a cura di  Vito Camarretta  20/05/2007

La Haunted House Records e' una giovanissima etichetta inglese, fondata da Stephen Haunts, che si e' proposto di dare spazio alle forme espressive piu' oscure dell'elettroniche. Per il momento tre sigle messe sotto contratto: due creazioni di Mat Howlett (ZiBir -dark elettronica molto lo-fi- e Happy Welly -assurdo progetto al confine tra elettronica e nonsense-) e una dello stesso Haunts, chiamato Creature, con il quale abbiamo fatto due chiacchiere riguardo la sua etichetta e la sua creatura. Buona lettura. Creature "Mechanical" (Haunted House Records) 01.Intro 02.Nexar 03.Twilight 04.Vitamin 05.Magenta 06.Mechanical 07.Hotel 08.Wish 09.Daisy Cutter 10.Even Flow 11.Reverend 12.Neptune 13.New World 14.Terrapin 15.Nox 16.End Of The Line Hi Stephen! First of all, how are you? I'm good thanks. 2007 is proving to be a good year so far, both personally, for Creature and for Haunted House Records. I'm just listening to your Creature... or better to Mechanical! Even it's easy to recognize some influences, there some excerpts I find quite genial! For example, that 80s "new wave" way of grooving combined to organic sounds in Vitamin give a strange effect to listeners... Great! Yeah I'm really pleased with how Vitamin turned out. The song was quite un-intentional. I was experimenting with some synths one weekend, not really intending to write a tune, and I stumbled along the main synth line. Before I knew it I had most of the tune down on the computer. Just goes to show an idea can hit you when you least expect it. Nine Inch Nails returned to their old exquiste industrial style. In tracks such as Magenta -the colour in the middle between rose and violet!-, it seems you managed to imprison that morbid fascination of their style. Anything intentional in it? I have been a fan of Nine Inch Nails since they first release Pretty Hate Machine and followed Trent Reznor's career ever since then. The thing I really like about the band is that each album sounds totally different. He is willing to completely experiment and push the boundaries. I personally thought The Fragile was a monumental album with lots of thought and feeling to the songs. I suppose it is fair to say Magenta pays slight homage to NIN's earlier styles, with the glitched distorted beats. I originally had different plans for that track, but the more I developed the track the more I started to not like it. I left it alone for a few weeks and when I revisited it, I stripped it down to its bare elements, and at that point the track took on a whole different life which I really liked. The name came about when I was working on the newer revitalized version of the track. It was a late afternoon and I had a curtain in the studio closed to reduce glare on the screen. The light shining through the curtain created this magenta glow in the room which looked really warm. So the name seemed quite apt, the warmth of the magenta glow against the harsh glitched, distorted beats seemed like a perfect match of opposites. Furthermore the title track seems cite the most oniric Moby tracks. What about that strange mechanical sounds? What's the source? Those mechanical noises sound great don't they? My wife owns an old 1950's mechanical fruit machine from an old casino. The entire game is totally mechanical except for a light bulb to illuminate the reels in the dark. Shortly after we picked up the fruit machine from the dealer, we opened the front panel to expose the mechanism inside, and when you inserted a coin and pulled the handle, it just sounded awesome. So one day I set up a microphone rig and took lots of recordings of me just playing the machine. After making the recording I started chopping up some of the sounds into shorter rhythmical samples. I then had the idea of doing a track that starts and ends with very cold sounding mechanical clangs and whizzes and then morphing the track into something more natural and gentle in the middle. The idea was to try symbolizing what modern life is like. We are natural beings living on this planet, yet we now have a total dependency on technology, which is what the mechanical samples represent. One of my favourite tracks (maybe the best in my opinion) is Daisy Cutter. What about the idea behind this track? Are there any club still dancing it? Yeah it's a great track. This track actually appeared on its own self titled EP before the album was released. The track started off with a pounding kick drum and I built it up from there. My favorite element of the track is when the strings and piano sections come in. I just love the sound of strings and violins. They can give a track a real chilling appeal. The title of the track doesn't relate to picking flowers in a field though. It has a much more sinister meaning. A Daisy Cutter is a fuel air bomb designed by the Americans for clearing large areas on the ground from the air. It explodes just before it hits the ground and causes total devastation. This is partly signified in the