Interview

Who would each of you see as an influence musically - both individually & as a band?

Modest: I'm pretty strange really, I listen to weird turntable music made by Californian hip hop musicians with too much time on their hands, like Mike Boo, RiccI Rucker and DJ Excess, and then really early blues records, by people like Bessie Smith and Leadbelly. What I really like I suppose is that you can hear the same good things in music made 90 years apart. There's good things to listen to everywhere if you look hard enough, one of the favourite records I picked up last year was a compilation of 'folk' music from around the Mediterranean sea... sort of one song from each country. It was released in the early 60's on a easy listening label and I can't imagine who was intended to buy it, but there are two tracks which just have the most amazing sounds on them, you could play them at a deep funk night and people would dance.
 
Ricky: I listen to a lot of different music and as Tim says doesn't really matter when something was made, if it's good, it's good. I guess at first I was mainly into Blue Note jazz like Grant Green and Jimmy Smith. Recently I've been listening to a lot of Lee Scratch Perry, The Cramps, Roy Orbison, Lynard Skynard, Buraka sound system. just everything really.

Kathrin: Its really hard to say, my music collection is very broad. I think London is a major influence on me, London exposes you to so many styles, genres of music. It has an enormous transient musical culture that consciously or subconsciously affects everyone who has ears. From fringe music, out of venues like Shunt, and then to places like the Barbican, London has everything, small live musical collaborative venues and large scale stuff..

I love that Tim always finds time to dig up vinyl from random places and brings it to our ears. I'm a fan of youtube, its less dusty and the visual of old 50s and 60s tracks of people like Ella, Billie, Sarah, Carmen, Nancy, Dusty, Serge, Aretha and Ray Charles are very cool. Musically we play off one another, its a simple thing, if we like what each other are doing we jam and find out where it goes, we influence each other a lot.
 
You mentioned both current artists and music from the past. Would you say that you  reference music from any particular time in the songs you are creating now?

Modest: I don't think so, but I suppose it's hard to reference music from the future... I think there might be a 'feel' to music made with analogue technology... which we are trying to replicate with cheap digital technology! Music is the best way of evoking nostalgia, but that's sometimes a bad thing I guess.
 
Ricky: I think because we don't set out to make a particular type of music there's no reference to anything in particular. for myself personally I think everything we listen is kind of available to us, but when someone starts playing something the other may not be picking something along the same lines and everything meshes together.

Kathrin: Not really, but I suppose its hard to make something completely new without some reference to established music, I can see why some people say that on The Express we pulled references from the blues but you could say the same about funk, soul, jazz and hip hop. Whatever it is we are just making music that feels good at the time and theres not too much thought put into that kind of thing.

Are there any musicians/bands you really like that you have come across recently, maybe whilst touring?

Dj Modest: There's a great musician called 'Plume' who we played with in Marseille - we brought her over to play at our album launch party, along with a Scottish band called Underling. I'm quite into how some people are using loop pedals live now, it's developing quite quickly away from the sort of cliched ideas that were around when they first became available, it's always interesting to see how new things allow live shows to change and develop. It's great when you see someone using something in a way that it wasn't intended - which I suppose we do in a way with the live stuff.

Kathrin: While we were at a festival in Nantes we stayed in this little hotel and each morning if I stood in my bathroom I could hear someone play a muted trumpet, really stunning stuff- and they were mostly scales! Later on we ended up meeting him and taking him to a turntable jam where he blew everyone away, he was a lovely Italian called Antonio Falzoni.

Tell us a bit about your live set up and how you play the albums songs live between the three of you?

Dj Modest: We've always done things a bit differently. At the moment we use a laptop running into one side of my Rane mixer, with the turntable on the other side; combine that with a 3 channel guitar looping pedal, a guitar through a valve pre-amp and a vocal mic and that's how we roll currently. We've done different things in the past, involving cd decks with foot pedal switches or two turntable and two mixers that I had to run between. Basically we try to work out ways of turning studio ideas, which are often strange - like running a recording of Ricky's guitar backwards through the turntable - into a live show that's fun to play and easy to mess around with. And that doesn't confuse sound engineers too much.

Kathrin: Improvisation and jamming live - I think that's what's pretty special about our shows. With Tim using the guitar pedal we have even more freedom to build songs and jam live with the ideas that we came up with in the studio.

You've made a point, with your own record label initially, then with Tru-thoughts about releasing music on vinyl. Why did you do this and what's the future for it as far as you see?

Kathrin: Because we could! and I suppose no one else would... We saw that other people had don it so we thought 'so could we'.. and it was a lot of fun being so involved in our music from every aspect of production, dealing with the Czech vinyl press, screen printing record sleves and walking around to record shops distributing our own product. If anything it kept us out of trouble.

I just find it really exciting to put vinyl out there, 45s used to be the staple of new music, finding an interesting jem of a song on a dusty 45 is a great feeling. I hope we can bring that to someone in years to come.

Kathrin, can you tell us about the singers that you look at for inspiration?

Kathrin: There are too many to mention but a few key vocalists, Souad Massi - 'The Storyteller' is one of my favourite albums, she sings in Burba, Arabic, French and English. I love how she mixes western and eastern instruments, her voice is so raw and beautiful. Oh and then theres Lauren Hill, I love her early music from the Fugees to Miseducation. All of the above.. And theres, Australian musician Freddie Wilson who gave me much advice about just being myself. There are a lot of singers try to emulate a vocal style or vocalist but the only thing a vocalist should be giving is their own voice.

Ricky, what would you has influenced your guitar playing - obviously it's not a conventional set up (turntable, guitar, vocal) - has this made you change the way you play the guitar?
 
Ricky: I think it's made me listen to music a lot more carefully. Playing with a vocalist and turntables it makes you think about your guitar part a lot as it can completely change the song. quite often in other bands your part is just another texture to the music, but in Belleruche each of us is vital to the others to make the tune work. as there's only three of us playing you get very conscious of how things are working rhythmically which has changed my approach to the guitar.

Who would you like to support, if you could get on any tour, at anytime, anywhere?

Ricky: I'd like to have supported The Ramones in a dive in New York. reckon that would be a pretty fun gig.

Finally, can you tell us about the next record - what plans have you got?
 
Ricky: We've started recording for the next album. I'm enjoying playing with a lot of different sounds at the moment. I don't feel limited by how stuff should sound at the moment and I'm really enjoying experimenting. It always feels good when you start to recognise how the songs going to sound and feel you'e heading in the right direction

Kathrin: We started out with a very basic and rudimentary studio and made do with what we had. For the next album, the studio is sounding so much warmer. Its going to be different to TSM and The Express, I'm excited about it, I have a lot of words to find!