Tag Archives: Gareth Jones

Erasure: Behind The Sleevenotes

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Being invited to write the notes for the reissue of Erasure was, as it was for I Say, I Say, I Say and Chorus, a humbling experience. A pinch-yourself moment. An honour. A privilege. All of these things. Whenever I’ve worked with Andy and Vince like this, I try to imagine what my younger self would think if he knew that one day he’d cross the rubicon between fan and employee of Erasure. I doubt he would believe it. I still can’t believe it.

I found myself reflecting on my younger self as I began the Erasure project. I very often mark out the significant events in my life through Erasure albums, and this was no exception, though perhaps the memories were a little more prominent and poignant than they had been with the previous two albums.

Between the first single, ‘Stay With Me’, and the album’s release, I’d left home and moved to university in Colchester. ‘Stay With Me’ seemed to capture a specific and strange feeling that descended on me as I made my final preparations for leaving, a feeling that was somewhere between optimism and fear. My first year campus university accommodation was in a tower block, and I imagined the observational viewpoint of Andy’s lyrics as if they were looking in on me as I started a new chapter of my life.

By the time ‘Erasure’ was released, I was already at university. I now forget where I purchased the album from but I suspect it was Our Price and I seemed to remember that it was the first week I was there. I still had some wages left from my summer job and I remember I also bought a pair of Levi’s. A shop worker in Birmingham, where I’d bought a pair of Levi’s before, told me to buy them with a larger waist size to avoid them being too tight, and that’s what I did with this pair. Within a month I’d lost so much weight at university that they became way too big and I couldn’t wear them anymore. I wasn’t ill and it wasn’t that my diet was poor: I’d just decided to become vegetarian to save more money so I could afford to maintain my record buying habit.

I first listened to Erasure in my tiny room in my tower block the afternoon of its release. I played it while ironing my new jeans.

“You had a pair of white jeans!” said Vince, when I told him this story. The connection of our Zoom call had either broken; or, more likely, he had deliberately misheard me.

“No, not white jeans,” I protested. (They were blue.)

“Oh man, I can’t believe you wore white jeans,” he laughed, ignoring me, his face displaying the huge grin I’ve become accustomed to seeing over the years. “I don’t think I can talk to you any longer.”

If BMG don’t invite me to write the liner notes for any future reissues, you now know why.

—

Whenever I’ve approached Erasure liner notes, I’ve always followed two guiding principles. The first is to never rely on either my own personal recollections or the massive amount of magazine and newspaper clippings that I collected voraciously at the time. The other is to try and include as many voices as possible in the piece.

The first principle is important. I want these notes to tell the story of the album, and I can think of no better way of doing this than speaking to the people who made it. In many cases, a detailed account of the process of making an Erasure album has never really been written, which gives these notes – I hope – a certain freshness, rather than something familiar. I also go back to what I was saying at the beginning. I am, first and foremost, a fan. These albums are important parts of my life and I’m completely biased. I figure that the best way to avoid these pieces being nauseatingly gushing fanboy pieces is to focus on telling the story. I’m also naturally inquisitive. I like to get inside a story. I like the details.

The ‘many voices’ principle is one that I really, really enjoy following. This isn’t a reaction, by the way, to not getting much information out of Andy and Vince. Far from it. Both have always been incredibly forthcoming with their recollections, and I could easily write these pieces without relying on any other input. But there are always more than two characters in these stories, and those other characters always play an important role, not least because they give us the opportunity to see what it’s like to watch Andy and Vince at work. Those players give a totally different, external perspective on the Erasure creative process, as well as life beyond the studio.

Vince would, for example, never talk about his cumbersome coffee machine and the elaborate process of making cappuccinos before recording sessions at his 37B studio could begin; engineer George Holt did, because they were the best cappuccinos he’d ever drunk, and it was an important part of the daily routine in the studio. Andy wouldn’t necessarily talk about the different ways that his voice would be recorded; Gareth Jones, who produced Andy’s vocal, could explain how he suggested things like sitting on the sofa in his room at Strongroom, or lying on the studio floor to get the specific vocal texture he thought worked best.

For Erasure, I spoke to Andy first. Andy was at his house in Mallorca, where he has some of the original Ashley Potter paintings that were used across the album and single sleeves. He spoke to me from the room containing the piano that became the focal point of Herbie Knott’s celebrated press photograph for the album. I next spoke with Gareth Jones. Gareth and I sat in the artLab, his studio at Strongroom in Shoreditch, and listened back to the album. This is the third time he and I have done a playback like this, and it’s always a fascinating and illuminating experience to hear anecdotes and memories prompted by listening to the music. We spent an inordinate amount of time trying to identify Paul Hickey’s vocal contribution on the track ‘Love The Way You Do So’ and a long time debating whether I should try and speak to Diamanda Galás (in the end, I tried, but didn’t manage to secure time with her).

With Vince, apart from talking about my white jeans, we spent a lot of the time talking about Dark Side Of The Moon and how it influenced the sound of ‘Erasure’. Vince and I have spent a lot of time talking about this album over the years, and at his insistence he made me buy a vinyl copy because, in his emphatic view, Dark Side Of The Moon should only be heard on vinyl. When Vince is serious about something, I find its best to follow his advice, and he’s never wrong. The whole time I was compiling the liner notes, a copy of Dark Side Of The Moon sleeve was behind me in the room I do my writing in. I read up about the Pink Floyd classic voraciously, watched a documentary about it to understand its technical appeal to Vince, and listened to it almost as many times while writing the piece as I did Erasure.

Perhaps because he knows I am a bit of a technical Luddite, Vince and I rarely talk in detail about the process of making sounds. He once showed me how his studio works and how everything connects up, but I think he noticed quite quickly that I was confused and so anyone looking for my notes to explain precisely how he made that bass sound three minutes into ‘Rock Me Gently’ will always be disappointed. To me it’s basically just magic, and I’m happy for my understanding of what Vince does to stay that way.

