News / / 22.07.13

FUCK BUTTONS

The deafening drone of two men and their machines

It’s hard to believe, but it’s less than 150 years since the first recorded sounds were etched onto scratchy, crackly wax, in the late 19th Century. That means for hundreds of years, music was only ever heard live. Of course, it could be written down using notation – but the version you heard when you witnessed a live performance was the only version you were ever going to get. And, as Talking Heads frontman David Byrne points out in his excellent book How Music Works, people took a while to get used to mass-produced, recorded music. They complained that the recorded version didn’t sound like the real thing.

These days folk are more likely to whinge if a live show doesn’t faithfully recapture every last detail of the recorded version. And now that DJs play ‘live’ sets from laptops, laptops control midi-orchestras and even a forensic examination can’t conclusively prove whether Beyonce faked her show for Barack Obama, the line between the live and the pre-recorded is an increasingly dubious one.

We should be all the more grateful, then, for the shimmering, raucous, tribal, drone-electronica that Andrew Hung and John Benjamin Power – the duo otherwise known as Fuck Buttons – produce. Because not only are they an electronic act that viscerally, physically play their machines, but because the way you find them on stage – stooped over processors, synths and bundles of wires – is the way they compose, create and record the music in the first place.

Fuck Buttons – about to release their third album, Slow Focus, on the ATP label – weave drone-heavy darkness and euphoric electronica into a patchwork of powerful, passionate post-rock grind. And when Crack spoke to John Power, as the band prepared to descend on Glastonbury for the first of their summer festival dates, we got an insight into the creative process between two men and their machines that produces such weird and wonderful progeny.

“When we set out to write these tracks we don’t have any intention other than to explore the sounds we can get out of the gadgetry in front of us”, says Power. “I mean, once we come across a texture that interests us both we go from there, but it’s not like we ever come into the writing process and say ‘today we’re going to write a certain kind of track’ or anything like that. The whole process is a lot more free. That way we don’t end up boxing ourselves in, the possibilities are maximised.

“When we come into a writing session we don’t sit in front of a computer, we set up as we would do on stage, across the table from each other, with wires going all over the fucking place, we re-patch things, pretty much in the same way that we do when we play live. The two go hand-in-hand, we get a buzz from writing in that way, and in the same way we get a buzz playing like it. We’re a live band still – I certainly see it that way”.

A glance at their summer schedule – Glastonbury, Green Man, but also the more esoteric ArcTanGent – shows that their live show is both much in demand and impossible to pigeon hole. Probably the only act rubbing shoulders with kitsch folk-poppers Kings of Convenience and extreme metallers Dragged into Sunlight over the festival season, a Fuck Buttons performance produces one of two shamanic responses from the audience: either wild, spasmodic thrashing or a stunned, delirious reverie.

“It’s quite interesting”, concurs Power, “you can’t really gauge what kind of a time the audience are having by looking at them really, because that one person stood there, seemingly with their eyes closed, seemingly uninterested, might be having a party in their head. I feel like we’ve not necessarily ever had a place when it comes to line-ups and such. I can’t really see what would be the right kind of festival to play really, but I quite like that we get bundled in with such a range of different people. It’s interesting, you know … sometimes we wonder why promoters think it would work in some of the situations we end up in, but it’s quite fun, variety being the spice of life and all that.”

The Fuck Buttons story began back in the early 2000s, when both Power and Hung were at art college. “We studied in Bristol”, explains Power, “and the band started in Bristol, but I think it’s a bit of a misconception that we’re Bristolians. Andy used to live above a pub called the King Bill which is where the band started, and we’ve been doing this for ten years now, which is actually quite amazing when we stop and think about it. I’m 30, Andy’s 31, so that’s a pretty big chunk of our lives. We’re both very humbled to be able to do something like this. We never really expect anything – we certainly didn’t in the first instance. When Andy and I were making music above the King Bill in Bristol all that time ago, we were doing it because we wanted to make music together, we didn’t have any grand plans of playing around the world together. So the fact that people have taken to it is a really great feeling, we feel very privileged.”

One person who took to Fuck Buttons in a big way – big enough to incorporate two of their tracks into the opening ceremony of the London Olympics – was Underworld’s Rick Smith.

“I guess he was just a fan and he got in contact”, explains Power. “You get this phone call and at first you think there’s no point in getting too excited about it, but it actually transpired that it was a very genuine request. We didn’t know in exactly what capacity they were going to use it until a few weeks before the opening ceremony, so it’s safe to say we were just as surprised as the next person. It was very strange! The London Symphony Orchestra recorded a version of Sundowner, one of my Blanck Mass tracks too, and it turned out that was used three times throughout the ceremony, and at pretty key points as well, when the flag was being carried up to the flag pole.”

