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A Grave With No Name - Interview

Scales from the crypt - Everyone digs the deathly serious A Grave With No Name

Alex Shields, the prime mover and orchestrator behind London’s A Grave With No Name, shifts awkwardly as the photographer cajoles him into position. The flash, illuminating his pallid complexion, candidly captures his inability to conform to such social norms as he shuffles uncomfortably in the wake of his shadow. “I don’t really relate to that many people to be honest with you,” he explains timidly as he rustles through a bag of nuts and raisins. “I kind of keep myself to myself, but then a part of me hates that: I understand that I have to make an effort in life and with people… so that’s why I make music, it’s the only language I can speak in really.”

From the isolation of his bedroom, with his instruments, an eight-track and an understanding of melody, Alex has crafted a debut album, Mountain Debris, that sits in purgatory between the earthly melancholy of lo-fi grunge and celestial shoegaze. Its fractured sonic and visual aesthetic seems to explore the thin, fragile line between heaven and here. “I really believe that, and it sounds a touch pretentious, but melody and sound can be transcendental,” Alex explains earnestly. “[The album] is meant to take you on a journey and just be inside… It’s a world that I have created and I’m slightly fascinated as to how people react to it.”

For Alex and his bandmates, who are part of his live set-up – Thomas King (bass) and Anupa Madawela (drums) – this year has seen the release of a split 7” with Natural Numbers, an eponymous EP that sold out, and a warm reception by almost everyone who has stumbled into their world. And a tour supporting similarly haze-infatuated friends The Big Pink has furthered Mountain Debris’s chances of success when it is released November 30. “Going on tour with The Big Pink was the most fucking fun I have ever had in my life and you don’t get that unless you are in a band,” Alex reminisces with a wide-eyed excitement, “but [being in a band] means fuck all to me. It is literally about making music that is good and actually stays true to what I believe in.”

As you’d guess from their name, it’s hard to find any defining identity within Mountain Debris except for that of your own. The brittle beauty of the record creates fissures in the surface of reality only to be swamped with psychedelic solitude and melodic detail; what gravitates towards a certain sadness in sound is only uplifted by the grace that is distilled within its recording and your resulting mind’s voyage. Or, as Alex puts it: “There is beautiful melancholy and then there is self pity and I think that it resides on it being that kind of inspirational melancholy where you find beauty in art as opposed to the self absorbing side of it.”

Miike Snow – ‘Miike Snow’ album review

Two Swedes and an American walk into a bar, sit down and order their drinks. The two Swedes are lost for words and out of work. “I don’t get it,” one says to the other, “we’ve written and produced for the likes of Madonna, Kyle and Jennifer Lopez. We’ve even won a Grammy for Britney’s ‘Toxic’, and we still can’t find work.”

The American then pipes up: “Well I’m buggered then, I’ve only worked with Daniel Merriweather.”

It’s a bad joke for sure, but you at least get the picture of what we are dealing with here. Stockholm-based producing team Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg, better known as Bloodshy & Avant, the men who took Spears all the way to the top before she tied the knot, got up the duff, went mental and reached for the shears. Well, they’ve teamed up with American Andrew Wyatt, whose CV includes working with Mark Ronson (famed for plagiarising and over producing) on Daniel Merriweather’s Love & War, in order to claim all copyrights on their colour-by-numbers electro-pop debut as musical enigma, Miike Snow.

And as far as hard times go, the music industry is really suffering at the moment. Illegal downloading, a recession, and another round of Louis Walsh’s performing pets John and Edward in the X-Factor, even I’m starting to worry for Simon and his gossamer of credibility; even I’m starting to think that they are making a mockery of the show. So when there is literally no talent to cash in on, it’s no wonder producers decide to start polishing their own turds in hope of the Midas touch.

Pissing up the post of Radio 1’s playlist won’t have done their image any harm either, especially as their eponymous album swims in a slipstream of Drive Time discothèque. ‘Black & Blue’ and ‘Animal’ pulsate with rousing piano-led choruses, auto-tuned falsettos and memorable melodies, but an album full of padded-pop equivalents leaves it somewhat of a throwaway listen.

With an equal weighting of pensive lyrical lines and mediocre dancefloor fizz, listening to Miike Snow turns out to be as simulating as listening to your best mate drunkenly sob about how he thinks his girlfriend is cheating on him while you’re all on a lads holiday in Ibiza. And if you do enjoy said vocations in Ibiza and music to be indifferent towards, then you’ll be happy washing your sins in the likes of this as you’ve probably bedded the girlfriend yourself.

Julian Casablancas – ‘11th Dimension’

When The Strokes broke through at the start of the millennia, Casablancas single-handedly mapped out a new direction in metronomic melody in rock n roll; but behind the media pretension, image and artistry of ‘Is This It’, its decidedly pop presentation delineated to the direction that he and the band would take.

