5. David Maranha – Antarctica
It’s an album that really influenced the first Marching Church album. We were in Japan with Iceage and there’s this bar we like, a place called Golden Gai. It’s one of the last bastions of old Tokyo nightlife. There’s only room for about eight people in there but they play great records often at really intolerable volumes, which makes conversation in that tiny room very difficult but it’s worth it because you get introduced to things you haven’t heard before. They started playing this album and there was this really heavy, slow, dragging rhythm to it, a bit like John Cale’s viola drones, times a hundred. It sounded so warm that it was like embers from a bonfire and I remember thinking I wanted to achieve that same kind of draggy-ness. Later on we were touring with Marching Church and I noticed on a poster David was playing before us on one date in Lisbon as support. That was crazy to me because I knew nothing about him because he was just this mysterious presence I once encountered in Tokyo. That night he played and it turns out Alex Hungtai, who has collaborated with Marching Church, had worked with David and said he was this really interesting architect and jazz musician. They played the show and it wasn’t at all like the record, it was much more jazz but like I’d never seen a modern act perform it before. It had such immense power and was so incredibly sexy at the same time – really overpowering, godlike musicianship that I haven’t witnessed in modern jazz players before. I was in awe, it was completely wild and unruly but it wasn’t free jazz.
