Danalogue transcript
R: Hello this is Robyn Rocket’s Zoom Zoom, now anyone who’s known me for the last 6 months I’ve been going on about what I’ve been calling my fantasy radio show because it didn’t have a home. Well now it does, welcome to the first ever episode of Robyn’s Rocket Zoom Zoom.
R : Hello and welcome to Robyn Rocket’s Zoom Zoom, I’m Robyn Rocket and I’m really delighted to welcome you to my radio show. Thank you for tuning in!
That was a bit of Rocket #9 by the Sun Ra Arkestra ,if you don’t know the Sun Ra Akestra they are led by Marshall Allen who is 99 which is incredible and he does amazing things and the band is amazing.
In this radio show I am talking to artists who inspire me, I’m delighted to welcome Danalogue from The Comet is Coming and Soccer96.
Let’s hear a bit of the Comet is Coming, this is their single Code.
R: That was The Comet is Coming’s single Code. With me, in the Comet is Coming’s Synth player, Danalogue , Thanks for joining us.
Dan, what music did you listen to early on in your life.
D: I actually listened to tons of music in the car as a 4 or 5 year old listening to Motown and the Beatles or whatever, y’know so many great old pop songs, at night the tuning in on the radio became more difficult so we switched to cassettes. They’re quite cheesy now, so it’s slight embarrassing in a way but we used to listen to Tubular Bells and also Jean-Michel Jarre which is crazy , because those records were super popular in the 80’s but they’re essential instrumental prog albums.
R: I’m Robyn Rocket. As well as having a show here on Resonance FM, I also have a semi regular night at Café OTO , called Robyn’s Rocket , it aims to be Inclusive conscious space, which means we think about who would not normally be in a space, think about how to welcome them, and then collect feedback to then change the space or make other changes to help more people feel welcome. You’ll hear throughout this series of shows me talk more about it, but for now lets go back to our guest, Danalogue, synth player with The Comet is coming and Soccer96 . Dan what was your first instrument, was it the keyboard or piano because it’s similar in layout to a synthesizer I guess?
D: I didn’t like piano lessons so I quit, I really didn’t enjoy the pressure of having to play scales to my teacher , she was actually lovely I’m not having a pop at her at all.
I played so much more when I was having lessons, I played like 2 hours a day or something , and I didn’t know what I was doing but it was fun.
I did end up learning the saxophone traditionally , doing all the grades and what not.
Going to Guildhall school of music once a month with Jean Toussaint who is a great sax player who play with Art Blakey . I was like one a freebie basically scholarshipy type thing and I was like his worst student by a million miles, and he knew it and I knew it <Laughs>.
Shabaka who I play with now in The Comet is Coming he was being taught by Jean Toussaint at Guildhall at that exact moment!
And I decided over the course of a couple of years that I wasn’t gonna be a sax player cos I just couldn’t find anything new in it. And I find with synths I could make something that sounded like me quite fast and it was very expressive whereas with sax I felt like I was in a bit of a prison of history or something.
I find it incredible that Shabaka was having the same lessons with the same guy, and did create a new sound in my opinion y’know he did create a fresh sax style!
R: Cool. Well let’s hear some Jean Toussaint and then some Shabaka.
R: I’ve been chatting to Danalogue from Soccer96 and The Comet is coming.
So, Betamax or Max is in both Soccer96 and the Comet is Coming, how did you meet Max?
D so Max I met at Sussex University , we were both on a music course , it was tiny just 12 students and I think only a 2 or 3 of us are still going.
I gathered a group of my favorite people in the class and we actually connected through Elizabeth Walling ( Gazelle Twin).
We made this 6 piece it was incredible actually, it was one of those bands with loads of instruments and cables, I think we had 26 instruments on stage at one gig, we were just trying to do everything, you know. It was kind of post-rock which was a style at the time. We did our first show supporting Thee Silver Mt. Zion, an off-shoot of Godspeed You! Black emperor, and it was all that kind of thing that kind of scene
and that was a brilliant band but a nightmare to co-ordinate because there was 6 of us, I kind of left and the band managed one more gig and then they all quit and then I rang up Max.
I just remember thinking to myself out of that whole group who do I wanna keep playing with as a matter of supreme urgency, and I was like ok I think I need to ring up Max and just have a jam.
R: Before we find out how Max and Dan started working together let’s hear a bit of Gazelle Twin.
R: That was Gazelle Twin. So, Dan what kind of music were you listening to when you met Max?
D I was into Lightning bolt, Hella, math rockey stuff, Battles, Holy F**K. At that time I was really into Madlib and, like, the beat makers of west coast America hip hop, and I was really into Squarepusher and the drums were so mad, and I feel like Max had so many chops but in the bands I’d seen him in he was playing more like tracks with beats which still demonstrated his talents , but I was like with Squarepusher he just like the beats are so mad
R: Cool, alright, let’s listen to some Squarepusher , Holy F**K and Madlib.
R: Back to our story with Dan.
So how did you go from being in a 6 piece to being in a duo with Max like what was that creative process?
D: I just felt sure if I got a loop pedal together and Max on drums I reckon we can make like a really distilled sound. If I could just set up some like sonic worlds quite simply and you just do your thing. It was liberating I should say at that point.
R: I’m really into loop Pedals, so what loop pedal did you have?
