Issue 18a / 17 May 2024
In part one of this week's blast of DIY electronic goodness... Album Of The Week: Ex-Easter Island Head's 'Norther' + interview with Benjamin D Duvall
The weather is a funny old business. We seem to talk about it all the time, I know I’ve mentioned it more than once in these intros. Our Album Of The Week this week is inspired by the weather and even has the weather appearing on it as a performer. I had a great chat with Ex-Easter Island Head’s Benjamin D Duvall about it all, you can read about it below.
Other than to say it’s a lovely sunny day where I am, there’s not much else to report this week. I should be able to start talking about the new issue of Moonbuilding fairly soon. People are often surprise to learn that the Melody Maker and NME offices were a floor apart in King’s Reach Tower. It was an unspoken rule that you didn’t discuss work outside of the office. It’s something that’s always stuck with me, it’s kind of like a superstition now I guess. Don’t talk about what you’re doing until you’ve done it. So I won’t. There is a new issue on the way though.
If you’re enjoying all this, please don’t forget to recommend us to a friend. There is a handy link below for sharing, the one that says “Share Moonbuilding Weekly”. The more the merrier. Righto, that’s me. See you back here at 3.30pm for more fun and games in Part 2.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
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EX-EASTER ISLAND HEAD ‘Norther’ (Rocket Recordings)
The weather is a very British concern and we get lots of it. Barely a day goes by when you don’t hear mentioned of it in some shape or other. So much so it’s entered our lexicon – feeling under the weather or being right as rain, chasing rainbows, the calm before the storm, breaking the ice or a moment in the sun are all common expressions. On their weather-inspired album ‘Norther’, Ex-Easter Island Head are turning idioms on their head. When they talk about throwing caution to the wind, they do mean the actual wind.
Quick catch up? Sure thing. Ex-Easter Island Head are a Liverpool-based experimental ensemble whose thing is composing and performing with prepared electric guitars. Those preparations include metal rods underneath the guitar strings, varying degrees of dampers, alternate tunings, playing strings with percussion mallets (indeed, they have three volumes called ‘Mallet Guitars’), ”bowing” the strings to create drones, multiple guitars… 2020’s ‘Large Electric Ensemble’ features 12 prepared guitars. In other words, there is a lot of guitars.
Hm. Guitars. There is a but. “The less it sounds like it could have come from a guitar,” the band’s Benjamin D Duvall says, “the more interested we tend to be.” And the more interested we’ll definitely be. What’s more, the collective are also branching out. There’s been quite a break since their last album in 2016, but in that time the band decided it was time to build something new. The result of that is ‘Norther’, their best album yet.
The eye-catching story surrounding this album is how they took to the roof of the 19th century Bidston Observatory on the Wirral to plant a homemade aeolian harp in order that the actual wind can appear on the record. The observatory itself is interesting – built in the late 1800s, it’s an “artistic research centre” these days, a workspace where individuals or groups can go to develop their practices and projects. Which is how EEIH came to be strapping an aeolian harp to the roof.
A norther is a strong, cold wind that blows down from, well, the north. As it happens, their aeolian harp was played by one and of course appears on the album’s title track. What does a norther sound like? Remarkably like a guitar feeding back apparently, which is ironic when you consider their guitars don’t even sound like guitars.
The press material talks about how EEIH have operated as a everything from a deconstructed rock band, ambient chamber ensemble and minimalist compositional workshop, on ‘Norther’ we get all three both barrels. It is, as their people say, a record that is “singular and coherent with a deeply emotional core”.
The opening track, ‘Weather’, sounds like, well, the weather. It starts with string raindrops and builds, Sound upon sound, layer upon layer, from a shower to a downpour to a storm as a satisfyingly deep bass rumble appears. Each of the six tracks here are created from a different creative process. ‘Weather’ sees whirring motors employed to flit across guitar strings making the bright raindrop-like sounds.
