Music, Style & Culture
| Print : Web : Radio : Mobile

In The Studio: Breton

Emma Swann pays Breton a visit at their London base.

Posted 12th October 2011, 4:18pm in Features, by Emma Swann


Recent FatCat Records signees, it’s been a busy year for Breton. Following a trio of EPs, and numerous remixes, the quartet are now hard at work on their debut album. Emma Swann pays them a visit at their London base.

Breton’s Roman Rappak is supposed to be hard at work mixing “about half the tracks” on the south Londoners’ debut album, currently due for release in early 2012. But he’s easily distracted: “At the moment, if I make a track and send it around to the other people in the band, they’ll just say ‘Why aren’t you mixing?!’, so I just make them privately now.”

The band’s studio is also their home, a not-quite-converted bank near Elephant & Castle which still features some of the original decor - canteen visible, vault-style doors throughout. “The thing we like about it is that there are all these big, cavernous, echoey rooms.” It’s additionally responsible in part for the way the band sound. “Pretty early on we got obsessed not only with this building, but with the idea of recreating sounds, re-mixing them and using the fact that we’re in here as an element of the track. There are loads of rooms with inexplicable objects in them, and one of them has got an electric organ which makes one noise, regardless of which key you press. It sounds horrible, so we sampled it and put it in ‘The Well’, this big organ sound. I like the way we’ve captured it here, and played it all over the UK. Loads of people have listened to it. It’s this one sample of this one moment with an organ that’s going to be forgotten about and smashed to bits.”

While recording everything themselves has its benefits, “I’ve always wanted to wake up in a studio, make a track, then rehearse with my band,” explains Roman, they’re keen to move away from the generic sounds so-called ‘bedroom artists’ create. “Everyone’s really happy that there’s this big revolution in music, that everyone can do it and you don’t need a big studio any more, but it’s kind of soulless. You make things that use all the same presets as someone else, you use the same keyboard sounds, the same drum beat. You’re on some SoundCloud and their track sounds a bit like this track you’ve heard on some other guy’s SoundCloud. You find people using the same things and reaching the same conclusion, musically. Communication is great for this amazing new trend of post-retro-dubstep-future-garage, but ultimately, everyone’s ideas get watered down a little bit.”

To remove any hint of this from the album’s material, label FatCat sent the band to Sigur Ros’ studio in rural Iceland: “it looks like a lunar apocalypse... everyone talks like Bjork. We thought it was gonna be cool, with all these instruments. But everything you touch in that whole room sounds like Sigur Ros’ music. You touch it and it goes [does vocal impression of Sigur Ros], you press something else and it chimes.

“Here, we were bringing all these elements together and trying to combine them to make something new, so much that you’ve lost all notion of where one ends and another begins, almost ending up with something new. In Iceland we were taking it all apart and doing an autopsy of it, working out why tracks worked, or what we liked about certain things. We replaced all the blog-heavy, disposable synth sounds, all the pirate software plugins, the cheesy tricks with a proper, grown-up album sound.”

The record is scheduled for an early Spring release, with the band already planning how to celebrate its launch. “We’re going to play a huge gig, spending all our money on it, where we’ll have films that we’ve shot especially for it. We’ll have huge projections above each musician, play some of the album’s tracks, and do a live soundtrack for a five-minute short. Make it a worthy beginning to all the work that’s gone in to it, and for all the people who’ve helped us.”

Taken from the Autumn 2011 issue of DIY, available now. For more details click here.
Click like to get the latest music news, hottest tracks and more via Facebook.

Comments