I'm a huge Boards Of Canada fan. They're my favorite contemporary band. The interesting thing about Boards Of Canada is, they use analog and digital recording techniques, and nobody really knows how they get their sound. But I think that very warm, enveloping analog sound.
Alasdair MacLeanI think whatever we've done as a band at The Clientele, we've done because it's so natural. Our "old" sound isn't really like any actual bands from old times. We take elements of past music styles and past sounds as a way to... this is going to sound very pretentious and perhaps overly thought-out, but as a way to strike chords of vague nostalgia, and strike chords of, "I've heard this before somewhere." That's what a lot of our music is about in terms of the words and ideas behind it, so we really use old sounds as a way to serve that agenda.
Alasdair MacLeanI remember the period in the 1980s where the Beatles were terminally uncool, and it seemed to me then like they were just my little secret, and the rest of the world didn't know anything about them.
Alasdair MacLeanI think that's one of the problems with downloading mps these days. You never really get a chance to attune to a different logic, a different musical logic. If you hear a song and don't like it, you'll just delete it off your hard drive.
Alasdair MacLeanCornelius Cardew very famous in Britain, because he was the darling of the avant-garde, and he played in a band called AMM, which was an improvising band in the '60s. Paul McCartney used to come watch them. Later on in life, he became disenchanted with avant-garde music, because he felt it couldn't reach the public. It didn't have a wide enough appeal. So he'd take these tunes of old English folk songs and write Stalinist lyrics over the top of them. I do think that when he changed to folk songs, he actually lost the tiny audience he already had, which is quite interesting.
Alasdair MacLean