I interviewed the photographer Den Elliot about his candid photos of a depressing seaside resort for Vice. Have a look at a sample of the photos at bananacake.org.uk
DEN ELLIOT
INTRO:
Den Elliot might never have ended up taking photos had it not been for a previous life as a conservationist. Before you reaching for your ‘stone the hippie’ rocks you should hear the way Den talks about his time spent wandering around the windswept crags and leafy forests. As he patters through tales of dewy dawns and solitary sunsets in his lilting West country drawl it’s almost impossible to imagine how anyone wouldn’t want to take photos of all the great stuff that gets served up by planet earth every day.
Except that Den didn’t actually reside in the Arcadian forests of wonder he spent his former working days conserving. He lived and grew up in and around Weston Supermare’s Bournville estate. Bournville consists of a group of high rise tower blocks and council housing built to serve as accommodation for a planned chocolate factory that never arrived to revitalize the area’s ailing economy.
Den’s time out in the fields and forests inspired him to put himself through a photography degree at Falmouth University where the work of photographers like Tom Wood and Donovan Wylie encouraged him to return to the Bournville of his youth and capture the spirit of community and resilience he had experienced every day growing up in the area.
INTERVIEW:
VICE: What first made you think you wanted to take photos of things?
Den Elliot: Just being surrounded by all this stupidly nice scenery when I was working as a conservationist. That made me go out and get a cheap Fuji point and shoot just to kind of catalogue all this stuff I was seeing.
What were you shooting initially? Like, sheep and stuff?
There weren’t many sheep around actually. It was more all these massive open spaces with no other human beings in. It was really eerie. You could walk about for hours and not see another person. Just trees and fields and forsests.
You sound a bit like a Jack Johnson song right now. How did taking shots of ‘mother earth’ lead you taking shots of a Somerset shithole?
Well, I’d never even thought about going to college or University you know? I was just interested in going out and working. Taking photos of all this scenery made me actually want to go and study something and learn how to do it well. I went back to college and I thought it would be like being back at school but I was well into it. Learning all this new stuff.
Yup, learning can be ok. Shocking but true. Was it at college you began to develop your photojournalistic style?
I began to develop an idea of what I wanted shoot during my foundation. My lecturer there exposed me to people like Donovan Wylie, Chris Killip and TOm Wood whose work on Liverpool really made me realize I could go and shoot the kind of stuff that had surrounded me all the time growing up.
What drew you back to Bourneville? You know the chocolate factory never got built right?
Well that was part of the economic problem in the area. It was where I had a lot of memories bound up. The time I spent out in the countryside prior to taking up photography reminded me of my time growing up there in weird way. How you could be surrounded by buildings or natural landscape and still feel alone. Plus going back there and remembering things like the tin roof above the corner shop where I got off with my first girlfriend. Things like that made me want to go back and capture it all.
Some of the shots here feature characters who look like they might be a bit of a handful. Did you ever get any opposition from the scally wags you were pointing a flash at?
Well, to an extent I find taking pictures goes against my natural instincts. I am pretty shy and putting yourself in a situation where you are having to be really forward and very much in a public state at all times isn’t the easiest thing in the world for me but that makes the whole process more rewarding.
So no one chased you out of the estate for your camera?
No I tried to be accommodating and clear what was I doing. Most of the people in the photos were into it once they had got over their initial weariness. I also offered them prints of the photos once they were processed which a lot of people were really into. I really wanted to show the sense of community that the estate maintains. Outsiders might no see that. They might just see walking ASBO’s and dole queues or whatever but growing around up there I knew it wasn’t like that. I had some of my best memories there and wanted to portray that.
The photo’s have a weird ability to kind of make you heart plummet like a lead balloon pumped with sadness then leap with springs of joy in the same shot. How did you feel while you were shooting them?
It was great to be there documenting this place I’d grown up in but elements of it were saddening, the lives some of these kids were living. The sense of re-exploring my own childhood through them and these places was sort of polarized by my granddad dieing at the same time which put the whole thing in perspective.
Tuesday, 4 March 2008
Psychedelic Horseshit Interview
Psychedelic Horseshit are the best band I have listened to in 2008. I actually heard them in 2007 but only listened to them this year.
Psychedelic Horseshit
You may recall us going on about Times New Viking the other month. TNV are a great outfit who, if the world is a just place, will reap major rewards this year and get massive crowds swaying to their wall of weird, lo fi rock and roll that hides tiny nuggets of pop swaddled away in its psychedelic fuzz. If the world were an even more just place then just twice as many people will be going nuts to the band billed as Siltbreeze Records Stooges to Times New Vikings MC5.
