The Horrors are a band who have always had a healthy persuasion towards progression, a sense that they’re making music that comes from a genuine love of crate-digging. The scope of 2011’s Skying was both intricate and vast, the sound of a band forging a record shaped by their own new musical discoveries, and by the time of last year’s Luminous, their large-scale, colourful sonics had become a trademark.
At least part of the reason for this increasingly kaleidoscopic direction is Tom Furse, the band’s former bassist and now keyboard player, and his interest in library music and exotica. In light of his forthcoming compilation Digs, a 19-track release that features high points in the genres mined from the Southern Library of Recorded Music, we asked Furse to put together a Baker’s Dozen that featured 13 records that reflected his thought process in putting the release together .
“I found it extra difficult,” he says of compiling the list. “I recently had to put all of my records into storage temporarily, so I wasn’t really able to sit down and look through and listen to stuff, so it kind of just went based on memory, trying to put something cohesive together.”
Furse points instantly to the influence of one band when tracing the genesis of his interest in exotica. “The Cramps had that kind of trashy aesthetic going on and all these kind of aesthetics mixed up and for one reason or another I was just completely drawn to this weird voodoo thing that was going on,” he says.
“I got hold of these compilations called Jungle Exotica,” he goes on, explaining how the fascination developed, “and it wasn’t really exotica, it was like rock & roll instrumentals and surf stuff, mixed in with these exotic themes. It was those, and when we went on a tour of America, we’d go to record shops and as soon as we saw a Martin Denny record that said Exotica on it, I’d think, ‘Oh, that looks cool.’ They’re so cheap out there, only a couple of dollars each, and each time I’d just pick up more and more, and I think that was it: just going through the natural thing of being really drawn in by the aesthetic, and then being really taken in by what that music actually was.”
Tom Furse Digs is out now on Lo Recordings. Furse will be launching the album tonight at Brilliant Corners in London, where he’ll be DJing, alongside Friendly Fires’ Ed Macfarlane and Lo Recordings’ Jon Tye; for full details and tickets, head here. Click on his image below to begin scrolling through Tom’s choices, which run in no particular order
