IN THE STUDIO WITH: Beyond The Wizards Sleeve

The alter-ego of Erol Alkan and The Grid’s Richard Norris, Beyond the Wizards Sleeve’s debut album is a warped fusion of Rock, Psychedelia and Acid-tinged Disco. Danny Turner taps into the duo’s studio skulduggery

We meet Psychedelic duo Erol Alkan and Richard Norris as their debut album The Soft Bounce arrives

Having met on London’s club scene, Erol Alkan and Richard Norris decided to work together on a project under anonymity – a plan that was wrecked when their identities were leaked before they could even release a record. Frustrated but undeterred, the duo set about re-editing tracks by the likes of The Chemical Brothers, Interpol, Goldfrapp and Franz Ferdinand, collated for the release of a remix album, Reanimations (2009).

Having ‘reanimated’ other artists’ records, the duo then focused on creating original material. Despite coming from very different musical backgrounds, it was their shared love of Psychedelia that would form a strong backbone of ideas for their recently released studio debut, The Soft Bounce.

FM: The Soft Bounce is your debut album but you’ve been working together for a while…

RN: “Our first album was edits, or reanimations as we like to call them, but it’s always been a studio and DJ-based project. We knew each other from various London clubs during the Electroclash era, when Erol had a club called Trash. Then we met at BBC Radio London where we were both booked to play on Sean Rowley’s show. I was doing an A to Z of Psychedelia – I think I got up to about H or L [ laughs]. We started swapping CDs of our favourite music and both thought it would be great to hear them on a sound system. Once we’d DJ’d together, we started editing and releasing tracks, then after a great period of time started thinking about doing our own record. It’s been a long voyage, but it came in rather natural stages.”

What’s the idea behind the name and the anonymous imagery?

EA: “For us, it sounded very British – a playful series of words. We love the word ‘beyond’ in general, the ‘wizards sleeve’ part obviously has its connotations, which we weren’t aware of back then. From our side, it was purely the magical aspect of it. Our thinking behind it was more to do with the saying, ‘what have you got up your sleeve?’, but we decided to be brave about it. I remember hearing the name The Sex Pistols when I was a kid and dared not repeat it – a bit like Throbbing Gristle, Steely Dan or 10cc, which is such a brilliantly disguised name for a band. At the time, there were so many bands called ‘The’ this or that, which seemed too static. At first, we just thought we’d be playing in the backrooms of bars and stuff, we didn’t think there would ever be a record out or posters on the street.”

RN: “We were anonymous as, when we started doing the edits, we didn’t really want anyone to know who we were for various reasons – not just legalities; nobody was going to be getting rich on our royalties. Erol still has a very successful career – albeit very different music – and my background was very different. We didn’t want to colour our sound by saying who we were, but the secret got out within about a few seconds [ laughs]. After the first edits we put out, we didn’t do any press at all; we just took them to Rough Trade and they put them in the shops with no information on it.”

EA: “Up until recently, we’d worked with a chap called Craig Tilford and he designed a lot of the sleeves. There came a point where people wanted pictures of us but we still wanted to have a level of anonymity and be playful with the imagery, so we just took skulls and put them over our heads. For me, this is such a departure from what I normally do and, even though the music is as natural as any other, I guess we just want it to be seen and judged in its own right. It also makes photoshoots a lot more fun because you don’t have to strike a pose.”

The Soft Bounce has a Psychedelic element to it, but that’s not the background either of you are most associated with. What does Psychedelia mean to you?

RN: “Psychedelia is what brought us together in the first place. Before I was in The Grid, I worked for a record label that reissued a lot of Psychedelic records and had been a collector for years. It’s outsider music, studio-based but taking elements of new technology and pushing it way too far, which is what you kind of do when you get a new piece of kit. Initial Psychedelic records were happening at a time when there were great advances in new equipment and new techniques were being invented – it’s not just confined to ’60s records, you can hear it in Dub, Techno or Drone. When you listen to the original Psychedelic records, they were being forward-thinking and continually trying to evolve. It’s a shame that people look back on Psychedelia as a museum piece and pin it down to an era when the idea was to be constantly evolving and trying to do things that you haven’t done before. That freshness of approach – using the studio as an instrument – is something I’ve always done and was part of the initial conversation I had with Erol.”

EA: “It’s all about altering perceptions. With the songs on our album, you can look at a couple and think you can hear a Psychedelic influence in there, but the bulk of it is more to do with how the record moves stylistically, which we feel is something very important to do within the realm of the album. One thing that frustrates me about listening to a lot of contemporary music is that you can hear where the effort has gone into them. We wanted to put all our effort into every millisecond of this record, so there is something happening at every point.”

So what can we expect from The Soft Bounce?

RN: “There’s definitely an element of surprise. There are sounds that come in and tracks that join each other that are quite jarring or come at things from a completely different angle, and that’s what we want. My favourite records are the ones where they sound like they’re falling apart or just about held together, or a noise comes in and you go, ‘what the fuck is that?’. In terms of production, we were looking for those elements of surprise and shock, falling off a cliff or waking up in a different field and transcending genres.”