Welcome Readers! The PROLE JAZZ gang are deliriously pleased to present Jack Chat, a shiny new column dedicated to the efforts of the good Captain to capture the utterances and opinions of the musical luminaries of Planet Earth.
To prepare for this debut episode we commanded tea-boy & meteor freak Captain Jack Avery to train under masterful interview queen Celestial Broc, to learn the dark arts of artistic interrogation, to interlocute with panache and verve. Under her instruction Jack read all 6 Broc on the Blocs, daily, whilst chanting in a bath of ice.
For his first assignment Jack tracked down ‘Sarah’, cosmic jazz drum shaman of the wild and wonderful Beyond Albedo and tested his newly acquired skills under the beady eyed guidance of Guru Celestial Broc. With her help, he placed one sentence after another, ending some with question marks, and deftly quizzed alien skronk goddess Sarah about matters of relevance and interest such as interplanetary visits, favourite dinosaurs and prolonged tantric alien foreplay.
Introducing Jack Chat 1! Read on, space freaks and love bunnies…
Captain Jack Avery: Can you tell us who you are and what you do?
‘Sarah’: My Earth name is ‘Sarah’.
J: Where are you from, in real life?
S: …What is real life? I’m from Planet Albedo. With three of my colleagues we’ve been exploring space. We’ve had previous visits to Earth, in the 1950s and 1980s (Earth Time). We came then to collect data on Earth Music.
Celestial Broc: What did you do with what you collected?
S: We experimented and made music. We like to do that.
J: So tell us about the name… Albedo sounds like a mixture of albino and libido… am I right?
S: (laughs) Jesus! That’s a hard question…
J: It’s a law of physics innit, something to do with the reflectance of white in outer space or something.
S: Yes!
J: What’s your alien name by the way?
S: It’s impossible to say with a human mouth
J: Tell us about Beyond Albedo…
S: I play drums, Lara plays sax, Tim plays guitar and bass and Ben plays synth.
B: So there are no lyrics?
S: No, we wanted to keep it universal.
B: So how do you travel?
S: We have a spaceship that transcends spacetime.
J: For our readers who haven’t heard your music, can you describe it in 5 words?
B: No more no less (Ed. Is the magic number)
S: Retro-futuristic, electronic, dancey, improvvy…interstellar
B: How did you all meet?
S: I met Tim training for Operation Beyond Albedo on the Space Jazz training programme.
B: Have you ever been to any other planets?
S: There are a couple of others, we’ve been writing music about them. One’s called Pergetus, basically it’s this abandoned planet, it seemed derelict but then we found life… and then it got creepy, and we left.
J: Sheffield is a hotbed, possibly even the centre, of the intergalactic cosmic music scene on this planet… and cosmic bands always seem to have saxophones in them… what’s going on?
S: Yeah! Saxophones have special frequencies, a bit like whale-speak, the sound waves can go beyond the stratosphere and you can hear them on other planets.
J: My theory is that saxophones are alive, and they’re actually controlling all the aliens in these bands, they’re in charge of everything.
B: There are limited materials you can only get in certain places to build space saxophones.
J: You’ve got a single, Arrival… what’s next for Beyond Albedo?
S: We’re hoping to tell two more stories about our travels, two more singles and we’re making a holographic interpretation of our songs
J: A wodgebod?
S: Yeah!
B: Are your outfits uniforms?
S: Yeah
J: Are you engineers?
S: They’re our work outfits, and different colours are for different jobs… so Lara our sax player is communications expert
Transmission here is lost and found… we return to a discussion of the mighty Poppers
J: Poppers Revival are psychedelic freaks… definitely deeply embedded in the cosmic scene.
S: Yeah, we’ve played with them in our last Sheffield visit… and we were impressed!
B: Is Emily an alien?
S: Friends with aliens
Conversation turns to Ableton… Jack rambles about a pitch shift graph function and making glitch-hop, then Broc admits she’s never seen Star Trek
J: So tell us about your next gig?
S: It’s in a secret location, at Jeff’s House. (Ed’s note: No longer secret! Location is now announced on the gig page HERE). We’re playing with Earthling musicians at a Mondrian-themed mansion in Heeley… it’s basically a massive open room with mezzanine balconies around the room so you can be looking over and watching the band from above… it’s really cool!
B: Who are you playing with?
S: Our friends Archipelago.
J: What’s their vibe?
S: Free jazz… very, very interesting. They got a bassist, drummer, sax player…
J: There you go! They’re like little saxy aliens taking over musical planets
S: They’re touring with their new album… they’re definitely strange. It’s like they’re from the future.
B: When is this wonderful gig?
S: It’s Thursday November 7th (Ed’s Note: that’s this Thursday!!)
Long conversation about venues in Sheffield ensues… transmission lost
J: Who’s your favourite band at the moment?
