AUSTRALIAN EAI
In the back of the tiny, ground floor performance space in Adelaide, Australia’s De La Catessen Gallery sits a baby grand piano that’s slowly going out of tune. Resting on that instrument, whose 88 keys remain untouched for most all of this eight-act showcase for Matt Earle’s Breakdance The Dawn cassette label, are two mixing desks, and other associated apparatus. Operating the desks are Earle and his long-time collaborator Adam Süssmann, who slowly twist together pure tones, phase patterns, electronic glissando, and shards of feedback with unassuming grace. Their set, as Stasis Duo, winds to its end in front of an audience numbering in the low twenties.
Some would call this electroacoustic improvisation (much as that term is inherently problematic), and until recently, I’d have agreed: there is certainly aesthetic and ideological overlap between Stasis Duo, Earle and Süssmann’s local and national peers, and such ‘glocal’ scenes as the New London Silence, onkyo, and Berlin reductionism. Dive further into the endless proliferation of sub-groupings, collaborations and on-the-fly gigs and recordings from this sub-set of the Australian underground, however, and EAI doesn’t even begin to cover the breadth of exploration undertaken by Stasis Duo and a clutch of their loosely related peers - people like Anthony Guerra, Arek Gulbenkoglu, Will Guthrie and Joel Stern.
In order to get to Adelaide, Earle and Süssmann, along with Riko and James Heighway, had spent several days on the road from their base in the Blue Mountains, camping out in the country while lugging all of their gear, including multiple amps, drum kits, and countless instruments, on the back of a large ute. Three more - the Unaustralians duo of Bonnie and Nylstoch, and New Zealand filmmaker Snakebeings - had driven over from Melbourne that day. Having them in town was, by all accounts, a wild time. But hang on a second…the Blue Mountains?
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“I don’t like the Blue Mountains,” Earle confesses in our interview. “I’ve got bad bones from riding my skateboard too much, [and] the cold hurts.” That’s fair enough. While I’ve not been there in over two decades, my memories of the Blue Mountains, from various family holidays, are not particularly positive. Those living in the small towns dotted through the mountain range, which begins about 50 kilometres west of Sydney, tend to either be retirees, or escaping something – Earle once joked, in passing, that to live there you had to be “rich, or crazy.” But life in certain towns (or off the beaten track) is actually quite cheap, and given skyrocketing rental in inner suburban Sydney, plus Earle and Süssmann’s enrolment in arts at the University Of Western Sydney, roughly halfway between Sydney and the Blue Mountains, their move makes some sense.
For Süssmann, there were other reasons for the relocation. “In 2004, my son Charley was born,” he recalls, “and we moved.” “[I moved in] early 2005,” Earle continues. “I’m here because the music is good. I have had a lot more time and space to work on stuff, and the music has become more diverse.” The space and relative isolation offered by the Blue Mountains has also helped in ways that are more prosaic: “There were always complaints if we played loud [in Sydney],” Earle says. “When we moved to the Mountains, there were no more problems with noise. All of a sudden, we all had spaces where we could play loud.”
Consequently, the duo have helped foster a community of artists, and the remit of their music has expanded, taking in noise-rock, weird non-pro pop, and non-idiomatic improvisation. Akemi, a venue in “ghost town” Medlow Bath that has hosted countless gigs, along with the Tsuji Giri performance series and Winter Tragic festival, is the physical focal point for the Blue Mountains crew. “Akemi was once a fish and chips shop,” Earle laughs. “The performance space is the old shop front. There is a five-bedroom house attached at the back. It’s on top of a magnetic water table, which makes everyone crazy, so legend goes. One side is the car yard, on the other is a vacant lot, [and] next to the car yard is a series of abandoned derelict buildings that used to be an asylum. People say it’s haunted.”
This is all far removed from my first encounters with Earle and Süssmann: having Arek Gulbenkoglu insist I chase up Süssmann’s revelatory Acoustic Guitar Solo, hearing word of bracing Stasis Duo gigs in Sydney, and seeing Earle in duo with laptop provocateur Mattin at 2004’s What Is Music festival. Süssmann’s history, in particular, is fascinating: “In my ancestry there were a number of accomplished musicians,” he says, “Jews from Eastern Europe, Russia, [and] Poland. I only found out recently [that] John Zorn is my cousin; our maternal grandfathers were brothers. I used to travel to India regularly with my mother, [where] I got to hear some really amazing music. I actually did my first ever gig in India to over 5000 people at an ashram in Mount Abu in Rajasthan. I was only 11.”
Both Süssmann and Earle had their heads turned by electronic music, Detroit techno and Krautrock in the mid 1990s. They met in the mid-late ‘90s, while Earle was working with Adam Rasheed in their duo, The Minerals. In 1998, Earle and Süssmann started working together, “making totally out there [and] abstract music with all this gear we had collected,” Earle recalls. “A lot of our friends thought we were crazy. I thought, ‘whatever…’” In 2000, they began working as the Stasis Duo, a nomenclature under which they still record and perform.
“Throughout this period I was working for the National Parks service at The Gap in Sydney,” he continues, “a cliff face that falls 30 metres to the ocean, and notorious for suicides. There was so much death around. I often thought our music sounded like what it would be like after you’re dead.” Soon after, they started broadcasting on community radio station 2SER, taking over Vicky Brown and Scott Horscroft’s Radio Alice program.
“We decided to play no pre-recorded material,” Süssmann recalls, “[we were] performing live each week, which was a real baptism of fire into composition and instrumental techniques. We had to sustain our music - one piece for a whole hour without a break. In the beginning, we would get fifteen minutes into the show and find ourselves exhausted of ideas. Each week we would compose another piece to perform on the show, and eventually became adept at stretching out ideas, with a huge repertoire of instrumental techniques.”
The combination of the peculiar demands of Radio Alice, their discovery of certain related strains of improvised music, and performing at and attending Sydney improvised music events like The NowNow and Impermanent Audio helped focus the Stasis Duo’s playing, while introducing them to a wider community of improvising and electronic music artists. Impermanent Audio, a night run by critic and university lecturer Caleb K, was particularly important, and Caleb K would eventually release Stasis Duo’s first album, Hammer and Tongs, on his Impermanent label.
Stasis Duo is the closest of all of their projects to electroacoustic improvisation. Their simple set-up, combined with a tendency toward silence, or the edge of audibility, reflects onkyo playing, though their over-riding interest is in phenomena over ‘musicality’, betraying an understanding of Alvin Lucier’s work. “We were more into acoustic phenomena than music stuff,” Earle confirms. “We had been into ideas of making music out of nothing, right here and now. Making something special. Our approach had become very conceptual, our compositions were experimental over ‘musical’. Stasis Duo has always had a distaste for the romantic nature of most music.”
This conceptual approach is also reflected in Süssmann’s solo guitar recordings, which document the outcomes of simply defined parameters, rather than providing a ‘musical experience’. His Acoustic Guitar Solo, for what he terms “electromagnetic guitar,” felt like a significant leap forward for the instrument, similar to Annette Krebs’s Guitar Solo in its almost brutal stripping of the instrument’s lexicon. “I certainly use very rigid conceptual frameworks,” he agrees. “They are like vehicles.” This also extends into his other projects: “The many bands I play in are all distinct. That is, they display particular signs which affiliate or separate themselves from different tribes, which may even be hostile to one another. It’s quite schizophrenic in some ways. Some methods I may use in one context are critiqued by another.”
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“Adam and Matt were very influential on my playing,” claims Will Guthrie. He’s writing from Nantes, France, where he’s lived for the past few years, after leaving Melbourne in 2003 and travelling through London and Paris. I’ve caught him in reflective mode, tracing the history of his musical development, from learning piano and drums as a teenager, through studying music at the Victoria College of Arts, on into professional playing in jazz groups, and then his shift into free improvisation and electronics, something concretised through his trio with Earle and Süssmann.
“I had never heard anything like what Adam and Matt were doing,” he states. “However, for me what was really interesting about [our trio] is that me, Adam and Matt were coming from very different places, we had very different approaches and aims in our music, [and] this created a tension that to me was very interesting.” Coming from a traditional jazz background, which was more about tracings of melody heads, quick shifts in tempo, stop/start dynamics and 180-degree turns, Guthrie was liberated by these new developments in improvised music: “I remember listening to this music for the first time and thinking, ‘Whoa! The music is really changing.’”
