Album of the Week: Walls ‘Walls’

Album of the Week: Walls ‘Walls’

30 April, 2010 | 1.00AM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Music News: kompakt, walls

Sometimes, the most satisfying records are the ones that come seemingly from nowhere. Walls‘ self-titled debut was like that for me when it landed on my desk and first found its way through my speakers.

Sure, it had the Kompakt imprimatur, which I trust as a mark of a certain level of quality, even if not everything they do appeals to my own tastes. But Walls, with their odd, open-ended name, were a blank slate. And the first listen reinforced that sense: here was music I couldn’t quite put my finger on, which took scraps of recognizable styles like ambient, or new disco, or Krautrock — along with elements of My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Durutti Column — but spun it into something that didn’t sound quite like any of the other versions of similar mergers.

Part of what sets the album apart is its range. The first three tracks run from smoldering shoegaze to Balearic disco/pop to slow-motion techno, bruised and abraded to within an inch of its life. They’d be easy to mistake for the work of three entirely different bands. But the more you listen — and the fact that the album is less than 30 minutes long encourages repeated listening — the more they gel together.

It turns out that Walls aren’t a total cipher. One half of the duo is Alessio Natalizia, aka Banjo or Freakout, whose acoustic, indie-leaning cover of Burial’s ‘Arcangel’ caused an Internet stir last year. The other half is Sam Willis, of the duo Allez-Allez; they’ve done one EP for Kickboxer and have remixed Fever Ray, among others. But their most significant contribution to the music world remains their Allez-Allez blog, home to a vast array of mixes — many of them around a half-hour long, just like Walls’ album — from a staggeringly diverse list of musicians: Luke Vibert, Prins Thomas, Ben Watt, Ada, Exercise One, Tadeo, Animal Collective, Four Tet, Optimo‘s JD Twitch, Matias Aguayo, and many more. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ve also done a pair of mixes for them.)

Knowing the duo’s background explained a thing or two about Walls’ range, but it raised even more questions for me, so I reached out to Sam Willis, who talked about analog/digital agnosticism, dodgy samples, and the magic of plastic cameras.

‘Burnt Sienna’

Is there any special meaning behind the name, Walls?

We were sitting in a cafe, having a coffee, and it just popped into my head… It just seemed like a strong, solid name, and we also figured it would be open to interpretation or suggestion to other people – like walls of sound, or walls of noise, or walls of bliss!

How did you come to release the album on Kompakt?

We sent over the first few tracks that we made to them and they were very quick to respond and express their interest. It was really exciting and humbling, for me at least, that our music had caught their attention – Michael Mayer called and offered us the chance to do an EP or mini album with them to which we of course said yes! From that point onwards the rest of the record really flew together and we found ourselves with enough tracks for an album, albeit a short album. Personally I’ve always enjoyed shorter albums, or DJ mixes – it just feels like it forces you to work harder to make your point over a shorter period of time and also means that hopefully the listener never quite gets their fix and has to come back and listen again!

It’s true, it’s a very short album. 29 minutes long, eight tracks, with many of them three minutes or less. It seems like many of these jams you could have easily extended…

Like I said, we’re real believers in brevity. It’s a great feeling to have people want to go back and listen to your song or album again and again, rather than get bored half way through, or just plain run out of time. We all live busy lives these days and don’t always have the time to sit down and listen to a 76 minute concept record! As much as we try to sit down and write a long track, they just feel right around the 4:40 mark or thereabouts.

Also, we plan on extending stuff in the live show. The experience of time is so different from a club in comparison to on headphones on a bus. I feel like not enough people in electronic music recognize this. There was a reason that you’d have the “12-inch dance mix” for singles in the ‘80s, as that was for the DJs, whereas it now seems like we’re all treated as DJs rather than as music fans, who want the track to get to the point rather than meandering around for 32 bars with just a kick drum and hi-hat so that a DJ can mix seamlessly with it.

‘Hang Four’

You’re in London and Alessio is in Italy, or at least he is at the moment; was the record a long-distance collaboration, or was it done together in one of your studios?

Actually Alessio’s been living in London for the past few years, and after the first six months of us exchanging files remotely, he moved just round the corner from me. Now we pretty much see each other every day, and go to work in my little bedroom studio. Quite a bit of the guitar and noise stuff was recorded at his place and then worked in to the beats and synths, etc., when he brought it round to mine. We’re really looking forward to properly getting stuck into the live show to explore more of a free and improvisational approach to composition.

How exactly did you guys make the music? Was there a lot of “jamming” and hands-on action? What sort of gear were you guys using? I hear a lot of synthesizers, of course, but it also sounds like there’s a lot of guitar and electric bass, run through scads of effects. (Also, who’s singing?)

Alessio is the vocals guy! As Banjo Or Freakout he properly sings, so straight away it was a decision to “treat” his vocal a little more on the Walls stuff, plus to avoid any overt lyrics. I personally enjoy the open feeling this gives the music, whereby the title might suggest a scenario or sense of place and atmosphere, rather than having lyrics do that in a traditional narrative way. In terms of the synths, it’s a mixture of hard and soft — I have a Sequential Circuits Sixtrak which creates the bassline on ‘Burnt Sienna’ amongst other things, and a Waldorf Pulse, but we also used software versions of Korg Polysix, Moog Modular, ARP-2600… We have loads of VST plugins also, including a replica of a specific phaser as used by Tangerine Dream, an ADT plugin, compressors, distortions, etc. Alessio also has a whole heap of guitar pedals which he uses to process stuff. It’s all about the final product for us, though, rather than some slavish devotion to analogue or digital. Really it’s about whatever feels right and instinctive at that moment in time.

