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 bunch up too many similar tempos together, but there’s no overall concept. I really like deciding what order the songs go in, it’s part of the fun of doing an album. With the second album, I spent more time on this and had several different versions and listened to them before I got the right one. I was also listening out for the way they sounded as well i.e. did they need a bit more mastering, etc.

What’s in your studio?

I use FL Studio and Adobe Audition. Most of the music is made and composed using FL Studio (plus external samples and VST plug-ins are used with it) and I put it all together (and sometimes add guitar/bass) using Audition.

I have a Tanglewood Memphis electric guitar, a Crafter acoustic guitar, and a Yamaha bass. Oh, and a computer, of course.

Is there any gear you’ve got your eye on?

I’d love a proper microphone — a really good one — and I’d love a vintage keyboard, but I guess I’ll have to sell quite a few copies first!

What’s your usual process for writing songs?

It nearly always starts with a chord sequence. At the moment I would say there are two types of Mister Fusty songs — the more electronically inspired, and the more guitar inspired. Meaning, it’ll either start with programming a few chords into FL Studio and building from there, or I will come up with some chords on a guitar and record them into Audition and build from there — creating drums and other bits in FL Studio to go with it. It’s usually pretty easy to guess which Mister Fusty songs started from what method. But starting with a nice chord sequence is usually what happens, though not always. Some have started from a drum beat I’ve particularly liked.

Where do you get your ideas for chords? Did you study jazz piano? It’s kind of rare to hear that sort of harmonic vocabulary in electronic or pop music.

It may be a bit embarrassing to admit, but I can’t play piano at all. The computer does all that for me. I just tell it where to play the notes.

Wow, I would’ve never guessed that! I thought for sure you had played the chords from a MIDI keyboard into a sequencer…

I am a big fan of interesting chord sequences — that’s where Brian Wilson is an inspiration. The software I use has a list of chords that you can place into the song. It’s cheating, I know, but some chords I can figure out where to put the notes — some I can’t. So I tell the computer to do that. I have never studied music, so I just put things where they sound nice. Sometimes I have no idea what chord it should be.

Is some of the music also automatically composed by the computer?

The computer doesn’t do any composing — it can make things easier though. It’s a bit like using a graphics program. You still have to draw the pictures, but if you want a box or a square the computer can do that instantly for you. I place a note marker on a grid where each row represents a note on the keyboard, but it has a handy function where, say, I want a major seventh chord, it’ll fill in those notes for me to save time. Moving about these notes on the grid is how I compose, and you can have it playing on a loop so you can hear it as you are going along. It’s very useful. I will hear a melody line in my head and try and figure it out on the “piano roll”.

How did you go about writing “Gin Clear Skies”? That’s an amazing, haunting track.

Thanks! It started from a chord sequence, like most of my songs do. I’d just got a new plug-in which emulated a Rhodes piano and another one which had some nice orchestral sounds. If I get a new plug-in or sound sample I usually want to use it straight away and often build a song around it. That’s why you’ll find a lot of flute and Fender Rhodes sounds on the new album — I’d just got a couple of nice new plug-ins, so I tend to over use them! Once I’d got the sounds I wanted to use, I just built it up, adding new melody lines as I went along, I think it only took me a couple of hours to get the basis of that track. Sometimes it happens like that, you get on a roll and it’s almost like magic. I was particularly happy when that came pouring out.

The textures and sounds you use are very colorful — very visual. How do you go about choosing what kind of sounds a song needs?

A lot of the time, I have in mind what sounds I want in the track. But sometimes, it’s a case of just experimenting with different sounds. That’s the great thing about using a computer — it’s very easy to change the sound as you are going along. In “Tiger Jones,” I found, on a sample CD, an asian instrument (sorry , I forgot what it’s called). I liked the sound of it, so I added it to the song I was working on and it made the song — it gave it that extra bit of colour that it needed. Sometimes though, you can tweak forever and lose sight of what you wanted in the first place. The track “(I Want To Live On) Toronto Island” I had a hard time getting the sound I wanted. It still doesn’t sound right to me! But sometimes you just have to let it go.

Is it a deliberate decision to utilize so many sounds which are reminicent of ’60s and ’70s music? Or is it a matter of “these are the plug-ins I have and this one happens to sound like a Mellotron”?

A bit of both. I was after a particular Mellotron sound, so sometimes I do seek out sounds like that. I like sounds and plug-ins that sound “real” i.e. as much as possible sounding like a real Mellotron or Rhodes. In an ideal world, I’d like to have a real Mellotron and Rhodes, but I haven’t, so you try to make do with the plug-ins and some sound pretty good.

Do you stockpile song ideas, do you finish every song you start, do you throw lots of stuff away…?

