We
all originally met in 1996. I met Peter and Nick independently after
making my Ahead
mini-album.
The three of us met up for a jam with Gerard Johnson (St Etienne
keyboardist) towards the end of that year, but nothing else happened
between the three of us together until summer 2004. I had been in
bands with Nick the whole time, and he and I had formed a bass and
drums duo called Pulse
Engine.
I bumped into Peter at the Royal Festival Hall, and invited him to a
Pulse Engine gig the following week. I knew he’d like it, and I
suspected this might be a good way into working with him. Up until
then I’d only ever listened to records and drunk brandy in his
living room or gone to gigs with him, and had then lost touch with
him completely for about three years. He was very impressed with
Pulse Engine, and we were all keen for him to start adding some
guitar. We invited him to join us for our next gig, and that was the
beginning.
We
now have this 6 CD release imminent: can you talk through what the
different sessions were that led to this material?
The
entire package is a condensation of everything we recorded, at least
everything that we can reasonably access without spending a lot of
money recovering old ADAT tapes that we are sure have nothing useful
on them, i.e. they are of attempts to rehearse things, rather than
improvise. The sessions were just our normal band activities. In the
early days we were trying to learn Pulse Engine material, then we set
about improvising, interspersed with the occasional attempt to learn
a couple of Peter’s things (like "Knights",
from his Two
Sides
album).
We seldom did anything without recording it. Even if we weren’t
trying to make an album, it was always good to record just to capture
good ideas to develop later, plus recording was easy because I was
mostly using electronic drums. We used ADAT tapes for multitrack some
of the time, but it was quite cumbersome to do so, so we often just
put stuff down onto minidiscs.
CD
1—Struggles Discontinued: where do these come from?
There’s
quite a mixture on here. It was the last disc to be made, and only
came about because we had all sorts of spare bits and offcuts. Some
of it comes from jams recorded to ADAT, where I took the best bits of
Peter’s playing (actually most of it) and either looped up drums
and bass, or recorded new parts entirely. That makes this record
something of an odd-one-out in the set as it’s the only one where
we recorded new parts (except for some vocal bits I added to Try
Again).
Besides the ADAT material, there are some rearrangements of live
sections that didn’t make it onto Hitting
The Fans [Live],
again with new bass and drum parts. Plus there’s a duo piece with a
very long and ridiculous title ("On
the 6th Attempt…")
that Peter and I made after compiling What
Is This?
onto which I got Nick to add some bass. In a couple of cases I used
drum parts that I had leftover from other things. For example, the
freeform drumming on the two "Harmogeny"
pieces
is actually a spare take from one of my youtube videos called "Free
As In Fall".
CD
2—What is This? I understand there are 2005 sessions with
just you and Banks. There was talk of splitting the band into a set
of three duos...?
Yep,
What
Is This?
is
the duo album I made with Peter. The aim was to release What
Is This?
at
the time. I’m not sure why we didn’t, but it’s likely to have
been a combination of (a) Peter wanting to add more guitar parts to
it, (b) trying to find a decent label via which to release it, which
was shelved by (c) Nick enrolling us into the 3-Of-The-Essence gigs
with The David Cross Band and Nick May’s Whimwise.
I
did find more duo recordings from later in the year after we’d put
the album together. The one good piece I found is on Struggles
Discontinued, as is the one to which Nick added a bass part. It
has some pretty electric playing on it by Peter. The rest seems to be
just rehearsing stuff, and didn’t having anything like the pizazz.
CD4—Try
Again: where do these come from?
Most
of it comes from minidiscs from one session on 28 September 2004.
I’ve long forgotten it of course, but it seems to have been a good
evening. It makes up the bulk of this album, plus there’s something
on Trying
from
that session as well ["Sods at Odds"]. I say a good one,
the trouble was that most of the material needed some serious editing
to turn it into music. Trying
was
an album we had to make fairly quickly in time to sell at the
3-Of-The-Essence gigs, therefore any candidate material had to have
as few duff sections as possible. The pieces on Try
Again
were a lot of work, but worth it I think. There’s a lot of variety
on there, and they show that we were quite an inventive unit.
CD5—Hitting
the Fans (Live): Is this still you or over to Speight?
All
me, it’s stuff from the first four trio gigs, namely Peter’s
guest appearance with Pulse Engine in October 2004, the gig at the
Klinker on 3 June 2005, and the first two 3-Of-The-Essence gigs in
March 2006. Sadly the third wasn’t recorded, a shame because it was
my favourite by a long way. Although it looks like we’re billing
this as the (only) live disc in the set, there’s also live material
on Struggles
Discontinued
(tracks
2 and 6) and Trying
(track
5 plus the bonus track 6), and Nick made Spontaneous
Creation
largely
out of live recordings from the David Speight era.
You
were re-visiting material that you hadn't heard for some years. What
were your feelings on coming back to it?
