It’s been a looong time coming! We’ve been talking to the brilliant folk behind Liverpool’s a.P.A.t.T. for more than five years now about bringing them to Sheffield. The pandemic scuppered our first attempt (though we made this awesome livestream show with them instead) so our upcoming gig with them at The Dorothy Pax is going to feel super special. Aitch caught up with General MIDI as they prepare to descend on the Steel City…
So how are things in a.P.A.t.T. land?
It’s really fucking hard at the moment. The music scene’s hard. The world’s a strugglesome place. There’s a line of like a hundred 1,000 artists who want to do things, because everyone was paused for a bit (because of Covid) and now there are all these people who want to play, but there aren’t a lot of opportunities to do that. Liverpool’s absolutely filled to the brim with people wanting to do stuff. But there’s no venues. There’s no nights. People won’t go out. There’ll probably be a solution to this in a few years, it will just naturally sort itself out, but I think we’re in a little pickly bit right now. I think there’s a way we can manage – I think about this kind of thing a lot – it’s redefining notions of failure and success, something that is in our bandcamp/website description.
We really do learn far more from failure
Yeah, exactly. It’s that, and also it’s about repositioning. What is the goal? You know? If the goal was numbers then I’d have stopped a long time ago. But I’ve had experiences on good tours where we hit big numbers, and we go down like a house on fire. So I also know that given the right opportunities, success kicks in. It’s just that you need endless opportunities. But we’re not in the paradigm we were sold in the nineties, with big band names and achievable success – its more that everyone is trying to be famous, and there’s such a massive volume of humans wanting to be seen and heard. That’s why we’re all mental around about the Xennial age – everything has completely and fundamentally changed in our lifetimes.
What’s a Xennial?
I’m a Xennial. I think its people born between 1978 and 1986. People who lived through the technological change and understand it on a certain level, or have experienced it in a certain way.
I feel like that’s my experience too though – although I was before ’78 – that realisation that you went through much of your youth without a phone – how did we cope with that? (I’m Gen X though – of course we coped).
Yeah. And like, I’m a tech person. So its been constant – having to always keep an eye on the next thing, because it basically can make my job easier or my tasks quicker or whatever, and if you don’t do it, you might not get the work, or you might spend too long on something that’s pointless. But it’s like, you know, doing multimedia things, whether it be like jobs or art or whatever, you’ve got to keep up. You’ve got to keep on it, and it saves money.
Most of my work’s driven by saving costs. It’s always been that. So I use open source, I merge equipment – I guess in some way it’s like sellotaping things together. Merging the broken things to make something useful.
Have you always tinkered with music tech? I wonder what’s your earliest music related memory? And/or what’s your earliest memory of music giving you joy.
I think it’s a really good question – I haven’t thought of it that way. And this sounds like I had a musical family. I didn’t, really, but my auntie had an upright piano, and she let me goof on it. And I liked the chair just as much as the piano. That’s the definite memory, because the chair was like “Whoa! It lifts up!”.
Then there was a little, like a Busilacchio organ. A Bontempi style thing. We had one of them, and the story in my family mythology was that it was brought over from Canada. Well I was playing with that, playing with the accordion keys on the left hand side, and I was like, “this is mental!” because each key plays a chord. And it’s got them all. You can suddenly understand chordal work, super quick, if you start just fucking around with one of them. So I think I just fucked around with it.
And then there were the cassette tapes, because I was into (ZX) spectrums. And I had a data cassette. And I used to fuck around doing radio shows and stuff like that And I was running wires out the phone into the cassette and importing conversations and shit like that.
So you were 10 and you were already bastardising phones & connecting stuff together
Yeah, and then I used to just do the crank calls and whatever but it was, you know…I’d love to have those tapes. I bet I’ve got one somewhere.
You were fiddling with things, seeing what you can make with them…
Yeah, what does this thing do? How can I break it? How can I put it back together? If anyone’s really interested, I did a very long podcast, talking about music, called Sound Torque. And it’s just about people’s experiences of things that are tech based.
And another childhood memory – I had an older cousin who played guitar. He was obsessed. So I knew everything about guitars before I even played a guitar. And I’m left-handed. Well, I’m not. Actually I write with my right hand, but I play guitar left-handed, and I play all the other instruments the other way, because I’m a dickhead. Well, I’d never even picked up his guitar, but I just felt like it was the wrong way round. So I decided to put it the other way up. It may well have been because I think I saw Paul McCartney on the telly, and I knew the telly reversed the image, but it was Paul McCartney, and he was left handed anyway. So I play guitar left-handed. Cos of Macca.
