dragon chaser:
Gomez - Get Myself Arrested (from Bring It On 1998)
Plus One - Arabesk (from Bare Necessities 2000)
Marvin Gaye - Abraham, Martin and John (from That's The Way Love Is 1969)
whispering dave:
Smokey Robinson and The Miracles - More Love (from Make It Happen 1967)
Isaac Hayes - Medley: Ike's Rap III: Your Love is so Doggone Good (from Black Moses 1971)
Skepta ft Boy Better Know - Too Many Man (from Microphone Champion 2009)
poacher:
Silkie vs Mizz Beats - Test (from Purple Love 12" 2009)
Dark Captain Light Captain - Questions (Hatchback Dub Remix) (from Miracle Kicker Remix EP 2009)
Graham Coxon - In The Morning (from The Spinning Top 2009)
I wonder if the relatively safe nature of this record is indicative of the whole atrophying of the New Weird America thing - of its co-opting by the mainstream etc. I was listening back to Jackie-O's triple Live in Europe CD from 2002 and it sounds like a manifesto for the scene. It contains multitudes: free jazz skronk, wild bliss outs, a wringing through of 'Amazing Grace' - it's a mess but it has a fire in its belly that seems to be missing from Ballads.... Anyway, the review is below.
Artist: Jackie-O Motherfucker
Album: Ballads of the Revolution
Label: Fire
In a brilliant short essay in The Wire, Byron Coley delineated the boundaries (or lack of) of the New Weird America scene – a term coined by David Keenan to describe that broad swathe of acts that had taken on John Fahey’s inbuilt experimental fervour and run with it, and in doing so had rediscovered and re-enlivened the haunted howl at the heart of the Old Weird America that had so entranced Greil Marcus in Invisible Republic - his book on The Basement Tapes. When Coley spoke of the common ground between jazz, noise, folk, psych, experimental, electronics and free rock he was of course describing the possibilities that the scene explored, but he might have been talking about Jackie-O Motherfucker…
The Jackie-O Motherfucker remit has always been a broad, inclusive thing: to delve with both hands into the claggy mulch of the American musical unconscious, dredge up what resides within and throw it into the air and see what clamour results from the humming tensions between sound and air. Consequently, listening to them can be a very visual and at times sublime experience, as if the weight of all that stratified music were absently present in the fragments they capture on tape. And naturally, because of inclusivity of their sound, they can also be a maddening self-indulgent mess.
All that said Ballads of the Revolution is probably their most coherent and song-based record to date. It still has that undercurrent of experimentation and the same sense of historical weight, but here it’s streamlined into (relatively) recognisable forms, which in its way is as subversive a move as they’ve pulled. Even the blissouts, when they come – like at the end of ‘The Cryin’ Sea’ – are understated and restrained. Perhaps it is due to a settled line up (the focus point of Tom Greenwood, plus Nick Bindeman, Danny Sasaki and Honey Owens; plus an assorted crew of scene luminaries such as Michael Duane and Lewi Longmire) or the mellowing of age (though god knows the live sets can still be violent and challenging) – whatever the reason, Ballads… is a lush and at times delicate piece of work.
This is nowhere more apparent than on the opening track, ‘Nightingale’ - a traditional ballad reworked as a kind of post-rock lullaby built around some aching pedal steel from Lewi Longmire and Greenwood’s flanged guitar and odd fragile vocal. ‘Skylight’ – a long-time Jackie-O live staple - follows a similar pattern but has a darker undertow of drones; Greenwood sounds more distant here too, deeper in the muck of the past. There’s an element of The Doors at their most opiated to ‘Skylight’, or some of Spacemen 3’s longer jams. Yet there’s always something else lurking with Jackie-O Motherfucker and it feels at a number of points, bizarre as it sounds, that ‘Skylight’ is going to mutate in ‘Sloop John B’. And while we’re at it, ‘The Dark Falcon’ featuring a knee trembling vocal from Honey Owens (intoning the liner notes from a Mamas and Papa’s album sleeve, no less), also seems to reseed ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, taking it apart and leaving a shell of treated guitars and sheet-metal skronk creaking in the breeze.
