the march afternoons: the last album review / interview

album review and interview

the march afternoons

I hope you don’t get anyone else

(Marketstall Recordings)

Released 21 Sept 2024

 DL 

This is the march afternoons final album. As fortold in the remarkable ‘there is too much music… Game Over’ interview. The previous album mostly had lyrics and singing.  This one doesn’t.  There is a warning on the cover: this is an album of instrumental music. non-specific non-generic, hard to pigeonhole music.  Ged Babey asked the Chicken-Licken of Underground Indie for assistance reviewing his own last release. 

When a journalist and an artist hit it off. the reviews and interviews become collaborations. This has happened with Mark Estall and I.  We are both very cynical, hugely talented, modest and sick to death of the music business in the post-post modern, post-truth, modern world. We take the art/music too seriously, but can actively laugh at ourselves, each other and into the void that that has a gravitational pull on our mental health.

(Ged Babey) Y’know in music magazines they have For Fans Of (FFO) as a guide? Well, at a rough guess I would say, FFO ‘Ethno-Analogue-Techno’…

(Mark Estall)  Hahaha! “Ethno”?  Because I put bongos in one of the tracks?

No, There is some kind of woodwind flute and a sample that made me think of Sanctus (from If…?) which was a Congolese choir. And you worked with one of Trans-Global Underground I seem to remember…..

Oh gosh, I didn’t upset you with that did I? I was just pulling your leg. The flute thing is just a cheap software synth patch that I liked because for some reason – the attack of the notes couldn’t keep up with the speed of the phrase, so it started to sound like a person who was struggling for breath and dropping notes from the relentless repetition of the phrase! An accidental bit of computer randomness that I liked for its failure to do what it’s meant to.

And yes of course, Hamilton Lee, great drummer! I’ve not seen him for ages, he’s not on this record. Or perhaps only as an unconscious influence.

Oh, and that “sample” too – that’s just me dancing around and singing vowel sounds so I didn’t have to write any words!  You’re not the first person to ask me about where the “sample” is from, it’s very amusing and pleasing to me to have hoodwinked a few proper music people with that!

I’m quite easy to hood-wink. As I was saying, FFO ‘Ethno-Analogue-Techno’… maybe Mogwai, a touch of Eric Satie and old-school experimentalists This Heat. How accurate is that?

I love Mogwai, I love Satie and they’re both in there somewhere. I’ve never heard of This Heat but I’ll look them up.

If I was gonna do a FFO list it’d be: Faust, Neu, The Beta Band, Mu-ziq, Andrew Weatherall, Brian Eno (Here Come the Warm Jets / Another Green World era), Broken Social Scene, Squarepusher.

I’m feeling generous today so you can also have five records which help to make sense of where this mess of mine came from:

The KLF – Chill Out (now renamed “Come Down Dawn” on Sp*tify for some reason)
Floatation Toy Warning – Bluffer’s Guide to the Flight Deck
Mu-ziq – Bluff Limbo
Julian Cope – Jehovakill
Faust – The Faust Tapes

I haven’t heard any of ’em, which confirms that this particular march afternoons album is me out of my ‘comfort zone’.  But I do like the way the tracks build – repetition, yet constantly changing …. but they seem to end up disorientating and manic. Is this, again, a reflection of what it is like ‘living in your head’?

To a degree. And especially as it’s wordless – you’re in a totally different field of expression when you take words away from music. It becomes much more about mood and how sound relates to emotion, than meaning. Show, don’t tell, you know? So yeah, as a personal work of art this record is the most honest and unfiltered musical expression and presentation of my own experience of myself that I could make. Which sounds terribly wanky and self-indulgent, but all art is narcissism, right?

No, not really.  Isn’t it self-expression and aiming for the communal? 

Humans talking to other humans about how special it is to be human, and how special they are for being able to express it in such a special way? Ask a polar bear what it thinks of Rothko.

I’m half joking, of course. I do actually think Art can reveal the best of humanity, and be a real agent for positive change, personally and collectively and politically. But there’s a tremendous amount of bullshit done in its name too. And I’m sure plenty of people who read this will point that finger right back at me too, and fair enough, I can’t argue with that 🙂

It’s taken me several listens, a bit of effort, but the album does sound pretty special to me.  Given that I don’t normally listen to music from a similar kitchen. 

This is the nearest I’ve got to making a record that really sounds like me, not me restructured and reordered and tidied up and viewed through a prism of what one is supposed to do when making a pop song. And so, yeah, my mental illness is in there too. And that’s gonna mean that a lot of what’s there is messy, and that there’s gonna be some difficult bits. And the brave thing in music is the same in life – don’t shy away from them, look at them honestly, give them space, try to work through them so you can get to see/hear what’s on the other side.

