BRISTOL: The Fleece

THU 29TH JAN, 2009 8.00pm

MAX TUNDRA + BEN BUTLER AND MOUSE PAD

THURSDAY 29 JANUARY @ THE FLEECE, 12 St THOMAS STREET, BRISTOL, BS1 6JJ

8.00pm - £7 Door, £5 Adv / NUS


MAX TUNDRA

Pop / Progressive / Rock
From London

Ben Jacobs was lucky enough to grow up in a house with a piano. As a child he protested about the lessons in which he was forced to learn the music of the famous (dead) composers. “I used to prefer sitting at the keyboard at home and playing tv theme songs and music from adverts”, remembers Ben. Eventually he realised that this expanse of black and white keys could be turned to his own advantage and he began forming his own musical inventions.

One day, the teenage Ben bought a Commodore Amiga 500 home computer. Armed with this and a £1 piece of music software, he began to explore the world of electronic composition. Eventually he got so good at using this cheap set-up that Warp Records released his first single Children At Play; an energetic, if lengthy, instrumental romp created with these lo-fi means and sent to the label as a demo tape. “Warp were the only label who were interested in my first tune,” says Ben. “I sent my demo tape to fifty labels in all, but most people freaked out. A couple of guys made the bizarre criticism that I had too many ideas.” This criticism has frequently dogged Max Tundra (as he was hereby renamed), in a musically diverse, eclectic career where time signatures, musical genres and instrumentation have been given the thorough shake-up they have long needed.

A debut album Some Best Friend You Turned Out To Be, and three subsequent singles for Domino Recordings have given the world a set of dense, multi-textured, emotionally-charged tunes, each of which has a different story to tell. “My working methods for each composition tend to vary every time. Often my music contains no electronics at all, and I greatly enjoy learning as many musical instruments as possible, so as to make my records stand out from those made by totally computer-based musicians.” As well as his trusty Amiga (which he still does all his sequencing on today, having vowed never to use a laptop to make music), Max Tundra's records have variously featured himself playing drums, trumpet, banjo, cello, piano, guitars, violin, recorders, synthesizers, melodica, Fender Rhodes, xylophone, bass guitar, oven door, egg-slicer and even a recording of an ancient clock in the British Museum in London.

Max Tundra's second album, Mastered by Guy at The Exchange, is his most recent long-player. However, the phrase “long-player” is something of a misnomer; once again, the album clocks in at less than 45 minutes. Max explains: “In the old days, you would rarely get an album which was longer than three quarters of an hour. This was due to the limitations of the single vinyl LP. Now that CDs have been invented, musicians all over the world feel obliged to bombard their public with 74 minutes of music at a time. This frequently leads to albums cluttered up with boring stuff, leaving people reaching for the skip-button of their CD players. I try and spend as long as possible ensuring that every track on a Max Tundra record is totally necessary. Most of the classic albums in history are single pieces of vinyl.”

Anyone who heard Max's instrumental debut album will be pleasantly surprised to learn of the appearance of vocals this time round. In fact, every track on Mastered by Guy at The Exchange contains singing (except for 61over which contains a conversation). The singing voices are provided by Ben himself and his sister Becky. “She's been blessed with a beautiful voice. I use hers whenever the pitch of the song is slightly too high for me.” The mixture of instrumentation, styles and textures is as vivid as ever, with a few more reference points to existing forms of music than before. Brassy opener Merman isn't a million miles away from the sassy swingtime big bands of the 1950s. Lysine, the first single to be taken from the new album, and Max's poppiest number to date, recalls the detailed programming of R&B producers The Neptunes, whilst album track Hilted owes more to 80s English pop-psychers XTC. The final track Labial gives this LP its grand, epic closure. These warm, emotive, uplifting songs will capture your spirit, pour it over ice, and serve it back to you at the best disco in town (where you won't get turned away for liking both Destiny's Child and Frank Zappa). Incidentally, there's no dress code either.

He recently recorded one of the last ever Peel Sessions with a special eight-piece band. Max explains: “I decided it would be fun to see if I could come up with some full live arrangements of my songs. So my sister and I, and six of our musically talented friends, learnt to perform four of my existing compositions on a variety of instruments. The resulting arrangements are exciting, organic versions of the originals. The track Lysine for example has complex drum programming on the original; my friend Paul learnt to play every single drum hit on a real kit. A sequenced melody line on the album version was played on a Yamaha QY20; the Peel Session version includes a hammered dulcimer replica of this part. And so on. We used twenty musical instruments in all on the day of the session, including the BBC's own Fender Rhodes, Hammond organ and Steinway grand piano. What fun!”

