Francis Plagne
By Mistletone in Francis Plagne, Artists - Label | 0 comments
MP3: Wings 6Ft Leather Briefcase
The much anticipated second album by fractured kaleidoscope pop sound artist extraordinaire Francis Plagne is a collaborative release between Mistletone and the UK-based Synaesthesia Records
This eponymous release further explores Francis’ obsessions with ‘pop’ and ‘organised sound’. Blending the dual influences of Brian Wilson and John Cage, all from a modest bedroom studio in the Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne, Francis has developed his craft to a level way beyond his 19 years and certainly outside the realms of his contemporaries in both the Australian and international music scene.
Incorporating field recordings, drones, electronics and improvisations, along with harmony-rich pop songs of the finest order, Francis Plagne has become one of the most unusual, identifiable and exciting musicians to rise from the rich musical landscape of 21st Century Australia.
From The Wire:
On his second album, Australian bedroom dreamer Francis Plagne redoubles the wide-eyed wonder of its 2005 predecessor ‘Idle Bones’. A songwriter whose impatience with form suggests creative bi-polarity, he is unwilling to settle within one idiom. ‘Francis Plagne’ loosely slots into a trajectory of experimental song/sound art crossover that stretches from Caetano Veloso’s ‘Araca Azul’ through to Broadcast.
The home recorded fidelity casts his songs in an amber glow that recalls other ‘radio stuck in fog’ outcasts Ariel Pink and Lamborghini Crystal, but passages of improvisation and drone upset the pop equilibrium. On ‘Replace U with an A’, 1960s pop is cleft in two by percussive rattling that littered across the mise en scene, while ‘Arrested iin Vaslui’ is modular in its construction, tacking jack-in-the-box melodies onto bubbling noise. Plagne treats his records as jigsaw puzzles, with the melody of “Vaslui” subsequently recast for piano on “Maidenhead Before Grandchild”.
The aesthetic is clear from the song titles, which invert the English language, everything submitting to Plagne’s cryptic internal logic. Shifting from freeform freakout to song as altered state, the album’s enigmatic character floats close to The Red Krayola, whose influence hangs heavy over both the vocal delivery and lyrics. Concealing meaning through non-sequiter and surrealist juxtaposition, these songs are delivered in a halting, soft lisp, whispering floods of words that ricochet downstream like driftwood.
–Jon Dale, The Wire, 11/2007
Francis Plagne, barely twenty years old, is in reviews, articles and general chitchat, almost unanimously described as a wunderkind. One might have come across his music on the ABC live experimental music program ‘Set’, or in one of countless bars, theatres, galleries and dives in Melbourne.
Nursing a cold, Plagne has taken his last exam for the year, and is preparing for his first solo tour to Adelaide and third trip overall. Up until recently, Ned Collette (guitar/bass/vocal) was a part of Plagne’s live band, but Connal Parsley is now easing back into the role he once vacated. In our chat a few weeks ago Collette remarked that Plagne is both musical and academic savant. The shy Art History student replies, “Uh…he could be wrong.” One thing for certain is that Plagne’s sound universe -informed by classic pop, loose-limbed free improvisation, and musique-concrete - is complex, arresting, and completely his own.
Plagne, who has been recording at home since he was an adolescent, cut his teeth on avant-garde music first as a customer, and next as an employee at Melbourne’s legendary Synaesthesia Records. Store boss Mark Harwood, whose Synaesthesia label is synonymous with avant-garde music, was so taken with Plagne’s home recordings that he asked the young man to compile what was to be his debut album ‘Idle Bones’ in 2005. Harwood has since relocated to London, and has along with Melbourne-based Mistletone Records co-released Plagne’s second, self-titled album.
‘Francis Plagne’ is a lot to take in at once. Plagne, the hardworking music obsessive, takes up almost all of the CD’s available space with 17 tracks - in the pre-digital era, ‘Francis Plagne’ would have been a double LP. “There’s a couple of tracks that are almost entirely from a couple of years ago but I think even they have a [newer] vocal track or whatever. Nothing sort of stayed untouched”. Plagne recorded the songs on his 8-track tape recorder, utilising primitive sampling techniques, stereo panning and the hum of roomsound to present a work of queasy outsider genius.
