If the new album Famous Lost Words from Blu Mar Ten was a film from the 60s, what viewing it’d be: an interplay of grief, regret, a fleeting cameo from a mysterious Swedish gent, a mysterious Eastern European woman and the delicious bitter pang of the title: Famous Lost Words. Pow!
Even the cover seems to be something glimpsed in an old shop window, all sun-bleached and dusty. Time to find a space in the local light up some cigs and discuss the album in depth.
Sir what actually are the Famous Lost Words?
Without going into too much detail, the Famous Lost Words theme is to do with the melancholy of grief and regret but also the confusing feelings of elation and freedom that can be bound up in those low moments. It’s to do with missed opportunities and how to cope with them. The ‘Famous Lost Words’ track itself is quite far-ranging, sonically, but the emotional themes are very ‘kitchen sink’. It’s small-scale drama pretentiously writ large.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZOggKjIQRg
Where in your mind is this played out? What clubs/spots/countries?
No idea. I guess it gets played somewhere but I have no idea where. It seems quite popular so someone, somewhere must be playing it. It’s not really music made for clubs, we just enjoy operating within the really strict D&B template and trying to deliver something emotive from the inside out. Sometimes it works and mostly it doesn’t, which is the way it should be.
I ask as it’s music of travel: it reminds me of soundtracks of films where there’s a journey. Do you get inspired by stuff like that?
Yeah, film audio is always really fascinating, the overall sound design as well as the soundtracks. The 70s & 80s were interesting times in cinema. There were big budgets available for people to take big risks and do quite leftfield things in the mainstream and do them really well, before we ended up in the low-risk homogenisation we’re in now.
In terms of inspiration it’s no secret that we have a very broad love of music and constantly flit around genres and historical periods, as you can hear very obviously on our podcasts.
Photek once said “All jungle is, is whatever you listen to outside of jungle” and I think that’s absolutely true. If all you love listening to is D&B then D&B is probably the last thing you should be creating.
From one master to another: what was it like to work with Seba? ‘Hunter’ is an awesome tune.
We had a sketch that we sent him, he spotted the bits that were worth keeping and sent us a core idea back and we elaborated on it from there. Luckily we have a pretty similar aesthetic so there’s not too much of a struggle as there has been with other people.
On the specifics, can we isolate ‘Remembered Her Wrong’ and ask about the creation of the tune and also the inference of the title?
Going back to the Famous Lost Words theme, ‘Remembered Her Wrong’ is based around the ideas in the film ‘Solaris’, which are to do with the coping of loss, regret and the drift of memory. This clip elaborates on the title.
Sonically the track reflects these ideas, with the percussion being very deliberately mechanised to indicate drudgery, someone emptily ‘going through the millions of gestures that constitute life on earth’ in order to try and find their way back to normal life after a trauma, trying to find the rhythm of the world where they used to live. The sounds overlaid are deliberately ‘wide screen’ and ethereal, written in a key that indicates a deep sadness but also hope. We massively overused reverb on all the sounds to give a sense of distance and detachment.
‘Somewhere’ is one of the most unusual tracks of the year to me, notably for that horn touch! What was the vibe you wanted to bring with this tune?
We really wanted that smokey, late night, city feeling: somewhere between Miles Davis ‘Round Midnight’…
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kufiFzdrX-0
Trace & Pete Parsons ‘After Hours’
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41n-WHBdyXQ
and Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks‘
The track was written in a single evening and barely changed from the first version to the finished version and I think there’s a lot to be said for trusting that first gesture when making impressionistic music rather than overworking an idea for months on end. It’s a very zen approach to creation and we’re getting better at it as we get older.
The vocalist Agné: who is she? She brings a fresh vibe, and a welcome change to bolshy vocals.
Agné is a Lithuanian girl living in London. She’s not a ‘rave’ singer, as you imply, she’s an acoustic singer-songwriter so I think there’s a level of sensitivity there that’s often lacking from people who shriek motivational gym lyrics or advertising slogans at you.
There’s a shade of darkness in her voice that we enjoy a lot and she’s very easy to work with which, as anyone who’s worked with singers will tell you, counts for a lot. She features on three tracks on ‘Famous Lost Words’.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNl1-myb4-A
BMTM has had a wonderful year, as a label. Stray, delPurr & Eraser, eleven8 and Frederic Robinson come to mind. What’s a quick overview from you?
Yeah, the label is starting to take shape nicely. The Frederic Robinson album was fantastic, both in terms of the actual material and also the response from listeners. It seems people have really taken him to heart which is great. It’s been very liberating to be working with people on projects that are outside the mainstream taste and try and help them find an outlet for material that doesn’t ‘fit’ in many other places. I also think Frederic’s quite intimidating for many producers – including us – as the musical level he’s operating at is so far beyond what most of us deal in, so I think he’s made a lot of people step back and realise they need to stop going through the motions and really up their game a bit. Frederic’s only just 21 so this is just the start of what I expect to be a long and incredible journey for him.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5cFa3qqF-s
He’s a bit of a renegade of the early ‘Aphex Twin’ variety I hear?
Frederic’s constantly building his own instruments and finding ways to produce music on the fly in ways that are interesting for the audience to watch. He’s just in the process of building special gloves so he can gesture-control the music even more. He’s a bit of a mad scientist.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2JTQjK7C3w
Apart from Frederic’s album ‘Mixed Signals’, probably the highlight for me was releasing Stray’s ‘When It Rains’, which remains one of my favourite and most moving pieces of music from the last few years, and was actually the track that originally triggered us wanting to release material from other artists, so well done, Stray.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hhOS0_J1RE
Having started working with other artists I have to say I’ve found a new level of respect for labels like Critical, Spearhead, Dispatch, Samurai, Exit, Soul:R, Auxiliary et al who have been running pretty much on their own for years on end and still manage to pump out great music again and again. It’s a colossal amount of work and the list of things to do never seems to get shorter, no matter how many hours you put into it. I didn’t really appreciate the scale of the work involved until we started doing it ourselves.
Before we leave, some album talk. The album session question: which album over time would you have loved to have been present at?
Probably John Coltrane’s Stellar Regions. There are moments on it that barely resemble music as we know it and I find it hard to imagine how they kept a grip on what they were doing.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM_898cI880
Wrapping it up, it’s time to go: what’s next?
Well the new Blu Mar Ten album Famous Lost Words is out now and we have a whole bunch of great producers working on remixes of it for release next year. We have more Frederic Robinson material coming up and more releases from other artists like Mutated Forms, Tiiu & Faib. And of course we’re constantly scouting for new and interesting artists and music.
And? I hear there’s something very unusual in the pipeline…
We recently regained the rights to our 2003 album The Six Million Names of God so we’re looking at revisiting that with some new music and new mastering. It’s a side of our production that many people who know us for D&B are completely unaware of so we’re thinking it might be nice to reintroduce some listeners to that.
Famous Lost Words
Album preview
httpv://youtu.be/JZOggKjIQRg