Track X Track: Grasscut - 1 Inch / ½ Mile

Andrew Phillips has some CV. When he's not making glitchy, dreamy electronica as Grasscut, or indeed playing keyboards for Faithless side-project of sorts One Giant Leap, he's paying the bills by composing music for film and television, racking up over 100 screen credits in the process.

However it's his work as Grasscut, performed with the help of mulit-instrumentalist Marcus O'Dair, that captured our attention a few months back and we're happy to be able to share Andrew's thoughts on Grasscut's debut record 1 Inch / ½ Mile, out today (July 5) via Ninja Tune.

1. High Down 
I wrote ‘High Down’ at the phone mast at Fulking Beacon on the South Downs in Sussex. It’s about how it feels to have left the city, seeking solitude in nature, and to be electrified by the power of an image: the natural meeting the unnatural – starlings flying around a phone mast. I wanted the song to be as dramatic as that felt, colliding lyrical classical piano with abrasive electronic textures, while the lyrics explore the contrast between urban – ‘drive straight on at the bypass’ – and pastoral – ‘rabbit eye mirror the skylark’. 

2. Old Machines 
‘Old Machines’ was started in the woods in Stanmer Park outside Brighton, where sometimes you feel as though you’re in the remotest countryside, but you can still hear cars the whole time. The ‘Old Machine’ of the title is the brain, dealing with shadows in dark woods, or shadows in city streets. The music contrasts classical strings with heavy electronic beats, and the lyrics explore the relationship between our primitive emotions and our technology. Frank Byng plays the fractured live drum break in the middle of the track. The American gentlemen whose voices feature at the end of the song were discussing a property development in Sussex; I had to record them! It seemed right to have their voices over a string quartet in the style of Vaughan Williams at the end, with the sound of a motorway in the distance. 

3. Meltwater 
On 1st January 2009 I was climbing in North Wales. The mountain ridge we were on ran west to east, and divided the country into low lying cloud to the south and blazing sun to the north. The day was so cold that huge chunks of ice were floating in the sea, and the mountain lakes were frozen. We ran out on them to the edge of the ice and gazed down into the black depths. Everything was like crystal, and we felt like we were gatecrashing the most amazing party in a room full of chandeliers, like we shouldn’t be there out there on the ice. The brilliant live drums on this track were played by jazz drummer Jim Whyte. 

4. The Tin Man 
This song was inspired by 3 things: the squeaky gate sound at the start is a recording [on my phone] of a massive moving metal sculpture at the Pompidou Centre in Paris that had a haunting melody to it. The singing voice is Count John McCormack’s, (known as ‘The People’s Tenor’), from ‘The Little Silver Ring’, which he recorded in 1927, where he imagines his own death and grief at no longer being able to think of his lover. I found a 78 of this in an antiques market and fell in love with it, sampled it sticking a mic inside my wind up gramophone. I met an old man with a metal walking stick in a park in Brighton, who told me his wife had recently died, and his story linked all these sounds in my head. 

5. Muppet 
This song is about a very English kind of frustration and totally losing your ability to communicate… I was talking to a bunch of people having a conversation none of us could be bothered to have, we all couldn’t wait to get away, and I could hear someone really gossiping about a mutual friend behind me – I couldn’t resist pretending to text while actually recording them… I wrote the song while walking home and recorded the vocal straight into my phone. Musically it had to go from a pop song to total self destruction… I remember Marcus ramming a drumstick into a cymbal, jamming the stick into a tom and bowing the cymbal furiously while I was yelling at the end. We really went there. Frank Byng is also on drums here. 

6. 1946 
This is my favourite track from the record. The voice is my Mum’s. She didn’t know I was recording her speaking (are you getting the snooping audio freak theme yet?) and I love the way her memories of post-war austerity go from black and white (or ‘very grey’) into colour as she remembers more and more. I wanted to create a landscape of overlapping metallic gamelan-like sounds around her voice, so got hold of a clothes rail and hung saucepans, woks, and cymbals off it and played them with soft beaters. The whole thing takes off in a string trio in the middle section – played by Ms Annie Kerr on violin, viola and Mr Marcus O’Dair on double bass. 

7. The Door In The Wall 
Krautrock meets the Brians (Wilson and Eno) and Robert Wyatt. I wrote this very quickly on an old casio keyboard with a great organ sound, bashed down the drums and the lyrics just fell out pretty complete. It was influenced by Hilaire Belloc’s ‘The Winged Horse’ (which features in ‘In Her Pride’) – he’s flying over England towards the Channel on his feathery steed, I’m on Southern Trains heading back to Brighton. Both having transcendental experiences of England, though. 

8. Passing 
I started this on a tour bus, in the middle of the night on a motorway in the north of England, watching car headlights. There’s a lot of darkness in the track, loads of distortion and glitch, it reflects the time and the place, and the way things were appearing and disappearing into the night.

9. In Her Pride 
The singing voice is English poet and man of letters Hilaire Belloc, performing his poem ‘The Winged Horse’, recorded in 1932. The speaking voice is the American poet Ezra Pound, reading from ‘EP: An Ode’, written in 1926. Though an old man, Belloc’s voice is extraordinarily powerful as he sings of flying over England and Europe on a horse, seeing figures from the past. Pound is meditating on the decadence of the 1920s and his own old fashioned artistic naivete: “the age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace…to maintain the sublime, wrong from the start”. I really like this idea and it’s very resonant for grasscut. I also wanted to end the album with a chorus of the reflective voices of the old.

Grab your copy of 1 Inch 1/2 Mile here. Download the brilliant 'High Down' and and an album mini-mix below. 

Grasscut - High Down by Ninja Tune & Big Dada

Grasscut - '1 Inch 1/2 Mile' Album Mini-mix by Ninja Tune & Big Dada