Storm Static Sleep: A Pathway Through Post Rock | facebook |
By: Dan Salter
Jack Chuter is the author of the recently released Storm Static Sleep, widely regarded as the first ‘complete’ history of post rock. As most of our regular readers will know, we cover a fair bit of what is thought of as post rock on the site so this was relevant to our interests. We sent our editor to sit down with Jack in a busy Dalston coffee shop to try and dig below the surface of the meaning of post rock.
(((o))): So, the book. First of all I have to say – I hate you a little bit, because that’s the book that I was planning to write but to be fair you got off your arse and did whereas I’ve been procrastinating about it for about two years, so. What inspired you to start writing it?
Jack: So I’m sure, like yourself, it’s just something that interests me a lot because it’s been a formulative part of being a music listener, for me and arguably the most formulative area of music. I think I was about 15 when I first started listening to post rock and that’s kind of the time in my life where I was most…
(((o))): Impressionable?
Jack: Impressionable, yeah, pliable and just also naïve as well, so I had albums like Panopticon by Isis and like Pelican, The Fire in Our Throats and that was pretty mind-blowing for me at the time and so since then it’s just been a constant companion for me, so it’s always been an area of interest but if ever I try to read any context about post rock and try and gain an understanding of the history it just didn’t work. I just didn’t… like, nothing that I read really made coherent, chronological sense. It was quite obvious, I think, from the accounts that exist already on, like, Wikipedia but anywhere that people try to write about it: they don’t know, really, what the history is. They don’t know what they’re talking about. So yeah, Function Books approached me and were just, like, “We want someone to write this book about post rock”.
(((o))): Function Records?
Jack: Yeah, sorry – Function Records, they’re just starting to get into publishing. They’ve done one book already and they were like “We want to release this book” so I was like “Great, let’s do it”.
(((o))): So obviously you got into post rock quite early in your life. How did that come about? It’s not something you can stumble across really. Were you led to it?
Jack: No, it’s not. I don’t know. I think it’s a couple of things. I think one is I was on Internet forums all the time so constantly just trading music recommendations. I hung out on the Meshuggah forum, like, for most of my evenings and was really into metal. Loved the intensity of it.
(((o))): So did you come to post rock via a sort of a tech metal route?
Jack: Yeah. I mean, it was like… I think I just loved the intensity of metal music but I kind of reached my limit and I think it just kind of mirrors being a teenager and being, like, 13 and finding out that you can be angry and that’s quite fun and then getting to, like, 15 and realising that actually you want to be a bit more nuanced and you want to be introspective and so then I wanted something more than the music I was listening to. So I think I found post rock that way and I think for some reason I can’t really pinpoint as well I think just the patience of post rock really appealed to me as well. I think I’m someone who likes their own company quite a lot so anything that unfurls with a bit of patience and allows you to kind of bed in to your own introspection, that’s just something that really appeals to me.
(((o))): Yeah, I can totally understand that. I guess I came to post rock in a similar way although it was a bit more of a journey. In your intro and the first part of the book, you discuss Talk Talk. Spirit of Eden came out when I was 16 and I had got into Talk Talk through The Colour of Spring (the preceding album) and ‘Life’s What You Make It’ – their ‘hit’ single – and so suddenly this album landed in my lap that was unlike anything I’d ever heard and, like you say, very dark, very introspective, very dense and 25 years later I still listen to it and I still hear new, amazing things. I think that was an attraction for a lot of people.
Jack: Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny about that record as well, because when people talk about post rock history and relevance to Talk Talk they kind of cordon off those last two records whereas I’m sure someone like yourself, who’s come from Colour of Spring as well, can see that it was more like that from start to finish.
(((o))): It was an evolution, certainly, through all their albums. I mean there is a distinct change between Colour of Spring and Spirit of Eden, but I think you can see how they were getting there.
Jack: Yeah, definitely. I think it’s more of a gradient than I think a lot of people give it credit for. I mean, Colour of Spring was entirely acoustic instruments by then so there’s no synths and that New Romantic connection was all but gone, really and then you had that track, ‘Chameleon Day’, where it just like… I mean that’s the kernel of Spirit of Eden, right there. It’s already happening by that point.
