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Andrew PM Hunt (Dialect / Ex-Easter Island Head)
58 Plays14 days ago
This week Pete is joined by the musician, producer & member of Ex-Easter Island Head - Andrew PM Hunt aka Dialect. His solo album "Atlas of Green" is a beautiful exploration of sound, inspired in part by a world of fantasy & sci-fi books whilst the critically acclaimed sixth album "Norther" by Ex-Easter Island head expands their palette of minimalism & prepared guitar into exciting new realms. Both records and projects are discussed in depth as well as a healthy amount of chat about gardening & literature... Enjoy!
Reading List
Always Coming Home - Ursula K Le Guin
Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban
Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe
The Ever Present Origin - Jean Gebser
Prophetic Culture - Federico Campagna
The Wake - Paul Kingsnorth
Ears To The Ground - Various
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgements
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey everyone, this is Pete from Ishmael Ensemble, back with episode three of Catching Light. Thanks for all the kind words and everyone that's checked out the last couple of episodes.
00:00:15
Speaker
um It's been really fun and this week got something very special.
Andrew P.M. Hunt's Musical Journey
00:00:22
Speaker
a chat with someone solely and partly responsible for two of my favorite records of last year that was his solo album atlas of green under the name dialect and as a member of the brilliant x easter island head and their album norther um Two albums that kind of, to not be too cliche, stopped me in my tracks but yeah I've kind of returned to again and again.
00:00:55
Speaker
And I kind of say in this chat, um you know I've never been one to have that list of favorite records or whatever every year but these two definitely just resonated with something, i don't know, quite deep inside.
00:01:10
Speaker
um We chat a lot about particularly the solo album Atlas of Green. um It's kind of set in a futuristic sort of utopia where this character Green is finding these instruments left behind from the forgotten earlier epoch of the human race and what follows is the music him and his friends create.
00:01:32
Speaker
Yeah, pretty interesting concept and we go very much into that alongside loads of other sci-fi books, a bit gardening and of course a bit of music.
Ishmael Ensemble's Upcoming Performances
00:01:48
Speaker
um In Ismail News, we've just released a very special filmed performance we did at The Mount Without in Bristol, featuring the Rituals Orchestra, which is, yeah, kind of this new show we're putting together. We're debuting it at Ford's Festival this year in Bristol and hoping to do some shows next year.
00:02:11
Speaker
um Yeah, bringing back Bethany Lay into the fold, who's played harp with us a lot and did some of the string arrangements on the last album.
00:02:23
Speaker
So yeah, it's a string quartet, Bethany on harp, Holly and Ryder Shafiq on vocals and... Yeah, really, really happy with how it came out. So do go check that out um on YouTube.
00:02:37
Speaker
And we've also got a busy summer lined up. A couple of Glastonbury shows, one of which announced this week at Greenpeace on the Sunday afternoon. um We'll also be opening the Shangri-La main stage at midnight on a Thursday night.
00:02:54
Speaker
So yeah, that's going to be pretty special. Bringing out the extra bangers for that one. Um, yeah, we're also in a few other fields across the UK and Ireland.
00:03:07
Speaker
Uh, All Together Now, near Waterford. Green Man, that's going to be special, um, on the main stage on the Friday. Uh, Field View Festival, not too far from Bristol.
00:03:21
Speaker
And a few others, um, Yeah, suddenly it's summer, right? The weather's been beautiful and the garden's blooming, which is where we kind of start this chat.
Sponsor Highlight: Slate and Ash
00:03:33
Speaker
Before we get stuck in, just a quick mention of our sponsors, s Slate and Ash, the brilliant software instrument company based here in Bristol. who have also teamed up in the past with our guest today, Dialect.
00:03:49
Speaker
um Yeah, go check out their website. They've got loads of deals on at the moment. All the music you can hear playing below was made using their software. And yeah, really fun, intuitive stuff to play with.
00:04:02
Speaker
So go check it out. Slateandash.com And you can currently get 30% off all their instruments. Don't need a code or anything. Just, ah yeah, head on over.
00:04:14
Speaker
Alright, without further ado, let's get stuck in.
Creative Influences Discussion
00:04:17
Speaker
This is Catching Light with Andrew P.M. Hunt, aka Dialect. Enjoy.
00:04:48
Speaker
everyone, ah this is Pete from Ishmael Ensemble and delighted today to be joined by someone I guess solely and partly responsible for two of my favorite albums of last year.
00:05:03
Speaker
And ah that is Andrew PM Hunt, AKA dialect and member of X Easter Island head. Hey, Andrew, how you doing? Hey, Pete. I'm very well. Thank you. Thanks for having me on.
00:05:17
Speaker
No worries. um Yeah. How you doing? You enjoying this change of seasons? I am actually, yeah. I went away for a few weeks with X-Easter. We were sort of on on tour for a little while right at the beginning of spring.
00:05:31
Speaker
So I kind of missed the period of like making my garden like you know match fit. So I'm sort of catching up with all that. ah So I'm spending quite a lot of time in the garden um with my hands in the dirt, which is very nice.
00:05:45
Speaker
Nice. Is that a big thing for you? are you a keen gardener? Yeah, um I mean, we just have like a shared garden in front of our ah flat, um in front of our building. And like when we moved in, it was just like overgrown with brambles. it was like you couldn't walk through. It was like a ah jungle. and And so, yeah, it's been like quite a sort of slow transformation. mean, it's not really our garden, but like we just do it, and me and my partner, and it's great.
00:06:13
Speaker
Yeah, and it's good because basically our place sort of backs onto the street, so and it's a really busy street, so you just get people stopping and chatting to you all the time and giving you like you know advice about ah you know fertilizer and pruning and deadheading and stuff it's quite nice like a lot of people uh in the bit of toxteth i live in are really into gardening it's like quite a big thing in our little micro area ah so it's a nice social thing nice yeah are you are you the main custodian or does everyone in your block chip in no it's pretty much just uh just being heather
00:06:52
Speaker
and But that's kind of good, you know? They don't seem to mind. They leave us to it. it's not ah There's no sort of power struggles. Yeah, yeah, for sure. ah It's beautiful, yeah. I've got a three-year-old son.
00:07:06
Speaker
um And he's just, this year, kind of got obsessed with it all. And, you know, every day comes home from nursery and wants to check whether the strawberries have flowered or whatever. Oh, that's cool. He's kind of really enjoying the process. And, yeah, it's kind of given, yeah, me and my wife new energy, I think. And, yeah, I think it's important. It's it's it's funny that...
00:07:30
Speaker
um Yeah, witnessing the process of something growing for a kid must be so exciting. Literally the fruits of your labor, you know. Absolutely. It shows that ah shows that your kid is you know quite an interested person.
00:07:50
Speaker
Because when i i when I was a kid, my interest in plants went as far as like smashing pots. yeah with yeah bolts and stuff like I really wasn't interested at all.
00:08:02
Speaker
We a very, very small garden at the front of of our house and i didn't and did not give two hoots about what was in season or what was an annual or a perennial. But yeah I think it was for for a lot of people the same thing. It was like a lockdown.
