Simian Mobile Disco for Disorder Magazine

SMD interview for Disorder magazine, from February 2007:

After the Eno-produced electronic folk rock band Simian burned out in 2005, SMD rose from the ashes his year, with their new record, Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release and its brain-crushingly good lead single It’s A Beat. With set-ups at The End and Bugged Out! mixes under their belts, as well as a load of remix workouts for Klaxons and yep, Justice, they seem to be pretty well-born, combining the three key dance moods that are shaping up to dominate 2007 (Ed Recs-esque "filthy" electro, the trancey stuff coming out of Berlin and, yes, nu-rave) and post-rave acts like LFO and KLF. "Whoooooosh" is the overall effect and there's a bit on track seven that starts off really minimal, but caves into a Euphoria-heavy beat as if the song itself can't stop grinning for gurning. It's really, really fun, and – generalization alert! – kind of sums up dance music in this country in 2007.

What question do you always wish you were asked?
What would you like to drink?

Could you tell me about your new album, what's the story behind it?
We have been writing tunes for ages just for a laugh and we suddenly realised that we had loads of tunes. We want the album to be a good listening experience, not just loads of bangers thrown together.

What was the recording and writing process like?
We generally work really quickly. Rather than laboring over a few tracks we like to do loads of them and then choose our favourites. We plug the machines in and guide them while they make music for us.

It's an old story, but I'd like to hear it again. What happened with Simian the band and how were SMD formed?
Simian split in at the end of a long tour of the states but we are all still mates and help each other out with our new projects. SMD started with me and James djing in clubs after Simian gigs. We started doing remixes and when the band finished we just kept on djing and making music. Now we are an act in our own right.

Mr. Ford, you've just produced the Arctic Monkey's new record. Can you tell us something about them that we'd never know?
Jamie ate a phal for a bet. I had to pay for his curry.

There's a song on there called Tits and Acid, and I've been reliably informed that acid makes you visualise music. How would you describe your music in a visual sense?
Strobe. strobe. strobe. one of those old oil lamps. strobe. strobe. strobe.

What do you have in common with our primate cousins as musicians?
We like drums, and fire. We work on instinct.

These New Puritans: Complete Control for Dummy Magazine

I'm an absolute sucker for both high-camp and any band that recalls Marxist-Dadaists who battle brownshirts on the streets of Berlin. Dummy, September 2007:

These New Puritans – the band that brought you Heidi Slimane-approved numerology-obsessed no wave and blogs about boiling water and Jacobian tragedies – are playing around the country on the Blyk-backed Unitaur with Crystal Castles, The Teenagers and DJ Mehdi. Their debut album, Beat Pyramid, is out in January.

What was it like recording the album? You did it with Gareth Jones [who produced Wire, Einsturzende Neubauten and Liars], didn’t you?
Yeah, he’s a genius; he’s like a professor. A load of this record is made out of sampled bits and pieces, and he really brought that out: things like recording underwater or in a park, or sampling knives cutting. We were having a cigarette on the roof of the studio and we started messing about with these barbecue tongs.

What kind of stuff were you listening to when you were recording it?
We were watching a lot of movies, unrelated to music, I suppose. We were listening to a lot of dancehall, dubstep and ragga and 20th century classical music.

There’s something quite elusive about your “online presence.”
Yeah, we started off as an internet-only band, just doing webcasts and podcasts and stuff. We do like to keep it quite elusive. I really like the aesthetics of terrorist videos – how grainy and far-off yet immediate they seem – there’s something about the fuzzy screen which lets you add layers of meaning. So it was weird when we first started playing around and about. Playing live still feels weird – I don’t really know how to react when someone talks to me afterwards.

What’s the reaction been like so far?
It’s going alright, interesting to see people responding to our music – and playing it to people who might be into different groups. It’s weird, though. People either seem to really like us or be, like, visibly disgusted. People often seem insulted by us.

