PLAID IN FULL
A MODERN CLASSIC OF ANIME, TEKKON KINKREET TELLS THE STORY OF TWO YOUNG BROTHERS TAKING ON THE YAKUZA. AS PART OF GRAPHIC, THE FILM’S COMPOSERS PLAID WILL BE PERFORMING THEIR SCORE LIVE AT THE SCREENING. THE BRITISH DUO TALK TO ANTHONY CAREW.
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nglish electro duo Plaid are about to release their first straight-up album since 2003. Scintilli is out in September, on their longtime label, legendary English electro imprint Warp, the LP exploring “artificial acoustic sounds” – “it’s a developing realm within synthetic music, where you hear a sound and you’re not entirely sure whether it was generated acoustically and sounds synthetic, or if it was generated synthetically and sounds acoustic” – across its run-time. Ed Handley, who is half the duo with Andy Turner, kind of wishes Plaid hadn’t taken their time. “There can be a danger if you take so long that people who are into your music expect that it’s going to be brilliant and amazing,” he says. “After all, it’s taken this long for you to make it! In that way, it probably is better to just do one every two years, so you don’t raise unnecessary expectations from people.”
Of course, Plaid didn’t spend that interim time just dicking around. They released a collaborative DVD/CD piece with visual artist Bob Jaroc, Greedy Baby, which built visuals and soundtrack together from the ground up. They staged shows in collaboration with the Southbank Gamelan Players. They produced Mara Carlyle’s unspeakably-beautiful debut LP, 2004’s The Lovely, back when she and Turner were a couple, making the album, thus, a literal labour of love. And they
composed two scores for Michael Arias, a Tokyo-based American filmmaker. The first of these collaborations came with Tekkon kinkreet, a 2006 anime based on Taiyo Matsumoto’s manga. “It all started with an email we got in 2005 from Michael Arias,” recounts Handley. “He’d seen us play in Tokyo in 1998 or 2000, sometime around then. He’d remembered our gig and sort of said to himself that if he ever got to do a feature film he’d like us to do the soundtrack. He held onto that thought until years later, when he sent us some stills and animatics from Tekkon kinkreet, which hadn’t gone into production at that point. And we leapt at the chance.” Like any musicians, like, ever, Plaid had dreamt about working in cinema. “As electronic, mainly instrumental musicians, we’d always had the idea that we’d like to attempt it. And I guess a feature film is the dream, but not something that you’d dare hope for. Our approach to music has often been, at various cases, to create an imaginary world in sound. Not necessarily an alternate world, but just a different vision of this world. You could classify our music as escapist, because we were trying to create a place where we could feel more comfortable than we did in the real world. So, in some ways, we’ve always been making our own soundtracks.” Though Handley and Turner confess they
“weren’t obsessive manga fans”, they felt they were well-schooled in the kind of futurist dystopianism in which Tekkon kinkreet was dealing. Indeed, many of the works that inspired them in their youths were film scores depicting similar sounds and spirit. “The big film that influenced us and a lot of people who we know, was Blade Runner. Mostly because the film is so good. The soundtrack, when you really isolate it, is a bit up and down. But it used a lot of synthesisers and had this really futurist, dystopian aspect to it that was really appealing. And the early Hans Zimmer soundtracks when he was using a lot of electronic instruments were big for me. And I remember Sakomoto doing some scores, and John Carpenter, obviously, making his own scores with these very early, crude, charming, homemade synthesisers, has been a huge influence on everyone at Warp, for sure. For a lot of people, growing up in the ’70s or ’80s, their first exposure to electronic music was watching movies.” The story’s depiction of a pair of street orphans attempting to foil organised crime, big business and the combination thereof, inspired Plaid to pick out child-like sounds for their score. “We chose a lot of mallet-type sounds, either synthetic or real mallet sounds,” Handley explains. “It feels almost like a cliché of film music now, but at the time it wasn’t so much; there wasn’t such a
run of soundtracks using marimbas, vibraphones and xylophones. Because there was an emphasis on innocence and playfulness in the film, those instruments made sense. There’s a simpleness to a mallet being struck, and a xylophone can sound almost like a toy; and it’s often an instrument given to children, something you play with early on. You hit it with a mallet and that’s it, that’s the sound; it’s not like a string where there are so many levels of expression. It’s a tuned instrument, so there’s melody, but it has a very specific percussive attack, so there’s very clear, very defined
rhythms. Someone like Steve Reich is the master of that type of thing. Where you have these rhythmical things that you really want to get up and dance to, but that slowly evolve over time in very compositionally interesting ways.” Though Plaid’s score is easily good enough to stand out on its own, it was a painful succession of step-by-step ‘conversions’ of higher-ups, with plenty of requests for them to re-work things. “Because it was with Sony, there were a lot of negotiations,” Handley says, with comic understatement. “You have a chain of people that you have to please. Unlike doing our own album, where Warp sort
of gives us free rein to do whatever we want. Having to please a succession of producers can be really difficult, and dispiriting at times. Luckily, Michael had committed to us, not a particular sound. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted, he just knew that he wanted us.” WHAT: Tekkon kinkreet with live score by Plaid, Fourplay and Synergy WHERE & WHEN: Opera Theatre, Sydney Opera House Sunday 21 August