bass - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

how it felt to be alive in February 2020

The correct response to the title here is of course it depends who you are and what you did. But anyway; in a February when the big news story was the alarming spread of coronavirus/COVID-19, which history will tell us is either – (a) a pandemic like none seen since the 1918 flu outbreak which killed between 20 and 50 million people (quite a big ‘between’. that) or (b) an unfortunate but quite normal kind of illness which is causing inconvenience and a certain amount of tragedy but is mainly a media frenzy like SARS or Bird Flu, and will blow over soon – it seems a bit like fiddling while Rome burns to talk about music and books etc. But as everyone knows, Nero didn’t really fiddle while Rome burned, and anyway, the big and relatively thoughtful thing I was writing during the Christmas holidays is no further forward and I mainly spent February writing things for other places than my own website, so there it is.

I just finished reading the newest edition* of Jon Savage’s brilliant England’s Dreaming which is as good as any music-related book I’ve ever read and made me realise how many parallels there are between now and the political situation in mid-70s Britain. Up to a point, that is. It would be hard, even I think for a conservative person, to see the victory of Johnson’s Tories as a return to some kind of sensible order in the way that deluded right wingers saw Thatcher’s victory – which did, it has to be said, render somewhat pointless the extreme right wing groups like the National Front & British Movement that had been growing in strength and influence throughout the decade. As with Johnson/the ERG and their wooing of the UKIP/nazi fanbase though, the reassurance that comes from seeing extremist groups losing popularity is soured (to put it mildly) by having people in charge who appeal to that demographic.

*the latest revised edition is from 2005, and is the one to get – the excellent introduction, which addresses the ‘Englishness’ of punk within the wider UK setting, is itself quite dated, though more relevant than ever, and this version also contains a brief summary of that most surprising part of the whole Sex Pistols story – the band’s 1996 reunion.

Reading about punk – especially remembering the very tail end of it in the early 80s (i.e. seeing the stereotypical 80s fashion punks and skinheads and reading THE EXPLOITED/OI!/PUNKS NOT DEAD etc spray painted all over the place) it’s hard to imagine the force the movement had in ’76-7. In my own era, Acid House/rave culture/etc has had an even bigger impact on music and arguably a comparable one culturally, but although it annoyed grownups and upset politicians it was never as deliberately confrontational or as alien and ugly as punk. Its figureheads, insofar as it had any, could certainly be ‘outrageous’ in a way, but Shaun Ryder and Bez swearing on TV was worlds away from the omnipresence of the Sex Pistols in the UK media of the 70s; not least because the Sex Pistols and punk had already happened. Pop stars being obnoxious in the 90s was not a phenomenon – and the Pistols, despite everything, were a recognisable thing – a pop group or rock band.

The public and the tabloids knew about the existence of acid house, and might be alarmed by the ‘acid’ aspect in particular – but as far as signing record contracts, being on TV or playing concerts went, there wasn’t much to report on. An interesting thing about the acid house/rave phenomenon was that, although a musical movement, the music and its makers barely featured in the moral panics that ensued, it was all about the audience. Whether this made it more frightening to the older generation, I don’t know. In the 60s, the Woodstock kids might have been seen as outrageous dirty, drug taking hippies, but maybe the fact that they were being ‘incited’ by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Country Joe etc in a field (much like the teenagers in the 50s were under the influence of Bill Haley/Elvis etc and punk kids in the streets were being led astray by Rotten & co on TV) gave a clear them/us or leader/followers divide and made it easier to condemn/contain/control them? This is an interesting thing that I should think about more – except that I’m almost certain that there will be a book out there by someone who has thought about it more and knows a lot more than I do about the 90s (the most I can say is ‘I was there’, I wasn’t mostly very interested in acid house etc at the time).

Anyway; certainly the punks were heirs to the hippies (not that they would have welcomed the comparison) in that the visibility of the punk audience (who, whatever their claims of individuality, were clearly – especially by 1977 – dressing in emulation of other punks, of whom Johnny Rotten was the most visible example) marked them out as ‘other’. And made them a target of the authorities, as well as a flag for disaffected kids to rally to. The subtitle of England’s Dreaming – “The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock” is important. The Sex Pistols may not have the strongest claim to have invented punk, but in a sense that isn’t as true for other foundational bands, they were punk; their career trajectory; form band, play shows, cause outrage, record demos, cause outrage, sign contracts, appear on TV, cause outrage, get dumped by label, cause outrage get banned from venues, release singles, cause outrage, release album, cause outrage, split up, have a member die – within the space of around two years, is a microcosm of UK punk. The British punk scene was born with them and it essentially died with Sid Vicious; everything thereafter is either post-punk, second-wave punk or pastiche. Whether embodying a movement is an achievement as such is hard to say and in a way doesn’t matter, but what Savage documents is the way in which a youth movement – one with many and varied influences and antecedents – absorbed and expressed the anxieties of its time and in turn embodied and shaped them.

