Billy Fuller’s Kosmische ‘Fragments’ (Part 2 of 3)

Continued from Part One…

Something you just said made me think about this. When I talk to artists, it often comes up that they consider sequencing to be nearly as important as songwriting.

It’s the final bit of composing, really, after you’ve made a set of songs. Sequencing is everything.

I’ve got two younger kids, and now it’s just like the ‘50s again, isn’t it? It’s just about tunes, singles, songs. And I get that; I understand that they just want the bangers. But it’s very quick, isn’t it? It’s like, “I don’t want to go through somebody’s sad song on an album.”

I do come from an era where albums were still really important. I’ve always been into albums. And so I thought, “Well, if I’m going to make an album, I want it to have that feel of it having a narrative and something like a feeling.”

Because the tracks on Fragments are the product of you overdubbing – doing something and then coming back and adding to it – do you ever find that you’re unsure of when a piece is done?

[I know] just by feeling. Knowing when to stop is one thing, and it’s also knowing when to remove. A prime example on Fragments is the fourth tune, which is one of those incidental songs called “Budfrey Robbed Alexander.” Basically, that is just an acoustic guitar track on a tune that I was making. It had about 15 channels of audio: drums and bass and keyboards. But I was like, “This isn’t landing.”

And then, accidentally when I was overdubbing the acoustic [guitar], I had the speakers going in the room as well. So all the sound was going into the soundhole of the acoustic. And then with this compression that I added, I realized that the single acoustic guitar channel was the song. So I just deleted the other 14 channels of chuff. And it was like, wow. It was a really nice moment. It felt like what it must be like to live inside an acoustic guitar, on stage with a band going inside of it; it felt really organic.

I’m into things that sound organic. For me, the first Beak> album [2009’s Beak>] sounds like we’re crawling out the mud. We’re coming out the ground, and you can smell the soil and the wet grass. I like that kind of feeling. Not being folk music or anything; just a real dirty, organic, coming-out-the-ground.

I love that imagery. Do you mean to communicate thoughts, ideas or feelings with these instrumental tracks?

Like anything with music, they’re going to mean something different to everybody. All of the pieces of music on that album mean something; each one means something different to me: how I was feeling at the time, the state of mind I was in, whether I was happy or sad or whatever. So I’m very aware of it, but when it becomes somebody else’s listening experience, it’s very much [up to] that person and their personal take on it. And I think that’s really precious and important; that’s how it should remain.

Especially [with] instrumental music – because there’s not much lyric on my record – it’s gonna invoke a different [reaction for each listener]. You’re not being spoon-fed what this music’s about, so it is down to the listener to go, “This makes me feel like I want to go for a bike ride…” or whatever. There’s 16 pieces of music on Fragments, and it’s all done in 36 minutes. It’s quick, but there’s a lot of information in that short time.

If there’s such thing as a typical method of composition in rock and pop, it’s typically based on sitting down with a guitar or a keyboard. But you built many of these songs with bass guitar as the foundation. Since you’re skilled on multiple instruments, what led you to make that choice?

Because I am most definitely primarily a bass player; I always have been. The first time I got into music, it was the bass I would listen to.

I was the youngest of three boys. We used to live in a council house, a two-bedroom house in Bristol, and we used to share a bedroom. I was nine years younger than my eldest brother, so I must have been annoying to be around! But my eldest brother would come home with loads of Motown, soul records and the Jam; we loved the Jam. Getting into bass players around that time in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, Bruce Foxton was a brilliant bass player.

I could hear it, but I didn’t know it was called a bass guitar. I didn’t know what it looked like, but I knew what it sounded like. And [my brother] would play soul [records], so I was hearing [James] Jamerson without knowing who Jamerson was. And then when I finally did – I was about 14 – I was like, “I want a bass guitar for my birthday!” And then I just sat on the edge of the bed playing along to cassettes and records, and I taught myself how to play; I never had a lesson.

For me, everything is rooted [in that]. The way I hear things is all rooted around those four strings on a bass, on that piece of wood. And I find it really grounding. It’s a good place to start, because it’s the link-up between the rhythm, the melody and the harmony of a song. So I find that it seems very natural to start on a bass guitar.

Some artists create their music for a specific target audience, and others turn very much inward and make music completely for themselves. Where do you fall on that continuum?

I don’t have an age demographic that I’m thinking of when I’m making music. Can you imagine that feeling? “Okay, 35 to 55. Here we go.” Which [laughs] is probably where I do live, to be honest.

I’m not writing to any demographic, that’s for sure. My eldest son is now 15, but he was about 7 when I did the song “Pirate Ship” on the album. It’s just an instrumental, with bowed upright [bass], an electric bass and a little bit of noise. He came in when I was listening back to it, and he said, “Dad, Dad, this sounds like a pirate ship creaking across the ocean.” And I was like, “Pirate Ship!” That was the working title that went in, and it stuck. And even if I listen to it now, I’m like, “Well, kids know a lot, don’t they?” They’re completely open. He called it “Pirate Ship,” and he’s right: It is a pirate ship.

Speaking of upright bowed bass, that instrument is very prominent on the final track, “Last Train to Yatton.”

That’s four double basses. With one Korg synthesizer. It was all complete, and then I was like, “It’s just missing something.” One of the last things I did for the album was to get that synthesizer out and put that phase swell in it, to get some movement going.

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