00:08:20
Speaker
bit of a lockdown thing um you know having the time to really notice the slow change of seasons and yeah yeah yeah i think in this country we've like it feels like over the last 10 years we've gotten a more uh like spring has become a more noticeably ah spring is like dialed it up a notch basically i'm saying yeah yeah it's sunnier it's like our summer basically the hotter uh the change from winter into spring seems more dramatic yeah i don't know anyway yeah it was the um pandemic sort of radicalized me on plants yeah that's great yeah i mean it's funny i had
00:09:03
Speaker
uh yeah i guess somewhat hippie parents or you know hippie compared to of the other people in the village i grew up just south of bristol and in an old kind of mining village and uh right yeah there was these allotments and my parents had one and yeah, I remember hating it because like, oh, you know, we kind of ate very seasonally and, you know, there was a good sort three month period of beetroot and all my mates were having turkey twizzlers and hula hoops and i was just having beetroot soup. um
00:09:36
Speaker
It's funny because now, you know, we're sort of trying to... Everyone wants beetroot soup. an Aspirational beetroot soup now. Yeah. Yeah. I think as a kid, it's like it's ah hard to be interested in it because it's so slow, isn't it? like Everything about like taking an interest in the garden yeah is is slow by nature and like you know not only just over the seasons, but over the years as well. That's the thrill of it, the slow burning thrill of it. And so for a kid,
00:10:04
Speaker
you know a season in the garden is like quite a big proportion of their life. So it's just an incomprehensible amount of boredom to sort of have to sit through. Which, you know as as you draw closer to the end of your life, yeah yeah becomes more and more exciting to sort of bear witness to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:10:22
Speaker
No, it's special. I mean, it's interesting. A lot of music makes ah kind of maybe ah it's an age thing as well. We're all getting to an age where we're we're enjoying those things um more.
00:10:34
Speaker
But yeah, there's definitely a parallel with with mates getting into gardening and cooking and tinkering with sounds. I think there's a similar common thread maybe. of Oh, yeah. Yeah. um Who knows? Maybe, yeah, we're we're all just getting a bit
Musical Approaches and Improvisation
00:10:50
Speaker
older. but yeah And I think the other thing I used to, you know, I used to love doing gardening.
00:10:56
Speaker
But when you're moving from a house every six months and renting and shared houses, you know, you just about get it going and then, oh, we've got to move. So, yeah. Totally. I mean, the place um a place where I am right now is the basement of my old house, which is a really big but is a really big house with them like 13 mates all living here.
00:11:19
Speaker
So until ah maybe 2022, was living here. me and my partner were both living here after for a couple of years, and I've kept my studio in the basement. So I'm still here every day. But the garden of this place, it's...
00:11:33
Speaker
it's really, really well conceived and planned. So it's sort of planted so that as as early spring gives give way to summer, there's something always popping off and it sort of goes around the garden like clockwise.
00:11:50
Speaker
yeah and There's always something happening, which is, again, it's like, that's real foresight and planning and and thinking about time and this... in this different way it's it's sort of a commitment to time in a way that's quite i found quite fascinating during the pandemic um so it's a bit yeah it's a bit of an aspiration to get our garden in our place which is tiny in comparison yeah some somewhere like that level of sort of thoughtfulness or whatever yeah yeah amazing so yeah i can see you are in your studio is that somewhere you've kind of been for a while then if you if you were living there before is it Yeah, it's been here for about um six years, I guess. And then before that, it was ah another another place in the North Docks of Liverpool.
00:12:36
Speaker
So yeah, we sort of had a ah studio ah that I share with my friend Dave ever since we were doing a band together like 10 years ago.
00:12:47
Speaker
My band stopped. and We'd kind of used what what sort of little money we made as a band we ah put into buying recording stuff basically so that we could try and be as self-sufficient as possible really because we never really had budgets to do to work with mixing engineers or to go into a studio, ah so proper studio or anything like this. So yeah my whole sort of musical practice is based around having having a studio that I can work in really regularly, ah where I can kind of do do all aspects of of a record you know from start to finish, basically.
00:13:27
Speaker
Yeah, amazing. I mean, that's something that comes through for me anyway. It feels like you seem very resourceful or making the most of what's around you, maybe.
00:13:41
Speaker
Yeah, I really love the way you use kind of I guess, limitation and instrumentation to to really get the most out of of every instrument, um whether that's doing weird things with guitars or, yeah, kind of mashing mashing up very yeah organic sounds in a somewhat electronic way, are't I don't know. Is that something you strive for? Is that kind of the consequence of of limiting yourself?
00:14:12
Speaker
it's It's definitely become part of all the sort of projects I'm involved with for for sort of different reasons depending on the different projects. I mean with X Easter Island Head it's a big part of it um and the way that Ben sort of founded the idea of the band like 15 years ago now was ah partly around you know the idea of sort of repurposing a rock instrument, but it was also a set of techniques that he developed that were kind of geared around um limitations in his playing, which he'd be the first to sort of to sort of say. you know He was not someone who felt like he was going to be like a shredder on the guitar, but yeah yeah he had really interesting perspective on music and guitars and stuff. So developed a way playing the guitar that really
00:14:59
Speaker
ah lent into his his general skillset and allowed for a different type of like virtuosity in a way. and It's not about sort of this sort of dexterous way of playing. It's like a textural resourceful kind of conceptual way of approaching the instrument.
00:15:19
Speaker
So X Easter, there's a massive thing about limitations. And we we talk and think quite a lot about like where the boundaries are of what we'll use to make sound and always thinking about whatever sound we're producing with the guitars or with percussion or whatever, that it's sort of ah understandable to an audience and that yeah an audience can kind of perceive physically what's happening.
00:15:45
Speaker
yeah yeah and When I'm working on my own, ah you know it's ah it's a less sort of strictly kind of acoustic process. like I use the computer a lot, obviously. um But I also, I think and over the years, have sort more and more tried to um to limit the palette and the approach for each record, basically. So each each album will have a kind of distinctive approach where you know i Maybe I won't use the piano or I'll i'll i'll use you know this four-track tape machine like I did on my record last year and really sort of lean into trying to get as much out of that as I can, use it in as many different ways as I can um and allow that to kind of dictate the aesthetic of the record. So yeah, like limitations is ah is a big part of how how all the sort of music projects I'm involved with work really.
00:16:37
Speaker
Yeah, which is hard you know in ah in a world of electronic production, and so you know where you can just keep going. But it's so difficult, I think, if if you if you do indulge every whim and desire when you're making something in terms of the tools or instruments that you're using or the approach or whatever, It's so difficult then to create something that's coherent yeah and cohesive. I think it would take ah huge amount of discipline and kind of artistic single-mindedness to to produce something really great, having no limitations at all.
00:17:18
Speaker
yeah um yeah yeah It's kind of really helpful just in terms of defining a vocabulary and an aesthetic to to say you know that, not this. Having said that, I think it's like it's important to have a period whenever you're working on something, i'm sure you have the same thing, ah where you know you'll allow yourself total freedom for for a period to to sort of get ideas starting and to just allow the sort of...
