Coloureds Interview March 2011
By: Liane Escorza
Liane Escorza meets Coloureds for a discussion at the recent Blessing Force warehouse party in Oxford, Spring 2011.
- Photo by Tim Fluck
In your own words, what’s music?
Matt: Probably just synth and drums, right? Oh Christ, I dunno.
Nick: Does a bird think his ‘song’ is music? Is he actually just mouthing-off? Does he think we’re a little weird for liking his apparently cheerful tune so much? I don’t know, do you?
Matt: I guess the term ‘Music’ is manmade, and so it is as malleable as the sound is defining.
What creative process goes behind making one of your tracks?
Nick: Normally to involve as little of that as possible. I'm sure any time we have attempted approaching a track with an aim, and a process with which to reach that aim, it has failed to be something we're happy with. Equally, any track we have just started to blindly throw together has ended up both fun to create and something we are proud to play to people. Sure we have certain techniques that we know work, and that provide consistency to production quality etc, but that's as much as we're normally willing to include as 'process'.
Matt: I guess the key thing is we aim to have fun. But with Nick around it tends to be a bit easier said than done. It’s like hanging around with Basil Fawlty.
Tell us about your remixes, and why you chose those specific tracks to work with...
Nick: Those we've specifically written as live remixes, have normally been chosen for their potential as crowd-pleasers. For instance we have been throwing a remix of 'Altern8 - Frequency' in there quite a lot for its nostalgic 'old skool rave' appeal. We’ve also done them as a one-off, like our remix of the ‘Hallowe’en Theme’ by Jon Carpenter, for a Hallowe’en show. With tracks we're commissioned to remix by our piers, we want to avoid simply slinging a new beat behind the parts of their original tune, and instead approach remixing in a far more destructive manner - finding those milliseconds of sound that we like, before stretching them out, re-pitching them, smothering them with effects, and hopefully creating a whole new set of parts to play with.
Who do you listen to for inspiration?
Matt: I get fed up with a lot of things very quickly, not necessarily because it is boring, but because I listen to stuff so intensely. I’m fairly certain most people are the same though.
Nick: Yeah, I constantly need to refresh my playlist. Even the stuff I really love requires me to have a break from it once and a while. It’s hearing something brand-new or rediscovering something I haven’t heard in ages that I enjoy.
What other forms of art inspire you, and why?
Matt: I like anything that’s genuine. Music, Literature, Art etc, are all one and the same thing really – a barrier from morality. They inspire me to get off my arse and do something worthwhile and by that I mean something with integrity.
Nick: Very deep mate, very deep.
If you had to represent your music as a sculpture or painting or something else, how would it look like?
Nick: Arms missing, à la the Venus De Milo, but quite obviously having a fumble.
Matt: An unaired episode of Howards’ Way. But on DVD!
How much does your look and attitude define your act?
Nick: The masks were never meant to be a 'look' as it were, though I suppose they have become it through the past year. They're really merely for theatrical purposes, simply to liven up the show. It's why we feel it's important to put them on after the set has begun, and take them off before we've left the stage. Thereby including the 'metamorphosis' into the Coloureds characters, as part of the act.
Matt: Our attitude defines the music we produce, only in so far that we do this to have fun. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t bother.
In what waty do you see yourselves evolving in the near future?
Matt: I don’t care really, just as long as I enjoy making the music. As soon as that stops, the music will stop evolving. We’ve never been stagnant, I suppose because that would be boring.
Nick: For the moment we’re trying to make this whole thing more dancey, while maintaining the erratic and disjointed form with which we began. If we can eventually balance the two perfectly, then that would be just grand.
What do you want people to feel when they hear your tunes?
Nick: Soggy.
Matt: Well, funny you should ask because I was watching Stars In Their Eyes just the other day, and someone was singing as Marti Pellow from Wet Wet Wet and I thought ‘If only my music could make people feel like I do now, while I’m watching this’.
What is it that you’re looking forward the most musically in the next few months?
Matt: SebastiAn’s new record. Studio time. Going solo. Catching up on the last season of Stars In Their Eyes.
Nick: Studio time. The perfect cadence. Coloureds as a one-piece. A nice hot bath.
Artists in this article: Coloureds