Footprints in Snow

Ci sono band importanti nella nostra vita. cambiano di periodo in periodo. si alternano nella nostra infinita playlist come le stagioni che passano.
alcuni nomi pero' restano sempre li, appena dietro le novità del momento. e quando si vanno a recuperare quegli ascolti si riapre un mondo di passione e ricordi. ci sono davvero gruppi piacevoli e gruppi importanti. non tanto per la storia della musica mondiale, ma soprattutto per la nostra di storia. che e' la piu' importante e preziosa. la nostra storia di appassionati di musica.
trovo che gli hood siano il gruppo. hanno tutto dentro i loro dischi. dalle copertine, dalle edizioni fatte mano con le fotografie appiccicate, alle uscite su etichette sempre molto valide. vivono con assoluta normalità il fatto essere compagni di etichetta dei franz ferdinand e di autoprodursi qualche cd alle volte.
i loro live al limite della vita di un gruppo. l'evoluzione continua del suono. la sfida all'hip hop, al post rock, all'ambient, alle avanguardie minimaliste, alla poesia acustica d'albione, alle derive pop di casa neo zelandese/flyn nun, all'elettronica bristoliana ma anche urbana dell'inghilterra, ad alcuni riferimenti sonori dell'inghilterra oscurata dal grunge(disco inferno, a.r.kane, bark psychosis, talk talk)...tutto questo compresso in dischi unici ed uno stile sempre riconoscibile.
da qualche tempo gli hood sono fermi. forse stanno immaginando un nuovo futuro, forse devono scomparire per tornare senza pressione di alcun tipo. c'è chi purtroppo e' invisibile e lotta per la luce. c'e' chi una sua luce la coltiva stretta nell'essere invisibile e preferisce il suono alla sveltina dell'hype moderno.
gli hood, un grande gruppo. ma oggi c'è dell'altro, che non e' solo cosa di oggi, dato che gli hood hanno sempre coltivato esperienze parallele e si sono fatti accompagnare da musicisti che poi se ne andavano per portare avanti altri progetti(pensate a remote viewer, o matt elliot/third eye foundation..). il 2007 ha visto separarsi nelle uscite discografiche il cuore del gruppo, i fratelli Adams: chirs alle prese un avant pop elettronico e dubboso su anticon, mentre richard torna con un sette pollici timididissimo a nome The Declining Winter.
è quest'ultimo a lasciare traccia profonda nei miei ascolti: la materia musicale e' quella affrontata dagli hood, qui a rifare una versione meno dolorosa delle visoni post-folk di "rustic houses, forlorn valleys" o il pop side di "the cycle of days and season". uno spledido 7" con due sole canzoni. tutti materiali usati sono riciclati ed e' l'unica cosa di cui si parla nelle note del disco. di una consapevolezza ambientale e quindi politica dell'affrontare al musica. anche perche' questo e' un disco che fa bene all'ecologia degli ascolti. ad ha un titolo stupendo che stride con la sua realta' sonora "the future sound of hip hop parts 1 and 2". tutto handmade le prima copie arrivavano a casa vostra con un cdr 3" contenete quattro remix fatti da amici. vale la pena di ricordare solamente quello di remote viewer, ma l'idea di pubblicare due tracks e la necessita' di avere gia' le versioni remixate parlano molto bene dell'attidune della gang hood che ha sempre visto la rilettura elettronica come un elemento per andare oltre nell'ascolto dei propri pezzi.
le uscite di quest'anno mettono quindi un po' di chiarezza sul peso dei due fratelli nell'essenza del suono hood. questo e' un problema per fanatici lo so. ma so anche che e' un problema vostro come ascoltatori di musica se passate oltre queste esperienze per stare addietro ai titoli delle webzine.

qui a seguito un'intervista a richard adams ovvero The Declining Winter :

1-so here we have some different projects out from the hood gang. garet, your brother and you. after having listened to your 7", my impression is that you gave us the music that preserve most of the great quality of hood sound. the drum style, the violin, the mighty bass line(uh..maybe it's the bass style that i really love in all of your music... it's unique in some way)...and the impression of ghostly pastoral melodies.
so what move you on make a new project, a solo project? and do the past experiences have lot of influence on you?

I suppose with this project I’ve just gone back to what I think I’m good at and the kind of music I really enjoy. The last stuff we did with hood we were trying to move the sound along and at times I wasn’t really able to contribute the type of parts I would have liked because it didn’t fit in with the music. At the moment I’m happier working on this project. The problem with hood is that we place huge expectations on ourselves and need to create music that is beyond what we have done before. With this I’m just making the kind of music I really like without any concern for commercial considerations. Its funny you should mention the bass – I have been having a lot of problems adding bass to a lot of these tracks -its like that was one of my primary roles with hood and now i'm unable to do it. i've been playing more guitar i suppose and have just been happy creating anything and not worrying too much about what people may think.



