Martin Gore - MG "The Third Chimpanzee E.P." 29 January 2021

Martin L Gore

Join Martin on Thursday January 28th for an exclusive first listen of his brand new EP, live on Facebook.
Commencing at 3pm EST/8pm GMT/9pm CET, the full EP will be broadcast live through Martin’s Facebook page with Martin providing commentary during the stream. The Third Chimpanzee will be released digitally, on CD and on Azure Blue Vinyl the following day.

Пожалуйста, зарегистрируйтесь, чтобы увидеть ссылку. | Please register to see the link.

Martin Gore new EP

Пожалуйста, зарегистрируйтесь, чтобы увидеть ссылку. | Please register to see the link.

https://www.depmode.com/Martin_Gore_MG_ ... ee_E_P.php



Interview Martin Gore Un Depeche Mode ensolo

MARTIN GORE EN MODE PRIMITIF

Le compositeur en chef de Depeche Mode a profité du
confinement pour revenir å ses amours électroniques
avec un opus 100% instrumental, et s'interroge sur le
rapport homme/animal.

Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore monkeys around with solo recordings in COVID quarantine

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- It’s understandable to think of Martin Gore strictly in terms of Depeche Mode.

The British-born multi-instrumentalist did start that band in 1980 in London, and has been its primary songwriter throughout its career -- which includes a virtual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction this past November. But Depeche Mode hasn’t contained all of Gore’s ambitions, and he’s indulged in a side project with Mode co-founder Vince Clarke (VCMG) as well as releasing a pair of solo albums and a trio of EPs.

The latest of the latter, “The Third Chimpanzee,” comes out Jan. 29. The five-track set, which Gore, 59, recorded in Los Angeles, where he resides, finds him at his mad scientist best, creating and manipulating sounds with determinedly primate power. He even got a capuchin monkey from Canada to create the cover art.

With that in mind, then, it would be fair to say that even in quarantine Gore isn’t just monkeying around and looking at his Rock Hall trophy...

So, the last we saw you was during the Rock Hall induction ceremony. Congratulations -- and how did it feel to be inducted?

Gore: I think it’s very ironic that we managed to get inducted during a year when there’s a pandemic. But of course, it’s a great honor. I’ve been saying for years that I discovered music through the original rock ‘n’ roll, through my mother’s record collection, and I used to play it to death. So, to actually get inducted with all of those people I used to listen to, those heroes, it’s incredible.

It gives you a bit of pause, too, to think about all these years of Depeche Mode.

Gore: Yeah, of course. And also it happened during our 40th anniversary; We started in 1980, so you realize you’ve been doing it a long time. You also realize you’re getting a bit older. (laughs)

You have “The Third Chimpanzee” EP coming out. Have you been creative in quarantine?

Gore: Yeah. I love going to the studio, and it’s something that keeps me sane. I feel guiltily fortunate that I can isolate and still get to work, ‘cause I know that so many people can’t. It’s something that does keep me sane; Even on days I go over and don’t feel particularly creative, it’s just a relief to be in there and even try and do something. I don’t go on weekends; I only go over for five or six hours in the afternoons, Mondays through Fridays. But that’s enough to keep me, like I said, sane and productive.

So how did “The Third Chimpanzee” come about?

Gore: The first track that I recorded for this was “Howler,” and I did that before COVID hit. I recorded some vocals on it and manipulated them and resynthesized them and they came back sounding not like me and not very human at all. I thought they sounded more like monkeys. I go down to Costa Rica quite a bit, and there are a lot of Howler monkeys down there. You can hear them for miles, and this reminded me of that, so I called the first track “Howler.” And then as America went into lockdown, I decided maybe I should do a few more instrumental tracks.

And you stayed with the simian theme.

Gore: That’s right. I came up with this theme of resynthesized vocals on each track and renaming each track after a different monkey. I thought it would be quite fun. I just wanted to blur the lines, really, between humans and monkeys -- which seemed quite fitting for the times. Sometimes we think that we’re so much more evolved than monkeys and, y’know, I really don’t think that we are. We’re a danger to the planet. Just put the monkeys in control and I think the planet would stand a much better chance. Without saying that explicitly, that’s what was going on in my head.

You also gave a monkey control of the album art.

Gore: That was another way to blur the lines between the species. I was struggling to come up with a concept for the art. I was just lying in bed one night thinking about it, and I remembered there are actually monkeys who paint. So, I started a Googling frenzy and eventually found Pockets Warhol and the (Story Book Farm Primate) Sanctuary in Canada and wrote and asked them if they would be interested in getting Pockets to do the artwork for me. And they were really into it, so I was really pleased.

