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Joined: March 04 2008
Location: Retirement Home
Status: Offline
Points: 3658
Topic: 6LA8 Posted: November 29 2011 at 14:41
Some bands are truly indefinable, 6LA8 are one of these bands. Their music spans so many genres and yet has it's own concise sound that fans of practically anytime of progressive rock will enjoy. The Pakistani duo of Taimur Mazhar Sheikh and Omer Asim create a blend of electronic, ambient, drone and post-rock but their music never delves too far into one genre without being unclassifiable. The project was formed in 2009 by two music loving friends who wanted to create something all their own and they definitely succeed in that. They release all their music for free on their website.
I got in touch with Taimur from the band and here are their story.
When
and by whom was your band formed ? Did any of you, past and present
members, play in any other bands before joining up in your band ? Why
did you choose that name and which bands were you influenced by ?
Well
6LA8 is a progressive electronic/drone/post-rock duo to begin with
(Omer Asim and Taimur Mazhar Sheikh). We are old friends and before
6LA8 we had formed an avant-garde/noise band Aus Rine (early 2008 –
present). Our fellow members were usually preoccupied and it ended up
being just the two of us improvising and recording singles at
evenings after work/university. This started in October 2010, so a
little over a year ago.
“6LA8”
is a strange name, but we wanted a disconnection with everything
going around us. Our lives are based on a set of rules, languages and
without this mode of communication we could never get information
across and possibly not be where we are now as a species. But it gets
overwhelming: The culture clashes, the political quandaries, the
moral obligations, common sense, etc. Sometimes you want to stop,
breathe and enjoy without needing an inherent explanation, from your
own imagination and perspective. “6LA8” is just one of those
words, meaningless yet there is a feel, a connection when you see the
four characters bunched together; something that is interesting but
furthermore makes you realize how big your role is it when you are
thinking and making your own explanations, and how much that role
serves you in your daily life. Of course, this isn’t limited to
“6LA8”, it could be anything you can think of, but this was the
one choice we went along with.
We
have a huge list of influences that might not even be relevant to our
music, but have inspired us nonetheless. The biggest influences are
probably Port Royal and Brian Eno, followed by bands like
65daysofstatic, Jakob, Isis, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, The Mars
Volta, Mono, Pink Floyd, Boris, Daft Punk, Justice, Alva Noto, Type O
Negative, Neurosis, Yes, Mogwai, QOTSA, Helios, Tool, Fennesz, M83,
Future Sound of London, Novembre, Om, Filter, Massive Attack, Rameses
III, July Skies, Aidan Baker, King Crimson and countless more.
Your
band is from Pakistan. A very volatile country with religious
fanatics who wants to ban music altogether and is enforcing their
views with terror. How is it to live and being a musician in Pakistan
now?
To
be honest, religious fanatics are one of our secondary worries. In
fact, apart from the military takeovers that have happened, most of
the generally elected parties have been democratic.
Now,
nobody can deny the suicide bombings and extremism going on,
especially in Pakistan, but these events are so unpredictable in wake
of more obvious issues like electricity/water shortage, theft,
unemployment, political killings and just the financial expense of
life in general. Can you be consistently worried about suicide
bombing and religious fanatics when it is certain that the moment you
step out on the streets with any valuable phone you will get robbed
at gunpoint, or that everyday there is no electricity for hours, or
the greater chance of being shot because of your ethnicity or
political standpoint? All this while keeping in mind there can
potentially be no one to save you in any of these circumstances…and
it has become a norm. Life seems to be a standstill here, and while
we are one of the more fortunate to not lose sleep over worries of
having no food for the next day, there is still a feel of
helplessness in the air and that impacts everyone.
And
while listing all the reasons may seem to be irrelevant, our
environment has been integral to our music. When deaths are being
discussed casually and routinely over a family dinner, you finally
realize this is not an acceptable lifestyle at all, (especially after
you have been to other nations and can see from a wider standpoint).
Then any sort of therapy will work, which for us was/is listening to
music and is 6LA8.
Something
for an escape, and the more absurd and surreal it sounds the better
it could be, acting like a balm.
Something
that can speak out our frustrations but with the same vague views
that we have now, because blaming and pointing the finger has never
been less appealing to us.
This
is an archive based interview also intended for the fans you get well
after both you and I have passed away so let's go straight to your
albums. Please tell us more about.....
The
way you have put that… please forgive us if our responses to the
questions are a bit too TL; DR, but if there is a place to go full
details on our albums and our thoughts behind their compositions,
this would be it.
In
Wake of a Dying Nation from last year
Our
first album. A massive collection of songs, going to three hours.
After Aus Rine we were quite exhausted and just wanted to make music
without any forethought to it. So we used to hook up on evenings or
weekends and make music on the spot, and just finish it with nil
postproduction. The titles used to be satirical twists on whatever
the “breaking news” used to be for the time we made the tracks.
Instead
of looking at this like an album, one should see it as a collection
of songs made over a span of 3 months, because back then we were not
planning on this to be a proper album, or 6LA8 to be a proper band.