2 your first release is a 7" inch. nice handmade stuff. everything based on recycled materials. why that choice? i kow, that question could be stupid...couse actually everybody seems to be interested in climatic change...but....i wanna know more about what move a musician to make that kind of release.... and not a digital one's that maybe it's more "ecological"(but also it's pollution in a cultural ways...in my opinion)....

at first I was just going to put the songs up on the internet but in some ways that didn’t seem real. I wanted to create a product that people could look at & take home and play on their record players. It means a lot more to me to do it that way and I think it does mean more to people aswell. Online stuff and downloads are just so disposable - it doesn’t really exist. So I was torn between doing something real and my concerns with the environmental damage. Therefore I came up with the idea of doing a record using recycled materials to assuage my guilt of the environmental damage it would cause.


3 your band hood, used to be very interested in studio making of the record and not always be into live set... what about declining winter?

I’m trying to get a live set together over the next couple of months. At least to practice the songs with other people and having fun doing that rather than me just sat alone in the studio. The aim to start with is just to do a couple of low key gigs to see if I enjoy it or not. Playing live with hood was always so difficult because we are not fantastic musicians and so we felt we could never recreate the sound we made in the studio. We felt we couldn’t live up to peoples expectations and so it stressed us out a lot. In hindsight I had some great fun touring with hood but there was also tensions within the band that made everything difficult. I would like to do a tour with the declining winter primarily in order to travel and also to have fun touring with people even if the music may not be anywhere near the standard of the stuff I was involved in with hood.


4- i always have that impression when i listen to your music: white people in love with dub.... and make some of the only kidn of white dub music....in the sense...it's really dub..but without the feeling of been black music(nothing related on racism...i'm just talking about sound...)... what about?

my brother chris is the dub-head and he turns me onto a lot of stuff in this genre. I guess it filters through. I’m no expert on the real stuff. I tend to listen to bands who have been influenced by dub, moonshake, can, PIL, pylon, disco inferno, joy division. It seems to resonate through. I’m a sucker for a good, simple meaty bassline


5- i'm not going to ask about hood future...couse i'm gonna asking about your next step with this project.... live...recordings...or what?

the next step with this project is to finish an album length recording which is provisionally titled ‘goodbye minnesota’ . I’m now happy with the tracklist but I need to do a bit of work on post production and mastering. Again its going to be a low key project but hopefully with enough distribution so that people can get hold of it. As I said earlier I’m trying to get a group of musicians together to reproduce it live but that’s in its embryonic stages. i've recorded more music that i haven't mixed yet. once i've mixed and released everything i'm going to record stuff - maybe live to 2 track analog tape!


6- than, you live in england... a place where music have a strong economic role... but that's not a side i wanna talk you with....i like you say me: what about the impact of the internet in the relation between musicians? and also do you think that the possipilities to have "all the records and sounds you want for free" will makes a new generation of music experimentalist..or that possibilities makes only a lot of confusion and really quick relathion with records.....

I think the internet is good for people to get their music heard and good for people to rediscover old music that may have slipped under the radar. its also amazing to be able to communicate with like minded musicians all over the world. it makes my life seem more exciting than it really is. the problem i see is that music becomes disposable and you don't give records the same amount of time as you would if you had purchased a vinyl. good records mutate and grow and you are never going to get that if you are just downloading tracks or hearing them on myspace. it also gives people the excuse to put out really really bad music. if you are gonna spend 500 quid in releasing a record you are going to have to be sure that its good.


7- suggestion....what record we have to listen?...some from the present some from the past...( i always discover lot of artist from artist playlist..also the hood guys always are into good music)


i'm really into the new chessie record (due out next year sometime), the new robert wyatt just gets better and better, other ones i've liked recently have been many fingers, insect guide, phelan shepphard, deerhunter. theres probably lots more but i always forget!

8- a quick one. what about burial? i don't know...but there's something ...very subliminal....in my head...that says you have something in common...


yeah theres a kind of haunting sound there which reminds me of some of the stuff we did with hood. i think thats because we were listening to lots of drum and bass at the time and burial really is just updated drum and bass. some of his stuff is great (the remix of bloc party is astounding) but i think overall it has been over rated a bit - i'm sure the british rock press see it as safe dub step that they can sell to the masses. i think his new album is ruined by far far too many wailing garage vocal sounds. i'd buy an instrumental version (or one with half the samples removed) if they brought one out


9- what about the end of the new labour and the blair era? could a northern as gordon brown make any good for uk?


i think it will be better than blair because having a hollywood style bullshitter running the country had a knock down effect in that everything dumbed down even more. i think its better to have a dour, more serious politician in charge. that said some people do wonder why we have a scotsman running the country in that they do have their own parliament. as usual people forget their roots once they get into london and so recently when there was floods the country was in uproar when the south of england got flooded. a few weeks earlier some places in the north had terrible problems with floods but no-one really said anything or did much about it. thats the way it is. everything revolves around london and rich southerners. most northerners have a chip on their shoulder about this

10- what's you fav musical gear?

it might seem prosaic but at the moment its my acoustic guitar. all of a sudden i seem to write songs very easily with it and thats almost the most exciting bit for me the actual creation of new melodies. if a machine came out that would make my voice sound in tune (that doesn't sound like auto tune) that would be my favourite bit of equipment

link utili:
http://www.myspace.com/thedecliningwinter
http://www.myspace.com/brackenmusic
http://www.myspace.com/hooduk