I'm so excited to start off this series with one of my favourite musicians! Kiran Leonard. I don't wanna give you a wikipedia explanation of him and his life. But I must say he's one of the friendliest and most lovely musicians I've ever met. His taste in music often clashes with my own and I have to say I absolutely love that. Kiran's album Bowler Hat Soup is most certainly in my list of best albums of 2014.
1. When you were a child, what was your favourite song to sing to yourself? sing to myself? i'm not sure. but i remember driving to my grandma's house, which is in lancaster, about an hour away from where i grew up, and my mother made this b-52's mix cd we always listened to, so i probably used to sing that the most. when you think about it, the b-52's make a great children's band (once you take out all the songs about boning, of course). enthusiastic vocals, colourful textures, pleasant, upbeat songs. our favourites were 'rock lobster', 'dance this mess around', 'planet claire' and '6060-842'. nowadays i really like 'lava', 'private idaho' and 'party out of bounds' too. i still listen to them a lot. their lyrics still don't make a great deal of sense. i only recently found out what limburger is
2. Name 3 books that you have read in one sitting.i have a pretty shitty attention span (which is getting a little sturdier!), so to be honest with you i'm struggling to think of any books... like, NOVELS, that i've read in one sitting. i remember reading the 7th harry potter really fast when it came out though, when i would have been (...googles release date...) 11 years old. i finished that in a little over 24 hours i think. i probably finished the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy pretty fast, because that's more or less impossible to put down. probably under 24 hours for that one too. aaaaand... i submit 'animal farm' as a possible alternative, which i definitely read in under 24 hours when i was younger.
*somewhere midway through answering question four*... WAIT I JUST REMEMBERED... i read 'the old man and the sea' in one sitting, definitely. my choices are all so obvious :(. all really excellent books though. including the deathly hallows.
3. What's one album you could listen to on an infinite loop?taku sugimoto 'live in australia': https://www.
i don't think i'd wish listening to one album on an infinite loop on my worst enemy. first you have to make the absolute right choice and then can't go back, and if you do make the right choice it would spoil your favourite album! at least with sugimoto you can easily listen to other things over the top of it, it's just like listening on speakers where the cable's a bit frayed or something.
4.Do you find writing difficult? Lyrically or otherwise. very much so. obviously i've tried writing standalone prose and poetry like i suppose pretty much everyone has but i've never been very good at it. the wordy things i've written that i've been most satisfied with have always been lyrics, or maybe the odd essay. and i always write music first, then sorta wrangle syllables around to see if they fit in with the song, and then put words to those syllables. it's why a lot of the lyrics on 'bowler hat soup' are nonsensical, particularly the earlier tracks (the songs were more or less written in the same order they're in on the album). but i'm getting better at that now. only a couple of the songs on the next album are meaningless!
5. Your first foray into music was under the moniker Pend Orielle which through a very quick google search uncovered it's origin as a county in Washington State, and a lake in the northern Idaho panhandle. What compelled you to use this name? well i mean... pend oreille wasn't the first foray, but the earliest stuff i put out was electronic music, most of which i've now taken down because it wasn't very good. you can still find the best stuff on a compilation i put on the internet archive called 'a seed is a sovereign'. there was about 12 or 13 electronic albums put out under my own name, and then i put out a messy proggy-jazz album called 'the big fish' and then i decided to shift my focus to recording stuff like that and use pseudonyms for electronic stuff, just to keep things tidier. since then (i.e. from late 2010) i've drifted between various pseudonyms. there's a lot of crossover between the pseudonyms beach nurse, beat nurse and pend oreille, which came about in that order. beach nurse was a name i used to put out one ep on a friend's netlabel nearly 4 years ago now... just these 4 minimal pop songs i put together on ableton, whereas under 'beat nurse' i've put out one proper album of instrumental beats called 'escalator', and also the first deerhoof/death grips mash up album came out under the 'beat nurse' name. for the beach nurse ep particularly most of the track titles are geographical areas in or around the arctic circle, because i went through a phase where i was obsessed with northern scandinavia, alaska and the aleutian islands. i still am, a tiny bit, particularly the aleutians... big beautiful expanse that hardly makes it onto a 2d projection of the earth. and all those isolated towns, and abandoned stilt villages. in fact the whole pacific northwest looks unbelievable. the pend oreille ep came out a few months after 'escalator' and is basically a combination of re-mixed and re-mastered beat nurse tracks, one beach nurse song, a track from an unreleased drone record and one longer beat made specifically for the ep. and i guess i found out about the 'pend oreille' lake searching through wikipedia with the goal of finding a geographical area with a similar visual connotation with the pacific northwest. that influence is much more audible on the beach nurse ep, which is still online but it's not that great. i like that pend oreille ep though. i've started work on a pend oreille lp which is gonna be 8 tracks and 100% songs, no beats. it doesn't really sound anything like yla... it's like one sprawling, glitchy piece, with islands of songs in between these soundscapes. i've written and recorded about half the songs for it. there's an 11-minute track in the middle called 'consequences of whaling' which i'm really happy with. it's full of samples that i don't have the patience (or probably the legal standing) to clear, so i'm just going to put it out for free at some point next year. hopefully when i go home for christmas i'll be able to finish it.
