A little background:
As I always say with Setting Sun, I discover music by interesting
bands and music often by accident.
For the art of discovery of music, often comes through the
mereist accident or slip, perhaps sometimes walking through a
shop and I hear this wonderful song on their radio or even
Telly.
Thankfully “Guitare Brothers” came from a completely different
Source altogether. I would dread to think what their music would
Do to a quene of people in my local clothes shop, although it
Would be funny to see.
As one or two of you readers may know I am a subscriber to a excellent
magazine called “Electric Robots and Brains” (http://come.to/robots)
which is a interesting electronical Fanzine which loads of experimental
and sometimes downright weird electronical Music.
On one such issue of their magazine, Issue13 I seem to recall – it came
with an additional CD of music by a English – French duo “
Guitare Brothers”.
Like with the “Trilemma” interview from last year, the CD certainly
proved a grower, although in contrast to the sometimes dreamy and
cinematic tones of the “Trilemma” CD, “Guitare Brothers”’s music
borders on the crazy and in places downright scary. It simply has to be
heard to be believeable….
Interested I dropped the head of Robots and Electric Brains, Jimmy
and he helped me sort out a interview with the band….
Thanks to Mr Atomic and V Mark 3 (who are “Guitare Brothers) for
Their answers which may very interesting reading…
For more information on “Guitare Brothers” – please look at their
website
http://www.guitarebrothers.fr.set
Or contact them viva Robots and Electronic Brains whose e mail
address is:
Thanks Guys!
Andy N
***
Setting Sun: How's things and what are you also up to at the
moment?
Mr Atomic:
Things are going pretty well. We're happy with the reaction
to our new album and the 7" of remixes from our first album
and we're currently working on remixes for Goodnight Star
(www.miniaturerecords.com) and Serge (www.sergemusic.org)
Vmark3:
O yes we are le happy about all this. But wait till we conquer
the world. Or at least learn to speak proper Franglais all the
time.
Setting Sun: Now although I have been aware of the Guitare
Brothers for a little bit through their wonderful CD as produced
on Burning Emptiness and the always interesting Magazine,
Robots with Electric Brains, but as I always say there will be people
who won't have heard off you - so can you introduce yourselves to us, fill
us in our general music bio, what started you off and so on etc?
Mr Atomic:
Ha Ha! That's a good question. We're in the process of
interviewing each other for our website and the next issue
of Robots and it's turned out that neither of us can remember
exactly how we started making music together.
What we are sure about is that I sent some tracks to a
friend of V-Mark's for a compilation on Aspic records. That's how
he heard of me. Then he sent something to me for review in Robots,
then it's a bit of a blur, but we started working on our first record
when I bought some junk shop French 7" singles to sample. He did
the same with some English ones and that was that.
Vmark3:
I guess that's it, basically. But what matters isn't how a
relationship began, it's the way it flows and keeps on
going, isn't it? I remember being fascinated about Mr Atomic
doing all his music with a tracker (trackers are the
grandgrandgrandfathers of all audio programs, first ones
used to run on Amigas, but there's loads about
that later on)
Mr Atomic:
And I was fascinated that he was fascinated. I mean, it
was just normal for me to make music with the tracker.
Setting Sun: What are your musical influences and what have you
been listening to recently?
Mr Atomic:
Influences is always a hard question. For me, Pop Will Eat
Itself, Run DMC and Public Enemy were the first big loves
of my musical life. Recently I've been listening to Serge and The
Wicker Man soundtrack a lot.
Vmark3:
A friend recently asked me to make a compilation of
influential bands and the thing is there's not going to be enough
space on a 700Mb CDR for it, even if it only consists of low
quality mp3s. He insisted on it to be no more than 74 minutes long,
though, so I guess I'll send him the comp near 2035, time to think
about it. I suppose Carcass, Black Sabbath's first album and Napalm
Death's From Enslavement to Obliteration were my first musical
loves. Recently, I've been listening a lot to Trombone (dysfunction
records) And J.Torrance (sijis records).
Setting Sun: What is also the inspiration behind your name
"Guitare Brothers" - I guess it is French, but will be interested in
learning what inspired you to come up with the name.
Vmark3:
Mr and Mrs Atomic were at ours for a holiday and we went to
Avignon and we drove past this guitar-only music shop called
'guitare brothers' and it all seemed obvious. Mrs Vmark made a
picture of us in front of the store and Atomic had the final idea
for the 'pas guitars, not frères' motto.
Setting Sun: Do you play concerts or if you don't how you approach it?
How does this compare to your recorded material? Is there one you prefer
Over the other?
Mr Atomic:
We've never played live as Guitare Brothers. I don't know
how we'd do it if we did. Probably it wouldn't sound much like the
records. V-Mark is the technical one, so perhaps he's got some ideas.