Of the inspiration, Benjamin says the weather is hard to ignore. “The way that our whole mode of thinking and acting changes along with the conditions… it’s hard not to take notice of it.” And so the album shifts like the weather. From the opening raindrops we move to the title track, which is such a banger it could slay dancefloors. It also features the ghostly howl of the aeolian harp being played by that norther. You’ve got to admire that kind of innovative thinking haven’t you?
Elsewhere, the bright resonant chimes of ‘Magnetic Language’ give way to insistent hypnotic vocal harmonies that sound like they’ve been cut up. The band’s voices were played back through their phones and amplified with guitar pick-ups for that strange effect. The whole thing feels so uplifting, in the same way the collected voices of choir just gets you. The closer ‘Lodestone’ is the total opposite, it feels dark and ominous, like storm clouds rolling in. The bright string stabs and bass frowns almost cooking up a thunderstorm between them. Then a spot, and another. The rain is coming.
I might be taking it all too literally, but tell me an album is about the weather and then give me music like this and it’s all too easy to draw the lines. So while a norther might well be a cold, inhospitable wind, this ‘Norther’ is nothing of the kind. The music of Ex-Easter Island Head feels so warm, so resonant and so accomplished. This new phase has started in dazzling fashion. It’s going to be great see and hear what’s next from this brilliantly inventive quartet.
‘Norther’ is out now on Rocket Recordings
EX-EASTER ISLAND HEAD
Benjamin D Duvall (second right) from the innovative Liverpool-based four-piece talks about the weather, the wind recording a track for their new album and spooky goings-on in an old observatory
Photo: Simon Gabriel
Interview: Neil Mason
Hello Benjamin, how’s things? What are you up to today?
“Hello! I am plugging everything in for rehearsal tomorrow and trying to sort out some more UK dates for later in the year. That and working a day job.”
‘Norther’ is your first long-player since 2016. That’s a wait. What kept you?
“Writing new music is always a very slow, considered business for us. When we finished touring our last record we decided to break down our whole set-up, tunings, roles in the group and build something new. It takes a while to do that.”
Your people say the album was “years in the making”. It didn’t take eight years to make did it? It’s six tracks, that’d be less than a track a year!
“The pieces on the new record evolved through lots of different experiences and projects we were involved in after our last release – some of the ideas have been like hibernating animals, occasionally getting up to have a poke around before bedding down again until conditions are right.”
You’ve not exactly been twiddling thumbs in that time have you?
“Despite three-quarters of us living together, 2020-21 was a bit of a write off due to the pandemic. We had no idea when live music would be happening again so we just sort of stopped thinking about it for awhile. Other than that it’s been a really creative time with a lot of activity behind closed doors or as one-off performances – education projects with primary and secondary school kids, making two EPs of library music, large ensemble projects in the UK and Denmark, working with dancers and choreographers… on top of that we put out a collaborative album with Laura Cannell and Charles Hayward as Whistling Arrow in 2019 and worked with musicians from the BBC Philharmonic. We’ve also been pursuing other projects – solo stuff, Land Trance and The Aleph to name a few.”
How do you think Ex-Easter Island Head have changed between 2016 and 2024?
“Quite significantly! Firstly, we’ve moved from being a trio to a quartet with the addition of Andrew PM Hunt. Secondly, we’ve added new instruments – bits of percussion, a sampler, a taishokoto – and made some pretty definitive alterations to others, like pulling all the frets off our guitars to better facilitate extended techniques. Thirdly, we’ve surrendered some of the creative decisions to chance or aleatoric methods – we choose the notes the strings are tuned to, but the motor bouncing off those strings chooses the order they’re to be played in, would be one example.”
You also have a new home in Rocket Recordings. Daft question, why Rocket?
“Johnny and Chris at Rocket were enthused enough by the Land Trance record Andrew and myself made in 2020 to want to put it out on vinyl and did an excellent job while being really easy to deal with. Our friends in GNOD and Bonnacons Of Doom have nothing but good things to say about working with the label and their integrity, aesthetic and roster really appealed to us. We’re adjacent to many of their acts while also not being too much like any of them really, which is always something to be valued in a label’s catalogue I reckon.”