Most of the technical detail for the liner notes came from Thomas Fehlmann and George Holt. Similar to when I spoke to Martyn Ware for I Say, I Say, I Say, what I got from Fehlmann and Holt was their awe at how Vince worked. They clearly both work on a technical level that most of us would only ever aspire to, yet they thought what Vince did was basically magic as well. Vince insisted that I should meet George and ask him to cook me Italian food, as he thought he was the best chef he’d ever met; alas, that didn’t happen, but George did offer. Food came up a lot in conversations with the Clarke / Fehlmann / Holt trio, as did lots of tales of larking about in the downtime around the sessions.

Vince encouraged me to speak to Lloyd Puckitt, the mix engineer who worked at Strongroom with François Kevorkian on the album. I tracked him down and was so pleased that Vince had suggested it. I couldn’t secure time with François (“He’s always so busy,” said Daniel Miller) but, in many ways, speaking to Lloyd was better. This was a man who, by his own admission, got to witness two geniuses at work – he would watch the meticulous way that François set up and managed a mix, and he gushingly recalled a moment when Vince brought his Arp 2600 into the mixing room at Strongroom to add additional percussion sounds to a track at the near-final stage. Few people have seen Vince making sounds up close like that, and for Puckitt it was a hugely memorable day on the job.

My final interview was Daniel Miller. Daniel’s involvement with any Erasure album is often understated and imperceptible, but it’s always important. His guiding presence – never controlling, always supportive, always honest – is all over Erasure. It didn’t trouble him at all that this album wasn’t going to yield lots of pop hits for Mute. He thought it made make sense for Andy and Vince to stretch out their sound expansively, though he quickly challenged my assertion that this was the duo at their most experimental. “I generally find the word ‘experimental’ a little bit tricky,” he said to me. “Whenever anybody goes into the studio there’s an element of experimentation.” Daniel was responsible for the art direction of the album, incidentally.

I find myself obsessed with the routines involved when making Erasure albums, especially when Andy and Vince were working apart. For me, that’s what allows me to move from being a mere listener to being a fly on the wall of the creative process. I loved George’s stories about hauling himself in his car (“A 1957 Land Rover with no roof.”) from his girlfriend’s house in Dalston, to Soho to collect Thomas, and on to Vince’s place in Chertsey. I loved knowing that Andy and Gareth were night owls, recording beyond the small hours and running up against the mixing deadline, their tight bond yielding hours and hours of vocal recordings, much of which is sitting, unused, on the master tapes.

—

I recently met up with Janet Gordon, who managed the Erasure Information Service when Erasure was released. We got to talking about the ‘Private Ear’ booklets she produced for fans, and the annual charts she would ask us to complete for our favourite songs, B-sides, remixes etc.

There was also a section for ‘worst remix’, and for as long as I can remember, the top slot was taken by The Orb’s Orbital Southsea Isles Of Holy Beats remix of ‘Ship Of Fools’. That always baffled and frustrated me, and I generally voted it my favourite remix because of that. I loved The Orb. I’d been to see them at Warwick Arts Centre in 1994 and it was a decidedly transformative experience. At university I often said it was more important than my first sexual experience. I loved what Alex Paterson and Thrash did with ‘Ship Of Fools’ – stretching it out, exposing its fragile beauty and taking it off along a course that only someone with Paterson’s imagination could. When I heard that Thomas Fehlmann was going to produce the album, I smiled to myself.

By then, Fehlmann was a member of The Orb, though he hadn’t been at the time the ‘Ship Of Fools’ mix had been completed. When I spoke to him, he was aware that Alex and Trash’s mix had been universally derided, and I think we both shared the view that encouraging Vince to work with a producer attached to a group that was wholly un-Erasure was a brave, bold and typically Daniel suggestion by Mute’s boss.

It’s not right to call it a gamble. It was far too calculated for that. But however you might describe it, it paid off. Fehlmann readily admitted that his role could never be to suggest how Vince should make sounds. That would be like me trying to convince Vince that I didn’t have a pair of white jeans. Fehlmann’s value to ‘Erasure’ was in the arrangement, and how a track was permitted to evolve freely along its own path and hugely exceed the accepted length of a typical pop song.

There are so many things going on in these tracks that I don’t think it will ever be possible to hear them fully, or ever fully know them, and that’s undoubtedly part of its charm. Andy said that these are among the songs he is proudest of. Vince said that it was an album he played repeatedly to friends on his very expensive home stereo, excitedly pointing out details and sounds that may have gone unnoticed.

—

I held back tears when I first played Erasure. I wasn’t remotely sad: these were happy, joyous tears that I wanted to cry. I remember that was the first time that had happened, but it’s happened every time they’ve released an album ever since. I was a fairly emotionally closed person back then, and I’m happier to let the tears of joy flow freely now. There’s always something poignant and reassuring about the band you love the most coming back into your life with something new.

Erasure was a transitionary album for Vince and Andy, released at a transitionary moment in my life. Listening back to the album, and listening to its creators reminiscing about its creation, allowed me to revisit my younger self all over again. A lot has happened in 27 years. We’ve all lived, and are living, through a messy cocktail of joy and sadness; we’re all significantly older than we were then; we’ve all experienced tragedy and hope countless times since Erasure was released. But for the briefest time, I was able to transport myself back to being a callow youth at the start of my adult life, with all of that ahead of me, and for that I’ll be eternally grateful.

Thanks to Shaun, Richard and Janet.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2022 Documentary Evidence

Sunroof / Simon Fisher Turner / MICROCORPS / Nik Colk Void – IKLECTIC Art Lab, London 20.05.2022

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MICROCORPS / Alexander Tucker

Mute and Mute Song artists took over the IKLECTIK Art Lab near London’s Waterloo on Friday 20 May 2022 for a night of electronic music adventures.

Alexander Tucker’s MICROCORPS project offered faltering, industrial beats that usually formed out of a noisy, joyous sprawl of rapidly switched patch cables, over which he was prone to howl processed, wordless missives. An element of surprise dominated Tucker’s set, with sounds and rhythms cutting out suddenly just as you’d figured out how to shuffle along. A final segment found Tucker accelerating a beat so harshly that it rapidly left gabba territory and more than likely broke Moby’s ‘Thousand’ record with its pacing before abruptly stopping.

