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Canhex (Originally written for Probemusic, August 2001)"We don't give a fuck about the machinations of the industry. It's full of mediocre fools who are just there to make money out of you in the most grotesque ways possible." Mick Canning is in full flow. "We've had these really bad experiences with third-parties and it's generally not worth the grief." He's talking about Canhex, the long-distance collaboration between two Kiwis, between himself and Mike Hex, between Sheffield and New Zealand, which has taken two years to produce a 13-track album, Sentient Seas. The pair met for the first time this year when Mick remortgaged his life and took himself back home on tour. "When we finally met in the flesh it was as if we'd known each other for years. Strangely, we'd had a lot of similar experiences - having really bad times trying to get distribution and being fucked off by Flying Nun. They've fucked so many people around." Despite appearances, he's got things other than music biz wankers on his mind. Pressing at the moment is editing the footage he shot of Canhex's only gig ("We had 2 hours of rehearsals and did the show and it turned out brilliant.") and the imminent release of Sentient Seas. It's an album of long and short. Short songs that linger long. Part Spaceman drone rock, part Elephant 6 psyche-pop and part weirdy scratchings and kinetic noise. It started when a friend suggested Mick should work with Mike. "As synchronicity would have it, I saw a review of Hex's album in a fanzine so I wrote to him, he sent me some music and I loved his lo-fi aesthetic." Together, they're home-recording evangelists. "We were quite doggedly pursuing the idea of using all the capabilities of the 4-track. There's so much snobbery in music now, this horrible aesthetic that everything must be crystal clear. There's no mystery to it. You listen to something like ska from the late 60s and there's all sorts of stuff that you can't hear or you can feel it and it just shits all over that music. It's got so much soul. That's what Canhex is all about, having something that you can feel, or sense the presence of. We wanted to make something magical." They have. Two people on opposite side of the world never met and made a record. Forget Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. Sentient Seas will be out in August on Mick's Ghostjogger imprint. www.ghostjogger.com |
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