5. EarnHell On Earth
A stunningly beautiful album. Weirdly, tied in with Boards of Canada, which ties in with early Aphex Twin, and the lineage from there is early Krautrock, with synths that sound like they’re seasick. Sort of like classic My Bloody Valentine as well. I adore that sound, where things sound like they’re swinging in and out of tune. I used it on a couple of Jesu records and on the last record I thoroughly exploited it. A lot of people interpreted it as being out of tune, which is brilliant. The record is called Everyday I Get Closer To The Light From Which I Came – I didn’t promote it as much but it came out last September. It’s got that seasick sound. Yes, like you say, it sort of swells back and forth, that’s another way of literalising that sort of sound. It’s got a term in classical music… glissando? I was hugely obsessed with a composer called [Giacinto] Scelsi in the early 90s, Italian, recognised as avant-garde but if you say that people think electro-acoustic, or fast, or plinkety-plonk, where Scelsi is completely the opposite. Instead, what he’d do was command an entire orchestra to examine the nuances and micro-tonalities of one note for 60 minutes. It’s one huge monolithic sustained note that just quavers slightly. I like nothing more than one fucking note.
I met Adam [Wiltzie] from Stars Of The Lid recently, I didn’t know who he was but he came up and shook my hand and said, "I love your music" and I said, "Your face is familiar" and he said, "My name’s Adam, I’m in this band you might know called Stars Of The Lid" and I was like, "Wow, I love Stars Of The Lid", and he was equally shocked as I was. Those last few Stars Of The Lid albums will reduce you to tears; highly emotionally charged they are.
