Isan(Robin Saville and Antony Ryan)
Antony Ryan and Robin
Saville have been releasing music as Isan since 1996.
having recorded in the past for various labels (and
whilst still enjoying the occasional dalliance) they
now consider morr
music to be their spiritual home.
now based in southend and wiltshire respectively,
robin and antony work separately from each other
most of the time, communicating via post and internet.
periodically notes are compared and directions noted,
the end result is a hopefully coherent body of work
for which the pair consider themselves jointly responsible.
We were able to catch them after their great performance
at the IXMAE London and luckily before a series of
shows in Greece.
Where is the strangest
place to which you have traveled in order to listen
to music?
Antony: I'm not sure I've ever deliberately gone to
a strange place specifically to listen to music, but
I think one of the most memorable and strange experiences
I've had was on the art-trail at the Big Chill Festival.
Late at night, we sat and listened to a series of musical
fire-trumpets spouting flames from the ground at random
intervals.... strange and lovely.
Robin: I do sometimes go along my road to the clifftop
gardens in Westcliff in order to listen to music whilst
gazing over the estuary at the Kent coast. Not especially
strange but it's rendered pretty lovely by the appropriate
sounds. Never managed to synchronise it with a thunderstorm
yet but I'm working on it.
What music do you listen to in
the morning? Does that differ from music you listen
to in the afternoon?
Antony: I always listen to my earworms
in the morning. I'm open to random selections from
the radio or my mp3 library when I'm working, so it's
more in the evenings that I pick stuff to settle down
and listen to. Sometimes on a Sunday I'll try to start
the day with some 'Sunday morning music' - though I've
not been able to chart any kind of pattern of what
actually defines 'Sunday morning music' yet...
Robin: Noisy
music first thing, especially on a Sunday. Drum and
bass, anarcho-punk - that kind of thing. In the afternoon,
if I'm lucky, I'll put my feet up with a book and
listen to something a bit more serene. Reading music
needs to be instrumental - vocal stuff interferes
with my reading. I read a nice quote from a John
Irving story recently: "To
a musician, there's no such thing as background music."
What music do you never listen
to?
Antony: I have a CD by The Lunachicks ('Babysitters
on Acid'). I never ever listen to that, but I can't
bring myself to sell it or throw it away.
Robin: I never listen to blues music. Not that I have
anything against it, but there're only so many hours
in a lifetime.
What is the oddest thing that has
influenced this album?
Antony: I
usually pick a random name to save song files and
re-name them later when the song means more. I was
Googling about for names of minerals to name a particular
track and I stumbled on a story about the lives of
miners in the Old West... the phrase "working
in dust" just jumped off the screen and defined
the feel of the song. We play it live - and it's quite
hard work to play and even dustier sounding than the
album version. I like to imagine that the PA is filling
the room with the grains of the sounds we're mulching
into pieces instead of ordinary sound.
Robin: One of the tracks on the album was originally
inspired by a forty-foot-long wooden box poked through
the window of an art gallery. That seems reasonably
odd to me.
When you take risks in your composing,
what keeps you from turning back?
Antony: I'm not sure
we consider recording a risky business - after all,
what's the worst that could happen? Maybe we don't
think about taking risks because we really try not
to think about what we're doing, just whether what
pops out at the end of a process is interesting enough
to get labelled as an Isan song.
Give us four words that you hope
people exclaim when they first listen to 'Plans Drawn
in Pencil'.
Antony: "Not
bad. Quite nice."
Robin: "I'd
like some tea."
What impact has tea and the Lucky
cat had on your lives?
Antony: Tea quenches our thirst
and calms our souls. Our lucky cats calm our souls
and provide something for the audience to wonder about
when we play live.
Robin: Tea's a good social drink too. When somebody
gives you a really good cup of tea, you know it's been
made with the necessary amount of love and attention
and it's hard not to assume some of that love was aimed
at oneself.
If you could instantly download
a language or skill into your brain, which would it
be and why?
Antony: I'd love to download Japanese. I
would use it to make many friends. I'd love the instant
confidence a downloaded language would bring. I'm not
sure I'd like to download any other skills, because
other than languages, I like to learn stuff for myself.
Robin: Only one?! I'd like to be a proper polyglot.
Being English is a double-edged sword when one ventures
out into the world. It's pretty simple to find someone
everywhere who speaks some, but it encourages laziness
and always comes with a guilty feeling. As for a skill,
I'd like to be good at woodworking.
Tell us about your cover art on
'Plans Drawn in Pencil'.
Antony: We'd been playing around
with audio software like Audiomulch or Bidule for this
album. They mostly involve building your own sonic
contraptions by connecting function blocks together
with virtual cables. The album cover reflects a design
for an imaginary synth/drumbox made of components that
could never really exist but somehow represent the
music we make...like a ponderizer or melancholimeter.
Robin: The process of choosing tracks for an album
has always involved scraps of paper for us, too, so
it was nice to externalise that particular private
ritual.
How did you meet and do you still
like each other after working together for so many
years?
Antony: We met when I gave Robin's
sister, Victoria, a lift to stay with him for the weekend.
She said he liked synthesizers and that we'd probably
get on like a house on fire...she was dead right. It's
a lot easier to still be friends and still be a band
because we only get together for playing shows and
the odd social occasion, and we never spend time together
fighting in a studio.
Robin: Most of the social occasions also involve some
external moderators, too, which probably helps.
How do you make decisions about your
music? Do you each have an area of expertise that the
other gives carte blanche to?
Antony: Over the years, we've learned a couple of
things: that Robin is best for making sure a song has
all the right discrete components, and that I'm better
at seeing the big picture for a given song. Two sides
of the same coin, maybe. But other than that, the whole
point of Isan is that the other party has carte blanche
to try anything they like.
If you could live in any era, what
would it be and why?
Antony: The 1950s. I would have
liked to work for IBM and build computers the size
of houses. I think my girlfriend would love it too;
we could fill the house with Robin and Lucienne day
furniture and home-maker house-ware...and I think it
would be a great vantage point to watch music develop
over the following decades.
Robin: So hard to answer. Do I get to transfer the
2006-me to a different era or do I have to start from
scratch in a different year? Can I take my existing
knowledge with me? I wonder whether Antony would really
have fancy designer furniture and then get all his
crockery from Woolworth's. The more I think about past
eras, the more I see flaws in them and appreciate the
current one, so thanks.
Although...
I think I'd choose the late 60s. My girlfriend has
turned me into a bit of a hippie, anyway, and I could
be a first-generation dropout rather than a 21st-century
wannabe. I'd also stand a fighting chance of at least
seeing a synthesizer. |