‘A Cryin’ Sea’ is the album’s centrepiece and throbs with the same psych/spacerock vibe as ‘Skylight’ – but you could argue that the track never quite delivers, that if anything, it suffers from the general sense of restraint that suffuses Ballads of the Revolution. The track is built around a bowel-deep bassline and swathes of spiralling guitar courtesy of Bindeman and special guest Michael Dustdevil, and whilst it has a propulsive psychedelic heart it shimmers towards a climax that never quite arrives. As the tumult gathers, you long for some of that free jazz squawk that fired up their early recordings.
Ultimately, Ballads of the Revolution is a worthy addition to the Jackie-O Motherfucker canon – a back catalogue impressive in its sweep and form. And while it does feel a little safe at times, in the context of their ever evolving sound and their continual reshaping of the musical traditions to which they are heirs, it’s another impressive foray into the sonic possibilities of forever. Where they go from here is anyone’s guess but you can rest assured it’ll be worth hearing.
Artist: Boduf Songs
Album: There Is Something Hanging Above EP 2009
Label: Under The Spire
This was my first brush with Boduf Songs - the work of Mat Sweet. Since 2005 he's released three albums and a slew of EPs and CD-Rs, all exploring the primitive, blacker side of folk and drone music. On first listening to this limited edition EP, I assumed it was emanating from some Appalachian backwater, a mid-West hideaway; to discover it was conceived and recorded in Southampton somehow adds to the uncanny nature of it. This is of the old soil...
The EP begins with an ominous swamped drone, like the underside of something Windy and Carl might dream up, a drone that bleeds into 'Deathbed Triumps of Eminent Lackwits' a 6-minute hushed folk song - Sweet's signature style. Think of Nick Talbot's spookier moments, or perhaps the haunted sound explorations of Matt Elliott. At the halfway point, the song drops away to a single note pulse over which Sweet croons, his vocals layered and backtracked. Garbled effects gradually add to the soundscape, which conceivably could be a forest recording - a possibility confirmed by the buried background sounds on the dark final track, 'Peripheral Man' which sounds like a neolithic field recording.
Listening back to some of Sweet's older material - the likes of The Lion Devours The Sun and last years' How Shadows Chase The Balance (both released on Kranky) - 'Left Behind Like A Piece of Shit', the EPs centrepiece, might just be the most straightforward and accessible piece he's recorded. It's based around a relatively 'bright' guitar figure and brushed drums, and thematically it's a paean to movement, the song driven on by a incessant plucked bass string. Yet I wonder if perhaps the song is actually about the impossibility of movement, the bass string a ligature, a manacle... Sweet's lyrics here dwell on Sisyphean imagery and the clipping of wings and the temptation here is to map this onto the drab streets of Southampton and the mute horror of being trapped in the endless suburbs. And instead of escaping, Sweet has instead stayed and become mired - a pathway for the old voices.
This is a very limited EP but there should be copies out there and it, and Sweet's other records are well worth tracking down. There's more info on his website: Boduf Songs.
"There is an excess of information, making us prisoners of the news…It is as if history had caught up with us in the form of the news…Yesterdays news becomes history, already just barely perceptible. It ages more rapidly than fashion, of which it is an accelerated form."
Sad to hear that the author Gordon Burn has died. I'd only recently discovered his work and immediately felt as if I'd stumbled across something vital and charged, visceral. There is a short piece in commemoration over at The Guardian.
poacher:
Ben Reynolds - Skylark (Scorner of the Ground!) (from How Day Earnt Its Night 2009)
Lake Heartbeat - Mystery (from Mystery 7" 2009)
Pontiak - Aestival (from Maker 2009)
whispering dave:
Sa Ra Creative Partners - Go Ahead (from Sonic Seduction EP 2008)
Starkey - Dark Alley (from Ephemeral Exhibits 2008)
Beenie Man/Bounty Killer - Borderline Mobster (from Ragga Jungle Anthems Vol 2 1992)
dragon chaser:
Joker & Ginz - Re-Up (from Re-Up 12" 2009)
Shitmat - Whitelabel Unity (from One Foot In The Rave 2009)
The Platters - Only You (from Only You 7" 1955)
Prompted by the Borges radio shows I linked to yesterday, here's a piece on Borges I wrote a while back, plus a couple of his later poems and a few links to some of his works currently online.
Over time I have come to accept Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s idea of Borges as a master of evasion, both in his oneiric, ephemeral short stories and too in his oddly tragic escapist life. His admittance in a late poem called ‘Remorse’ that ‘I have commited the worst sin a man can commit/I have not been happy’ might be typical of Borges’ melancholy self-dramatisation but his late essay ‘Blindness’ based on a lecture given in 1977, a period in which he was running as fast as ever, suggests a more noble version of Borges’ evasive aesthetic.