“I wanted to be able to do more with less,” he continues, “and also to be able to work with long sounds as opposed to percussive attack sounds. Playing with Adam and Matt really helped me change in this direction, to not change the sound too quickly, to stay with one idea for a long time, [and] let the music breathe. This is when I started using microphones, engines and motors, electronics etc, in an effort to get away from what I had been doing before, with the main incentive being working with long sounds.”
This development has been documented on a small but potent set of recordings: two trio discs with Earle and Süssmann, Guthrie’s solo discs, Spear and body and limbs still look to light, and La Respiration du Saintes, a 3” CD-R released by Charlie Charlie, his duo with partner Erell Latimier. Spear is particularly powerful: it’s an eight minute coruscation, where musique concrete techniques meet grating percussive noise and brutal editing techniques. When Guthrie performed in Adelaide a few years back, his percussion and electronics set-up, with contact mics, strings and springs, bowed cymbals, and chattering noisemakers, blasted forth an audio outcome closer to tape music, or the cracked everyday electronics of Voice_Crack. Like that duo, or The New Blockaders, you can hear the singe of wires and the burn and blister of scraped metal or broken equipment in Guthrie’s music.
When I suggest that Guthrie’s recent recordings have privileged editing, he’s slightly doubtful: “Hmm, yes and no… I think my work with editing had been an attempt to express a music that has been in my head for a long time, a music that is impossible to do live (there are too many notes!) and therefore is done by way of editing. In the same way that working with Adam and Matt allowed me to play things I couldn’t play with other musicians, editing allows me to make another kind of music different to what could be done live.”
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In our email interview, Melbourne guitarist Arek Gulbenkoglu’s responses are short and to the point. Though a gregarious character, he’s not inclined to reflect too much on his music, and when I ask him to explain his aesthetic, he simply replies, “this is a hard one.” His unassuming, unpretentious near-silence perhaps is reflected in the slim body of work he has released in the past half decade: only one solo album, Points Alone, on Impermanent, and an untitled CD-R on Süssmann’s Document imprint. But he’s unequivocal about one thing: “I think the Earle, Süssmann and Guthrie trio, playing just prior to Will going overseas, was some of the best music I have witnessed in my life.”
Gulbenkoglu’s history is interesting. He played French horn in orchestras as a teenager, before going through what he describes as a “pretty usual” indie rock phase. His subsequent encounters with AMM, No Neck Blues Band, and New Zealand’s free noise scene were crucial, and in 1997, he co-formed Dworzec, with Louise Conroy, Henry Krips and Antony Eagle. They self-released the “Shore” 7”, “Kairow” 10” and a self-titled CD, before NZ label Metonymic picked up their second album, Wednesday. But early this decade, they went into hiatus, only reforming in late 2007, when all members were back in the same city.
Dworzec’s extended break proved timely for Gulbenkoglu, as his interests were changing. He saw Stasis Duo in 2002 - “another critical moment,” he confesses - and started playing with Earle, Guerra, Guthrie and Süssmann in 2003. One performance I caught, with Guerra and Gulbenkoglu improvising with Japanese players Takefumi Naoshima and Toshihiro Koike, was remarkable for its restraint, continually hovering close to absolute silence.
Gulbenkoglu’s playing in these contexts tends toward the minimal, his instrumental trademark being his near-surgical precision, and preternatural capacity for apposite note placement, coupled with a natural ear for the right sound at just the right time. He admits an interest the ‘historical turn’ toward silence and minimalism in improvising, musing, “I think I inherited any of these influences second hand through playing with locals. It made a lot of sense to me at the time and was a way of dealing with some of the problems and issues I had with the more routine improv stuff.”
Gulbenkoglu characterises his relationship to his instrument with one word: “Uneasy.” He continues, “I like exploring basic sound producing qualities - steel and wood. Preparations are a means to activate these materials.” This, combined with an austere take on construction, has Gulbenkoglu’s recorded output, particularly Points Alone, feeling ‘reduced’, yet not generically reductionist. He’s searching for essence: “I’m interested in the basic qualities of experiencing sound - texture, time, volume. These are building blocks. I like abstraction.”
Points Alone was received by some as an improvised work, largely due to Gulbenkoglu’s history. It’s actually a fastidiously edited document, “constructed and composed from various stock recordings,” he confirms, “involving different preparations and mic recordings. It was a careful process of reduction.” Recalling a conversation we once had, where we marvelled over the editing found on certain Schimpfluch Gruppe albums, he explains further, “[with] Runzelstirn and Gurgelstock, I like the form of narrative (bleak and confounding), and the efficiency of this approach - nothing is extraneous. This is hard to achieve via improvisation.”
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While I had been a fan of Dworzec for some time, one of the first clues that something was brewing on a wider scale in Australia was encountering Joel Stern and Anthony Guerra’s Stitch, another disc released on Impermanent. Reviewing it for Dusted back in 2003, I marvelled at Stern and Guerra’s ability to fold field recordings, electronics, and Guerra’s melodic guitar together in a way that, in retrospect, suggested an alternate route out of improvisation’s inclination toward absolutes.
Like Gulbenkoglu, Guerra and Stern came from indie rock backgrounds. They moved to London at similar times, Guerra in mid-1999 and Stern in 2000, and studied in Eddie Prevost’s improv workshops, where they met characters like Mattin, Michael Rodgers, and Matthew Nidek. For both, the connections made through the workshop proved fruitful: Guerra co-founded the TwoThousandAnd label with Rodgers and started a duo with Nidek, and Stern organised shows with Mattin.
“Eddie’s workshops were very educational and put me in contact with lots of interesting people,” Stern remembers. “The London scene, music and film-art, affected me indelibly. From Mattin, I learned to appreciate how important conceptual clarity and delivery is to your art. He is a real master of manipulation - of sound, of expectations, of people, of the art world. That is very inspiring and I think an appropriate and smart way to navigate and critique the experimental art scene, which is what he does.”
Stern and Guerra spent several years in London, both returning to Australia in 2003 - Guerra to Sydney, and Stern, eventually, to Brisbane. “I was sick of certain aspects of my London life,” Guerra groans, “shit housing, high costs of living, working in jobs with absolute fuckwits.” After meeting Earle, Süssmann and Peter Blamey through Caleb K, who had programmed them all to play one night of What Is Music, they started collaborating, joined soon after by Inge Olmheim, James Heighway, Chris Nylstoch, and Nick Dan. “Me, Matt, Peter, Adam, Inge, we loved rock music,” Guerra says, “and always talked about doing some more rock music together. We all had rock histories.”
Guerra may be best known for his improvising, or his more abstract compositions, but the way he tells it, the rock music he was playing with Earle, Süssmann, Blamey and co sustained him once he returned to Sydney. Players broke off into different groupings - Antipan formed with Guerra, Dan, Earle and Sumu Sivanesan; Mos Eisley featured Earle, Süssmann and Olmheim; Earle and Dan joined forces as xNoBBQx, whose first cassette (and recording session) was recently reissued by American label Siltbreeze as Sunshine of Your Love, while Guerra also formed a duo with Blamey.
“Suddenly, there were all these groupings of us that were using more rock elements,” Guerra reports. “Your Intestines [Blamey, Earle, Guerra and Süssmann] was the main one for me. We though it would be good before we played a note, and we were fuckin’ right! We were doing these gigs alongside our ‘harder-listening’ improv stuff. To me, the concept and ideas behind each were exactly the same, just the tools were different. I remember when I said ‘we are playing rock music’, a few people said after the shows, ‘well, it’s not rock music, it sounds just like your other stuff’.”
This was a particularly fruitful time for these musicians, recording on an almost weekly basis, and starting up their own labels to document their music. Earle churned out cassettes, and later CD-Rs, on his Breakdance The Dawn imprint. “I found a massive stash of tapes from the Royal Blind Society,” he chuckles, “it made more sense to recycle and make something that lasts rather than consume and make something disposable. I have since started doing CD-Rs too, on misprint CD-Rs. I still like to recycle.” Soon after, Nick Dan started Pulled Out Records, releasing LPs from Antipan, xNoBBQx, Unaustralians, and Heighway’s solo outfit Spiders, and a 3LP lathe by Sun Of The Seventh Sister, their all-in-one, everyone-plays, ‘no members’ outfit.
