Distant Airlines

'Distant Airlines' is the last track we are previewing from our new E.P. before it is released next week.  Take nine minutes out of your schedule to be transported...

Films Out Of Time

Here is another track from our new E.P. 'Slow Exit' released on 30th October.  Play loud and share generously...

Slow Exit E.P.

Our new EP is now complete and will be available from Saturday 30th October. It is called 'Slow Exit' and we are really proud of the work that has gone into making this recording. 

It's always a relief to have the jams we have been working on cast loose from the relative safety of our basement and put out there to start lives of their own. We will put some links up soon showing where you can purchase one of the hand-numbered CD's from or download the appropriate files.  In the meantime, we will be uploading a new track from the E.P. each week for you to stream - we are starting today with 'Son of Summer'.

We will be playing a live show at the Good Ship in Kilburn on Sat 30th October and you will also be able to buy the new E.P. from us at this show. It's been a while since we last played live, so it would be great to see some of your friendly faces there.

Coming Up For Air

The good people at Shot by Both Sides recently approached us for an interview - here are the results, which can also be found on their site:

Firstly, you're influences. By your own admission, you've put yourself in some esteemed company. The mystical Boards of Canada and Sun Ra, as well as pioneers in everything good ever in rock music, the Velvet Underground. A deliberate move? Or is that just a selection of the things you listen to as a group that inevitable influence the music you make?

David - We aspire to make music that's as important as these artists. They've all inspired us by doing something original, emotional and exciting. We'd love to make others feel the way these artists have made us feel.

Steve - Yeah, I think the big influence these guys have had isn't necessarily on our sound, but more on the way we approach making music. What they all have in common is complete fearlessless and a determination to make music that’s totally honest and personal. We start out making music that excites and inspires ourselves - if other people connect with what we do then it's a definite bonus!

The things I most obviously hear in your music, aside from the shoegaze elements, are German bands. Early Tangerine Dream, La Dusseldorf, Neu! Is there an attempt in your music to revitalise classic influences, in this case krautrock groups, for the modern age, or are you aiming for something totally new?

David - We make the music we make without any contrived themes. Inevitably the music we love influences what we do and that includes the Krautrock bands. Some of the music made by those guys was so ahead of it's time that it feels like no one caught up with them. They went off into unknown tangents that others weren't able to follow.

Steve - Those bands opened up all these new ways of thinking about and making music, so its kind of tragic that very few people have taken up the mantle. There are loads of artists around at the moment who are pretty cynically imitating the Krautrock sound but it seems about as pointless as making a tracing of a photcopy of a painting - the music always sounds washed out and bland. We'd like to make music that affects people the way bands like Can and Neu! affect us...but we want to find our own way of doing it.

Paul - I think the intention is that you're always going to produce something that hasn't been done before.  Whether you're successful in doing so is up to the listener to decide - but I don't really see the point of being in a band that aspires to just reproduce music from the past.

Did you find it difficult, before the release of any of your music, to play shows when you play music which perhaps isn't for the casual listener?

David - We've tried to play shows where possible to sympathetic audiences but sometimes its good to challenge people who think that guitar music should be about skinny jeans and three minute throwaway retro rubbish.

Paul - Finding promoters who put gigs on with bands who may have like-minded listeners has proved quite difficult in the past.  They seem to want to squeeze as many random bands in as possible, with no regard for musical kinship - so you may end up playing to people who only want to hear the skinny jeans music that David mentioned.  Which I suppose can be fun sometimes, but ultimately the goal is to play for people who are into your tunes.  Having said that, there are some great promoters who we've played for before and they've obviously spent some time putting the bill together with a considered agenda for the entire evening.

Steve - When we started out we made sure we had a backup plan: if the audience got hostile, we’d crank up the volume and attempt to deafen everyone with a wall of feedback and distortion. Generally, the casual listeners we’ve played to have been really cool and positive about what we do, so we’ve rarely had to resort to plan B.

Tell us about your excellent 'White Splinter' EP. What's your writing process? Were these well rehearsed live songs put down on to a recording, or new material written especially for this release?

Paul - We don't have a single writing process, but the majority of our tunes start as improvised jams - we're quite meticulous about recording everything we do.  If anything particularly stands out for any of us, we'll play and record it over until we decide it's a fully formed track and we have a definitive version of it.  There are moments when we'll listen back to the first time we've played a jam and collectively know we've captured something special that doesn't need to be re-recorded.

Steve - The important thing for us is that we make music as a band – it’s all about coming up with ideas spontaneously and collectively.

David - In terms of the White Splinter tracks: Descent Pattern and Broken are live favourites that we wanted to nail. 11:43 and Wipe the Sun Off Your Shoes are completely improvised, much like the secret track on our first ep, Eyes on The Wall.

Dream Driven Recordings have obviously put out this latest EP. Are there future release plans, or are you seeing how this one goes first?

David - We're working on EP3 at the moment which will also come out on Dream Driven Recordings.

Steve - At the moment EPs are the perfect format for us. It means we can have regular releases and take a few risks with the tracks we put out. We’ll also continue to regularly blog unreleased stuff – outtakes, demos, rough mixes etc . We have our very own basement tapes that’ll slowly get used in one way or another.

David - Yeah, we have much more to offer so keep your ears open for further EPs and more..

