Remember Remember: Commit To Memory

Nebulous seems the perfect adjective to describe Remember Remember. Cloud-like connotations sit perfectly with their ethereal sound, but it also aptly sums up a shifting line-up that snaps between an 11-piece string, brass and woodwind ensemble to a solitary guitarist armed with a loop pedal and a box of office stationery. “First and foremost it’s basically me,” states Graeme Ronald, the man in question. “I’m the only person who’s always been in Remember Remember, but it seems unfair to call it a solo project because the album was so collaborative.”

Ronald has previously played with Multiplies and The Royal We, however Remember Remember has been forming for some time, being his catch-all name for anything he did on his own at home on his computer. “I was initially put off performing it live because, to me, watching someone perform with a laptop is usually pretty boring. There aren’t many people that can make that kind of thing interesting,” he reasons. “Unless they dance!”

Deciding to take another route, Ronald became enraptured by loop stations, a guitar pedal that lets you, well, loop what you play in a live setting. “The songs mainly come from me having ideas and melodies in my head and the loop station is a brilliant song-writing tool for that,” he reasons. “As soon as you have an idea, you can put it down, loop it and then start to flesh it out with other ideas. For the first year, gigs were just me on my own, looping the guitar and complimenting it with other instruments.”

However, Ronald is keen to keep things ‘real’, particularly in the studio. “On the album I tried to avoid actually looping things as much as possible. It was more overdubs, so me and the other musicians were playing a riff as if we were looping it, but really we were just playing the same riff for like five minutes straight.”

He continues: “Producers are quite keen, especially these days with computers, to listen through a take for any slight trace of a mistake and then cut ‘n’ paste it out. I’m trying to work against that, trying to maintain the mistakes as long as they aren’t too awful. It’s good to keep that human feel to it. I don’t want people to mistake this for an electronic record.”

So how would Ronald describe his debut album? “It’s the most fundamental question,” he concedes. “A musician should really be able to describe what their music sounds like. One thing that’s getting banded around a bit is the ‘modern classical’ thing, which sounds really pretentious, but tags like ‘electronic’ and ‘instrumental’ are really quite vague. To describe music as instrumental is pretty stupid.”

'Modern classical’ on Mogwai’s Rock Action label? “My record is a bit of a departure in a lot of ways from what they’ve brought out before,” he admits. “The clue is in the name, but I’d like to think that I fit in well with them. I mean, even Mogwai have their more tender moments.”