Jean-Xavier Boucherat on the most cleverly named festival since Rockness, Doune the Rabbit Hole

Jamie Murray is one of the names behind a somewhat curious event that took place near the sleepy burgh of Doune last summer. I wasn’t there, but apparently, in what was an all-together phenomenal coincidence, a sizeable number of campers (including something like half the population of Woodlands) adorned in flowers, rubbish hats and rain macs quietly and politely descended along the same riverbank. Once there, they spent a pleasant day or two indulging in a number of sonic-based treats and psychedelic treasures, courtesy of a number of bands that also happened to be in the vicinity. They say the whole thing made for a bewitching, somewhat bewildering experience.

Turns out the whole thing was orchestrated, and what’s more, it’s going to happen again. The punderfully named ‘Doune the Rabbit Hole’ has just announced the first names for its June 2011 line-up, featuring names like Alasdair Roberts, Rise Kagona, Remember Remember, RM Hubbert and Dam Mantle. You’re either excited, or joyless. We went to talk to Jamie about the joys and terrors of putting on your own festival.

The line-ups just been announced, are you pleased with it? Who are you particularly excited about?

We’ve given people a taster of what’s to come but you can expect a lot more! That said, I’m really excited about seeing The Vaselines at Doune, and Mike Heron will be fantastic! Some great ones to watch are Rudi Zygadlo, Remember Remember and Trembling Bells but to be entirely honest picking a select few is somewhat arbitrary as I’m excited about every single one of the acts to tell you the truth!

Stylistically, have you tried to keep the music consistent? Or is it more an open to anything approach?

It’s never good to keep everything too consistent because then you end up with a long weekend of samey-same-samery and that can get boring so we’ve kept it pretty varied with great talent from lots of different platforms: folk, psychedelic, garage, reggae, electro-synth-pop-clamour-glam-superflava-pornowave and some other great fluff.

A big portion of the line-up is Glasgow-based talent – is this just because there’s quite a bit coming out of glasgow, or is there another reason?

We’ve got a lot of music from Glasgow, the reason being that we’re based here and there’s alot of good stuff going on. It’s great to be in a city with so much happening art-wise! We’ve also brought bands from further afield as well – people like Colorama and Blurt as well as Frank Fairfield who’s coming over from the States (what a Banjo genius he is!).

Apart from the music, what excites you most about the festival?

We’ve got a few brilliant non-musical acts joining us as well from comedy and dance to film to workshops and lots of stuff for kids too but the atmosphere is something pretty special in itself. Another thing that’s pretty important to us is the consequences of the festival – not alot of people are aware of this but we’re actually not-for-profit. Any of the funds raised from our events will go towards setting up workshops, evening classes and outreach programs to teach people how to paint, play an instrument, write poetry or anything creative really.

Tell us how DTRH came about. What was the trickiest part in setting it up? (I’m assuming it was a fairly DIY operation).

I suppose it came about almost entirely by mistake, myself and a few friends were just thinking about the idea of starting a festival. We realised that we always make grandiose and magical plans but never actually do anything about them and with this one we just decided to go for it and do the worrying later. So yes, incredibly D.I.Y, and I’m not about to tell you any of it’s easy! We learnt a lot of lessons from the first festival last year. The hardest part is probably dealing with the red tape that goes along with this kind of thing – health and safety and risk assessments and bla bla bla grumble grumble grumble. There’s just so much bureaucracy involved!

In relation to this question, why Doune?

We have a friend with some land just outside Doune and we knew that he would be very open to the idea, so we went to look at it and it turned out to be beautiful and perfect for a festival: A medieval walled garden for the main arena, a river running by the campsite, beautiful woodland, and the backdrop of Doune Castle. It’s stunning! We couldn’t be happier with the location.

Would you like to see the festival grow in the upcoming years or are you happy with it’s current size?