(at which point we talk about my 1st bass, a viola, as played by the aforementioned Macca, which a.P.A.t.T. record with, and which are apparently good for playing doom metal, then go off on a flat-wound guitar string tangent, which I really enjoyed, but I’m sure you haven’t all got 2hrs to spend reading this, so moving on…)
And there are so many autodidacts in music now (self taught people) – I mean, you literally can learn so much on the internet. I work with these young people in my studio, and they just go on the internet – I know 20 year old lads who are voicing John Coltrane solos on Sax, playing it on guitar, and they’re doing this daily and transcribing the music. And it’s just what they do for fun. And you’re like, “huh?” Because they’ve just picked up these learning processes from early age; how to understand whatever interests them, you know, like auto-diadacting music. Which is great, but I think there’s also a kickback, because a lot of kids, they don’t drink anymore. It’s just not the case that you will have a pint in your hands when you’re young anymore.
So there’s a predicament in the way we engage with music, because we engage with music in pubs, and I’ve always found that difficult, with a.P.A.t.T. anyway, because pub chatter doesn’t really work for us, even though we present ourselves as a bit like a band. And certainly, if you’re doing a set with music which has got an awful lot of dynamics…let’s just say it’s like noisy stuff and quiet stuff. If people are chatting over the quiet stuff, it’s kind of heart-breaking sometimes, if it’s the bit that’s meant to engage with the emotional side of human endeavour. And if people are talking or on the phones, or whatever, then it’s really difficult. And pubs really do promote that aesthetic.
Popularising music by moving out of concert hall, and into pubs, it’s like “yay”, but the downside is the link with Big Alcohol, the focus on selling booze. The focus isn’t on the music – which means often there’s a lack of appreciation for the performance. Even when you paid for a ticket. There should be a way to de-centre alcohol while supporting the venues that really care, who rely on alcohol in lieu of any other viable income stream. A different paradigm that includes non-pub venues…
Yes! Let’s make one.
Yeah, well I’ve got an idea. It’s a concept-based subscription system that works with and for the venues. You pay a very nominal fee, like a Patreon type thing. You have an engagement with maybe 7 venues, including non-pub venues.. And so you have these 7 places who benefit. So you pay for the subscription and if you want to go to every gig then you can. But obviously that’s not going to happen with everyone who subscribes. Everyone just pays it, no matter whether they go or not. So as a punter, you start getting either value for money, or you’ve invested in local venues, and a musical community.
I love the model, in fact the venue we work with, The Dorothy Pax, is trying to do exactly that as they have a Patreon that subsidises their free entry gigs. But where are the non-pub venues?
Well, that’s the point in it. You just need to find them. Back in the day, Liverpool had so many buildings that we could just find a space, run a bar, do a thing. But it’s not so easy anymore. So you’d have to do something. So you need to negotiate with places – something like a gallery. Basically, our whole industry is geared towards making money for Big Alcohol and for those landlords who don’t care about the music, when we should be focusing on the music and the venues who are invested in the music but struggle to make that work.
But then, as you say, all these young people are opting out of booze.
Yeah, and loads of venues are struggling – the other problem is people like to go to one space, and won’t go to another as well. You can run the same event in different places, in the same city, and you’ll get different people.
Yeah, the psychogeography of spaces is really not something that many promoters consider
And I think whatever we get a kinship with just happens, doesn’t it? So the way we avoid that is by working with an existing community, like Buds & Spawn, or Cardiacs or any other artistic movement – anything that isn’t geographical…I mean, there’s not many people into wonky music, you know. There’s probably about 5,000 on the whole island, who’ll dip in and spend money. There’s loads who engage with it, but I think bums on seats…not that many.
So you’ve had something like 20 members of a.P.A.t.T. and you’ve played in quite big numbers – I think there were 7 of you when you joined Buds & Spawn for one of our live shows during the pandemic?
Well the last violin player has left to carry on with their own thing. And everything’s great, but that was Number 29, and I was really thinking about lockdown. We needed to be less. There’s 4 of us playing at the moment. We’re streamlined. I really wanted to lower the footprint of all the equipment as well – I mean, it might be part of our appeal, you know, “there’s loads of them!”, but loads of stuff everywhere as well. Our band was like a huge machine. And I’m not complaining. I love it, and I loved it, but I was observing how the climate was. It just didn’t seem tasteful. Megalomaniac levels of things – so ostentatious in a time of poverty. So we basically reduced the equipment down to little boxes. We haven’t even got amps at the moment – that’s the technology; things sound good even when they’re small. And I’ve been playing through a computer for years, but now everyone does as well – we have a little box that acts like a computer, and we can tie them together. And we realised, that if we just borrow the drums, we really can get everything in a car, and that’s insane.
So anyway, the whole economy thing kicked in. And it’s been really good, because we’re writing faster, better, more coherent music. It’s more repeatable, things like that. And it’s now economic by design. For this period of time. And we’re all time limited – every single practice is recorded and filmed, which means that you can review it really fast. We’ll be watching it the day after. You can leave comments in the description, of what you need to do next time, and then you turn up and immediately work on it. So the way we work has changed because of the technology. Well, the process hasn’t changed, it’s just that there’s less hanging around doing things that are not to do with music.
