ADD (N) TO X : naturals sons

For synthesizers lovers, and for music lovers in general . Meeting with Steve Clayton.

A : There are differences, yes : I think there is a lot more structures, more kind of surgically making off : I don’t think there was something we prescribed before, that fact that the album would more song based, there was certainly no plan or kind of pattern we were gonna follow, it just became like that. I think that we reached a stage where just naturally within the kind of experimentation, within music where you just start to drift to other aspects and I think when we started, I don’t think any of us were really musicians, so when we started we were just sort of experimenting with noise and gradually, parts of that kind of musical structural environment became more appealing, more interesting, and for us it’s more experimental, really, to kind of try to get a sound and put some kind of structure on it, so you’d been just as uncompromizing with the sound itself and structuring it in a way that’s more concise, a direct delivery, a vehicle for the noise itself.

-‘Loud like nature’ has been recorded, and composed in different places, each one of you staying where he lives : how did it work ?

A : We’re all living in different places, geographically kind of separate, so what happened was we wondered how we were gonna do this. On the previous album, there were a couple of tracks we’ve done separately and it seemed to work out alright so we said alright, because we were in separate areas, let’s make an Add n to X album in the way we’ve always made, which is like three very different ideas crashing into each other, it’s like a particle accelerator or a collision on the road, all of these things that shouldn’t work and you have to find a way for it to work together, and that was always a challenge or else it wouldn’t have been interesting to us. We certainly made this album with that in mind, if we had all been doing solo projects, we would have done something really different, because it’s a sort of fourth member of the band, I suppose you have this kind of jurisdiction over the whole project, you know you gotta be faithful to the process, to the spirit of the enterprise, and that’s what is important, so you’re always working with that in mind, you got to do the best of yourself, you got to challenge yourself, you got to try to beat the others without any competitive element, as well you got to make sure that what you do is good enough for the whole project. We’re always working on the same stuff, so when we come together, there’s some tracks where you can’t distinguish who made what, but there’s definitely a crossover in it, that’s surprising and not surprising at the same, because we all knew where we got to move or something.

-What if one or two of you didn’t like the parts composed by the others ? you’d have to do it again and again...

A : No, because if that didn’t work, if that happen, then we wouldn’t release it. That was part of the experiment, and that makes it more edgy and interesting for us, and I think there’s only one track on the album that I’ve got problems with, but over time I kind of reversed my way of thinking about it, and now in certain circumstances I really like it. It’s the track called ‘Pink light’ I had problems with : it’s funny, because when we get interviewed by girls, they love it and interviewed by guys, they hate it, it’s really weird ! But I’m still ambiguous about it : I’m not sure whether it’s genius or just mingling, but it’s certainly a very peculiar thing, that’s why I could never say that’s not good. Obviously, we’ve done about eight or nine tracks each so we had to get rid of a few, some didn’t work, some became B sides, it’s a shame because you wanna play everything on, especially now that Ann’s kind of gone crazy and disappeared, so it would have been nice to put everything we’ve done and liked.

-And maybe a double Lp would be good for that ?

A : Yes, but in a way, then it loses its impact ; it’s got a lot of stuff on it, and I think it hangs together pretty well as a record.

-Do you intend to work like that for the next recording ?

A : No, I don’t think we will, I think we’ll do a live LP next. I think that’s what we’ll try to do, we'll learn the tracks, and then maybe we’re gonna do it on an eight tracks or something, very low tech and maybe we’ll rearrange it later on a computer, it depends. The way we would like to record it is live, what we did more or less on this one. We always work like that, we very rarely use MIDI because there’s a lot of limitations in conjunction with analog synthesizers, they’re not MIDI. I love the tools that modern musicians were unable to harness, and it’s good in a way, because otherwise you have too much control and I think that just limits what happens within the song making process.

It’s too easy in a way to use the sounds that are there for you because it’s maybe a hundred different sounds but they have been programmed by someone else ; on an analog synthesizer, you create the sound as you go, you’re inventing it, no one as ever heard it before, there are too many different parameters for you to ever really recreate exactly what's been done before. Even if you’ve written down all the sounds, it’s never quite the same, that’s a problem, but it’s also what is so beautiful about those machines.

-Do you have distinctive roles in the band ? Who plays and compose what ?