And not since the compressed Casio rhythms of ‘Room On Fire’ has Casablancas sounded so cool, comfortable and calculated. Accentuated Eighties synths punch holes into the songs structure for Julian to hang his idiosyncratic drawl mellifluously in an ether of surreptitiously layered guitar hooks and industrious beats. Pop so precise you’ll almost forgive him for the Europe-esque inquisition.

Hanne Hukkelberg – The Borderline, London – October 26th, 2009

As the air is painted with the pastel sounds of seashell recordings, Hanne Hukkelberg and fellow Norwegian band mates bumble around the stage nomadically trying to set up for the night’s proceedings. Despite the warm ambience that has been set in the room for this, her only tour date in the UK, the atmosphere on stage is tense as the perpetual battle between sound engineer and musician is lost in translation over technicalities, only to end in furrowed brows and shrugged shoulders on both sides.

However, as the crowd ruminates to the aural undulations that allude to Hanne’s entrance, all has not been lost in the patient anticipation that is felt from the humble gathering in attendance. Stepping coyly onto the stage with an empty wine glass in hand to open with the brooding thrum of ‘Bandy Riddles’, it becomes clear how captivating Hukkelberg is as a performer. As her vocal reaches far beyond her petite figure, the Norwegian singer-songwriter sheds singing styles like a Russian Doll: crooning with a jazz fluidity through the likes of ‘Cheater’s Armoury’ to the angelic swoon of ‘Blood From A Stone’ to the rasping rock abrasions of ‘In Here/Out There’, Hanne may appear to be floating in a pool of indefinable influences; however she uses this eclectic appeal to great effect, holding the crowd with an attentive, appreciative string throughout as they applaud tardily after each song with open-mouthed admiration.

Returning to the stage for an encore of ‘Ticking Bomb’, she beats metronomically at the wine glass with which she entered. With the chalice withstanding, her face contorts and cracks discomfortingly as to evoke her own thought and feeling behind the song’s underlying detail and not the glass’ frangibility, it’s her shattered mosaic of melodic jazz and dissipated pop experiments that ring soundly on the night and travel tangibly beyond any possible language barriers.

Mountains Interview

Shifting Sonic Landscapes

Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp, better known as Mountians, have created quite the sonic stir since their eponymous debut album was released in 2005. Each with respective solo projects to their name and a joint record label venture in the form of Apestaartje, their collaboration as Mountains has garnered them underground acclaim around their adopted home town of Brooklyn with their fusion of minimalist electronica, serene samples, blissful acoustics and DIY recordings.

Their latest release, ‘Etching’ (Thrill Jockey Recordings), was recorded in real time, and opens up their composed aural calm as a preview to their European tour that starts October 31 in Dublin. Ahead of their London show at the Slaughtered Lamb, The Quietus caught up with Koen to see what was behind the ether of their music.

**How did you both meet and unite over this style of music?**
Koen Holtkamp: We've been friends since middle school. We initially came together because of shared interests in skateboarding and visual art. We ended up going to the same art school in Chicago and both kind of gravitated towards the sound department. Mountains started a few years after that when we were both living in Brooklyn and wanted to start a more live oriented project after focusing mainly on the studio for a few years.

**I've been listening to your albums ‘Choral’ and ‘Etching’, and I have to admit, I got pretty lost within them - in a sense of depth and journey. Is this something that you set out to do? Does your music depict anything in particular or is it up to the listener to decide?**
KH: We have a tendency to shift in dynamics from more quiet intricate moments to more dense and over saturated at times, going from pulling the listener in to filling the space with sound. A certain kind of linear development. Generally the music we make tends to have a gradual pace and focus on detail; we try to keep it open-ended enough for the listeners to come up with their own interpretation.

**Do you use your music as a vessel for your own mind's travel?**
KH: This is not necessarily how I would define it but I do certainly hear sounds in my head and enjoy trying to recreate them.

**And your record label Apestaartje: is there meaning by the name Apestaartje?**
KH: Apestaartje means 'little monkeys tail'. It's the nickname the Dutch use for the @ symbol. Symbol to identify a location, a label being a location for music. I'm from The Netherlands originally and wanted to include something from my background.

**It reads as if you never intended to reproduce what you created collaboratively on a live scale until you came out under the name out Mountains. Is this the case?**
KH: Yes. Mountains was conceived for live performance. We'd done mostly studio-oriented work up to that point and when we tried to recreate these pieces live it always felt like there was something missing. So Mountains was about creating pieces specifically for performance. The idea to make records came later.

**How does the live set work? How do you recreate what is on record in a live setting? Or is it a different concept?**
KH: It's backwards. We loosely compose a piece to be performed. Then we play it for a tour or certain number of shows refining it a little each time. When we feel like it's reached a certain point we record it and then generally do not perform it again. So we never really play the pieces from our records by the time they're out.

