Sanguine Hum
From buttered cats to soft synths, Sanguine Hum’s concept-heavy Canterbury-influenced sounds are a purr-fect addition to modern prog…
The complexities of the buttered cat still occupy their thoughts on new album Now We Have Light.
“Ithink that, for us, Now We Have Power is about enjoying playing the music, having fun realising it and making it as interesting as it can be,” says Sanguine Hum’s Matt Baber on their new album. “It’s a much more expansive soundworld than we have achieved before.”
Now We Have Power has the same sort of elegant intricacy as its 2015 predecessor, Now We Have Light, but Sanguine Hum’s music is like an ongoing work-in-progress, mixing new compositions with music from their library of demos, some of which date back a number of years. And while on earlier albums they were keen to try to replicate these demos when they re-recorded them for release, here they have also reworked, rearranged and experimented with them.
This more open process has produced a greater feeling of scale and space, and yielded some particularly striking moments, like the chorales that open The View Part One, sung by guitarist, vocalist and keyboard player Joff Winks. Current drummer Paul Mallyon has contributed some sections, while bass guitarist Brad Waissman, although not a composer per se, is credited with arrangements and acts as the group’s “arbiter of taste”, in that songs that meet his disapproval have been dropped.
Baber, who plays keyboards, reckons that although he might have written the majority of the musical ideas, it’s their most collaborative recording to date.
The album is also more keyboard orientated, with Winks playing less guitar and more keyboards this time around. “The acoustic piano plays a major part,” says Baber. “And we spent a lot of time recording it in the Jacqueline Du Pre Music Building in Oxford, a specially built rehearsal and performing space where we rented the whole building and a Steinway piano for two days.
But Joff in particular has been exploring a lot of software samples.”
“We branched out into the ‘soft synths’, which are recreations of the classic synths, the ARP Solina, the Yamaha CS 80, the Oberheim SEM, the classic minimoog,”
Winks confirms. “So in a way, the new sounds that we have reached for are a recreation of the sounds that we grew up listening to, used by people we admired, like Bowie and Eno.”
They also admit that Todd Rundgren – particularly
A Wizard, A True Star and Todd
– was an influence on some of the rippling background synths on tracks like Skydive. But the conceptual narrative that began on 2013’s The Weight Of The World and is more overtly stated on Now We Have Light and Now We Have Power was also influenced by Rundgren’s exploration of theosophical themes on albums like Initiation.
The story dates right back to 2001, years before the formation of Sanguine Hum, when Baber and Winks heard the buttered cat joke: that toast always lands on the buttered side and a cat always lands on its feet, so if you butter a cat’s back and drop it, it will keep spinning. This prompted ideas of harnessing this energy for powering turbines and within a day or so Winks rang up Baber with news of a song he had written on this subject called Chat Show.
“I think that in the last 10 years or so, more and more bands are connecting in one way or another to prog rock and progressive music as a survival technique.”
Matt Baber