It all starts with a melody, cascading from somewhere above you like droplets of water falling from towering trees in a tropical rainforest. From here this song called ‘Sweet Love For Planet Earth’ exquisitely and purposefully reveals itself over a near 10-minute passage of music, as if you’re watching a flower open through time-lapse photography. What begins with a crystalline synthesiser line eventually becomes subsumed by wave upon wave of impenetrably thick and murky fuzz. Halfway through the song, the muck starts to pulsate and then… that voice. It’s as if you’ve received a phone call from someone who’s being repeatedly stabbed on the other end of the line. They’re screaming; a guttural, physical wail like something out of an Aphex Twin song. It kind of freaks the hell out of me.
Welcome to the rabbit hole that is Fuck Buttons. ‘Sweet Love For Planet Earth’ introduces the outfit’s debut record Street Horrrsing, one whose raison d’etre is to not merely be an auxiliary component in your life, but to confront and challenge you, both physically and emotionally. To call it sonic nihilism would be doing Fuck Buttons a grave injustice. Even in its most impervious moments, when the layers of distorted synthesiser resemble the density of asphalt, a paradoxical delicacy is clearly evident. It isn’t wanton noise, there’s specific reasoning behind the towering sound. Actually, now I think about it, Fuck Buttons is a paradox. Here’s two English musicians on the fringes of electronic music, creating sonic juggernauts that are simultaneously intricate and overwhelming, all with the use of modified children’s toys. For what is ostensibly serious music, there’s a playful heart beating underneath. Even the band’s name suggests it. 2008 will be remembered for many things, one of which may or may not be the rise of the ‘Fuck’ band. Fucked Up and Holy Fuck, along with Fuck Buttons, form this triumvirate of ‘Fuck’. The monikers might even be offensive if there weren’t so many of them. “I’m quite happy that there’s a lot of ‘Fuck’ bands around so we don’t have to fly the ‘Fuck’ flag,” laughs Andrew Hung.
Along with Ben Power, Hung rounds out the pair of musicians collectively known as Fuck Buttons. For most of their lives, Hung and Power lived in Bristol, a port town around two hours west of London. While other English cities like Manchester and Liverpool forged a musical identity through guitars, Bristol’s claim to fame is that it’s the birthplace of trip-hop; they call it the ‘Bristol Sound’. Acts like Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead call it home, alongside drum and bass heroes Roni Size and DJ Krush. The two met at Bristol Arts School in 2004, when Hung was looking for someone to score an avant-garde film he was creating for his fine art degree. Power, who was studying illustration at the time, heeded the call. Later that year, Fuck Buttons was born, peddling a sound like nothing Bristol had ever heard.
These days the band is based out of London, and Hung is on the phone from his apartment in the North-West of the city. He’s home earlier than expected, too. Fuck Buttons has just come off an aborted tour with Scottish post-rock auteurs Mogwai which was cut short because of some problems with drummer Martin Bulloch’s pacemaker. The tour dates coincided with a stop-off at the My Bloody Valentine-curated All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in upstate New York, where Fuck Buttons shared the bill with the likes of Shellac, Low, Thee Silver Mount Zion Orchestra and Tortoise. In 2009, Fuck Buttons will make another appearance on an All Tomorrow’s Parties lineup, this time at the inaugural Australian concert being held in Sydney during January.
Coincidentally, the band is signed to ATP Recordings, the label helmed by festival founder Barry Hogan. “It was at the end of March last year when I put on a show,” Hung begins, “which is, like, the first and only ever time I’ve ever put on a show. A friend of ours at the time – who we hadn’t met then – came to our show and he started raving on about our band and really liking us and he said he was going to tell Barry at ATP first thing in the morning, which I didn’t really think much about, until the next morning [when]we got an email from Barry saying a good friend of his reckons he should put our record out, and he came to our show a week later, and that’s when he was adamant he did want to put our record out. Yeah, it was amazing.”
At the time, music was just a hobby for the pair. Power was working as an illustrator and Hung was a video editor. They were creating noise music, abrasive and droning. Power was bringing his hardcore background into the music, while Hung had a love of electronica. In the confluence, the music of Fuck Buttons was found. “I think our musical paths convened at the same point and I think that was very much why we started the band in the first place,” Hung says. “Electronic music was going towards heavy stuff, and the music [Power] was listening to at the time was going towards heavy, and it just became noisier and noisier and then we started liking the same bands at that point. Music was a very big part of our lives at the time. We were both constantly turning up at the same shows independently.
“Ben’s really talented at making music,” he continues, “so at the first idea of us getting together to make music, I jumped at the chance. Before that, he played in quite a few bands I’d seen before. I think he’s very talented at playing instruments and coming up with ideas. A band needs one talented musician.”
