Mogwai - ‘Burning‘ Party - The Scala - 3/6/10

Another fine night at the London Scala as tonight is not your ‘usual’ sort of gig with the venue gearing up for the first London showing of Mogwai’s new feature film ‘Burning‘

A DJ set by fellow Rock Action buddy Steve from Errors provided magnetic beats in the foyer, music to subliminally listen to as the seamless changeover with Andrew Hung of Fuck Buttons rocking up to the decks, his electro/ techno mish-mesh provided the perfect appetizer for an eagerly anticipated film.

I managed to catch support act ‘Remember Remember’ who really came through with the musical goodies. An over abundance of layers, progressively engineered into a myriad of sound with xylophone harmonies and delicate samples, anyone who has seen Remember Remember before would have been in for a surprise as this was no mere solo show revolving around acres of loops, James Swinburne appeared with a five strong band along with him allowing tracks such as 'Mountain' to really sound their best. With so much going on I couldn't help but find myself comparing them to a less vintage Arcade fire.

The feature film begins; the impressive piece was filmed in black, white and greyscale tones, however I was one of the lucky few that had a nifty view from behind the main projection screen fabricating a Sepia style illustration, setting the mood as the hundreds of bleary eyed fans vision watched, transfixed upon the imagery before them.

‘Burning’ was filmed at the Music Hall in Williamsburg VA on April 27-29 capturing performances from 3 nights by in house art director Vincent Moon who had clearly taken the time and careful planning to cover almost every angle imaginable over the duration of the shows.

It is an exquisite film, full of dynamic contrast, insightful cadence and conquers the best parts of their live performance. It is a little on the short side at only 8 songs long but quality over quantity each and every time and Mr. Moon’s direction has quality in abundance, cleverly congregating the raw essence and sheer heaviness of classic Mogwai tracks such as ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’ ‘Like Herod’ and ending with the earth shatteringly powerful ‘Batcat’.

Mogwai put you in the moment with affluence and exhilaration and all that were involved in this project must be proud of their effort. I can certainly see more artists doing this sort of collaboration with top directors, a great success and a movie night with a twist enjoyed by all.



Words : Outer Audio Joe

Middle Boop Radar : Factory Floor

Dark, brooding, post punk undertones, pounding drums and screaming guitars play throughout Factory Floor's most recent single 'Lying,' released a few months ago.

They were first brought to my attention after a very successful tour with Fuck Buttons earlier in the year whereby the Hackney based three piece covered the stage in darkness and covered the Koko in abrasive noise, think of a really dark version of Health and you're in the right ballpark. Signed to Blast First Petite big noisy waves are already starting to be made and love them or hate them they will most probably go on to have a great year.

Middle Boop interviews Grasscut (Ninja Tune)

A few months ago I ran into the charming Brighton based duo Grasscut. Having recently signed to Ninja Tune and with their début album well on the way, it felt like a great time to hear what these guys had to say about their recent rise in popularity. We traipsed around some of Soho’s trendier hotspots trying to find a pub that would be quiet enough to conduct the interview and once a suitable venue was found and lager was consumed, the duo proceeded to let me in on details about their début and generally what made them tick. In what proved to be a really entertaining convo, we covered just about everything from how they create their vast sounds to ending up on a slight tangent about porn and other rather humorous but obscure topics. Read on and find out what just how we came to the conclusion that the best description for their music is Audio Peversion.


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

Fuck Buttons - Olympians video

Here's the new video from Fuck Button's amazing new single 'Olympians'
the single will be released on April the 12th as a 12" vinyl and digital download and features a remix by Spiritualized's J. Spaceman and Suicide's Alan Vega.
As always the artwork video was directed by one half of Fuck Buttons mr Andrew Hung.
The artwork also contains a hidden 3-d image.

