Influences: Three Trapped Tigers

The sounds that inspire 'Silent Earthling'...

Five years ago Three Trapped Tigers delivered their debut album 'Route One Or Die' – and the results are still smouldering on the landscape of British music.

A furiously inventive, incredibly visceral experience, the album seemed to spring from an entirely new dimension, one packed with sonic possibility.

But the trio faced a problem – how the hell were they going to follow it? The band's Matt Calvert explains: "I think the problem for anyone striving to create their own sound is, once you – hopefully – have achieved that, how do you expand that whilst maintaining it?"

New album 'Silent Earthling' does the track. Absorbing fresh elements while retaining the hues and flavours that made their debut so irresistible, it's a powerful, dynamic return from Three Trapped Tigers.

With a full UK tour now under way, Clash invited Matt Calvert to namecheck a few Influences…

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Death Grips – 'Takyon'

For this album we wanted to expand our sound but were feeling insecure about things not being exciting if they weren't our usual uptempo, full throttle schtick. 'Takyon' and it's killer groove was an obvious influence on the opening track 'Silent Earthling' – there are lots of slower tempos on our new album compared to our earlier stuff. The main difference is that Death Grips don't use guitars or cymbals, instead that noisy energy comes purely from the vocals. And it really rips! I think we can learn a lot from this kind of thing in the future. It's a totally different challenge with instrumental music.

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Hudson Mohawke – 'Octan'

It's hard to pick one HudMo track so I think really this represents the EP 'Satin Panthers', if not all his stuff. His use of highly emotive chord sequences and curious yet epic and colourful sounds is something that I think appeals to all of us. He also finds something unique groove-wise within quite conventional stylistic templates. Electronic music often gets streamlined into tempos – house, techno, trap, drum 'n' bass. Lots of our favourite artists – Clark, Actress, Flying Lotus – aren't limited to one and we'd rather not be either. Diversifying tempos and trying to create unique beats has really opened up our sound.

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Goldie – 'Saint Angel'

Betts and I worked on a Heritage Orchestra project recreating the Goldie album 'Timeless' live. When it came to finding something up tempo for our album we thought we'd try incorporating some of the stuff we'd been working on. The beats from our track 'Rainbow Road' were pretty directly inspired by the opening drum phrases from Saint Angel, whilst the whole parallel chord movement idea (from spreading one chord sample across a keyboard) we used is heard on a bunch of 'Timeless' tracks (4:48 here). It's a nice 'naive' way of creating chord sequences, heard in HudMo tunes and all sorts. That slightly kitch element is new for us. Timeless isn't a record that any of us grew up with, but provided a good jolt of inspiration.

It's also worth mentioning that a friend took me to a jungle rave in Brixton and the next day I came up with the main double time beat to 'Engrams'. It's not strictly a jungle beat, but there's an undeniable influence. Betts is now playing with Squarepusher. It's always been in our sound.

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Nine Inch Nails – 'Closer'

The only way we could make a 'funk' track work in Three Trapped Tigers is with some genuine consideration for our sound. I can't say that our track 'Tekkers' sounds like 'Closer', but I like how Trent Reznor works in super electronic sounding guitars alongside really mechanical programming and samples, keeping it very NiN. So it made us think, OK, how can we take familiar Three Trapped Tigers elements and do our thing? We had a demo that I'd programmed from back when we were writing EP2 actually, but rightly we felt at the time that it didn't fit. The key was how Betts has really expanded his live electronic processing side – blurring the organic with the mechanic. Rather than doing funky guitar strumming I used a delay to get a machine like stutter. It also helps that we're using dark synth sounds instead of Hammond organ, but there are still cowbells!

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Pat Metheny Group – 'Minuano'

Look past the now-cheesy, smooth production and you have some incredibly well composed, beautiful music. It's not cool, but it's glorious really. I liken the epic, unravelling form and glorious climaxes to some of our tracks, and when we use reverberant wordless voices it also evokes this era of Pat Matheny Group. 'Engrams' especially has all of those elements, but even on the heavier tunes like 'Kraken', you can hear it too.

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'Silent Earthling' is out now.

Catch Three Trapped Tigers at the following shows:

April
26 Guildford Boileroom
28 London Scala
30 Milton Keynes Craufurd Arms

May
1 Leicester Handmade Festival
2 Bristol The Lantern
3 Brighton The Haunt
9 Leeds Brudenell Social Club
10 Cambridge Portland Arms

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