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The members of Alt-J masked their identities in photos until success and ambition necessitated a compromise. ?It got to a point where it was like, ?Well, you?re not going to be in this magazine because they won?t even publish an article on you without a picture of your faces,? ? guitarist/bassist Gwil Sainsbury says.
Photograph by: Noah Kalina , Warner Music Canada
MONTREAL ? Gwil Sainsbury was speaking from Norway via a crackling connection, but you could still hear the ironic quote marks around the word when Alt-J?s guitarist/bassist described himself as a musician.
So success has changed Sainsbury?s life, but not Sainsbury. More than a year after the release of the British quartet?s debut, An Awesome Wave, Alt-J is still touring the album intensively, and is in the midst of a particularly demented summer itinerary that includes Europe, Australia, Mexico, Japan, the U.S. and Canada. Despite all the on-the-job training, ?I don?t really consider myself a musician, because I don?t really know about music,? Sainsbury said.
?I spent a long time in this band trying to work at how you write music: what the approach is, how it all happens, how it fits together. But at the end of the day, I don?t know things that lots of musicians know ? like, you know, what notes I?m playing on guitar. So it?s kind of amusing that we?re in this position.?
If Sainsbury?s modesty paints a picture of Alt-J as butter-fingered amateurs, the Mercury Prize jury may be a more reliable witness. The prestigious British award ? the equivalent of Canada?s Polaris Music Prize, awarded to an album solely on the basis of artistic merit ? went to An Awesome Wave last year, in recognition of a work that escapes easy definition. High-minded cultural references are hung on Joe Newman?s nursery-rhyme vocal hooks; Thom Green?s clattering percussion is as likely to drive a song as Newman and Sainsbury?s skeletal guitars.
An Awesome Wave?s tense but spacious songs don?t have many direct parallels, but the counterintuitive structures came from a place of intuition. The benefit to not knowing how to write a song is that you can write your own rules.
?When we went off to university, none of us did music. We did English and fine art,? said Sainsbury, whose studies fit in the latter camp. ?Those are both very critical courses. They?re much more critical than a music degree in the U.K., certainly. And I think that what we took away from our courses was: question everything. Question the conventions. Had we all got degrees in music, I think we would have ended up making more generic music, because once you?re involved in that world of defining so much, you become accepting of something being the way it is ? that to do music, you have to do it in a certain way.
?Terminology that most bands would probably use, like verses and choruses and middle eights and bridges, we didn?t really use, simply because we didn?t really know what a bridge or a middle eight was. I probably still couldn?t tell you. So that was really helpful ? we weren?t restricted by thinking about songwriting in a conventional way.?
Ignoring the conventions of Music 101 means you can pick a geometric figure for your band name ? Alt-J being the keyboard command for the triangular delta symbol. (Clearly, Sainsbury and his bandmates are Mac users.) The sign can indicate change in science and math equations, so as rock iconography, it suited a band in search of its own sound and its own approach to self-promotion. Members? faces were obscured in early photos, and the visual mystery likely would have carried through Alt-J?s lifespan if success and ambition hadn?t dictated a certain level of compromise.
?It got to a point where it was like, ?Well, you?re not going to be in this magazine because they won?t even publish an article on you without a picture of your faces.? You go, ?OK, we?ll do it for this magazine.? And if we do it for that magazine, another magazine goes, ?Well, they did a face shot in this one; can they do one for us?? And then it just sort of snowballed.?
Sainsbury clearly expected anonymity to be in the cards for a while longer: ?We?re doing the kind of shows I didn?t think we?d be doing for another three years ? not until at least our next album,? he said, citing the band?s headlining of the second stage at Britain?s Reading and Leeds festivals in August.
He also didn?t expect Alt-J to be touring in support of An Awesome Wave so long after its release, ?because we didn?t think many people would like the record,? he said with a laugh. ?I thought that a few blogs would like it, and maybe one paper in the U.K. ? there might be one critic who liked it ? but that that would probably be the extent of any success. And then we?d maybe be dropped from the label, or go straight back after doing a very short tour and write a second album.?
The finely woven production touches in An Awesome Wave allowed for a contingency plan: ?It was quite important for us to put lots of little things in there that we knew about and could draw on so we wouldn?t get bored if we were going to tour it (for a long time).? Many of the sonic layers are almost subliminal ? ?you wouldn?t even necessarily know they were there unless you?d done a massive bong hit? ? which makes sense coming from a guitarist who claims David Gilmour as an inspiration. (?Sometimes if I?m stuck I try to channel him, because one issue I have is always trying to play too fast, and Gilmour always plays incredibly slowly but very articulately.?) It initially made less sense to a guitarist who had expected the live show to recreate the album.
?I got a bit freaked out because we were putting down so many parts. I thought, ?We?re never going to be able to play this live.? But we decided as a group that we would worry about that later, and that we would simply put down whatever we wanted to put down.?
Sainsbury expects the same attitude to prevail in the making of the eventual second album, while allowing that the streamlined minimalism of the concerts will likely carry over.
?When you?ve been touring for a year and a half, you?re probably more comfortable on stage than you are in the studio ? it?s about what becomes familiar to you. And I think that as ?musicians,? we?ve grown a lot in terms of our understanding of each other ? understanding what other people can do and how you fit around that.?
Alt-J performs Friday, Aug. 2?from 4:15 to 5 p.m. on the Mountain Stage as part of the Osheaga Music and Arts Festival at Jean Drapeau Park. The festival is sold out apart from a small number of three-day VIP Osheaga Experience packages, priced at $740.95 and offering an exclusive viewing area at the main stages and other amenities. For more information, visit osheaga.com.
? Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
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