Nathan Coley interview for Insight

Nathan Coley makes beautiful, Turner prize-listed art from Western sets, Scottish islands, Belgrade housing blocks and cardboard churches, and I got a chance to speak to him in June 2008. House is a feeling:

You should pop down to the De La Warr Pavilion in July to see Nathan Coley’s show. Photographer, sculptor and installation artist Nathan has exhibited at some of Europe’s strongest houses, including the hyper-next Haunch of Venison, the CCB in Lisbon and the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, where he made knee-high cardboard models of every place of worship in the area. Of course, the thing that got him the most column inches was his Turner-Prize shortlisting, which he picked up last year for, among other pieces, beautiful scale miniature show homes and terraced houses. We love him because he wrestles with the hugest of issues – faith, country, art, nature, you name it – with heartfelt wit and rare humility.

Hello Nathan! What’s the work you’re showing at De La Warr Pavilion?
Hello… It’s a new commission from the DLWP and Haunch, and it takes as its starting point a Western stage set. Westerns are about decline, at least in part, and from it hangs five words; BELIEF, LAND, WEALTH, MIND and FAITH, which are the five rights granted under Islam, but also are appropriate for the frontier mind. Also, the idea of a stage set is very interesting to me as a sculptor. You can’t go for a whiskey in the salon, but that’s what people around the world think of when they think of “a salon”.

It’s really cool.
Cheers.

I really like how your work is totally political – in the sense of being about, y’know, “stuff” – but it doesn’t order you about.
Yeah! That’s what draws me to buildings – it’s the way that people build their environment and community around these things. You know, I don't think of art in that modernist sense of something which you stand before and "experience" – I think of it as something that builds up in your mind. It’s as simple as “This is what I think, what do you think?” Art should provoke discourse and make you see the world around you… Well not differently, but at least make you look around you and give you something nice to talk about when you’re having your tea.

Is the place something you give real consideration?
I think where a work is changes its meaning and effect, definitely. With There Will Be No Miracles Here [a huge carnival light display carrying the words of the title on bare scaffolding], it was originally erected on the Scottish island Bute, where it said something about what we want out of nature. When it was placed in front of a Belgrade communist-era housing block, where it might say something about the dream of socialism. Of course, where it is now [in the Tate] might mean something else entirely.

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.