Georges Méliès: A Trip to the Moon

In January, Aardvark were invited to play at a new silent movie soundtrack night at Mello Mello in Liverpool.

We were given the quite incredible choice of Georges Méliès' 1902 sci-fi film, A Trip to the Moon. Even more amazingly, we discovered there is an original colourisation of the film. The colour is totally surreal. It was carried out at Elisabeth Thuillier's lab in Paris by a team working on one colour each in a kind of assembly line. The resulting effect is half-way between film and animation, with colours flaring up and changing shades between frames.

We tried to capture something of the anarchic and otherworldly feeling to the film during our performance, holding several rehearsals to try and strike the balance between setting the mood for various scenes and following the action on-screen. The result maintains the "classic" Aardvark sound, while delivering an apt, if slightly tongue-in-cheek, accompaniment to Méliès' masterpiece. Enjoy!

Amphibolous - Rubber Sole EP

Last year, Roger Hill challenged Amphibolous to come up with a track that responded to the legacy of the Beatles for his radio show, PMS. So we got together for a session and recorded a number of short, radio-friendly length tracks, inspired by our task at hand.

We'd got used to playing longer 20 - 30 minute pieces, that take you to different places along the way, so doing a short sharp 3 - 7 minutes was challenging, but fun. We were quite surprised what you can actually fit into that shorter timespan.

We picked one track to send to Roger - i'm looking through you too - but the others turned out too good to leave on the cutting room floor. And so was born the Beetles EP, rubber sole. We picked out the five best tracks, one for each of the four Beatles, plus a billy bonus for Stuart Sutcliffe, the fifth Beatle (or at least one of them).


1. i saw paul mccartney with my girlfriend
2. stuart sutcliffe left the beatles to paint
3. john lennon and i were throwing balls in the cold when i caught one
4. big in fashion george harrison
5. ringo starr was cleaning his dog with a brush when it turned black and vanished

With the EP mixed and mastered, it was time to get the artwork together. We searched the internet for beetles - an interesting activity, if you've ever got an hour or two going spare - and found André Bemand, who keeps, and runs a blog about, giant beetles.

So we got in touch with André to see if he would take a picture of some of his beetles on a boot (with a rubber sole). To our delight, not only was he up for it, he really went to town on it. In a stroke of genius, he created a little zebra crossing for the beetles to cross. And voilà!

Amphibolous are: Adam Webster, Ash Steel, Simon Jones.

New Amphibolous Releases

Last month saw two new Amphibolous releases, in fact within a couple of days of each other.

The first was a release on the Classwar Karaoke label, part of their 0022 survey. In the just over a month since the survey's release it's already been downloaded more than 27,000 times. You can listen to the rest of the release here. Here's our track:

 

The second release was a track we created for Roger Hill's PMS show on BBC Radio Merseyside. He asked us for a track reacting to the legacy of the Beatles. It was actually quite a challenge to create a radio-friendly length track. We had a session in the studio recording a number of short pieces. The single release is the one we sent to Roger, I'm looking through you too. But we have a new EP coming out shortly featuring a few of the tracks. Going with the Beatles theme, the new EP is called Rubber Sole. The EP is all mixed now, and we're just working on the artwork, so the release should be within the next month. In the meantime, you can enjoy the single, with an intro by Roger, and the music video that accompanies it. The video was made with footage of a giant beetle by kraftwerkmod.





Unfortunately, Adam Webster has now moved to Poland, so Amphibolous is on hiatus at the moment, but we're planning a tour of Germany and Poland later this year, so stay tuned for more details.

New Amphibolous release

We've just released the first Amphibolous single, He Leans to the Left. Well, I call it a single, but it's just over 20 minutes long, and with no B side, but then that's often the score with experimental music. It's available for free download, or you can by the mini-CD for £4.



The single was recorded in the run up to a gig we played in Manchester last month. It's one continuous take with very minimal editing, so is quite reflective of our live sound. The theme for the track was a record that Ash found in a charity show, The New Maths. Fantastic! There's some really interesting manipulation of a sine wave record that Ash used as well. Enjoy!

Amphibolous at the Noise Upstairs

Amphibolous is a new group I formed last year with Ash Steel and Adam Webster. Last week we had our second live outing, at the Noise Upstairs in Manchester. It was a packed audience at the Manchester improv night, where part of the evening, people put their names in the hat to play in random groupings. Then it came to us.

The instrumentation in the group is:

Adam Webster: amplified cello
Ash Steel: turntables
Si Jones: objects and effects

The great thing about the group for me is that it's been a while since I've been in a noise group that practises regularly, and it's really paid off in our live performances.

You can listen to a recording of our set by following this link. We also have an album to be released shortly, and a few more gigs lined up, so stay tuned for more developments...

DJing and Free Improvisation

While I was delivering a series of workshops at Band on the Wall in Manchester recently, I was interviewed by Dan Leach for an article about the connection between DJing and free improvisation. The article explores the ways in which an improvisatory approach can help DJs, and is now available online.