Motor, aka Mr. No and Bryan
Black, are jarringly non-talkative. Maybe it
was a rough night before the day I spoke with
them. Or perhaps it’s to be expected from a
group whose lyrics read like the incoherent
stutterings of a junky. “Yak,” the second track
of their debut album, Klunk (Novamute),
is a case in point: “Hey man, have you got any
gak?/ It’s all wack/ It’s all wack/ Gak/ Gak/
Hey man, have you got any gak?/ You see my
head’s a bit wacked/ It’s all wack/ Gak/ Gak.”
Yes, as album title, song
title, and lyrics aptly suggest, verbal
articulation is the less preferred medium of
communication for these two young men. Of
course, these guys are club demons, not hip-hop
freestylers; as such, sonic assault is their
natural expressive forte. Given their list of
club singles, including “Sweatbox,” “Stuka
Stunt,” and the Klunk opening track
“Black Powder,” perhaps that’s what’s best –
both for them and the eager denizens of club
land.
Motor’s music is defiantly
lo-fi. While club friendly, it has a gritty
industrial underbelly in the tradition of Nine
Inch Nails, Nitzer Ebb, and Meat Beat Manifesto
– just a few of the bands Black listed as
influences on the current CD. And while Motor’s
dark, hypnotic beats have been referred to as,
“the ideal soundtrack to another era of global
instability” and “dark music for dark times,”
Black insists such speculation is far from the
truth.
“I think a lot of people
want to draw connections to our music being
aggressive to the state of affairs in the
world,” Black said over the phone. “But
personally we don’t make this music because we
hate George Bush. There’s nothing political
about our music. It’s more of a coincidence
that our music is so hard. We’re not trying to
make any political statements about the politics
of the world. Even though we feel strongly
about that, we’re not a political band at all.”
The true impetus behind
Motor’s sinister style is, in fact, rather
mundane. Simply put, “the dark side seems to be
a bit more interesting than light-hearted
music,” Black explained. “It’s just an avenue
for us to be a bit more dramatic and twisted and
have more fun.”
Motor’s compositional style
is similarly straightforward. “Some tracks we
start out with a vocal hook, an idea or a word
or a phrase, and sometimes we come up with songs
based on loose jamming beats and sounds,” Black
told me. But, he clarified, “every song we
start in a different way. We try not to repeat
ourselves by having a sequence or order of
events. Every song is built in a different way
and we try to use different sounds to avoid
repeating ourselves.”
That they consciously try
to avoid repeating themselves may seem ironic
coming from a group whose repertoire is built
around the repetition of stripped down drum
tracks and digital rhythms. Indeed, sometimes I
had the distinct feeling I was in the middle of
a Honda commercial while their CD thumped from
the stereo. Despite such potential
applications, Black insists Motor’s product is
of an artistic rather than commercial nature.
“I don’t think [our music]
is commercial,” he said. “It’s more like an art
form because when we make our music we don’t pay
attention to song format and such. We try to
make our music as unconventional as possible so
that it’s a challenge… To make it interesting,
for us to continue to make music, every song we
try to do something unconventional or we try to
do something different. So this is what keeps us
going and it seems like people appreciate that
we’re making U-turns and left turns and all
these kind of things.”
Another thing Motor’s fans
seem to appreciate, and which Black feels sets
Motor apart from the musical competition, is
their live performance. When live “we don’t use
laptop, we don’t mix our music on stage; we
actually perform our music with the energy of a
punk rock band. There are a few other people
doing it but there aren’t a lot of electronic
bands who perform their music with the intensity
on stage that they have in the studio,” Black
said.
A club duo that perform
like punk rockers; a group who find the dark
side lets them “have more fun;” a pounding,
synth-driven sound that consciously tries not to
be repetitive: Motor is a sonic paradox. Klunk drops July 25. Bryan Black and the
“always negative” Mr. No hope to make a side
performance in Toronto or Montreal during their
autumn US tour.
Copyright
James Sandham,
May 2006