We were just making songs because we enjoyed sitting, letting the
music flow and cherish the coming of ideas. Our recording process
here contributed to the raw, personal feel of the whole thing; it
Sounds like two guys making music in the basement, but this also
means it is the most simple and to the point work we have ever done.
Around
the 17th track, we finally released the songs to public on the
insistence of friends, as 6LA8. Most considered our music post rock
while we never thought that much about our genre. But the fact that
they were so many people who wanted to listen to the music was
amazing. It was what made us continue making music that we can share
with others, not just confined to our hard drives.
The
Moderate Picture from last year
Instead
of explaining the musical nature of album (one can just hear it to
know), we should probably explain what were the concepts behind so
that it can be better understood, which quite a few of our friends
have asked us to do.
This
was our first "proper" album. Unlike the wandering nature
of our debut we wanted to make songs that supported each other, that
seemed to be part of a bigger picture. And this album is as ugly as
its cover portrays. It is probably the most difficult to listen to of
all our works because of its aggressive, dark and jarring mood.
The
Moderate Picture is a concept that can be used in so many aspects,
based on how people refer to themselves as moderates, but moderation
is such a relative term. To some people, this moderation might even
be an extremity. But when so many people provide so many "moderate"
views, you notice things might not be that different as they seem,
because the motives that people have behind these views have the same
overlying causes and if we could analyze and react to these perhaps
the picture could be clearer on the whole.
We
tried to put the same concepts into our songs, that have completely
different arrangements and styles from one another but there is
overarching mood that makes the whole album seem unified. It is like
different organs with different purposes complementing each other to
make something that might prove beneficial to all of them.
This
Is Not A Conceptual Album from this year
The
one thing we noticed after making our first two albums was that our
production was very raw. While that made it sound personal, at the
same time we could see that most of the softer parts of our music
would just get lost in the mix. So This Is Not A Conceptual Albums
main move forward was in the production aspect. We lowered the
aggression and the tension a bit, and let the more slow, reflective,
progressive bits of our music as well as warm synth ambience take the
foreground, and this album has been the best received out of all,
except maybe "In the Land of Dreams" (coming later).
Like
its title implies, this album does not have any concept around it.
However, there is some mysterious, urban, stylistic mood over all the
songs that still make it click. This is our most accessible work yet,
and we just went wild with the genre influences here, reaching out to
dubstep, trip-hop, post rock, world, jazz, whatever we enjoyed at the
moment. If we could ever afford having a hard copy release for any of
our albums, this would be our preference.
The
Drone Collective from this year
Released
three weeks after This Is Not A Conceptual Album, it basically made
everyone go "how is this even possible you guys just-" but
truthfully most of the songs in this album were made before any of
the songs in our third album. The reason we held out on these songs
was because they were so, so depressing, in the pessimistic sense.
Maybe it could be our personal associations with the album, but "The
Drone Collective" is just grief and frustration conveyed in
music form. The music is mainly minimal/progressive drone, with most
of the influences being early progressive rock music and bands like
Anathema, The Angelic Process, Boris, Bohren and Der Club of Gore,
Kilimanjaro Ensemble and Neurosis.
Regardless,
we couldn't let our songs go to waste so the album came to be. Of
course, due to its hasty release this album went by almost unnoticed.
However, the little feedback we got was just amazing. We would
recommend any new listener of ours to start with either This Is Not A
Conceptual Album (for its accessibility) or The Drone Collective,
(our deepest yet our clearest album).
In
the Land of Dreams from this year
This
was where we took a step back, looked at all our music and decided to
take the best of each album and produce what we had unknowingly been
approaching too. A 2 hour long album, this has the aggression from
our earlier work, as well as the warm nature and softer, more
alluring parts from This is Not a Conceptual Album, coated with the
dense, heaviness of The Drone Collective.
The
main inspiration behind this album came from a Brian Eno interview
for his landmark Music for Airports album. He said that the music
some airports played was of this awful, poppy nature that didn’t
suit the clinical, serene nature of a typical airport, and he wanted
to make music that could be unobtrusive, easily interruptible and
instead of being overly optimistic, it would have a sense of realism
to it, as if it is saying that if you are on an airplane, if you die
from an accident it wouldn’t really matter.
This
made us realize that well, even though we have been making music as a
gateway to another world, or rather dreams which could be the
furthest we can go to, dreams aren’t clear-minded. You aren’t
fully processing what is going on when you are dreaming; it is a hazy
feel that you will just forget when you wake up.
So
we decided to let the ambience blur out the structures of the song,
and composed the whole album around that premise. So it plays out as
a long, progressive dream, the song length averaging around 7
minutes, in a very dronish, dreamy sense that you may not remember
the structure of the songs when they end, but if you lose yourself in
them you might as well just be living in them, for the moment.
Amazingly,
it worked. Released a full year after we formed 6LA8, it is an album
that we can boast about. Something that we had initially hoped of
making…and our friend loved it as well. Musically this can be
likened to bvdub, Jakob, Radiohead, Port Royal, Jesu, Mogwai and
Autechre, according to our listeners.
