INSANELY LONG INTERVIEW/LIVE REVIEW. THIS WAS THE FIRST ‘PROPER’ INTERVIEW I EVER ‘CONDUCTED’. IT SHOWS. ON ACCOUNT OF MY PROFOUND NERVOUSNESS, THIS RAMBLES SOMEWHAT. HOPEFULLY THIS MANIFESTS ITSELF AS AN ENDEARING TIC, BUT POSSIBLY NOT.
———————————————————-
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.