Psychedelic Horseshit coined the turn ‘shitgaze’, formed on a whim at a party and made up their name on the spot because it was the first thing that sprang to mind. Theirs is an unrefined, unpredictable and chaotic mess of sound which leaps in your face like a drunk old guy at the bar demanding change and won’t leave you alone until you’ve kicked it in the balls until it can’t move anymore. They have been chased off stage in more states than seem possible in their short existence but all the tour stories wouldn’t be worth an eighth of a shit if the music wasn’t the most heart poundingly great racket since that My Bloody Valentine covers record Comets On Fire never made.
VICE: Having formed on the spot had any of you had any experience in bands prior to Psychedelic Horseshit?
Matt Horseshit (guitar, vox & ‘shit’): First up that story about forming one night is totally true, only there was way more weed and babes involved at the time than in the re-tellings I keep reading here and there. But nah we were never in any other bands. We didn't know that there were any other bands. We thought it was just us and the Royal Trux.
How much of your show is improvised? There is a real sense of the unpredictable about you live stuff.
We have songs but they rarely get played the same way twice. Not because we're super awesome and like to improvise but because we really suck and can't play the same way every time.
What colour would a psychedelic horseshit be?
It depends on the drugs you are on and whether you are shitgazing or not. If you are then it'd be changing all the time like David Bowie. If not, then you can't see it anyway. Why would anyone be paying attention to the shit on the ground though? That said we usually take acid to make our shit psychedelic but I suppose drinking cough syrup would work just as well.
How do you feel about the growth of ‘shitgaze’ into a recognized movement?
Ah shitgaze. A movement after my own heart. That came from my sick obsession with My Bloody Valentine and our shite efforts at shoegazing. Shitgaze is gonna take over the world, haven't you heard? That new MBV album will have a sheen of shit glossed all over it and then everyone will forget about shoes forever. We're coming to get you.
http://www.myspace.com/psychedelichorseshit
Psychedelic Horseshit’s debut LP Magic Flowers Droned is available now on Siltbreeze.
Psychedelic Horseshit
You may recall us going on about Times New Viking the other month. TNV are a great outfit who, if the world is a just place, will reap major rewards this year and get massive crowds swaying to their wall of weird, lo fi rock and roll that hides tiny nuggets of pop swaddled away in its psychedelic fuzz. If the world were an even more just place then just twice as many people will be going nuts to the band billed as Siltbreeze Records Stooges to Times New Vikings MC5.
Psychedelic Horseshit coined the turn ‘shitgaze’, formed on a whim at a party and made up their name on the spot because it was the first thing that sprang to mind. Theirs is an unrefined, unpredictable and chaotic mess of sound which leaps in your face like a drunk old guy at the bar demanding change and won’t leave you alone until you’ve kicked it in the balls until it can’t move anymore. They have been chased off stage in more states than seem possible in their short existence but all the tour stories wouldn’t be worth an eighth of a shit if the music wasn’t the most heart poundingly great racket since that My Bloody Valentine covers record Comets On Fire never made.
VICE: Having formed on the spot had any of you had any experience in bands prior to Psychedelic Horseshit?
Matt Horseshit (guitar, vox & ‘shit’): First up that story about forming one night is totally true, only there was way more weed and babes involved at the time than in the re-tellings I keep reading here and there. But nah we were never in any other bands. We didn't know that there were any other bands. We thought it was just us and the Royal Trux.
How much of your show is improvised? There is a real sense of the unpredictable about you live stuff.
We have songs but they rarely get played the same way twice. Not because we're super awesome and like to improvise but because we really suck and can't play the same way every time.
What colour would a psychedelic horseshit be?
It depends on the drugs you are on and whether you are shitgazing or not. If you are then it'd be changing all the time like David Bowie. If not, then you can't see it anyway. Why would anyone be paying attention to the shit on the ground though? That said we usually take acid to make our shit psychedelic but I suppose drinking cough syrup would work just as well.
How do you feel about the growth of ‘shitgaze’ into a recognized movement?
Ah shitgaze. A movement after my own heart. That came from my sick obsession with My Bloody Valentine and our shite efforts at shoegazing. Shitgaze is gonna take over the world, haven't you heard? That new MBV album will have a sheen of shit glossed all over it and then everyone will forget about shoes forever. We're coming to get you.
http://www.myspace.com/psychedelichorseshit
Psychedelic Horseshit’s debut LP Magic Flowers Droned is available now on Siltbreeze.