**You live in Brooklyn, but there is a great sense of nature within your music. How does your music reside in the verve of the natural world considering your surrounds? How do you go about getting the samples?**
KH: I don't see our music as reactionary but perhaps it's an escape for some people and I'm ok with that. Neither of us grew up in a particularly urban environment so I think our sense of space comes from somewhere else. In terms of the field recordings we generally just make recordings for fun when we hear something we find interesting and then some if it works it's way into the music.

**What is it about the blend of acoustic and experimental electronic music that draws you to it? How do you get the balance?**
KH: It's a blend we were naturally drawn to. The acoustic instruments have such a rich overall sound and electronics have such a diverse range of manipulation possibilities. We spend a lot of time on the sound of each minor element.

**Have you ever considered collaborating with a vocalist? Would you use it lyrically or as another instrument? Is there a message in your music already?**
KH: If it were the right vocalist. We're planning to have some friends contribute to our next record so I think they'll be some surprises, but I'm pretty sure that will not include lyrics.

**Where do you even begin in starting a track and finishing? Do you already have a vision with the way it travels?**
KH: Usually we'll improvise on a certain tuning and slowly we develop that into more specific parts.

**Where does your musical background come from? Who/what is it that influences your sound?**
KH: My musical background is mainly as a listener. I had been working with sound for a few years but I didn't start playing music until my early twenties. Brendon has been playing various instruments as long as I've known him.

**‘Etching’ is a real time recording: how is it in producing the album? Again, did you have a vision at the time? Was it more experimental and free forming?**
KH: It's basically a recording of one of our practice sessions for a tour we were about to do. We record pretty much all of our sessions and this was our favourites so we sold it as a tour CDR at some shows in the US. The response was really positive so we thought we'd do a limited vinyl release to represent this phase of the band on a slightly larger scale.

**Your sound is quite cinematic, and not necessarily something aural - something visual. Have you ever thought about applying what you do to the screen? Something visual?**
KH: Brendon has done soundtracks for several pretty awesome documentaries in the last couple years. I made a video out of footage shot between shows when we were on tour and we've performed to that a few times. It's an abstracted road movie of sorts.

**There is a great deal of space and freedom in your orchestrations. How do you avoid adding too much, yet still create such texture?**
KH: We spend a lot of time on our overall sound. I think the fact that the two of us play a lot of similar instruments helps us achieve a full but detailed sound. We use a lot of layering, sampling ourselves, building up dense layers of sound and sculpting them via filters and other electronics in real time. Most of our pieces are fairly gradual. Spending time with something tends to give it more definition.

**What can the readers expect from your live performance on your new tour?**
KH: It's our first set without computers... a bit more raw, but I think it still really sounds like us. We've only played it a few times so we're pretty psyched to try it out in some different spaces. Other than that we have some touring and probably another record coming out next year but that's all still in the works.

Geoff Barrow Interview - BEAK>/Portishead

Geoff Barrow: the industry is full of “fucking idiots and some total geniuses”

When the news was announced that Kurt Cobain had died in 1994, the genre of Grunge was soon to follow in the eyes of the music press. Loud, long-haired Americans and their disciples where cajoled and condemned back into the ignominious underworld, as the new music media – seemingly overnight – coined a new phrase and phenomenon to alight the commercially servile public with a passion for a fashion.

Britpop’s juncture in the wake of Grunge changed Britain. The chinks in Conservatism’s armour where filled with the blue-collared grout of Labour’s hope, as the likes of Oasis and Blur penned working class stadium anthems to unite a nation in crapulous embrace.

As much as Britpop orchestrated the decade’s zeitgeist, not all the music of the time was of buoyant optimism. Portishead’s ‘Dummy’ went against the grain in 1994 in so many ways; unconcerned with gritty guitars, anthemic prosperity and celebrity enterprise, the band refused interviews, preferring to remain veiled behind their heavily produced and ruminating sound that was later to be defined as Trip Hop.

‘Dummy’ became a landmark album in 1995 when it pipped Oasis’ ‘Definitely Maybe’ and Supergrass’ ‘I Should Coco’ to the Mercury Music Prize, selling two million copies in Europe alone. The tortures of touring and publicity caused the band to remove themselves from the public eye for three years until the release of their eponymous second; and a further 11 years for the group to reform and produce 2008’s ‘Third’.

For someone that is a consumed perfectionist, producer/instrumentalist Geoff Barrow’s new project BEAK> finds himself not only going against the grain of prevailing trends once again, but his against his own musical progression and ethic. Along with Bristol-based musicians Billy Fuller and Matt Williams, their debut album entitled ‘Recordings 05/01/09 > 17/01/09’ was written and recorded in 12 days at SOA Studios with no overdubs or repairs. The result of which is the sum of its parts: musicians emancipated from musical structure only to be concerned with the assimilated texture and propagation of experimental sound.

