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Amelia’s Magazine | Album review and interview – Mechanical Bride: Living With Ants

Mechanical Bride by Sam Parr.

Her debut album came out a few weeks ago and she’s been busy promoting it since then, adiposity but I’ve finally managed to secure an interview with Lauren Doss, shop better known as Mechanical Bride. At the root of Living With Ants is Lauren’s piano… sometimes dissonant, see sometimes mournful but always spare and well considered. The nuances of jazz and classical music are a welcome addition to this hauntingly beautiful collection of songs. Mechanical Bride will be performing live at Truck Festival in just a few short weeks and in the meantime you can hunt out Living With Ants on the excellent Transgressive label. Well worth it.

Mechanical Bride Living with Ants

You pretty much taught yourself the piano. Have you tried your hand at any other instruments, or are you tempted to learn anything else at some point, if so what?
I try my hand at a few other instruments, guitar and tuned percussion. But I’d really love to learn to play the cello, it’s such a beautiful instrument.

Mechanical Bride by Avril Kelly.

What kind of music did your parents play when you were little? Any particular fond memories?
There was some great 80’s/early 90’s music my mum used to play that I remember well from cassettes in the car – Bruce Hornsby, Don Henley, that’s nostalgic of my childhood. My mum bought me Jackie Wilson’s Reet Petite on 7” as I loved it so much when I was little.

Reet Petite

How did you hook up with Tommy who plays jazz piano on your album?
Tommy is my good friend and a great musician; we met whilst studying our Music and Visual Art course in Brighton.

Mechanical Bride by Faye West.

What is the spiritual aspect of your inspiration?
I’ve learnt a lot from my upbringing, people and loss through the last few years. I’ve learnt how important the art of overcoming is, and to have faith things will work out, trying to think positively and being patient. I also think about certain people that I’ve lost in my life and I like to think they look out for me and I have their strength and blessing.

Mechanical-Bride_by_Alison Day
Mechanical Bride by Alison Day.

How do music and art fit together in your life?
I love the feeling of being immersed: looking at something wonderful and hearing something wonderful, it’s simple and very sensual. I’ve realised that I’m not really happy unless my own music and visuals are unified in some way. I suppose it’s subconscious, feeling the need to express things visually and musically so that the two entwine. It’s an interesting process when the two cross over.

mechanical bride field

What are the stories you lean towards writing about and what places and moments inspire your ideas the most?
Mainly it depends on the mood I’m in and what imagery I’m seeing. I like travelling a lot and I find that’s an inspirational thing, particularly train journeys. And I collect imagery in a scrapbook. Nature and water are an endless source of inspiration… I guess that’s why I like living where I do, as there is lots of both.

Mechanical Bride Illustration by Joe Collins
Mechanical Bride by Joe Collins.

Why do you think that Transgressive liked your music so much?
I’ve been working with Transgressive since 2005, and at the time there weren’t quite as many female artists as there are now. I was doing whatever weird things came into my head so it must have caught their attention!

Mechanical Bride colour of fire

Any stories from the shooting of the Colour Of Fire video in Berlin? It’s a beautiful video, what’s it about?
It was such a fun video to shoot in such beautiful places. One of the locations was a derelict complex of rehabilitation hospitals for German soldiers in the 1st and 2nd world wars. It had an incredible feel to it, really eerie but full of beautiful ornate colours. The song has a lot to do with dancing and being freed of burdens, ideas of traditional Indian ceremonies with animals and colours.

<a target="_blank" href="http://www.vimeo.com/22985508" rel="noopener">http://www.vimeo.com/22985508</a>Colour Of Fire

With the video the concept was to create a dark fairytale/ mythological mood in the forest. There are these spirit-like creatures and you’re not sure if they’re bad or good, but they are otherworldy and dancing through an ominous beautiful space. You are not sure if I am one of them or not and they transform through dance and light and fire.

mechanical bride-karla-perez-manrique

Mechanical Bride by Karla Perez Manrique.

What do you do to battle the stage fright?
I am still learning how to deal with it, but having a routine leading up to a performance helps. My friend Caroline who plays with me is good at calming me; she’s taught me some good breathing exercises and mini meditations to do when you start getting the fear. Also no caffeine and eating nuts helps!

What do you hope from the next year?
Well, I’d be happy if we could play some good shows, try and get the music heard in different places we’ve not been to. I’d like to start writing and recording some new music, do some other collaborations with people. Just hope for Good things please!

