Fused - Archive

This autumn sees the release of Pram’s exquisite new album, The Moving Frontier. For Fused magazine, Matt Price met up with Matt Eaton, Max Simpson, Sam Owen and Laurence Hunt to find out more.

It’s been four years since you released your last album, Dark Island. Does it feel like a long time or has it flown by?
Matt: Actually it’s a huge amount of time between records for us, but we had the Photophonic project which took up a lot of time. It was a touring project on which we worked with Blissbody and Project Dark.

It was quite an experience – I saw it at the South Bank Centre and it pickled my head.
Max: Well yes, it was us and a variety of dangerous, life-threatening instruments.
Matt: There was a lot of high voltage electricity on stage but nobody died!
Sam: We’ve also been spending more time working on films. Scott Johnston, who does our visuals, has made a film called Kraft, which is actually up for the St Petersburg festival, and Siniestro, an animated short for DancingDiabolo in New York.

And he made the Electric Séance film for you too.
Sam: That we made as part of the Photophonic project but also exists as a stand alone piece, and was shown at the Flatpack film festival earlier this year. Scott’s interested in special effects and techniques from early film, so much of the smoke and mirror type of effects, playing around with tanks and dropping in milk and wax and filming them and overlaying them. He was exploring projecting onto surfaces as well.

And that track’s morphed into a track on the new album…
Matt: Yes, Moon Miner, the vocal version. We’ve also just finished shooting a film to accompany the tune Beluga from the new LP.

And what’s the Kraft film about?
Matt: It’s an eerie, dark film, and stars the actor Tom Bell, from films such as My Kingdom, The Magic Toyshop and Wish You Were Here.

Are you touring with the new album?
Sam: Yes, it begins in Leeds in early October and we’ll be doing seven venues in the UK and hopefully a week’s worth of gigs in France and Belgium.

The new album kicks off with a spaghetti-western-esque tour de force entitled The Empty Quarter. What does the title refer to?
Loz: It’s a geographical term that seems to apply to different places – I think part of the Sahara is called ‘The Empty Quarter’, and there’s also one in Saudi Arabia. I could be wrong there!
Max: There’s one in North America and there might even be one in Wales. It’s like a metaphor, really, a frontier of some kind, the edge.
Sam: A place where no-one lives.

There are Pacific-infused elements in the middle of the second track, Salt and Sand. They made me want to check back in to the Mermaid’s Hotel from The Museum of Imaginary Animals album. Who is behind Pram’s South Sea vibe?
Loz: I guess me, on the marimba! I like Latin American music a lot and there are lots of interesting rhythms from Cuba and South America. As a percussionist I’m always drawn to these and the percussion ensembles they often use as part of the rhythm sections.

Tracks such as Mariana Deep, The Silk Road and Salt and Sand make me think of films such as The King and I, South Pacific, Blue Hawaii, Salammbo, Ali Babar, Sinbad and other popular films of the 1940 and 50s. Is there an exotic filmic imaginary involved somewhere along the line?
Max: Everyone of a certain age grew up with these kinds of films that were on the TV schedules in the 70s and 80s.
Loz: I remember watching Sinbad on television and I had an audio cassette from the films with the narrative read over the top, which I used to love. It was a fantastic musical score.
Max: I got to see Ray Harry hausen’s skeletons in the film museum in Berlin this year, which was magic. They have a collection of the models he used in his films, like the actual skeletons from Jason and The Argonauts.

In the next track, Iske, there is clearly a jazz element, with trombone and trumpet coming in early on, but then the track switches gear with a bold syncopated salsa rhythm before drifting into a space-age section with theremin swirling around in the distance.
Sam: We’ve been working on this album with our new theremin and trombone player, Harry, and he’s very experienced at improvising.
Loz: The space-age section has a sample of a wine glass that has been pitch-shifted, so effectively it’s a glass harmonica. It’s an instrument I’m fascinated by and by its history. It fell out of popularity and so today there are perhaps only a couple of people who are known for playing it – Thomas Bloch being one of them. Everyone’s run their finger round a wine glass and when you hear it harmonised, it’s fantastic! I wanted to
use it in this track, and that’s what came out.

Pram also has a clearly discernable space race aesthetic. The track Moon Miner is one of the songs mostly overtly sci-fi on the new album. Are any of you big into sci-fi?
Max: I think it’s definitely the old school sci-fi that excites us – notions of what the future was going to be in the past. We’re more This Island Earth than Star Wars.
Loz: H. G. Wells rather than Star Trek…

You’re playing for the reopening of Birmingham Town Hall in October. It’ll be your first gig in Birmingham since the Custard Factory this summer. Max: Yes, that was a fundraiser for Save the Balsall Heath swimming baths. We also did a Joe Meek night for Bob Stanley out of St. Etienne. After our set there was a DJ set from Bob Stanley and Jerry Dammers – Jerry did a little Pinky and Perky puppet show, which was amazing – them dancing to the March of the Globbits, one of Joe Meek’s more Pinky and Perky-esque tracks with speeded up vocals.

What projects have you got coming up?
Sam: At the moment we’re working on a Mohammed Rafi remix. He’s one of the most popular singers in Bollywood history and they’re erecting a monument to him in Birmingham city centre.
Max: And we’ve been working on projects with galleries and artists. We’re doing one for the Edgar Allan Poe installation for Halloween, which is a 7 Inch Cinema event. We’re also doing a track for Moriyama Daido, a Japanese photographer, for one of his exhibitions.
Matt : We’ve also done City of Eels for the Binary Oppositions project for CITRIC gallery in Brescia and Static Caravan – it’s a new track. This will be its first release and possibly it’s only release, so you could call it an exclusive. It’s made from a grimy old vibraphone sample from a tape, which seemed to fit the brief!

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