2Many Facts, Not Enough Quotes...

A Short biography of Soulwax/ 2Many Dj's.

Stephen and David Dewaele make a welcome return to Ireland, bringing their ‘Nite Versions’ Live 2 ManyDj’s tour to Dublin’s Ambassador Theatre on April 12th. The Belgian brothers will fuse their two alter egos, 2 ManyDj’s and live band Soulwax on their extensive European tour.

Brothers Stephen and David grew up in the Belgian town of Ghent, and attribute their love of music to their father. He was, in their opinion, Belgium’s version of John Peel, and presented a rock radio show in ’68 and ’69. Their musical education started at an early age, and the brothers fondly remember being dragged from record store to record store in London and Paris by their Dad. David cites the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Run DMC, Daft Punk, Small Faces, Prince, and David Bowie as influences. Stephen reached a turning point the first time he listened to hip hop such as Public Enemy, De La Soul, and the Beastie Boys. He felt a deep affinity for this kind of material, more for its mixing of styles than the rap or rhyming.

In 1996 the boys formed the band Soulwax with friends Stefaan Van Leuven, Steve Slingeneyer and Dave Martijn. They released several albums, including ‘Leave The Story Untold’ (1996), ‘Much Against Everyone's Advice’ (1999) and ‘Any Minute Now’ (2004), but the brothers soon felt drawn back to the decks. They started dj-ing in bars and clubs in the area as a side project, becoming renowned for their particular brand of genre-busting dance, inspired by the collage funk of Grandmaster Flash. A couple of years later, the brothers decided to take their act to London, making the airwaves of the BBC and independent station XFM. Their set went down so well that club owners started calling during the XFM broadcasts, asking the brothers to play at their clubs.

After much legal wrangling for clearance of tracks, the highly acclaimed ‘As Heard On Radio Soulwax Vol.2’ finally came to fruition in 2002. This album achieved the admirable feat of mixing 45 tracks in the space of about an hour. An egalitarian and unpretentious attitude infused the record, which mixed artists such as Destiny’s child, Peaches, Iggy Pop, 10CC and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. The album outsold their entire back catalogue, and also marked a significant departure from the popular style of dance mix album. The idea of blurring genre distinctions for the dancefloor was recently being explored by clubs and artists for some time. DJ Hell in Berlin displayed a penchant for throwing some 80’s industrial into the techno mix, while Adult from the U.S blended cool, detatched electro with an almost punk sensibility. Even clubs like Optimo in Glasgow were drawing dedicated cult crowds due to a similar irreverence for stylistic constraints since 1997. 2 ManyDj’s shot to DJ stardom simply because they could mix popular, obscure and diverse tracks with invention and flair, making it digestable for a mass audience.

Upon conquering the dance world, the brothers returned to the studio to record ‘Any Minute Now’ with Soulwax. The album enjoyed moderate success before the Dewaele’s went back to work on it, with the aim of adapting it for a 2Many Dj’s set. The resulting remix album, ‘Nite Versions’, was released late last year on PIAS recordings to a very positive response. The album title is an homage to the Duran Duran remix albums of the same name. The ‘Nite Versions’ tour will involve the complete Soulwax band comprising of drummer, bass player, and the brothers on synths. Each show will utilise Abelton Live software, allowing samples to be dropped into the live show and simultaneously ensuring that every performance is unique. Support on the Dublin leg of the tour will be provided by Sydney futurist electro pop band, The Presets.

What's Up Docs?

The Saw Doctors
‘The Cure’
(Sham Town Records, 2006)

The Saw Doctors guitarist Leo Moran should reunite his old band ‘Too Much For the Whiteman’. Irish reggae starts to sound like an ingenious idea when compared with this, the ‘Oirish’ rockers sixth album.

Long gone are the rollicking carefree days of ‘N17’ and ‘I Useta Lover’. Eighteen years down the line, and the red Cortinas and ‘glorious arses’ of old are but a distant dream. These days the boys have bigger fish to fry; like disappointment, estrangement and regret. Davy Carton grapples with the meaning of it all in ‘Funny World’, ‘‘What a funny world / Oh what a funny world / Certain things you’ll never understand.” In the world of The Saw Doctors an existential crisis corresponds with the chirping refrains; ‘‘funny funny world / what a funny funny world / oh what a funny world’’ over a yearning string section.