Generally
good ones, I’m happy to say. For me and Nick, a significant element
of the Pulse Engine workflow had been capturing jams onto tape, and
then putting the tapes away. We felt that music preserved in this way
had a magical wine-like property of maturing, as if we would enjoy it
more the longer we left it. That ethos definitely carried over into
Harmony In Diversity. I had put all my minidiscs in a box and left
them there, and for many years after my swift departure I had no
intention of ever going back to them. Having eventually dug the discs
out again to make this record, I definitely feel a lot more positive
about the material than I did at the time, or for years afterwards.
At least from the studio sessions, anyway! Once I’d got past all
the boring technical stuff, I started to really enjoy working on the
Try
Again
material
and turn it into end results that I can listen to now with pleasure
and some fondness for that period. As for Struggles
Discontinued,
I really love it and had great time putting it together. Whereas
working through the originals for Trying
Again
required
diligence, the ADAT-sourced material for Struggles
Discontinued
meant
I could be a lot more brutal with it. That was gratifying in a
different way: the luxury of being able to use only the best of what
we recorded. Anything crap was cut. Anything low-yield I probably
also cut.
What
did you do to the material to turn it into a release? How much is
this edited or processed compared to the original recordings?
A
lot. The only thing we left completely alone was Trying
(besides
the remaster, though even then it gets a bonus track).
I
rebuilt What
Is This?
Completely.
The pieces are (mostly) composed from the same recorded sections but
I did all the edits again, being a bit better at it these days than I
was then. Track 4 is a new version, it has a section that is not in
the original, and vice versa. Nick’s Spontaneous
Creation
album
was a lot of work for him at time, even then he went back and made
several updates for this release. For the rest: extensive listening
back through old material and editing down into some semblance of
musical form. I didn’t really use too many effects or treatment, at
least not with with later efforts, though the opening to Try
Again
("Prelusion")
is a bit of a knob-twiddler. I have, I’m not ashamed to say,
allowed myself some hefty reams of artistic license in doubling up
and looping bits where the source material was stereo minidisc, to
thicken the sound or improve the structure. I genuinely think Peter
would have liked the result. I still remember him raving about the
first Fatboy Slim and DJ Shadow albums at the time. I sort of think
of Try
Again
as
HiD does Fatboy Slim. When it came to the ADAT-based stuff on
Struggles
Discontinued,
I kept a lot of guitar soloing, kept a few good bass and drum loops
to build up the form and slung out the rest. I applied new drum parts
liberally, and even a few synth embellishments here and there,
whatever helped make another record that I would want to listen to.
You
joined Sanguine Hum for their second studio album, The Weight of
the World. How did you get involved with the band, and can you
talk about your role in the band?
Their
original drummer Paul Mallyon left, and Carl Glover suggested they
try me. Carl knew me from the No-Man live band (he also did the
graphic design for the HiD
Complete
Recordings).
The Hummies found an old web page, probably a decade old now, where
I’d posted some recordings of my polyrhythmic practice patterns,
mixing 3s and 5s, or 3s and 7s and so on, all in a way that was right
up their alley, so they sensed I’d be a good fit. I got them to
send me some songs to learn, which was a week’s work in just
figuring out the arrangements on paper, never mind learning how to
play the stuff. Then we met up, and got on really well. They
immediately enlisted me for their warm-up gig in London and then the
RoSfest date. I saw my role as helping their band continue and
helping them realise their vision, something they had in spades by
the way: they had at least three albums demoed. That was a major
attraction for me: being able to muscle-up on some nice difficult
drumming without having to agonise for months on end over
collaborative songwriting. Their music seemed intensely prepared, yet
I was more-or-less free to play how I saw fit - they didn’t expect
me to exactly mimic what Paul had done. There were a few bits of
their catalogue where I had to toe the line, for example "Diving
Bell".
I probably practiced that song more than any other Hum piece. After
the RoSfest date, then came the Weight
Of The World
recording. Matt Baber (keyboardist) had specced out the drum parts,
so I was following his guidance, sometimes doing pretty much exactly
what he wanted (for example as on "From
The Ground Up"),
otherwise coming up with what I felt sounded good. The clattering
roto-tom on "System
For Solution"
was my shout, as were "In
Code"
and "Day
Of Release".
I absolutely loved playing those two things live. "Day
Of Release"
was powerful but with a really relaxed groove that was a great way to
start a live set. "In
Code"
was very complicated, full of twists and turns and very little
repetition, yet once I knew my way around that piece I never got lost
in it. Much easier than playing 512 bars of the same thing.
You
are not on the next Sanguine Hum album, but are there plans for you
to be involved again in the future?
I
don’t know of any plans. Then again I’m not really sure what the
band will do next. I know in theory there is a final installment to
their epic Buttered Cat series. If they approached me again I would
be keen, but I have no expectations of that happening. While they’ve
got Paul back in the frame, they don’t need me. I still keep in
touch with Matt, though. He is prolific in his own solo work, and
continues to send me awesome things. It was nice to involve him in
the Piko Cloud Booker live show last year with his piano and
electronics set.
