album // Schwarma
In the early 1990s, Mike Edwards' Jesus Jones released their third album, The Devil You Know. In an interesting, but typically audacious move for Edwards (clearly forgetting his place as a pop musician), he hooked up with Aphex Twin, AKA Richard D James. The relationship appear to yield little of substance, but clearly Edwards felt that a brief relationship with the then über-important Twin leant his own music some sort of critical 'cool'. Strange then that the music therein sounded like only a slight progression from the crisp (and I recall school disco-friendly) pop of Doubt and Liquidizer - no spiralling micro-tonal synth sections or distorted hammer beats; basically, no change. The most pretentious element of Edwards' delusion lay in his sleevenotes: rather than crediting his bandmates with the instrument they played, he instead assigned them a 'frequency range'. Simon Fisher Turner's first album under the name SFT is, in contrast, both credible and clever, built around the much more believable 'frequency loops' of Wire's Bruce Gilbert. After all, Gilbert - along with Blixa Bargeld, Robert Fripp and Sonic Youth-ers Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore - has undone and unravelled the perceived notions of how to play guitar. Gilbert's contribution here is mysterious - neither are we told what instruments were used, nor which tracks his contributions are on; the approach renders his work here 'felt' rather than 'heard'. However, one can be assured that the powerful mystique implied in that phrase 'frequency tones' is here deployed successfully by Fisher Turner in what amounts to a further stunning example of his work as a master sonic manipulator.
Schwarma consists of 16 tracks, some of which are very short, almost little more than fragments, while others are much longer. SFT advises that this album can be listened to either very quietly (which carries the risk of missing out on some of its most intricate details) or very loud (in which case the noisy burst of static heralding the final track 'Endbang' will both deafen you and take you by complete surprise).
Schwarma, according to Simon, was a product of his desire to do a 'grown-up' album; after producing numerous movie scores on The Fine Line, as well as music for Rosemary Butcher's dance company, this was effectively Turner's first non-commissioned piece since his days as The King of Luxembourg. Furthermore, Simon wanted to sing again, and his lilting vocal is particularly prominent on a track like 'Sequel'. He is joined on vocals by Jocelyn West, Martyn Bates and Gina Birch (also playing bass), but the voices are just one texture among many - alongside Gilbert's loops are woodwind contributions from Segio Avila, strings from The National Achievement Quartet, brass from Kate St. John and harmonica from John Byrne, while Fisher Turner also supplies 'atmospheres' which colour the tracks - even at their most processed - with an organic ambience. He is assisted by Russell Haswell on Protools, and SFT is keen to point out that Shwarma was recorded at Mute's Worldwide Studios 'using all available facilities'.
Fisher Turner's approach sees him layering tracks and melding together cultural reference points with washes of contemporary sound manipulation. A case in point is 'Last Sky', a spoken word vocal from poet Nasia Hadin mixed with some arabic reed playing, prayer calls and fluid, reverberating sounds. It shouldn't work, and looking at the 'sound map' for each track on the inside cover, it's a small wonder that it did at all, but it does work. SFT's approach to combining sounds is not in itself a surprise, but the lack of restrictions placed on him by editors and directors does seem to allow these tracks greater breathing space for ideas to germinate. It's a well-polished album seemingly filled to bursting point with sonic adventure, but at the same time this is listenable music, and not art exclusively. Standout tracks are plentiful, but would definitely include the soaring, string-soaked melancholia of 'Strung Out', or the crunchy digital beats and reeds of 'Lower' (and its reprise 'Low'). Others would include the cracked electronics of 'Cut' or the fuzzy dub-inflected guitar / vocal pop of 'Young & Beautiful'.