For Dummy: Dan Deacon's top ten ways to make the world a better place

You know what I love about Dan Deacon? That his myspace lists his music as Americana. I really like that. Here's the first top ten for Dummy, from Dan in November 2007:

Dan Deacon has been setting Baltimore basement parties on fire since the days of his MA in Musical Composition with his Venetian Snares-meets-Playmobil piano electronica. His new album, Spiderman of the Rings sounds like a Shostakovich record that makes you want to eat jelly till you feel sick and need to lie down and to celebrate his awesome seventh LP, Deacon came by to drop some science on us fools. Here are the Deacon commandments:

1. Get a loop/delay pedal. If as many people who played guitar played loop/delay pedals then music would really evolve at a much more interesting rate.

2. Stop using money. All it does is fuck you over.

3. Book shows in your house. Music, art, dance and theater shows in homes are vital. It creates an atmosphere that no other space can achieve and everyone can do it! There are endless touring artists that are just starting out and would be willing to play anywhere. If you live in a big, dirty house where it can get loud, have big, dirty, loud shows. If you live in a nice, clean place that has to stay quiet, have art shows or quiet shows. Put on plays in your basement. Just about any space is suitable for some sort of awesome shit.

4. Don't be lazy.

5. If you feel there an unbalance, then balance it.

6. Stop having children. We are building our species up to an extinction point. Soon disease and bacteria will re-balance the earth and it will be awesome. So I guess have tons of kids and quicken the process.

7. Listen to Raymond Scott and Conlon Nancarrow everyday.

8. Watch the movies The Apple and Zeitgeist. Make children watch these movies.

9. Stop renting and do all that you can to end the concept of land ownership.

10. Realize that the world is already the nicest place to live, forever.

Yeasayer's top ten crap bands for Dummy

Yeasayer's rise to rule is another happy happy happy this year, and in March I tied them down to slag off some bands for the semi-regular Dummy feature:

Brooklyn's unfaultably earnest Yeasayer – who are rereleasing their awesome album All Hour Cymbals from last year, probably because nowhere near enough people realised it was out already – took a few minutes out to cuss some bands for us. Can't really fuck with any of their irony-busting choices. They're on mini-tour at the moment, so if you didn't get round to seeing them last year, get down to the ICA on Wednesday. Or see them in Glasgow or Manchester later in the week, if you live there. The 'Wait For The Summer' single is out on 17th March, and the pretty cool video is above. Yes! Yes! It is! On with the hate:

1. Van Halen / KISS
Let them duke it out. To the death.

2. Bare Naked Ladies
They should be number one, but Van Halen really deserve it.

3. Lenny Kravitz
Apart from the fact that Lenny is terrible on his own, he also taints other artists, like Jay-Z.

4. Black Crowes
Why are these guys famous? Their career was made off of crappy covers. Plus they just seem like assholes.

5. Eric Clapton
What a loser.

6. George Thoroughgood
One whiskey, one bourbon, one shoot-me-in-the-head-right-now.

7. AC/DC
Little Australian men in little shorts singing the same song over and over again.

8. Pearl Jam
Eddie Vedder influenced every bad singer from 1992 on.

9. Santana
Santana seems like a really cool guy, but he's had far too many collaborations with Rob Thomas.

10. Sublime
Snowboarders have really bad taste in music.

Dan Hillier for Dazed and Confused

An art piece for Dazed from way back in February 2007, about a Max Ernst-biting modern engraver. Last I heard he was on Neil Gaiman's thing, which is great news:

If there is a movement in art toward the dark, weird and down-right odd in art at the moment (see those Chapman boys, Sebastian Gogel and any given grub street gallery) then Dan Hillier is definitely a part of it. Hillier creates intricate, dark, surreal, graceful and iconoclastic engravings, sourced from ephemera such as Victorian medical encyclopaedias, religious imagery and found photographs. “I like using found pictures and drawing out new narratives from them by bringing previously unrelated images together. I particularly enjoy the results when they're dark and a bit weird,” he says. The results are like postcards by Beardsley from a Victorian inventor’s mansion. If the mansion was populated by circus freaks and Werner Herzog, that is. No surprise that he lists his influences as wine, Max Ernst and mushrooms, then.
He grew up in between the dreamy towers and rough-as-guts estates of Oxford, and studied art Cambridge fifteen years ago. Whilst working as a henna tattooist, he was drawn to doctoring images in his work and, as a hobby, collected fragments of Victoriana. Recently, he started combining the two and realised that new, twisted stories could be told from the most banal of materials. After sifting through car-boot sales and back-street charity chops, fitting images were found. Quite simply, he trawls though “old anatomy and science books, vintage wallpaper, old advertisements for ludicrous Victorian quackery and labour-saving devices” so we don’t have to. The images, once found are combined and doctored on Photoshop or illustrated with vintage Indian dipping ink.
The works depends on the use of forgotten images and discarded memories to re-write a gorgeously dark period of our history, full of elephant men and taxidermy, death and medicine. There’s rich vein to be tapped, and Hillier is only too happy to oblige. With a wink, he calls his work “the quiet dedications of a slightly idiotic man with a fledgling perception of the universe's mysterious charms and a joy in the pleasures of communicating a love of strangeness, darkness, nature, beauty and human people.” He pauses and laughs. “Or just lines of ink on paper and wood.”

