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.”

Bestival 2007 review for Fact Magazine: All rise

It's kind of hard to review Bestival without reeling off a long list of its many good points, but here goes, for Fact in September 2007:

Bestival does what no amount of earnest costume drama, lame tube advert or eager yoof retrospective can: it makes you feel genuinely, honestly, a little bit proud to be British. Rob Da Bank’s Isle of White festival has been taking the logical step of recreating a dusky summer country fete for four years now, and how: it’s been voted the country’s best small/medium festival and this year, tickets sold out double-speed. You’ve probably been told how good it is. September’s event saw the world’s best tea party nearly double in size on last years. It was, in no uncertain terms, spectacular. Though still a “boutique festival,” its 30,000 festival-goers made up the world’s biggest fancy dress party, there were 14 different stages where you could be entertained, and whether or not you can call a festival that featured heavy hitters like the Beastie Boys, Primal Scream and Madness alongside the latest upandcomers “small to medium” is in dispute.
But, still… Bestival retained its small town character; this is a festival put together by people who actually really, really know what they are doing. Rob and his mates have been through the filth, godlessness and magic that marks any festival – though most sorely lack the last part of the equation. They totally get what you what you want at every hour of the day. It’s Friday afternoon, you’ve just got in, you don’t want to queue for anything, so the bars are fully staffed. After partying at the Introducing tent till the wee small hours, come Saturday afternoon, more than anything, you want to play on a Coconut Shy and drink lemonade while listening to dub. In the Bestivalley you can! Listening to Bat For Lashes and eating lemon drizzle cake lifts Sunday morning’s fuzzy brain fuzz perfectly. People stand around selling the Observer in organic cotton sacks, on Sunday. As an aside, this is brilliant – even lying in a field, having slept in tent the size of a coffin for 4 hours over two days while teenagers threaten to steal shoes while we sleep and crapping in toilets that set off ‘Nam flashbacks, we’re still middle-class. Strangers, even as friendly as the Bestival crowd, need something to talk about, so surprise guests are speculated about left, right and centre and some of the most exciting acts are on at the Hidden Disco. Where is it? No body knows! For the first two hours at least! What else do you want from a festival? How about the world’s biggest fancy dress party? 20,000 people dressed as pirates, Lego men, Amy Winehouse, jellyfish and biscuit packets, and everything in between, makes for one motherload of happy. Especially when people forget they’re in fancy dress – the sight of a Crayola crayon having a lover’s tiff with a Ghostbuster will be making me and my girlfriend grin idly at work for months. It’s weird – it’s almost like they want you to have a good time…
Not that Mr and Mrs Da Bank (husband does the music stuff, wife does the arty stuff) are obsequiously giving us what we want – there is an agenda at work here. Firstly, there’s the huge peace sign subliminally and unsubtly placed over the rig in the main arena. Then there’s the constant appeals to pick your litter up, not “poo or wee” anywhere but the loos, the biodegradable plates and the recycling bins everywhere. Your mum would be proud of this festival, but that’s awesome: your mum’s great, she makes lovely spag bol, she was right about that haircut you had in 1998 and she brought you up, so she must have been doing something right: it’s just nice to stay at a site you don’t want to burn down like LA in 1992. There’s also another agenda here with the programming – though each one of the 14 stages has a distinct identity, it’s hard to stay at the same one for more than one or two acts, so great is the musical diversity of each tent. A lovely effect is created; rather than shacking up in the Dance tent and not moving till shin splints set in, you’re gently coerced into mixing about, trying out stages and events you might never bother with. Artistic manifestos – so long as they’re kept completely deniable – are magnificent, and this extends to booking virtual unknowns main stage slots. Nathan – A & R not Guys & Dolls – Detroit played before the Chemical Brothers, and Beardyman (champion comedy beatboxer: far better than he sounds) was sandwiched between Kate Nash and The Beastie Boy’s instrument set. It’s a sweet, very appreciated idea – hearing people praise Beardyman for the first time feels like watching your kid win the egg and spoon race.
Not too surprisingly, with a festival that celebrated more than anything else crowdpleasing and fun dance music, young pup or leftfield legend, the only real disappointment of the weekend (apart from Rob failing to declare himself the messiah, or at least king of the world) was the Beastie’s decidedly selfindulgent headline set. A band whose greatest moments evoke teenage kicks more than any other should know that what every person wants to hear Sabotage played twenty times in a row really, really loud, not watch a man born in the 60s tell us that the Isle of Wight is actually the “Isle of Mike” before launching into a jazz-funk didgeridoo jam. Cheers, but… This lapse notwithstanding, the music was peerless all weekend – it was the last night of Patrick Watson’s tour, but he played like it was the last night of his life, Go! Team were revelatory, Digital Mystikz’s night bus blues were achingly beautiful, Tom Brosseau broke hearts, Buraka Som Systema were terrific, Foals predictably killed it – but the real highlights were the non-musical ones. Learning how to Mambo, chatting rubbish to strangers, the Cockney Knees Up, not getting lost once, listening to a poetry slam in a yurt and laughing at the cunningly titled Jestival all made the weekend, as much as any individual band. Comedy tent headliner Andrew Maxwell, in between howling at the moon and yelling at breakdancers summed the spirit up nicely a few week ago: “At every single festival you get a few arseholes waving national flags, even at Glastonbury, that haven of the British left, whatever the fuck that means. At Bestival, the only flags people wave are the skull and crossbones.” Bestival: the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Cajun Dance Party live review for Fact Magazine: Air violence

