MB: So introduce yourselves to our readers, who you are what you do and define your genre...If you can
A: We’re Grasscut, I’m Andrew
M: I’m Marcus
A: We’re a duo and we play a sort of English hybrid of electronic and classic and various other types of music
M: Lots of kinds of music, I don’t know what we are in genre terms. We’re signed to Ninja Tune so you can go to their site and you can decide for yourselves and tell us, send us a message on Myspace.
A: Ninja think that we’re folky, with electronic knobs on.
MB: I like that
A: Yeah I like it too.
MB: They do seem to be going down a bit more of a folky road at the moment
M: Yeah they’ve got a very broad roster for bands at the moment, I think of late it’s spread out quite a lot, I mean we just did a remix for my favourite Ninja act Jagga Jazzist, I saw them recently very cool,
A: It kind of goes a bit more towards modern classical, its intense stuff and it fits in really well with us I think. The remix is quite out- there
MB: So how did you guys form Grasscut, where did you meet, how did it all come about?
A: Grasscut came about through us meeting in another band a few years ago in a more traditional, kind of singer songwriter folky band but we were touring together and I just started experimenting with my laptop and talking and a few months later we just decided to start up Grasscut but we’ve got a lot of similar influences musically and in terms of books, cinema so it seemed a sort of natural progression to make it into a mouthpiece for both of us.
M: It also has quite a strong cinematic base as Andrew’s done an enormous amount of film and tv composing and I played in lots of bands and we’ve played together in various bands.
'Audio pervert, that’s how I define myself.'
A: Yeah the music is very cinematic it was always sort of the idea to have something that sounds widescreen, have a big impact and use lots of sampled voices from old films and gramophones from way back in the past, a lot of the music addresses ideas of memory that go back into the past and bring them right up to the present so cinema has played a big part in that
M: And then the other vocal samples come from snooping around with our mobile phones and stealing little bits of conversation off people like a pair of, whatever the audio equivalent of a peeping tom is.
A: Audio pervert, that’s how I define myself.
M: I think actually as a genre ‘Audio Perversion’ is about right.
MB: I think that could catch on now.
M: Especially in Soho which is where we are right now.
MB: This time next year you have every journalist talking about where you started the term ‘Audio Perversion’
A: We could start our own label called Audio Perverts
M: There is Audio porn...Never mind. No we’re different we’re more classy we’re no mere bit of pornography
A: Darker and deeper?
M: Don’t ever say that again
MB: That’s a good name for a porno actually,
M: That’s the second pornography reference we’ve had in about 20 seconds
MB: When in soho....
M: That’s the third.
MB: Straying away from porn just for a minute. So Andrew having composed scores for films etc how did you go from that to Grasscut, was that an organic process?
A: Yeah it was an organic process going from composing into Grasscut, I produced quite a few records as well and I think the thing is I had quite a lot of things I had enough work behind me of my own that I started to sample bits of my own work and make tracks which is quite a weird and also technology has allowed live performances to move forward massively in the last five years it’s like going from doing a show with a whole range of keyboards and synths to doing a whole show out of a laptop, for us that’s what it’s all about you know playing and creating this big sound but without the need for so much kit but you’re still in control live and can be experimental and I think that’s really what has made Grasscut happen in the last two years rather than five, some of the ideas I’ve had for years but we haven’t been able to realise them until now, it’s a great time to be playing live.
M: A key part of it is that there is only two of us on stage we’re playing as much as we can, so Andrew is singing, playing guitar, playing keyboards and Ableton and I’m playing double bass and lots of keyboards so we do as much as we can but in the same time it does all easily fit in the boot of a car and there’s no need to get a big van, we’ve done that before with other bands so the whole point of it is to do something that comes out of Andrew’s film composition and background and for that we do use a whole studio of instruments and Andrews studio is absolutely cluttered with hundreds of instruments and the whole point about this is that we don’t need all that, we can take it out live and just unpack it straight away.
A:I always remember when I was a kid and we had Kraftwerk and they turned up with a suitcase and the lighting and sound was all in this suitcase and you were just left thinking ‘Jesus Christ how is this possible?' and nobody at that point knew what that was but I remember the idea that you could somehow just condense it to put on a show, I mean we do have double bass, electric guitar and other additional instruments and that’s just as important as well but it’s just important to have this sound that’s really mobile and excitingly fresh and we can put on a show really quickly
M: It’s very much the whole point of Grasscut that you know, there’s lots of samples and glitchy electronics going on and at the same time there’s loads of live instruments because the point is that there’s not just two people with laptops. Two people with laptops can be great but I think the days where you can command a whole show like that are probably over and visually and also you need that element of risk you need to know that basically things can fuck up.
A: You need that as a performer as well, I mean if you’re essentially playing back the same show every night and not miming but playing over the top of it you need to know that things could fall through at any moment and then you raise your game.
'There's a whole world of poetic imagination that’s what were both trying to tap into.'
MB: Ok so talking about this sort of style of music, with live instruments and samples is that what you wanted to explore live?
A: Yeah, I wanted to explore the idea of using lots of spoken vocals in the conflicts of a song so with melody, with beats but in a sort of unique way. To be honest with you it took quite a while to get the voice right and I think we talked a lot about it, finding what we had in common to slightly distinguish it
and explore that reserve. It’s just given us a really rich area to sort of film history of England and Britain, traipse back on English pop rather than American pop, that’s the mode we’re in, Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt these giants of independent English pop, I think we see ourselves in that sort of tradition.
M: Somewhere in-between that and the electronic contemporary composing tradition of Gavin Bryars who’s also a big hero of both of ours and quite a formidable double bass player as well, I don’t know where we are in all of this but it’s the same idea,
A: I don’t know there’s a whole world of poetic imagination that all those people have and I guess that’s what were both trying to tap into, a sense of finding your place in the history of music.
