New Warp signing The Hundred in The Hands almost fell into being. As members of punk collective The Boggs, their ideas started flowing and dance-floor classic Dressed in Dresden was born. Remixed by techno geeks and math-rockers alike, they are effortlessly scene-spanning New York hipsters. Perched on a back room sofa at Sheffield’s Tramlines festival we discuss fragile songs, old school disco, and avoiding rock 'n' roll.
Two giant eyes peering out from under a shaggy fringe, singer Eleanore Everdell is model pretty, with a hint of Charlotte Gainsbourg chic. Fixing me with a determined stare, she begins: “We met because I joined Jason’s old band, he was a mutual friend. After that we decided to work together”.
Jason Friedman’s old band was punk/afro-beat outfit The Boggs, named after the angry 1920s bluesman Dock Boggs. The band had a stellar line-up of guest members including Au Revoir Simone’s Heather D’Angelo, and Holy Fuck’s Matt Schultz. Live, Friedman is a fiercely energetic guitar player, deftly twisting complicated patterns into danceable hooks. In person, he is a man of few words, carefully studying his responses with sets of weights and measures. He adds: “I started when I was about 14 playing guitar. I had kind of avoided rock 'n' roll up ‘til then, out of rebellion. My parents, they really liked rock 'n' roll”.
The meeting of the two minds started on The Boggs' final tour, comparing music and sharing a love of early ska, dub, roots, hip-hop, soul, classic disco, house, and a heavy dose of post-punk. These influences collide on the jumbling Blondie-meets-Caribbean fiesta of Tom Tom and the recent Foal remixed electro smash of Pigeons.
Delving deeper, Eleanore explains the band name: “We found it in a book, 'Crazy Horse', about battles between Native Americans and the forces in the colonies”.Jason adds: “The name just popped out at us. It was a bit of Native American history, a bit of secret history. We didn’t spend all that long thinking about it, the first thing that really clicked would be it”.
Far more considered then, is their approach to songwriting. On their MySpace, I stumbled across this: “We’re using pop-forms and structures because we like songs; Kinks songs, Beatles songs, Michael Jackson songs; absorbing the lessons of the pop classics, folding the present into the past toward the future to create dub histories; avant-pop split between the austere and feverish.”
I put it to Jason that he seems very directed in how he approaches his music. He eyes me curiously, then laughs: “Yeah we wrote a treatise on it, we had the whole formula mapped out”. He adds: “No, we just read a lot of stuff and we tried to figure out what would fit into that. There’s a lot of back and forth and just, writing. We like pop songs but not the freshest, latest pop songs, more like pop meaning like Phil Spector, or The Marvelettes”.
Eleanore adds: “The tradition of pop songs, not, like, Christina Aguilera”.
After the release of Dressed in Dresden, through taste-making record shop Pure Groove, they were quickly snaffled by Warp. Currently home to artists as diverse as Aphex Twin, Hudson Mohawke and Grizzly Bear, how do they feel they fit alongside their new label mates? Jason starts: “It’s a little intimidating”. Eleanore adds: “When they signed us we looked at the other acts and they were all insanely good. Stylistically, I don’t think we’re really like any of them, but then they’re not really like each other either. I kind of like that”.
We move on to the creative video making legacy of Warp, including classics like Windowlicker. The Hundred in the Hands video for the spine-chilling Ghosts features a house trashing sequence, from the French film 'L'eau Froide' ('Cold Water'), which seems almost tailor made for the song.
Swiftly seguing from the cinema to the discotheque, we are back to DFA artist Jacques Renault’s popular remix, Undressed in Dresden. Jason explains its origins, but not before pausing to examine his horribly broken thumbnail, for which Eleanore promptly tells him off. “I’m just more intrigued to see what’s going to happen”. He continues: “Jacques is an old friend of mine, we always talked about working together, so after we made Dressed in Dresden it seemed like the right time”. Eleanore adds: “It’s really logical because it’s kind of his kind of bread and butter, old disco”. Jason interrupts: “After we did Undressed we started pretty much going over to his house every week and just pushing tracks along. The EP is stuff that we did over the course of a month and a half or so”.
So are there any plans in the works do anything else with him? Jason smiles and puts on his broadest Brooklyn accent: “He’s in the family”.
Following on from May's 'This Desert' EP, they have a self-titled album out on September 20th, and they’ve also worked on remixes for fellow New Yorkers, Bear In Heaven. Jason adds: “They were a group of guys who’ve been in New York forever and I’d no idea they made music until we saw them playing with The Rapture at a secret show.”
Along with talented neighbours like Holy Ghost and Blondes, they enjoy listening to the understated gloom of Sharon Van Etten. Eleanore says: “She’s a singer-songwriter and so beautiful. I feel like in England when you say “miserable” it means sad. It’s not sad, it’s just very delicate, fragile”.
They have a big round of festivals coming up, including Green Man, The Big Chill, La Route Du Rock, and Lowlands, with plans to return to the UK in November. Their Tramlines show was met by a packed crowd, all curious to see if the hype was deserved. Never known to mince their words, I turned to friends for their assessment. One promptly stalked off, pronouncing it “bloody awful”, the other bemoaned the lack of a real drum kit. The crowd as a whole gradually thawed out, but the road ahead is not an easy one. With a determined man like Jason Friedman at the helm, rest assured any kinks will be ironed when they next return, but beneath his rigid exterior is a joyful soul waiting to get out. As the man himself says, this is “party music, physical music, romantic music”.