GIVING THE CONCEPT DEPTH - EXPERIMENTAL SOUND
- Katie King
There's a universal hum, there's a universal scream.
I'm definitely stuck thinking about Palm Honey and how they use noise in time, they say they're about repetition but never play anything the same way twice live and they are very much a live band. Their recordings render completely meaningless when you discover them live first as most do in the depths of Purp Turts. Their live sets are short moments of time in the grand scheme of things but pack more energy exchanges than are often experienced by the average person in the entirety of a month. Now they've just disbanded, does that make their music have even less value as they're now irrelevant, or give it more value if small groups of people with significance decide it is?
- Katie King
Well Hot Simian Weather was a track that came entirely out of a jam session, so it very much had a sort of unconscious birth, you could say. Listening back, it’s obviously very much based around repetition; sort of pummelling an idea into the listener’s head without respite. At the time, we were mainly listening to krautrock and electronic music based on a similar principle. I can sort of hear a bit of Talking Heads in there too, though.
It’s all quite stream-of-consciousness, which I suppose is quite an obscure thing in itself.
It’s incredibly boring to play something the same way over and over again, frankly. Too many bands just play the hits and try to replicate the sound of their recordings. But really, recorded music and live music should be treated as entirely different entities. A lot of our newer material is quite loosely structured, so as to allow us more freedom to improvise and develop things off-the-cuff in a live context. We’re very influenced by bands like Can in this regard. Live music should allow for the unplanned and the unexpected. It should never be predictable, for us or for the audience.
- Some thoughts from Joe & co. when I interviewed them back in summer
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