We don’t want or need to get too big. The great thing about a small festival is that you get a fantastically close community develop over the weekend and with that comes a really friendly atmosphere that’s unique and quite unrivalled really.

How do you feel the environment for independent festivals is in general?

Great – people are starting to realise that huge, corporate festivals only really provide an ugly, commercialised kind of entertainment which feeds off a mundane lack of creativity and the odd desire for some people to have their critical ability flagellated into submission by mainstream media. Smaller, independent festivals show people that there is true, original creative talent out there and it doesn’t have to sound like X-Factor to be exciting.

Do you want to help out at DTRH this year? Of course you do you kind, gentle soul! You can email Jamie at Jamie@dounetherabbithole.co.uk, but no band requests! Jamie is up to his neck in them and doesn’t need that kind of stress!

A psychedelic security guard, keeping out the bad vibes

Japanther

Captains Rest

10/02/11

Japanther use cassette tape players in their live shows. They like to perform their art-punk-dance-party-silliness over recordings of their own songs. You hear it and you ask yourself all kinds of pointless questions about artistic ownership and the nature of performance. That, or you spend the next week boring your friends to death with stories about how awesome it sounded. Except Japanther’s tape players weren’t loud enough at the start of their set. Let me just say this – any band who thinks it’s funny to spend a good few minutes berating the soundman is firstly, totally immature, and secondly, pretty funny. In a way, the evening’s preliminary sound issues highlight just how much of a damn Japanther don’t give. And listen now, because I’m serious – not a single solitary damn was given tonight, and that is exactly the kind of rubbish, generalized statement I’m completely averse to making.

It was really good to see the Glasgow one-man outfit Streets of Rage opening tonight with a full band set-up – they tear it up like a stripped down Social Circkle and it sounds joyous, translating well from the glorious fuzz-ridden drum-machine fuelled sound of the EP (available online).

Shellshag are quite obviously the perfect warm-up for Japanther’s feel-good fest. ‘Alright!’ they cry, ‘My new best friends! Let’s go!’, before wailing, crooning, dancing and thrashing through a rapturous, forty-minute eruption. Visually, Shellshag throw a stunning party. Everyone loves a standing drummer bashing the hell out of a floor tom and snare, especially one who’s got so many bells and jangling trinkets on her person that every other step she makes sounds like a hippie’s back garden in the middle of autumn. Truly the best medium through which to deliver succinct, inspired messages like ‘Fuck Society, Fuck Sobriety’. True that.

Here’s the biggest problem with this gig – it doesn’t take long to realize that you will never in your life come close to having nearly as much fun as Japanther seem to have all the time. The joyful arrogance of the two beach-combing art school terrors yelling down their telephone-microphones, thrashing out an uncompromising brand of feel-good noise is something so utterly ridiculous and overblown about that it feels revolutionary. Or at least, it does, until something ridiculous like the duo’s encore destroys any pretentious notion whatsoever – amid a sweating crowd demanding one more tune, Japanther stick on a weathered Beach Boys tape and dance onstage for the entirety of Surfin’ USA. I suppose the real question is why did I not feel like I was getting ripped off by Cry Parrot, and I’m not being flippant, I’m sure there is a perfectly good answer to that question involving words like ‘spectacle’ and ‘challenging the nature of performance’, but honestly, I find it hard to care, and have found reality to be quite a challenge since.

Jean-Xavier Boucherat

Trolling through endless review material to ascertain a flavour of what the furry sextet had to offer, the same buzzwords appear time again so much so that if we were to get our Staedtler highlighter out for the occasion there would be a florescent rainbow of ‘twee’ and ‘high fructose’ scrawled across our jotters.

Nevertheless, with a new year, a drastic band reformation and musical re-orientation comes a new Bearsuit. Gone are the brass and strings in favour of a decisively hipster set of techno-rhythms and synthesizers. The band, in steely competition with the Sugababes for most line-up changes, returns with their fourth album The Phantom Forest. Rising from the ashes of their former indie-laden sweet tooth melodies first championed by long-serving BBC1 DJ John Peel, they return with an abrasive new sound which strives to make easy bedfellows of the punk and dance genres.

