Track by Track: AFXJIM

TRAVIS BAIRD has played guitar for Melodie Nelson, Sounds Like Sunset and Founder. He also makes sample-based experimental pop music as AFXJIM. His new album ‘Distant’ sources samples from op-shop vinyl, radio evangelists, kindergarten classrooms and Costa Rican karaoke bars.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

‘For Jack Darling (Before You Were Born)’

Dubious album opener, although at five-plus minutes there’s something for everyone in here. It’s named for the West Coast forward but not for any reason. It was originally recorded as a seven-minute cello, looped guitar and synth drone track before I cut up the middle bit and added some chopped/stretched-out Afro beats. I always felt it was destined to have some pop star sing on the middle section and maybe it will happen one day. There are a couple of field recordings/samples buried in the end bit; a public art installation beeping at me in Montreal and an anonymous hippie’s thoughts on drone music. It’s not supposed to be a manifesto but there’s definitely some poetry in it.

‘Requiem for the Broken Discoverer’

Mostly written on an old Baldwin Discoverer combo organ, one of my favourite keyboards, picked up at Miranda Cash Converters many years ago. It got looped up and then played on some more. After the basic tracking, the Discoverer stopped working for a couple of years and no one wanted to fix it. Eventually my man Toby Baldwin was the only person brave enough to have a crack, probably because the organ bears his name. Happily, it’s working again now and usually gets used with the live show. I have a handful of old Casiotones around the house (and I think probably every household needs a couple) but the Discoverer usually gets the first nod in the studio.

‘Huyano (Here is a Hammer)’

‘Huyano’ took many turns before ending up here. I tried adding verses a couple of times but they always felt a bit heavy for this track, and too often about the sea. In the end I left the vocal duties to this kindergarten class who were rehearsing for a school assembly. It’s not a song I remember from my childhood. I’ve listened to the sample hundreds of times and I’m still convinced they’re singing “Here is my head, here is a hammer.”

‘Distant’

Lyrics usually arrive last when I’m writing a song, but ‘Distant’ was written on a miserable London night when you find yourself too many miles from where you need to be when the tube stops running and you know you won’t get to touch a guitar for another four months. The scratchy singing sample in the middle break was recorded to minidisc in a bus-top karaoke bar in the Costa Rican backwoods. Weird scene. A lot of the bones were tracked with Tony Dupé in a beautiful old sandstone church in Wildes Meadow.

‘Joint Account’

Years ago I was convinced to buy the sp404 sampler so that I might stop relying on minidiscs to trigger samples for the live shows. Since then, with a reluctance to read manuals and too many other distractions within arm’s reach, I’ve barely scratched at what the sampler can actually do, but I did use it to write and record this song in a single night. Subtly, it’s my political protest song. I also managed to squeeze in a Blazing Saddles sample. The other samples come from classic kung-fu movies, ’60s Cambodian pop and baroque horns.

‘Time to Turn Over the Rekurd’

This song has been going around for years – a mixing nightmare – but it sounds better than it did eight years ago. To me it feels and sounds like it should have been on the first album. Like most of that album it was written around a single guitar loop and there are a lot of acoustic instruments on here: piano, glock, bells, guitar, upright bass, thumb piano, and the 19th century pipe organ at St Paul’s, Hay, NSW.

When I was a kid my piano teacher was the church organist. Occasionally, when she was crook or out of town and her regular backup was unavailable, I would have to go play the hymns for the Sunday morning service. The massive old organ fascinated me and sounded like a thousand seraphic footy sirens. Andrew Tuttle (Anonymeye) did a beautiful remix of this track for a Feral Media/Lofly Strain of Origin compilation that isolated/looped the organ and piano tracks. I wished I’d thought of it.

‘Class of 96’

Not much to tell about this one. Double-delayed bass, synths, samples and e-bow drones. The drum flip-out was pinched from the Spencer Davis Group album With Their New Face On and although I live kinda next to the airport, the plane samples came from a different airport in Japan.

‘Song for Rejoicing’

I started listening to a lot more world music a few years ago, when my local library had a great cd collection. The song sampled here is titled ‘Song for Rejoicing After a Hunt’, performed by the Ba-Benzele Pygmies of Central Africa. I really hope they wouldn’t mind me using it. Similar to ‘Requiem’, I tried using these vocal chants as a melodic/percussive element and in many ways this one was probably inspired by Madlib’s awesome Beat Konducta releases.

‘Autumn Diary’

An electro-bossa-pop experiment written about 10 years ago. It’s about clearing out the shoebox of old correspondence stored at your mum’s place in the countryside, feeling the weight of sentiment and loss, feeling sorry for yourself and not really knowing why. Like some other songs it went back and forth to the scrapheap over a few years. Also, as the vocals were recorded in a register I could barely access even back then, the final vocals were an ongoing challenge. Others were asked to sing it and kept insisting I should. Tony Dupé helped me out on the mix somewhere along the way and worked some wonders on the percussive tracks.

‘JW’

This track was originally pitched for a Johnnie Walker advertisement – the weird Eyes Wide Shut-vibe one. Robin Dixon played a bunch of cello on that shorter version and it didn’t have the beats and samples. It went to the scrapheap for a time while I considered what other product it might be used to sell. In my head I wanted the middle section to float like Evenings’ awesome 2011 album Lately. The vocal sample came from the Danish movie Pelle the Conqueror.

‘Jealous Type’

Originally written as a distorted Sparklehorse-style banger, played twice as fast and lasting half as long. The guitar was written and recorded 10 years ago in some bizarre one-off tuning that I wish I’d written down somewhere. My first instrument was the tenor horn, which I started playing when I was about 10. It doesn’t get touched much year-to-year, but I laid some horns down on the middle section and outro here. Bit pitchy, but you get the picture. The ending was supposed to be kind of chaotic, paranoid and ominous, which is a fine way to finish any album.

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‘Distant’ is out now on CD and any-price download through Feral Media.