What themes run throughout your work? The usual themes of love and relationships appear in our songs but we are also interested in the stranger aspects of the human condition and the way the usual can be twisted into something mysterious and new (being in love with the Eiffel Tower, being eaten by a bear, making love in the airlock...).
How do you hope your work will affect its audience? Hopefully they'll enjoy well crafted songs. A song is a bit of a message in a bottle; once you've written the message and thrown it into the sea you can never really tell what effect it might have on the finder. Any sort of emotional response is better than indifference.
What sounds influence your work? We use quite a lot of 'found sounds' in our music though these are often buried in the final mixes to provide textures rather than standing out as obvious effects. We've recorded machinery, various sounds from deserted buildings, aircraft, hoverflies, dogs barking snippets of conversation, anything that can give a sense of place to the music.
What makes you decide to create your work? It's a compulsion, we have to!
Where do your talents lie? Hopefully, creating quirky enjoyable songs which also have enough depth to be listenable many times over.
What successes have you had so far? We've done some very enjoyable gigs, been listed as a 'hot pick' in Future Music magazine and recently released a CD EP distributed by Lakeland records.
What was the first creative thing that you ever did? As a band, the first creative thing we did together was to make a cup of tea that was just the way we wanted it.
Has anyone taught you how to use your talent better? Not yet; we learn by experience and experimentation.
What makes you creative? Tea, biscuits and cup cakes. Everyone is creative to some extent. We've been lucky enough to find each other and team up to channel our creative talents into making Army of Mice songs…
How did you get started? Ellie gave her first performance singing Little Donkey at church when she was 5. Chris started by recording friends bands. Mark started programming his Spectrum computer and playing trombone.
What inspires you? Ellie says Chris inspires her, but no one is sure what she means by this. Mark is inspired by many and various styles of music. Chris is inspired by nature, art, film, technology, love and loss.
Who inspires you? The Surrealists, Bjork, Werner Hertzog, David Lynch, Kate Bush, Oliver Postgate, anyone with great skill at something.
What do you do when you are suffering from creative block? Listen to something I would never usually listen to, maybe I’ll put radio 3 on or borrow a random CD from the library. Drink tea. Take a long walk. Consult Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies and then ignore what the card says.
What are you trying to achieve? Music that means something, affects people and is taken seriously as well as having a good groove and a phatt beat. Also an escape to a more fulfilling life.
Do you collaborate? There's lots of people we'd like to collaborate with. We'd like to do music for film or video or provide something for an art installation.
Ignoring money and all of life’s woes, what would you want to be? Artistically successful and unconstrained by commercial tastes.
Accepting the need for money and all of life’s woes, what do you want to be? Commercially successful.
What’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen / heard / experienced? Swimming with a turtle in the Maldives, travel experiences, thunderstorms, waterfalls, love, flying, dreaming.
What do you consider to be the most important thing in life? Artistic honesty, happiness, paying attention to the details, living in the moment.
Who/what is your nemesis and why? Depression, Nissan Micras, bland music - because they destroy creativity.
Artist Statement: Creating the Wildflower EP:
Wildflower was written and recorded between 2008 and 2009 on English summer Sundays and Wednesday nights fueled by copious quantities of tea and triangular shaped biscuits. Song ideas sown in many and various locations finally germinated in Mark's laptop, growing from motifs and riffs chiming out from virtual pianos and driven by makeshift drum loops. Sounds and files were swapped between computers until, somewhere north of Norwich, in blurry late night sessions Chris coaxed sounds from a collection of dusty synthesisers, old effects units, added in 'found sounds' and committed Mark's songs to hard disk. Lyrics written on scraps of paper, on beer mats and in battered note books were shared with Ellie, to be revised and refined, until vocals were recorded in the acoustic-tiled room known to Ellie as 'The Dungeon'. Dirty electric guitars were treated with a smattering of overdrive or delay from Mark's collection of pedals through a carefully miked guitar amp. Clean and crisp acoustic guitars were recorded in a bright and shiny room. Finally the recordings, edited, polished, effected and scattered with digital 'fairy dust' were at last completed and released to the world to be loved and enjoyed or ignored and dismissed...
Wildflower is available direct from Lakeland records, in many good record shops and by download from iTunes, emusic, Amazon and Soundclick.
Name://
Army of Mice
Age://
4
Profession://
Music Location://
Norwich, United Kingdom Email Address://
armyofmicemusic@googlemail.com Web Link://
www.myspace.com/armyofmice Favourite Website://
www.photochrishylton.co.uk Type of work displayed on Magnus://
Music / CD Artwork
Work:// - Bear 141
- Wildflower
|
