STACK #148 Feb 2017

MUSIC NEWS

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MAX RICHTER

is another classic American music city. It’s a city that we both love, but at the same time we don’t know a lot of people so we’re on our own. We’re very much living together 24/7, working on songs and then going out for meals together. It’s a bonding experience as much as anything.” The great shift in approach, this time around, was the songwriting. Near To The Wild Heart Of Life presents experiments in studio production, with far more changes in tempo (such as the

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M aster of atmosphere Max Richter is following his acclaimed 2015 album Sleep with Music FromWoolf Works ; these slowly sumptuous pieces come from the scores Richter wrote to accompany Wayne McGregor's Royal Ballet, based on the works of Virginia Woolf. Expect instrumental idiosyncrasy and provocative genius from this three- part release.

JAPANDROIDS INTERVIEW I n choosing where to take themselves to write their brand new record Near To The Wild Heart Of Life , Japandroids’ Brian King and David Prowse decided to follow the thread of experience from their heart-bursting second record, Read the full interview online at stack.net.au Celebration Rock . “We’d finished about half the songs and we just got burnt out, or hit the wall, and got stuck,” explains vocalist/guitarist King of their 2012 album. “We thought it would be good for us to go out of town for a bit. We decided to rent a house far away, [and] we ended up in Nashville. That house became the Japandroids place for about six weeks. It was really good for us, we had a really good time, it really inspired us.” Not surprising it was where the pair wrote perennial banger The House That Heaven Built . “This time we picked New Orleans, which

wonderful, slow build in Midnight To Morning ), yet we still get that tangled background chorus of voices, the parts that encourage any old wet sock to sing along. “In the beginning we really didn’t have conversations about what we wanted to do – it was more about what we didn’t wait to do,” King says. “We made the first two records by a very similar process, with the mentality of making a live record that’s very simple, very raw, very direct. I think with Celebration Rock we felt we had achieved this thing we’d been trying to

Near To

The Wild Heart Of Life by Japandroids is out now via Inertia.

achieve since we started the band, which was to make a really great live-sounding rock and roll record. If you feel like you’ve achieved it, all you can really do is a) have a new goal or b) just continue to do that same thing over and over. This was the big conversation we had in the beginning."

© Yulia Mahr

Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works by Max Richter is out now via Deutsche Grammophon/Universal.

FACTOID: Between the end of their Celebration Rock tour and their mid-2016 announcement of new shows, Japandroids' online presence was non-existent for three years, with many presuming they'd quietly broken up.

FOXYGEN

Indie rock duo Foxygen (Sam France and Jonathan Rado) have just released their fifth album Hang , full of dynamic and dramatic orchestral arrangements, cool keys, peachy horns and cheeky Muppet harmonies. We posed some questions about it all to the pair.

How well acquainted with orchestral instruments were you guys before liaising with Trey Pollard on arrangements? Did you direct him as to which instruments you wanted highlighted on each track? We were decently acquainted with orchestral instruments going into the process, but we had little knowledge of how to stack the instruments and divide melodies between the instruments. We gave Trey and Matt a detailed moment-by-moment breakdown of the record: how we wanted each part to sound, like "This part sounds like a big band jazz, this is Star Wars cantina music." Apparently no computers were used in the making of Hang – why is this important to you, or were you challenging yourselves for fun? We always use analogue tape. Computers are not necessary to our type of music and create more problems than they solve.

In the Follow The Leader clip, where did the guy on the horse come from? It looks like he just happened to be hanging out in the park that day. Yes, correct. It was just a man and a horse, enjoying his day at the park. We "roped" him into being in the video.

Hang by Foxygen is out now via Inertia.

You could think of it that way. The second side of the record definitely operates as one piece. I actually originally envisioned Rise Up as the opener to the record, but it felt best as a closer. The kind of clavichord sound that jumps in amongst your more regular piano, is it a real one? There's a lot of different keyboards on the record – it depends on what song. On Mrs. Adams we used an old RMI electric piano. There's also lots of clavinet that pops out. We made it a thing to not use

any "synths" on this record (but there's one hidden in there somewhere).

How did you get to know the D’Addario boys [The Lemon Twigs]? Did they contribute any ideas or did they solely play in a session capacity? They were our hot session band. We had demoed everything beforehand and they learned the parts. A few parts were developed in the studio; Brian played the virtuosic jazz guitar solo coming out of the first chorus of Avalon . But the structure of the songs was already laid out.

America is one of the most dynamic (style, tempo, vocal variety) tracks on the album – is that why you chose it for the first single? Exactly. We felt it best summed up the themes of the record and what we were going for as a whole. Big tune. Trauma seems a companion track to America , to me, with Rise Up being the kind of hopeful conclusion to the trilogy. Am I making these connections up?

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FEBRUARY 2017

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