Songs and Sonics

Pea Hix (a.k.a. Dan “Pea” Hicks) is the world’s foremost authority on Optigans.

What’s an Optigan? Glad you asked.

While Pea will explain it better than I ever could, the short version is this: The Optigan was kind of like a poor man’s Mellotron, intended for groovy early ’70s family room sing-alongs. Pea began collecting Optigans when nobody cared what they were, and when their eBay prices commanded virtually nothing (if anybody bothered to list them in the first place). He created not only the definitive web site on Optigans — optigan.com — but perhaps one of the most entertaining, well-written web sites dedicated to a specific musical instrument.

The story of his quest for Optigan information goes deep, culminating with his legal ownership of the Optigan master tapes and creating the definitive set of Optigan samples.

But wait, there’s more! He teamed up with singer/songwriter Rob Crow from Pinback to form the duo Optiganally Yours, featuring Pea’s Optigan stylings and Rob’s vocal and guitar work.

To date, Optiganally Yours have released only two albums: 1997’s Spotlight on Optiganally Yours and 2000’s Optiganally Yours Presents: Exclusively Talentmaker. Sure, there’s a couple tracks that are laugh-out-loud funny, like their brilliant reworking of Jimmy Webb’s Witchita Lineman, but both albums rise above being mere novelty music. It’s just plain great stuff to listen to, sometimes oddly touching but always full of solid pop songwriting hooks. And the most amazing thing is just how utterly… modern Optiganally Yours‘ music sounds. (To my ears, it sounds a bit like a lounged-up Beck.) Yet, at the core of their sound is a cheesy ’70s home organ from Mattel.

In this interview, Pea takes us on a multimedia tour of some of his gadgets, his other adventures in sound (like his Lucas & Friends project), and explains why the other half of Optiganally Yours just can’t keep his clothes on during a live show.

Pea: The Optigan (OPTIcal-orGAN) was kind of an adult toy chord organ that Mattel produced in the early ’70s. It’s brown, ugly, and not very interesting-looking. The reason why we love it so much is that it produces sound in a very unique way. Unlike most typical home organs of the time period, which produced sound electronically, the Optigan utilizes LP-sized celluloid discs, which are encoded with concentric rings of optical waveforms. These waveforms are the same thing as optical film soundtracks — except they’re bent into circles so that they can loop.

The important thing is that these soundtrack rings contain recordings of actual instruments and real musicians playing, say, a bossa nova pattern or whatever. So the Optigan was like an early analogue sampler, only you couldn’t record your own sounds on it — you could only play back the pre-recorded discs. Your left hand plays the chord buttons, which has the band, drum loops, sound effects, etc. Your right hand plays the melody on the keyboard, which also utilizes recorded sounds (Hammond B3 organs, etc.). The sound quality is very poor — think AM radio quality, at best. But that’s what makes it so cheesily haunting-sounding.

I actually have a lot less hardware now than I used to, as I tend to do most of my work on the computer these days. But I have a small collection of oddball instruments. My current fave is a Moog Sonic-VI, mostly because I just got it a couple days ago. It was a lucky Craigslist score — got it for about 1/3 of the usual price. What an amazing, weird synth!

Of course, I’ve got lots of Optigans — I don’t know how many, but at least eight. Then there’s the Optigan’s cousins: the Vako Orchestron and Chilton Talentmaker. I’ve only got one of each of those. I also have a Chamberlin Rhythmate, which is an early tape-loop drum machine:

Another early drum machine I have is a Wurlitzer Sideman, which was a totally tube-based monster made in the 1950s:

In the synthesizer dept, I’ve got a Sequential Pro-One…

…an Electro-Harmonix Mini-Synthesizer…

…a Yamaha CS01-II…

…a Casio CZ-101, an Ensoniq ESQ-1, a Kurzweil K2000, and a MicroKorg. Then there’s the Wurlitzer 200 Electric Piano I scored at AmVets for $20! Other than that, I’ve got loads of Casios and other toy keyboards.

How did the idea of Optiganally Yours come about?

When I got my first Optigan, I immediately had the idea that it’d be fun to do some sort of lounge act with a singer, just singing cover songs with the Optigan. Rob immediately volunteered to sing, but before we ever got around to working up any cover songs, we ended up writing four originals, all in one afternoon. We just made quickie four-track recordings of these, and realized that we had something good. So we kept writing more songs.

Rob came up with the band name, which I hated and I still hate, but it is what it is. I wanted to call the band “Mattellica.”

It was sort of a fluke. Rob’s in a successful indie-rock band called Pinback, and they were supposed to do a short tour of Japan a few years ago, but had to cancel at the last minute. Since they had already sold tons of tickets, a compromise was worked out, and it became sort of the “Rob Crow Variety Show” tour, which included a set by Optiganally Yours. It worked out well, because we had already released our second album on a Japanese label, and the Japanese are into stuff like what we do anyway, so we got a very enthusiastic reception there.

Well, I’m not really sure — somebody has probably written their doctoral thesis in anthropology on it, though! I guess probably the question is whether this is a post-war phenomenon, or if it comes from deeper within Japanese culture. All I can say is that, in our case, whatever popularity we have in Japan comes from a mix of the pop music and the gadget factor, the gadget being the Optigan, of course.

Yes, unfortunately. You kind of have to see the whole show — he has several costume changes (Ed. note: Here’s a concert photo, possibly not work-safe), more or less amounting to a gradual striptease over the course of the set. Believe me, it’s nowhere near as great as it sounds! Spanish Flea is the last song in our set, so he’s pretty close to naked at that point.

It’s pretty simple. I’ve never been much for writing melodic material — mostly I’m interested in chord progressions. So I usually come up with a chord progression and song structure, using Optigan sounds, and send it to Rob. If he likes it, he’ll write a melody and lyrics and record his parts over the top of it, sometimes adding guitar parts as well. Then he’ll send it back to me, and I’ll do keyboard overdubs and final production/mixing. We almost never work together apart from rehearsals and live shows.

