sunnyvale noise sub-element

interviewed by A Roman Scandal

How did you come about your name?

Simon Proffitt: The Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element is:

a) A 1999 city by-law banning the use of leaf blowers, gasoline-powered hedgers and outdoor paging systems

b) An experimental rehabilitation scheme involving tension release through shouting

c) A local government initiative to curb car stereo volume, particularly in the case of 'hip-hop' music

d) A big dinosaur

You decide.

Simon Minter: That's before my time. It's something to do with some obscure American town law, I think.

Stuart Fowkes: To CONFUSE promoters of gigs, it would seem. We’ve been variously billed as ‘Sunnyvale Sub-experiment’, ‘Sunnydale Nose Sub-element’ ‘Sunnyvale Boise Sub-element’ and, confusingly, ‘South Sea Company Prospectus’. But to clear up the multiple choice answer for anyone who might be interested, it’s a). We liked the idea of immortalising an obscure, pretty pointless bit of local by-law, and if we’re honest, wanted to get the word ‘noise’ in there, as it was pretty indicative of our early sound. Plus, since everyone knows us as ‘Sunnyvale’, if we ever get a budget to make a video, that’s a trip to California in the bag.

Do you shape your technology or does technology shape you?

SF: Some of the most exciting electronic sounds we’ve put together have come about by accident: applying the wrong effect, splicing a different section of the sample than we originally intended or trial and error, which might indicate that perhaps technology, when used improperly, offers us suggestions we wouldn’t have come up with alone. But then aside from the usual range of wave editors and samplers (both hard and soft), the sequencers we use to put our electronics tracks down are bewilderingly primitive. Though this was originally the situation out of necessity, it’s now become a definite composition choice, as it forces us to be more creative with the approaches we use to assemble the beats and construct the source samples we use in the first place. I think we’re also quietly afraid of that dark interim period where you’re just learning the ropes with a piece of technology that you might decide doesn’t suit the way you want to make music anyway. So there you go – the technology we do use, we try to stretch to make it do new things, but we’re a tiny bit afraid of change. We’re techno-Luddites.

SP: My lack of skill and creativity shape me AND the technology. There's a psychological trick in there, too: if I have super amazing technology, then the only thing stopping me from creating the world's greatest music is my imagination, so that when I fail, it's MY fault. By limiting the technology, and only using very simple machines, I have something else to blame when I fail.

SM: I don't use technology. My guitar is made of wood. My amplifier is powered by a lad on a bike, who's usually kept 'round the back, out of view.

How do you feel about the description 'angular' when applied to interlacing melodic lines?

SF: It’s just another one of those journo words applied to genres like math rock (while we’re on the subject, what does THAT even mean?), so it’s essentially little more than a lexical signifier pointing you towards ‘this band sounds like Slint’ or ‘this band’s songs might not be in 4/4’. I’m as guilty as anyone of using it in reviews, though. That and ‘iridescent’.

SP: Ever so slightly bewildered, but at the same time quite flattered. I always wanted to make jagged music, but never knew how. I'm not certain Sunnyvale is particularly jagged or angular or geometrically inclined in any way, but I'm really glad someone thinks it is.

SM: It's my second favourite, after the description 'fractured'. I'm not too keen on the description 'spastic' when applied to music.

One of your reviews compares you to having a root canal? is there a more applicable medical term?

SP: Priapism.

SF: We’ve always said we’d love it if anyone compared us to Prolapse. Ho ho.

SM: Involuntary priapism.

What is the last album you collectively bought?

SP: That's a difficult question. Possibly Phil Collins' Platinum Collection. I know that at least three of us have Celine Dion's latest live album (the Las Vegas one), but I don't know whether Giles has a copy yet. I taped it for him, but I don't think he's got an original.

SM: We've never collectively bought an album. The closest we've got to that is looking at the bargain cassettes for sale in service stations, and mocking them, like we 're musically, artistically and morally superior.

SF: Collectively, we share quite a lot of common ground musically, but not to the extent that we’d ever go record shopping together. Assuming that’s not what you’re talking about, I’ve been enjoying a lot of demos from great UK bands recently, like Breakneck Static, Ivory Springer, Geisha and The Young Knives. The last album I paid money for was by Vibracathedral Orchestra.

Did you feel bad after buying it?

SP: No, I felt GOOD. Because whichever album it actually was, the chances are I was the first to get it.

SM: Don't know about the others, but I feel bad most of the time.

SF: I felt exultant – I found it in Chatham, which is one of the towns you’re least likely to pick up a second hand copy of a VO album, along with Doncaster, Swindon and possibly Kirby Muxloe. It’s very good, too.

How is the music scene where you live? What's the band to DJ ratio?

SP: It [Cardiff]'s pretty good, despite there being few proper venues. We're very open minded to new and weird things here, and there's a thriving experimental scene - and crucially it IS experimental, not just that there are a couple of bands without vocals. Although having said that, we did just give the world James Fox [UK Eurovision Song Contest failure].

SM: I love the music scene in Oxford - it's varied, supportive and exciting, with lots of opportunities for getting your music to a wide audience. The only downside seems to be a tendency for people here to complain that things are probably better elsewhere. Such is the way of humans. I don't know what the band-to-dinner-jacket ratio is; maybe something like 5:1?

SF: I think we’re pretty lucky in Oxford – there’s a vibrant, (for the most part) supportive scene with loads of great bands who are more than open to helping one another out. Despite the fact that there are hundreds of bands in the area, it’s still pretty easy to promote gigs, set up events or festivals or put out CDs. Basically, you can be as involved – or not – as you want to be. Decent nights for DJs are harder to come by in Oxford than elsewhere, largely because what clubs we have cater for the massive, ABBA-loving student population, and because if you want to, you could just pop down to Fabric or something in London in an hour or so.

You seem to balance human and robotic playback very well. At what point do you feel one crosses the line to one camp or the other? (or is it constantly in flux?)

SP: The moment we start playing our guitars with pneumatic claws is the moment we've gone a step too far into the robot camp. But I'd never want to do that - part of the fun of what we do is the delicious imbalance between the precision of the machines (although our machines have a history of being imprecise) and our ham-fistedly human string manglings. It's the poetic struggle between structure and collapse, as someone might once have said.

SF: The line is constantly being crossed – the two aspects, when applied to Sunnyvale, cannot work in isolation from one another or the whole thing falls apart. A lot of our samples come from us playing drums, toy keyboards, tone generators, guitars and so forth, but then they’re manipulated, effected, and subsumed into the domain of ‘robotic playback’. In terms of playing live, robotic playback is simultaneously our best friend and worst enemy – the beats keep us tight and together, but should the technology fail, Sunnyvale unplugged is rarely an option.

SM: I think it's that flux which is one of the most exciting aspects of our music - never knowing if we'll fall apart because of our insistence on merging humans with computers.