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ModernRock.com Presents...
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MARK RED
 
Style(s): Alternative, Electronica, Unclassifiable
Location: Oslo, Norway
Label: looking for a label
Manager: sabine bevers
Booking: email
Introducing Mark Red…
Or Mark Francombe, an ex-member of the band Cranes, with whom he recorded and toured for over ten years, who is now writing and recording music under his own name. Cranes, however is just the most well known of Mark’s bands. His other projects have included Uncle Ian (well known in the Portsmouth, UK scene in the eighties for their multimedia, humorous and often destructive performances), Eardrum (danceable with a techno/ethnic twist), and God.com (Oslo-based noise).
Where Cranes presented you with tasteful elegant music where all sounds were carefully placed in the sound picture, the album title “The last vestiges of taste” shows Marks interest in contrast and juxtaposition, joking as he is, with the idea that he is discarding all notions of taste or style. Demonstrating his wide and eclectic tastes in music, he no longer wishes to fit into some predefined category or pigeon-hole, no music is sacred and no genre is safe! Techno, jazz, krautrock, punk, disco, funk, metal, electronica and ethnic influences and can be sewn together with a (Mark) red thread into a sound that is all and none of the above, making it music that has a little something for everyone.
“The last vestiges of taste” is the product of many of Mark Francombe’s recording sessions. All but two tracks (Eat her kin, co-written with Steve Austin and Kathy Wallenbrock & Heckstick, samples of drumming by Steve Austin) were written in 2002, by Mark, and recorded in his home studio. Mark works by day as senior multimedia designer for an Oslo based E-learning company, but has also made Pop promos, TV Documentaries and 16mm films.
Mark combines the use of new music technology with guitars and very old and traditional instruments such as the Turkish saz. And don’t be surprised to find snippets of phone conversations or an angry cat in any of his tracks. His style is improvisory, using loops, odd samples, breakbeats, creating spacey atmospheres, always distorted, twisted, chewed and spat out.
One minute he may bash you round the ears with painful noise and chaotic beats, the next he might surprise you with the cutest tune you ever heard. However different one track may seem compared with another, the Mark Red sound is distinctive and recognizable. His late night recording sessions, are a process, almost alchemical in nature, working for hours on occasion with a single waveform to create source material for the often very quick and improvised arrangement that will come later... Building a massive library of processed sounds, loops and samples that he can call up at will.
On other occasions he will just sit down and play, the recording being the raw material for the Mark Red treatment! Often he streams the output of his studio to the web so that listeners can not only hear the finished result, but can hear the process at work, breaking down the idea that music is, or should be, some kind of magical talent!
Tracks on the demo album;
Butterhook ( inspired by the James Bond theme)
Rambunctious (cheeky)
Grunkphuker (Mulch)
Practical Krayphish (it was a dark and stormy night, the rain came down in torrents, there was a band of robbers, and the chief said to Antonio, tell us a tale, and the tale goes as follows)
jflow ( Mulch, Handels’ Messiah and dogs barking, Thonked, random drum loop filtering)
Grizzle (lyrics based on 'I know there is love' by Crass 1982)
Heckstick (Drums by Steve Austin + a sample from The Breeders and Simon, Sabine's cat)
Eat her kin (Drums on this track by Steve Austin and Vocals by Kathy Wallenbrock)
Chrunchie (just a short guitar/sheet-metal morph from something else that doesn’t exist yet)
Zebadia Novacaine (a telephone conversation between American man and his Philippino 'bride to be')
Listen to tracks on www.mark-red.com and sign the guestbook! | |
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