Well, as far as the lyrics go, only Rob could answer you on that. Sometimes I don’t even know what lyrics he’s singing, or what they’re about. We wrote that song the same way we write most of our songs, as I already described.

Hmmm… I thought there might have been some sort of connection between the lyrics of that song and Optigan collecting! (”How come he’s not like any of them / I don’t know”)

Nah… Rob writes all the lyrics, usually off the top of his head, and he’d never probably never have any reason to write anything explicitly about the Optigan. I’m very conscious about not doing the whole Optigan “theme” to death — mostly we just stick to using those sounds. Apart from that, the songs can go anywhere. So, on the one hand, we’re in a closed loop sonically, but on the other hand, things are wide open thematically.

Well, funny you should mention that, because actually I tend to take a very purist sort of approach most of the time, and tend to shy away from “tricks.” I prefer to present the basic sound of the Optigan as it is, and work within its limitations.

The most simple/obvious “trick” you can do with an Optigan is to insert a disc upside-down, which results in the music playing backwards. We’ve never done this on any Optiganally Yours song because it’s kind of like saying, “Well, I like the Optigan, but it just doesn’t do enough, so we’re going to use every last little trick to get as many weird sounds out of it as possible.”

If I went down that road, the next thing I’d be saying is, “Well, I like the Optigan, but it just doesn’t do enough, so I’m going to send it through this phaser pedal and then add some delay and distortion…” But then you’d end up with something that sounds nothing like an Optigan, so why even use an Optigan in the first place?

Obviously, there’s something to be said for using whatever gear you have to arrive at whatever sound it is you’re ultimately looking for. But I guess my mind is just sort of wired in such a way as to think, “I want an Optigan on this recording, therefore the Optigan I record should sound like an Optigan.”

All that being said, something I have no qualms about at all is using other technology to bolster the sound of the Optigan and make it easier to present. To that end, I use the computer a lot, like recording the Optigan and making .wav files of loops and arranging songs in software like Sony’s Acid.

That’s hard to say. I do remember always being fascinated with tape recorders from a very early age, and my dad was a ham radio operator, so we always had electronic equipment and strange disembodied sounds in the house. But other than that, often I think my preoccupation with sound as a medium is more or less arbitrary. I could just as easily see myself having gotten involved with, say, assemblage sculpture or photography instead.

Although, I will say that I do tend to have a fascination with found objects in general. When it comes to writing music, I like to use found sounds because it’s just another way of collaborating with forces outside of my own mind. People collaborate artistically with all sorts of things: other people, folk traditions, drugs, chance processes, etc. I like to collborate with seredipity and found objects. In a way, the Optigan is sort of a meta-found-object, in that it’s really a cultural discard that contains all these faint messages-in-bottles in the form of fragments of long-forgotten musical recordings.

Well, there’s always more to explore, if only because we can always bring new musical ideas to the table, and interpret them using Optigan sounds. Within any closed system or palette, there’s an infinite amount of exploration you can do — it’s just a matter of getting the most out of your limitations. I personally find that much more liberating than being constantly faced with a much broader, general palette.

In other words, I don’t think I’d ever get any Optiganally Yours stuff done if I was constantly saying things like “Well, I like the Optigan sound on this, but could I make it even better if I added some Kurzweil K2000 to it?” I have a very hard time working that way, with too many options. I’d spend all my time considering the options, and never get around to doing any actual writing or recording.

I’m a casual fan — I only have a couple of his records. But every time I read an interview with him, I tend to find myself agreeing with a lot of points he brings up. I had an original Oblique Strategies deck several years ago, but I never actually used it for anything. I ended up selling it on eBay for like $400 or something.

What’s the status of the next Optiganally Yours album?

The third Optiganally Yours album, Optiganally Yours in Hi-Fi, has been a frustrating project. It’s been in the works literally for years. Rob and I just can’t seem to get our schedules together to finish it up. In terms of the songs, it’s about halfway finished, though we have plenty of song sketches from which the remaining songs will emerge.

For this album, we’re actually not using any Optigans at all. Rather, we’re building songs from loops taken directly from the Optigan master tapes, which were the original studio recordings of the musical material on the Optigan discs. Sonically, this album will be different than our others, in that it will be all studio-quality hi-fi, but the songwriting process is the same, so it will sound like Optiganally Yours in that respect.

I always have a million things on the back burner. It just tends to take me forever to get around to finishing anything. As an example, I like to write chamber operas, and have had a few of them produced, but it’s expensive and requires lots of resources.

Yeah, I have a degree in music from UCLA. It’s not worth much, though. I mostly just hung around the Ethnomusicology department, messing around with all the exotic instruments they had there. I wasn’t really in tune with most of my teachers.

Here’s an excerpt from a workshop production of my opera The World Is Round, which is a setting of a Gertrude Stein children’s book. You can find some more info about this piece at operazero.org.

I’ve also been working on a sort of Lucas & Friends opera, which basically means an opera made out of found sounds. I put together a sort of short “demo” version of that last summer, it’s just a matter of getting the resources together for a full-length production.

You know, I’ve had many people suggest such a thing over the years, and I guess I’m just not the guy to do it. I tend to be good at gathering raw materials and information, but not so good at editing and organizing it. That’s why the web is a nice medium for me — I don’t feel any pressure to “finish” something before I present it to the world. Things can always be works-in-progress. If I were to make an Optigan book, it would take me forever, because I’d get bogged down in the minutiae of making decisions about what to set in stone, etc.

Well, these days most of the good stuff I find goes on eBay. I have to make a living somehow. I have this loose policy that basically says that if I find something I like, and I paid, say, a buck for it, and it’s going for, say, $100.00 on eBay, I just ask myself: “If I saw that on a store shelf with a $100.00 tag on it, would I buy it?” And if the answer is “No,” I sell it on eBay. In other words, NOT selling it on eBay for $100.00 is financially indistinguishable from buying it for $100.00. I’m choosing the thing over the money.

