Gilles Peterson once wrote: “The Cinematics feel straight up correct and natural – Mr Organic no need to panic. This is about Manc jazzers and Roots Manuva all beanied up, tumbling out of the back of a smoky transit van and onto the stage in mid-winter Birmingham and leaving the crowd open-mouthed.”
The beanies have gone, the hot boxed van has gone – thankfully Gilles has gone back to DJing – and the Cinematic Orchestra of 2009 is an altogether more refined flavour.
These days going to a Cinematic gig is a full-on cultural experience: next month’s show at the Roundhouse sees the band in full orchestra mode, accompanying screenings of Dadaist surrealism to a sit-down audience. Talking to me in Brooklyn, Jason Swinscoe, the man behind masterpieces like ‘To Build a Home’ and ‘Breathe’ is in no doubt that the jazzy trip hop of some of his Ninja Tune label-mates seems dated. “Is The Herbaliser still going?” he asks jokingly when I mention them, before telling me how he used to play their tunes way back in 1994, when he would memorize secret door codes for a tower block in Wandsworth for his slots on pirate station Heart FM.
Swinscoe studied fine art in Cardiff and was fascinated by conceptual art of the sixties and seventies. It is strange that the founder of such a ‘serious’ band have no musical training whatsoever, and Swinscoe seems at pains to assert his musical pedigree throughout our chat. In his faint Scottish accent he articulates his band’s journey across music, film and image with the assurance of the art student, never lapsing into humour; but in a way this doesn’t matter, his expressions are so elegant, so felt.
His latest project, providing the score to Disney’s Crimson Wing [a documentary about flamingos in Tanzania] has been fraught: he tells me of “bending over” for the exacting studio as he wrote and re-wrote music for the film over a nine month period. “I think the score was to a degree successful and in other ways it was unsuccessful – it was very tough writing the music. At certain times I would say to myself: I’m not doing any film after this.” The score was crowned with a much-hyped boutique performance at the Union Chapel in Angel this autumn, for which the film was cut to make it “more us and less [adds witheringly] Disney.”
Swinscoe puts great store in the relationship between music and image – he packed in his slot in the Wandsworth council block to start a night called Loop, where DJs were invited to mix live scores to feature films projected on the wall of a church; soon people like Kieran Hebden from Four Tet were contributing and Swinscoe felt he could push the idea further.
“People said to me after I graduated [from Cardiff] – ‘Are you not going to do any photography, or painting or sculpture any more?’ I said to them that music is one of the arts, and the ideas can be directly translated from a painting to music, or from photography to music, or from film to music especially.” Swinscoe names soundtrack legends like Bernard Herrmann [Hitchcock] and Quincy Jones as inspirations, adding: “House music is also quite influential, in the way that you can build on repetition to create tension and release, using certain clusters of notes like Herrmann to create that tension.”
All this soundtrack / orchestral chat is quite worrying for a fan of their Roots Manuva-featuring ‘All Things to All Men’-type tracks, and it’s a relief to hear that Swinscoe hasn’t altogether relinquished his Roland: we hear how he played around with the recording of his seminal ‘Breathe’ track [from the Ma Fleur album] to get that distinct wave-crescendo effect – setting up the drums in one room and the mike down the corridor.
The irony in that anecdote is that Swinscoe intended Ma Fleur to be a ‘beatless’ album, to focus on the idea of song. “At the time I was listening to Nina Simone and Billie Holiday – for me it was a need to concentrate on song, to focus on it as a concept. I was trying to disregard the beat being a part of contemporary music. If you think, over the last few decades rhythm has defined music – from funk and disco, house, hip hop – drum and bass with the early amen break. The rhythm has come over harmony. With Ma Fleur I wanted to strip the music right back.”
Even with this overtly studio album the Cinematics could not resist making their work a kind of score; the album is loosely based on a screenplay written by an advertising art director friend of Swinscoe’s. Surprisingly given his experience with Crimson Wing, Swinscoe still relishes the constrictions of a screenplay: “With a screenplay it becomes something objective. Rather than being a subjective experience, it is all based on a script. In a way it takes you out of the selfishness of yourself. I think writing music to film and music of its own accord are whole different worlds, different languages or palettes, that I like to keep separate – although they are the same medium – which is quite a bizarre thing.”
My first memory of the Cinematics was the song Breathe, played very late on a terrace in the Argentine pampa. Remembering Fontella Bass’s voice as it swam out to the midges and the velvet green night, Swinscoe’s aim “to create as wide a scope as possible so people can create their own meanings” hit its mark. He had fooled me; just like countless other people in countless other nights, into thinking that song belonged there.
For a different, Q & A version of the same interview, visit the Spoonfed website here:
http://www.spoonfed.co.uk/spooners/miguel82-6247/the-cinematic-orchestra-interview-1627/
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