Borges delivered the lecture during a period of intensive travelling, when he was virtually omnipresent in North American Universities. It was period in which his veneration was reaching new levels, thus he could give a lecture that began by detailing his own ‘modest blindness’ and go on to discuss other lionized blind sages, such as ‘Homer, Milton and Joyce'. Borges’ own blindness had been foreseen, in that his father and grandmother had both died blind, ‘who both died blind - blind, laughing, and brave’. It had been a slow process of degeneration, one that he acknowledged as debilitating, but not one that should ‘be seen in a pathetic way’, for it enabled a different way of seeing, a strange movement, a different way of life: embedded in blindness was a metaphor for sight. So the ‘slow nightfall, that slow loss of sight that lasted more than three quarters of a century,’ that ‘began when I began to see’ contained an inherent capacity for sight of a different kind, a new way of seeing that allowed strange figures to dance and play and gave light a new, distinctive form. ‘People generally imagine the blind as enclosed in a black world…I who was accustomed to sleeping in total darkness, was bothered for a long time at having to sleep in this world of mist…vaguely luminous, which is the world of the blind’. What we have then is a fundamental blurring, a vague haziness: full sight not replaced by its opposite, but by a spectral luminosity; not something as simple as sight turned in on itself, or sight removed completely but altered, realigned, allowing for a space of possibility. Borges, remembering a line from Rudolf Steiner said that something ending should be thought of as something beginning, and that ultimately blindness should be figured as ‘a way of life: one of the styles of living’.
There’s a deliberate poignancy here, not a gawky shame - Borges as anti-Gaucho – but a contemplative acceptance a variation on Pascal’s dictum that ‘all men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone,’ a sense that in blindness Borges had found a way of accepting himself, the latest manifestation of the wandering blind sage, a mode of withdrawal he’d long sought in the anxious labyrinths of his fictions.
THE JUST
A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South,
a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a colour and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well
though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets
of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of
Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.
Elegy
Oh destiny of Borges
to have sailed across the diverse seas of the world
or across that single and solitary sea of diverse names,
to have been a part of Edinburgh, of Zurich, of the two Cordobas,
of Colombia and of Texas,
to have returned at the end of changing generations
to the ancient lands of his forebears,
to Andalucia, to Portugal and to those counties
where the Saxon warred with the Dane and they mixed their blood,
to have wandered through the red and tranquil labyrinth of London,
to have grown old in so many mirrors,
to have sought in vain the marble gaze of the statues,
to have questioned lithographs, encyclopedias, atlases,
to have seen the things that men see,
death, the sluggish dawn, the plains,
and the delicate stars,
and to have seen nothing, or almost nothing
except the face of a girl from Buenos Aires
a face that does not want you to remember it.
Oh destiny of Borges,
perhaps no stranger than your own.
Yes, we have been a little quiet of late. A combination of summer lassitude, eye-ache from sleep deprivation and the density of all the cricket that's around at the moment: it gets in under the door... Normal business should return once we've adjusted ourselves. We have another 6 weeks of it so we'd better adjust fast.
Speechification have been a little quiet themselves recently, but over the last couple of weeks there has been a whole host of great stuff posted. Follow the links below.
The Percy Edwards Showdown is almost too twee to contemplate yet somehow listening to a man imitate a jay and have Bill Oddie and Mark Cocker trying to guess if it's real or artificial is a thing to behold. Plus David Attenborough chairing. (MP3)
Ever since being mesmerised by Richard Preston's The Wild Trees, a book that manages to make Californian Redwood's alluring and terrifying, I've been wanting to climb trees. This brilliant programme follows the exploits of James Aldred as he climbs one of Britain's biggest Redwoods - Goliath. (MP3) Some photos here too.
Two cracking programmes on Borges - one featuring his old reader and all round polymath Alberto Manguel (MP3), and another that follows Peter White on a trip to Argentina to view a project that is making Borges work available in Braille (MP3).
Lastly, not listened to these myself, but two programmes on Larkin: both featuring Paul Farley who traces Larkin's journey during The Whitsun Weddings (MP3) and then discovers a box of tapes of Larkin reading his own poetry (MP3).
