Undoubtedly the factoid most bantered about regarding Pretty Boy Crossover is that they were almost released by the record label SKAM, home to Boards of Canada, Bola and high cred releases that fetch some of the more absurd prices seen on eBay. When that deal didn’t eventuate Australian label
Surgery picked up the slack, and in 2001 the material that SKAM had sat on finally surfaced in a form the general public could check out, under the title
One night while listening to The Building and Formation shortly after moving to Melbourne, Australia, it dawned on me that I was now living in the same town as these guys. I promptly got in touch, and arranged an interview. I discovered that Pretty Boy Crossover (PBXO for short) is the project of two rather amusing and thoughtful guys from Adelaide, Jason and Cailan. The interview was predominated by self-deprecating jokes, laughter and general smart arse responses, which I hope I can capture with some justice in text.
Jason formed his first band in 1990, doing “jingly jangly pop stuff”, and dreaming of being in the Smiths. Cailan got his first taste for music when his brother bought a guitar, but sadly at that point his musical fantasies were of being in Bon Jovi. The two met later down the track when they were both working on a play.
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Jason: I was doing the radio show on 3D in Adelaide. That was called Pretty Boy Crossover. It was just like playing general music, and Cailan and I used to bring in our records and play them. I’d been doing radio for a while –
Cailan: – and I was known as the person that giggles.
Jason: “The Giggle Boy”.
Cailan: It was really funny, it was like ‘oh you’re the guy that giggles on the radio’ and I’m like ‘yeah, thanks. But what about my good music taste??’
Around this time Jason received a grant to release the material he had written for plays, films and so on. He asked Cailan to add a track of his own to the CD, and this became the first PBXO release, under the title System Soundtracks. From there some proper collaboration began, and the new PBXO duo decided to shop around their material to their favourite labels. They were over the moon when they got a bite from SKAM. Sadly, after two years of waiting, SKAM finally said they had too many problems with financing and distributing the release, and Adelaide label Surgery stepped in to assist.
After SKAM’s initial offer, both Jason and Cailan moved to Melbourne, where a local label Optikut offered to do a vinyl release of a bunch of tracks from the same period, predominantly covering the same material Surgery released on CD. This was also somewhat fraught, however.
Cailan: There was this whole thing, something to do with, well, it was obviously money and things, but for ages, it was kind of going to happen… well, not that it was never ‘gonna happen, but we thought for a while maybe it wasn’t ‘gonna happen, and then it was ‘gonna happen, and then it happened.
Jason: Try transcribing that one!
With both the Optikut and Surgery releases finally on shelves, things are looking a bit more certain, release-wise
Jason: Tim [Koch, aka Thug] from Surgery also put us on to a label called Miy Paluk in the UK, which is based in London. It’s a woman who works for 4AD and Ouija records. She’s doing her own label and putting out a 7″ as a co-release with Bad Jazz. Then Clan Analogue are putting out a CD EP as well.
Surgery are also lining up a second full length CD for 2002. I had to enquire how the actual music for these releases comes about.
Cailan: I think the way we work is I’ll have sat at my computer and tinkered around, or got on a keyboard or something. Usually I’ll have something really rough and whatever, and I’ll show it to Jason and he’ll go ‘I can fit something to that’. We’ll make little tracks of it and I’ll give it to Jason, and he puts it in the microwave and pushes the button, and it comes back.
Jason: We used to work a lot more live. [The Building and Formation] was all on eight track [tape recorder] and we spent a lot of time –
Cailan: – jamming –
Jason: – on Cailan’s four track and my eight track, just making tracks and basically improvising stuff.
Cailan: We haven’t really had as much time to do that recently. Jason’s been away a lot, and just, you know, moving to Melbourne and that whole last year was kind of weird. Me getting a job – a really crap job by the way – stuff like that takes time away. So all this new stuff has been almost like audio letters to each other.
Igloo: Aah, like the track title. [“Audio Letters” on The Building and Formation]
Cailan: Yeah, yeah, but it’s kind of like that. Like I’ll go ‘here’s something I’ve done’ and Jason will take it away and go ‘here’s something I’ve added to it’. It gives it a different edge, but I have to admit in the future I’d like to get back into doing stuff, um, well, together again.
Jason: In the same room. [At the moment] Cailin will give me stuff and I’ll go home and work on things and then I’ll bring them back and he’ll say ‘how about trying this out?’ and usually it works. Or Cailin will try something different.
Cailan: And we’ve also got this thing, like, where if Jason’s got some things that he’s worked on, or I’ve got some, then we’ll just sprinkle that in too. I dunno, I’ve never thought of it as a band or anything, it’s just whatever happens.
So it seems that a lot of the somewhat meandering mood of The Building and Formation corresponded closely with the guys’ working method, with several tracks being a simple case of laying down a drum pattern and the two of them jamming alongside with the tape running. It also became evident that a lot of the noise was a result of this home tape recording approach. That made me curious about how much was intentional or otherwise.