It’s been interesting, actually, incorporating Talk Talk into the book because I think as someone like myself, who arrived around the mid 2000s and then went back, to then hear that Talk Talk are allegedly the fathers of post rock music, to listen to Talk Talk and try to fit them into the picture – initially it was just difficult. You know, I understood that it’s very dynamic music and there was a lot of silence in there and a lot of the principles of what I consider post rock in a Red Sparrowes-y kind of sense were present in Talk Talk. It was also there was a song at the centre of it and I didn’t really understand – for me that was the first time I was a bit, like, “Hmm, is something a bit weird about the current account of post rock history?” because I was like “I can’t reconcile these two points” and there’s a few steps in between that as soon as they become apparent it does make sense. But there’s more steps than I think are accounted for in so many different accounts of the history.
(((o))): Yeah. I mean, I would perhaps even argue it goes back before Talk Talk. Like with any genre or any movement, it’s never like history portrays it, where there’s “a start”.
Jack: Yeah, exactly.
(((o))): You know, like “the era begins here and it ends here”. Any musician draws on what’s come before them and arguably you could draw a line back all the way to 60s Pink Floyd, ‘Set the Controls’ and that sort of thing but I think yeah, you’re right, in terms of what we now perceive as post rock probably did start around that sort of time.
Jack: That’s where I decided to start the book but yeah, like you say, every single person I spoke to was like “You’ve got to include this person, these are an absolute essential inclusion” and I was like “I can’t do all this”. If you go back to incorporate, I mean, a lot of people talk about Public Image Limited and what Eno was doing with Cluster and all the krautrock stuff and it just starts getting wider and wider until the point where the narrative’s completely gone so it’s a real nightmare.
(((o))): You have to draw a line somewhere, I guess.
Jack: That’s it, and I thought with Talk Talk and also Slint who, essentially, are the starting points in parallel for the book, I thought I had enough opportunity to talk about them in respect of their influences and their own origins and use that as a way to reach back further into history. I wanted to keep it quite tight and coherent because I knew that was the main problem with what we’ve got currently.
Echoes And Dust Guide To…. Post Rock by Echoesanddust on Mixcloud
(((o))): Obviously the perceived wisdom is Spiderland is kind of where it started. Certainly, I think they were probably the first American band but even now, if you listen back to Spiderland – and interestingly last year when there was the anniversary of it, we asked a load of post rock fans who had never heard it to listen to it and write about it in the context of the post rock they knew and a range of reactions came out and a lot of people going “Well that’s not what I understand as post rock”. Do you sort of see that?
Jack: Yeah, absolutely. I think the thing with post rock as well is that to a certain extent it’s got so many different meanings and it’s been applied in so many different contexts that if we try and talk about something that’s got a linear history and has developed as though it’s a single idea that’s been nurtured over time, and it’s not, it’s nonsense. And to be honest the way that I’ve kind of led Spiderland into the book is because a lot of the ideas are in there that now inform what we currently consider post rock but actually it’s the way it fed into stuff like Tortoise and then how Tortoise, I guess, fed into other stuff to a certain extent, like Mogwai or how Tortoise triggered this perception of post rock as instrumental, quite dynamic, democratic rock music. That’s the reason that Slint are in there, not necessarily because people are like “Oh, that’s a post rock record like the Red Sparrowes that we know and the Explosions Tn The Sky we know”. So yeah, and Spiderland is a *weird* record, as well. Some of the melodies and stuff they’re using – that’s one thing I wanted to talk about a lot in the book – the melodies in that album are, are weird. They’re some really anxious, itchy, strange bits made by teenagers.
(((o))): It’s quite an uncomfortable listen.
Jack: It really is, isn’t it? And it’s obvious that they’re all quite estranged people, you know? Which you don’t get, I don’t think, with most of the post rock now. The emotional themes now are a lot more open and…soft, I guess is the word? Or, like, universally understood. Whereas with Spiderland, you felt like you were kind of observing something that was a bit…wrong and a bit messed up.