Hands on a low limb, I braced,
swung my feet loose, hoisted higher,
heard the town clock toll, a car
breenge home from the club
as I stooped inside. Here
I was unseeable. A bletted fruit
hung through tangled branches
just out of reach. Over house roofs:
sullen hills, the firth drained
down to sandbanks: the Reckit Lady, the Shair as Daith.
I lay to sleep,
beside me neither man
nor child, but a lichened branch
wound through the wooden chamber,
pulling it close; a complicity
like our own, when arm in arm
on the city street, we bemoan
our families, our difficult
chthonic anchorage
in the apple-sweetened earth,
without whom we might have lived
the long-ebb of our mid-decades
alone in sheds and attic rooms,
awake in the moonlight souterrains
of our own minds; without whom
we might have lived a hundred other lives,
like taxis strangers hail and hire,
that turn abruptly on the gleaming setts
and head for elsewhere.
Suppose just for the hell of it
we flagged one - what direction would we give?
Would we still be driven here,
our small town Ithacas, our settlements
hitched tight beside the river
where we're best played out
in gardens of dockens
and lady's mantle, kids' bikes
stranded on the grass;
where we've knocked together
of planks and packing chests
a dwelling of sorts; a gall
we've asked the tree to carry
of its own dead, and every spring
to drape in leaf and blossom, like a pall.
Artist: Wise Children
Album: Wise Children EP
Label: Self Released
I saw Wise Children supporting Fanfarlo in the grotty interior of the Hamptons Bar in Southampton - an actually half-decent venue in what is generally a cultural wasteland. They quietly held the attention of most people in the place, despite the heat, and despite the low volume. I was intrigued enough to buy this, their first EP.
The band's sound is a fairly simple one, based around Robin Warren-Adamson's gentle voice and acoustic guitar, but there is a real depth to the sound in terms of instrumentation, and in the impact these 4 songs have. So alongside the guitar you have glockenspiels, Timothy Davies' cello plus sundry scrapings and bowings. Live this was supplemented by Jami Wilson's gorgeous backing vocals, and she is absent presence on this recording. The 4 songs were recorded in a bunch of different locations 'round Southampton - an old cinema, a bath (that makes sense in context) - and despite the fear that the pale wash of the city might have seeped into the body of the songs, it sounds great. For touchstones you might think of traditional folkies like Bert Jansch and certainly Nick Drake, yet the subtle dissonances take it beyond these comparisons. There are also elements of the modern creakier folk stuff we've yammeredabout on here before, like Gravenhurst or Matt Elliot- they share some of that inherent darkness. And their invocation of Efterklang might give you some idea of the direction they might take with a bigger budget...
'Paint' is a case in point. A 6 minute track that moves in four sections from a haunted opening sequence - ominous drones underpinning an odd minor-chord pattern - to a beautiful mid-section ('we've been lost from the start/let them see our deserted heart') that spirals skyward before returning to that darker central figure.
If you're interested in getting hold of the EP then you'll find stuff on their MySpace page, or you can buy a download here. There's also some tracks on a BBC Hampshire page. There will hopefully be a new EP at the end of the summer.
This is a transcript of an interview I did with Doug from Tortoise a month or so ago on the dusty Grays Inn Road near Kings Cross. Cheers to the guys at The Line of Best Fit (where this first appeared) who have been kind enough to let me reproduce this here, and to Rowan at Thrill Jockey for setting this up. Go get the new record, Beacons of Ancestorship, it's one of their best.
I can’t think of another band like Tortoise. They’re a one off. Effortlessly straddling multiple genres (dub, jazz, hip-hop, electronica), and revelling in their sense of experimentation they still manage to retain a sheen of cool, and more to the point still function as a capital R Rock band. What’s more, they seem to be well and truly in it for the long haul – if Beacons of Ancestorship, their dazzling new record, is anything to go by, then they are still very much bursting with ideas and new sonic angles. They sound more vital, and younger, than ever. Well, I say younger…
I met Doug McCombs – Tortoise bassist and glabrous gentle giant – in the troglodytic cavern of the Thrill Jockey offices on The Grays Inn Road. As I walked up the stairs into the shadows, I could see Doug, Kurtz-like in the damp light, with his head in his huge left hand, twirling a packet of cigarettes in his right. It was half past five and after flying in late the previous evening, he’d evidently been talking to the press all day. He looked shattered. It was hot too; the heat lay across London like another layer of clothes… Mercifully, we were shown into the safety of a nondescript boozer on the far side of the road where we could escape the fug and where the cold beer suddenly made the day more attractive.