Cailan: I’m not really into – well, I like smooth styles, like a lot of that Chain Reaction stuff has quite smooth sounds – but whatever comes out of you is what comes out of you, and we just tend to be rough around the edges. If we weren’t like that, it wouldn’t be us. We’d just be smooth, and, well, somebody else! I’d like to think that somebody might listen to Pretty Boy Crossover and go ‘oh, they like it like that’. Well, either they’ll go ‘they don’t know how to record sound properly!’ or ‘They really like that!’ But if you listen to cLOUDDEAD, that Anticon stuff, that’s all recorded on eight tracks and four tracks and it’s so noisy and dirty and I love it! It sounds really crappy but they’re getting a lot of appreciation from a lot of people, because people maybe want something a bit more raw.
Jason: Ultimately it should be about the music, not the production values.
Cailan: But maybe people are kind of drawn to that because they are so used to hearing things on the radio that are all smoothed over and glossy.
Jason: We’ve had heaps of comments about the noisiness on the record. Even when we were getting it mastered one of the questions was ‘We’ve got a special button that will erase all the tape noise: do you want us to use it?’. We were like ‘no way, we like it!’
Cailan: Yeah, absolutely. I sample old cassettes. Like I might sample something that Jason’s done. Lots of our tracks are based on old things. Sampling of ourselves.
Jason: It’s resampling. Heaps of references. But to go back, everything we do now is done to hard disk, pretty much.
Cailan: Yeah, but we still end up with that sound.
The notion of using the relatively old technology of tape seems an anathema to the slightly embarrassing obsession with “progress” that seems to haunt electronic music. When I asked about a certain sample sounding like Boards of Canada, it was made even more clear that PBXO are not great believers in novelty.
Jason: Definitely there are big influences in there, even in just those chords. But I mean if you use melodic chords or anything melodic now, suddenly it’s Boards of Canada.
Cailan: Yeah, no one’s invented anything. I mean, Chuck Berry – everyone’s ripped off rock and roll! The Ramones, or whoever.
Jason: Yeah, Boards of Canada even imitate Boards of Canada!
Cailan: Even Brian Eno. I have Discrete Music by Brian Eno, and it sounds like Boards of Canada! And Aphex’s first album sounds like the incidental music from Beverly Hills Cop [by Harold Faltermeyer]!
Jason: Really? Wow!
Cailan: Yeah, for sure. I was watching it with Mark [fellow Surgery artist Super Science] and we were going ‘God, this is just like Selected Ambient Works I, just cheesier!’
Whether or not an article on the common ground between RDJ and Harold Faltermeyer will be seen any time soon, it seems parallel evolution as a concept is too frequently overlooked in music journalism. Another example of such a coincidence was a certain progression of chords used in “Blu-Glo”, which happen to be identical to a track on Autechre’s album Tri Repetae. I thought I was being nerdy for noticing it, but Jason informs me that SKAM also enquired on Autechre’s behalf. Cailan’s story is that he opened one page of a book on organ chords and played the first things in front of him.
During the interview both Cailan and Jason talked about the fact that some of their influences from guitar bands have made their way into the PBXO sound in the years since The Building and Formation was recorded.
Cailan: I think the change might be to do with what we’ve been listening to, like I’ve been listening to my friend Cornell’s stuff [aka Qua, also Cornelius W on the Surgery Records compilation Initial Release] and he uses lots of guitars. Also bands like Tortoise and so on. I’ve just got this desire to buy a bass guitar and get a bit more into that. Jason still does this thing called Simpático which is more guitar based.
Jason: I think also when we played live a couple of weeks ago we realised we wanted to give ourselves more of an interest value when we play, so we thought it would be nice to have some more instrumentation. But I don’t think we sit down and say “it’s gonna be this or that”, it just ends up being whatever.
This open ended approach certainly leaves me curious about what we’ll hear in the future from the two. At the time of the interview they were about to start work on a more upbeat, guitar-driven film soundtrack, and as well as Jason’s band Simpático mentioned above there is Other People’s Children, who have released something relatively recently on the German label Morr Music. This project takes a more electro-pop approach, and is primarily Jason and a friend called Nicole, but still involves Cailan.
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For further information about PBXO and related projects try some of the following links.
Pleasurecraft Centrum – homepages for PBXO, Other People’s Children, Simpático and more:
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Pretty Boy Crossover :: The Building and Formation (Surgery)
It was a very shrewd call on Surgery Records’ part to make it explicit that this material by Australian duo Pretty Boy Crossover was originally going to be released on cult label SKAM, who originally brought artists such as Boards of Canada and Bola to popular attention. Good marketing or not, this piece of information is a good starting point for giving a quick understanding of what to expect on The Building and Formation.
Although pretty in terms of the soft melodies that wander across the tracks, the soft and muted production might be more fairly described as “grubby”. Slowed down drum loops crunch away in the background as evolving keyboard parts wander across a bed of crackling hissing and fuzz. Chords swell and shimmer through long echoes, crumbling and fraying around the edges.
Lest you get the wrong impression, Pretty Boy Crossover’s crackling textures and wavering pitch give off the feel of a worn down tape or LP more than the overtly digital feel of many modern minimalists. Think of something like Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works II (Warp), not Clicks and Cuts (Mille Plateaux). A little nostalgic possibly, but very beautiful.
The Building And Formation is out now on Surgery Records.
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