Written by Amelia Gregory on Wednesday July 6th, 2011 12:48 am

Categories ,80s, ,90s, ,album, ,Alison Day, ,Avril Kelly, ,berlin, ,brighton, ,Bruce Hornsby, ,classical, ,Colour of Fire, ,Don Henley, ,Faye West, ,Geiko Louve, ,interview, ,Jackie Wilson, ,jazz, ,Joe Collins, ,Karla Pérez Manrique, ,Lauren Doss, ,mechanical bride, ,Music and Visual Art, ,Reet Petite, ,review, ,Sam Parr, ,Transgressive Records, ,Truck Festival

Amelia’s Magazine | An interview with Still Corners

Still Corners by Nicholas Stevenson.

I discovered Still Corners when they supported Our Broken Garden late last year. The band are as elusive as they are beautiful, viagra 40mg but I managed to track down songwriter and keyboardist Greg Hughes to answer a few finely tuned questions. Delve into the enigmatic Still Corners world…

Who are you?
We’re ghosts, web but if you close your eyes and listen carefully to the music you’ll find out who we are.

Still Corners by Sandra Contreras.

You’ve managed to create an impressive amount of hype already… have you intentionally pursued press or has this just come about of it’s own accord? ?
We mostly keep our heads down working as hard as possible. However the press has been fantastic and we all feel very lucky and happy that people are enjoying the music and shows. It’s a wonderful feeling.

?Would you like to stay independent or you would you like to sign to a major label?
We’ve always been a DIY band and we don’t use producers – I record it all and we do all our own artwork. These are things that major labels usually like to have a say about and that probably wouldn’t work very well with our ethos.

Still Corners by Karina Yarv.

You have said “Everything is handmade” – what does this mean in practice?
That means that all our output is created by our little circle of friends. I have a little studio where I do the recordings, link then we rope in friends and like minded artists to take photos and help with the artwork. It’s just that we have a very definite idea of everything, a vibe of how things should be. So it’s just easier to do it ourselves, to take what’s in our heads and make it a reality.

Still Corners by Alison Day.

Your stage shows are characterised by a wash of deep colours that hides your faces… how did you decide upon this feel, and how important is the look and ambience of your performance? ?
We’re not actually trying to hide or anything, we just don’t think that what we’re doing on stage is all that critical to observe. We like to use projections because we think they are beautiful to watch and they bring more out of the music. Projections are best seen in the dark so we usually turn the lights down to create an atmosphere, maybe something you don’t always get in your typical smaller venue.

What is it that so appeals to you in the creation of such a woozy atmosphere?
?Whether recording or playing live we want to go off into another world, something we see in our heads and feel in our hearts. We want to make our audience feel something.

Wish is just beautiful. How was the video made??
Thank you. Lucy Dyson made that video for us – she came up with the idea and filmed it all on 16 mm film which lends a sort of dreamy washed out feeling to the visual quality of it. We shot it all over 2 days on a nice summer stretch of green in London.

What inspires the lyrics to your songs??
The English countryside, a sunset, a romance, films of yesteryear, a photograph, a painting, a story, lying in the grass watching the stars, the little moments of life.

Still Corners by Nicholas Stevenson.

What has been your gigging highlight of the year and why?
?We recently played in a castle in Berlin and in the most incredible opera house in Toulon in France. The people, places, and response was amazing – both definitely stand out moments for us.

Are there any other up and coming bands that you recommend that we check out?
A band we think are just magical are Twin Sister, and they are lovely people as well.

?What are your plans for 2011? Can we expect to see you at any festivals?
We hope to have a single out with Sub Pop early this year and we’re working on a full record for release mid-next year so fingers crossed we’ll find a nice home for it!

You can read a more in depth interview over on The Quietus.

Written by Amelia Gregory on Wednesday January 12th, 2011 10:28 am

Categories ,Alison Day, ,berlin, ,france, ,Karina Yarv, ,Lucy Dyson, ,Nicholas Stevenson, ,Sandra Contreras, ,Still Corners, ,Sub Pop, ,The Quietus, ,Toulon Opera, ,Twin Sister, ,Wish

Amelia’s Magazine | Berlin musician Miss Kenichi introduces her haunting third album The Trail

misskenichi_by_AntjeTaigaJandrig
Berlin based musician and artist Katrin Hahner is Miss Kenichi. Her third album The Trail was released on Sinnbus late last year and is a personal journey into a quiet, magical place where memories and experiences echo hauntingly through each song. I asked Katrin to explain bit more about her inspiration and process.

A trail is described as ‘a series of signs or objects left behind by the passage of someone or something‘, ‘a track used in following someone‘ or ‘a beaten path through rough country‘. As an artist as well as a human being I am trying to find my way through the thicket of life, beating down my own path, but at the same time I am walking an ancient line, following a trail that is already laid out for me.

What is said is as important as what is not said. The pause, the blank spots, they are just as valuable. Once you know what needs to be said you don´t have to say much more. It translates. You have to be quiet to listen. It´s like standing still in the forest and letting the animals come out into the opening one by one.

