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Jan 28, 2011 Web Exclusive By Hays Davis

While three-and-a-half years have passed since the Manchester band Working for a Nuclear Free City released their second album, 2007’s Businessmen & Ghosts (which was really just an expanded version of their self-titled debut), theirs has hardly been a case of idle hands. As co-founding keyboard player/producer Phil Kay describes it, there’s so much on their slate at the moment that the picture here is more like shaking a bottle for a thousand days and finally releasing the cork.

WFANFC’s new album, the two-disc Jojo Burger Tempest (released last fall), is a hearty stylistic smorgasbord. Rather than nursing concerns that rampant variation might blur their identity, Kay and company embrace the notion that their eagerness to try something new is part of what serves as their identity. And if their laudable ease at shifting from frenetic rock to icy electronics to Britpop and elsewhere over the course of Jojo‘s 17-song first disc isn’t achievement enough, consider the six-months-in-the-making, half-hour title track that spans the second disc. This, by the way, is only the gateway to the other two albums they’re on the verge of setting free. Kay is also a member of Motorifik (along with Idrisse Khélifi), whose debut, Secret Things, was one of Under the Radar‘s Top 50 albums of 2010.

Hays Davis: For a city that once had a music scene with a pretty identifiable sound, I wondered how Working for a Nuclear Free City seemed to fit within what’s going on these days in Manchester.

Phil Kay: In terms of what’s going on in Manchester these days, to be honest, there’s not been much happening here that I’ve been a fan of, going back fifteen years or so, maybe more. I think the influences we take from the Manchester stuff are more probably more obscure. Not so much Stone Roses kind of stuff, maybe, but more like Magazine and Autechre. Those two are the main Manchester bands that we like at the moment. Obviously, in our earlier days, we were really into Stone Roses and stuff, and I suppose that comes through a little bit.

When your band works on the new album, did you have any different approaches in mind compared to what you had done with Businessmen & Ghosts?

The first thing we did, for the first six months of recording, the process we were doing was these, at most, 30-second-long loops, these very dense layers. Loops that just went on. We recorded them over the space of half an hour, just building up on top of them. And we did close to a thousand of those over a six-month period, so all these little song ideas were all there. When we tried to go through them and make them into songs, it was such a long time ago that the energy had kind of disappeared, but some of those songs did finally get the full treatment and they do exist on the record. There’s a second CD which is mainly built up of those short, looped ideas. That was one way that we went about it. Also, a lot of Businessmen & Ghosts was sample-based in terms of the drums. On this record we really tried to record drum parts and try and record more as a band the standard way to see what we could do with that. Which, again, is kind of an experiment for us to do anything the standard way.

The title track of Jo Jo Burger Tempest is roughly the length of an album side, or longer.

Yeah. A little longer than 30 minutes in length. As I was saying earlier, when we were doing the loop ideas, there were a lot of these ideas. One day I sat down and went through them and said, ‘I’m going to do a whole half-hour track today, one way or another. I’m just going to throw them all together and sit here.’ I almost did the whole thing live. It was actually built live. I was throwing things in as it was continuously playing. I probably listened back to it three times the other day. I was really just trying to make it like a live, almost DJ-set thing, just feeling my way through it, chucking in the next sound I thought would work. The next [WFANFC] record is also a similar kind of thing. It’s a bit longer and more fleshed out, but it’s a kind of long piece, interweaving.

When I first heard about you recording such a long track I wondered if the band had holed up somewhere with some old Yes records.

I think what it was, I was listening to Gaslamp Killer. He’s an LA guy in a similar vein to Flying Lotus. He’s mainly a DJ. He does a lot of mix records, kind of chucks in all his favorite records. That was always a format that I wanted to try and do, a long piece of entertainment that’s constantly changing and really keeps you on the edge of your seat. You don’t know what’s coming up next.

After hearing new tracks like “Silent Times” and “Pachinko” and “Buildings,” the first thing that occurred to me was that you guys seem as determined as ever to ensure that no one is going pigeonhole Nuclear Free City into any particular musical category.

I think so. It’s not that we’re trying to be difficult. It just seems like such a natural way of making music. If you’re a fan of different types of music, it just seems like the most natural thing for us to do. It doesn’t seem a like a strained or forced kind of thing. That [diversity] is our identity, and I think it’s a perfect reflection of who we are as people, really. We enjoy all different types of things, and one sound isn’t ever going to get that across. I find it kind of strange that when more bands do it, it seems like something out of the ordinary. That just comes from getting bored of doing one kind of sound after a while. At the moment I’m trying to work on a completely electronic album that is quite difficult to do, to kind of maintain your focus on that one sound without getting bored. [Laughs] Wanting to throw in some acoustic guitars or whatever.

Do you have a release date planned for the electronic album, or is that still a while from being completed?

No, we’re really trying to speed things up now, trying at least to get two albums out a year from now on. There’s already the third album which is ready and waiting to go, which is mainly material that was recorded toward the end of Jo Jo Burger Tempest. That one’s ready to go, so that should be out, hopefully, the early part of 2011. The electronic project should be out shortly after that, and then another Nuclear Free City out shortly after that one as well. We’re just trying to keep as busy as possible, really.

www.myspace.com/wfanfc