Lost And Sound

This week, we zap over to Norway to catch a conversation with producer Stian Balducci and pianist Kjetil Jerve about collaboration, jazz’s origins as a dancing music and their desire to make an “Improvised music of our age”.  Their joint LP, Tokyo Tapes mixes drone, jazz and frequency-pushing sonics and I think its a stunning listen, and before you think that maybe these are some serious dudes, prepare for some surprising music confessions. 

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I had a conversation with Amsterdam-based producer, songwriter and musician Tessa Douwstra, who records under the name Luwten and finds a way of blending nu-soul tinged vocals and textured, experimental production. Luwten means ‘Place without wind’ in Dutch and I was interested to ask her about the way her music feels so intimately personal yet sonically expressive.

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It’s been thirty years since they last met but I had a chat with A Guy Called Gerald and Trevor Miller.

Miller’s cult novel Trip City caught the early acid house zeitigest and it was released with an EP made by Gerald, riding high at the time with what are now the classics Voodoo Ray and Pacific State. To celebrate the book’s re-release I caught up with the two for a frank, revealing and at times hilarious chat. It was pretty much two old pals catching up with me somewhere in the middle. Enjoy!

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We’re back. Today, I spoke with Jim O’Rourke, iconocalstic producer, singer-songwriter, former Wilco and Sonic Youth collaborator, from his home half way up a mountain near Tokyo. 

The interview was originally recorded to talk about Jim’s film connection for the Lost and Sound - Playtronica collab podcast, Seeing Sound, but the conversation went into different realms and spilled out into this much, much longer version. 

Jim goes deep into working with Werner Herzog, his “just do it” mentality to the creative process, his Irish roots and speaking Japanese. It was such a pleasure for me to connect with a musician whose work I love so much and for him to turn out to be such an utterly humble, entertaining and damn well revealing human. Enjoy!

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Jim O’Rourke’s Bandcamp

You can check out Seeing Sound here

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Lou Hayter’s on the show today. We spoke about the things and influences that have led up to her Roxy’eque space-disco tinged solo LP Private Sunshine, as well the New Young Pony Club days in the post punk and party mid noughties. Lou is a certified Steely Dan fan and she very kindly gives some advice too, on finding your way into the Dan’s catalogue.

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I met up with Roman Flügel, and boy did it feel good to be doing an in person interview again. And what a guest for that be to with. We did corona tests to be safe and met in his secret studio in Berlin, where he spoke about getting on board the early rave scene in Frankfurt, how electronic music is actual songwriting, the primal nature of dancing and of course, his fantastic new LP Eating Darkness, which evolves the lineage of deep, layered electronica he began with Happiness Is Happening . 

Roman is a true gentleman of sound. I was wondering if I’d wobble out or something, I'm so not used to being in a space and talking, but it felt like natural. 

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Flora Yin-Wong: producer, DJ, writer, multi-disciplinarian spoke with me from London about the startling work of textural sound that is her debut LP, Holy Palm.

Her debut book Liturgy, offers glimpses across travels, traditions and religions and we had a conversation about balancing different jobs (she was digital editor at Dazed for some time and also worked for Berlin's PAN label) as well as the commonalities between music and words, field recordings,  growing up with an opera singing Mum and her DJ mixes, most recent of which, a Resident Advisor one that is so utterly not afraid to leave the dance floor.

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“Everyone whose listening… go off the grid!”

Sage advice from this weeks guest on Lost and Sound - musical polymath King Britt, beaming in from San Diego. Right now, he’s taken a lifetime in DJing, producing, remixing and just being an all round presence in electronic music’s evolution into the realms of education. We had a chat about whitewashing in electronic music and the need to have access to the lesser documented history.

Along the way we took in his roots from 5 year old King DJing at his Dad’s barber shop in Philly, the legendary Silk City in Philadelphia, forming partnerships with Josh Wink and Digable Planets, about his university course Blacktronica: Afrofuturism in Electronic Music - researching and honouring the people of colour, who've pioneered groundbreaking genres within the electronic music and even taking a trip into the future. His advice for future music? Go off the grid! What does that mean? You’ll have to listen to find out. Enjoy!

If you’re listening the week this episode comes out and want to get involved, check out Blacktronika presents Sound for Humanity, a series of performances by six music creative artists, who were asked to think about sound, not only in its sonic definition (noun) but sound as an adjective (sound mind) and verb (sound the alarm), and how their choices will contribute in some way to humanity. Hit the link if you want to join.

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I spoke with Gruff Rhys, the always inventive artist, frontman of Super Fury Animals, sometomes half of Neon Neon, author, director and all round potential Welsh national treasure.

Super Fury Animals, often considered the last great band on Creation Records gave  a sense of surreal adventure and a global musical pallet unusual for the Britpop era. They sung sometimes in Welsh, were politically conscious, at one point they had a tank, they mixed in techno, tropicalia and a million other sonic sources and of course there’s that song The Man Don’t Give A Fuck that sampled Steely Dan.

Then at some point, Gruff set out with a solo and collaborative body of work that’s seen his music grow into films, collaborations, such as Neon Neon (with Boom Bip) a book and a rather novel use of power point presentations.

We had a chat about language, about the Velvet Underground, about his film American Interior and about scoring a hit with a song that says “fuck” over 50 times. Enjoy!

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Fresh up in Lost and Sound today, legendary Brit in Berlin, Mark Reeder. 

Musician, record producer, label owner, the man who bought Joy Division to Berlin, who pioneered Trance with his MFS label, he’s been an outlier and creative force in the city from post-punk to now, whose story of arriving in Berlin over 40 years ago is vividly chronicled in the amazing doc B-Movie. 

This is a kind of redux. A really rather short version of this interview appeared in one of the very first episodes of Lost and Sound, the idea was always to share a much longer cut, because the story he tells, of arriving in Berlin in the 70s initially just to buy some records, and how he smuggled cassettes across the border into East Berlin, eventually setting up a punk gig under the noses of the Stasi, needs to be heard in full. 

Right now, he’s just released SUBVERSIV-DEKADENT, a double album featuring his own tracks, and remixes for the likes of New Order, Yello and Liars. But we recorded this conversation in a cafe on Zossener Strasse, a real cafe with real atmosphere in 2018 on the 1st of May, as the annual street celebrations were kicking off a kilometre away. Get ready to be transported back to the early 80s…

MFS Label Website
Mark Reeder

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