“On the first one it was a lot more separate. I sort of made all these songs, and made all this concrete, and stuck them together”. On ‘Francis Plagne’, out of abstract passages bloom wonky pop songs, and vice versa, Plagne’s apparent disdain towards sitting still reflected in his continuously metamorphosing arrangements.
It is when Plagne talks about music other than his own that he appears most relaxed. What Is Music? Festival co-founder Robbie Avenaim recently curated a series of performances at Melbourne’s Bus Gallery. Avenaim, Dale Gorfinkel and Ernie Althoff set up homemade instruments and played twin prepared vibraphones and found instruments over the top, inviting a swag of experimental artists to improvise alongside them and Plagne was at three of the concerts. “They pretty much just made all these instruments that played themselves. And Dale and Robbie both had their vibraphones. Ernie just did really strange things. So they turned these instruments that played themselves on and off and then Robbie and Dale would just play live over the top and Ernie would play…like…jam jars.”
“I mean the stuff they were doing was really incredible. The way they were playing was like an ideal sort of form of improvising for me. It was spread out in the space, really layered, really non-linear and strange. I mean the show they did with [Anthony] Pateras was amazing.”
It is the self-prescribed linearity of Plagne’s own live group sound that has led him to redefine his approach. Playing with Collette was an enjoyable experience - “it was something new every time,” says Plagne, reveling in Collette’s willingness to jump straight into the improv passages. In Adelaide, Plagne will perform with voice, electronics and acoustic guitar, leaving his myriad knick-knacks at home.
Plagne - two intriguing LPs under his belt, as well as a cassette-only release on Matt Earle’s fantastic Breakdance the Dawn imprint - has tentative plans to travel abroad to England, to study, and indeed to tour. “I wanna try and go, actually. But I mean I’m just sort of confusing myself at the minute, because I want to go on exchange…It’s sort of scary because in Melbourne I have some sort of reputation or whatever, and can get shows and stuff but even in other (Australian) cities, nobody knows who I am.” Let’s hope that’s not the case for much longer.
From Cyclic Defrost magazine:
Francis Plagne interview by Richard MacFarlane
Before I spoke to Francis Plagne on the phone, I rode the bus with my headphones firmly in place, the volume up high. For the duration of my trip, I made it nearly all of the way through Francis Plagne, his second album, watching out the window the entire way home.
After spending much time with this record, it seemed the perfect way to hear it, the strange and visual evocations of different places, and the variety of different spaces that shift throughout its 91 minutes. There are claustrophobic spaces, and wide-open vistas conjured through the use of field recordings. Francis Plagne is like looking out the window of a bus as the scenery unfolds. It’s easy to attach metaphors to his sprawling work, but it’s bewildering to discern exactly where Francis is coming from, probably because he’s coming from everywhere at once. You could say it’s a schizophrenic musical identity, but I’d say it’s really just glee and enthusiasm that drive it all.
“I suppose initially it just comes from having an interest in lots of different things. Everything I did on this record was just something I was peculiar about in its own form, field recordings, songs, or whatever. There was a point where I just decided to stick it all together; there is something a lot more schizophrenic about this new album, or at least more self-consciously so. With the first one, I just made a whole bunch of concrete and a whole bunch of songs, but with this one, it ended up that there was a lot more obvious interplay between the two things.”
So, he’s young - 20 years old. Francis started playing guitar early on and started recording “garbage” onto four-track when he was about thirteen. He’s currently studying for an Art History degree in Melbourne, making music in the same bedroom as he always has, at the same time. He’s got different toys now, and way more of them. There are plenty of instruments and sounds at his fingertips, but far more to grasp onto in terms of music that has come before. I’m unsure if it’s necessarily a youthful willingness to try and take past music and further it, or destroy it (or both), but Francis is certainly eager to do so.