The secret of the Doctors success is in the repetition. That’s why they have such a good reputation for their live shows. The more you say it, the more it sounds true, and bingo, the audience can sing along too. Listen, here they do it again in the album’s first single, ‘If Only’, until Davy comes over all poetic. “Cause I watched the moon for hours / watched it slowly fade away / Til my dreams turned into flowers / If only I could tell her so.”

Despite a new line-up that includes former Waterboy Anthony Thistlethwaite on bass and sax, and Fran Breen (ex. Lucinda Williams), the band maintain a formulaic and unimaginative sound. Not the worst album you’ll hear this year, but not far off.

“I’m a bit like a headless chicken at the moment” jokes Isobel Campbell. “I think I’m going to try and get an evil twin. I could send her out to work while I stay at home and watch T.V.”

Assuming the existence of her doppelganger, it appears that the good twin is fielding the questions today. The softly-spoken Scottish vocalist discusses the making of her latest album, Ballad of the Broken Seas, and upcoming Dublin show by way of giggles, good-humoured banter and meandering anecdotes.

Ballad of the Broken Seas, Isobel’s fourth album since her departure from Belle & Sebastian, is a collaboration with Mark Lanegan and was released earlier this month to widespread acclaim. At face value, it could be taken as a hot contender for the ‘most unusual musical pairing’ of the year. Lanegan has towed a significant line through the U.S. rock scene for almost two decades, most notably as lead singer with The Screaming Trees, and more recently with Queens of the Stone Age.

Isobel explains, “It started when we were making the Time is Just the Same EP. The A-side was a duet, and we were thinking about who we could get. I thought it could use someone like Shane Mc Gowan, but my boyfriend at the time told me I should listen to this guy. He played me one of Mark’s tracks, and I heard the voice...” Campbell still sounds amazed that Lanegan agreed to the project at all, “I didn’t even know him and didn’t even know if he’d get back to me, but I sent him half a song and he sent it back finished.”

Geographical distance was the first disparity to be overcome, with Isobel based in Glasgow and Mark in L.A. The pair flouted convention, and decided to continue as they had begun. They recorded their pieces separately, posting completed parts to each other and communicating via e-mail. “I quite liked it”, she says of the unusual process, “It made the project even more exciting. It wasn’t like he lived in Partick and I’d be asking, ‘fancy coming in the studio down the road?’ It made things a bit more international. If we’d been in the studio together we might have had a bust up or something!”

Perhaps not so much the evil twin, Lanegan is nevertheless antithetic to Campbell’s sweetness. While Isobel’s otherworldly voice calls to mind folk sensibilities and angelic purity in equal measure, Lanegan taints with his trademark guttural and jaded delivery. Duets were something that Isobel had planned to experiment with ever since hearing the pairings of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, and Bobbie Gentry and Glen Campbell. However the primary stylistic aim of the project, Isobel says, was to create something ‘timeless’. During recording, she was listening to “mostly Johnny Cash albums like The Man Comes Around, and also some of his older stuff. I was listening to quite a lot of Hank Williams too. I’ve got pretty eclectic taste, but I am a bit of a country fan!”

The hybrid result of this peculiar alliance is a collection of ballad variants, moving from dark and brooding to hauntingly beautiful. Isobel describes the material as ‘love songs’, but believes the inspiration behind the songs is more universal. “I just wanted to tell stories within songs” she says. “I never really try to be too clever with what I do. I mean most people experience being in love at one point or another…some people do it every week! I’m not like one of those little literary boys, wrapped up in scarves and carrying their books around. That’s not really my thing.”

Isobel speaks with similar unaffectedness about another album, Milkwhite Sheets, to which she has recently put finishing touches on. “I’ve been kind of joking with people saying that probably only five people will buy it! It’s not really trying to endear itself to people, put it that way.” She describes the album as “my interpretation of traditional Scottish, Irish and English songs, and a couple of American traditional songs. It’s quite earthy, pagan or primal, I suppose. It’s quite sparse too, a bit of a bleak record really.”