00:17:42
Speaker
Yeah, the sort of creative flow to start. But then I think once you're sort of trying to commit to making some sort of statement with those ideas, yeah, then all of a sudden you really have to narrow down and remove options, don't you? And it's like, yeah, having too many options is sort of the thing that kills any project, I think. yeah yeah yeah Yeah, it's hard. I mean, for me anyway, you know, Ishmael Ensemble was kind of like both a solo project and a band a big collaborative beast that yeah yeah how does that work was it something that you you founded on your own and then have brought other people into or yeah kind of yeah started out yeah just kind of doing solo stuff and
00:18:30
Speaker
was very much you know me as a producer working with samples and kind of much more in that traditional electronic thread of like digging for records and you know doing this and kind of getting to a point of like, Jay Diller or Theo Parrish have done this a million times better than I ever but will, so what's the point here? But...
00:18:51
Speaker
at the same time was playing saxophone and different instruments in a more traditional way and yeah I guess just got to a point of being around so many great musicians that grown up with or knew in the Bristol scene that I kind of thought about it as an opportunity to use them almost as like the sample pack and Or just you know record them and use that kind of in the same way of then taking it into the studio, chopping it, looping it, whatever, making it different. and And that's still very much the the process. you know I'll do a guitar day with Mullins, who plays guitar.
00:19:31
Speaker
I'll then mangle it into some form of an instrument and it comes out the other end and then we'll go into rehearsals for live shows and they'll be oh, what's that thing? It's like, oh, that's what you played, but it's, you know, pitched, rehearsed. you to record people improvising or will you give them a part to play? Yeah, much more improvisational kind of...
00:19:51
Speaker
Yeah, almost see the recording days as like a thing in itself that's almost something just for us. And then what comes of that is maybe a ah song or a or even just a sample. You know, might just use, you five seconds of a 20 minute drone.
00:20:10
Speaker
that then becomes like a pad and then you know I'm all about that kind of making saxophones sound like guitars guitars sound like synths and you know quite that's interesting because you get to be a composer on on one level but you're composing with you still keep the spontaneity you're composing with improvisations aren't you like you're using that as the yeah as the material so you you kind of always have that sense of naivety or discovery and in the sounds themselves think that's great you know yeah totally and yeah and i mean the last record was very much then kind of having toured a lot as a band trying to almost like honor that band thing so last one was much more bandy but i think i'm having now like the impulsive reaction of oh, i just want to rip all that up. And it's a very kind of recycled process, you know, forever. but well
00:21:05
Speaker
There'll be a vocal on a tune and then the next tune will be that vocal mangled and, you know, i' forever digging in kind of the stems of the previous record to make the new record. And yeah, i mean, there's forever stuff that, you know. Composting.
00:21:19
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, back to back to allotment. Maybe it was all worth it, that beat tune. Yeah. But when you play live, will you then play ah stuff from the record kind of faithfully or what do you do Like how do you approach them playing live?
00:21:34
Speaker
Yeah, but we'll always start with like, I'll then send out the stems of what the... album version is and people will learn them and then we'll get to rehearsal and then we'll extend bits or kind of allow for spaces to be a bit more jammed out or whatever and okay and then inevitably you know the things that you think you're improvising live that you're doing differently every time you listen back you're like oh we do that for the exact same amount of time every time without knowing you know you kind of dial in Yeah, so we we've kind of noticed this with XE Island Head. At some point over the last six months, we sort of added in these two sections of the set where you know we could sort of improvise pretty freely.
00:22:14
Speaker
And over the course of those six months, they've really solidified into just tunes, basically. There's a part of us that can't help ourselves sort of start chipping away and be like, oh yeah, but if it was just like this, but a little bit dull, yeah. I think that's why we're starting to think about making a new record um now.
00:22:34
Speaker
And one of the things we're thinking a lot about is ways to keep more improvisation in the set. So gent generally ways to sort of reassess how we how we put tunes together and sort of get trying to get out of a kind of more pattern-based way of working into something that has more unusual angles or a little bit less sort of symmetry in it or something.
00:23:02
Speaker
um And I think yeah improvisation is kind of the main way that we're sort of looking at doing that. Yeah, how how does that work? Because to my ears, anyway, it's quite linear music, if that makes sense. It's quite sort of additive and...
00:23:20
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. is that yeah how How does improvisation work in in that space? I think there tends to be a period of improvisation once we've once we've sort of defined a set of techniques that we're going to use. Like, oh, we're going to use the phone yeah through the pickups the guitar, or we're going to use you know these brass rods under the strings and sort of mute the guitar in this way or whatever. like ah think Once we've sort of established that technique, then we'll sort of have a period of improvising where we're trying to settle on something that feels, you know, feels right.
00:23:54
Speaker
and And then, you know, ah as with most groups, then a period of like trying to sort of really knuckle down and and sort of try and impose some sort of structure onto that. Yeah. Because I think we are all quite, uh,
00:24:07
Speaker
quite into composition ultimately and and trying to trying to create some sort of you know beautiful, immovable musical object.
00:24:19
Speaker
But I think you know that's one of the things we're trying to sort of reassess a little bit when we're we're starting to work on. new music, you know, i think one of the things that's great about playing with a number of people in a room is that, yeah, you have the chance for improvisation and spontaneity and these things that happen that you wouldn't plan or wouldn't write yourself.
00:24:38
Speaker
But in a way, the downside to it is that If you're trying to write something together, everything you're doing has to be sort of ultimately translated into language because you have to talk about it in a room together for the most part. Or, you know, we have to be like, oh how long we do in this section? how And then, you know, because you're having to talk about it and agree on an amount of time, you know, you agree on things like fours and eights and twelves and things like that. And, you know, so there's something about being in a room together and the verbal nature of like that kind of collaborative music making that also channels you into particular structures.
00:25:13
Speaker
that we're sort of trying to think about ways to sort of get out of that but still have this kind of compositional arc to it all, you know, not just to be a sort of improvised group because I think that's kind of fundamentally not quite what we are as a band but, you know, still have some of that spontaneity in there and more of it. It's certainly in the live show.
00:25:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's hard that language thing, right? It's, um feel for me, anyway, it's so based on like past experience and your own kind of view of what music is even. you know like There's so many references of what, as you say, like a beautiful moment for me in music might not be a beautiful moment for someone else. or you know There's a real...
00:26:01
Speaker
ah Yeah, I find we listen to music so differently, like the reference points are so different. Yeah, I remember bringing something to Mullins, our guitarist, that you know who kind of is not into electronic music, whereas I kind of very much come from that background as well as the kind of traditional more jazz instrumentation side of things. and Yeah, I remember just presenting him with something once. It just sounds like the Wenger boys or something. That's his like frame of reference. yeah you know elect this like That's what I'm going for.
00:26:38
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, that that must be tricky in terms of... like I think it works both ways, you know, in in any group that's been, like, we've we've known each other a long time. i mean, before I joined the band about six years ago, like, I've known all those guys and played in groups with them for, like, you know, the best part of like, 20 years at this point. and And so it's a kind of mixed thing. Like, on the one hand, you know each other very well, so you know exactly what the other one is good at or exactly you have a sense of somehow what each other are going to do on some level. And obviously you understand very clearly what each other like and don't like.
00:27:13
Speaker
yeah But I think in a way the thing that you you miss out on a little bit when it's a really long-standing ah musical relationship is it's almost like you know too much yeah yeah what what the other person is going to do or that there isn't as much surprise about the way that someone else receives an idea. Like you already know you already know that one person is going to like this and then not like the other thing.