It says here your studio is in the former Brazilian consulate in Liverpool. That sounds interesting, tell me more!
“The studio is run by our newest member Andrew PM Hunt and by engineer and producer Dave Berger. It’s Andy’s main base of operations for working with other people, but mainly for creating excellent and unclassifiable music under his Dialect alias, do check out the albums he’s put out on RVNG International. It’s a small but beautiful space to work in and sits in the basement of a big shared house – there’s 15 of us living there in all. In the mid-1930s the building functioned as the Brazilian Consulate. One of our housemates just dug out a photo of the physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford stood on the front step in 1932… who knows what else has gone on here.”
Right, let’s talk about the new album… the overall theme is weather – that’s a very British pursuit isn’t it?
“An inescapable national pastime.”
Why do you think Brits are so obsessed with the weather?
“Possibly due to the seemingly endless variety of conditions operating seemingly at random – in the course of this interview it’s gone from torrential rain to blazing sunshine to being so overcast it looks like late evening. It’s constantly reframing the built environment and day-to-day experience – it’s hard not to take notice of it.”
What is it about the weather that captures your imagination?
“The endless variety and the way that our whole mode of thinking and acting changes along with the conditions.”
You’re very into process aren’t you? Here you’ve got vocals played through mobile phones and amplified with guitar pick-ups, brass rods sliding under guitar strings to create harmonics… what’s the appeal?
“Process dictates everything we do, more or less. The different techniques we use are in pursuit of unique sounds or of approaches to putting these sounds together. The sounds suggest how we should use them so we follow their lead. The less it sounds like it could have come from a guitar, the more interested we tend to be. There’s also something in there about dialogues between technologies that we’re becoming conscious of as a theme in our work. The human voice, which is ‘no tech’, broadcast through something very ‘high tech’ in the phone, received by something ‘low tech’ in the form of the guitar pick-up… there’s something in there worth exploring, even if we haven’t quite figured out what that thing is yet!”
It’s music made with guitars rather than guitar music?
“The guitar is a sound generator for us. We’re interested in the sweet spot of musical possibility that exists between constraint, invention and chance.”
For the title track you erected a “ramshackle aeolian harp”. That sounds good… erm, what is an aeolian harp and what was so ramshackle about it?
“An aeolian harp is a harp played by the wind. In this case, a length of bamboo, shelving brackets, a tin can as a resonator and some fishing line to serve as the string. When the wind excites the string, it generates harmonics, which constantly slide and change in accordance with the strength and direction of the wind.”
You built it “on the roof of a former meteorological observatory on The Wirral”. I guess that precise roof was just the right place for it?
“If you’re working with the wind you need to increase the chances of it being able to blow uninterrupted. Close to the ground is no good because you get drag, whereas high up on a hill is pretty perfect, which is no doubt why the observatory was situated there in the first place. Also it’s an incredibly vibey place with amazing views so any excuse to do some work up there is always welcome.”
It’s Bidston Observatory, which is a not-for-profit research centre for artists these days. It’s a fabulous old place, built in 1866. If the walls could talk eh?
“Two weird occurrences that stuck with us: Working on the roof of the observatory in winter, a four-engine drone appeared and hovered over us. No one else around, the building surrounded by denuded woods… it was very unsettling to be actively scrutinised by an unseen watcher in an isolated place. At 3am or so, us and one other person in the building, all of us sleeping on the ground floor. I awoke to what sounded like several wardrobes being dragged around the upper floors. Going to investigate, the sounds stopped. No idea what was going on there, no one could offer an explanation or find the source.”
What did you discover from your recording with the aeolian harp?
“That the harmonics generated from a piece of wind-blown fishing line sound uncannily close to electric guitar feedback.”
