lot more challenging (for me anyway). For example, when writing for synth drums, it doesn’t matter if there are 6 drum kits at the same moment because the synth drummer doesn’t need to worry about arms and feet. When writing for a real human, clearly there is a limit to the amount of sound events that can be created at a time.

There’s a far more organic tone to the album than on the last one, I’m thinking in particular of the live drums or even the glockenspiel that closes out ‘Snookered’ and opens up ‘Of The Mountains’, was that sense something you were aiming for right away? I’ve always thought that there was a really warm feel to a lot of the synth tones you’ve used in the past, particularly the single note stuff that underpins some of the older songs, is the feel of ‘Bromst’ a natural progression of that?

I think so. Beyond the acoustic instrumentation I think a lot of it has to due to the recording process and mixing process. SMOTR was recorded in a week in my bedroom with one mic. ‘Bromst’ was recorded over a 9 month period and mixed in an all analog studio. I still love lo-fi sounds but I wanted to try working in hi-fi. The studio we worked in, snow ghost, was just amazing and it added a lot of character and quality to the album.

On the subject of natural progressions there’s songs on the new record that if I heard without being told who it was that I never would have guessed were yours, ‘Wet Wings’ in particular would fall into that category but there are parts of the record that make it sound unmistakably like a Dan Deacon album; the drums exploding into the mix about 3 minutes into ‘Build Voice” or some of the arpeggios you use, or the pitch shifted vocals. In particular one song,”Baltihorse”, sounds like a distillation of some of my favourite parts of your last record, but it seems to me to be more concise and more focused. You’re now on your 8th or 9th album since 2003 and I’m wondering if you find it easier to accomplish what it is you’re trying to achieve with your music as time has gone on or is it more of a trial an error thing? Do you have a vision of what you want to do with a song when you start composing it?

Each song starts differently. Sometimes it’s already written in my head and I just need to figure out how to get it out. Other times it’s a slow battle between me and an idea, trying to hash it out into something. Other times it comes from improvising or jamming or fooling around. I don’t think its’ getting easier. I hope it doesn’t. It would suck if it did.

The reason I ask the last question is that at odds with what the widespread perceptions of you might be in that you’re a wacky pied piper character with a bunch of crazy ideas and a table full of gadgets that makes for a sweaty fun time for the folks that come to your gigs whenever I read interviews with you or your MySpace blogs and bulletins you strike me as being very thoughtful and serious about your music. Do you on occasion feel frustration at not getting enough credit for the sophistication of your music?

To be honest, yes, I do get frustrated. But I realize that I shouldn’t. People’s perceptions are their own to make. It’s not like I am not any of those things they say I am. I just wish they would also see the other side as well. The juxtaposition between the serious and the absurd is an important dialog for me. It’s much easier to latch onto the later and ignore the rest. That’s what gets frustrating. But again, I shouldn’t let it get to me. There so many amazing musicians that never get a chance to share their music with anyone and I’m insanely grateful and humbled by how many people like my music. Complaining about my “image in the media” is like saying “there aren’t enough sprinkles in my ice cream cone! I wish I could have more cake! etc, etc”

You’ve built quite a reputation as a live act and you’re coming back to Dublin in June, this time you’re bringing an ensemble of musicians. How is this going to impact on the live show, are you planning on staying on the floor or playing on stage. Will the games/dance offs/etc. still be a part of the gig? Will the band just be playing ‘Bromst’ material or will they be playing new arrangements from older songs?

I live show will certainly have gone through a transformation by the time I get to Dublin. I don’t plan on removing any of group activities from the show. I’m not sure if I’ll continue to play on the floor. The main reason I started playing on the floor was to communicate to the audience (which used to be really fucking small). Now that its gotten to the point when I need to ask people to step back and I can’t face the audience because I need to block off my equipment, it seems like that communication aspect has been lost. I like being in the crowd and I’m trying to come up with a way to make both worlds work. I also need to make sure I can see the performers and give cues and some of the instruments I play are on the stage because they are being shared by others. So I’m not exactly sure what the setup will be but I’ll have 7 weeks in the US before coming cover to the EU to figure it out.