Hung recalls the outfit’s third show at a pub in Worcester: “We got turned off because the land lady of the pub we were playing in came through the audience and just started saying, ‘I’m sorry, that’s just not music’.” He adds with a laugh, “Which I’d be inclined to agree with right now. We were just playing half an hour drone pieces devoid of any kind of structure or dynamic. It was very, very different to what we play now.”
How to describe the music that Fuck Buttons play, particularly that which is found on their debut Street Horrrsing, is somewhat of a difficult task. Tracks like ‘Race You To Your Bedroom – Spirit Rise’ and the bludgeoning album closer ‘Colours Move’ would lead you to (incorrectly) believe Fuck Buttons were nothing more than a bunch of noisy punks. But then there’s the psych wig-out of ‘Ribs Out’s and the skittering ‘Bright Tomorrow’, a song I’m sure LCD Soundsystem wish they’d written. Taking Street Horrrsing as a single entity, it’s the subtle moments on the record that make the chaos so affecting. “We like the envelopment aspect of sound and loudness,” explains Hung. “I guess it’s one step away from annihilation [laughs]. It’s not like muddy sound, it’s very much, like, crafted noise. That’s what we’re interested in. I guess with the melodic elements we’re able to feed into that and possibly add an interesting dynamic juxtaposition as well.”
This juxtaposition, which makes the soft seem softer and loud almost suffocating, lends Street Horrrsing a decidedly visceral element. “That’s something that definitely interests me about the music that we make,” considers Hung. “I’m interested in the way that it interacts with us physically.” The same philosophy holds for their more raucous passages of sound. “For instance, Mogwai and My Bloody Valentine have used noise to envelope their listeners and pummel them into submission – in a good way,” he says, laughing. “So we’re very much interested in that element of it and exploring that.”
Submission through hypnotism, perhaps? “Yeah, definitely,” he says brightly. “I love the feeling of it. Repetition has the power to hypnotise as you said and I think that’s very much an interest of ours.”
With such opaque foundations as repetition and juxtaposition, it would be quite easy to let the music take the reins, and in the process lose any sort of self-restraint during the writing process. So how does the band know when a song is done? “The first thing we do is enjoy the thing we’re making,” he describes, “and after we’ve kind of structured it so we know what to play and when to play it, at that point I’m able to listen to it as like an audience and I guess at that point that’s when I get some kind of imagery and it’s really exciting at that point. We wrote a new song the other day, last Thursday. I remember at that point when I was listening to it whilst being able to play it, I got quite strong imagery.”
Another interest of Fuck Buttons lies in what Hung calls “new sound”; their arsenal consists of a handful of synthesisers and a lot of children’s toys. While the latter may have been added purely out of pragmatism (“Initially, buying these children’s toys were simply to do with finances and economics,” says Hung, “i.e. we were very poor”) it’s opened up a whole new sonic spectrum for Fuck Buttons to, err, play with. “We very much collect anything that produces sound. Like, my living room is chock full of crap,” he says with a laugh.
A checklist of the band’s instruments reveals “loads of toy keyboards, a Gameboy on stage, a Fisher-Price karaoke machine, pedals and synthesisers”. So how do they know what will work in the context of their music? “We don’t,” Hung exclaims. “We just get together and play with the stuff. We just bring these things along and if they serve a purpose then we use them. It’s kind of mercinary in that way.” Just like the karaoke machine used by Power to create that voice, the one that conjures up images of bloody murder and those mutated kids in the ‘Come To Daddy’ film clip.
Fuck Buttons utilised the skills of Mogwai guitarist John Cummings to produce Street Horrrsing, which was recorded in a small studio in the South-East of London. Hung recounts, “We lived and slept and worked on this album for a week in the studio. It was very much a kind of physical bubble that we were in.” He adds with a smile, “It was one of the best times of my life really.”
Having just recently returned from their truncated trip with the Scottish quintet, I instinctively ask him what the audience reaction was like, not because I expected it to be negative, but because they’re a band that fans of post rock mightn’t initially find appealing. “I thought about it during and before going on tour,” he answers pensively. “I thought they was very receptive, the audiences, and I wasn’t sure they would be because Mogwai have been around for ages and they’re purveyors of that kind of music, so I was very happy that we were welcomed by a lot of their fans. I mean, there were a few people who didn’t like our music who were a bit precious about who Mogwai brought on tour with them, understandably so. But generally and mostly it was very receptive.”
When your modus operandi is noise, it’s perhaps not the ideal genre to be precious about the reaction you might receive. If there was ever music that could polarise people, regardless of the accolades and plaudits showered upon it, it would be that of Fuck Buttons. “We generally do tend to polarise people,” Hung considers, “not in terms of 50-50, people like us, people don’t. I’d find it almost insulting if they all thought they were alright [laughs]. So we do tend to polarise people. People either hate us, or people tend to love us, which I think is fine with me. That’s my perfect scenario.”
Fuck Buttons’ Street Horrrsing is available from ATP/Remote Control.
