LomoAmigos: Going Wide with Mogwai

Mogwai is a Scottish post-rock band that formed in 1995. Last year the band released “Rave Tapes”, its eighth studio album, and has been touring intensively over the last 12 months.

Hello Mogwai, tell us a bit about yourselves.

We are five men from in and around Glasgow. We have been playing in a band for nearly 20 years.

How would you describe your music to someone who has never heard of Mogwai?

All music is essentially abstract. If you haven’t heard of Mogwai before, there’s a good chance you would have heard the Martin Mull quote, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Fairly indefinable. Also, [there’s] a good chance you won’t have heard of The God Machine or Spacemen 3, bands that we used to want to sound like. Maybe we failed in a way because I don’t think we really sound very much like those bands. We make mostly instrumental rock music. We use guitars and drums, bass guitars, keyboards, and computer techniques to create a wide selection of sounds that we then try to organize in a way that is pleasing to all of us.

If you haven’t heard of Mogwai, I’m pretty sure you’ve heard of Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, and The Beatles. We’re not really anything like them. Maybe a bit more like The Velvet Underground or The Cure (you must have heard of them). But we’re still not very much like them, either. I guess we’d all like to be Led Zeppelin but we don’t have their high level of skills so have to be something quite different.

You are famous for your dynamic contrasts in sound, from quiet and gentle to heavy and distorted. How did this sound come about and what influences you all?

We like quiet sounds and we like loud sounds. If one person is playing a loud sound, then it’s difficult for someone else to play a quiet sound and be heard. Similarly, if one person is playing a quiet sound, you don’t want someone coming in and playing a loud sound and ruining it all. What you end up with, then, is five people playing quiet sounds at the same time, or everyone playing loud sounds at the same time so it can end up [that] the quietness or loudness can be multiplied by five. So once you have all these sets of quiet sounds and loud sounds, you put them all together in a way that seems least bad. No big story, really.

Your music is often termed as post-rock. How do you feel about being associated with this genre?

All genres are by definition not creative. We hope that we are not generic. As a description of our music, post-rock fits as well as any other, I guess. Thinking theoretically, the term means anything that grew out of rock. Can and The Velvet Underground are pretty post-rock. These days you don’t have to be too worried theoretically about it. Post-rock is a way of describing music that sounds a bit like us, or Godspeed You Black Emperor in a kind of generic way.

How was your experience shooting with the LC-Wide and what did you take photos of?

It was simple and easy to use. We had the camera with us in Japan so its mostly pictures of things we saw in Japan: buildings, food, taxis, and sunsets, which seem more interesting there because they look different to the ones at home. And of the people we travel with, I guess this is simply because they are there.

If your photos could have a soundtrack, what would it be (five songs, title and artist, please)?

• “All Cats Are Grey” – The Cure
• “Some Things Come From Nothing” – Super Furry Animals.
• “Some Summers They Drop Like Flies” – The Dirty Three
• “Revolution” – Spacemen 3
• “Steam Machine” – Daft Punk

You also run the record label Rock Action. What do you look out for when signing a new act?

Originality, mainly, but there aren’t any strict rules. Most of the bands on the label sound quite different from each other or ourselves, so I guess it’s more of what we imagine to be the mindset of the artists.

Do you have anything exciting coming up that you want to tell us about?

We’re playing a few gigs and releasing a compilation album to celebrate our 20th anniversary this year, in June.

Thanks for taking part! To find out more about Mogwai, visit their website.

written by hannah_brown on 2015-03-11 #people #lomoamigo #mogwai #lomo-lc-wide #section-people #category-lomoamigos