Domino Records

Amelia’s Magazine | Album Review – Anna Calvi

by

Du Goudron et des Plumes Ellie Sutton
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Compagnie MPTA with Mathurin Bolze started with a swinging platform lowered slowly over the heads of the performers, medications crushing them into the floor. They emerged from beneath, generic ripping out the innards, transforming the planks into a clanking and clattering playground as the dancers/acrobats/I’m not really sure what you call them swung adeptly, building and destroying, meeting and parting. Rotating vignettes from everyday life met with random acts of acrobatic grace, often finely tuned for comedic effect – the performers scaling planks to sit, gnome like, at the top, or hanging upside down to mirror each other.

The platform rose, swaying, as paper sheets were unleashed to shade the manic silhouettes of the characters behind until, in a flurry of motion, the paper was ripped apart. From minimalist jazz to crashing bells, the soundtrack was finely tuned to the minutest motion. The platform tilted as the occupants scrabbled to maintain control, clinging to each other. My later reading of the notes tells me this was a metaphor for our unstable future on this earth. The show ended with them mired in the middle as if aboard a desperate life raft.

I’d like to say that I drifted off rather frequently during this show because I’m really pre-occupied with the launch of my new book this Friday, but the fact is I probably would have done anyway… for me, that’s the trouble with theatrical shows that lack a strong narrative. At times the rhythm and flow of the five fluid acrobats had me gripped, but then I would find I’d gone somewhere else entirely (shit, I don’t have enough drink for 300 guests) as they swung repeatedly from side to side, the motion acting as a hypnotist’s pendulum to send me off… and when I snapped to the scene had completely changed…a character was half naked smoking a pipe at the end of a plank, the lone girl was swinging wildly through the air astride a rope swing, a man was swinging wildly from the oversized lamp. Director Mathurin Bolze calls this effect “mesmerising patterns.”

This performance was typical of the way that traditional circus skills have been co-opted to create something much more abstract and intriguing in a theatrical setting. There was multiple applause and a standing ovation flooded through the packed theatre as the lights came up on the opening night of Du Goudron et des Plumes.
Du Goudron et des Plumes plays at the Barbican until the 29th of January. You can read another interesting review by Ought to be Clowns here. The London International Mime Festival continues until 30th January 2011. My new book, Amelia’s Compendium of Fashion Illustration, is officially launched tomorrow.

Du Goudron et des Plumes Illustration Gemma Smith
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Gemma Smith.

Du Goudron et des Plumes by Compagnie MPTA with Mathurin Bolze started with a swinging platform lowered slowly over the heads of the performers, visit this site crushing them into the floor. They emerged from beneath, viagra 40mg ripping out the innards, price transforming the planks into a clanking and clattering playground as the dancers/acrobats/I’m not really sure what you call them swung adeptly, building and destroying, meeting and parting. Rotating vignettes from everyday life met with random acts of acrobatic grace, often finely tuned for comedic effect – the performers scaling planks to sit, gnome like, at the top, or hanging upside down to mirror each other.

Du Goudron et des Plumes by Ellie Sutton
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Ellie Sutton.

The platform rose, swaying, as paper sheets were unleashed to shade the manic silhouettes of the characters behind until, in a flurry of motion, the paper was ripped apart. From minimalist jazz to crashing bells, the soundtrack was finely tuned to the minutest motion. The platform tilted as the occupants scrabbled to maintain control, clinging to each other. My later reading of the notes tells me this was a metaphor for our unstable future on this earth. The show ended with them mired in the middle as if aboard a desperate life raft.

Du Goudron et des Plumes Ellie Sutton
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Ellie Sutton.

I’d like to say that I drifted off rather frequently during this show because I’m really pre-occupied with the launch of my new book this Friday, but the fact is I probably would have done anyway… for me, that’s the trouble with theatrical shows that lack a strong narrative. At times the rhythm and flow of the five fluid acrobats had me gripped, but then I would find I’d gone somewhere else entirely (shit, I don’t have enough drink for 300 guests) as they swung repeatedly from side to side, the motion acting as a hypnotist’s pendulum to send me off… and when I snapped to the scene had completely changed…a character was half naked smoking a pipe at the end of a plank, the lone girl was swinging wildly through the air astride a rope swing, a man was swinging wildly from the oversized lamp. Director Mathurin Bolze calls this effect “mesmerising patterns.”

Du Goudron et des Plumes by Bertie Simpson
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Bertie Simpson.

This performance was typical of the way that traditional circus skills have been co-opted to create something much more abstract and intriguing in a theatrical setting. There was multiple applause and a standing ovation flooded through the packed theatre as the lights came up on the opening night of Du Goudron et des Plumes.
Du Goudron et des Plumes plays at the Barbican until the 29th of January. You can read another interesting review by Ought to be Clowns here. The London International Mime Festival continues until 30th January 2011. My new book, Amelia’s Compendium of Fashion Illustration, is officially launched tomorrow.

Du Goudron et des Plumes Illustration Gemma Smith
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Gemma Smith.

Du Goudron et des Plumes by Compagnie MPTA with Mathurin Bolze started with a swinging platform lowered slowly over the heads of the performers, medicine crushing them into the floor. They emerged from beneath, nurse ripping out the innards, transforming the planks into a clanking and clattering playground as the dancers/acrobats/I’m not really sure what you call them swung adeptly, building and destroying, meeting and parting. Rotating vignettes from everyday life met with random acts of acrobatic grace, often finely tuned for comedic effect – the performers scaling planks to sit, gnome like, at the top, or hanging upside down to mirror each other.

Du Goudron et des Plumes by Ellie Sutton
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Ellie Sutton.

The platform rose, swaying, as paper sheets were unleashed to shade the manic silhouettes of the characters behind until, in a flurry of motion, the paper was ripped apart. From minimalist jazz to crashing bells, the soundtrack was finely tuned to the minutest motion. The platform tilted as the occupants scrabbled to maintain control, clinging to each other. My later reading of the notes tells me this was a metaphor for our unstable future on this earth. The show ended with them mired in the middle as if aboard a desperate life raft.

Du Goudron et des Plumes Ellie Sutton
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Ellie Sutton.

I’d like to say that I drifted off rather frequently during this show because I’m really pre-occupied with the launch of my new book this Friday, but the fact is I probably would have done anyway… for me, that’s the trouble with theatrical shows that lack a strong narrative. At times the rhythm and flow of the five fluid acrobats had me gripped, but then I would find I’d gone somewhere else entirely (shit, I don’t have enough drink for 300 guests) as they swung repeatedly from side to side, the motion acting as a hypnotist’s pendulum to send me off… and when I snapped to the scene had completely changed…a character was half naked smoking a pipe at the end of a plank, the lone girl was swinging wildly through the air astride a rope swing, a man was swinging wildly from the oversized lamp. Director Mathurin Bolze calls this effect “mesmerising patterns.”

Du Goudron et des Plumes by Bertie Simpson
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Bertie Simpson.

This performance was typical of the way that traditional circus skills have been co-opted to create something much more abstract and intriguing in a theatrical setting. There was multiple applause and a standing ovation flooded through the packed theatre as the lights came up on the opening night of Du Goudron et des Plumes.
Du Goudron et des Plumes plays at the Barbican as part of Bite until the 29th of January. You can read another interesting review by Ought to be Clowns here. The London International Mime Festival continues until 30th January 2011. My new book, Amelia’s Compendium of Fashion Illustration, is officially launched tomorrow.

Du Goudron et des Plumes Illustration Gemma Smith
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Gemma Smith.

Du Goudron et des Plumes by Compagnie MPTA with Mathurin Bolze started with a swinging platform lowered slowly over the heads of the performers, look crushing them into the floor. They emerged from beneath, order ripping out the innards, transforming the planks into a clanking and clattering playground as the dancers/acrobats/I’m-not-really-sure-what-you-call-them swung adeptly, building and destroying, meeting and parting. Rotating vignettes from everyday life met with random acts of acrobatic grace, often finely tuned for comedic effect – the performers scaling planks to sit, gnome like, at the top, or hanging upside down to mirror each other.

Du Goudron et des Plumes by Ellie Sutton
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Ellie Sutton.

The platform rose, swaying, as paper sheets were unleashed to shadow the manic silhouettes of the characters behind until, in a flurry of motion, the paper was ripped apart. From minimalist jazz to crashing bells the soundtrack was finely tuned to the minutest motion, and as the platform tilted the occupants scrabbled to maintain control, clinging to each other, pushing and pulling. My later reading of the notes tells me this was a metaphor for our unstable future on this earth, and how we can either act together to survive or fail apart. The show ended with them mired in the middle as if aboard a desperate life raft.

Du Goudron et des Plumes Ellie Sutton
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Ellie Sutton.

I’d like to say that I drifted off rather frequently during this show because I’m really pre-occupied with the launch of my new book this Friday, but the fact is I probably would have done anyway… for me, that’s the trouble with theatrical shows that lack a strong narrative. At times the rhythm and flow of the five fluid acrobats had me gripped, but then I would find I’d gone somewhere else entirely as they swung repeatedly from side to side (shit, I don’t have enough drink for 300 guests), the motion acting as a hypnotist’s pendulum to send me off… and when I snapped to the scene had completely changed…a character was half naked smoking a pipe at the end of a plank, the lone girl was cascading through the air astride a rope swing, a man was swinging wildly from the oversized lamp. Director Mathurin Bolze calls this effect “mesmerising patterns.”

Du Goudron et des Plumes by Bertie Simpson
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Bertie Simpson.

This performance was typical of the way that traditional circus skills have been co-opted by mavericks such as Mathurin Bolze to create something much more abstract and intriguing. A standing ovation flooded through the packed theatre as the lights came up on the opening night of Du Goudron et des Plumes.

Du Goudron et des Plumes plays at the Barbican as part of Bite until the 29th of January. You can read another interesting review by Ought to be Clowns here. The London International Mime Festival continues until 30th January 2011. My new book, Amelia’s Compendium of Fashion Illustration, is officially launched tomorrow.

Du Goudron et des Plumes Illustration Gemma Smith
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Gemma Smith.

Du Goudron et des Plumes by Compagnie MPTA with Mathurin Bolze started with a swinging platform lowered slowly over the heads of the performers, here crushing them into the floor. They emerged from beneath, ripping out the innards, transforming the planks into a clanking and clattering playground as the dancers/acrobats/I’m-not-really-sure-what-you-call-them swung adeptly, building and destroying, meeting and parting. Rotating vignettes from everyday life met with random acts of acrobatic grace, often finely tuned for comedic effect – the performers scaling planks to sit, gnome like, at the top, or hanging upside down to mirror each other.

Du Goudron et des Plumes by Ellie Sutton
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Ellie Sutton.

The platform rose, swaying, as paper sheets were unleashed to shadow the manic silhouettes of the characters behind until, in a flurry of motion, the paper was ripped apart. From minimalist jazz to crashing bells the soundtrack was finely tuned to the minutest motion, and as the platform tilted the occupants scrabbled to maintain control, clinging to each other, pushing and pulling. My later reading of the notes tells me this was a metaphor for our unstable future on this earth, and how we can either act together to survive or fail apart. The show ended with them mired in the middle as if aboard a desperate life raft.

Du Goudron et des Plumes Ellie Sutton
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Ellie Sutton.

I’d like to say that I drifted off rather frequently during this show because I’m really pre-occupied with the launch of my new book this Friday, but the fact is I probably would have done anyway… for me, that’s the trouble with theatrical shows that lack a strong narrative. At times the rhythm and flow of the five fluid acrobats had me gripped, but then I would find I’d gone somewhere else entirely as they swung repeatedly from side to side (shit, I don’t have enough drink for 300 guests), the motion acting as a hypnotist’s pendulum to send me off… and when I snapped to the scene had completely changed…a character was half naked smoking a pipe at the end of a plank, the lone girl was cascading through the air astride a rope swing, a man was swinging wildly from the oversized lamp. Director Mathurin Bolze calls this effect “mesmerising patterns.”

Du Goudron et des Plumes by Bertie Simpson
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Bertie Simpson.

This performance was typical of the way that traditional circus skills have been co-opted by mavericks such as Mathurin Bolze to create something much more abstract and intriguing. A standing ovation flooded through the packed theatre as the lights came up on the opening night of Du Goudron et des Plumes.

Du Goudron et des Plumes plays at the Barbican as part of Bite until the 29th of January. You can read another interesting review by Ought to be Clowns here. The London International Mime Festival continues until 30th January 2011. My new book, Amelia’s Compendium of Fashion Illustration, is officially launched tomorrow.

Du Goudron et des Plumes Illustration Gemma Smith
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Gemma Smith.