(((o))): A bit dysfunctional?
Jack: Exactly, yeah.
(((o))): And in that way it takes from a lot of almost post punk, really. That sort of anxiety, you know? It’s an anxious record.
Jack: It is, exactly. And it’s like, I guess all of that stuff like Jesus Lizard, as well, and Big Black, where it was kind of heavy but almost felt a bit too erratic for its own good. Like, it didn’t really have a good rein on its own intensity and its own rate of catharsis. It’s like, it just seems a bit…nuts and unstable. You don’t want to get too close. But yeah, like Steve Albini and stuff like that. So that features as well, in the book. When I talk about Slint, it’s like they come straight out of that, you know, Touch and Go stuff, where it’s just all these guys making really heavy music in slightly strange ways, it was just an extension on that.
(((o))): So, as you’ve analysed post rock over the years, do you feel the definition of what it covers has evolved?
Jack: Oh yeah, yeah yeah. In a ridiculous way. When Simon Reynolds was talking about it originally, I mean I spoke to Simon for the book and one of the first things – he was one of my first interviewees, because I was like “Right, I need to suss this out from the source before I do anything else, because if he uproots my research when I’m six months in, I’m fucked”. So I thought, let’s talk this out. So, basically, he doesn’t consider Talk Talk to be a post rock band, Slint to be a post rock band, anything like Mogwai to be a post rock band. So all of that, as far as he’s concerned, is out of the window and the stuff that he considers to be post rock is bands like Insides and Seefeel and Stereolab.
(((o))): Ok. That’s interesting.
Jack: Yeah. And the more I spoke to him, the more I understood where he was coming from, because essentially when he was talking about post rock being using rock instruments for non-rock purposes, he was talking about bands that didn’t have that visceral quality where it had really strong rhythmic drive and it was, you know, like these rock bands rocking out, essentially, and kicking ass. So you had these bands that were influenced by techno and by indie and where guitars floated in space, generally made by people just completely holed up in their own flats – making stuff, home recording it and not having the same sort of catharsis that you get from live music.
So it’s that which is like a non-rock purpose within post rock. And then I think basically it has mutated simply because people haven’t understood what Simon Reynolds meant. Journalism is just very impatient and post rock sounds pretty dramatic, so it’s something that sounds great on a page. So you’ve got bands like Mogwai who get featured who are essentially a rock band really.
(((o))): Most post rock bands hate being labelled as post rock.
Jack: Yeah, I do not blame them and that was an absolute bloody nightmare, writing that first email approaching people. Being like “I’m writing a book on post rock. I don’t necessarily consider you to be part of this family but I just want to talk to you as musicians, blah blah blah” and trying to like tiptoe around potentially going “You’re post rock” because yeah, it is such a sore point for a lot of people.
(((o))): And I know Stuart from Mogwai particularly detests it.
Jack: Can’t stand it.
(((o))): And I understand that, because it’s a very broad brush term – or it’s become a very broad brush term – and it now covers bands as diverse as, at one end, Godspeed and then Three Trapped Tigers and things like that at the other end, which frankly are…I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know – that’s the problem. I don’t know what to call them, so we call them post rock.
Jack: Yeah. It’s a miscellaneous, isn’t it? It’s like “I don’t have the word to plug this gap, so post rock, because there’s a rock element to it, it’s post rock. Let’s call it post rock”.
(((o))): Weirdly, unlike metal, it hasn’t disintegrated into sub-genres. Nobody says “Oh, that’s…” Well, I’ve started to see the phrase ‘crescendocore’ more and more. Not always in a complimentary sense.
Jack: No, rarely!
(((o))): But that’s about it. Nobody really says “Oh that’s blackened crust death grind”, you know, like you get in metal?
Jack: I think, to be honest, post rock’s such an immaterial and confusing construct – to put another hyphen in there I think would just blow people’s minds. I just think the problem is, I guess, is that the terrain of post rock is so complicated and strange that no-one’s really sure when something stops being just post rock. So yeah, you have 65daysofstatic, for example, who are lumped in as post rock.
(((o))): They also hate that, by the way.
