The Rectifiers long-awaited third album 'Playtime for John Mountain' was made with happiness in the heart, writes LAWSON FLETCHER.

Playtime for John Mountain is playing, crackling through speakers dreamlike, an electrical current charging the atmosphere into a technicolour sunset. This is the third full-length from The Rectifiers, and it’s an album that chimes with joyful paradox: smell the old, it gleams like new; rub the new, it sounds old. What time is this of? It’s like the soundtrack to an antique, misty Disney film – ’60s psych-pop; and blossoming pastoral, all densely coated in samples and loops, with a band that is quite obviously of the now singing and playing melodic into all of this. It only makes it more confusing to know that such fresh-faced journeys are the will of a band formed over a decade ago and from an album that took five years to gestate. Complex and playful, Playtime for John Mountain maintains that these are not opposites. I am driven to find out how such is possible, to understand the hands and labour behind this record.

Upstairs at Bakehouse Studios, North Fitzroy, I’m welcomed into The Rectifiers’ studio by Todd Denham, organist and one third of the band’s core. “Coffee, tea, water? Sorry we couldn’t give you something more rock’n’roll,” he says, apologetically. Taking my hardcore glass of water, I search around the room for an empty space – “this is cleaner than usual,” I’m told – contending with nearly a decade’s worth of instruments, pedals, doodads and wires, empty beer bottles.

This place has a musty, lived-in quality that’s only confirmed further as brothers Nick and Jo Volk (sampler and vocalist-guitarist, respectively) trickle in, bringing along Ange the dog, putting on the kettle, lighting up smokes. The band are simply at home here, settled and relaxed. Playing off each other’s answers, telling bizarre stories about sign-language chimps, constantly joking, Jo out the back: “Does anybody want sugar?” I feel like a welcome house guest, and as we settle into the sunny afternoon, talking about the band’s quiet and yet adventurous journey that has lead up to Playtime, it’s the effect of this space on their music that immediately strikes.

“This is where we record all our stuff, anyway, the whole sort of studio,” gestures Nick, “Even though it doesn’t look very good, it does work. It’s good actually, it’s ... How many years have we been here now, five?” “It’s getting close to ten,” notes Todd, who remains more reserved as the conversation continues, albeit offering occasional, considered nuggets.

So thoroughly inhabiting this place means it shapes the band’s work in a number of ways. Pragmatically, notes Nick, “You can definitely do what we do in a proper recording studio, but it would be prohibitively expensive. You just couldn’t afford to work the way we record.”

“But conversely, that’s probably why we take so long as well,” adds Todd, “because it doesn’t necessarily cost a lot to spend a long time doing stuff.” A blessing and a curse, then? “Yeah,” says Nick. “And also, it’s a bit like a club room as well, you know you get here, you get away from all your troubles and you know, have a few beers. So it sort of does lend itself to both experimentation which is a good thing, but also just drinking beer and not doing any music as well. Which sometimes happens.” So not only has Playtime accrued layers of musical meaning like the equipment piling up in here, the relaxed working method this room beckons means it can also take flight, light and carefree.

Knowing this much, I let the band in on the somewhat messy interviewing technique to be employed: with a bunch of questions directed at no-one in particular, anyone can jump in when they’re ready and we’ll see how it goes. “That’s how we made the album, actually, it’s exactly the same,” quips Nick. “That’s the way we work, shit go for it. Maybe it’s just this room.” Adds Todd dryly, “Here starts the four year interview.”

“It’s been so long, Brother John”

Four years, indeed. Upon the 2004 release of second album Wear the Weight of the Resting Sky, which infamously took just that amount of time, Nick said in an interview, “We’re already writing and rehearsing a bunch of new songs. Hopefully this next album won’t take four years.”

“The actual process of making this album was an absolute delight, it was a really fucking happy experience.”

“No and it was true,” Nick chimes in, “It took five!” Point taken. Clearly the band didn’t just slack off for that time, so the question remains, what happened in the intervening that produced Playtime?