‘A Virus Waits’

I’d love to know how you did ‘A Virus Waits’, in particular. So gnarly!

That came about from a bass loop from a house track which shall remain nameless (!) which Alessio fed through a whole web of different guitar pedals — constantly tweaking and morphing settings to create this crazy noise… I got involved at the production stage, adding swathes of different convolution reverb from different spaces and high end units cycling from wet to dry, the idea being that you’re sucked in and out of different physical spaces or something.

When you guys began the project, did you have a very clear idea in your minds of how you wanted the music to sound? That is, did you expect it to turn out like this, or was the final result more the product of experiment and happy accident?

I think Alessio definitely did – he heard something in my remix of his Banjo track which he thought could really work well together, and I guess you could say he was proved right! I’ve learned so much from working with him, and hopefully vice versa – we have very complimentary skills and ideas, which really makes working together a very exciting and pain-free experience.

‘Gaberdine’

Also, there’s just one “club track” on the album (’Gaberdine’); was it a conscious decision to move away from house & techno structures?

Pretty much. With my stuff as Allez-Allez I’ve always been around the 120 BPM mark by default, but exploring slower and faster tempos has been a real revelation in terms of how it makes the music feel – for instance ‘Soft Cover People’ originally had a kick drum and hi-hat, but it just felt too fast, and then one time I loaded it up, and the drive which the drum sounds were loaded onto was disconnected, so when I hit play, it was unexpectedly turned into an ambient track, and we liked it so much that we left it that way! I certainly feel like we’re going to explore more house and techno structures in the future, particularly for the live show. We definitely want to make people dance, but also take them on a journey at the same time!

‘Soft Cover People’

What kind of material got left on the cutting-room floor, so to speak? There’s so much range here between, for example, ‘A Virus Waits!’ (which reminds me a bit of Oni Ayhun or T++) and ‘Cylopean Remains’ (which has a kind of kosmische/Kraut throb to it), that I can’t help but imagine there are even stranger forays that didn’t make it onto the LP.

There’s only one track, which Kompakt passed on, which I still really like — I think they maybe felt it was a bit too much like the classic sound of Harmonia or something of that ilk. On reflection they might have been right, but I feel like with some extra work it can be a really special track. We’ve just finished remixes for Caribou and Tracey Thorn as well as the recent ones out there we did for Pantha Du Prince and The Field, so we’re definitely looking forward to cracking on with some more original material, which we may well give away for free on our blog. That stuff I think will potentially be a bit stranger and more out there.

‘Cylopean Remains’

It’s funny, because for the longest time I thought that the cover photograph was an exploding volcano — only now do I realize it’s cherry blossoms, or dogwood, or something like that. Which makes perfect sense, it really is very much a *springtime* album.

It’s a photo that I took in Paris. I have a Holga camera, which I absolutely adore — if ever there was an argument over the “magic” of analogue over digital, that camera wins it game, set and match. It takes medium-format film, and has a plastic lens, and leaks light all over the place. All of its imperfections add up to totally unexpected, unique images every time. I recently found out that I had been using it with completely the wrong settings and zoom etc. but came out with some really unique pictures that I wouldn’t have done if I’d properly understood how it works. I should mention that my good friend, the designer James Joyce, really helped bring out the best in the colours and add some subtle layers — if you look closely you can see the outline of a girls head. We did our own press shots but triple exposing on the film. I took Alessio’s picture, he took mine, and then we’d layer it with a shot of a puddle or tree bark, and it ended up with some really interesting images. Our forthcoming single ‘Hang Four’ is another image that I took with it – this strange blue/red ghostly landscape that really fits with the album cover. I’ve recently taken a whole load more photos and have some other great images which we’ll no doubt use for future artwork. Although our production or photography may not be the most professional, it’s such a good feeling to have done it all yourself!

‘Strawberry Sect’

To move on to your other projects, do you know what Alessio is doing now with Banjo or Freakout?

He recently recorded his debut album in NYC at the Rare Book Room studios – I’ve heard some of the rough mixes and it sounds really fantastic. He’s considering his options label-wise at the moment, but I think the plan is to get it out sometime in autumn.

Finally, I’d like to ask about Allez-Allez. You guys have been doing the podcast thing for longer than almost any of the principal outlets, and you’ve also distinguished yourselves by encouraging a rare kind of eclecticism… I guess I’d like to know how your work with Allez-Allez (as a curator, let’s say) has affected your own music-making?

Well, my decade’s experience of working in the music industry has been a huge privilege, to be surrounded by great music of all different kinds, and to be introduced to it by equally great and enthusiastic people. My partnership with Steve in Allez-Allez came about as an opportunity for both of us to share the knowledge and love that we have with whoever’s interested in listening. We’ve never claimed to be the most knowledgeable or to have the greatest collections, because we haven’t — hopefully what sets us apart is our passion and honesty about the music that we feel strongly about, and also our sensitivity as to what music goes well together. Certainly putting together as many mixes as I have through the site, it definitely refines your sense of mood and musical narrative. In terms of how I personally approached the tracklisting for the Walls record, also, certain samples, snippets and ideas were cannibalized from mine and Alessio’s collections in the process of making the record – pretty much all of it obscure stuff, apart from one sample from a giant pop group who shall also remain nameless!

‘Austerlitz Wide Open’

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