Women are certainly one of the weirder indie rock bands to have achieved a degree of mainstream acclaim this year (where “mainstream” means a good review on Stereogum). Where lo-fi pop, colourful, ambitious hip hop, subsonic, dubstep wobble and the reverbed haze of chillwave have all to varying degrees defined the last 12 months, Women’s music runs deeply against the grain, being as it is, insular, sparse, brittle and often uncomfortable. There are no obvious weed references, and certainly no cat jokes. In spite of running against the grain, it seems that Women have succeeded this year for precisely those attributes, for being one of few bands who have attempted to make melodic, yet unusual music infused with a sense of unease. “Public Strain” was a perfect testament to this, taking the various aspects of their debut to polar extremes, the poppy bits poppier, the weirder bits weirder.

And so it is with their live show. Cliched as it is, they come alive, casting off the airless nature of their studio output and sounding like a full blooded, fire breathing rock band. “Eyesore” naturally receives the best reception, it’s uneasy harmonies and dark surf vibe proving a reliable stand out in the live arena, but really everything from Public Strain sounds like a highlight. In the flesh, Women sound more aggressive, more human, particularly on “Heat Distraction” and “Locust Valley”, the more limber and supple sound allowing the crowd to cut loose and get down, as they say. This certainly looks like success, where difficult music is being embraced in a time honoured fashion, but if they consider it thus, Women don’t let on. Undemonstrative on stage, they don’t give off the impression of a band entirely at ease with life outside the studio. Recent events would suggest this is the case. While the demise of Women would not exactly shake the “indie” “community” to it’s core, it would certainly represent a significant loss. In a commercial and artistic climate where it is becoming increasingly difficult to pursue a sustainable career in alternative music without explicitly mining the past for ideas, bands like Women are essential to provide an outlet for and inspiration to the genuine weirdos.

{ADDENDUM: A cursory Google revealed some pictures from this show, courtesy of photographer Daniel Heaton. Check them here: www.danielheaton.com/2010/09/women-brudenell-social-club-leeds/)

2010’s Lounge On The Farm festival took place on a weekend so hot that I was forced to wear a vest in public. This is not something I make a habit of, and is, in fact, not something I’ve ever done before. No one needs to see what I have to offer. This is one gun show that can go unknown and unappreciated. Yet there I was, stumbling around like a strategically covered piece of raw chicken, albeit a piece of raw chicken that was managing to both sweat and complain. Couple this with the fact that I was covered head to toe in Factor 50, and thus had the texture of a condom, and you’ve got quite a disarming mental image. In addition to the searing heat, there was apparently some music on offer, but it would be remiss of me to not make mention of the general feel of the festival first. Of course, I wouldn’t be reviewing the venue were I seeing Diana Vickers play at the Koko, but festivals these days, as we are so often told, are about more than just the music. And so…

Lounge On The Farm takes place on a farm just outside the city of Canterbury, and is decorated to loosely resemble, yes, a lounge, in as much as there seem to be a lot of sofas around the site. It is run by the same people that opened the highly successful Farmhouse restaurant/venue in the town a couple of years ago. It’s remit, like the venue, is one that emphasises the boutique nature of itself, trumpeting the locally sourced food and entertainment as a calling card of sorts. As is the custom for these sorts of festivals these days, there is comedy, performance spaces, arty bits, and a bloody creche. In fact, the new, huge Farm Folk field, provides ample space for families, seemingly designed to safely remove them from the dilated pupils of the masses. This is an obvious contradiction at the heart of the festival, and one that is apparent over the course of it’s three days. Given the lack of outlets for an alternative culture in Kent, something as relatively high profile as Lounge attracts pretty much every person in the county interested in such things. As a result, the clientele is made up of a bizzare mix of psuedo hippy and psuedo hipster families, local sportswear scallywags and apparently most of the students from the three uni’s in town. Were this Glastonbury of Reading, such a mix would be par for the course, but at a festival of comparable size and stature to Truck or Indietracks, it’s unexpected at most.

That was all apropos of nothing really. Important stuff now; the food. My reviews are as follows:
Noodles – Lukewarm, but still tasty. Fresh ginger a welcome presence.
Paella – Undercooked. Not enough chorizo. Back of the class.
Halloumi and Bacon Bap – A middle class cheeseburger, and therefore obviously brilliant.

Hopefully that provides ample illumination of the general festival character. And now the music.

Friday:

On the plus side, their miniature pop dramas seem to find a comfortable home in the micro-opulence of Canterbury’s Farmhouse. The low lighting, drapes and not unknowingly twee wallpaper create an intimacy that complements the warmer elements of the band’s songs. Such elements are made apparent in the folksy approach that the band employ in re-interpreting their songs live, the wealth of electronic fuzz and laptop beats that characterise their records taking a back seat to the increased presence of the guitar and melodica. As it happens, one new song given a trial run tonight dispenses entirely with multi-instrumentalist David Farrell’s samples, beats and keyboards in favour of dual acoustic guitars delicately picking and strumming their way through a dainty country melody. It makes for a pleasant diversion, even if it remains fairly anonymous at this embryonic stage.

Generally speaking however, The Shortwave Set don’t seem lacking in musical identity. The slow-mo strumming and fat keyboard bass of a majority of the set is quite distinctive, to the extent that they are able to offer a valid reinterpretation of Grace Jones’ “Slave To The Rhythm” by swamping it in their numerous stylistic tics. Former single “No Social” reaps these benefits too, retaining the stately yet fruity nature of the original whilst being necessarily pared down for the occasion. Yet what the band possess in immediacy, they lack in dynamism. “No Social” is the high watermark of their set, but none of their other songs achieve a similarly successful synthesis of electronica, country and pop. The chorus of that song is the best example of the problem; nothing else matches it for sheer pop sass. For a band who are ostensibly crafting pop music, to not have that many good pop songs is a pretty critical flaw. Equally disheartening, their other “big” song, “Glitches N Bugs,” is just a bit staid and dreary tonight.

