review
Jon Hopkins (official Spotify Digs playlist)
JON HOPKINS DISCUSSING RAMESES III WITH JONNY TRUNK
TRANSCRIPT included below.
TRANSCRIPT
Jonny Trunk
I found it interesting, then, that you bring in Rameses the Third, which is kind of, like, folk / ambient. I mean my
interpretation of this is this is piece of folk / ambient music or ambient folk music.
Jon Hopkins
Yeah, I mean, a very interesting act. I think they've separated into different entities now
[note 1] but
absolutely there's crossovers there into the acoustic guitar ... which track have I chosen?
JT
The track is
'Blood in the Palm of your Hand'.
JH
Oh, this one, yeah. So, a lot of their music actually was drone-based I would say more than anything with kind of
Americana slide guitar with huge amounts of reverb and I love that sort of thing and it fits well amongst these kind
of tracks but I wanted this particular piece which as you say, rightly, is much more folky, is much more of a ...
it's almost like an instrumental song, in some ways. I just wanted to choose it because, firstly, it fits in with this
list really well but also wanted to highlight it because no-one had really heard it and it's a truly extraordinarily
beautiful piece of music and it's recorded so well
[note 2]. I kind of wish it was much longer actually.
But yeah, I think this is good opportunity just to try and let people know about it really.
JT
I had a read-up of various Rameses the Third activities and I came across this statement saying they, "Want to take
time hostage" and to, "Slow it down"
[note 3] and I thought that was a really interesting way of looking
at making a record, if you set that as a brief and then were to write music around it you would come up with a track,
you could easily - well not could easily - but you could come up with a track something along the lines or certainly
sounds something along the lines of "Blood in the Palm of your Hand". It's quite an extraordinary thing, isn't it?
JH
Yeah. That's a great quote actually, I wish I'd thought of that.
JT
You could nick it!
JH
I could ... not now though you've told everyone! (both laugh) Erm, yeah, I mean as a band if you explore some of
their albums, as a whole, I think there's a live album recorded
[note 4], yeah, absolutely, time becomes
reasonably irrelevant.
note 1:
Rameses III are on indefinite hold for now as members Spen, Steve and Dan have happily moved onto other projects.
For their latest projects please see:
- Padang Food Tigers (the new music from Spen and Steve)
- Daniel Thomas Freeman (new music and film scores)
note 2:
Dan was particularly chuffed to hear this because he recorded all of the Rameses III studio tracks in the front room of his flat
- we never used a professional studio.
note 3:
The full quote from the home page of the old ramesesiii.com site and written by Spen is,
"Rameses III want to take time hostage -
slow it down and put it on ice. Combining acoustic guitar, lap steel, samples, voice, keyboards and field recordings they atomize
isolated notes, before stretching them into lush oceans of somnambulant sound."
note 4:
Jon Hopkins is referring to 'Basilica'.
This is a transcript of part of the interview (from 8:43 to 10:38) included as part of the
Official Spotify Digs playlist 'Jon Hopkins Presents: Psychedlic Ambience'.
Tuesday 1 October 2019