My Tiger My Timing for Dummy

Next piece on really cool new band called My Tiger My Timing

“I made a resolution to take up Pilates and form the band. Now I’m only doing the band.” Anna Vincent is talking about forming My Tiger My Timing , a minimal and earnest London electro band that she sings and plays keyboards in. Jamie Harrison, vocals/guitar/bass, finishes the story: “We decided to set up the band at a New Year’s Eve 2007/8 party. January’s usually written off, this time we formed a band. We’d been wandering around in a dream-like state. Now the band is the dream. ”

We’re sitting around Spitalfields Market late on a chilly afternoon. They both seem really, really nice and pretty smart. They joined by Anna’s brother James, Gary Drain and Seb Underhill in the Arthur Russell-referencing, New Cross-based band, My Tiger My Timing. On their own label, Silver Music Machine, they put out pop music with its middle stripped. Their debut single, This Is Not The Fire, came out a few days ago, and it sounds distilled, concentrated – it’s electro with its bones showing. Anna: “We wanted to do something that was more about rhythm and texture, without any frivolous bits. We’ve been quite puritanical about the way we make up the song. If you allow yourself to do anything, it can be limiting, whereas a narrowed field can be freeing.” As Jamie says, even their visual element is stripped down, using only primary colours: “It’s become basic but vibrant, and the more striking for it, and the music is primary. Rhythm and melody. Texture and atmosphere. It’s almost a dissociative technique – you’ll listen, and realise that you’re hearing something created by a pop song. There’s something about a synthesiser that offers that difference of interpretation. You’ve totally taken away the emotion – you allow people to add it for themselves. “

If the idea of a south London band playing deconstructivist electro pop rings a bell, then it’ll come as little surprise that Hot Chip are all over this. Joe Goddard has produced some songs for them, joining Andy Spence from New Young Pony Club, who produced This Is Not The Fire. There’s a similar, almost unnerving not-fucking-about sense to MTMT’s plans, from releasing their music themselves, to playing in the with the lights off to prove they can. Jamie: “We never wrote down a manifesto, but we should have. Focus isn’t a dirty word. We rehearse the set for hours and hours and hours, so we can play it the dark, which we do.” Anna agrees: “That’s what the single is about – that moment before you unleash something, when you know the fire is just round the corner.” Jamie: “Even our name is determined… Ferocious and precise. It was either that or Super Bingo Bingo Time, which I still think is a great name.”

Arthur Russell for Clash

One of many hagiographic Arthur Russell pieces I've put my name to, this little blighter came out in Clash in the Autumn of 2008.

New York, 1983. On the Staten Island ferry, a man, alone but not lonely, is gazing into the distance over the water, his head full of music blaring from his Walkman headphones. It’s probably his own – he likes to listen to the songs he made while looking over the Hudson into the Jersey lights. This is Arthur Russell, the undisputed king of the downtown disco scene, a man who quietly made some of the most extraordinary music of all time until his AIDs-related death in 1992. As well as being a supremely gifted dance producer, he was also a renowned composer, folk singer, classical cellist and experimental musician who counted people like Philip Glass, Richard Hell and David Byrne as mates. When he moved to New York in 1973 from a San Francisco Buddhist commune, Allen Ginsburg let him siphon his electricity. He produced six albums, over a dozen 12” projects and several hundred unreleased cassettes, hundreds of reels, dozens of DATs, and countless thousands sheets of music and lyrics. Yet, despite his talent and beyond-prodigious creative output, he died in almost total obscurity. Gradually though, something extraordinary happened: as word slowly spread of the eccentric mastermind standing at the heart of late-20th century music, Arthur’s work is taken up, rereleased, played out. Biographies were written, minds blown, and everyone from filmmakers to forward thinking party organizers took up his cause. Now, in 2008, with a new LP, Love Is Overtaking Me and film, Wild Combination, Arthur Russell is finally finding the mass audience he craved – and deserved. Over the next few pages, we’ve compiled our own Arthurian legend: five DJs, producers, singers, fans and fanatics on the most important musician you’ve never heard.