The Breakdance The Dawn catalogue is, shall we say, daunting. Rudely packaged with black and white photocopy sleeves and hand-scrawled artwork, my first response to their music was a mix of surprise, confusion and wonder: tapes from the likes of Moss Eisley, Antipan and Your Intestines spewed primitive rock grunt that was monomaniacal in its intensity. The label’s groups had also started performing in Sydney’s few sympathetic venues, Frequency Lab and Yvonne Ruve. The latter was started by noise-rock six piece Castings, most of whom had moved from Newcastle, a small city north of Sydney. “I was running a removal business and I got a call for a job,” Earle reminisces. “There was a NowNow sticker on the back of the truck, [and] the guys I was moving for asked if I was into music. It turned out they were the Castings mob moving into town!” “The Castings guys were doing a lot of gigs and they invited me to play a lot,” Guerra smiles. “That was a good situation to be in, and I was really inspired by what they were doing, too.”
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Blamey, Earle, Guerra and Süssmann were also still playing improvised music in various spaces, from joints like Yvonne Ruve through to the What Is Music and NowNow festivals, and newly opened gallery spaces, like Blamey and Caleb K’s Pelt. Stern sees this ideological mobility as one of the key characteristics of these players. “Perhaps the uniquely Australian thing about these artists is the extent to which they have been able to move freely between ‘high art’ modes of practice,” he argues, “[like] serious galleries, intellectual and conceptual discourses, fine art and radical art interpretations of their music, and underground DIY modes - cassettes, lo-fi obscurism, rock and noise mangling, total DIY processes of dissemination, getting wasted. I think maybe in Europe and the USA, artists tend to see that divide as more permanent and less navigable.”
As we speak, Stern is readying his new solo album, Objects Masks Props, for release on the Nature Strip label. “I’ve been labouring, revising, deleting, recovering, forgetting and remembering it for a few years,” he smiles. “It’s a culmination of all my approaches to music up to now, and is densely layered with sounds sourced from machines, computers, instruments, environments and detritus of all those things. It also has some consciously sentimental and expressive sections which I think will divide opinions.”
Based in Brisbane, which has been going through significant cultural regeneration over the past few years, Stern has found himself in a particularly good place to develop his own projects, and act as mentor for other artists. He’s done more than most anyone in this loosely-knit scene to build relationships between high art and DIY culture, from his co-curation of the Audiopollen Social Club in Brisbane, which takes place ‘illegally’ behind a fruit and veg shop, to the OtherFilm Festival he runs with Danni Zuvela and Sally Golding. He performs audio-visual improvisations with Golding in Abject Leader, teaches electronic music at the Queensland University of Technology, and is on the programming committee for the Melbourne International Film Festival.
Stern is very conscious of the way art forms inter-relate: “OtherFilm and Audiopollen are both basically ‘intermedia’ organisations and this means we have the freedom to work with artists that we can relate to in whatever field.” That freedom is inherent in their festival programmes - when I attended 2007’s OtherFilm Festival, I was surprised by the breadth of avant-garde and experimental works on display, and pleased by the non-dogmatic attitude fostered by Stern, Golding and Zuvela. Stern also plays free music in Brisbane, as a member of No Guru, Gyanism, Sunshine Has Blown and Impromptulons. “I enjoy playing in large freeform groups, even though it’s frequently chaotic and frustrating,” he states. “When the dynamics and awareness are right, the power of those large ensembles is exhilarating, and causes people to behave and play in unhinged, uninhibited ways.”
There’s a strong collective approach to all of this music, improvising from certain structures or foundations, an approach that has taken off particularly strongly in Brisbane. Why is that so? After thinking for a moment, Stern ventures it’s down to a combination of knowledgeable musicians, “a really healthy assimilation of the most positive ideological tenets of hippydom and punk, and a very healthy dose of noise-thirst. Perhaps this is all a reaction to the over-determined repressiveness of the reductionist stuff…”
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In every interview with these artists, I asked about both reductionism and EAI, any personal allegiance to these genres (or otherwise), and any relationship between the ‘Australian strain’ and its predecessors. Most replied with responses that floated somewhere between dismissive and critical acceptance, acknowledging some kind of parallel practice while musing over the shortcomings of this form of improvisation. “There were definitely common ideological and practical approaches which became pervasive from 2000 to 2003,” Stern confirms, “based around the reductionist approach. I think that for non-instrumentalists like myself, it was very attractive because the total rejection of any conventional notion of virtuosity evened things up for us. The whole experimental scene, including jazz and rock musicians seemed to become more aware of processes of ‘close listening’ and more open to that less interventionist, slowly evolving textural style.”
“I guess the common ground was that many of us were interested in a certain path of development,” Guerra continues, “to get to some kind of essence or core, strip away useless gestures and bullshit, [and] think about structure and texture.” Indeed, many of the players have released albums that focus with particular intent on the ‘essence’ of one instrument, one gesture, or one conceptual approach. Witness Süssmann’s Acoustic Guitar Solo, mentioned earlier, or Earle’s untitled double disc set of no-input mixing board, which proffered twenty short but hefty chunks of white noise, mutating from track to track in incredibly small increments.
When I ask Earle for his thoughts on the fixed nature of movements like onkyo or reductionism, the way they appear to be borne of particular city, he argues, “Those things were site specific. We couldn’t be attached to that. I thought of it as the new global music; something that could belong to everyone, free from the old restraints, [and] based on a mutual appreciation of each other’s company, communication in new ways that were cross cultural, without linguistic limitation. [It was] something positive to come out of globalisation, it was punk, but it quickly became territorial. Now we are working in a less territorialized field for this moment.
“I think there are a lot of people out there that can’t find a way into new improv or reductionism because of its exclusive nature,” he continues. “Something that was essentially punk, with no rules, began to take on these creepy bourgeois, fascist undertones.” And, in much the same way Guerra sees his rock music as a continuation of his improvisations and electronics work, Earle conceptualises the noise-rock elements of the Breakdance The Dawn artists within the same continuum: “All of our current work is a continuation of this stuff, not an apostasy. No one has really been making the connections between Breakdance The Dawn and reductionism or new improv, but it’s all there.”
“It’s new improv in a rock idiom rather than a classical or jazz idiom. New improv is meant to be non idiomatic?” he asks. “It rarely is.”
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These are busy times for all of the aforementioned players: Guerra is releasing music on his Black Petal label, and recording solo, and with The Green Blossoms (with Aiko Koga), Shining Rice (with Junichiro Tanaka and Sei), New Zealand ex-pat Mark Sadgrove, and Hisato Higuchi. Earle and Süssmann are busy with various projects, including their new 2779 trio, the Ora(Ra) quartet, and Earle’s solo pop nom de plume Muura. Stern’s new solo album is out soon, and he continues to play in various improv outfits in Brisbane. Gulbenkoglu is working with Dale Gorfinkel, and looking toward certain site-specific recordings, and Guthrie is working on various groups and projects, and a solo LP – “just trying to get more and more into my sound, with my own personality,” he says.
“There is something definitely Australian going on,” Guerra proclaims, after I ask him whether he feels the music he’s been working on for the past half decade, alongside the other players mentioned above, has any essentially Australian qualities. Guerra should know – having lived in Tokyo for over two years, he’s had enough distance from the ‘home country’ to be able to abstract from immediate experience. “I think of a certain rawness or honesty, and a less studied, more direct approach to things. I think Australian people generally speak quite directly and honestly, and that translates into the music. And definitely there is a lack of pretension, at least in the people I know and I love. There is also a certain amount of naivety and isolation.”
“I remember I put on a gig one day,” Guerra concludes, “and at the end of it, over a beer on the street, Adam happily proclaimed ‘fuckin’ Sydney music, man’. I guess that sums it up best for me.”
Originally published in Signal To Noise #50, Summer 2008.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Thursday, September 4, 2008
001
THE HIGH LLAMAS
Photo © John Knights
“This music is literally for sharing, it’s everybody’s music.” Sean O’Hagan is speaking down a slightly crackly phone line from his home studio in London about music and egalitarianism, touching on folk modes of performance and the unpretentiousness of music that valorises community over individual experience. This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s picked up on the simple joys of O’Hagan’s songs and arrangements for his group The High Llamas, who formed in 1990 on the back of O’Hagan’s rough and ready solo record titled, with predictive referentiality, High Llamas.