Regrettably, despite a noble attempt, the band has stumbled into the jaws of the dance-punk bear-trap alongside the countless bands that had their fleeting 60-seconds of fame when the first season of Skins reinvigorated the adolescent craving for glow stick bulk buys and neon shades. Reminiscent of new-rave favourites These New Puritans and Cajun Dance Party, Bearsuit attempt to tap into the same gene pool and bring about the dominance and cult following which those previous outfits lost their grapple of.

This album has occasional glimmers of promise, most notably in opening track ‘Princess, you’re a test’ maintaining a taste for their art culture roots but sprinkling it with guitar chaos, but regardless, Bearsuit have missed the new-wave boat that was revelling in success five years ago. It is a noteworthy attempt but this will not be an album to make a roar in the art rock music scene.

Louise Pollock

O2 Academy

3/02/11

This year’s NME Tour line-up consists of The Vaccines, Everything Everything, Magnetic Man and Crystal Castles. Disappointing list? Well in comparison to last year’s Maccabees and Bombay Bicycle Club, and 2009’s Glasvegas and Friendly Fires, I would have to say ‘YES’. As far as I was concerned, The Vaccines were the most interesting band on the line-up by far, but that was only before they played the gig! Intrigued and excited, I ventured along with a gaggle of keen NME readers to see The Vaccines kick off the show at twenty past seven.

There is one word that springs to mind to describe The Vaccines live: anticlimatic. The youthful, fun, rock ‘n’ roll guitar pop of their recordings was nowhere to be found in their live counterparts, most probably because of the ever-miserable looking frontman, Justin Young. You could have easily counted on one hand the number of times that he smiled. The tracks themselves were technically superb and the lyrics remained as gritty and wonderful as ever. There was no excitement generated though, none at all. It was as though they thought there was an invisible wall between them and the audience, making it ok for them to look bored to be there. Not pleasant for all the young NME lovers making the effort to come and watch them (on a school night).

For a band described by NME as “the return of the great British guitar band,” I expected a little bit more. You could have put it down to nerves (being only the second night of the tour), but The Vaccines aren’t a band unfamiliar with playing live, having recently completed their own live tour, which appears to have included every single town and city in the UK prepared to loan a venue (no hint of desperation there then).

So maybe my disappointment was simply due to all the hype surrounding them? Considering they haven’t even released an album yet, there is a lot to live up too. However, you would think with all this hype they would at least try to look alive while performing. It’s a shame they haven’t got the album out sooner, as there is now an impossible amount of pressure on them to deliver. An album title has been decided on though, ‘What Did You Expect From The Vaccines?’ One answer, after seeing them live, might be ‘a hell of a lot more’.

It would, however, be unfair to write them off completely. The tracks floating around the airwaves at the moment are stunning stuff, and individually are perfect examples of timeless guitar pop. Fingers crossed, that with time, this will cross over into their live performances and the exciting buzz of their record will be found on the stage. The Vaccines return to Glasgow on 5th April at the O2 ABC, so we shall just have to wait and see.

Laura Stockwell

In her eighth studio album, Polly Harvey has taken a significantly different route from any of her previous works. There is little resemblance to the grunge of her first releases, nor is there any likeness to the sparse piano and breathy vocals of her last album, White Chalk.

Instead, Harvey has done what it seems every contemporary musician is doing, and embraced the tenets of folk. Yet don’t let her succumbing to this current trend put you off: this is a woman who seems to succeed whatever the musical endeavour. Strumming an autoharp throughout, the twelve tracks explore the rather heavy concept of war. This is an extremely political record – befitting an album that was first unveiled on Andrew Marr’s show with Gordon Brown looking on.