00:27:35
Speaker
and So you tend to be surprised less often by yeah the people that you're playing with, which you know is is one of the the great things about like you know the beginning of like a beginning of a relationship. It's you're surprised constantly and you're sort of seeing yourself in the reactions of ah the other people that you're playing with and that's helping you see what you do well and what you know all these kind of things there's there's a joy to that but um you know you also haven't developed that language yet together yeah know it's you can't get around it like you have to develop a language as a band to to sort of discuss what you're doing but
00:28:14
Speaker
Once you do that, you also sort of shut out other options. It's a real compromise, I suppose, that that type of collaborative music making. But it's wonderful nonetheless.
00:28:26
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it is amazing. And like, know, as you say, it's a very deep relationship, you know, similarly to the guys I went school with. So we've been playing music since a very young age. And yeah,
00:28:39
Speaker
yeah we're almost in a new phase where like I feel on the last record because we'd done quite a lot of music we had like reference points of like oh cool yeah then we could do that thing that we do where it's like this and you know it's quite cool being like oh we've released enough music to have these kind of like references and identities in our sound and now i feel we're at a phase where it's like oh but then that feels too obvious to like oh obviously we're all going to go to this thing and it's going to do this for exactly 16 bars because that's the ishmael ensemble sound or whatever
00:29:13
Speaker
yeah that's Yeah, you gotta fight against that a little bit. I mean, it's so beautiful that you that that happens, but um that you sort of become so sympathetic in that way. But I guess you have to fight it a little bit, don't you?
00:29:26
Speaker
It's the new part of the relationship where, yeah, you need to seek new things and to make stuff entertaining, for sure. Yeah. Yeah.
Exploring 'Atlas of Green'
00:29:35
Speaker
I mean, let's let's touch on ah your solo stuff a bit, because as I said at the top, I mean, both records for me, and I don't think I've ever really had that like, oh, this is my album of the year. But I don't know, for me, Atlas of Green really profoundly hit me. I don't know.
00:29:55
Speaker
oh thank you. Whether it was just what I needed at the time. Well, I know it is. That's exactly what it is. But yeah, Yeah, it just kind of... So I've been a fan of ex-Easter Island Head and hadn't really listened to much of your stuff until this record. And i yeah, just found it so refreshing and...
00:30:20
Speaker
conceptual and you know we talk about those like setting intentions for a record and and I'm sort of envious of how well you seem to have followed through with what feels like quite a strong concept for a record I went to a talk last night that a writer, Robert McFarlane, was talking about his new book and he was saying that i eat that is basically what he does. He like he writes a letter to himself at the beginning of every book that he writes, sort of laying out what he wants to do with it and what he thinks is ah is important.
00:30:53
Speaker
And then he revisits that letter at the end of the book and sort of sees where it went and how much he stuck to it and all this kind of stuff. yeah But that's not quite how it works for me.
00:31:03
Speaker
But what I found with that, I mean, it's interesting talking about sort of um you know sort of economy of means and a sort of reduced, limited palette. I think Atlas of Green was quite influenced by working and being in XE's Rinalhead, to be honest. There's something about...
00:31:23
Speaker
there' something about how how sort of refined and and sort of select the sort of palette on it is and the approach and how I was sort of using the four track and stuff that I feel like is quite influenced by you know bit playing in X-Easter which is yeah a very process-oriented group you know that's sort of the ah tradition, the experimental tradition of that band so we're coming out of.
00:31:53
Speaker
um But you know the sort of concept for it, yeah it developed alongside the making of the record and as i was and kind of developed with things that I was reading at the time.
00:32:04
Speaker
And, you know, as you're reading stuff and getting lost in books and sort of new ideas, inevitably it shapes, if not the music that you're making directly, certainly the way you're thinking about it, or certainly the sort of the sort of tone or hue that you kind of see these new pieces which are emerging, you know, through you start to develop a sort of aesthetic sensibility for a sort of period of your life as you're yeah Something you're reading or people you're talking to or new people in your life or whatever it is, getting into gardening. yeah
00:32:38
Speaker
These things you know that that then shape how you perceive the stuff you're making in the studio. and ah Another thing for for Atlas of Green was it was something that a lot of the material kind of came out of playing live.
00:32:49
Speaker
and right preparing for shows which is not something I'd done a ton of um before this record like I had done dialect shows here and there and I did ah i did a little tour with a dialect trio for for a while but I hadn't taken it as seriously and then for whatever reason I started getting asked to play all these shows kind of quite randomly it wasn't really around a release or anything like this and so I started having to think about what was going to do and I'd started using my 4-track more and more and using these tapes. So I did a bunch of live shows that really lent into using the tape machine and a sort of live field recorder and using the sort of channel strips on the 4-track to kind of cut between live inputs and stuff that was on tape loops.
00:33:38
Speaker
Through doing these live shows and through some of the reading that i was doing, so of like sci-fi, fantasy stuff i was I was reading about, ah yeah This kind of like story emerged in my mind of like this this musician called Green, who's living in a sort of ah undisclosed future ah ah indeterminate sort of distance, ah who is sort of...
00:34:03
Speaker
trying to create music or create some sort of personal sonic language with all these like little fragments of ah the past and fragments of a sort of old world that's no longer legible.
00:34:18
Speaker
And so it sort of became all about trying to take sounds out of context, re recombining them, um and yeah using these sort of quite short little fragments mostly.
00:34:31
Speaker
um And yeah, just it just became a sort of quite quite enjoyable, ah relatively for me, relatively quick process of um of of improvising and then refining and composing with these improvisations that we talking about before. That's sort a big part of what I do as well, is trying to retain the freshness that you get from an improvisation, but then you know trying to impose some sort of you maniacal will on it, where you trying to and of make it do exactly what you want it to do, but not too much what you want it to do.
00:35:05
Speaker
So, yeah, it's ah that's sort of how... how that project came about really. I'd been doing it i'd been i'd sort of started the process doing this residency in a it's an observatory on the top of a hill near near where I grew up actually. That's now been turned into a kind of like artistic research center.
00:35:27
Speaker
um So I spent quite a lot of time I set up a studio in the in the the domes at the top of this observatory. so This is literally was used for looking at the stars in the late 19th century.
00:35:39
Speaker
and And then for a while it was like a seismological ah data gathering center and all this. ah It has all these really interesting artifacts from yeah so ah late nineteenth early 20th century sort of scientific apparatus and yeah The domes at the top of the building are literally these huge 20 foot wide wooden paneled domes, like sort of half spheres that you go into. They've got this really weird acoustic setup in there and started using tape loops.
00:36:12
Speaker
Experimenting with, yeah, so processing those tape loops. And for a while, like singing over the tape loops, like for a while, the record was going to be basically just tape loops and vocals. um And then it sort of, you know, went a slightly different direction.
00:36:26
Speaker
But yeah, that's kind of where it started.
Futuristic and Nostalgic Blends
00:36:28
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think what hit me is it feels like nostalgic or or sentimental and and maybe even like slightly melancholy.
00:36:41
Speaker
And as you say, you talk about this, like fragments from a ah future world, maybe be trying to make sense of the past or something. And that that's how i kind of heard it before.
00:36:54
Speaker
Knowing any of that really is... is uh yeah for me I grew up around a lot of kind of folk music I guess my dad was very much into that I guess grew up in that 70s sort of folk revival and you know so we'd often go to to folk festivals and him and his brothers were always singing in the kitchen at you know one in the morning at the family gathering or something and had a lot of that instrumentation I guess of like interesting string instruments and and whistles and bells and stuff. And and i hear a lot of that in in that record. And yeah, i don't know what it was. it It's certainly like, yeah, i don't know how to describe it. almost like pastoral or something. It feels like...