Vice February Reviews
Here they are:
Vice February Reviews
Family Battle Snake
Sweet Mine Of Child
FBS Recordings
8 Yet another in the seemingly endless slew of releases from the warped mind of young Bill Kouligas. This one is on 3” CDR so I imagine that if you popped it into your laptop by mistake it would probably end up creating a similar noise as it slowly destroyed both itself and your computer to the sound that comes out of the speakers when you actually play it on a regular CD player.
Excepter
Debt Dept
Paw Tracks
8 There seems to be some overarching theme here involving the affects of the economy on the individual. Or maybe that’s just a facile reading and I’ve got it all wrong? Regardless, Excepter still sound like two bands attempting to play each others set lists and then falling out before making up and hugging it on out.
Fight
Eugene S. Robinson
Hydra Head
5 Eugene likes fighting. He likes fighting so much that he has made a career out of telling people how much he likes fighting. He sung about it in his band Oxbow, he wrote about it for us in the ‘Vice Guide To Getting Beaten Up’ and if you ever run into him it’s a pretty safe bet he’ll either fight you or talk to you about fighting. The problem with this release is that hearing Eugene talk about fighting and nothing else for a whole disc gets really tiring. Almost physically exhausting. Then you realize that there is a whole other disc left to go and you decide to go out and buy a new belt that fits that belt buckle you’ve had knocking around your room for so long.
Digital Penetration Vol.2
alt < delete Recordings
8 alt < delete reminds me of Kitsune without the money. But with the one thing that all of Kitsune’s money can no longer buy: taste.
Destroyer
Trouble In Dreams
Rough Trade
9 Yank indie-pop has to hit saturation point soon. You can’t move for being swamped by Band of Wolf Parading Decemberist Rubdowns at every turn. It’s getting silly. I might drown in approaching middle-age melancholia at any minute. Then once in a while something like the Silver Jews record or this new one from Bejar comes along and it all makes perfect sense again.
Evangelista
Hello, Voyager
Constellation
8 This sounds like Patti Smith covering the whole of Swordfishtrombones. Sound scary? Now imagine that with added disjointed strings and wanton static bursts courtesy of Thee Silver Mt Zion Orchestra. Not for moments of mental fragility. Like Sunday evenings after you haven’t slept for two days. I won’t be trying that one again soon.
P.W. Long
God Bless The Drunkards Dog
Southern
10 This is so all-American that it should replace Springsteen in the hard drinking, late nights, early mornings filled with work and blood red steaks for dinner washed down with 6 pint pitchers bracket of the bar room sing-along cannon. Except that P.W. is the real deal. And having the real deal stare you in the face every day is far scarier than having a walking Gap advert greet you from the bottom of the jukebox.
The Sword
Gods Of Earth
Kemado
4 If you took High On Fire, subtracted the intelligence (which, lets face it, was at Fred Flintsone levels anyway) and blew the whole thing up the arse with a bicycle pump full of over-the-top gas then you would end up with The Sword. Kind of like a pompous riff-metal balloon animal: amazing fun for the first 30 seconds but soon boring as hell and waiting to pop.
Geoffrey Oi!Cott
The Good, The Bad & The Googly
X Fist/Boss Tuneage
10 This a cricket themed Oi record by a band called Geoffrey Oi!Cott entitled “The Good, The Bad & The Googly”, performed by guys with names like W.G. Disgrace and featuring songs with titles such as “Dart’s Player’s Wives”. Which part of all this is not screaming “10/10” at you yet?
Rod Modell
Incense & Blacklight
Plop
8 Miss all of last years hyper-limited Echospace 12”s but still want to listen to something that makes you fell like your trapped inside of an iceberg while old transistor radios hum and clunk somewhere in the near distance? All is well in the world for you then as Rod Modell has decided to release a CD that won’t disappear within five minutes of its onsale date.
Vice February Reviews
Family Battle Snake
Sweet Mine Of Child
FBS Recordings
8 Yet another in the seemingly endless slew of releases from the warped mind of young Bill Kouligas. This one is on 3” CDR so I imagine that if you popped it into your laptop by mistake it would probably end up creating a similar noise as it slowly destroyed both itself and your computer to the sound that comes out of the speakers when you actually play it on a regular CD player.
Excepter
Debt Dept
Paw Tracks
8 There seems to be some overarching theme here involving the affects of the economy on the individual. Or maybe that’s just a facile reading and I’ve got it all wrong? Regardless, Excepter still sound like two bands attempting to play each others set lists and then falling out before making up and hugging it on out.