From a woman who has explored so many different musical directions, this is vocally her most accomplished record to date. It seems that Harvey has abandoned any constraints she may previously have felt. We have here an album with a sense of freedom for experimentation, embodied by none of her previous releases to such an extent. Throughout her earlier dalliances with different styles, Harvey had always sustained a sense of precision, which she here abandons with both positive and some not-so-positive results. At times her use of syncopated rhythms and discordance can feel messy and uncomfortable and yet it is also what makes the album so fascinating.

Let England Shake is not even close to what I had (or anyone else could have) anticipated, and is experimental even for Harvey. This is not the PJ Harvey you know, this album is an abrupt progression from anything she has made before, but for this reason alone it is well worth a listen.

The Pulse of The World feat. Zakir Hussain

Thursday 13th January

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Zakir Hussain is hardly a household name. With so many renowned musicians and groups performing at the festival, it might have seemed an odd choice for the opening night headline act to be an Indian tabla player. The tabla is itself a relatively unknown instrument, and those who do know what it is (roughly, a set of variously sized hand drums), they may well be curious as to how a ‘glorified bongo player’ could be handed such a pivotal role.

I can assure you, however, that Hussain is nothing short of a virtuoso. I could mention some of the musicians he has worked with (George Harrison, John McLaughlin, Yo Yo Ma), but frankly, Hussain’s brilliance is only truly appreciable the old fashioned way: sitting down and listening to him work his musical magic. The tabla is not percussion as the West knows it, at least the way Hussain plays it – he does far, far more than keep rhythm. The variety in timbre and pitch is truly astounding, meaning Hussain is much more than a passive member of any ensemble – he dictates the flow of the music – it leaps and springs from his remarkable fingers. As the central character in the night’s performance, his delicate touch allowed him to direct his fellow musicians, without dominating or stifling them.

For this was not a one-man show. Three fellow Indian musicians accompanied Hussain, along with half a dozen from the Scottish and Irish tradition. It was this headlong collision of two musical cultures that made the night the perfect introduction to this year’s festival. The fact that this blend of styles was carried off so effortlessly was what made this night a success. It was a celebration of two vastly differing traditions finding common ground in the roots of their music. It was a celebration of world music, and a reminder that Scotland has no small place within it.

Nick Biggs

Kepa Junkera

Thursday 20th January

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

When considering Celtic connections, a festival priding it’s firmly rooted traditional Scottish folk domain, the words genre-blind and Basque accordionist don’t spring immediately to mind; in fact they seem wholly alien and radically nonconformist to a concept all to commonly reduced to roaring ceilidhs and Gaelic pop. However, accordion especialista Kepa Junkera pioneers an aspect of the festival that would take a fair few tries to rummage up if Celtic Connections was a round on Vernon Kay’s Family Fortunes; that of international folk and world music.

Making his festival debut in 1999, Kepa has since returned to grace Glasgow with a magic touch for revitalising his native traditions with the aid of his trusty trikitixa (a Basque diatonic accordion with a wealth of heritage under its belt.) The Royal Concert Hall being the stage set for his return, the question arose over whether Kepa would bring a fresh approach to his live stage performance, deviating from his prior visits to Scotland’s live music hub. Not failing to disappoint, Kepa came armed with his secret weapon; Leioa Kantika Korala, a 15 strong female choir adorned in multi-coloured harem pants ready to unleash a oscillating sway in time to their harrowing harmonies. Reminiscent of classic Bollywood, the choir was received with varied degrees of trepidation by the notably maturing crowd the concert had attracted, bringing an almost public school choir dimension to the carnivalesque fiesta theme the music strived to evoke.