These contrasts prove to be problems that manifest themselves in other ways. Perhaps emblematic of this is singer Ulrika Bjorsne’s striking green floor length dress. She looks statuesque and alien, like a classic rock performer. For a majority of the set though, she just looks really worried. It’s this unease that ultimately undermines The Shortwave Set, the impulse to be a colourful summation of their influences undone by an inability to fully engage with their noble aims.

TV On The Radio don’t go in for this kind of thing. Elaborate set dressing, or the desire to launch a rocket into your face whilst dry humping their own instruments, are not their way of putting things across. TVOTR’s dense and brooding soul rock is far more readily absorbed with frontman Tunde Adebimpe sweating like an ox as he flails about the stage, gesticulating wildly at the crowd, the band, and possibly the furnishings. As he becomes more agitated, so too does the music, guitarist David Sitek’s and-the-kitchen-sink method of music production translating well to a live arena. As on the band’s records, the heavily reverbed sound is at once overwhelming and intimate. It would seem that modern soul is as much concerned with textures as it is nimble basslines.

This method of purging one’s emotional baggage through a budget wall of sound begins earlier in the evening with sole support act, The Big Pink. Derided/lauded as a noise band, they make for a more melodious experience than anticipated. They’re still loud mind, so much so that I’m revelling in a private tinnitus party before the end of the first song. The minimal, tom heavy rhythms employed by the band are danceable yes, but a sinuous, sensual world away from your average, hi-hat heavy cod-disco schmindie band. Over this, the band layer droning synths and the occasional sequenced percussive embellishment, before the fuzzed out guitar adds saturated melody. Then, the dual boy/girl vocalists coo in harmony, and the whole thing sounds like what I always imagined The Jesus & Mary Chain would sound like, before I actually heard The Jesus & Mary Chain. It also reminds me of Husker Du, the endless torrent of sound resembling the pin-you-to-the-wall screeds of Bob Mould’s hardcore baiters, only on heavy tranquilisers. The rest of the set follows suit. It’s samey, but largely enjoyable, all thanks to those tribal rhythms.

As a result, the main event are in danger of sounding like a tinny understatement. Danger probably isn’t the right word – it’s more of a concern, and an entirely unwarranted one. From opener “Young Liars”, TVOTR fill the room. Sitek wails on his guitar without cease, while Adebimpe tumbles, hops and vibrates across the whole stage for the duration of the show. It’s his performance that humanises the more reserved aspects of the band. Where Sitek is often prickly in interview and Jaleel Bunton and Gerard Smith remain largely unknown quantities, Adebimpe makes up the deficit by giving as much of himself as he needs to. Each song is a catharsis unto itself, mostly foggy and oblique in lyrical nature, but always emotive. It’s his and co-vocalist Kyp Malone’s intertwined melodies that are one of the most enjoyable aspects of the band’s live set, the ample contrasts in their voices catching the ear and the honeyed melodies making whatever they are singing, and whatever they are singing it over, sound gorgeous. When “Golden Age” drops, more raw and direct than the messy take given recently on Jools Holland, the band show a rough edge that their dense recordings do not.

If there’s one thing that TVOTR lack, it’s the ability, or desire, to really engage with a crowd. Adebimpe carries the burden admirably, but for whatever reason, the atmosphere in the venue never really feels as celebratory as it should. An unbalanced set list leaning heavily on “Dear Science” leaves many older gems untouched, disappointing when considering songs like “Dreams” or “I Was A Lover” are eschewed in favour of the weaker moments on the new album, such as a perfunctory “DLZ”. As a result, the set feels more like a straightforward promotional run than the feverish live experience they’ve often been labelled. A predictably delirious run through “Wolf Like Me,” still stupidly exciting, is the only thing that really gets the crowd moving, and thus acts as a sad reflection on what could have been. “Stork & Owl” and “Shout Me Out” meanwhile, both suffer from a soupy sound mix that quashes their subtleties in a blur of mid range.

Of course, the burden of expectation is not the fault of the band. I’m one of many who expected too much. Adebimpe apologises unnecessarily for his tatty vocal cords and, as if to underline the feeling of an unusual night for the band, “Staring At The Sun” is, for the first time in many a desperate YouTube viewing, not a total disappointment. Forgoing any semblance of restraint, the band take it for a full on, hard house spin, the straight ahead beat booming and bludgeoning the crowd’s passive nonchalance. The song, never really done justice in the live arena, sounds titanic here. After that they’re gone, the whole set lasting less than 90 minutes. Perhaps it’s in the band’s best interests to give sparing performances such as this. In the midst of their hugely increased media profile and the wild accolades being thrown at “Dear Science”, the maintenance of a certain distance is probably the soundest way for this band of natural introverts to ensure that they survive the attention.

What else then? You get the instrumental title track, a barroom country ballad, where Casiotone’s keyboards are augmented and enlivened by Jason Quever’s lilting pedal steel and walking bass. Then there’s another instrumental, this time of CFTPA’s own ‘I Love Creedence,’ which is so very nearly the definition of superfluous, were it not for the subtraction of Ashworth’s brusque, tragi-comic narrative exposing the song’s low key, chiming, twinkly loveliness not obvious on parent album Etiquette. And just as you’re lulled into a steady, sedated haze, the ragged and fuzzed out demo of ‘Green Cotton Sweater’ takes root. Taking a similarly raw approach to the internet freebie demo of ‘New Year’s Kiss,’ it sounds like it was recorded shortly before most of Ashworth’s equipment exploded. Very good, if somewhat out of step with the rest of the EP.