Entirely self indulgent and geeky question. What’s your favourite piece of musical equipment?

Most likely these two modified whammy pedals I have just built. My friend Karl Ekdahl is an electronics wizard and turned them into really amazing instruments.

Following on from that in general what sort of gear do you use most when making music?

I compose mainly with the program Reason but I’ve been using Sibelius as well. I used to do everything by hand but it took forever and since I compose mainly on the road using the computer makes it earlier. I promised myself I’d soon compose at least two large pieces (or albums, whatever) of music made with out computer. I use it to much. I think its a great tool but there are a lot of other great instruments out there that I should be giving attention too.

One of the more surreal things I’ve seen in the internet in the past 12 months was a link to a video on YouTube featuring you that a friend sent me. How in the hell did you wind up on an NBC morning show in Ohio at 5:30 AM?

The world works in wonders in weird ways.

Bromst is out now on Carpark Records. Foggy Notions presents Dan Deacon & Ensemble in Andrew’s Lane Theatre on June 3rd.Photo used above by John Sisk.

Animal Collective

illustration by Phil Dunne

Ten years ago the good ship Animal Collective began its musical voyage, embarking into a deep ocean of avant-garde noise, bubbling psychedelia and whirlpools of high-frequency delirium. Year by year, release by release these four adventurers sailed ever-closer to their eventual destination, distracted by an Odyssey-like saga of encounters- the Sirens of synths-pop, the many-headed monster of freak folk, the divine seductions of ethnomusical experiments. In 2009 the band finally sailed through their water curses and found themselves in the shallow waters of a sunny lagoon. Disembarking from his well-worn vessel, Admiral Avey Tare regaled us with his adventures, told us his itinerary, and what they make of their new environment- Oh, and didn’t they lose a man overboard?

Hey Dave. Dave or Avey? Do you have to be in character to do interviews?

Haha, Dave is cool.

First of all I have to give you a collective thanks from the people in Dublin who got to your last gig, I think it’s pretty much everybody who was there’s show of the year.

Oh man, that night was such a mess. By the time we finally got to the venue we were exhausted, but really psyched up to play as good a show as we could, especially since we had such bad luck the last time we came over when I was sick. We wanted to just get out of our minds, and get everybody else out of theirs too. We ended up getting an amazing energy from you guys, it was genuinely one of our highlights of 2008 too. We’re looking forward to coming back in March and making it up to all the people who’ve missed out so far though.

If that show was a high point of 2008, I think Merriweather’s already in contention for the defining musical happening of 2009…

Awh man, thanks, we’re so excited for it.

You’ve talked about your music being certain colours before- What colour do you think Merriweather is?

I guess I see at as two different groups of styles, two different groups of colours splitting the record. Overall we talked about it having a lagoon quality, like a shallow lagoon with lots of blues and greens, quite tropical and shimmering, anything you’d see in a coral. So we see a lot of it as having a blue-green quality, but then a bunch of songs are more earthy.

When I talked to Brian (Geologist) when Strawberry Jam came out he explained the relation of the texture of that album cover and the sound inside, on Merriweather were you trying to create an optical illusion sound?

I think that particular optical illusion reminded us of that aquatic feeling, the waves of it, the shimmering, and the sense of being underwater. That’s why were so partial to it and decided to use it.

The visual record you’re working on now, is that following the same line of effect?

That’s a collaboration with our friend Danny. The music and the film are really joined together, it’s a little more experimental. We want it to be really difficult to seperate the images from the music. Because of that it’s a sort of different experience, compositionally. It’s not very song-y, but it still sounds like Animal Collective. And there are a few sweet pop moments on it.

Talking about the aquatic sound, I thought Water Curses was about as wet as an album could get, but Merriweather takes it to a whole different level…

Hahaha, I know! We did too…

What is it about that echo effect that attracts you?

