There’s
something familiar about Edinburgh Leisure, the duo formed by visual artist Keith
Farquhar and Tim Fraser, whose debut album, Die Gefahr Im Jazz, was recently
released by Tenement Records. It’s not just their civic-minded name, which
conjures up images of public swimming pools and soon to be demolished leisure
centres. Neither is it the band’s logo, which appropriates that of a well-known
high street bank.
Rather,
it’s more to do with the record itself, which showcases a laconic series of
skewed thumbnail sketches of modern life in all its first world problem
rubbishness, from broken iPhones to being trapped in Ikea. Scorpio Leisure makes
a fleeting but troublingly insistent musical reference to The Police’s song,
Roxanne, with Get a Good Job doing something similar with Dark Side of the Moon
era Pink Floyd’s own cash cow, Money.
“These
little kitschy type appropriations break the ice a little bit,” says Farquhar.
“There’s a lot of appropriation in my art, and Tim was interested in that as
well. That’s driven by need, because I’m not a
musician, and I’m sure Tim wouldn’t mind me saying he’s a limited musician, so
there’s a naïve desperation to use what you can, which is a lovely thing. I’m a
big believer in art like that, which comes from a great economy of means. I’m
definitely drawn to that kind of art.”
Die
Gefahr Im Jazz utilises a palette that moves from the garage band electronics
of early Cabaret Voltaire on Call the Number to Fraser’s Syd Barrettesque vocal
style backed by what sounds like DIY era Scritti Politti on Mammals and Birds.
The sound of nature documentaries, supermarket check-out tills and an Apple Mac
start-up permeate throughout. The result is a pick and mix sonic collage that
still manages to sound tuneful, albeit in a bleakly funny way.
“The
album’s actually quite old,” says Farquhar, “and has probably been done and
dusted for about two years now. I think we started this in 2016. We’ve done
another album since that which hasn’t been released yet, and is quite
different. There’s no real instrumentation on it. It’s much more mechanistic.”
Edinburgh
Leisure formed after Farquhar and Fraser got talking at an exhibition. Best
known as an artist, Farquhar also teaches on the Intermedia course at Edinburgh
College of Art, where Fraser had been a student. Fraser was a fan of The Male
Nurse, the band Farquhar played in during the 1990s.
“Tim asked me if I wanted to do some music
with him,” says Farquhar, “so we met up, and
decided
to give it a go, without knowing at all what it would be like. We would meet,
and for the first three or four times, we just played each other stuff we
liked, music, art, anything, and that was a really nice breaking of the ice.”
This
approach fed into the recording of the album.
“We’d
walk around with our iPhones on recording everything,” says Farquhar, "and
we would just sample all these things, kids playing bells, the checkouts in
Lidl. We were like magpies, sampling all this stuff in our immediate
surroundings. Then we would just load them up on Logic, and a lot of the
rhythms on the record came out of that. It was a very organic process. We
didn’t have any preconceptions. We jokingly called the genre iPod shuffle,
because it’s genreless, and skips around.”
Live
Edinburgh Leisure performances have seen Farquhar wielding a staple gun and
masking tape.
“Using
art materials is quite deliberate,” he says. “These things are what painters
use to stretch the canvas, and we’re sampling them and using them live as
percussion instruments.”
Farquhar
may be talking about the physical action of stretching a canvas, but it’s also
a perfect metaphor for what Edinburgh Leisure do.
“Maybe,”
he says. “I hope so. Of course, most things have been done before. It’s not
like what we’re doing has come out of nowhere. I remember reading Mark Fisher
talking about popular modernism in the 1960s, and Pete Townshend smashing a
guitar, which came from Gustav Metzger’s idea of auto-destructive art, and that
was about working class kids taking what they could from avant-garde art. There’s
a big element in what we do of taking from the avant-garde and playing with it.”
While
there is an archness to the record, there’s a grimness too.
“It’s
dark and its comical,” says Farquhar. “There’s this recurring guitar motif that
runs through several songs, and there’s something tragic and sad about that. We
both like Chris Morris, so there’s some comic bits, but it’s quite gothic.
The
album title, which translates roughly as The Fear in Jazz, comes from an
exhibition Farquhar did with German artist Thomas Hellbeck in London in the
1990s. The exhibition title, Deutsch Britischer Freundschaft, referenced German
post-punk duo Deutsche Amerikanische Freundschaft, another duo who worked in
provocatively experimental but still tuneful ways.
“The
music isn’t jazz,” says Farquhar, “but there’s a looseness to it.
This
looseness has affected Farquhar’s visual art work as much as that has informed
his work with Edinburgh Leisure.
“It’s
all very connected,” he says. “I suppose it informs my art, but also expands it.
I don’t see it as something different. Edinburgh Leisure has been great for me,
because it’s given me the chance to collaborate, and collaboration is never
easy, but when you find someone you can work with it’s a great thing. A lot of
stuff can go unsaid because you know you’re on the same page. It’s great for me
as well to work with someone younger, who has that sensibility.
“There’s
so much play on the album. On a song called Dada’s Boys we’re both playing the
guitar at once, with me doing the fretwork and Tim strumming. There are a lot
of strange untoward techniques on that record. It was very joyful to make. The
second one maybe not so much because there was a lot of looking at the computer
screen, but I don’t know what the next project’s going to be. We’re totally
free to do what we want.”
Die
Gefahr Im Jazz by Edinburgh Leisure is available now on Tenement Records.
Edinburgh Leisure play Jupiter rising at Jupiter Artland, August 23-25.
The Herald, July 5th 2019
Ends
Comments