Fight
Eugene S. Robinson
Hydra Head
5 Eugene likes fighting. He likes fighting so much that he has made a career out of telling people how much he likes fighting. He sung about it in his band Oxbow, he wrote about it for us in the ‘Vice Guide To Getting Beaten Up’ and if you ever run into him it’s a pretty safe bet he’ll either fight you or talk to you about fighting. The problem with this release is that hearing Eugene talk about fighting and nothing else for a whole disc gets really tiring. Almost physically exhausting. Then you realize that there is a whole other disc left to go and you decide to go out and buy a new belt that fits that belt buckle you’ve had knocking around your room for so long.
Digital Penetration Vol.2
alt < delete Recordings
8 alt < delete reminds me of Kitsune without the money. But with the one thing that all of Kitsune’s money can no longer buy: taste.
Destroyer
Trouble In Dreams
Rough Trade
9 Yank indie-pop has to hit saturation point soon. You can’t move for being swamped by Band of Wolf Parading Decemberist Rubdowns at every turn. It’s getting silly. I might drown in approaching middle-age melancholia at any minute. Then once in a while something like the Silver Jews record or this new one from Bejar comes along and it all makes perfect sense again.
Evangelista
Hello, Voyager
Constellation
8 This sounds like Patti Smith covering the whole of Swordfishtrombones. Sound scary? Now imagine that with added disjointed strings and wanton static bursts courtesy of Thee Silver Mt Zion Orchestra. Not for moments of mental fragility. Like Sunday evenings after you haven’t slept for two days. I won’t be trying that one again soon.
P.W. Long
God Bless The Drunkards Dog
Southern
10 This is so all-American that it should replace Springsteen in the hard drinking, late nights, early mornings filled with work and blood red steaks for dinner washed down with 6 pint pitchers bracket of the bar room sing-along cannon. Except that P.W. is the real deal. And having the real deal stare you in the face every day is far scarier than having a walking Gap advert greet you from the bottom of the jukebox.
The Sword
Gods Of Earth
Kemado
4 If you took High On Fire, subtracted the intelligence (which, lets face it, was at Fred Flintsone levels anyway) and blew the whole thing up the arse with a bicycle pump full of over-the-top gas then you would end up with The Sword. Kind of like a pompous riff-metal balloon animal: amazing fun for the first 30 seconds but soon boring as hell and waiting to pop.
Geoffrey Oi!Cott
The Good, The Bad & The Googly
X Fist/Boss Tuneage
10 This a cricket themed Oi record by a band called Geoffrey Oi!Cott entitled “The Good, The Bad & The Googly”, performed by guys with names like W.G. Disgrace and featuring songs with titles such as “Dart’s Player’s Wives”. Which part of all this is not screaming “10/10” at you yet?
Rod Modell
Incense & Blacklight
Plop
8 Miss all of last years hyper-limited Echospace 12”s but still want to listen to something that makes you fell like your trapped inside of an iceberg while old transistor radios hum and clunk somewhere in the near distance? All is well in the world for you then as Rod Modell has decided to release a CD that won’t disappear within five minutes of its onsale date.
Jungle Rescue
This is a thing I wrote for the 'Wazzup' news section of Vice about a Jean Prouve exhibition at the Tate Modern.
Ever heard of Jean Prouvé?
Nope? Ok here’s Prouvé’ 101:
He was the young turk of 19th century architecture who applied industrial concepts to minimal design. This means he basically had a sheet metal fetish and made simple, clean cut stuff to put in your house half a century before Ikea made millions from doing the exact same thing.
Like all people with an over-loaded greatness quotient Prouvé was unknown in his own lifetime but now his works are more sort after than copies of the first Velvet Underground acetate.
The scarcity of original Prouvé’s has led to a weird cottage industry of obsessives and collectors who scour the world looking for undiscovered gems. The Holy Grail of lost Prouvé loot were the three concept houses, which, it was rumoured, had been dispatched to the French colonies in the ‘50’s as a blueprint for cheap, sustainable housing. No one knew if these things existed or if it was all an elaborate architectural in-joke.
Until a guy called Eric Touchaleaume, who is basically the Indiana Jones of Prouvé hunting, decided to go to war torn Congo-Brazzaville to find out. He discovered two of the fabled ‘Maisons Tropicale’ in the Congolese jungle, riddled with bullets but salvageable.
After ‘charming’ the locals into parting with the structures, dismantling the whole lot, wrapping them in banana leaves and doing a little more ‘charming’ with the outbound customs to the tune of £23,000 Touchaleaume headed back to Paris with the fabled Prouvé’s in tow.
He swiftly flogged the first to rubber skinned hotel owner and sometimes Uma Thurman humping guy Andre Balazs for $5m. Balazs decided to kindly let the Tate Modern exhibit his new 5 million dollar flat-pack toy which, for people who care about design and stuff, was a pretty gigantic deal.