Simon Fisher Turner

Simon Fisher Turner presented nowhereyet, his sounds – inchoate melodies, processed cello, clamorous beats – set to a slideshow of London photographs by Sebastian Sharples. There was something eerie about Sharples’ photos, appearing to show a mostly empty, lockdown-era vision of the capital. We cross-cross from Spitalfields to the bombed-out sanctuary of St. Dunstan in the-East; from monolithic skyscrapers to snow-covered residential streets; from Canary Wharf construction to a deserted Bond Street. Fisher Turner’s music seemed to carry the same sort of alien, mournful sparseness; it’s as if the sounds and images, to paraphrase the enquiry ‘if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’, pondered the question as to whether a place devoid of its people can still be considered a place at all.

Sunroof / Daniel Miller & Gareth Jones

Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones resurrected their occasional Sunroof collaboration for a celebrated collection of modular synth improvisations, released last year as Electronic Music Improvisations Vol. 1. For their Iklectik set, they were seated opposite one another in a manner reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage’s 1968 chess game, the board and its pieces replaced by innumerable boxes of flashing lights and tangles of coloured cables. In contrast to the pieces on their album, the set was intensely rhythmic, with grids of spare, almost skeletal beats instead of carefully-wrought, sinewy sequences. Miller and Jones have been friends and sonic adventurers together since 1982 and the symbiosis between them as they teased rhythms and patterns from their kit without ever seeming to communicate with one another was a testament to that enduring partnership.

The evening was interspersed with DJ sets from Nik Colk Void, ranging from juddering techno through to a memorable after-hours moment where she dropped Mudhoney’s socially-undistanced anthem, ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’.

Nik Colk Void / Mat Smith – photo by Leanne Mison

See Sebastian Sharples’ photos of the night at Instagram.

Words and bad photos: Mat Smith

(c) 2022 Documentary Evidence

Nous Alpha – A Walk In The Woods

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Nous Alpha is a duo of Christopher Bono and Gareth Jones. A Walk In The Woods is their second album together and was released on May 7 2021, just ahead of Gareth’s third album in less than a year, his collaboration with Daniel Miller as Sunroof. I was asked to write liner notes for the release, which have been re-produced below with the kind permission of Our Silent Canvas.

A Walk In The Woods is the second album by Nous Alpha, a collaboration between multiinstrumentalist Christopher Bono (Ghost Against Ghost, Bardo, Nous) and noisemaker Gareth Jones (Spiritual Friendship, Grizzly Bear, Depeche Mode). Like the immersive Without Falsehood, their 2019 debut album, A Walk In The Woods was created at Our Silent Canvas’ converted barn studio in the Catskill mountains during Fall 2019.

Nous Alpha is a partnership almost five years in the making, beginning when Christopher asked Gareth to help mix two tracks for his project Ghost Against Ghost, which appeared on the 2017 album still love. “It was a huge task,” recalls Gareth, “but out of that intense experience Chris and I forged a spiritual bond and a musical relationship.”

Nous Alpha emerged through Christopher and Gareth’s desire to work together on a project that would exist as a parallel to NOUS, Christopher’s loose collective of diverse players with improvisation as its cornerstone. From the beginning, it was agreed that they would always work together in person, eschewing the obvious convenience of distance collaboration between New York and London. Without Falsehood was formed from a series of ‘duet improvisations’, governed by a constraint that any further contribution needed to be a second duet improvisation, resulting in a suite of layered, and yet uncluttered, tracks.

For A Walk In The Woods, they set themselves different constraints. “We had some specific ideas about this second album,” says Christopher. “We decided we’d work on a tempo grid this time around, rather than being so very freeform in our approach, and that we’d limit the length of the songs.” Working this way made the sessions for ‘A Walk In The Woods’ more electronic than its predecessor. Where Without Falsehood used acoustic textures and familiar instrumentation, A Walk In The Woods abandons those elements and adds synth passages, evolving melodies and skeletal, hypnotic rhythms.

Naturalistic elements, used as the basis of what could be called organic improvisation, were created by performing with found objects in the dense woods of the nearby Catskill Mountains, and the outbuildings around the studio. These foraged fragments form the seeds from which each track grew: stones and rocks are the foundation of beats across the whole record; a tranquil pond provides the sonic jumping-off point for the noisy ‘Blackwater’; ‘Bike Wheels’ uses the distinctive mechanical sounds of a bicycle as its base layer.

If their walks in the nearby woods provided the impetus for the tracks, the trees surrounding the studio also supplied the duo with a means of escape from cabin fever. “We developed a ritual,” remembers Gareth. “We had a gong hanging up in the studio, and when either of us felt it was necessary we would go and bang the gong. That meant we’d either sit and meditate or go on a circular walking meditation through the trees around the studio building. We would walk, stop, contemplate and breathe. It was the most positive and creative way to reconnect.”

This sense of spirituality is another critical ingredient in how A Walk In The Woods evolved. “I see it as our own version of shamanism,” says Christopher. “There was a definite trance state that happened within the studio space while we were creating, and this offered an opportunity for transformation. Channeling that energy became critical to what happened on this album.”

The result of their constraints, discipline and ritualistic approach to the creative process is a body of work steeped in harmony and balance – of beauty and melancholy, of technology and nature, and of two like-minded spiritual beings in creative lockstep with each other. It is an album that is utterly unpredictable, where a track like ‘Fox Hollow’ can be graceful, yet also showcase a dizzying back-and-forth exchange of ideas.

A Walk In The Woods feels like a contemporary Walden-esque rumination, evoking a sense of selfdiscovery and unity with one’s surroundings, but one where modern technology is added to Thoreau’s concept of simple living. On ‘Fibonacci Failure’ we hear rippling sequences and turbulent, constantlyevolving rhythmic passages that sound like a sudden rainstorm heard from inside a cabin. The watery tones and chanting we hear on ‘Golden Lemon’ has the euphoric, hopeful quality of a Fall sunrise. And on ‘Virtues’, we hear Christopher and Gareth calling out a list of affirmations set to stirring melodies and washes of gathering electronic clouds.

From the sampled field recordings that it began with, to its many, often turbulent, sonic juxtapositions, the nine electronic tracks on A Walk In The Woods delicately reflect back the stillness and drama of the natural world.