I dunno. I guess with Water Curses it was a little more predetermined. It was called Water Curses from a joke phrase that came up during Strawberry Jam when all these tragic events seemed to be happening with water. There was a flood in the studio, and we kept spilling liquid on stuff and things like this…

And it start seeping into the sound through the mic inputs?

Exactly! Everything we came up with started being like that, people would come up to us after shows and tell us it was like being underwater.

Is Merriweather a more electronic version of your more acoustic stuff, if you get me? Song-wise it’s a lot more along the lines of Sung Tongs, say, but it also sounds like your using more samplers and electronics.

Oh totally, we’re approaching an electronic album in an organic way. Even though we’re utilizing a lot of the samplers we want to gel with each other in a more natural way. Plus a lot of the sounds we’re sampling are acoustic instruments. Lots of string, guitar, drum samples. And I think the sound reflects that.

How does the album name reflect the music within it?

Well Merriweather is this venue in Maryland we’re all aware off from that we went to shows in when we were younger. There’s this rumour going around that we saw the Grateful Dead there when we were kids, we actually never did. I think the Dead were actually banned from playing there! The venue’s in a sort of planned community, and a lot of the community bands were from there and none of them liked the Dead at all. But the name signifies the ritual of listening to music outside. Merriweather has this really large lawn you can sit on and chill out during the music and enjoy the atmosphere. When we were younger and listening to some Neu! track or something with a big guitar solo we’d say “Man! This is so Merriweather!”. We often got into music that way, when we were younger, from just hanging out outside and listening to all kinds of new stuff. So we picked it because it had a really personal meaning but is about that communal feeling.

Do you think the album’s so Merriweather then?

I think it has this pretty epic quality. A lot of the early takes of our songs we noticed seem to come from the outside, or would descend on your, like ‘In The Flowers’. We also really liked that it had the word ‘weather’ in it, because we started attaching different weather patterns with the songs, tornadoes, hurricanes and tropical suns and stuff like that, since when we recording the weather was pretty drastic- We had to shut down the studio because of a tornado at one point.

Lyrically and musically speaking, a lot of Animal Collective’s stuff is always innately linked with nature. But, apart from Noah, you guys live in New York City. Is it sort of escapist that your songs are so set in this less man-made universe?

In New York sometimes you do forget you’re part of nature sometimes, and me and Brian are lucky in that we get out all the time to tour, and it is a breather to get out of the city. We’re lucky that we grew up in Maryland, which is where I guess a lot of that stuff stems from.

I read a preview from a big music magazine saying that Merriweather is a ‘landmark American album’… Do you think there’s anything distinctively “American” or representative of America in Animal Collective’s music?

Haha… It’s difficult to say being on the inside, though I think originally I would never have thought that. A lot of interviewers bring up the Beach Boys in regards to our sound. It’s so weird. I know some people think sometimes sounds a lot like Brian Wilson, but it’s still weird. I mean we like the Beatles, probably more so than the Beach Boys, they’re not like our favourite band. I love Smile and stuff, but I would hardly ever throw them on. Someone said to me recently when they were here “The Beatles are so British” but there’s nothing really British about Animal Collective at all, so you must be more American. I guess… We are American, which is probably where that comes from. Something like Summertime Clothes is very New York, lyrically, being about living in a city so hot you need to go outside and walk around in it.

When bands like El Guincho and Ruby Suns and Born Ruffians take that Animal Collective template and run with it do you feel more possesive, or proud that people are using your sound to some degree?

That’s a whole new thing for us, even just talking about it. People bring being highly influential up a lot now… I think it’s cool when bands that are our peers say we’re a really sweet band and are influential to them, because we used to be at the stage where we’d say the same thing about other bands. But it’s not like we’re in a position to point fingers and say “Oh they’re ripping us off”, or anything.

Do you feel in a position of some responsibility then, and any pressure from that?

