Jason Swinscoe couldn’t have chosen a more perfect name for the revolving, evolving musical collective he’s dubbed The Cinematic Orchestra. On the group’s latest album, Ma Fleur, as is the case with their entire catalog, their evocative, sweeping soundscape inspires filmic vistas within the imagination of the listener, utilizing an amazing blend of electronica, jazz, classical, hip hop and pop components that are knitted together to create the soundtrack to a movie that plays out well behind the retinas.
While he was studying fine art in college, Swinscoe began his music career in London as a bassist with a punk band in the early ’90s called Crabladder. From there, he took a gig as a DJ on a pirate radio station called Heart FM, a position that also took him to area clubs as well. “The main influence and the music I was playing was sort of New York house music, which is far from the sound of the Cinematics now,” says Swinscoe from his current digs in Brooklyn, NY. “It was a lot of fun but it wasn’t a serious pursuit of music, it was kind of a halfway house, a stop off point. While I was DJing, I realized that I really enjoyed the art of mixing and finding a third song out of two tracks you put together.”
Sufficiently inspired, Swinscoe acquired a Mac to use as a sequencer and an Akai S3000 and then began poring over his collection of jazz and soundtrack records, sampling various chunks and amassing a huge collection of sonic bits and bobs. This served as the foundation for the first Cinematic Orchestra album, 1999’s Motion.
Swinscoe realized that he was going to have to address a live application of the music he was creating, and enlisted the help of his friends, saxophonist/pianist Tom Chant, bassist Phil France and turntablist Patrick Carpenter. Since then, Swinscoe has augmented the Cinematic Orchestra’s core group with a shifting membership based on need and availability and evolved his initial concept by melding the rigid planning of electronic programming and the freeform fluidity of jazz improvisation into one sonic structure.
The success of Motion led Swinscoe to a pair of interesting projects. The Cinematic Orchestra was invited to perform for Stanley Kubrick’s Lifetime Achievement Award presentation by the Director’s Guild, and they were commissioned by European film festival organizers to compose a new original score for the 1929 Russian silent film, Man with a Movie Camera. The latter project - which also entailed a live performance - ultimately became the CO’s third album, a year after their phenomenally successful sophomore release, 2002’s Everyday.
After the physical film scoring methodology of Man with a Movie Camera, Swinscoe envisioned something different with the next Cinematic Orchestra project.
“I continued to develop the visual aspect,” says Swincoe. “I came out of Man with a Movie Camera wanting to work with a director while composing music, as that director was writing a film. I wanted to be doing the music at the same time rather than working from an artifact.”
After a move to Paris, Swinscoe fashioned some instrumental sketches and outlined his plan to an art college friend who provided a skeleton script for an imaginary movie. Swinscoe’s original concept for Ma Fleur was that the music and “film” would tell a story about the emotionalism of the passage of time through the arc of life, so Swinscoe also engaged a trio of vocalists to more clearly frame that story; former Lamb vocalist Lou Rhodes, Jeff Buckleyesque newcomer Patrick Watson and soul legend Fontella Bass provide minimal but absolutely essential - and chilling - substance to Ma Fleur.
Swinscoe also wanted to strip back the orchestrated grandeur that had characterized Man with a Movie Camera, as he felt Ma Fleur would benefit from a less-is-more approach.
“I was finding myself overwhelmed by what you could do with technology and layering and layering audio and disguising the skeletal idea,” says Swinscoe. “I wanted to strip things back and look at the Cinematics as a band and see where to include them and exclude them in the arrangements. It’s kind of about finding new ways to orchestrate some sound, rather than just immediately always having a drum, a double bass, the Fender Rhodes and just take a part that needs just a guitar and a voice. This was influenced by the resurgence of the new folk revival, in a way. The band is exactly the same; it’s just a shift in perspective.”
Swinscoe’s breakthrough in the concept came with the album’s title track. During the three years between the release of Man with a Movie Camera and the fruition of Ma Fleur, Swinscoe notes that he wrote and discarded two albums’ worth of music that didn’t quite fit the bill. The song “Ma Fleur” was different.
“The pivotal track was ‘Ma Fleur,’ where I found myself having everything I needed with just four instruments; tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, double bass and piano,” he says. “I didn’t need much more and I wanted to create music in that minimal way where you restrict your palette and you really explore the nuances and the textures and emotions you get when you combine a smaller palette of sound. I was wanting something a little more intimate, which I found in folk music. I knew that intimacy in music was coming back. I wanted something more cerebral and intimate.”
--Brian Baker
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The Cinematic Orchestra's Ma Fleur album is out now on Domino Records
http://www.cinematicorchestra.com
http://www.myspace.com/thecinematicorchestras