“I suppose all music, whether popular or experimental, is based on interpretations; no one ever makes some outrageous new discovery, or at least very rarely. With the way that I work, which is lots of different styles mixed together, it becomes obvious that it’s me picking and choosing from what I’m interested in, and then having a go. One of the things I really like about recording at home, with limited means and playing everything myself is that I can try and rip off something. I could do a direct rip off of some big ’60s band, and it will sound like a hermetic interpretation of a ’60s big band. Really it’s just me trying to do the same thing but I just can’t, because of the means that I have at my disposal.”
“I think a lot of what goes on musically today, in popular music or indie music or whatever, there’s an overly-knowing appropriation of different styles without personality attached to it, that happens a lot. But when someone can actually use influence to make something interesting and worthwhile—that’s where music is for me, I guess.” His music is dense, that’s for sure. For all the field recordings and abstract sound pieces that stitch Francis Plagne together, it’s clear a lot of work has gone into creating these spaces, allowing the ‘song’ based moments room to breath, or room to suffocate. The album is positively littered with pop gems; I visualise Francis struggling to walk along underneath an armful of different musical odds and ends, some falling off along the way.
It’s a gleeful act of appropriation, but with such a unique spin on music, it’s hard to label it as merely that. Francis Plagne is everywhere and everything ; it’s cluttered, but sounds purposefully this way. The title of the track ‘A Chance Exposure To A Distant Rumbling’ reflects one of Francis’ chief aims; random moments in sound coming together all in one place, creating spaces, letting songs form beneath and between their folds. It’s an act of cutting and pasting, a monumental process of trial and error, considering just how many sounds make up his opaque pieces.
“This time, a lot of the things that weren’t songs, I worked a lot with editing improvisations. It was a case of making an hours worth of stuff and then cutting it into small pieces and sticking it all together. It is intentionally dense; I wanted it to be as dense as possible while still being listenable.” This begs the question; just how one would decide where to put all these things? It seems like a nightmare in terms of editing, because in a sense, many of these sounds don’t match up, they don’t fit together conventionally. Foreign sounds meet the all too familiar, open spaces are met with the claustrophobic, pop meets noise. Working from home allows Francis to indulge his perfectionism, even if his perfection is littered and rambling.
“On the first album, it follows a pattern of five minutes worth of pop every ten minutes or something—it’s pretty predicable—especially when I realize how it sounds after I step away from the whole process. There are moments where I use that same sort of pattern on the new one. I like the idea of having a juxtaposition of ten minutes of abstract stuff then the song comes in out of nowhere, like the first pieces of the record. I like the sound of one song stopping and another starting straight away, like on a proper pop record. I was trying to play around with that on this album, just trying to think of good ways of leading into what is a song and what’s not a song; rather that just having a sharp cut or fade.”
Most of the record is field-recordings; plenty of cars passing by, but most importantly a tonne of different spaces and textures. It’s an extremely visual sort of sound; there are hundreds of different rooms and spaces within what is basically one continuous sound piece. Most of all, it’s a warm record, thanks to the Casio keyboards and organs; the sound of cartoons in the morning, the warm buzz of the afternoon sun. “Part of that, is that when I am recording at home, I end up with a lot of background sound and I don’t really make any attempt to get rid of that. I like the openness of sounds with a resonance like they were recorded in a big room with an open window. I usually try and bring across some sort of feel of space in the way I record things. It’s not a conventional studio technique; someone that knows about that sort of thing would probably just say I had really bad miking! I do it on purpose, or at least that’s what I tell them. I really like that once you start getting some feeling of space the sounds aren’t abstract any more. It’s tied to some visual thought, the listener could maybe imagine what the room looks like.”
Straddling pop and textural styles of music leaves Francis in a funny place, if he were to locate himself in a scene or collective, working in Australia. Francis feels partially at home, in terms of an ‘experimental’ scene in Melbourne; but there’s a humourous and irreverent spirit running beneath all the musique concrete that keeps his stuff from sounding stagnant. Half way through ‘Replace U With An A’ comes an absurd little voice—put on by Francis—denoting a healthy spirit of humour that runs through his music and the way he works. “I think a lot of my friends in Melbourne are related to the ‘proper’ experimental scene—I mean, they don’t sing songs. I know that I have high standards to try and meet, as far as the experimental stuff goes, but a lot of the time it could just be me doing this lazy thing that is interesting because of the context. I have friends that write pop songs as well, so I feel as if I have influences from both ‘scenes’, although in Melbourne it’s just one big soup pretty much.”
