download: Her Blameless Mystery
download: Of Life's Declivity

It’s not often I have to run to catch a musical bandwagon, but for this one I really had to sprint. I’ve been championing CLLCT a LOT in the last few months, but this guy and his music is a single-handed shining example why this little DIY goldmine is already outsinging corporate giants like MySpace and LastFM. It would seem that most people over at CLLCT know, and have known how great a songsmith and soundsmith FailedSitcom is for quite some time. But try googling “Failed Sitcom music” and you’ll be scrolling through page after page of homages to something involving Kelsey Grammar.

Trundling murmurs of quiet approval with occasional claps of genuine mind-blown wonderment have been steadily rolling in since CLLCT resurrected. The acclaim for the two existing EP’s, ‘Of Life’s Declivity’ and ‘Her Blameless Mystery’ may in part be to do with the fact that the guy behind them (Sam Durkin) tries to take in as much new music appearing on the site as he can. I must confess I took the slightly cynical view when I twiddled my thumbs as the bandwagon rolled by with a grin. I instantly bought the philosophy – attempting to fuse folk-pop with experimental hip-hop beats – but time was short and I couldn’t help but wonder if much of the hype was to do with Sam’s presence. I had a couple of minutes and played a song. It sounded great and I grinned back, putting my head down as the trundling passed. It took for Simon Piler to ask me while we were putting together Daydream Generation 8, ‘Obviously you’ve invited FailedSitcom?’

And obviously I hadn’t. I lifted my head, muttered under my breath ‘Ah shit Smally’, and ran. I caught another couple of songs and they were as great as the first one I’d heard months previous. I emailed Sam and thankfully he was as interesting and diggable as the music he’d been making. I downloaded both the records and was totally blown away. Take one song, any song from either EP and I guarantee you’ll think it’s good. Take more than one song and listen to them back to back and I guarantee that it will click in your brain. Take a whole EP and you’ll be hopping into your finest running shoes to catch up with the rest of us.

The philosophy is that of sound collage – seriously cool electronic beats underpinning the sparkling organic sounds of glocks and ukuleles, guitars and mad percussion. Add to this the softest of voices singing shimmering little stanzas about things someone loves and you’ve got yourself a recipe for something that will someday undoubtedly knock Kelsey Grammar off the front page of a Google search for all the right reasons.

I started with ‘Of Life’s Declivity’. Clocking in at a surprisingly short thirteen minutes, these eleven songs are a bright-eyed trip through an autumnal dream, ringing melodies over complex supercool beats, zips and zings of sound, all topped off with the murmur of soft poetics. An obvious comparison would be Animal Collective, a band I am frequently told I should listen to. But having downloaded one record and not been overly impressed, for now at least I’m happy to stick with this little EP. ‘Of Life’s Declivity’ is so together that it feels wrong to single out tracks like ‘To The Bowsprit’, ‘Mushrooms’, ‘Horse Chestnuts’, or ‘Locus Amoenus’ as my favourites. When I first heard this record and obsessively played and replayed it for the next 48 hours, I found myself wondering ‘Where can FailedSitcom possibly go from here?’ The only answer I could come up with was ‘More of the same please’.

Surprisingly and fortunately I was pretty wrong. The much loved ‘Her Blameless Mystery’ is still very much FailedSitcom, but compared to its brief, deliberate, and concisely beautiful counterpart, this 12-track EP is a glorious sonic avalanche of adventurous sound. At the time of hearing it, I didn’t realise that it was a collection of songs recorded over the course of two years, but that just makes it an accidental great record, the shifting of styles being one of its biggest strengths. Whereas ‘Declivity’ is a shooting star that melts in the sky, ‘Mystery’ is a piebald nebula of ideas engulfing your ears. Here, the robotic charm of ‘Data-Byte, Sound-Byte’ sits happily alongside the catchy ‘Matthew’, and the familiar folk-electronica fusion of the lovely ‘You Should Revise’ is not out of place on the same record as the eerily infectious closing ‘Much Like A Gherkin Creepy’. After one listen I was convinced that ‘Of Life’s Declivity’ was THE record to download. After two listens, I started to feel like ‘Her Blameless Mystery’ was more adventurous and perhaps the real accidental masterpiece of the two. From three listens onwards I have reached the only conclusion possible that both records are little classics in their own right and well worth a chance of your precious time.