Talking to The Quietus following one-off gigs in Paris and Berlin, Geoff Barrow explains all about his musical transformation in the form of BEAK>, how easy it was to record their debut in 12 days, why the industry is full of “fucking idiots and some total geniuses”, and what’s happening with Portishead’s fourth album now they are free from record company restraint.

**Hello Geoff. How has your time been performing in Paris and Berlin? It must be strange touring with another unit?**
Geoff Barrow: Yeah it’s alright. I mean we got the synths in a suitcase on easyJet and got a back line and stuff. It’s nice not to have a fuss, where we can just have it all set up in 20 minutes and we can play without a PA so it’s kind of nice ‘cos we just stick the vocals through an amp like we did on the album. It’s good; it’s nice to see it as it really is.

**How did you guys get together?**
GB: Billy [Fuller] plays in a band called Fuzz Against Funk who are on Invada, and Matt [Williams] who is Team Brick records for Invada. We were at an Invada New Year’s party and we did a thing called the Invada Acid Trance where lots of people on Invada just jam together for an hour, two hours, whatever. Bill played bass, I played drums, and Matt played clarinet.

Matt had played on the last Portishead album and we were just like let’s go do it. I’ve always really liked what both of them have done, so it just seemed like the right thing to do.

**You decided to record this album in 12 days. The last Portishead album took 11 years to release. What made you decide to do this so quickly?**
GB: It’s just different things for different bands really. [Pauses] It’s just kind of like if Portishead wanted to record in 12 days we would love to, I mean it’s just a different set of, I don’t know… rules, because you just want to write some more music. But I kind of had to switch one part of my brain off really, which had been annoying me for some time really…

**Which part was that?**
GB: It’s like the side where you are so over analytical about things that it kind of stops you from doing anything. So for me it was a really good thing.

Ade’s [Adrian Utley] been out playing with different people… we all do stuff outside of Portishead, producing records and so forth. It’s just another thing for us to do, I mean, we’re all into different things. And just because it’s another record it just seems that it’s related to Portishead in that way. Whereas if you produce records or play gigs, it’s maybe not seen in the same way.

**BEAK> has been a great step away from Portishead in many ways: what are your musical influences in making the record?**
GB: It was a case of we didn’t talk about anything really. We just knew what each other kind of liked and just got shut up in a room, put the levels up, mics up, and no fucking about.

The first track was the first track on the album and that was it. We just didn’t really talk about it really, I mean the record that we played once halfway through the session on day six was like The Plastic People of the Universe, and Billy hadn’t heard of them and that was kind of it. It just comes from a world that we’re all excited about, so we weren’t going to have an influences kind of chat. We were all into it. We just kind of shut up and away we went.

**So was it as fluid as it sounds? Was it a tough 12 days?**
GB: No. We worked from kind of midday ‘til seven o’clock so I could go home and put the kids to bed. We could have kept on going back over it with the torment and turmoil because you feel that it warrants a bit more of something; but just because it was easier, doesn’t mean that it was a throwaway record.

For us it’s a record that we really like the sounds of. In the past we have all made multilayered records and this was kind of slightly a reaction against that. What would happen was that we would play a tune and usually for me and Billy it would be like that’s alright and then we can start adding stuff; but Matt was already on a computer really bored of it going ‘No well it’s done isn’t it?’ because he comes from a one take avant-garde style background where he never repeats himself again. So we all decided it sounds alright and that it was done.

**It must be hard for a musician to know when you are finished?**
GB: Yeah, but it was actually really refreshing. We knew that there were imperfections, but that is what gives a face character. So it was the same with us: our out of tuneness or our wonkiness made it us. It didn’t go into Protools for some Swedish guys to then put it all in time [laughs].

So it was kind of rough and ready and a reaction to music that you hear on the radio. People like yourself are aware of albums that happen like this all the time, but not many people are and just hear “Sex On Fire” or whatever it’s called, and you just hear this enormous sound with everything in its right place but it’s just nice to have something that isn’t.

I don’t know if that is refreshing for anyone else but it definitely was for us. We’ve kind of renamed the genre ‘Regressive Rock’ [laughs].

**It is, like you say, regressive in comparison to other end products that we are used to from yourself and what we hear on the radio at the moment…**
GB: I mean not everything is, and obviously there are some really good albums out there, but the majority of what you here on the radio is.

I mean how we did it was just [pauses]… amazingly easy. The writing process was just a flow of consciousness with three different vocal mics going through a guitar amp in the room so we could hear ourselves sing. I mean we would probably do three or four takes on some stuff, and just kind of go ‘Oh well the first one was better, but the lyrics were fucked but it doesn’t really matter, forget it anyway’ [laughs]. I don’t mean for that to seem like it was some kind of throwaway project.

