Interview James Rutledge aka Pedro

Abbiamo fatto una chiacchierata con James Rutledge, artist known as Pedro, simpatico ragazzone laureato in matematica con la passione per la chitarra e -passione mutuata dall'ascolto di Dj Shadow- per la musica elettronica. Ama conversare sul post-rock prendendo a riferimento John McEntire dei Tortoise. Il suo penultimo (l'ultimo uscirà in questi giorni) tuttavia contiene moltissimi riferimenti alla musica di Erik Satie, il compositore "classico" che tuttoggi influenza maggiormente la composizione elettronica. Anche degli "emergenti". Buona lettura.

Hi Pedro. Have you ever been in Santa Fè? :) Hello. No, can’t say I have.

I've heard you last album issued on the interesting label Melodic. Could you make a track-by-track commentary? Wow. OK.

Intro/Outro
These are really simple piano tracks that took me about ten minutes to do. Just a reference to the well trodden path of Glassworks Philip Glass stuff, Erik Satie etc. I also thought it’d be nice, given my age and musical background, not to start with some apeshit scratching and/or vocal samples which generally stink.

Fear & Resilience (mp3)
Most people like this track. I thought they wouldn’t because of the weird brass break in the middle and the mental drums at the end. This track crackles so badly, which I like – that’s because it all came off my Akai S20 which is a little brother of the MPC. It has a weird sample rate that makes everything sound muffled. What’s in the title? Well, when you try and make a record/do anything creative/tough then you get more sensitive to things. I must have read these two words in a book and thought they applied to how I was feeling at the time. This track was probably a really straightforward nod to DJ Shadow but was also trying to put across the idea that this album was a mixture of beats, free music and classical minimalism. To be honest, I never really thought about it too much, I just did it.

Dead Grass
There’s a line in an Ezra Pound poem which features this phrase. It’s one of the most peaceful, strong, sad lines I have ever read. I’m getting too caught up in song-titles, which is OK seen as most people seem to want to invent words for their song titles or make reference to some mathematical thing or some terrible pun or something because that’s like ‘SO crazy’ and what you should do if you make electronic music (fake irreverence). It’s difficult to resist sticking a beat to any track. I’m pleased I let everything unfold on this track about half-way through. Just after I made this track I heard the Murcof stuff. My track was referencing something like Arvo Part, Durutti Column and Orff Music For (Nazi) Children.

These Pixels Weave A Person
This was basically an attempt to make quite a free, human bit of electronic music. Most of it was done live.

The Water Ran This Way Back & Forth
Can you hear the Fennesz influence on this track?! Actually I started this long before I heard Endless Summer, but it has that same sound about it. This came from listening to Gorecki and trying to do a long unfolding track with just an acoustic guitar. I’d gone through folk music on my first two EPs about four years before this, so I wasn’t too interested in that, though I suppose people hear what they want to.

123
I’m really proud of this track; it’s a distillation of all the stuff I set out to achieve with the album. I really like this Public Enemy idea of throwing lots of sound together and squashing it into a whole. I was listening to things like the Cannibal Ox record at this time. EL-P’s production was sort of menacing and dirty - there was no sheen to it. Also, things like No Neck Blues Band, early electronic music and weird organ chamber music. I think it has the ‘where the hell is this going’ feeling of all those Joe Henderson records.

All Things Rendered.
I wanted this to be a heavy dub track so I changed the tempo and all these guitars I’d been messing with started glitching which I thought sounded cool. Glitches are just another production technique, aren’t they? This was more of an accident that said ‘here is music being made on a computer’. Some magazine said that this album made electronic music less frigid! So this track is warm, inviting and doesn’t go anywhere. It does contain a direct reference to my favourite folk music though.

Seven Eight
The year of my birth, the time signature (not a mathematical reference) – this was the first track I actually did for this album. I was hearing all this garage music that was cutting up bits of vocals and going through odd tempo changes. It was that and all the Thomas Brinkmann Klick stuff that I got into. The music box bit in the middle was a sample of a really limited edition Badly Drawn Boy music box. I used this bacause BDB’s first two EPs (not the later records that made him famous) were amazing and my first contact with the music industry because I use to play in a group called DOT on his label.