In one sense, it comes down to repeating a pattern established in recording Wear the Weight: “three quarters experimentation and one quarter production”, where much of the time is spent finding the particular sound of an album. Once that’s done, says Todd, “it clicks and gels and it’s there and starts working. Things get their own momentum.”

There’s also a kind of bricklaying going on, says Nick, where the scores of material being continually recorded are whittled down and then cut and pasted into a collage. “Often we’ll take parts of songs that have been written and discarded, sort of like sampling ourselves.” Does that get a little disorienting? “The process is really ambitious and complex,” says Jo. “So to make music sort of the way that we do – and you can fault that – just takes fuckin’ lots of time, even with three sessions a week in the studio. It takes years to pull off a sound like that.”

Nick quickly adds: “It’s not so much taking a long time to get, you know, the perfect guitar – it’s not about the technical side of it, you know it’s more the ... “

“Mixing and post-production,” says Jo, finishing his sentence. “Yeah, but it’s also just finding the right ... atmosphere and sound. The methodology as well.”

Joe is chipping off Nick like only brothers can now: “Because we never sort of do things the same way, process-wise. I mean songs come through in batches, but it’s all different. Hopefully the next album won’t take four years.”

Nick corrects him: “Hopefully it won’t take five years.” Mark that one down Rectifiers fans, but I wouldn’t be laying bets just yet though.”

Despite the cut-and-paste approach, Playtime is remarkably whole. Much of their time then, is about drawing it all together, stitching up the seams and seeing what sits together. Pay attention, there’s a story here, even though its ends might be uncertain. “The whole telling of a musical narrative, for all of us, it’s really important that the album is cohesive,” says Nick. Sounds and samples thus bounce across different tracks, like the warbling tripartite ‘Floating in a Modal Field’ movement. This isn’t some Where’s Wally game, though – we’re not here to mark out moments but revel in Playtime’s sensate wholeness. Just don’t stick this one on shuffle, folks.

As discussion dives into the intricacies of recording, my hope is that I might steal upon some originating moment, that primal scene where the magic is imbued into the music. Thus proceed questions about sampling, who does what, where things start (“most songs are written on an acoustic guitar at the very start or based on a recurring sample,” says Nick, “but they never end up that way”) and I slowly realise that they do not give answers, but only take us further into a four-year labyrinth that the band have just emerged from. It’s getting knotty and complex, no way fun at all. So, peel back the clouds, stop the four-year interview in its tracks and don’t start from the beginning, but the end! The question then is, when do you know when to stop?

Because at times The Rectifiers seem like they would be a band that never released a finished project, if music somehow worked that way and the obligation to release didn’t exist. Untrue, though, says Todd: “I think it gets to a point where you just have to say, ‘It’s enough.’ I think it’s not something you could do, work on the one album for forever. It would just get too much.”

Of course. But is there some arbitrary point at which the band said, “We should stop mixing this”? Nick: “Even while we were mixing there were still some songs where the album was sort of different. But then you take out a couple of songs and it just becomes very clear that that’s the album, that’s the way it’s done, it’s finished. It’s kind of just a moment, of you know, it’s sort of like a Buddhist thing of enlightenment, but very, very low key.”

He considers his comment anew, “Well, not enlightenment at all, nothing like it in fact. But it’s just a realisation that it’s done, it’s gotta be done, it has to be. And everyone get’s fucking sick of it, you know. Of waiting for the mixing to be done, making decisions and talking about it and all that crap, you just want to be free of it. You wanna be ready to get back into the real world again.”

It’s this harmony of readiness, or alternatively, getting “fucking sick of it”, that also causes Jo to forcefully interject, and answer the question that is probably the most important: Was it fun? “It’s worth saying that the actual process of making this album was an absolute delight, it was a really fucking happy experience. As opposed to some other stuff we’ve done, which was like pulling teeth.” Everyone laughs, a wry acknowledgement. “And, um, we’ve had some stuff go in our lives that would mean that, you know, on a personal level, you could quite possibly be justified in making a really depressed album. I see this album as a really happy one, a really great experience.” Nick agrees. “It should have been kind of miserable.”

