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HISTORY
We all grew up in the same area in Nottingham and played together in different line-ups. We were mainly jamming and improvising earlier on. Instruments would often be switched around, there weren’t any static roles and we were more interested in experimenting. We started getting into similar music in our teens, Adam, Pish & Dorian together with guitarist Little Barrie formed an instrumental 4 piece, musically the band was a mix of 60's soundtracks meets the Meters. We got introduced to the usual sort of psychedelic music like CAN, early Floyd and then to more obscure stuff like soundtracks, rare groove, easy listening, acid folk/Jazz.
The Soundcarriers grew out of those early sessions from a desire to arrange the music in an orchestral way, and to condense the ideas into more structured forms. One of our favourite albums is the soundtrack to Midnight Cowboy John Barry’s arrangements are really beautiful. However we still wanted to keep the spontaneity and random ideas that can be gen erated through improvisation, but without the self-indulgence. CAN are perfect examples: the instruments ble nd in a democratic way. The way we work on our music now is a mixture of those two approaches.
When we came to record the album we already had quite a lot of experience of recording our own music by starting on basic four tracks. We’ve never seen the production as separate from the creative musical process, and we’ve always liked producers like Phil Spector and David Axelrod who were more inventive and imaginative and thought conceptually rather than just reproducing what was already there. We prefer using analogue because it reacts like an instrument would to being played, there’s that element of chance and some evidence of human interaction. We could never be one of those bands that records an album in a week in a 'standard' studio - we need time to explore and experiment in a non-pressure enviroment so we built our own studio. We’ve got quite a diverse array of instruments lying around, harps, random keyboards, stylophones and chimes, most of which has found its way onto the album.
The music for the album came together over quite a long period some songs being reworked from earlier improvised fragments and others being more fully formed. One of the good things about the band is that we’re on the same wavelength musically so an idea can come together really quickly. Prior to the album we’d been getting into more diverse sounds such as Tropicalia, Bollywood soundtracks and European folk, as well as 50s surf and exotica. In a way this comes across on the album, but often what you aim for is just the starting point; sometimes it goes completely wrong but you end up with something interesting.
Our plan for the moment is to record as much as possiblenow we’ve sort of got a system that works, we’d really like to tour our music as far a field as possible.
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Celeste
Out Now