No, not really. (Contemplatitively) We only really feel responsible to ourselves. Ever since we started we always wanted to be an act doing something singular, something individual, whether we were popular or not. We don’t let other people’s opinions effect us all that much, so long as we feel we’re progressive and moving forward with our own things, being experimental if you want to say that. But we like to feel soulful, make music that comes directly from us, and we’re very aware of being derivative. We want to be Animal Collective.

Is there anything particularly insulting or frustrating critics have said about Animal Collective?

I wouldn’t say insulting as such, but there was a school of people who thought were just a bunch of jokesters, or tricksters taking the piss out of modern rock, trying to poke fun at it. And people who think we don’t work very hard at what we do, that we just improvise and throw everything together, or don’t care what we do onstage. That would be the most frustrating thing, and there are some other smaller things like when we get too associated with drugs, called druggies or weirdos, or people thinking we’re being weird for weird’s sake. To us there’s nothing weird about what we’re doing at all. That and the whole “childlike” thing. So many of our more recent records have been inspired by who we are now and our current experiences, but get tagged with this sort of childlike wonder. I think it is good to view life that way, as if everything is new and untainted but we’re not these guys obsessed with writing about our childhood memories.

I think that’s down to you making a lot more positive and optimistic music than the more cynical-is-cool majority would.

Totally.

Has the band dynamic changed at all since Deakin stopped contributing?

In the sense that he’s a pretty big guitar-orientated part of the band it’s shown I think on this record, but it’s fine I mean, it challenges us to find different sounds and directions, and we’re quite used to that challenge and that dynamic from one of us going away for a while. Not just musically, I mean personality too, Josh is a pretty big personality, especially onstage, his energy is definitely missed by us. But it’s something we’re used to having to work around, and find new ways of filling those gaps.

Have you got any other projects in the pipeline? Would you consider putting out another Pullhair Rubeye record, say?

It sorta depends on what comes up, we’ve been really Animal Collective-orientated lately, especially with this visual project coming up. I know Noah has started working on some new songs, which will probably just evolve over time, he usually takes his time with records. With me collaborating with people like my wife (Kyia Brennan of Iceland swoonsome collective Múm) or my friend Eric (Copeland, of fellow NYC noise-experimentalists Black Dice) it comes down to when I have time to do it, when we’re hanging out, and it’s relaxed which sadly hasn’t been a lot lately. It’s something I do like to do a lot though, so hopefully something will happen soon.

So what do you want 2009 to bring Animal Collective?

Surprises, I hope! I hope it’s as productive and interesting as this one, I’m amazed we got so much done this year. Maybe there’ll be some time off, I do like to relax, to travel a lot, but I do hope we get a lot done.

Has there been anywhere that the band hasn’t taken you on your travels yet that you’d like to go?

I don’t know how possible it is, but I’d really like to play in Africa. I love African music, old folk music, it’d be wild to explore certain areas like that. We’d also like to tour Asia a lot more, it’s something we don’t get to do a whole lot.

Merriweather Post Pavillion is out now. Animal Collective play Tripod on the 27th March.

Crystal Stilts

Brooklynites Crystal Stilts have a touch of Joy Division to their sound, but it is in an atmospheric, rather than sonic way. They have captured the essence of post punk, but sound like they have been influenced by the music from both sides of that era. There are bits of Smiths, Velvet Underground, Jesus and Mary Chain and rockabilly that are mixed together without sounding ripped off or pastiche. Analogue got a chance to catch up with front man JB Townsend in advance of their gig in Whelans.

You grew up in Florida but are now based in Brooklyn. How long have you lived in Brooklyn and what was it that attracted you to Brooklyn?

JB Townsend: I’ve been living in Brooklyn for about 7 years. Brad and I moved here around the same time from Florida. When you live on the East Coast it’s the obvious move to make. We both wanted to get out of there. It was a fairly dismal place.

Was it a musical decision? Were you making music in south Florida?