So… that being said, I’ve found lots of valuable old hi-fi gear, vintage microphones, records (I had a Bob Dylan promo recently sell for over $4k — I paid a buck for it at a garage sale), and countless other things. I’ve been doing eBay for ten years, so there have been lots of great scores.

In terms of great garage sale scores that I’ve kept, I suppose I’d have to include my Chamberlin Rhythmate, alot of my Optigan stuff, some art, lots of weird records, things like that.

Serendipity

Purity

Sincerity

Flaws

Repetition

Organic structures

Landscapes

Velocity

Myth

Lydian mode

Optigan web site | Order Optiganally Yours CDs and Optigan sample CDs from Optigan.com | Optiganally Yours MySpace page | Lucas & Friends web site | Lucas & Friends MySpace page | Opera Zero | Pea Hix’s YouTube videos

While MySpace is often a fantastic place for checking out new music, the Swedish band Testbild! can’t be properly represented within that site’s conventional ADD-friendly structure. Then again, there’s very little about Testbild! that’s conventional. (Yes, there’s an exclamation point at the end of their name, and no, they don’t show their faces in their band photos.)

Testbild!’s latest release, Une Teinte Intense, is an atmospheric concept album about adventurer Isabelle Eberhardt. Sometimes the album sounds like a Middle Eastern Free Design playing lite jazz. (!) At other times it sounds like what might’ve happened if Pink Floyd recorded an alternate soundtrack to Lawrence of Arabia.

But even those far-out comparisons don’t quite describe what Testbild! sounds like or what the band is about. The only thing that can probably be said is that Testbild! doesn’t make background music; this is most definitely art which demands and rewards attention, preferably with a good set of headphones. And there’s some pop thrown in for good measure. If you’re willing to go along for the ride on Une Teinte Intense, the experience is one you won’t soon forget.

Petter Herbertsson is Testbild!’s mastermind, a polite yet slightly mysterious gentleman who prefers the shadows instead of the limelight. And as you’ll see in the following interview, he’s got ideas about art, sound, and making music that differ from the norm. And if you’re as taken with Testbild!’s sound as I am, you might be able to record your own Testbild! album one of these days. What does that mean? Read on. (Studio photos by Moa Andersdotter.)

Petter: Well, the short answer would be that we get inspired by artistic people, or visionaries, who do exactly the opposite of what society expects of them. Further examples would be Chris Marker, William S. Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Bas Jan Ader, Mike Alway, Ferdinand Cheval (the French postman that singlehandedly built a fantasy castle called Palais Idéal in his garden), Delia Derbyshire, etc., etc.

Isabelle Eberhardt was the daughter of Russian nobles, had an anarchistic upbringing in Genève, converted to Islam, and travelled around in North Africa in the early 1900s dressed as a man. She was elected to a mystic Islamic brotherhood called Qadriya, wrote articles for French and Swiss newspapers (but weren’t allowed to return to her home, since she was considered a dangerous and subversive character by the government). And as if that wasn’t enough, she drowned at Aïn Sefra, in the middle of the desert, at the age of 27. Her life was fascinating, as was her personality. She seemed torn between her Islamic religious ideal, and her at some times wild way of life with the cross dressing, lots of alcohol and kif, etc.

And at the same time, she was an artist by definition; her descriptions of the myriads of colours in the North African sunset is totally unique. To make a themetic album about her is simply our way of paying our dues to one of our greatest heroes.

The manifesto said that Testbild! is a band wich doesn’t profess itself to a single musical genre, that one of the main assignments should be to investigate and dwell on the relationship between pop music and sounds that could be described as noise. Total honesty was also a key conception, i.e. the music could never have a commercial purpose, and had to come from our personal musical tastes only. These things are still followed, I guess, but if we were to write a manifesto today, it would be more developed in a way. But also more or less non-existing, depending on points of view.

We strongly believe that it’s an artist’s (artist in a broadened sense) duty to avoid clichés at all cost, to at least try to kill your darlings every now and then, to never underestimate the audience and to create something that is far beyond the music business and the establishment. On the other hand, Testbild! should be a band based on ideas of any kind; in that case you could say that the only rule is that there are no rules.

I started the band ten years ago, because I was fed up with playing with “normal” bands where you were supposed to stick to a genre, wear a certain type of clothes, write prefab songs that people could dance to, etc. Testbild! was supposed to be the antithesis to all that.

Back then, it was just me. Today we are at least eight members, and we’re still growing. I want Testbild! to be around when I’m dead too. I want the project to be immortal. I have suggested to other bands that they could perform as us, and do more or less exactly what they want, but so far no one has dared.

Absolutely. The thing is, confusion is something good in our opinion. You have to keep moving forward all the time to develop as an artist, and as a human being. I may have started the project ten years ago, but at that very moment I had to resign as a leader, since the whole thing was supposed to be idea-based. You can’t have a leader if you want to be a part of something that opposes authorities and the establishment, can you? If some people decide to “kidnap” the idea, and release an album under the same name, playing indie rock in leather jackets and sunglasses, that’s a good thing too, because there is always a small chance that reviewers or journalists eventually will find out that there actually is (or was) another band with exactly the same name, with a totally different approach. And then you have a discussion, a debate on the subjects that we’re interested in.

I’m not saying that there ever will be a debate, but anyway… I know all this sounds terribly pretentious, but that’s something we just have to accept. There used to be at least one band from Sweden calling themselves Testbild, but I’m not sure if they’re around anymore. And I know for a fact that there is a German band with the same name; I think they’re into metal stuff. There’s also a Danish collective, but they’re concentrating on video art. I contacted them about six years ago, and asked them if they thought it was a problem that we had the same name, but they were just amused.