00:37:40
Speaker
It almost feels quite English, weirdly, or like quite British, or, you know, I don't know, quite, there's something folky about it that that really resonated with me, and there's maybe something i was sort of searching for, and um is that you got something you've... Well, the sort palette of instruments was quite influenced by thinking about what, yeah basically, simple instruments, instruments that would be, you know, would be reinvented, basically, you know, so a simple string instrument, you know, sure that you bow.
00:38:10
Speaker
I have a terrible cheap violin that I can't play, so you know that that's part of the sound of it. um you know Where there are electronics, they're very simple electronics. They're like simple oscillators, basically. so you know some the The kind of thing that you might... You found some sort of old circuitry that you hot-wired with some old solar panel or something, that you might get a sound out of it that sounds like it's dying, but then you'd you'd try and find the musicality in that.
00:38:36
Speaker
So it's like the concept, it's this guy has made this record almost, it's less you, it's more him, but you embodied. Yeah, that's how I was thinking about it and um it became, once you sort of put a character in that in that world, you're able to...
00:38:56
Speaker
You're able to sort of, I don't know, channel a certain subjectivity into it that like, I think any good story needs ah needs some sort of, if you're making a world, it needs a kind of protagonist or something. And so a lot of the books I was reading were also, yeah, sort of fantasy and,
00:39:13
Speaker
Well, i'm I'm typically more of a sci-fi reader, but i kind of opened the door to fantasy on this ah and its record and really got into this ah this American writer, Gene Wolfe, who wrote these kind of more more on the side of sort of cloak and dagger kind of um fantasy stuff, which, you know, they always have like a kind of strong typically yeah kind of male uh protagonists who in in the case of the gene wolf books was called severian great name um but i liked the idea of making my character a little more ambiguous and calling him green um partly because it's one of my favorite uh joanie mitchell songs little green which is a song about uh her giving up a child when she was young so you know it's
00:40:03
Speaker
kind of Me and my partner ah decided that we weren't going to have kids of our own for various reasons, but it sort of became, you know, on a personal level, it became almost like a sort of fictional child or something that that you're sort of putting into this future.
00:40:21
Speaker
And as soon as you do that, you then care about that future quite a bit and and so it sort of imbues it with a humanity And at the moment, it's pretty easy to look into the future and not really see very much humanity. So ah it felt necessary to me in order to to sort of make a record that was thinking about the future. it was like kind of important for there to be a person in it.
00:40:44
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it not be like some sort of dystopia. and And to be honest, neither neither was it intended to be some sort of utopian kind of thing either. It's... um It was more about accepting that something will happen ah and people will deal one way or another with what they're left with.
00:41:09
Speaker
yeah i mean yeah there I could talk for for ages about the books that sort of fed into some of this, but I don't know how interested in it. in sci-fi and shit you are.
00:41:20
Speaker
No, no, I mean, Ishmael Ensemble is very much Ishmael from Moby Dick. I was reading Moby Dick at the time and it famously opens, Call Me Ishmael, like call me anything. I'm the protagonist, but actually the story is about these other people and that was the kind of basis of working with these collaborators.
00:41:38
Speaker
Amazing. don't know if you've read Moby Dick, but it's very much... i haven't actually. It's a bizarre book. Like it's weirdly... It's like half a story. It's like kind of alternate chapters.
00:41:49
Speaker
so It's like half a kind of, you know, natural history book about whales and the mammal, not the country. And, the you know, about the the the various ways that whales were used in that period of time for, you know, various things. And also their, like, physiology and Yeah, it's like every other chapter is really mundane, very nonfiction kind of.
00:42:21
Speaker
our explanation of what a whale is and then the other chapters are like this epic story from the eyes of Ishmael of these different characters that are all kind of thrown together you know it's kind of like a weird leveller of I think it was written you know this was one of Herman Melville's kind of ideas was it was about effectively like painting the working class of that time as the the true heroes of society because there' you know there's like an aboriginal guy there's a spaniard there's like all these different people who are making up the you know that social class of americans and there's this kind of wild captain ahab who like thinks he's in control but actually it's all like his mad idea to go and fight this whale moby dick that um yeah has tortured him his whole life but but the true heroes are this kind of raggle taggle group of of people who are sort of thrown together and it's their story it's their kind of
00:43:19
Speaker
social history I guess and yeah i kind of liked that as a sort of artistic angle of like okay I'm sort of the leader and my face is it and it's opening with Call Me Ishmael but it's actually about the relationships I either have or these other people have between each other and from a kind of producer point of view that was kind of always like the grounding You know, it's obviously kind of evolved and changed since then, but that idea of working with lots of different vocalists and kind of bringing them in and yeah, yeah, maybe it's a loose, loose thread, but to me it made sense at the time. and um
00:43:58
Speaker
Yeah, I think having something like that to kind of reference is a really interesting way to work. It's a good guiding principle, I think. I mean, it's interesting, yeah, you say about um about Moby Dick. i I haven't read that, but that's really made me want to read it. Structurally, it sounds quite similar to... um Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin, which was a big influence on Alice in Green. In the sense that that's also a book that's sort of alternating between being fiction and non-fiction. It's a book about this sort of future people called the Kesh living in this very far-flung future after various collapses.
00:44:35
Speaker
And it's it's sort of a faux anthropological book about them. So it does have stories from their folk tales that you read like a story, but then it also has chapters that are like, yeah, this is this would be the traditional dance that they did. you know Their diet would have been mostly this. they were kind of like They had the internet, but they didn't really use it. it was like kind of like a public utility they could visit if they needed to, that they'd sort of mythologized in their mind in this particular way. The way they conceived of technology is quite different.
00:45:09
Speaker
Yeah. and it's It's kind of written in that style. So it is in a way kind of a pain in the ass to read. Like it's sort of, it's like one of these books, I've said this to lots of people, it's like, it's one of these books that didn't necessarily enjoy reading while I was reading it.
Sci-Fi Literature's Impact on Music
00:45:24
Speaker
Right. But it was sort of like changing my life and changing my brain, particularly when I wasn't reading it. When I put the book down, I'd sort of just sit there and sort of think about the ideas in it and it was just, you know, such rich material. But like, right yeah, you know, you do have to wade through a chapter about like, you know, how they made their clogs, you know, for wow but like 10 pages or whatever.
00:45:48
Speaker
But yeah, the sort of world building and storytelling is like next level to the point of almost being like a bit alienating. yeah But it's it's like you can't help but marvel at it and and to be and it really...
00:46:00
Speaker
It does absorb you. yeah Totally. Was it written fairly recently if it's talking about the internet? I think it's 1981. Okay, so the internet wasn't such a thing it now. No, it wasn't. And at the time, i mean, this is another way in which it was sort of an influence. Like, it was... um When the book was released, the first um the first publishing of it, what do you call that? First edition, that's it. First edition. It came with a cassette of music ah of the Keshe.
00:46:31
Speaker
Oh, wow. It was this sort of speculative folk music, which is kind of a mixture of basic sort of indigenous inspired acoustic instruments and horns and Zithers and things like that and then yes some sort of simple electronics and there's something about that, just that idea in itself that was you know certainly certainly an inspiration.
