INTERVIEW : CLEFT

Since few months, I discovered CLEFT on Bandcamp. Cleft is a crazy turbo prog band who comes from Manchester, composed by Dan and John. They agreed to answer some questions... 

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WAS : To begin with, can you introduce each member of the band?
Dan: My name is Dan and I play guitar. I've been doing horrible guitar music for a long sodding time and can't seem to stop now. Aside from doing Cleft things I also record bands, make music for film and teach music technology.

John: I'm John and I molest the drums. I've been doing that for 16 years now, and, like Dan, can't stop doing it now. I also play in another band, and do mixing and mastering of other people's music (often with Dan).


WAS : How did you come to make music together?
Dan: We met through a website called joinmyband.co.uk. It was a deeply romantic encounter in a pub in Chorlton, Manchester, two doors down from where John's mum was born. True story.


WAS : Why did you choose « Cleft »? There is an anecdote behind this?
Dan: It's a fairly idiotic product of an evening's Wikipedia'ing where I was just trying to find a word that meant two, or something related to a single entity being divided into two equal parts. Somewhere a found a definition that was something like "A Cleft is the product of cleavage" and that was enough for me. I'm a simple man really...


WAS : About your music, you said that it’s « turbo-prog music », can you describe it precisely and list me some influences?
Dan: We have a jointly unhealthy obsession with Oceansize (Mike Vennart and Steve Durose came and saw us play not so long ago, I nearly died!). We knew we wanted to just do silly riffs that were progressive in nature (odd time signatures and quirky rhythms etc), but without the drawn out laborious nature of the typical 20 minute long guitar solo, prog rock format.

John: We make music for those without a long attention span (like us), and we love to chop and change what we do so often that we don't get bored.


WAS : Without bands, artists…Are there other things that can inspire you around you to make your music?
Dan: I think so. I like to think that basically everything in my life is an influence on my creative output one way or another. That's quite a fluffy, arty farty answer though...

John: You arty bastard. You'll be tie-dying your t-shirts next and making love to a tree.


WAS : Does your music tell a particular story?
Dan: Most songs are stories about an unfortunately obese dog named Arthur, who has a penchant for leaping out of windows whilst breaking wind and eating doritos. In other words, no.

John: It tells a story of love, heartbreak, teenage pregnancies, crippling financial debt and the joyous celebration of youth. No...wait, I think I read that in a supermarket tabloid.


WAS : When I heard you music, I had the impression that you are more than 2 musicians who are playing together…but…I was surprised when I constated that you are just 2 people in the band ! How can you explain that? How do you work to obtain this effect to your listener?
Dan: I spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how to fill all of the gaps that inevitably form when you are in a guitar/drum duo. I main weapon of choice is octave pedals, I have three of them on my pedalboard and they do an excellent job of fattening up my guitar sound so as to deceive the listener. I also run a dual amp set up where my guitar signal is split at my delay pedal into my guitar amplifier (Hayden Mofo 30 - AWESOME amps) and then into a bass amp simulator which runs to the PA/recording device. This allows us to get fairly triumphantly loud and bass heavy sound without us having to deal with huge amps to lug up and downstairs, or, worse yet, bass players.

John: We also use some extra samples to add a bit of flavour in some tunes that I trigger on my Roland SPD-SX, such as piano, strings, glockenspiel and other instruments we can't play very well.


WAS : About your album « BOSH! », I noticed that you put voices in one track, « Elephant In The Bar Room », but in the live version, there is no voices. Why did you chose that?
Dan: We have Matt Franklin (of Halfling's Leaf) sing with us whenever we can, but as it's only one tune it would be pretty excessive to drag the poor git around with us everywhere we went. On that particular live take of it, he couldn't make it down to the gig so we played it instrumental. It's great fun playing it with him though. We've never actually rehearsed it all together, we just drag him up on stage when we can.

WAS :  Recently, you released a LIVE EP. Can you tell me more about this EP?
Dan: When we first started gigging, we used to try our best to record the audio from every gig. We never really had to big a plan for this, it was more as a document to listen back to for ourselves. Over the course of about 18 months, we amassed quite a few live recordings (of varying quality). When we were putting the finishing touches to the album it occurred to us to release these recordings as a live EP as we thought it might be something people would be into. It's very much a warts and all snapshot of what we were doing when we first started playing live, it has recordings from our very first gig we played together which is really nice to have actually.

WAS : I saw that you have live videos but no music videos. Is it in construction?
John: We've got plans for a music video in the future, once we have another album or EP to release, but we're both useless in front of the camera and don't want to make a typical and boring music video, so it'll have to be pretty special.

Dan: We did actually have plans to have an animated video put together for a track on the album, but in the end we realised it would be a great deal more time consuming and costly than we'd anticipated. We are very much a live band, and doing a live session seemed like a good way to publicly air our new album. Both being technically inclined in the audio direction, and my girlfriend Jess being a film maker seemed a perfect opportunity to put something together on our tiny budget too.

WAS :…Anything to add?
Dan: All of our tunes are available to download for as little or as much as you like at
http://cleft.bandcamp.com 

John: Thanks to you and your readers for having us, and if any of you in France want to see us play, Tweet us (@cleftband) or get us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/cleftband) and we will do our best to make it happen!