Noisy Bits & Awkward Fits #1
Songwriting with one Bb dishwasher, a squeaky grill-pan and a Greek nymph.
I guess if Sweet Billy Pilgrim might be remembered for anything, it would be that we are the only band to have performed a song featuring a plucked dishwasher at a televised music awards ceremony. Our Twitter profile used to refer to us as 'serial white goods abusers,' but that's possibly disingenuous. We're prepared to abuse almost any stationary, non-living thing if there's a chance it'll make an interesting noise when we do it.
Moving beyond Shaeffer and Musique Concrète, many artists have experimented with integrating non-musical sounds into musical settings. I’ve always loved bands like Einstürzende Neubauten and Test Dept and their bloody-knuckled reset of what constitutes rock music, but their furious avalanche of hammered fire extinguishers and Health-&-Safety-be-damned pneumatic drills can eventually feel like a dead end because extremity is - inevitably - less inclusive.
So many ideas arrive blunt and ugly at the outskirts of popular culture, but given time they’re absorbed into the work of cultural innovators like Bowie, who introduce them to the mainstream by stealth until the middle ground itself shifts to accommodate what was once considered the avant-garde.
You can hear this in the work of SOPHIE, Charli XCX and the Hyperpop phenomenon, for example. It’s pop music, but the sounds hark back to the harsh syntax of those industrial bands and noise artists.
(I’ll probably end up writing something else about SOPHIE. It’s extraordinary music)
Of course, assimilation into mainstream culture can snuff the spark of what made those things so thrilling in the first place, but - for me - it was the adoption of that pure sound aesthetic by Public Enemy's production team, the Bomb Squad, in the late 80s that ignited the biggest thrill of all. Creating songs from densely layered, often non-musical sources seemed almost miraculous to me, and despite taking a rather different direction with my projects (to the immense relief of hip-hop fans the world over), I was just happy that the music I heard as I stepped from my front door - the chance harmony of a lawn mower duetting with the bumblebee drone of a light aircraft; the windscreen wipers' free-jazz skittering across the chuckle of a diesel engine: the simple joy in sound - could actually be wrought into song form. My Uzi didn't weigh a ton, but - as I learned how to build an arrangement, layer by layer - my densely packed imagination almost collapsed in on itself, like a slightly apologetic English black hole.
Check out the list of samples used in Fight the Power, complete with audio clips, here.
Sound as Hook
We innately understand a melodic hook (duh-duh-duh-duh-duuuh - I’m lovin’ it). A harmonic or chordal hook isn’t beyond us (the riff in Back in Black or the synth in Van Halen’s Jump). I’d argue that a good rhythmic hook can be pretty seductive (the push and pull of Ringo’s drum part in Tomorrow Never Knows; the looped Bill Withers sample in No Diggity).
But what about the specific qualities of the sound of a thing lodging itself in our brains: a sonic hook; incorporating the textural / timbral ?
Listen to the plucked dishwasher recording I made (on my Minidisc player !), that eventually became the song Kalypso from our Twice Born Men album.
To someone unfamiliar with the song, as a sound, it’s intangible, possibly even mysterious - hopefully intriguing. As a songwriter, it’s a musical instrument that no one else owns - potentially a new vocabulary with which to tell a story in a more compelling way.
In this case, a particularly well-read friend introduced me to the myth of the nymph Kalypso who ‘imprisons’ Odysseus on her island for seven years using her sensual wiles (sex and good food, as far as I can tell) and feminine cunning. We wanted to take another metaphorical look at the story, without the boring Fatal Attraction-esque view of the duplicitous female, and the sounds of the kitchen / bedroom seemed (sadly) like an appropriate place to start.
Here’s the squeaky grill pan you can hear throughout (but especially at 0.05 and 0.10)
These sounds occurred in a specific space and point in time, so their recontextualisation also has a bearing on how we perceive them.
Take this example from our song Joy Maker Machinery:
The piano was recorded on one of those dictaphones with the tiny cassettes, so the sound quality is awful; like it’s been badly remembered (which is technically kind of true, I guess), and it’s this idea that lead me to the heart of the song, lyrically and sonically. It also gave me clarity of purpose: I was now using the ‘studio’ (my laptop, a shitty mic and a cheap audio interface) as a musical instrument and composing in the moment, rather than writing a song on the guitar or piano and arranging it later.
Finally, listen to this, extracted from the closing thirty seconds of There Will It End. I recorded the part on an HD recorder balanced on top of the piano in the kitchen, on a sunny day with our back door open. My boys - tiny then - were playing outside (I’ve turned them up at the end so that you can hear more clearly), birds were singing, my wife was moving through the space too: an ordinary summer Sunday. It was only supposed to be an aide-memoir so I didn’t forget the chords, but the sound of the recording; the sound of that specific moment captured, seemed, well… magical.
And that moment generously offered me a lyric, included below:
And the planets move as I touch your back
The stars go out as I tip my hat
Will I kiss those hands as we fade to black
So say us – there will it end
And we’ll fill our ship with the days & years
Our own funeral pyre on a sea of tears
And we’ll watch that light til it disappears
So say us – there will it end
And the trees will grow where we used to lie
And our children’s names will be washed away
But the sky looks down on another day
So say us – there will it end
All of which, perhaps, is a little more detail than anyone needed. But as I proof-read this, my eyes are drawn back to the phrase 'joy in sound'. That's what unites my record collection, my own music and my being the owner of two very ordinary ears in an extraordinary world of noise.
It might deprive me of sleep on some nights, and of patience when it all arrives at once, but it never deprives me of inspiration.
Note: I’ll be doing more of these song break-downs, so do check in again if you’ve enjoyed this one.
"Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not…”
Fascinating insights to the process and outcome My dog was less impressed, or possibly unnerved by the process. She never barks at anything on the radio or tv, yet the final track resulted in a barrage of small, slightly disgruntled, barks. Just wondering what in the sound could cause the reaction. She's listened to your albums frequently without comment!
Absolutely beautiful, not enough artists do song breakdowns nowadays, it can often feel robotic. The ending reminded me of the glorious school years! Keep this coming, I absolutely loved reading this.