A norther is a cold wind that blows down from, well, the north. It sounds bleak, but your music is far from cold isn’t it?
“That’s true. The sonic vocabulary we’ve built our music from is full of sounds that could be described as glowing, crystalline, warm, there’s a lot of light and heat in there. In contrast, the environment we create the work in – the coast of north west England – can be pretty windswept, cold and gloomy. Maybe we’re trying to warm up?”
The title track is a belter, almost a floorfiller. Are you fans of the repetitive beat?
“Thank you! If we’re able to feel hypnotised we generally feel like we’re on the right path with the music. Sometimes you want that from something weightless and suspended, sometimes you want to achieve that through forward momentum and movement. We knew we wanted to explore a simple contrast, a piece with no rhythmic elements being followed by a piece that is nearly all rhythmic elements. We’re very careful about how and when to deploy the kick drum or any of the bits of the drum kit. A lot of the textures we use on the guitars get swallowed up if the drums are too insistent so we have to consider that and make a virtue of being sparing.”
It’s kind of ripe for a remix, who’s your dream remixer?
“James Holden would be a great fit – he’s something of a kindred spirit. It’d be nice to do a remix by just letting other musicians play on a bit of our set-up so they’d be constrained to using the same tools we used to make a piece off the record, but would be bringing their own thing to it. They’d be forced to ditch most of what they normally bring to an instrument and I think that would yield some fascinating results.”
‘Easter’ sounds beautifully like the rain. Talk me through that?
“It’s a first for us, that piece. It uses no electrically amplified instruments at all, purely acoustic sound sources. In this case two sets of tuned cowbells played with soft beaters, roto toms and some bamboo sticks for time keeping. It’s a six-beat bell pattern pushed and pulled through on the spot improvisation – it never plays the same twice. There’s something very watery in those fast metallic sounds and the soft beaters seem to make it more liquid.”
Do you have a favourite track on the album?
“I think each of them has been my favourite at some point. Right now it’s probably ‘Lodestone’, the final track because it’s got so much space in it. When we play that live, sometimes it gets so quiet in the empty spaces between the musical sounds that you can hear stuff from a couple of blocks away, or the quiet hum of the fridge behind the bar. At other points my favourite has been ‘Weather’, the first track on the record. One of the underlying ‘rules’ of that piece is of sounds getting more and more resonant in tiny increments, so the guitars start off with paper threaded between the strings and foam dampers and piece by piece these are patiently removed and the sound begins to brightly bloom. The incremental journey to that point puts the ear in microscope mode – or more accurately stethoscope mode – perceiving tiny details and changes. I love using that as a way to invite acclimatise the audience to our sound world.”
So how is the weather with you today?
“Unruly!”
For more Ex-Easter Island Head, visit exeasterislandhead.bandcamp.com
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The current issue of MOONBUILDING is full to the gills with the good stuff. On the cover, star-in-the-making Maria Uzor, we profile label-of-the-moment quiet details, there’s an incredible interview with Captain Star creator Steven Appleby, and Ghost Box’s Jim Jupp gets busy with our There’s A First Time For Everything questions.
We review a big pile of releases from labels including Castles In Space, Woodford Halse, Persistence Of Sound, Assai, Ahora, DiN, Werra Foxma, Ghost Box and many more. There’s a column from The Orb’s Alex Paterson and the world-famous Captain Star cartoon strip.
This issue’s CD is ‘The Moonbuilding Miscellany – Volume One’, which is put together by CiS supremo Colin Morrison. It’s a belter featuring tracks from the likes of Lo Five, Lone Bison, Twilight Sequence, Ojn, NCHX and more.
Moonbuilding Weekly is a Castles In Space publication.
Copyright © 2024 Moonbuilding
Cracking piece this, been following these for a few years now, never disappointed. Also Bidston Hill and the observatory are literally round the corner from where I live, and can confirm the vibey nature of the place, the hill itself has a rich history of folklore and high weirdness!