Jack: I know, they declined my interview.
(((o))): Oh did they?
Jack: Yeah, they said “Thanks,” you know, they were really nice “Good luck with the book. We don’t really understand what post rock is or how we fit in and to be honest we don’t really care for it anyway” and then they were like “We’re usually happy to do interviews but I think that sums up our opinion”.
So, yeah, they didn’t want to – and I completely understand, because yeah, as you say, you’ve got these bands that make 20-minute pieces that unfold really, really slowly and then you’ve got 65daysofstatic, which are the complete opposite and just these frenetic, four-minute pieces and no-one knows where the boundary is and 65daysofstatic still get called post rock because no-one knows when they’ve overstepped and stopped being post rock.
That’s the problem, the territory keeps getting bigger because no-one knows when to turn the tap off and say “Alright, that’s not post rock any more” because no-one understands it.
(((o))): Yeah, it’s fascinating. My girlfriend Hannah plays violin in Rumour Cubes and it’s been interesting watching, very close up, that internal argument about whether to associate themselves with post rock.
Jack: What’s their opinion on it?
(((o))): I think when they started out they tried quite hard to disassociate themselves from being called post rock. I think over the years they’ve resigned themselves to it being a necessary evil.
Jack: Yeah. And that seems to be the recurrent thing. Like, “It’s brought us a lot of listeners and it does reach out to the right people but it’s a horrible generalisation”. And I think, as well, the difference between post rock and grindcore or techno or whatever is that there’s almost an implied manifesto to it, where it’s like someone is making a very deliberate attempt to sabotage rock. Which isn’t necessarily, I think, what people want to say with the music. They just want to make music.
(((o))): Yeah, well that’s interesting because I would say that actually ties in with what I’ve seen firsthand. Rumour Cubes would be more comfortable with the former sort of description, you know. They quite deliberately try to deconstruct what they do and write things that are a little bit unusual. So actually, probably, in some ways they might be truer to the original interpretation of post rock than its perception now.
Jack: Yeah, exactly, and that’s another thing as well – so some bands like talking about it quite openly. Other bands, say Trans Am, for example, I think at the time found it rather academic and basically theorising the music they make which, a lot of the time, is just cock rock. You know, it doesn’t need to be broken down. I can see how for some people that’s an appeal but for others they’re like “Just let us get on with it”, you know?
(((o))): So, on a personal level, who are your favourite post rock bands?
Jack: [laughs] You know, I thought about this the other day and I was like “I need to have an answer ready if anyone asks me”.
(((o))): You will get asked this!
Jack: Fuck. At the moment – it’s going to have to be – probably Godspeed. If you asked me right at the start of this process, I wouldn’t have said Godspeed. I mean, I’ve always loved them but just over the past little while I’ve been like…this group! I think the way that they allow each identity in that band to be subsumed for this greater good is awesome. And they sound massive as well and I think while most bands sound quite like a negotiation between different egos, Godspeed just sound completely indivisible and they sound bigger for it.
(((o))): Yeah, they’re almost like an orchestra in that sense. It is a group of musicians, playing to a common goal.
Jack: Yeah, exactly. And the great thing, I think, about that is that unlike classical, orchestral, there’s no obvious leader, I guess you could say Efrim’s the leader of that band and he essentially is, but there’s no overt spokesperson or there’s no overt leader. When you see them on stage, there’s no-one out front directing them. They’re just all…
(((o))): There’s no front man.
Jack: Yeah, exactly. They’re just this complete wordless force. Like the way they use drones, as well. I love microtonal drones, where it’s like, you know, two notes very, very close together and then the same and then not again and then all those dissonant tensions and stuff, I just love that. So they do all that as well but, like, yeah. They’re just wicked. They’re just the best band.
(((o))): It’s interesting. I got into what you would now perceive to be post rock through Godspeed. This was 20 years ago, I used to go out to techno clubs a lot and then we wanted stuff to chill out to afterwards and a friend of mine used to play Lift Your Skinny Fists.
Jack: To chill out?! Christ!
(((o))): When you’ve been listening to 180bpm techno all night, it is something of a chill-out.