M83 Fact interview: Dubstep for supermarkets

One of the nicer events of 2008 so far is the return/re-energising of M83. Nice to be able to have a chat with him for Fact in June of this year:

M83 was born made. I mean, if you record total-immersion shoegaze electronica with Ewan Pearson and are named after a face-on spiral galaxy receding from us at around 337 km/sec, you have to paddle pretty hard to keep praise-free. Still, his newish-one Saturdays=Youth plays its strong hand well, holding down the expansive scope of his wonderful previous albums and adding stuff like “focus” and “tunes”. Themed around Antibean Anthony Gonzalez’s rosy ideas of 80s teenage life, it sounds like the soundtrack to a film about summer rain and sine waves and buried treasure and sexually charged all-day detentions and friends with dads with yachts, and it’s pretty cool because it sounds a bit like the Cocteau Twins without being the Cocteau Twins.

How does it feel to be touring the new album?
It’s refreshing! ‘Till The Dawn was drawn how I wanted it to be – it was very noisy, very huge and very epic. It was very… dreamy. Digital Shades [] was not a full studio album, it is more of a side project – I just wanted to explore the ambient sounds that I love. Saturdays=Youth is different. It is – um – sturdy.

How do you mean?
Each time I try my best to make the album to sound as I want it to sound. It’s important to make something different. Everything should be something different to what came before.

This is a very rose-tinted look at the 80s. Is it fair to call it a tribute record?
Yes, yes! It is a tribute record, yes. I mean it’s not only a… “covers record”, a machine record. It is also very personal to me, which it is important to be. That decade, it has an identity that is close to me.

It’s certainly a genuine affection.
Yes, no… I tried to avoid irony all together. It was exactly what I didn’t want to make. There was no irony at all.

Unlike most consciously “80s” records, Saturdays… doesn’t seem at all ironic.
Many make funny sounds about the 80s, but I don’t. For me, I cannot be funny about what I love. Music is very serious for me! I grew up in the 80s, so I grew up listening to this music. It has a great drama for me, things like Cocteau Twins and Tears for Fears. It was a totally new music then, and that is very thrilling to hear, even now. They proposed a new sound. Good music to be a teenager.

It’s – uh – ironic that you chose 80s music to soundtrack your “teenage” album, isn’t it? I mean, without pointing out the obvious, you were a nineties kid.
Ha, yes! I discovered music really when I was 13, 14 – when you are young enough for love, but old enough to look around you. The first music that called me was this very brushed thing, not the music that surrounded me. You could say my first crush was on Blue Nile! That was what made me feel really special, when production just sounded so perfect.

Speaking of production, you hooked up with some interesting people for this record. What was it like working with Ken Thomas [who was behind Cocteau Twins, PiL and Alien Sex Fiend] and Ewan Pearson?
It was fantastic. It was my first time working with “producers” – before it was just me and a sound engineer, but this time I wanted to try something new and tap into his experiences. Sharing music: I love that idea, man, and I love to share music, especially with Ewan Pearson and Ken Thomas. They are fully different backgrounds – the way that Ewan looks at electronic music is just so forward thinking it is unbelievable, but Ken Thomas has so much experience – he has just worked with so many of my favourite bands. As with so much, the combination is the exciting thing.