When writing songs I see a movie scene, a landscape, a story unfolding in my mind and I illustrate the scenery with the music. I switch between the characters of the scene, taking on different views. Sometimes I am the observer, sometimes I am part of the story.

I am inspired by all kinds of things: stories, books, films, landscapes, nature, people. It’s all out there. Nature is so merciless and rough and so endlessly beautiful and perfect at the same time. At the time I wrote the song Bobby Bacala I was reading the stories of Flannery O´Connor and simultaneously watching The Sopranos. O´Connor’s stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque, almost always dealing with matters of violence, pain, faith, grace and salvation. Both formats deal with the same questions of morals, fate and violence and Bobby Baccalieri with his childlike innocence, who could very well be one of O´Connor’s characters is born on the wrong track and loses his life on it.

The album is co-produced by Earl Harvin, a unique and very inspiring musician, who worked with many a great name and who is currently the drummer of the British band Tindersticks. When we started to work together, I instantly knew that this was something very special, intuitive and rare. We recorded the album mostly at Chez Cherie Studios in Berlin, a big recording room with no booth, so everybody who is in the room has to remain silent during the recording. It is as if you record the awe and the held breath of the people in the room as well.

We played most instruments ourselves: guitars, drums, organs, vibes, harmonium, bass, percussions. If a song asked for an instrument none of us could play, we would ask friends to come in and record with us. So Satch Hoyt played an incredible flute solo on the song The Night. This solo is like a flock of birds winding up onto the skies. Terry Edwards graced us with a beautiful horn arrangement on Dream and Chris Bruce´s guitar pickings on this song wove it all together. The song is called Dream because Earl saw me play the song in his dream on a little paper accordion in a certain club in Los Angeles. He got out of bed and recorded the pieces that he could remember and I built the rest of the song around that. A person is witnessing her own funeral in a dream and gets the chance to turn her life around into what it was actually meant to be. The magical thing about this is that I played in this very club a couple of months later, but we didn’t know that at the time of the dream.

misskenichi_thetrail_cover
I wanted an album that is dark and full of shadows and gloom, yet filled with light and beauty at the same time, because that´s how I perceive life. So fragile and fleeting and also incredibly powerful, full of magic and wonders.

“Just wrap yourself in light and don´t you frown…” (The Trail)

Written by Amelia Gregory on Tuesday January 13th, 2015 7:37 pm

Categories ,berlin, ,Chez Cherie Studios, ,Chris Bruce, ,Earl Harvin, ,Flannery O´Connor, ,Katrin Hahner, ,Miss Kenichi, ,Satch Hoyt, ,Sinnbus, ,Terry Edwards, ,The Trail, ,Tindersticks

Amelia’s Magazine | An interview with Peter Broderick and review of new album http://www.itstartshear.com

Peter Broderick by Gemma Cotterell.

http://www.itstartshear.com makes no grand entrance: I Am Piano is the softest of openers, with quiet keys gradually joined by the curling sighs of a looped violin. The vocals only makes an appearance at the end, sliding easily into the next tune. Melody, whether picked out on violin, piano or guitar is the most essential component of this album, which I think is best listened to as a whole. (As an aside, ever fancied learning the violin? Try this website for a range of affordable electric violins). Blue, written by Peter’s father, is deliciously light but it isn’t all airy fairy – the title track It Starts Hear references the website domain name of the album in the lyrics, complete with scratchy off beats and sampled trumpets. With Asleep things once again take a more secretive turn, female chorals creating a rolling lull in Colin. Peter then does a fair effort of singing in German for sparse Bad Words, despite confessing to a poor knowledge of the language (see below). With The Notes On Fire the album gathers speed again, with vocals entirely composed of la-las; who knew they could be so evocative? The album finishes on the beautifully sophorific Everything I Know, ending http://www.itstartshear.com with low key panache.

It Starts Hear

Where were you born and where did you grow up?
I was born in Searsmont, Maine (USA) and raised mostly in Carlton, Oregon.

How did you find your way into music; was it an easy and natural process or has it been a struggle to make it happen?
Both of my parents are musicians, and both my older brother and sister as well, so I grew up in a house full of music and it felt natural, almost essential, for me to take up an instrument. I started taking lessons on the violin at age 7, and also tried to play whatever other instruments I could get my hands on.

Peter Broderick camera
When was this album put together and what frame of mind were you in when you wrote it?
I started recording the first notes for the new album in January, 2009 . . . and from there it was a long and surprisingly complicated journey before I was able to call it finished. I think my frame of mind went through many phases and changes in those few years… everything from ecstatic happiness to complete depression and all that’s in between.

Peter-Broderick Image courtesy of Incubate
Peter-Broderick. Image courtesy of Incubate.