Jack: I guess so, yeah. So bleak, though! Like, Christ, I would just… I’d be an absolute wreck, I think.
(((o))): I think because a group of us that used to go clubbing togerther, we’d gone through a strange journey in that before techno we were into metal, and then we’d had this epiphany with Orbital and, y’know…. So I think it’s not that unusual. I think if people had come from purely electronic they might find it a little more [gasp!]
Jack: Yeah, yeah. At least you were kind of braced for impact, I guess. I just, as well, I think what I really love about what they do is that there’s a certain political utility to what they’re doing.
They want to confront things but, at the same time, they don’t impose an agenda. They’re almost – it feels like they want to spark and engage a conversation rather than dictate what to think. They just want to raise an awareness which then people recognise themselves. But also I think they seem to also acknowledge the futility of what they’re doing. They’re like “Yeah, we want to raise awareness of all this stuff but at the same time we’re just people playing instruments and playing music really loudly, as much political utility as that has, really”. Like I love – I think that for such a formidable sound they’re a very vulnerable and self-aware group of people.
(((o))): Yeah, and I think if they weren’t they wouldn’t be able to make music like that.
Jack: Absolutely.
(((o))): It is without ego and it is… I wouldn’t say without agenda but you know where I’m going.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly it. It’s like – I mean it’s a weird comparison but you know the band Sleaford Mods? Who are just like “Fuck everything” and almost exist as, like, “We’re flying a flag for cynicism and holding things to account” rather than holding anything particular to account.
(((o))): I honestly believe that Sleaford Mods are the most punk band around at the moment, in the true ethos of what punk was about – that nihilistic, chaotic, “just get it out there” way of doing things. You don’t have to like their music to like what they’re doing.
Jack: Yeah, exactly. Precisely. And also I like how it used to be, like, anyone can play guitar and now it’s like anyone can hit space bar on a laptop. It’s like… digital ineptitude. But also I remember I saw them at Primavera in Barcelona this year and I took my girlfriend to see it and she saw these two people come out, both looking like they’d stumbled off the beach from a stag do or something like that and she was like “I’m not up for this” and as soon as he opened his mouth she was like “This is fucking wicked”. Like, they’re so unlikely when you first see them.
(((o))): They’re just so raw. So much music now is so packaged and fronted and thought about and they’re just two blokes in the pub, shouting.
Jack: Yeah exactly. I love them.
(((o))): But yes, you’re right. That couldn’t be more different than Godspeed but I can see they’re coming from a similar place.
Jack: Yeah they’re just standing, flying the flag for just being politically aware and not being fucked over, I guess.
(((o))): And frankly there is nothing else quite like standing at the front when Godspeed are in full flow and just going…”Holy shit!”
Jack: [laughs] Yeah, exactly. I mean I actually hadn’t seen them until this year.
(((o))): Oh wow!
Jack: Yeah, I don’t know how that had happened but I had several friends coming back with myths and legends of, like, how wicked it was and my friend Dom was like “Oh they shut the door half an hour before they came on and then when we walked in they were already droning” and I was just like, man… So when I finally saw them I was ready for them to be good but I was like “Oh shit”. Like, I couldn’t have been prepared for how good it was. Just fucking amazing.
(((o))): Yeah, I mean I guess they’re the gold standard of what’s perceived to be traditional post rock? Is that even a thing?
Jack: I don’t know if they’re the centre point or not. I think they – for me – feel like a bridge between what was happening in the mid 90s and what is now happening in the Explosions in the Sky vein of post rock. But yeah, they’re weird. They also stand out on their own, for me, as well. There’s no-one really like them.
(((o))): There isn’t. It’s interesting because you talk about Explosions and I would say out of all the big post rock bands, they’re probably the most copied.
Jack: Yes. Absolutely.
(((o))): And part of me thinks that’s probably because they’re also the most simplistic, in a lot of ways and so it’s kind of easier to do that – I suppose you have to call it crescendocore – that kind of…build, build, build. Whereas you can’t get three guys in a garage that sound like Godspeed.