For the current project of the 4 of us, the writing process is very easy – I can compose, work with the other players, come together to write whatever it is. We’re writing and rehearsing together because we always have limited time. The whole thing is more economical – lowering the footprint, making it easier to do our thing. And because we are so compact now, we just did our 1st fly show – we flew to a gig, played it, and came back, In the past I wouldn’t even have known how to consider it, because we have that much equipment, and so many instruments – 7 people, a tessellated van full of, you know, 28-ish instruments.
So what future excitement is on the cards for this new shape of a.P.A.t.T.?
We’ve got a European tour coming up in June. June 28th to July 20th. That’s as 5 piece. But our current guitarist, Boss DR-5, he’s in a much more popular band at the moment, and sadly he’s got to go and do all that. And he’s the main composer for Zombina & the Skeletones.
So it’s like, “What do we do? What do we do now?”. So we did the usual thing – we did an open call, because we accept waifs and strays. Basically. We met with some really cool people, but we just couldn’t make it work. Then luckily, Timba Harris from Extra Life finished his tour the day that we needed him, so we are going to play our 1st show with an original a.P.A.t.T. member, Dorothy Wave, because she is also available and she lives in France. So our 1st gig is in Paris on the 28th.
So this is a bit of a twee question, but I’m expecting novelty from you – which band or artist do you think has had the biggest influence on your music over the years.
Which band or artist has had the biggest influence on my music?
It doesn’t have to be music
Well it’s not music, because it’s Chris Morris. Well, it’s either Chris Morris or television advert themes. Something to do with being this pathetic age, where we were stuck with 4 channels, 5 channels max. And we were bombarded with the same adverts, over and over.
This is why I know what a numismatist is, because of a Mcdonald’s advert that I saw hundreds of times.
I’m a sucker for the junk store memory as well. – you’ll see in our forthcoming set at the Dorothy Pax. We’ve got a medley of the inside of my head. From about 1982 to 1985. Similarly, Chris Morris was like a guiding light of entertainment around that period, and later.
He was a god.
He still is. He’s one of the few people that I’d definitely be shy around. He was extraordinarily provocative at a time when it was right to be provocative. And he’s extraordinarily sympathetic to people’s needs and worries these days. He reads the room, really fucking well, and he’s adding to the pot something terribly at the moment. All his latest films have got so much more depth and understanding of what we should be doing with our time and artistic practice. He says something in a very recent interview on Channel 4, I think it is, and he says something like, “what are we meant to be doing, entertaining the court or changing something?”. And I just loved that.
And with him, something that might seem comedic and silly and flippant on the surface, the actual, the underarching thing is generally deeply, politically moving. A left-handed look at life, you know, and I would suggest that’s what a.P.A.t.T. does. Like his last couple of films, like dealing with the FBI, one of the main organizations to have accused people – 100% of accusations of terrorism by them are false claims, you know. It’s all bullshit and that’s an insanely shattering statement to just be A true, and B no-one else has mentioned it since this film. And yeah, here we are. Trump’s in, and everyone’s going mental. And they’re just lying, lying, lying, lying. So yeah, I think, just because you’re being daft doesn’t mean you’re just trying to entertain the court. You know what I mean.
And the man made Jam.
Oh, yeah, and, as I said, from any initial fiddling around with tapes and running it through karaoke machines and making sound on sound things before you even have 4 track. Doing all these things when I was a kid – the 1st thing I did was make these little weird radio plays with spooky shit on, and the 1st time I heard Jam I was like, “He’s done it. It’s amazing, he’s done it.” It’s so well done as well, and we’d all, as a group, we’d all be sitting there just listening, going. “Oh, it’s so good”. The components are just absolutely correct, and the style of it being, well, because he’s a musician himself, so the flow is absolutely spot on. Ok so I’m gonna say him then, he’s been the biggest influence.
So we are going see you perform very soon, in Sheffield, on March 7th. It was way back in December 2020, when you did a video for our live online show, which was fab, but I’ve never seen you live, so it’s going to be very exciting for me.
Yeah, I made a montage collage. I made a collage of montages.
Yes, it was definitely a metamontage.
I remember everyone really loving it. Yeah, it’s going to be a good gig – we have drums, keyboards, clarinets, saxophones, flutes. I play guitar synth now as well. That’s a lot of fun, and that’s part of the minimizing the gear thing – it’s allowing us to try other stuff.
Brilliant, thanks v much, and we’ll see you on Friday March 7th at the Dorothy Pax in Sheffield.
Find out more about a.P.A.t.T. here:
apatt.com
https://apatt.bandcamp.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@apatt
https://www.facebook.com/aPAtTpage
https://www.instagram.com/itsapatt/
General MIDI will be performing live with a.P.A.t.T. on Friday 7th March at the Dorothy Pax in Sheffield, accompanied by a DJ set from GongMan (All Hail Hyena)
This gig is FREE ENTRY, but the Pax is a small venue with limited space so you can guarantee your spot by BOOKING A PLACE for a £5 deposit. We’ll pass the bucket around at the end (cash and card accepted!) so that you can show your appreciation for our awesome artists too.