“For me, a lot of things that I like in music I find really funny, as well as substantial. My music isn’t sort of dour or anything; there are musical jokes, in a sense, running through my work. For instance, my range does not go as high as I sing, so it’s funny to have this squeaky little bit sometimes.” His take on music is a palpably fresh one, as I talk to Francis (softly spoken, slightly sarcastic) over the phone. He’s self-aware but not over-confident. His perceptions on making things new are certainly inspiring and his ideas seem to culminate with little concern for style or genre.
Free Wheelin’ Francis is relaxed, and why wouldn’t he be with such an enormous world of music at his disposal? “Styles and genre are helpful in figuring out how music works. I think a lot of people pick some sort of stylistic thing and try and work within it; I don’t really have any interest in that at all. I just take whatever and then do whatever I want to do with it.”
Francis Plagne is out now through Mistletone/Synaesthesia.
From Rave magazine: I didn’t know you could fit this much noise on one CD
Francis Plagne is one of those crazy scientist types who has a way with sound and sample combining. I reckon it’s good creative music – get out your paints and printing materials and get weird. I don’t know whether all these songs should have been put on the one album, but I still manage to get lost in the tweaking, winding, breathing and feedback. The album’s occasional deviance into pop with xylophone, organ and ambient husky vocals is a welcome change that comes every few tracks. While 19 year-old Plagne has been praised for his mature approach to music, his descriptive and distant lyrics still seem at times adolescent. But in the context of an album filled with similarly distant and descriptive noises, experimental lyricism and odd instrumentation, they are fitting. I love the haunting style and driving dynamics of Replace U With An A.
by ILI TULLOCH
InPress article:
Mess + Noise review:
Other people’s interpretations of the familiar, as bizarrely as they come across, are what draw me into music. Hearing a musician provide their own take, rather than mimicry, of a style or concept can create a parallel universe so intricately constructed that – for the time spent in that world – no alternative seems possible, let alone desirable. This is where Melbourne teenager Francis Plagne’s sophomore record succeeds.
Creating a parallel pop universe, Francis Plagne sounds as close to Pet Sounds era Beach Boys as it does a future classic or an exercise in folk collage. Through it Plagne builds a new world order, picking up portions of his musical ideas and piecing them together with a complex thought process and even more convoluted progression. It’s a curious marriage, as pop sounds are kept while pop constructs avoided, leaving in their stead the uncomfortable dismissal of linearity. The self-important pop purveyor would call it musical naïveté, but Plagne’s pop-compositions suggest something else – on Francis Plagne he demonstrates a continually evolving musical maturity where the conceptual and accessible aren’t mutually exclusive.
by Eliza Sarlos
Dazed + Confused review:
Three Thousand review:
Wunderkind teen experimentalist, Francis Plagne, dons stripes of genius on his second album split-published by Mistletone and venerated ex-pat, Synaesthesia Records. A pleasurably schizoid, patient mix of abstract sound assemblage and skewed melodic hooks, Francis Plagne neatly stiches-up 70 years of winning pop and conceptual music discoveries in just 70 minutes. Dialling through the Out-sounds spectrum as if taking a leisurely Sunday walk, Plagne’s ability to skip across and combine field recordings, extended instrumental technique, electronics and harmonic song is staggering, but never pretentious – making for one of the year’s most intriguing and go-ahead local releases.
Chamber pop gems and sound exercises appear in equal measure, and everything exhibits a warmth typically foreign to hard-nosed experimental music. Tracks change smoothly and in wondrous detail, taking in wildly different sonic vistas at frequent pace. Where ‘A Chance Exposure to a Distant Rumbling’ sounds like the unlikely amalgam of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s samba and an Andre Breton poem, ‘A Boat Called Ghost’ has electronics, ripping duct-tape and basement carpentry noise. Undeniably avant overall, what’s most pleasing about this record is its accessibility without compromise. Plagne is a ripping Art Party dude with historical smarts to rival your local library.
By Mark Gomes
email this | tag this | digg this | trackback | comment RSS feed