Chris Letcher Interview

I recently interviewed a young South African songwriter (now living in London) about his new album Deep Frieze...which came out early this year in the US but has yet to be released in Europe. It's very smart, imagistic pop, carefully constructed but weirdly eccentric. The closest reference I can think of is Robyn Hitchcock, but that's not quite right. Anyway, here's a bit from the interview, which went up yesterday at PopMatters:If you listen closely to the lovely "I Was Awake, I Could Not Move My Eyes", a track on Chris Letcher's new album Frieze, you'll hear a strange sort of percussive background, metallic sounding and mechanical beneath the pure shimmery pop of the melody. That's not a drum machine, and it's nothing generated out of Letcher's computer. It's audio taken out of a heart transplant ward in London, sounds donated by a friend of Letcher's who works there. "I know somebody who is the arts manager in a transplant hospital and they were doing a project that involved doing quite a bit of recording of the ambient sounds, so that's where the initial idea came from," he says. "It just kind of spun off into a separate piece of music." "The song is all based on the ambient sounds in a transplant ward in a hospital," says Letcher. "All the percussive sounds come from this sort of clanking artificial lung, basically, that someone's plugged into." He adds that even if most people don't know what they're listening to, the juxtaposition of real world sounds and lyrical content is what interests him the most. "It is a song about somebody lying in a transplant ward, being surrounded by the sounds, and just kind of trying to imagine what that must be like. So it makes sense to me." (More here: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/features/article/47110/chris-letcher-london-south-africa/)I've put "I Was Awake I Could Not Move" because that's what the first three paragraphs of the story are about. But I like "Deep Frieze", available here as an MP3, a little better:http://www.letchermusic.com/DeepFrieze.mp3