Now, we have arrived. Bakehouse was not just a club room, but a haven. “The studio became like just a place of like, a really safe, happy spot. It was just a spot where you could come and forget all your worries.” Jo might as well have just described Playtime, because this utopian ambience shines through its tracks. “We’d talked about this as we were going through it,” says Jo. “And you were just saying, ‘I’m determined not to make a self-indulgent album,’” completes Nick.

Finding a world away from personal suffering thus also became a process of necessarily avoiding the moping-guy-with-a-guitar paradigm. It’s this very reason that Playtime is imbued with a radiant, completely accessible joy; it is not written as catharsis for one, but playtime for all. Wear the Weight, brilliant as it was, was quite a heavy album in many ways, it had a dream-like quality but only one of dark, grey tones, and a sense of pervasive melancholy (“A sadness I’ve grown to love,” sighs one line).

Playtime marks the turn; it is pure, unbridled joy. “We wanted it to be kind of pastoral,” says Jo, “it’s sort of about nature and we also wanted to find new topics and things to write songs about, lyrically. So we ended up creating a really bizarre little set of characters and fed that into the album so there’s recurring themes and characters and stuff like that, and none of it really makes sense.”

Says Nick, “We were trying to sort of, almost do a children’s album, just happy, not about ourselves. We didn’t want to say, ‘I’m so sad’ or whatever. Taking it completely out of that singer-songwriter kind of confessional. So the way that we approached was just by creating scenarios and little stories and that’s why it was fun because we’d just sit here drinking beers and just going, this song, what’s this song about – well obviously it’s about a dog with a blue nose. And none of that ever gets to the final kind of cut, but just the process was like you know just completely surreal and ridiculous.”

The brothers devised the lyrical cosmos “on a Friday night session that we did for about two years”. “The end of the working week. Instead of having drinks and stuff like that we used to come to the studio and drink a six pack each and completely lagered up it was just so much fun and just laugh.” Nick seemed to draw the easy end: “Jo’s ultimately responsible for getting it all shipshape, the meter and everything. I mean I can come up with ideas, like the first of second line, and once Jo’s all done I can kind of criticise it.” Notes Jo, “Which is why I mumble my fuckin’ words all the time.”

“It just feels really wrong to settle into a sort of almost automatic way of playing.”

Or is it rather because they were adamant about sidestepping that “singer-songwriter confessional”? The singing voice is subsumed on Playtime, floating like some immanent but untraceably affective presence within the song. The band agree, noting how Jo worked on a really soft voice and “getting air into the note”, along with some “hard-pan double tracking” of the vocals that gave them their suffused quality.

Jo’s “pastoral” description really evokes the right things, here. The songs are almost landscape reveries, broadly sketched imaginative tableaux. “It’s just that whole thing about trying to convey another world, an imaginary world,” says Jo. “I did not expect the birds to swoop so far / And pick us up,” goes ‘Floating in a modal field (part 2)’, and this magic realist sentiment is accented throughout the album, a dreamlike otherworld of giant numbers, blackbirds and the mysterious character at the centre of it all, John Mountain. Because while the brothers are adamant that “there’s no developing metaphorical structure” to the lyric, Nick notes that “by the same token we did, as part of working out how we were going to approach the album, we would literally make up stories about, ‘Who is this John Mountain?’”

“And John Mountain’s a person too, not a place,” adds Jo.
Nick: “But it’s also a place.”
Jo: “But it could be a place as well.”
Nick: “It’s a mountain.”
Jo: “But he’s also a man.”

I hesitate to ask, but is he also ‘Brother John’ (track seven) as well? Nick and Jo, in perfect unison: “No”. Then, “Yeah”.
Nick: “And that’s the answer we’re sticking with. That sums everything up, we don’t have to say anything else.”