00:46:57
Speaker
I mean a lot of that record is also like vocal music of them singing in their Keshe language. you know It's like very yeah kind of austere Meredith Monk type singing but the the idea of it is just wonderful.
00:47:14
Speaker
Is it archived anywhere? is the Yeah, actually, and it got released maybe a while ago now, maybe 2017 or something, um yeah on the Revenge sub-label Freedom to Spend.
00:47:27
Speaker
Was that before your record, did you introduce them to you? Yeah, that was, yeah, sort of. Yeah, six or seven years beforehand. So it's been a sort of slow burner. I had the record before I read the book.
00:47:41
Speaker
And yeah, there I mean, there are a couple of other really great books. Ridley Walker, you ever read that? No, I don't think so. It's Russell Hoban, who is actually mostly a children's author. He he wrote this book that's some it's a dystopian ah story set in Kent after after like ah some sort of undisclosed nuclear ah meltdown, basically. like Thousands of years in the future where humanity has kind of recovered to the point of living a kind of Iron Age ah existence. Yeah.
00:48:13
Speaker
But the thing that's interesting about that book is that it's written phonetically in this kind of broken down dialect of English. Right. so it really throws you when you start trying to read it, it's like, oh, this is kind of incomprehensible.
00:48:27
Speaker
But you you really like actually quite quickly acclimatize to so reading it. And there's something about the way it's written and and the way that these people in the book think that's like very poetic and kind of the language is quite slippery. And again, in that book, ah they have these sort of fragments of the old world, the culture of the old world that they've just about forgotten.
00:48:52
Speaker
that have kind of endured in these like very unexpected ways. you know There's a fragment of um an artwork from Canterbury Cathedral, and The Legend of St. Eustace, that has become ah central figure in this ah and this society's kind of mythology.
00:49:10
Speaker
And they've kind of they've sort of attributed the sort of they've kind of got like a dim awareness of nuclear technology and St Eustace.
00:49:22
Speaker
Yeah. And they've kind of like brought them together, and that's sort of a symbol for their fall from grace as a people. Right. Yeah. it's It's fascinating again, yeah, and very much an influence in terms of the way that like, yeah, these sort of seeds from the past grow in unexpected ways or are repurposed and and misused in sort of these creative ways and in ways that kind of generate new knowledge, basically, or new awareness. But yeah, that book is absolutely amazing. Quite a short book. What's
00:49:56
Speaker
Ridley Walker. Ridley Walker. Oh, the title is Ridley The title is Ridley Walker, yeah, yeah. I've heard a few years ago now that my uncle gave me that he's also set in the east of England, think more like East Anglia, and written in a kind of old English, but it's set in the old English. You know, it's set in the past. Yeah.
00:50:15
Speaker
ah This rings a bell, actually. There's a recurring like eagle, and it's the way, yeah... Anyway, but that was... Someone else has mentioned this to me. I wish I could remember what it was. yeah i'm trying the back of you mentioning that? Possibly. I think it might have been my stepdad where I was talking to him about Ridley Walker and he's like, oh no, but I did read this other book in like an old Kentish dialect. That's right. I can't remember what is now.
00:50:37
Speaker
Nor can I, but I'll send it to you. But yeah, it's it's great. And like, it's weird how quickly you acclimatize, as you say. Yeah. the metic and maybe Maybe that's what it is. That's why I feel there's ah there's a nostalgia in your work in that it does feel like a universal kind of musical language anyway. It's like... It's interesting for it to now have that futuristic setting for me to hear it because it's kind of got that.
00:51:00
Speaker
ah And I love that in sort of sci-fi and fantasy if there's like a ah sort of melancholic nostalgia and, you know, it's like a ah humanness, I guess.
00:51:12
Speaker
I guess a lot of... sci-fi and maybe more fantasy like lacks humanity if that makes sense or lacks kind of human emotion maybe and that's where gets too obsessed with the world and forgets about that what an individual might be experiencing in that world and um Yeah, I feel there's, I think for me, as I've said, like there's something about the instrumentation as well that maybe harks back to my first experiences with musical instruments, let's say. um
00:51:44
Speaker
That's kind of the palette. So it really, yeah, really got me and got me emotional and I can't, still can't quite work out why. And which is why I don't want to go into the technical side because almost don't want to know how it was made. I'd love to pick your brains about all that but actually I think there's something to be said for as a producer it's very rare you come across a record where you're not first and foremost analysing the process and for me it was just a listening experience which I find to be few and far between these days so yeah I'm not going to ask you about your 4-track I won't tell you anything more about it
00:52:25
Speaker
and I definitely relate to the sort of melancholy of it and I mean there's the something about the sort conceptual framework or the setting that this music is taking place in that's kind of inherently melancholic. In a way I don't quite know what to make of the nostalgia thing ah because I don't know. it's it's like I liked the idea and continue to like the idea of like ah people who are marveling at how advanced the past was. So the idea of the past being a more futuristic yeah thing was kind of interesting to me. like and you know
00:53:04
Speaker
Just really hammering home this idea of time and progress being this cyclical kind of thing. So I think I've sort of slightly bypassed my, or like rewritten my understanding of ah what nostalgia sort of means in this musical context. Because I was thinking of the ways in which the sounds are coming together as being of the future, but not necessarily futuristic. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:53:28
Speaker
Or like trying to re reimagine what like futuristic sounds like. The thing is, you know, you can you can go you can go obviously much further with breaking apart this musical language and making it something far more alien sounding and far more abstract or whatever.
00:53:45
Speaker
And there was part of me ah working on the record that was like, oh, you know, should it be more fucked up, basically? Because it's quite plausible that it would be. and But I think, you know, there is a certain concession to like ah trying to tell the story
Challenges of Live Electronic Performances
00:54:01
Speaker
emotionally. You know, you you kind of want to, you want to find a way of framing these ideas in a way that people can relate to.
00:54:09
Speaker
Because I think ultimately there is there is kind of like, yeah, there is there is a sort of human ah emotional intention behind the record and and ah some some sort of like, veiled commentary or whatever. So like i I don't want it to be a completely alienating thing or for it to be something that is difficult to relate to necessarily. I kind of want those ideas to be couched within something that people kind of can approach and and sort of dig into.
00:54:39
Speaker
um yeah ah think Yeah, I mean ah think for me, yeah, that nostalgia is rooted in, maybe it's the instrumentation more than anything. i like There's particularly like what hit me was that it's the third track in where the like a rhythm starts it's that born through is it you know kind of all kind of comes together and i'm sort of transported back to this kind of you did a beat is it called rhythm um but yeah like that is just like so joyous and kind of takes me to like this pure and i'm sure like so much of this is like embedded in this process of having a child and you know all this stuff that i'm
00:55:20
Speaker
having at the moment? Well, I think actually, yeah, what you're sort of touching on there is maybe is is true, actually, in in the sense it's like there is something childlike about it. And I really yeah can see that.
00:55:32
Speaker
um And it's partly like, yeah, there's quite a bit of recorder on it. Yeah. You know, this which is you you can't help but associate that with childhood. I don't know if it's the same in other countries, but like certainly in the UK, that was like the the instrument you were given.