JD Twitch (Optimo)
As part of the DJ team Optimo, Twitch has been playing Arthur Russell to crowds around the world for more than a decade

I’ve was vaguely aware of Arthur Russell’s existence for as long as I can remember – a song like Go Bang never leaves you when you hear it, but it wasn’t until I read a review for Another Thought in 1994 that I started to connect the dots between his disco stuff and his other work. And it just wiped the floor with me! I was having a particularly bad year emotionally, and though it sounds cheesy to speak of music “saving lives”, in this case, it’s true: Arthur Russell’s music really did save my life. And after that, I just became completely obsessed with the man and his work. Every time I play ‘Is It All Over My Face’ out, it always sends ripple of pure joy through the crowd. There’s just something about it – whether people have heard it a hundred times before or just that evening, they love it! There’s something so beautifully playful about it, so totally unlike any other dance music. Maybe it’s the words… “Is it all over my face… You got me love dancing”. Sometimes we play ‘Kiss Me Again’, this Dinosaur track, as a reward at the end of a really, really good night, and it’s been so wonderful to hear the crowd upstairs singing it on the way home – this song is still framing these great times. One of the reasons for his resurgence, apart from what you could call the internal logic of the zeitgeist, is as part of this general interest in dance music’s pre-history; which is itself probably to do with the fact that not so much exciting new stuff is coming out at the moment, since minimal disappeared up its own arse. It’s funny, when I was growing up disco was this dirty, dirty word, but that was only because of what I was hearing on the top 40 and in my mum’s car. So when I heard that Dinosaur L stuff, it was amazing to hear dance music that was that imaginative, that out-there – it really felt as if I found someone who understood the way we saw music! He just covers so many different schools, and covers them so well. From his well-known disco stuff to that ambient work to that Love Is Overtaking Me, which is essentially a country record! I mean, it’s just so out there – it could have been made twenty thousand years ago, it could be made tomorrow. But the most wonderful thing, I think, is that so many of these amazing songs were written just waiting for his boyfriend to come home from work.

Tim Lawrence
Journalist, author and academic Tim has written the first full length biography of Arthur, Hold On To Your Dreams, out next year.

I was really drawn to the figure of Arthur Russell after hearing about him while researching Love Saves The Day, my history of Dance music in the 1970s. I was drawn into this strange, evocative dance music – and the way that he was this central figure in all these different scenes in the late Seventies/early Eighties. He was really there at the formation of these incredible experiments in rock, disco, hip hop and “compositional” music: his story is really the story of creative New York during that time. Any kind of eclecticism was genuinely, genuinely shocking until very recently, and I think that Arthur in some way heralded in this post-tribal musical age – which is why he strikes a chord with us in the Age Of The iPod. Everyone now had Girls Aloud next to Mongolian folk music next to Hip Hop next to Steve Reich on their iPods – something Arthur would have no doubt been happy about. However, it’s essential we don’t think just because we can download a song in seconds on our laptops, we are somehow more enlightened, that we have somehow progressed, that we’re kind of close to Arthur’s incredibly genre-less taste. For him, it was never about easy access and standing on the sidelines: it was about active engagement and being in the thick of a real, physical, social commitment to music.

Andy Butler
Andy Butler plays in a dance band called Hercules and Love Affair

You know what I just found out? That Arthur Russell was a really, really big fan of the Muppet Show, like me. It’s funny because I’ve always thought that his music had a real Muppet-like sensibility – it’s really almost child-like, the quality it has, and like most children’s music it has this colourful, vivid imagination and simplicity. It’s magical. It’s just the sound of this lunatic musical freedom – and the way that those records worked collectively: it wasn’t the sound of just one person, but the noise of a whole bunch of people expressing themselves! It was super, super inspirational to hear that kind of collective, family atmosphere – where the attention is spread out over the whole band – itself a very punk idea. Derrick Carter actually first bought me a copy of Dinosaur L’s Go Bang – before I had heard that line sampled in so many house songs [Todd Terry’s Bango (To The Batmobile), to name but one – Ed], dancing at Body and SOUL, places like that, and he was such a huge part of that community. Dancing there, arms in the air, to these amazing songs that first played in the Paradise Garage: I was participating in the traditions. Arthur Russell, for me, was all about finding my roots.