Over their fifteen-year tenure, The High Llamas have written some of the most richly constructed and oddly affecting pop music since The Beach Boys’ disarmingly humble pop fantasias on Friends and Surf’s Up, or the post-Tropicalia sweetness and modernist impulses of Brazilian artists like Marcos Valle, Joyce, Milton Nascimento and Lo Bôrges. The group have also drawn on 1950s pop arrangements, English jazz and Canterbury prog, 1970s singer-songwriters, German electronica, Italian soundtrack music, French pop and American post-rock to create a self-styled universe where songs are pliable, mutable sculptures. They have cross-pollinated with everyone from Stereolab to Arthur Lee and Scottish folk outfit Appendix Out, Louis Philippe to Will Oldham and Kev Hopper, Saint Etienne to Lee Hazelwood and Edith Frost, and O’Hagan also has a neat sideline in string arrangements for groups like Saint Etienne offshoot Birdie, Doves and Super Furry Animals.
But back to O’Hagan for now - he’s on a roll, explaining in roundabout fashion why he’s disinterested in the cult of personality that comes pre-packaged with so much current music. Instead, he’s offering alternate prescriptions of ‘ways of going on’ for musicians interested in society and community. “(This) is what music was about many years ago. It was storytelling. People went from town to town to share tunes. Just like when Irish music was taken to Australia, it wasn’t about the people, it was about the music. Actually, that’s a really good way of putting it. It’s a shared experience, a shared happening.”
“For me, tunes are gifts,” he continues. “I might go to a country where I can’t speak the language, and it’s a struggle, you’d have to exchange some pidgin language, but you could sing a tune to someone, and if it’s a great tune, that’ll communicate. That’s what I’m trying to say. It really is a shared experience, and there is something egalitarian about music, which is innate.”
Though they’ve continually shifted aesthetic ground since their formation in the early 1990s, The High Llamas in essence work through similar concerns on every record: arranging beautifully crafted songs in unassuming yet surprising ways. High Llamas, credited to O’Hagan alone but also featuring future long-term Llama Jon Fell on bass, is a great opening shot, a set of stripped-back songs that touch on the peculiarly English country rock of Brinsley Schwarz and the plain-speaking r&b of Alex Chilton’s s post-Big Star solo records like Black List or High Priest. It also builds on the mid-Atlantic melodies of O’Hagan’s first group Microdisney, which he co-directed with Cathal Coughlan on vocals and lyrics. The group formed in the early 1980s and went on to record several albums for Rough Trade before disbanding in 1988. (Fell was also a member of Microdisney.)
The subsequent High Llamas mini-album Apricots was released in 1991 on Plastic, an offshoot of England’s Creation Records run by The House Of Love’s Chris Groothuizen. Apricots was later expanded to become the French-only album Santa Barbara in 1992, which preceded the group’s first magnum opus, 1993’s Gideon Gaye, a stunning album recorded on a shoestring budget of ₤2000 and originally released on the tiny Target Records label in Brighton. Around this time the group’s core membership solidified, with O’Hagan and Fell joined by Marcus Holdaway on piano, organ and strings, and Rob Allum on drums and percussion. Holdaway and O’Hagan are also responsible for the group’s string arrangements. This same line-up backed Arthur Lee of Love for a series of performances, where the group gave note-perfect renditions of Forever Changes.
With Gideon Gaye the Llamas found their feet, essaying a brave collection of songs that traversed territory from the Beach Boys’ post-Pet Sounds pop dreams to the quaint country FM of “Checking In, Checking Out”, the song that had Herb Alpert trying to sign the group to his label. In the end, the Llamas formed their own company, Alpaca Park, via Sony/V2, and settled in to record their 1994 double-album Hawaii, which thought through the Gothic America of Van Dyke Parks and Dr John by way of complex arrangements and cellular instrumental suites. The album’s playful lyrics loosely addressed nomadism, nostalgia, film and musical theatre, and the effects of colonialism. Bruce Johnson and Brian Wilson were such fans of Hawaii that O’Hagan was invited to collaborate with The Beach Boys on a new album, though the project was ultimately shelved.
During this period, O’Hagan had also been doubling as an ancillary member of Stereolab, and for a time the two groups were inseparable. For their fourth album Cold And Bouncy, the Llamas brought Stereolab drummer Andy Ramsay on board as electronics advisor, who filtered the group’s playing and scrawled giddy blurts of analogica over songs that were beginning to appear more like modular constructions than simple verse-chorus-bridge narratives. This development in writing style blossomed on 1999’s Snowbug, a warm, breezy album that was equal parts Tropicalia and Shuggie Otis, which featured contributions from Tortoise’s John McEntire and Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen, and was recorded in part by McEntire, Jim O’Rourke and Tortoise alumni Bundy K Brown.
By this stage, O’Hagan’s approach to writing and arranging was coming across more like a series of mischievous non-sequiturs, hopping between sections like nomads crossing continents. “The modular approach, if I remember, was literally working with individual ideas, totally separate, even written over extended time periods,” O’Hagan patiently explains, “and then throwing them together, perhaps fine tuning the flow by changing key so that the ongoing section follows on intelligently. I might throw a passing bar in to ease the change. It’s a way of forcing yourself not to write in cliché.”
“That’s one approach,” he further qualifies. “There is another approach which is instinctive. That’s when I try to imagine myself as a French writer in the late 50s slinging out songs for the torch singers of the day. Very silly I know, but I imagine the community of musicians at work.” Often with an O’Hagan song, you never quite know what’s coming next: he’s adept at throwing the listener’s expectations for a loop, moving the arrangements around like Lego blocks and reusing elements throughout the song as mnemonic devices. “The structure is sometimes classical verse, chorus, middle eight, but sometimes the chorus is integrated into a verse and takes one by surprise,” he clarifies. “I am a great fan of opening a song with an instrumental refrain drawn from the chorus perhaps which sets up the first verse. A good example would be the opening to “Calloway” on Beet, Maize And Corn.”
High Llamas fans who also follow modern English fiction may have been surprised to find a reference to the group in novelist Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters Club, which elliptically addresses the political and social malaise of 1970s Britain: the final section of the book is titled “Green Coaster” after a song from Snowbug. For his part, Coe has repeatedly professed his love of the group’s music, going so far as to write the liner notes for 2003’s Retrospective, Rarities And Instrumentals double-CD compilation on V2, where he wonders whether “any other band, in the history of pop music, could release a double CD compilation and not include a single love song on it. Have The High Llamas ever recorded a love song, in fact?”
It’s an interesting question. O’Hagan’s approach to lyrics is refreshing in a field that privileges the emotional outpouring of the individual over the observational documentation of the everyday. When I ask O’Hagan about his lyrics, he is honest about his struggle with the written word. “I am not a literary person and read much less than I should. I find lyric writing difficult and not a natural process. Lyrics come right at the end, sometimes six months later. With words, I try to defy the obvious lead the music sets and write about architecture, food distribution, urban regeneration, the US space program, poets who encounter traveling salesmen.”
O’Hagan tends to work in ‘concrete abstractions’, making everyday experiences surreal via their framing within a structure that often privileges the musicality of the word over its meaning. O’Hagan is by no means a nonsense writer, but the logic to his lyrics is far from the traditional ‘I love you/you don’t love me’ memes that plague so much pop. There’s a subtle, benign game play going on in his lyrics, where O’Hagan offsets the romanticism of his arrangements with a narrative or tableau that defies expectation. He suggests that he learnt this from his Microdisney band mate Cathal Coughlan, who O’Hagan thinks may have been drawing on John Cale’s example, and O’Hagan himself admires what he describes as the address of “the mechanics of living” that’s writ through Cale albums like Paris 1919 and Vintage Violence.
“The Goat Looks On”, from Gideon Gaye, is a perfect example of O’Hagan’s writing, with its detached observations on the quotidian impacts of urban ‘progress’: ‘Can’t quite believe what I’ve just seen, Construction workers dressed in green. A supermarket on the hill, The way things happens makes you feel ill. And the goat looks on, at another one.’ The lyric works as counterpoint to the sweeping strings and slow, mournful tone of the song, just perfect for lyrics that rhapsodize over love’s easy tears. O’Hagan, rather, removes the first-person from the frame. “I do this because it’s a protection, I could never be too personal with words,” he reflects. “I don’t really want anyone to know that stuff, but I like the sound and effect of a love song…so how about making it sound like a love song, but you are singing about a goat on a hillside watching a supermarket being built instead. Perfect. No one gets hurt but I really feel for the goat.”