**I was reading a few news feeds and comments on the album…**
GB: Have you seen any reviews out there?

**Funnily enough, there was one post on Drowned In Sound saying something along the lines of ‘Well done for ripping of The Horrors’ and I found this hilarious, as you had produced their last album. As a side, how was it working with them?**
GB: The Horrors knew exactly what they were doing, I’ll just say that right from the off. I just kind of helped out on that record – if I had a traditional production role, I don’t know? I did most of the mixes and sat through all the recordings, but they gave me a CD of pretty much every single one of those tunes as it sounds on the final record.

I was away on holiday in Portugal and took one of their CDs and there were god knows how many tunes there were… loads! All I said was that they needed to record them properly, not get over commercialised sonically and just be confident about what they were doing. I know they wanted to experiment a lot more and really they have done it themselves in their own rehearsal studio.

Some of the recordings were actually from their room. I think myself, Craig Silvey and Chris Cunningham didn’t really do anything really [laughs]. They knew what they were doing and people think that they are style over content because of the way they dress and shit, you know what I mean? But they really had it nailed and they turned me onto so much music that I had never really heard of, like really avant-garde stuff. They are real record collectors and always have been.

I think myself lucky to have worked with two bands that have so much talent and are mad record collectors, and that’s The Horrors and Coral and you wouldn’t think that about them at all.

I mean literally, when they were recording the record they would be sat on the settee with five laptops and it would just be churning. You could hear their laptops straining with files, music and stuff that they were buying off eBay and God knows what. It was just unbelievable.

**You have made a reputation, especially over the last decade, of being this faceless entity behind music, co-founding trip-hop and the ‘Bristol Sound’ of the mid Nineties, and generally going against the grain of popular music at the time. Your new project BEAK> defines this somewhat. What are your opinions of the music industry at the moment?**
GB: I think at the moment, everyone is entitled to do whatever they want at any point. The industry is struggling to make money like any business is. I think that there are some total fucking idiots and some total geniuses working at every level.

The industry is in a bit of a mess where the great unwashed haven’t bought records since Oasis, and I do include myself in that [laughs]. But it’s one of those things where if we don’t have another Arctic Monkeys where the hits are at, they won’t go out and buy it. It’s like anything that people are into; they’ll spend their money on films or in Ikea. It just depends.

It’s just like people that are around my age – I’m 37 now – who were really into music like Joy Division and Factory [Records] or whatever it was, have kind of cut off all their outlets to hearing new music. You would think that it would be easier with the Internet, but maybe it is more daunting for people because there is so much.

I run a label [Invada Records] and it kind of struggles along, but if a good record comes along and someone gets hold of it, it can make money for the band but not enough to pay their rent for the year. I just don’t know how it’s all going to work out.

**There is a great sense of freedom within the ‘BEAK>’ album, do you think that this is going to replay into the new Portishead material? You’re without any ties to a record company at the moment, it must feel quite liberating?**
GB: We’re just talking to the majors at the moment, indie figures and loads of people really. It might do, but I doubt it [laughs]. We’ll just try and write it as quickly as we can, but it’s all about inspiration and whether you’re happy with yourself. If you can come up with the stuff you like then it’s fine. I don’t think that I have lowered my expectations or anything; I just think that Portishead is this dysfunctional relationship. No, dysfunctional, not relationship, because that sounds like we don’t get on; it’s like a dysfunctional family that basically just find it difficult to create something that we all enjoy together.

**So are we talking another 11 years to see another album?**
GB: No, it’s just that I gave up music for five years, so the album only took about four years in total. But I guess when you’re trying to reinvent the wheel… [laughs]. I don’t think we did it – don’t get me wrong, I don’t rate myself that highly – but when you come up with something that you are finally happy with, it’s ok.

We didn’t want to repeat ourselves [with ‘Third’], but it was really difficult sometimes: if you want to do something different, you really can’t because it doesn’t sound like you; so when you don’t sound like what you like about yourself, you end up writing stuff that you hate. It was like eating a curry and puking it up and eating it again [laughs].

**Beautiful imagery, Geoff. So have you started writing anything for the fourth album yet?**
GB: No, no. We’ve got a lot of ideas, but it’s all brain stuff and notes knocking about.

**What about BEAK> then? Is this a one off project or are you looking to move on to other stuff?**
GB: No, no. I think the way that Portishead works is that we do have gaps in between our work and stuff, and as long as the other guys are happy to do it then we’ll do it again. Whether it takes 12 days or not is different, but we were just jamming around the other day in rehearsal and it was sounding good as a new track.

It might become a multilayered synthesiser record, we just don’t know at the moment, but we are going to do it again. We’re going to go on tour at some point in December so it’s all good.

**You haven’t played in the UK yet, are you looking forward to your debut at ATP’s Tenth Birthday?**
GB: Yeah, but we’ll be playing the night before at the Garage, London, before that.

**Are you looking forward to getting back and playing on the UK scene?**
GB: Err, yeah, to be honest the English scene is, like, I don’t know… a bit fucking shit! It’s something about England: I think a lot of bands on a small level feel it all the time.