Lola Love
Singer and dancer Lola Love collaborated with Arthur on Go Bang (under the name Dinosaur) and Wax The Van (under the name Lola)

I got to working with Arthur through my then-partner [disco producer] Rob Blank in the early 80s. I had just come off tour with Mr. James Brown and heard this wacky, funky, popping sound playing in our apartment – I loved it! It was just so avant garde, so experimental – and that’s what were my roots were. So we got to working together. We hit it off so quickly. He was such a perfectionist, like me, but his a perfection was a room of people losing their minds – that was what interested him – how wild people got. He’d always say “Wilder!” And you go crazy. Then he’d say “Go wilder! Wilder still! Wilder!” That was his collaborative style, you see: he didn’t order you around, he’d just make you be who you are. Working with him such a free, beautiful, creative experience. It was… it was [sings] “Bang a bang a go bang go – OW!” That’s how it was! And you’d never hear him go wild himself, like some producers do, but when it sounded right, he’d let a smile spread across his face. That’s all: a nod, and a smile. Even when we played at the [Paradise] Garage, that was the way he was: he’d never soak up the glory in front: he’d just sit at the back with his cello, letting the others tear it up. It was like a crazy, intense acid trip at the time: every night would be so wild. So wild you can’t imagine, honey! People would just loose their minds when we played. It was an interesting time, and downtown [New York] was an interesting place – and Arthur Russell was the most interesting person there. Whenever I’d invite him round for a party, he wouldn’t really socialise, he’d just stand in the corner, taking it all in, watching. He was like a ghost, you know! He’d just appear in a flash of smoke, and there he’d be – the most sweet, kind guy in the world, and then he’d disappear again, right away. And all that would be left was the smoke. The smoke would still be there.

Steve Knutson
Steve Knutson, as head of Audika Records, is devoted to rereleasing Arthur’s work.

My introduction to Arthur's music came from the legendary DJ, Walter Gibbons in 1986. Walter was a buyer at Rock & Soul, one of the infamous DJ shops in New York, and I sold him records while doing sales at Tommy Boy. We became quite friendly and invariably spent a lot of time discussing music. He told me about this odd genius he was working with. A few months later he gave me a copy of the Sleeping Bag 12", "Schoolbell/Treehouse" that he remixed. Hearing it changed my life. The intimacy of his voice and instrument first grabbed me. What I heard was pure consciousness. No separation between the voice and instruments. Holistic and deeply spiritual. Allen Ginsburg said it best, "Buddhist Bubble-Gum Music". After my introduction from Walter, I searched around for everything that I could find of Arthur's music. It was tough as there was little to no information out there (this is still the mid-80's), and I relied on simply searching through used bins in record stores, or asking my fanatical dance music friends for insight into his various pseudonyms. I was easily confused and taken aback by the (what I thought to be) disparate styles and elements of his music. I vividly remember buying "World Of Echo" when it first came out and being really disappointed. It wasn't a disco record, it was something else and I did not understand. But after finding the album "Instrumentals" I had an epiphany. What I heard in Arthur's music wasn't genres, I was very simply hearing "Arthur Music". Being the selfish sort, I had to hear this music, and the only way it was going to happen is if I compiled and released it myself. I'd known Will Socolov from Sleeping Bag for years and one day I asked him for Tom Lee's [Arthur’s life partner] phone number. I called Tom and we got on like a house on fire. The first time at his apartment Tom immediately began bring out cassettes of unreleased music. It was heaven! All in all around 1,000 plus tapes of music exist. And then there are dozens of manuscript books, hundreds of pages of lyrics and song sheets. It's almost never ending – it’s been all consuming at times, and I must has spent hundreds of hours compling these CDs! In the process, I've met with and corresponded with dozens of Arthur's friends and musicians. No one has ever uttered anything but love and respect for the man. Frustration, yes, but also deep respect, and love.

Matt Wolf
Filmmaker Matt Wolf’s Arthur Russell documentary Wild Combination has played around the world, including a very successful run at London’s ICA, the Berlin Film Festival and New York’s IFC, where it was the highest grossing film in its class.

