Mercury rising on the double

Mercury Rev are coming down from the Catskill Mountains to visit Kilkenny, and they're bringing a new double album and a small tribute to James Joyce with them, says guitarist Grasshopper. He talks fractals and James Joyce with  Lawrence Mackin

IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE Grasshopper, aka Seán Mackowiak, being anything other than a bit of a rock star. He talks in slow, glacial syllables, his east-coast, languid drawl shunts down the phone from the Catskill Mountains like a bad weather forecast. In pictures, he is almost perennially sheathed in aviator shades and every word seems to be deeply considered - but then again, it takes him an age to get them out.

There's the name - "Grasshopper" comes from the English translation of his surname, a hunk of heritage from his Polish grandparents. And then of course there's the band - Mercury Rev, experimental rockers with lush, ornate sensibilities who write thrilling, uplifting music.

Grasshopper seems genuinely excited about the release of Mercury Rev's new double album. When Snowflake Midnighthits the shops, the band will also release an accompanying album as a free download, called Strange Attractor.

" Strange Attractoris more, I wouldn't say instrumental, but there's less word content, there's more music," rumbles Mackowiak. He admits that Snowflake Midnightis more commercial but giving a second album away free has perhaps allowed the band to be more ambitious.

"We've been playing small shows and instrumental, experimental music. We've been moving studios and it was a time for a change. We had been experimenting with computers and music generation and new synthesizers and putting our guitars through different manipulators."

There is a cerebral texture to much of Mercury Rev's music and some of the language being used to describe the album is oddly scientific, with talk of fractals and the like.

Aptly, Mercury Rev's previous releases seem to be generally grouped into threes, with Yerself Is Steam, their debut, taking a chaotic, unprocessed art-pop approach that only relented with their fourth album, Deserter's Songs. Its pristine production and unfolding sense of wonder brought them a cult following in 1998, and the band have stuck to this template with subsequent releases. But will the release of Snowflake Midnightmean reinventing the Mercury Rev-shaped wheel?

"It's completely different," says Grasshopper. "I don't know what the next couple of albums will be like, but this is definitely a departure. Some of the adventurous spirit of our first three records came back into Snowflake Midnight, where we threw all the rules out the window and got down to it. It was like being adolescent and experimenting all over again with new technology and instruments."

Snowflake Midnightswims in the hallmark stately sound of Mercury Rev, with soaring guitars and cathedral-sized sections, but it is built with some stand-out electronic architecture. That said, we might have to wait for Strange Attractorbefore the band starts showing us a truly new facet to their sound.

So, do they ever get tired of the enormous arrangements and want to strip it right back to just guitar-driven rock?

"We do that too where we all sit down around a piano, the three of us. A lot of these songs were written in the studio with myself and Jon [Donahue] and both of us on guitars and Jeff [Mercel] on a piano and going from there."

Grasshopper's own inclinations seem to be towards a more minimal sound; he studied under iconic composer and performance artist Tony Conrad and has written several soundtracks. However, once the band begin working as a unit, things have a tendency to take "a different tone; it gets more grandiose".

The band's base of operations is famously the Catskill Mountains, and there is something charming in thinking of the band holed up in the hills, slaving away over a hot mixing desk to produce music that is so polished and refined.

"That does happen. Jonathan lives out more in the woods and then we come into our small town and that's where our studio is, and then we mix everything with Dave Fridmann up in Buffalo."

Fridmann has been a mainstay in the band since the early 1980s, but in the period surrounding Deserter's Songs, it seemed that every decent indie rock release had been through his production process - within the space of a few years he had worked with Mogwai, Sparklehorse, Wheat and The Flaming Lips to name a few, and produced some of those bands' most critically-acclaimed work.

Does that put pressure on Mercury Rev to come up with something extra special in the studio, giving that Fridmann is a band member?

"We just do what we do," says Grasshopper. "We're separated from him by about six, seven hours. We do what we do and then we bring it to him and work together on shaping it up and mixing it. It doesn't put that much pressure on, apart form the pressure on ourselves of just doing something different."

ONE OTHER SIDE project has taken several years to come to fruition, but could have a special resonance as the band prepares to tour in Ireland. Fire Records has released Chamber Music, an album that puts James Joyce's poetry to music and Mercury Rev are among the artists involved.

"That was commissioned quite a while ago and the record company didn't get pre-clearance for it [from the Joyce estate] so that took another four years.

"We were very much into Joyce and the Chamber Music. They were always meant to put them to music, but it never happened." Until now.

Playing the track in Ireland could prove too hard to resist when they come down from the mountain to play a former cattle market at the Kilkenny Arts Festival.

"Next summer we will probably do more of the bigger festivals. [At Kilkenny] we're going to play the new stuff and a lot of the older stuff, three or four new ones mixed in with older tracks. I like the smaller festivals, it's like a big circus."

This is certainly true of the Kilkenny Arts Festival, where it's not unusual to find yourself rubbing shoulders at a bar with somebody you've seen on stage a few hours previously. Grasshopper says he's intending on taking advantage of this, and hopes to track down jazz legend Tomasz Stanko at the festival.

"Yeah, let's have a pint with Stanko," he says, and his slow east-coast drawl almost breaks out of its iceberg pace with enthusiasm. It seems even rock stars have their heroes after all.

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Mercury Rev play The Hub at Cillín Hill as part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival on Tuesday, Aug 12th. The Kilkenny Arts Festival runs from Friday, Aug 8th until Sunday, Aug 17th.

[ www.kilkennyarts.ie ]