Spectrum Savers…
Enigmatic Anglo/American noise merchants Colourmusic unleash their unique dance/rock hybrid with their debut LP Warp-ed. BRAD BARRETT talks to the band about coming from a “wasteland” and how the UK is “the musical capital of the world”.
duo Boards of Canada, Warp provide a home for some of the world’s most interesting and cutting edge electronic artists. Fitting, then that the fuzzy etchings of BoC and other Warp luminaries lurk within Colourmusic’s textural noise. The patchwork of tones, semitones and microtones all vying for your ears makes Colourmusic recall an ancient monastery chant ready to sublimate the masses. “It sounds like an organism,” says bassist Colin Fleishacker when asked to
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describe the shifting soundscapes and fluid beats undulating through Colourmusic’s debut LP. “It sounds like its living and breathing and that’s what we wanted to try and do with this record, make music that sounded alive.” Colourmusic drew their name from 17th Century polymath Isaac Newton’s theory of Color and Sound and claim to focus their musical styles on colour, with a different colour representing each song. Two EPs called Red and Yellow, both reflect this unusual approach whereby oblique opaque polygons with undefined edges blur and swirl like the fringes of an acid tab. Ryan pipes up. “The weird thing to me about (their song) Beard is that I would hear that song in my head and because it kept coming back to me I knew we had to do this song. And once everyone understood it, we were like ‘that’s the beast’: The beast that started the Pink record. We could talk about our musical influences, but that song was our central musical influence.” Most would say the moment you realise you’ve influenced yourself, that’s when the best work flows. Colourmusic’s debut is a defining work. The ideas, concept and arrangements were already in place by the time the band had become the fearsome live entity it is today, so its intriguing that the music is still evolving, alive and dangerous. My _____ Is Pink takes the idea of entwining colour and music to an aural conclusion. Though Ryan admits that before Colin and Nicholas Ley arrived Colourmusic really wasn’t anything other than a theory and some sounds…
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olourmusic founding members Ryan Hendrix and British born ex-pat Nick Turner share a mutual fascination with the eclectic output of British independent label Warp Records. Home to the likes of Aphex Twin, Autechre, Brian Eno, comedian/musician Chris Morris, Squarepusher, Flying Lotus, and Scottish ambient
“These guys have amazing chemistry. They’ve been playing in bands their
entire lives. We were really lucky to have met them and start working with them because it brought a level of musicality to the band that Nick and I didn’t have. Nick and I were lo-fi heads or whatever, but I didn’t want to be a lo-fi band.” Colin takes up the mantle. “It just felt really special. It can be hard to explain to people who are not musicians but a musician spends their whole life trying to find other musicians who think about music the same way and we totally found it here.” Even the presentation of Colourmusic has evolved consistently since its inception. The band offers themselves to audiences differently as they evolve. Their earliest gigs were brimming with visual and performance art but the band eventually tired of the theatrical elements when they began to get in the way of the music. “That’s what I dislike about the mega stars these days,” Colin says, “It’s
all Broadway. In this song, this thing happens et cetera. Our songs are all about the moment but doing the
theatre...it just wasn’t real. So live we’re trying to create a real experience as much as possible, us connecting with the songs.” A group coming from a cultural “wasteland” such as Oklahoma – a place that despite the band’s negativity towards it has still given us the similarly lysergic Flaming Lips – usually has no choice but to fall in with the rest of the Christian rock, country and hyper-polished pop that dominates the state. Hence the band’s dreaming of England… “We talk to our mothers about what we should be doing with our music and they think we should be on American Idol or something,” says Ryan. “That’s the track record of Oklahoma. England has always been more well rounded and you’ve created so much great art here and it’s an honour to be here and it’s great that people in the UK like what we do.” The English love of eccentricity is well in tune with this frankly acidic blast of imbalanced noise and 60s pop. It could be the start of something truly beautiful. Whatever colours are in the spectrum, Colourmusic have a uniting charm. PM
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