![]() We have always done this, but there is always a new way of making it. It’s ancient music you can trace back to the earliest of human experiences. I don’t mean just in my period of experience, but for millennia. “Listening to it again, I realized how it was always there. “Repetitive, trance-inducing, dynamic: my first extra-sensory experiences were from listening to this, before I could walk.” When asked what influences shaped the record, Hardy says “I don’t think we need to mention any,” while Thomson exclaims “Can’t really think of any other than Tarka Daal and McEwans Export.” Kapranos does mention re-discovering Greek composer Yiannis Markopoulos’s interpretations of Cretan music on the Rizitika LP: Wouldn’t it be glorious to make music that made you feel like that?” How the imagined experience is way more powerful than anything actually triggered by a drug could be. “We talked about the purity and naivety our earliest psychedelic experiences: when you imagined what drugs might do to your mind, before there was an opportunity to let them. ![]() He knows how to take an idea and break it so you can see the better idea hidden within it.” Dino Bardot (the greatest rockstar Glasgow ever produced) has joined the line-up since they started touring again and Sam Potter, late of Late Of The Pier, hung out with the band in the early stages of the LP. From zero, we created this new universe to inhabit: nebulous at first, gradually taking form, until it felt like it had always existed.” The LP was mixed at Philippe’s Motorbass studio in Paris, recorded in a couple of weeks at RAK and written over the preceding year somewhere in the west of Scotland. Everything comes from that: the sound, performance, tempo, instrumentation, how far you stand from the mic… everything.” He understands that what is essential is the emotion: the emotion that inspired the song and the emotion that the song inspires in you on hearing it. We don’t know.’ Then I remembered I still had his number, so I texted him and said ‘I’ve always thought we could make a truly great LP together’ and he replied straight back and said ‘Yes! Let’s do it!’” I asked Laurence (Bell, Domino boss) and Cerne (Cannning, manager/svengali) to put us in touch and they said ‘Oh, he’s a bit of an enigma. “Philippe is someone we’d wanted to work with for a long time.” said Alex “Last time we spoke, he was recording the Beastie Boys. With reclusive producer Philippe Zdar (Cassius, Phoenix, Beastie Boys), FF have taken a knife to their old canvas, creating an album that is so foreign in its familiarity it could only be current. In case you missed the announcement last year, Nick McCarthy (guitar) left to raise his family and Julian Corrie, a much-loved figure in the Glasgow music scene, joined core members Alex Kapranos, Bob Hardy and Paul Thomson. There have been substitutions, but the team is playing stronger than ever. ![]() ![]() ![]() “We wanted this to sound like nothing we made before,” said the band and after listening to the first moments of the title track it’s obvious that’s what they’ve accomplished. The album’s ten songs are a triumphant recasting of one of our favourite groups, bursting with fresh ideas and vigorous sonic experimentation. Always Ascending is nothing short of a rebirth. Forget everything you think you know about Franz Ferdinand. ![]()
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