Despite this aesthetic and oral pleasure cocktail, the real magic of Kepa’s performance lay in his cheeky-chappy approach to audience participation. Undeniably, Kepa is a man who clearly enjoys what he does and has no qualms about showing it. Toying with audience expectation, the Basque accordionist approached the performance as one would approach an experimental jam session in a mate’s garage over a few tinnies and a common idealist notion for creating something wholly individual. Carrying his concert off the beaten track of expectation, Kepa used his spotlight as a means for indulging in masterful accordion solos. Beginning his score with mellow, understated folk songs, audience members twitched with the anticipation of an explosive climatic encore courtesy of the jig-friendly ‘Bok-Espok’. Admittedly, without the aid of a faithful programme, the language barrier between the Basque musician and his majority English speaking audience created a degree of distance as he failed to communicate the story behind his music, leaving the crowd uncomfortably awkward and gawping at his attempts to connect with them. Nevertheless, his crowd interaction had undeniable results managing to secure a standing ovation from an all seated auditorium and encouraging a daring few to throw a few shapes in the aisles.

Challenging the sceptics in his transformation of the music of Basque mountain shepherds into an inspiring Spanish fiesta, there is no doubt that Kepa’s genius and individual innovation championed the Celtic Connections once again. The audience were left stomping in time to the frivolous folk and swaying with the esoteric harmonies as they exited, wondering what he would bring to the table on his next visit to the tartan nation.

Louise Pollock

Anais Mithell

Friday 21st January

Old Fruit Market

Anais Mitchell’s most recent project was always going to sound daunting on paper. After all, a “folk opera” based on an ancient Greek myth does not necessarily appeal to the masses. Hearing it live, however, was a truly unique experience. In the relaxed setting of the Old Fruit-market, surrounded by fairy lights and candle lit tables, Mitchell’s music created an other-worldly atmosphere.

With the help of a large cast of singers, musicians and even a narrator, Mitchell shares her own modern-day adaption of the ancient myth of Orpheus, who embarks on a journey to the underworld to retrieve his lost love Eurydice, her part sang by Mitchell. A vast range of musical genres are utilised throughout Hadestown. Again, on paper, Mitchell’s fusion of jazz, blues, gospel and ragtime can sound off-putting; however she has created something that works astoundingly well.

Unlike the recording, the live performance included quite an in-depth narration between each of the songs; a feature that felt somewhat unnecessary, as Mitchell’s lyrics speak for themselves. One of the main successes of the album version is that each song blends together in a flowing progression, rather than existing as a succession of entirely disjointed songs.

For some, Mitchell’s girlish vocals are perhaps a little too sweet to listen to for an entire night, and so input from the other cast members – with their own distinctive voices – was warmly welcomed. We were privileged to the rather more powerful female vocals of Persephone, the booming bass of Hades and, the particularly outstanding sorrowful tones of Orpheus.

Her youthful voice, however, should not be mistaken for immaturity in her song writing talents. Mitchell’s play on words is continually witty and creative, “The River Styx was a river of stones” and aside from the lyrics, it is remarkable how Mitchell has combined so many genres and yet managed to create something that actually works rather well.

Hadestown is much larger scale and more epic than her previous works which, though brilliant, are entirely conventional folk records in their format. However, while it was a novel experience to witness a “folk opera” for an evening, I could have quite happily listened to Mitchell with no backing and only her guitar.

Abbey Shaw

Nick Biggs talks with Iron & Wine about religious influence, film professorship and the joys of collaboration.

Over the last decade Sam Beam (or Iron & Wine, as he is better known) has become well known for writing songs about love, recording on a shoe-string, and his distinctive, melodic guitar picking. His new release, entitled Kiss Each Other Clean, reflects an unmistakable change in direction. On a cold winter evening I was lucky enough to question him on this, his ever-growing family, and plenty more besides.

I’m a little disappointed that you won’t be stopping by Glasgow on your forthcoming tour.

I know me too. I wish we were going to Glasgow, I love Glasgow, but you know, we’ll be back, we always come back.

It’s been almost four years since your last album. Have you been enjoying spending some time away from the studio?