Arthur's story is about more than just his experience as an idividual—it's about a particularly fertile period in Downtown New York's cultural history, it's about the experience of being gay and living with AIDS, and also it's about the cathartic process of making art and pursuing popular success at a time when those two things seemed possible and within reach. I think disco presenting a really liberating social context to create music. The early underground discos were very different than what people commonly associate with the genre: Studio 54, John Travolta, etc. The Loft was a kind of social experiment where David Mancuso brought together an incredibly diverse group of people: black, white, gay, straight, hippies, artists, and they danced together. There was a kind of essentially positive attitude in this context—you might compare it to a child's birthday party. But the repetitive serialism of minimalist composers and the structure of Buddhist mantras could certainly be correlated to the patterns of disco dance records. As a counter-cultural space, disco seemed like an obvious extension of Arthur's experience in a Buddhist commune in San Francisco.My favorite moment in the film is the scene where Arthur and his boyfriend Tom meet in the East Village. It's a very romantic, tender story and we use really beautiful Super 8 imagery of an old school, rundown ice cream shop in the East Village to bring that story to life. Arthur could certainly be perceived as an eccentric figure—he was constantly thinking about music, listening to endless variations of his songs on headphones. Another moment that really strikes me is a videotape I have of an early performance where Arthur plays the guitar. When he's finished, he takes off his pumas (presumably his "performance sneakers") to put on his vans, or I guess his street shoes. He was such an endearing weirdo in that way. But I was also really drawn to the ordinary moments in his life: watching the Muppets Show with his boyfriend on the couch, brainstorming the name of a record company while listening to James Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag." There was a time that Arthur told a collaborator and business partner Will Socolov that "Music can heal. That music isn't something that you just go dancing to, but that it can really heal you." That really stuck with me. I love Arthur's persistent connection to childhood and childlike experience. He struggled; he created obstacles for himself and frustrated his collaborators and his loved ones. But I think, unlike many other people, Arthur was able to connect to this primal place of childlike innocence and fun. And I love going there with him.

LOTP for FACT

Quick chate with one of my favourite bands of the last few years, Late Of The Pier...

Late of the Pier’s space odyssey started in the verdant summer of 2004 under the gleaming spires and proud turrets of Castle Donnington. Since then, they’ve made the kids dance dance dance with their indescribably beautiful hair and chrome-plated squat-suited electro. The debut album, Fantasy Black Channel, is produced by Erol Alken and sounds like a ship made out of heroically gleaming metal piloted by android Knights of the Realm of Infinite Sublimity. We chatted with lead singer Samuel Eastgate in the departure lounge of Heathrow airport.

Hi Sam!

Oh hello.

So, the new album is out now…

Yeah. It was finished in March actually, and we wanted to release it right away. But that would have been a very silly thing to do, as word spreads quite slowly, and still very few people knew who we were, and those that did would have been really surprised to see it out.

That sounds almost cynical.

Yeah, I dunno. We definitely wanted it be like the first chapter of something special, like the first step of a beautiful journey. That meant people would have to buy it and realise it was out. I mean, some people and some magazines have behind us since the early days, but a lot have only recently gone Oh, hold on…

I heard that the album was recorded in one big old house?

Yeah! When we signed, we thought Let’s do this properly. It was a conscious decision, definitely. We just thought, if we want this to be good, we had better be doing this all time, so yeah, we rented this huge derelict mansion with shoddy foundations just outside Nottingham and recorded the album there. There’s something about the immediacy of living in such close quarters, being able to get up every day and just make. It was nice relying on gut instincts there. And thowing really good parties.

There’s something very “English eccentric” about that idea: retiring to the country to make this strange psychedelic work…

Yeah, I suppose there is! But we’ve never seen ourselves as a particularly English band: a lot of the music that we’re into is from all over the place, which I suppose is totally normal, isn’t it? The psychedelic thing is interesting though… A forming point for us was stuff like Revolver-era Beatles, and talking about drugs, though none of us had ever taken drugs. So I suppose what got us together was the idea of mind-alteration rather than mind-alteration. It was totally just us going into this world of our own and thinking our own way. What was really lovely a few years ago was coming to London and Way Out West, the Underage thing and all that… Seeing these kids that just got it.

F&M review for Fact

Fujiya & Miyage

Lightbulbs

Full Time Hobby 

Of all the ways to start an album, a bad joke about a rather tragic child star has to be among the worst: the song's called Knickerbocker Glory, and it's about the "ghost of Lena Zavaroni", who died of anorexia nervosa - geddit? Us neither. Anyway, it's strange that such a poor taste begins Fujiya & Miyage's third LP. I mean, few bands have traded so hard on their superlative taste: their previous album, Transparent Things had us crits gushing about its reworkings of Serge Gainsbourg and Krautrock, its tailored updating of rare italo synths and no wave elastic funk, and those influences are on Lightbulbs:there's a lovely bit of Tangerine Dream/Popul Vuh synthesized piano on the title track, and the closer, Hunrdeds and Thousands, a reprise of that horrific opening gambit is a lovely mix of restrained psychedelia. The new drummer, Lee Adams punches his weight nicely, with decent work on Dishwasher. Still, overriding the album's theoretical plus-points is a teethgrinding smugness. In combining elements from kommishe to slow funk, singer David Best's vocals are so, so deadeningly self-aware that the music is robbed of any viscerality, its heart-and-soul thrill. Through its murdering brevity, the album's taileating mixture of selfawareness and self-satisfaction... I don't know. All I mean is that a knowledge of German Oak is no substitute for a soul and Lightbulbs sounds like branded-denim adverts from the mid-nineties. It's just really, really fucking boring.