– Mat Smith, Electronic Sound

Listen to A Walk In The Woods here. Watch the videos for tracks from the album at YouTube below.

A Walk In The Woods by Nous Alpha was released May 7 2021 by Our Silent Canvas

(c) 2021 Our Silent Canvas

Spiritual Friendship – Drones

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Seven chakra-inspired drones released weekly from February 1 by Calllm, a new ambient label from Calm + Collect

‘Root’ released today – listen here.

Drones appear throughout the early history of music, across many cultures. They reflect nature’s most elemental hum, the chord that threads its way through creation, said to be the sound of the universe as it stretches out into the infinite unknown. Channelled in Indian spiritual music, through the battlefields of Scotland and on through the minimalism of pioneers like La Monte Young and Phil Niblock, the drone is a universal constant in music, one that instils a sense of vibrating in perfect synchronicity with the energy that surrounds us.

For Spiritual Friendship – the pairing of hip-hop beatmaker and producer Nick Hook (Run The Jewels, 50 Backwoods, Gangsta Boo) and fellow producer and noise maker Gareth Jones (Depeche Mode, Nick Cave, John Foxx) – the idea of creating a suite of drones was not informed by their own shared spiritualities or an awareness of the transcendent properties these sonic devices possess; instead, it was the electrical hum of a hot tub the pair were sharing one balmy night in Asheville, North Carolina that coincided with a eureka moment from Gareth.

The pair were in Asheville in the summer of 2017 for a week-long residency at the Moog Sound Space. Previous collaborations between the pair had taken place either at Nick’s studio in Brooklyn or Gareth’s studio in London, whereas for what became DRONES they were sharing an apartment together in Asheville, and the experience of being away from each other’s normal equipment proved to be inspiring. They decided to build a fort out of vintage synthesisers in the upstairs performance space at Moog Sound Space and create a number of individual drones, each one representing one of four chakras – the root chakra, the sacral chakra, the heart chakra and the crown chakra.

The project referenced their debut album together (SPIRITUAL FRIENDSHIP, 2016) which comprised base elements of drums, drones, field recordings and sequences. In Asheville they decided they would make a series of albums isolating each of those individual elements. DRONES would be the first to be created, but to date only one of the pieces Nick and Gareth recorded during that week has been officially released (‘Root’, issued on Alternative Medicine as a limited edition cassette in 2018).

Spiritual Friendship (Gareth Jones & Nick Hook) recording Drones, Asheville 2017

“I was pretty scared at first,” admits Nick as he recalls their Asheville sessions. “I’m a wild ADD, hyperactive kid. I didn’t really understand how to do this. Gareth was like, ‘We’ll just set it up and let it breathe,’ and that’s what we did. When I heard all the harmonic interactions that could happen in a single drone, it felt like I was listening to free jazz.” 

“Each of the drones is simple,” adds Gareth. “We chose to honour each of the chakras with a drone note. We didn’t do any deep mystical research into the actual tuning – we just used the conventional scale for the drones. We set up a whole bunch of oscillators from Moog, and we borrowed a rig from Make Noise, who are also based in Asheville. It was important to us that we could fuse equipment from two companies who have been so inspirational to both of us. Just as Nick says, it all interacts with itself, almost as if there’s this gentle swaying between each of the frequencies, and these unexpected rhythms and melodies begin to emerge.” 

The process for each of the new pieces would be the same: they would set up the drone around a particular note, meditate together for fifteen minutes, stand up and then hit record, allowing the ground tone they’d created to evolve and develop. The pieces, typically lasting around 45 minutes, were executed with no conversation between Nick and Gareth. They relied entirely on instinct, and the kind of shared deep listening and non-verbal cues normally the preserve of improvising players as they altered the sound they’d constructed using volume controls and filters. Each piece was created completely live, with no overdubs, each one displaying a commanding resonance and a restless, ever-changing hypnotic energy.

Recording drones, Asheville 2017

“We turned it up as loud as it would go,” recalls Nick. “The guys at Moog were excited to hear their gear being used at very high volumes. They got to hear our drones rumbling and howling for eighty hours that week, while they were downstairs building the modern versions of what we were using upstairs, by hand. It was literally like a farm-to-table ecosystem.” At the end of the week’s residency, after sequestering themselves away in the synthesiser fort they’d built with very little contact with the outside world, the pair invited friends from the Moog and Make Noise workshops into the space for a special final live performance. They would go on to perform further live drone events for friends in Manhattan and a immersive two-and-a-half-hour drone, based around the solar plexus chakra, at 2018’s MoogFest.

To launch the new Calllm ambient label, Nick and Gareth felt it was time to complete the DRONES project with two pieces referencing the remaining chakras – the throat and the third eye. “Pushed by the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, the end of 2020 and a realisation that we hadn’t seen each other physically this year, we decided to create these last two drones remotely,” explains Gareth. Nick created the basis for the third eye chakra and Gareth created the basis for the throat chakra. They then each added to the other’s creation remotely, thus finalising the suite of drone recordings they envisaged in Asheville.

Beginning on February 1 2021, all seven DRONES will be made available as a weekly series of digital releases through Calllm. Each release will be accompanied by a Spiritual Friendship drone performance on YouTube and Twitch accompanied by live watercolour painting by Calm + Collect illustrator Hydriaillustrations and guided meditations from Quazzy.

Calm + Collect: Instagram | Twitter | Bandcamp | YouTube | Twitch

2017 drone suite
Root (46:40, C)
Sacral (57:24, D)
Heart (37:00, F#)
Crown (41:49, B)

2018 MoogFest performance
Solar Plexus (2:21:43, E)

2021 drones
Throat (43:39, G)
Third Eye (44:16, A)

DRONES release schedule
All live performances are scheduled for 1100 EST / 1600 GMT

Root – digital release February 1 / live performance February 4
Sacral – digital release February 8 / live performance February 9
Solar Plexus – digital release February 15 / live performance February 16
Heart – digital release February 21 / live performance February 23
Throat – digital release March 1 / live performance March 2
Third Eye – digital release March 8 / live performance March 9
Crown – digital release March 15 / live performance March 16

Spiritual Friendship discography:
Spiritual Friendship (Calm + Collect, 2016)
Drums (Calm + Collect, 2018)

Press release text (c) 2021 Mat Smith for Calm + Collect

Producer Gareth Jones to release debut album ELECTROGENETIC

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GARETH JONES – ELECTROGENETIC

Album released 18th September via Calm + Collect

 

ELECTROGENETIC is the debut album by producer and noise maker Gareth Jones.