Matt – It feels like you've been away for ages. What have you guys been up to?
Doug – Yeah, I guess it seems like Tortoise disappears for periods of time but mostly we're really active all the time. It's true that we all play in other bands outside of Tortoise and that takes up a certain amount of our time but we also are pretty consistently working on Tortoise – whether it's going on tours or working on new material and so to us it feels as though we're always pretty active. We try to do as much live playing as we can, even if it's not a tour. We get lots of offers to do one off shows or festivals and even without a new record it's vital for us to go out on tour and play live as much as possible as it's part of being in a band that we like a lot.
We did a tour two years ago in the spring that was a whole tour of the US despite the fact that we didn't have a new record out and it was one of the best tours we've ever done! I don't know it seemed like that, maybe it's something to do with the fact that you get used to people only being interested in the band when you have a new record out and for us it was great to get that validation, that people were coming to our shows even when we didn't have a new album. It really gave us a lot of confidence for the longevity of this band and that we could work at our own pace.
Matt – So about the new record – where does the title, Beacons of Ancestorship come from?
Doug – Well, because we're an instrumental band, when it comes to time to title songs or albums, we're usually trying to draw on different things in our lives that we interested in. It can be anything from literature or art or whatever. Beacons of Ancestorship is an avant-garde, I guess you'd say ‘novel’, or it might be considered an artwork. Basically it was this piece of literature – and I don't even know the author's name – that's one paragraph repeated over and over again for something like 700 pages. That's not necessarily why we chose it as an album title, and I'm sure each member of the band has his own reasons for wanting to choose this title, but essentially, it was a title we all liked. To me personally, what the title invokes is how we see our place in the continuum of popular music, or at least the music we're interested in. It's a reflection of all of our influences and how we see ourselves and where we might take the band in the future.
Beacons of Ancestorship
Matt – The way you describe the repetition of the piece seems to fit in your aesthetic too.
Doug – That's true and also anything that's even vaguely cryptic fits into our aesthetic too [laughs].
Matt – It feels like a very direct record for you, there might even be what are considered a couple of 'songs' on there.
Doug – Sure. I think the second song 'Prepare Your Coffin' might be the most conventional rock song Tortoise has ever played. Which wasn't really anything conscious. Things that we were conscious of when going in to make this record were, thinking about our last album It's All Around You, I think we were trying to, at least in retrospect, refine and perfect everything we had done before and get it to some sort of compositional ideal or something, or at least try to become better as songwriters. So this time we may have unconsciously tried to push away from that a little bit and make it a little more rough around the edges, more scrappy, and more open ended – not as compositionally direct. And it feels that way to me – more direct and looser at the same time. More natural. The songs flow and don't feel as constricted. And I can't speak for everyone in the band but I think that may have been what we were trying to achieve.
The other thing is, as the band has gotten older and more experienced we've become a much better live band and I think we're more conscious of using dynamics in our live shows, and about being a more powerful rock band. When we first started we might have been a little tentative and not sure we could perform this music in front of people and have it be interesting, and so we've slowly grown into this thing where we're now pretty powerful live and also have moments of delicacy. I think we wanted to reflect some of that on this record.
We used the same compositional techniques to get to that. We didn't perform any of the songs live in the studio and we wrote most of the material the same way which is a slow process of bouncing ideas of each other and arriving at something we like by a process or subtraction or addition or cutting up or rearranging. So we didn't perform any of it live but to me it reflects more what we can do live.
Matt – How much of that goes back to the ATP shows you did, where you played the whole of Millions Now Living Will Never Die from start to finish? Was that part of the confidence building process?
Doug – No, that's different. Playing Millions... live from start to finish was a completely separate challenge because we'd never attempted to play parts of those songs live ever. For instance 'Djed' which many people see as the cornerstone of the record, we'd never played that in its entirety in a live situation. So that was a real challenge as that song is really a tape edit or a collage. That's not really what I was talking about – I was more getting at the fact that when we started the band a lot of the music was so delicate that we felt if we were going to rock out on it we'd almost do it a disservice so we eventually grew into the thing of not being afraid to rock out. So even though we all came from rock bands in the first place it was almost as if we were treating the Tortoise music with too much reverence.
Matt – I was listening to the first album again recently and I'd forgotten how many delicate, essentially ambient moments there were on there. There's little of that on the Beacons...
