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Mole
Harness interview / feature written by John Stevens, from Bristol's
Venue magazine, December 2006:
It’s
not stretching an analogy (just keep telling yourself that –
Ed) to suggest that, around five years ago, Bristol’s alternative
music scene started resembling a mole colony: lots of furtive underground
activity; artists and promoters co-existing within networks of independently
forged musical burrows; why, in the precociously teenage Team Brick
the city even had its own Penfold. Not to get too Kate Thornton
about it, but James ‘Mole Harness’ Brewster, a former
Bristol-dweller who this year saddled up and migrated to Malmo,
Sweden, remembers these golden times fondly: ‘There was a
definite electronic scene developing as well as a wider DIY ethic,
and an incredible supportive atmosphere as well. People like Float,
Silent Age, Clean Cut and Tom Bugs helped me out in so many ways,
and the fact that other people had faith in what I was doing gave
me confidence during a period when I was still trying to find my
own sound’.
And that
sound he most certainly found. Brewster’s three albums and
an EP as Mole Harness remain arguably the most focussed, carefully
developed and sonically satisfying body of work to have come from
any of Bristol’s many electro-acoustic artisans in recent
years. 2004’s ‘All Your Memories Return At Once’
found glistening synth lines and distinctly Detroitian rhythms grazing
alongside Factory Records guitar melodies, and with each release
since Brewster has slow-boiled his sound down to its essence, culminating
in the warm, airy electric guitar impressionism found on brand new
album ’Out Of The Walled Pathway’, launched at The Cube
this Saturday. ‘This album actually had less of a conscious
direction behind it than the previous one (2005’s ‘A
Present From The Future’)’, says Brewster. ‘With
that I wanted to make a record entirely from guitars, a series of
variations on the same theme - juxtaposing processed and unprocessed
versions of the same melodic material. In one sense ‘…Pathway’
was a reaction against that, because I then started working much
more spontaneously. Then again, in another sense I was unconsciously
boiling the sound down even further by stripping away the layered
structures which had previously defined my music’.
The album’s
defining piece is its closer, the thirty minute-long ‘A Feast
For Regret’: where less inventive producers would nod off
at the desk when attempting something of such scale, this multi-sectioned
opus, restless in its tranquillity, is actually the product of Brewster’s
boredom as opposed its cause. ‘On previous releases I’ve
tried to make the structures flow as seamlessly as possible, so
that the listener can be carried along without making too much effort
to keep track. But by the time I started making this album, and
‘A Feast For Regret’ in particular, I’d become
bored. So I started introducing more arbitrary jumps between sections,
and tried to create dramatic points where new elements would enter
suddenly’.
The upping of sticks to Scandinavia has proven liberating for Brewster
and Mole Harness alike, it seems: ‘Being in a new environment
has definitely made me feel freer to start afresh. Part of what
was holding me back before was that I had a backlog of ideas and
unfinished things that I’d never had time work on properly,
but over here I’ve had more time to finish things off and
get ideas out, which has been really cathartic. Physically speaking
there’s also much more space in general, which I think has
also informed this feeling of being less restricted and more able
to let go of previous ideas’.
There
are more travels afoot, too, with the exciting news that Apestaartje,
a celebrated Brooklyn-based conduit for explorers in beatific sound
manipulations, wants to release future Harness output. ‘They
are one of my favourite labels, and share the same musical and visual
aesthetic as my own label Stray Dog Army. I really can’t think
of a better label to release my next album’. As Brewster,
like Anticon-signed SJ Esau, enjoys the benefits of the evermore
globalised music industry, will he still hold a candle for the city
that birthed Mole Harness in a rented Montpelier room five years
ago? ‘Bristol still holds a lot for me emotionally: it’s
where I started making music, which altered the course of my whole
life and gave me a sense of direction I lacked before. If I hadn’t
been there at that time, surrounded by those people, I may never
have started doing it in the first place. Some of the best and most
memorable times of my life so far took place in Bristol, so it definitely
still holds a lot for me’.
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