This take on song lyrics also reflects O’Hagan’s own engagement with the mechanics of living. “I am a very political person and regard your responsibility to your community only second to that of your family,” he asserts. “However, I could not attempt to bring that into my writing. I am just not that good. I separate the two without a worry, and then I live a life that I hope respects the sanctity of others.” It also defiantly pulls the plug on the cult of personality endemic to so much pop and rock. “I think it’s weird that a large number of people would want to know everything about a certain singer,” O’Hagan sighs, sounding genuinely puzzled. “You can hear the emotion in the vocal style, it’s a big set up, you can hear the ‘crack’ in the vocal style. There was a time where it disappeared for a while, but it came back, and everyone was excited about deep emotions in music, and passion in music, and yeah, passion in music is great but only if the passion is genuine, if it’s about sharing…”
Snowbug was The High Llamas’ final release for major-indie label V2, after which they signed to Drag City in the USA, and Stereolab’s label Duophonic Super 45s in Britain. Both labels had previously released O’Hagan’s Turn On collaboration with Stereolab’s Tim Gane and Andy Ramsay, an experimental instrumental mini-album whose sense of play made it an important precursor to both the Llamas’ Cold And Bouncy and Stereolab’s Dots And Loops. In 2000, the Llamas released a mini-album, Buzzle Bee, which saw the group at their most abstract, particularly on the schizophrenic “New Broadway”, which cuts between performances much like an electro-acoustician mangling analogue tape into deliriously abstruse audio scaffolds.
Without the financial backing of a large label, The High Llamas have perhaps had to scale down their recordings, and it took them three years to follow up Buzzle Bee. 2003’s Beet, Maize And Corn received fairly short shrift in some quarters - I remember a ridiculously misguided review in Adelaide, Australia’s street press which suggested the album was a carbon copy of the Llamas’ earlier records. But its fantastic combination of understated lyrics, sweet nylon string guitar, buzzing organs, and the pop-in-abstract of the group’s most risky strings and brass arrangements yet, mark Beet, Maize And Corn as the group’s mislaid masterpiece, and my favorite work in their canon.
When I start asking about the album, O’Hagan appears surprised and pleased that I’ve picked up on the record’s quiet yet determined individualism: there was simply nothing else in 2003 across pop music’s bleak horizon that sounded quite like this. It has always struck me as the group’s most self-contained set of songs, and according to O’Hagan, the album works through several key areas of interest. The rhythm section is all but absent from the record, with percussion working more as punctuation or shading. “The difference between the music I’d been brought up with, you know, post-Beatles pop music, and some music from the 1950s that I was interested in, was basically the absence of backbeat,” O’Hagan observes. This absence gives the record its unhurried, nostalgic air: “I really wanted a record that had autumnal colours.”
O’Hagan also worked with two particular string sounds - a very dry string sound, and its converse, “that American sound, strings (that were) dripping with reverb.” The brass arrangements on the album stand out the most, though. Arranged by O’Hagan and Andy Robinson, they draw on the avant-garde brass O’Hagan had heard on Carla Bley’s landmark albums from the 1960s and 1970s, beautiful titles like Escalator Over The Hill. “They were quite strange records,” O’Hagan chuckles, “those Carla Bley avant-garde brass arrangements. But it’s a great sound, I really wanted to use that sound. That’s what you’ll hear on songs like “Barney Mix”.”
Furthermore, the way the songs repeat tiny cells of melody and harmony, from the seemingly real-time cut-ups of “Porter Dimi” to the languorous, dream-like haze of strings that floats through “The Holly Hills”, a song that eulogises Van Dyke Parks and the art of the song writer producing for pop singers - ‘But white pianos seem to be across the hills of Beverly / The singers wait for songs to sing, the city pipes the water in / One day the singing will begin, Across the Holly Hills’ - recalls the demands of composition for film soundtrack. “You are completely right about the repetition of ideas on a record as homage to film soundtrack and I get a lot of my instrumental developmental ideas from soundtracks,” O’Hagan claims. “I love French and Italian soundtracks, and American - let’s not forget Bernard Herrmann. They are as experimental as they are impressionistic. Using the sense of soundtrack removes the song from the ordinary and gives it a special space of its own.”
I’d also always been intrigued by the cover for Beet, Maize And Corn. High Llamas record covers in the past had featured rude huts, abstract paintings dotted with power lines, or skyscrapers made unreal by pastel shadings, but Beet, Maize And Corn is clothed in a gorgeous painting of an everyday urban setting: a tower block in glass and red. O’Hagan divulges, “Beet, Maize and Corn featured a local landmark hated by all but painted in a slightly 1950s Parisian style. Previous to that, we played with graphics for a while but I got bored with that and returned to trusted painting. It will go in and out of style but we will stick with it. I just love it. One picture and you can create a little world for a few to see. The art does not need to function next to the music. I like the idea of causing the listener to ask the question ‘how does this work’?” And, far from the abstracted imaginary of some of his earlier lyrics, O’Hagan recalls with genuine wonder, “after Beet Maize And Corn I was walking around and I thought, ‘I’ve just written about what’s on my doorstep’.”
Can Cladders, the new High Llamas record, features another painting by Jeremy Glogan as its cover. “All the mini scenes are extracted from the songs but this is a first. The new painting started off as a collage I knocked up and I asked Jeremy to paint the collage very much as on the cover of Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite”. The album is a subtle about-face from the gorgeous urban stillness of Beet, Maize And Corn. The way O’Hagan puts it, he wanted to tap into a rich seam of 1970s singer-songwriter recordings and soul, gospel and r&b choruses. “There’s a lot of joy in that music”, he grins, singling out Laura Nyro And Labelle’s 1971 collaboration Gonna Take A Miracle, where the New York songwriter paid tribute to soul and pop from the 1960s with the Labelle trio as female chorus, as particularly important. It’s not a sound that The High Llamas have touched on before. “I’d shied away from it,” O’Hagan agrees, “but on that Laura Nyro And Labelle album, there’s that track called “The Bells”, and I thought, well, I just want to get that gospel stuff (on the record).”
The resulting album is perhaps the most celebratory of their career, with the female chorus of Winnie Asmah, Tania Degale, Sylvia Arthur and Kelsey Michael belting out charming counterpoint to O’Hagan’s modest singing. “They hadn’t really heard the music I’d referred to,” he recalls, “but I had the idea that I had, and we just gathered around the piano, and listened to the records. The rhythm section came back, and we recorded the rhythm section mostly with just a few mics and a few takes, I really wanted to get that live sound you hear on those records…(For the vocals) the idea was really a trashy recording, a slightly trashy sound on the vocals.”
It works beautifully, with the sweet, understated melisma on “Winter’s Day” the record’s highlight, alongside a gorgeous near-ballad named after and written in tribute to the American jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby, whose Afro-Harping album is an under-recognised classic, and who played on countless sessions for soul singers before moving further out into previously uncharted territory. O’Hagan’s lyric documents an experience he had while DJing, playing Ashby’s records to the general confusion of the squares in the crowd: ‘Puzzled by the sound, Dorothy’s around, from another day / Music lost and found, from another day / Brought upon a harp from another day’.
“Sailing Bells”, with its chorus cascade of rich harmony - almost like a folk music round - and gentle spider’s-web strings, pays homage to another of O’Hagan’s heroes, Robert Wyatt. “Yeah, there’s a tribute to Robert Wyatt in the second verse,” O’Hagan explains, “where the lyric goes ‘Bobby sails the cat / Down the Medway flats / Like a freeform not far from the land / Sailing bells are hung / Brushes on the drum / And the free men of Canterbury play / And the cat moves on down the Medway’. That is basically, I dunno, that’s more just about Canterbury in the 1970s being the hub, the Canterbury scene. I was trying to capture the scene, of these hippie guys making their music, Soft Machine, Hatfield And The North. For some reason, I put them on a boat. And of course, ‘Bobby sails the cat…’ is Robert Wyatt.”
