‘Hearts’

Hello. My name is Neil Wells and I record electronic music under the name ‘Line’. I have made an album, ‘Hearts’, which will be released on the 9^th of February 2009 on Uncharted Audio. There are quite a few sources of inspiration for this album- the obvious musical influences of course, but there are also visual artists whose approach has informed what I do, ideas, particularly from mathematics and science, the technology used to create the album, have all had an important role in shaping the album. So I thought it might be interesting to talk a bit about some of those things and how they relate to the album.

So to start with, a double bill.

BOGDAN RACZYNSKI:

A fairly straightforward musical influence here. It’s very rare that one can say that an artist is completely unique, but I think that’s fairly safe to say that Bogdan is just that. He’s one of those rare artists who ride completely rough-shod over the unspoken conventions of music-his music is intensely personal, and in terms of content is probably closest to someone like Daniel Johnston- there’s a similarly sweet, naïve concept of love coupled with a sometimes almost unbearable emotional intensity. But instead of using guitars and pump organs, Bogdan uses a primitive synth and a primitive PC, running primitive software, pulling the same trick the Aphex Twin often has: of lifting his hyperactive, scattershot drum’n'bass, gabba and abrasive screes of noise out of the frankly usually dull realms of breakcore with shards of gorgeous melody and harmony. Bogdan’s melodies are disarmingly simple and pure, and his vocals- unstudied, often out-of-tune but all the better for that- completely short-circuit the usual conventions of vocals in electronic music- instead of epic, austere, robotic or camp, they’re completely direct and personal, sometimes electronically mangled, sometimes painfully naked on top of the track. Combine all that with a playful wide-ranging imagination, which pulls in both the music of his Polish heritage and a good chunk of hyper-real Japanese attitude as well (as well as English, he also sings in Polish and Japanese), and who thinks nothing of releasing an LP dressed up as a drum’n'bass compilation, complete with a different alias (DJ Whiskey, Abdullah K) for each track, and you have an artist for whom it’s difficult to find a parallel.

Listen here: http://www.last.fm/music/Bogdan+Raczynski

RICHARD DAWKINS

Dawkins has been a bit of a hero of mine for a long time- the song ‘Predisposition’ on the album is partially inspired by his notion of the ‘Selfish Gene’- the idea that the evolution of animal (and human) behaviour and characteristics is driven, not by the survival of the fittest individuals, but of the fittest genes. Dawkins’ book of the same title, and his other books explaining evolution and natural selection, are some of the most lucid and compelling popular science books ever written, explaining what is after all a far from immediately intuitive idea in terms which make intuitive sense- not an easy task.

I feel slightly sad then that in recent years he’s moved his focus, and public persona, from promoter of scientific ideas to detractor of religious ones. Not that I’m in any sense religious, nor do I think that religious ideas should be immune from criticism, but I don’t really see the sense in setting up religion in opposition to science- after all, Isaac Newton, along with many other great scientists, was a fervently religious man, and many of the greatest horrors of the 20th century were committed under atheist regimes- dogmatic regimes, but not religious ones. And scientific ideas don’t seem to me to oppose religion so much as simply to sidestep it- if science does anything it’s to confront us with the sheer unintelligible enormity of what we don’t know about the world, making any idea that there’s further stuff beyond that seem, not impossible, but irrelevant. But though I disagree with his current methods, Richard Dawkins has still been enormously important in shaping my world-view- but through his masterly espousal of ideas, not his sometimes clumsy criticism.