S: Hint hint (laughs)
J: What about Richard Dawson, his new album is fucking insane!
While Sarah ponders this Jack rambles on about how stressful making a Triceratops stencil is
S: I really enjoyed the John Pope Quintet… John’s in Archipelago and the drummer is insane, he’s called Jonny Hunter. You have to watch them, it’s five phenomenal musicians, really improvvy and enjoyable to watch.
J: Sounds incredible! So I’m writing a review of the intergalactic music scene in the UK, of which Beyond Albedo are a pretty major player these days
B: On earth, in the Universe!
J: Who’s your favourite cosmic band? I mean contemporary so you can’t say Sun Ra who’s dead… well as dead as aliens get, anyway…
S: Comet is Coming
J: I saw them in Chai Wallahs a few years ago, they were totally primal
S: Nubya Garcia played Shambala this year, she was great!
B: I was there in body but not in mind.
J: So you’ve got a single called Arrival, is your follow up gonna be called Departure?
S: No comment!
B: Have you got any parasites?
S: Only the ones we picked up from you guys.
B: Have you ever been to a wedding?
S: (laughs) On our planet we’re post-marriage.
J: (whispers) How do aliens have sex? I mean I know cos I’m an alien but we’re all different, right? How do Albedians procreate?
S: It’s a very long process…
J: Seven hours? Millipede sex is seven hours long.
S: In human time, it’s a light year of foreplay.
J: Wow! Holy shit that’s like next-level tantric…
B: And then what? That’s it?
S: Yeah
J: Hey maybe Albedo is split into two supercontinents, Albino and Libido, and there was a huge war but no-one could decide who won and so they joined forces to become Albedo.
B: That’s what you want to have happened…
S: Blasphemous!
J: I think Beyond Albedo: Beyond Libido that should be your album title
S: Maybe when we make a 70s porn funk album!
J: I think you’ve got it in you, as a band.
Conversation pauses while everyone makes wah-wah guitar noises
B: The core question for every interview is ‘What is your favourite dinosaur’?
J: It’s the only reason we do this, to find out.
S: Pterodactyl! We have pets like these.
J: On Earth they were the first animals to evolve powered flight… no wait, that was insects. They were the second.
S: Our climate is similar to yours
B: Is that why you came here?
S: Our planet Albedo is a bit fucked, we’ve come to warn you.
J: If you have one piece of advice for earthlings, what would it be?
S: It would be ‘take your time on the foreplay’.
B: Give it a light year…
J: Another EP title!
S: It’s about 3 years of foreplay… it’s basically dependent on the cycle of our moons. We have lots of moons, we have so many we haven’t even counted them yet, we’re very affected by their movements.
B: Astrology…
S: What’s astrology?
J: It’s like astronomy but made up.
B: You decide your future depending on where the stars are … OK so you don’t understand weddings, I was gonna say what song at a wedding would make you stand up and dance
Long discussion about DJs, weddings and vinyl
B: I DJed at a wedding once and someone asked me to play Angry Birds!
S: Maybe T-Rex…
B: That’s a good answer, I would dance to that.
B: Right this is my favourite question… would you rather die like Whitney Houston or live like Mariah Carey?
S: (Laughter) Oh my god… how’s Mariah Carey living these days
B: She’s got a 9-octave voice
S: I’d live like Mariah Carey.
B: I’ve run out of questions, I didn’t prepare for this…
J: Me neither, I had no time…. (to ‘Sarah’) don’t worry, we’ll edit it down into something fascinating.
Interview discussion and rambling…
J: I really enjoyed the Snapped Ankles one, it was mostly gibberish but great to read. They’re kind of like cosmic priests.
S: Who’s that?
B: Snapped Ankles
S: Oh I’ve seen them, they’re amazing! I loved it, wow.
Lots of talk about Beyond Albedo’s wild live show which is top secret …
J: So PROLE JAZZ is based in Sheffield and we focus on a lot of Sheffield bands… give a shout out to some of your faves
S: Well there’s Captain Avery.,.
J: (laughs) That’s cheating!
S: Poppers Revival, Rhiannon Scutt… I saw Jackie Moonbather the other day, I really like his music
J: Yeah he’s great, a lot of Sheffield bands craft incredible live shows which are quite difficult to capture on record, but Jackie has a great recording aesthetic.
Everybody rambles on for ages about space
B: Do you have any closing statements for the readers of PROLE JAZZ? Anything poignant?
J: Oh wait, what is jazz?
S: (laughs) It’s shit isn’t it!
J: It’s shit?! You can’t say that!! You’ll get fired from your band! Oops… where’s my thing?
B: I think you’ve just turned it on and off again.
END OF TRANSMISSION
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Come to Beyond Albedo’s Sheffield gig Thursday 7th November! Tickets and info here
Watch the video for ‘Arrival’ on YouTube here
Or listen on Spotify here
Follow them on Facebook here
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