It’s a beautiful image, the antic heroes of a very English strain of 1960s psychedelia, Wyatt, Kevin Ayers, and Australian ex-pat Daevid Allen manning the sails. O’Hagan acknowledges that Wyatt in particular is an “incredibly important” figure in his private constellation of musical heroes. It’s not hard to figure why. Wyatt was one of the first singers to break free of the Americanisms of early 1960s English r&b and rock, first in The Wilde Flowers and then with the earliest line-ups of The Soft Machine, and his consequent project Matching Mole. Wyatt sings with an almost defiant colloquialism, his slightly soured falsetto bringing equal parts pathos and humour to a nearly four-decade run of solo recordings that draw from jazz, prog, bossa nova and pop. And though Wyatt’s music is never short of the whimsically absurd - Wyatt himself has claimed in interview that he’s “deeply shallow” - his benign presence and generosity of spirit is matched by a cussed political streak.
One of Wyatt’s great skills is the wry concealment that often occurs in his lyrics, with political broadsides cloaked as dolorous love songs, an approach that directly echoes O’Hagan’s own take on the word. “Yeah, you’re absolutely right,” O’Hagan agrees, before continuing, “Robert Wyatt, I mean, getting back to what we’ve been talking about, he’s never shied away from pop music.” Anyone who’s seen Wyatt’s Top Of The Pops appearance when his mid-1970s cover of The Monkees’ “I’m A Believer” broached the English charts would doubtless agree, with his plain-singing vocal the bridge between the way-out Canterbury cats and the pure pleasure of the pop song.
I wonder aloud whether Wyatt’s conversational singing style had any impact on O’Hagan, and he pauses before suggesting there’s one particular connection: “I think it’s really love of melody, and…There’s a little bit of folk music in the way I sing, not that I sing like a folk musician, but I don’t like the idea of embellishing. There are very few people who sing without that (these days), maybe Trish (Keenan) from Broadcast, she doesn’t embellish the melody.”
As we speak, O’Hagan has been editing and mastering the soundtrack for La Vie d’Artiste by director Marc Fitoussi, which has been composed in collaboration with Tim Gane. As The High Llamas slow their output - over three years separate Beet, Maize And Corn and Can Cladders - O’Hagan has been busying himself with other projects. Alongside the film soundtrack, which is due for release on Beggars Banquet sometime in 2007, he has recently been collaborating with fellow Llama Marcus Holdaway and artist Jean-Pierre Muller on their ongoing Musical Painting and Musical Wheel collaborations, where O’Hagan’s and Holdaway’s compositions inhabit the very fabric of Muller’s artwork. He also recently wrote three songs for the new album from Kassin+2, Futurismo, the latest manifestation of the post-Tropicalia trio of Moreno Veloso (son of Brazilian pop pioneer Caetano Veloso), Domenico Lancellotti and Kassin.
O’Hagan’s ongoing connection with Brazilian music, which he hails for being “sophisticated pop music, but not ‘hack’ music - it’s sophisticated pop without pomp”, also led to his hiring as musical director for the London Barbican’s staging of the Tropicalia manifesto album Panis Et Circensis. O’Hagan and Holdaway transcribed the Rogerio Duprat arrangements from the album and staged the performance with Brazilian outfit Orchestre Imperial. His enthusiasm for Brazilian music spills over in our conversation: “One of the things I love about that music, and it connects back to our earlier conversation about community and music, is that at their shows the entire audience sings along with the tunes! It happens at Caetano Veloso gigs, you go and see him and the audience is singing along.”
It’s an approach to the song - as conduit for shared experience, as an access moment for community - that resonates with O’Hagan’s own writing: his dream of an egalitarian song that rings true, a benign, generous and unpretentious song that collapses the false divide between experiment and accessibility. “Your instinct leads you to write in a way which satisfies your artistic intentions and if you are strong you stick to your guns. If the high street likes your music, so be it. If the avant-garde embrace you, so be it, just as long as they do not abuse a non-believer for not being on message.” O’Hagan pauses before concluding, with a gentle nod, “It’s the music and not the lifestyle that is important.”
Originally published in Signal To Noise #45, Spring 2007.
Photo © John Knights
“This music is literally for sharing, it’s everybody’s music.” Sean O’Hagan is speaking down a slightly crackly phone line from his home studio in London about music and egalitarianism, touching on folk modes of performance and the unpretentiousness of music that valorises community over individual experience. This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s picked up on the simple joys of O’Hagan’s songs and arrangements for his group The High Llamas, who formed in 1990 on the back of O’Hagan’s rough and ready solo record titled, with predictive referentiality, High Llamas.
Over their fifteen-year tenure, The High Llamas have written some of the most richly constructed and oddly affecting pop music since The Beach Boys’ disarmingly humble pop fantasias on Friends and Surf’s Up, or the post-Tropicalia sweetness and modernist impulses of Brazilian artists like Marcos Valle, Joyce, Milton Nascimento and Lo Bôrges. The group have also drawn on 1950s pop arrangements, English jazz and Canterbury prog, 1970s singer-songwriters, German electronica, Italian soundtrack music, French pop and American post-rock to create a self-styled universe where songs are pliable, mutable sculptures. They have cross-pollinated with everyone from Stereolab to Arthur Lee and Scottish folk outfit Appendix Out, Louis Philippe to Will Oldham and Kev Hopper, Saint Etienne to Lee Hazelwood and Edith Frost, and O’Hagan also has a neat sideline in string arrangements for groups like Saint Etienne offshoot Birdie, Doves and Super Furry Animals.
But back to O’Hagan for now - he’s on a roll, explaining in roundabout fashion why he’s disinterested in the cult of personality that comes pre-packaged with so much current music. Instead, he’s offering alternate prescriptions of ‘ways of going on’ for musicians interested in society and community. “(This) is what music was about many years ago. It was storytelling. People went from town to town to share tunes. Just like when Irish music was taken to Australia, it wasn’t about the people, it was about the music. Actually, that’s a really good way of putting it. It’s a shared experience, a shared happening.”
“For me, tunes are gifts,” he continues. “I might go to a country where I can’t speak the language, and it’s a struggle, you’d have to exchange some pidgin language, but you could sing a tune to someone, and if it’s a great tune, that’ll communicate. That’s what I’m trying to say. It really is a shared experience, and there is something egalitarian about music, which is innate.”
Though they’ve continually shifted aesthetic ground since their formation in the early 1990s, The High Llamas in essence work through similar concerns on every record: arranging beautifully crafted songs in unassuming yet surprising ways. High Llamas, credited to O’Hagan alone but also featuring future long-term Llama Jon Fell on bass, is a great opening shot, a set of stripped-back songs that touch on the peculiarly English country rock of Brinsley Schwarz and the plain-speaking r&b of Alex Chilton’s s post-Big Star solo records like Black List or High Priest. It also builds on the mid-Atlantic melodies of O’Hagan’s first group Microdisney, which he co-directed with Cathal Coughlan on vocals and lyrics. The group formed in the early 1980s and went on to record several albums for Rough Trade before disbanding in 1988. (Fell was also a member of Microdisney.)
The subsequent High Llamas mini-album Apricots was released in 1991 on Plastic, an offshoot of England’s Creation Records run by The House Of Love’s Chris Groothuizen. Apricots was later expanded to become the French-only album Santa Barbara in 1992, which preceded the group’s first magnum opus, 1993’s Gideon Gaye, a stunning album recorded on a shoestring budget of ₤2000 and originally released on the tiny Target Records label in Brighton. Around this time the group’s core membership solidified, with O’Hagan and Fell joined by Marcus Holdaway on piano, organ and strings, and Rob Allum on drums and percussion. Holdaway and O’Hagan are also responsible for the group’s string arrangements. This same line-up backed Arthur Lee of Love for a series of performances, where the group gave note-perfect renditions of Forever Changes.
With Gideon Gaye the Llamas found their feet, essaying a brave collection of songs that traversed territory from the Beach Boys’ post-Pet Sounds pop dreams to the quaint country FM of “Checking In, Checking Out”, the song that had Herb Alpert trying to sign the group to his label. In the end, the Llamas formed their own company, Alpaca Park, via Sony/V2, and settled in to record their 1994 double-album Hawaii, which thought through the Gothic America of Van Dyke Parks and Dr John by way of complex arrangements and cellular instrumental suites. The album’s playful lyrics loosely addressed nomadism, nostalgia, film and musical theatre, and the effects of colonialism. Bruce Johnson and Brian Wilson were such fans of Hawaii that O’Hagan was invited to collaborate with The Beach Boys on a new album, though the project was ultimately shelved.