So somewhat bizarrely, two Worcester experimentalists can lay claim to being one of the dominant musical forces in the world’s biggest sports spectacle.

“It was very validating in a sense” Power continues. “It was very warming to think that someone other than us thought the music had earned its place at something that grand. There is definitely a triumphant feel to some of our tracks, an aesthetic that’s suited to something like that.”

The Fuck Buttons story began back in the early 2000s, when both Power and Hung were at art college. “We studied in Bristol”, explains Power, “and the band started in Bristol, but I think it’s a bit of a misconception that we’re Bristolians. Andy used to live above a pub called the King Bill which is where the band started, and we’ve been doing this for ten years now, which is actually quite amazing when we stop and think about it. I’m 30, Andy’s 31, so that’s a pretty big chunk of our lives. We’re both very humbled to be able to do something like this. We never really expect anything – we certainly didn’t in the first instance. When Andy and I were making music above the King Bill in Bristol all that time ago, we were doing it because we wanted to make music together, we didn’t have any grand plans of playing around the world together. So the fact that people have taken to it is a really great feeling, we feel very privileged.”

One person who took to Fuck Buttons in a big way – big enough to incorporate two of their tracks into the opening ceremony of the London Olympics – was Underworld’s Rick Smith.

“I guess he was just a fan and he got in contact”, explains Power. “You get this phone call and at first you think there’s no point in getting too excited about it, but it actually transpired that it was a very genuine request. We didn’t know in exactly what capacity they were going to use it until a few weeks before the opening ceremony, so it’s safe to say we were just as surprised as the next person. It was very strange! The London Symphony Orchestra recorded a version of Sundowner, one of my Blanck Mass tracks too, and it turned out that was used three times throughout the ceremony, and at pretty key points as well, when the flag was being carried up to the flag pole.”

So somewhat bizarrely, two Worcester experimentalists can lay claim to being one of the dominant musical forces in the world’s biggest sports spectacle.

“It was very validating in a sense” Power continues. “It was very warming to think that someone other than us thought the music had earned its place at something that grand. There is definitely a triumphant feel to some of our tracks, an aesthetic that’s suited to something like that.”

Although there’s an essential darkness to Fuck Buttons, there’s also a sense of celebratory progression to be found. If anything, the productions have grown more complex, and denser over time. On each of their three albums, the final track always seems to go that extra mile: an ultra-epic finale to complete a set of already anthemic material. “I’m not too sure if there’s a ‘saving the best for last’ mentality, but the narrative is something that’s very important to us when we’re compiling the album and the sequence of the record. I’m not too sure – it’s always good to go out with a bang, isn’t it!” laughs Power. “But each track has its place and it’s pretty considered.”

Fuck Buttons are keen to emphasise that it isn’t their place to push a visual metaphor for their music onto the listener, they clearly have a personal take on the meaning of the music for them. “I think it’s nice that people get to create their own story as they listen to it, and I think that’s the beauty of instrumental music: you don’t have some guy or some woman telling you what you should be thinking about when you’re experiencing the whole thing unfold. But to me, personally, the idea of Slow Focus – once the album was near completion and we sat down and started to discuss any kind of mental imagery that it conjured up for us, as we do – it almost felt like the moment your eyes take to re-adjust after being in a very deep sleep, like after being cryogenically frozen or something. And as you regain focus you start to realise that you’re in a place that you might not necessarily understand, or know, and the anxiety that comes along with that feeling.”

There’s certainly no shortage of possible interpretations to put on Fuck Buttons’ evocative productions. Rarely clocking in under seven minutes, the tracks on Slow Focus continue the theme developed on their previous two albums: nothing done by halves.

“There are a couple of shorter tracks on the record”, muses Power, “but we are drawn to longer pieces because the textures we use lend themselves to them, we’re perfectionists in that sense. We don’t just throw things in for the sake of it, for decoration’s sake, it’s all very considered. Sometimes it works to have particular textures play out for a little bit longer, because as your ears adjust to a particular sound, you start to be able to pull out intricacies and individual components that you might not have been able to hear before had it played out for a shorter period of time.”

It’s a perfect summary of why Fuck Buttons are such an immersive, rewarding band to listen to. Packed full of intricate details, which reveal themselves only after multiple listens, they capture the crucial elements of disparate genres and weld them into a scary new form. Catch them on their autumn tour – you may not know whether to dance or stand transfixed, but you definitely won’t go home disappointed.

 

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Slow Focus is released on July 22nd via ATP Recordings. Catch them at Green Man Festival, Glanusk, Wales (August 15th-18th) and ArcTanGent (August 31st). 

fuckbuttons.com

Words: Adam Corner

Photo: Alex De Mora

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