Away from that book, I’ll keep up with my pick of the most interesting things to be sent my way in February.

Out in April is a reissue of a noise-rock classic from 1995:

Caspar Brötzmann Massaker
Home
Southern Lord Recordings
Sounding something like The Birthday Party playing noisy free jazz, the Massaker are a brutal guitar-bass-drums (with minimalist vocals) trio; heavy on feedback, tense dynamics and churning distortion, but sometimes almost groovy and (very) occasionally kind of pretty. Home was their fifth album and it’s pretty similar to the only other one of their albums that I know, The Tribe, from 1987. Squally, angular and dark but with insistent percussion, it’s a great palate-cleanser for your ears after too much pop music.

I could say the same about this, very different but equally eccentric record:

JZ Replacement
Disrespectful
Rainy Days Records

Zhenya Strigalev (saxophone), Jamie Murray (drums) and Tim Lefebvre (bass) have made a frankly insane-sounding but weirdly addictive record that at different times reminds me of the John Zorn/Bil Laswell/Mick Harris jazz/grind band Painkiller, Ornette Coleman and King Tubby. But it also has the odd moment of funk, breakbeat and drum-n-bass. Nevertheless it’s amazingly coherent and although at times I thought Murray, Strigalev or Lefebvre was what made it so great, subtracting any one element would make it all collapse. Recording something at once as familiar and peculiar as any song here (‘Guilty Look 3‘ is a great example) is a special skill. Disrespectful borrows from everywhere and yet somehow sounds like nothing else – and really that’s just what jazz is all about.

Perchta
Ufång
Prophecy Productions

This Austrian black metal project has a very specific local (Tyrolean) focus, but judging by its Facebook page is the brainchild of Italian ex-pat Fabio D’Amore of symphonic power metal band Serenity; which makes sense – for all its atmospheric/folkish elements (there are some very nice jangly clean parts), this is a theatrical, musicianly album which feels epic and polished rather than dark and brutal. The band’s name refers to a pagan goddess, and throughout the album an odd, witchy narrator pops up declaiming or whispering, who I assume is the woman in the artwork, who the promotional material refers to as “the front woman [who] will sermonize, face-painted in historical black garb with embroidered belt and cast-iron broom …”

Not really my cup of tea overall, which is a shame because I really like the idea of the Tyrolean folklore etc, but it’s extremely well done and has some very good tunes and with the usual excellent Prophecy treatment it will no doubt find its audience.

Weekly Update: Complicated Comforts

For a variety of reasons, it is being a slightly stressful, sleepless time, so I’ve been looking at things that are, in a variety of perhaps complicated ways, comforting or soothing (to me). I suppose comforting because it can be a relief to have one’s brain stimulated by something other than worry about external events. So, possibly comforting but at the very least distracting, hopefully. Here are a few of those things:

Listen to these:

HAV – Inver (Folkwit Records, releases 5th May 2017)

I am not at all averse to folk music of various types, but I have to admit that on the whole I avoid the folk music of my own country. Partly it’s because most of the Scottish folk music I have come in contact with is dance music. I’m with Mark E. Smith on that one; I don’t want to dance (he may of course have contradicted that somewhere in the hundreds of albums he’s made since 1979). There are lots of kinds of dance music I do like, but the memory of Scottish country dancing at high school; of accordions, fiddles, ceilidhs etc; it’s just not for me. However, on their debut album, Inver, HAV make music that seamlessly combines the instrumentation and feel (and some of the tunes) of Scottish folk music with delicately atmospheric ambient electronica and field recordings and it is quite simply beautiful. Alternately bracing and embracing, it really seems to capture the feeling of the landscapes I grew up in, while also making the past (traditional songs like Loch Tay Boat Song, Peggy Gordon etc) feel present and the present timeless; which is surely what folk music is all about.