To commemorate its significance the exhibit curators commissioned our staff photographer Ben Rayner to shoot the three week assembly process for a time-lapse installation and forthcoming book, While we laughed at Ben every day when he tramped into the office after 12 hours shooting in the freezing February cold and rain the resulting film is pretty amazing so we had a chat with him once he’d thawed and the building was all built and stuff.
VICE: Couldn’t they just have left a video camera running the whole time, why did you even need to be there?
Ben Rayner: They are the only team in the world that could put that building together and they need a human being there taking photos. You couldn’t like just let a robot do it.
It looks like a treehouse. Surely you wouldn’t actually want to live in it?
It would be pretty good if I could live in it on the Thames like a big houseboat. I would get massive mirrors and interchangeable wall colours and one of those controllers where you can control the hi-fi and TV all in one. And a beer tap. A Red Stripe tap. Then I’d live in it.
Was it the most boring job you’ve ever done?
Nah I once had to take photos of a Norwegian woman’s kids. That was really boring. I just spent all day smoking fags, drinking loads of tea and talking to the French builders. They told me weird stories about heroin and women that I can’t repeat here. Oh, and I hung out with my friend Jose who was helping me out. His dad bought us a whole octopus for lunch one day.
Ever heard of Jean Prouvé?
Nope? Ok here’s Prouvé’ 101:
He was the young turk of 19th century architecture who applied industrial concepts to minimal design. This means he basically had a sheet metal fetish and made simple, clean cut stuff to put in your house half a century before Ikea made millions from doing the exact same thing.
Like all people with an over-loaded greatness quotient Prouvé was unknown in his own lifetime but now his works are more sort after than copies of the first Velvet Underground acetate.
The scarcity of original Prouvé’s has led to a weird cottage industry of obsessives and collectors who scour the world looking for undiscovered gems. The Holy Grail of lost Prouvé loot were the three concept houses, which, it was rumoured, had been dispatched to the French colonies in the ‘50’s as a blueprint for cheap, sustainable housing. No one knew if these things existed or if it was all an elaborate architectural in-joke.
Until a guy called Eric Touchaleaume, who is basically the Indiana Jones of Prouvé hunting, decided to go to war torn Congo-Brazzaville to find out. He discovered two of the fabled ‘Maisons Tropicale’ in the Congolese jungle, riddled with bullets but salvageable.
After ‘charming’ the locals into parting with the structures, dismantling the whole lot, wrapping them in banana leaves and doing a little more ‘charming’ with the outbound customs to the tune of £23,000 Touchaleaume headed back to Paris with the fabled Prouvé’s in tow.
He swiftly flogged the first to rubber skinned hotel owner and sometimes Uma Thurman humping guy Andre Balazs for $5m. Balazs decided to kindly let the Tate Modern exhibit his new 5 million dollar flat-pack toy which, for people who care about design and stuff, was a pretty gigantic deal.
To commemorate its significance the exhibit curators commissioned our staff photographer Ben Rayner to shoot the three week assembly process for a time-lapse installation and forthcoming book, While we laughed at Ben every day when he tramped into the office after 12 hours shooting in the freezing February cold and rain the resulting film is pretty amazing so we had a chat with him once he’d thawed and the building was all built and stuff.
VICE: Couldn’t they just have left a video camera running the whole time, why did you even need to be there?
Ben Rayner: They are the only team in the world that could put that building together and they need a human being there taking photos. You couldn’t like just let a robot do it.
It looks like a treehouse. Surely you wouldn’t actually want to live in it?
It would be pretty good if I could live in it on the Thames like a big houseboat. I would get massive mirrors and interchangeable wall colours and one of those controllers where you can control the hi-fi and TV all in one. And a beer tap. A Red Stripe tap. Then I’d live in it.
Was it the most boring job you’ve ever done?
Nah I once had to take photos of a Norwegian woman’s kids. That was really boring. I just spent all day smoking fags, drinking loads of tea and talking to the French builders. They told me weird stories about heroin and women that I can’t repeat here. Oh, and I hung out with my friend Jose who was helping me out. His dad bought us a whole octopus for lunch one day.