At my place we have Fender Rhodes, piano, electric bass, acoustic guitar, a couple of analogue synths, lute, kantele, vihuela, glockenspiel, banjo, chromatic harmonicas, melodica, violin, oud, hand drums and other percussive instruments. At Douglas’s place there’s lots of guitars (both acoustic and electric) and analogue synths, a vibraphonette and other stuff, and at the rehearsal place there’s a Wurlitzer piano and drums.

We go out on excursions in the city or in the nature where we happen to be, and just record everything we can come up with on our mini disc. We keep these recordings in what you might call sound libraries at home, and whenever we need a special kind of sound, we just look through our files.

We’ve done some odd stuff when it comes to our field recordings. For example, I borrowed a professional microphone from my stepbrother — he’s into filmmaking, so he has incredibly expensive stuff — that was rather long, like a forearm maybe. It had a pink angora cover to protect the recordings from wind sounds, and the handle was shaped like that of a gun. I walked around at the docks in Malmö last year, recording water sounds and sea birds, and people just stared at me like I was some kind of maniac. It was summer and very hot, so imagine a sweaty guy in sunglasses, pointing a pink angora gun at everything!

We’ve also done stuff like breaking into abandoned buildings and attics to capture the inherent sounds. There are recordings of Pontus playing accordion to cows, of Mattias playing a satellite dish with a bow, of me sitting at an old chair and moving backwards and forwards all the time to get a creaking sound, of Siri picking mushrooms in the woods, of fighting cats, etc.

Once I had the idea that every song of mine should contain an element of chance, to get a mystery feel to it. You can hear traces of that on our second album, The Inexplicable Feeling of September, but we abandoned the idea rather quickly, since it tended to limit the possibilities rather than broaden them. It turned out to be just another type of musical straitjacket or uniform that we’ve always tried to run away from. So it’s not a rule anymore. But I think it’s sometimes just a way of reasoning when you compose, like, “Now let’s see, what does this song need after the chorus — an anarchistic noise part maybe?”

I’m also somewhat fascinated with the idea of sound that suddenly stops and changes perspective, like a meta listening. We did that a couple of times on our unreleased “real” second album The Lolita Wagner Case (to be released some time in the near future on Radio Khartoum, it’s the second part of a thematic trillogy starting with The Double Life of Testbild!). First you have a proper song. Then in the second verse, you hear someone putting on a cassette recorder, and the song continues on the tape while you hear the person breathing in the background. There are many more layers than you think. You are listening to a record, but at the same time someone is listening to you, listening to a record, and a person listening to the person who’s listening to you, listening to a record and so forth. Very John Cage indeed!

Oh, thank you! But getting back to song structure: it’s a very delicate matter and should not be taken lightly. The key word is listening, of course. You have to listen carefully to where a melody line or a chord progression wants to go, and then the music actually writes itself. It takes a lot of time and effort, and sometimes you don’t have the patience for it, but when it happens it’s the most wonderful thing. I think you can tell when you’ve been careless about a song, but usually not until after a while.

I’m not ruling anything out, but for my own part I’m through with writing conventional songs. I’ve done that so much in the past. I guess you can see that as part of a learning process. And I should stress that it does of course happen that we write conventional stuff every now and then, but these songs are always thrown away. I don’t see the point in keeping something anybody could do; you should listen to your own inner voice instead.

Oh you know, just fooling around with EQ to get that old, fractured sound. There was also a great deal of voice direction; the way that Katja was supposed to read the text was in a kind of slow and half whispery tone to strengthen the dream-like atmosphere.

It depends on the circumstances. I personally have an indestructible passion for great songwriters, i.e. musicians that really treat the song like the work of art it is, people like Louis Philippe, Brian Wilson, Laura Nyro, Paddy McAloon, George Gershwin or Dorothy Ashby, people who are in love with the songs they write. I want to become one of them myself, and I hope that maybe I will some day.

On the other hand, I get obsessed with artistic ideas all the time, and perhaps it’s easier to find those in movies than in music, I don’t know. I love directors like Andrei Tarkovsky and Victor Erice; they have the aesthetics and a poetic attitude that’s very close to my own, describing the beauty, the mystery and eternal sadness of the world and its inhabitants.

When I get obsessed with something, I have to find out everything there is about it. My latest infatuation is French film maker Chris Marker, who is mostly known for a short low budget science fiction movie from the early sixties called La Jetée, entirelly composed of black and white stills. Apparently Terry Gilliam was very influenced by this when he wrote Twelve Monkeys, with all its time travel business. But La Jetée is something completely different, of course.

Sans Soleil, a full length movie from 1983 that is a unique and puzzling mix of documentary footage, apocalyptic science fiction, meditations on what memory is, and a highly intellectual and essay-like voiceover, is even better. Chris Marker (it is said that he took his name from a Marker pen) is an enigmatic character who’s been around the business since the fifties. He rarely gives interviews and almost never shows his face. The images of him that exist has him most of the time standing behind a camera, and nowadays he’s been known to send pictures of his cat Guillaume to journalists who contact him.

You’ve obviously taken a Residents-like approach to band photos, yet — correct me if I’m wrong — that’s your face singing in Testbild’s “ENIAC vs. UNIVAC” video. So the cat’s out of the bag, at least as far what you look like. Why bother hiding now?

First of all: that’s not me in the video, it’s a friend of director Angelique Clark. I don’t remember his name, but I think Alexander Bailey (of our American record company Radio Khartoum) mentioned that he actually is Scandinavian, and I guess he was chosen to play the part because he looked like our friend Magnus Löfgren (the guy impersonating ENIAC and UNIVAC on the cover of the first album).

You won’t find any pictures of me anywhere, not of the band with uncovered faces either, and there are no pictures of the whole band together. On the other hand, there are images of several of the other members out there (most of them have other musical projects on the side), so I guess you could cut them out and make little Testbild! collages of your own…

We chose to have it this way for many reasons; one is to emphasize the fact that it’s all idea-based, and that no member is more important than the other. In our modern society, you tend to put focus on the artist rather than his or her work, which is a rather twisted way of looking at things. So that’s of course something we want to protest against. The fact that we sometimes use anagrams instead of our real names is another manifestation of these thoughts.