He’s right, I suppose. But there’s still some time left, clear up what’s still left hinging. Because, now it’s all finally finished in the studio, Playtime takes on a second life as the band start gigging. “The songs are never too far away from you,” notes Jo. Between Wear the Weight and now, the line-up has lost David Lord, Paul Rigby and Rich Young, gaining a new drummer in the mysterious Ben Tenniswood. Well not really lost. “Nominally, everyone’s still in The Rectifiers,” notes Nick, “there was never any ‘you’re sacked’ or anything. They all appear at some stage on the record.”

But, as life and music goes, the band shifts, but its current four-piece incarnation is one Jo favours. A six-piece was “really unwieldy” in many respects, and “really dense”. The band agree that the live unit now inhabits the music much better, and Jo says “that’s due to the songs being different, having more of a song structure to them as with Wear the Weight, whose songs were sort of free-floating. But the four-piece as well, for tightness and efficiency, it’s just so much fucking easier.”

It’s already been such a positive experience that Jo dares to consider a change in the band’s unorthodox recording process. “We’re kind of onto something now with the live sound, I reckon we can probably bring in a bit of that live recording stuff for our next record.” This sends the band into a staged debate. “Yeah so you say now,” Nick says to his brother, “and it’s gonna be quicker and we’re gonna record really fast next time too, hey?”

“What, like at over 150bpm?” jokes Jo.

The brothers switch positions, for, against, for, the idea of “rehearsing before recording”. As it stands, The Rectifiers finish an album and then work up a set. “it’s not like the songs exist,” notes Jo. “Ideally, I think that it would be a lot easier and smarter if we rehearsed and then the result of the rehearsal was a recording,” notes Nick, level-headedly. “A lot of bands seem to do it like that, you’re onto something,” jokes Jo, typically self-effacing. “Like fucking everybody. Like that band fuckin’ everyone.”

But questions over the future are moot and The Rectifiers have repeatedly shown that they certainly aren’t “fuckin’ everyone”. In fact, they are a band defined by the very fact that they cannot steer one course. They have been playing together 13 years, and yet it is still so fresh-faced. “Because we’ve changed constantly,” says Todd, “I think its fresh because it’s fresh to us. If we had been doing country-inspired music still, it wouldn’t be at all.” (Oh, yes – The Rectifiers ostensibly began life as an alt-country act, culminating in 1996’s Sparkles from the Wheel.) He continues, "and by keeping it changing you don’t get too slick, you know, ‘I’ll play this standard riff here and here again,’ because we’ve been constantly trying new things and getting sounds and instruments going.”

Nick drives it home: “It has been a really strong ethos in the band too, as soon as it feels like we’re falling into the same way of playing, it’s almost like a little, maybe overly vigilant, but it just feels really wrong to settle into a sort of almost automatic way of playing. It’s like constantly trying, ‘How about we try something different?’ I think part of it is just because we’ve had absolutely no commercial success as well, which is obviously a really good thing, you know.”

“I can’t speak highly enough of it,” chimes in Todd. But the point remains; without external pressure or expectation, The Rectifiers have had the room to experiment.

So while what’s left in front of us now is wholly more relevant and pressing than what sits behind it or what comes next. And it’s not some complex document that needs deciphering and parsing out and thousands of words of explanation. And despite (or, perhaps, because of) the deep musical mining, the amount of effort and density put into writing and recording, Playtime remains a record of “genuine invitation”. It was made with happiness in the heart and for you to hear. “For the first time, for a very long time,” admits Jo, “We did write music with an ear to an audience, we actually do want people to like it. We want it to be happy and accessible, a good experience for everyone, for us and for people listening to it.”

And Playtime for John Mountain, in all its inexplicable and radiant joy, deserves to be heard for what it might bring us as much as The Rectifiers deserve its success, so much more that they might embark on another journey. For now, though, the clouds have parted, John’s arms are outstretched; come and bask in its elated splendour.

Playtime for John Mountain is out now through Sensory Projects. The album will be launched on Friday, September 19, at the Northcote Social Club will special guests Sly Hats and Great Earthquake.

+