Tuesday, 12 February 2008
Death Set Interview
An Interview with the Death Set for Vice:
The Death Set Don’t Watch Neighbors
I am in love with Baltimore. Which is a little weird as I have never actually been there before. In my head it’s a mysterious wasteland filled with derelict warehouses strewn with the victims of Edgar Allan Poe stories and fringed by the high rise projects that you see in The Wire while Gram Parsons records croon quietly out of late night dockside bars. Even if it’s nothing like that it would still be great to go there just because every bit of music that comes out of the place right now seems to somehow be original, entertaining and best of all fun. Maybe it’s the low rent, communal living and abundance of arts based colleges or maybe there are just a bunch of super talented guys there right now. Either way you can’t really argue with a city that’s produced acts as varied and interesting as Dan Deacon, Spank Rock, Double Dagger and Cass McCombs. The Death Set arrived in the city as outsiders from Australia and soaked up the towns club, punk and Wham City scenes only to forge them into some weird hyperactive amalgam of the lot. Try imagining Video Hippos doing Fascist Fascist covers with a live show that has caused structural damage to several squat venues. For a band that make the Libertines look like Dire Straits in terms of holding it together the improbably named duo of Johnny Siera and Beau Velasco have managed to put out a hefty slew of 7”s on labels like Super Busy Bodies and Every Conversation. They now have a CD due on new Ninja Tune offshoot Construct but don’t worry: the one thing they sound nothing like is DJ Kentaro.
VICE: Is there a hierarchy in Baltimore with Dan Deacon as like, Old King Cole, Spank Rock as the court jester and Ponytail as the court choir?
Johnny Sierra (Guitars, bass, samples etc): When I first got to Baltimore I just happened to move in next door to the original Wham City so we used to play a bunch of shows there and I met Dan and all those guys. I met Spank Rock through our friend Emily Rabbit who put our first EP and there are just a bunch of connections between us all. We’ve done tours with Ponytail and live with their drummer and I mastered their last record. Nolen from Double Dagger is doing our artwork and everyone helps each other out. It’s nice.
You play all your live shows on the floor and people seem to always go nuts. Did you just see a Lightning Bolt show one day and think: “those guys are onto something there”?
I first saw ‘The Power Of Salad’ when I was living in Australia and it was pretty inspirational but we just did this one tour that had no stages and found it more fun to get in peoples faces. The reaction is usually pretty good. We played a basement in Brooklyn a few months back with Dan and people were running outside to throw up from heat exhaustion. The roof was also covered with some asbestos like crap. People were grabbing onto these water pipes covered in it and afterwards all these kids broke out with a weird grotesque rash. It felt like a thin layer of glass all over us for days.
I heard you had a side project called Retarded Kitten?
That was just stupid songs I wrote that weren't Death Set songs. One of the dudes who did it was in Lifetime so that was pretty cool.
In which soap does Alan Dale give the better performance: The OC or Neighbors?
I had to Google image search that dude. Fucked if I know. Not all Australians watch Neighbors you know.
www.myspace.com/thedeathset
Jimmy Jam Jar
The Death Set Don’t Watch Neighbors
I am in love with Baltimore. Which is a little weird as I have never actually been there before. In my head it’s a mysterious wasteland filled with derelict warehouses strewn with the victims of Edgar Allan Poe stories and fringed by the high rise projects that you see in The Wire while Gram Parsons records croon quietly out of late night dockside bars. Even if it’s nothing like that it would still be great to go there just because every bit of music that comes out of the place right now seems to somehow be original, entertaining and best of all fun. Maybe it’s the low rent, communal living and abundance of arts based colleges or maybe there are just a bunch of super talented guys there right now. Either way you can’t really argue with a city that’s produced acts as varied and interesting as Dan Deacon, Spank Rock, Double Dagger and Cass McCombs. The Death Set arrived in the city as outsiders from Australia and soaked up the towns club, punk and Wham City scenes only to forge them into some weird hyperactive amalgam of the lot. Try imagining Video Hippos doing Fascist Fascist covers with a live show that has caused structural damage to several squat venues. For a band that make the Libertines look like Dire Straits in terms of holding it together the improbably named duo of Johnny Siera and Beau Velasco have managed to put out a hefty slew of 7”s on labels like Super Busy Bodies and Every Conversation. They now have a CD due on new Ninja Tune offshoot Construct but don’t worry: the one thing they sound nothing like is DJ Kentaro.
VICE: Is there a hierarchy in Baltimore with Dan Deacon as like, Old King Cole, Spank Rock as the court jester and Ponytail as the court choir?
Johnny Sierra (Guitars, bass, samples etc): When I first got to Baltimore I just happened to move in next door to the original Wham City so we used to play a bunch of shows there and I met Dan and all those guys. I met Spank Rock through our friend Emily Rabbit who put our first EP and there are just a bunch of connections between us all. We’ve done tours with Ponytail and live with their drummer and I mastered their last record. Nolen from Double Dagger is doing our artwork and everyone helps each other out. It’s nice.
You play all your live shows on the floor and people seem to always go nuts. Did you just see a Lightning Bolt show one day and think: “those guys are onto something there”?
