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 exchanging e-mails with Petter Herbertsson before the Testbild! interview, I remarked that it would be helpful to have an English translation of the parts of Une Teinte Intense which were in French.

Katja, who spoke Isabelle Eberhardt’s words on the album, was kind enough to send along an English translation of L’errante, a song on the album that is also featured on Testbild’s MySpace page. So go ahead, click on that Testbild! MySpace link in the previous sentence, choose L’errante from the MySpace player, and follow the English translation below.

Katja says, “L’errante means roughly ‘The one on the move’, ‘Girl on the move’, etc. It’s Isabelle, in the desert…”

Count me in among those who really like The High Llamas‘ particular brand of licorice.

Over the course of eighteen years and twelve albums, the Llamas have cast a dreamy sonic spell. ’60s California pop, Steely Dan-like studio perfectionism, Moog synthesizer albums, Steve Reich-style minimalism, thrift store vinyl soundtracks, and a bossa nova beat mingle in surprising ways and are wrapped in a distinctly British sensibility.

Some are resistant to the Llamas’ spell, and the various controversies in the music press sometimes threaten to overshadow the band’s accomplishments. Certainly, what The High Llamas do is good enough for Bruce Johnston, who hired Llamas mastermind Sean O’Hagan to produce an eventually aborted Beach Boys comeback album in the late ’90s. A number of other artists have employed Sean’s arranging and session skills to more fruitful ends: Stereolab, Will Oldham, Cornelius, and Louis Philippe, to name a few.

While The High Llamas’ music might not be played in shopping malls around the world, Sean’s influence has certainly spread far and wide: the majority of artists already interviewed for Songs and Sonics have acknowledged his musical influence on their own work. Heck, he’s one of my influences! So it’s definitely a thrill to have him here.

Sean was nice enough to take time out of his busy schedule to chat about 2007’s Can Cladders, the Llamas’ well-received and most accessible outing yet. In fact, if you’ve never heard The High Llamas, Can Cladders is the ideal place to start. (Sean O’Hagan photo by Kev Hopper.)

Sean: I start on nylon string guitar usually, then go to the piano. The arrangements are already taking shape as I write. They kind of arrange themselves in a way. I write chords that lend themselves to arrangements.

I write in fragments sometimes and record these to MiniDisc. I then review the writing, and put these fragments together in a way that I hope defies convention.

A lot later, I start to arrange, even though I know what the arrangement might be.

Very short answer: Listening to records. No training, just listening and trying to work out what is going on. I taught myself to read music only recently and am still a very slow reader. Marcus Holdaway (piano) is trained and helped with the strings. He also helped with my sightreading.

I used old 4-track machines to demo parts. I crudely noted parts and worked with either Marcus or Andy Robinson as I dictated the harmony from piano or guitar. Yes, I suppose I used pencil back then. But the 4-track was essential.

Just getting older and wanted to be absolutely instinctive. I thought I went through a period denying that I loved pop (Carole King, Laura Nyro, Neil Sedaka, The Flamingos), and with age you just stop the fooling around and get on with what you are good at. I know Becker and Fagen are hated by some, but the early LP’s are full of crack pop tunes, as were The Specials, The Beach Boys, The Zombies, ELO, 10cc, Dion and the Belmonts. You can go to any era or style and find great pop — even today. I just wanted the pop I wrote to be a bit different.

Yes, it was happy. I worked at home a lot. But as a process draws on it, it becomes somewhat frustrating as well. I was determined to capture my pop positivity that I had rediscovered. Formerly, I think I was denying the instant melodic ideas I would churn out, mistaking the ease of writing with poor quality. I am glad for any idea now.

I really cannot say what the next record will be like. It’s not in my head, and will not be for a while. I have to do some other stuff before that time comes around again.

I often wonder whether the world can cope with another High Llamas record. We don’t exactly set the world alight when we release a record, and it is hard putting in a real commitment to writing and know that a great number of listeners will stare blankly at the product and wonder why we make this music. I always have to get over that image in my head.

OK.

That’s a chap we know who was a tour manager and gave up touring, preferring the land locked middle England to constant driving for ferry departures.

Aluminum cladding salesmen (tin men… no prize for guessing) and beat poets, sort of meeting up in my little invention. I think it works very nicely. Who needs love.