Vmark3:
Yea, say I'm the technical one when a difficult argument
arises. I thought YOU were the one with the ideas, tinbox. Blimey,
how could I know how to play live across The Channel? Okay,
then, if you threaten to have me trapped forever in a Top of the Pops
live show I can come up with an answer and here it is: we both have
laptops and I have noise-making toys Atomic just gave me, so I guess
we could both run Modplug on our laptops and sort of take turns at
improvising over each other's beats and tunes.
Mr Atomic:
Christ knows how bad that would sound. One of the beauties
of making music on the computer is that you only have to do
something good once and then it's a piece of piss to reuse it. I make
loads of crap music, but I'm very good at throwing the bad stuff away.
Setting Sun: I notice from your CD I have "t'aime pas de techno or
what?" That you used the modplug tracker to help you produce it.
Can you enlighten us with explaining how you first encountered this
Particular interesting little plug in, which you kindly enclosed in addition
On your CD also.
Mr Atomic:
I first started making music years ago on the Amiga. There
was a piece of software called MEDTracker which later turned into
OctaMED that was a pretty basic sequencer. Very simple to get the
Hang of and very low on memory requirements.
Vmark3:
a tracker is to a 'normal' audio sequencer/sampler what a
Vespa is to Concorde. Which is kinda funny when you think about it:
We live 1000 miles apart, so using Concorde could be a lot more
convenient. A regular GBros song weighs a mighty 50Kb.
Atomic has the current record with 9Kb for a 2 minutes song.
Mr Atomic:
6k, actually. When I had to move onto the PC, V-Mark helped
me find ModPlug which is essentially the same thing. There's
stacks of trackers out there on the web and the files are compatible
across computer systems, so it's a great way to exchange music or to
collaborate.
Because V-Mark lives in Arles, in France, and I live in Cambridge,
We usually work by exchanging tracker modules back and forth on
The email. I know that for him it's a bit like using stone-age
technology, but part of the fun is getting something new and
interesting out of the software and keeping the size of the files down.
Vmark3: Atomic once told me 'using low technology levels forces
me to remain creative'. As you can see he's not very modest, but he's the
wisest robot I know.
Mr Atomic:
Downloading an MP3 of one track can take forever but our
whole album fits onto a floppy disk.
Vmark3: That's the trick. With a dial-up connection, exchanging
Logic or Cubase or Cakewalk files or even mp3s would take
decades, but it takes minutes for us to exchange a whole 30 minutes
record...
Maybe our Vespa has something of Concorde inside it after all.
Setting Sun: It was interesting to read about you also doing remixes
as well as doing albums. Do you find your approach to remixing varies
from doing your own material.
Mr Atomic:
Not at all, because our collaboration is just remixing what
we've sent each other.
Vmark3:
Except we've been making music together for a while so we're
quite used to the other's ways. That's the fun about remixes:
turning people's material into your own. Something funny,
while we're at it: I noticed recently we never argued whereas a song is
'finished' or not.
Mr Atomic:
That's true. Something else I just thought of is that when
we're together we hardly ever talk about our own music at all, let
alone argue about whether something's finished or not.
Setting Sun: What's next for "Guitare Brothers" - Do you have any
more releases / remixes planned?
Mr Atomic:
Like I said, we're doing remixes of Goodnight Star and Serge.
Vmark3:
And as I said, we plan to conquer the world (did I say that?)
Mr Atomic:
And like he said, I just gave him a load of old music
toys so perhaps we'll sample them for our next record.
Setting Sun: When you are not living the lifestyle of a rock n roll star,
What do you do?
Mr Atomic:
I write and run Robots and Electronic Brains
fanzine (www.come.to/robots) Our second album was given
away free to Robots subscribers recently. I'm also The Guy Who
Invented Fire (www.listen.to/guyfire) which is another tracker-based
project.
Vmark3:
My life is very dull, it's all fighting Aliens That Want To
Enslave Us (TM) and Protecting Democracy (TM), you know,
that sort of stuff us warrior robots have to do.
Setting Sun: Lastly, hacking a question one of my friends used to use
in her Magazine, if you were stranded on a desert island with a record
Player (although I could be tempted to let you upgrade it to a CD Player
if I was feeling nice), what 5 records what you choose to have with you?
Mr Atomic:
Today? Public Enemy - It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold
Us Back; Johnny Cash - Live At San Quentin; The Wicker Man
Soundtrack;
Serge - playMeLoud; Louis Armstrong and
Ella Fitzgerald - Louie and Ella
Vmark3:
Carcass 'necroticism, descanting the insalubrious', Sonic
Youth 'evol', Plastikman 'consume', The Telescopes 'third wave',
And something from Albert Ayler. Ask me again in 5.2 milliseconds
And you'll get nothing but different names.