This contextual isolation is what brings down most soundtrack releases. If you want to use the music in your film to create a mood, an ambience if you will, chances are that the same music is not going to have the same effect in a purely audio format. If you just want to play loads of cool shit that people will lap up like unfed cats, on the pretext of being “cultured,” then your job is a bit easier. The ‘Town Topic’ EP falls uneasily between the two categories, a bit here, a bit there, a bit nowhere. Seeing the film itself then, is probably the wisest move at this juncture. And if you like that, and/or coloured vinyl, then maybe this is for you.

This is a theme carried by ‘Downward,’ where Cambier’s mutated, multi layered vocals jostle for position against a seemingly random sputtering of percussive fizzes and pops, like a dancefloor filler as imagined by mental people. Said song elaborates by way of some beautiful, twinkling guitar pieces, fading into the succeeding ‘La Reine Du Sasndwich’ (which may or may not have anything to do with sandwiches) more incongruously than you might imagine. Not a chronically disabling flaw, but the dreamy drift of the album’s body is interrupted by some weak transitions. Ever heard And The Glass Handed Kites by Mew? That’s a textbook example of how to employ seamless transitions between songs as a means of creating a greater whole than the songs necessarily allow, but that approach is not touched on here, to the detriment of the records’ cohesion. The music is almost absurdly nuanced and ambitious; it simply sounds like it was meant to flow as a single entity, the perfect soundtrack to a surreal sleep, yet it often doesn’t. Ho hum.

Still, should you be looking for a record that provides such “vibes,” there’s plenty to wrap your brain around here. Even when Tang Type ditch their textures and sonic weavings, as they do on the soft, simplified jazz of ‘Lulled By A Rubbery Sleep,’ they are a beguiling proposition, simultaneously sensual and icy. As far as juxtapositions go then, Tang Type are far more appealing than, say, bananas and vinegar. Ambitious music, deftly executed.

Forewarning is probably necessary for those interested in Tom Denney’s new outfit, Lonely Ghosts. Shorn of the obnoxious righteousness of his day job, Lonely Ghosts are a lighter, poppier offering. But then, that’s entirely the point, and as such the band are a far more user friendly proposition. Skirting from gentle pop-folk to some all ravin’, all dancin’ glam fuzz, it’s clear Denney has the songs to warrant the diversion, something of a necessity given that HSCS are hardly lacking in the tune department. They’re not fully fleshed out as a live band yet, and it’s kind of disconcerting to see a four piece making pretty unnecessary use of a sequencer, but ‘Bones Are Shaking’ is such a chorus heavy, ass grabber of a dance floor fillah that such transgressions go overlooked. Ones to watch then.

Casiotone’s Owen Ashworth is a more unassuming kind of guy. Taking to the stage in a corduroy jacket, he looks every inch the reputed lapsed intellectual chronicler of the sadly humorous and the humorously sad. Live, there’s not a great deal of visual flair, the set being just Ashworth poking (what is only visible to the audience as) a big bank of flashing lights, but he does a nice line in stage banter, and is far “groovier” than on record. The rhythm track to his ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ cover is a bass heavy churn, whilst elsewhere he throws some pleasantly glitchy flourishes into the mix, lending older songs like ‘Jeanne, If You’re Ever In Portland’ a rewarding randomness. This is something he doesn’t really exploit enough, and as a result the second half of the set drags, the mix of straightforward synth pop and bittersweet narrative tiring with little in the way of live danger to support it. Get a band, perhaps? There’s little doubt he’d benefit from one.

A literally gruff performer (he coughs, a lot), he’s still confident enough to play the demo version of “hit” ‘New Year’s Kiss’, bereft of the original’s big, Coldplay-spooning piano hook. But it needn’t be this way, Owen! As much as we all appreciate your economical aesthetic, Dylan didn’t stay acoustic, Radiohead didn’t stay crap and Michael Jackson didn’t stay white. To paraphrase, mix it up, start again.

ANOTHER LENGTHY INTERVIEW, THIS TIME WITH ADDED VIDEO (!)

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For those uninitiated to Efterklang, they are a Danish five piece that look a lot like them over there. They’re not really a five piece though, given the wealth of collaborating artists and musicians involved in their creative process. In fact, they’re not really your average band. There’s no need for three chord tricks or minor key middle 8′s here. Theirs is an approach, yes, an aesthetic, that invites you into a multi sensory world far removed from our own, comprised of shapes and misshapes, logic and illogic, possibles and impossibles. Efterklang revel in combining the audio and the visual, creating an end product, an experience if you will, that’s immersive and inclusive. And all the time whilst sounding like Heaven’s own marching band. Their new LP, Parades, is a particular case in point. There are a million ways of describing it in light of what it is not (Razorlight, for example), but Wikipedia labels it/them with the rather nifty tag, “Neo-Classical.” This isn’t massively wrong. The record is expansive, majestic, complex and dense, beautiful in its robust layers of sound, with horns, strings and whatnot all fighting for space, and equally in it’s fragility. But enough of this. Over to Casper Clausen, the band’s primary vocalist, with whom I managed make chats before their Brighton Pressure Point show last week.

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How’s the tour been?

It’s been great. Our first proper UK Tour, it’s been so overwhelming, there have been so many big crowds, a lot of people. You’ve been working on Parades for a while now. How does a commitment like that work practically? Do you have your own recording space? Yeah, we’ve had our own studio since we did Tripper. Really, we’ve grown from a studio world. We spend more time in the studio than we spend playing live.

With regards to your new material, how have you gone about preparing your live show? With Parades, you have taken a more organic approach than Tripper. Has it been an easier record to take from the studio to the stage?