Gareth is perhaps best known for adding his distinctive studio technique to albums from Yann Tiersen, Interpol, John Foxx, Erasure, Grizzly Bear, Nick Cave, Depeche Mode and countless others. More recently he has collaborated with Nick Hook in the duo Spiritual Friendship and with Christopher Bono as Nous Alpha. After many years spent in legendary studios in Europe and the US realising other people’s projects, Gareth decided now was the time to record his first solo album.

ELECTROGENETIC is immediately and necessarily personal. Recorded over a year-long period following the passing of his mother and mother-in-law, reflections on life and death hang heavy over the album’s nine pieces. The emotive and stirring ‘Farewell’ and ‘Safe Travels’ were recorded in his mother-in-law’s home in Michigan during a house-clearing visit following her passing; his photograph on the sleeve shows a view from the desk in London where many of the album’s pieces started, containing his late father’s wedding ring and an ankh, a symbol of fortitude that Gareth has been drawn to from his teenage years right through to his recovery from cancer over a decade ago.

Across the record you hear delicate, simple melodies, each one fashioned from lovingly-tuned samples of his mother’s piano that he played as a boy. Here you will also find motifs played on the recorder, an instrument that the infant Gareth learned to play, evoking a sense of youthful innocence, and complementing sections of spoken word.

These naturalistic elements – piano, recorder, voice – sit on top of intense, writhing nests of searching electronics that unfold with an understated forward motion. Those pulsing, criss-crossing patterns acted as the starting point for ELECTROGENETIC’s tracks, which in turn inspired the album’s title. “The name embodies my creative interaction with the machines,” explains Gareth. “These pieces each started with me building a patch with my modular synth. Building a patch is a creative act, but in a way you’re not really in control of what it does. Each time I started a piece the modular gave me back something that I would never have done consciously, or deliberately.”

The process gave Gareth hours of material to work with, which was then edited down into the seamless sequence of far shorter pieces presented on the album, with the other elements added on top. Tellingly, the album’s logical opener, ‘The Beginning’, finds Gareth reading from the Book of Genesis in Wesley’s Chapel in Islington, its familiar creationist text acting less as a statement of religious belief but as an allegory for the creative process that he went through while developing these pieces – namely taking a modular patch that was without form, and transforming it into something exuding brilliant light.

‘Mercury’, the album’s dramatic, yet meditative, centrepiece finds Gareth ruminating on the dualities of life that he is continually drawn to. Here he toys with the idea of Mercury as the Winged Messenger of the ancient Roman religion, while also reminiscing about the thermometers of his youth, the mercury’s rise and fall representing our perpetual ups and downs, of our continually fluctuating emotional states. The piece ends with a poignant ode to Mother Earth, an offering of thanks to the planet we call home, but also an appreciation of the mother figures whose passing fed into the creation of ELECTROGENETIC.

“The record is about death, commemoration, celebration, separation and transition,” reflects Gareth. “I’ve always been conscious of mortality, and of course I’m more and more conscious of that as I get older. I turned 65 last year, and the symbolism of that, plus an appreciation of the ongoing cycle of life, is what informed this album. I wanted to make something that was authentically me, something that was utterly personal yet whose themes would be relatable to everyone. I like to think that’s what I’ve achieved with this album.”

ELECTROGENETIC will be released as a download, stream and limited-edition cassette through Calm + Collect on 18th September 2020.

For more information on ELECTROGENETIC, including Gareth’s notes on each track, visit the album website – electrogenetic.com

Visit Calm + Collect at Bandcamp

Track list:

1. The Beginning
2. Trinity
3. Mercury
4. Michigan
5. Farewell
6. Goonhilly
7. Safe Travels
8. I Believe
9. Alone Together

Calm Collect.jpg

(c) 2020 Mat Smith for Calm + Collect

Stubbleman – Mountains And Plains (Crammed Discs album, 2019)

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Stubbleman is the alias of Pascal Gabriel, formerly of Mute electronic pop alumni Peach, a central figure in Rhythm King via S’Express, Bomb The Bass and others, and a producer to the stars. Mountains And Plains was inspired by a trip across the breadth of the United States and finds Gabriel in deeply reflective territory, the eleven pieces here tapping into a voguish, borderless modern classical style wherein an array of analogue synthesizers sensitively accompany stentorian piano. The album was mixed with the knowing ear of fellow Mute stalwart Gareth Jones.

Despite the grand scale of the vistas, buildings and infrastructure that Gabriel was enthralled and captivated by, there is a deeply introspective tone here, one that only slips into uplifting territory on the closing piece, the ephemeral ‘Piety Wharf’. Could it be that he is silently commenting on some sort of quasi-political squandered environmental opportunity as he looks out from car and train windows between New Mexico, California and the relentless flatness of the Mid-West? Did he not enjoy the trip? Or was it simply that I played these tracks on a particularly sullen, overcast Tuesday after a warm public holiday where nothing in my life seemed to make much sense anymore as I trudged to and from work?

Maybe that’s oversharing on my part, but such is the effect of the beguiling detail available to the listener on Mountains And Plains. Pieces like the stillness of ‘Great River Road’s upright piano motifs, sensitively-deployed modular synths and found sounds prompt you to consider your tiny place in the world; ‘Griffith Park’ moves forward on a particularly absorbing, ever-changing synth pattern, a perfect allegory to the unsleeping vibrancy and disposable creative hustle of the Los Angeles that the park overlooks; ‘Badlands Train’ has a quiet grandeur, water-like synth sprinkles evoking the incessant slow-motion dance of the derricks as they suck oil from below the Texas bedrock.

