8 Tracks: Of 130701

Tracking back 15 years ago, Set Fire To Flames were the sole reason we set up 130701. They were a collective of 13 musicians from Montreal, including seven members of Godspeed plus members of assorted other bands kicking around that scene – Fly Pan Am, A Silver Mt Zion, Hanged Up, HRSTA, etc. Their two albums were both founded out of super-long, intense communal recording sessions that were like experiments in extended-duration improvisation, later brought together through some pretty stunning editing. This is the third track on the debut album. It’s just such a brilliant, emotive, epic building track. But it’s just one angle from an album that is full of a myriad different angles – kraut motorik-style pieces, chamber-like string ensemble pieces, hacked electronics noise pieces, sections of field recording, drone pieces – which to me that made it it way more interesting than Godspeed. It’s a stunning, stunning record, an intense labour of love realised to an amazingly high standard. The packaging on both albums was pretty incredible but crazily expensive, which was why it never got repressed.

Our second release and the album that started to really help define what the aesthetic of 130701 would be. When Sylvain got in touch and sent us this in 2002, it just seemed to fit really nicely alongside Set Fire To Flames. It’s a really beautifully balanced collection of sparse, Satie-esque piano tracks and sections of gritty, electro-acoustic noise, and is such a concise, beautifully poised and cohesive album. there’s lots of silence, lots of space around the piano. It’s a very brief record. the total time is about 25 minutes. but it is perfectly formed and feels like all the juice has been condensed into this pure, emotive essence.
Sylvain was someone who was doing this kind of modern, decontextualised piano stuff really early on, but i feel he’s never really received the attention his work deserves.

Max sort of fell into our laps back in 2003 or 2004, and we released 5 albums with him between 2004 – 2012.
I could of picked any number of his tracks here, but this is from Max’s debut album, ‘Memoryhouse’, which originally came out on BBC’s Late Junction label – the one album he did before he came to us. I don’t think anyone was expecting the level of success we’d see with Max, but he was always a total pleasure to work with, and the success he’s seeing is hugely deserved. He’s a very grounded, humble and likeable person as well as being really driven and it was fantastic working with someone who had such a clear vision and a strong conceptual base and whose work extended outwards to other forms like the installation work, the ballet, the chamber opera, all the film scores he was involved in. He’s someone I share a lot of similar cultural interests with. This track, for example, is titled after one of my favourite Max Ernst paintings.

This is from Hauschka’s first album for us, ‘Room To Expand’, which came out in February 2007, which we’ve just recently reissued in an expanded edition on vinyl with another 6 unreleased tracks.
Volker came to us through a tip-off from Max Richter and seemed like a really good fit in that he was someone using a traditional classical instrument yet totally undermining how it was supposed to be played and opening up all these extra tactile and percussive possibilities for it. He’s a stunning live artist and I think that’s where most people get hooked into his work – when you can actually feel the viscerally of his playing and see all the theatre of the preparation – the ping pong balls bouncing around, the bottle tops and gaffer tape and vibrators he pulls out of the pianos guts.
After corresponding and compiling ‘Room To Expand’ for nearly a year, I first met Volker at a FatCat events I was curating over in Belgium, just a couple of weeks before the album came out. Within an hour of our meeting, completely unplanned, we were onstage together doing an improvised collaboration. So I got a pretty rapid, deep end introduction into how he was as a live performer!

I’ve known Jóhann a long time, since his days organising the fantastically experimental Kitchen Motors collective in Reykajavik at the end of the ’90s. Like Max, Jóhann has his fingers in lots of pies and is driven by finding interesting projects and concepts that resonate with him, and this came from one such project. ‘The Miners’ Hymns’ was a collaboration with film maker Bill Morrisson. I’d previously known about Bill through a film he’s made called ‘Decasia’, which was this utterly stunning, compelling piece composed entirely of very old film stock that had been rescued from flooded libraries or that had been subject to decay in other ways. ‘The Miners’ Hymns’ was again based upon archival film footage, this time of the ill-fated coal mining community in North East England, and Jóhann’s soundtrack featured a 16-piece brass ensemble (including members of a colliery band). I was immediately intrigued when Jóhann came to me and suggested this as a release. I liked the idea of moving away from the piano and also the film angle felt like a really good fit with the black & white photographic aesthetic of 130701. Originally, we were also going to be releasing this as a full DVD, but had to scrap the latter plan as it just wouldn’t budget out. It’s a pretty dark release and this track is definitely the money shot.
It’s fantastic to see Jóhann’s soundtrack work being so well received with the two Oscar and BAFTA nominations.

We signed Dustin at the same time as Jóhann Jóhannsson, towards the end of 2010. Jóhann had just mixed ‘Lumiere’, which became our first release with Dustin and came out in 2011, quickly followed by a live solo piano album. On ‘Lumiere’ Dustin expanded himself with larger ensembles and a denser texture than previous albums. The string parts were performed by New York’s ACME ensemble (who also worked with Grizzly Bear, Owen Pallet, Matmos, Max Richter, and Hauschka), and he also employs subtle electronics, guitar from Stars of the Lid’s Adam Wiltzie and violin from Peter Broderick.
As well as being a really great pianist / composer with a beautifully lyrical, delicate touch, Dustin is just one of the nicest people I’ve ever worked with – a wonderfully warm person and always a joy to spend time with. He’s taken some time out of his solo work since ‘Lumiere’ as he’s been so caught up in A Winged Victory and the film scores he continues to work on, but I’m hoping he’ll get back down to another album soon. It’s too long already since the last one.

I only just started working with Ian this past year, but have been following him since his ‘A Turn Of Breath’ album on Recital Programme back in 2014, which was just such an amazing record to discover. Ian is a classicaly-trained vocalist, with a stunning voice, but who processes that through customised reel-to-reel tape decks, and other electronics. So it’s got a kind of level of noise and decay going on that might recall the likes of William Basinski or Fennesz. I really love that kind of push and pull between the anchoring beauty of his voice and melody and the dissolution of the processing, eating at the edges, peeling surfaces away, threatening to erase the whole. Ian’s a printmaker (the artwork on his new album is his own) and works at a University in Vancouver as a printmaking technician, and I can totally feel the connection between that and the processes in his music.
This track is from his first album for us, which is just about to come out. It’s been so great to be working with him. He’s unbelievably productive, and another of those artists who are working with heightened powers, doing something set apart from everyone else.

Like Ian William Craig, Resina (real name Karolina Rec) is another very new signing to 130701. She’s one of the new breed of 130701 acts in our process of rebuilding the roster from scratch, and someone i’m really impressed with. She sent us an album as a demo completely out of the blue late last year which pretty quickly stood out as being very special, and which is being released as her debut album in September. I’d been looking to orient the label away from the piano a little bit, to try and expand our scope, and Ian and Resina do that perfectly.
This is a live version of a track from her album, from a show in Poland in December. It’s a really lovely album but I think, like Hauschka, her music really comes alive when you hear it played live, when you see it performed. Carolina came over to play a 15th anniversary showcase at The Brighton Festival back in May and just absolutely killed it. We had a sold-out crowd of over 300 and I don’t think anyone had heard of her before but her live show is just so forceful and cleverly conceived and just stunning visually – almost complete darkness with a hazer and just a single spot on her and this big circular back-projected film above her. There’s something really primal and organic in her playing and the way her part-improvised pieces are animated. We’re working on trying to set up a tour for her around her album in the Autumn, so I hope more people will get a chance to check her out soon.