I first saw ‘The Power Of Salad’ when I was living in Australia and it was pretty inspirational but we just did this one tour that had no stages and found it more fun to get in peoples faces. The reaction is usually pretty good. We played a basement in Brooklyn a few months back with Dan and people were running outside to throw up from heat exhaustion. The roof was also covered with some asbestos like crap. People were grabbing onto these water pipes covered in it and afterwards all these kids broke out with a weird grotesque rash. It felt like a thin layer of glass all over us for days.
I heard you had a side project called Retarded Kitten?
That was just stupid songs I wrote that weren't Death Set songs. One of the dudes who did it was in Lifetime so that was pretty cool.
In which soap does Alan Dale give the better performance: The OC or Neighbors?
I had to Google image search that dude. Fucked if I know. Not all Australians watch Neighbors you know.
www.myspace.com/thedeathset
Jimmy Jam Jar
Telepathe
Here is an interview I did with the ace New York girl/girl duo Telepathe for Vice.
Telepathe have OCD just like me!
Bands tend to treat the ‘Influences’ column of their MySpace page like their own personal peacock parade ground. A chance to puff up their feathers and try to cook up a list that’s simultaneously more eclectic, obscure and populist than is feasibly possible. Nine times out of ten it’s best to just skip the whole thing altogether and actually listen to the MP3’s. A list that includes Three 6 Mafia, DJ Assault and Digital Mystikz to describe what has affected the sound of a Brooklyn two-piece electronics outfit on Social Registry does not bode well…were it not totally representative of the paradoxes that make Telepathe boner-inducingly great. They sound so refreshingly unlike almost everything else going on right now that they might as well be a called First Sip Of Ice Cold Lager On A Global Warmingly Hot Day In London Fields. Busy Gagnes and Melissa Livaudais create music as in thrall to the Hip Hop hooks of Hot 97’s daytime playlist as it is the loops and drones of Charalambides or Growing. They fuse primitive, repetitive chanting and electronic feedback with skippy drums you can actually dance to and moments of vocal melody that make you feel like Weiss sisters might be singing in the wings. While their early releases saw the girls exploring fuzz and drone it was with the “Farwell Forest” EP that they found their girl group meets Gang Gang with DJ Paul on the buttons middle ground. That record bought them to the attention of NY avant-overlord guy David Sitek who was so excited that he offered the girls a month is his studio to create a record. Out popped the perfect ‘Chromes On It’ and cue me not listening to anything else for three weeks.
VICE: You have referred to your music before as ‘process orientated’. What does that mean? Am I an idiot for not knowing?
Busy Gagnes (voice and effects): Maybe. It’s just the way we write. The process changes all the time. We continually change the instruments we use, our roles in the band, and the people we collaborate with. We place a lot of importance on how we make the music and not just the finished product. This takes the weight and pressure off of the final thing being ‘good’. I guess it's more of an ideal than a reality though because we definitely end up stressing out over recordings. We never release anything we don't fully believe in.
It sounds like you have case of ‘output OCD’. I have that with a lot of stuff. Like I can only use Pilot V5 Rollerball pens.
Melissa Livaudais (voice and effects): Erm, well, everything is very well calculated yes but not always well executed. No space for playing is ever the same and even if it is the same space there is no way we could have the same exact experience twice but improv does not appeal to me at all so I guess that is kind of OCD yes.
Is there a hot New York boy-boy duo who could be your avant-garde mirror image?
Busy: Stay High
Melissa: Stay High is for real. Some hot ass, cute little boys that make some fly music.
I hear wedding bells. Who are your favourite telepaths of all time?
Busy: Carrie White.
Melissa: Maybe Darth Vader but we are telepathic in the sense that all life on Earth is telepathic, we the same as you.
The “Dance Mother” LP is forthcoming on Social Registry.
www.myspace.com/telepathy
Avant Yams
Telepathe have OCD just like me!