00:55:46
Speaker
It's not actually a particularly easy instrument to play. and But there's something about an overblown recorder that immediately is is childhood. And it's very... It is nostalgic, I guess. Yeah, I can see that.
00:55:58
Speaker
and but But again, it's such a simple instrument that it's I think it's useful as a kind of rhetorical tool because it's like this would be... like You start humanity again tomorrow from scratch. Someone will come up with a recorder within 2,000 years or something.
00:56:16
Speaker
and those types of instruments were quite important. I didn't really want anything that sounded too digital basically. sure Or if it was digital it should sound like it's been dug up. you know like it's it's some sort of a really good scene There's a really good scene in the beginning of Ridley Walker where that the main protagonist is digging with this team of people digging this huge ah this huge pile of rusted metal out of the ground and they don't really know what it is but they're going to repurpose it and there's is this huge hulk of metal that they're pulling out the ground and my friend Ben from X-Easter always likes to to think of that as being like a JCB or something you know like digging out this thing that they don't understand from the past that's actually a digger you know that they're then going to repurpose and there's something yeah
00:57:07
Speaker
yeah what is this beast exactly yeah yeah yeah this must have been the thing that the humans were fighting this evil robot yeah i'm probably over analyzing the the timeline here but yeah i mean i certainly because but it came out in september right um yeah but yeah i think we'd just come back from tor around then and yeah i remember bringing back a an irish whistle after our show in dublin for hamish our our lad and uh yeah so there was a lot of overblown penny whistle happening around listening to your record so yeah it's all coming it now you've dissected it and it all makes sense it's um but it's funny i go back to like the the instrumentation thing of flutes and you know those kind of primitive uh instruments yeah so like
00:57:55
Speaker
So I've been doing a lot of work with a guy, Ross Hughes. i don't know if you've come across it. He's a local Bristolian musician, but like phenomenal reeds player. And, you know, he kind of works with a lot of great people. does does a lot with like Jeff Barron, Ben Salisbury on, you know, he's kind of go-to eerie flute or Bansuri guy. And yeah, we had a day in his studio and just recording some new bits for a new single. Yeah.
00:58:21
Speaker
Yeah, I made the mistake of saying, oh, can we do a pass on just like, you know, normal flute? And it's like, what? By normal flute, do you mean a bone flute? for You know, the first flute.
00:58:33
Speaker
Yeah, original flute. There's 50,000 flutes in the world. So yeah, you're right, you know, that there was something very primitive, but it's amazing. People are still making exciting music with those same instruments. Oh, yeah. Tens of thousands of years or...
00:58:49
Speaker
whatever the timeline is of a bone flute, I'm not sure. yeah I mean, by all rights, there should be a lot more drums on the album, so I'm sorry about that. should I mean, it was also, like, my first instrument was drums, ah so I have kind of a complicated ah relationship with drums.
00:59:07
Speaker
I love them, but I also find it quite hard to... use them in a way that I'm excited by. i don't know if you if you have the same sort of struggle. it Drums are the thing that sort of make or break a piece of music most of the time for me. yeah Yeah, I mean, I love live drums. Experiencing like a drum kit happening around you and like playing instruments along with that for me like goes right back to that.
00:59:34
Speaker
first jam with your mates in primary school or whatever way you know get the buzz of what it might feel like to be on the pyramid stage or something yeah right but they're powerful like you know there's not many other instruments that have that instant like who i've got you know power in my hands, which is often overused and you know probably guilty of that myself. But yeah, yeah it's ah it's a simple way as well to add dynamic, I guess. So it's it's amazing to be able to create dynamic music without relying on those
01:00:09
Speaker
yeah simple effective tools to add impact you know like well that's why keen when when when the shaker comes in it's like well exactly i'm crying on the floor you know yeah that's the drop right there yeah yeah yeah my son's art life all ahead of me and it all comes flooding in yeah yeah yeah one last one on this like for you is that is the record or this future in which the record is set is it is it in the uk or is it a nondescript place or Because for me it does have these folk connotations that to me feel quite British. I don't know that's something that... Yeah, that's interesting. ah
01:00:48
Speaker
I have never thought explicitly about it. Sorry, it's a bit weird, I guess. I kind of realize now that when I've been imagining it, it's been kind of ah some of it at least has been happening.
01:01:02
Speaker
ah around the observatory where I sort of started working on it, which is not that far from where I grew up um on the Wirral, which is just close to Liverpool. Has that seeped in as well, that teenage experience or anything like that? is Yeah, definitely. I mean, the Wirral is quite ah quite a storied location in terms of its sort of folklore.
01:01:26
Speaker
um And the hill, Bidston Hill, that this observatory is on, you know it also has like a Neolithic... stone goddess, sorry, sun goddess carving in the sandstone near it. And yeah, there's there's a lot of, ah particularly rocks and areas of large sort of stones in there on the Wirral that are like named after, you know, like Thor and Thor's rock and things like this that sort of have a connection with a Viking past.
01:01:58
Speaker
and So yeah, that like the Wirral is a place that sort of wears its mythology on its sleeve. and And so that definitely kind of seeped into into the record and to does a desire for this. Yeah, I guess it is a sort of, there's something pastoral about it. How how do you feel about that? ah I don't know if you've you're aware or you're subscribed to this kind of, you know, there does feel like a movement of interest in a kind of deeper history of the British Isles and, you know, there's the like weird walk stuff and there's a big sort of folk music, you know, I don't know if, you know, the Shovel Dance Collective and, you know, all these kind of, almost a revival of what I guess my dad was into 50, 60 years ago and... It's so hard to like articulate with bordering on the kind of patriotism, which also makes me feel very ill. You know, it's a really hard thing to yeah get behind. I don't know. like but obviously it's an ancient history that but yeah is being explored. Yeah.
01:02:55
Speaker
we We do need to find ah you know stories that that ring true for about about the country. and about like It is important for us to have some sort of shared framework for understanding our past and the place that we live and the sort of culture, however flawed it is, that sort of emerged from it. So, yeah, I think that stuff is...
01:03:17
Speaker
I think that stuff is good. I'm not i'm massively interested in traditional music ah per se, but I think it's really interesting the way that like yeah Shovel Dance, for instance, sort of re they shine a different light on that sort of music-making tradition and ah yeah bring out a different hue in it, which I think is is interesting.
01:03:42
Speaker
and I'm i'm ah sort of skeptical of any anything that sort of feels like it's sort of back to the land. yeah i don't really ah I'm not really down with that per se, but um I think there's something understandable about also just more tangible performative gestures and in in shows, you know playing instruments that people can can understand and enjoy the sort of you know, simple thrill of like someone's drumming something and you're hearing a sound. You know, it's difficult to do with electronic music. It's really difficult to ah to do performances which are embodied and which are truly engaging. You know, like i
01:04:24
Speaker
I pay very close attention to sort of everything that's happening and in electronic music as far as I can and like see see a lot of stuff and it's pretty few and far between where you see something that really has a lot of presence, yeah ah sort of musically or performatively like live. um It's hard to do that. so I also kind of understand why people are more interested in yeah stringed instruments and old flutes and stuff like that you know you can't beat it it's great yeah i mean that was certainly ah a thing for me of like starting the band was having seen some of my favorite electronic producers or you know musicians live and it being the most underwhelming kind of macbook presentation yeah like there's there's plenty of music uh that's made with computer that can be
01:05:17
Speaker
that can have an um an element of danger to it or unpredictability and rawness. you know therere the There's a lot of music I really love that could only have been made on ah on a computer, obviously. but um yeah It's tricky, especially beyond a certain type of venue or space.