Has the EP been played for Pockets and the other monkeys at all?

Gore: (laughs) No. It was obviously earlier in the process, so I wasn’t really giving out the music to anyone at that point. Maybe when it comes out someone will play it for them.

What was the musical intent as you constructed these tracks?

Gore: For me these weren’t so much about melody, as things usually are. I really wanted capture more of a kind of primal power, especially with “Howler” and “Mandrill,” even with “Vervet.” They’re more about a power, really, than actual melodies.

What are you working on now?

Gore: I’ve been writing some songs with a friend. We don’t really know what the plan is for them, really. We’re just writing for the sake of it ‘cause it’s fun, and we haven’t’ discussed even when or how it’s going to come out yet. Apart from that, I really think it’s a question of waiting to see what happens with the world, to see when the world starts spinning again and then kind of make plans. Right now, everything’s so up in the air. With the vaccine everything is promising, so let’s hope it all goes well.

What’s ahead for Depeche Mode?

Gore: Well, everything’s too up in the air now to really say. I suppose at some point we could think about at least talking about what we’re going to do. I think maybe that’s the next thing. But it seems kind of almost irrelevant to be doing that right now, when everything’s so unknown. We might as well wait ‘til there’s a better idea of what’s going to be happening.

Пожалуйста, зарегистрируйтесь, чтобы увидеть ссылку. | Please register to see the link.

Martin Gore - Howler (Official Video)

MG "The Third Chimpanzee" exclusive broadcast

Присоединитесь к Мартину, чтобы получить эксклюзивное первое прослушивание его совершенно нового мини-альбома, в прямом эфире Facebook.

Мартин будет давать комментарии во время стрима.



https://www.depmode.com/Martin_Gore_MG_ ... ee_E_P.php

The Third Chimpanzee - exclusive first listen
Join Martin on Thursday January 28th for an exclusive first listen of his brand new EP, live on Facebook.
Commencing at 3pm EST/8pm GMT/9pm CET, the full EP will be broadcast live through Martin’s Facebook page with Martin providing commentary during the stream. The Third Chimpanzee will be released digitally, on CD and on Azure Blue Vinyl the following day.

Пожалуйста, зарегистрируйтесь, чтобы увидеть ссылку. | Please register to see the link.

Here is what Martin wrote during his live stream:

Martin Gore on Making Soundwave Art from Depeche Mode Songs
The electronic innovator joins Kyle Meredith to unpack his new instrumental album

Depeche Mode songwriter Martin Gore hops on the line with Kyle Meredith to discuss The Third Chimpanzee. The new instrumental solo album finds him thematically bridging primates to humans in both the sounds he’s making and the inspiration he draws from. Gore dives into the ways he makes instrumentals speak to something, and the state of panic and anxiety he felt over the past four years. The electronic innovator also talks about being on the forefront of computerized music, his thoughts on AI songwriters, making soundwave art out of Depeche Mode songs, and the upcoming remixes for The Third Chimpanzee.

ALBUMS: Martin Gore Isn’t Monkeying Around on New EP

Artist: Martin Gore

Album: The Third Chimpanzee

Label: Mute Records

★★★★ (4/5 stars)

The Third Chimpanzee finds the Depeche Mode guitarist and songwriter diving deeper into his experimental side

Depeche Mode albums may not come as fast and furious as they did in the ‘80s, at a clip of almost one album a year.

But that doesn’t mean Martin Gore, the principal songwriter for the iconic group, is on a creative hiatus in between Depeche Mode releases.

The prolific Gore is always in his Electric Ladyboy Studios (presumably a play on New York City’s famed Electric Lady Studios) in Santa Barbara, California. Here, he has amassed a collection of old and new gear, which he plays with constantly. Without the pressure of creating another Depeche Mode masterpiece—which he has consistently done, and continues to do for 40+ years—noodling with his studio toys becomes a creative outlet.

The latest collection of output from these low-pressure sessions is an instrumental five-song EP, The Third Chimpanzee. The EP comes five years after his 16-track instrumental and cinematic MG album, and many years after Gore’s previous solo releases: Counterfeit EP and the Counterfeit2 album.

Experimental and industrial, a bit like Nine Inch Nails without lyrics, The Third Chimpanzee tracks are named after various types of monkeys: “Howler,” “Mandrill,” “Capuchin,” “Vervet” and the closing reprise “Howler’s End.” The monkey theme is not intentional. None of Gore’s always thematic solo releases are, it’s just what emerges as defined tracks start forming. Plus he had read the book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, so it all fell together.