Regurgitate Life – Obliteration of the Self (Truthseeker Music, out now)

This could hardly be more of a contrast to the HAV album; Regurgitate Life was once the technical death metal solo project of Sammy Urwin, but is now a duo (Sammy plus drummer Daryl Best) and not having to play everything really seems to have made Urwin experiment more with his guitar playing and composition. Whereas his (highly recommended) 2012 debut album The Human Complex was a brutally exuberant creation with more riffs per song than some bands manage per album, the new songs, without sacrificing their heaviness, refrain from throwing everything into every song. Instead, the riffs and melodies are put together as effectively as possible and the songs, for all their extremity, have far more depth than before. Also, I think this is the first Regurgitate Life recording where Urwin’s compositional and technical skills are used with the same kind of imagination he showed with Oblivionized. The Human Complex was intense, punishing and fun; Obliteration of the Self is more complex but also more complete and satisfying; a deeper, wider ranging and more considered but no less brutal death metal album; progressive without being boring. Oh, and Daryl Best’s drumming is superb throughout.

Dominic Lash Quartet – Extremophile (Iluso Records, out now)

Despite the title, after the squeaks and pings intro of Puddle Ripple (the first of several strangely tense Lash compositions), Extremophile as a whole isn’t especially extreme (unless you hate jazz in general I guess). It is certainly an imaginative and wide-ranging album, featuring both a peculiar and beautifully atmospheric jazz exploration of the already very peculiar 14th century French composition Fumeux Fume and an epic, incredibly effective version of Cecil Taylor’s Mixed Mixed. The quartet consists of Lash on bass, Ricardo Tejero (saxophone and clarinet), Alex Ward (surprisingly loud stabby guitar and clarinet) and Javier Carmona (drums and percussion) and across the seven tracks on the album they range from joyous exuberance to fragile melancholy to tranquil menace to chaotic tension. It’s a really good album.

Read these:

One of the reasons I love art history so much is that it encompasses so many things; art and history (duh), but also psychology, politics, religion, sociology, gender studies, sexuality… the list goes on. And when a really good writer combines all of these things in the study of art which is in itself fascinating, emotionally involving and intensely unsettling you have, essentially, a very good read; with pictures! One such book is Sue Taylor’s brilliant study of the German surrealist Hans Bellmer:

Hans Bellmer,The Anatomy of Anxiety (MIT Press, 2000)

Whereas many of Bellmer’s admirers have sought to clear him of

Hans Bellmer 'La Poupee' (the Doll) 1934 — Hans Bellmer ‘La Poupee’ (the Doll) 1934

charges of misogyny and paedophilia in his art, Taylor, who subjects the artist and his work to Freudian analysis, neither shies away from, nor seeks to simplify these elements in his art. Regardless of whether one regards Freud’s discoveries as a) not actually universal, but specific to a particular period/class, b) not right, or c) genuinely revealing the workings of the human mind, the approach works extremely well with Bellmer’s obsessive, symbol-rich work, relating the images closely to his biography and preoccupations, and uncovering layers of plausible meaning in the process. His art is disturbing, and was supposed to disturb; to deny its problematic aspects is to misunderstand it and ultimately underestimate and trivialise its power. Anyway; this is a really good book.

Also art history related, but somewhat different is:

Munch by Steffen Kverneland (SelfMadeHero, 2016)

A graphic biography of the great Norwegian Expressionist Edvard Munch, Kverneland’s book uses Munch’s own words and those of his contemporaries to create a vivid picture (literally) of the artist’s life, times and the genesis of his most famous works. The inclusion of Kverneland and his colleague Lars Fiske working out the artist’s complicated life through often amusing conversation makes it not just a biography, but also a book about writing (and drawing) a biography and as such it is a multilayered and hugely enjoyable read.

And why not watch this:

The Last Kingdom (series 2, BBC2)

Okay, it’s not finished yet and could still turn bad, but after being dubious about the BBC’s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall their adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories still makes me not grudge paying the license fee. It’s extremely well made, directed and acted, but for me what makes it is the central performance of Alexander Dreymon as Uhtred of Bebbanburg; heroic but slightly comical, even a stint as a slave couldn’t kill his basic smugness for long.