Coming Soon, Plan B

Coming Soon are a lovely French band, part of a flourishing anti-folk scene over there. Plan B, September issue:

First notes: Small places make big sounds. Coming Soon are a six-piece anti-folk band from the small town Kidderminster in the French Alps. They sound a lot like Ezra Pound and cold winters and hot summers and Bob Dylan cover art from the 1960s. “We grew up listening to birds, waves, trucks and garbage men, in a small town in between a lake and a mountain with a lot of graveyards. We all had very stimulating dreams,” says de facto leader Howard Hughes. “But we left 'cause it's small and we get bored. Sex shops are too far out of town and you can always meet some old friend who owes you money. You know the Lou Reed line, don't you? There's only one good thing about a small town: you know that you want to get out. That's strong enough.” They formed in early 2005 and while scratching and studying they visited New York, to party, and Berlin to work with Kimya Dawson and Paris to work with Stanley Brinks of Herman Dune. After two grind years, hustling labels, touring constantly (including a recent slot supporting Wave Pictures) and sneaking their demos into copies of Les Inrockuptibles (to “meet big producers and get instantly famous around the world”), it paid off, Paris’ Kitchen Music finally got in touch. The debut album is called New Grids, and on the CD is a drawing of a compass. In the midst of Hebrew letters and phonetic names of faraway places is the word Kidderminster, written at south-southwest.
Second notes: Loves saves days. Within the band are lovers with clarinets and friends with cameras and brothers with each other. One pair of brothers is Leo Bear Creek (who joined the band aged 13 playing drums and ukulele) and Ben Lupus (who draws dance steps and plays a banjo). When I ask Howie for a story about love, he tells me that both are somnambulists, and when sleeping together, Leo talks and Ben answers. This story breaks Howie’s heart. “It is a collective in a way; a ‘DIY’ thing where we try to trade roles & parts, like a hip-hop band, like a mafia where nobody wants to be the accountant forever (even if it's safer), because individuality makes you get up in an angry mood every morning and the band makes life bearable. We have this anthill with five breeding queens.” On the live experience: “We trade mics, we step on each other's feet and find all sorts of last minute stage ideas. Touring is a sheer beauty, there are at least two couples in the van and I spend my afternoons looking for post offices to write to my wife. Love obviously plays a major part in this game.”

Face Addict piece for Dazed and Confused

A chat with one of the greats of modern photography, Edo Bertoglio, for DazedDigital in September 2008:

When Edo Bertoglio came to New York in 1976, he was a young film student looking for a ring flash for his Leica and a good time. When he left in 1990, he was a celebrated artist and staff photographer on Interview Magazine, having been part of the downtown scene – the hedonistic circle of freaks, artists, musicians, writers and whatevers vaguely orbiting around Andy Warhol’s Factory. He’d also become a heroin addict, pawning everything bar his two chests of negatives – pictures of friends and lovers, many of whom never survived the AIDs and OD epidemic that swept through the scene. After fifteen years in Italy, he decided to make the trip back to the rotten apple to connect the pictures in his archive to the faces of those who survived. Face Addict, out this week, is the film he made on the trip: a remarkable document – part confessional memoir, part art history – of a remarkable time.

Dazed Digital: Tell us about the film.
Edo Bertoglio: Face Addict was shot over two or three trips to New York. I lived in New York for 14 years from 1976 to 1990, and I had the privilege to work for Andy Warhol’s Interview, in the beautiful time that was the “downtown scene”. Unfortunately by 1982, 1983, the community started to be wounded by heavy drug use and the AIDs, overdoses, so the lightening flash lasted for 4 years, the really good years from 78 to 82. With the film I wanted to see how my friends rebuilt their lives. We were all survivors, in a way.