Morgan Kibby’s vocals on Saturdays work out really well, eh? How did that hook up come about?
Yes, I was very pleased to work with her. I like cinema and film very much, and she works as a singer for movie trailers [Morgan sang on the trailers for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and The Lady In The Water] – a director friend actually put us in touch. I listened to her on the internet, and she sounded to me like a combination of Kate Bush and Liz Fraser. I was in love!

What effect do you want to have on the bodies of your listeners?
Oh, er… I like to drive very much, and I think of my music as driving music. So it should feel like driving very, very fast in a very good car. Or maybe in no car at all.

Stricken City: Mistakes happening for Fact

Stricken City, another immaculately thrilling indie band from the ACTH camp, were interviewed by yours on a blustery Brighton beach in March 2008 for Fact's new talent section:

Stricken City drift and jerk and are bright windy days and flowers in jam-jar vases. Set up in the midland's endless leafy suburbs four years ago by schoolfriends guitarist Iain Pettifer and singer Rebekah Raa, the band play tight pretty art rock. A year or so ago, perhaps in order to make the line-up sound even more like a 1930s radical literary circle based in the East Sussex countryside, drummer Kit Godfrey and bassist Espen Dahl were recruited.
Stricken City sit happily in the fine tradition of naff-town daydreaming, cankicking and stargazing: "We met when Rebekah moved to Northampton, where I'd lived since ever. I got out as soon as I could! Rebekah came to London a year later, and went to drama school before going to the London College of Fashion," says Iain. "We were the kids on the outskirts, definitely! It was an opportunity to take in a lot of music, watch a lot of films and read a lot of books: I think we both wanted to do something less ordinary than drinking in crap clubs."
Influences, in the most charming way possible, are worn on the sleeve: Orange Juice's fey 303s, Young Marble Giants' pastoral swoons, the cocky, precocious hyper-invention of the Slits slide in and out of the imagination. Ideas bounce ecstatically, fresh, clean and bright. Recalling LMC's constant retraining regime, stricken City is fresh with unlearnt intellect: "We're very, ahem, 'mistakist'. Only Espen and Kit are what you could call experienced! I learnt guitar in a week, and Rebekah has never bought a record in the seven years I've known her. It's the way we like to work: learning to play as much as playing, writing songs by stumbling on niceness. You know that that kind of extend to the production: it's been co-produced by Will from Adventures Close To Home [who signed them earlier this year], who has never produced anyone before – he's a house DJ." House is under the skin of tunes like Tak O Tak and Bardou, there like the answer; bass carrying through, both driving and delicate, with elegant vocals swanning around. "Dance music kind of seeped in I suppose: we'd always hang around at ACTH, and Rebekah always sews her clothes to late night pirate radio. We do play dance music, yeah. It's just a little too awkward to dance to."

Fact's Jong Pang feature: The Way Things GO!

Fact online feature about a quietly spectacular musical brain, May 2007:

