Music, Style & Culture

| Print : Web : Radio : Mobile

Exclusive: Listen: The Voluntary Butler Scheme - The Grandad Galaxy

Listen to The Voluntary Butler Scheme's new album, and learn about it from the man himself.

One-man band Rob Jones, aka The Voluntary Butler Scheme, is set to release his second full length album 'The Grandad Galaxy' through Split Records on Monday (18th July).

Before then, however, you can listen to the entire thing exclusively here on DIY! Exciting times.

The record features contributions from Welsh singer-songwriter Sweet Baboo on saxophone, plus Rob’s girlfriend and Mum on sampled vocals for 'Do The Hand Jive.'

You don't need us to tell you that though - Rob's also talked us through the entire record, from start to finish.

1. Hiring A Car
I bought this old Jewellery box thing cause it had this really slow and broken wind up musicbox inside. I recorded some loops of it, pitched it down two octaves and chopped it up - and made this track from it. The same music box is all over the album. It's called Hiring A Car cause I was trying to record the tannoy beep on the Paris underground on my iPhone and my girlfriend speaks over it bout hiring a car - it comes in at the end of the track. It sounds like travel too I think.

2 & 3. Shake Me By The Shoulders / Sky Shed
This track's made up of loops from a mellotron and other little broken up sounds from gramophone bits. I sent my friend the track to put some brass instruments on it. It came back sounding like the Coronation St theme so I sliced it up took it out of context and made (Sky Shed) a hip hop outro to the song with it - it has this dark hip hop, exotica, out-of-tune thing to it. Next to where i live there's some scaffolding three storeys high with a garden shed on top - it always does it for me and I call it Sky Shed - so I named a track after it.

4. Astro
I heard an old fruity song on late night radio that mentioned Astronomers in the lyric - I thought I needed one of them.

5. Do The Hand Jive
This was inspired from listening to the Bs2000 - Simply Mortified album. There's a few songs on there name after pretend dance crazes. Like 'The Side to Side'. I wanted in.

6. To The Height Of A Frisbee
I wrote this song first for the album and it's got my friend playing saxophone's on it. The riff is jerky and skanky and I like that kind of thing.

7. Umbrella Fight
I had this tune fully formed ready for the album and needed a title. I was trying to come up with a title based on what it sounded like - then I realised it sounded like an umbrella fight. Pretty civilise but a little aggression too…

8. Phosphor Burn-In
Apparently that's the term for when your LCD telly is screwed. Seemed appropriate for the song. This tune's kind of as far down the doomed doo-wop vibe as I can go.

9. Don't Rely On It, Don't Count On It
50's guitar, mashed up drums - I recorded a few versions of this and mashed them all together in to one. You can hear the chopped-up-ness but it led to something I was pleased with.

10. Satisfactory Substitute
There's a wicked documentary called Secondhand Sureshots where four producers make a track out of five charity shop vinyls bought for a $5 budget. I tried to do that with this - but was probably a little less strict on rules…

11. Manuals
The music kinda reminded of the Avalanches. When I had it mastered I said to the mastering guy I wanted it to have more bass like the Avalanches tunes - it turned out he'd mastered that record. I had the record sleeve as my screensaver so we had a moment bout it. Then we had a sandwich and forgot all about it…

12. Stone
This song I made after seeing the Michel Gondry documentry. He seemed to write really strict lists about what aesthetic he'd stick with in a vid. So I wrote a list of a few things I really wanted in a tune and stuck to it - vocoder, sped up guitar, clavinet, sampling my own voice - can't remember what else was on their but I remember I did it in coloured pens...

13. DOPL
I was going through some really old music i'd made and found a track that sounded really french - it was all made from Wurlitzer electric piano and had this nice muted sound. I wanted to resurrect it so i cut it in to tiny pieces in the computer and made a completely different kinda tune from it.

14. Empty Hand
I had this simple tune and my mate Steve came and played loads of Saxophones on it at this studio I had in London. Few months later my mate Sam played some ace drums on it in the midlands in his garage. Few months after that i cut it up a bit, added some music box bits and sat and finished it.

15. Pow
As well as being the last song on the album - this was the last one I made. It took ages to make the album cause I was being fussy, wanting better sounds and relaxing too much. This song sounds like a slow motion finish line to me. It's called POW cause the snare (which is me hitting my friends bike with a pen) has some real POW to it. All the drums on this are made from that bike actually.



Click here to visit The Voluntary Butler Scheme on Facebook.