Guitare Brothers interview from Setting Sun (April 2004)

A little background: As I always say with Setting Sun, I discover music by interesting bands and music often by accident.

For the art of discovery of music, often comes through the mereist accident or slip, perhaps sometimes walking through a shop and I hear this wonderful song on their radio or even Telly. Thankfully “Guitare Brothers” came from a completely different Source altogether. I would dread to think what their music would Do to a quene of people in my local clothes shop, although it Would be funny to see.

As one or two of you readers may know I am a subscriber to a excellent magazine called “Electric Robots and Brains” (http://come.to/robots) which is a interesting electronical Fanzine which loads of experimental and sometimes downright weird electronical Music.

On one such issue of their magazine, Issue13 I seem to recall – it came with an additional CD of music by a English – French duo “Guitare Brothers”.

Like with the “Trilemma” interview from last year, the CD certainly proved a grower, although in contrast to the sometimes dreamy and cinematic tones of the “Trilemma” CD, “Guitare Brothers”’s music borders on the crazy and in places downright scary. It simply has to be heard to be believeable….

Interested I dropped the head of Robots and Electric Brains, Jimmy and he helped me sort out a interview with the band….

Thanks to Mr Atomic and V Mark 3 (who are “Guitare Brothers) for Their answers which may very interesting reading… For more information on “Guitare Brothers” – please look at their website http://www.guitarebrothers.fr.set Or contact them viva Robots and Electronic Brains whose e mail address is: rebzine@hotmail.com Thanks Guys! Andy N

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Setting Sun: How's things and what are you also up to at the moment?

Mr Atomic: Things are going pretty well. We're happy with the reaction to our new album and the 7" of remixes from our first album and we're currently working on remixes for Goodnight Star (www.miniaturerecords.com) and Serge (www.sergemusic.org)

Vmark3: O yes we are le happy about all this. But wait till we conquer the world. Or at least learn to speak proper Franglais all the time.

Setting Sun: Now although I have been aware of the Guitare Brothers for a little bit through their wonderful CD as produced on Burning Emptiness and the always interesting Magazine, Robots with Electric Brains, but as I always say there will be people who won't have heard off you - so can you introduce yourselves to us, fill us in our general music bio, what started you off and so on etc?

Mr Atomic: Ha Ha! That's a good question. We're in the process of interviewing each other for our website and the next issue of Robots and it's turned out that neither of us can remember exactly how we started making music together.

What we are sure about is that I sent some tracks to a friend of V-Mark's for a compilation on Aspic records. That's how he heard of me.Then he sent something to me for review in Robots, then it's a bit of a blur, but we started working on our first record when I bought some junk shop French 7" singles to sample. He did the same with some English ones and that was that.

Vmark3: I guess that's it, basically. But what matters isn't how a relationship began, it's the way it flows and keeps on going, isn't it? I remember being fascinated about Mr Atomic doing all his music with a tracker (trackers are the grandgrandgrandfathers of all audio programs, first ones used to run on Amigas, but there's loads about that later on)

Mr Atomic: And I was fascinated that he was fascinated. I mean, it was just normal for me to make music with the tracker.

Setting Sun: What are your musical influences and what have you been listening to recently?

Mr Atomic: Influences is always a hard question. For me, Pop Will Eat Itself, Run DMC and Public Enemy were the first big loves of my musical life. Recently I've been listening to Serge and The Wicker Man soundtrack a lot.

Vmark3: A friend recently asked me to make a compilation of influential bands and the thing is there's not going to be enough space on a 700Mb CDR for it, even if it only consists of low quality mp3s. He insisted on it to be no more than 74 minutes long, though, so I guess I'll send him the comp near 2035, time to think about it. I suppose Carcass, Black Sabbath's first album and Napalm Death's From Enslavement to Obliteration were my first musical loves. Recently, I've been listening a lot to Trombone (dysfunction records) And J.Torrance (sijis records).

Setting Sun: What is also the inspiration behind your name "Guitare Brothers" - I guess it is French, but will be interested in learning what inspired you to come up with the name.

Vmark3: Mr and Mrs Atomic were at ours for a holiday and we went to Avignon and we drove past this guitar-only music shop called 'guitare brothers' and it all seemed obvious. Mrs Vmark made a picture of us in front of the store and Atomic had the final idea for the 'pas guitars, not frères' motto.

Setting Sun: Do you play concerts or if you don't how you approach it? How does this compare to your recorded material? Is there one you prefer Over the other?

Mr Atomic: We've never played live as Guitare Brothers. I don't know how we'd do it if we did. Probably it wouldn't sound much like the records. V-Mark is the technical one, so perhaps he's got some ideas.