We have an album coming up in September, it’s called Aquatint, and will hopefully be our most conceptual piece yet. Apart from the music and lyrics, there’ll be a movie and a short story. And if everything goes as planned, the nice digipak will smell of tar.

Well, apparently we have to do it ourselves by hand, so it all depends on if we get the CD’s before they’re sent out to the shops or not, I’m not sure about these things.

Anyway, we’re still working with Bed Stilt, our orchestral and apocalyptic third part of the trillogy I mentioned earlier, an album about Belka and Strelka (the two Russian space dogs from the sixties that actually came back alive) and other things. Oh, and we’re supposed to go on a small tour in Sweden and Denmark in August. We like to keep busy!

The seaside. Everything about it really, water, boats, lighthouses, sand, shaped rocks, fishes, the horizon, the smells and sounds.

Rain. The sound the raindrops make, and just the plain fact that there’s actually water coming down from the sky.

Coloured lamps hung in the trees on summer evenings (is it called Chinese lanterns in English?).

Shortwave radio. I can sit and turn the knob backwards and forwards for hours, the sound has a completely absorbing effect on me.

Used copies of The National Geographic Magazine, preferably from the sixties and seventies. Older copies is OK as well, but never newer.

Foxes. Red foxes, that is. It’s been my favourite animal since I was a child, and I used to dream of them all the time when I was in my early twenties, I even dreamt that I had this fox alter ego, called Kani. I guess you could call the fox my totem if you’re into new age mumbo jumbo stuff (god knows I’m not).

The night sky and the stars.

Dreams. I find it eternally fascinating that ones subconscious is crammed with poetic images and abstract art. I used to have this dream diary where I wrote down everything; many passages in the lyrics and stories are taken from there. I’ve been neglectful to it lately though, maybe I should start again.

Old libraries and dusty archives. I’m a librarian by profession, and have always loved the somewhat archetypal idea of a forgotten, hidden room somewhere in the basement of a public building, stuffed with old books and files with subversive information.

Tea. Preferably Lapsang Souchong or Russian Earl Grey.

Testbild’s web site | Testbild’s MySpace page | Buy “Une Teinte Intense” from Friendly Noise (Sweden) | Buy “Une Teinte Intense” from Amazon

His career as a professional recording artist spans over 20 years, his Wikipedia entry calls him one of the “elder statesmen of indiepop,” and he’s worked with laundry list of distinguished artists, including The Clientele, The High Llamas, and former XTC guitarist Dave Gregory.

Louis Philippe (real name Philippe Auclair) is a unique figure on the pop music landscape. He has the ear of a seasoned orchestral arranger, yet is musically self-taught. (Anyone with an interest in arranging should check out his excellent blog post on writing for strings.) He crafts sophisticated tunes which pay their respects to the shrine of Pet Sounds, but his music is gentler than anything on that album. And, as you’ll discover in the following interview, he doesn’t employ the methods that a typical pop songwriter might use when capturing ideas.

Elegant is the word that most often comes to mind when listening to Louis Philippe’s latest album, An Unknown Spring. The songs are highly literate, delicately arranged, and supplemented with real orchestral instruments. Make no mistake — this is indeed pop music. It’s just smarter and a little quieter than what typically falls under the pop umbrella. There’s no screaming guitars, no trace of the modern loudness wars. Instead, An Unknown Spring boasts an intriguing mix of confessional songwriting, Brill Building-like pop craftsmanship, and cinematic but intimate orchestral arrangements. And then there’s Louis’s angelic vocals soaring over top of it all.

Not only does Louis make great music, but he gives great interviews too.

Louis: I’d become quite disillusioned, to put it mildly, with what I was hearing around me; most of it seemed very reactionary to my ears, beat-and groove-driven, with hardly any attention paid to melody and harmony in any sense of these words. I wanted to see if I could get closer to my ambition of writing pop lieder, in which repetition would be a device used with far greater economy that is the norm (including in my own work). By the way, this was not a choice as such; it’s the music I was hearing in my mind and that coming out when I walked in the street or sat at the piano. It’s something I’ve been atrracted to ever since Danny Manners and I worked on our album of Poulenc mélodies. When the songs started to take shape, I noticed that my writing had evolved towards more evolutive lines, more fluid harmonies. It was more a matter of going with a natural, ‘organic’ flow than a decision as such.

The analytical process took place afterwards, if you see what I mean, when I had to build the record in Ken Brake’s studio. Another thing: the form of the songs, and the curve of the album were also influenced by a personal necessity: sing a body of songs which would have a common emotional colour, and a very tender one at that. There is hardly any place for tenderness in pop these days, whereas it is ever-present in the music I love. Nostalgia too.

I guess this is more of a constant in what I’ve done over the years than a “new” inclination. I couldn’t say if it is a theme as such… Maybe it’s an echo of Ray Davies’s obsession with weather in albums like Face to Face and Something Else (and Village Green, of course!). Do you think it has to do with living in a country where we experience four seasons in a day? And a clue — every time “spring” is used (and it is quite a few times), it is in all its meanings. What you said about the weather could also be said about water.

Do you mind if I bat this one out of the park? It would be a bit like answering a question like, “How often do you have sex?” But there isn’t a line in this song that doesn’t come from very, very deep within me. “You’re a clock without a hand, a broken shell turning to sand” — when love has gone, death asserts itself.

This is a very flattering thing to say — so much so I’m not sure what to add to it. One thing I remember about writing this song is that I first “heard” the first verse in its entirety, lead line, chords and lyrics all together, something that is (alas) very rare… Don’t forget that the one dream I’ll never fulfill is to be a Brill Building songwriter, banging on the piano from 9 to 5 with the divine Carole King for a neighbour, and looking forward to present a demo to Jackie DeShannon (at which point I made my excuses and left).