Max Tundra has just released his third album for Domino, titled 'Parallax Error Beheads You'. This is also his first album for six years! To celebrate Domino have a special offer available: buy a copy of Max Tundra's limited edition Kosher Chicken Soup and you will receive a copy of his new album from their new download store!! We kid you not!!

'Will Get Fooled Again' - Max Tundra
" Max Tundra plays at being a rock band (which is actually different from playing "Rock Band") at the start of the Woof Wan Bau -directed video for the well-titled "Will Get Fooled Again". Then it turns out the vocals are coming from a bug sucking blood from the face of the band's matinee idol frontman, and we're set for more of Tundra's now-expected Commodore Amiga 500 -pop superabundance. As on the similarly fantastic " Which Song ", another track from the forthcoming LP Parallax Error Beheads You , Tundra's light voice as he sings of the trials and tribulations of meeting women online recalls Scritti Politti's Green Gartside; he's backed by high guitars, melodic bass, and electronic beats that buzz quickly enough for that mosquito. The video lets a daydreaming student's booger, a cotton candy-eating young lover's molar, and a plate of spaghetti and meatballs all also get their turns on vox. Watch Tundra lead some synchronized choreography on the video-game instrumental breakdown." - PitchForkMedia


MAX TUNDRA ‘Parallax Error Beheads You' by Paul Lester

"There are more ideas crammed into the 41 minutes of Max Tundra's third album than most bands manage in their whole careers. Parallax Error Beheads You, the third Max Tundra LP and his first since 2002's Mastered By Guy At The Exchange, is a masterpiece of micro-melodies and sound-bytes; a triumph of splicing, dicing and editing. It's an intricate mosaic of sounds and styles, some of which you might recognise from the last 30 years of pop, rock, prog, disco, funk, techno, rap, metal and soul, but many of which are completely new: either from a startling recombination of existing genres, or from Max inventing an original one himself. The attention to detail, and the sheer speed at which ideas whizz past you in the mix, will leave you stunned.

“Each song contains many facets and genres, and the starts of songs are often stylistically extremely different to how they each end up, touring via a few styles along the way,” says the man himself, going some way towards explaining why there are multiple, simultaneous or sequential, melodies during each of the 10 tracks on Parallax, and why one song can sometimes sound like seven different bands from totally different worlds playing at once - Glycaemic Index Blues, to name but one of the songs on the album, is like Yes playing glitch techno with Pharrell Williams fighting Todd Rundgren at the controls while Green Gartside offers his creamiest falsetto. Just call it cosmic glitch-pop R&B.

“There are micro-melodies on the album – generally, layers and layers of stuff,” says Max. “Hopefully, the more you listen to it, the more new stuff will reveal itself, stuff you didn't notice the first few times you played it. It's intricate but that should mean it's more rewarding over the distance, so that people can go back to it and hear new things each time.”

Mentioning that Which Song - earmarked as the second single from the album, following Will Get Fooled Again (which itself sounds like McFly in space) - sounds like Scritti Politti had they signed to Warp in 1991, Max admits, “I like the Scritti comparisons.” For him, 80s pop isn't a Guilty Pleasure, it's an untapped resource. “Even Nik Kershaw – he's often dismissed as cheesy, but he also had really nice, catchy melodies that were quite Zappa-esque. I'm a big Zappa fan, and I also really like progressive stuff like Gentle Giant.” Among numerous other things: on his MySpace he lists 100 bands that he loves, from Art Of Noise to Andrew Poppy to Ariel Pink to Akufen to Autechre to Architecture In Helsinki to Alan Braxe to Arthur Russell to A Certain Ratio. And that's just the A's…

As for the aaahs and ooohs - the luscious, smooth vocals – Max says he arrived at those from years of “doing Prince at karaoke.” But how many people did it take to put together the multi-faceted extravaganza that is Parallax Error Beheads You? Three? Five? Nine? All of the above? No – one: Ben Jacobs a.k.a. Max Tundra, who handles all the many instruments, the vocals and the production. This might be why the album took six years to create.

“It's my first album for six years because it took six years to record!” laughs Mr T. “My studio process is getting ridiculously intensive. What can I say? I'm a perfectionist; it can take me six months to do a song.

“I'm in a really privileged position on a label like Domino,” he adds. “They've left me to it for six years, I've taken my time, and I've been able to make exactly the record I wanted. I wanted it to feel like an event, like something you've been waiting for for ages.”

The album's closing track, Until We Die, in which the whole history of technoid whizz-kid pop are squeezed into 11 minutes and 4 seconds, took six months to assemble. “There are some peculiar sounds on that one – it's like a ‘70s cop show theme meets the Mothers Of Invention with Crosby Stills & Nash-style three-part harmonies. I often accidentally reveal my influences despite trying to keep them difficult to pin down. I try and avoid writing music to genre.”