Ride On A Golden Wave: Uriah Heep’s …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble

Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble (Vertigo/Mercury, 1970; Bronze shortly thereafter)

This year (2016), BMG begins an extensive reissue campaign of releases by one of the original Spinal Tap-influencing ‘rock dinosaur’ bands, the mighty Uriah Heep. Along with an anthology, the first of these releases is, logically enough, the band’s 1970 debut – one of my favourite albums of all time – …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble. This album is probably not cool. Judging by the mostly negative reviews it got in 1970 (‘If this group makes it I’ll commit suicide’ and ‘it’s too loud, too repetitive, too predictable’ are representative quotes) it never was cool, but 46 years later it can stand proudly alongside any of the hard rock, blues rock, progressive rock or rock-rock albums of its era.

And it was an era of rock; bear in mind that that particular year also spawned Deep Purple In Rock, Black Sabbath AND Paranoid, Led Zeppelin III and many more and, while the mighty Heep are perceived to be a relatively underground cousin of Deep Purple & co, they too ponced around the US in Lear jets and limos in a way that few new rock bands do nowadays. Judged on those 1970 albums alone, the band were clearly up there with the best. Slightly less heavy (but who wasn’t?) than Black Sabbath, more jazzy and poetic than Deep Purple, more riff-centric and bluesy than (1970-era) Led Zeppelin, …Very ‘Eavy… is monolithic but nimble, straightforward but, except in its most bludgeoning moments, not at all simplistic.

Unlike most decades, the 60s is often felt, culturally, to have a clear and decisive ending; from the perspective of nowadays, the Stones at Altamont and the Manson Family in Death Valley ended the peace & love/flower power era that was already shaken by the revolutionary events and protests of 1968. But the pre-Uriah Heep story, that of a band called Spice, (essentially Heep sans organist Ken Hensley), talent-spotted while playing in ‘The Blues Loft’ in High Wycombe, could not be more redolent of the hippy era. To me, the best work of Uriah Heep always has a hazy aroma late 60s underground optimism and …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble is a kind of time capsule of a world almost as distant and quaint now as the Victorian Age. This was a time when – as the great Charles Shaar Murray wrote (in a Cream magazine T-Rex article in 1972, just as the world moved into another cultural phase) – “Any gentle freak who believed that Nostradamus and King Arthur were alive and well in a UFO hovering somewhere over Glastonbury Tor, or who read Tolkien and Moorcock over his brown rice and apple juice, just had to own the Tyrannosaurus Rex albums...” It was these kind of freaks, one assumes, who in their less gentle moments, wanted to rock out to Spice. In High Wycombe. Incidentally, it may be this very hippy-hangover aura that prevented Uriah Heep from being as influential on the metal scene as their contemporaries, Black Sabbath (whose musical background in blues rock was very similar). Indeed, I can personally testify that the whole flared-trousers-and-moustaches vibe of the Heep (as well as the slightly bland rock they were putting out at the time) was enough to prevent some 80s metal kids from checking out their older work.

Anyway; Spice became a pretty well known band on the progressive rock circuit in the dying years of the 60s. In fact, their music as preserved on the first few LPs is very much ‘progressive’ in the late 60s blues rock sense (in which sense Led Zeppelin were also progressive), but not in the sense that ‘prog’ came to mean as the 70s wore on. Mick Box, founder, guitarist and, to this day the real heart of Uriah Heep, began as a jazz player and it was perhaps this more than anything, that coloured the heavy blues rock that Spice played; parallel to the British Blues boom but not really part of it, the band used elements of the blues, but they were never constrained by its structures.

The Band

Mick Box: guitar

(highly underrated as player, composer & all-round riffmeister)

David Byron: vocals

(a versatile, very English-sounding rock voice, equally at home with swaggering, earthy blues-rock vocalising and delicate fantasy

Ken Hensley: organ, guitar, vocals etc.

(Without Hensley Uriah Heep would have been far more like a standard late 60s blues-rock band)

Paul Newton: bass, vocals

(in the classic 70s tradition the bass is loud, clear & occasionally funky on this album; co-wrote lots of the songs.)

