Eclectic Guitar

Best known as drummer from improve jazz outfit The Necks, Tony Buck has strapped on the guitar for his latest album 'Project Transmit', a rock record rooted in the minimalism of Shellac and the shimmering harmonics of My Bloody Valentine. He speaks to ADAM D MILLS about the album’s lengthy and enlightening birth.

Tony Buck is best known to most people for the two decades he’s spent drumming for exploratory free jazz trio The Necks. But in addition to this, his long career has had many tangents. He’s been in a huge number of bands – from the jazz-punk of Great White Noise to the industrial chaos of Peril, which he formed in Japan in the early 1990s with renowned noisemongers Otomo Yoshihide and Kato Hideki. Buck has also collaborated with the likes of The Ex’s Andy Moor and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, and has released three solo records: The Shape of Things to Come (1989), Solo Live (1994) and Self _contained _underwater _breathing _apparatus (2002).

All of these projects have, in one way or another, informed the sound of Buck’s new solo album Project Transmit. A nine-track journey into muscular-yet-minimalist rock, the record’s genesis lies about five years in the past, in a series of live collaborations between Buck and Asi Föcker in Berlin, where he now lives.

“We’d just play lots of different things together at the gigs,” he explains. “She’d play guitar and sing and play accordion, and I’d play samples and loops, and sometimes drums and guitar. I started to play electric guitar with her and I was really drawn to this approach that I would apply it to the songs. Around that time I was playing with guitar players like Andy Moor and Lee Ranaldo and being drawn to how they would use guitar sonically and dissonantly. The sort of swinging quality of how those guys used the strings and the resonances of the strings. So I started playing a lot more, and felt compelled to play and write some pieces.”

The process of recording Project Transmit began in mid-2007. With a very clear idea in his head of how he wanted the drums on the album to sound, Buck set about trying to find a drummer in Berlin. When his search proved fruitless, Buck made the obvious choice: he’d just play drums himself.

“I use really thick strings, so it feels like I have something to hit. I play the guitar like a drummer, I guess.”

“Sometimes it’s very specific, how I want it to sound. Sometimes it’s specific to the details of how far I want the hi-hat open or where I want the snare. So that’s a bit weird. I also feel a bit weird about asking people to play in a project where it’s like, ‘This is the groove, you do this for 10 minutes and I don’t really want to hear a drum fill or anything.’ I feel that’s a lot to ask in a way. And I don’t really like telling people what to do.”

The first stage of the recording was done live with Buck playing drums and longtime friend Dave Symes on bass. Buck then took the results of these sessions back to Berlin with him, where he spent six months overdubbing guitars.

“I’ve always played guitar,” says Buck. “I’ve always had a guitar around the house and have played it since I was 12 or 13. It was nice to be able to play a bit and write a bit, you know, strum away. I always enjoyed it, but I was never drawn to it like I was playing drums. Until I started playing this electric guitar stuff, and then I was drawn to playing it in a specific way. I’m very clear about how I want to play. I don’t want to get into learning how to play jazz guitar, because that’s a highly developed, technical thing. I just want to play like I do.”

The guitar is obviously a very different instrument to the drums. But on Project Transmit, there’s a distinctly percussive quality to Buck’s playing – especially the heavy, slamming chords on opening track ‘What You Want’ and the hypnotic repetition of his version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ – that suggests quite a strong overlap between the two. “I use really thick strings, so it feels like I have something to hit,” he says. “I play the guitar like a drummer, I guess.”

At the other end of the scale, Buck gets a myriad of shimmering tones from the instrument on ‘Follow You’ and ‘Kayla’. The two tracks highlight the influence Buck took from guitarists like Ranaldo and My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields in terms of the instrument’s resonant possibilities, both in terms of harmonics and dissonance.

“Drums are a very orchestral instrument,” he says. “The bottom end of the kit, the floor toms and the bass drum and stuff like that, can be very muscular, and then the harmonics [come from] the cymbals. But I guess it’s not really specific, harmonically. You can have all those ringing tones, but they’re not specific. So I guess playing the guitar opens up that specific harmonic language. Which is very interesting to get into, and I’m enjoying that.”

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