Music

Drum Eyes reinvents the Wall of Sound

John Rogers | Saturday 15 May, 2010 15:49

Brighton-based collective Drum Eyes have been a long time in their convoluted making. Formed in 2007, even Osaka-born band mainstay Shige Ishihara has trouble keeping count of his band-mates. “We’ve changed members quite a few times,” he explains. “At the moment we have eight…”

“We do?” interjects keyboardist Kathy Alberici. “Seven, maybe seven,” laughs Ishihara. “Bass, guitar, two drums, one keyboard, violin, and one guy doing sound with dub effecting in live time.”

The result is a monolithic live band, propelled forwards by the two drummers with their twin kits staring out from the front of the stage. Dark, jagged jazz is pushed through unravelling structures; pulsing krautrock tumbles with climactic improvisation. Keyboards and guitar coil around throbbing bass, underscored by celebratory, evolving rhythm. But while Ishigura wears the band’s krautrock influence on his sleeve, he wants Drum Eyes to stay free from pigeonholing. “I don’t like to be categorized,” he says. “I don’t want to make music for scenes. I’d like to make music as music.”

And this he does, with a flourish. Prolific and varied in his output, Ishigura currently works under four different monikers. “I do Scotch Egg and I have another band called Devilman, it’s more heavy dub-influenced two-piece project. And I’m also in Seefeel.”

It was as DJ Scotch Egg that Ishigura first enjoyed cult success, playing punishing comedic breakcore constructed from gabba, happy hardcore, distorted noise and Gameboy samples. His solo live shows often include him pelting a rabid moshpit with scotch eggs and standing static for long periods, occasionally looking at the chaos in front of him and nodding approvingly. DJ Scotch Egg is almost anti-musical, a barrage of sounds that is overwhelming at the same time as being faintly ridiculous.
Drum Eyes retain some of this mischievous energy, whilst opening out into a sprawling, multifaceted proposition – a leap in style, but a necessary one for Shige.
“When I was only doing Scotch Egg I always wanted to a lot of different kinds of music,” he explains. “All the guys in Drum Eyes are actually my good friends. We were just kind of jamming and making music together and it encouraged me to do more. I love all different kinds of music so it was great for me to have the opportunity to do something like this.”

Shige isn’t the only one who’s moonlighting. Drummer e-da is also in Seefeel and is a former member of Japanese psychedelic noise legends Boredoms. Second drummer Tom also plays with I’m Being Good, Sloath and Blue House. And the list continues – Drum Eyes personnel have also featured in a range of bands from Moon Rescue to Powerup!!! to Phil Collins 3. The potential of all these musicians coming together in such a fashion goes some way to explaining the exhilarating excitement of the project. Their free-form style of playing has evolved alongside the membership, and they’ve started writing collectively as a result. “In the beginning I was writing all the songs, and the band would play whatever they want on top of it,” says Shige. “Now we just jam. Now that the members of Drum Eyes are fixed, everyone can contribute something good on the songs, so we can write the songs together for the next album. It’s changing. Now all Drum Eyes people are contributing. It’s more exciting now.”

The album took time to germinate. “It’s been a long process from early days of Drum Eyes to actually releasing the album,” says Alberici. “It was really important to draw a line as say, ‘okay, it’s finished now’, especially because it was a varied lineup for such a long time. Now the band is in a different place, and we’re writing in a new way. We needed to move on to the new stuff.“

Perhaps surprisingly, Gira Gira was recorded track by track in many different spaces, rather than as a performance. “I produced it myself, but with help from friends.” says Shige. “John Hannon from the No Recordings studio helped us record some drums and guitars and stuff. Also we recorded with Sam Dook from Go! Team, he had us record in his house, and Tim Wilton who engineers for the band, he recorded us in the practice studio. So we did it with friends.”

The album will come out via esteemed London promoter and label Upset The Rhythm in May. “Chris from Upset The Rhythm is a friend of mine,” smiles Shige. “He asked us almost three years ago to do something. They put on lots of cool stuff in London, so we said yes.”

There’s a strong element of community around Drum Eyes. It seems important to Shige that things happen naturally, both on and off the stage. “Organic is always our point – this is now more about connection between musicians, what they can contribute, communication between musicians.”

Tellingly, the energy between the musicians crackles when Drum Eyes play live. The players spontaneously combine, reaching natural cooperative decisions and segueing between sections of the performance intuitively. “There’s definitely whole section of what we do that’s based around feeling,” explains Alberici. “We’ll feel when the climax is coming and when we feel it it’ll move onto the next part, and it’s communication between everybody that creates when that movement happens.”
Shige is working on taking Drum Eyes out into Europe and over to Japan in the near future. The logistics of shifting the band and their menagerie of instruments must be dizzying, but when a bands makes such a living, visceral, thunderous sound, the support and acclaim they need to thrive must follow.

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