A little later, we’ll be posting an interview with Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip and About Group on cult television series Fishing With John. While we had the man on the other end of our dictaphone for that piece, the Quietus asked Alexis a little about how a new Hot Chip LP might be going on. "We’ve started recording the new album, but we never really have a plan," Alexis told us. "We always get asked in interviews what the next one will be like, and we make an accurate description of one song and a year later in Australia people are saying ‘so I hear it’s going to be a rock record’… We’ve got a few tracks almost finished. Two of them are played by me and Joe without the rest of the group, and I suppose they’re quite tough sounding in terms of production, house or techno in a way. But nothing else we’ve written is like that so I don’t know what it’ll end up sounding like." We had better not write "new house album from Hot Chip", then.
Alexis told us that the writing and recording process was different from the more free-form approach taken by About Group. "We tend to start recording before we’ve written a whole bunch of songs, and that’s never a plan it’s just how things work. With About Group, I’ll turn up with some songs and start playing them in the middle of some more improv music, and then similarly it forms around itself, but it’s got a few things in there already. I suppose we do do that thing in Hot Chip of although there’s lots of live playing, we do layer it, so it’s much more about the process of building up layer by layer, whereas we’re trying to do something a lot more immediate with the recording process with Hot Chip."
Alexis also says there’s a dialogue between the music of the two groups. "I think for a while it was starting to influence things with Hot Chip, we even did a Maida Vale session where we got Charles Hayward and John Coxon from About Group to play with Hot Chip. For a brief period of time Joe was quite excited about getting Hot Chip to record in the way About Group recorded, which is playing live and doing first takes. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do with Hot Chip, but maybe it took me doing it somewhere else for it to feed back into our group. Right now I feel that this interest has slightly waned within Hot Chip because we’ve got other ideas now."
About Group play the Quietus Village Mentality stage at Field Day, this Saturday August 8th.