Alex Napier – drums (on half of the album)

(great, agile and subtle drummer, not as thunderous as some contemporaries, but for my money up there with the best; retired after leaving the band I believe)

Nigel “Ollie” Olsson: also drums, plays on a few songs

(another great drummer; went on to play with Elton John after his stint in the Heep)

THE ALBUM

1. Gypsy (Mick Box/David Byron)
The perfect opening track; after the busy little intro the simple, bludgeoning guitar/organ riff provides an excellent backing for David Byron’s authoritative vocal, establishing the Heep as a band of (for the time extremely) heavy sound and somewhat whimsical, romantic preoccupations; hippies in fact. Excellent organ and guitar soloing and harmony backing vocals by pretty much everyone make this a superb manifesto for the band’s approach. 70s heavy rock par excellence

2. Walking In Your Shadow (Paul Newton/David Byron)

An excellent funky drum intro which should be (has been?) sampled leads into a dynamic blues-rock song with another perfect vocal by David Byron. The song is a relatively understated version of the kind of pleased-with-itself blues rock swagger that Whitesnake were to excel in later in the decade, and it has an excellent Mick Box solo too.

3. Come Away Melinda (Hellerman/Minkoff)

A delicate and drama-filled version of the much-covered melancholy anti-war folk/protest song. Byron’s clear enunciation and expressive voice make the most of the (possibly slightly twee and pretentious) post-apocalyptic lyrics. Lovely mellotron-flute intro and lovely acoustic guitar; the key word is ‘lovely’. The great vocal is made even better by imaginative use of stereo.

4. Lucy Blues (Mick Box/David Byron)

A somewhat quizzical and sad blues-rock song, Lucy Blues is, despite occasional claims at the time that they were Led Zep clones, the closest Uriah Heep comes to Led Zeppelin on this album; not all that close. And with all respect to the iconic Robert Plant, David Byron managed the same kind of expressiveness without the melodramatic whimpering and screaming. As the original sleevenote remarks; ‘hardly unpredictable but rather pleasant’. Nice piano work adds to the barroom blues feel, far less epic than the usual Heep sound. Byron’s English accent gives the song a strange and unique flavour, as it tends to do on all of the more blues-based material – one of the features that makes early Uriah Heep so distinctive. Meanwhile, Ken Hensley proves himself master of the classic blues Hammond organ solo too.

5. Dreammare (Paul Newton)

Side two commences with one of the heavier songs on the album. Dreammare has an ominous organ intro, a strangely funky, reverby riff and a suitably feverish quality, enhanced by the speaker-to-speaker shimmer on the vocals. A nicely bad-tempered, squalling guitar solo too. This is perhaps the only song where the claims of sheer noisy unpleasantness could be deemed fair enough; for non-rock fans anyway.

6. Real Turned On (Mick Box/David Byron/Paul Newton)

Proto-Whitesnake swagger again (but even more so), Real Turned On is a cocky mid-tempo blues-rock tune with an angular riff, several good solos, tons of slide guitar by Ken Hensley and a good naturedly sleazy David Byron trying to lure a young woman with wine and so forth. Unreconstructed 60s freewheeling sexual (and arguably, but arguably not, sexist) revolution rock, it ends, oddly, with screeds of apocalyptic feedback.

7. I’ll Keep On Trying (Mick Box/David Byron)

Archetypically 70s flared-jeans hard rock, with organs, screaming guitar and an impassioned David Byron vocal. The tune skips between sinister-toned, portentious organ and wailing vocals and nimble-fingered fiddlyness during which every band member gets to show off, before settling into a heavy blues riff. There are tranquil interludes and dramatic, siren-like guitar and even a Zappa-esque wah-wah solo. If you don’t like this, you probably don’t like Uriah Heep; fair enough.

8. Wake Up (Set Your Sights) (Mick Box/David Byron)

The final track on the album is also the most ‘progressive’, jazzy one, which manages to encapsulate all of the facets of early Heepdom in six minutes. The intro has David Byron intoning ‘aaahhh’s over a bass and organ scales before a dramatic, grandiose verse about justice prevailing, before the music becomes a kind of hoppity, percussive jazz with some excellent bass playing and very understated guitars. As the song builds (with some enjoyably silly vocalising; ‘justice, justice, just-iiiice‘ etc) it breaks not into rock but another jazzy verse/chorus and then a lovely soft pastoral interlude before fading out. Byron’s vocal is highly theatrical and generally one of the best he ever recorded and it’s just an excellent, dynamic end to a superb album that people don’t like as much as I do; their loss.

As if all this wasn’t enough, the album is housed in one of the great rock sleeves of the era: a fallen warrior (David Byron in fact) covered in cobwebs, the darkness surrounding him only broken by the (superbly-fonted) logo and title. The gatefold features a photo of the band onstage.

The album was released in the US in a different and slightly inferior form (missing Lucy Blues, and featuring instead the great Bird of Prey from the band’s second album, Salisbury). The US album is simply called Uriah Heep and its cover – a kind of dragon/wyrm thing – is not one of the great rock sleeves of the era.