Fuck Buttons - Heaven - 29/10/09

Heaven is probably the last place I would have ever expected to see one of the most interesting, challenging and loud bands of the last few years but then again if Surf Solar (out last month) is anything to go by, Fuck Buttons proving to be are full of surprises.
After missing Andrew Weatherall's set deciding to grab a few cheap beers before hand we made it just in time to see the legendary Clark on stage, the Warp Dj was a brilliant choice for support blaring out his stunning array of loud bassy beats and crazy mixes which got the packed crowd moving more than I have seen for a support act for a long time, especially right at the front where there was a conglomerate of about 20 people going nuts like it was three in the morning on a Saturday night as opposed to around nine on a Tuesday.
Now onto the main event, Fuck Buttons have built up a huge following over the last few years with their reputation for intense, live shows that have people watching in amazement with their vast swathes of electronic craziness, euphoric melodies and huge pounding beats generally leaving people feeling pretty humbled.
Word of their magnificent showcases have obviously got around as Heaven, their biggest headline show in London was completely sold out.
Finally squeezing my way to the front past a mixed crowd of anyone from proper ravers with their neons and sunglasses to fat middle aged business men, I watched as Fuck Buttons ploughed through material from Tarot Sport, to which working with producer Andrew Weatherall they have somehow managed to make their sound a little more accessible without losing any of that visceral noise that they are famed for. 'rough steez' and 'olympians,' two of my highlights from the album were quite breathtaking to watch and the guys themselves looked absolutely lost in the music, staring at each other over their table full of pedals, gadgets and toys. The finale came in the form of 'Sweet Love For Planet Earth' the opener from their debut Street Horrsing, a fans favourite which starts minimally and ends in a haze of distortion and noise.
I left the venue as many did with my ears ringing and feeling pretty disorientated. The sign of a very good gig.

Invada Invasion, Bristol Colston Halls

Invada Invasion, a days worth of music, film and art curated by Invada Record's label boss and Portishead member Geoff Barrow set at Bristol's legendary Colston Hall venue, really intrigued me and with a lineup featuring rare performances from bands such as Italian noise trio Zu, Crippled Black Phoenix and Team Brick, not to mention two of the best live bands you will ever see, Mogwai and Fuck Buttons and artwork from some brilliant artists and designers such as Andy Council I felt it would be too good to miss.
Colston Halls which has recently been extended, adding a brand new 30 million pound building onto the existing structure was a great place to check out such a diverse lineup, as soon as we walked in we were greeted with music as one of the stages was set up in the foyer, after sampling the delights of what Bristol had to offer on the Friday we turned up just in time to see local three piece Thought Forms take the stage and blow the minds of everyone watching. Their heavy instrumental post rock proved to be one of the best opening acts for a festival I have ever seen, their loud and very epic sound managed to entice crowds of people three floors up. I hope to see a lot more of these guys as they really put on a brilliant show.
Next onto the main stage which saw a collaborative effort between a number of local bands and the Emerald Ensamble Orchestra who stayed on stage throughout the sets of Team Brick, Joe Volk and Crippled Black Phoenix. We caught up whilst Joe Volk was running through a number of his solo acoustic numbers, aided quite stunningly by the Orchestra but things really took off when Volk was joined onstage by Crippled Black Phoenix and Dominic Aitchinson of Mogwai who played bass on CBP'S last album. Playing through material from their recent success '200 Tonnes of Bad Luck' they wowed the crowd with their Pink Floyd esq sound and with the orchestra subtly adding even more depth to their sound this proved quite special.
Headliners Mogwai, of course proved to be band of the night, you could feel the anticipation from the crowd before they came on, this was obviously the band most people had come especially to see. They eased their way on stage playing the slow classic 'May Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door' which was an odd song to start with but nevertheless went down a treat. The set comprised of songs from the latter part of their career with highlights including 'Scotlands Shame' and 'I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead' from their latest album The Hawk Is Howling sounding loud as ever, the older songs included the beautiful 'Cody' and 'Helicon 2' which is quite honestly one of the best songs you will ever hear live. Mogwai are without a doubt one of my favourite bands so maybe I'm a little biased but as always this was a fantastic show, ending with Batcat which was so loud it hurt.
The final band of the evening were Fuck Buttons back in the foyer, coming out with new material from their eagerly anticipated second album Tarot Sport which went down an absolute treat, with most of the material sounding a little more accessible than the last, more emphasis on electro and beats than the truly amazing debut 'Street Horrsing.' They were probably the only band on the night to get the crowd dancing playing an intense set which seemed to fly by. Playing after Mogwai is probably one of the toughest jobs in the industry but if there was one band who could follow them, it would be Fuck Buttons.
Invada Invasion is one of those events that will always attract the proper music fans (I mean I ended up in a conversation with a guy wearing a Slint hoody, where else on earth would that happen?) its events like this that are purely about the music and arts, it was well worth the trip down the M4.

Fuck Buttons - Surf Solar video

Fuck Buttons - Surf Solar from ATP Recordings on Vimeo.

Check the video for the stunning upcoming single from Fuck Buttons

Mogwai Photos

Here are some photos from the legendary Mogwai gig at Hammersmith, supported by Fuck Buttons. Enjoy