One guitar is all Bristol’s resurrected Flying Saucer Attack needs
The sounds and textures that David Pearce delivers as Flying Saucer Attack are full of contradictions. On Instrumentals 2015, his first album in 15 years, the music is noisy and melodic, dreamily ambient and jarringly aggressive, dense and full of wide-open spaces so vast they could be intergalactic. The 15 songs suggest tolling church bells, ouds, synthesizers, steam locomotives, ocean waves, mournful cellos and twanging country guitars, but they’re all created by Pearce on a single electric guitar in his home studio.
“I may have two, three or four guitar tracks going on, but it’s just one instrument, the same guitar throughout the record,” says Pearce. “I use a basic digital reverb unit, a digital delay foot pedal and a distortion foot pedal. I use some when I’m mixing the tracks, rather than when I’m actually recording the guitar. The question is always, ‘How can I get something interesting-sounding out of this?’”
The last Flying Saucer Attack album came out 15 years ago. Did it take a year to create each track? “Well, it does average out to that,” says Pearce. “I stopped making music for a number of years. I wasn’t even listening to music during that time. When (director) Peter Strickland reached out to me and asked if he could use an old piece in his film The Duke Of Burgundy, it snapped me out of my stupor. I started putting together songs and sequencing the record. I’ve been surprised, intrigued, beguiled and uplifted by the finished sequence of music.
“At some point in the process, I realized stripping things down was the way to go. I needed to get up quite a bit of self-confidence to try and do stuff that was so bare, though. Maybe I was trying to hide behind the noise in the past? Regardless, the stripped-down thing seems to be an accurate reflection of what’s being going on in my life the last 15 years. I was going through a process of returning to basics in the music and in my life. Maybe I’m just less angry these days, so I don’t start by making a big noise, then trying to make some sense of it. It’s more like building up from silence, with a view to carefully put only a few elements into that silence.”
Pearce doesn’t enjoy playing live and won’t be doing any shows to support the album. “The only shows—of the handful I ever did—that I really enjoyed, were the all noise, completely improvisational ones, which were pretty stressful on everyone concerned,” he says. “That would be the only route to go down, if I was ever to play live again, even though that seems a bit old hat now. I remember the first time I ever picked up a guitar. I was more interested in trying to get odd noises out of it, rather than trying to play notes. In some ways, I’m still very much that five-year-old kid. Maybe it’s better that way?”
—j. poet
