Most people lucky enough to reach seventy-four years of age are very much in slowdown mode by then – feet up, slippers off, Countdown on – but a few driven souls remain artistically vibrant long beyond bus-pass time.
Hans Joachim Roedelius, for instance, is probably the only currently-active recording artist to have once been a member of the Hitler Youth (albeit a hugely reluctant one).
He went on to become one of electronica’s founding fathers, and has a new record on the racks in early April. ‘Fibre’ is a collaboration with British soundtrack composer Noh1, who’s best known for making theme tunes for TV shows like Channel 4’s Worst Jobs In History. Not the most obvious of bedfellows, perhaps, but it was during the making of another TV show that the pair were set up, musically speaking.
“We were brought together by filmmaker Frederick Baker,” recalls the German, “to create the soundtrack for a film about John Lennon titled Imagine Imagine. It worked out well.” Noh1, AKA George Taylor, agrees. “I just instantly got what HJR was about. Neither of us read or write dots, so I think I saw a kindred spirit there.”
They may not dig the clefs and quavers, but the duo’s album is beautifully crafted, if perhaps skewed more towards pleasant incidental music than edgy experimentalism. The actual sessions for the album only took a week, and were hardly intense, with “many fun intermissions in between,” according to Roedelius, “drinking tea in the sunshine, having beers in the pub, walking around the countryside.” Having finally gotten an album’s worth of material down, though, it fell to Taylor and engineer Jez Coad to mix and master it, which took rather longer.
“Initially there was so much material and it seemed so unfocused to me that I just shelved it for a good year,” admits Taylor. “The challenge was to try and keep the spirit of the improvisational journey whilst trying to mould it into something that was actually listenable – without killing it. And it took two years.”
The end result wasn’t exactly as Roedelius expected. “I think George and Jez didn’t know much about what to do with all the material we recorded, to make a good record from it that people [would] want to listen to,” he says. “For me the music the two created with ‘Fibre’, it is a surprise.”
Hopefully not a bad one though, as the duo are planning to record together again in the near future. Expect to hear the fruits of that in, ooh, about 2013.
