By Sean Flinn | April 12, 2000
 |
| This stuff is really fresh: Luke Vibert and B.J. Cole jam at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles.
|
Buy Luke Vibert's music
Visit Luke Vibert's
Web site
Visit BJ Cole's
Web site
Visit Vibert / Cole's label
Astralwerks
|
|
"Coming to the states is always a blast food-wise," says pedal-steel guitarist B.J. Cole, musical legend and, apparently, international culinary connoisseur. His road manager has just interrupted our interview to query him and his current collaborator, drum 'n' bass pioneer Luke Vibert (a legend in his own right), on their dinner choices for the evening. We're backstage at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles following a sound check in advance of Cole and Vibert's appearance here to promote their rollicking and thoroughly intriguing album, Stop the Panic. Vibert is, as he has been countless times already during the tour, hungry for Thai food.
Happily, not missing the dearth of exotic cuisine in his native England, Vibert observes that American culture is "more about eating."
Oddly, the same might be said of Stop the Panic. The press release for the album cites it -- and Vibert's career in general -- as a tonic to cure turophobia, the irrational fear of cheese, which can be taken as Vibert and Cole's code word for fun, something a good many musicians and DJs just aren't having these days. So is Stop the Panic a fat chunk of musty Limberger?
"Some of it is," says Cole, warily. "Not all of it. You musn't make that mistake. Some of it is very serious -- as much as we can be serious. But there are other things that are specifically kitsch -- making the use of the steel guitar in its true kitsch manner, where I can indulge myself in being as cheesy as possible."
"I think it's kind of dangerous music, subversive in some ways," adds Vibert. "I think I would find the lighter [songs] as subversive as the darker ones because they use those same familiar sounds that people have heard for the last 50 years -- with the guitars, and organs and lots of the noises we've used. But then, there's so many twists and turns within it."
The twists and turns -- and, yes, the cheese -- are audible on Stop the Panic, as one would expect of some seriously involved collaborative studio work on the part of Cole and Vibert. But the twisted, cheesy elements are also the natural result of two fast friends who had an absolute blast kicking back and jamming together. After all, Cole is a seasoned veteran who's played guitar on albums by everyone from Iceland's quirky dance queen Björk to '70s glam-rocker Marc Bolan (of T-Rex), and Vibert has, during his remarkably short career (he began recording in 1993), changed the landscape of electronic dance music with both his Wagon Christ and Plug projects.
Vibert and Cole are both master chefs, laudable as "masters" because the concept of their main dish seemed, at first thought, so distasteful. Drum 'n' bass and pedal-steel guitar? British breakbeats and Hawaiian riffs? Show it to your average music fan, and he'll probably just ask for the salad instead. After sampling a morsel of Stop the Panic, however, one can only say "bon appétit."
|
|
| Click here
to read our review of Vibert and Cole's Stop The Panic |
|
|
It was Cole who initially sparked this unusual mixing of ingredients. "I was just playing in a club in London, kind of in between where me and B.J. live -- because we both live very near each other -- and I was playing some drum 'n' bass, I think. But that's probably irrelevant," Vibert recounted. "B.J. came up to me and introduced himself and said he'd heard my Plug album [1997's Drum 'n' Bass for Papa], which had been out just a few months before, and told me he was a steel-guitar player, which excited me a lot."
The two kept in touch for the next few months, eventually drifting together for the first of two years' worth of collaborative sessions. "I just did a simple drum 'n' bass backing track, with literally just a drum beat and a bass line," Vibert said of their early, fruitful sessions together. "And then B.J. did tons of stuff on top of it and really amazed me."
The two began jamming at one another's homes, layering Cole's languid guitar parts and Vibert's pointed electronics until they'd woven a fine tapestry of richly textured and totally unique music. "I used quite a lot of multilayered steel-guitar sounds," Cole said, describing the recording process. "There'd be one track of regular steel, and I've got a MIDI steel pickup -- a pickup on a steel guitar that tracks MIDI [a digital interface that allowed Cole to play his guitar while generating completely un-guitarlike sounds]. They would be running on a couple of tracks, and then we would process the steel guitar through a Lesley cabinet or a voice tube and incorporate those all into one sound."
"So you get a really thick sound," Vibert explained. "And sometimes I'd just resample all of that, and that would become just one small thing, and B.J. would play again on top. Sometimes it's really dense, kind of layered. On the most simple one, the one called 'Party Animal,' it's supposed to sound like a live track; that one we passed back and forth for about two years. That's the one that Tom Jenkinson -- Squarepusher -- plays [bass] on."
Vibert's mention of Jenkinson's contributions to Stop the Panic brings the conversation round to another topic: the translation of this densely layered, instrumentally complex and heavily collaborative record into a dynamic two-man show.
"I think the live shows are very different, for several reasons," Cole explains. "One is, it's impossible to use all those people that contributed musical stuff to the album. Also, technically, to reproduce those tracks, with the samples and all that sort of stuff, it would be really difficult and require taking out an awful lot of equipment. Luke has rationalized it down quite radically, and therefore, we're forced to qualify what we do."
| "
I've always thought I'd love to put out my old stuff, just as a kind of library thing, just so there's loads and people can take what they want. "
|
While seen initially as a weakness, this pared-back approach has actually freed the two up to improvise more on stage, Vibert spontaneously developing drum loops and composing bass lines from a limited sample bank, Cole coming up with guitar lines and textures to complement Vibert's rhythms. It's the kind of onstage partnership, a bridging of generations and technology, that's only possible because of Cole and Vibert's long working relationship.
Not surprisingly, the lengthy duration of their partnership found Vibert and Cole influencing one another's listening habits, with each opening the other's ears up to new music and making their present working situation all the more workable.
"It was a steep learning curve, as they say," Cole, the elder partner by a few decades, laughingly explains of his musical education under Vibert. Over the course of their collaboration, Cole found himself exposed to everything from Squarepusher's experimental drum 'n' bass to A Tribe Called Quest's jazz-rooted hip-hop. In turn, Cole exposed Vibert to his own past work. "One of my favorite things that he exposed me to, which took a while, was his first album, from 1973 -- the year I was born -- a solo album called New Hovering Dog. That's a great album, very obscure," Vibert said.
For his part, Cole acknowledges that both playing and listening alongside Vibert will influence his future projects -- not only because of his broadening appreciation for electronic music but also because he sees it shaping contemporary music at large. "It's a big part of the musical spectrum these days," he pondered. "And as a person that works in as many areas as possible, I'm going to be working more and more, inevitably, in this area. Because it's going to be a larger part of what people listen to."
The same sentiment applies to both Vibert and Cole's approach to online music, another area that's playing an increasingly larger part of what people listen to. "I was just thinking how big the Web was," Vibert says, noting that all of his interviews for the night have been with the online media. Both he and Cole have Web sites, Vibert's a part of the Brainwashed network of non-corporate music sites, Cole's self-run, complete with music samples from his album Transparent Music.
Vibert has also dipped his toes into the pool of online music distribution. He gave tracks "to an English label [that was] putting one track out a month of mine, kind of exclusive, just on a Web site they were doing. But that was only when I was on the label, and then, when the deal fell apart, I stopped giving them tracks. But I've always thought I'd love to put out my old stuff, just as a kind of library thing, just so there's loads and people can take what they want."
It's a free and easy sort of attitude Vibert and Cole have -- toward music, toward technology, toward one another. Free, easy and, given the subtle complexity of the music they make, absolutely necessary. Don't ignore the seriousness but take what you want of it, have a good time, and above all, don't panic. Maybe it's not so cheesy after all.
|