Another
recent album you played on that got strong reviews was Tim Bowness'
Lost in the Ghost Light. Can you talk about that session? Did
you have much leeway in what you played?
So,
this is the third of three solo Tim albums that I’ve been on, and
comes in at #2 in the pecking order of how much I enjoyed being
involved! #1 was the album before it, Stupid
Things That Mean The World,
and as with that one, I recorded all my drum parts in my practice
room in South Woodford. As far as I could tell, the bulk of the
source material for LITGL
had
come from Stephen Bennett, and was mostly a body of work I already
knew, because he had intended it for another Henry Fool album. Also
for the most part he was the one soliciting me for drum parts. I
recorded lots of drums for several pieces, but in many cases either
the material was dropped, or I was dropped. In the end I’m only on
four things, and two of those were from the STTMTW
sessions
("Nowhere
Good To Go"
and
"Kill
The Pain").
I like to feel that I have leeway with Tim, I did on STTMTW
at
any rate, but on this record I probably didn’t. I either persevered
with my ideas (e.g. on "You
Wanted To Be Seen")
or gave up ("You’ll
Be The Silence",
which went to Hux Nettermalm). For "Nowhere
Good To Go",
which I think was the first thing I recorded for the previous album,
I just played what I thought fitted the demo, and it sounded really
nice just with Stephen’s keyboards and no orchestral overlays. The
toms outro came instinctively. I like how the drums can enhance the
atmosphere of a piece a great deal by shutting up with all the
cymbals and swishiness, and giving the more subtle elements of other
instruments some space. For "Kill
The Pain",
I dug out my Bill Bruford Discipline-era
influence and went for the kind of rototom clatter that I used to
love messing about with, playing a drum on all four limbs, and tuned
the rototoms and the snare pretty much to the key of the song. Pity
we’ve never played it live, it would be terrific. For the last
track,
"Distant
Summers",
Stephen had come up with the original song structure, and said he
wanted it in the style of "The
Great Electric Teenage Dream"
from STTMTW.
I banged away at various takes, handed over something respectable,
and Tim just couldn’t get into the song at all. So he re-assembled
it as a jazz piece with some demo GarageBand drums and got Ian
Anderson to do a flute solo in the middle. I then had a really nice
time putting some jazz drumming onto it. My original takes were
therefore now spare. They happened to be exactly the tempo and feel
(once shifted by a beat or so) of "Everything
Ends In Nothing"
(from Struggles
Discontinued).
So on they went.
Can
I jump back to another favourite of mine, Henry Fool's Men
Singing? How was this album made?
One
day of improvised ensemble playing, and about 8 years of editing and
adding of auxiliary bits and pieces. A lot in common with The Harmony
In Diversity Complete
Recordings,
then! The recording day was in a barn in Lenwade in Norfolk, either
in the summer of 2005 or 2006, I have pretty much forgotten it. It
was an improvisation session with Tim Bowness, Mike Bearpark, Stephen
Bennett, Peter Chilvers and Myke Clifford - essentially Tim’s live
band with one swap-out (Myke instead of Pete Morgan). Apparently we
recorded about five hours of material. Some of it I do actually
remember playing, e.g. the funk groove of "Man
Singing".
Relatively soon after, within a year or so, Tim had taken one of the
decent sections and turned it into a song called "Schoolyard
Ghosts".
With a lot of re-arrangement by Steven Wilson it became "Mixtaped"
on the No-Man album Schoolyard
Ghosts
from
2008. We now always play "Mixtaped" in Tim’s live band.
His original version turned up as a bit of an anomaly on his Memories
Of Machines
album,
mixed by Steven. I really like it, and it’s worth a listen if only
to hear what the drums should have sounded like on Men
Singing.
Besides that track, I didn’t tune in much to what Tim and Stephen
were doing with the material. I occasionally heard they were working
on it, by way of a few mixes here and there from Stephen, but in
general progress seemed to be slow. For me, the penny didn’t drop
that the album was a thing until they were just about to release it.
Suddenly I found out Jarrod Gosling (who now does Tim’s artwork)
and Phil Manzanera had contributed parts. I still cannot believe they
pushed it out the door with that boxy mono drum sound. I mean, guys,
come
on.
You
recently formed Piko Cloud Booker with guitarist Cameron Piko (of
Montresor) and bassist/violinist Gaz Cloud (of Cloud & Owl).
Is there any more news on this project?
Not
much from me! My main interest these days is in playing live. Cameron
moved back to Australia last year, so that put an end to any gigging
prospects for the foreseeable future. Plus, the vast Harmony In
Diversity Complete
Recordings
effort
was soaking up quite a bit of my time, so I stepped out. I’d
happily step back in again if it led to gigs. Anyway, Cameron is
prolific, he’s always writing stuff, so I expect we’ll all be
hearing from him soon one way or another.