The British music scene is pretty amazing in that it reinvents itself all the time and breaks it down in the space of two days in the constant search for something new. But I think that it’s eaten it’s own bum at the moment and can’t seem to break out of it’s own negativity at the moment and it’s just really odd.

It’s just a very peculiar time and it just needs to believe that something is going to happen. I’m probably the wrong person to say, because I’m not checking out new bands all the time and there is probably some really good stuff happening, but there is that belief that people don’t support other bands though in the UK.

The thing is, with the likes of The Maccabees and The Horrors, I really expected them to be played on Radio 1. They have both produced amazing second albums and there is something quite special about them. The industry needs to get behind these bands and give it the daytime, as it is the best of new British music, but they just won’t – they’ll be lucky if they get a spot play of 6music. What the fuck is that about?

**Is new British music about whoever wins the next X Factor then?**
GB: I don’t know, but the alternative music scene in the UK has been squeezed down, especially when it comes down to the media like TV or radio. All the indie bands are scrambling over each other like rats in a rubbish tip to try and get at one can of mackerel and they are eating each other to do it.

If the level in the media was slightly pushed up a bit, so instead of like Little Boots, it was like The Horrors on Jonathan Ross – I mean, open it up a bit so that real people who will go out and buy records will go out and buy their record instead of the shit from X Factor so that we can support our industry again.

We kind of need to have another Arctic Monkeys to get behind.

Volcano Choir Interview

Wanderers Are Not Always Lost

To the listener and producer, music can be a very cathartic experience; but for the musician to reach out and empathetically tangle the attentive within their emotive orchestrations is something of a talent. Justin Vernon’s shattered existence following the break-up of his band DeYarmond Edison and the loss of a love resulted in a bout of mononucleosis and societal detachment, but also the opus for a broken man’s resurrection and reconnection with the outside world.

We will never fully understand the depths to which Vernon sank in order to create something of such compositional beauty that ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ would form, but the frangible pieces of his shell that were puzzled together in his father’s cabin in the quiet north woods of Wisconsin caused something of an irreverent stir amongst critique and customer.

The forlorn and ethereal tenderness that undulated from his sentimental falsetto and folk demure culminated in a meteoric rise to fame, but what drew us into the wistful charms of the records loving arms was the relation to, and understanding and of, a splintered heart that quivered within it’s musical threate. We lived, breathed and travelled the ruminating soul that unravelled and unmapped before us.

Almost as a prelude to this journey taken, his new collaboration with fellow Wisconsinites and “favourite band”, Collection of Colonies of Bees, Volcano Choir unearth paths less travelled with ‘Unmap’: a brooding debut of experimental sound and vision. Along with guitarist Chris Rosenau, Volcano Choir have unveiled a convulsive and radiating symposium of twists and turns that, for those of us who are willing to wander in parallel to its voyage, may be left entwined within its intimate and creative bond.

The Quietus caught up with Chris Rosenau (molecular biologist by day; brooding experimental musician by night) on his lunch break in order to unravel a timeline of events and original songwriting that dates back to the summer of 2005, when a unity was formed and ideas began to gather over the Internet.

**So how do you go from your day job to this brooding prog-rock sound that you have been developing through Collection of Colonies of Bees and, now, Volcano Choir?**
Chris Rosenau: [laughs] It’s totally in parallel. I’ve been in bands and playing music since high school and college. I went to school to be a molecular biologist, and my hobby has just been music. It’s a little weird though: I don’t meet many other molecular biologists on tour or at music festivals, but you know it’s the same thing as everyone else working during the day and trying to make a go of it with music at night.

**So what are your influences in creating this very progressive sound?**
CR: I’ve been influenced by a lot of things that kind of inform the way that I play. With all the bands like Pele and Vermont there was a lot of influence from the Chicago post-rock scene, but in particular bands like Don Caballero: Ian Williams was a big influence of mine. Also bands like Gastr Del Soul, Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs, but especially, perhaps even back further than that, people who influenced them like Don Stacy… but I don’t want to pigeonhole it too much.

Recently, the Bees have been trying to screw around with some minimalist composer ideas like Terry Riley and Steve Reich. That’s the new thing that we are trying to explore right now, how to incorporate that kind of compositional minimalism into a total full blown rock band. I think it’s those kinds of things that are evident when you listen to stuff that I’m involved with.

**How did Collection of Colonies of Bees come together?**
CR: It’s really been an evolving project literally about 10 or 11 years. It started out as a side project when Jon [Mueller, percussionist], and I were in Pele. It’s kind of funny because Pele’s live shows were more rock-based, so I started the Bees as a way to experiment with more acoustic types of music, like all of my first records were all acoustic-based. Then over the years we didn’t have an outlet for the acoustic live show, so Bees kind of transformed itself into this gigantic rock band now. It’s just been this outlet for a lot of different music ideas I’ve had, and it’s constantly evolved over the years.