So there you have it. Kelsey Grammar, if you’re reading this then feel free to quake in your google-boots. My ears are ringing and my heart is singing with the sounds of two cracking EPs as I catch my breath from the sprint. The Quixodelic Commune is one genuine and seriously talented songsmith better off. It is a privilege to have FailedSitcom on board to please take the time to download one, and inevitably both of these records. After all, bandwagons are always more exciting when you get on at the very beginning.

Say hello to the newest member of the Quixodelic Collective – FailedSitcom. You may have stumbled across his unique blend of folk and electronic beats over at CLLCT, or even caught the really cool ‘Mortlake’ on DG8. But for those of you who haven’t heard of him (and even for those of you who have), I threw some pretty random questions his way to find out a little bit more.

DG – Where did you get the name FailedSitcom from?

FS – It comes from a song called “The Toss and Turn” by the rapper Pedestrian, there’s a line in it where he says: “like our lives are lines out of failed sitcoms.” I remember listening to that track on an old MiniDisc whilst standing near the sea whilst on holiday in Whitby and it kind of stuck with me ever since. It also seemed suitably self-deprecating.

DG – You can take one record to a desert island for the rest of your life – what would it be?

FS – The Books – Lost and Safe

DG – Who is your favourite artist?

FS – Lynda Barry

DG – Haha. I rarely back someone I know to questions like these. I guess it’s a good sign that there are plenty of great things to discover out there. What would you say have been the been the biggest influences/inspiration for your own musical endeavours?

FS – I was probably most influenced to start producing my own music by Dan The Automator. Around the time that I was starting to listen to music I borrowed my brother’s copy of Gorillaz first album and then devoured everything he had done before, I remember being particularly into his work with Deltron 3030.

Knowing that he was the “producer” and therefore responsible for the way these records sounded was when I realised you could create music without necessarily being a musician. A lot of his collaborators, particularly DJ Shadow, were also a big influence in those early days and are certainly responsible for the hip-hop element to my music.

Nowadays my obsession with The Books definitely informs a lot of what I do, so much in fact that I often have to consciously avoid certain things to separate myself from them. I certainly aspire not only to their seamless use of samples alongside traditional instruments, but also their ability to make the experimental easily accessible.

DG – What’s the best song you’ve ever written?

FS – I’m probably most proud of Edith Blake. With it’s fragments of samples and real instruments playing off of each other, it feels like it captures a lot of things that I’d been aiming for before but never quite pulled off how I’d intended.

DG – I really love the way you fuse electronic beats with organic folk instruments. How do you go about writing a song?

FS – I like to write the lyrics first, this means that when I start writing the music I already have a feeling for what kind of structure is going to work. After that I tend to just sit down with an instrument (my guitar more often than not) and lay down some kind of melody to sing over. Everything sort of develops organically from there.

DG – It definitely seems that there are three ways to go about writing a song – the lyrics first approach, the melody first approach, and the song pops into your head fully formed approach. Would you say that lyrics are the most important part of what you do? What sort of things do you like to write about?

FS – I do think lyrics are fairly important, but I guess from a song-writing viewpoint it’s just that they just help inform the feeling of the rest of the song and where it should go. One such example is when I when I was sitting in my favourite teashop and at a nearby table a toddler was going “b… b… b…” for what felt like an impossibly long amount of time, before ending with “biscuit!” I knew I had to use it and that everything else in the track should just slip playfully around my impersonation of what I had heard him chanting.

A little while ago I made a pact with myself that I’d only write songs about things that I love, not only does this help me make the kind music that I want, but it forces me to notice how much there is in the world that I love and hopefully it makes me appreciate it more. This means that I tend to write songs about nature, small details and people that are special to me. If I feel that I’m writing about the same things all the time, I just acknowledge that I’m obsessed with these things and that I simply must embrace them.