In the midst of such solemnity it’s reassuring to hear that all humour is not lost. Isobel is touring with long-time friend and former Vaselines member, Eugene Kelly, who is standing in for Mark Lanegan. However, she does express some apprehension about playing in Dublin with the band, “Just as long as we all don’t crack up laughing, because it’s been a bit of a problem in rehearsals. It would be really bad for the record because it’s quite sad and serious. It wouldn’t make much sense, us all laughing like lunatics!”

Ballad of the Broken Seas is released on V2 records.

Isobel Campbell plays live in the Sugar Club on February 18th.

Visit www.isobelcampbell.com

Interview with Chris Brokaw...

Although probably best known for his work in bands ‘Codeine’ and ‘Come’, Bostonian Chris Brokaw has accumulated a body of work during his career that most musicians could only aspire to. The prolific musician took time out from practice in Chicago to talk in advance of his Dublin gig.

His European tour coincides with the release of his latest solo offering, Incredible Love, which showcases the musician’s trademark fluid guitar skills, and also debuts his hesitant and hypnotic vocals. Brokaw explained how the album came together, “I guess there are three songs on the record that were originally demos. I did a series of demos in March 2004. Then I went back and re-tooled some of those and recorded another eight songs in August and September of 2004. Everything was put down a year before it actually
came out."

Incredible Love is a little rockier and more hard-edged than his previous solo work, though he views the change as a natural progression. “I was becoming more interested in rock music, after a fairly long period of not listening to any. People were also saying to me that they missed me playing rock and that I should put together a band, so I wanted to try it out.”

Considering his extensive history of musical collaborations, it comes as no surprise that Brokaw was joined on the album by similarly talented friends, Jeff Goddard and Kevin Coultas. “I’ve known both those guys for a long time” he says, “Jeff used to play in a band called ‘Karate’ up until pretty recently and Kevin used to be in a band called ‘Rodan’. He also played drums with my old band ‘Come’ for a little while and did some touring with us.”

The musician enthuses about the group dynamic and its power to refresh material with every performance, “We played a show in New York about a week and a half ago, and something really turned around that night, like it went from being a good band, to being a really good band. So it’s growing and getting better - it’s exciting.”

In the spirit of reinvention, Brokaw decided to take the album on tour alone. “That’s mostly how I’ve been touring for the last couple of years, playing acoustic guitar and singing. I’ve kind of figured out a way to make it a full-sounding experience. I really try to make the guitar sound like a whole band, and make it a little bit different from the typical singer-songwriter style.”

One of the album’s highlights is a reworking of Suicide’s I Remember. The singer chose the track after seeing the band’s live show. “I saw them in Boston about three or four months after the war in Iraq had started. It seemed to me that nobody was talking about it, at least in the context of the arts or music. It always seems that really big stars waste good opportunities to say something. I went to the Suicide show and they somehow turned every song into a huge anti-war protest. I was so impressed by that.”

Brokaw wants his own music to ‘say something’ also, and refers to The Information Age as an example, “I can’t believe as many people in my country voted for our current president, twice! Especially given that never before in human history has so much information been available. I think years from now people are going to be amazed.”

Upon completing Incredible Love, Brokaw immediately threw himself into new projects.
“I’m actually in Chicago right now working on some new music with Doug Mc Holmes who plays in ‘Tortoise’ and a drummer called Elliot Dicks who used to play with ‘The Nerves’”, he says. He also describes the project he is working on with Jeff Farina, formerly of ‘Karate’. “It’s going to be a lot of old blues stuff like Gary Davis, just because it’s what Jeff and I have been listening to a lot. We’re trying to do it in such a way that it’s not just two white guys sitting around singing the blues. If we can manage to make it sound interesting and not hokey, well, that’s sort of what we’re going for.”

With such a rapid production of ideas and material I ask what the Dublin audience can expect of the gig later this month. Brokaw, however, is giving nothing away. “I think it’ll be better than the first time I played at Whelan’s! My first show there, two or three years ago, was o.k. But I was really only starting to play solo at that point, I was pretty new at it and I think I’m better at it now. I love playing Dublin and I always look forward to playing there.”

Chris Brokaw plays Whelan’s on Saturday, February 25th.

