Interview: CYP2D6 (by Simon Piler)

Hello, human race.

Presented before you, we have an interview with CYP2D6 in which he briefly reflects on the generation of his first EP, CYP2D6, and the human roots of creative mythology.

You can, of course, download CYP2D6 (and many other great albums, for that matter,) right here:

quixodelic-records

To learn more about the obscure movies referenced herein:

www.zerotrooper.com

And listen to more stellar music on his myspace page:

defmutedemute

And actually read the interview below these three little asterisk guys, here.

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I am curious. How did CYP2D6 even occur in the first place?

I had been working on the [film] soundtrack to ‘Dark Island’ and I was getting really frustrated with it. They had really particular ideas about what they wanted. Soundtracks to horror films these days are a lot of synth pads. I like older, 80’s horror film soundtracks - they’re much more kinetic, you know?

I was using arpeggiators to keep a steady beat going, and I stumbled on a distortion effect I really liked. At that point, I didn’t even know which [percussion] instrument I was playing, I only could go by the sounds I heard. Actually, the whole [album] only took about twenty minutes to record.

It was a good change of pace to work quickly. I definitely build up things too hard and then I want to let it go or I want to destroy it.

Gosh, I always get upset when I hear about artists burning their early works.

See, I understand that, though. I totally understand that.

Ah, then again, I’m also worried my computer will die and I’ll lose everything I have on it.

(laughs) Yeah, that’s scary shit, man. Yeah, I know, I’m about to get a hard drive for my computer because I have all sorts of stuff in pieces.

Where did the name ‘CYP2D6’ come from anyway? I guess I know it’s a protein that breaks down toxins in the body…

Oh, it was always stuck in my head because of (a friend, who was incapable of making the protein) Erik Anderson, and I told so many people I was going to make CYP2D6. I told them I was going to keep it around as a glitchtronic moniker. Yeah, and so I’ve always had it in the back of my mind since I heard it and was looking for a good place to use it.

Where are you living these days?

Where am I living? Logan Square. It’s northwest of downtown [Chicago].

By bike, about 20 minutes. If you take the train, it’s about 30 minutes.

And in miles, it’s, uh, two miles? Wait, I can count this. I’m on 2600 and each block is an eighth of a mile… and downtown is, well, downtown is zero…. (silence) …I don’t know man, it sounds like two miles to me. How about three miles?

How do you go about building up the mythology of your various projects?

I think [mythology] is definitely taken from your life. [The film] Zerotrooper, at least, is cues taken from my relationship with Eric Lim.

I guess I don’t totally understand. Does your mythology overlay over your ‘real’ lives?

Yeah, it is overlaid over our real lives, I guess. But more than that, Zerotrooper F is the product of our overlapping perspectives, I feel. Perhaps that’s any collaborative art project. I know for sure, though, that Zerotrooper F is very specifically the result of that overlap. It’s something we’ve talked about for years. Since high school we’ve been making films, and we finally got around to making that specific story into film. Eric has always been this way - he creates his own universe out of pop culture that exists. And I felt that way for a long time, too, but I never really realized it until I met Eric.

Do you piece together your stories through preliminary drawings and writing, or to you kind of make it up as you go?

Well, I think I piece it together more than anything else.

Well, actually, I don’t know… not for recent things. Not for things I’ve done in the past year -DJOHNSMITH2000, Tycho Broham, or CYP2 - because those things are just a flicker of an idea around which I try to create as much as I can.

Ah! That really reminds me of CHIME [Collective] - take a blip of an idea and expand on it as quickly as possible.

Yeah. The more I play these days, the more I am grateful for having been in CHIME. You know, I’m not going to lie - sometimes when I was in CHIME, I was kinda thinking like, “C’mon, what am I doing, here? I wanna be a jazz jazz pianist, you know? This is just noodling for me.” That was just what I was thinking at the time, not necessarily what I feel about it now. How I feel about it now is quite different. It really did help me learn to let go - I still don’t do it 100%, but it was better for me than trying to join a standard jazz quartet.

Because honestly, jazz is dead, man. At least any jazz that’s played today - I pretty much think it’s ghost jazz. Or maybe worse than ghost jazz. I’m looking to the future. Jazz is not about being square, and I think pretty much everyone who is playing jazz is square today.

Thelonius Monk was punk rock, man. He was, like punk rock, defined.

So, no new jazz for you, these days. What have you been listening to instead?

Hmmm… Have you ever heard of Andre Williams?

No, what does he do?

This guy, to me, invented hip hop, and he doesn’t even know it. He was from the 50’s, with a really sweet, dirty bar-room jazz sound and a kinda bluesy, jazzy backup band. With really dirty lyrics, well, not like “Fuck, Shit, I’m going to touch your balls,” kinda dirty, (laughs) but more like really gross old man type lyrical content. He is a rapper, actually, and nobody knows where to place him. But he’s a rapper, honestly. He’s one of the first rappers.