Vmark3: Yea, say I'm the technical one when a difficult argument arises. I thought YOU were the one with the ideas, tinbox. Blimey, how could I know how to play live across The Channel? Okay, then, if you threaten to have me trapped forever in a Top of the Pops live show I can come up with an answer and here it is: we both have laptops and I have noise-making toys Atomic just gave me, so I guess we could both run Modplug on our laptops and sort of take turns at improvising over each other's beats and tunes.

Mr Atomic: Christ knows how bad that would sound. One of the beauties of making music on the computer is that you only have to do something good once and then it's a piece of piss to reuse it. I make loads of crap music, but I'm very good at throwing the bad stuff away.

Setting Sun: I notice from your CD I have "t'aime pas de techno or what?" That you used the modplug tracker to help you produce it. Can you enlighten us with explaining how you first encountered this Particular interesting little plug in, which you kindly enclosed in addition On your CD also.

Mr Atomic: I first started making music years ago on the Amiga. There was a piece of software called MEDTracker which later turned into OctaMED that was a pretty basic sequencer. Very simple to get the Hang of and very low on memory requirements.

Vmark3: a tracker is to a 'normal' audio sequencer/sampler what a Vespa is to Concorde. Which is kinda funny when you think about it: We live 1000 miles apart, so using Concorde could be a lot more convenient. A regular GBros song weighs a mighty 50Kb. Atomic has the current record with 9Kb for a 2 minutes song.

Mr Atomic: 6k, actually. When I had to move onto the PC, V-Mark helped me find ModPlug which is essentially the same thing. There's stacks of trackers out there on the web and the files are compatible across computer systems, so it's a great way to exchange music or to collaborate.

Because V-Mark lives in Arles, in France, and I live in Cambridge, We usually work by exchanging tracker modules back and forth on the email. I know that for him it's a bit like using stone-age technology, but part of the fun is getting something new and interesting out of the software and keeping the size of the files down.

Vmark3: Atomic once told me 'using low technology levels forces me to remain creative'. As you can see he's not very modest, but he's the wisest robot I know.

Mr Atomic: Downloading an MP3 of one track can take forever but our whole album fits onto a floppy disk.

Vmark3: That's the trick. With a dial-up connection, exchanging Logic or Cubase or Cakewalk files or even mp3s would take decades, but it takes minutes for us to exchange a whole 30 minutes record...

Maybe our Vespa has something of Concorde inside it after all.

Setting Sun: It was interesting to read about you also doing remixes as well as doing albums. Do you find your approach to remixing varies from doing your own material.

Mr Atomic: Not at all, because our collaboration is just remixing what we've sent each other.

Vmark3: Except we've been making music together for a while so we're quite used to the other's ways. That's the fun about remixes: turning people's material into your own. Something funny, while we're at it: I noticed recently we never argued whereas a song is 'finished' or not.

Mr Atomic: That's true. Something else I just thought of is that when we're together we hardly ever talk about our own music at all, let alone argue about whether something's finished or not.

Setting Sun: What's next for "Guitare Brothers" - Do you have any more releases / remixes planned?

Mr Atomic: Like I said, we're doing remixes of Goodnight Star and Serge.

Vmark3: And as I said, we plan to conquer the world (did I say that?)

Mr Atomic: And like he said, I just gave him a load of old music toys so perhaps we'll sample them for our next record.

Setting Sun: When you are not living the lifestyle of a rock n roll star, What do you do?

Mr Atomic: I write and run Robots and Electronic Brains fanzine (www.come.to/robots) Our second album was given away free to Robots subscribers recently. I'm also The Guy Who Invented Fire (www.listen.to/guyfire) which is another tracker-based project.

Vmark3: My life is very dull, it's all fighting Aliens That Want To Enslave Us (TM) and Protecting Democracy (TM), you know, that sort of stuff us warrior robots have to do.

Setting Sun: Lastly, hacking a question one of my friends used to use in her Magazine, if you were stranded on a desert island with a record Player (although I could be tempted to let you upgrade it to a CD Player if I was feeling nice), what 5 records what you choose to have with you?

Mr Atomic: Today? Public Enemy - It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back; Johnny Cash - Live At San Quentin; The Wicker Man Soundtrack; Serge - playMeLoud; Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald - Louie and Ella  

Vmark3: Carcass 'necroticism, descanting the insalubrious', Sonic Youth 'evol', Plastikman 'consume', The Telescopes 'third wave', And something from Albert Ayler. Ask me again in 5.2 milliseconds And you'll get nothing but different names.