Is there any influence by minimalistic pianomodernists? Piano modernists? Do you mean Satie or Alva Noto & Ryuchi Sakamoto sort of thing? Well, I think Satie is great, but it’s more coming from the big guns like Glass, Reich, Part, Orff – that sort of hammer/mallet/string feel.

What's the true meaning of the word "decadence" in your own words? Are there any representative albums meaning "decadence"? Are there different facets of this concept? What?! Is this an exam? Decadence, in an artistic sense, generally means a decline in something or other, a decay – ‘lacking in moral physical or artistic vigour’. So, I suppose you could use it in this negative sense to describe things like Kings Of Leon, Jet, The THEs of this world i.e. lack of artistic vigour. Not all of them, though. It now also gets used to describe OTT things in a positive way. Bling innit. What a nutbag question.

Among your musical skills, there's mandolin... who transitted the passion (or interest in) for this instrument? I played the mandolin once. I don’t understand the question but I’ll waffle for a minute and hope some shit sticks. I played the clarinet to grade 2 (so I have a basic grasp of scales) then took up the guitar. I loved guitar music in that cold sweat sort of way or when you heard a bit in a Jimi Hendrix track you went nuts, or that Canned Heat 7" in my Dad’s collection. Or that bit in The Who Live At Leeds. Then followed Sonic Youth, Nrivana, those American groups. So my passion was initially for guitar. This means you can normally play a whole load of stringed instruments. If you’re touching on the folk element, then that probably happened when Johnny Trunk reissued The Wicker Man soundtrack. When I was in Manchester everyone used to go on and on about that album so I went and picked a copy up. Everyone acts now like they were at Fairport Convention gigs in a farmyard, or something. Then I got into Joe Boyd produced stuff (Incredible String Band, Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan etc etc) and it sort of took off from there. I was never into all this stuff as a kid, it just touched something very British in me about four or five years ago when I started making records. My main impetus for starting to make music was hearing DJ Shadow’s Entroducing when I was 18 and had just got to University. It was like hearing the sort of music I had been waiting all my life to hear. So, I just coupled all these things together and did my first record. I’ve been involved of lots of musical projects now so playing string instruments seems as honest and natural as stitching some beats together.

Any follows with Kathryn Williams after "a la chem bros"? I haven’t really found anyone yet. When I do, maybe.

Do you think that art is something intimately related to pain? Woah. I’m not planning on writing a book here. Yes, sometimes. It depends. A lot of art, I think is made out of a half-arsed attempt to set yourself aside from anyone else. This is where annoying concepts like high-art, low-art crop up. I hate these. There’s snobbery and inverse-snobbery on all sides. That sort of renders art or opinions on art useless. I don’t know – it’s striving for perfection isn’t it? For me music is a compulsion, I can’t help but talk about it, be interested in it, want to check out new groups. That’s why I can never understand all these retro groups who have such closed ears to everything. It should be a compulsion. There’s not much pain in my life (touch wood). The people that adhere to the phrase ‘art is about pain’ are normally spoilt brats, in my experience. Those are just the wet disillusioned types. There are obviously people who suffer for their art. Stuff can be hard at times but I’m not about to moan about it. When you get to go to New York to play music, there’s little to whinge about.

There's somelike fellinian in your approach to sound textures. Isn't there? Is there? I like some Fellini films - they’re usually nuts. I don’t like 8 ½ though. I couldn’t get into it and it made no connection with me at all. I couldn’t comment on the Fellini connection. I would be lying if I said there were one. Although, I’m pretty into the psychedelic style of Roma.

Any work in progress? Yes. A Fear & Resilience remix LP with mixes by Prefuse 73 (Warp), Danger Mouse (Lex), Four Tet (Domino), Koushik (Stones Throw) and Cherrystones (Twisted Nerve).

An Early Pedro LP.

I’ve nearly finished my new album.