Convex Mancave - WHAT THEY COULDN’T PRINT
Not really. But we did get interviewed by the massively great Fluid Radio a few weeks ago, and by necessity a lot of my drivel was cut out. Here’s the full text from my contribution, if any of you could possibly care.
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What I really love about this project is how much of a marked contrast it is to anything else I’m involved in. Greyhound Out Of Mainline is a bedroom lo-fi thing increasingly involving sourcing and layering large numbers of textures, and An Insection is a lot more considered, a lot more electronic. Both take a hell of a lot of time to get anything finished, whereas with Mancave we just play when we feel like it and we have an end product more or less straight away. It’s a completely spontaneous thing and everything is improvised.
Matt’s processing is in real time; I use delay and reverb on the guitar to initially make it more organic, but all of the feedback and distortion is being added as a bespoke reaction to what I’m playing, as opposed to being a part of it to begin with. It’s infinitely more interesting and dynamic to me than just using an effects pedal, and also means that I’m in the unusual position of playing guitar and having no clue whatsoever how it will eventually sound. I always loved the idea of Eno being behind the mixing desk at early Roxy shows and don’t really understand why that isn’t really done by anyone these days.
Because everything is being done with no pre-planning of any sort, what I’m noticing is that the riffs sometimes subconsciously reflect whatever it is I’ve been listening to recently. The first guitar part on Mogadishu is a massively sludgy, slow, threatening kind of thing – it’s probably no coincidence that I’d had Weighing Souls With Sand by The Angelic Process on an awful lot in the weeks before we recorded it. Ultimately, everything we do is hedonistic and hopefully purer as a result than some meticulous post-classical wank, or whatever. I also hope that the artwork and general aesthetics hint at this; these are done completely on the spur of the moment, so I’m not sure anyone should read too much into them! Again, though, I suppose that in itself is a reaction; if I see another po-faced post-rock album with a blurry photograph of a fucking electricity pylon for the cover, I think I may scream.
Although planning things is not really the point with this project, I’d like to do something with a groove next. There’s a bit in Mogadishu where a little beat comes in and everything immediately gets more dreamy, settles into a kind of mantra. It cuts through the noise and I’m massively into that. Although Matt incomparably prefers the second piece, I still think the best thing we’ve done yet is the final part of Atomic Blonde where there’s hints of something really subtle and really beautiful buried underneath the squall of feedback. I’m just a shoegaze kid and I can’t help it, no matter how clichéd. But ultimately, we don’t have a clue what’s happening next, and that’s the joy of it.
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