During this period, O’Hagan had also been doubling as an ancillary member of Stereolab, and for a time the two groups were inseparable. For their fourth album Cold And Bouncy, the Llamas brought Stereolab drummer Andy Ramsay on board as electronics advisor, who filtered the group’s playing and scrawled giddy blurts of analogica over songs that were beginning to appear more like modular constructions than simple verse-chorus-bridge narratives. This development in writing style blossomed on 1999’s Snowbug, a warm, breezy album that was equal parts Tropicalia and Shuggie Otis, which featured contributions from Tortoise’s John McEntire and Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen, and was recorded in part by McEntire, Jim O’Rourke and Tortoise alumni Bundy K Brown.
By this stage, O’Hagan’s approach to writing and arranging was coming across more like a series of mischievous non-sequiturs, hopping between sections like nomads crossing continents. “The modular approach, if I remember, was literally working with individual ideas, totally separate, even written over extended time periods,” O’Hagan patiently explains, “and then throwing them together, perhaps fine tuning the flow by changing key so that the ongoing section follows on intelligently. I might throw a passing bar in to ease the change. It’s a way of forcing yourself not to write in cliché.”
“That’s one approach,” he further qualifies. “There is another approach which is instinctive. That’s when I try to imagine myself as a French writer in the late 50s slinging out songs for the torch singers of the day. Very silly I know, but I imagine the community of musicians at work.” Often with an O’Hagan song, you never quite know what’s coming next: he’s adept at throwing the listener’s expectations for a loop, moving the arrangements around like Lego blocks and reusing elements throughout the song as mnemonic devices. “The structure is sometimes classical verse, chorus, middle eight, but sometimes the chorus is integrated into a verse and takes one by surprise,” he clarifies. “I am a great fan of opening a song with an instrumental refrain drawn from the chorus perhaps which sets up the first verse. A good example would be the opening to “Calloway” on Beet, Maize And Corn.”
High Llamas fans who also follow modern English fiction may have been surprised to find a reference to the group in novelist Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters Club, which elliptically addresses the political and social malaise of 1970s Britain: the final section of the book is titled “Green Coaster” after a song from Snowbug. For his part, Coe has repeatedly professed his love of the group’s music, going so far as to write the liner notes for 2003’s Retrospective, Rarities And Instrumentals double-CD compilation on V2, where he wonders whether “any other band, in the history of pop music, could release a double CD compilation and not include a single love song on it. Have The High Llamas ever recorded a love song, in fact?”
It’s an interesting question. O’Hagan’s approach to lyrics is refreshing in a field that privileges the emotional outpouring of the individual over the observational documentation of the everyday. When I ask O’Hagan about his lyrics, he is honest about his struggle with the written word. “I am not a literary person and read much less than I should. I find lyric writing difficult and not a natural process. Lyrics come right at the end, sometimes six months later. With words, I try to defy the obvious lead the music sets and write about architecture, food distribution, urban regeneration, the US space program, poets who encounter traveling salesmen.”
O’Hagan tends to work in ‘concrete abstractions’, making everyday experiences surreal via their framing within a structure that often privileges the musicality of the word over its meaning. O’Hagan is by no means a nonsense writer, but the logic to his lyrics is far from the traditional ‘I love you/you don’t love me’ memes that plague so much pop. There’s a subtle, benign game play going on in his lyrics, where O’Hagan offsets the romanticism of his arrangements with a narrative or tableau that defies expectation. He suggests that he learnt this from his Microdisney band mate Cathal Coughlan, who O’Hagan thinks may have been drawing on John Cale’s example, and O’Hagan himself admires what he describes as the address of “the mechanics of living” that’s writ through Cale albums like Paris 1919 and Vintage Violence.
“The Goat Looks On”, from Gideon Gaye, is a perfect example of O’Hagan’s writing, with its detached observations on the quotidian impacts of urban ‘progress’: ‘Can’t quite believe what I’ve just seen, Construction workers dressed in green. A supermarket on the hill, The way things happens makes you feel ill. And the goat looks on, at another one.’ The lyric works as counterpoint to the sweeping strings and slow, mournful tone of the song, just perfect for lyrics that rhapsodize over love’s easy tears. O’Hagan, rather, removes the first-person from the frame. “I do this because it’s a protection, I could never be too personal with words,” he reflects. “I don’t really want anyone to know that stuff, but I like the sound and effect of a love song…so how about making it sound like a love song, but you are singing about a goat on a hillside watching a supermarket being built instead. Perfect. No one gets hurt but I really feel for the goat.”
This take on song lyrics also reflects O’Hagan’s own engagement with the mechanics of living. “I am a very political person and regard your responsibility to your community only second to that of your family,” he asserts. “However, I could not attempt to bring that into my writing. I am just not that good. I separate the two without a worry, and then I live a life that I hope respects the sanctity of others.” It also defiantly pulls the plug on the cult of personality endemic to so much pop and rock. “I think it’s weird that a large number of people would want to know everything about a certain singer,” O’Hagan sighs, sounding genuinely puzzled. “You can hear the emotion in the vocal style, it’s a big set up, you can hear the ‘crack’ in the vocal style. There was a time where it disappeared for a while, but it came back, and everyone was excited about deep emotions in music, and passion in music, and yeah, passion in music is great but only if the passion is genuine, if it’s about sharing…”
Snowbug was The High Llamas’ final release for major-indie label V2, after which they signed to Drag City in the USA, and Stereolab’s label Duophonic Super 45s in Britain. Both labels had previously released O’Hagan’s Turn On collaboration with Stereolab’s Tim Gane and Andy Ramsay, an experimental instrumental mini-album whose sense of play made it an important precursor to both the Llamas’ Cold And Bouncy and Stereolab’s Dots And Loops. In 2000, the Llamas released a mini-album, Buzzle Bee, which saw the group at their most abstract, particularly on the schizophrenic “New Broadway”, which cuts between performances much like an electro-acoustician mangling analogue tape into deliriously abstruse audio scaffolds.
Without the financial backing of a large label, The High Llamas have perhaps had to scale down their recordings, and it took them three years to follow up Buzzle Bee. 2003’s Beet, Maize And Corn received fairly short shrift in some quarters - I remember a ridiculously misguided review in Adelaide, Australia’s street press which suggested the album was a carbon copy of the Llamas’ earlier records. But its fantastic combination of understated lyrics, sweet nylon string guitar, buzzing organs, and the pop-in-abstract of the group’s most risky strings and brass arrangements yet, mark Beet, Maize And Corn as the group’s mislaid masterpiece, and my favorite work in their canon.
When I start asking about the album, O’Hagan appears surprised and pleased that I’ve picked up on the record’s quiet yet determined individualism: there was simply nothing else in 2003 across pop music’s bleak horizon that sounded quite like this. It has always struck me as the group’s most self-contained set of songs, and according to O’Hagan, the album works through several key areas of interest. The rhythm section is all but absent from the record, with percussion working more as punctuation or shading. “The difference between the music I’d been brought up with, you know, post-Beatles pop music, and some music from the 1950s that I was interested in, was basically the absence of backbeat,” O’Hagan observes. This absence gives the record its unhurried, nostalgic air: “I really wanted a record that had autumnal colours.”
O’Hagan also worked with two particular string sounds - a very dry string sound, and its converse, “that American sound, strings (that were) dripping with reverb.” The brass arrangements on the album stand out the most, though. Arranged by O’Hagan and Andy Robinson, they draw on the avant-garde brass O’Hagan had heard on Carla Bley’s landmark albums from the 1960s and 1970s, beautiful titles like Escalator Over The Hill. “They were quite strange records,” O’Hagan chuckles, “those Carla Bley avant-garde brass arrangements. But it’s a great sound, I really wanted to use that sound. That’s what you’ll hear on songs like “Barney Mix”.”
Furthermore, the way the songs repeat tiny cells of melody and harmony, from the seemingly real-time cut-ups of “Porter Dimi” to the languorous, dream-like haze of strings that floats through “The Holly Hills”, a song that eulogises Van Dyke Parks and the art of the song writer producing for pop singers - ‘But white pianos seem to be across the hills of Beverly / The singers wait for songs to sing, the city pipes the water in / One day the singing will begin, Across the Holly Hills’ - recalls the demands of composition for film soundtrack. “You are completely right about the repetition of ideas on a record as homage to film soundtrack and I get a lot of my instrumental developmental ideas from soundtracks,” O’Hagan claims. “I love French and Italian soundtracks, and American - let’s not forget Bernard Herrmann. They are as experimental as they are impressionistic. Using the sense of soundtrack removes the song from the ordinary and gives it a special space of its own.”