Yeah, a couple of people have said that. Has it been that long? It seems like yesterday we put the last one out. But yeah, we’ve just been busy touring and we put out that compilation record called Round The Well, a collection of B-sides and rarities, then working on the new record, and we had another child. You know how it is, life goes on and you stay busy.

You have five children now, all girls. Has being a dad affected how you work?

That’s right, yeah. It’s definitely been harder carving out time for music, but I treat music like a job. I have a lot of fun at my job but at the same time you have to apply a certain amount of discipline to it. For instance, I take the kids to school, then come home, go the studio and work some, and keep going ‘till it’s time to pick up the kids from school. You treat it like punching a card. I always liked the idea of the old Brill Building where people went to write songs for other people to sing.

Uncut magazine describes your new album as capturing your ‘evolution from alt’ country dependable to sonic pioneer.’ Is that a fair description?

Well, [laughing] I guess. I don’t like the idea of putting out the same record twice. Because, that’s no fun, right? No fun for me, or for the listeners I don’t think. Because to be entertained means you need something to come along to make it interesting. So with each record I’ve tried to push things along into a new area that I haven’t explored yet. Luckily that early stuff was so minimalist and raw that I have a lot of places to go.

You have a lot more money for the recording process now than in those early days. Has that been a help to the recording process, or has it sometimes felt like a hindrance?

Well, the songwriting is really kinda the same. I’m a slightly different person after ten years, a lot of the early songs were love songs, but they’re still as heavy and light. I’m still doing portraits and poems on life. You embrace the happy and the sad, the beautiful and the terrible. As far as money goes, I was able to buy a studio, where I can make more and different kinds of sounds that I used to be able to, but you know, sometimes it’s good to work with a handicap, with an obstacle. The Creek Drank the Cradle sounds the way it does because I had to borrow a four track, guitar and banjo. You make the best of what you have. Money doesn’t necessarily make anything easier or harder, you just have different tools. I use it on different tools.

Over the years you’ve worked with various musicians, probably Calixico most notably. Have you enjoyed collaborating?

Calixico in particular was a big learning experience for me, I was really learning how to work with other people. I wasn’t shying away from it before that, but I didn’t have a lot of experience with it. Then when that record came along I was thrust into a room with other people, but luckily they were really talented, generous people, they’re still like family to me. I learned a lot about collaborating and I’ve been doing it with different people ever since then. It moves making music into an exploratory thing, instead of just a translation of your ideas, of what’s going on inside your head. Instead of that you start trying to explore different options and the fun is being surprised with what you end up with. Music is fun to play by your self, but it’s a lot more fun to play with other people.

Exploration of community has always been a binding aspect in the folk tradition. Is that a tradition you feel you have ever been a part of?

I don’t really think about it one way or another: I just right songs. I can definitely see why people would listen to the old records and think so, the acoustic guitar and banjo signifiers are certainly there, but hopefully these songs can exist in other contexts too. I try to write songs that can just exist, that have an intrinsically valuable quality.

How did you decide on the title of your new album, Kiss Each Other Clean?

Well, it’s a lyric from the last song on the record – “The happy kids who kiss each other clean” – the record in general embraces the good and the bad, the sour and sweet, the hard and soft, pretty and ugly, so they’re fairly heavy tunes at times. But this record’s a little more upbeat, major key, almost danceable at times, so yeah, it’s almost like bad news with a wink, or with a spoonful of sugar. I wanted a title which showed both of those sides. Kiss Each Other Clean is a phrase that doesn’t mean anything. It feels positive, but with an undertone of something darker – that you’re dirty, that something’s fucked up.

Religious imagery crops up throughout the album. Is your music in anyway an expression of faith?

I’m not a religious person, but I grew up in a religious place, and religious characters were the characters we learned. They were taught to us to teach us our moral lessons, our equipment for life, so I learned to use them. Religion is a big part of the world, it’s part of human everyday life, but I’m not religious myself.

So would it be it fair to say your songs are reflective of your childhood?