Doug – The new album has moments.... The other direct thing about the album I think is the rhythm patterns on the songs, even though some of them are contrapuntal and interlocked, most of the songs are in 4/4 time signature. And we've always done stuff in 4/4 but we've also used a lot of semi-convoluted time signatures and I think that lends a certain directness to the record. There's only 1 track, 'Minors', which jumps from phrases of 3 and 4 to phrases of 7. That was all sort of a compositional experiment – Jeff wrote the melody to no time signature at all and then put the chords under it after the melody had been laid down and he realised the chords slipped into weird times.
TLOBF – A couple of the tracks seem to have an almost dubstep inflection to them, 'Northern Something' and even 'Gigantes'. It made me think of D/j Rupture.
Doug – 'Northern Something' for sure references some of that stuff – it's almost like a dancehall or dubstep samba. I think that was a conscious nod. 'Gigantes' was also a song that was based around a rhythm before anything else – the interlocking drum patterns came first before the melodic content.
Matt – And what about 'Yinxianghechengqi'?
Doug – [Laughs] I don't actually know how to pronounce that word! I think it's Chinese. Someone told me it was the first synthesiser ever manufactured in the country. Anyway, that song was another experiment. We were in the studio talking about modern composition and someone said wouldn't it be hilarious to try twelve tone and hardcore which is basically what that is.
TLOBF – So you're mixing Schoenberg and Hardcore? It's been done millions of times, I don't know why you bothered... The track though is really falling apart under its own weight, splitting at the sides.
Doug – That's probably actually the oldest song on the album and we've probably recorded 5 or 6 different versions of it and that version on the album is two wildly different versions spliced together with really different feels. The first part has this sense that we can barely play feel to it, and then it kicks into the real version.
Matt – Has the way you've recorded changed at all? You've said that at times things do get in the way – other projects, band members having families etc.
Doug – Our first two albums were recorded almost all analogue, on tape machines; only on the second album, a little bit of digital editing came in – just some cross fades or something. This was right when digital recording programs first came in. So from the third album until now, it's been in the digital age where, we do record on analogue tapes, but we'll bounce back stuff from tape to pro-tools or vice versa. So, our recording process since the digital era has been pretty much the same. We'll go to the studio, start throwing around ideas and recording them as we go. On a more practical level since some of the guys have children there are times when not all of us can make it to the studio at the same time. But then it's not always that important for us to be in the studio all the time – as long as everybody is there some of the time to agree on any major changes. It can become frustrating when we're in a particularly creative period and someone doesn't show up - I've been that guy too – but it's just the way it has to be.
Matt – Does one of you take charge in the studio, as it were?
Doug – John [McEntire] does most of the recording and mixing. He's the one with the real experience as far as being a recording engineer goes. John Herndon and Dan Bitney have home recording set ups of their own, and they can do stuff with tape machines and pro tools. But John can do it with a remote control – just walk into a room and hit play and away he goes. As far as what you would call production, that is the group effort and John is sort of the conduit. He's able to interpret everyone's ideas and translate them into what's going to work in terms of recording. For someone like me, who's not really familiar with a lot of the equipment, it's really awesome to have someone who understands what I mean when I describe how I want something to sound because he can do it. It's a really amazing thing to have in a band, to have that autonomy, and to have that total confidence in someone to realise those ideas you have. It's a privilege really.
A Lazarus Taxon
Matt – Can we talk a little about A Lazarus Taxon? What was behind the decision to release that box set?
Doug – The main impetus was sort of a compulsive need to gather things together. I felt like the material in that box set represented a side of Tortoise that people weren't that familiar with. I think our albums represent one side of Tortoise, then we have this other side, which is when someone asks us for a track for a compilation, or we make a 7” to sell on tour, or someone asks us to do a remix. A lot of that stuff involves a different working process for us as a band, and some of the results are quite different to the stuff that ends up on the albums. And there was so much floating around out there in different places, and I'd been pushing it for a while to gather it all up so people could hear this other side to the band.
Matt – It's a fantastic artefact, just as an object – but I read somewhere that it was like a tombstone.
Doug – I heard somebody say that too, like 'this band is over'! That's not really what it was meant to be. Maybe they got the idea from the imagery on the front.
Matt – Those Odermatt photos are incredible...