I’d also always been intrigued by the cover for Beet, Maize And Corn. High Llamas record covers in the past had featured rude huts, abstract paintings dotted with power lines, or skyscrapers made unreal by pastel shadings, but Beet, Maize And Corn is clothed in a gorgeous painting of an everyday urban setting: a tower block in glass and red. O’Hagan divulges, “Beet, Maize and Corn featured a local landmark hated by all but painted in a slightly 1950s Parisian style. Previous to that, we played with graphics for a while but I got bored with that and returned to trusted painting. It will go in and out of style but we will stick with it. I just love it. One picture and you can create a little world for a few to see. The art does not need to function next to the music. I like the idea of causing the listener to ask the question ‘how does this work’?” And, far from the abstracted imaginary of some of his earlier lyrics, O’Hagan recalls with genuine wonder, “after Beet Maize And Corn I was walking around and I thought, ‘I’ve just written about what’s on my doorstep’.”
Can Cladders, the new High Llamas record, features another painting by Jeremy Glogan as its cover. “All the mini scenes are extracted from the songs but this is a first. The new painting started off as a collage I knocked up and I asked Jeremy to paint the collage very much as on the cover of Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite”. The album is a subtle about-face from the gorgeous urban stillness of Beet, Maize And Corn. The way O’Hagan puts it, he wanted to tap into a rich seam of 1970s singer-songwriter recordings and soul, gospel and r&b choruses. “There’s a lot of joy in that music”, he grins, singling out Laura Nyro And Labelle’s 1971 collaboration Gonna Take A Miracle, where the New York songwriter paid tribute to soul and pop from the 1960s with the Labelle trio as female chorus, as particularly important. It’s not a sound that The High Llamas have touched on before. “I’d shied away from it,” O’Hagan agrees, “but on that Laura Nyro And Labelle album, there’s that track called “The Bells”, and I thought, well, I just want to get that gospel stuff (on the record).”
The resulting album is perhaps the most celebratory of their career, with the female chorus of Winnie Asmah, Tania Degale, Sylvia Arthur and Kelsey Michael belting out charming counterpoint to O’Hagan’s modest singing. “They hadn’t really heard the music I’d referred to,” he recalls, “but I had the idea that I had, and we just gathered around the piano, and listened to the records. The rhythm section came back, and we recorded the rhythm section mostly with just a few mics and a few takes, I really wanted to get that live sound you hear on those records…(For the vocals) the idea was really a trashy recording, a slightly trashy sound on the vocals.”
It works beautifully, with the sweet, understated melisma on “Winter’s Day” the record’s highlight, alongside a gorgeous near-ballad named after and written in tribute to the American jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby, whose Afro-Harping album is an under-recognised classic, and who played on countless sessions for soul singers before moving further out into previously uncharted territory. O’Hagan’s lyric documents an experience he had while DJing, playing Ashby’s records to the general confusion of the squares in the crowd: ‘Puzzled by the sound, Dorothy’s around, from another day / Music lost and found, from another day / Brought upon a harp from another day’.
“Sailing Bells”, with its chorus cascade of rich harmony - almost like a folk music round - and gentle spider’s-web strings, pays homage to another of O’Hagan’s heroes, Robert Wyatt. “Yeah, there’s a tribute to Robert Wyatt in the second verse,” O’Hagan explains, “where the lyric goes ‘Bobby sails the cat / Down the Medway flats / Like a freeform not far from the land / Sailing bells are hung / Brushes on the drum / And the free men of Canterbury play / And the cat moves on down the Medway’. That is basically, I dunno, that’s more just about Canterbury in the 1970s being the hub, the Canterbury scene. I was trying to capture the scene, of these hippie guys making their music, Soft Machine, Hatfield And The North. For some reason, I put them on a boat. And of course, ‘Bobby sails the cat…’ is Robert Wyatt.”
It’s a beautiful image, the antic heroes of a very English strain of 1960s psychedelia, Wyatt, Kevin Ayers, and Australian ex-pat Daevid Allen manning the sails. O’Hagan acknowledges that Wyatt in particular is an “incredibly important” figure in his private constellation of musical heroes. It’s not hard to figure why. Wyatt was one of the first singers to break free of the Americanisms of early 1960s English r&b and rock, first in The Wilde Flowers and then with the earliest line-ups of The Soft Machine, and his consequent project Matching Mole. Wyatt sings with an almost defiant colloquialism, his slightly soured falsetto bringing equal parts pathos and humour to a nearly four-decade run of solo recordings that draw from jazz, prog, bossa nova and pop. And though Wyatt’s music is never short of the whimsically absurd - Wyatt himself has claimed in interview that he’s “deeply shallow” - his benign presence and generosity of spirit is matched by a cussed political streak.
One of Wyatt’s great skills is the wry concealment that often occurs in his lyrics, with political broadsides cloaked as dolorous love songs, an approach that directly echoes O’Hagan’s own take on the word. “Yeah, you’re absolutely right,” O’Hagan agrees, before continuing, “Robert Wyatt, I mean, getting back to what we’ve been talking about, he’s never shied away from pop music.” Anyone who’s seen Wyatt’s Top Of The Pops appearance when his mid-1970s cover of The Monkees’ “I’m A Believer” broached the English charts would doubtless agree, with his plain-singing vocal the bridge between the way-out Canterbury cats and the pure pleasure of the pop song.
I wonder aloud whether Wyatt’s conversational singing style had any impact on O’Hagan, and he pauses before suggesting there’s one particular connection: “I think it’s really love of melody, and…There’s a little bit of folk music in the way I sing, not that I sing like a folk musician, but I don’t like the idea of embellishing. There are very few people who sing without that (these days), maybe Trish (Keenan) from Broadcast, she doesn’t embellish the melody.”
As we speak, O’Hagan has been editing and mastering the soundtrack for La Vie d’Artiste by director Marc Fitoussi, which has been composed in collaboration with Tim Gane. As The High Llamas slow their output - over three years separate Beet, Maize And Corn and Can Cladders - O’Hagan has been busying himself with other projects. Alongside the film soundtrack, which is due for release on Beggars Banquet sometime in 2007, he has recently been collaborating with fellow Llama Marcus Holdaway and artist Jean-Pierre Muller on their ongoing Musical Painting and Musical Wheel collaborations, where O’Hagan’s and Holdaway’s compositions inhabit the very fabric of Muller’s artwork. He also recently wrote three songs for the new album from Kassin+2, Futurismo, the latest manifestation of the post-Tropicalia trio of Moreno Veloso (son of Brazilian pop pioneer Caetano Veloso), Domenico Lancellotti and Kassin.
O’Hagan’s ongoing connection with Brazilian music, which he hails for being “sophisticated pop music, but not ‘hack’ music - it’s sophisticated pop without pomp”, also led to his hiring as musical director for the London Barbican’s staging of the Tropicalia manifesto album Panis Et Circensis. O’Hagan and Holdaway transcribed the Rogerio Duprat arrangements from the album and staged the performance with Brazilian outfit Orchestre Imperial. His enthusiasm for Brazilian music spills over in our conversation: “One of the things I love about that music, and it connects back to our earlier conversation about community and music, is that at their shows the entire audience sings along with the tunes! It happens at Caetano Veloso gigs, you go and see him and the audience is singing along.”
It’s an approach to the song - as conduit for shared experience, as an access moment for community - that resonates with O’Hagan’s own writing: his dream of an egalitarian song that rings true, a benign, generous and unpretentious song that collapses the false divide between experiment and accessibility. “Your instinct leads you to write in a way which satisfies your artistic intentions and if you are strong you stick to your guns. If the high street likes your music, so be it. If the avant-garde embrace you, so be it, just as long as they do not abuse a non-believer for not being on message.” O’Hagan pauses before concluding, with a gentle nod, “It’s the music and not the lifestyle that is important.”
Originally published in Signal To Noise #45, Spring 2007.
Monday, June 30, 2008
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