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Addictive TV school us on sampling
Other | Thursday 5th March 2015 | Christina
Addictive TV are the first artists to be sanctioned by Hollywood to remix movies, and they have twice topped DJ Mag’s annual visual DJ poll. The producer/remixers have been at the forefront of the audiovisual scene for well over a decade, having taken their amazing live show to over 50 countries. We caught up with Mark and Graham to talk about mash-ups, wacky instruments and their latest project, Orchestra of Samples.
How did Addictive TV come about?
GRAHAM: It's really developed over the last decade in different stages as oppose to being created one sunny morning. Back in the day, I was producing TV like the ITV1 music show Mixmasters and Channel 4’s late night trippy music series Transambient, if you remember those, but I was also VJing in clubland at the same time, and performing AV shows in an earlier incarnation of Addictive TV when mine and Mark’s paths first crossed back in 2005 when EMI asked me to do the music video to his ‘Rapture Riders’ mash-up. You know Mark was actually the first DJ to ever get an album released of cleared mash-ups with his album Mashed?
MARK: Yeah, I'd been mashing up and producing bootlegs for quite a few years at that point with my Go Home Productions project and EMI had gone to my management to see if I was interested in making a cleared album of mash-ups, which eventually ended up being my Mashed album in 2006, and EMI had asked Graham to direct the music video for the track 'Rapture Riders', mashing-up Blondie's 'Rapture' with 'Riders on the Storm' by The Doors and the rest, as they say, is history after the pair of us decided to work together!
Can you tell us a little more about your current project, Orchestra of Samples? What was the creative process behind it?
GRAHAM: Well it’s been a huge undertaking, creating this project, which is why I guess very few artists have ever attempted to create something like this. We really wanted to collaborate with loads of different musicians internationally and that’s pretty impractical in the real world, unless you’re Bono or Sting, but obviously in the digital world of sampling, it’s very practical! So we took a camera and recording equipment with us while gigging around the planet for a few years, spending time filming local musicians everywhere we travelled and that’s now more than 150 musicians in over 20 countries like Brazil, Mexico, China, Senegal in West Africa, even Egypt and Kazakhstan and all over Europe! We then sampled all these recordings to create new music, and it’s visual music because audiences can see the samples! When you see the show, we’ve chopped up the musicians as if they’re playing together, when in reality none of them ever met!
MARK: The creative process is simply just seeing which samples work together. The whole Orchestra of Samples project is kind of an exploration into musical probability, the idea of bringing together really different musicians who wouldn't normally play together, and more to the point their instruments which wouldn’t normally be heard together! I’ve found working in this way fascinating, especially as I’m also a guitarist, and working outside of normal musical conventions has really opened my eyes, finding really unexpected combinations of instruments we didn’t know about.
What’s the strangest instrument you came across during the project?
GRAHAM: There’s quite a few! Henry Dagg’s Sharpsichord, that Björk used in her last project, is quite strange, though strange in an incredible way. But one of the strangest and most fascinating things we recorded was in Mexico with an expert on ancient music who spent years searching for naturally tuned fragments of rock, as he reckons hitting rocks would have been pretty much the first instrument humans ever played. He lays out the fragments in a musical scale, a bit like a “stone xylophone”, and simply plays them by hitting them with another small stone! Just incredible and it sounded like high-pitched synth notes!
MARK: I’d say the weirdest was in France, a huge type of bagpipe made from a whole goat called a Boudègue! Its legs became the pipes, and you blow down where its head was! It looked like a guy carrying a goat over his shoulder when we filmed the musician playing it! It was rather smelly too but sounded great, a very deep guttural sound! Definitely not for vegetarians!
How has the Orchestra of Samples tour been so far?
GRAHAM: It’s been amazing taking it to different places, especially to somewhere like Russia, where we performed in a contemporary art museum in St Petersburg and we weren’t quite sure how it’d be received, but it went down amazingly with the audience.
MARK: One of the best for me so far was in Italy, we performed it for the closing night of the very prestigious Romaeuropa Festival at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Rome, and at the end the audience all stood up and applauded, and we didn’t expect that!
And how was it performing at Rich Mix alongside Howie B?
GRAHAM: Wonderful, really fantastic to perform the project again in London a year or so after we first performed the premiere, the night was packed and the crowd were so up for it! And, as it happens, it’s been over 10 years since we last played together with Howie! We both did a big audio/video head-to-head night in Tokyo together in the early 2000’s, and I still have very good memories of that trip!
MARK: Loved it, a very special night. It was great to see so many familiar faces there and artists we’d worked with on the project like Laetitia Sadier from Stereolab and Henry Dagg, the ultra-talented guy who collaborated with Björk on her Biophelia project with his giant Sharpsichord instrument, it was awesome to see them all there. And Howie’s set was just brilliant, a real one off and he improvised the entire thing!
Why do you think there aren’t more AV artists from the UK? It’s definitely something that fits in with the London creative scene.
GRAHAM: Big question with no easy answers…maybe it’s partly that it’s still quite difficult and time consuming to create the work, or the fact you need projectors and screens to perform which not all venues have. Then there’s the rights issue - just like in the mash-up scene - if you’re sampling movies and so on and so on!
MARK: It is odd though that we find more acceptance of our work abroad than in the UK, especially in France and Spain. The electronic and digital arts scene does cross over much more with electronic music abroad than it does in the UK, with more festivals etc – so maybe that’s something too.
Do you have a favourite genre of video/film to work with?
GRAHAM: Action or science fiction – or ideally both!
