Fuck Buttons: “Rough Steez” (Tarot Sport, ATP, 10/20/09)
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When their flatmates leave the homestead, Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power, better known as British electronic duo Fuck Buttons, set up and ready themselves for a little practice time. With a slew of analog and digital synthesizers, effects, and laptops, they delve headfirst into the atmospheric chasm of their music.
“We don’t make a terrible amount of noise, but it can be sort of in the way; a lot of time is also spent in our respective bedrooms,” Hung explains in his pleasant British demeanor.
While retaining some of the dark, distorted undertones that peppered its 2008 debut, Street Horrrsing (ATP), the duo’s latest offering, Tarot Sport, relaxes a bit more with hammock atmospherics that glaze the record in a glassy sheen that grabs and jerks the ears while remaining crisp and, at times, fragile.
“We just play the sounds that we like to hear. There are no ideological intentions or messages we are trying to convey.”
The seamless transition to the deeper, more mature sophomore record seems like second nature to Fuck Buttons; its members are friends who first met in art school in Bristol, UK (and have since relocated to London). Power spent his youth playing guitar in loud, angular punk bands, while Hung concentrated on electronic music with little to no intentions of playing out until about four years ago when the two began Fuck Buttons.
With their different backgrounds, it would be easy to call Fuck Buttons a middle ground of sorts between their respective tastes. Not so, Hung explains. “It would be more of a meeting place, not a middle ground,” he says. “Really, we are just proving our tastes to one another.”
Although both Power and Hung listen to their fair share of music, they don’t find inspiration in the music of others. “We do not look outward for our influences,” Hung says. “We just play the sounds that we like to hear. There are no ideological intentions or messages we are trying to convey.”
In essence, Fuck Buttons merely does what it enjoys, which is what artistry is really about. Luckily for the duo, its music has become popular enough both in its home country as well as abroad, allowing it to devote more time to the project.
“With Street Horrrsing, we still had full-time jobs, so the [writing] process took a few years or so,” Hung says. “We’ve been really lucky in that we’ve been able to concentrate solely on Tarot Sport. We still recorded in a quick manner, a few days, but were able to spend a full three weeks on the mixing, which is always the part that is most labor intensive.”
This steady patience becomes clear throughout Tarot Sport’s entirety. As the synthesizers hum and droll with the air itself, a steadfast beat emerges from the fog, adding to it a grating distortion and a melody line nestled perfectly in the breast. The overall mood is both chilling and warm, violent and soothing.
“The Lisbon Maru” combines all of these elements perfectly while also dropping in a near-tribal exercise in worship through repetition, elating the listener into an almost trance-like state. In the bright white extended flash of the ending and into “Olympians,” one’s mind easily wanders away, but not from the music — instead, it wanders from the world and the thoughts that plague, and far from all responsibility.
The seemingly more upbeat, gentle waves of crystal hums and the near-directionless snares and toms take this mythical realm to push the listener’s brain into a safe and comatose state. This is pure aural escapism at its finest, with no illegal substances required.
One of the most notable differences between the two records is the lack of vocals on the latest effort. Whereas they had been at one point both sparse and memorable, the absence of the discomforting vocals, abrasive in their full-frontal delivery and lack of melody, makes one wonder whether or not it was a conscious decision.
“There are songs that we considered putting on Tarot Sport that featured vocals, but they never made it onto the record,” Hung says. “There was never an intention to exclude them from the record. With regards to the individual songs, they just didn’t need that element.”
With an international tour completed and a constant thirst to create (“Writing…ha, always writing,” Hung says with a quiet shrug), it is evident that Fuck Buttons has only just begun this journey. A slight change of timbre and the world would know them simply as a fresh and ever-changing duo of composers. However, the slight change of the world’s listening habits could reveal Hung and Power to be exactly what they are: a humble duo of innovators.