——————————————————————————————————

Although …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble is one of those rare perfectly formed albums that can only be marred by adding bonus tracks to, it is also one of those albums I have to own on multiple formats, and the 1996 CD release adds bonus tracks, thus:

Gypsy (single edit)
What is says; a shorter version, omitting the organ intro & so forth. Pretty great, though unnecessary

Come Away Melinda
An early version recorded by Spice before they changed their name to Uriah Heep. Interesting, not hugely different from the album version really, but Byron’s vocal has less feeling and it’s generally not quite as good.

Born in a Trunk
A rocking Spice tune, this features the kind of dynamics that early Heep excelled in, plus another strangely English David Byron vocal and some great funky drum breaks.

BMG’s latest version is in all regards superior to the 1996 version: wisely retaining the whole of the original album (but with beautifully remastered sound) as disc one of two, it adds an entire (and to be fair, slightly inferior) version of the album on disc two. These are unreleased (earlier or alternate takes) of most of the songs, plus the US mix of Bird of Prey and a nice Spice track called Magic Lantern.

Although the earlier versions are, naturally, mostly not quite as good as the finished ones, they are nearly there and, while Spice without Hensley can never equal Uriah Heep, that late 60s atmosphere, an indefinable (and you would think incompatible) mixture of unpretentious ‘let’s just get up and play’ attitude and love of airy, fantastical romance is present in its most concentrated form.

No hierarchy In the world of sounds: Kib Elektra interview

Singer and multi-instrumentalist Abi Bailey has an impressive list of credits to her name; as a session musician she has worked with Emilíana Torrini, Sylver Tongue, Brian Eno & Karl Hyde, among many others, but her work as a solo artist is even more impressive. Her debut EP, Blemishes, released under the name Kib Elektra and available as a limited edition cassette here through Bezirk Tapes, is a strange and beautiful collection of beguiling and intricately detailed glitch-pop songs and Abi was kind enough to take the time to talk about it, and various other things, so without further ado….

Although Blemishes is your first solo release, you have a lot of experience as a musician, do you feel very at home in the studio?

Hello Will, thank you for having me!

Yes I do feel at home in the studio, I like my own company and will happily spend hours on end working on ideas. The technical side of working as a producer is something I’ve had to brush up on a bit as I hadn’t really written seriously for quite a number of years. I’ve been enjoying experimenting with the new technology available to me

Where did the name Kib Elektra come from? Is there a difference between ‘Kib Elektra’ and ‘Abi Bailey’?

When Blemishes was being mastered I sat behind Sam [Norland], my master engineer in the studio and had the joy of brainstorming an alias for the project. It took ages but eventually I settled on Kib Elektra. Kib is a nickname of mine from childhood and Elektra is a girl’s name I like, it’s got a nice ring to it; and so I went with that – nothing profound I’m afraid! As for any difference between KE and AB.. none really – Kib Elektra is a part of me.

A striking aspect of Blemishes is the balance between electronic sounds and the more organic/human elements, but it’s not an obvious contrast; sometimes you have ‘perfect’ electronics and ‘imperfect’ vocals and in other places a quite angelic, pure vocal with a very glitchy bit of electronica, but do you differentiate between organic/synthetic/found elements or is the process different with each song? (what a question! Sorry, I hope you get what I mean :/ )

I’ve definitely been exploring the voice itself, as well as the ways in which to manipulate the voice though this record. Initially I treated it as an instrument like any other, and then on other tracks the voice revealed itself as more of a feature. As for the contrast, well it makes musical sense to me to have rough with smooth for certain tunes. Not much of what I’m saying is something I’ve necessarily consciously thought about when writing music.. often it just comes out the way it does instinctively and through experimentation.

On songs like Blemishes itself, the very detailed texture of the music gives it an extremely intimate feeling, would you say the sound/texture of a song is as important to you as the melody/songwriting aspect?

Absolutely, I don’t really see any hierarchy in the world of sounds, though sometimes the rhythm will take a turn to shine, or the melody, or the bass line. Even the silence and space or indeed lack of space can become a feature… One building brick is as important as another. This applies to the song and the sound world too. With the track ‘Blemishes’, Sam helped me to sculpt the sounds more as there was more space in which to do so. He honed the sounds to bring out the detail and texture with tonal colour.