“Hi! I am in the studio recording percussion, let me get quiet. Hi! Right! I am all ears. And head; and eyes. And mouth.” These are not my first words with Jong Pang, these are my first words with Anders Rhedin. That’s because Jong Pang is no-one: neither a collective nor a producer alias nor a band. According to the earnest and incredibly likable leader-slash-producer Anders, Jong Pang is “a brand! It’s a vibe, an atmosphere. It’s an identity, like a company – but not a corporation! It’s a not a band, it’s not a collective, it’s an idea of what a band could be. It’s not the people in it and not me. At the moment I’m the conductor and I’m looking after it, but one day someone could hold it and it would be theirs.”
Being faintly scared of all animals bigger than me, I’ve never ridden a horse bareback through an Aurora Borealis-lit snowfield to worship a God whose name is a colour not a word, but I bet it would sound like just like Jong Pang if I done. There’s a great Fischli/Weiss video of two people dressed as a bear and a rat on his myspace beating sticks over the Alpine clouds, and it’s really, really fitting because his music is just like. It’s like when you dress up as a bear with a friend at a party and you pretend to play-fight-dance like one and somewhere along the way you forget – just a little bit, for a second – that you’re human and not a bear, and you never talk about it with your friend because you forget about it a minute later but you know it was real (because it was) and so does your friend. That’s what it’s like; and once ancestral and completely new. And really fun.
After Danish indie hopes Moon Gringo drifted apart in 2004, Anders set about rebuilding his musical universe. “You know, I stopped reading music magazines, and stopped listening to indie rock. Imagine that! I cut out what I had been listening to since forever, which was like European music and American music of the last 30 years. Folk music from around the world, composers like Arvo Part and Steve Reich was what I filled my head with. It is so fucking exciting to hear this when you have been listening to the same rhythms all of your life! That was the idea behind Jong Pang: I wanted to see what Steve Reich would sound like if he was a rock band.”
Anders’ “musical trip” was focused on the pop moment rather than any ‘architectural’ follies, building immaculately one-dimensional, instant creations out of an ever-expanding world of organic instruments and foreign feelings: a kind of comfortable treatment of musical extremes, a sumptuous remapping of indie, running through Reich’s curt vocal jabs to African polyrhythmic drumming to swoonsome, engulfing shoegaze. “I love the way that as soon as you listen to [Steve Reich], a whole universe opens up, but if you just listen with one ear, it’s nothing. I mean, I always say Thanks! when someone describes me as pop: I love to dance to Friday I’m In Love. It’s the most pure, poetical music imaginable: to merge quality with underlying experimentation to create this universe.”
Universe is one of Anders’ favourite words: it comes up a lot in conversation. Is that why he ditched the band to be a producer? Don’t all great studio heads want to build and control their musical universe? “Yes! I suppose I’m a producer like Brian Eno is: I saw this fantastic quote when he said that everyone is an engineer, and I think that I like to direct music, to make every single certain thing unfold rather than take a guitar and sing a story about my life.” But Jong Pang doesn’t sound like one man’s inner visions: it sounds too ritualistic, too collective, too much fucking fun to be the product of complete singular control. Fine for some, but UK distribution-TBC debut album Bright White Light doesn’t sound like one person’s inner world, but a group’s collective imagination. Doesn’t control get stifling? Isn’t it, well, boring? “At first you have freedom, which is nice, but then there’s an element of loneliness, which is not so nice. So I wanted to share the creative process.” Like outsourcing? “Yes! Outsourcing atmospheres, so it wasn’t a solo record: it was very easy to give this record out: I was lucky to know so many talented people. Now is a bit of time when I’ve conducted it, but I could be anyone: they never have one sole emperor: it is not an imperialist way!” Anders pauses. “One day Jong Pang might be nothing to do with me. I think I realized it a month ago: if I only have absolute control, which is what happens with something perfect, it is not really perfect: even if you have 100% control, you can never really have 100% control. There will always be something that bothers you. Because you are not completely satisfied: it’s impossible! So, what is more fun is what takes more time: thinking that you could completely involve everyone into working with Jong Pang, free from ideas of it as you. Sometimes, it is like a cult: a strange indie cult.”
What’s next? “We play live at festivals, which is great: translating the studio outside with two drummers, a cellist and six singers. We are recording much of the new album with relation to the outdoors, and playing more concerts. With the new album, I don’t want to wait or linger, but you have to wait, have to be inspired. You have to gather information.”

Dan Deacon Fact interview: To get to the other side

It's kind of weird that one of the most technically gifted musicians out there (dude did a masters in in electronic music DURING his final year at music uni) is written off as a joke by many. Still, whatever. Fact Magazine, May 2008:

Between the total total total communal regression fests that splattered 2007 and the release of his maximalist electro masterwork Spiderman of the Rings, pennies started dropping. Maybe the “cuddly” chap in the sweat-drenched thrift-store tee making crowds scream about castles wasn’t a just reasonable visual/musical gag: maybe Dan Deacon’s hyper-complex, 10,000%-joy desk-set live art musical was just what this decade’s increasingly apocalyptic dog end needed. Keeping us guessing, showbusiness’ hardest-working-man is touring his ass off and taking his bumbag house live to new ritualistic heights. Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham!

How are you?
I’m pretty good. Thanks for asking.

Most of your albums mention animals. Which animals are going to be behind the new LP?
The new record is about cycles, ghosts, dogs and bees. I guess it’s about me.

I heard you wanted your new work to sound ritualistic…
The last record was very much a party record and it was composed at a time when I was playing mainly loft and warehouse parties, [but] with the larger audiences and the level of crowd participation a lot of people say the show has taken on a ritualistic or religious feel. The songs on the new record reflect that sound, and it’s sort of a culmination of the early party pieces with the newer more intense, percussion-driven works.

