Caned & Able, aside from being an interesting play on words and Biblical reference, is something of a musical collective headed by Patrick Bird and Martyn Savigar. The musicians they collaborate with are notable in their own right. To take a few examples, guitarist Jon Klein used to play for Specimen and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and drummer Chris Bell also played for Specimen as well as many other quality '80s bands. Their combined sound takes the concept of the mash–up to extremes, intermixing Billie Holliday and John Peel with Anna Jacyszyn's vocals. The group combined efforts yet again to answer our same six questions.
Q1 How did you start out making music?
Patrick Bird: I was studio trained back in 1993 by Andy Montgomery from On–U Sound. I was in post–production for the rest of the nineties working on records with Tricky, Aswad, Primal Scream and Suede – since then I've done pretty much every job there is to do in the audio business. I've got my own production company now and most of our work is mixing and mastering, but we also produce music for films, television and for brands. Martyn and I started Caned & Able five years ago to give ourselves the freedom to do what we wanted in music – that's when we started the Beats For Bars project.
Q2 What inspired your latest album?
PB: We got together with Mike Coles from Malicious Damage Records last year and made an ambitious decision to do a double album – one uptempo and one chilled. 'Smoke' is the chilled one, where we got to do a lot of experimenting and trawling through ideas we've had around for a while. We also got together with Paolo Ogliari from Milan as co–producer – chilled music is his bag, so that was a real pleasure and we found a good working formula together. There are quite a few guests featured on the album too, notably Tommy Deff and Anna Jacyzsyn on vocals. Jon Klein from The Banshees also played guitar on a lot of the tracks, Chris Bell on some drums and we obviously did a lot of audio sampling too, which I think made for a nice hybrid of sounds. Last year ended up being a very chilled year, so we only got round to making 'Smoke'. The 'Mirrors' album got left behind but we're working on it now.
Martin Savigar: 'Smoke' is one of those albums that's been around the block a few times. Different names, different tracks, you know – we'll probably do a very interesting remixes, b–sides and covers album at some point.
Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
MS: Lots of robust debate is a diplomatic way of putting it.
PB: It's a difficult question for us to answer because we never make two tracks in the same way. I like to start with a title to inspire me, then see what happens – basically, one of us will get an idea down and often pass it on to the others in the team. An important part of our process is not being precious about our own ideas and to let the others improve the tracks whenever possible. When we all end up in the same studio at the same time, we focus on the mixing and get the tracks finished – that's it!
Q4 Which artists influence your work?
MS: Portishead made the best album I've ever heard in 'Dummy'... faultless production. And I'm a big Bonobo fan – Simon Green's got a fantastic knack for rhythm.
PB: The Cure, Groove Armada, Gorillaz, DJ Shadow, Beethoven.
Q5 What would you say to someone listening to your music for the first time?
MS: Listen to this.
PB: Pour yourself a drink and listen to this!
Q6 What are your ambitions for your album, and for the future?
MS: We'd really like to have Roots Manuva do a rap for us – and we'll just keep making fucking good music for the cows to come home to.
PB: We're going to up the tempo a bit now – we've got plans coming out of our ears. We're just starting a Beats For Bars–style project with Kris Needs, we're remixing a bunch of Ike & Tina Turner tracks, which will eventually become its own album, and of course there's 'Mirrors' which will hopefully be ready this summer. Plans for the 'Smoke' album? To sit beautifully in people's record collections right next to 'Mirrors'.
Published June 2008
The milkman delivers his verdict on Smoke...
Caned & Able is the multi-faceted project of Patrick ‘Trickster’ Bird and Martyn Savigar, with additional contribution from drummer Chris Bell and former Siouxsie & The Banshees guitarist John Klein, who once shared stage space as part of eighties glam goth punk band Specimen, and singer Anna Jacyszyn, and the attentive listener will also spot John Peel, Marc Bolan and Billie Holliday visiting from beyond the grave.
Smoke…, released on Malicious Damage, is a vastly eclectic collection which establishes unlikely bridges between densely layered trip hop, psychedelic pop, hypnotic ambient, dub and indie rock. As soon as one begins to feel comfortable in a particular setting, the pair swiftly change pace and direction to establish an entirely different décor, starting all over again and again.
Heavy, dense and sober, Trav’lin’ Light, which opens the album, is haunted by the ghost of Billie Holliday, tearing through clouds of effects and slow moving beats to carve chillingly tripping motifs upon a comatose soundtrack. A similar result is achieved with entirely different tools on the magnificent closing Orchestra, which builds on a Massive Attack-esque blanket of strings and beats tightly wrapped around soulful vocal drifts, which suddenly become saturated, literally, emotions running high, in its second half. In between these, Bird, Savigar and guests develop intriguing concepts and theories, based on the core duo’s taste for mashed up soundscapes and chemically infused music. On Wild On The Sidewalk, a familiar sounding riff is given an unexpected makeover, while Airhead, Soul Clapp and Killa Sound re-arrange the hip-hop furniture to fit the C&A ethic. White Space distils fine hints of Sergeant Pepper and smears them with a head-nodding groove and processed vocals, and, on Deaf Aid, a young jumbled up John Peels is heard talking about wildlife upon a rich backdrop of delayed and treated guitars melting over a steady beat. Elsewhere, Never Coming Back is a lush piece of electronica which could have been dug out from Alex Paterson’s vault, and Deuteronomy injects a slice of lazy soul funk to the mix.
With its incessant twists and turns, Smoke… surprises and entertains in equal measures all the way through. Caned & Able may not be reinventing the wheel with this album, but their ludic approach serves their finely tuned organised chaos rather perfectly, making this an album that is likely to repeatedly finds its way to your favourite music player.
4/5