Music
Observatory (w/ Rakas) from this year
As
is our nature, we always attempt to go through genres and experiment
without trying to overkill and ruin the actual music. Music
Observatory was a strange concept; basically, you lock us in a room
with instruments and tell us to make a full-fledged album a.s.a.p. .
How would it turn out?
Well
we didn’t actually lock ourselves in, but we did attempt to make an
hour-long album in less than a month. We wanted to see that under the
constraints, how diverse we could get. Fortunately, Rakas, an
electronic solo musician (Asadullah Qureshi), an old friend and also
an Aus Rine member was available for the ride and we set off.
There
were other self-made constraints as well: no songs could be more than
5 minutes long and the song titles were asked randomly from our
unaware friends/listeners, which were then used to think out and make
the songs.
The
end result? It was our most enjoyable experience, especially for
something completely unlike any of our previous music. The inclusion
of Rakas and other guest artists, the extremely talented
ambient/post-rock bands Air Liner and The Eternal Twilight, made us
think about our songs in a completely different sense. The short
tracks made us much more focused and the progressions were rapid, the
tempo was relatively fast and completely off course ideas were
implemented. And the recommendations from our friends and listeners
made us think up songs based on words that we may have never
considered.
But
most importantly, it was the realization that for all our detailed
concepts and reasons for our albums, the end thing that matters is
the music. Our passion came from listening to music, be they epic
orchestral ballads or short rage inducing fits, and while we love all
the bands that influenced us, we might have completely different
reactions and associations to their music, and that is completely
natural. In the end, the main reason why we are here or one is to
just listen and enjoy the music, and music can come from anywhere and
is as big as it can get.
How
do you record your albums and with what soft and hardware ?
Both
of us use the Line 6 UX1 processors to record guitars, bass, vocals
and synth. The softwares that we use are Ableton Live (for MIDI
instruments and sampling) and Audacity (for recording). Our
guitars/bass are just Fender strat copies, and we have a Korg
Microsynth and pretty basic midi controllers! The Drums/percussion
are basically samples, though occasionally we do get assistance from
Rakas in the acoustic drums department if the samples don’t click.
Also, we use different relevant public domain or creative common
sample pieces in our music that we get from either archive.org or
freesound.org, both being amazing websites.
How
would you describe you music and which bands would you compare
yourself with ?
I
guess we have explained it quite a lot by now. To be brief, our music
is primarily progressive drone with noticeable elements of
ambient/electronic/post-rock added to it, with each album having its
own genre classification. The bands we have been often compared to
are Mogwai, Port Royal, Aidan Baker and GY!BE.
Your
albums are free or pay if you want albums from Bandcamp. Why this
solution ?
Our
albums are meant to be free as coming from Pakistan we can understand
people not being in the best of positions to pay for our loads of
albums, but we would appreciate any money from any listeners who can
afford to give us some, as a donation. We can use the money to
advertise our music around a bit more, or get new instruments or
maintain our current ones, so it will be definitely go towards our
music.
How
is the creative processes in your band from coming up with an idea to
it's being recorded ?
One
of the reasons why we were frustrated when working as Aus Rine was
that we just couldn’t write any songs. The riffs were there, the
idea as well, but the arrangement or composition just seemed to be a
mess. As 6LA8 however, we started on pure improvisation. We don’t
know what chords are, how to properly use them and most of the music
theory, all we know when we were playing is that this is how it
sounds, and it sounds great.
For
us, this technique just worked. This is also how we came up with 10
hours of music in a year; just improvising and progressing as we
naturally would. There are mistakes (sometimes even in the finished
songs, but they somehow sound real good!) and we do have to repeat
plays a bit or trash a few unlucky tracks, but the natural
progression when we play just comes to us, probably because of
listening to so much music and playing the instruments extensively to
just have a hear of things. Initially (and even now) we almost never
ended up playing what we thought of playing, but the feel was still
there. And I guess it suits us.
Now
we have a greater idea of how to approach things, so we can work on
concepts as can be seen by our releases. And it will get better,
there is no doubt, for both 6LA8 and Aus Rine.
What
is your current status and what is your plans for this year and
beyond ?
Working
on new music! This is something we love and we have no intentions of
letting go. For now, just make more music, reach more boundaries and
explore new areas we haven’t touched yet, we usually never plan
beforehand what we will do in specific, so no idea. But there will be
something!
Maybe
after a couple of years we will start to do gigs, right now though we
are fine on just self discovery and studio work, plus university
work/jobs will prevent us from pursuing that for now, but we
definitely would attempt to get into music as a full-time career. We
have received a lot of encouragement from our listeners and we cannot
let them down by not giving them the best musical/live experience
possible from us.
To
wrap up this interview, is there anything you want to add to this
interview ?
Just
a lot of thanks to you and the prog-archives team for interviewing
us! Once again, apologies for the rants we went on, especially on the
albums, but if someone wants to read about us and know what drives us
to make music or what we were thinking we really feel like we should
give them our perspectives, however complicated or idealistic they
are.
But,
for the sake of music, feel free to leave this all behind and make
your own stories and memories from our songs, as long as you are
listening.
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