Well we built Parades up step by step, like a puzzle, but we’ve never got to play any of these songs live before. So when we prepare them, we have to restructure them. The record feels like a photograph, and we try and rebuild the music as something more simple, but with the same shapes. If we got lost in the process, we went back and looked at the photo. It was actually hard to tell when something was done, but it was actually pretty fun. This time we’ve been working with more composing musicians, more classically trained musicians. It’s been nice working with people that really have these great ideas that fit with the style of the record. Playing Tripper live…a lot of that came from the projections. It was a much more visual experience, so we had to deal with the films, and make music to suit them. We wanted to change that this time, to become a more physical experience.

You’re music is very non-linear and expansive, with no conventional verse-chorus structure. I’ve seen the phrase ‘post-pop’ applied to your work…

It was in a review, yeah. We’ve also been called post-rock! We don’t feel that really applies to us.

There’s a great attention to detail in your music, which seems more in line with classical composition that contemporary songwriting. How do you go about composing? Do you have any rules that you try and stick to?

Not really. We start out just going piece by piece. Something might start with us around a piano, and from there, we find something we like and build it up, getting people to come in, and work on the melodic structures. A lot of stuff we do is based not on one melody lines, but on a few. We do have lots of scoring, so we try and sort out how all these pieces fit together. We want to sound epic, but we don’t want it to be two dimensional…or flat and grey. It’s been a challenge, but a nice one.

It’s been a long time in the making.

One and a half years. It is a long time. It’s the longest we’ve worked on a project. It’s definitely a long time to spend with the same songs. It’s been annoying at some points, because it felt like these songs were talking back when we felt they we finished. We felt that…because we had this puzzle thing going on when we started, trying to build up songs from these small layers, then it could be hard to tell when a song was finished. But we found that sometimes when you had a bit of distance from a song, like standing outside the studio, having a cigarette, a coffee or whatever, and you were hearing it from three rooms away, it would then sound right. ———————————————————————————————————————

This idea of Parades working, in theory and in practice, as a puzzle, is certainly borne out by Efterklang’s live show. At one point, the band, in full choral harmonic flight, come to a halt, standing frozen in position for a good minute. Perhaps the longest silence in the history of live music to not induce a single heckle, they come back, of course, piece by piece, swiftly and easily building into something where there are so many interesting sounds and phrases competing for your attention that it’s almost overwhelming. Yes, it’s potentially austere and overt, but the band, to their credit, temper this by injecting the show with character and humour. Decked out in sparkly shoes, short trousers and shirts, looking not unlike what Liberace may have dreamed up after a night on the meths, the band stamp and convulse unselfconsciously all over the tiny stage, violin bows at a face threatening height. Clausen himself engages constantly with the crowd, chatting and grinning in between bouts of thrashing his drum set up at the front of the stage.

This extra percussion certainly adds to the new material. Mirador in particular sounds like the previously mentioned marching band, its sprinkled pianos and weaving strings gaining poise and pulse in a live setting. It’s in these grander moments when Efterklang possess similarly euphoric qualities to the likes of Wolf Parade or Arcade Fire, bold and dramatic yet warm and inviting. Elsewhere, they display a great intuitiveness, the music slowing down and regressing to their composite parts in an effortless fashion. It’s a testament to the attention to detail in these compositions that the dynamic shifts sound as natural as they do. What with the chimes, rings and melodies, it’s also weirdly festive.

In light of this, material from Tripper perhaps suffers by comparison, not from a lack of quality, but because the more claustrophobic arrangements don’t move you as instantly as the newer songs. The pockets of sound and the nuances of the filtered beats of that record are harder to detect in performance, less dynamic than something like Cutting Ice To Snow. Still beautiful, but in a different, more introverted way.

Efterklang – Step Aside

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You’ve mentioned the idea of it the record being approached conceptually as a puzzle. I’ve seen a video of the artwork being disassembled and reconstructed like a puzzle. This was an approach you decided on beforehand? How closely did you work with the people doing the artwork?

This was the first time we’ve been involved with the artists while doing the music. It was a rush, because they had this other project going on that they had to finish, but we just had to deal with it. We explained how we looked at the music, and how we felt it was structured. What we wanted was to create this otherworldly, very distinct world, something that you couldn’t find anywhere else. I think they did a brilliant job. It was nice to see the finished image. It makes sense to us.

Your music is very cinematic, and lends itself well to visual accompaniment. The Mirador video for example…

That was done by a guy called UFEX. We’re so used to working with other art forms that I don’t think we could make music without doing it (the videos). You’re trying to build it bigger than you are.

Would you ever consider doing something like the Mirador video, but on a larger scale? Like a full audio-visual release as opposed to a CD?

We’ve been dreaming about it! We’ve wanted to do something like this for years, but things cost money, and take time. That would be nice, extremely nice. But when you’ve worked on a record for a year and a half, it’s nice to let it stand on its own somehow. It feels like if we wanted to do a full audio-visual experience, we’d have had to have started it as an audio visual experience. I feel that we would have to collaborate with the other artists, so that it became a 50:50 thing. If we just made a piece of music and then put some visuals to it, your collaborators would be directed by you, whereas it would be preferable to do something together, entirely collaboratively.

It’s quite an undertaking.

It is, and you have to have the right idea. Collaboration is something that’s clearly very important to Efterklang, and the way you work. Is there anyone i particular that, ideally, you’d like to work with? Oh lot’s of people. We meet new people everyday. Yesterday we were in a room with Akron/Family, and they’re so sweet. Being in a band, you’re meeting people all the time, and sometimes it’s quite stressful, because you’re thinking about all these possibilities available to you. It’s the amazing thing about being a musician, to meet and work with other people. Music really is a universal language. You can achieve so much. With all these possibilities, like the internet, collaborate with a guy sitting in America. We’ve built the band up like this, recruiting people as we’ve gone along.