A : No, we don’t work like that, except on two tracks, so I just completely contradicted myself : I worked on two of Ann’s tracks : I wrote the vocals for ‘Large number’, wrote the lyrics and vocals, and then I sort of helped Ann to produce ‘Electric village’, there was an interaction on that and she worked in a lot of places, I worked in eight different studios, she worked in three or four, and Barry worked in three as well, I went over to New York. It was very interesting, and yet everything is quite homogenous. The thing about Add n to X is I think the previous albums sound perhaps a little more schizophrenic, despite the circumstances in which they were made, which was us all together, because each track develops itself, some people have kind of concept albums and, as far as I’m concerned, people only make concept albums when they run out of ideas and have to come up with an album for the record company, but for us each track develops its own narrative, its own landscape, its own environment, so it was never surprising to any of us that we might do an album where each track sounded different because the track dictates what you do with it. You can’t put your mark on something as volatile as an analog synthesizer, they’re prone to making mistakes and usually that’s a catalyst for the musical process.

-Do you have distinctive roles in the band ? Does everybody play several instruments, or... ?

A : We’ve always said no to that because we all just play synthesizers and sometimes we’re using a little bit of vocals and stuff, sometimes I’ve done it, sometimes Ann has done it, but I think now it would be less about what instruments you play but more about your approach to making music : Ann is very automatic, she comes into an environment, she doesn’t do any preparation at all, she doesn’t try to learn how to play parts, she just comes into the studio, does something that is fantastic in one take, then it takes a while for her to relearn what she’s done, because she’s very automatic, she’s very kind of explosive. I suppose I'm quite interested in some melody and maybe I have a more song-based approach to creating a tune and Barry has this facility to collage sound in a way, to take parts, almost like a junk shop, taking things from a junk shop and putting them together to create a new environment. So I think we have three distinctive roles, but I think there’s a lot of crossover within, and essentially, we just all find a great delight in playing analog synthesizers.

-Is this trio formula the best for Add n to X ? Do you extend it live ?

A : Yes, we did it on this tour, because Ann is not here, she’s mentally unwell, she just can’t face any of this at the moment. It remains to be seen whether she can handle it anymore after six years, it’s kind of madness and drinking and lunacy, it reached a kind of logical and illogical conclusion. She’s not here, but we have some other guys with us. The live experience is very different from the studio experience anyway, this is all time live direct with the audience, and the studio is a much more passive environment.

-A big surprise has been the presence of Kim Fowley : what do you like in his work ?

A : He’s a maverick, so was Bob Moog and all the people who invented early synthesizers. They were individuals who had a kind of vision but they didn’t quite know how to kind of establish it, and he was outside of a kind of a larger mechanism. Kim Fowley, by whatever process, always works slightly outside of the mainstream music mechanism. On the same idea, he invented analog synthesizers and so we’ve always been attracted by these peripheral characters, I think perhaps we consider ourselves like that, because we don’t really think about ourselves as accomplished musicians. We don't really understand what it is to be part of the scene, I don’t understand electro clash, I don’t understand any particular genre, we don’t feel like we could be part of any group or movement because that would mean you have to recognize what you do and we don’t recognize what we do as being anything, each song, like I said earlier, has its own life. It’s a way of mirror of our environment and we try to use these machines to our best ability to interpret that, digest our environment and then manifest it, and so you take it or leave it. The rest of the job is done when you listen to it, that’s when the job is complete. We can’t complete a song and say that it’s brilliant, we like it, we’re gonna put it out. You just leave it and say "I don’t know, you tell me". You can tell maybe I prefer this one to that one, but you don't know why and that’s when it goes out into the world. Then, it becomes someone else's job to tell us that.

-Wouldn’t you have enjoyed Kim Fowley to produce your album ?

A : We’re gonna to the States in a couple of weeks, and I think we’ll see him, but he’s a very unhinged man and I think it might just be too problematic. But maybe, I don’t know. For the production of this lp, it’s done now, but anyway, we don’t want to work like that, we want to produce our own tracks, that’s how we work, we just take elements of things with a few different people working on it.

-Tell us about the other guests : Richard Hawley, from Pulp...

A : Well, Richard was in the studio at the time and had a chorus, and I switched it when he played a bit of guitar, he doesn’t even remember it : he rung us and said : ‘Did I play on an Add n to X record ?’. I just sent him a copy ! So that’s how that worked ! But then we’ve got Alison Goldfrapp and Rowan Oliver from Goldfrapp who did a lot of the percussions on the tracks I worked on and Barry worked with Kim Fowley and Ann worked with me. She worked with two other people, who really fucked her up, really abused her and I think that led to her breaking down, I think. She worked with these people who then claimed fifty per cent of everything she had written, when in actual fact they’ve just been engineers. It was a bad situation and it should have been managed better, but here we’re going.

-What were your biggest influences when you started ?