A curmudgeonly live review of Cajun Dance Party from Summer 2007:

Cajun Dance Party take the prize in this egg and spoon race. One of many bands heading up the Way Out West charge of tremendously exciting bands born in the nineties, CDP are feted as heroes tonight, the penultimate date of their first headline tour. Taking to the stage through the crowd to the strains of World, four-fifths of CDP plug in and play, stating on the one. There’s no time to wait. It’s straight into the opening, future anthem chords of Time Falls. After giving it a couple of minutes, Singer Danny wanders through the scrum, resplendent in blood clot inducing trousers and hand-me-down jacket, looking like nothing so much as Tiny Tim sketched by Jim Henson. Right on cue, he launches into song, a nasal whine tangled round the mic stand.
Though Danny strutted his way happily through the set, yelping into the crowd, and getting every person under 18 into a tiz, guitarist Max was the standout, the thing that lifted the band out of the “cool band” stupor into something that could, perhaps, be magnificent. Subconsciously paying homage to that age old indie set-up of slightly irritating singer / great guitarist (hmm, Suede, Blur, Stone Roses, The Verve) his winding yet acerbic, exuberant yet tighter than sewn-in jeans jam was incredible. His shout out of “this guitar’s new. The man who gave it to me is called [hammy pause for suspense]… Bernard Butler” was a sweet and unreconstructed homage. The tracks are good, clean, and fun, brilliantly arranged and professionally preformed. Very professionally – Danny’s electro-shock boogie, his cuddling of Max, his fey mumble “Brighton, we love you,” Max’s sonic youth meets Spinal Tap strutting – CDP are damn close to the bedroom mirror. Not that this is a cynical appropriation of rock history. Far from it – they are literally the opposite of cynical. Rather that this gig felt somehow phoned in, rehearsed, appropriated.
But why is that such a big deal? How many gigs do you go to when the music not the stage show is identikit, lifted straight from the annals of Britpop (urgh) history? When the music is uninspiring, over-rehearsed and copy-cat? That’s not the case with this band – CDP are make great, fun songs that, though never jaw droppingly original, are never dull. Crowd wise, how many dancey gigs have you been to only to bemoan the lack of dancing? Why does it matter when a band so full of vim go through the motions? The factor that made the other night slightly wanting is, and I’ve been trying to avoid this, age. Not just of the band, but of the audience. They could have quite easily packed out an over eighteens show, but opening it up to over 14’s (this is such an everyday occurrence that it doesn’t even have to be mentioned at ticket retailers) it’s an just more energetic, more wild, it’s less knowing, more grinning, but sets anyone over the age of nineteen as an observer than a participant. Facing the crowd rather than a face in it. Take the moshing – it is guilty pleasure, and a bit of a daft-but-fun thing to do, but for the pit last night, it was their first time slam-dancing. It’s strange watching things that you did when you were younger done by people younger and it can’t help but seem like the band are going through the motions - enacting rock’n’roll’s rituals as much as enjoying them. Even the stage invasion felt practiced and safe – it was the air guitar of violence.
Why are journalists so fascinated by the phenomenon of under-18 nights? That’s obvious: standing in a crowd of under 18 year olds and you instantly feel, well, old. Somehow, strangely, out of the club. And that comes from the band – there is an edge (or, more accurately, a lack of an edge), an energy, a certain wide-eyedness that seems both exuberant and but a also little naïve. Listen to them on CD and you’re blown away – the Guardian recently called final song The Next Untouchable, their I Wanna Be Adored” with only fifteen stone of hyperbole. See them live (at an over 18 show) and they’re just brilliant – when they were 11 months younger, I saw them in Edinburgh, and they sounded more like the future of rock’n’roll than any cynical no r/wave. See them at an underage show and all the above will still be true. It’ll still be a great party, even though the party isn’t (y)ours. Halfway through the encore, the stage got rushed. First, a couple moshers climbed on the stage. They climbed fully behind the amps, gleeful, before the entire crowd ran forward to party with the band. The older people (all journalists, as far as I could tell) hung back and couldn’t tell musicians from fans. That, all things aside, is a beautiful thing.