Spot on as far as colours are concerned.

I most certainly don’t. I find understanding what Olivier Messiaen said about the purpleness of certain tonalities an impossible task.

That is different. Yes, the combination of the two CR78s is actually meant to reflect the “snowishness” of the snow, the precision of the crystal structures, with its peaks and radiating spikes. As to the adequation of sound and instruments to lyrics, absolutely — very much the arranger’s prerogative. Are we sounding a bit pseud-ish here? Who cares? I’m trying to think of another example… You’d have the french horn on Wild-Eyed and Disheveled, a very sylvian instrument, which seemed appropriate when thinking of the America that Scottish crofters discovered when they landed in Nova Scotia; and the “surf” organ in the same track, a sonic hello to God, i.e. Brian Wilson.

The sparseness is out of fidelity to one of my guiding principles as an arranger: economy. The arranger’s work should consist of taking out as much as needs to be done; ideas can be like weeds, and proliferate to the point when they negate each other’s beauty. I was listening to Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges a couple of nights ago — and I defy you to find one note that is not “needed” in this luxurious score. As Poulenc said, “I’m not Ravel, unfortunately”; but what was good for him (and how) has got to be good for a minor craftsman like me.

The other thing is: I hear my songs in orchestrated form, not as lead line/chords compounds. It’s a great asset — until you realise to need to work like mad to unravel what is played in your mind’s ear. As an arranger, I do not have a philosophy as such; the work I’ve done for bands like The Clientele or, very recently, Humbert Humbert (a very good Japanese “psych-folk” duet) bears little relation to the way I work on my own material. With other artists, my role is to enhance colours (sometimes find some when there are very few), to enrich the harmonic patterns, draw out the most arresting lines, embellish, whilst remaining in the background; a matter of technique as much as anything. With myself, as songs do ‘come out’ in already-arranged form, it’s a question of finding means to execute what’s been found. In any case, one priority doesn’t change: less is definitely more.

All background vocals on that particular song were recorded part-by-part with three singers singing in straight octaves or unison: Alasdair and Mel of The Clientele, plus me. Each of the four parts was triple-tracked, using a very transparent reverb. There was no use of Auto-Tune or any other gizmo… It’s just the way our three voices combine! We only used a “special effect” on two songs of the album: we put the background vocals to Fallen Snow through an old AC30, whacking the tremolo by hand as we were laying the tracks; and Ken processed the background vocals to An Unknown Spring (the song) through a reverse-reverb plug-in. Other than that, the sound of these harmonies was the result of coaching Al and Mel through their parts, and not just pitch-wise. I’m very pleased with the ghostly chromatic line you can hear, and not hear at the same time, in the bridge. It’s done entirely by multi-tracking my voice, but singing “as a trombone” (can’t put it any other way — a vocal technique I also use in Toi le coeur de la rose) — great fun to do.

Is it 16? You’re probably right. I feel like this after every single record! It’s horrible.

Paddy McAloon had a trick to get over this sense of vertigo you cannot fail to feel when you finish an album. “I’ll never write another line as good as this,” etc. He always kept 3 of the most striking songs he’d written in a kind of musical savings account, if you will! Like a greedy child who puts away the best bits of his meal to have a special mouthful to look forward to (Yes, used to do it). That way, Paddy knew that, should he stumble and have to face a bad case of writer’s block, he’d have something to lean on, a springboard for new songs.

I felt awful after An Unknown Spring, totally dried out, an old jellyfish stranded on a not particularly clean beach… My remedy against this type of hangover hasn’t changed: keep to the discipline of writing, every day, carry on, even if you come out with rubbish; at one point, it’ll click.

Further than that… Arnold Schoenberg used to tell this story about a caterpillar who was asked by an ant: “How do you manage to move all these legs at the same time?” The caterpillar stopped and thought: “Yes, how do I do it?” And it thought for so long, and got so confused, that it never moved again.

It can be. Every song I write is an attempt to bring a particularly intense experience out of the memory, and give it a shape in the timelessness of music. It is already a very narcissistic process, you see.

I’ll probably sit at the piano for a couple of hours every day, mostly in the evening. Playing through bits and bobs I’ve already “found,” refining the harmonies, and, crucially for me, the scansion (almost a lost art form these days). I’ll stand up and walk about, trying to listen to the mind’s ear, and find what I’m doing wrong in transcribing what I’m hearing. I’ll do a lot of work in the street too, walking, shopping, whatever. This may explain why the beat my songs have slowed down in recent years; I’m a more sedate walker than I used to be.

I hardly throw anything away, inasmuch I’ll keep a score of everything (I’ve never used dictaphones or portable recorders, and don’t own any form of recording equipment — pen and paper always), and rummage through the lot from time to time. It might just be that a 4-bar sequence, which was originally the first draft of a verse, and led to nothing, might provide me with just the bridge I was looking for.

Did you know Roy Orbison combined three different songs to create Only the Lonely? And may I just add that I still haven’t got over what his death has robbed us of? This man was more than a genius, he was an angel.

The most important one is: do what you do out of a personal sense of necessity. Then here a few others: never underestimate your audience. Be daring. Don’t be afraid to be naked in front of your listeners, lay yourself bare, until it hurts. Have the spontaneity of a lover, the meticulosity of a craftsman. People like Sean O’Hagan and Bertrand Burgalat are brothers to me, if you need names. But the resistance movement is growing all the time. Think of Testbild!, the Swedish band, The Lionheart Brothers, King Creosote, Brian Campeau…

One confession: I hate ROCK. (love rock ‘n roll, though — the Burnette Trio, Buddy Holly, John Fogerty). I despise every single “value” which is attached to “rock,” in the Bruce Springsteen sense. We’ve just lost four readers.

Good.

