Horton Jupiter: Artistically. It’s genius. I’m not that into irony, I think it’s a very tired tool. It’s easy. But the way Go Kart Mozart uses it… This guy is a real, bone fide genius. How to explain it? You have to hear this stuff. The two Denim LPs and the two Go Kart Mozart LPs. Lyrically it’s very scathing and direct, there’s no wry asides or “aren’t we clever” it just is clever. You have to listen to it.
BCR: To bring it back to TCFTSIST, most bands… ok, take modern art, there seems to be this formula to it that has to incorporate a fuck you. And with Go Kart Mozart, Felt and you there seems to be a fuck you to the fuck you… if you know what I mean?
Horton Jupiter: [Laughs raucously] ok, it’s interesting about the fuck you to the fuck you thing because, yeah, modern culture has to regurgitate itself. It’s all been done. The bastards! Because it’s all been done, you can either regurgitate it or you can use it… and I think that’s what Go Kart Mozart do. They use it but it’s not a pastiche and it’s not “aren’t we clever”. I think you can use it in a tired fashion or you can use it in a fresh fashion. The other thing of course, is you can try your damndest to ignore it. And when it does encroach on you can sort of explode it and highlight it. There’s a great Brian Eno trick, he made this set of cards, the Oblique Strategies, with a conceptual artist in the late seventies. If you’re making music and you hit a brick wall, you turn over a card and it’ll say something like “take the smallest thing and make it the biggest”. One of his things that was in there was “every time you make a mistake, amplify it.” You can sort of say the same about culture – you can try to be true to yourself and try and use your artistic… voyage, hhaa… as a way to find yourself or touch on something unusual. Which I think is what we’re really after, looking for the ineffable or merging with the infinite or whatever nonsense. But occasionally culture encroaches itself and the only thing you can do is write it really big and say “this is culture, this is not transcendent.”
BCR: So what you’re saying is to take all these things that are ineffable, that are intangible, that are without the knowledge that you have as concrete and to make it concrete.
Horton Jupiter: … Yes. But to not tie it into culture because the ineffable knows nothing of culture.
[Naomi arrives, finally, into this odd conversation and sits down completely unperturbed. BCR thinks she’s used to conversations like this]
BCR: So. Naomi. Your comments?
Horton Jupiter: We were talking about Go Kart Mozart and how it relates to us. Do you think he uses culture or do you think he refutes it? Because it’s totally beyond irony isn’t it? He’s just got an excess of ideas.
Naomi Auerfeld He’s got an excess of ideas and references and is unimpressed by all of them.
Horton Jupiter: That’s the one! That’s the ticket. That’s why he ties in with us. You can’t tie a million ideas down to this pastiche or that copy-cat-ism or that genre or that mode of expression. All you can do is just churn them out really fast.
Naomi Auerfeld: Or you get bored with that referential thing. He’s almost taking the piss out of people he would use as his reference points. Obviously we take references from all sorts of places but we do it with a more innocent, joyful way.
Horton Jupiter: We’re a bit less angry…
Naomi Auerfeld: Or we pretend to be a bit less jaded.
Horton Jupiter: Hahha, yeah. We’re actually as fake as the Polyphonic Spree, hha!
BCR: So what’s happening with your new old album, or rather how do you lose an album?
Naomi Auerfeld: You record it on a format you can’t do anything with…
Horton Jupiter: With a record label that won’t give you any money…
Naomi Auerfeld: And then you get so frustrated that instead of crying every day you put it on a shelf.
Horton Jupiter: It was 2001 or something, we made a couple of singles for Low recording, they wanted us to make an album, we went to Wales, we spent three days making a great album, we got back and before they’d even heard it they asked us how much it had cost and said “900 quid? We can’t give you 900 quid for a recording! We’ll just release the singles as a compilation”. Meanwhile it was recorded on a really expensive format that’s not even useable. We thought they had a computer but they just had this weird format that you can only get inside posh studios.
Naomi Auerfeld: Here’s a really good lesson. If you ever want to make a record on a budget, check.
Horton Jupiter: They said they had a computer! It said on the list “computer”! So then we had to save up another £1000 to convert it, which was cheap.
Naomi Auerfeld: Yeah, 2002 prices.
BCR: These days you can just go onto Piratebay and get a crack to sort you out.
Naomi Auerfeld: No, no, it’s this big studio box.
BCR: What, like the computers they had in the sixties that they thought they would have only five more by the year 2000?
Naomi Auerfeld: Yeah, you can only control it by using one of those really big mobile phones and a giant dial with lots of flashing lights.
Horton Jupiter: It just went on and on. Even the release of it was a huge fiasco. But it’s a great record and I like it.
BCR: Well, you’ve been going since 1999 through many incarnations… I saw you in around 2001 or something at a squat party. It seems that you’ve had a lot of members…
Horton Jupiter: We have a plan. 1st of April next year is our 10th anniversary. What we want to do is an hour long version of The Holy Mountain with every single member that’s ever been in the band on stage and do an epic, just building and building and building and building and building…
And that’s what this writer sees for TCFTSIST. A building force that could easily take over the front pages of any music rag and rightly should. With ten years under their belt and many, many mistakes and bad turns helped out by what the music industry is today, TCFTSIST deserve their time in the sun. A prolonged tan would do them good and has definitely been earned.
The night whiles away with BCR, Horton and Naomi expounding on the virtues and vices of what the industry is today and what is expected of bands. It’s sometimes bitter and sometimes expressive of the joy that TCFTSIST find in making music. This is what you will find if you choose to listen to them. Which you quite obviously should.
They Came From The Stars (I Saw Them) official site
They Came From The Stars (I Saw Them) Myspace site