Doug - He was an Austrian, and an employee of the police, and part of his job was to document car accidents. Most of his photographs don't seem to be documenting tragic events – I mean most of them are just fender benders, it doesn't look like anyone died in them. But they are beautiful photographs. And since then there's been another book, of his colour work [Arnold Odermatt: On Duty], featuring loads of Austrian police cadets doing callisthenics, and there's one series of broken tail lights, all melted.
Arnold Odermatt - Untitled
Matt - They struck me as so Ballardian – not just the obvious car crash element, but the affectlessness of them, they're so clean. Going back to ...Lazarus, I also read someone describing it as a time capsule.
Doug – That's a better way of describing it! To me, that box set documents a totally different side to Tortoise – recorded much quicker, less structured, making less decisions, doing it out of necessity.
Matt – I was listening to Rhythms, Resolutions and Clusters EP on the way up here [the third CD in the A Lazarus Taxon box] and there is some very strange stuff on there...
Doug – For sure. Rhythms, Resolutions and Clusters was after our first album and we were definitely into the idea of our songs never being finished, or that there was potential for them to go in different directions there didn't have to be a definitive version. So we thought it would be cool if there was a different version of the album and all of the people on the EP were friends of ours. It was never a situation of 'let's find the hippest producers' – it was more like 'let's give these tracks to some people we like and respect and see what happens'. Later on, after our second album all those remixes were done by people we did and didn't know and after that we just weren't really interested any more. It was more like at that point we felt our songs were standing on their own.
Matt – That period is often seized upon as a kind of zenith for Tortoise in terms of output, which I guess must be quite frustrating for you guys? What do you make of that whole 'godfathers of post-rock' stuff?
Doug – I don't really know how I feel about I. A couple of years into this band I knew that we had potential to be a band for a really long time – just from the chemistry, and that's the way I still feel. The strength of this band isn't going to be how we peaked in the ‘90s; our strength is going to be how we continue to be band, and what comes in the future. We're working through some of those things now. I definitely know that some members of Tortoise are not really that thrilled with Millions Now Living Will Never Die – I mean it was pretty ambitious and we did a good job of it but it was never really completely finished, we didn't have the resources. There was a sense of 'this is what we have and this is going to have to do.' There are some successful experiments on it and some loose ends. And I feel like over the years we've got way better at tying up those loose ends and not having any extraneous, unnecessary material on our albums.
Millions Now Living Will Never Die
Matt – So is there another vaults-worth of stuff waiting to come out?
Doug – There are odds and ends floating around but no, no vault [laughs].
Matt– I'm intrigued by what you said about Beacons earlier, and you're place in a continuum of music – who are the other beacons along the line?
Doug – There are too many to mention! I guess our ambition is to be part of the continuum, be part of what makes music move along. Our only hope could be that we might inspire people to make music, the way the music we all love has inspired us.
Matt – As a final question, going on from the last one I suppose: how do you explain your position as a rock band in that the general response to Tortoise's stuff seems to stand outside the usual clichés of rock music – the simple build and release and the emotional response. How does sit with you? How does it work?
Doug – I think people have become used to hearing music in a certain context, and only if they become really interested in music do they eventually seek out a band like us. Even somebody as successful as Sonic Youth for instance still is not on the radar of your average person. They're an insanely influential rock band and yet they've never reached a kind of universal acceptance. The average person has never heard of Sonic Youth. So I guess there's a certain kind of music listener who eventually finds out about a band like Tortoise and that's fine because those people who do find out about us will carry it with them.
Matt – What do you make of the fact that Sonic Youth have started coming in for some negative press recently? That they've become part of the nostalgia industry and cool for their record collections rather than their music?
Doug – Somebody's always going to run you down for something. I've never known Sonic Youth do anything with anything less that total integrity. And as for the nostalgia stuff, well, the whole Don't Look Back Thing isn't something we'd ever get involved in again – and Sonic Youth did a whole tour of it so must feel even worse about it! I mean, playing Millions... was kind of fun but really, as a rock band you want to be playing you're new stuff. I think we'd have been infinitely more entertaining playing our new stuff...
Matt – So when are you coming over to the UK again?
Doug – We might be here in August or September but nothing is confirmed. Other than that it might be November or December. We'll let you know for sure... [Unless you've been living underground, you must have heard the announcement of the 10th Anniversary ATP show in December. My word, what a line up. If Tortoise come over before that you'll read about it here first.]
If you've got stuff for us to listen to or read then get in touch and we'll do our best to get something written. You can reach us at mountain7blog at googlemail dot com