01:05:38
Speaker
Like if if the room gets slightly bigger than like 20 people or something, it becomes quite difficult to do something visceral with a computer or something that really is like, oh, fucking hell, something's happening in the room.
01:05:51
Speaker
and And then it does sort of become, yeah, it can just become a bit boring, can't it? and Let's be honest. So it's a challenge always to try and find ways to to perform with the flexibility of like,
01:06:03
Speaker
computers but with the impact of you know a band or a sort you know sort of acoustic artist or whatever is that something you're planning are you constantly evolving a live set or are you stepping back away from doing dialect shows or what no i'm definitely uh it's been ah kind of developing over the last two years or so and i kind of i'm at the point now where you know I'm playing some stuff from the record or kind of interpretations of some stuff from the record and then also just playing these sort of new pieces that only really exist as like a live thing which is fun it feels quite creative um so I feel in a good place with that but yeah like I'm quite conscious of the fact that
01:06:44
Speaker
What I'm doing with my live set, I think it works really nicely in like a sort of 100 capacity room tops. And I think if it gets bigger than that, it'd I'd have to do something totally different because it wouldn't um translate in the same way.
Creative Routines and Discipline
01:06:58
Speaker
um So yeah, I'm quite conscious of the types of space that i play in and what the setting is like. I think that has a huge impact on with this type of music and with this type of performance. I think it has a huge impact on the experience for people.
01:07:14
Speaker
think most when people are able to really listen and like, you know, often like sit down or sort of get on the floor or whatever, like that does seem to be where people have the more ah deeper experiences with the music.
01:07:27
Speaker
um I did a show a couple of years ago where I was supporting Richard Dawson in a pub and it was just like, this doesn't work. yeah Or it didn't feel like it worked at all. and but I say that afterwards, people kept coming up being like, I really loved that, it wass great. I was like, oh, weird. It did not feel like that at all in the space.
01:07:44
Speaker
But I think a lot of places I'm booked to play, Either the rooms or the way that the producers and promoters have sort of laid it out really directs people's listening to this sort of close listening thing which is which really works for for what I do.
01:08:00
Speaker
But yeah, I'm definitely looking to do more more shows for sure. Nice. Well, let's leave it there. But um thank you so much for putting in the time. It's been really interesting to and to dissect um some of this. And yeah, as I say, really, really kind of impactful music for me and and the pleasure to kind of hear more about it. I feel like we're going have to add a reading list here because there's been a lot mentioned. Yeah. What are you reading now? Is there anything yeah that's that's influencing what's next?
01:08:32
Speaker
Yeah, what am I reading now? um Actually, at the moment I'm reading another Ursula Le Guin book, The Dispossessed, which is great, um sort of about a scientist who's from an anarchist planet who's visiting a capitalist planet. And so kind of comparing and contrasting these ways of structuring a world, which is really good.
01:08:50
Speaker
I read a really good book by Kim Stanley Robinson called Ministry of the Future. That's basically a book about the climate crisis. okay it's so It's a fiction, but it's basically nonfiction in the sense that it's full of like real science and like real ways that ah we might practically, pragmatically like tackle the climate crisis.
01:09:12
Speaker
It was pretty amazing, actually. It was a pretty great book. um Could have shaved 100 pages off it, but it was it's pretty. the first 400 pages, pretty fucking great.
01:09:24
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, there's there i mean I want to read this Robert McFarlane book that he was talking about last night, but I've not quite got the headspace for it yet. yeah How about you?
01:09:36
Speaker
Well, I'm afraid, yeah, have having a busy schedule of children and... Yeah, that doesn't help. yeah Yeah, it's kind of busy, but i've i've been been reading a lot of just like collections of of experience and stuff. there's a There's a great book on ah field recording artists basically and about their process and about how they feel about getting out there and...
01:10:01
Speaker
And using field recording in ah in an interesting way, i guess. What's that called? I'm going to have to grab it off the shelf. Ears to the Ground is is the book. And Adventures in Field Recording and Electronic Music.
01:10:15
Speaker
um Right. don't know. Yeah, I've more and more found it interesting learning about other people's process. and it kind of Not in a way to try and interpret or copy that, more just...
01:10:26
Speaker
Oh, right. Yeah, we are all doing it so yeah differently. It's fascinating. yeah yeah that everyone Everyone has some different way of perceiving what they're doing as well. like Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:10:37
Speaker
I don't know. I love listening to people talk about how they do things or how they how they see. Well, listening to Robert McFarlane last night was brilliant, actually. Yeah. I mean, talking about his process in a very literal way, like, you know, how he does it and how he structures his day.
01:10:53
Speaker
He has a break about 10 hours into the day to eat fresh chilies and then goes back to it wow um but just his sort of the way that the the artistic mind and kind of eyes that he brings to every everything he experiences basically or every place he goes particularly um was yeah quite uh yeah makes you feel optimistic is there a ritual or a routine to end on that you
01:11:26
Speaker
ah No, but I would echo what he said yesterday, which is that you got it you got to show up for work, man. You got to just put in the hours. It's like so cheesy, but I think it's basically the only useful advice you can give to someone because beyond that, it's so subjective and personal, but like yeah you do just have to like...
01:11:43
Speaker
turn up and do it yeah like it'll be shit yeah and i tell you what like one thing of having a child has like having quite fixed you know bedtimes nursery pickup like you kind of get if you're having a unproductive day and you know it gets to that point i've written some great stuff in 20 minutes because i have to leave at that specific time yeah well that's another limit whereas i've spent six hours getting to that 20 minutes of thinking right i should probably just leave early but yeah yeah right being there to do it and for sure well let's leave it there um andrew thank you so much it's been a great chat gardening sci-fi bit of music as well done it all and uh yeah hey look forward to to seeing you at some point in the flesh i'm sure and absolutely yeah yeah be great to meet up um cool enjoy the rest of your day you too pete all right nice to meet you yeah likewise cheers
01:13:03
Speaker
Alright, hope enjoyed that.
Conclusion and Future Plans
01:13:05
Speaker
um That was Andrew P.M. Hunt aka Dialect. I'm recording this in a hotel room Vilnius, Lithuania.
01:13:15
Speaker
um Played a show last night at Vilnius Jazz Festival. Yeah, really fun night. a Beautiful city and nice to be back on the road um ahead of a ah busy summer.
01:13:28
Speaker
Yeah, you can see us in a field in the coming weeks. Glastonbury, Green Man, All Together Now, Field View. We're up to Edinburgh in a couple of weeks to Hidden Door Festival.
01:13:40
Speaker
So yeah, kind of hitting all four corners of the UK and Ireland. Maybe see you along the way. um I'm going to stick a reading list in the show notes because there were so many great books and bits and bobs mentioned that, yeah, if you want to do some further research, then find it there.
01:13:59
Speaker
Right, I've got a pack, so I will love you and leave you. But as always, this has been Pete from Ishmael Ensemble. You've been listening to Catching Light.
01:14:12
Speaker
See you next time. Cheers. Bye.