track by the vocal sample that says 'Disco Bombing'. It exists partly to express my horror at the state of the world today. There are so many wars going, and with conflict zones like Afghanistan and Iraq that I feel like the world is eventually going to implode and it will be our fault. If global warming doesn't destroy us, then our love of war and conflict will. Are you a daisy cutter? :) From the description I gave for the track, then no. Well I hope not anyway. Being dropped from a plane and exploding might be a little painful. I have picked flowers though, and some of them were probably daisies, so yeah, in that case I am J I like those fading sounds in Neptune. They let me imagine the methane winds (did you know they are the strongest in the solar systems?) of Le Verrier's planet... Higly evocative! Wow I didn't know that about the solar winds. That's pretty cool. That track, I feel, is very calming. It's the sort of track I like to listen to with headphones on and the lights out and let your imagination go wild. It's interesting to hear what the track made you imagine. I named it Neptune as it has a very space travel feel to it. Kind of like sitting on a rock on Neptune just staring out at the stars. Might be a bit cold there though J Any work in progress? Yeah totally. I have been working for the past 3 months on the next album. I already have 14 tracks in various different stages, and I'm really happy with how they are turning out. I could just finish them off and release them now, but I am holding back, and will probably keep on writing until September. Then I will edit down the final format for the album. I'm having lots of ideas at the moment so I think the next album will be a great follow up to mechanical. I have been doing a lot more circuit bending of old children's toys for the new record. Although you wouldn't recognize some of the sounds in the music as they have been re-sculpted and shaped into a range of sounds from gentle to downright scary. Let's speak about your label. We have listened its first releases and they look promising a relevant position in Uk electronic scene in my opinion. How did you start it up? What are you going to feature in the nearest future? I started the label up towards the end of 2006. I decided to go independent as I don't like the idea of signing my musical rights away to a larger corporation. I had some larger label interest, but I would rather be in total control of what I do with my music. I am hoping to grow the label this year. I also have Happy Welly and ZiBiR signed to the label. I also have another potential act to sign later in the year. One of the main things with Haunted House Records is that I will never dictate to my artists what they should do, so they have complete control over the artistic process. I think giving this level of control create excellent albums. How do you imagine future of music? And mankind's future? I think the future of music is going to be interesting. Technology puts the tools into more people hands now, so everyone can have ago. One thing that really excites me is these modular synth environments like reactor, and max/msp. These are tools that I am currently trying to learn, but the potential is immense. Mankind's future, wow that's a biggy. I would like to think mankind has a good future, but from watching the news every day I feel things are looking grim. I think the 2 most dangerous things in the world are money and religion. These two things could do even more harm to mankind in the future. Some excerpts of Haunted House records look perfect as soundtracks. Have you already been involved in some projects related to film scores? No I haven't, but I would love to do sound track work for film. Or even art installation work too. Who knows what the future holds. I like writing in cinematic parts to the music as you've heard. I think the sound of a string section accompanying electronic grooves sounds amazing. I love listening to movie sounds tracks too. I recently bought the score to the movie Aeon flux. The film was the best in the world, but it had a really good sound track. What are your favourite readings? I must confess to being a bit of a geek recently as I have been reading books on synth design so I can translate some of the ideas over to reactor and max/msp. But I like a good thriller novel. I quite enjoyed the Dan Brown books recently, especially Angles and Demons. I am also a fan of the Harry Potter books. Those books allow you to be a child again, which is a great thing, especially in this tough world J Is it too soon to think about touring for spreading your label through festivals or not? I haven't planned a live show as of yet, but I am not ruling it out in the future. Certainly when the 2nd album has been released as this will give me an amazing body of work to select tracks from. It will take a lot of work getting Creature ready for playing live as there are just so many layers to the music. But it would sound awesome. Watch this space J