Röportaj // Interview: Travis Louie
Konu: Patates // Topic: Potato

Björk’ten Thurston Moore’a, Zu’dan Six Organs of Admittance’a birçok müzisyenle sayısız projeye imza atmış, yeni dönem müziğin davul dehası olarak anılan Chris Corsano akıllara durgunluk veren tek kişilik davul performansıyla arkaoda’da. Noise ve deneysel rock sahnesinin vizyonu ve tekniğiyle son 10 yıldaki belki de en gözde ve sözü geçen davulcularından biri olarak anılan Corsano, daha önce de Björk konseri için geldiği İstanbul’da URA’da gizli bir konser de vermişti. Arkaoda ve Bant dergisinin ortak konser girişimi Kulaktan Kulağa’nın bu ayki konuğu Corsano işte bu konserin rövanşı için İstanbul’da.
KULAKTAN KULAGA PRESENTS: CHRIS CORSANO (US) 04.03.2010 @ ARKAODA
This month, arkaoda and Bant Magazine’s concert series Kulaktan Kulağa presents the prolific drummer Chris Corsano. Best known for his noise and avant-garde projects such as Vampire Belt and Flower Corsano Duo, Corsano has also worked with names such as Björk, Thurston Moore, Ben Chasny, and Sir Richard Bishop. Corsano will be performing one of his mind blowing solo performances at arkaoda.

www.myspace.com/chriscorsano

Get ready for a psychedelic Valentine’s Day experience! The legendary Sir Richard Bishop will be tearing apart the lovers’ day with his guitar. Starting his solo career after his first band Sun City Girls – stated as one of the best psychedlic rock bands of all time – Sir Richard Bishop released his first solo album Salvador Kali in 1998. Since then he has released 8 albums with styles ranging from surf to Middle Eastern tunes, rock to flamenco, blending them all with a unique vision. His 2009 release Freak of Araby, was a tribute to Egyptian guitar master Omar Khorshid. The Ankara based psych band Hayvanlar Alemi will be lighting up the flame of the night. A not-to-miss night at arkaoda!

2 - ATLAS SOUND - LOGOS

3 - BILL CALLAHAN - SOMETIMES I WISH WE WERE AN EAGLE

4 - FUCK BUTTONS – TAROT SPORT

11 – THE VERY BEST –  WARM HEART OF AFRICA
12 - GRIZZLY BEAR – VECKATIMEST
13 – ISIS – WAVERING RADIENT
14 –DOOM – BORN LIKE THIS
15 – YONLU – IN A SOCIETY IN WHICH NO TEAR IS SHED …
16 - THE FLAMING LIPS - EMBRYONIC
17 - OM – God Is Good
18 - REAL ESTATE -REAL ESTATE
19 -MICACHU & THE SHAPES - JEWELLERY
20 - BEACH HOUSE – TEEN DREAM
21 - DESIRE – II
22 - HEALTH – GET COLOUR
23 - GIRLS - ALBUM
24 – DINOSAUR JR –  FARM
25 – TORTOISE – BEACONS OF ANCESTORSHIP
26 - FEVER RAY - FEVER RAY
27 – TELEPATHE - DANCE MOTHER
28 – YACHT – SEE MYSTERY LIGHTS
29 – WAVVES – WAVVES
30 – HELENA ESPVALL & MASAKI BATOH – OVERLOADED ARK
31 – LIECHTENSTEIN -SURVUVAL STRATEGIES IN A MODERN WORLD
32 – SONIC YOUTH – ETERNAL
33 - DIRTY PROJECTORS – BITTE ORCA
34 – GREYMACHINE – DISCONNECTED
35 - THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART -THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART
36 - KURT VILE - CHILDISH PRODIGY
37 - HERE WE GO MAGIC – HERE WE GO MAGIC
38 - BURNING HEARTS – ABOA SLEEPING
39 – BALMORHEA – ALL IS WILD, ALL IS SILENT
40 - M WARD - HOLDS TIME
41 – POLVO – IN PRISM
42 - JORI HULKKONEN - MAN FROM EARTH
43 - VIC CHESNUTT - AT THE CUT
44 – KING KHAN & BBQ SHOW – THE INVISIBLE GIRL
45 - THE WHITEST BOY ALIVE –  RULES
46 - YEAH YEAH YEAHS – IT’S BLITZ
47 – NADJA – WHEN I SEE THE SUN IT ALWAYS SHINES ON TV
48 – TAKEN BY TREES –  EAST OF EDEN
49 – THE EMPEROR MACHINE –  SPACE BEYONDE THE EGG
50 -PERFUME - TRIANGLE

