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

Keyboard Choir

'We did once have a power cut on stage. I would have loved to have seen it from the crowd.'

Posted 31st January 2008, 10:48pm in Interviews
Keyboard Choir Keyboard Choir are, in some aspects, the musical equivalent of Ronseal. In that, by being a collection of people playing instruments which could roughly be described as keyboard-ish in one way or another, their name is about as descriptive as you can get. The Oxford-based fans of electricity played last year's Truck Festival, and are due to release album 'Mizen Head To Gascanane Sound' on 25th February.

Before we ask you lots of questions about keyboards, would you like to introduce yourselves formally?
I'm James, I play Keyboards. The other members of the band are Ady, who plays Keyboards, Guy, who plays Keyboards, Fred, who plays Keyboards, Seb, who plays Keyboards and Woody, who makes a lot of noise with Keyboards.

So, how, exactly, does a choir of keyboards work?
We generally bring ideas to Ady, who sequences the drums and then we'll work as a smaller group of two or three to come up with the basis for a track. Then we'll bring that to a rehearsal and everyone else will add their own ideas and sounds to the track. In the past we have also written through jamming. with all six of us, but it is more problematic and generally difficult to do - in the same way that it would be very difficult to write a song with six bass-guitarists jamming alone. Each member takes on a different role - one player will play bass, someone will pad out the sound, someone will play lead, someone will make some horrible noise etc. Ady normally triggers the drums and conducts us from the front of the stage with his back to the audience - giving more weight to the 'choir' aspect of our music.

Your album 'Mizen Head To Gascanane Sound' has a rather unusual name. Care to explain just what that means?
We recorded a large proportion of the album in a house on the south-westerly coast of Ireland. We'd gone out there without a title, and on the first night Guy found a map on the wall of the room we were playing in that was charting the area of 'Mizen Head to Gascanane Sound'. Mizen Head is the furthest south-western point of Ireland, and we went out there when we were recording. As I understand it, Gascanane Sound is a body of water, something like a bay, in the area. Just over the top of the hill from the house was a cove - with an island in the middle that was only accessible via a causeway at low tide. You could stand on top of that hill and look south - and the nearest piece of land is the Antarctic. In the same way, when we were at Mizen Head you could look west and the nearest land is America. I found that area absolutely vast - and it made me feel incredibly small - something that I think comes across in the album, as does the area we recorded in.

Is there anything you do on stage that isn't entirely electronic? Are you all robots, for example?
We aren't robots, no. Not yet anyway. I wouldn't mind a bionic thumb at the moment (I jarred it playing football and it kills). Everything we do musically is electronic - that was one of the main aims of the band. Even when we're writing, we don't allow ourselves to sample organic sound knowingly. We have to 'find' it somewhere, we can't make it. Our stage show, especially for the larger gigs, revolves around a rotating cast of robots that we have built over the past year. We only have one at the moment, because the last ones got too shot away at Truck 2007. There will be more though, I'm told. The robots are made from cardboard and tin foil. They aren't real, don't be scared. So yeah - onstage, the robots aren't electronic. And you joke about it, but Woody is actually a robot. He's packed away safely in Ady's keyboard case when we're not on stage.

If you were forced to perform an acoustic set, how would you go about it?
We did think about this last summer. We were approached to see if we could do an acoustic set in Piney Gir's country roadshow tent at Truck. We didn't do it... but it got me thinking. I guess we would (as you have already sort of answered below) use battery powered keyboards. Probably all toy keyboards too. With Guy beatboxing.

What about a power cut? Do you have keyboards that run on battery power?
We did once have a power cut on stage. I would have loved to have seen it from the crowd. It was in the Port Mahon, Oxford, where the electrics were questionable at best. We were in a really carthartic, heavy piece, and we were all going mad when the sound cut out and we were all just throwing ourselves and our keyboards around to nothing. Our laptop broke once, too, which means no beats. We just ended up playing all of the demos on our respective keyboards at the same time while Woody hit the PA speaker with his. It was pretty strange, that one.

What would be your ultimate keyboard?
One that sounds like a pregnant whale diving into a rainbow. But with a bit of distortion too. It should have some beats on it. Just in cast the laptop breaks, and be battery operated. And it's gotta have all the notes. ALL OF THEM.
Click like to get the latest music news, hottest tracks and more via Facebook.

Comments