Yeah, there’s bits and bobs from stuff that was classic pop radio when I was a kid, like Fleetwood Mac and Elton John, much more on the surface of this collection of songs than it ever has been before. But at the same time there’s an equal measure of synthetic music, African music, jazz – there’s a bit of everything thrown into the pot.

You were a film professor in earlier life. Do you think about visual elements at all when you’re writing songs?

There are definitely some connections. In screenwriting you’re limited to a description of action and dialogue, which makes for a real visual writing style. I don’t necessarily write songs to be like screenplays, but I feel like I was drawn to writing screenplays and drawn to writing songs because that’s a communication form that I like. It’s a more suggestive form of writing than to simply argue or explain a point. The audience can cooperate with you, be a bit more engaged because they can make their own assumptions about what things mean rather than if I’m explaining emotion or argue people should be one way or another. It’s much more fun to describe a place, a story, or something that happened. Explaining it isn’t so much fun.

Are you pleased with how the new album turned out?

To be honest I haven’t searched out a lot of reaction from the fans. My mum said she likes it though. That’s good enough for me.

Jean-Xavier Boucherat chats with Ben Chansy, aka Six Organs of Admittance.

As might have been mentioned, we’re big fans of inane genre tags. The uselessly vague Freak-Folk label started getting thrown around in self-absorbed magazines around about the turn of the century and since then has repeatedly failed to encapsulate an abundance of interesting sounds, some of which may have mutated from what was and is already an incredibly diverse and adaptable form (that is, folk).

For example, it should be fairly obvious that applying the term to guitarist Ben Chansy’s Six Organs of Admittance is an entirely crass thing to do. Look at his back catalogue and it’ll quickly dawn on you that ‘varied’ isn’t really the word – a split single with California stoner-doom duo Om, and collaborations with current 93, Sunn0))), Devendra Banhart, and not to mention a member of psych-noise adventurers Comets on Fire.

Chansy has kept the affair personal for his new record, Asleep on the Floodplain, a mixture of intoxicating psych-jams and poignant, succinct acoustic compositions, recorded in his own apartment. ‘This record is actually my least collaborative in a long while. After so many guests on the last few records I wanted to strip it down’. There is a consistency in the record which suggests this. That’s not too say this spoils it any way, but in the past Chansy has expertly demonstrated the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts magic of collaboration. ‘I think my favourite collaboration so far was with Hiroyuki Usui for the august Born record. All of the tracks were sent physically through the mail and we would attach pictures and graphs as to how the music should fit together with letters and presents. It was pretty exciting. I also really enjoy playing with Rob Fisk in Badgerlore. He’e been a big influence from way back when he started Deerhoof with Greg as a noise band.’

You recorded this album at home. This way you can avoid some of the hassle and problems you’d get in a studio, but did you encounter any problems recording at home? For instance, did the process become suffocating at all?

I was living in a really small studio apartment with my girlfriend so it was hard to carve out a space and time to record. It was sort of like, “are you planning on going out today because I feel inspired to record. Can I have an hour?” That sort of thing. It was never really suffocating. There were many moments of being tangled up in chords and wires. I think there is a great art to recording in a studio that certain really great engineers bring. I hope that doesn’t get lost in the proliferation of home recording.

There’s a mixture of droning, pscyh-laced jams and more crafted pieces on the new record. For example, ‘hold but let go’ seems to act almost as a signpost, mixed like it is between soundscapes that a listener could easily get lost in. Do you like the idea of people becoming disorientated in your sound?

I kind of hope that the music would be more orienting than disorienting. That sort of sound has just always appealed to me, which is why I do it so much I suppose. I think it is because in my own life I generally listen to more ambient stuff and also acoustic, so I like to put those sounds together.

How would you feel about a world without fx pedals?

That world doesn’t really appeal to me because I love insane pedals. I have one built by Bill Skibbe, who runs a studio in Michigan and recorded the School Of The Flower record, that is totally insane. I also like Last Gasp Laboratories.

