Recording
After touring wrapped up for their previous album Whorl, the duo took a short hiatus in 2015. James Ford produced albums for Foals, Mumford & Sons, Florence & The Machine, The Last Shadow Puppets and Depeche Mode, while Jas Shaw built a new studio at his home in Kent and released a series of solo EPs born out of experiments in the studio. Shaw also continued DJing, "playing with more austere techno artists than we were with before". [1]
Foals are a rock band from Oxford, England formed in 2005, consisting of lead vocalist and lead guitarist Yannis Philippakis, drummer and percussionist Jack Bevan, rhythm guitarist Jimmy Smith, and keyboardist Edwin Congreave.
Mumford & Sons are a British band formed in 2007. The band consists of Marcus Mumford, Ben Lovett, Winston Marshall and Ted Dwane.
The Last Shadow Puppets are an English supergroup consisting of Alex Turner, Miles Kane, James Ford, and Zach Dawes. They are joined live by Loren Humphrey and Tyler Parkford. The band released their debut album The Age of the Understatement in 2008. Following a lengthy hiatus, they returned, releasing second album Everything You've Come to Expect in 2016.
Ford and Shaw reconvened in early 2016 to work on new material, and announced a series of singles on their Delicacies label soon after. Initially the plan was to release four club-focused singles, totalling eight new tracks, though this was slightly revised following the completion of the album. Unlike previous Delicacies singles, the new material sees the band abandoning the tradition of naming their traditional techno tracks after exotic cuisine, "for the simple reason that we've pretty much run out of weird and wonderful food stuffs to steal names from. Instead, a semi-random automated process has been used to create the track names". [2] In an interview with Lauren Laverne, the duo said they picked track titles primarily on how much they made them laugh, a continuation of lighthearted humour that has been a part of their act from the beginning. Laverne compared their naming process to William S. Burroughs' cut-up technique. [3]
Lauren Cecilia Fisher, known professionally as Lauren Laverne, is an English radio DJ, model, television presenter, author, singer and comedian.
William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. Burroughs was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author whose influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films. He was also briefly known by the pen name William Lee. Burroughs created and exhibited thousands of paintings and other visual art works, including his celebrated 'Gunshot Paintings'.
The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs, and has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.
The band set out on a DJ tour to support the new singles. In September, Shaw hinted at a new album during an appearance on George FitzGerald's BBC Radio 1 show, while premiering the Lena Willikens remix of "Far Away From A Distance". Soon after the band posted an hour-long mix on their Soundcloud account made up of tracks they were playing during their summer tour, which included four new SMD tracks. [4] A week later they announced their fifth album, Welcome To Sideways. The nine-track album, like Delicacies from 2010, comes with a bonus mixed version which includes extra tracks and remixes.
BBC Radio 1 is one of the BBC's two flagship radio stations, specialising in modern popular music and current chart hits throughout the day. Radio 1 provides alternative genres after 7 pm, including electronica, dance, hip hop, rock and indie. The choice of music and presenting style is entirely that of programme hosts, however those who present in the daytime have to rotate a number of songs a specific number of times per week. It was launched in 1967 to meet the demand for music generated by pirate radio stations, when the average age of the UK population was 27. The BBC claim that they target the 15–29 age group, and the average age of its UK audience since 2009 is 30. BBC Radio 1 started 24-hour broadcasting on 1 May 1991.
Delicacies is a compilation album by British electronic band Simian Mobile Disco. It was released on the iTunes Store on 23 November 2010, and released in physical form on 29 November 2010. It is a collection of tracks inspired and named for various unusual foods the band have sampled while touring the world, hence the name.
All the tracks were created with the club in mind, in contrast to the experimental style found on Whorl. Ford explained the concept and title in a statement: "We realize that from an outsider point of view, it can seem like we change quite radically with every album we do but from our point of view it always feels like a smooth transition. Hopefully people who have stuck with us this long, and appreciate the fact that we aren’t trying to repeat ourselves with every album, will enjoy another slight turn sideways." [5]
Shaw further elaborated on the ideas behind the album in a career retrospective for THUMP: "It's club music. Right now, I feel it's really great how quite functional techno and noise––the kind of stuff I would have played in a bar in 2006 just to annoy people––seems to be this fruitful area of music that is really adventurous and is challenging the idea of what music can be. The appeal of all those noise guys is that, you don't go there because it's going to press all of your pleasure buttons, you go there because you get this hypnotic sensation from texture. It works at Berghain, but also at a church in London, or at the Jazz Cafe." [1]
Berghain is a nightclub in Berlin, Germany. It is named after its location near the border between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain in Berlin, and is a short walk from Berlin Ostbahnhof main line railway station. An American journalist described Berghain in 2007 as "quite possibly the current world capital of techno, much as E-Werk or Tresor were in their respective heydays".
Along with the nine tracks that make up the album, thus far four other tracks from the sessions have also been released. "Sky On The Floor" and "Soft Attack" were released as b-sides, "Laughing In The Face Of Block" was released as a non-album single in October, and "Balloon Takes A Holiday" was contributed to Fabric's #savefabric compilation. Edited versions of "Sky On The Floor", "Soft Attack" and "Laughing In The Face Of Block" appear on the album's mixed version.
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