In terms of your influences, I read about this man called Moondog (pseudonym of blind American musician Louis Thomas Hardin, composer, inventor, helmet wearer) who you cited as an influence. What is it about him that appealed to you?

He’s just fucking cool. We were amazed by his music.

Have you ever invented any instruments?

Not so much. We just try and use things we find for the purposes of making music, like a spring, or old tubes. We’re more into using things we find, using raw sounds, to create music, if you could call it that! It’s extremely interesting though.

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That’s it then. As they bring their show to a close, Efterklang exit through the crowd, looking, in their sparkly threads, like a group of prize fighters. It’s all part of the production and the performance of the ‘world’ of the record that makes the band and their music such an involving experience. Go on, invest some time in it, if only to hear what all the fuss about this ‘Neo Classical’ music is. It’s the new grime, I swear.

Parades is out now on The Leaf Label.

(above photo is courtesy of www.myspace.com/efterklang)

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Getting there is the first hurdle. Miles upon miles of rural English country roads, thousands of arched tree’s making for a menacing nocturnal canopy. Worth it though, for the respective sets from Adam Gnade’s and Youthmovies’, the former’s dense narratives as bewitching as ever, and the latter pulverising with their swollen, convoluted epics.

Adam has a new record out soon, called Palaces/Whidbey Island. Youthmovies are releasing their first LP, Good Nature, in the new year. The two of them have just released a collaborative EP, the super lush Honey Slides, and they have been on a joint tour ostensibly to promote said CD. I interviewed Adam after his set on Friday night, and found him to be an interesting and engaging kind of guy. He even shows us a pile of ravaged books he picked up earlier in the day, including one he bought for Andrew from Youthmovies, which is pretty sweet. The things below are everything else that was said.

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So how’s the tour been going to this point?

It’s been pretty good so far. We’ve had a couple of shows that were really weird or bad, that we shouldn’t have done, shows that were just ridiculous.

How so?

We played at this one venue, in a small town where no one lives I guess. We get to the venue and it’s like this auditorium, this huge fucking venue, and they have a smoke machine already going, and this huge lighting set up. We go backstage, and it’s this massive area just for us, with piles of booze. They gave us a lot of money to play and 5 people showed up. And they were there just to watch a movie that was playing downstairs. So we went crazy and turned it into a weird New Year’s Eve party. We found all these balloons and covered the stage with them and a bunch of toilet paper. It was just fucking weird. We sang happy birthday, and we were lying to everyone…

It was no-one’s birthday was it.

No! We lied to everyone, said the guy from Jonquil had had a baby. It was great.

How are you finding the English audiences? With the exception of the small ones?

Yeah, they’ve been really good so far. Well, we played Scotland and that wasn’t so good. I don’t think Scotland like me very much. but English audiences so far have been pretty good.

You’re playing a song with Youthmovies later…?

Yeah, we’ll be finishing the set with Honey Slides, a dance song. We did it last night in Kingston, and we all got really fucked up. I ended up climbing onto the barrier, and security guards were grabbing me, and I fell into the audience (laughs), and then Andrew (Mears, Youthmovies singer) jumped into the audience. I think some girl broke her arm. Graham from Youthmovies did a flip, and landed on her. He’s a killer.

Will he be busting any of that out tonight?

The works! The lot. Even though he feels really bad.

So the Youthmovies EP, who initiated that?

I have NO idea. We toured last year and Drowned In Sound set it up. We didn’t know each other, but just kind of got together, and (Youthmovies’ guitarist) Al came up with the idea. We had the day off, so we recorded two songs really fast, and it was gonna be a 7″, and then for whatever reason it ended up being a 5 song record. I recorded the other songs at my house.

How did you find that way of working? Writing and recording words for music you couldn’t hear?

Yeah, it’s weird. I recorded three sets of lyrics and…it’s a lot more freeform than the two songs we recorded together.

It works really well, given that you didn’t know each other before. It seems like a good match.

It could have been horrible. I mean I was really worried, ‘cos the chances of us getting along as well as we did were pretty slim

It seems a lot more direct than anything you or they have ever done.

Yeah, the two tracks we did in the studio are like, some of my favourite stuff that we’ve ever done. They have a lot of immediacy…ah it feels really bad to say shit about your own songs. They feel a lot more natural, and it just seems like those two songs work really well. The other ones are really cool but I think those two we did together…maybe because we were locked in a van for two weeks together and we just bonded really well (laughs).

I really like the third song, “We Walk Unknowing In The Cross Hairs”.

Oh yeah. I haven’t heard the record yet. I mean, I’ve heard the rough mixes and stuff, but I just got over here and haven’t had a chance to listen to it. It feels bad listening to it in front of other people, like, “Come on, let’s listen to our record! We rock!”

Yeah, it’s kind of something you want to do on your own.

Oh yeah (laughs).

I wanted to talk about your writing. You’ve said about your lyrics, that they come from prose, not spoken word or poetry. Who influences you as an author?

Oh man. That’s tough. Uh, I read a lot. I like Saul Bellow a lot, especially “The Adventures Of Augie March” and Steinbeck, just ‘cos I grew up on the West Coast, so that’s almost a cultural thing. Hemingway too, he’s pretty good. I’ve been reading Hemingway for years, and it finally clicked in with me like how good he is.

What is it about Hemingway that you like?

It’s just…he knows what not to say. It’s kind of like…his sentences are really sparse, but it’s more than that. He’ll describe something, like this wall or something, but the things he leaves out are the things he knows people are gonna fill in. Maybe that’s like a cultural thing, where he knows Americans will fill that in and so on. I don’t if that’s actually how he worked, but he’ll describe a setting in a way that makes your brain do all the work, and you have this five word sentence about this place that he’s at and it’s vivid as hell, y’know, it’s really clear. He kind of has this reputation as being a thug, but I think he’s a lot smarter than people thought.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a modern author, not that they’re bad. There’s just so much stuff out there. Going to that book store was amazing. There was all this Kipling and Dickens and Twain and stuff, and it would take me my entire life to read it all, and it’s all a lot better than I know a lot of contemporary stuff is.

