Mike Bourne, aka Bruise Blood, will be best known to tQ readers as one third of the magnificent Teeth Of The Sea, the sonic voyagers whose travels have taken them from sprawling psychedelic rock to immense prog wigouts, to the mutated beats of last year’s career-peak Hive and beyond. Bruise Blood, however, sees him set out on a journey of his own, one that’s been a long time coming; the first six tracks from his solo project, made available exclusively to our subscribers today, “represent an itch that I needed to scratch,” he says. It’s a record no less dizzying than anything he’s released before, defined by punishing rhythms – some holding fast against barrages of noise, others mutating over and over until they reach a transcendent chaos – and by moments of crystalline electronic bliss.
Bourne’s been working on solo material for years. “I just never actually got around to completing a lot of it,” he explains. “There are hard drives and tape recorders that are full of unfinished jams.” The problem, appropriately enough given the massive sonic scope of Teeth Of The Sea’s discography, came through the overload of choice. “Personally, when I start making music it’s very tempting to get really into a track, then get distracted, then start another one, then I don’t really want to go back to the last one because by then I’m too excited.” One of the main advantages of being in a band, he says, was the sense of mutual accountability when it came to getting things over the line.
“Teeth Of The Sea is basically just the three of us in a room drinking beer and bouncing ideas off each other, and that’s always going to be fun,” he says. “Other people will force you to continue ideas that maybe you’re a bit too quick to dismiss, and it’s just as good if someone turns around to you saying ‘Look, that’s shit.’ I find it really stimulating, because they’ll suggest things that I would never have thought of in a million years. But at the same time, I saw [a solo release] as a challenge. There’s no one to tell me whether something should be a bit louder in the mix or shouldn’t be buried by other stuff. I can have whatever bits I like be as loud as I want.”
Teeth Of The Sea are still a going concern, and Bourne’s also working a day job and several freelance roles alongside music. He and his wife also started a family at the end of last year. “It’s been difficult to fit in time to do this stuff,” he notes, and yet he was able to turn these limitations into an advantage. As well as the tQ commission “giving me the kick up the arse I needed to actually finish some tracks,” limited time and space meant that he could bring intensified focus to Bruise Blood. With just a couple of weeks before the deadline, he shifted away from an initial plan to explore abstract sonic collage – “loads of ideas that had been hanging around, bits of tracks mixed with field recordings and found sounds” – in favour of embracing the raw momentum that carries Plays Blood Music Volume 1.
“It was a question of taking the best ideas then trying to flesh them out as quickly as possible, not spending so much time that you get bogged down in detail and make them sound too elaborate, but still giving them that extra edge that they needed.” Intense as they are, he also points out that they were actually made “at fairly low volume, so as not to disturb the family, but I’m pleased with how they’ve come out. They’re intentionally quite raw, loud and – I don’t want to say ‘angry’ – but they’re not very subtle. Let’s put it that way.”
In an effort to add further focus, Bourne envisaged Plays Blood Music Volume 1 as “a mixture of hardware and software jams.” He began by fleshing out material on a Polyend Tracker, SoMA machines and a Lyra-8 analogue synthesiser before taking it all to his production software, keen to strike a balance between analogue and digital. When working purely on a computer, “it’s easy to get distracted. Ableton’s an incredible creative tool, but you can find yourself sat there, wanting to put reverb on something, faced with an infinite number of reverb plugins and combinations and algorithms. I know for some people that’s a great thing, and it really is magnificent that nowadays all you need is a relatively cheap computer, and you can make absolutely wonderful music. You’ve got a recording studio and an orchestra right at your fingertips. But sometimes you’ve got to set those limitations, not get too carried away, and that’s what I did with this.”
It’s worth noting, of course, that the doors Bourne’s closed to himself with Bruise Blood’s debut release may well be re-opened later. With this release constituting the project’s launch, from here he sees the scope as limitless. “This is just the starting point really, an excuse to make a racket,” he says. “It’s not just a solo project, it can be anything, really. I’d love to get other people involved going forward.” The initial collage-like approach he abandoned while making this release may well be revisited, for instance – “There’re hours and hours’ worth of material to sift through” – and his early ideas for the project’s live debut mean shows will likely “sound a lot different” to what we’re hearing here. Nor can we expect Teeth Of The Sea’s parallel sonic voyage to be put on hold to make room for this new endeavour. “We’re still as firmly committed as we’ve ever been, and both projects will happily co-exist. It’s incredibly difficult, starting a family, working a full time job, doing a lot of freelance work and doing this project as well, but I like to keep busy. I don’t feel like I’m making use of my time if I’m not a bit stressed.”
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