What has changed for you in the last 12 months?
I guess things in my personal life and the way I view the world. I’ve learned that the music and art scene is really cut throat and a lot of people are just doing it for a quick dollar or for some weird desire for fame. I’ve learned it’s easy to mistake sincerity for opportunism, unless you look really hard. The scene I came up in is very much about community and friendship. I wish the larger scene were too. I think it’s getting there, but there are snakes and sharks out there.

Tell me about the Jimmy Joe Roche Ultimate Reality tour.
This tour was most likely the most fun tour I’ve been on. All the shows were awesome. It was a much larger scale tour than any of my pervious tours so it was nice to take it up a notch with the live drummers and massive projections. I wish we could of done the tour in Europe. One day.

Is this what we can expect from your next album in terms of live instrumentation?
I have gone back to working with live performers and live instruments a lot. I started working with electronics, computers and MIDI because it was difficult to find players. With the success of the last record it’s been easy to find skilled performers. Having live percussion, marimba, vibraphone, glockenspiel, xylophone, piano and drums makes the album so much fuller than if it was just electronics. I’m really happy with how it’s coming out.

What are you doing tomorrow?
Recording the sax parts.

What should we all do tomorrow?
Learn to farm, get a bike and stop breeding.

Zombie Zombie Fact preview: Schlock horror

A Fact preview of this fantastic Kosmische-horror band from 2008's early thaw:

If there's a colder moment that that bit on Assault On Precinct 13 when the kid’s song turns into John Carpenter’s keyboard line as a sniper looks through the sights, I've yet to see it. Funnily enough, Zombie Zombie have turned it into a band. They turn slasher stories and horror movies into slow-Can-inflected-disco jam epics. Less a side-project than a juvenile obsession, the duo formed around the studio spaces of Paris in the first half of this decade, fascinated equally by the horror films of Dario Argento and their Goblin soundtracks. “The music that soundtracks these films is so atmospheric. It is about creating a physical reaction as much as it is about the sounds themselves,” says the improbably titled drummer and soundsmith, Cosmic Neman, who makes the music with Etienne Jaumet, a free-jazz saxophonist, sound engineer and electronic handyman by day. Live, they are joined by Romain Turzi, Jay from Friction and David Ivar.
The pair’s rise has been pretty spectacular. Originally “something fun to do at parties”, they were snapped up by Parisian electro heartland Versatile after releasing an EP on Boomboomtchak. Last summer they were first on the bill at The End Of The Road, this month they opened for the Silver Apples at their reunion show in Paris, and well as guesting on Allez Allez and Le Blogotheque. Whether the band’s involvement with cardigan-rock heroes Herman Düne (Neman bangs their drums as well) has oiled their wheels is anyone’s guess – Neman is loath to see this band as a side project, saying “this is just fun, but so is Herman Düne. Different kinds of fun” – but some of the antifolk band has rubbed off on ZZ.
Firstly, there’s the commitment to obsolete instruments: “We use hardly anything made after 1980. With computer programs, you can do anything, so you end up playing them. With an old synthesizer, they are so temperamental that they end up playing you.” Then there’s the impressive commitment to misinformation and mythmaking: rumours of unnatural phenomena – walls have reportedly bled and strange marks have appeared on people’s bodies at their gigs – are neither confirmed nor denied.
Debut album A Land For Renegades was conceived as the soundtrack to an imaginary road movie about two mercenaries racing against the night, hounded by unseen forces. Apart from a rather daft track about a “nightclub where Iggy Pop and David Bowie’s ghosts are performing”, it’s a brilliant conception – while bits wouldn’t sound out of place on Italians Do It Better, it’s more soundstage than Studio Five-Four. As well as John Carpenter and Goblin, there’s bits of Popul Vuh’s stuff for Herzog. There’s a definite shade of Suicide’s more cinematic moments in the mix – with whom they share an absolute will to fuck us up. “To make you feel, I drum like a heartbeat. There are screams and pacings on the record. I want us to sound like fun, but fun that is so close you can feel it, you can smell it, so it makes you jump.”