The Beat Surrender

Black Grass are the creative vision of two very different individuals, who prove that opposites do attract, at least musically.

Based in Brighton and signed to the excellent Catskills Record label, the self titled debut album has finally been released in the UK, having been available overseas since October 2003.

One half of the duo, Carl Faure took time out from a hectic schedule and battled his jet lag to answer a few questions for The Beat Surrender.

As always, if you haven’t already, you can read the review of their self-titled debut, Black Grass.

So explain how the two of you got together, it seems you come from completely the opposite ends of the spectrum musically?

Basically, I was working in Ian’s record shop while at Uni, and we just talked about music all day. We found a lot of common ground with certain types of music, stuff like eighties boogie and a lot of the more recent soul stuff and it just went from there really. I think it was really good for us both to be opened up to a lot of different stuff we’d never heard before.

Has your different tastes caused you any problems in agreeing on how a track should sound when you are in the studio?

We’ve had a few minor issues as you might imagine, but you just learn to thrash them out quickly or you never get anywhere. I think this was more so when we had only a few tunes under our belts, as the project progressed we realized there was plenty of room for lots of ideas and experimentation for both of us.

What were the major influences on you in recording the album?

I think that perhaps the main influences for us were each other at the time, we both have our own backgrounds, Ian in funk and hip hop, and mine in more dance stuff. At the time I was getting into more disco and funk tracks, going through Ian’s collection, and enjoyed looking at how that stuff worked and how it influenced the new stuff I was into then. I think he also got a lot more exposure to straight up dance stuff than he would usually, and it was interesting to see how each other approached programming and production.

Did you both have a clear vision of how you wanted the album to sound or is it just something that evolved over time?

We didn’t really set out with a plan, it just happened. I think we both approached each track in it’s own right, rather than trying to go for one sound in particular. That’s how we ended up with such an assortment – It’s fun to work that way sometimes, I think we probably had an unconscious motive to make each track different from all the others.

Are you pleased with how it’s been received so far?

Yeah, we’ve had some great support from Djs in the UK, and the LP has been out overseas for a while now. We’ve just come back from Australia where they are really into it, it was quite a shock to see our picture on the cover of a magazine and all that!! It’s been out in the UK now a couple of weeks so it’d be great to see it sell over here too.

Despite it being a very diverse album, it flows very nicely when you listen to it, how hard was it to make it a cohesive listen, with the different genres it crosses?

Thanks. It took a bit moving of around! In the end we had to drop a couple of tracks that didn’t work with the flow. Between Catskills and ourselves we tried lots of different running orders and I seem to remember the final descision being made during the actual cut.

You’ve got some really good collaborations on the album, notably Black Twang and Supa TC Iz, how did they come about?

Catskills made some calls to hook up with Tony, he was into the beat, and we went up to London and recorded it in an afternoon – he was a proper professional in the studio – no messing around! We both know TC due to the fact he spends a lot of time in Brighton, and we just called him up, did the session, and that was that.

Did any other potential collaborations slip through the net this time?

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