The Full Mix -

The album was a journey over the last year which started with some digging through an awesome record collection that belongs to MIck (T-Wok) He has a collection of thousands of rare records a really amazingly curated selection of rarities that i spent a few weeks going through when i was staying in his house for a while, from Venezuelan funk from the 60’s to loads of amazing Brazilian and Afro Beat stuff, I would just walk along the rows and do eeny meeny miny moe on different records and just stuck them on and potter about until I heard something and then grab a sample of it, I had my live hardware rig in the house too so the sample would go from the mixer through the modular synth and into a chaos pad for looping so the samples were processed and set to tempo before they even hit the computer so it was really easy to sketch beats around the bits of loops.

Choosing some sweet unique samples formed the foundations which became the building blocks for 20 tracks which were organised in the form of an hour long mix in one gigantic ableton set!

Anna improvised with vocals and harmonies over the loops and this shaped individual tracks.

She sang some hooks over some and on others just hummed harmonies and even did some sweet whistling which kind of made the bit sound like a chase scene! We then drafted in Wookie on sax and flute, Chris Con on drums, New Cicero on MC duties, Ivan Jackman on double bass, Ghaham Teeling on electronics, Tracy with some spoken word and Griffo from New Secret Weapon on guitars and mongolian throat singing!

We also used samples from some trips including caves in Iceland, Castro’s piano in Havana and a Cuban percussionist/priest, as well as other found sounds.

The whole Album kind of folded out in a linear way, as in the first things i sampled are on the first track and they are played on the album in the order they were sampled in and then everyone improvised over that and I edited everything to fit together and make the whole thing flow as a continuous piece.

We are big fans of concept albums that have something unusual to them like the Small Faces - Ogdens Celebrated Tobacco Flake - that has a narrator between the tracks fleshing out the story that is being told in the tracks. Or King Crimson’s - In the Court of the Crimson King was a huge Influence on me with it’s meandering tracks and the story and artwork behind it. This kind of attitude to a musical piece being all one entity along with a kind of sampling mentality like DJ Shadow or Amon Tobin who really write stories with their sound design, we wanted that element in this piece, and pulling from all these sources is where we got the title Appropriation

Then in the studio I got all my old analogue synths and drum machines and went to town layering sounds over the whole lot of sound content I had gathered.

I like the idea that this album has so many weird bits maybe someone else will sample from it and make something new :)



Our last release was very much electronic with synths, beats and programming done in the computer in our studio, the vocals being the main thing I would bring a mic out for but in this one there was loads of instrument recording and proper studio work like my friend Simon Wall (Wookie) would come in with his Sax and flute and jam over loads of parts and suggest brass harmonies and stuff. Chris Con who did the drums, some he recorded at home under his stairs and sent them to me and other tracks he came into the studio. The MC guest parts from Conor Fin (New Cicero) were done over the more Hip Hop bits but the third section he did which is over the grimy bit near the end he came into the studio a bit drunk and did this amazing freestyle with a load of attitude and it was amazing, he wanted to fix it up after but i wouldn’t let him as i wanted to keep the drunkness to it :)

So this album was more like getting a load of amazing musicians to do their thing and I would cherry pick the best bits and add them to the big monster mix I was making in ableton, 20 tracks in one set, which i would not recommend doing for various reasons but for this project it seemed to work!



Anna was pregnant during the making of this album and would pop in whenever she could to work on it, fair play to her she put the work in like a trooper still buzzing into the studio even when it was hard for her to walk she is pretty amazing!



Here is her comments on the track ‘Roots’



Anna - ‘Yeah With roots I was preggers and thinking about what we pass down the line and how we are influenced by our families. It's about healing what needs to be healed so that you don't consciously or unconsciously pass on issues to the next generation’.



I suppose this piece of music kind of flowed naturally and came together of its own choosing like a big sound collage of many elements. It was a concept that almost dragged us along with it and became its own thing. We are already planning the next record which is going to be the complete opposite, very fine tuned and thought out in advance and much more of a minimal thing and getting back to more solid song structure and more to the point musical works and way less tracks on the next one :)