Interview by Ekin Sanaç

This is the original English version of the interview with John Robb on the Membranes published in Bant’s 57th issue.

Which bands were the biggest deal for you when you were growing up? Who did you see on stage perform and wanted to make music of your own and perform it?

I grew up with glam rock in the early seventies. It was time of insane musical possibilities in the middle of grey times in the UK. Whilst the country seemed to be falling apart eh music just went crazy! The soundtrack was Bowie, Trex, Mott The Hoople, Slade and even bands like Mud and the Sweet who get sneered at by critics but had some great moments…add to this the hangover of the Beatles and the Stones and you’ve got some great music to grow up with. I grew up in Blackpool which is a seaside resort in the north of Blackpool 60 miles from Manchester and we felt very cut off from the music scene- music for us seemed to be made by aliens from another planet.
What really made a difference for me was when punk rock burst into our lives- the idea that you could make your own music was revolutionary and it was at that point that my generation rallied and made its own music/art/media- it was the beginning of everything that we know now. Someone at school ha d a copy of the Buzzcocks Spiral Scratch EP which looked home made and that was truly inspirational- we made our own record a year later- the idea that you could make your own record was so thrilling…
Punk changed everything- it changed our music, our politics, and our trousers!
DIY is the key to punk rock and the most revolutionary thing that came out of the movement- the idea that you could create your own art and not to be a passive consumer wa avery powerful stamenet and one that so many people from my generation were inspired by…

Reading about the Membranes, it looks like you started out pure D.I.Y. in terms of instruments as well, with building your own bass guitar and so on. Was it also the first time you started playing the bass as the Membranes?

I had never played an instrument in my life- like most of my generation we were never encouraged to play instruments and the idea of making music was really alien to us- but DIY and punk empowered us and that a powerful feeling- I wanted a violin bass because they look amazing- such a bizarre shape for a bass guitar but there was no way you could buy one on Blackpool so I bought a chunk of wood and spent the summer carving it with a pen knife whilst sat on the street in Blackpool- I had never made anything before but the great thing about punk DIY was that you believed that anything was possible- there no such thing as no- if you wanted to be in a band then you formed a band- if you wanted to have a magazine you made one (we made our own fanzine called Rox) and if you wanted a violin bass you got a piece of wood and made one- somehow the bass sounded amazing- a stupidly heavy bass sound…!

You were the punk rock band who did not sound like a punk rock band. And it still sounds true. Did you have control over how you wanted to sound like when you first started out, like consciously? Or was it an unconscious consequence of your wide range of influences?

We were influenced by so much music- we loved the psychedelic punk of the Stranglers and tat opened a lot of possibilities we loved the clash the pistols and the Buzzcocks the dammed and also post punk as it started to emerge with subway sect, the fall, the Manchester bands, killing joke, public image- we also loved blues, free jazz and so called world music- John peel was important his radio show played such an eclectic amount of music that it turned you onto whole areas of music- we also knew lots of older hippies- in smaller towns all the youth cults were closer than in the cities- so we heard a lot of their music…nights spent on magic mushrooms wallowing in the genius of Can and Hawkwind were important!
We thought we were apunk band but for us the idea of punk rock was to make your own music and even I w eloved a lot of the bands who just copied the punk bands we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to go our own way but still be a punk band, a punk band as we understood it was to be something really original and I think we achieved that!

