By Vincent PollardBritish IDM duo Plaid (aka Ed Handley and Andy Turner) are just about to release their first album in over five years. We spoke with Plaid member Ed Handley to find out exactly what they've been up to in the past half decade, which as it turns out includes two film soundtracks, building a new music studio in a garden shed, collaborating with British artist Felix Thorn and working on their new album Scintilli.
The new album took a while to come together. Are you happy with how it turned out in the end? Yeah. This is the strange moment where you have to almost explain it or defend it and I'm obviously slightly doubtful as I've lived with it for quite a long time now and doubt creeps in after that period, but I remember being happy with it for sure! [laughs]
When did you finish it? We probably finished it in February fully but we sort of finished it a few times and then had a chance to go back so the finishing process has been really stretched out really, so I couldn't actually say when we delivered because we delivered it in stages.
I understand you built a shed to house a studio in and that's partly why the album took so long to make. We call it a shed but really it's a log cabin, it's like something you'd find in the Swiss Alps but not particularly big. It must be three by three metres inside as we built an internal wall [for soundproofing], so not massive. It's at the bottom of [Plaid member] Andy's garden.
It seems like a very British tradition to have a shed at the bottom of the garden. Yeah, I think we're taught very early on that you need to potter at the end of the garden. There's the idea of having your tools there but also your porn collection! All your "man" stuff should be in the shed basically. Your model railway collection. You have all the tools and you bang about a bit but nothing is ever actually achieved! [laughs]
The tone of the new album is really quite varied from track to track. Would you agree? Well, I hope so. There wasn't a deliberate attempt to do that but I like albums where there is a lot of variety but still some continuity so if that's happening then that's a good thing. It was all really written from start to finish in about three years. Obviously not three years' solid work. So there are tracks on there that are quite old so yeah, maybe that's why, because over time we'll update our software and have different interests sonically. We should date the tracks and work out why that's come about! Hopefully it works as an album.
I think it does. You have different tones and feels, for instance "Tender Hooks" has a kind of Caribbean lilt to it and I don't know if it's deliberate but "Unbank" sounds a bit like the Doctor Who theme. Yeah, we're discovering that people think that and it did occur to us, especially the beginning, has that [imitates bass line]. Yeah that wasn't intentional, it's just that the bass sound is similar to the bass sound they use and the progression of the notes is quite similar and everything about it is Who-ish but we respect Doctor Who so that's no bad thing.
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop [who produced that theme] were amazing in their time. Exactly. Delia Derbyshire is our heroine. It was a collaboration with Benet Walsh who we've done a few things with in the past and so it just happened. When I first heard it I was thinking Doctor Who but then I sort of forgot that bit so now I'm slightly surprised that everyone is saying Doctor Who. I thought I managed to get rid of most of that.
You guys just released a video for one track off the new album, "35 Summers". How did that come about ― did the director come up with the concept? Yeah, the director's Richie Burridge, who's helped us with a lot of our artwork over the years and it was his first live action video really. He'd already done parts of it as a competition and he wanted more people to see it so we wrote a piece of music more or less around what he'd done, modified it to fit with what he already had and then he did the final edit, or someone else did actually. The video almost came first with that and then we made the two match up and we got a lot of help from some production houses in London who gave their time for free in the end, 'cause obviously with all that CG and water tanks and things it wasn't really a cheap production but it turned out to be something everyone really got into and chipped in so we're really happy with it.
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