**How did you come to first meeting Justin?**
We met through a mutual friend, Thomas Wincek [piano, guitar, electronic], who’s in the Bees now but he wasn’t at the time. He lives in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where Justin is from. The other guys from the band that Justin was in, DeYarmond Edison, were really into a Bees album that we had done called ‘Customer’ and he was like ‘Hey, I know two of these guys, I’ll put you in touch with them and maybe you can play a few shows together.’

So they got in touch with us and we played a gig in Eau Claire and had a blast and hung out all night. From there we kept in touch and played shows around the mid-west in the States and did some tours. It was a case of close proximity; I don’t know if it would have been easy to meet up if we were across coasts or something like that. But we were all in Wisconsin so it was like a four hour drive to meet up and play a show and hang out, and we just ended up hitting it off with those guys over the next couple of years.

**There is a lot of crossover between yours and Bon Iver’s music with this very forlorn, spatial sound. Is there something over in the water over there?**
CR: (laughs) Yeah, I can see that, but I don’t know. It’s very weird timing for sure.

**Your music is very experimental in the way that it is orchestrated, but you’ve never used vocal before. What was the allure of Justin for you?**
CR: It was really great for us in the way that Justin approached this record. We are always interested in new things and exploring traditional instrumentation in different ways so this was a great way to do that. When you think of a vocalist you think of this guy standing up in the middle of the stage singing words about something.

Justin is a friend first and foremost, so we started sending ideas back and forth; some stuff was even recorded before we met him, and he just came back with this really interesting vocal approach that everyone is familiar with now. He was sending stuff back and we were really in love with his approach because while it is vocal, it is more focused on the melody and the more percussive aspects of the rhythmic stuff, so it kind of lends itself as another instrument.

Even when there are lyrics and stuff, at least for me, they are not in the foreground; I just really like the way that he approaches his vocals in melding it into the song and changing the song like another instrument would. I just think that we all got off on the way that it all worked from the beginning.

**Justin has given you quite the commercial backing in celebrating Collection of Colonies of Bees as his favourite band, and stating that in a perfect world you would be bigger than U2. How does that feel?**
CR: I’m kind of happy that someone digs our music [laughs]. It just happens to be that he has this new strange influence at this point. If he digs it and can turn people onto it it’s cool.

One of the things about him recording under the Volcano Choir project is that I like the idea of him being able to turn people onto different things through this safe doorway of his vocals. So I think if people can get exposed to all sorts of different music, I think that is a really positive thing.

**There is a great deal of solitude and ruminating feel to the record, backed by a somewhat religious feel – where exactly do the album’s roots stem from?**
CR: I think you’ve really hit on it there and I’m glad that you are hearing that in the record because that’s kind of the way that it was made. This record has kind of been this whole construction, deconstruction, addition, and subtraction experiment for the past three or so years. When I hear the record I hear this intent in the musical space, but then all this stuff happening in the non-musical spaces. The record was probably recorded in ten different spaces with all sorts of different people.

Tom Winseck had a guy out recording the sound of a field whilst recording guitar stuff at some point, so the feel is just the culmination of this creative process of editing and adding and everything by everybody.

The project up until last year was a tape-trading project by friends. We had this FTP site and we would put stuff up for Justin to work on, and he would do the same, so that we could work on ideas. So I think that all these songs stem from friends just trying to kick each other’s ass musically. Really, that’s all it was – there was no plan, there was no Volcano Choir while this stuff was being played with.

At the same time it was this kind of safe place for everyone to play around because there was no goal. Everyone just wanted to see what we could do with the other’s stuff. I hope their does sound like there is a lot of time encapsulated into those songs because there was. It’s definitely a travelling timeline.

There is a really great friendship and brotherhood that has come out of the record, so it’s fun to have this new type of thing to have and play around with. I know Justin has the same view and it’s given him this new confidence to go forward from Bon Iver. It’s kind of this free space that we have all grown to love operating in.

**Do you know of anything that is happening with Bon Iver at the moment?**
CR: Yeah, he’s definitely got some stuff in the works for sure. I haven’t heard any of it but Dan Spack [guitar] has been up in Eau Claire and heard a bunch of it. So Justin is definitely recording, but I also know that he has been going 110 per cent for two years so he’s probably going to be laying low for a couple of months trying to get his head straight and write some new songs and everything.

**Do you think that there is going to be any possibility of Volcano Choir touring? I can imagine it’s going to be hard to replicate what you have put on record.**
CR: We’ve been talking about it a lot. The short answer is yes we hope so because we would really love to try and present this stuff live. It gets a little complicated with everyone’s schedules, especially Justin’s. Then to compound that with the way that the record has been made – none of these songs have been played in the same place, by the same people at the exact same time.

