I m a real cheapskate, declares Hyper[Borea] s David Bickley (aka Mobius) with a wide grin. I always want to take the fastest approach to a conclusion as possible. When I was doing art in Art School I used to use an airbrush to do all the shading and backgrounds. So all that shading and careful graduation of paint between areas was done in seconds - sssshhhhh (makes hissing sound). And that s what I was always really into, doing things quickly. And electronic music was the same thing. I could achieve results very quickly.
London-born Mobius got his first synthesiser when he was just 16 years old. I just had this really weird ambient music in my head that wasn t being made by anyone else, he recalls. And synthesisers were really exciting to me because they enabled me to make that music. Then someone gave me a Brian Eno album and I was really pissed off. Someone had beaten me to it!
Even though Eno had pipped him at the post, Mobius continued to make music. Now aged 36 and working as a producer with RTE Cork, he is currently assembling an album of his old recordings made over the last twenty years.
I just want to get rid of the back catalogue, he grins. Some of the old stuff sounds a little dated but that s easily rectified. It s a simple equation, I reckon. Music speeds up by about 5% every four years, so I simply turn the dial until it sounds modern. So if you want to know how music will sound in the year 2010 then you know what to do. That s what we did with this new record. We had recorded some new tracks but they only took up about twenty minutes of the CD, so I dug some of our older recordings out and speeded them up until they sounded right and then added them on.
The new record in question is Mystura, the second release from Hyper[Borea}, the Cork-based dance collective that s stuck together with Mobius s glue. We re sort of a loose collection of musicians who work in very different areas and I draw them all in, he explains. I do most of the writing on computer and sequencer and then get the people and the vibe together, sort of taking different bits from different people and mixing them all together. I m a regular Svengali (grins).
With the exception of regular vocalist Una O Boyle, the musicians in question vary from recording to recording and are mostly traditional Irish players. So why has an English electronic artist chosen to put Irish trad, of all things, over a backbone of Moog moods and hardcore beats?
I ve said this a million times before and it sounds like a real fucking clichi now but it s true, he says. I used to get really pissed and go to trad sessions in Cork and I d find myself getting very enthusiastic and starting to do drumbeats behind the rhythms. And it just really fitted it was all really rhythmic and on the beat. And yet the bodhran was always really shy and in the back there. So I got to imagining how it would sound with massive drums behind it so fucking powerful it d knock your socks off kinda stuff. A real groove to it. And so I wanted to do something that was like that. So eventually I went to my studio and took a traditional Irish song one from Clannad I think and I sampled it and added drums and worked it out. And it sounded really good. So I kind of took it from there.
All of Hyper[Borea] s lyrics are sung in Gaelic and have a distinctly ethereal and otherworldly feel. Gaelic sounds fucking great when it s sung, he enthuses. It s the next best language to English to sing in it sounds almost Arabic or something. In a sense Hyper[Borea] s almost an archaeological experiment: it s doing music in Gaelic and it s recreating all of these Bronze Age and Iron Age atmospherics and musical vibes.
The new tracks featured on Mystura were all written in West Cork. Their previous album Serpentine was written in Cornwall. Location is all important when it comes to writing music he reckons.
The thing about writing music and I discovered this years ago is that you write it in different places. It s all about ambience. I learnt that from The Orb. I met them through Tom Green who works on the electronic end of things with me in Hyper[Borea]. The whole point is getting the vibe right both in terms of the area you re living in and the room you re working in. He goes on to describe at length the studio set-up for Hyper[Borea] s recording sessions statues, incense, candles and sundry other items conducive to good creative vibes. We used to drive the sound engineer mad, he chuckles, but in the end he wouldn t start work on something until the incense was lit and the Shiva statue was facing a certain direction.
Having heard all of this, Mobius s next anecdote doesn t really come as a surprise. A year ago Hyper[Borea] won a Hot Press Dance Award for Serpentine. The award sat on his mantelpiece for several months but began to bother him after a while. The award was really beautiful but there s something deathly about having something like that in your house, he says. It s a little like having gold discs or guitars hanging on your wall. It just didn t feel right. Anyway, I had a friend over with me who s like a total freak. He claims to have been abducted by aliens three times! Completely mad! Anyway, he suggested that we sacrifice it, do a magical ritual with it. It seemed like a good idea at the time so we took it to Galley Head which is quite near my house. And we walked past the lighthouse and onto the edge of the cliff. It s really high up there and there was a beautiful sunset, an amazing view. Anyway we threw it off the cliff . . .
You threw it off a cliff? I gasp incredulously.
Well, yeah, he laughs, but in a ritualistic kind of way. I could see it glistening under the water and it looked far more beautiful there than it ever did sitting on my mantelpiece. It became part of the Earth s energy. And that s what music is all about it s all about universal energy and about forces and refining those forces to make people dance.
Erm, quite. Mystura is available now in all good record shops. I suggest you buy it, take it home, light candles and incense, turn the volume up loud and dance your night away. Whatever you do though, please don t go throwing it off any cliffs in the morning . . .n