DG – Posters above your bed when you were a teenager?

FS – I didn’t really have any when I was a teenager (my friends described by room as minimalist), but when I was younger I had a poster of Yoshi that I remember my parents getting from a petrol station.

DG – Haha, well I can kinda hear the Yoshi influence in your electronic blips and boops.

If you could learn and play one instrument, what would it be?

FS – Pretty much any brass instrument, I was part of a junior brass band when I was really young but couldn’t actually play my given instrument (the cornet). I guess I was just there to look cute at fundraisers. I really wish I’d practiced and paid more attention now.

DG – I got given a cornet too as a kid and I was terrible at it, but I also regret not paying more attention to it. Have you ever considered collaborating with people that can play brass? Or could you ever see Failed Sitcom existing in a band set-up?

FS – Whilst I would love to have brass on some tracks, I rarely go out of my way to collaborate with others.

Failed Sitcom is me living out my control freak fantasies, I know roughly how I want everything to sound so I just do everything myself. This sadly makes playing live an impossibility without either teaching other musicians parts that I hardly remember how to play myself, or relying heavily on the original recordings. I must say that neither option appeals a great deal to me.

With that being said, there has been talk of a musical project between myself and few friends. We sadly live much too far apart at the moment and rarely see each other, but I hope to see something come of it one day.

DG – Shuffle your iPod – what are the first five songs that play?

FS – Here goes:

Paul Giovanni – The Landlord’s Daughter
John Cale – The Endless Plain of Fortune
Tom Waits – Cemetery Polka
Electric President – We Were Never Built to Last
Hanged Up – New Blue Monday

DG – Describe your music in three words?

FS – Collage, folk, pop.

DG – “Collage”… I think that’s a brilliant description of what you do.

When did you first start writing your own songs?

FS – I guess I first started messing around with sounds about six years ago, these were mostly experiments in sampling found sounds and recording my guitar using a pair of headphones. I’m not sure if any even survive.

DG – Favourite smell?

FS – The general dampness after a heavy downpour of rain.

DG – Favourite book?

FS – The Master & Margerita by Mikhail Bulgakov

DG – Do you have any recurring dreams?

FS – Not any more, but I used to have one where I was being pulled up out of a pit of zombies in a cemetery by my brother before the rope broke. I woke up as they pulled me limb from limb, or at least that’s how I remember it.

DG – Favourite track from Daydream Generation 8?

FS – A couple of days ago it was Chakra by Tuck Son, but right now it’s Trip (To Heaven) by Maureen Sill.

DG – I’m with you 100% on both of those. You’ve heard a LOT of music on CLLCT over the last few months, and I know you’ve been asked this before, but for the benefit of people who haven’t visited it can you recommend any other musical gems they should start with?

FS – There are so many great artists and releases I’m missing, but here are a few favourites:

The Yataris – Fun Summer
Dirty Merlin – CLLCT Vol. 1
Kenny Hamilton – Good Boy
Simon Piler and The Atom Band – A DISASTER
box_ – hello special glowing world
Insomniatic – A Penny Dredful for All (…and songs to drink tea too)
Like A Villain – Flight I took to Antarctica once

DG – What’s the first thing you remember?

FS – Trying to open my third birthday present, but being unable to get through the paper so my mum opened it for me. It was Playmobil Truck.

DG – What kind of recording set-up do you have? Equipment etc.

FS – I use my MacBook, a simple firewire interface and record everything with a single condenser microphone. I have a few physical instruments that I can’t play particularly well (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, mandolin, ukulele and glockenspiel) and I sequence everything else in Ableton Live .

DG – What kind of drunk are you?

FS – I act appallingly and hide under tables.

DG – What are your musical plans for the future?

FS – Hopefully a new EP, it’s mostly theoretical right now but I have started writing some lyrics and should be recording shortly.

DG – Got some websites of your own we can visit?

FS – Why certainly:

http://cllct.com/art/failedsitcom