We weren’t really making music at that time and didn’t have plans to start a band. We both kind of joked about it. Brad doesn’t really play an instrument and wasn’t really a singer then. He was into writing poems and stuff. Then after a few months of living in Brooklyn, this guy we knew had a practice space in Greenpoint with nights available. I would go there. I invited brad along, and for quite a while it was kind of directionless. We were experimenting and trying out different sounds. After about 6 months to a year of doing that, we had a little batch of songs which was the first single we put out. Also, a few of the songs on the LP are also from those days.

Do you consider the Brooklyn music scene to be a collective musical environment?

There are a lot of bands that are known as Brooklyn bands that we don’t really interact with. Because there are people here from so many different places, it almost creates sects in the Brooklyn scene and divides it. There are probably about ten bands that we’re pretty close to, although it’s only really been in the past year or so that everyone has gotten past anything weird.

Do you think that your success has had anything to do with that?

I don’t think it’s been anything to do with success. It’s more an affinity. Especially with Blank Dogs. That’s been great. Mike has been such a help with everything. Mike from Blank Dogs has done really well getting everyone together.

I’m pretty curious about the recording process and the techniques you use to create that sound. On the EP especially, there’s an almost Martin Hannett-like shimmer to the tracks.

That EP has a very cold sound, but also a lot of reverb and tape. When mixing I tend to just disregard 90’s production values. On the EP I used a Roland TR606 Analogue drum machine with some reverb, then doubled the drum track with real drums. I also like mono sounding recordings; so on the EP there isn’t a whole lot of panning going on. The sound is mostly centred.

So sticking to the recording process, and production, I wanted to ask about the positioning of the vocals in the mix. Is their depth a deliberate technique to make people think about, or hide what is being sung? Or is it just an aesthetic thing?

Well reverb adds volume, so when you put reverb on something, you tend to turn it down, but we also like the idea of not being able to make out the lyrics, and then you have to find out what they are. Then when you do find out, they’re not bad I think.

I can hear a lot of your influences in the music, so I’m not going to ask you to list them out, but I’d be interested to hear what makes you tick at the moment.

At the moment, I’ve been listening to the Trashmen and a lot of doowop records that I buy for a dollar. There’s a record store called Academy in Brooklyn, and in the basement they have tonnes of old 45’s. I like to go down there and look for odd R&B and doowop records. They’re pretty fun to discover.

You’re on an independent label at the moment, has there been any interest from any other parties?
About a year ago, we weren’t really stirring up anything. We had that EP that just came out on vinyl only. When we were making the EP we thought that Slumberland seemed like a good idea, but we had no idea if Slumberland was even accepting bands. Then Mike from Slumberland contacted us about doing a single out of the blue and I was like “well we have this whole album if you want to hear it!” He liked it, and from there we decided we wanted to mix it again. Slumberland is an amazing label.

Considering the fact that you’re on an independent label, and the fact that you had to cancel our interview yesterday to go to work, how difficult is it for a band like Crystal Stilts to survive without day jobs?

Right now we’re kind of at the point where we’re almost able to not work. Once we’re touring and more records come out, that will help.

I hope this doesn’t ruffle any feathers, but is there any way you can explain to me what happened to ‘Converging in the Quiet’? The version on the EP is my favourite song of yours, but the album version doesn’t seem to have as much kick.
It’s probably going to tear some fans a bit. That version was recorded in 2005, and I guess you change the way you play. Those records are studio records where I played almost all of them. We also decided that we wanted to re-record all those old songs, because at the time that record was not out, it was CDR only. I wanted to do it a little bit more like we play it live, because then we used a drum machine, but now we play with a drummer.

So tell me a bit about the band set up right now.

It’s the same five people. Kyle, who has been playing organ with us live for a few years, Andy, who plays bass, Frankie and Brad singing. It’s basically been me and Brad since the beginning, but we’ve had some different members. For the past year and a half, it has been a pretty steady line up.

Is that line up just for playing live or have you made any recordings?

We recorded a single with that line up in the way we play live. It was really nice to be able to do that. It took a lot less time. When we play live, it’s a little different. Some people think it’s great, but some people just expect to hear the record.

