Goldfrapp > Unearthly Music for the Masses

Words by Jenni Miller
Image by Joe Dilworth

The music of Goldfrapp is a gorgeously eerie blend of sensual cabaret songs and electronic music like nothing else out today. Alison Goldfrapp plays the keyboards, sings, whistles and yodels in the songs she created with Will Gregory, film composer and arranger, for Goldfrapp's first album Felt Mountain.

The album, which was released in October 2000, evokes the magical and spooky world of children's stories, alternately surreal and sinister yet beautiful nonetheless. The band is often compared to a strange hybrid of the movie soundtracks composed by Ennio Morricone and Angelo Badalamenti, with a twist of Portishead, but comparisons are often cheap and lazy. Suffice it to say that Goldfrapp is creating music like only they can create.

Felt Mountain has slowly and quietly garnered acclaims from the music industry and an ever-widening fan-base that includes Mute label-neighbor (and Mac fan) Moby, Ed O'Brien, guitarist for Radiohead. In the past, Alison has worked with the techno band Orbital, Tricky (with whom she toured for two years after the release of Maximquaye in 1995), and Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music. Through sheer coincidence, Gregory heard a tape of Alison doing an early version of one of the songs on the album, and the two got in touch. They found mutual ground as artists, and Goldfrapp the band was born. Felt Mountain was released in September of 2000 by the Mute recording label.

Felt Mountain is, in essence, a fairy tale world, composed of opposites, both magical and vaguely threatening. The idea of a mountain made of felt is, according to Alison, "a state of mind, an imaginary place where one can go." The lyrics speak of dark desires and strange futures, with the ominous feeling of big open skies bearing down on the listener. Alison says, "There is something threatening about big spaces. But it is also like a place you can plant in your own imagination; that's what is really exciting. It has a lot of room to imagine and that's very good I think. It's a healthy place to be."

The claustrophobic feeling of the album is probably in due, in part, to the band's recording process. Alison and Will secreted themselves in the English countryside, away in a "grotty, little, smelly bungalow" where most of the brainstorming, writing and mixing went on. The result was an exploration of childhood memories, sci-fi nightmares, and cracked love affairs, with overtones reeking of James Bond movies and Weimar decadence.

To a certain extent, Alison's inspirations reflect the conglomerate of adjectives music journalists use to attempt to pinpoint the band. She says, "Well, for me the first thing I ever heard that really made me think, 'Oh my God, wow!' and sort of the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, was listening to Carmina Burana I just heard that and I just thought, 'Oh my God, these people and they were people, the idea that these people were making this really powerful, orgasmic, scary sound was like, 'I want to make that sound. I want to do that. I want to be able to do that.'"

Another influence on the duo is sci-fi and more particularly, the seminal black and white film Metropolis. According to Will, "I think Metropolis, that film, was probably one of the first times anybody put the brakes on and said, 'Technology doesn't necessarily mean progress. Technology could actually be something very harmful and something that.' It's almost like a religion; if you put your faith in it, it can be destructive. I think there is a certain, that kind of genre of sci-fi, which is like the Phillip K. Dick school, which says your worst nightmare can become reality, really. That kind of melancholy mood that you can get, or the idea that in the future human beings will be some weird combination of their own devising, but because we're not God that combination could be something fairly horrific. I think that that is quite powerful, that subhumaness that you could imagine is something that we like to play with and maybe comes out on some of the... In a sense a synthesizer is subhuman. It can't really produce a musical sound, inverted commas, as we traditionally except it. So I think it has a crossover idea as well."

The album was composed using a plethora of instruments, from the traditional to the esoteric. They include the cello, violin, viola, double bass, flugal horn, French horn, baritone ukulele, melodica (a type of wind piano or keyboard harmonica), koto (a traditional Japanese wooden stringed instrument), tremolo guitar, synthesizer, a Moog and even an entire brass band. Goldfrapp used a Mac G3 equipped with a Korg 1212 I/O digital audio card and Logic Audio for production. Apple's QuickTime Hot Picks Music section links to Goldfrapp's QuickTime music videos, as well as those by Bjork, Depeche Mode, Faithless, Peter Gabriel and other highly regarded music ensembles. www.feltmountain.com.