You decided to release it via your website – what was the thinking behind this?
Well, when I first started recording the songs for this album, I realized that most of them had a real story they were based around, and I was imagining the finished album coming with some kind of book in which people could read all these ideas I wanted to share about the music. but then I thought . . . wait a minute . . . most people don’t get physical copies of music these days! Most of them just download it, so they’ll never see this book which, to me, would be a big part of the album. So I developed the website idea to be a place online where all listeners, no matter which format that they obtain the album in, can have access to the same notes and visuals that are meant to accompany the music. That’s the basic idea.

Peter Broderick by JL Illustration.

One of the songs on the album was written by your father when he was 19, which sounds incredibly romantic! What kind of musician is he?
My father is a closet musician . . . he is very passionate about music, and perhaps at one point he had his own dreams of building a career in music, but he’s terrified of performing in front of other people. I’ve actually never heard him sing, except for on this one cassette tape my mother kept with a recording session from 1979, where he plays the guitar and sings this one song that he wrote, called blue. I fell in love with this song when my mother played it for me in 2008, and dreamed about sharing it with the world somehow. So I recorded a cover version for this new album, plus a lovely label from Berlin, called Sonic Pieces, released his original version on a 7″ vinyl in December, 2011.

Peter Broderick face
Another song is dedicated to a bird whose life you stole whilst driving – what did this make you feel and do you feel that amends can be made by means of expressing gratitude in incidences such as this?
The day I ran over that bird I felt absolutely awful… I remember feeling ashamed to be human, thinking it was so stupid that we roll around in these big machines on our smooth roads that destroy parts of nature. I wrote a long piece of text that day about how terrible I felt, and also wrote the song trespassing, and I think doing those things definitely helped me to make amends with the situation. It was an accident after all, and since I wasn’t able to go back in time and undo it, I did the best I could to express my sorrow and to somehow turn something tragic into something beautiful and positive.

Peter Broderick by Gareth A Hopkins.

You’ve had a somewhat difficult year, what with a recurring knee injury that left you unable to walk. What happened, if you don’t mind me asking? And how did you learn to cope?
There has been a great paradox in my life the last few years . . . because, the week before I moved to europe toward the end of 2007 (which is when I feel like my career in music really started), I had a very stupid accident in which I tripped over my suitcase and destroyed my right knee… and it took me a long time to figure out what was really wrong with it, and in that time I was traveling the world and doing all these amazing new things, but always feeling restrained by this physical problem. And since I waited so long before having the right operation for my knee, I developed a lot of strange habits in my body to compensate for the bad knee, and which sort of threw off the balance in my body. But I also have so many things to be thankful for, and in many ways these last years have been a dream come true, so I try to focus on the good things and to be grateful for all that I have.

How would you describe http://www.itstartshear.com and do you think that the website as a name of an album will work? (it confused me a little bit)
I’m sorry if it’s confusing! But I really like the idea of the website as a title . . . and not because I’m obsessed with the internet or anything. Actually, sometimes I really hate the internet, but no matter what I think, I can’t deny that it’s become a huge part of our lives and has made so much possible for me. So in a way I see the title as some kind of tribute to the internet, or maybe even a statement of how our virtual lives are seemingly becoming more and more prominent and possibly even pushing reality aside… but I like the web address as a title because it brings people to the site, which I have built it as a place where people can listen to the music and read about it and see images and videos associated with the music. Any time the album is written about, it will automatically become a link to this virtual place… in my mind it makes perfect sense! Of course there is another side of me that thinks the whole idea is ridiculous . . . but it was just one of those ideas that I felt I had to try out. You’ll never know how it works until you try it… (brilliant answer!)

Peter Broderick by Adrian Bischoff.

What are your plans for 2012?
2012 is a slowing-down year for me. I’ll be taking a break from touring, spending more time at home in Berlin, releasing this project which I’ve been working on for quite a while and following the progress (or anti-progress) of this album and website… and I’m trying to pay more attention to my body, which needs some love after these years of sitting in cars and planes and trains, carrying heavy equipment in and out of buildings, and eating different foods all the time. One goal I have for this year is to finally learn how to speak German! fingers crossed.

http://www.itstartshear.com is due for release on Bella Union on 20th February 2012.

Written by Amelia Gregory on Wednesday January 25th, 2012 2:22 pm

Categories ,Adrian Bischoff, ,Asleep, ,Bella Union, ,berlin, ,Blue, ,Carlton, ,Colin, ,digital, ,Everything I Know, ,Gareth A Hopkins, ,Gemma Cotterell, ,http://www.itstartshear.com, ,I Am Piano, ,interview, ,It Starts Hear, ,Jason Lear, ,JL Illustration, ,maine, ,Oregon, ,peter broderick, ,review, ,Searsmont, ,Sonic Pieces, ,usa, ,With The Notes On Fire

Amelia’s Magazine | Album review and interview – Mechanical Bride: Living With Ants

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