During the years you were together, looks like you have toured quite all around. What were some of the peaks of the Membranes being on the road? Did the Membranes toured together with some other bands as well?

Touring was very important and we would be the first Death To Trad Rock band to go to many of the towns in the U/Europe and America- people didn’t always understand the music that we were trying to make and the levels of intensity that we would play it at- we were quite far out on a limb but we nearly broke through in the UK- we were mainstream TV programmed the Tube and had several national music paper covers etc- we preceded the American post hardcore scene of Sonic Youth, Big Black etc by a couple of years- we mainly headlined gigs- there were not many other bigger bands that we could play with and we were evry much involved in the underground- we would take out all the new bands from the Death To trad Rock scene with us on tour (all these bands are written about in my Death To trad Rock book)

I have come across to so many interviews with different bands/musicians who mentions the Membranes as a huge influence… It’s always the music + the attitude. What could you say attitude wise the Membranes had different that most other punk rock bands lacked?

That’s nice of those bands to acknowledge us! I guess at one time we were the noisiest and most extreme band of our time and we played music with a level of insanity that was unusual in the UK- our attitude was what we believed punk rock was- we would employ all the punk rock ethics - the idea that the band and the audience were the same community- looking back now I guess we were pretty original and that can inspire people! We also had a lot of energy- an energy that would transfer to people and we would encourage people to make their own music and their own art- we did our fanzine, ‘Rox’ which featured many of the bands as they started- quite often their first piece pf press- the fanzine was quite over the top- a spew of ideas, writing and stupid jokes…(I could send you a jpeg of it if you want) we wanted to turn the music scene over and were quite ambitious even though we had no money. I guess we were a catalyst band- one of those bands that inspired people…

What was recording for “Kiss Ass Godhead” with Steve Albini like? How did you meet him? Was he a fan of your music when you met him? It was his early career. Did you see that coming that he was gonna get this big as he is now?

Steve was already a fan of the membranes he told us that in 1985 he made a trip to the UK and tried to get in touch with a handful of bands and one of them was the membranes but he couldn’t find our number which tells you a lot about life in the pre internet times! We met him in 1987 when Big Black did their first UK tour. I loved the sound of their early records and figured he could do a great job for the membranes- we had made some great sounding records and some that sounded just OK. This was before he was known as a producer…by the time we got in the studio with him to record Kiss Ass Godhead he had worked on a couple of other records like Slint and the Pixies.
It was great working with him- we shared a lot of very similar ideas about music. The first thing we did was four tracks at Steve’s house in the suburbs of Chicago. Our drummer couldn’t make it because he was knocked back by the visa people! So we had to use the Big Black drum machine which was a huge wooden box- I’ve never seen a drum machine like it! the tracks sound great you can hear the door creaking in the room!
We then finshed the album off in Leeds and Steve ame out to do it there- we all splet in this damp cold room in Leeds and went into the studio to to the album by day…he did agreat job even if the studio was falling apart!

Kiss Ass Godhead was when we got the sound perfect and songs of love and fury was pretty good as well— songs of love and fury got the best reviews- even rolling stone made it one of their top ten albums of the year- when I look back at the press we got I cant believe that we didn’t end up being massive but I don’t think our record labels were big enough to make that push and that’s what music is always about…

In all these years, up until the ATP Festival, has there been any times where you wanted to get together and start performing again as the Membranes?

I am so busy that I never thought about it! When we got asked to play ATP it was like a bolt from the blue and I agreed straight away to do the gig and when we started rehearsing it sounded great…I like doing things on the spur of the moment and the membranes paying ATP felt right and it was great to play that kind of music again!

How have your recent gigs been? Both, the ATP, and the Manchester gig you played… How does the crowd react? Do you have old Membranes followers or is it more a mixture of young kids who are into you now?