Jack: No. [laughs] Yeah, like, it’s funny – I mean the way I’ve structured the book, I speak about Godspeed as essentially being like the peak of scale of post rock music, like I can’t think of any bands – I mean apart from Swans now – that sound as big as what Godspeed are doing, and I think Explosions almost humanise that sound a bit. So there’s a sense, with Explosions, that they’re dealing with themes that are maybe a bit more intimate and, like…
(((o))): Personal?
Jack: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the time they’re writing love songs and at the same time relatable emotions, I mean one example that I pick out in the book is ‘Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean’, where it’s, you know, a track based on this submarine disaster where 118 people were sunk to the bottom of the ocean and yet it’s not really about the disaster, it’s about six days that the crew were alive down there.
(((o))): The personal experience.
Jack: Yeah, exactly. So it’s extracting that strand of human empathy from what’s otherwise quite a sweeping scenario – a sweeping event. I think that’s partly why I perceive Explosions in the Sky strike a chord with so many people and upcoming bands, because they have that overwhelming aspect but it’s not at the expense of human intimacy and human contact.
(((o))): Yeah, and a lot of people join bands because they want to write about their experiences or experiences that they’ve encountered.
Jack: Yeah, exactly. I think they offer a means to take those experiences and, you know, dramatise them and exaggerate them slightly as well. There’s something quite dramatic about what they’re doing.
(((o))): It’s interesting that you mentioned Swans just then. Do you think they’re post rock? Would they fit in?
Jack: I wedged them in there! [laughs] Because I wanted to talk about them. Basically what I tried to do for the book is follow the term post rock as it evolved and changed and not question whether bands deserve to be there but because post rock is so convoluted and has ended up where it is, almost by accident, by Chinese whispers, just to accept that that’s where the term had got to and use the term post rock to weave and narrate the story of that music.
So, I think in the last chapter I thought “Well, if we’re going to try and re-imbue post rock with some meaning, what are the bands that are maybe doing something that we could consider to be post rock?” and so, I don’t think Swans are post rock in the sense that they don’t really relate to the post rock that’s just gone but I think in the same way that I see Godspeed having a certain semblance of post about their rock, they are on a different timescale to any other band on the planet. You know? Like, you can tell that in Swans time, two minutes is actually 20 and that when they’re doing riffs and guitar work it doesn’t feel like people playing guitar. It feels like these entire shifts and they move in, they just move up, down, forward and back and they’ve almost transcended that form of music.
(((o))): It’s sound as a visceral experience as opposed to – almost as opposed to music?
Jack: Yeah! Exactly, that’s it. And I think that’s where I see them to be post rock, because I think they still have that very visceral, loud quality and they’re playing guitars and they essentially sat like a rock band with a few people in there but the way they navigate through sound is so much more. So basically that last chapter, I speak about Swans and then a project called Wrekmeister Harmonies. So, similar vibe, where he takes these – I mean that, there’s some orchestral stuff in there as well but he takes these sounds and makes it into this art that goes up and down and like… So, yeah, at the end there I try and re-theorise post rock, really, in a kind of slightly selfish way. Like “Well what if – let’s just pretend that I could decide what happens to post rock now. Where would it go?” and they’re the kind of bands that I think.
(((o))): So would you consider someone like Sunn O))) to be in there?
Jack: Erm, yeah, in a certain sense. Actually, it’s funny, I spoke to Greg Anderson for the book and yeah, there’s a point where I query that, where I’m like “Well, are they just doing riffs that transcend the fact of being riffs and are just big old slabs of sound?” and yeah, I think there’s a lot of that going on with them as well and then at the same time with Sunn O))) They’re so camp and…
(((o))): Ridiculous?
Jack: Yeah. They’re almost, like… either they’re rock reduced to just frequency or they’re rock x 1000, where it’s like everything that’s bombastic and macho about rock, times a million. So yeah, they’re really interesting actually and it was nice to be able to mention them briefly.
(((o))): I’ve seen some weird arse bands over the years and at ATP and things like that. Sunn O))) are probably the only band where I’ve stood there and I’ve just thought “What in God’s name do the bar staff think about this, because I don’t know what to think about this”. There’s a man dressed as a tree on stage and they haven’t changed chord for 40 minutes!