2. Name 3 books that you have read in one sitting.i have a pretty shitty attention span (which is getting a little sturdier!), so to be honest with you i'm struggling to think of any books... like, NOVELS, that i've read in one sitting. i remember reading the 7th harry potter really fast when it came out though, when i would have been (...googles release date...) 11 years old. i finished that in a little over 24 hours i think. i probably finished the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy pretty fast, because that's more or less impossible to put down. probably under 24 hours for that one too. aaaaand... i submit 'animal farm' as a possible alternative, which i definitely read in under 24 hours when i was younger.
*somewhere midway through answering question four*... WAIT I JUST REMEMBERED... i read 'the old man and the sea' in one sitting, definitely. my choices are all so obvious :(. all really excellent books though. including the deathly hallows.
3. What's one album you could listen to on an infinite loop?taku sugimoto 'live in australia': https://www.
i don't think i'd wish listening to one album on an infinite loop on my worst enemy. first you have to make the absolute right choice and then can't go back, and if you do make the right choice it would spoil your favourite album! at least with sugimoto you can easily listen to other things over the top of it, it's just like listening on speakers where the cable's a bit frayed or something.
4.Do you find writing difficult? Lyrically or otherwise. very much so. obviously i've tried writing standalone prose and poetry like i suppose pretty much everyone has but i've never been very good at it. the wordy things i've written that i've been most satisfied with have always been lyrics, or maybe the odd essay. and i always write music first, then sorta wrangle syllables around to see if they fit in with the song, and then put words to those syllables. it's why a lot of the lyrics on 'bowler hat soup' are nonsensical, particularly the earlier tracks (the songs were more or less written in the same order they're in on the album). but i'm getting better at that now. only a couple of the songs on the next album are meaningless!
5. Your first foray into music was under the moniker Pend Orielle which through a very quick google search uncovered it's origin as a county in Washington State, and a lake in the northern Idaho panhandle. What compelled you to use this name? well i mean... pend oreille wasn't the first foray, but the earliest stuff i put out was electronic music, most of which i've now taken down because it wasn't very good. you can still find the best stuff on a compilation i put on the internet archive called 'a seed is a sovereign'. there was about 12 or 13 electronic albums put out under my own name, and then i put out a messy proggy-jazz album called 'the big fish' and then i decided to shift my focus to recording stuff like that and use pseudonyms for electronic stuff, just to keep things tidier. since then (i.e. from late 2010) i've drifted between various pseudonyms. there's a lot of crossover between the pseudonyms beach nurse, beat nurse and pend oreille, which came about in that order. beach nurse was a name i used to put out one ep on a friend's netlabel nearly 4 years ago now... just these 4 minimal pop songs i put together on ableton, whereas under 'beat nurse' i've put out one proper album of instrumental beats called 'escalator', and also the first deerhoof/death grips mash up album came out under the 'beat nurse' name. for the beach nurse ep particularly most of the track titles are geographical areas in or around the arctic circle, because i went through a phase where i was obsessed with northern scandinavia, alaska and the aleutian islands. i still am, a tiny bit, particularly the aleutians... big beautiful expanse that hardly makes it onto a 2d projection of the earth. and all those isolated towns, and abandoned stilt villages. in fact the whole pacific northwest looks unbelievable. the pend oreille ep came out a few months after 'escalator' and is basically a combination of re-mixed and re-mastered beat nurse tracks, one beach nurse song, a track from an unreleased drone record and one longer beat made specifically for the ep. and i guess i found out about the 'pend oreille' lake searching through wikipedia with the goal of finding a geographical area with a similar visual connotation with the pacific northwest. that influence is much more audible on the beach nurse ep, which is still online but it's not that great. i like that pend oreille ep though. i've started work on a pend oreille lp which is gonna be 8 tracks and 100% songs, no beats. it doesn't really sound anything like yla... it's like one sprawling, glitchy piece, with islands of songs in between these soundscapes. i've written and recorded about half the songs for it. there's an 11-minute track in the middle called 'consequences of whaling' which i'm really happy with. it's full of samples that i don't have the patience (or probably the legal standing) to clear, so i'm just going to put it out for free at some point next year. hopefully when i go home for christmas i'll be able to finish it.