That is an interesting assertion, at least. Is there anything else you’d like to say about your music or music in general?

CEEEEEEE-WHYYYYYY-PEEEEEEEEEEE

***

This has been Simon Piler reporting.

Good night, human race.

Namu the Disco Whale - CYP2D6

Namu the Disco Whale

CYP2D6

Out Today!

Download it for FREE from our Quixodelic Record Store: here

So here’s one from left-field. For the first time here’s a record by an artist that I can’t tell you anything about. A 4-track EP called “CYP2D6″ that accidentally fell into my hands and an intense sound adventure full of distortion, samples, bleeps and things you’re unlikely to have heard anywhere before.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Namu the Disco Whale, then all I can suggest is that you hit the search engines and hopefully will have more luck than I did.

www.therealburnouts.com

www.therealburnouts.com

Why not take some time out of your busy lives and click on the link above? Disappear down the rabbit hole of The Real Burnout’s universe, with news about a shiny new record - (IN) A WORLD NOT UNLIKE YOUR OWN - videos, words, pictures, and the expected unexpected, you’ll be reluctant to ever climb back out again.

Review: FROGVILLE “A Bug-Eyed Swamp”

There is so much good free music floating around on the internet that it sometimes feels if you know where to look, that you might never need to buy another record again. But every once in a while an album comes along that is worth putting your hands in your pockets for, and Frogville’s “A Bug-Eyed Swamp” is one of those albums. For the price of a packet of cigarettes you can have yourself 11 tracks of psychedelic pop home brew, songs that stick but not as sickly sweet as bubblegum, lo-fi bones but with a shiny studio feel to the skin, and experimental without losing sight of the raw solarized melodies that underpin it.

Song writers seem to fall into one of two hands. In one are those who can’t help but keep writing, like butterflies flitting from one idea-flower to the next, putting quantity over quality and hopefully somewhere in amidst all those rushed recordings will be something worth keeping hold of. In the other are individuals like Frogville’s Jason Raspa, blessed with the patience and determination to take an idea-flower and keep tending to it, only walking away from it when it’s grown as high as it can. I first heard about this New York band back in June 2007 and spent the next year and a half trying to get a Frogville track on one of the Daydream Generation compilations. The first time I finally heard any music was an album of demos in January of 2009 that confirmed a hunch I had that this was the best band we never featured. Now, six months and a crash course in audio mastering later, “A Bug Eyed-Swamp” is grown. The Daydream Generation compilations might now be but ghostly soundtracks of the past, but the regret that we never got a Frogville song onto any of them is at least alleviated somewhat by the brilliance of this finished record.

From the word go, with the swirling psychedelic guitar lines of “I Believe In You”, this is something of an all-out assault on the parts of your brain that instinctively hoover up hooks and retain them, regurgitating them at random intervals throughout your waking day. The first five songs of “A Bug Eyed-Swamp” are the equivalent of a top-heavy bombardment of melody. For those of you going into it blind, I’d be very surprised if you’re not waving the white flag of submission a couple of verses into the upbeat 90s indie-pop of second track “Just Like Sunday”. Three through five are my own favourites - “The Speed of a Crawl” is cinematic and sweeping, a sonic lullaby for the frazzled heads of the 21st century. “I’m A Bee” is comical and catchy as fuck, combining Jason’s reassuringly loveable voice singing “Collecting honey for the Queen / I love her, I think you know what I mean / There’s too many guys in the hive / She doesn’t even know that I’m alive”, with suitably bee-powered musical swagger. The vocals, like the range of guitar riffs, walking bass-lines, steady drums, and liberal helpings of effects and sound tricks that are central to the Frogville sound, are actually each but a part of the well-oiled machine, each doing their bit, carrying it forward, letting each song breathe bedecked in blinking lights into the muddy swamp of creation. You won’t play this record to your friends and say “Listen to the guitar on this”, or “What is he doing here?”, but you will put it on and let it play out saying “Listen to all of this”.

Fifth track “The Light You Give” is as close as you’ll get to a standard ballad form - an ageless melodic love song where “The light you give shines”. Simply put - it’s fucking beautiful. From the blistering start, the rest of the record is more of a blur of ideas and sounds. The mainly instrumental and eerily weird title track signals the end of the “song” songs and the beginning of something a little darker and less deliberate. Frogville shows that the psych-pop salvos are just a part of the bigger picture (albeit a glorious part). Equally the machine is at home producing freaky indie guitar blow-outs “Time is Growing”, druggy Jonestown Massacre-esque shoegaze funk amalgamations (”Turns to Gold”), dig up something that sounds like it fell off the edge of “Forever Changes” (”Mexico”), or do lush country drone experiments like the closing “Speed of Disillusionment”. Penultimate track “Face” deserves a sentence or two on its own. Like a lost song from 1966, think somewhere in between The Rolling Stones and The Velvet Underground, tambourine punctuated tunnel of stark sound and a vocal melody that sounds like something you should have heard somewhere before, but know that you haven’t.