Have you been indulging in more English Literature while you’ve been over here?

(pause) No (laughs). I didn’t bring any books. Last time I didn’t read at all ‘cos we were raising hell the entire time, but we’ve been here for so long that eveyone’s starting to acquire their old hobbies back. And I’ve been freaking out, reading the NME, or the Gideon Bible in the hotel rooms.

Whoa. That’s a really unholy mixture. What are your opinions on the NME?

Oh…so much hype y’know? Like, I like the fact that there’s a lot of positive stuff, because I have a hard time dealing with criticism, where writers think they have to say something positive and negative to have a valid opinion. But the NME is kind of ultra positive. I think it’s too much.

It’s positive perhaps about the wrong things, or positive about things for the wrong reasons. …like always claiming something defines something.

Like Klaxons, the voice of a generation. Did you see that issue with them in all their crazy make up?

No. That issue was shrinkwrapped. I can only read it if it isn’t.

That’s the way to do it. I feel bad too, ‘cos they have like 10 bands in it, two stories on Klaxons, a little blurb on Klaxons, on the back cover will be Klaxons. It’s kinda cool, ‘cos a lot of our friends in the Youthmovies circle are doing well with the NME, like Foals. They’ve been covering them a lot lately but, fuck man…

It’s what they ascribe to the music, that it is something beyond what it is, beyond being a piece of music, like everything is a huge cultural event.

It’s gonna change everything! Y’know, music’s amazing and it gives you a lot of openings, but in the end, art is so secondary to so many other things, like having actual experiences in the world, having human interactions. I kind of wish it was back like how it was with Shakespeare, when he would write about the actors coming to the city, and they would be considered scum. People wouldn’t be like, “Oh what does the artist have to say about politics! What does the artist have to say about the grand cultural scheme!” I mean, fuck, it’s just a song.

Back to the lyrical thing, I read that your prose is never fiction, that it’s all based on real experiences. Does that apply to the novels you have coming out?

Yeah, they’re all… well there’s a lot of stuff that I don’t really want to admit is real, but I can’t really not write non-fiction, ‘cos there’s so many good things to say about things that have actually happened.

I wrote a science fiction novel! Last summer, when I was really bored and living in the south..the southern united states man, it’s so hot, and I didn’t have anything to do but sit around waiting for my first tour to start, so I wrote this psychedelic science fiction novel. It was so bad.

So it won’t be seeing a commercial release?

Oh I burned it (I laugh, like a fool). I’ve been writing books since I was really young and that’s kind of what I’ve done, burned every manuscript until I’ve felt like it was ready. So the book that’s coming out at Christmas, I felt that was the first one that was ok.

You sound like quite a perfectionist…

Oh I don’t know about that, I just don’t want any shit to come out.

So the science fiction novel. Shall we go there?

(laughs) It was like x-rated, psychedelic, surrealistic…it was just horrible.

It sounds like Scientology, like those novels…

Like Dianetics?

(cue a tangent about Scientology, specifically it’s geographical proximity to our current location i.e. the worldwide centre of it being just down the road. This has been deleted for reasons of narrative cohesion, and for the fact that THEY MIGHT BE READING THIS.)

Yeah, I’m totally obsessed with cult religions, my Mum was in one. Well kind of a cult religion, not as crazy as Scientology.

What was it called?

The 7th Day Adventists. It’s like a new religion that came out in 50′s, with all this bullshit connected to aliens. Like vaguely Mormonist things, but not polygamy, cos that would be kind of cool. I just find cult religions so interesting. There are so many different sects, like so many that people don’t know about. There’s this part of the Catholic church called the Polmarian’s (sic?). It’s where everything is just really strict and puritanical…this isn’t a really good story ‘cos I can’t remember any of the details.

That’s ok, this is like a whole other conversation that we could theorise on for hours and hours. Back to the novels, do they continue the themes and characters from the last record?

Yeah definitely, all the characters from the records…it’s almost not cool to call them characters cos they’re barely referred to, they’re characters as much as any song has characters, names, people and stuff like that…but a lot of the stories and characters are continued. A lot of songs came from prose stories. Some of those songs are like…a paragraph of prose story and then there’s like 15 more pages about that character. It’s all about the same universal characters and themes, and things that I kind of want to say.

What do you want to achieve as a writer of prose? Where do you see this going?

That’s a good question. I guess I just want to do something I’m proud of and …with the book, create something I feel that stands on its own that I really believe in, even if nobody reads it ever again. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything that I’m completely 100% proud of that I can sit on the shelf and say, “that’s a permanent thing,” and er, that’s kind of the main thing. I grew up being incredibly…not “inspired by,” ‘cos that’s a cheesy thing, but a lot of the stuff I read when I was a kid…I guess this is pretty common, like everybody does this…it kind of kept me alive, kept me going. Reading certain people helped pull me through, and I feel it would be a good thing to make people feel a little less alone.

Certain things that I’ve experienced have made me feel that…maybe I’m not as a crazy as I seem to think, that there’s other people doing things like this. I’ve always wanted to do what my heroes did for me.

A lot of people I know have a hard time with life. I mean, I’ve had a rough go of it, not because my life is hard but because I’ve got bad wiring in my brain or whatever, and there were certain things that kept me from not killing myself, or on the other side of things, not taking a 9 to 5 job that would crush my spirit. It’s just about having a reason to carry on, and even if you can do that for one person then that’s a noble thing.

