In case you've been on an adjoining planet recently, you can't fail to have noticed that the Red Bull Music Academy 2010 has STARTED in London and to keep you up to date with all that's happening, those nice folk at RBMA are producing a daily news bulletin called the Daily Note.
Here's a taster of the kind of thing you can expect from The Daily Note, starting with this interview with London's own Hot Chip...
Hot Chip are a textbook melting pot of cross-cultural ideas. In their music, you hear the street sounds of Brixton filtered through the quaking speakers of Fabric, via the six-string rattle-through-the-corridors of the sadly departed Astoria in full swing. Progressive and metropolitan, they’re a five-a-side team revelling in the endless possibilities of our sprawling 24-hour city.
Their new album, One Life Stand, has already been hailed as a classic (variously described “an early marker for the best album of the 2010” and “extraordinarily lovely”). As the queue begins to shuffle into the shop, Hot Chip – that’s Joe Goddard, Alexis Taylor, Al Doyle, Felix Martin and Owen Clarke – are sitting in a nearby pub cradling beers while telling The Note about love, life, London and Wiley’s all-star phone book.
The Note: For a band who are often labelled “intelligent”, this record seems to be coming entirely from the heart.
Felix Martin: It’s the heart filtered through the head via the balls.
The Note: Excellent. Was that intentional? The openness of it, not the balls.
Joe Goddard: There was some intention to be more open, because we’ve been labelled as clever-clever previously. I think there was a vague feeling that we shouldn’t let anyone misunderstand us with this record.
The Note: It reminded me of a lot of early house records, both sonically and lyrically, in the way those records quite often have very pure, uplifting lyrics. It’s like dance music has become darker and the euphoria has been replaced.
Joe: I think that’s a good point. I had it in mind that I wanted to replicate the feeling that you get from those records, and the feeling you get during a DJ set, where it’s serious, dark and moody, then you see just a crack of light at the end of it. I love the point where a DJ set relaxes and it all gets very loving, where the DJ tries to bring the crowd back together.
The Note: That seems like a very pure form of pop. In the same way that groups such as Pet Shop Boys just sound like themselves, One Life Stand just sounds like Hot Chip.
Alexis Taylor: We spent longer working on One Life Stand than any other album we’ve made. We kept listening back to what we were working on in order to give it more time to breathe. Obviously we still listened to music other than our own and DJed a lot, but it felt very different from everything else we’d done. All of last year was dedicated to this record. We spent so long listening to ourselves, living with the songs, rather than moving on quickly. It was a self-contained year, the most focused we’ve ever been as a band. We usually had intensive bursts of working on songs over quite short periods of time. We’d often end up mixing tracks while doing other things, like going on tour. We’ve never really had the luxury of time when recording before, but that’s often been our own decision.
The Note: There was a lot of extracurricular work going on over that period, including solo records (Alexis’ Rubbed Out and Joe’s Harvest Festival), doing productions or remixes, touring with LCD Soundsystem, and DJing. Do those external influences feed into the band?
Alexis: Knowing we were going to make a concise ten-track album meant we could all do those side projects more freely. I’d find myself working on certain songs that might well have made it on to previous Hot Chip records, but were never contenders for this one. This time around there was a focus on the succinct pop songs, getting it as tight as possible, to avoid it seeming like there were a load of very disparate sources firing. So the other ideas naturally ended up being explored outside the band.
Joe: It’s nice when you don’t have the burning desire to squeeze a random idea into the Hot Chip record just because you can – you can do that somewhere else if you want. It meant the Hot Chip record could be something very special. I really appreciated that. I enjoy making music on my own but it’s a lot of work making all those decisions yourself. Coming back to Hot Chip felt like such a pleasure.
The Note: In the last couple of years you’ve collaborated with an incredibly diverse array of artists – Wiley, Peter Gabriel, Robert Wyatt, to name just a few. How did they come about?
Alexis: All those names happened to be in Wiley’s phonebook.
The Note: Wait, Wiley knows Peter Gabriel? Brilliant. What did those collaborations teach you?
Joe: Wiley taught us the best part of the song to do the “olly olly olly”s in. We had one rehearsal with him prior to playing at Glastonbury in 2008 and we were trying to work out how the song [Hot Chip’s remix of Wiley’s Wearing My Rolex] would work live. He kept saying things like, “Short chorus here, then I’ll do the ollys”, which confused the hell out of us. He kept referring to the ollys as if they were the song’s big moment.
Al Doyle: And it turned out they were a pretty big moment! You’ve got 40,000 people going “Oi oi oi!” back at you while the sun’s setting in front of the Other Stage. It’s definitely a moment to remember.
Read the rest of the Hot Chip interview at the Red Bull Music Academy site. Even if you're not in London, there’s lots of ways to keep up with the Red Bull Music Academy: you can download the Daily Note, tune in to Red Bull Music Academy Radio or follow the Academy blog, the Twitter feed or connect via Facebook.
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