Jack: [laughs] Yeah, it’s bizarre! My favourite experience of seeing them was, again, at Primavera. The lineup for that festival is ludicrous. Me and my girlfriend walk in from watching Black Keys – she loves Black Keys – and they finished and Sunn O))) were on straight afterwards, and as Black Peas cut out you could hear from a distant stage this hum and I was like “Right, we’ve got to go, they’ve already started” but that instant transition was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen in my life. But yeah, they were amazing and they’re so good. So yeah, I reckon in that sense of transcending what rock’s about they probably are.
(((o))): So, I guess to sort of wrap up a little bit – where do you see it going from here? I mean, I know that’s like trying to predict what the weather in five years’ time is going to be, but…?
Jack: I don’t know. It’ll be really interesting because the recent crop of bands that are being called post rock, a lot of them – like, say sleepmakeswaves, or Tides From Nebula or Maybeshewill [Typist’s note – why are so many post rock bands allergic to spaces and capitalisation…?] – are now very tight and very precise, so that duration element of post rock, with those bands anyway, has really been shrunken down. So, I wonder if there’s going to be – and again, they’re so overtly rock bands just making music with this slightly emotional bent – but I don’t know, I think once it gets to that point then I’m not sure… I don’t know, I think it’s almost settled down, you know? I think it’s close to actually finding its place and asserting its boundaries. I don’t know. Yeah, I think we might be reaching a point now where that’s it and maybe people will continue to be interested in this carnation of post rock for a while and then it might go away.
What do you think?
(((o))): I don’t know either. The last three years, since ArcTanGent started and I’ve been every year, and you kind of look around at all these bands and you think in some way these guys are all grouped together under one umbrella but they genuinely couldn’t be more different.
Jack: Yeah, exactly.
(((o))): It’s interesting, I do think there’s been a move towards a slightly more conciseness. You look at a band like Cleft – don’t know if you know them?
Jack: Yeah.
(((o))): And they’re nuts. And they play the content of a 20-minute post rock song in three minutes I think there’s been a shift – and maybe it’s because there’s now a festival for it – a kind of fun element has crept in.
Jack: And a prog element as well?
(((o))): Yeah.
Jack: People love people doing really technical shit and that boundary’s becoming quite blurred.
(((o))): Yeah and that’s interesting because if you trace it all the way back it probably grew out of some sort of prog influences and so…
Jack: Exactly! Pink Floyd, King Crimson. Yeah. It’s weird. It’s wicked, I’ve been to ArcTanGent as well and it’s so cool because so much of the post rock community exists online and you don’t get the same sense of local post rock scenes in the same way you do hardcore and punk, but when you go to a festival like that where you’ve got all these people sharing that experience, it was… Like, the atmosphere when I went last year was fucking amazing. People always seem so grateful to have a festival that they can congregate at to see this music.
(((o))): Well, I think they are. It’s given the scene a centre of gravity to coalesce around and, you know, talking to Dan from Cleft after their set and I said to him “Did you ever in your wildest dreams, when you started Cleft, imagine you would be playing in a field to 2000 people?” and he replied “Jesus, we didn’t expect to get a gig. Anywhere”!
This is profoundly weird music by any standard calibration. But there seems to be an enormous appetite for it and I think that’s great and I think what we’ll see over time is a cross fertilisation of ideas at things like ArcTanGent. A lot of the bands we spoke to at ArcTanGent were just like “This is so inspiring, because all these people are *really* fucking good, so we’ve got to up our game”.
Jack: Yeah, absolutely! Wouldn’t that be sweet, like, wouldn’t it be amazing – because I think, as you say there’s terms like crescendocore coming from people maybe tracing the same lines as post rock – it would be amazing if that close proximity to each other stimulated growth, I mean there’s still so much variety within post rock and there are some bands doing some, as you say, really profoundly weird and unique stuff but if that could just be exacerbated by the friction of surrounding bands, that would be wicked.
(((o))): Yeah. Well, that seems like a good place to leave it so thank you so much.
