Renfro are so avant-garde, they make Cubism look like join the dots.
This London electro duo sound like musique concrete meeting pop and bearing a baby named folk and the dysfunctional family of genres results in an album that ripens into a blissful fruit of Basinski-like ambience. Band members Tim Branney and Atom-James Draper are junkies of culture and their shared interests led them to delve into the reticular world of the aforementioned musique concrete. Their album, ‘Mathematics’, owes alot of its attraction to the enchanting sounds of tapping teeth, burning credit cards, static distortion and a variety of animal noises, including elephant seals. All inspired by the innovative musical movement.
The natural musical ability of Renfro is still blatant over the unorthodox methods of production. ‘Broken Little Pieces’ opens with a NASA space launch combined with static distortion, repeated until a subconscious beat develops within the sample, at which point Branney drifts in with vocals of a tender falsetto. The electro-acoustic articulations of ‘Planting Flags’ is complemented in an unlikely manner by the sounds of bubble wrap popping. The album floats on a steady ocean of mellow pop, highlighted by the exquisite harps of ‘Telescope’.
With so many strange sounds and unconventionally successful writings, we were intrigued. Clash caught up with the band to find out more, and how these lads could afford to burn their credit cards:
So the album is quite an engaging piece that stands quite alone in its genre, but who would you say were your biggest influences when writing?
Firstly we wanted to write songs that could potentially stand up in any genre but then to arrange them with unusual, interesting sounds & textures. We tried to avoid using synths or drums, and instead looked for other things to use for percussion, rhythms, melodies etc. We also wanted to create something new and un-retro sounding and to get away from the whole presumption that electronic = the 80’s. The idea was to explore new or future electronic music – the likes of Oval, Fennesz, Jan Jelinek, Paul Wirkus – that’s barely been used alongside pop songs. Both can be emotional and expressive.
Song-writing wise, when we started out on this album we were heavily influenced by Low and Susanna & the Magical Orchestra, and we also became really interested in the whole early 70’s Laurel Canyon scene – particularly people like Judee Sill & David Crosby – and wanted to integrate those lush vocal harmonies into a totally different setting.
The album has a distinct feel of musique concrete about it. Did you record all the sounds yourself (obviously not the NASA space launch)?
About 90% of them involved us using/abusing various microphones and tape recorders, the rest – mainly NASA stuff and some of the animal sounds – were tracked down online for the most part…of course if anyone wants to launch us into space to gather sounds for the next album we’d be very happy to don our astro-suits and head for the stars.
Some of those must have been great fun to record?
Probably shorting out multiple electrical leads to record the sound of pure electricity, if only because a) we never knew what the end sounds would be, and b) we were never sure if we’d be electrocuted when we stuck them in our mouths and tapped them onto every surface around….it’s all very ‘Bride of Frankenstein’.
Ah so you compare yourself to Bride of Frankenstein. Yet we have spotted a lot of reviews comparing you to Radiohead and Portishead… Is that off putting (in an expectant hype manner) or encouraging?
Well, both those bands are really important and era-defining, so to be compared with them is obviously really flattering, but right now we’re a new band on a tiny label, so comparisons like that are also very helpful in attracting attention and getting people to listen to what we’re doing, at which point the music can hopefully stand on it’s own.
Kramer, who mastered your album, has produced with a number of successful artists like Sonic Youth, Robert Wyatt and Dot Allison. What was it like working with him?
Yeah, he’s a bit of a legend. He was also one of the first people to “get” what we were trying to do musically. He actually contacted us to tell us that he loved our stuff and wanted to get involved. Not only did he do a fantastic job on the album, but he’s also been continually enthusiastic and helpful about getting the record out. The intention is now to work together on an ongoing basis. Kramer, we salute you!
‘Mathematics’ will be available from 6th October, accompanied by an EP release featuring remixes by Christian Fennesz, Porn Sword Tobacco and many others.
