Tigon World

Headphone Commute: Cell interview and review

Headphone Commute has just published my interview with Alex Scheffer, better known as Cell, and review of his album Hanging Masses.

Interview: Cell

Alex Scheffer, aka Cell, has been a member of the Ultimae family since 2001, releasing tracks on many of the label's compilation albums, including the excellent Fahrenheit Project series. We recently  reviewed Hanging Masses, Cell's first full length album for the label and his second overall, not counting a couple of very fine live albums in the last few years. We had the opportunity to ask Alex a few questions about his influences and how he achieves his lush, warm sound.

You say that the album is an homage to Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream and Steve Reich. How have they influenced you?

 

Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, Steve Reich – I also think of David Behrmann, Alvin Lucier, and many more – are really great composers and very important to me. So, yes, you can consider Hanging Masses to be a sort of homage to them. I think they have explored every area of electronic music. Today, we are only repeating their work with faster and more modern tools than they had. I don’t think we’re creating anything new. We’re just the new generation, following our mentors.

 

Interview: B.J. Nilsen

 
Swedish sound artist B.J. Nilsen is one of the shining lights on the Touch roster. His music, heavily  grounded in field recordings, focuses on "the perception of time and space as experienced through sound, often electronically treated," as his bio puts it. Here, B.J. talks about his impressive new album, The Invisible City, his "spiritual" approach to field recordings and how he got into experimental music in the first place.

Headphone Commute: Richard Skelton interview and review

Headphone Commute has just published my interview with the one-of-a-kind Richard Skelton, along with a review of his new album Landings. A short excerpt from the interview follows below.

 "Like many people, I started out with a deep attachment to nature. As a child, I wanted to be an ornithologist or a cartographer. But for some reason studying biological science at school left me completely cold, and I lost interest, and there certainly wasn’t any academic outlet for my obsession with maps. So these things gradually dwindled and soon adulthood came with that way it has of driving a wedge between us and our passions. Modern culture. Television. Careers. The built environment. These things conspire to make us forget..."

Interview with Richard Skelton

Review of Landings

Headphone Commute: Richard Anthony Jay review and interview

Headphone Commute has just published Tigon's interview with Richard Anthony Jay and review of his debut album, This Is What I Live For.

Interview: Richard Anthony Jay

After 20 years in the music industry, working mostly behind the scenes, Richard Anthony Jay recently decided to step forward into the spotlight with his wonderful debut album of warm and stirring neo-classical music, This Is What I Live For. Here, Richard reflects on his ups and downs in the business and what inspired him to finally strike out on his own. He tells us about his love of melody and why he's a "lazy minimalist".

Richard, what took you so long?

Well, that's a long story but I'll give you the short version! I started writing music at the age of 14 and left school at 16 to train as a sound engineer at a local recording studio. After moving to London a few years later, I effectively became freelance, working as an arranger/programmer, for unsigned bands, to earn some money and then concentrating on my own music in my spare time. And there was a lot of spare time in those days. 

I guess that I wanted to be a film composer then, like every other guy who writes instrumental music in his bedroom, and I never at any point thought that I could be an "artist" releasing records under my own name. I guess there were two reasons why: firstly, I was - and indeed still am - very shy so I've never sought attention, but secondly, in those days, early 1990s, there was no obvious market for my music, at least not that I could see. The big chill-out movement hadn't happened and contemporary composers like Philip Glass and Michael Nyman were not big names. So, after a chance meeting with a talented young singer who was looking for a writing partner, I guess it's no surprise that I ended up on a 10-year detour in "pop" music and put my own passion for classical fusion, to one side.

Interview: Susanna and the Magical Orchestra

Susanna Karolina Wallumroed, one-half of the duo Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, talks about her musical inspirations and her weakness for hard rock. (See also a review of their new album, 3.)

Your voice is very much front and center in your music and you're often singing very intimate songs. One would think you would feel a bit exposed.

Well, it's a chosen exposure, of what I want to expose. It is true that my voice is very much at the center in Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, and also my other project Susanna. I like it that way - to build the music around my voice, which is what comes first for me.

Is music primarily an emotional catharsis for you?

I wish to express things through my music and I want the listener to experience something when listening to it. But except for that, it's rather abstract in terms of "what" and "why". But yes, the music has a lot to do with emotions for me.

Interview: Plastik Joy

Fannar Ásgrímsson, one-half of the Icelandic-Italian duo Plastik Joy, talks about their excellent debut album, 3:03, and tells us how the group ended up on n5MD.

The story about how you came to land on n5MD is kind of like an Internet fairytale, isn‘t it?

It definitely was like a fairytale for us because we hadn't even started looking for a label to release our music. We thought that would be the biggest task. But by pure luck we added Mike Cadoo's (n5MD label owner) wife as a friend on Myspace and she happened to check out our profile at the right moment so Mike heard it. He then contacted us and soon thereafter we signed a contract with him. For us, that has been the most amazing thing in the short time that Plastik Joy has been in operation because Mike is really easy going and wants all the best for his artists.

Headphone Commute: Tigon's review of Ryuichi Sakamoto + Alva Noto, with interview

 
My review of utp_, the new album from Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto, has been republished by Headphone Commute, along with our interview with Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto).

Headphone Commute republishes Tigon's review of Rival Consoles, with interview

Headphone Commute has republished my review of IO, Rival Consoles' new album, along with my interview with Ryan Lee West, the man behind Rival Consoles.

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