As for how he constructs a song, the words “painstaking” and “methodical” spring to mind, although it should be stressed that there are no signs on Parallax that this element of calculation means a lack of spontaneity, warmth and emotional engagement.“Each song is approached in a different way, but I often use a Commodore Amiga 500 for sequencing work,” he explains. “I don't use PCs or Macs; I use a MIDI device to control the various instruments and hardware, the keyboards, synthesizers and samplers. And it all gets recorded onto a hard-disk machine. Hopefully it's a more pristine sound than before but with the warmth of my other records.”

It's not all electronic equipment and computer technology, though. “There are trumpets, violins, cellos, guitars, dulcimers, xylophones - whatever's lying around,” he says. Jacobs/Tundra is entirely self-taught. “That's another reason the record took so long to make. I thought a cello would be good so I had to spend three weeks learning to play that part and then layering it with so much stuff that people wouldn't notice that I'm not exactly an amazing cello player!”

In between furiously mixing and matching and inventing new futures for pop he's been supporting himself by doing remixes of other bands, both unofficially (Missy Elliot, The Strokes) and officially (Franz Ferdinand, Futureheads, Pet Shop Boys).

But why Parallax Error Beheads You? “It's nothing to do with the music,” he says of the curious title. “I always try and come up with a semi-poetic but oblique phrase for my album titles. In this case, it's from when you buy a cheap camera, and the eyepiece and lens are separate, and when you take a photo and get it back from the chemists the picture you see is slightly lower in the frame than you'd like - that's known as a ‘parallax error'. All three of my LP titles are quite strange and don't have a great deal to do with the music.”

And yet for all its instrumental prowess, titular ingenuity and intricate intelligence, Parallax is a pop record. “There are nagging, catchy melodies,” says Max, who points out that some of his songs have started to get used on high-profile film soundtracks and TV adverts. “It's for singing and whistling along to. That's what I'd like – to walk past a building site and hear builders whistling a song of mine which they've heard on Radio 1. Some of the sounds and songs are not that far from the sort of pop music made by people like OutKast or Beyonce. Maybe I'm deluded about this, but there are things going on on my record that you might hear on a song by Rihanna or Sugababes.”

Could he write a Top 5 hit? “I already have,” he reveals. “But I'm saving it for someone like Rihanna or Sugababes. It was written with a girl singer in mind. Hopefully I'll be able to write songs for a few super-pop artists before the next Max Tundra album comes out!” "

Paul Lester

July 2008



Reviews:

“A lot more enticing and instantly gratifying than much of the computer-generated boredom that this genre is so often guilty of mass-producing.” - Rock Sound

“Ludicrously enjoyable…buy it” - The List

“A part-played, part-programmed pop'n'funk torrent destined to win new admirers, as long as they can keep up.” - Mojo

“So precisely orchestrated you suspect he must use a scalpel, but there's nothing remotely clinical about this heart-warming, ear-bending exploration of the infinite possibilities of sound…utterly brilliant.” - Time Out

“A genuine attempt to find new permutations in electronica.” - Uncut

“Although it's certainly more likely to appeal to the adventurous listener everyone should check out ‘Mastered…' to see how one man can create an entire sonic universe of his own.” - Slant

“If Beefheart and Zappa had used samplers…” - DJ

“A delicacy for your aural tastebuds.” - Absorb

“Completely charming, by turns amazing and thoroughly musical, sweet and funny.” - Sleaze Nation

“Intriguingly bonkers.” - Metro

“An album which has more ideas per minute than most of his contemporaries can manage over the course of a career.” - BBCi

“Refreshing and cliché-free.” - Q

“Revels in sweet, fractured pop excess of a kind Saint Etienne and Stereolab stopped striving for years ago. Impossible to sleep through, talk over or ignore.” - The Wire

“A shot in the arm and a slap round the head.” - NME

“Totally nuts and totally adorable.” - Big Issue In The North

“More warmth than many leftfield knobbers can conjure up.” - PlayLouder

“It shouldn't work but it does.” - Bizarre

“More ideas in six minutes than Squarepusher has had in years…a tonic of an album to jaded ears.” - Seven

“This record shows the breadth of his creativity, yet it's accessible, catchy and brilliantly simple. A massive achievement.” - Pitchfork (voted 52nd best album of 2000-2004)



Ffi: http://www.myspace.com/maxtundra and http://www.maxtundra.com



Supported by

BEN BUTLER AND MOUSE PAD

Progressive / Psychedelic / Funk

Ffi: http://www.myspace.com/benbutlerandmousepad



The Fleece doors open at 8PM and it's an 18+ venue with a 'Challenge 21' policy so anyone lucky enough to look 21 or under will need photo ID.