Anyway I was put in touch with Howe and John who suggested
Anyway, I was put in touch with Howe and John, who suggested I go out to see them. I had to drive out two and half hours to a ranch near Joshua Tree to meet them, and when I got there I had to wait another two or three hours while John came back from a hike in the desert. It was great practice in patience." Fortunately, his patience paid off Burns and Convertino have been working together ever since. It wasn't until 1996 that they struck out on their own."Giant Sand had been touring a really loud, raucous record, and John and I wanted to try something acoustic by ourselves.
We had been collecting instruments - a marimba, a vibraphone, a cello, violins and mandolins. It was the first time we had sat down and created something of our own."They finally produced an album called Spoke, a low-key affair that was released only in Germany.Hispanic culture is firmly lodged in Tucson, a town that was Mexican until the Americans bought the land for the railway and moved the border in the mid-19th century. It is only natural, then, that mariachi should be an intrinsic part of Calexico's sound. Last year, during the City Slang label's celebrations at the Royal Festival Hall, in London, Burns and Convertino brought a merry band of mariachi trumpeters, violinists and guitarists. It was a spectacular evening, though it wasn't always as much fun for the band as for the audience."It's no joke being cooped up on a tour bus with so many people, especially when there's nowhere to hang your coat.
The shows were great, though I don't think we'll be doing that again."The 1998 record The Black Light and last year's Hot Rail established Convertino and Burns as brilliant and wildly eclectic musicians. The former was an epic quasi-concept album, inspired by the writer Cormac McCarthy, about a kid in a dead-end dive in downtown Tucson, who travels through the desert and ends up joining a Mexican circus. Both albums perfectly evoke the desiccation of the desert, though just when you think things are heading too far into spaghetti Western territory, the music will do a stylistic about-turn and slip into a stately accordion waltz or a free-form jazz interlude."I think the most important element in our music is that idea of space and ambience," says Burns. "I sometimes think that electronic ambient music is more desert rock than we are. But that's what we try to bring out - the feeling that you get from being out there in the desert, away from town, away from the radio, away from all other life I like that feeling of nothingness when you are out there. If there is a sound that goes with that sensation, I like to think that we're it."The single 'Crystal Frontier' (City Slang) is out on Monday. Calexico play All Tomorrow's Parties on 7 April and London's Ocean Rooms on 11 April.
The title of Venus Ray's first LP, Chuck Berry vs IBM, sums up the war waged between the band's members and banks of antique, malfunctioning machinery as they recorded it in an isolated farmhouse in Wales. It was a two-week session that caused illness and injury and a mountain of tape, which the legendary producer of PiL's Metal Box, Mark Lusardi, had to be brought out of retirement to rescue The result is well worth it. Deliberately simple tunes by the singer-songwriter Diggory Kenrick are resonant of prime Fifties rock, but with Suicide and King Tubby added to the mix, and retaining the surges and false starts of equipment pushed past its limit It doesn't sound like anything else. The title of Venus Ray's first LP, Chuck Berry vs IBM, sums up the war waged between the band's members and banks of antique, malfunctioning machinery as they recorded it in an isolated farmhouse in Wales. It was a two-week session that caused illness and injury and a mountain of tape, which the legendary producer of PiL's Metal Box, Mark Lusardi, had to be brought out of retirement to rescue The result is well worth it.
Deliberately simple tunes by the singer-songwriter Diggory Kenrick are resonant of prime Fifties rock, but with Suicide and King Tubby added to the mix, and retaining the surges and false starts of equipment pushed past its limit. It doesn't sound like anything else. Recovering months later in the safety of Kenrick's local bar, Venus Ray have pasts as disparate as their music. The keyboard-player, Barney Oliver, was classically trained and has performed his own orchestral version of the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray". Robert Coyne, the bassist, is the son and sometime collaborator of the rock king Kevin. Kenrick and the drummer Steve Smith have been west London mates since the age of 14 and were in bands not much later. All have lifelong, love-hate relationships with music."Steve and I were in two previous bands together, with no great ambition or purpose," Kenrick recalls "The Tongues were strange and aimless.