I was DJing one night and playing Dorothy. The reaction of the folk in the club prompted the second verse:

They were rich kids. Then I brought Dorothy into it as a living person. I imagined the harp as a means of travel for her and the listener.

If there has to be one, lets say Clarion Union Hall. I love the girls’ voices on this tune and the ooh refrain at the end is as close as I got to a classic 60’s girl sound, which chuffs me up. Its my favourite moment on the record.

Once when I was robbed, and once when the good old US border guards really did not want to let me back to the US in El Paso. I had to give them a big load of cash to get over the border.

The line was born to be sung. It was always going to be that. I think the rest of the song wrote itself around that line.

I know what you mean, but do not agree with the premise. I will answer in spirit. How about Queen, You’re My Best Friend.

But that’s a good song! OK… I’ll let you off the hook for that one. What’s next for you and The High Llamas?

Right now, I’m in Rio making an LP with Kassin Kammal (Kassin + 2) . We are co-writing an LP. I hope it works and people like it. It is an experiment, really.

We spent time wondering whether there should be a name. I think it will be Kassin + Sean.

The Llamas have a big show in Ireland where we are doing the music for a narrative written by the wonderful UK novelist Jonathan Coe. The soundtrack is Llamas music from the last eight LPs played live with strings, July 20 in Dublin.

I started out as a construction worker at the age 15 before working in UK car plants.

I suppose they did. As you know, I write about everyday stuff in a narrative way, and an assembly line can produce a storyboard every bit as poetic as a love tragedy.

That’s pretty much where I am, standing on street corners looking up at architecture that most people miss and wondering who drew this stuff up. From there, a story begins.

Pembrokeshire

Birdsong (I’m a recent convert… it happens when you get to 45)

Architecture

Marcos Valle

Anything I hear that makes me rush to the piano

Paul Auster

French movies (1967-1978)

BBC Radio 4 (Embodies England)

School singing. When you hear your own children sing it’s quite wonderful.

Great pubs. Because they usually host great conversations, which in turn inspire.

Thinking about LA and New York as they were in 1968-1971…

The High Llamas’ official web site | The High Llamas’ MySpace page | Order Can Cladders from highllamas.com (UK) | Order Can Cladders from Amazon.com

Between a number of interviews that are in various states of disarray and a basement that’s desperately begging for some remodeling, I was unable to put together an article this weekend for Songs and Sonics. BUT… I have a link to an unbelievably rich web site that should make any musician drool:

In the seventies and eighties, there was a world-class studio in New England called Long View Farm. Gilbert Scott Markle hosted the biggest names of the day there, and does a fantastic job at describing those sessions.

It could take days to read through the entire site. I know, because I already have! So here are three gems to get you started:

Stevie Wonder at the “Songs in the Key of Life” release party (All ’70s Stevie Wonder fans must watch the video at the end of the article!)

Cat Stevens recording his final album under that name

Tattoo Me (The Rolling Stones invade a small farm town.)

Enjoy!

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

What does Todd Rundgren’s A True Wizard, A True Star, Prince’s Lovesexy, and Paul Steel’s April & I have in common?

Glorious studio bombast. Song suites. Total record production mastery. All three albums are the sound of an artist at the top of his studio game.

Except Paul Steel’s album isn’t a pinnacle.

It’s a debut.

And it was recorded as a mostly one-man-band effort when he was eighteen years old.

His followup album, Moon Rock, is, for the moment, doing the unfortunate record company shuffle. But April & I — praised by such musical heavyweights as Sean O’Hagan, Van Dyke Parks, and Wondermints — is available now, and it recently found a home on iTunes.

In the following interview, this virtuoso of hyperactive overdubbed pop assures us that — despite having written lyrics to the contrary — he’s not on crack. It’s always good to clear that up.

Paul: It’s my bedroom, so a bed and a wardrobe! Got a desktop PC and monitors hooked up to a rack of preamps and FX. A MIDI keyboard and drum pads for programming. A percussion box full of bells, shakers, scrapers, whistles, and other useless nonsense. A Wagner U47 mic. I like to collect instruments, so I have a cupboard containing my banjo, ukulele, electric sitar, Quattro de Puerto Rico, mandolin, baby accordion, lap steel, and melodica. I keep my favourite guitar and bass with the monsters under the bed.