Well if that’s the case, they should just stay at home and listen to it.

Crystal Stilts play their first Irish gig upstairs in Whelan’s on 19th of February, tickets are €14.

Buraka Som Sistema

illustration by Phil Dunne

Kuduro isn’t a genre known to the vast majority of the Irish populace. In fact, the chances are quite high that you weren’t even aware there was such a thing as kuduro until curiosity inspired you to read this article. Either that or you’re a die-hard fan of the stuff; my sincerest apologies for patronising you if this is the case.

Likewise, Buraka Som Sistema are a band you’ve either never heard of or are madly in love with. Analogue had the chance to sit down and have a chin-wag with these Portuguese beat-meisters at their pre-Christmas DJ set in The Twisted Pepper. Two of the band - L’il John and Riot - producer Conductor is sadly absent - and guest vocalist/pretty-much-member Kalaf have been busy touring Europe.

Riot, guitar in hand, idly strums some tunes as L’il John gives a brief explanation of what exactly kuduro is. “You can describe it as a sound that’s based on […] African DJs’ and producers’ attempts at doing techno and house music. It’s picking up on the different aspects that they created around their own interpretations of these things, and it’s developing that and giving our own European version of it at the same time.”

Fast tempos, frenetic African beats and pounding bass drums under a rapid fire of MCing are typical characteristics of Kuduro. The genre is almost exclusively of Angolan origin, and with a high concentration of Angolan immigrants in certain suburbs in Lisbon it’s no surprise that the city is essentially home to the movement.

L’il John and Riot, making music since their teens, hooked up with kuduro producer Conductor a few years ago and formed Buraka Som Sistema. Describing themselves as “progressive kuduro” (pretty much a meaningless term; “it was a joke in an interview” confesses L’il John) and with a handful of EPs under their belt, they managed to attract the attention of M.I.A., who quickly got in touch. “It got to a point where she knew about us because we met so many mutual DJs and producers,” Riot explains, “so basically one day she called our studio, she talked with Jo?o [Barbosa, a.k.a. L’il John] and that’s how we got together.” Their collaborations resulted in Sound of Kuduro, the most popular single off their debut LP Black Diamond, which was released in November.

The album title reveals a lot about the band’s approach to their craft and origins, according to L’il John. “In South Africa, they had all that apartheid stuff, black people were excluded from experiencing the whole country, they were restricted to areas. What they call a black diamond is… imagine, a son of a couple that lived in apartheid, a son coming up from nowhere and making it for himself. That’s called a black diamond.”

When the genre first began to emerge in the poorest suburbs of Lisbon, kuduro artists were essentially forced to use aging and severely limited equipment to make their music. “It actually comes from production,” L’il John says. “It was never traditional, it was a reaction to traditional music. It was kids with their parents and grandparents playing the same instruments throughout their lives, […] and, even though they can play the same instrument, they broke that link in a way and just grabbed a shitty PC from seven years ago, installed Fruity Loops or some software like that, and started doing beats.”

These days Buraka Som Sistema have managed to accumulate enough of a following to be able to afford a plush studio in Lisbon, complete with de rigeur studio software behemoth Pro Tools. While other dance acts may grow to obsess about analogue synths and vintage compressors, this clearly isn’t in the Buraka/kuduro spirit. “It’s not about having the ultimate kick drum or snare,” L’il John says, “it’s about trying to pass on an idea or a concept.”

When I ask them for their thoughts on illegal downloading and whether I think it’s hurt them or helped them, their response is refreshing. “In Angola, it’s more or less the same process; when you release a track, people buy your albums, but they also [illegally] copy the music,” Kalaf explains, “so if your music is really good, you’ll find bootlegs; if it’s crap, you’ll find bootlegs. Simple as that.”

Future plans for the band include the release of Black Diamond in the United States, though Kalaf is already looking onwards. “We really want to make the biggest show that we can make with our size,” he reveals. “To be able to throw a good show, thats the way you fight the downloading - to be able to make a show that people will like to see and will remember.”

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).

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