Truthfully I don’t know what you can do with five dollars these days, but there can’t be many things you can buy as worthwhile as Frogville’s “A Bug-Eyed Swamp”. It’s an instant shot of soulful pick-me-up and harmonic cool-me-down in equal measures, and a fine, fine debut album from someone who makes studio recordings sound just about obsolete. More importantly, it’s a little help towards maintaining a 4-track recorder apparently on its last legs. You might have to wait two more years for the next audio chapter, but if “A Bug-Eyed Swamp” is anything to go by then it’ll be well worth the wait.

Find out more about Frogville and buy “A Bug-Eyed Swamp” here:

www.myspace.com/frogville

Review: THE LOADED WHISPERS

Artists Use Lies To Tell The Truth

Syd Lane from The Loaded Whispers says there are two kinds of music - “That which moves you, and that which doesn’t”. I challenge anyone to tell me that the music she and poet partner-in-crime Jeremiah James make doesn’t fall into the former category.

From the first song I ever heard (”Easily Loved / Easily Hated” on Daydream Generation 6) I knew that this was very special music, but nothing prepared me for just how mind-blowingly great a full-length Loaded Whispers record would be. It was a weekday and with an early morning working start I was planning on being asleep no later than midnight when I first downloaded “All Artists Use Lies To Tell The Truth”. My intention was to listen to a couple of songs before I drifted off. In actual fact from the moment “I’ve Got Sunshine” magically burst into my ears utterly stunning me to the pillow in amazement, there was no way I was drifting anywhere until the last notes of final track “Up The Shore” had rung out.

The composite elements of this self-recorded Dublin duo are actually quite simple. Syd Lane has one of the most incredible voices you are likely to ever hear, gliding and soulful, carrying hers and Jer’s words over stripped back tremelo electric guitar or shimmering piano melodies. At the root of it all is simply great songs - heartfelt without being mawkish, and cool enough to carry even the most charged of emotional content to a different stratosphere in your mind. An instantly recognisable breeze of sound blows through the recording moving it in the same direction, so even though a whole handful of genres are toppled like dominoes (psychedelic folk, piano pop ballads, Pixie-esque guitar, country-tinged folk blues, and 60s acid rock & roll), it’s the consistency that kills you - that feeling that the flawless songs surely at some point much reach some kind of logical conclusion and snuff out. But no, even as the playful (and damn brilliant) Carpenter’s nod right at the very end makes you grin, The Loaded Whispers are still whispering away from you.

Stand out tracks? Oh where do I begin? “I Got Big Dreams” is beautiful and poignant and timeless, could have been written in any of the last five decades and been loved by any of its generations. “Tell Me How” is almost like hearing Nico hitting high notes - so good that it appears (quite rightly) twice on the record. “Eidolons” is a feisty boy/girl duet full of fire barely concealing the laughter below the surface. “Charlotte” is the kind of song that someone would have sold their own Grandmother for to put in Marianne Faithful’s mouth in 1965. “Suicide In The Trenches” is a lyrical heavyweight synchronised to perfection in Syd’s voice. And if I had to pick a favourite of all the songs it would probably be “Sick of Writing Sad Songs” - I don’t think a day has passed since I first heard this record when I haven’t gone back to it at least once, with it’s rolling majestic piano and understated explosive melodies. Some days I’ve listened to more times than I can count on my fingers and toes.

So there you go. If you haven’t heard The Loaded Whispers before then now’s your chance - I can vouch from experience that “Artists Use Lies…” is as great an introduction to a genuine talent as you are going to find this year. And if you already know about them, then I’m sure you will have been nodding your head in agreement through these clumsy paragraphs where I’ve attempted to convey just how great a record this is. Sometimes when you discover a band whose music you love you get an insatiable urge to go out and find every song they’ve ever recorded and gorge yourself over the following weeks and months and hopefully years of your life. In this instance though, I feel completely different - I want to savour this one, give it weeks at least to go back to it again and again, hear things I didn’t hear the first twenty times around, and re-hear the things I’d happily hear twenty times more. Listening to it now as I write this I still feel as stunned as I did when I first heard it on the wrong side of midnight. Long may the wind of song whisper.

You can download THE LOADED WHISPERS “All Artists Use Lies To tell The Truth” for FREE at our Quixodelic Record Store!