The crowd was a real mixture..At ATP there were youth there who had never thought of the Membranes and thought we were an amazing new band…there were also lots of old membranes fans there and it got quite emotional! The Manchester warm up gig was great- we only mentioned it on facebook and people came from all over the country to check it out- someone even flew in from Moscow to see it!

Bant Dergisinin konuğu olarak ülkemizi daha önce iki kez ziyaret etmiş müzisyen ve müzik yazarı John Robb’un 1977’de temellerini attığı efsanevi İngiliz post-punk topluluğu The Membranes 1990 yılında sahnelere veda edişinin ardından yeniden bir araya gelişini İstanbul izleyicisine vereceği unutulmaz konserle kutluyor. Noise pop, post-punk ve shoegaze adına, My Bloody Valentine, The Pastels, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Slowdive ve Ride gibi zamanında çok değerli isimleri dinleyiciye ulaştırmış yüksek tesirli plak şirketi Creation Records’un ilk anlaşma imzaladığı grup olma şerefini elinde tutan The Membranes, Aralık ayında My Bloody Valentine tarafından düzenlenen geleneksel All Tomorrow’s Parties Festivali için 20 senelik bir sürenin ardından yeniden bir araya gelmiş ve sıkı bir performans gerçekleştirmişti. 28 Ocak akşamı ise İstanbul Indigo, kitleleri hakimiyeti altına alan ritmik ve gürültülü şarkılarıyla punk’ın altın günlerine doğru bir zaman yolculuğu gerçekleştirmek üzere The Membranes ile unutulmaz bir geceye hazırlanıyor.

Punk’ın dünyayı ele geçirişine tanıklık etmiş değerli yazar John Robb, bugüne kadar punk’ın sözlü tarihini ele aldığı, Manchester’dan çıkan müziklere yoğunlaştığı ve Stone Roses’ın ilk gerçek hikâyesini yazıya döktüğü, büyük ses getiren çeşitli kitaplar hazırladı. Aynı zamanda Morrissey’in tek sevdiği müzik yazarı olan Robb’un birçok müzisyenin hayatını değiştirmiş topluluğu The Membranes’in yüksek enerjili sıkı performansı için kemerleri bağlayın. Gecenin açılışını ise yalnızca yerli malı garaj punk adına değil tüm İstanbul sahnesi adına sıkı performanslarını ortaya koyan The Raws yapıyor.

CITY STAR NIGHTS BY CONVERSE  #23
THE MEMBRANES (UK)
JANUARY 28, 2010 @ INDIGO
OPENING ACT: THE RAWS

Bant Magazine invites the musician and music journalist John Robb, once more to Istanbul. This time John Robb is getting ready to perform with his legendary post-punk band The Membranes, after almost 20 years. The Membranes holds the priority of being the first band to make a deal with Creation Records, the home to influential names of noise pop, post-punk and shoegaze such as My Bloody Valentine, The Pastels, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Slowdive and Ride. They have guested the All Tomorrow’s Parties curated by My Bloody Valentine last December and played their first gig in 20 years. On January 28, the Membranes is on Indigo Stage with their rhythmic and noisy songs that define the time travel to punk’s golden days. John Robb has witnessed punk conquering the world and has written books on the oral history of punk, Manchester music, and the true story of the Stone Roses. He is also Morrissey’s only favorite music journalist. The opening act of the night; The Raws, is not only the highlight of the local garage punk, but also of the whole Istanbul scene with their strong performances.

www.myspace.com/themembranesuk
www.myspace.com/theraws

Röp/Interview: Laurie Lipton
Konu/Topic: 2000′ler/2000s
Konu/Topic: 2009′un En’leri/The Bests Of 2009

Röp / Interview:  The Membranes, The Fiery Furnaces, Toz ve Toz, Tolga Fidan, Sir Richard Bishop, Orhan Eskiköy, Zeki Ökten, Turbo