With that nightmare section in It’s the algorithm, stupid, for instance. I tried to adorn that with all kinds of extra layers – big Metal Guru style Oooohs and Aaaahs and handclaps and all sorts to try and take the edge off its brutality.

I played it to my friend Peter Doolan (who has a brilliant record coming out soon, by the way) and he asked for a copy without the extra bits, he just said it’s better like that, and he was right. You can’t dress that shit up and still be honest about it, so make your choice.

Anyway, away from all that psychological stuff, a slightly more mundane explanation for why this record came out like it did: after working on the march afternoons aren’t real I was just really sick of song as a format for musical expression.

All those rules, all those words, all that structure. Intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, double chorus, outro. Why why why must it be like this? Boring! Predictable! It’s a straightjacket, maaan!

Obviously in my studio work I have to pay full respect to that when I’m working with other people – most who come have chosen song as their medium, they’re there to record songs. And of course I’d never do anything that interferes with someone else’s art, that goes against what they want it to be.

But when I found myself with the time and creative energy to do my own thing, the *last* thing I wanted to do was write a song. I was much more interested in tearing down the walls and seeing how all the stuff inside spilled out. And it turns out that was quite easy. There were only two props to remove – the words (if there’s nobody singing you can’t really call it a song) and the structure (if there’s no verses or choruses you can’t really call it a song either) – and then suddenly the whole thing collapsed into a glorious boundless mess that I could get lost in, go anywhere, do anything, and I kind of just swam with the currents that were released.

So yeah, “disorientating” … I did a big smile when you said that. If you boil it right down *that* is the point of this record. Sonically, it’s made of the same stuff as all the other march afternoons records – guitars and basses and drums and pianos and synths – but the shapes are different to the ones you’re used to, the trajectories are different, the ways in which the elements interact are different. The journey is different to the one that songs normally take you on. There’s lots of repetition but the journey is linear – where it ends is a very different place to where it begins. The repetition kind of hypnotises and soothes, but the formlessness as it unfolds makes the whole thing unpredictable, you never know what’s coming next. And for me that’s the most exciting thing you can do making music – surprise people (in the good way, not just shitty jump scare stuff!). Especially if you can still do it with really catchy hooks and grooves and little ear worm melodies that’ll follow you around for days in your head, not just a cloud of ambience or a clatter of atonal dissonance (though there are bits of both along the way). I’m still a pop kid, you know? There isn’t much in life better than an irresistible melody. I just stuck them in a different landscape this time.

Did you ‘strive’ for originality? Making music which hasn’t been made before?

Absolutely yes, isn’t that always the aim for every artist?  When people come to record with me one of the sayings I repeat very often as we’re working is an encouragement for them to “be as much you as you can be”.

I was also thinking a lot about AI, and how it’ll soon be the end of us as the dominant intelligent species on this planet, you know? Light stuff like that. I decided that an artist’s response to this inevitability should be to start making stuff that AI can’t make (resistance!), and something profoundly human. And I thought well, songs have all these rules and recognisable structures and it’s probably really easy to get intelligent computers to churn them out to order, so let’s get about making something else much more instinctive that’s harder to break down into rules and patterns, and so I began.

Then I had this very conversation with Sam Walton from Dog Unit and he told me AI is actually already pretty good at doing kind of formless vaguely nice sounding ambient stuff, but by then I had It’s the algorithm, stupid all recorded and mixed, so I just ploughed on.

We will all be replaced by AI eventually…. I know it seems unlikely, but should you ever make another record, you have to call it Ask a polar bear what it thinks of Rothko.

Haha I’ll add it to the list of all the unused band and record names I’ll never get round to.

Fin

(Ged) It took me a while to appreciate I hope you don’t get anyone else but the elements of dub and Delta 5 type basslines kept my interest.  The full on ‘nightmare’  section in the 18 minute it’s the algorithm stupid (a hint of MBV and ‘Dirge’ by Death In Vegas) and the breakneck end of one day there’ll be no-one left to look back on this and laugh appealed, whilst the ethno-techno and circular piano ripples gradually got their hooks in me.

I really don’t know if it’s a ‘great work’ in terms the wider world of music, it might be… But it’s an important piece of work for the artist. His final gift to us all.

Mark Estall is not making any more music due to his fibromyalgia and mental health as explained in the previous interview. He currently still runs Marketstall Recordings Studio ‘book now’. 

All of the march afternoons digital back catalogue is available on Bandcamp at Name Your Own Price.

Buy I hope you don’t get anyone else from Bandcamp

All words Ged Babey

Previous march afternoons coverage

first release
second release
cover version single
interview
first album