As if reading an interview with Electric Assembly wasn’t enough incentive, we really recommend you check out the rest of the site. It's definitely one of the most insightful and entertaining music sites around at the moment. Particularly recommended is their idiosyncratic but hard to fault ongoing run down of the top 20 albums of the last decade. Any list that includes J Dilla, Black Dice and Boards of Canada gets our full endorsement. In a world drowning in increasingly bland and trivial music magazines, Shot by Both Sides is a real oasis of passionate and intelligent music journalism.

The next EA release is just round the corner - more details soon. In the meantime, here's another previously unreleased studio jam from the vaults...

One Big Comedown (live session)

Electric Assembly - One Big Comedown (live session) from Lux. 

Plastic Tides

A quick update on all things EA before we head off for the Christmas break. First of all, thanks again to everyone who came down to see a slightly slimmer EA than usual at the Wilmington Arms on 26 November. It was a pretty strange experience playing for the first time ever without Amos on the drums - but also great fun stretching ourselves and finding new ways of making music. The new tracks we played will definitely see the light of day some time soon.

We’ve had a few offers for gigs in the New Year and we’ll keep you posted when they become official. In the meantime, most of our focus is on finishing our next EP, which is due out around Feb/March next year.

In the meantime, here’s an unreleased track from the EA vaults. Plastic Tides is a studio outtake recorded in June 2007 - a track that just kind of came out of nowhere perfectly formed and then faded away, never to be played again…..

Interview with The Blog That Celebrates Itself

Our new friend in Sao Paulo, Renato from The Blog That Celebrates Itself, got in touch recently to ask us some questions for an interview.

Here's what we came up with:

Q. Why Electric Assembly?
Well, we came together through a shared love of similar music, films and sense of humour. All of us were already playing music in some capacity before the band started, but none of it was serious. As close friends, it just seemed like a natural progression to start a band together. The name 'Electric Assembly' came about after hundreds of other suggestions - but we just liked the way it looked on the page and how it sounded.

Q. When the bands start?
Electric Assembly was born on Halloween night of 2004 but our roots go back a little deeper. In a previous incarnation we had music released on the sadly now defunct Earworm records.

Q. Tell us about your influences...
While the more obvious influences would be Spacemen 3, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, early Mercury Rev, Harmonia - we also love music by Boards of Canada, Clark, Angelo Badalementi, Can, James Brown, Steve Reich...the list is endless. We would also have to include films by directors such as Werner Herzog, Monte Hellman, David Lynch, Gaspar Noé; books by Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis, William Burroughs, Haruki Murakami; art works by Yayoi Kusama, Adam Neate, Jackson Pollock and the relationships we have with our family and friends. We don't know if any of these examples can be clearly identified in the music we make, but we certainly would not be the same band without them.

Q. How Electric Assembly feels playing alive?
Maybe nervous euphoria? It's a bit like going on the scariest ride at a fair - you're not sure how safe it is, or if you're going to like it - but something compels you to do it anyway. Then once it's over you're on a real natural high and can't wait to get back on.

The best moments are always the ones that are spontaneous and unrehearsed – when something new and magical emerges from what we're playing. Live is often when songs we’ve been working on finally reach their peak.

Q. How was the shows?
Instead of just playing a bunch of separate songs thrown together, we generally try to make our gigs flow into one trip or 'soundtrack' if you like. Whilst we believe the songs work individually and in their own space - we like to make the gig experience a bit more special than that. We sometimes work with our friend and film maker Lux who does visual projections for the gigs - these have always been the most fun shows for us. But when we're playing without the visuals, we like to think people use their ears to experience the music and not their eyes.

Q. What´s your opinion about shoegazer classc era?
It was a time for beautiful and crazy guitar sounds, perhaps the final era in the electric guitar’s evolution. Certainly it was a time when digital combined with analogue technology bringing the electric guitar somewhere fresh and new.

Q. What´s your opinion about the new shoegazer era?
We're suspicious of anyone deliberately trying to sound exactly like they come from the past. Having said that there are many bands, artists and producers using the sounds of that time as inspiration for something exciting today. Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi was like this decade’s Loveless. To us it represents a similar approach to sound and mood. We're not so into bands who sound exactly like the old shoegaze bands, we would rather go back and listen to the early Ride/Slowdive/Swervedriver/Moose eps.

Q. Which bands you like actually?
Current acts we're into would include Animal Collective, My Bloody Valentine, Do Make Say Think, Deerhunter, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Jim O'Rourke, Magnolia Electric Company, Twilight Sad.

Q. Tell us about the eps? When the album is coming?
The first EP was recorded and put together over a really long period of time. As it was our first release we were all a bit apprehensive about making our first 'musical statement' as a band - so many bands seem to get boxed or labelled by their first release. So we took a lot of time recording and making sure the mastering by Kramer was as good as it could be. We realised that working in this overly cautious way wasn't much fun, so made a pact that we would never go down that route again.

There was quite a gap between that and our second EP 'White Splinter', but that was more to do with us spending time on writing new songs and just getting better as a band. The actual recording, choosing of songs and artwork all came together fairly quickly once we decided we wanted to release another EP and we think the music is much better for it.

We haven't really spoken about releasing an album yet as we're not even sure if that format is really relevant as an artform any more. A lot of albums that have been released over the past few years seem to dilute the aesthetic of the band. That's not to say there aren't albums that we all love or that we would never record one ourselves - we would just have to feel like the time was right. The EP format seems to work best for us at the moment.

You can read the interview on The Blog That Celebrates Itself here.