There is no need for words with these emotive and atmospheric numbers which go from dark, harsh and repetitive to soaring and emotional of the course of five minutes, e.g., “Howler.” A different dichotomy happens on “Mandrill” which begins terrifying and dystopian and shifts into bright and spirited. “Capuchin” has so much character in its instrumentation, the music sounds like it has words embedded in it. The eight-minute opus, “Vervet” is a combination of chimes, electro vibrations and shudders broken up by unexpected yowling synth patches which move so effortlessly that it’s over before you can tire of it.

The Third Chimpanzee ends on a bold, echo-y notes with “Howler’s End,” leaving the listener feeling like they’ve been through a whirlwind of emotions in under 25 minutes.

The EP will be released on Jan. 29, 2021 digitally as well as on CD and a limited-edition 12-inch Azure Blue vinyl, which also includes an art print by Pockets Warhol.

Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore on New Monkey-Themed Solo EP and Why He’s Glad Trump Lost

The artist discusses how primates inspired his latest avant-garde release The Third Chimpanzee and the moment he knew he had too many synths

Martin Gore was recently tweaking his voice electronically — “resynthesizing it,” to use his words — for an avant-garde piece when he realized that it now sounded animalistic. The original vocal was “an almost yelling blues kind of line,” he says, but it had started to seem “human-like.”

“It wasn’t quite human anymore,” he tells Rolling Stone on a mid-December call from his home in sunny Santa Barbara, California. “It just reminded me of a different kind of primate. I went down to Costa Rica a bit during normal times, and we often hear the howler [monkeys] down there. The track reminded me a bit of the sound of howling.” So he titled the composition “Howler” and decided that monkey business suits him well.

Out Friday, the Depeche Mode musician and singer’s new solo EP, The Third Chimpanzee, collects five instrumental compositions named for primates — mandrills, capuchins, and vervets among them — all bound by the primitive spirit he evoked with his resynthesized vocals. The recordings are gritty and stark, fuzzy yet cutting. They’re not the hummable, soft-spoken electro-pop songs of his band; instead, they’re an extension of his most recent solo release, 2015’s MG, which also displayed a less commercially accessible side of the musician.

Part of why he decided to explore a different aspect of his art is because he had the time to do so. He had written “Howler” before coronavirus lockdowns went into effect and worked on the rest in isolation in the months since. “I haven’t been leaving the house too much,” he says. “Fortunately for me, I can just go to the studio and work most days. And I usually go, like, five days a week and for about five or six hours, and it helps to keep me sane. If I didn’t have that, I think I would have been in in an institution by now.”

Despite the seriousness of the music and the gravity of the world situation, Gore feels generally upbeat and optimistic. He even paid for a monkey to paint The Third Chimpanzee’s cover. “It’s striking,” he says of the art furnished by a primate named Pockets Warhol. Then he adds with a laugh, “We should put monkeys in charge of a lot of things.”

How did “Howler” inform the rest of the Third Chimpanzee EP?
I think when I was working on “Howler,” the thing I liked about it most was how it had kind of a primal power. That was something that I was quite insistent on keeping throughout the project. I wanted to keep that initial, hair-raising power.

Did you create the songs primarily with synthesizers?
I think that all of these tracks are synth-based; I don’t think I used a guitar on any of them. So it’s vocals, synthesizer, drums. There’s other stuff that I’ve been working on with a completely different aesthetic, and I’ve actually been using guitars a bit on those. But I would say the majority of them are very electronic still.

It’s been 40 years since Depeche Mode formed. What attracted you to electronic instruments in the first place?
Well, I think I must have been about 18, and one of my friends had a synthesizer. He lent it to me for a week, and I just fell in love with it and just loved the different sounds you could make with it. So I bought one. And I think if I hadn’t done that, I probably wouldn’t have been in Depeche Mode, because at the time, Vince [Clarke] and Andy [Fletcher] were just starting a band. And Vince played guitar, and Andy played bass. And when they heard that I had a synthesizer, they asked me to join. So had I not bought it, I might not have made it into the band.

Do you own a lot of synths now or do you maintain a small collection?
No, I have so many synthesizers and pieces of equipment that it’s not funny. I used to say the more stuff you have around you, the more creative you will be. But I passed that tipping point. And now I walk into the studio and I just think, “Oh, God. What should I use today?” It’s overwhelming.

What do you get out of making an instrumental EP like this, as opposed to music with traditional vocals?
You get different things out of them. The moment you put a vocal on a track, it’s obviously the most important thing, and everything has to work around it. If you take that away, everything is equally important, and it’s not like you’re having to worry about something blotting the vocal out and you can’t hear the words anymore. It’s more about the atmosphere and what the what the instrumental conjures, because music is powerful. And it is powerful with or without lyrics. I like working both ways.