Broken Social Scene – Broken Social Scene (Arts & Crafts, 2005)

Broken Social Scene is the third full-length album from the Canadian collective of the same name. It was recorded over the past two years with producer Dave Newfeld, who also worked on the band’s acclaimed previous record, You Forgot It In People. The 17 - strong collective, featuring artists from Metric, Feist, Do Make Say Think and Stars, are joined by a further six members on this ambitious offering.

Opening track Our Faces Split the Coast in Half yawns and stretches, tentatively tugging the album into action. The track sets the tone of what is to follow, playing out like a swirling jamming session, everything tied at the top with horn arrangements and melodic, garbled vocals. Ibi Dreams of Pavement (a better day) provides the collectives first opportunity to flex some real muscle, showcasing a glorious mish-mash of stirring noise that builds towards a triumphant crescendo.

7/4 (shoreline) is a straightforward, double-dose of upbeat indie-pop. Handclaps maintain the momentum in Windsurfing Nation, as insidious guitar hooks topple out breathlessly. It’s all Gonna Break spectacularly closes the album in characteristic Broken Social Scene style; an almost ten minute sprawling kaleidoscope of sound. While the experimentation works well here, it is occasionally lapses into indulgence, for example in Bandwitch.

Minor complaints aside, it’s amazing that a group of musicians of this quality managed to create an album with such great designs, and still retain a sense of haphazard beauty. Great stuff.

The Squirrels Are Revolting

A little bit of comfort for all of you out there struck with the (F.A.S) feature anxiety syndrome. If in doubt, make it up. Surely this can't be real?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4489792.stm

Go Buy

Nice to see that Foggy Notions is back in action after a period of hibernation...Picked up a copy the other night in Whelan's (after seeing the hugely overrated Cocorosie), for some reason it appears that they haven't sorted out the whole distribution problem. It's a really good music mag so I would advise everyone to go out and buy a copy and support a burgeoning publication or else all we are left with is poxy hotpress. At €6 a go, it's, well who am I kidding it's a fucking rip off, but no more so than other magazines in this state. And you also get a free Secretly Canadian CD with some pretty good stuff on it.

The Day

I see that one of my fellow bloggers is getting excited about the new Bosco DVD. I want to add my own little bit of sentimentalism for Irish childhood...

Doesn't anybody out there remember this? I know that there are people out there that do but I haven't met them yet (aside from my siblings). And I will be genuinely happy if I do meet one.

This is Judge, a dog who advised kids how to cross the road, 'stop, look and listen'. Sound advice. I was looking at stills from the programme and some of them were in black and white, which made me feel very old. Yes folks, I am actually forty-two years old. I just got a face-transplant, Tony.

But the point is how sad it is that some quality stuff just seeps through the cracks, never to be seen again. (Except, as Gen said, in x-mas 2006 when there is the possibility of making a couple of quid from some sentimental 20-something suckers.)

On the other hand,

The other night me and 'a classmate' were walking along Nassau Street when we decided to go into Celtic Note, with the purpose of checking out the aforementioned Bosco DVD. (Also wanted to see if the Wanderly Wagon DVD provoked any memories for her. It didn't.) We were having a look through the shelves when we noticed a bit of commotion behind the counter. The owner was getting his picture taken with a group of girls, who my friend immediately identified as the Conway sisters of x-factor fame. It was all a bit uncomfortable really. The excitement that had warranted our attention in the first place seemed to be confined to the area behind the counter. The rest of the store was empty, except for a bored looking security guard, and two old men.

I'm not a fan of the show, and I am being honest here. I saw it once, and unfortunately on that occassion it featured Chico. The dickhead that couldn't come up with a better catchphrase than 'It's Chico time'. After that occassion I felt like running, wailing, to a scalding hot shower with a wire scrubbing brush. I didn't watch it so much after that. Since he couldn't sing for shit, and doesn't have a trace of anything resembling charm, I'm guessing that he is teetering on the edge of the celebrity oblivion. Although the Conway sisters could sing, they managed to do it like Alvin and the Chipmunks. Anyway, the tumble-weeds in Celtic Note that evening said it all. Maybe the Celtic Note is the last refuge for forgotten stars...

It's doggy dog in T.V world. Sometimes you have to thank God (or darwin) for natural selection.