Listeners (especially music journalists) tend to focus on the lyrics as containing the meaning of a song, but presumably the music is just as, or even more important in connecting with people, how much of your meaning is in the music, if that’s a question you can answer!

Indeed, as I said before all elements are integral to the piece as a whole. The music itself carries a lot of the emotion for me… sometimes the sparser the lyrics, the more meaning a listener can draw from a piece. Basically, the answer is probably quite a lot!

More straightforwardly, does your music inspire your lyrics or vice versa?

This always changes… Sometimes something will come to me like in the song ‘Blemishes’, which presented itself as a stripped down bass riff, leading to the lyrics ‘if you strip yourself down’.. Other times I will have something I intentionally want to write about, and the lyrical theme itself will inspire what comes musically.

In your work as a session player you have played lots of different kinds of music, does any one genre or type of music inspire you in particular?

So through sessioning I’ve had the opportunity to play a mixture of rock, pop, electronic, Latin, and African styles of course I’ve drawn inspiration.. I think it’s pretty much impossible not to be influenced in some way or another by the sounds surrounding you. I am definitely inspired by the heavy sound I’ve heard and played in stuff like rumba, post-rock, soukous and maracatu.. I do like my music to have a lot of bottom end and heaviness in general, and this is something I’ve always been drawn to and have felt connected with.

A related question, do you think the kind of glitch/pop showcased on Blemishes will be the Kib Elektra sound, or do you see KE as a name for whatever musical inspiration you happen to be following as an artist?

I reckon the Kib Elektra sound will probably stay in this realm.. I do write in other styles and plan to complete a collection of kuduro tracks at some point. I think this would have to be under another alias for sure though as kuduro and glitch pop are very very different!

You have worked with lots of musicians and singers, who if anyone would you say you have learned the most from?

I think I’ve learned bits and pieces from everyone. Emilíana Torrini taught me tonnes about the voice through osmosis really – she’s got lungs of steel! Midnight Davis taught me how to kick myself up the arse and get something finished as well as how minimal a lyrical idea can be.. The list could go on and on..

How did Blemishes come to be the first release on the Bezirk label, did you have any previous history with Daryl Worthington & Tristan Bath?

Well Tristan somehow found my demos on soundcloud and tweeted the link.. The connection was made there and then – wehay for the internet!

How big a part do your surroundings play in your songwriting?

Massively. I write in my home studio, which is in my kitchen/living room. It’s in a converted attic and has amazing treetop and garden views, I’m really lucky. There were some fantastic electric storms during the recording of the EP and I found it super special and energising recording with nature just there. I try to go out every day to my local fields, they are also pretty special and always seem to recharge and inspire me.

In theory the internet makes it much easier for artists to connect with the public, but it also makes it easier to give something a cursory listen and move on, do you find having an actual physical release makes it easier to connect with people than simply having songs online?

I must say it is novel for me to have a physical product – the internet is handy for sure and the EP probably wouldn’t be out if it weren’t for social networking. I do feel the attention span of people in general these days is shorter than when I was young, so yeah probably the physical product helps with this. A lot of people still like physical formats I believe. I like the fact it’s a bit more effort to listen to a physical release. If the listener makes the effort to physically put the tape or CD into a machine to play it out loud, then to me it feels like that person is more inclined to actually actively listen to it. I don’t really know if this is making the connection easier or more difficult… Perhaps it could be described as a deeper connection than with the digital.

Related to the last question; the idea of albums/single/EPs etc is almost an anachronism nowadays, do you think in terms of groups of songs rather than just songs?

I probably do group songs together… I seem to have spurts of writing tunes which would work together…It is still really early days to say what my normal pattern is though as I’ve only completed the whole process once!

A generic kind of question; who or what would you say are the biggest influences on your music?

I’d say probably at the moment nature and loss

Is it easy to find time for songwriting, or is it something you just do, whatever else is going on?

Yes writing is part of my weekly schedule. If it gets neglected I can go a bit doolally.

What does the rest of 2016 hold in store for you music-wise?

Mainly more writing, a few sessions here and there. There are plans to work on some vocals for electronica duo Neuschul as well. I’m potentially already in the process of writing another Kib Elektra EP at the moment as I’ve got a few tracks in progress.. this might progress into an album, depending on how the workflow goes. I’ll see where it takes me!

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions!

Thanks so much for having me and for the great questions – it’s been a pleasure!

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