That’s a wonderful thing to aspire to. With the new record, you seem to have consciously moved away from the starker, barer sound of the last record. Was there any event that presaged that?

Yeah, I’ve always done these records for a group of friends, ‘cos I didn’t think anyone else would really give a shit. I did Run, Hide, Retreat, Surrender because I was in a really dark place and I really felt that this was the end, like I was slipping into some kind of…I don’t know. I needed to do something….to not let go. I tried anti-depressants, partying really hard, traveling all over the country…and all these different things, and just nothing was working and I was getting sadder and sadder and I didn’t know why. There was no reason whatsoever, I had an ok life, but I was getting really bad, so I decided if I could do this record about all this stuff that maybe I could heal from it a little bit, and for the first time in my life…I mean I’ve never been happy, I’ve never, ever been happy…but I’ve found a place where I can be. I mean, I keep slipping back into it, like every few months, something just pisses me off and I get really hopeless again, but it’s not as bad as it used to be. Like what we were talking about earlier, I wanted to do stuff that was a little more positive to tell people that things aren’t always gonna be that bad. All the new songs are like pep talks for people that I knew that weren’t doing so well. For whatever reason I have friends and people around me that really have a hard time, and it’s really tough to see them deal with life so badly, so all of the songs on Palaces are pep talks, to try to help…I don’t know if it even articulates that way, ‘cos it’s so personal that it might not seem like it is, but that’s the way it is.

Would you say they were easier to write and record than Run, Hide, Retreat, Surrender?

It was completely natural. It felt like the thing that I needed to be doing. But the last record was like improv. We recorded it in a week or something, and we were all really, really drunk and unhappy. I didn’t play any music on it, I was too fucked up, and I was just like “play this!” and we tried to work it out. But these songs actually feel good to play. I can’t listen to Run, Hide, Retreat, Surrender, I can’t play any of those songs live. It just feels like listening to my own requiem or something (laughs). If that’s the right word.

So what are your plans post-Palaces? Where’s the rest of your year headed?

Well we’ve got a couple of weeks left on this tour. Me and one of the guys from the band Album Leaf were talking about doing a solo tour of California, but that’ll probably be it for a while. I have another book that I want to write. I’m trying to do one a year for the publisher that I have. So I’ll probably do that twelve hours a day for the next year, and that’s pretty much it for now.

Do you see music as a finite thing? Do you see yourself continuing more as a writer/author?

Yeah, that’ll be the thing I always fall back on. I mean, from the purely financial side of like feeding myself, it probably works better and has more of a shelf life, and I’ve been doing it for a long time. I’ve kind of had the feeling all along that when I make a record that I really like I’ll probably stop, cos I think the style I do, the talking songs, like I’ve never felt that it’s right. I just think that as soon as I figure out my shit and record a record that is completely done, I’ll probably finish it. I’ll probably keep playing it for myself, but not taking up so much of my fucking life! (laughs). I’ve been on tour all year man. It can be wearing.

You can call it fiction, but that’s my real true love, trying to come up with something as good as one of the people that I really love. I mean, I like the book I’ve got coming out but it’s not even near ready. I kind of look forward to being old and finally figuring out my shit. I mean, Henry Miller lived forever, and he wrote some amazing stuff in his twilight years, and I kind of like that idea. I mean, I never thought I’d live as long as I have, I always figured I’d be dead by 20 or something (laughs). Sometimes things are really shitty and hard but I think I’ll live as long as my health sustains me. I like that a lot, and I want to be writing books for the rest of my life.

——————————————————————–

And that’s that. Adam also contributed a great performance of his song “We Live Nowhere, And Know No-one,” to this little project-a-rama, the original of which is available on his mini album Shout The Rafters Down! which was released last year as a digital download by Drowned In Sound. Listen to it, in all it’s brittle glory, there.

I also managed to get my sticky mitts on a copy of the new Adam Gnade/David Christian record. More info on that, and probably details about how to buy it from Bad Drone Media. I’ll review it sometime, should that be of interest to anyone, but not for a while, cos I want to live with it for a bit, rather than blahhing out thoughts on it without due consideration. It sounds like something that deserves real attention. It looks proper lovely as well.

That’s all for now. G’nite.

———————————————————-

Kitchen Motors Tour

- Johann Johannsson, Hilmar Jensson

+ Kira Kira

28.11.06 @ Komedia, Brighton

Iceland then, that most generous producer of the glacial and the ethereal, the ambitious and the beautiful. Called home by Bjork, Mum, Sigur Ros and Magnús Scheving (creator of Lazy Town!), the place has once more offered up an embarrassment of riches for the ears. And in this case, the eyes, but sadly not the nose.

For the uninitiated, Kitchen Motors is the banner under which some of Iceland’s most bestest and talented musicians and artists congregate to operate as a sort of ongoing cross media ensemble. The natty little leaflet slash guide available at the venue says as much; “a collective with a reputation for cross-art chemistry and surreal charm.” To look at the format of the show, this would be appear to be true; two hours of uninterrupted music, moving seamlessly between solo shows and band pieces, all backed by eerie, fuzzy projections and films. They have toured over here before when, I am told, Kira Kira (a solo artist who “lived in a rice field in Japan for three months, thinking.”) played with a puppet show. The project is headed benevolently by the people known as Hilmar Jensson (founder member and guitar whiz), Kira, and one Johann Johannsson, fellow founder member and the man responsible for this year’s quite peculiar and really quite sublime ‘IBM 1401, A User’s Manual’ LP, which the tour ostensibly is in support of. I get a chance to catch up with these musical mischief makers on a horrifically rainy night in Brighton, before their show at the Komedia. They have good tea there.