It shouldn’t comes as the remotest surprise, when you consider Gabriel’s CV, that this album is a highly accomplished body of work. It is more than just a producer’s pet vanity project and opportunity to deploy a mouth-watering array of kit; it is a highly personal, evocative, thought-provoking, affecting and arresting endeavour that seems to transcend just about every single expectation you might have about what it could sound like.

(c) 2019 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Apparat – LP5 (Mute album, 2019)

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The recording of LP5 by Apparat’s Sascha Ring saw him unburdening himself of the grand, bold gestures that have become the domain of his Moderat trio. In doing so, and in trying to focus instead on the fundamental components of these new Apparat pieces rather than aiming after something anthemic, Ring has nonetheless created something where his quintessentially muted, restless power still offers an affecting, emotional dimension.

In the context of Ring’s other Apparat output, none of this is a surprise. However, compared to something like 2011’s The Devil’s Walk, there’s less of an emphasis on ephemerality. Tracks like ‘Heroist’ or ‘In Gravitas’ move forward on robust, clubby rhythms that give the piece an immediacy, even if Ring’s vocal and the unswerving synths in the background contain a mitigating, mournful quality. These are tracks where those offsetting gestures pull you in all sorts of different, competing directions at once, a dizzying, manipulative effect that leaves you feeling fully uncertain by the end.

The big departure for LP5 is its sheer breadth of vision and instrumentation. Ring has always operated at the more tolerant, eclectic end of electronic music, but LP5 finds him investing in a whole new sonic palette more akin to his occasional work for theatre – opening track ‘Voi_Do’ is like a cinematic free jazz experiment, an unshackled approach to sequenced structures and one where strings, guitar, piano and horns can co-exist with synths and processing.

The stand-out track ‘Caronte’ employs Philipp Thimm’s defiant cello where the temptation might instead have been to use a faltering, scratchy synth, giving the track a strident, expansive dimension, making its sudden lurch into buzzing electronics and urgent rhythms all the more thrilling. It’s those unexpected moves, those introductions of new sounds or sharp pivots in motion, combined with his diaristic lyrics, that once again means Ring has delivered another mesmerising album, and one whose vision allows it to stand slightly apart from everything else.

LP5 by Apparat is released by Mute on March 22 2019.

(c) 2019 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Irmin Schmidt – 5 Klavierstücke (Mute / Spoon album, 2018)

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5 Klavierstücke is Can co-founder Irmin Schmidt’s first album since 2015’s career-spanning Electro Violet, and finds the composer – ably assisted by Gareth Jones – playing not just one, but two pianos on five spontaneous compositions.

Well, I say spontaneous; one of Schmidt’s pianos, a Pleyel, was prepared following the teachings of his onetime mentor John Cage, whose various prepared piano compositions over a roughly 25 year period are perhaps the best exemplars of adding nuts, bolts and all sorts of contraptions to piano wires to disrupt their typical sound. It is a painstaking approach that few have the energy and artistic vision to undertake, since one needs to almost surrender one’s compositional ideas to the piano before striking a single note; unprepared, a composer may, in their head, create an expectation of what a song might sound like – when prepared, the composer cannot make those assumptions, for the piano will never behave precisely the same each time unless the precise preparations are followed each and every time. It is one manifestation of Cage’s lifelong obsession with chance interventions into the composition process.

Alongside the prepared piano, Schmidt also used a Steinway, his instrument not that much older than the octogenarian composer himself, and the five tracks alternate between both instruments, the Steinway or the prepared Pleyel. Aside from natural studio ambience, no further gimmicky or sonic trickery was employed, even though at times it’s hard to convince your ears that could possibly be the case.

Though I’m generally not a fan of the track-by-track album dissection approach these days, the five pieces here seem to justify individual analysis on this occasion. These are songs that contain a quiet drama, a composer’s natural instinct for melody and the white space in which the notes can float, uninterrupted, unadorned or adorned depending on which piano is being used. They may be formed from complex treatments, but the results are surprisingly sparse, bringing to mind Chopin’s observation that “simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes, and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”

I.

Delicate, filigree playing gives way to noisier, percussive sections from the prepared piano. At times, the repeated prepared bass note sounds like a very meditative jazz rhythm section that’s been asked to wait it out in the background, or notes that sound like the extended echoes of a gong.

II.

Rain-like sounds and insistent rumbling infiltrate the natural resonance of the sporadic unprepared piano notes. After a while, the piece opens out into a section that sounds like a clanking Hang pattern, one that is intensely melodic but unrecognisable from a piano.

III.

Percussive, low-register sketches are coupled with high-register sounds not unlike a cymbal. Loud shards of sound arrive without expectation, almost as if someone is driven to emphatically striking the side of the piano.

IV.

Beginning with churning, bass-heavy arpeggios reminiscent of some of Throbbing Gristle or Dome’s most regimented work, the addition of sprinkles of unaltered piano ends up making this sound like some sort of heavily-shrouded exotica or a spontaneous jazz cop theme. ‘IV’ accelerates toward the end into a thunderous, panic-inducing conclusion that leaves nothing but cavernous reverb in its wake.

V.

This is vaguely reminiscent of Jacques Louissier’s interpretations of Satie’s Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes or a Sunday afternoon Bill Evans session, all gentle, delicate melody and harmonics. That’s the case until the very end, when a clangorous discordancy comes to the fore to bring this outstanding, understated album to a conclusion.

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Mute 4.0: Josh T. Pearson – Last Of The Country Gentlemen (Mute Artists album, 2011)

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joshtpearson_lastofthecountrygentlemen2

As part of Mute‘s fortieth ‘anti-versary’, the label is making available very special limited edition vinyl versions of selected releases from their four decades of releasing and curating incredible music. To celebrate this element of Mute 4.0, we’re re-posting reviews of those special albums from the depths of the Documentary Evidence archives. Full details on the releases can be found here.

Last Of The Country Gentlemen, Josh T. Pearson‘s much-anticipated début album, garnered all manner of positive reviews in the run up to its release. In a climate where everyone seemed to be focussed on the retro punk stylings of The Vaccines, it was pleasing to see that an album consisting mostly of heart-wrenching confessionals delivered by a singer over simple accompaniment (mostly guitar, some strings) could get so much positive praise. The album was preceded by a piano version of the track ‘Country Dumb’, the album version resplendent with guitars and violin instead of piano, a towering yet fragile ballad that stirs something deep within.

