Plaid at Graphic Festival interview by Chris Downton

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While they’re easily one of the flagship acts to emerge from the Warp Records roster over the last two decades, London-based electronic duo Plaid have eschewed the high-profile maverick status of label-mates Squarepusher and Aphex Twin (no MTV-poised Chris Cunningham music videos for them) in favour of spending the last twenty years amassing a solid body of work. Despite this comparatively lower profile, since their split from their former incarnation The Black Dog alongside Keith Downie in the early 1990s, they’ve had their share of flirtations with the mainstream in the intervening years, remixing tracks from Björk’s 1995 album Post, as well as joining the live line-up for her subsequent world tour. Despite this aforementioned venture, Plaid (real names Andrew Turner and Ed Handley) have never quite managed to mount a solo Australian tour under their own name, a situation that’s about to change with their live appearance at the Sydney Opera House as part of this year’s Graphic Festival. In this case the occasion involves them performing their score live to Tekkonkinkreet, the acclaimed 2006 anime movie directed by Michael Arias (the first US director to head up Japanese anime productions and acclaimed animation house Studio 4°C), itself based on the seminal ‘Black & White’ manga by Taiyo Matsumoto. In fact, Australian audiences are in for something of an exclusive treat, as this marks the first and so far only time Plaid have recreated their film score live, with the added instrumental input of local outfits FourPlay and Synergy.

When I call Ed Handley at his London home it’s 9AM local time and he’s just gotten up, apologising in advance if he comes across as slightly ‘boring’ due to his lack of sleep. He spent the entire night in the studio. “Actually, you’re very precise – I can hear the bell ringing outside,” he opens, before going on to explain that he’s probably going to go straight back to bed following our interview. Having established that I haven’t woken him up with my phone call, one of the first things I’m keen to find out about is what initially drew both him and Andy to working on the Tekkonkinkreet score, and whether they’d been particularly interested in the anime genre prior to the project.

“We certainly weren’t specialists, and anime is a fairly specialist thing,” Ed replies. “For us, the first love was really always music, and so we never really had time to explore it properly. We’d seen well-known films like Akira and Ghost In The Shell, and a few others through friends who were into it.” As it turns out, the seeds that led to their collaboration with Michael Arias on Tekkonkinkreet were the result of a purely chance event, rather than any real conscious design. “We played a gig in Tokyo; I think it might have been the late 1990s or early 2000s and Michael Arias was at the show,” explains Ed. “I think he was working his way up to directing films at the time and graphics for anime in Japan. A few years later when he was doing Tekkonkinkreet he remembered us and got in touch. It was something that all resulted from a completely random event.”

That initial creative contact has gone on to forge an ongoing collaborative relationship, with Plaid following their work on Tekkonkinkreet with a second score for Arias’ 2009 film Heaven’s Door and a soundtrack to his surreal short film Hope, which apparently centres around a struggling animator stuck in an elevator overnight. When I mention this work though, Ed prefers to avoid comparisons with the duo’s Tekkonkinkreet score. “It’s hard to relate the soundtrack we did for Heaven’s Door to the one that we did for Tekkonkinkreet because Heaven’s Door was really aimed a lot more towards a Japanese audience,” he offers. “It’s hard to really compare the two.”

One thing that’s always struck me is just how well the rhythmic flow of both the imagery and the soundtrack syncs up throughout Tekkonkinkreet. As Ed explains however, the duo didn’t exactly have the luxury of being able to compose their accompanying score to finished visuals, having to make do instead with the creative inspiration drawn from initial concept art. “We were brought into the project at a very early stage,” explains Ed. “We worked to storyboards and animatics, as well as short clips and stills. We read the original (manga) books; luckily there were translated versions,” he laughs. “One thing that really helped was that Michael did all of his backgrounds first; the really detailed background art. This really established the atmosphere and emotional tone of the film, even if we didn’t completely understand where the scene would eventually be placed in the film, or its context. We were also able to see the main character designs and their poses, which really helped establish what the movie was about.”

While there’s always been a highly cinematic quality to Plaid’s music, the marriage of their compositions to visuals first ermerged with their 2006 Greedy Baby collaborative CD/DVD set with filmmaker Bob Jaroc, something that in retrospect struck me as an initial step towards working with the moving image. Was working on cinematic scores something that they were always consciously moving towards? “Greedy Baby got us used to doing music to pictures, as well as the degree of contrast you need to have between the two,” replies Ed. “Especially with the emotional parts; if you don’t get that contrast, it just gets very predictable.” When I suggest that working in a film soundtrack realm in many senses must free them up from the sorts of bpm-based constraints inherent in dancefloor tracks, he’s inclined to agree. “We’ve always been between the two worlds; dance music and non-dance music. It’s difficult to DJ our tracks too. They’re mixed differently and in some cases perhaps there’s a bit too much going on,” he laughs. “You do still hear a few tracks out though, here and there.”

With the knowledge that Plaid recently employed the services of a gamelan percussion group for live shows in the UK, I’m keen to find out what sorts of things they have planned for their upcoming live Tekkonkinkreet score performance at the Sydney Opera House. Have they ever done this sort of live performance before? “This is the first time we’ve ever done a live score to a film,” Ed explains. “We did an art thing in France a few years back with Bunuel films showing, which is probably the closest we’ve come (prior to this). Performing live to Tekkonkinkreet also gives us an opportunity to ‘touch up’ bits of the score. We’ll be performing live with FourPlay and a percussion group called Synergy; so far the guy who’s doing the arrangements has sent some stuff back and forth which we’ve seen.”

Despite being a fan of Plaid’s work dating back to their days as part of The Black Dog, I can’t recall them ever visiting Australia before, apart from some initial tour rumours around the time of their 2003 album Spokes. “We’ve never toured Australia as Plaid before,” confirms Ed, “although Andy came and DJed in Melbourne with Mark Pritchard a few years ago. We haven’t really been asked to tour Australia before, so I’m assuming that there hasn’t been that much of a demand,” he laughs. “We had the opportunity to see a few of the major Australian cities back in the mid-90s when we toured with Björk, which as you can imagine is a rather nice way to travel.” When I mention that I’d forgotten about their involvement with that particular Björk tour and actually attended it, he laughs slightly as though it’s an association Plaid constantly get asked about. “I’d actually love to see more of Australia. We thought about doing a larger Australian tour, but we have to keep the Sydney Opera House show exclusive. I can’t see us touring Australia again after this in the immediately foreseeable future.”

Finally, with the knowledge that Plaid have been hard at work on their upcoming Scintilli album for the last couple of years, I can’t resist probing Ed for a few hints of where the duo are headed next with their music. Are they still continuing their long-running relationship with Warp Records?

“I can’t say too much; the time for all of that will come a bit later,” is Ed’s slightly guarded response. “The new album should be out at the end of September. It is different; perhaps a little less beaty. I have to be careful what I say here, but it shows us doing quite a few things that we haven’t really done before. Perhaps I’m saying too much here already,” he muses. “We’ve re-signed with Warp; our original contract with them finished last year and we re-signed. It’s a case of mutual satisfaction; they like us and we like they way they’ve handled our stuff. For them to survive (through the whole label collapse) is a big thing, and for a label of their comparative size they continue to support smaller artists, especially in the case of Warp Films, which has put out some incredible stuff already. I can’t really imagine working with another label.”

Plaid perform a live score to Tekkonkinkreet at the Sydney Opera House as part of the Graphic Festival on August 21. Scintilli will be available on September 26 on Warp Records.

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A dastardly man with too much music and too little time on his hands

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