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Where The Wild Things Are / Fantastic Mr. Fox / İki Dil Bir Bavul / Jack Rose / Beach House / Tiger Trap / Paul Laffoley / Food Inc. / White Man’s Burden

Casiotone For The Painfully Alone:

Chicago’lu Owen Ashworth’ün tek kişilik dev grubu Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, 1997 yılından beri tadından yenmez pop şarkıları icra ediyor. Ashworth’ün müziği karşı koyulamaz gücünü, çeşitli klavyeler, davul makinaları ve diğer elektronik ekipmanlarla şekillendirdiği parçalarının üzerine oturttuğu vokallerindeki Magnetic Fields-vari ironiden alıyor. İlk kayıtlarında ağırlıklı olarak elektronik ekipmanlardan faydalanan Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, ilerleyen albümlerinde analog enstrümanlardan daha sık faydalanmaya başlayarak müziğini daha ileri bir seviyeye taşımıştı. 2009 tarihli son albümü “Vs. Children” ise Casiotone For The Painfully Alone’un güçlü melodileri ve yeni hikâyeleriyle, cazibesi yüksek bir dizi “hit” ortaya koymayı başardı. Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, 19 Aralık akşamı Indigo’da insanın kendi başında kaldığı zamanlardaki içselleştirme güdüsünü besleyen, samimi ve tatlı bir melankoliyle desteklenen müziklerden hoşlananlar için kaçırılmaması gereken bir performans sunmaya hazırlanıyor.

Wildbirds & Peacedrums

19 Aralık akşamı, Casiotone For The Painfully Alone’dan hemen önce ise, İsveç’in son zamanlarda çıkardığı en orijinal müziklerden birinin altına imzasını atmış olan Wildbirds & Peacedrums sahne alıyor. Wildbirds & Peacedrums, aynı zamanda evli bir çift olan Mariam Wallentin ve Andreas Werliin’in kurguladığı bir vokal ve ritim ikilisi. Müzikte Mariam’ın teatral vokal yeteneğiyle anlattığı hikayelere çoğunlukla eşlik eden tek şey Andreas’ın kendinden geçmiş davulları ve onların yanı sıra netice alabildiği her şeye vurarak çıkardığı sesler. Başka bir şeye ihtiyaçları olmadığı da aşikar. Kimileri onları free blues olarak tanımlıyor, kimileri ise alternatif pop… Kimileri deneyselcilikleriyle Björk’ün yaptıkları arasında sağlam bir bağ olduğuna inanmış, punk grubu olduklarını düşünenlerin sayısı ise oldukça fazla. Mütevazı bir tavırla 2007’de kaydettikleri “Heartcore” adlı ilk albümlerinin ardından geçtiğimiz yıl tamamladıkları “The Snake” ile ise onlar çoktan küçük mahallelerini terk etmiş, okyanuslar aşarak çok sayıda insanın gözünü kamaştırmayı başarmış. 19 Aralık akşamı Casiotone For The Painfully Alone’dan hemen önce, Wildbirds & Peacedrums tokmaklarıyla mekânı inletiyor olacak, sakın geç kalmayın.

CITY STAR NIGHTS BY CONVERSE # 23 // CASIOTONE FOR THE PAINFULLY ALONE (US) + WILDBIRDS & PEACEDRUMS (SWE) // 16 DECEMBER WEDNESDAY @ INDIGO

Casiotone For The Painfully Alone

City Star Nights by Converse concert series organized by Bant Magazine presents 2 amazing acts of these days on December 16, Wedneday at Indigo.

Casiotone For The Painfully Alone is Chicago’s Owen Ashworth’s one man band going on since late 90’s crafting beautiful pop songs with various keyboards, drum machines and his ironicly sweet vocals. With strong melodies and brand new stories, his latest album “Vs. Children” succeeded in putting forth a series of charming “hits”. Casiotone For The Painfully Alone’s sincere melancholy will be on Indigo stage on Wednesday, December 16.

Wildbirds & Peacedrums