SMIRK

I’m in a band. It’s called SMIRK. In can say with confidence that it’s the most unusual band I’ve ever been in, and I once played in a Swedish folk band in rural Sweden without any Swedish beyond Ikea furniture names.

It all started one day when someone who I vaguely knew posted on Facebook:

My favourite is the person who has responded with the ‘Care’ icon. You okay hun?

Now that’s a pretty small space on the Venn diagram. I’m a trumpet player with imposter syndrome. Stoner rock; I love all things QOTSA and QOTSA related. I’ve had a fair amount of experience with experimental noise; In a past life I used to work on projects with IRCAM in France and attended all sorts of performances of squeaks and bleeps and glitches where you didn’t know if it had started or when it would end. Sludge/doom/Heavy; I’ve seen the Melvins numerous times and even once attended them playing the soundtrack of an experimental film live at The Rotterdam Film Festival - it was so loud that we legally had to wear earplugs.

yet….. Who on earth would answer that?

I felt it was my duty.

So we met at a practice space. There’s going to be two drummers….. My melvins qualifications suddenly seem more relevant. We’ve got Greg on Trombone. Me on trumpet and the project’s originator on Baritone Guitar which is getting further lowered through effect pedals and one half is sent off to a guitar amp and one half is sent off to a bass amp… everything is going through effects pedals….. there are looooooots of effect pedals.

We all just play….. anything we want….. there’s a few guitar riffs, but no real guidelines as to how we have to react to them. There’s a graphic score:

It’s like a cross between something a deranged mathematician would scroll on the back of a napkin and something Gandalf would hand optimistically to a hobbit.

The noise is so loud that I’ve got ear plugs in the whole time. Playing trumpet with earplugs in is a whole new experience. You kind of hear it in the middle of your head instead of with your ears or something like that. I would give myself little games to play like trying to find the most disgusting note to play, or trying to play every note around the note. Big blasts. Up high. Play in unison with the Trombone. After 20 minutes we’d stop and Alistair would compliment us as if things had gone to plan.

We just kind of went on like that and some of the noise experiments naturally found form… So we played a gig….

We crammed two drum kits into the corner of Bloc+ in Glasgow and did our noise thing. A modest audience crowded round and watched on. Now I say modest, it was probably around 40 bodies; listening to the least accessible noises imaginable.

Having been in bands who have sold less gig tickets than they have members, this is quite a good crowd. They dress in black. They stare intently. They are deep in thought and every now and again they nod approvingly as if a good decision has been made. Many of my decisions are outwith my hands. Sometimes I can’t even hear anything between the ear plugs and the two drums pushing air at my bum and sometimes I’m just lost in the moment blowing notes with more feeling than any particular musical aim.

There are points where no one is sure where we are meant to be on the graphic score. Not sure whether one song has ended and another has started etc. Eventually it’s clear that we’ve finished so I take my ear plugs out. There’s a wonderful feeling of catharsis when you take the ear plugs out. It’s a bit like coming out of deep water and coming up for air. We all look around speechless and smile to congratulate each other…… and that’s SMIRK.

By this point we had three songs. Circle, Triangle and Square. The shapes are intended to give less solidified meaning than a title. I worry what we are going to do after we got to Octagon, but I also look forward to dodecahedron. Either way, if the band lasts we are going to have to brush up on our Greek cardinal numbers.

Photos by Brian Hartley

After that we played a few more gigs and if anything the crowds got bigger and more engaged. We were naturally learning more structure and plans for the songs. This had the effect of us all coming together on riffs and certain repeated passages. The onslaught of distorted guitar and brass became a force to be reckoned with but it also meant that we were more accessible and moving into territory where we could be in line-ups with noise art and avant-garde acts but also metal and the fringes of rock.

This is what AI thinks we look like. Turns out that if you ask it to render a second drum kit it just gives you more effect pedals.

The natural progression was to record what we had. It’s really interesting to record something experimental, because you are recording a snapshot rather than some sort of finalised composition. The band also had enough recording know-how between them that they could do it themselves. Diaries were such that I took a back seat and let them get on with it until I needed to record brass. Then diaries were such that I took the helm.

We recorded Ali and the two drummers(Dave Edwards and Fraser McPhail) at Audiolounge in Glasgow. The two drummers would face each other at other sides of the room and Ali would stand in the middles with his baritone-effected-bass guitar-guitar rig. We ran through the three polygon based experimentations a few times and then chose the ones that had the best energy.

This gave us a ridiculously good grounding. I love recording drums. I have done it for decades. You take the all the microphones from different parts of the kit and sculpt something which sounds great. You get used to the sound of an audio file being out of sync when you can hear two different sources from the snare drum. mixing two drum kits was mind bending, cos you have two sources of every drum. Mostly it’s a cacophony of drums making a wonderful soundscape with a beat running through it, but when drums hit exactly in sync it’s like shotguns going off.

The sound filled the EQ spectrum, so it was hard to see where we could shoehorn in disgusting horns, but try we must. Greg, Alistair and I sat for days in Alistair’s studio and recorded an estimation of what we played live. No longer were we just hitting and hoping and feeling things, now we had the opportunity to add harmonies and play in sync and plan things out. So the songs became a different thing.

We had two microphones on the brass. these were sent via effects pedals into a bass amp and a guitar amp. The amps were in a separate room facing each other. Each with a ribbon mic catching the air moving. This meant that for each part we had the “bass amp” version and the “guitar amp” version.

We went through a variety of different effects options. In general the trombone is played through an octave pedal which makes it fill the bottom end. This leaves the top end for the trumpet, so if I want to have pedal fun, it’s mostly about making it dirty with distortions, fuzzes and ring mods. This squeezes the sound. The harmonies that we were randomly hitting on in an attempt to make things disgusting were very modal and “world music” sounding. So when the trumpet is isolated I described it as sounding like Moroccan bees in a biscuit tin*.

We layered the doom trombone and the apian trumpet up to create something disgusting. At one point through a series of delays and a really cheap reverb we managed to create an echo which echo’d back with such a sinister harmony that it sounded like something out of Hitchcock horror. I’m not convinced I could recreate it.

This experimentation is often the first thing to when you are recording to a deadline, so I was in my element.

Alistair added vocals which went through so many pedals that they were more like an extra brass instrument than anything human. They would sit quite low in the mix and just add a bit of organic flavour. We had a guest spot on Square from Tony Morris doing a spoken word bit. It is wonderfully arcane and fits in exactly with the mood.

The result is an EP which is one of the most original, fun and a strangest things I’ve been involved in. The mixing was challenging, but years of bombarding my ears with obscure noise bands finally paid off and I had something I was confident in. You can listen here

One of the best things about SMIRK is that they appreciate a good poster. Due to the experimental nature of the band, each gig is a unique performance and comes with a unique poster - usually designed by Alistair

Due to the nature of good gigging drummers, we take our cue from Spinal Tap and so far have had a Dave, 2 Fraser’s, an Alex and a Jackson. I will put it on record that none of our drummers have exploded.

Since the recordings we’ve added a Conor on Sax. There’s been a Duncan making noises at our live shows from the get go.

Here’s an attempt to capture what we look and sound like live:

*No offence is intended to Bees, Moroccans, Moroccan Bees or even Biscuits.