A : I don’t know, we’ve listened to all kinds of many things, and as we are often asked about our musical influences, I think probably the best thing is to go is far back as our childhood, as both Barry and I listened to our dad’s records, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and stuff like that, that's what I liked, the Beatles as well, but I never really liked the Beatles. And bagpipes music, I really love bagpipe music ; I love the smell of petrol ; I loved all these things and all seems pertinent now when I think about how I’m writing : that stuff seems to be more in tune with it than me saying I really like Scott Walker, although maybe there are influences of that, and some garage music like the MC5, but also ragga and bits of hip hop, anything usually due to poverty, people creating something within parameters and I think if you work within restrictions, that’s when you could be the most creative : usually, the bigger the budget somebody gets, the worst and more kind of defused is the product, that goes for films directors Peter Greenaway for instance, or Wim Wenders : the bigger the budget was for a movie, it just becomes more dissipated and I think that when you look at the ragga or the hip hop, it came out of that environment.

-And Frank Zappa ?

A : I don’t really know any of the Frank Zappa stuff. I’ve never been a big fan of that, although everyone tells us that we were obviously influenced by them and by Wire and stuff like that, but I’ve never even heard a Wire record : so, I’m gonna got out and get some ! We are more influenced by individuals like Jacques Brel, for instance, I think he’s amazing, and Kurt Weill, all that kind of stuff. On the B-side of the single, I used a German dadaist piece of poetry recorded in 1928. For us, it's all about the present, there's nothing retro about using that. We're always pointed out like "retro futurists", whatever that means. We are very pragmatic, very much about the present, we operate within a present and concrete environment, we’re realists, and it always seems strange when people say that we try to create this crazy, fantastical world. We wanna create a psycho geography, we wanna escape in music, and I suppose that has something maybe in common with the situationists.

-And what do you think of a band like Suicide ?

-A : I love Suicide, they are great, but until I was in Add n to X, I had only heard about them. I think that all of that new wave stuff, post punk or happening around the time of punk, Pere Ubu and stuff like that, which I've only just come around to listening to now, maybe Wire and stuff like that, that was a really interesting time, and a lot of that stuff has been overlooked, as Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing gristle and Suicide, that whole scene is I suppose more akin to us, and had we been around then, maybe there would have been some kind of association, but we were influenced by hip hop as well, as we are by Suicide, so you can’t make a direct connection, there’s all these musical family trees and lineages, but it’s too disparate for that.

-If ADD N to X were a movie, what would it be ?

A : Oh, there’s a film called ‘The bedsitting room’, made in the sixties in Britain and, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of ‘The Goons’ by Spike Mulligan, these comedians who came out after the war in Britain and I suppose they were our version of surrealism but they were also comedians and I suppose after them came the Monty Pythons and stuff like that. There was a collection of very disillusioned writers, actors and musicians who after the war got together and formed this kind of, I suppose they just became comedians, but they also made a lot of films and one of them is ‘The bedsitting room’ and it’s a weird dystopian view of the future but it’s also rooted in the present, and it’s very old fashion in the same time, it kind of mixes everything, sort of political comment on Britain at the time, and I think that film, in its ludicrousness, has humour of violence and a very serious note to it as well, I thinks what we can hope to do is incorporate all of those things. That film yes, but it certainly wouldn’t be ‘Star Wars’ !

-And so, would you like to compose a score ?

A : Yes, and in fact we had our music used, Wendy Carlos used one of our tracks for a film she was putting together soundtracks for. We did a couple of soundscapes for her adverts and stuff that weren't used. It would be better to do a film, and then do the soundtrack.

-Do you intend to put out a DVD for your songs, and would it be a good extension of it ?

A : I f you get the single, they’ve got the video on it, but we’re talking at the moment with a guy in France about putting together a film, a guy from Crash magazine. It is important to us, the artwork and the videos are the same thing as music, we can’t separate one from the other...

-Like the same universe ?

A : Yes, that’s why we did this one (for ‘Take me to the leader’), with the video, the press shots, the artwork, etc., all in one place.

-Are you big Internet users ?

A : Well, we’ve only just joined the twenty-first century, we’ve only got computers in the last year, but we’re very keen on our website, we completed the new site last week. It’s too bad that you can’t see the previous one anymore. I’m becoming more and more of a user, but I don’t want that to describe my world, I’m quite reluctant to totally go down that road and I don’t think I could. We're all much too fascinated with the physical, so the virtual is something that is a great tool, but I know people who do everything on their laptop : they go shopping, they make their music, they check how many sales they’ve made, they download instruments, they don’t need to go anywhere. Although I’m quite envious because I’m not very able to use it yet, I find it a little scary to rely on something so much. I like to go and live in the woods for a day, that’s exactly what Ann is doing at the moment : she’s gone totally into nature, she kills pigeons and eats them. She’s gone mad !

(Interview made in Paris, October 25th 2002 by Jean Paul Coillard)