Surfing with the Alien

<b>Andrew Hung</b> and <b>Benjamin John Power</b> came from different worlds, but a shared love for experimentation brought them together as <b>Fuck Buttons</b> to make sweet sounds for the people of planet Earth. The duo check in on all things cosmic before beaming into The Arches.

Feature by Darren Carle | 02 Mar 2010

For anyone already familiar with the playfully abrasive sound of Fuck Buttons, it should come as little surprise to discover that the group’s two members, Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power, are as contrasting and exciting on paper as the nerve-shattering, soul-lifting music they create. Both men cut their musical teeth as hard-up art students in Bristol, but came from very different backgrounds. Power was heavily into punk, playing with various raucous guitar bands, whilst Hung pled allegiance to the techno scene. By chance their paths met when Hung needed music to score a short film he had made as part of his degree.

“Everything crosses over somehow,” states Power enigmatically on how they managed to bridge the creative gap which initially divided them. “I think it’s about our sensibilities being compatible,” embellishes Hung. “We tend to enjoy similar things when they happen regardless of what aesthetic it takes the form of.” And with Hung’s video project a successful showcase of the duo’s shared passion for experimentation, it wasn’t long before these two disparate young men collaborated on a more regular basis.

Playing live relentlessly as Fuck Buttons, they amassed a cult following which was quickly matched by critical acclaim for their debut album, 2008’s Street Horrrsing. A result of their increasing boredom with just creating abrasive noise music, Street Horrrsing introduced structure, rhythm and melody to create an album of interest to more than just hardcore noise obsessives. Using children’s toys as much as bleeding-edge synthesizers, it was an austere work of disturbing beauty.

Yet where they seemed to stretch their own template a little too far on Street Horrrsing, with the band appearing content under a self-imposed glass ceiling, its follow up – last October’s Tarot Sport – resolutely blew the roof off and injected Fuck Buttons with a shot of liquid nitrogen. “I guess Street Horrrsing became a document that we could refer to,” says Hung, looking back on their relatively grounded first effort. “We weren’t interested in repeating the same thing.”

“The creative surge was the drive to evolve,” says Power on the huge leap between records. “I’m sure a lot of bands are happy to ‘get’ their sound and be very comfortable with it, but that’s not what interests us. We’re interested in evolving our sound and moving forward all the time.” That also applies to their individual music tastes as Hung attests. “Our sound has just progressed naturally as our tastes have become, I guess, refined and certainly different from what they were a year or two ago.”

However, both remain tight-lipped on “reeling off” an arbitrary list of bands they are either listening to now, or even ten years ago. “Our main influence comes from the equipment we use,” claims Power. “We don’t step into the songwriting process with any idea of the finished form. We literally just play around with a bunch of equipment and experiment with what sounds we can extract from them.” However, even the tools of their trade hold no special place in Fuck Buttons' heart. “In any song, the equipment that’s used is for the song itself. We don’t really have any attachment to it,” dismisses Hung.

Clearly Fuck Buttons are not a sentimental band and listening to Tarot Sport should make this clear. So peerless and forward-thinking does it sound that you’d be forgiven for thinking it had fallen through a tear in the space-time continuum. Glittering melodies bounce around like light-beams refracting off the rings of Saturn, whilst propulsive sine waves bathe everything in a glow of sci-fi wonderment. And that’s just the first few minutes of opening track Surf Solar. “It is a big departure,” agrees Power. “But something that’s important to us both is the emotional attachment. It’s not purely technical music. We definitely aim towards something that is more enveloping.”

With a good sound-system or a decent pair of headphones, Tarot Sport pushes past the boundaries of ‘enveloping’ and into areas closer to hypnogogic hallucination. “It’s never been on our agenda, but it is definitely something that we’re interested in,” replies Power when asked if the tribal rhythms and repetitious, seemingly infinite beats and melodies are a deliberate attempt to induce mass enlightenment. “We tend to jam it out for a very long time and the more you listen to something the more intricacies you can pick out of it. So it does have that hypnotic effect on us and hopefully it will with other people listening to it.”

There is, however, a third party attributable to the new frontiers in which Fuck Buttons now gleefully play around, as Power puts it, “like a couple of kids”. Taking the place of their debut’s producer – Mogwai guitarist John Cummings – Andrew Weatherall was the Buttons’ man in the studio this time around, having expressed his interest through the well-established path of getting drunk with the band’s manager. A well-placed remix of early single Sweet Love for Planet Earth didn’t hurt either.

“You could really tell that he had a thorough grasp on the music that we make and he even embellished sounds, just with the remix, that didn’t necessarily pop out much beforehand,” claims Power on the clincher for giving Weatherall the job. “It was three and a half weeks and really long hours,” says Hung of the actual recording. “It was a really intense, but very positive experience at the same time.” That Fuck Buttons have gone from avant-garde noiseniks to cosmic pop overlords in the space of eighteen months surely speaks volumes of Weatherall’s involvement.

As for the title, Tarot Sport is another masterstroke in nomenclature, an area the band put a lot of thought into. Its combination of the mystical with the physical could fill a student essay. “I think it fits, although we never want to force any kind of narrative upon anything,” claims Power. “But I think the overall feeling that pairing of words conjures up really put a final stamp on the record.” And even the bastardisation of their own name, as F-Buttons, or F**k Buttons, doesn’t faze them. “I guess it’s just a way of people being polite, which is fine with us,” shrugs Hung. "We're up for people being polite."

So, in the interests of good etiquette, our time with Fuck Buttons ends with a look towards what the future holds for a band with little time to put their feet back on the ground. “We’re people who like to be busy,” says Power. “We find it very hard to sit around whilst things just happen themselves and we love to make music together, so I dare say you will see a new album at some point soon.” Hung agrees and is unequivocal that their partnership has a lot of life left in it. “It’s an extremely fruitful relationship. The things that come out of Fuck Buttons, I don’t think either of us could imagine on our own,” he marvels. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Fuck Buttons play the Arches, Glasgow on 24 April.

Tarot Sport is out now on ATP Records.

http://www.myspace.com/fuckbuttons