Spooky

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This is the space where we will be featuring dub mixes of our tunes and some of the more ambient stuff. Follow the links in our blog to hear more Spooky music.



North America

TenInOneTalent Inc

Email: nsolgot@teninonetalent.com

Office: +1 (303) 945-4051

Rest of World

Coda Music Agency LLP

Email nikk@codaagency.com

Tel: +44(0)20 7456 8888

Press & Info

530db Ltd

Email: info@530db.com

Office: +44(0)191 565 7820



Found Sound



In the shows they played in the year leading up to the release of ‘OK Computer’, Radiohead would set the scene and come on stage to either a) ‘Quartet for the End of Time’ by Olivier Messiaen or b) ‘Found Sound’ by Spooky.



1996, I think.

I remember meeting Charlie and Duncan at Duncan’s place in Camberwell. They’d seen some little home micro movies I’d made on super 8: slow motion silhouette of a girlfriend dancing on holiday on a beach in southern Spain …bridge over the Liffey wobbling in reflection…etc…all to Eno tracks. Stoned, sweet (from 2010 perspective) artsy home movies.



And on the back of that and plenty smokes and cups of tea and good revved-up yaks about …Tortoise’s ‘Millions Now Living … ‘ and …‘In C’…. they let me make a (tester?) video for their wonderful tune ‘Stereo’ and all went smokingly and swimmingly.



And then they wanted a film to accompany Found Sound. Maybe the original idea was to do a film for the whole album. I can’t remember. I do remember there was a total budget of £20k (which ended up being £16k as Another Director was briefly involved who ate £4k shooting a few rolls of super 8 on a jaunt up London canals. FYI: That footage eventually turning up in the vid for Lo-Fidelity All Stars’Blisters on My Brain’)



But anyway, Found Sound. We decided to make a 30 (ish) minute thing instead,



I was paying the rent as a cameraman and motion graphics designer for TV sports shows - snowboarding, The Boat Race, beach volleyball, triathlons - and was able to steal lots of 16mm film to shoot Spooky Stuff. I could also telecine Spooky Stuff pretty much for free on the back of other jobs as well as finding myself being able to shoot Spooky Stuff in exotically banal locations that would otherwise have been far far beyond the range of our little 16k budget: a satellite TV dish dump in Morocco, the yard of a manufacturer of marina wave baffles in Ishigaki Island, a NASA museum in Columbus, Ohio… etc etc etc



So our little video had this weird, grand global landscape.



And I remember being obsessed with Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ and that certainly directed the filming too. Though how, exactly, beyond the near-the-end shots of a skyscraper seeming to pierce a hole in the film/sky and the final downward trajectory of the graphic parabola I couldn’t say.)



And apart from all the goofy ambition, a major part of the beauty of the thing (the album) was its hyper domesticity: every found sound right within reach. Animated and reanimated. Cyberpunk folk art! (I remember the boys/the band being inordinately proud of the new tongue ‘n groove panelling in the studio at the back of the house. Proper Scando!



And my filming went the same way. After a few months of shooting about the bush came some kind of low rent Zen reveal where it became clear that Anything and Everything could be animated and reanimated and made source material for Found Sound: teacups, pylons, WW2 fortifications, windblown trees in a Tokyo park, the scrubbing brush from our sink, the train line back to the parental home in Plymouth, a plastic Slinky, that odd, cracked, non-place under the M32 in Bristol, a Mini Maglite on a string swinging round and round in the Camden bathroom, the clouds out the window, the phone box next to the Serpentine Gallery…Anything! Everything!



The pure acceptance and excitement of ‘Anything!’ and ‘Everything!’ that happens so rarely (though admittedly, less rarely when you’re younger and dumber with the amour of amateurism closer to hand and to heart.)



Whatever, making the film was a total gas. And easy like the best things are (no matter how hard they are).



And it was all shot with a wind up, clockwork Bolex Rx4 camera.



And, inconceivably now, it was all edited on a linear tape-to-tape set up: 3 digibeta decks with an RM 450 controller and a tiny little Grass Valley mixer. (If you know what this means then you’ll know what a nightmare this was. But the miracle is, it wasn’t.



Whatever, Found Sound (the album) now seems like an evolutionary dead end that perfectly demonstrates that evolution can make some fucking big mistakes.



It is a stone cold, super smart, down home, sci fi, minimalist classic.



And I still really like the video.

GG 20/12/09