You titled the record The Third Chimpanzee as a nod to Jared Diamond’s book The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee. The third chimp in that title is man. What are you saying with your title?
After naming all of the tracks after monkeys, I wanted to blur the lines between monkeys and humans. I think sometimes we put ourselves on a pedestal and think that we’re so much better [than animals]. And there are so many things that we do so badly. Maybe we’re better off putting monkeys in charge. And then I thought it was a great idea as well to get a monkey to do the artwork and blur the lines even more.

The cover art is by a monkey named Pockets Warhol. How did you get turned onto monkey art?
The idea came to me one night when I was laying in bed and I remembered reading about monkeys that paint. “That would be a great idea for the artwork.” So I went down that rabbit hole googling and managed to come across Pockets Warhol and found the sanctuary where he lives up in Canada. So the next day, I just sent an email to them and told them who I was and what I was doing and asked them if they would be interested in getting Pockets to do the artwork for me. And I had no idea if they would be into it, but they were. I’m really pleased with the results, too.

Do you own many of Pockets’ paintings?
They actually sent me five paintings to choose from. We’ve got a lot of remixes for of the tracks; I don’t know yet when they’re going to be coming out, but hopefully we’ll use at least one of the other ones for remix releases. I thought about auctioning off the rest, the ones I don’t use, at some point for the sanctuary.

Let’s talk about Depeche Mode. The band made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year. Was that special for you?
It’s obviously a great honor. Yeah, it’s nice to be recognized. And believe it or not, I was kind of sucked into music by the original rock & roll, the early pioneers, because that’s what my mum had in our record collection. When I was 10, that’s the music I discovered. I used to play those records to death for years and years until I left home. I think [Depeche Mode] is just about old enough to catch the coattails of it. So it’s nice to be inducted into the same Hall as all those people that are listened to so much.

What does it say to you that the Hall has started recognizing artists who play synthesizers primarily?
I think they finally decided that it’s OK to open it up to nontraditional rock-guitar bands. It’s about time. You’ve either got to move with the times, or there’ll be nobody to induct in about 50 years.

I don’t think Kraftwerk is in yet.
I think that they’ve been nominated a few times. I don’t think they’ve ever made it.

You mentioned earlier that you had other projects in the works. Is that music for Depeche Mode? What’s next for you?
Really, I think it just depends on what happens with the world. We haven’t really talked about what we’re planning next, because it just seems premature with the vaccine probably not hitting the general public until the summer. So as a band, we haven’t made other plans. I’ve just been writing, and I’ve actually been doing some writing with a friend. Again, we don’t have any plans on what we’re going to do with it; we haven’t even spoken about releases or anything like that.

If there’s one positive thing about all this, it’s that it is a nice time to just rethink and reflect and decide what you want to do. Because I think the world is going to be a different place after this.

Speaking of which, Depeche Mode’s last album, Spirit, was a rebuke of Trumpism, Brexit, and conservatism around the world. What did you learn from the band’s Global Spirit tour?
I’m just so happy that the election results came out the way they did, and this country’s managed to get rid of Trump. And I’m hoping that that’s a bit of a turning point for the world. Because it seemed like the world was being hit with doom and gloom from every angle. And if Trump had won again, I don’t think we would have been able to take it [laughs]. But let’s hope that that is a turning point. Let’s hope that that actually means something.

Martin Gore "The Third Chimpanzee EP"

Cat No: IMUTE629
Release date: 29 January 2021
Label: Mute
Genre: ELECTRONIC

Boomkat Product Review:

First new solo material from Martin Gore in half a decade, packs a gnarled tang where it matters.

‘The Third Chimpanzee EP’ holds Martin L. Gore’s first outing since the eponymous ‘MG’ album in 2015, and arrives 40 years since his earliest roles as one of DM’s founding members and primary songwriters. The five tracks pay testament to a perennially searching spirit still in the process of hunting for the perfect synthetic sound arrangements, but taking “perfect” to mean strangely expressive and uniquely textured synthesis, as generated by his formidable racks of gear.

Melodic and harmonic pop conventions are out of the window, and replaced by a taste for rawest elemental synthesis in all five parts, turning up some heavily satisfying grot recalling Wolf Eyes’ trip metal styles in ‘Howler’, and a ruddy sort of electro-dub chug on ‘Vervet’, along with some curled eastern tunings in ‘Capuchin’, and the elegiac fanfare of ‘Howler’s End.’

We bow down MG.

Пожалуйста, зарегистрируйтесь, чтобы увидеть ссылку. | Please register to see the link.