A few years ago, when I had started recording the tracks for April & I, I was invited to a party at the other end of town. So I took my laptop and microphone along and recorded a gang vocal for a song called Honkin’ (On My Crackpipe). I recorded loads and loads of shouting, inhaling, and some crack-addicted Aberdonian slang.

After the party, at about 3am, a bunch of us headed up the road. One person was dressed as Spiderman and another had a guitar. We found an old alcoholic lady in the street who joined us and penned the Little Tiny Bill song with us. If you type in “Little Tiny Bill” in YouTube you might be able to find it somewhere. So the backing vocalists in Honkin’ (On My Crackpipe) ended up being the Little Tiny Bill Symphonic Choir.

I was always knocked out by the coda to God Only Knows by Brian Wilson. I wanted to do something similar with interwoven counter melodies and stuff.

It’s a lot less specific. I can write about anything I want, and still put a lot of myself and my personality into it.

One day I would definitely like to. I think I want to live a bit more and find a way of translating my thoughts and emotions into standard music notation.

Yes, my mother. Everyone asks, “Do you take crack then?” I say yes, but of course I don’t. I don’t know anyone who does either. It’s part of the story where “I” get corrupted. I am a little bit concerned that kids might listen to it and grow up to be addicts.

Ha ha, I am a fool to myself. I’ll leave the crack for my hardcore techno phase.

I can’t say without relistening to it, but it’s “like the time when my dad caught my trying on old womens clothing”… Don’t ask!

Yes. Yes. I’m obsessed with a Japanese electro-pop artist, Cornelius. April & I’s production pales in comparison to the crazy shit he gets up to! He uses guitars and drum samples in a really insane and creative way that I’m certain could be applied to pop music in a tasteful way. It sounds like it takes a lot of work and attention to detail, though!

I would definitely like to explore more extreme production ideas and techniques, but I’m also keen to master more traditional styles. It’s all educational!

I do get a lot of ideas and write a lot of songs, but I find it difficult to identify which ones are good and which ones are terrible. I’ve been on complete bummers for months just because of a lack of confidence. When I get any writer’s block, I turn into a bit of a workaholic and try to compensate by writing or recording lots of music. But I think it’s a lot more sensible to take break or try writing with other people. Try something different.

Melody: To me, there is no song without a strong, engaging melody. Which is ironic considering most chart-topping tunes are void of any melodic interest!

Arrangement

Harmonic structure

Rhythm

Lyrics

Audio engineering

Solos: Solos can be really good and really lift a song if used cleverly, but they’re not important at all. I particularly hate improvised blues guitar solos and saxophone solos.

Lots of sunshine pop bands like The Association, The Free Design, and Millennium. A friend of mine turned me onto Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard. A True Star and I can’t get enough of it… It’s insane.

Weirdly enough, no. I was on the phone to a producer friend of mine, Charlie Francis, telling him what I was working on and that it was a continuous piece of music. He mentioned that album, and I bought it a few days after I finished April. I wish I had heard it beforehand cause Todd Rundgren used lots of different interesting ways of linking up the tracks that I would’ve liked to employ in my stuff. I’ve only really gotten into it recently. International Feel is one of my favourite tracks ever!

There isn’t a week that goes by that I forget to listen to The Beach Boys or The Super Furry Animals. My friend Ralph told me to “only study greatness,” so I don’t listen to the radio or watch any music television or anything. Most new music is written to be talked about, not listened to.

I’ve just got out of the record deal that has been holding Moon Rock back for the last nine months, so we’re going to be making plans for the release of it soon. We’re getting a animated film made for April & I using ten different animators and filmmakers. It’s looking amazing so far.

I’m hoping it will get into film festivals. The guys making the film are doing things that I think will really blow peoples minds, and they’re all so different. We’re thinking about doing a re-release of April & I with a DVD and maybe a live performance… Maybe.

I’m playing bass for a Brighton band called Stars and Sons. I’ve just finished a song called Ocean that I wrote with Beach Boys collaborator Stephen Kalinich. It’s on my MySpace right now. I’m also doing a project with Nick Littlemore, out of Australian electro band Pnau. Of course, I’m still writing and recording and making plans for myself!

Brighton beach

Pet Sounds

Comedy

California

Rhapsody In Blue

Sunshine

Fruit

Outer space

1960s

Super Furry Animals live

Paul Steel’s web site | Paul Steel’s MySpace page