Next up........My favourite album this year is Leisure and Technology by the band Torn Sail who released the work on digital download, CD and superb vinyl format. Eight tracks, gatefold sleeve and black vinyl (if you get it on vinyl) of an emotional roller coaster ride and a beautiful piece of work, but the real beauty is that time stands still for a moment when you give it a listen. That moment in time feels content and .....it's A Beautiful Life.
Frontman Huw Costin has collaborated with many great musicians for this album and they have collectively given us a piece of work that demands your attention. There's no bad track on this album and for me the number one listen has to be Green Nature.....I dare you to be unmoved!
Huw Costin kindly gave me an interview on his life story and the release of Leisure and Technology.......
Can you tell us about your musical background Huw - and how would you describe your sound?
My Mother was a music teacher so music was ever present at home, I learnt piano, euphonium and sang in the school choir, but that all got left behind when I was given a tape for Christmas with Iron Maiden on one side, and Meatloaf on the other. I got a Charvette bass guitar with a pointy headstock, and eventually got my first band together at school. We were called Lamia and I screamed, my friend played drum machine and the other played one-finger guitar. We were into thrash metal. This is about 1985.
When I moved to rural England I made some new friends and we got into art and dance music and drugs and became a kind of psychedelic grunge band and we played gigs all over the place, we had a Moog player for a while too, and used to travel in a an ex gas-board mini van, someone squashed in the back with the amps, no windows, feeling every bump. We did our own projections and had a white parachute we'd project onto. We got into recording our own tapes and selling them at gigs and in the local record shop (which is essentially what I still do!). Over about 15 years that band became Earth the Californian Love Dream. It was always a serious thing to us, but for a couple of years from 2003 we started making waves in the press and on the radio - A-listed on 6 music, put some 7”'s out, went to the States, played a few festivals, recorded a Peel session. Then it all fell apart in the usual cliché of breakdowns, fall-outs, and bankruptcy.
Around that time my girlfriend left, I was going from crap job to crap job, pretty miserable, but luckily I had the studio I could use and started learning how to use it. I put out my first solo album 'Regrets' in 2009, not that anyone noticed - though I did get offered a record deal with Ever Records on the provision I re-recorded it. I couldn't face opening up those wounds again though,so I declined, and I was busy by then playing with Richard Warren AKA Echoboy in the Cold Light Of Day. Richard had got the band together to back Soulsavers featuring Mark Lanegan. We only ever played one gig with Mark – headlining All Tomorrow's Parties at Butlin's Minehead – the biggest gig I've played by a country mile. The Cold Light Of Day got offered a deal, but Richard turned it into a solo deal for him, so the band regrouped without him, I renamed us as Torn Sail and after I'd released my second solo album - Something/Nothing in 2013 – we released 'This Short Sweet Life'. Mark Lanegan sang one of the songs - weirdly, he'd written some of the exact same lines he sang for one for his own songs with the Screaming Trees.
By the time This Short Sweet Life was out most of the band was touring the world with more financially viable bands like Spiritualised & The Selecter, so I started writing alone in the studio again, eventually getting the band in to add their own parts and ideas. A much more difficult album to make – In part Leisure & Technology explored some of the tangents and outliers I'd passed on the way from my first demo tapes in 1988 to the This Short Sweet Life.
Along the way there's been most recently the release of Disconnected & A Beautiful Life on NuNorthern Soul, a song called Blood on White Elephant's EP – a stunning EP from BJ Smith with Jim Baron & Chris Todd of Crazy P, and collaborations with Smith & Mudd on Claremont 56, a great version of Torn Sail's Treasure and an instrumental work I co-wrote with Huw Jones at Kinema Audio called Connected, recorded by Berlin artist Andre Lodemann, and released on Bestworks, and I sang a whole bunch of tracks for a great album by Popsneon, out on Paper Recordings. Paper also also just put out a brilliant album called Canopy by Stubb, I wrote a song for that with Rachel Foster - It's called Love Not Sex. Jane Weaver, Sirius Rush, Mike Lindsay are on there too.
What challenges did lockdown present in getting the new album out?
If anything it made it easier. Thankfully all the recording was complete and with no gigs or rehearsals I could focus solely on pushing it out in the world. The downside was that with no gigs or rehearsals, opportunities to flog the vinyl or CD copies at gigs were non-existent.
The new album is called 'Leisure and Technology', can you tell us the idea or theme behind the project?
For years, the working title was Science Friction – A title I stole from Roy Harper's label, but on doing a little research I realised there were lots of albums with the same title. Essentially, I was struggling with the technology and as always wondering what the hell the point of it all is- the point of being a musician, and artist – not technology...it's also a comment on the law of unintended consequences, that seems to be so vividly illustrated by so much death and despair in our world as humankind evolves. Leisure & Technology is an abstraction of the Science Friction title.
Who's worked with you on the album?
My band obviously – John Thompson, Lee Horsley, Henry Claude, Jonny Aitken (from my Earth the Californian Love Dream days). My friend Emma (E.R. Thorpe) wrote and recorded a song for the album – Bible; BJ Smith, who was in Manatee back in the 90's and who I've recorded with over the years for Smith & Mudd helped out with some electronics, and Michael Chapman, the veteran singer/songwriter/guitarist contemporary of John Martyn & Nick Drake recorded a shamanistic vocal for Green Nature too. Hats off to Simon White for helping me pull the strands together, and for mixing the album too. It was a tricky job and he smiled the whole way through.
Where can folks get to listen to the album?
All the usual places online. It's in a few stores on vinyl – Tallbird in Chesterfield and 586 in Newcastle are the best. Rough Trade Nottingham wouldn't take it which is odd – they sold out of the last one pretty quickly... tornsail1.bandcamp is ideal for me – a much fairer platform than spotify...all the Torn Sail tracks, and Vinyl etc is on there, my solo stuff too.
I've noticed that there are various remixes out on some of the tracks, can you give us an overview of them?
Popsneon made a Bladerunner kind of deep house Detroit cavernous thing, Brown Fang made a kind of slow moving whale in deepblue sea midnight sky ever so gentle thing. Fang Jr. made some fractal technicolour skitish acid shoal of fishes things. They just do whatever they feel, it's always bold and beautiful.
What's next for you?
I've just had the masters in for an album I've made with my friends Emma & Matt. We're called the Low Drift and the music is really special. It includes site specific songs written and in part recorded out in the fields and hills of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Covid buggered all our plans – we had a tour booked, a residency – all that is shelved for now, but we struggled on with the recording and I'm so glad we did. I've just had the test pressings in for some amazing remixes of Torn Sail by Shrinkwrap – Matt Horobin & Mark Rayner which should be out on a 12'' next year on the Sun Sea Sound label. Shrinkwrap have just started mixing the next Torn Sail album too, and I'm thrilled to be working on some new music with my my friend BJ again – some of which is destined for a NuNorthern Soul release next year. I've a vocal to finish for Cal's Scruffy Soul Society & I've a couple of guitar instrumental albums just gone out to library – co-written & produced by Huw Jones – I'm really proud of those and, yeah, hopefully they'll do ok.
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