This record feels quite rooted in place.

The record is pretty rooted it the place that I grew up as a child. I wanted to see what I could do with that. It seems the couple records before it were concerned with here and now and they ended up being pretty depressing. I wanted this one to be a little more lively.

Chansey has got an exciting year ahead of him. ‘I’m looking forward to getting back on the road and playing some Six Organs shows. I didn’t tour at all last year. I’m also looking forward to finally putting out some records by myself, just little things but things I’ve wanted to do for a while now.’ Keep your eyes open for a Glasgow date – Chansey is an exciting artist who’s almost certainly worth your attention.

Asleep on the Floodplain is released Feburary 14th on Dragcity.

Unfeasible fantasies aside, it did occur to me that there must be processes at work that determine what makes certain works ‘obscure’ and similar works ‘accessible’. Quite a lot of the time, when people talk about ‘a particularly good year for music’, or even ‘a good year’ for such and such a genre, they’re usually inadvertently referring to concentrated media interest in things like a home-grown scene that’s been around for years, an independent artist already adored in his/her hometown, or a group of friends who, really speaking, are just trying to have some fun, and are in no way trying to make some sort of grand gesture through their music.

Before you get indignant, I’m not suggesting that the music press has somehow disseminated itself throughout your consciousness and hijacked your opinions. My point here is that in fact, I think music is a remarkably consistent thing in that records across every genre with the ability to change your entire outlook are released every year. There are bedroom producers and garage bands hidden all over the place, secretly pushing the envelope. Admittedly, (and obviously, I would hope), the press do occasionally pick up said records, but then in doing so, they immediately establish a somewhat unavoidable bias that works in both directions – either you’re gonna get snobby and reject the artist, or you’re gonna decide you quite like that particular artist and get angry with all the former. Or you could be like me and get gratuitously angry at the whole affair! And thus we all alienate each other just a little more. Wonderful.

As mentioned in our review of the particularly fantastic James Blake, an infuriating selection we get every year is the BBC’s Sound of the Year award, winners of which include path breakers like, Keane? Little Boots? Mika? I daresay the most elaborate practical joke that Lebanon has ever played on the international community would have a pretty difficult time capturing the essence of a single day of anyone’s life, let alone a year. Sniping at easy targets you say? Me? Surely not.

Jean-Xavier Boucherat

James Blake is leading this camp with his self-titled debut album, and whilst he has been picked for the BBC Sound of 2011 list, the sheer weirdness and inventive scope of the record may hinder any serious chances of it gaining the kind of mainstream accessibility that the BBC seem to hope it will.  The pitched-down vocals from his previous work on CMYK and Klavierwerke have developed into an eeriness that leans towards the Southern rap style of Chopped and Screwed as much as it does to Bjork and Joanna Newsom. Whilst his EPs specialised in taking early 2000′s R&B vocal loops and crushing them up beyond recognition, his album makes the undeniable presence of his own original and very touching voice its unfurling creative thread. With his simultaneously harmonious and broken vocals constantly playing catch up with the beat, or leaving it dragging behind him, James Blake joins a form of music production that uses the human voice as an instrument in itself, rather than another squashed layer in the fabric of the sound.

For such a sparse palette it all sounds remarkably balanced; the keys, synths, drum machine and vocoder are always fragile but never quite snap under the weight of one another.  Where dubstep is often loud to the point of creative exhaustion, there’s an elegantly beautiful quietness to James Blake.  His lead single ‘Limit To Your Love’ – a Feist cover – is the only potentially mainstream track on the album, and one that the BBC will probably wring out until shrivelled. But Blake will almost certainly be able to maintain a graceful arms length from the Kiss of Death that the sound of the year selection has delivered to artists in the past, if only because his album is one of the most creative releases I have heard in a long time. I’m just waiting for the rest of the so called post-dubstep crew to play catch up.

Lauren Martin