D: It was just like that classic Boss loop pedal with the 2 pedals it had this really awkward thing where when you hit loop it jolted by kind of a fraction of a second, which doesn’t matter if you’re doing stuff that’s not in time. But I actually wanted to do stuff that was in time and then loop live and then Max join in one the drums, so it was so important it was in time, so sometimes we’d do these gigs where it was slightly out, or Max couldn’t hear me in the monitor but we just kind of beasted through it, and it did make a big difference to the sound to have you know quite a few things looped and then I’d play on top of that, it made quite a big difference there. But, er, yeah it was a really terrible loop pedal for what I wanted to do in a lot of ways. I rocked it for a good 5 years, until Max was like “Dan I don’t want to play to loops anymore”, and I was like “alright mate” it was quite hard at that point cos then I started to just try and play just the two keyboards and sing that was pretty tricky for me to not have that extra layer.
R: I hope you’re enjoying listening to my conversation with Dan as much as I enjoyed having it. There will be a podcast series towards the end of the year with extended interviews, but for now I want to ask Dan about 2022-2023 new releases , tour dates that kind of thing I know that’s quite a jump.
D : We just put out two soccer96 records so that’s exciting. Two Soccer96 records we’ve put together, and have released in the space of a year, which is quite nice normally you have to wait a long time in-between releases, and apparently it’s sensible to do that so people have time to digest them and you don’t just have a constant wave of music slapping in people’s faces. But we were like we have to get these two records out before the new The Comet Is Coming album and tour the whole cycle with an album with Comet is a good 16 months, if not more, at this point .
So, you need to get them out there otherwise you won’t be able to release them, for quite a long time.
I really want as many people as possible to listen to them. I think there’s some great stuff on there like on Dopamine there’s this track called Prelude to the Age of Transhumanism and I just think it’s one of my favourite things me and Max have ever done.
Dopamine and Inner Worlds are two records we put out and they’re both based loosely on the theme of our impending coalition with technology and artificial intelligence
Dopamine is almost like a soundtrack to a imagined film soundtrack.
Inner Worlds kind of goes into a different energy more like imagining I mean this is all our creative tools to write music so it’s not expressed very explicitly in the music.
But the next one ( Inner worlds) is imagining we have become AI and we’re trying to express ourselves through sound. I love that idea because AI has been making a lot of Art recently, and probably everyone’s seen it online; that kind of Dali, where AI makes paintings and stuff and it can make them immediately and it’s kinda awesome!
And y’know it’s starting to happen in music too. I've been getting more and more into choir sounds on keyboards ‘cos I feel like choir sounds are like a human voice being made by a piece of technology and it’s not right, y’know, it sounds a bit weird and off and it’s always the same when you hit that note, it’s like Ahh, Ahh, its kinda awesome it makes me feel like the technology is trying to speak. Oh, and I use a bit of vocoder on Dopamine for the same reason, that album I just wanted to sing through the technology, we’re kinda singing love songs between robots and humans. There’s this song Entanglement where its almost like a love song between a computer and a human, which is already weird but it might be a thing in 2000 years, I already have an intimate relationship with AI in the sense that it suggests music for me and then I listen to it and it makes me feel certain things, so that’s already pretty intimate
R: How does Soccer96 and The Comet is Coming interact?
D: I hope that they are kind of different stars in the same constellation there’s links between them the works, there is a qualitative difference the dramatic urgency in Comet we all love. I feel like making Soccer96 records is just a chance to express something else.
Like there’s a track Entanglement on Dopamine which is like the first ballad we’ve ever written; we wrote a ballad that’s crazy!
R: and I’ve been chatting to Danalogue from Soccer 96 and the Comet is Coming
So we’re coming into the last bit of the show. So, Dan was there any other careers you’d of gone into or was music always what you were gonna do?
D: I actually wanted to work with reptiles for a long time, I was super into Steve Irwin; he used to rescue crocodiles essentially from land where they were gonna get shot by farmers. A true hero of conservation and I loved animals when I was growing up.
I used to work in a reptile shop and I had lots of reptiles in my room and bred them. So, at one point I was either going to work at Australia Zoo. That was my mission get out to Steve Irwin’s zoo and work there as a reptologist or get into music, so somewhere out there is a parallel universe where I’m wearing Khaki shorts and wrangling carpet pythons.
R: So, what was it that, kind of, definitely steered you in the music direction?
D: Yeah, I’ve no idea, I think it’s pretty probably pretty random, maybe just it was more fun. I feel like all my pals were making music and I was hanging out and I think I gradually became aware that putting animals in cages even if there really big, well made beautiful homes, its still a little bit weird keeping animals in cages isn’t it?
R: Thanks so much for joining me Dan and thank you to you for listening. Thank you Paul Dutnall , Heart N Soul and Resonance.
Thank you for everyone who believed in me and people who helped me.
More about me or the show at www.robynrocket.com/zoomzoom
Next Robyn’s Rocket April 20th at Café OTO
The Comet is Coming have been around the world, they have some tour dates left. I am supporting them March 7th in Norwich and March 8th in Cambridge.
See their website for more info,
I play space trumpet through guitar pedals. I was inspired by Andy Diagram. I’ve been experimenting over the last few years. Meg Woof kindly played me back to back with NikNak ( a female turntablist), I was inspired by her work and made a EP; this is a track from that called Scratch A.