What happens in Vegas
Music journalists in search of an easy life everywhere, we have some bad news.
For some time now, there’s been a very convenient way to start any interview with Richard Fearless aka Death In Vegas. You – and in this case the you in question has certainly, in the past, included this writer – simply describe the rather remarkable surroundings in which he makes music.
You talk about the spartan shipping container aka Metal Box studios at Trinity Buoy Wharf, perched on the Thames riverfront near Canning Town, at the point at which the River Leigh meets the Thames, giving off the positive ions that Fearless will wax lyrical about the health benefits of. You might mention his neighbours. Daniel Avery is one, who’s fond of sampling the clanking industrial sounds that eminate from the massive factory on the opposite side of the Leigh, starkly floodlit throughout the night. Jem Finer, formerly of The Pogues, now in cahoots with former KLF man Jimmy Cauty as Local Psycho and the Hurdy Gurdy Orchestra, is another. His Longplayer installation, a piece of music designed to play for 1,000 years, is housed in the complex’s ancient lighthouse, the first of its type. Mention it was once used by godfather of electricity Michael Faraday to effective invent the life and ship-saving concept and you get extra Brownie points.
We only mention all this one more time not, as you might suspect, because we like to have our cake and eat it, but rather because by the time you read this Fearless will no longer be operating out of this rather special space that’s he’s called his creative home for more than a decade.
“Yeah, I’m being moved,” he says, with a hint of sadness, although his new location, inside the main Wharf building, will be opposite the stock room for his Drone label, so there’ll be a lot less traipsing back and forth between the two. “I will miss the river though.”
“There’s a good bunch of down here. Daniel (Avery) is still here. Gem is leaving though. He’s going on a world tour with The Pogues. He always distanced himself from The Pogues, even though he was a founder member, but he’s on board like before now.”
There’s even been the odd sighting of Jimmy Cauty down there. “They made hurdy gurdy album first. Then they did this amazing thing in Lewes, they erected this monolith and had a ceremony. It’s a five ton monolith, I’m not quite sure how they did it but they put these speaker drivers inside, so you can go up to the stones and hear them resonating. Then they did this other thing where they cut records into stone. Sadly I don’t have the right record player to play them.
The move may be minor, we admit, but it’s not insignificant. There seemed to be something about the shipping container that mirrored the Fearless approach in recent years. Death In Vegas has been one of the biggest and most respected names in electronic music since its 1997 debut Dead Elvis, and many a famous name, from Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, Iggy Pop, Dot Allison, Jim Reid from The Jesus and Mary Chain and Mazzy Star chanteuse Hope Sandoval, has been more than happy to lend their vocal chords to its sounds.
But when Fearless moved to what became Metal Box, it marked a distinct shift in gears for both him and the project. After a string of high profile label deals, he opted to concentrate on self releasing, buoyed (if you can forgive the pun) by the freedom it afforded him. The music he made, too, seemed to reflect the surroundings in which it was made, self-contained, tight and frills-free, with a distinctly metallic sheen to it to boot. There’s a distant touching of base with the techno sound which was his first love as a DJ, and has been his staple sound behind the decks more recently.
Death Mask, the latest Death In Vegas album, is an almost entirely instrumental affair, with the only vocals being the whispered words of he and his partner on the track ‘Your Love’.
From lush sonic landscapes to more jarring, industrial edged moments, it’s both meditiational and visceral, as well as being highly personal and drenched emotion, as he reflects on everything from his origins (opener ‘Chingola’ is his birthplace in Zanzibar) to his father’s death.
For Fearless, however, it’s part of a constant process of refinement rather than a total reinvention. “I feel I’ve been honing my craft over the last four albums – this one (Death Mask), Transmission and the two Richard Fearless albums. The way I’m working, I’m using the console differently. Instead of just getting the machines talking to each other, creating all these big jams over two or three days and laying down ‘passes’, I’ve been taking the stems and doing dub mixes with them, that’s very much the process I’ve used for this album. Some tracks I did that several times, I think on ‘Roisin Dub(H)’ I did it four times, trying to strip it further and further back.”
When we suggest it might like a continuation of the two Richard Fearless solo albums that preceded it, Deep Rave Memory and its companion piece Future Rave Memory, Fearless isn’t convinced.
“It’s a funny one, because I’ve been using the same tools, the same machines, for all of the records really. The difference is, I screwed on my Death In Vegas head. I remember playing it to Avery and he said ‘it sounds like Death In Vegas’, which is a good thing I think. It was definitely supposed to be a Death In Vegas record, so having that as a start point helps too. But I’m really happy with the album, there’s usually something that niggles me about it when it done, but not this time.”
This isn’t the first instrumental Death In Vegas album, of course. Their fourth, 2004’s Satan’s Circus, was the first on which guest vocalists were dispensed with. “That was the one that got us dropped,” he laughs. Not a problem this time round, we venture. “I have been trying to drop myself,” he jokes.
While he could easily have walked into another deal with a bigger label, Fearless feels it was vital to create Death Mask for a Drone release, because he knew there’d be pressure to pull in vocal favours from his many famous mates. That just didn’t sit right in the circumstances.
“I knew I didn’t want to work with any guest vocalists, I knew that from the get go. But I can’t lie, there was no big plan for the album. I just went in and.. well, as it has been for us all, the last five years have been quite a diffcult time. I’ve been dealing with the loss of my father, struggling with that on various levels, the journey you go through with grief really. That and just… life. The state of the world and politics. There’s been a lot going on. But what I’ve learnt is you have to be really, brutally honest with how you’re feeling at that moment and not say ‘I’m going to make something really happy’. I’ve been going in and trying to listen to how I feel at that particular moment. As an artist, I feel that’s where I can do my best work, if I’m true to myself. That was the goal with this album, to a certain extent.”
His father’s death isn’t directly connected to the title Death Mask, he says, although the track ‘Roisin Dub(H)’ is the one which sees him most directly working through his feelings about it, the celtic references in its name a nod to his roots. “With Death Mask it was more about the start, birth, and then the circle of life, and how, with grief… I mean, I’d lost people before, but I’d not dealt with grief on this level. There’s a sense of closure with the last song on the album.
In actual fact, it was a trip to that great and sometimes controversial institution the British Museum that sparked the idea for Death Mask‘s title.
“There was this exhibition of death masks, and this was before I lost my dad, it really resonated with me, just this moment in time, someone caught there right there at the end. That summed up the start and the end of the journey.”
Ben Willmott
To buy your double vinyl copy of Death Mask, click here