Bands tend to treat the ‘Influences’ column of their MySpace page like their own personal peacock parade ground. A chance to puff up their feathers and try to cook up a list that’s simultaneously more eclectic, obscure and populist than is feasibly possible. Nine times out of ten it’s best to just skip the whole thing altogether and actually listen to the MP3’s. A list that includes Three 6 Mafia, DJ Assault and Digital Mystikz to describe what has affected the sound of a Brooklyn two-piece electronics outfit on Social Registry does not bode well…were it not totally representative of the paradoxes that make Telepathe boner-inducingly great. They sound so refreshingly unlike almost everything else going on right now that they might as well be a called First Sip Of Ice Cold Lager On A Global Warmingly Hot Day In London Fields. Busy Gagnes and Melissa Livaudais create music as in thrall to the Hip Hop hooks of Hot 97’s daytime playlist as it is the loops and drones of Charalambides or Growing. They fuse primitive, repetitive chanting and electronic feedback with skippy drums you can actually dance to and moments of vocal melody that make you feel like Weiss sisters might be singing in the wings. While their early releases saw the girls exploring fuzz and drone it was with the “Farwell Forest” EP that they found their girl group meets Gang Gang with DJ Paul on the buttons middle ground. That record bought them to the attention of NY avant-overlord guy David Sitek who was so excited that he offered the girls a month is his studio to create a record. Out popped the perfect ‘Chromes On It’ and cue me not listening to anything else for three weeks.
VICE: You have referred to your music before as ‘process orientated’. What does that mean? Am I an idiot for not knowing?
Busy Gagnes (voice and effects): Maybe. It’s just the way we write. The process changes all the time. We continually change the instruments we use, our roles in the band, and the people we collaborate with. We place a lot of importance on how we make the music and not just the finished product. This takes the weight and pressure off of the final thing being ‘good’. I guess it's more of an ideal than a reality though because we definitely end up stressing out over recordings. We never release anything we don't fully believe in.
It sounds like you have case of ‘output OCD’. I have that with a lot of stuff. Like I can only use Pilot V5 Rollerball pens.
Melissa Livaudais (voice and effects): Erm, well, everything is very well calculated yes but not always well executed. No space for playing is ever the same and even if it is the same space there is no way we could have the same exact experience twice but improv does not appeal to me at all so I guess that is kind of OCD yes.
Is there a hot New York boy-boy duo who could be your avant-garde mirror image?
Busy: Stay High
Melissa: Stay High is for real. Some hot ass, cute little boys that make some fly music.
I hear wedding bells. Who are your favourite telepaths of all time?
Busy: Carrie White.
Melissa: Maybe Darth Vader but we are telepathic in the sense that all life on Earth is telepathic, we the same as you.
The “Dance Mother” LP is forthcoming on Social Registry.
www.myspace.com/telepathy
Avant Yams
So So Modern Live Review
Here is a live review I did on the band So So Modern for the NME:
So So Modern
The Buffalo Bar, London
16/01/08
Nothing changes at the Buffalo Bar other than the band on the stage. Tonight it’s So So Modern as they make a final UK appearance before returning to their native New Zealand after weeks of talked up shows. While the support acts, Maths Class and The Ghost Frequency, share with their headliners an obsession with yelped vocals and intricate guitar and synth patterns layered over restless punk-funk rhythms they both fail at any point to transcend their obvious influences. It’s all basically a bit Rapture with added ADD guitar lines. No such problem for So So Modern. From the moment they stroll on stage in pseudo-shamanic cowls their tour-honed live show brings to mind not 2003 but a gloriously re-imagined 1993. ‘Synthgasm’ and ‘Firefights’ immediately translate the frenetic on-stage energy to the previously static crowd and it’s as if Q & Not U are playing from Don Caballero’s crib sheet. While the keyboard dominated ‘Love Code’ may lose a sense of momentum the band are never without focus or a maniacal sense of spontaneity. At one point they even cobble together a Melvins style drum circle. Awful name aside, in a sweaty North London basement it becomes apparent that Transgressive may just have signed the interesting, challenging and engaging act that Foals have wholly failed to become.
So So Modern
The Buffalo Bar, London
16/01/08
Nothing changes at the Buffalo Bar other than the band on the stage. Tonight it’s So So Modern as they make a final UK appearance before returning to their native New Zealand after weeks of talked up shows. While the support acts, Maths Class and The Ghost Frequency, share with their headliners an obsession with yelped vocals and intricate guitar and synth patterns layered over restless punk-funk rhythms they both fail at any point to transcend their obvious influences. It’s all basically a bit Rapture with added ADD guitar lines. No such problem for So So Modern. From the moment they stroll on stage in pseudo-shamanic cowls their tour-honed live show brings to mind not 2003 but a gloriously re-imagined 1993. ‘Synthgasm’ and ‘Firefights’ immediately translate the frenetic on-stage energy to the previously static crowd and it’s as if Q & Not U are playing from Don Caballero’s crib sheet. While the keyboard dominated ‘Love Code’ may lose a sense of momentum the band are never without focus or a maniacal sense of spontaneity. At one point they even cobble together a Melvins style drum circle. Awful name aside, in a sweaty North London basement it becomes apparent that Transgressive may just have signed the interesting, challenging and engaging act that Foals have wholly failed to become.
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