Journeyman: Exiled In the Din of England
Fade in.
The war is over, but war time measures go on indefinitely in the land of endless petty amusements, keeping people
busy like the fallen angels in Milton's Paradise Lost that invent card games to pass the time in hell. Grey skies.
The stinking smell of lamb wool fills the town carried downwind from the pastures. Football's the national pastime,
but nowhere are the fields so muddy. The market square lined with pubs. They seem old and authentic, but they're
almost all entirely owned by rich corporations. Nowhere are security cameras so ubiquitous. Another link in the
transglobal economy of 'hi-tech, service, and entertainment.' Welcome to Great Britain.
From this milieu emerges Journeyman. Like overexposed memories of childhood, the latest album National Hijinx
is a fragment from the collective memory/unconsciousness of England. Half-heard conversations float in and out
- exchanges from someone's engagement party - a man says, "By the way, I got a charge account over at Mr.
Swank's Menstore, so if you want to pick up a suit and tie, a shirt, the works, you can charge it to me."
In other words, this takes place on the forefront of the revolution of everyday life. This is music with thin
walls. The cover art features a collage of assembled faces, as if this is not the art of one man, but a voyeur
who has scanned the soul of Britain.
"I'd been living in Hull in Yorkshire. And it's really grim up there," says Paul Frankland, the mind
behind Journeyman and, also, Woob - the latter carnation released two very fine albums on the now defunct T:me
label. "It's cheap and cheerful, and everyone's pretty happy. But it's got this impending doom feeling about
it." Not unlike Journeyman's second album, National Hijinx, out last year on the Ninja Tune imprint, Ntone.
"Well, it was all written up North. It was kind of weird. I mean, like, some of the stuff was written in very
strange periods of time living in Manchester and stuff. There was a lot of stuff going down, a lot of guns, and
a lot of shit happening."
For a solid hour, despite the creator's protests that there are some cheery tunes, that certain dark, quite suspenseful,
on-your-way-to-a-fight vibe persists. Though only a few tracks are actually quite blistering -- drum'n'bass that's
been chucked through so much echo that it's become this huge swelling mass of sound. He sounds surprised himself
by the resulting ruckus when he talks about it. "One of the reviews that didn't like it said that it was music
to make your ears bleed. It was a bit too much for them. There's a couple of tracks that are really intense and
really thick. There's so much drum'n'bass around that is so thin and lifeless, and it was just trying to push it,
and take the mickey out of all that, and just have fun with it. But the rest of it is really quite chill and peaceful
and filmatic. To categorize it all as music to make your ears bleed is a bit of madness really. The reviews were
kind of varying towards that. I don't think anyone really listened to the album."
The sounds of power plants, sparks of electricity, the movement of heavy machinery - 'fetish-wear factories' connected
by a system of canals to container ports.
Driving through an industrial district with huge warehouses amidst swamps, where the road dropped off 15 feet on
either side into deep ditches, snapping photographs, Journeyman's National Hijinx provides the perfect accompaniment.
It's a night time music filled with suspenseful zooms, mounting tension, slinky beats, classical dynamic tensions
('that loud to quiet thing'), dubwise caverns ('I like the fact that there's lots of echo and lots of effects,
and lots of mad sounds shooting off all over the place'), phat hip-hop style beats, and cinematic overtures (he
cites Bernard Herrman and his scores for Hitchcock's Vertigo and Spellbound). The soundtrack influence comes across
in "Spy," where there's all these strange noises and incidences in the music - sounds equivalent to jangling
keys, bullets being loaded into a gun's chambers.
"I had this image of the characters and everything in my head," says Journeyman. "I do that a lot,
I suppose, especially with the Woob stuff. When I was doing my degree, I did about 15 or 16 soundtracks for student
films and stuff. And I just recently did some music for arty commercials as well. And I'm working with the guy
I went to film school with on a film for the next Journeyman 12 inch. It'll all be done with Super 8 film, just
scratched images and weird little buildings all around Europe."
The spying locust on its way to the opera.
"There was a documentary on TV. And it was like 'this is how loud a locust can sing compared to an opera singer.'
And she was singing and the locust was singing for two minutes, and it was just a little loop from that,"
says Frankland. "My whole idea for National Hijinx was just to do whatever I wanted and fuck the consequences.
"In fact, taking something and putting it in an environment where I can listen to it. Ninja Tune was quite
stressed out about Al Pacino's voice being in there. But it was quite a low-key album. It didn't cause too much
trouble. I just wanted to do what I wanted to do."
What else can you do?
Sink back into the mire.
--
Journeyman - My Atari just blew up, and I had to move on. Again with desks as well, and consoles -- there's
a lot of digital desks coming out, which are brilliant, cause if you go out and play live, you can save each track
on a disc. But at the same time, if you're recording you can't just play around with the EQ. I love to use the
EQ as like an instrument.
SAB - Yeah, like fucking with the treble and bass as you go.
Journeyman - Yeah, and just constantly do it live as well. But if you've got a digital desk, you have to
select that parameter. It's just not as spontaneous. But there's so many advantages.
SAB - And the panning. That's a lot of fun.
Journeyman - Yeah, I try not to go too overboard on panning, cause I can sometimes go a bit mad. But there
is quite a bit.
SAB - The thing about panning, I suppose, is that it's the most obvious thing you can do.
Journeyman - Yeah, well if you can do it subtly, and swirl it, or even the odd hard pan left, or move it
around a bit, then it's quite good. It creates more space.
SAB - So what do you use to create your echoes?
Journeyman - It is digital. I'll bring up a fader with the echo on, and I'll EQ that, and I'll feed itself
back on it to get that sort of feedback, dub style stuff. But it is digital stuff. It would be great to have a
whole bunch of analogue stuff, but it's getting a hold of it, and getting the money.
SAB - So is it getting expensive?
Journeyman - Yeah, that's it. Plus it needs repairing a lot. I do have a little old analogue pedal, which
I use a bit. That's quite good, cause it's quite wooly sounding. But I don't use it as much. I've got this SC-50
Roland, which is good quite good, if you just use it as a mono channel, and bring it up on the desk. It's perfect
for that feedback effect…
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