I have a lot of half-finished ideas on my hard drive. Some I will dig out again and have another go at, some remain unfinished. There were a couple of tracks that didn’t make “Sparkly Darkly” like “Whirlygig” (which you can download for free on my website) that I thought didn’t quite fit or were too similar to something on there. Looking back now, I think “Whirlygig” should’ve been on there ‘cos I like it more now than when I did it. But it’s too late now and what would I take off?

You mention some of your influences on your web site: The High Llamas, Brian Wilson, Burt Bacharach. Who are some others, and what kind of impact have they had on your music?

I’m a big Beatles fan. They were my first great musical love. I guess it’s their eclectic-ness (if that is a word) which is one way they have influenced me. But more recent artists like Jim Noir, who did his album on his own in his bedroom, inspire me too. The fact that you can make something pretty good at home, these guys have done it, so why can’t I?

For a electronic musician I don’t often listen to much electronic music! I like more guitar based stuff really. My favourite current musician is Richard Hawley, I love his sound. It’s very melancholic, yet uplifting. Very northern England. I love the pure pop of stuff like the Apples in Stereo and the classic style of bands like Teenage Fanclub and the Green Peppers. Probably the best band around at the minute is Super Furry Animals, a band from Wales who are eclectic and write great pop songs. They’ve been around for over ten years now, and every album they make is great. The new one is stunning.

What’s the most unusual or pleasantly surprising thing you’ve come up with in the studio?

I’m not a brilliant guitar player and I can’t do solos but I had a go at one on “Perpetual Spinach” and it took take after take after take to get it right, but I finally nailed it. I was very surprised and pleased when I finished the track. I listen back and think, did I really play that? I doubt it I could play it again!

What’s your favorite track from Sparkle Darkly?

“Perpetual Spinach” for the reason given above. Also, I have a fondness for “Saturday.” It’s exactly what I was after — a proper pop song, but without any words.

What’s next for Mister Fusty?

Vocals. Possibly. I think I’ve gone as far as I want to go with instrumental-only tracks. I want to do something a bit different and I’m thinking of adding vocals. Unfortunately, I’m not the greatest singer and I have a really cheap crappy microphone, so it’s going to be an uphill battle!

I’ve also been talking with friends about starting a band, but it’s usually a drunk-in-the-pub kind of conversation. So who knows if that will happen, but I’d like to as I miss playing live and Fusty is not a live act.

I’d also like to get into soundtracks a bit more. I think that’s something that would be really interesting to have a go at, but it’s tough to get into.

Last question. If money and resources were no object, what would be the ultimate Mister Fusty project you’d like to take on?

I’d have a proper band and orchestra and things like that. Get a decent singer too! I’d make sunshine pop inspired album, stuff like the Association and Roger Nichols and the Circle of Friends, The Free Design, etc. I’d take that sound of late 60’s California pop and bring it kicking and screaming back into the 21st century. It’s about time we had some proper pop songs again!

10 Things That Inspire Mister Fusty

Mister Fusty’s web site | Mister Fusty’s MySpace

Welcome to the Songs and Sonics blog. I’m your host, Jeff Boller, main songwriter and performer in The Simple Carnival.

You’re probably wondering, “Who? The Simple what?” That’s OK, because I don’t know who you are either. And I don’t know how you found this site, but please make yourself at home.

So what’s this all about? Well, within these electronic pages you’ll find a smorgasbord of tales from the front lines of songwriting, music production, and working with bizarre objects that make grinding, belching, unwelcome noises (which can be, but are not limited to, actual musical instruments). We’ll take a close look at the creative process of making music. We’ll have some audio show-and-tell. There will be interviews with other artists who are doing cool things with sound. Mostly though, I hope that this blog will provide you with ideas and inspiration for your own creative endeavors.

“OK,” you say. “But who the heck are you, and why should I care?”

Fair question. I’m a 30-something singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist based near Pittsburgh, PA. Since 2001, I’ve fronted The Simple Carnival, a pop recording project that sounds like what might happen if Harry Nilsson and The Beach Boys collaborated on Sesame Street. To date, The Simple Carnival has released three EPs and the first real, honest-to-goodness album (titled Girls Aliens Food) scheduled for release in late 2008 on Sundrift Records. I play all the instruments and sing all the parts on these recordings.

My music career has led me from writing and producing songs for other artists, to recording bands at professional studios, to directing video productions, and ultimately… to finding a 9-5, non-audio job that actually pays the bills.

So if you’re looking for advice on how write that hit song or make it big in the music industry, you’ve come to the wrong place. I don’t mind communicating with a large audience, but my background is mostly in writing and recording songs for a specific niche, and it’s not the same audience that closely follows the Top 40. Write what you know and all that. Still, even if you’re not into the kind of music I do, I hope to keep things general enough so that the majority of the content here is relevant to anyone doing creative things with sound.

You can probably expect a new post every few days, with a big article about once a week — as long as there’s something to talk about. I look forward to your feedback, as it will help steer the conversation toward the things you find most interesting. And yes, I do consider this blog a conversation. So please post some comments to help get things rolling!