Hilmar and Kira are lovely and forthcoming, whilst Johan seems somewhat wary. This may be something to do with the phrasing of my first question essentially insinuating that all Icelandic bands sound the same. When pressed on the idea that Icelandic music seems to share a uniting theme, in its focus on the ambient and the majestic, he says “that’s a generalisation I think. A lot of people start saying it’s the landscape, that it’s the grand, grandiose mountains and these deserted landscapes. But I think there are scenes in different countries that have a strong identity, like German music in the early 70’s, like Krautrock. With Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk and lots of electronic musicians, they all had separate identities but it was easy to put them together in that they were all German.”

Which is fair enough. He goes on to say “I think it’s very natural and very normal that there are people influencing each other and there is a dynamic going on. I think that happens a lot, but I also think that most Icelandic bands are extremely individual, they have strong individual voices.”

Hilmar elaborates, “But at the same time, all this music hasn’t just shot up out of the ground somehow. It uses a lot of influences from England, all these bands that have strong influential voices.” Johannsson agrees, “Like a lot of the electronic scene, like Warp (records).”

What Warp artists in particular? “In Iceland it would be things like Aphex Twin.” This comes as something of a surprise, since terrifying, head eating bleep core is not something in abundance on the Kitchen Motors’ show. A more realistic point of comparison that I offer is Bjork, since she too has attempted to explore the relationship, both musically and thematically, between man and machine in her work, a principle theme of ‘IBM 1401′. A lot of her music attempts to bridge the gap between the mechanical and the organic, something apparent in both Johannsson and Kira’s solo work. “Bjork is our mountain,” Johannsson says, half joking. “In Iceland, we don’t have a long history of music or culture, unlike other countries that have hundreds of years of history and artistic evolution. All the great musicians and artists in Iceland all came out of the twentieth century. In that sense, there isn’t anything to aim for, no peaks to aspire to. We still consider Bjork an inspiration, we’re just more influenced by Warp artists.”

Do you know what it is about Iceland that provokes all this music that is so against trends in other countries?

Hilmar: “The thing about Iceland that is different to other places is the fact that it is so extremely small, so that everyone can interact on a different level than they would in bigger cities In New York or London or those places, there is an extreme separation between genres. if you were someone who plays in a musical, you’re not going to work with anyone that’s doing electronica, whereas in Iceland it’s too small a community for people to be really separated, that’s one of the beauties of being there, is that you get…”

Johann: “…there’s more interaction between the different scenes…”

Hilmar: “…and we have totally exploited that fact as Kitchen Motors. That we can get anybody to perform with anybody.”

Johan: “I think that’s a survival reflex also. It has to be collaborative for it to survive.”

It’s this sense of a genuine musical community that sets Kitchen Motors apart from mostly everyone. There are many, many bands in this country that operate on similar principles, keeping things independent and getting as many like minded people together as possible, but few scenes seem to share the level of intimacy or the unpretentious work ethic of Kitchen Motors’. To them, the individuals behind the music are often wilfully obscured simply by the numbers involved. The ‘star’ is taken out of the equation, and all that is left is the music, the work. There is also a degree of artistic freedom that they seem intent on achieving.

Kira: “It’s like a little laboratory, or a playground where it’s easy to get these gransiose, sometimes quite foolhardy ideas. And no matter how ridiculous or far fetched the idea is, the environment is built that way to make things happen, so we can try out a lot of different things, crazy things.”

These crazy things are manifested to wonderful effect during the show itself. But how do you begin to describe the music that Kitchen Motors’ produce? It feels heretical to draw comparisons with other western musicians. Having said that, a woman sat next to me during the show whispers conspiratorially in my ear that it sounds a lot like Michael Nyman. I say something along the lines, “Yeah! Freakin totally!” in spite of having no idea who Michael Nyman is. It turns out (i.e. Wikipedia says), that Nyman is a minimalist composer, famed for his orchestral works. This is an apt comparison. The Kitchen Motors’ show is stately and slow building, working mainly around the themes of delicacy and gradual elaboration. The show starts with a lone cellist, looping her instrument through a laptop. Other musicians join, further string players and keyboardists. Eventually, Hilmar appears, his stunning guitar lifting and dropping and weaving through the tapestry. No one instrument or melody overrides another. That, my dears, would be too crass. Further pieces herald a wonderfully pulsing backbeat. The ambience and delicacy is reigned in, and the stage begins to thump to dramatic builds and flourishes. The string section begins to sound remarkably celtic. On the screen a bird pecks at invisible worms.

So far, so gorgeous. Kira Kira’s set however, flirts devilishly with what could be termed madness, if madness is singing into what appears to be an electronic Toblerone. There is also that feeling of child like exploration that only Iceland seems capable of producing, and of the traditional being forced through the mechanical jaws of the modern. Her laptop spews out sparse and twitchy beats, while she toys with the technological jumble sale in front of her. She sings beautifully, and then distorts her vocals beyond recognition, while wind up toys tinker away, filtering through the PA with a click and a clack. Wonderfully confusing, restraint tossed away, the set makes an intriguinly fractured counterpoint to the symphonic nature of what went before.

The stage gradually fills before Johann Johannsson enters, dressed sombrely in a black suit. The ensemble then proceeds to flesh out the songs from ‘IBM 1401′ in glorious fashion, the burbling, polyphonic keyboards meshing with the exquisite string arrangements to hypnotic effect. Here, the themes of the album are made flesh, the organic bringing out the warmth in the mechanical and vice versa, whilst gunshot drums scatter about in the background. It’s a wonder as to how such ambitious and epic music can be kept understated, free of bombast, but it is and it works. After two hours of this melodic sprawl, the audience is pretty much transfixed. Kitchen Motors’ “surreal charm” is as searching as it is bewitching, much like the lone man projected onto the screens, swiping away at a barren landscape with a stick.