Vibracathedral Orchestra - Mothing CDr (1998)

The first in a series of post of (mostly early) VCO stuff. Rather than try and wax eloquent on the virtues of the VCO sound-world, I'll excerpt reviews and interviews that may explain and inform your listening experience.

Here's an excerpt from an interview with Mick Flowers from 2008. Read the full thing here.

MC: Your music has been at times compared with Indian ragas. Do have any particular fascination with Indian Classical? Do you see your own sounds as generating from or seeking to reach for the same point?

MF: Hmm...Well I suppose there's a similarity between what I play and Indian ragas insofar as I use an electronic tampura box, there are no chord changes etc. I do listen to Indian classical and folk music but no way would I say what I do is anything near the level of Indian classical music (more on the folk music side of things) I suppose I'm just jamming my own versions of ragas, hopefully there's a similar purity there although a more naive/ham-fisted one in the music I play. When I was a teenager we used to listen to the Velvet Undergound, Indian classical, flute music of Papau New Guinea, primitive blues. I guess all the music I make is vaguely informed by that period. The VU have the drone going on, I suppose that comes from John Cale and his time playing with the Theatre of Eternal Music - I'm not sure whether Lamonte Young studied with Pandit Pran Nath before or after John Cale's time though, maybe there's a connection there.

MC: Does Vibracathedral Orchestra have a formula for creating music or does each project come together in a completely different way?

MF: The VCO is one long project I suppose, we play on a regular basis and record everything we do and we go through the tapes every once in a while and edit. Maybe that's why each release sounds a little different, each is a document of a particular period made unique by the instruments we used at that time etc. The instruments have changed a little over the years. We use fewer acoustic instruments and more amplified instruments and electronics. Things are quiet at the moment for VCO. I think we're going to change our MO in the next few months, try different ways of working. At the end of last year and the beginning of this year we only really played shows, some were big festivals in Europe. I'd like to go back to playing for ourselves for a while and exploring new ways of recording, getting more in touch with the spirit of the music. I've been going through our recordings over the past couple of months, there's some exciting stuff in the vaults and we'll have a few new releases out there pretty soon. We'd love to come to the states again but it's hard arranging long overseas trips with everyone's commitments outside the band.

Cheers,

GP.