Meat Beat Manifesto’s Jack Dangers takes our probing line of quick-fire questioning in his stride
Hello Jack, how’s things?
“Fucking awesome!”
Where are you right now?
“I’m at Tape Lab in San Francisco, and there are synthesisers as far as the eye can see.”
Your new album is based on a colour… opaque couché, which is…
“Baby shit brown.”
Sounds delightful. Where’d that idea come from?
“I always wanted to do an LP based around a colour… all the obvious ones have been used.”
Were any other colours in the running?
“Fulvous, fast and fulvous, mikado, wenge, sarcoline…”
Someone said opaque couché is used on cigarette packs to make them less appealing. The idea a colour can put people off things is interesting, right?
“No.”
And yet the special edition coloured vinyl double LP version sold out in about two seconds. Surely no one should have bought it?
“…”
Our theory is that it was bought by smokers…
“You are wrong, wrong I tell ya!”
As an ex-pat living in San Francisco, do you do “color” or “colour”?
“‘Colour’ of course… your man abroad reporting from the front.”
It’s all a bit synesthesia isn’t it, do you “hear” colours?
“I don’t hear colours, I just see them. I see decades in colours, the 70s was yellow and the 90s was black!”
‘Opaque Couché’ is your “back to my roots” album, right?
“Yes, what I wanted to do was to go back, way back into time…”
You say it has “familiar breaks in unfamiliar places”, care to expand?
“The most famous breaks fashioned into something that doesn’t sound so familiar anymore is what I’m getting at, sunshine.”
We do love a bit of press blurb… says here that “‘Hailing Frequencies Open’ comes across as a paranoid nighttime stroll through a forest made of wind chimes and tubular bells”. Crikey, eh?
“Beam me up, Scotty.”
You’ve been working with Adi Newton of Clock DVA fame of late, care to tell us a little about that?
“Adi is unlike any one I have ever met… a true sound artist. Much respect. Time seems to slow down when working with him to the point of seeing worlds within worlds.”
When might we see the fruits of that project?
“SOON.”
We also hear talk of Meat Beat live dates too?
“Yes, you can’t get rid of me that easily, I’m gonna stick in your craw you sour beasts.”