The drive of that track is phenomenal. Just phenomenal. That bass line, good grief… It’s just perfection. Born out of precious stone like Venus emerging fully-formed from the ocean. It has a certainty about it that is akin to the certainty of loving and being loved by someone. A statement that is irrefutable, undeniable, which makes you feel drunk.

I first heard that song in 1974, in my father’s car. We were going through a forest in the Auvergne. I still remember the light of the sun exploding on the leaves.

Yes, and there are many. Duke Ellington’s Perfume Suite. All of Ravel. Sibelius’s symphonies… then the Easybeats! Bobby Fuller (Never To Be Forgotten, wow)… Rock Bottom. I am haunted! But The Zombies‘ Odessey & Oracle has, in many ways, had a more direct impact of my way of working than Pet Sounds or any other album. Odyssey is almost something I could conceive myself “equalling,” if you see what I mean (I should be so lucky…), whereas Pet Sounds is a miracle that can’t and won’t be replicated.

I’ve just realised I haven’t mentioned Burt Bacharach. Probably because his presence feels so natural that I don’t even realise it. Sonically, and harmonically speaking, no one, not even Brian Wilson, had had and has as much of an influence on me than Burt has.

Christ — a book, which I need to finish by August. A track for a Joe Raposo tribute album (to be recorded), another for an album dedicated to the memory of Keith Girdler, the Blueboy singer who passed away so tragically a few months ago. Work on Stuart Moxham’s new album (the demos are pure gold); a gig at a festival in Bremen on July the 2nd; another one, hopefully, at the Rip It Up festival in Sweden later on in the summer; knocking into shape the 15-20 songs that will comprise my new solo album; kick-start my own label (Wonder Records) for good with a compilation; help Cathal Coughlan do a new CD; have some rest, some time in the future. A long way away.

Still a secret; in fact, I’m still hesitating between 3 or 4. And it’ll be an instrumental!

THAT is still a secret! Publication date is February 2009.

The best bar none is the unbelievable flexibility, and cheapness of modern digital recording technology. An Unknown Spring hardly cost more to make than my first proper studio album for él/Cherry Red in 1986…and that one (Appointment with Venus) was one of the cheapest ever recorded. Then, the community web sites, MySpace in particular, thanks to which it is now possible to initiate collaborations with almost anyone you care for, and have brought about a tightening of the emotional bond between artist and fan.

The worst… Where to start? The collapse of independent distribution networks, which was a catastrophe in England in particular; the disappearance of “mid-market” recording studios, and of the fabulous craftsmen and engineers who worked in this environment when I started out. There are very few “ears” left in the business today, believe me. The total utter bullshit that is mainstream “independent” music today, with its reactionary music, its vapid acts, its fucked-up obsession with “the new” which almost always turns out to be very old. The unavoidable death of the album format because of the MP3 downloads dictatorship; the cowardly attitude of 99.9% of the music media, or of what’s left of them. I need a drink.

It’s not every day that someone asks you about synesthesia. You certainly won’t read about it in Mojo. So thank you too, Jeff, it’s been an absolute pleasure.

Love, and memories of love.

Memory, precisely.

The generosity of Francis Poulenc.

Pet Sounds, forever.

Odessey and Oracle, for as long as Pet Sounds.

Horace Silver’s piano playing.

Robert Wyatt’s voice.

The sea.

My hatred of violence, in any form.

The poems of Philip Larkin.

Love, again.

Louis Philippe’s web site | Louis Philippe’s MySpace page | Order “An Unknown Spring”

Charles Schultz was my first childhood idol. I wanted to draw cartoons when I grew up.

There was only one problem with this rather lofty career plan.

I couldn’t draw.

Still, my lack of ability never stopped me from trying. I made a number of cartoon projects in grade school in preparation of my future non-career. Flip books. Stories on adding paper rolls. A paper-and-cardboard nickelodeon which worked only one time before falling apart.

But my most ambitious childhood cartoon experiment was the animated film I made in the second grade. I borrowed my dad’s Super 8 camera and shot hundreds of stick figure drawings in sequence to make three minutes of cinematic… incoherence. I always had to tell the audience what was going on in the film as they were watching it. From an aspiring cartoonist’s viewpoint, this was not a good sign.

The film’s plot could be summed up as, “A guy has very bad day.” Coincidentally, that same theme continues to weasel its way into my creative endeavors over twenty years later.

Case in point: Really Really Weird. This song is from the new Simple Carnival EP, Me and My Arrow.

I won’t be focusing too much on the song itself or how it was recorded, other than saying that, on the surface, it’s about a guy who has a very bad day. Instead, I’d like to turn your attention to its accompanying video, made with $7.25 in office supplies and two weeks of free time. It should be obvious from the video that my drawing ability hasn’t progressed much since I was in the second grade.

Creating a music video might seem only tangentially related to songwriting and recording — the two things this blog is supposed to be about. But I think the method in which this video was put together is a good example of acknowledging one’s limitations and finding creative ways to work within them. Or around them. After all, that’s essentially what making music is about, too.

I wanted a video for the same reason that any recording artist wants a video: to get people to check out the music.

I couldn’t justify paying someone a lot of money to make a “real” video. Given that CDs and music downloads have an embarrassingly slim profit margin to begin with, I wasn’t convinced that a real video would be worth the return on investment.

That is, unless the video cost less than ten bucks to make.

I figured I could rig some Monty Python-ish animation with a few photos taken by Pam Neill, a terrific local photographer. I wanted to start this project while the idea was still fresh, so I used the tools that I was already familiar with, like Paint Shop Pro, instead of a real animation program. As far as drawing, I had already commissioned the very talented Missy Kulik to draw the cover artwork to the Girls Aliens Food album.

Without hearing the album herself, Missy successfully captured the vibe of the songs. And unlike me, Missy can actually draw. So I slavishly recreated her designs using construction paper, glue, and a black magic marker. I also made additional cutouts with my own meager drawing skills. Here’s all of the construction paper cutouts used in the video.

Really Really Weird is, at its core, a story song. And a story song seems to be a straightforward choice for a music video, because the lyrics are already stating what needs to be shown on the screen.

So I put on my headphones, got some blank paper, and listened to what Really Really Weird’s lyrics were saying. Then I sketched out what needed to happen visually.

Remember English class? Remember dramatic structure? The video is set up like an onion. It starts with the minimum of what can be shown to get the point across, and as things progress, the layers are peeled away. And then all heck breaks loose at the end. The song is structured in the same way.

Making art isn’t much different than the way a child plays with blocks. As adults, we attach all sorts of social significance to art. We buy into the mythology of artists being mysterious conductors of inspiration. We read biographies and eat up every word about how artists pour their personal demons into their work, how they wear their heart on their sleeve. And these things can be true.

But when you break down the actual art making process, it’s nothing more than taking a set of blocks and arranging them in interesting ways.

The Really Really Weird video was an experiment in using the minimum number of “blocks” for the maximum effect. There wasn’t a noble artistic ambition behind this. Animation — especially without any proper skills or tools — is hard. So out of sheer laziness, I looked for ways to reuse construction paper cutouts and animation sequences, yet still keep the viewer engaged.

What I’ve observed with video — or with music — is that setting audience expectations is important. If the video began with the rich detail of a Disney cartoon, there would immediately be an expectation to maintain that level of quality for the next three minutes. If, on the other hand, the video were to start off with the cheapest looking spaceship in the history of animation, the bar has been set at precisely the right level for someone with my particular drawing ability. Things can only go up from there.

And that’s what I tried to do for the end alien abduction sequence — bump the amateurish artwork up to a near-Hollywood special effects level. Because the expectations were set so humorously low from the start, the intended audience reaction when the spaceship begins sucking things up is, “Wow, this video seemed so cheap that I didn’t expect that to happen!” Again, it’s onion peeling.

There’s a curious effect this video seems to have on people. I’ve seen an audience laugh and feel schadenfreude at the construction paper guy’s misfortune. On the other end, I’ve seen an audience feel sorry for him. And then I’ve seen a kind of interesting middle ground, where there’s laughter but a sense of uneasiness over who you’re supposed to root for. Like, the audience might subconsciously realize that by laughing at the construction paper guy, they’re aligning themselves with the aliens and thinks, “No, you’re not supposed to do that.” That’s like watching Jaws and cheering for the shark.

So at the end of the video, when the sets themselves are getting sucked up off the page, it was an attempt to break the fourth wall. It was to remind the audience that, despite whatever emotional investment you’ve placed in this story, it’s all construction paper, folks. And you are watching something deeply absurd. I’m only playing with blocks, and this is the part where they get knocked over.

I suspect that viewpoint makes me no better than the aliens, though.

All of the construction paper was scanned into Paint Shop Pro. The images were then carefully separated onto layers. (If you’re not familiar with photo editing software, “layers” in a paint program are like a stack of clear plastic transparent sheets.)

Then it was time to animate the action. Animation was created by tweaking an image in Paint Shop Pro, and saving it as a new file. How many files were there? Well, there 30 frames for each second of the video, and the song is almost four minutes long… Although I repeated some sequences, it should go without saying there were a lot of files.

Sometimes the animation was as simple as turning a layer on or off, like the alien mouth movement, as shown above. Sometimes it involved Paint Shop Pro’s drawing functions, like the closeup of the fish smiling when he receives a hat. Other times it involved rotating the construction paper cutouts.

Hold on, let’s back up to the fish with hats thing.

Out of the dozens of events that occur in this video, the fact that fish wear hats seems to have hit an unusually strong nerve with people.

Why fish? Why hats? I don’t know why there are fish in the video, but I can explain why there are hats.

The Simple Carnival isn’t above being deliberately cheesy. I take my kitsch seriously. To me, a lightweight ’70s AM pop radio hit can be just as satisfying as a “serious” piece of music. Since this video is supposed to be entertaining, what better way to project that intention than to feature a bunch of Fred Astaire-like top hats? Might as well have a little fun before Armageddon.

I used a free application called VirtualDub to stitch all of the image files into AVI movie files. I used another free (but buggy and unfinished) program called ABC Video Roll as the video editor. This is where I synchronized the AVI movie scenes with the music soundtrack.

There were a couple of “special effects” sprinkled throughout the video. The shot where the camera zooms into the restaurant silhouettes was actually my home video camera zooming into a construction paper picture I had taped to the wall.

When the construction paper guy wakes up, it’s a video of the guy glued to a piece of cardboard, and my hand flipping him upward. It is also perhaps the most boring thing on YouTube.

You’ll notice that this shot was performed in front of a “green screen.” It’s green tagboard from Wal-Mart. And it’s not even cut right. I’m not sure why.

If the computer programmers who worked on ABC Video Roll had actually finished writing it, I would’ve been able to seamlessly superimpose this footage in front of a Paint Shop Pro background. Instead, I discovered that, despite claims to the contrary in the manual, ABC Video Roll just plain couldn’t do this. So I used Paint Shop Pro to manually “scrub out” the green in each frame. And if you look carefully at the finished video, the green is still there around the edges of the cardboard guy. I wasn’t able to remove it all. Oh well. On the other hand, it’s not as though it makes the video look any cheaper.

For the ending alien invasion, I needed an “earthquake” effect. VirtualDub has many great plug-ins, but I couldn’t find something that would simulate a shaky camera. So I used an excellent automation utility called AutoHotkey to control Paint Shop Pro and make a random earthquake effect for thousands of frames that I had already hand-animated.

Not anytime soon. This project was exhausting. I’m a songwriter and a musician, not a video director.

I’d spend seven dollars on the video and pocket the rest.

See the previous question about the half million dollar budget. If you can meet that criteria, then let’s talk.