Hello and welcome to the first of, hopefully, many Album of the Week columns here at Light In The Attic. Each week we’ll showcase a new album getting bandied about the office. We’ll “sit down” with an assortment of bands and pick their brains on the inspirations, the ideas, the concept, and the processes that went in to these pieces of work. We hope you enjoy.
We’re starting with a favorite band of Techmonkey Noah: The Black Ghosts. Theo Keating (The Wiseguys) and Simon Lord (Simian) came together in 2006 to form The Black Ghosts. After releasing a series of EPs over the course of the last few years, the two are set to release The Black Ghosts on July 8th. We sat down to find out their thoughts on the current state of electronica, the return to 8-bit, and just what goes in to making an album this enjoyable.
Light In The Attic: In making this album both of you guys are coming from completely different bands, how did this affect the sound of the record? What did you draw from Simian and The Wiseguys (and conversely, what did you leave behind) in the creation of this album?
Simon: It meant we could combine the best bits of what we were doing. I drew on my past of writing songs and lyrics and mixing them with electronic sounds.
Theo: It’s hard to say, as things like that are never conscious – that’s the stuff other people notice and comment on. So I’m sure this album does have echoes of The Wiseguys in some songs, and my Touch’e stuff in others. It’s all just part of one’s “style” or whatever. It all gets filed away in the brain somewhere – the good stuff you learn gets distilled into new projects, and you bin the stuff that didn’t work.