We really want to do it right, so if we can get the time and get this ship together so we are happy with it, we’ll be hoping to do some show next year. Like I’ve said, it’s just about hanging out and having fun and that would definitely be a different way for us to experience the record that we made, and I think that it would be really fun for everybody involved.

**Will you be taking your ‘Mother’ pillow on tour?**
CR: (laughs) This is a great story and Jon Mueller is going to kill me for this: We were playing a show in Grinnell, Iowa, with Pele and I was really done for the evening. It was like four in the morning – one of those kinds of nights – so I headed back to the hotel.

Jon was planning to go out to some place else, so we had to leave him some kind of signal of where we were in the hotel. So whatever state I was in, I took one of the hotel pillows and wrote ‘Mother’ on it and hung it on the door handle. It’s just been like one of these weird things that have travelled with us ever since. Everyone got back home safe and sound in the end so it’s all good – into ‘Mother’s’ arm I should say.

**So what does the future hold for you with the Bees and Volcano Choir?**
CR: As far as the Bees are concerned, we are half way through recording our new record right now and will be finishing that up in the next six months.

Volcano Choir: I think it is definitely going to continue along the exact same path that it started and we have been working on. I’ve already sent those guys some new ideas for some songs that everyone seems into so it’s kind of like starting over again. ‘Unmap’ exists so we’re starting over again and seeing what happens.

We all have a really great time working together and really trying to challenge each other, so I see no reason why that would stop. There is no timeline for us, which really worked for all of us so we will probably try and do it all that way again. I have no idea what is going to happen and what everyone is going to be busy with, but we are definitely making it a priority to hang out once in a while and when we do, definitely more music will be being made.

Kings Of Convenience – ‘Declaration Of Dependence’ album review

Upon the release of their debut album ‘Quiet Is The New Loud’, Kings Of Convenience were seen to be at the forefront of a refulgent New Acoustic Movement in 2001, burgeoning at the hands of the Astralwerks record label. Along with the likes of Turin Brakes, the folk duos orchestrated simply serene undulations that struck a chord with critics, indie patrons, and parents alike. To couple such acts with the likes of Simon and Garfunkel would not have been seen as a slight against pretension or stereotype – they were simply nice.

Little has changed in their audible output since then. 2004’s ‘Riot On An Empty Street’ may not have had the instant charm and pitter-patter pop of ‘Winning a Battle, Losing a War’ and ‘Toxic Girl’, but the pair’s effortless intuition and adherence to unperturbed structures ruminated with peaceful precision and poise.

After a five-year hiatus, Eirik Glambek Boe and Erlend Oye still strum and pluck away with heartbreaking humility; however, behind the innocence of their unfurling folk tunes and angelic harmonies, lyrically they are not as innocuous as once thought.

Despite their platonic appreciation and unity, there is a great deal of loneliness, in hindsight honesty, and subdued contemplation throughout ‘Declaration Of Dependence’. ‘24-25’ opens with their idiosyncratically mellow movements through constructing arpeggios, unveiling the line “What we build is bigger than the some of two”; the jazzy dalliance of ‘Peacetime Resistance’ nostalgically calls for better days behind a thumping double bass and violin lead; and single ‘Mrs. Cold’ opens the door and deals with relationships lost to its musical ether.

Their ability to write rather bucolic and winsome tunes makes King Of Convenience somewhat of a reliable listen regardless of their content, as ‘Second To Numb’, ‘Riot On An Empty Street’ and ‘Power Of Not Knowing’ tread water with what they have already achieved in the way of diligently structured guitar work and angelic harmonies; however, ‘Declaration’ also sees the denunciation of political zealots veiled behind their softening sound, darkening the playful glee of ‘Rule My World’ with tenebrous asperity and depth: “You set yourself above that all forgiving God you claim that you believe in/Your kind is going to fall, your ship is sinking fast, and all your able men are leaving.” Granted, it is probably the most polite critique of political decision-making to date, with all the bite of the denture-adorned attempting to eat pork, but you get the point.

‘Declaration Of Dependence’ sees the pair strip back much of their sound to something of a comforting coffee shop coupling, simply leaving where they left off with their delicate deliverance and erudite craftsmanship. It might not be one for the protestors to get behind, but it’s certainly one for the parents and the people to enjoy.

Swanton Bombs - 'Doom' review

Before the recession left the independent music industry with all the monetary prosperity of a colander for a punch bowl at a Skins party, indie commerce was often criticised for making its vesicle of potential upstarts porous upon its own accord. A slew of ciphered fruit and guff discharged into vacuous commercial gaps known as ‘landfill-indie’, and if anything is to be proven by Swanton Bombs’ new single ‘Doom’, the drabness of economical recovery is well on its way. With torpid vocals, aggressively scuffled guitar and punctuated drums, this Essex two-piece stumble with all the garage potential of Brit-pop petrol asphyxiation. Let’s just say that their B-side cover of The Strokes’ ‘New York City Cops’ ain’t so smart.