On a personal level, Last Of The Country Gentlemen‘s gentle, emotional grace is deeply affecting. I listened to this over a weekend where we had sold or given away some clothes, toys and other ephemera belonging to our two girls, in itself a moving experience, and Pearson’s songs of transition seemed to heighten the fragile mood I was in over the weekend.

Pearson’s voice is a beautiful thing to listen to. Occasionally whispered, occasionally rising with clarion quality, the consistent aspect is that he makes every single syllable, every word and every line count; everything that comes from his mouth is freighted with depth and sentiment. Though his Texan twang is a million miles away from Antony Heggarty’s vocal gymnastics, the two singers share the same talent for soaking their most basic utterances in something indefinable which can leave you feeling affirmed, tearful and empty after listening to their music; you will need to invest almost everything you have into listening to these songs, and you will feel utterly spent at the conclusion. One song is hard enough; eight songs is nigh on torturous.

Last Of The Country Gentlemen was, according to The Times review, written during a period of heartbreak, and there is a definite theme of separation running through the eight songs here (three of which are well over ten minutes in length). However, with the exception of the bitter (yet controlled) statement of intent ‘Woman, When I’ve Raised Hell’, soaked in strings arranged by Dirty Three and Bad Seeds / Grinderman violinist Warren Ellis that amplify the mood palpably, the theme does not appear to be one of regret at his loss; more, there is a resigned air of Pearson almost forcing a separation, for the benefit of his lover. The twelve minute ‘Sweeheart I Ain’t Your Christ’ is a case in point – throughout this song, Pearson is effectively advising his lover that she’d be better off without him. That sense of setting someone free, for their benefit, especially if they don’t realise it, is just about the hardest damn thing to do, a selflessness that is gut-wrenchingly moving.

That theme is somewhat at odds with the sleeve, which appears to show Pearson trying to prevent his lover – whose face is blank, emotionless, detached – from leaving. He is grasping her legs, eyes closed, as if he would rather be dragged across the gravel rather than let her go, but it fits with the heartbreak and torment evident in the songs here. The track ‘Honeymoon’s Great! Wish You Were Her’, is a song about marrying someone but still being in love with someone else; this is the closest Pearson gets to being frustrated with his lot (albeit, it seems, of his own doing), and there is a section where the strings come up in great big swells that make you sympathetic toward his conflict, not angry at his infidelity. ‘Sorry With A Song’ is Pearson’s apology, of sorts.

Something about these songs encourage you to believe that Pearson is telling you his story here; like a début novel, the roman a clef tends to be written mostly from personal experience and emotions, containing thinly-disguised autobiographical aspirations more than pure fiction. These songs seem so honest, so genuine, that you want to believe that this is Pearson’s own story being articulated across these eight songs in spite of the desperation, frustration and sorrow contained here. We would be faintly disappointed if this songwriting was found to be fictional.

Last Of The Country Gentlemen was recorded in Berlin, and mixed in London by Gareth Jones (although a couple of tracks were mixed by David ‘Saxon’ Greenep). There is a sense of hands-off production on these tracks, a sense of respect for the songs themselves and the outpourings contained within them. Presenting the songs ‘just so’ is a brave, yet powerful thing to do; the album thus has a stark innocence that leaves me well and truly floored whenever I listen to it.

Special edition: Rough Trade Christmas Bonus

Mute released Last Of The Country Gentlemen again in November 2011 with a second disc of Josh T. Pearson performing a selection of Christmas songs, the occasion being Rough Trade Shops placing his album at the top of their 2011 album chart. The expanded version was only available from Rough Trade. To celebrate the release of Pearson’s Rough Trade Christmas Bonus, Rough Trade East printed up a special rubber curtain containing the picture from the Christmas EP’s sleeve to cover their front entrance.

The thing with Christmas carols is that they can often have an air of sadness about them; few have an obvious joyousness, though all have an inherent beauty. As such, Josh T. Pearson is well-suited to delivering the five songs he intimately performs here. Last Of The Country Gentlemen had few naturally uplifting moments, though – as evidenced by the live LP (again, only released through Rough Trade Shops) The King Is Dead – Pearson himself is actually pretty light-hearted and self-deprecating. Here we find him struggling while trying to pluck the notes to a lovely rendition of ‘Silent Night’, unaware that his musings are being recorded, cocking up the introduction to ‘Angels We Have Heard On High’ and delivering a faultless accapella rendition of ‘Away In A Manger’, which masterfully rescues the carol from thousands of painful school nativities. Likewise, his bluesy rendition of ‘O Little Town Of Bethlehem’ moves the song away from the tuneless butchering of this carol by assembled toddlers and into masterful, graceful territory. In defiance of his image as a humourless misanthrope, he even adds a wee coda of ‘Jingle Bells’ at the very end.

‘O Holy Night’ is testament to how Pearson can take a song that’s not his own and add his own distinctive style to create something utterly original. Here his reading sits somewhere between the melancholy grandeur of Last Of The Country Gentlemen and the more introspective aspects of the Rufus Wainwright back catalogue. In a burst of seasonal goodwill, an alternative version of of ‘O Holy Night’ was made available for free from Pearson’s own website.

For Mute 4.0, Last Of The Country Gentlemen is being reissued as a gold double LP edition.

First posted 2011; re-edited 2015; re-posted 2018

MUTE4.0_V3

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Josh T. Pearson – Last Of The Country Gentlemen (Mute Artists album, 2011)

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album // Last Of The Country Gentlemen
  
mute artists | lp+cd/cd/dl stumm326 | 14/03/2011
rough trade shops edition xcdstumm326 released 21/11/2011

Last Of The Country Gentlemen, Josh T. Pearson‘s much-anticipated début album, garnered all manner of positive reviews in the run up to its release. In a climate where everyone seemed to be focussed on the retro punk stylings of The Vaccines, it was pleasing to see that an album consisting mostly of heart-wrenching confessionals delivered by a singer over simple accompaniment (mostly guitar, some strings) could get so much positive praise. The album was preceded by a piano version of the track ‘Country Dumb’, the album version resplendent with guitars and violin instead of piano, a towering yet fragile ballad that stirs something deep within.