Du Goudron et des Plumes by Compagnie MPTA with Mathurin Bolze started with a swinging platform lowered slowly over the heads of the performers, story crushing them into the floor. They emerged from beneath, cure ripping out the innards, page transforming the planks into a clanking and clattering playground as the dancers/acrobats/I’m-not-really-sure-what-you-call-them swung adeptly, building and destroying, meeting and parting. Rotating vignettes from everyday life met with random acts of acrobatic grace, often finely tuned for comedic effect – the performers scaling planks to sit, gnome like, at the top, or hanging upside down to mirror each other.

Du Goudron et des Plumes by Ellie Sutton
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Ellie Sutton.

The platform rose, swaying, as paper sheets were unleashed to shadow the manic silhouettes of the characters behind until, in a flurry of motion, the paper was ripped apart. From minimalist jazz to crashing bells the soundtrack was finely tuned to the minutest motion, and as the platform tilted the occupants scrabbled to maintain control, clinging to each other, pushing and pulling. My later reading of the notes tells me this was a metaphor for our unstable future on this earth, and how we can either act together to survive or fail apart. The show ended with them mired in the middle as if aboard a desperate life raft.

Du Goudron et des Plumes Ellie Sutton
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Ellie Sutton.

I’d like to say that I drifted off rather frequently during this show because I’m really pre-occupied with the launch of my new book this Friday, but the fact is I probably would have done anyway… for me, that’s the trouble with theatrical shows that lack a strong narrative. At times the rhythm and flow of the five fluid acrobats had me gripped, but then I would find I’d gone somewhere else entirely as they swung repeatedly from side to side (shit, I don’t have enough drink for 300 guests), the motion acting as a hypnotist’s pendulum to send me off… and when I snapped to the scene had completely changed…a character was half naked smoking a pipe at the end of a plank, the lone girl was cascading through the air astride a rope swing, a man was swinging wildly from the oversized lamp. Director Mathurin Bolze calls this effect “mesmerising patterns.”

Du Goudron et des Plumes by Bertie Simpson
Du Goudron et des Plumes by Bertie Simpson.

This performance was typical of the way that traditional circus skills have been co-opted by mavericks such as Mathurin Bolze to create something much more abstract and intriguing. He certainly seems to be a popular man: the performers took multiple bows and a standing ovation flooded through the packed theatre as the lights came up on the opening night of Du Goudron et des Plumes.

Du Goudron et des Plumes plays at the Barbican as part of Bite until the 29th of January. You can read another interesting review by Ought to be Clowns here. The London International Mime Festival continues until 30th January 2011. My new book, Amelia’s Compendium of Fashion Illustration, is officially launched tomorrow.

anna_calvi_abby_wright

Illustration by Abby Wright

Rider to the sea starts. With slow, approved sensuous notes, find running then halting. We wait. This is like some sort of Spanish guitar tease; the heroin with eyes masked looks at the man playing the guitar on the balcony of a castle. She jumps higher, find her cape flowing out behind her. They see each other and the notes build up to a feverish level. Then stop. My breath is involuntarily left held.

Anna Calvi’s voice is pushed, because she pushes it. She said in an interview with BBC 6 Music recently, that her vocal performances are about commitment; “baring the soul when you sing, not be scared, just show emotion. it’s important that, I think.” And when compared to Florence and The Machine, she says they are similar in that: “When we go for it, we really go for it.” She does.

Anna Calvi by Avril Kelly

Illustration by Avril Kelly

Anna credits a wide range of musical influences from Roy Orbison and Elvis to twentieth century music, which she says comes out in her guitar playing. Sometimes she sounds like she should be singing the intro music to a James Bond movie, other times she is a Kate Bush atop a cliff, and then you may get a hint of Adam and The Ants – tribal, wigs and theatre. She certainly has her own sound, and as she says, really unleashes on that mic. You can feel her whole body behind those deep, propelling notes. Visually, her red lips, sculpted cheekbones and feline eyes add to the womanly, lustful passion of the adventure.

anna_calvi_abby_wright2

Illustration by Abby Wright

I have to admit that the first listen I had, I was not instantly in love with her. However, I was hosting a knit club at my house at the time. And now I realise, for a first listen, Anna is wrong when (perhaps…) extra strong girly vibes are circulating. She is a powerful woman, with no messing or moaning. She is vibrant and direct, not fluffy kitten cute. She has said herself, she is in the business because she loves it. For her, it is not about being ‘careerist’. Maybe this has made her less fearful and safe. She is riding on her own expectations, of which she is willing to push. Thus, I listened to the album a few days later when the moon was full and I was feeling a bit more lioness like, and blimey. It was on all morning and beyond. Together with a coffee, I was screaming from my basement flat. Such a shame I have no rooftops.

Anna-Calvi-by-Mina-Bach

Illustration by Mina Bach

Listen to this and you will see exactly what I mean:

So track highlights; No More Words’ guitar notes are so sweet, with Anna’s voice ‘ahhhing’ over the top and singing so close to the microphone. Desire is as you would hope, with the title it holds; “The sound of love is beating like a fevered heart… It’s heavenly, heavenly, desirrrre.” Yes to desires, passions and DRUMS! In contrast First We Kiss, is the lingering and submission of desire and the story from the kiss to beyond. Whilst Blackout is a scaling, swinging, red hot infused, deep breathing track. Then… we have Morning Light, all strung out notes, infused by the morning’s spreading sun. New starts and consequences. A fabulous, long, slightly hazy, almost mumbly track, climaxing with symbols and the full sunrise. It reflects perfectly the early morning’s sensation. Feeling like you have so much time before the sun rises, but it’s always over quicker than you anticipate. You are not invincible, and the day is beginning.

anna calvi 2 by Avril kelly

Illustration by Avril Kelly

My iTunes says she’s ‘Latin’, but she seems to cover more genres. She has the passions of the Latino, but Anna is also rockier, showier and yet almost primmer than Latin. It’s liberating music, but also feels quite private. A bit like being within the bubble of thoughts consuming a girl in the throes of deep lust, she is singing literally from within. With her Italian blood running through her veins, Anna says this album is about: “intimacy, passion and loneliness.” Strong and all encompassing emotions, that supports both her commitment to performance and the deep, trusted position we are in, as listeners. And you really do believe her feelings as you listen to her.

You know at the end of some of those 80s films, when the couple that have spent the whole movie arguing and bouncing around in bed, get in the car and drive off around a cliff in a sports car that looks like an insect? She would be an AMAZING soundtrack to a modern version of that.

Anna Calvi‘s Album is Out Now on Domino Records

Written by Helen Martin on Thursday January 27th, 2011 6:39 pm

Categories ,80s, ,Abby Wright, ,Adam and The Ants, ,album, ,Anna Calvi, ,Avril Kelly, ,Desire, ,Domino Records, ,Elvis, ,Florence and The Machine, ,Helen Martin, ,Italian, ,iTunes, ,James Bond, ,Kate Bush, ,knitting, ,live, ,Love, ,Lust, ,Mina Bach., ,music, ,Passion, ,Red lipstick, ,Rooftops, ,Roy Orbison

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Amelia’s Magazine | Diamond Mine by Jon Hopkins and King Creosote. An interview with Kenny Anderson.

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King Creosote and Jon Hopkins by Rosemary Cunningham
King Creosote and Jon Hopkins by Rosemary Cunningham.

In the second part of my attempt to delve into the creation of the amazing collaborative album Diamond Mine, physician Kenny Anderson (aka King Creosote) answers my questions with a frankness and candour that matches the genius of his songwriting. Thanks so much for your wonderful answers Kenny! And if you haven’t heard it yet, viagra you must get a copy of Diamond Mine by Jon Hopkins and King Creosote, out now on Domino Records.

Jon Hopkins and King Creosote by Sarah Alfarhan
Jon Hopkins and King Creosote by Sarah Alfarhan.

How did Jon first approach you and what were your first thoughts about his proposal?

Diamond Mine is the latest instalment of many years of different sorts of collaborations between JH and KC. In 2004 (I think) Jon approached me at a Fence Collective show in Pittenweem and asked if I’d re-record a version of a track called Your Own Spell with him. He’d heard the original on an old KC album, but he asked in a way that didn’t make me question the quality of my version, and I thought ‘what a clever, tactful chap’. 

YouTube Preview ImageYour Own Spell

He remixed a track called A Sad Ha Ha that I recorded with Magnetophone for 4AD, and that made me all teary at the end of a Homegame when I heard it.

YouTube Preview ImageThe Vice-like Gist of It

Next up he remixed The Vice-like Gist of It as a B-side which stopped Janice Forsyth in her tracks, and at the end of 2006′s Green Man Festival he played me And the Racket They Made. I shed real tears and instantly agreed to play at a stranger’s wedding because of it. 

YouTube Preview ImageAnd the Racket They Made

We started on a collaboration album proper late in 2006, and the initial efforts were drafted into Bombshell for 679 once we’d secured the producer’s job for Jon, and in 2008 he worked on a couple of the Flick the Vs songs.  

Even with all that under our collaborative belt, I think Jon felt he hadn’t quite made a true and genuine collaboration with my voice very much to the fore, band and record label concessions very much to the aft. Two years ago he called me back to London – this time there’d be no siphoning off of our labours.

King Creosote. Photo by Steve Gullick
King Creosote. Photo by Steve Gullick.

How well do you think you have both managed to evoke “space, longevity and timelessness”?

As a collection of songs spanning my entire songwriting history, sung in what is undoubtedly my best recorded singing voice to date, for my part I hope that was enough to push the record away from just the period leading up to a 2011 release. There’s everything from the naive views of an impatient student right through to the cynical musings of an impatient middle aged grump. Jon’ll tell you the in & outs of the music content, but most of what you hear is acoustic guitar, accordion, piano and voices – all of them timeless instruments I’d say. Jon’s given the whole thing a fairly light and airy touch.

Longevity … Well, I should be quite a few dozen listens ahead of our most ardent fans, and I still hear brand new sounds with every listen. The tracklisting still surprises me from time to time, and the album can take an hour to pass, sometimes just a few seconds. In brief, we’ve nailed it on all three counts :)

King Creosote and Jon Hopkins by Sam Parr
King Creosote and Jon Hopkins by Sam Parr.

How is middle age treating you? I like the way that you say you intend to make the most your “thinning hair and diet of white flour and sugar” but it can’t be all bad?

I’m enjoying middle age immensely. I’ve resigned myself to most of the physical wear and tear, but in my head it’s not as bad as when I actually see my ageing mush in a mirror. I only have to look at an Ampeg bass rig and my back starts to hurt, and so as a rule I avoid reflective surfaces and load ins.

YouTube Preview ImageJohn Taylor’s Month Away

What’s the best part about growing older?

There’s a certain smugness comes with the realisation that I was incredibly lucky to grow up in the 70s & 80s – not only had national service long ended, but we enjoyed immense freedoms. Being young in the 2010s with all these mobile phones, digital cameras, youtube, facebook and twitter sites tracking your every move has absolutely no appeal. Hahahahahahahaha! And we TREASURED records, making live gigs and the latest album releases real moments of excitement and joy.    

YouTube Preview ImageBubble

Some of these songs were written as long ago as 20 years and more. What did it feel like to dredge them up again? Did you experience lots of weird emotions?

I’ve re-recorded many of my songs for lots of different albums, so I’m used to it. It’s difficult to explain now just what Your Own Spell from 1988 is truly about, so I just say it’s a banal ‘be careful what you wish for’ type tale. I’ve got a better, more emotionally believable voice now than I did back then, so not so hard to get the mindset right. Thankfully there are no real happy songs on Diamond Mine – that’s the one emotion I haven’t cracked yet.

King Creosote by Victoria Haynes
King Creosote by Victoria Haynes.

How do you feel about modern technology?  

On one hand a genius from the modern age can come along and make something that sounds as good as Diamond Mine, but in general I find it a real drag and best avoided whenever possible. If technology results in a machine that drops one back into a pre-technological era, than I’m all for it. I’d punch 1974 into the dial and would probably expire in time for the millenium celebrations. 

YouTube Preview ImageBats in the Attic

You say that “being a dad lights the way out”. How do your family fit into the musical world? Do they join you, and do they take part in your projects in any way?   

My dad, uncle, brothers and cousins are all musical, but quite different in their approach, so it doesn’t feel like competition in any way. My daughter has an incredible ear for melody and a limitless memory for lyrics – she wants to do medicine, so she didn’t get my squeamish gene. I used to play with one of my brothers – Iain – in a bluegrass outfit yonks ago, and I’ve backed up the other brother Gordon on many live sets, but as we get older, the brothers and I tend to avoid interaction with each other’s music as much as possible, and stick to comedy impersonations of our dad, clicking heels and all. I’m a bigger fan of their music than they are of mine, so that helps!

YouTube Preview ImageYour Young Voice

My dad recently organised an Anderson showcase for charity. It was an incredibly surreal afternoon of many different musical styles played in front of a white haired audience, so not a chance of any of it landing up on youtube. 
And relax.

Thankyou so much for your wonderful answers Kenny!

King Creosote and Jon Hopkins by Laura Warecki
King Creosote and Jon Hopkins by Laura Warecki.

Diamond Mine is intended to be listened to in one sitting, so once you’ve had a chance to sample the tracks above make sure you grab a copy of the whole thing. Jon Hopkins and King Creosote will be back on tour in September. Full Diamond Mine tour listing information here. Don’t forget to also check out my interview with Jon Hopkins here.

Written by Amelia Gregory on Friday June 3rd, 2011 12:05 pm

Categories ,4ad, ,679 Recordings, ,A Sad Ha Ha, ,album, ,And the Racket They Made, ,Bats in the Attic, ,Bombshell, ,Bubble, ,Diamond Mine, ,Domino Records, ,Fence Records, ,Fife, ,Flick the Vs, ,interview, ,Janice Forsyth, ,John Taylor’s Month Away, ,Jon Hopkins, ,Kenny Anderson, ,King Creosote, ,Laura Warecki, ,Magnetophone, ,Pittenweem, ,review, ,Rosemary Cunningham, ,Sam Parr, ,Sarah Alfarhan, ,Steve Gullick, ,The Vice-like Gist of It, ,Victoria Haynes, ,Your Own Spell, ,Your Young Voice

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Amelia’s Magazine | A post Tin Tabernacle interview with Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou

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Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly.

I love Jesca Hoop‘s new song City Bird and the accompanying video so much so that I decided to get in touch with both Jesca and Elia Petridis, side effects the director of her recent videos, sildenafil to find out what makes them tick. Elia Petridis runs boutique production company Filmatics in Los Angeles, California. After making several award winning shorts and music videos he is about to start shooting his first full length feature The Man Who Shook The Hand Of Vicente Fernandez. I think his incredibly detailed answers throw an intriguing light on what goes into the creation of a very considered and beautiful music video.

Jesca-Hoop-by-Liam-McMahon
Jesca Hoop by Liam McMahon.

When did you start working with director Elia Petridis?

Jesca: Elia is an old friend. We met in Los Angeles at one of my shows. He would say that he forced me to be his friend, which is kind of true though I would say that he used his clever imagination to lure me in. I’m glad that he did. The Kingdom was our first video adventure together.

Elia: A producer I’m working closely with these days said to me recently that humans are “meaning making machines” (a soundbite from some career seminar) but that phrase really resonated with me. I’m infatuated with screenwriting and personal mythologies, sometimes to the detriment of my own mental health. I grew up in Dubai for 18 years before moving to LA for film school – although Dubai had a lot of its own magic it didn’t have a music scene to speak of so I’m always a little astonished by the talent I find in LA. When I saw Jesca perform live I really felt her music was very special and otherworldly, and tried to do my best to see if, as human planets, we could potentially orbit each other and become friends. 

I would venture to say that the first time I saw Jesca Hoop live was one of the most astonishing musical moments I have ever witnessed. It was the night before Halloween and she came out in a marionette outfit, complete with rosy cheeks, and stood motionless while her back up players wound her up to life. For a visualist like me, a storyteller, it really had an impact. The whole endeavour of courting a friendship with her was kind of a lark for me because I honestly thought she had better things to do. It was just a matter of pushing the boundary between fan and friend and seeing how much I could get away with. Suddenly, unexpectedly, as with most of life’s wonder, we had some mileage behind us and had transformed into friends. I will tell you that the first *official* conversation, the ice breaker, was when she was writing Tulip – from the Hunting my Dress album – and I was writing a screenplay dealing with Tulip Fever in Holland so I leant her my reference material. I knew I had two opportunities to wiggle my way in there – one to give her the book, and one to get it back!   

Hunting my Dress
The Hunting My Dress album cover.

Where was City Bird shot and where did the inspiration come from?

Jesca: It was shot in a miniature haunted house in downtown LA. We both wanted it to be a ghost story and Elia was the one to bring the children’s narrative into it.

Elia: FALSE! The video was shot in a garage in Riverside, Ca. The whole thing was fractal – an infinite amount of information in a finite space, as the garage is attached to an 18th century ‘Painted Lady’ Victorian house owned by my fiance. So in essence, it was shot in a miniature dollhouse inside a bigger dollhouse which made the shoot utterly magic. I think what Jesca is communicating is that the story takes place in a miniature dollhouse in downtown LA. The whole thing was lit using candles and christmas lights. 

Where did the idea for an animated video come from?

Jesca: It came out of limitation really. We had very very little money for this video so we just mused about what we could do with what time and money we did have. I set a pretty hard task considering the resources available and I am delighted with what Elia and his team came through with.

Elia: To me, the track is seance folk. That’s the sonic iconography that City Bird evokes – a ghostly seance. When it comes to music and music videos I am not a literal thinker so although my mind knows the song is about the fright and sadness associated with homelessness that’s not what my heart feels when I hear the song, and it’s not what the dream theatre in my mind projects over it either. But here Jesca’s mastery shines through, because the sonic landscape, right down to the very physical shape her mouth is making around the lyric is just as important as what she’s trying to say; the two are organically woven together. The magic of Jesca’s music lies in the alchemy that exists between form and content. All my artistic heroes do this, from Chabon, to Spielberg; they use genre to sugar coat the pill. So here she uses the disguise of seance music to coat the literal message of homelessness she’s trying to communicate. 

Now, narrative is something I am always running away from when directing a music video. Whenever I read a music video treatment from some kid that went to film school it makes me cringe and I think the best music videos come from documentary filmmakers who get a chance to put forward a psychology of form rather than one of narrative. But, having said that, my instincts on City Bird were narrative, perhaps because it’s a kind of lilting waltz so it felt right to have a narrative to pull you through it.  So, for the treatment, I sat down and wrote an entire ghost story from scratch, in the style of Poe or Hawthorne. I even wrote nursery rhymes about the ghost, because ghost stories are mostly aural traditions.

On The Kingdom video Jesca had a ton of input because I quickly realised that it would only reach its full potential if I pretended to be a paint brush and let her grab hold of the crew through me and paint. Once I took my ego out of the equation I realised there was something special there I was meant to service, and honestly, that’s the best method of working with an artist on a music video, that’s what you really cross your fingers for, isn’t it? You can see a little more of that process on the behind-the-scenes doc of the kingdom here:

But for City Bird Jesca was in Manchester and we were in LA shooting. Her schedule was tight, and I was really flattered that she had enough faith in me to let me just go and shoot because I know how much she loves her songs and how much faith it took for her to let go a little. I had originally submitted an entirely different treatment to her and had kind of resigned myself to the fact I wasn’t going to do it, which was cool enough for me because god only knows how many talented people Jesca comes across in her travels. Surely, I thought, she can find people in the UK to make amazing videos, and surely, as an artist, she wants to go and do cool stuff with other cool people. So I thought I would just give it a shot. I submitted this treatment about metaphorical ghosts, which dealt with mis-en-scene of places that had just been left and abandoned – an unmade bed, plates on a table after dinner, a toilet still running, stuff like that, where humans had vacated the frame only seconds ago and you’d just missed them – kind of pretentious honestly. Then I came across my fiancée’s childhood dollhouse and started taking video and snapping pictures and all of a sudden this whole new idea came to mind of the dollhouse and miniatures and stop motion and ghosts. I sent the examples to Jesca and she totally fell for it! 

City Bird house
City Bird house.

Ghost stories are tricky because they are incredibly emotional stories surrounded in gothic imagery. Ghost stories like The Others, The Orphanage, The Sixth Sense, are rite of passage stories – they’re about letting go. About the dead letting go of the living and the living letting go of the dead. They’re NOT about the living being punished for a sin like horror movies, but about forgiveness of that sin from all parties, the relinquishing of unfinished business. And I wanted to nail that, I really did. In City Bird it is the boy who is at the centre of the story and has the rite of passage: the ghost is a sort of Frankenstein or Edward Scissorhands character. 

The boy has nightmares and makes up ghastly stories that paint the ghost as a demon, then something happens to the boy on his bike and he dies. We get those silent movie inter-titles: his tower (the city) is turned to a tomb. Shadows loom over his white coffin and he becomes a ghost, set into the underworld where he is refused and becomes a refugee with nowhere to go. It’s scary out there for a little boy so he returns to the ghost’s house and we realise that’s her purpose – she is a host for waywardly spirits like the dead boy. But he has been so scared of her, will he change? Can he let go of his fear of her? Can he muster up the courage to enter as she beckons him in? The song ends unresolved sonically so I wanted to leave the audience there just as the music does. The theme is that of judging a book by its cover and misunderstanding something: just as we pass the homeless on the street and pretend they are invisible like ghosts when they all have a real inner life. Can we let go of our prejudices and see beyond the stereotypes to see that the issues that made them homeless are ones that could very well come to prey on and haunt us at any time? That’s kind of the metaphor I was trying to get at. 

City Bird ghost
The City Bird ghost.

Who made the puppets and how long did the video take to make?

Jesca: I’m not quite sure actually… I should ask.

Elia: Everyone who was involved in making the City Bird video knew there was a finite time of ten days in which to create this beautiful, creative thing so necessity was to be the mother of invention due to the time constraints, and everyone really fed on that and brought their best to the project. My fiancee, Maranatha Hay, is an Emmy award winning documentary filmmaker who is piped into the most creative, kind, and daring community of filmmakers and her best friend Natalie Apodaca is an artist with experience in installations. I showed her Metropolis and told her we were going to build a monotone city from cardboard and she just went for it. Cosmin Cosma was my left hand man who insisted we use the Dragon Stop Motion software, which honestly was the main reason we were able to get the shots we needed in the time we had. 

The crew never lost faith in my direction, even when I had no idea how we would do it just ten minutes before the shoot. In the opening shot of the video there is a city cardboard diorama, the dollhouse, the puppet of the ghost AND the moon projected over the city! All those elements came into play because we just broke down the shot we had in mind element by element: that’s real filmmaking in a pure form. 99% of this video was done IN-CAMERA, like The Lumière Brothers! Then it was given that incredible aged look by Dan Geis, our after effects genius.

Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson
Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson.

I can tell you how the puppets were made, but I urge you to remember that cinema is like a magic trick. The home made feel is part of the fun of the viewing experience, especially the joy in realising that things like hair are actually twine. The doll’s arms are made of tiny painted tree branches, her spine is metal wire and her dress is made of muslin. Her face is tracing paper and is removable so that we could change her expressions from shot to shot. The part where the fork floats across the table had to be done with tweezers! (nudged lovingly one frame at a time by Maranatha)

The house was a nightmare. It is three feet tall and it took us 3 days to put it together from a flat box. We painted every part, so we had to know what the end product would look like before we even started. Luckily an architect friend, Dannon Rampton, showed up just to check out what was going on and got so enamoured with the dolls house that he ended up putting it together which is just as well since Natalie and I were clueless as to how we were going to do it. We painted it and then we had to DILAPIDATE IT so it looked old and haunted! We scrubbed it with metal brush, we broke its steeple and we stuffed miniature moss in all its crevices so that the ghost story would feel real and lived in. 

My motto is: make movies that can only be movies! Make movies that need that final step of the medium to fully realise the vision, because it’s such an expensive, time consuming endeavour that the content had better deserve and earn the medium. If it can be a song, a book, a play, let it be that. But film, film is reserved for the special stories that need the seven arts to make them whole. SO don’t give away our secrets if you don’t have to. 
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly.

I love Jesca Hoop‘s new song City Bird and the accompanying video so much so that I decided to get in touch with both Jesca and Elia Petridis, drug the director of her recent videos, hospital to find out what makes them tick. Elia Petridis runs boutique production company Filmatics in Los Angeles, California. After making several award winning shorts and music videos he is about to start shooting his first full length feature The Man Who Shook The Hand Of Vicente Fernandez. I think his incredibly detailed answers throw an intriguing light on what goes into the creation of a very considered and beautiful music video.

Jesca-Hoop-by-Liam-McMahon
Jesca Hoop by Liam McMahon.

When did you start working with director Elia Petridis?

Jesca: Elia is an old friend. We met in Los Angeles at one of my shows. He would say that he forced me to be his friend, which is kind of true though I would say that he used his clever imagination to lure me in. I’m glad that he did. The Kingdom was our first video adventure together.

Elia: A producer I’m working closely with these days said to me recently that humans are “meaning making machines” (a soundbite from some career seminar) but that phrase really resonated with me. I’m infatuated with screenwriting and personal mythologies, sometimes to the detriment of my own mental health. I grew up in Dubai for 18 years before moving to LA for film school – although Dubai had a lot of its own magic it didn’t have a music scene to speak of so I’m always a little astonished by the talent I find in LA. When I saw Jesca perform live I really felt her music was very special and otherworldly, and tried to do my best to see if, as human planets, we could potentially orbit each other and become friends. 

Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson
Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson.

I would venture to say that the first time I saw Jesca Hoop live was one of the most astonishing musical moments I have ever witnessed. It was the night before Halloween and she came out in a marionette outfit, complete with rosy cheeks, and stood motionless while her back up players wound her up to life. For a visualist like me, a storyteller, it really had an impact. The whole endeavour of courting a friendship with her was kind of a lark for me because I honestly thought she had better things to do. It was just a matter of pushing the boundary between fan and friend and seeing how much I could get away with. Suddenly, unexpectedly, as with most of life’s wonder, we had some mileage behind us and had transformed into friends. I will tell you that the first *official* conversation, the ice breaker, was when she was writing Tulip – from the Hunting my Dress album – and I was writing a screenplay dealing with Tulip Fever in Holland so I leant her my reference material. I knew I had two opportunities to wiggle my way in there – one to give her the book, and one to get it back!   

Hunting my Dress
The Hunting My Dress album cover.

Where was City Bird shot and where did the inspiration come from?

Jesca: It was shot in a miniature haunted house in downtown LA. We both wanted it to be a ghost story and Elia was the one to bring the children’s narrative into it.

Elia: FALSE! The video was shot in a garage in Riverside, Ca. The whole thing was fractal – an infinite amount of information in a finite space, as the garage is attached to an 18th century ‘Painted Lady’ Victorian house owned by my fiance. So in essence, it was shot in a miniature dollhouse inside a bigger dollhouse which made the shoot utterly magic. I think what Jesca is communicating is that the story takes place in a miniature dollhouse in downtown LA. The whole thing was lit using candles and christmas lights. 

Where did the idea for an animated video come from?

Jesca: It came out of limitation really. We had very very little money for this video so we just mused about what we could do with what time and money we did have. I set a pretty hard task considering the resources available and I am delighted with what Elia and his team came through with.

Elia: To me, the track is seance folk. That’s the sonic iconography that City Bird evokes – a ghostly seance. When it comes to music and music videos I am not a literal thinker so although my mind knows the song is about the fright and sadness associated with homelessness that’s not what my heart feels when I hear the song, and it’s not what the dream theatre in my mind projects over it either. But here Jesca’s mastery shines through, because the sonic landscape, right down to the very physical shape her mouth is making around the lyric is just as important as what she’s trying to say; the two are organically woven together. The magic of Jesca’s music lies in the alchemy that exists between form and content. All my artistic heroes do this, from Chabon, to Spielberg; they use genre to sugar coat the pill. So here she uses the disguise of seance music to coat the literal message of homelessness she’s trying to communicate. 

Now, narrative is something I am always running away from when directing a music video. Whenever I read a music video treatment from some kid that went to film school it makes me cringe and I think the best music videos come from documentary filmmakers who get a chance to put forward a psychology of form rather than one of narrative. But, having said that, my instincts on City Bird were narrative, perhaps because it’s a kind of lilting waltz so it felt right to have a narrative to pull you through it.  So, for the treatment, I sat down and wrote an entire ghost story from scratch, in the style of Poe or Hawthorne. I even wrote nursery rhymes about the ghost, because ghost stories are mostly aural traditions.

On The Kingdom video Jesca had a ton of input because I quickly realised that it would only reach its full potential if I pretended to be a paint brush and let her grab hold of the crew through me and paint. Once I took my ego out of the equation I realised there was something special there I was meant to service, and honestly, that’s the best method of working with an artist on a music video, that’s what you really cross your fingers for, isn’t it? You can see a little more of that process on the behind-the-scenes doc of the kingdom here:

But for City Bird Jesca was in Manchester and we were in LA shooting. Her schedule was tight, and I was really flattered that she had enough faith in me to let me just go and shoot because I know how much she loves her songs and how much faith it took for her to let go a little. I had originally submitted an entirely different treatment to her and had kind of resigned myself to the fact I wasn’t going to do it, which was cool enough for me because god only knows how many talented people Jesca comes across in her travels. Surely, I thought, she can find people in the UK to make amazing videos, and surely, as an artist, she wants to go and do cool stuff with other cool people. So I thought I would just give it a shot. I submitted this treatment about metaphorical ghosts, which dealt with mis-en-scene of places that had just been left and abandoned – an unmade bed, plates on a table after dinner, a toilet still running, stuff like that, where humans had vacated the frame only seconds ago and you’d just missed them – kind of pretentious honestly. Then I came across my fiancée’s childhood dollhouse and started taking video and snapping pictures and all of a sudden this whole new idea came to mind of the dollhouse and miniatures and stop motion and ghosts. I sent the examples to Jesca and she totally fell for it! 

City Bird house
City Bird house.

Ghost stories are tricky because they are incredibly emotional stories surrounded in gothic imagery. Ghost stories like The Others, The Orphanage, The Sixth Sense, are rite of passage stories – they’re about letting go. About the dead letting go of the living and the living letting go of the dead. They’re NOT about the living being punished for a sin like horror movies, but about forgiveness of that sin from all parties, the relinquishing of unfinished business. And I wanted to nail that, I really did. In City Bird it is the boy who is at the centre of the story and has the rite of passage: the ghost is a sort of Frankenstein or Edward Scissorhands character. 

The boy has nightmares and makes up ghastly stories that paint the ghost as a demon, then something happens to the boy on his bike and he dies. We get those silent movie inter-titles: his tower (the city) is turned to a tomb. Shadows loom over his white coffin and he becomes a ghost, set into the underworld where he is refused and becomes a refugee with nowhere to go. It’s scary out there for a little boy so he returns to the ghost’s house and we realise that’s her purpose – she is a host for waywardly spirits like the dead boy. But he has been so scared of her, will he change? Can he let go of his fear of her? Can he muster up the courage to enter as she beckons him in? The song ends unresolved sonically so I wanted to leave the audience there just as the music does. The theme is that of judging a book by its cover and misunderstanding something: just as we pass the homeless on the street and pretend they are invisible like ghosts when they all have a real inner life. Can we let go of our prejudices and see beyond the stereotypes to see that the issues that made them homeless are ones that could very well come to prey on and haunt us at any time? That’s kind of the metaphor I was trying to get at. 

City Bird ghost
The City Bird ghost.

Who made the puppets and how long did the video take to make?

Jesca: I’m not quite sure actually… I should ask.

Elia: Everyone who was involved in making the City Bird video knew there was a finite time of ten days in which to create this beautiful, creative thing so necessity was to be the mother of invention due to the time constraints, and everyone really fed on that and brought their best to the project. My fiancee, Maranatha Hay, is an Emmy award winning documentary filmmaker who is piped into the most creative, kind, and daring community of filmmakers and her best friend Natalie Apodaca is an artist with experience in installations. I showed her Metropolis and told her we were going to build a monotone city from cardboard and she just went for it. Cosmin Cosma was my left hand man who insisted we use the Dragon Stop Motion software, which honestly was the main reason we were able to get the shots we needed in the time we had. 

The crew never lost faith in my direction, even when I had no idea how we would do it just ten minutes before the shoot. In the opening shot of the video there is a city cardboard diorama, the dollhouse, the puppet of the ghost AND the moon projected over the city! All those elements came into play because we just broke down the shot we had in mind element by element: that’s real filmmaking in a pure form. 99% of this video was done IN-CAMERA, like The Lumière Brothers! Then it was given that incredible aged look by Dan Geis, our after effects genius.

Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson
Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson.

I can tell you how the puppets were made, but I urge you to remember that cinema is like a magic trick. The home made feel is part of the fun of the viewing experience, especially the joy in realising that things like hair are actually twine. The doll’s arms are made of tiny painted tree branches, her spine is metal wire and her dress is made of muslin. Her face is tracing paper and is removable so that we could change her expressions from shot to shot. The part where the fork floats across the table had to be done with tweezers! (nudged lovingly one frame at a time by Maranatha)

The house was a nightmare. It is three feet tall and it took us 3 days to put it together from a flat box. We painted every part, so we had to know what the end product would look like before we even started. Luckily an architect friend, Dannon Rampton, showed up just to check out what was going on and got so enamoured with the dolls house that he ended up putting it together which is just as well since Natalie and I were clueless as to how we were going to do it. We painted it and then we had to DILAPIDATE IT so it looked old and haunted! We scrubbed it with metal brush, we broke its steeple and we stuffed miniature moss in all its crevices so that the ghost story would feel real and lived in. 

My motto is: make movies that can only be movies! Make movies that need that final step of the medium to fully realise the vision, because it’s such an expensive, time consuming endeavour that the content had better deserve and earn the medium. If it can be a song, a book, a play, let it be that. But film, film is reserved for the special stories that need the seven arts to make them whole. SO don’t give away our secrets if you don’t have to. 
TM AND HL-Jan 11-photography by Amelia Gregory
Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, viagra dosage all photography by Amelia Gregory.

Last week Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou held a preview screening for their Tin Tabernacle tour video, viagra sale titled 11 Nights Under Tin. I caught up with them at Bush Hall a few weeks ago to find out more about this talented couple.

Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia GregoryTrevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia Gregory

The Tin Tabernacle tour followed on from Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou’s Village Hall tour of last year. To pull it off they found approximately fifty churches through the Tin Tabernacles website, got details of about thirty of them and managed to stage concerts in eleven of them. The website often listed the nearest town or they enterprisingly zoomed in on the google street view: sometimes a contact number would be visible on a noticeboard, and at other times they phoned the local pub. Most people were really enthusiastic, but some were overwhelmed by the idea and worried by the commitment. “We wanted to get out into the community and play for people who don’t have much access to music,” they told me when I spoke to them at Bush Hall. “We went to those who were keen.” It seems to have been a successful venture: the audiences were mostly comprised of locals.

Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester
Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester.

The Tin Tabernacle churches all vary in size, though they have a few things in common. They are all made of corrugated iron, and were invented circa 1840, when the scattering of God fearing British citizens across the British Empire hastened the need for an easily transportable place of worship. Mining communities sprung up in all sorts of remote corners of the globe so the churches often had to be carried for long distances overland. “They warm up fast because they are wooden clad inside,” explained Trevor and Hannah, “but some had no electricity so we played by candlelight.” The smallest church held only about 40 people, all squashed into the pews, but the average capacity was between 70-120. What with Trevor, Hannah and their two support acts it was still quite a squish.

Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester
Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester.

I spotted a tin church on my visit to the Cornish village of Cadgwith earlier this year, but sadly this was not one that they managed to include on the tour, despite Trevor’s Cornish heritage. Many were nevertheless located in amazing locations, including on cliff tops.


11 Nights Under Tin, a film by Trevor Moss, can be watched in full above.

Why did they chose such an innovative way of touring? “We had toured the same venues for years and they are all the same, painted black inside.” Trevor and Hannah hope that with their Arts Council funded tours their audiences will experience an event, instead of just standing in the shadows. “It’s no wonder that so many bands’ later records are rubbish when they live in such a strange parallel reality.” So they have chosen places that will open their eyes to other communities. They always stay in independent B&Bs and sometimes with the local vicar – it’s also a carefully considered way for them to have an interesting time whilst peddling an album. “We get to play in places we would never have seen otherwise.”

Tin Tabernacle by Alison Day
Tin Tabernacle by Alison Day.

I can totally relate to this idea – half the reason I was so attracted to fashion photography as a creative medium was the possibility of visiting interesting locations to take photos. During my nascent fashion photography career I went to South Africa and America before I began to realise the environmental problems of excessive air travel.

Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by Sarah Matthews
Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by Sarah Matthews.

The *world* premiere of the resulting Tin Tabernacle film was shown at The Social on Wednesday 16th March. It was entirely shot on an old 80s Hi 8 camera in three seconds bursts three or four times an hour, so it is basically what they describe as “a collection of moving photos” with mostly in-camera sound.

Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou - Tin Churches by Emmeline Pidgen
Tin Churches by Emmeline Pidgen.

This interactive approach to playing and documenting music is a result of Hannah and Trevor’s art college career. They both met at Goldsmiths, where Trevor was studying fine art and Hannah was doing theatre studies. By the time they reached their third year they were signed as the band Indigo Moss, which we profiled on Amelia’s Magazine. By this point they were spending so much time immersed in music that Trevor had to enlist the rest of the band to help get his degree show up on time.

Tin Tabernacles by Reena Makwana
Tin Tabernacles by Reena Makwana.

The couple have now been writing songs together for 8 years and seem a lot older and wiser than their 25 years of age, a fact which they attribute to having lots of older friends. They met whilst living in halls but did not start going out together until Indigo Moss, and managed to keep their relationship secret from other band members for two months. They got married in 2008.


There’s Something Happening Somewhere, a film by Trevor Moss.

Indigo Moss eventually broke up because they didn’t enjoy it anymore, especially the way the label was pushing the band. Inevitably, they were pulling bigger audiences as a duet. At that point Tom from Lewis Music saw them and they signed a one album deal. After that Jeff of Heavenly saw a couple of shows and as they put it “it all happened quite naturally. We had a cup of tea and the Tin Tabernacle tour really caught his imagination.” Heavenly Recordings have parted ways with megalith EMI and are now part of the Universal funded Cooperative Music initiative which supports independent labels such as Transgressive, Moshi Moshi, Bella Union and Domino. It means they can share PR costs and everyone knows when the others are releasing records so they don’t step on toes, which seems to make brilliant sense. These are amongst my favourite labels and between them they host some fabulous musicians – why would they want to deliberately compete with each other?

Trevor-Moss-Hannah-Lou-by-LJG-Art-Illustration
Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by LJG Art & Illustration.

Ever prolific, Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou aim to put out one album a year from now on. The next record will be out in May and then comes the festival season, starting at Wood Festival on 21st May, and moving onto Truck Festival, Port Eliot and of course Glastonbury – where they played on my Climate Camp stage last year alongside Danny and the Champions of the World.


Performing at Wood Festival in 2009.

What to expect from the upcoming record? “There will be drums and a much bigger sound.” But as always all guitar and voices will be recorded together. I can’t imagine there will be much room in their van for more band members, and they agree that it is perfectly sized for just them. Although Trevor jokes that Hannah gets on his nerves it’s clear that this is very much a twosome. What happens when a family enters the equation? “Trevor wants to be a house husband,” laughs Hannah. “It will be a nice quiet time to write!” For now what they really want is a pet whippet. “They are lovely; so skinny and frail,” says Trevor. “It could travel in a hammock in the van.” The main trouble would be taking a dog into festivals, but I’m sure they could find an interesting series of venues that would accept a canine companion. Did someone mention lighthouses?

Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia Gregory

Written by Amelia Gregory on Wednesday March 23rd, 2011 12:11 pm

Categories ,11 Nights Under Tin, ,Alison Day, ,Arts Council, ,Bella Union, ,British Empire, ,Bush Hall, ,Cadgwith, ,Climate Camp, ,Cooperative Music, ,Cornish village, ,Cornwall, ,Danny and the Champions of the World, ,Domino Records, ,EMI, ,Emmeline Pidgen, ,Gilly Rochester, ,glastonbury, ,goldsmiths, ,Hannah Lou, ,Heavenly Recordings, ,Heavenly Social, ,Hi 8 camera, ,Indigo Moss, ,Lewis Music, ,LJG Art & Illustration, ,mining, ,Moshi Moshi, ,Port Eliot, ,Port Elliot, ,Reena Makwana, ,Sarah Matthews, ,The Social, ,There’s Something Happening Somewhere, ,Tin Tabernacle, ,Tin Tabernacle Tour, ,Transgressive, ,Trevor Moss, ,Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou, ,Tripod Stage, ,Truck Festival, ,Universal, ,Village Hall, ,Whippet, ,Wood Festival

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Amelia’s Magazine | Diamond Mine by Jon Hopkins and King Creosote. An interview with Kenny Anderson.

by

King Creosote and Jon Hopkins by Rosemary Cunningham
King Creosote and Jon Hopkins by Rosemary Cunningham.

In the second part of my attempt to delve into the creation of the amazing collaborative album Diamond Mine, Kenny Anderson (aka King Creosote) answers my questions with a frankness and candour that matches the genius of his songwriting. Thanks so much for your wonderful answers Kenny! And if you haven’t heard it yet, you must get a copy of Diamond Mine by Jon Hopkins and King Creosote, out now on Domino Records.

Jon Hopkins and King Creosote by Sarah Alfarhan
Jon Hopkins and King Creosote by Sarah Alfarhan.

How did Jon first approach you and what were your first thoughts about his proposal?

Diamond Mine is the latest instalment of many years of different sorts of collaborations between JH and KC. In 2004 (I think) Jon approached me at a Fence Collective show in Pittenweem and asked if I’d re-record a version of a track called Your Own Spell with him. He’d heard the original on an old KC album, but he asked in a way that didn’t make me question the quality of my version, and I thought ‘what a clever, tactful chap’. 

YouTube Preview ImageYour Own Spell

He remixed a track called A Sad Ha Ha that I recorded with Magnetophone for 4AD, and that made me all teary at the end of a Homegame when I heard it.

YouTube Preview ImageThe Vice-like Gist of It

Next up he remixed The Vice-like Gist of It as a B-side which stopped Janice Forsyth in her tracks, and at the end of 2006’s Green Man Festival he played me And the Racket They Made. I shed real tears and instantly agreed to play at a stranger’s wedding because of it. 

YouTube Preview ImageAnd the Racket They Made

We started on a collaboration album proper late in 2006, and the initial efforts were drafted into Bombshell for 679 once we’d secured the producer’s job for Jon, and in 2008 he worked on a couple of the Flick the Vs songs.  

Even with all that under our collaborative belt, I think Jon felt he hadn’t quite made a true and genuine collaboration with my voice very much to the fore, band and record label concessions very much to the aft. Two years ago he called me back to London – this time there’d be no siphoning off of our labours.

King Creosote. Photo by Steve Gullick
King Creosote. Photo by Steve Gullick.

How well do you think you have both managed to evoke “space, longevity and timelessness”?

As a collection of songs spanning my entire songwriting history, sung in what is undoubtedly my best recorded singing voice to date, for my part I hope that was enough to push the record away from just the period leading up to a 2011 release. There’s everything from the naive views of an impatient student right through to the cynical musings of an impatient middle aged grump. Jon’ll tell you the in & outs of the music content, but most of what you hear is acoustic guitar, accordion, piano and voices – all of them timeless instruments I’d say. Jon’s given the whole thing a fairly light and airy touch.

Longevity … Well, I should be quite a few dozen listens ahead of our most ardent fans, and I still hear brand new sounds with every listen. The tracklisting still surprises me from time to time, and the album can take an hour to pass, sometimes just a few seconds. In brief, we’ve nailed it on all three counts :)

King Creosote and Jon Hopkins by Sam Parr
King Creosote and Jon Hopkins by Sam Parr.

How is middle age treating you? I like the way that you say you intend to make the most your “thinning hair and diet of white flour and sugar” but it can’t be all bad?

I’m enjoying middle age immensely. I’ve resigned myself to most of the physical wear and tear, but in my head it’s not as bad as when I actually see my ageing mush in a mirror. I only have to look at an Ampeg bass rig and my back starts to hurt, and so as a rule I avoid reflective surfaces and load ins.

YouTube Preview ImageJohn Taylor’s Month Away

What’s the best part about growing older?

There’s a certain smugness comes with the realisation that I was incredibly lucky to grow up in the 70s & 80s – not only had national service long ended, but we enjoyed immense freedoms. Being young in the 2010s with all these mobile phones, digital cameras, youtube, facebook and twitter sites tracking your every move has absolutely no appeal. Hahahahahahahaha! And we TREASURED records, making live gigs and the latest album releases real moments of excitement and joy.    

YouTube Preview ImageBubble

Some of these songs were written as long ago as 20 years and more. What did it feel like to dredge them up again? Did you experience lots of weird emotions?

I’ve re-recorded many of my songs for lots of different albums, so I’m used to it. It’s difficult to explain now just what Your Own Spell from 1988 is truly about, so I just say it’s a banal ‘be careful what you wish for’ type tale. I’ve got a better, more emotionally believable voice now than I did back then, so not so hard to get the mindset right. Thankfully there are no real happy songs on Diamond Mine – that’s the one emotion I haven’t cracked yet.

King Creosote by Victoria Haynes
King Creosote by Victoria Haynes.

How do you feel about modern technology?  

On one hand a genius from the modern age can come along and make something that sounds as good as Diamond Mine, but in general I find it a real drag and best avoided whenever possible. If technology results in a machine that drops one back into a pre-technological era, than I’m all for it. I’d punch 1974 into the dial and would probably expire in time for the millenium celebrations. 

YouTube Preview ImageBats in the Attic

You say that “being a dad lights the way out”. How do your family fit into the musical world? Do they join you, and do they take part in your projects in any way?   

My dad, uncle, brothers and cousins are all musical, but quite different in their approach, so it doesn’t feel like competition in any way. My daughter has an incredible ear for melody and a limitless memory for lyrics – she wants to do medicine, so she didn’t get my squeamish gene. I used to play with one of my brothers – Iain – in a bluegrass outfit yonks ago, and I’ve backed up the other brother Gordon on many live sets, but as we get older, the brothers and I tend to avoid interaction with each other’s music as much as possible, and stick to comedy impersonations of our dad, clicking heels and all. I’m a bigger fan of their music than they are of mine, so that helps!

YouTube Preview ImageYour Young Voice

My dad recently organised an Anderson showcase for charity. It was an incredibly surreal afternoon of many different musical styles played in front of a white haired audience, so not a chance of any of it landing up on youtube. 
And relax.

Thankyou so much for your wonderful answers Kenny!

King Creosote and Jon Hopkins by Laura Warecki
King Creosote and Jon Hopkins by Laura Warecki.

Diamond Mine is intended to be listened to in one sitting, so once you’ve had a chance to sample the tracks above make sure you grab a copy of the whole thing. Jon Hopkins and King Creosote will be back on tour in September. Full Diamond Mine tour listing information here. Don’t forget to also check out my interview with Jon Hopkins here.

Written by Amelia Gregory on Friday June 3rd, 2011 12:05 pm

Categories ,4ad, ,679 Recordings, ,A Sad Ha Ha, ,album, ,And the Racket They Made, ,Bats in the Attic, ,Bombshell, ,Bubble, ,Diamond Mine, ,Domino Records, ,Fence Records, ,Fife, ,Flick the Vs, ,interview, ,Janice Forsyth, ,John Taylor’s Month Away, ,Jon Hopkins, ,Kenny Anderson, ,King Creosote, ,Laura Warecki, ,Magnetophone, ,Pittenweem, ,review, ,Rosemary Cunningham, ,Sam Parr, ,Sarah Alfarhan, ,Steve Gullick, ,The Vice-like Gist of It, ,Victoria Haynes, ,Your Own Spell, ,Your Young Voice

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Amelia’s Magazine | A post Tin Tabernacle interview with Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou

by

Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly.

I love Jesca Hoop‘s new song City Bird and the accompanying video so much so that I decided to get in touch with both Jesca and Elia Petridis, side effects the director of her recent videos, sildenafil to find out what makes them tick. Elia Petridis runs boutique production company Filmatics in Los Angeles, California. After making several award winning shorts and music videos he is about to start shooting his first full length feature The Man Who Shook The Hand Of Vicente Fernandez. I think his incredibly detailed answers throw an intriguing light on what goes into the creation of a very considered and beautiful music video.

Jesca-Hoop-by-Liam-McMahon
Jesca Hoop by Liam McMahon.

When did you start working with director Elia Petridis?

Jesca: Elia is an old friend. We met in Los Angeles at one of my shows. He would say that he forced me to be his friend, which is kind of true though I would say that he used his clever imagination to lure me in. I’m glad that he did. The Kingdom was our first video adventure together.

Elia: A producer I’m working closely with these days said to me recently that humans are “meaning making machines” (a soundbite from some career seminar) but that phrase really resonated with me. I’m infatuated with screenwriting and personal mythologies, sometimes to the detriment of my own mental health. I grew up in Dubai for 18 years before moving to LA for film school – although Dubai had a lot of its own magic it didn’t have a music scene to speak of so I’m always a little astonished by the talent I find in LA. When I saw Jesca perform live I really felt her music was very special and otherworldly, and tried to do my best to see if, as human planets, we could potentially orbit each other and become friends. 

I would venture to say that the first time I saw Jesca Hoop live was one of the most astonishing musical moments I have ever witnessed. It was the night before Halloween and she came out in a marionette outfit, complete with rosy cheeks, and stood motionless while her back up players wound her up to life. For a visualist like me, a storyteller, it really had an impact. The whole endeavour of courting a friendship with her was kind of a lark for me because I honestly thought she had better things to do. It was just a matter of pushing the boundary between fan and friend and seeing how much I could get away with. Suddenly, unexpectedly, as with most of life’s wonder, we had some mileage behind us and had transformed into friends. I will tell you that the first *official* conversation, the ice breaker, was when she was writing Tulip – from the Hunting my Dress album – and I was writing a screenplay dealing with Tulip Fever in Holland so I leant her my reference material. I knew I had two opportunities to wiggle my way in there – one to give her the book, and one to get it back!   

Hunting my Dress
The Hunting My Dress album cover.

Where was City Bird shot and where did the inspiration come from?

Jesca: It was shot in a miniature haunted house in downtown LA. We both wanted it to be a ghost story and Elia was the one to bring the children’s narrative into it.

Elia: FALSE! The video was shot in a garage in Riverside, Ca. The whole thing was fractal – an infinite amount of information in a finite space, as the garage is attached to an 18th century ‘Painted Lady’ Victorian house owned by my fiance. So in essence, it was shot in a miniature dollhouse inside a bigger dollhouse which made the shoot utterly magic. I think what Jesca is communicating is that the story takes place in a miniature dollhouse in downtown LA. The whole thing was lit using candles and christmas lights. 

Where did the idea for an animated video come from?

Jesca: It came out of limitation really. We had very very little money for this video so we just mused about what we could do with what time and money we did have. I set a pretty hard task considering the resources available and I am delighted with what Elia and his team came through with.

Elia: To me, the track is seance folk. That’s the sonic iconography that City Bird evokes – a ghostly seance. When it comes to music and music videos I am not a literal thinker so although my mind knows the song is about the fright and sadness associated with homelessness that’s not what my heart feels when I hear the song, and it’s not what the dream theatre in my mind projects over it either. But here Jesca’s mastery shines through, because the sonic landscape, right down to the very physical shape her mouth is making around the lyric is just as important as what she’s trying to say; the two are organically woven together. The magic of Jesca’s music lies in the alchemy that exists between form and content. All my artistic heroes do this, from Chabon, to Spielberg; they use genre to sugar coat the pill. So here she uses the disguise of seance music to coat the literal message of homelessness she’s trying to communicate. 

Now, narrative is something I am always running away from when directing a music video. Whenever I read a music video treatment from some kid that went to film school it makes me cringe and I think the best music videos come from documentary filmmakers who get a chance to put forward a psychology of form rather than one of narrative. But, having said that, my instincts on City Bird were narrative, perhaps because it’s a kind of lilting waltz so it felt right to have a narrative to pull you through it.  So, for the treatment, I sat down and wrote an entire ghost story from scratch, in the style of Poe or Hawthorne. I even wrote nursery rhymes about the ghost, because ghost stories are mostly aural traditions.

On The Kingdom video Jesca had a ton of input because I quickly realised that it would only reach its full potential if I pretended to be a paint brush and let her grab hold of the crew through me and paint. Once I took my ego out of the equation I realised there was something special there I was meant to service, and honestly, that’s the best method of working with an artist on a music video, that’s what you really cross your fingers for, isn’t it? You can see a little more of that process on the behind-the-scenes doc of the kingdom here:

But for City Bird Jesca was in Manchester and we were in LA shooting. Her schedule was tight, and I was really flattered that she had enough faith in me to let me just go and shoot because I know how much she loves her songs and how much faith it took for her to let go a little. I had originally submitted an entirely different treatment to her and had kind of resigned myself to the fact I wasn’t going to do it, which was cool enough for me because god only knows how many talented people Jesca comes across in her travels. Surely, I thought, she can find people in the UK to make amazing videos, and surely, as an artist, she wants to go and do cool stuff with other cool people. So I thought I would just give it a shot. I submitted this treatment about metaphorical ghosts, which dealt with mis-en-scene of places that had just been left and abandoned – an unmade bed, plates on a table after dinner, a toilet still running, stuff like that, where humans had vacated the frame only seconds ago and you’d just missed them – kind of pretentious honestly. Then I came across my fiancée’s childhood dollhouse and started taking video and snapping pictures and all of a sudden this whole new idea came to mind of the dollhouse and miniatures and stop motion and ghosts. I sent the examples to Jesca and she totally fell for it! 

City Bird house
City Bird house.

Ghost stories are tricky because they are incredibly emotional stories surrounded in gothic imagery. Ghost stories like The Others, The Orphanage, The Sixth Sense, are rite of passage stories – they’re about letting go. About the dead letting go of the living and the living letting go of the dead. They’re NOT about the living being punished for a sin like horror movies, but about forgiveness of that sin from all parties, the relinquishing of unfinished business. And I wanted to nail that, I really did. In City Bird it is the boy who is at the centre of the story and has the rite of passage: the ghost is a sort of Frankenstein or Edward Scissorhands character. 

The boy has nightmares and makes up ghastly stories that paint the ghost as a demon, then something happens to the boy on his bike and he dies. We get those silent movie inter-titles: his tower (the city) is turned to a tomb. Shadows loom over his white coffin and he becomes a ghost, set into the underworld where he is refused and becomes a refugee with nowhere to go. It’s scary out there for a little boy so he returns to the ghost’s house and we realise that’s her purpose – she is a host for waywardly spirits like the dead boy. But he has been so scared of her, will he change? Can he let go of his fear of her? Can he muster up the courage to enter as she beckons him in? The song ends unresolved sonically so I wanted to leave the audience there just as the music does. The theme is that of judging a book by its cover and misunderstanding something: just as we pass the homeless on the street and pretend they are invisible like ghosts when they all have a real inner life. Can we let go of our prejudices and see beyond the stereotypes to see that the issues that made them homeless are ones that could very well come to prey on and haunt us at any time? That’s kind of the metaphor I was trying to get at. 

City Bird ghost
The City Bird ghost.

Who made the puppets and how long did the video take to make?

Jesca: I’m not quite sure actually… I should ask.

Elia: Everyone who was involved in making the City Bird video knew there was a finite time of ten days in which to create this beautiful, creative thing so necessity was to be the mother of invention due to the time constraints, and everyone really fed on that and brought their best to the project. My fiancee, Maranatha Hay, is an Emmy award winning documentary filmmaker who is piped into the most creative, kind, and daring community of filmmakers and her best friend Natalie Apodaca is an artist with experience in installations. I showed her Metropolis and told her we were going to build a monotone city from cardboard and she just went for it. Cosmin Cosma was my left hand man who insisted we use the Dragon Stop Motion software, which honestly was the main reason we were able to get the shots we needed in the time we had. 

The crew never lost faith in my direction, even when I had no idea how we would do it just ten minutes before the shoot. In the opening shot of the video there is a city cardboard diorama, the dollhouse, the puppet of the ghost AND the moon projected over the city! All those elements came into play because we just broke down the shot we had in mind element by element: that’s real filmmaking in a pure form. 99% of this video was done IN-CAMERA, like The Lumière Brothers! Then it was given that incredible aged look by Dan Geis, our after effects genius.

Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson
Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson.

I can tell you how the puppets were made, but I urge you to remember that cinema is like a magic trick. The home made feel is part of the fun of the viewing experience, especially the joy in realising that things like hair are actually twine. The doll’s arms are made of tiny painted tree branches, her spine is metal wire and her dress is made of muslin. Her face is tracing paper and is removable so that we could change her expressions from shot to shot. The part where the fork floats across the table had to be done with tweezers! (nudged lovingly one frame at a time by Maranatha)

The house was a nightmare. It is three feet tall and it took us 3 days to put it together from a flat box. We painted every part, so we had to know what the end product would look like before we even started. Luckily an architect friend, Dannon Rampton, showed up just to check out what was going on and got so enamoured with the dolls house that he ended up putting it together which is just as well since Natalie and I were clueless as to how we were going to do it. We painted it and then we had to DILAPIDATE IT so it looked old and haunted! We scrubbed it with metal brush, we broke its steeple and we stuffed miniature moss in all its crevices so that the ghost story would feel real and lived in. 

My motto is: make movies that can only be movies! Make movies that need that final step of the medium to fully realise the vision, because it’s such an expensive, time consuming endeavour that the content had better deserve and earn the medium. If it can be a song, a book, a play, let it be that. But film, film is reserved for the special stories that need the seven arts to make them whole. SO don’t give away our secrets if you don’t have to. 
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly.

I love Jesca Hoop‘s new song City Bird and the accompanying video so much so that I decided to get in touch with both Jesca and Elia Petridis, drug the director of her recent videos, hospital to find out what makes them tick. Elia Petridis runs boutique production company Filmatics in Los Angeles, California. After making several award winning shorts and music videos he is about to start shooting his first full length feature The Man Who Shook The Hand Of Vicente Fernandez. I think his incredibly detailed answers throw an intriguing light on what goes into the creation of a very considered and beautiful music video.

Jesca-Hoop-by-Liam-McMahon
Jesca Hoop by Liam McMahon.

When did you start working with director Elia Petridis?

Jesca: Elia is an old friend. We met in Los Angeles at one of my shows. He would say that he forced me to be his friend, which is kind of true though I would say that he used his clever imagination to lure me in. I’m glad that he did. The Kingdom was our first video adventure together.

Elia: A producer I’m working closely with these days said to me recently that humans are “meaning making machines” (a soundbite from some career seminar) but that phrase really resonated with me. I’m infatuated with screenwriting and personal mythologies, sometimes to the detriment of my own mental health. I grew up in Dubai for 18 years before moving to LA for film school – although Dubai had a lot of its own magic it didn’t have a music scene to speak of so I’m always a little astonished by the talent I find in LA. When I saw Jesca perform live I really felt her music was very special and otherworldly, and tried to do my best to see if, as human planets, we could potentially orbit each other and become friends. 

Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson
Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson.

I would venture to say that the first time I saw Jesca Hoop live was one of the most astonishing musical moments I have ever witnessed. It was the night before Halloween and she came out in a marionette outfit, complete with rosy cheeks, and stood motionless while her back up players wound her up to life. For a visualist like me, a storyteller, it really had an impact. The whole endeavour of courting a friendship with her was kind of a lark for me because I honestly thought she had better things to do. It was just a matter of pushing the boundary between fan and friend and seeing how much I could get away with. Suddenly, unexpectedly, as with most of life’s wonder, we had some mileage behind us and had transformed into friends. I will tell you that the first *official* conversation, the ice breaker, was when she was writing Tulip – from the Hunting my Dress album – and I was writing a screenplay dealing with Tulip Fever in Holland so I leant her my reference material. I knew I had two opportunities to wiggle my way in there – one to give her the book, and one to get it back!   

Hunting my Dress
The Hunting My Dress album cover.

Where was City Bird shot and where did the inspiration come from?

Jesca: It was shot in a miniature haunted house in downtown LA. We both wanted it to be a ghost story and Elia was the one to bring the children’s narrative into it.

Elia: FALSE! The video was shot in a garage in Riverside, Ca. The whole thing was fractal – an infinite amount of information in a finite space, as the garage is attached to an 18th century ‘Painted Lady’ Victorian house owned by my fiance. So in essence, it was shot in a miniature dollhouse inside a bigger dollhouse which made the shoot utterly magic. I think what Jesca is communicating is that the story takes place in a miniature dollhouse in downtown LA. The whole thing was lit using candles and christmas lights. 

Where did the idea for an animated video come from?

Jesca: It came out of limitation really. We had very very little money for this video so we just mused about what we could do with what time and money we did have. I set a pretty hard task considering the resources available and I am delighted with what Elia and his team came through with.

Elia: To me, the track is seance folk. That’s the sonic iconography that City Bird evokes – a ghostly seance. When it comes to music and music videos I am not a literal thinker so although my mind knows the song is about the fright and sadness associated with homelessness that’s not what my heart feels when I hear the song, and it’s not what the dream theatre in my mind projects over it either. But here Jesca’s mastery shines through, because the sonic landscape, right down to the very physical shape her mouth is making around the lyric is just as important as what she’s trying to say; the two are organically woven together. The magic of Jesca’s music lies in the alchemy that exists between form and content. All my artistic heroes do this, from Chabon, to Spielberg; they use genre to sugar coat the pill. So here she uses the disguise of seance music to coat the literal message of homelessness she’s trying to communicate. 

Now, narrative is something I am always running away from when directing a music video. Whenever I read a music video treatment from some kid that went to film school it makes me cringe and I think the best music videos come from documentary filmmakers who get a chance to put forward a psychology of form rather than one of narrative. But, having said that, my instincts on City Bird were narrative, perhaps because it’s a kind of lilting waltz so it felt right to have a narrative to pull you through it.  So, for the treatment, I sat down and wrote an entire ghost story from scratch, in the style of Poe or Hawthorne. I even wrote nursery rhymes about the ghost, because ghost stories are mostly aural traditions.

On The Kingdom video Jesca had a ton of input because I quickly realised that it would only reach its full potential if I pretended to be a paint brush and let her grab hold of the crew through me and paint. Once I took my ego out of the equation I realised there was something special there I was meant to service, and honestly, that’s the best method of working with an artist on a music video, that’s what you really cross your fingers for, isn’t it? You can see a little more of that process on the behind-the-scenes doc of the kingdom here:

But for City Bird Jesca was in Manchester and we were in LA shooting. Her schedule was tight, and I was really flattered that she had enough faith in me to let me just go and shoot because I know how much she loves her songs and how much faith it took for her to let go a little. I had originally submitted an entirely different treatment to her and had kind of resigned myself to the fact I wasn’t going to do it, which was cool enough for me because god only knows how many talented people Jesca comes across in her travels. Surely, I thought, she can find people in the UK to make amazing videos, and surely, as an artist, she wants to go and do cool stuff with other cool people. So I thought I would just give it a shot. I submitted this treatment about metaphorical ghosts, which dealt with mis-en-scene of places that had just been left and abandoned – an unmade bed, plates on a table after dinner, a toilet still running, stuff like that, where humans had vacated the frame only seconds ago and you’d just missed them – kind of pretentious honestly. Then I came across my fiancée’s childhood dollhouse and started taking video and snapping pictures and all of a sudden this whole new idea came to mind of the dollhouse and miniatures and stop motion and ghosts. I sent the examples to Jesca and she totally fell for it! 

City Bird house
City Bird house.

Ghost stories are tricky because they are incredibly emotional stories surrounded in gothic imagery. Ghost stories like The Others, The Orphanage, The Sixth Sense, are rite of passage stories – they’re about letting go. About the dead letting go of the living and the living letting go of the dead. They’re NOT about the living being punished for a sin like horror movies, but about forgiveness of that sin from all parties, the relinquishing of unfinished business. And I wanted to nail that, I really did. In City Bird it is the boy who is at the centre of the story and has the rite of passage: the ghost is a sort of Frankenstein or Edward Scissorhands character. 

The boy has nightmares and makes up ghastly stories that paint the ghost as a demon, then something happens to the boy on his bike and he dies. We get those silent movie inter-titles: his tower (the city) is turned to a tomb. Shadows loom over his white coffin and he becomes a ghost, set into the underworld where he is refused and becomes a refugee with nowhere to go. It’s scary out there for a little boy so he returns to the ghost’s house and we realise that’s her purpose – she is a host for waywardly spirits like the dead boy. But he has been so scared of her, will he change? Can he let go of his fear of her? Can he muster up the courage to enter as she beckons him in? The song ends unresolved sonically so I wanted to leave the audience there just as the music does. The theme is that of judging a book by its cover and misunderstanding something: just as we pass the homeless on the street and pretend they are invisible like ghosts when they all have a real inner life. Can we let go of our prejudices and see beyond the stereotypes to see that the issues that made them homeless are ones that could very well come to prey on and haunt us at any time? That’s kind of the metaphor I was trying to get at. 

City Bird ghost
The City Bird ghost.

Who made the puppets and how long did the video take to make?

Jesca: I’m not quite sure actually… I should ask.

Elia: Everyone who was involved in making the City Bird video knew there was a finite time of ten days in which to create this beautiful, creative thing so necessity was to be the mother of invention due to the time constraints, and everyone really fed on that and brought their best to the project. My fiancee, Maranatha Hay, is an Emmy award winning documentary filmmaker who is piped into the most creative, kind, and daring community of filmmakers and her best friend Natalie Apodaca is an artist with experience in installations. I showed her Metropolis and told her we were going to build a monotone city from cardboard and she just went for it. Cosmin Cosma was my left hand man who insisted we use the Dragon Stop Motion software, which honestly was the main reason we were able to get the shots we needed in the time we had. 

The crew never lost faith in my direction, even when I had no idea how we would do it just ten minutes before the shoot. In the opening shot of the video there is a city cardboard diorama, the dollhouse, the puppet of the ghost AND the moon projected over the city! All those elements came into play because we just broke down the shot we had in mind element by element: that’s real filmmaking in a pure form. 99% of this video was done IN-CAMERA, like The Lumière Brothers! Then it was given that incredible aged look by Dan Geis, our after effects genius.

Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson
Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson.

I can tell you how the puppets were made, but I urge you to remember that cinema is like a magic trick. The home made feel is part of the fun of the viewing experience, especially the joy in realising that things like hair are actually twine. The doll’s arms are made of tiny painted tree branches, her spine is metal wire and her dress is made of muslin. Her face is tracing paper and is removable so that we could change her expressions from shot to shot. The part where the fork floats across the table had to be done with tweezers! (nudged lovingly one frame at a time by Maranatha)

The house was a nightmare. It is three feet tall and it took us 3 days to put it together from a flat box. We painted every part, so we had to know what the end product would look like before we even started. Luckily an architect friend, Dannon Rampton, showed up just to check out what was going on and got so enamoured with the dolls house that he ended up putting it together which is just as well since Natalie and I were clueless as to how we were going to do it. We painted it and then we had to DILAPIDATE IT so it looked old and haunted! We scrubbed it with metal brush, we broke its steeple and we stuffed miniature moss in all its crevices so that the ghost story would feel real and lived in. 

My motto is: make movies that can only be movies! Make movies that need that final step of the medium to fully realise the vision, because it’s such an expensive, time consuming endeavour that the content had better deserve and earn the medium. If it can be a song, a book, a play, let it be that. But film, film is reserved for the special stories that need the seven arts to make them whole. SO don’t give away our secrets if you don’t have to. 
TM AND HL-Jan 11-photography by Amelia Gregory
Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, viagra dosage all photography by Amelia Gregory.

Last week Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou held a preview screening for their Tin Tabernacle tour video, viagra sale titled 11 Nights Under Tin. I caught up with them at Bush Hall a few weeks ago to find out more about this talented couple.

Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia GregoryTrevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia Gregory

The Tin Tabernacle tour followed on from Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou’s Village Hall tour of last year. To pull it off they found approximately fifty churches through the Tin Tabernacles website, got details of about thirty of them and managed to stage concerts in eleven of them. The website often listed the nearest town or they enterprisingly zoomed in on the google street view: sometimes a contact number would be visible on a noticeboard, and at other times they phoned the local pub. Most people were really enthusiastic, but some were overwhelmed by the idea and worried by the commitment. “We wanted to get out into the community and play for people who don’t have much access to music,” they told me when I spoke to them at Bush Hall. “We went to those who were keen.” It seems to have been a successful venture: the audiences were mostly comprised of locals.

Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester
Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester.

The Tin Tabernacle churches all vary in size, though they have a few things in common. They are all made of corrugated iron, and were invented circa 1840, when the scattering of God fearing British citizens across the British Empire hastened the need for an easily transportable place of worship. Mining communities sprung up in all sorts of remote corners of the globe so the churches often had to be carried for long distances overland. “They warm up fast because they are wooden clad inside,” explained Trevor and Hannah, “but some had no electricity so we played by candlelight.” The smallest church held only about 40 people, all squashed into the pews, but the average capacity was between 70-120. What with Trevor, Hannah and their two support acts it was still quite a squish.

Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester
Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester.

I spotted a tin church on my visit to the Cornish village of Cadgwith earlier this year, but sadly this was not one that they managed to include on the tour, despite Trevor’s Cornish heritage. Many were nevertheless located in amazing locations, including on cliff tops.


11 Nights Under Tin, a film by Trevor Moss, can be watched in full above.

Why did they chose such an innovative way of touring? “We had toured the same venues for years and they are all the same, painted black inside.” Trevor and Hannah hope that with their Arts Council funded tours their audiences will experience an event, instead of just standing in the shadows. “It’s no wonder that so many bands’ later records are rubbish when they live in such a strange parallel reality.” So they have chosen places that will open their eyes to other communities. They always stay in independent B&Bs and sometimes with the local vicar – it’s also a carefully considered way for them to have an interesting time whilst peddling an album. “We get to play in places we would never have seen otherwise.”

Tin Tabernacle by Alison Day
Tin Tabernacle by Alison Day.

I can totally relate to this idea – half the reason I was so attracted to fashion photography as a creative medium was the possibility of visiting interesting locations to take photos. During my nascent fashion photography career I went to South Africa and America before I began to realise the environmental problems of excessive air travel.

Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by Sarah Matthews
Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by Sarah Matthews.

The *world* premiere of the resulting Tin Tabernacle film was shown at The Social on Wednesday 16th March. It was entirely shot on an old 80s Hi 8 camera in three seconds bursts three or four times an hour, so it is basically what they describe as “a collection of moving photos” with mostly in-camera sound.

Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou - Tin Churches by Emmeline Pidgen
Tin Churches by Emmeline Pidgen.

This interactive approach to playing and documenting music is a result of Hannah and Trevor’s art college career. They both met at Goldsmiths, where Trevor was studying fine art and Hannah was doing theatre studies. By the time they reached their third year they were signed as the band Indigo Moss, which we profiled on Amelia’s Magazine. By this point they were spending so much time immersed in music that Trevor had to enlist the rest of the band to help get his degree show up on time.

Tin Tabernacles by Reena Makwana
Tin Tabernacles by Reena Makwana.

The couple have now been writing songs together for 8 years and seem a lot older and wiser than their 25 years of age, a fact which they attribute to having lots of older friends. They met whilst living in halls but did not start going out together until Indigo Moss, and managed to keep their relationship secret from other band members for two months. They got married in 2008.


There’s Something Happening Somewhere, a film by Trevor Moss.

Indigo Moss eventually broke up because they didn’t enjoy it anymore, especially the way the label was pushing the band. Inevitably, they were pulling bigger audiences as a duet. At that point Tom from Lewis Music saw them and they signed a one album deal. After that Jeff of Heavenly saw a couple of shows and as they put it “it all happened quite naturally. We had a cup of tea and the Tin Tabernacle tour really caught his imagination.” Heavenly Recordings have parted ways with megalith EMI and are now part of the Universal funded Cooperative Music initiative which supports independent labels such as Transgressive, Moshi Moshi, Bella Union and Domino. It means they can share PR costs and everyone knows when the others are releasing records so they don’t step on toes, which seems to make brilliant sense. These are amongst my favourite labels and between them they host some fabulous musicians – why would they want to deliberately compete with each other?

Trevor-Moss-Hannah-Lou-by-LJG-Art-Illustration
Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by LJG Art & Illustration.

Ever prolific, Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou aim to put out one album a year from now on. The next record will be out in May and then comes the festival season, starting at Wood Festival on 21st May, and moving onto Truck Festival, Port Eliot and of course Glastonbury – where they played on my Climate Camp stage last year alongside Danny and the Champions of the World.


Performing at Wood Festival in 2009.

What to expect from the upcoming record? “There will be drums and a much bigger sound.” But as always all guitar and voices will be recorded together. I can’t imagine there will be much room in their van for more band members, and they agree that it is perfectly sized for just them. Although Trevor jokes that Hannah gets on his nerves it’s clear that this is very much a twosome. What happens when a family enters the equation? “Trevor wants to be a house husband,” laughs Hannah. “It will be a nice quiet time to write!” For now what they really want is a pet whippet. “They are lovely; so skinny and frail,” says Trevor. “It could travel in a hammock in the van.” The main trouble would be taking a dog into festivals, but I’m sure they could find an interesting series of venues that would accept a canine companion. Did someone mention lighthouses?

Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia Gregory

Written by Amelia Gregory on Wednesday March 23rd, 2011 12:11 pm

Categories ,11 Nights Under Tin, ,Alison Day, ,Arts Council, ,Bella Union, ,British Empire, ,Bush Hall, ,Cadgwith, ,Climate Camp, ,Cooperative Music, ,Cornish village, ,Cornwall, ,Danny and the Champions of the World, ,Domino Records, ,EMI, ,Emmeline Pidgen, ,Gilly Rochester, ,glastonbury, ,goldsmiths, ,Hannah Lou, ,Heavenly Recordings, ,Heavenly Social, ,Hi 8 camera, ,Indigo Moss, ,Lewis Music, ,LJG Art & Illustration, ,mining, ,Moshi Moshi, ,Port Eliot, ,Port Elliot, ,Reena Makwana, ,Sarah Matthews, ,The Social, ,There’s Something Happening Somewhere, ,Tin Tabernacle, ,Tin Tabernacle Tour, ,Transgressive, ,Trevor Moss, ,Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou, ,Tripod Stage, ,Truck Festival, ,Universal, ,Village Hall, ,Whippet, ,Wood Festival

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Amelia’s Magazine | Album Review: Villagers – Becoming a Jackal

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From the series Post Punk

A little while ago I wrote an article about fashion in Berlin. It wasn’t particularly amorous to say the least; save a few incredible museums, and I wasn’t overtly impressed by the grade of the fashion I saw on the street. I was only there for the weekend, malady mind.

Coincidentally an email popped into the fashion inbox pretty soon after from Cynthia Berger – German born and Berlin based fashion photographer. I failed to mention my less-than-flattering view of Berlin, but her photographs completely stole my attention.

Cynthia is a fashion photographer through and through, and her early years were spent wielding a camera with the help of her photographer father.

The images Cynthia creates are often stark portraits of the citizens of Berlin, and with minimal settings and styling, there is a real photojournalistic realism to her photographs (it’s no surprise to discover, then, that her influential father was also a journalist). Her work reminds me much of some of the work that was featured in Amelia’s Magazine – Louise Samuelson in Issue 08 for example.

Cynthia uses street-cast models in her photographs, giving each picture added verisimilitude, along with the designs of up-and-coming Berlin fashion designers; with most of her work being set within the dramatic urban landscape of Berlin herself, Cynthia’s photographs embody the spirit of this historical city entirely.

From the series Berlin Fashion

I managed to have a quick chat with Cynthia about her father, her work and her future…

How did you get in to photography?
My father was both a photographer and a journalist, so at a very early age I was surrounded by photography.
Aged 8 I start to take my own photos.
 
What did you study?
I studied Photography in Germany and worked later in Capetown as a photographer’s assistant. Back in Germany, I studied Communication and worked for a while as a researcher in the media world, finally coming home after that.

How do your shoots come together?
The photograph is already taken in my mind before I go and shoot. I plan the shoots entirely, so that I have the freedom to experience everything and to allow the ideas to evolve.

What about photography in particular keeps you focussed?
I like to involve and inspire people.

From the series Boys in the Suburbs

What messages do your photographs carry?
Every photograph always carries a variety of messages.

Which photographers do you admire, and why?
I like Richard Avedon, particularly his portraits – they have such high density and intense impression. I also like the work of Anna Gaskell, her mysterious atmosphere and symbolic storytelling.

How is the fashion/photography scene in Berlin?
Berlin is the fashion capital of Germany. Berlin is a city that is immensely inspiring through constant change. It’s a melting pot for design, fashion, art, architecture, music and photography.

Have you travelled as a photographer?
I lived three years in Capetown, a year in London and did a few travels through the USA and Europe.

Do you think photographs can change opinions, challenge ideals, inform, provoke or otherwise?
They can – if you put them into the right context.  

What are your plans for the future?
I write any ideas I have in my “Idea Book” that I have with me wherever I am. I have many projects planned for the future, with an exhibition here in Berlin high on the list.

From the series Laura’s Story, exclusive to Amelia’s Magazine

You can see more of Cynthia’s work here.

From the series Post Punk

A little while ago I wrote an article about fashion in Berlin. It wasn’t particularly amorous to say the least; save a few incredible museums, see I wasn’t overtly impressed by the grade of the fashion I saw on the street. I was only there for the weekend, cialis 40mg mind.

Coincidentally an email popped into the fashion inbox pretty soon after from Cynthia Berger – German born and Berlin based fashion photographer. I failed to mention my less-than-flattering view of Berlin, but her photographs completely stole my attention.

Cynthia is a fashion photographer through and through, and her early years were spent wielding a camera with the help of her photographer father.

The images Cynthia creates are often stark portraits of the citizens of Berlin, and with minimal settings and styling, there is a real photojournalistic realism to her photographs (it’s no surprise to discover, then, that her influential father was also a journalist). Her work reminds me much of some of the work that was featured in Amelia’s Magazine – Louise Samuelson in Issue 08 for example.

Cynthia uses street-cast models in her photographs, giving each picture added verisimilitude, along with the designs of up-and-coming Berlin fashion designers; with most of her work being set within the dramatic urban landscape of Berlin itself, Cynthia’s photographs totally embody the spirit of this historical city.

From the series Berlin Fashion

I managed to have a quick chat with Cynthia about her father, her work and her future…

How did you get in to photography?
My father was both a photographer and a journalist, so at a very early age I was surrounded by photography.
Aged 8 I start to take my own photos.
 
What did you study?
I studied Photography in Germany and worked later in Capetown as a photographer’s assistant. Back in Germany, I studied Communication and worked for a while as a researcher in the media world, finally coming home after that.

How do your shoots come together?
The photograph is already taken in my mind before I go and shoot. I plan the shoots entirely, so that I have the freedom to experience everything and to allow the ideas to evolve.

What about photography in particular keeps you focussed?
I like to involve and inspire people.

From the series Boys in the Suburbs

What messages do your photographs carry?
Every photograph always carries a variety of messages.

Which photographers do you admire, and why?
I like Richard Avedon, particularly his portraits – they have such high density and intense impression. I also like the work of Anna Gaskell, her mysterious atmosphere and symbolic storytelling.

How is the fashion/photography scene in Berlin?
Berlin is the fashion capital of Germany. Berlin is a city that is immensely inspiring through constant change. It’s a melting pot for design, fashion, art, architecture, music and photography.

Have you travelled as a photographer?
I lived three years in Capetown, a year in London and did a few travels through the USA and Europe.

Do you think photographs can change opinions, challenge ideals, inform, provoke or otherwise?
They can – if you put them into the right context.  

What are your plans for the future?
I write any ideas I have in my “Idea Book” that I have with me wherever I am. I have many projects planned for the future, with an exhibition here in Berlin high on the list.

From the series Laura’s Story, exclusive to Amelia’s Magazine

You can see more of Cynthia’s work here.
villagers_jackal_album

Since I noted the idiosyncratic name of first single Becoming a Jackal, sickness Villagers have been skimming around on the periphery of my aural radar: once I realised I liked the band I did what I am wont to do and went looking for them on twitter, decease only to read a devastating last tweet: Conor’s sister was dead. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting to find and threw me a little, healing which is to say nothing of how he must be feeling right now. Becoming a Jackal – now also the name of the debut album from Irish singer songwriter Conor J. O’Brien – marks a coming of age that seems all the more prescient, released at such a momentous time in his life.

Front man Conor has been making music since the tender age of twelve and has enjoyed chart success in Ireland as one half of The Immediate, but a series of knock backs and disillusionments with the industry has ensured that his second foray into music comes with a more sanguine attitude. Scarred by his experiences of working with other musicians Conor wrote and recorded the entire album himself – starting with a basis of poetry from which hang some beautiful folk tinged melodies, he has already been compared to Elliott Smith and Bright Eyes. Clearly no longer a wide eyed ingenue, he shrugs off such comparisons: “I guess I’m cursed, because I sort of look like a more hamster sized version of Conor Oberst,” he said in a recent interview with Contact Music.

Conor J O'Brian

When on tour Conor is accompanied by a band of friends who become the Villagers. As befits a man who regards himself as first and foremost a poet, his words are a cut above your usual pop ditty… but the melodies are no shirker either. Opening tune I Saw the Dead starts off the album with the dainty ringing of sleigh bells and an angelic violin, before descending somewhere altogether darker: “Let me show you the backroom where I saw the dead dancing like children on a midsummer morn. And they asked me to join…. ” There’s a dark undercurrent to these tunes and the opener ends in crackling oblivion. On the title track the jackal is an unusual metaphor for a difficult love affair, but it works beautifully. “Where the jackals preyed on every soul, where they tied you to a pole and stripped you of your clothes…” New single Ship of Promises follows straight on with a hasty strum, Conor sounding curiously American in brogue – maybe that’s just the similarity with the Irish accent. Home returns once more to the twilight hours, somewhere halfwhere between reality and the dreamworld, backing vocals muffled behind lyrics that talk of weapons and running. Things start to look a bit more upbeat by The Pact (I’ll Be Your Fever) which sees Conor falling in love, in harmony. “Your newness is all I need.” Set the Tigers Free is about heading for the open plains, rather than a potential health and safety situation with some furry beasts, and To Be Counted Among Men ends this endearing debut on a quiet reflective note. This album marks a coming of age all Conor’s own, no hamsters required.

You can catch Conor on tour all through May, and he will be playing the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 15th tune supporting Field Music as part of the Meltdown Festival. Becoming a Jackal is out now on Domino Records.

Written by Amelia Gregory on Tuesday May 25th, 2010 5:50 pm

Categories ,Becoming a Jackal, ,Bright Eyes, ,Conor Oberst, ,Domino Records, ,elliott smith, ,field music, ,folk, ,Irish, ,Meltdown Festival, ,poetry, ,Queen Elizabeth Hall, ,Southbank centre, ,The Immediate, ,Villagers, ,Violin

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Amelia’s Magazine | Kate Stelmanis of Austra talks about touring Europe with her debut album Feel It Break

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Austra by Karolina Burdon
Austra by Karolina Burdon.

Truth be said, pills I have been thoroughly wowed by the debut album from Austra. Maybe it’s the strong influence of The Knife, medicine a band I absolutely adore, malady or the sweetest of vocals from the classically trained Canadian lead singer Katie Stelmanis. Either way Feel It Break has been on repeat for many weeks or more. From the throbbing beats of Beat and the Pulse, with its 80s-esque gymnastic dance video, to the lush loops and yearning wails in Lose It, Austra has me hooked.

Austra Sleeve
I spoke with Kate Stelmanis, the Toronto-based brains behind Austra. A very independent lady: we like.

What was the best part about being a singer in the prestigious Canadian Children’s Opera Chorus and then the Canadian Opera Company?
Being in a choir was a very social thing for me. I loved my friends. But most importantly, it is such a powerful experience performing in a huge group like that. Standing in a choir and being surrounded by voices, each person singing their specific harmonies that all come together so unexpectedly was the most amazing thing for me.

Austra by Clive McFarland
Austra by Clive McFarland.

How has your voice changed, now that you sing dark electronica?
My voice has changed a lot since my training. I’ve basically abandoned all of it and over the years, being in lots of different types of bands, developed my own sound.

How have your inspirations shaped the way you sing and make music?
My greatest inspiration is classical music and opera. That is what I grew up on, and so that is what I am most familiar with. My music is very influenced by these genres.

Austra Kate Stelmanis

What has been the best and worst parts of managing your whole career independently?
I have had help from lots of people, the Blocks Recording Club provided me with the resources to learn how to be a band. And Mike from Fucked Up acted as my manager for years. He is more of a mentor really, I respect his opinion and his ideas immensely. Nowadays it’s becoming more difficult to stay on top of things, but I don’t want to chose a manager until I’m sure it’s the right fit. Essentially a manager is almost like another band member, so I will chose carefully.

YouTube Preview Image
Beat and the Pulse.

How does being based in Toronto affect your life and creation of music? Why are Canadians not as receptive to your music as Europeans?
I don’t think it’s that Canadians are not receptive to my music, I think its more so that because we are so sparsely populated and such a large country that it’s difficult to promote smaller sub-genres. Canada is known for its folk and rock music, not for its electronic scene. Though people here are ready for it it’s just difficult to grow in a country that isn’t set up to support that particular genre. Things will evolve though I’m sure. Toronto has been a great place to make music, mostly because of the huge amount of people making music successfully in the city – which is great inspiration and motivation to continue with my own project.

Capture-something-rare-by-Abi-Heyneke
Capture Something Rare by Abi Heyneke.

What do you most recommend a new visitor to do in Toronto?
You should visit Trinity Bellwoods Park, the Ossington restaurants, Kensington Market vintage shopping and make sure you check out the cheap eats.

YouTube Preview Image
Lose It.

What can an audience expect from your live performance?
I am currently performing as a six piece with two back up singers and an extra keyboard player. We play a mixture of analog and electronic instruments.

Kate Stelmanis of Austra

What have you learnt about Europe that has been most surprising, whilst on tour?
It’s terribly hard to find hummus in many parts of Europe, and far too easy to find cheese.

Feel It Break is out now on Domino Records. I strongly urge you to check it out! Kate Stelmanis and co will be on tour in the UK during July.

Written by Amelia Gregory on Thursday May 19th, 2011 4:59 pm

Categories ,80s, ,Abi Heyneke, ,album, ,Austra, ,Beat and the Pulse, ,Blocks Recording Club, ,canada, ,Canadian Children’s Opera Chorus, ,Canadian Opera Company, ,Clive McFarland, ,Domino Records, ,electronica, ,Feel It Break, ,Fucked Up, ,Karolina Burdon, ,Kate Stelmanis, ,Kensington Market, ,Lose It, ,opera, ,Ossington restaurants, ,The Knife, ,Toronto, ,Trinity Bellwoods Park

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Amelia’s Magazine | She and Him, Premiere of their New Video

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HelpJapanArtSale_Poster
She and Him

She and Him are cool eh? Zooey Deschanel in the vintage clothes I would love in my collection and marvelous fringe, pilule and Matt Ward, wearing his sunglasses and nonchalance. They’re also very happy sounding, which is great when strolling along a beach or beetling about in an open top car. But also when our beloved month of January is upon us, and we don’t reside in the Southern Hemisphere. Joyous music can be very important for SAD (seasonal affective disorder) fighting. Like Angel Delight, oh so sweet, it’s a joy to surround ourselves with sunny sounding high notes and chorus ‘badadadaaaas’. Ah swimming in a dessert bowl. Together these two create dreamy, poppy, nostalgic music that’s gentle, pleasant and cute as a button.

So, as a sunny treat, here we have the premiere of the new video for She & Him’s ‘Don’t Look Back’ (Merge US, Domino Records UK) directed by Jeremy Konner.

She & Him – Don’t Look Back from Merge Records on Vimeo.

Ward says on their website: “There are a lot of people who write music so that they can take their audience to a dark night of their own soul or to get something really heavy off their chest. I don’t think Zooey looks at music that way, and I think that’s a huge part of where her songwriting is coming from. Certain people write songs to make other people feel good. When I think about some of my favorite singers, like Sam Cooke or people of that generation, I think that they saw their gift as the ability to make people feel better, to feel happy. It’s contagious to be around people like that.” Delightful indeed.

Written by Helen Martin on Monday January 24th, 2011 12:43 pm

Categories ,Angel Delight, ,Domino Records, ,Dreamy Pop, ,Helen Martin, ,Jeremy Konner, ,Matt Ward, ,Merge Records, ,Nostalgia, ,Sam Cooke, ,She and Him, ,single, ,video, ,vintage, ,Zooey Deschanel

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