MB: Set yourselves some goals then eh?
A: Yeah well I guess fail gloriously rather than succeed easily I suppose or succeed gloriously
MB: Andrew are you still composing as well now? Or is this the main thing now or is Grasscut more of a side project?
A: For us it’s not really a side project, for me the composing and the music kind of fit into each other and that’s really where I wanted to get to so that one. The aim is for Grasscut to take more of our time.
Grasscut- Swallow The Day
MB: Yeah sure so what else do you do apart from Grasscut?
M: I’m a music journalist; I play in another band as well, more jazz, left-field rock. I mean that’s just the way that it is, when we’re selling out the Royal Festival Hall, we’ll be able to put more time into this but it’s only really the beginning. We’re also working on some more visuals that will come into our shows so there are always things to work on.
A: It’s kind of an obsession really that runs along everything else, I mean when you’re not working on something else you’re working on this and it’s just fun, you get to do something you love doing, it doesn’t feel like work really.
MB: How did the whole signing to Ninja Tune come about?
M: I sent them a track which we’d done and it just got through, we didn’t know them or anything and in fact that track hasn’t ended up on the album it ended up as a B side but they liked it, so we sent them another track and it went on like that.
A: They came to see us at a tiny gig at a community centre in Brighton and it was like ‘yeah let’s do it’ I think we originally signed to them on a small scale but once they heard all the material, I wrote a few new songs and we developed it live I think it became a lot more serious for them and they wanted to sign a more comprehensive deal which was great but the downside is you have to delay your releases as you’re waiting for things to go through and the profile to rise, I mean the album was meant to be out last October. They’re a great label, a really great combination of really on it but really ramshackle, friendly people.
M: I mean they’ve been going for 20 years, people like Amon Tobin is a big one for us, Cinematic Orchestra, all big influences.
We're trying to find a musical language and lyrics to describe how it feels to be around ‘now,’
MB: Ok so talk me through the album, who produced it, did you do it yourselves?
A: Yeah I produced it and recorded it at my studio Marcus played bass and we’ve got friends guesting on drums and various other musicians, string players.
M: David Bramwell from Oddfellows Casino sings on one tune, Andrew produced his album as well.
A: The album is kind of, well someone wrote about it and said it’s like a sort of state of the nation piece and I quiet like that, it’s like a journey into different parts of England, Englishness and just sort of explores that. A lot of it is set in the Sussex South Downs landscape and it’s just trying to find a musical language and lyrics to describe how it feels to be around ‘now,’ it’s deliberately abrasive, there’s a lot of left turns its really trying to get away from the way that pop music generally tends to be stylised and you just feel like things are happening because of a particular style but this is more we’re making it up as we go along. Turning left when you should turn right.
M: Breaking traffic laws left right and centre. No respect for the green cross code, it’s total chaos.
A: A lot of it’s about memory I mean we’ve got samples of a Victorian poet hilaire belloc as the lead vocals on one who I sampled off a 78’ and there’s a guy from 1927 known as ‘the people’s tenor,’ I’m speaking on some, my mum’s speaking on one so it’s always different.
M: The idea is, there’s only two of us on stage we’re both doing lots of things, there’s not meant to be the normal ‘rockist’ vocal role, it’s not there. Andy doesn’t spend that much time with one foot on the monitor and one hand on his cock. Not that much...Enough. Medallions, chest wig you know.
MB: Would you say there’s a whole trend at the moment with creating music with totally different instruments, household objects etc. Do you think there’s a reason that this sort of sound has come about recently?
M: I mean there are lots of people doing it at the moment but there have been for a long time. I think there’s quite a long tradition of making horrendously leftfield music, we’re actually quite pop compared to some of these but there does seem to be something going on at the moment, I mean I really love Battles I think they’re excellent but then again Tyondai Braxton’s dad Anthony Braxton who was making very weird music himself.
A: I think it’s partly an online thing because if you’re good you can get to an audience quite quickly. Everyone always moans about making money out of music but I think it’s good for the health of niche music, more experimental music I mean more people have a broader vocabulary on their Ipod than ever and that’s got to be to do with Myspcae
M: Left-field music has been around for a long time is what’s changed of late is the structure has broken down, mainstream music must be less important now than it’s ever been, the reasons for that are manifold but there isn’t even Top of the Pop’s any more the whole focal point of one big main genre are gone, I know you look back and everything seems to be marginalised by the effects of time but.
A: I don’t think that, I think what’s happening is that once upon a time in the mainstream you’d be playing about with the margins and you’d get mainstream artists with the odd bit of experimentation on the side but I think with an act like Grasscut we’re an experimental band but we’re playing about with the mainstream so we’re taking little bits of pop and bringing them into our world and that’s become almost like another instrument, the conventions of pop and in some ways have been turned on its head and I love that idea. Same with Fuck Buttons, less obvious than us but it takes on confrontational risks and it’s still pop. You can have the most insane sounds and a lot of that is to do with r & b production it’s very experimental yet people accept it.
M: And these are the days where all these crazy sounds are readily available online so you get a situation where you can add all of your niches from around the world and create something that maybe ten years ago you couldn’t and both these bands are brilliant live, in particular Battles so as the music industry crashes and burns you still have the live scene that’s flourishing and so you get people like that who doing really unusual stuff that sound amazingly compelling live and bigger shows, Animal Collective just did Brixton Academy you know. So if all of those people would like to buy a few hundred copies of the Grasscut album each then we’ll be alright, I don’t think that’s a reasonable request.
Grasscut - Muppet
Interview : Gordon Reid
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