On a personal level, Last Of The Country Gentlemen‘s gentle, emotional grace is deeply affecting. I listened to this over a weekend where we had sold or given away some clothes, toys and other ephemera belonging to our two girls, in itself a moving experience, and Pearson’s songs of transition seemed to heighten the fragile mood I was in over the weekend.

Pearson’s voice is a beautiful thing to listen to. Occasionally whispered, occasionally rising with clarion quality, the consistent aspect is that he makes every single syllable, every word and every line count; everything that comes from his mouth is freighted with depth and sentiment. Though his Texan twang is a million miles away from Antony Heggarty’s vocal gymnastics, the two singers share the same talent for soaking their most basic utterances in something indefinable which can leave you feeling affirmed, tearful and empty after listening to their music; you will need to invest almost everything you have into listening to these songs, and you will feel utterly spent at the conclusion. One song is hard enough; eight songs is nigh on torturous.

Last Of The Country Gentlemen was, according to The Times review, written during a period of heartbreak, and there is a definite theme of separation running through the eight songs here (three of which are well over ten minutes in length). However, with the exception of the bitter (yet controlled) statement of intent ‘Woman, When I’ve Raised Hell’, soaked in strings arranged by Dirty Three and Bad Seeds / Grinderman violinist Warren Ellis that amplify the mood palpably, the theme does not appear to be one of regret at his loss; more, there is a resigned air of Pearson almost forcing a separation, for the benefit of his lover. The twelve minute ‘Sweeheart I Ain’t Your Christ’ is a case in point – throughout this song, Pearson is effectively advising his lover that she’d be better off without him. That sense of setting someone free, for their benefit, especially if they don’t realise it, is just about the hardest damn thing to do, a selflessness that is gut-wrenchingly moving.

That theme is somewhat at odds with the sleeve, which appears to show Pearson trying to prevent his lover – whose face is blank, emotionless, detached – from leaving. He is grasping her legs, eyes closed, as if he would rather be dragged across the gravel rather than let her go, but it fits with the heartbreak and torment evident in the songs here. The track ‘Honeymoon’s Great! Wish You Were Her’, is a song about marrying someone but still being in love with someone else; this is the closest Pearson gets to being frustrated with his lot (albeit, it seems, of his own doing), and there is a section where the strings come up in great big swells that make you sympathetic toward his conflict, not angry at his infidelity. ‘Sorry With A Song’ is Pearson’s apology, of sorts.

Something about these songs encourage you to believe that Pearson is telling you his story here; like a début novel, the roman a clef tends to be written mostly from personal experience and emotions, containing thinly-disguised autobiographical aspirations more than pure fiction. These songs seem so honest, so genuine, that you want to believe that this is Pearson’s own story being articulated across these eight songs in spite of the desperation, frustration and sorrow contained here. We would be faintly disappointed if this songwriting was found to be fictional.

Last Of The Country Gentlemen was recorded in Berlin, and mixed in London by Gareth Jones (although a couple of tracks were mixed by David ‘Saxon’ Greenep). There is a sense of hands-off production on these tracks, a sense of respect for the songs themselves and the outpourings contained within them. Presenting the songs ‘just so’ is a brave, yet powerful thing to do; the album thus has a stark innocence that leaves me well and truly floored whenever I listen to it.

Special edition: Rough Trade Christmas Bonus
  
mute artists | xcd stumm326 | 21/11/2011

Mute released Last Of The Country Gentlemen again in November 2011 with a second disc of Josh T. Pearson performing a selection of Christmas songs, the occasion being Rough Trade Shops placing his album at the top of their 2011 album chart. The expanded version was only available from Rough Trade. To celebrate the release of Pearson’s Rough Trade Christmas Bonus, Rough Trade East printed up a special rubber curtain containing the picture from the Christmas EP’s sleeve to cover their front entrance.

The thing with Christmas carols is that they can often have an air of sadness about them; few have an obvious joyousness, though all have an inherent beauty. As such, Josh T. Pearson is well-suited to delivering the five songs he intimately performs here. Last Of The Country Gentlemen had few naturally uplifting moments, though – as evidenced by the live LP (again, only released through Rough Trade Shops) The King Is Dead – Pearson himself is actually pretty light-hearted and self-deprecating. Here we find him struggling while trying to pluck the notes to a lovely rendition of ‘Silent Night’, unaware that his musings are being recorded, cocking up the introduction to ‘Angels We Have Heard On High’ and delivering a faultless accapella rendition of ‘Away In A Manger’, which masterfully rescues the carol from thousands of painful school nativities. Likewise, his bluesy rendition of ‘O Little Town Of Bethlehem’ moves the song away from the tuneless butchering of this carol by assembled toddlers and into masterful, graceful territory. In defiance of his image as a humourless misanthrope, he even adds a wee coda of ‘Jingle Bells’ at the very end.

‘O Holy Night’ is testament to how Pearson can take a song that’s not his own and add his own distinctive style to create something utterly original. Here his reading sits somewhere between the melancholy grandeur of Last Of The Country Gentlemen and the more introspective aspects of the Rufus Wainwright back catalogue. In a burst of seasonal goodwill, an alternative version of of ‘O Holy Night’ was made available for free from Pearson’s own website.

lp+cd/cd/i:
1. Thou Art Loosed
2. Sweetheart I Ain’t Your Christ
3. Woman, When I’ve Raised Hell
4. Honeymoon’s Great! Wish You Were Her
5. Sorry With A Song
6. Country Dumb
7. Last Of The Country Gentlemen (lp/i bonus track)
8. Drive Her Out

xcd:
1. Silent Night
2. Angels We Have Heard On High
3. Away In A Manger
4. O Holy Night
5. O Little Town Of Bethlehem

Note: this CD was packaged with the CD copy of the album as a Rough Trade Shops exclusive

First posted 2011; re-edited 2015

(c) 2015 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence