Songs and Sonics

Mister Fusty is not your ordinary electronica. The brainchild of UK-based Rob Gibson, Mister Fusty pulls sounds reminicent of ’60s sunshine pop and wraps it in glowing electronic blips and bloops.

There’s a distinctly British sensibility to quirky, bouncy instrumental tunes like “Saturday,” “Mavis Enderby,” and “Tiger Jones.” The music is often reminicent of a peaceful vacation in the English countryside… That is, if the countryside were overrun by robots.

Mister Fusty’s 2007 full-length, Sparkly Darkly, consists of twelve ethereal, slightly funky tracks sounding much like what the title promises. Sprung, a new, freely downloadable EP, stretches the Mister Fusty sound in different, intriguing directions. In this interview, Rob reveals his creative process in crafting his electronic pop gems, plus makes a surprising admission.

Jeff: Tell me a little about how you got started as a musician and how Mister Fusty came to be.

Rob: I used to be a drummer, many years ago, in a band with friends. The reason I ended up as a drummer was purely because my friends roped me in because they couldn’t find anyone else! We were around for a few years and played a lot of gigs locally - then I relocated to Liverpool, so that was the end of my drumming career! I was actually a guitar player, so it was a bit frustrating being sat on the drums! For a brief period, I was rhythm guitar in a covers band, playing Hamburg-era Beatles rock ‘n roll. The band is still going, but as the rest of the band came from another part of the country, it was hard for me to rehearse, so I gave that up.

Ever since I got a computer about nine or ten years ago I’d always sought out bits of music software, mainly playing around seeing what I could come up with. It was always a hobby and I rarely played my stuff to other people. It wasn’t until the software got better, and I got more adept at using it, that I started impressing other people I played the songs to. I wondered what to do with the stuff I was making. I started discovering sites like MySpace, where it was easy for people to hear my music, and then sites like CDBaby, which made it really straightforward to put your own music out — even if you weren’t on a label. So I decided to challenge myself and do a whole album, mostly just as an experiment to see how easy it could be and to see if I could actually do it.

Where did the name Mister Fusty come from?

It was a nickname given to me by my girlfriend once on a holiday in Prague, although I can’t quite remember why she called me that! It stuck anyway and it seemed a good name to go under. I didn’t want to put stuff out under my own name, mostly due to being a bit coy, but also Mister Fusty doesn’t have to be one individual, it could be (and may even be) a band also. My girlfriend Andrea can also claim the naming of both albums too. She’s good at that kind of thing!

Is that Andrea as the telephone operator at the end of “Antimacassar”?

Well spotted! Yes, I coersed her into that. I thought it’d be a funny and a typically British self-depreceating end to the album. All Mister Fusty is good for is telephone holding music!

That made me chuckle out loud the first time I heard it, because I thought that’s what you were implying. So who comes up with the song titles?

I do. It’s a bit tricky to come up with titles sometimes because, as there are no lyrics, you have nothing to refer to and I want to avoid titles like “bouncy song” or “slow groove” that describe what style they are!

Usually I will spot something that I think makes a good name for a song. For example, I saw a poster that had all the different breeds of cattle in the UK on it and I saw one kind of sheep was called “Castlemilk Moorit,” so I thought that would make a great title. Similarly, “Perpetual Spinach” is a type of spinach we are growing in the garden. Often, places that I have been to or know crop up.

A lot of the titles on “Honest Blundering” were village names from my home county of Lincolnshire, like “Silk Willoughby,” “Temple Bruer,” and the Heckington in “Flipping Heckington,” they are all great names and people are surprised they actually exist! “Unter Den Linden” is a main street of Berlin, a city I have visited a few times. So places are very much an inspiration for titles too.

I listened to a couple mp3s from both the “Honest Blunderng” and “Sparkly Darkly” albums before ordering them and was intrigued with what I heard. However, I found that Mister Fusty is most enjoyable when listening to the albums the entire way through. Do you intentionally craft your music to work well as an album, or does it just turn out that way?

I do have a think about what order the songs go in, like what makes a good opener, etc. Also, I try not to bunc