DD: You came to New York in 1976 from Paris. What was it like, falling out into this crowd?
EB: It was a great time because there were so many artists living close together geographically, and the music was what tied us every evening together. There was no difference between playtime and work – it was nice, “serious fun”, because we were having so much fun doing our thing with movies, pictures, painting, writing, music. There was a lot of creativity, but as a community not as individuals

DD: It most of been very exciting for you, as a photographer.
EB: I’d meet people and say, 'Can you come to my studio in the morning the way that you are dressed now?' This was long before stylists and so on: it was just the way that you saw the world and showing that to other people on the scene. Young people had come out of the early seventies, and people were not caring about clothes: not hippies, but jeans and all that. But in that scene, there was a real effort to look special.

DD: Today, the downtown scene is held up as this creative Mecca: were you conscious that what you were doing was going to have such a lasting impact?
EB: When we shot 'Downtown ‘81', the original guy was not reliable, so the director was like, Why don’t we take this young kid called Jean-Michael Basquiat? He was a star in that little, little corner of New York but we didn’t have this idea that he was this big star of the world. We were living so much for the moment, for the day – we were so busy underlining the importance for us, but not as a thing we could read the signs of in the future.

DD: When did this change?
EB: The DIY scene got bigger and bigger and got fashionable, but that’s where it started to go wrong, because the core of the downtown scene dropped off, because of AIDs or drugs, or just because everything going so fast all of the people there at the beginning little by little fell at the waysides. No… heavy drug use in '82 was what destroyed the whole thing. Suddenly a lot of people got big problems. For really a little while, for the space of a morning, drugs helped the creativity, made us even more prodigious, more dynamic, and because were sharing and we were discussing; we really thought that we could go on like this and we could maintain this habit; but when it became a habit, it was not so important to paint that painting: what was important was to go out and get drugs. For such an experience there is a very high price to pay, you know and we did pay a high price. I was the lucky ones, but many, many of us are not here now. That’s why I call Face Addict a survivor’s film.

High Places for Dazed and Confused

A lovely interview I from months ago on Dazed's ticket. Really, really cool band, and a really sweet couple:

High Places are really sick of fighting. "Everything extreme you can think of has already been done. Like if you want to see someone fucking vomit on the floor and beat their fists, you can, but it's done man," says Robert Barber. Rob plays nearly all of the instruments live in High Places, and Mary Pearson sings over the top, though that division doesn't stick in the studio. They're a really nice art-folk duo who live in flat in Brooklyn with their cats and sound like every song you've ever heard played backwards all at once.
They've played warehouses and split singles with Xiu Xiu and blown up The Smell with No Age. (Rob: "Everyone expects linked bands to be like mini-versions: people can't believe we're friends. But we love playing to new ears."). Pearson's a Michiganer who studied classical music and does projects about minimalism and immediacy and plays the bassoon. Barber grew up taking the Saturday train to New York to go skateboarding and studied printmaking at art school and designs some of their awesome covers with Pearson, like the red and yellow 03/07-09/07, which is a collection of EP and comp tracks.
Sitting over lemonades in Café Oto before the first date of their first European tour earlier this month, Pearson agrees that aggression is played out. "We get called childlike sometimes, but whatever. If that means we're honest, wide-eyed, then that's cool. When you see someone freaking out, it's like 'Yeah, that's interesting...'"
Barber and Pearson met through mutual friends (one of the Death Set, actually) in 2006 or so, and wanted to get together immediately. "We met while we were in the middle of our solo projects, and we just decided to work together," says Barber. Adds Pearson: "It was nice to do something not thinking too much – I find it really refreshing to collaborate and not have to think about, you know, classical form. I never annotate our music, but sometimes I'm still like 'You can't just change time signatures like that!' And Rob's like 'It's fiiine! It sounds good to me.'"
"We make tracks kinda like a collage, actually," says Barber. "We just make these small bits of a sound, sample them and piece them together later into songs." Pearson laughs: "The first song we did was just like messing about on a computer – emailing sounds to each through the walls. The other day I was just making this really horrible noise through a recorder, and we're going to loop that. I was reading Carl Sagan's Varieties of Scientific Experience, it's all about how there can scientifically be a God – this book about man's place in the universe. I got so obsessed with it last summer! But you have to stop drawing your place in the universe all day. It's good to have mundane tasks to stop your head exploding."