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Baker's Dozen

Addicted To Serendipity: Hayden Thorpe Of Wild Beasts' Baker's Dozen
Kiran Acharya , July 20th, 2016 09:47

As the Cumbrian quartet prepare to release their "'fuck you' to adulthood", Boy King, their singer and guitarist takes us through 13 LPs that shaped it, including Nine Inch Nails, Max Richter and Oneohtrix Point Never

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Laurie Anderson – Home Of The Brave
I don't know too much about the concept around the record other than I find it an incredibly moving piece of work. And on a more technical aspect, it's all made of MIDI. It's made of this very crude form of electronica, made at the dawn of MIDI as a technology in the 1980s. We use MIDI a lot. Because you know what? I don't credit myself as having, really, any kind of innate gift or natural talent, but I tend to write in a way that shortens the distance between an idea and the realisation of it.

For me MIDI has always been a simple and crude way of shortening that distance. Going back to Leonard Cohen, and how his tool was a crap guitar with an A chord and an E chord – you can do what you need to with that. Laurie Anderson's record is the same, but instead of using a guitar she uses a MIDI keyboard but still creates these works of great imagination.