MARK: The films that I personally love, might not translate so well in an Addictive TV remix way, 1960’s films like The Trip, Barbarella or the Monkees’ film Head wouldn't really translate in a live show but would work in a more specialised environment like a retro cinema project. We did remix 1960’s cult classic Blow Up though for a project with French arts broadcaster Arte a couple of years ago, which was cool. I just love experimental and surrealist Psychedelic cinema, Italian Giallo films, Blaxploitation and Biker flicks etc – all that same stuff that influences Quentin Tarantino it seems.
On your website you describe Orchestra of Samples and the archive you built as “creating a digital supergroup of international artists who never met”. If you could make your own supergroup with any artists, alive or dead, who would you go for?
MARK: Easy one… Johnny Marr from The Smiths on guitar, James Honeyman-Scott from the Pretenders on guitar, Andy Partridge of XTC on guitar and vocals, Colin Moulding of XTC on bass and vocals, drums from XTC’s Terry Chambers, lead guitar from XTC’s Dave Gregory, keyboards from XTC’s Barry Andrews, and lastly more guitar and vocals from Mansun’s Paul Draper!
GRAHAM: Hmmm… I’ll have to get back to you on that one!
What’s your favourite place to play and why?
GRAHAM: I like everywhere – I genuinely do! Brazil is always great, but so is Italy too, but if it had to be one place, I’d say France. It’s always great food, great hospitality, great technical support at gigs and always great audiences – plus the French go out to gigs at more sensible times, the opposite of playing in Spain – which I love too – but it’s always at something like 4 or 5am!
MARK: Hot countries with a day or two spare to spend by the pool sipping an alcoholic beverage or five!
And is there anywhere that you’re desperate to play that you haven’t got to yet?
GRAHAM: Cuba! We’ll play there one day I’m sure…maybe we’ll have to remix the Buena Vista Social Club movie or something, but it’ll happen…
MARK: Australia: It's a sizeable chunk of planet Earth that we've oddly not played yet! But also Peru – ever since being impressed by their mid-70's football team! And maybe somewhere near Nevada so I can go and do some UFO sightseeing!
What are you listening to at the moment?
GRAHAM: Right this second, I’m listening to ‘Double Barrell’ by Dave & Ansell Collins, in fact been listening to a lot of old Trojan Records stuff lately.
MARK: Oh lots! I've just finished a fortnight of listening to a combination of Krautrock bands like Neu!, Kraftwerk, Can, Cluster and Harmonia. I’ve even caught myself listening to early British synth pop like Human League, Soft Cell and OMD and have now settled on early 90's Shoegaze like Ride, Chapterhouse, Levitation, Adorable and Verve alongside New Wave Of New Wave like These Animal Men, S*M*A*S*H and others… and even Britpop in the last few days like Mansun, Menswear, Sleeper, Spearmint and even a bit of Blur and Oasis.
We’re coming up to festival season, have you got any plans to play or attend any this summer?
GRAHAM: Yes, we’re playing at Chilled in a Field and have been asked about Glastonbury, but we played Glastonbury last year and not sure we’ll do it this year. And we’ve two summer festivals in Spain in July and one in France we’re playing at.
MARK: I’m looking forward to catching lots of bands this summer. We’ve also been asked about a two week residency in Morocco as part of a big music festival, they want us to also record lots of musicians for Orchestra of Samples, but it’s not yet confirmed – so fingers crossed.
What’s your best festival memory?
GRAHAM: Has to be the enormous SOS4.8 Festival in Spain a couple of years ago - it was Mark’s birthday and he missed the flight after the M25 motorway was closed and he got stuck, and then at airport security they took away part of our kit from me! It all started so badly but when Mark finally arrived in Spain, and we’d had no sound check but went out on the main stage in front of 40,000 people it was one of the best gigs we’d ever played! Very very memorable…
MARK: Glastonbury Festival last summer for me. It was just a complete drunken mud-fest topped with seeing some of my favourite new bands like Temples and Wolf Alice. We also bumped into Gaz Coombes backstage somewhere too which was very memorable indeed, and we also played the main Hell Stage at Shangri-La, which was utterly fantastic. We finished our set with a drum n bass Muppets remix we’d created especially, loved it! A very memorable festival for me that one!
Any exciting projects coming up that you want to tell us about?
GRAHAM: Yes, we’ve been asked to create something for the 50th anniversary of somewhere in London, but I can’t give away anything right now… check back later in the year!
MARK: We’re thinking of remixing Star Wars for our live set – could be very exciting to do, but with a whole load of dread, as we want to get it right!
Now for some fun Guestlist questions.
What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
GRAHAM: Stacking shelves at Sainsbury’s as a teenager!
MARK: Picking up three days worth of doggy-do from our back garden last month. Was looking after 4 dogs while in-laws went skiing in the south of France! The fact that it also rained heavily for the duration made the task most unpleasant. That was far far worse than working in a warehouse in New Barnet when I was 19.
If you could have 3 people stranded on a desert island with you, who would you choose?
GRAHAM: My girlfriend, a genie with an endless supply of wishes and a world-class chef!
MARK: My wife and our 2 dogs - Mojo and Lennon.
If you were in charge of the country, what’s the first law you would change?
GRAHAM: I’d get rid of our system of government and replace it with something much simpler…
MARK: I think I'd bring back national service and public execution, also abolish the TV license and make public flogging the punishment for excessive programming of cookery shows and reality TV!
And some word association. What’s the first thing that comes to mind if we say……
Music
GRAHAM: Video
MARK: Psychedelic
Marmite
GRAHAM: Love it
MARK: Twiglets
Conspiracy
GRAHAM: Theory
MARK: Swine flu
Monday
GRAHAM: Tuesday
MARK: Morning
Memory
GRAHAM: Back-up drives!
MARK: Elephant
Alien
GRAHAM: Versus Predator
MARK: Ripley
Future
GRAHAM: Living on the moon!
MARK: Seeds
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