It's an honour & pleasure that we return to our Getting Deeper podcast series, after a few months break, to bring to you an absolutely exquisite & diverse 1 hour journey. Brighton-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, sound designer, and producer Alex Banks is our very special guest for our 130th podcast.
Alex Banks
@alexbanksmusic
www.instagram.com/alexbanksmusic/
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https://alexbanksmusic.bandcamp.com/
www.alexbanksmusic.com/
Tephra EP - https://ffm.to/tephra
Official video - youtu.be/OCAo6Q4bMTk
Mesh
@meshmeshmeshmesh
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www.facebook.com/meshmeshmeshdotnet/
https://meshmeshmesh.net/
Getting Deeper
@getting-deeper
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Also a supremely technically gifted sound technician, Alex creates music for film and television and could never be accused of lacking excitement. Amplifying his skills on every level, he retains the essence of emotional communication that makes his work so engaging.
“People really feel like they’ve got an emotional connection to it,” he says. “I feel like every track that I write has to resonate with me on an emotional level. If I’m not connecting with it and it’s not evoking some kind of feeling in me then why should I expect the listener to feel that too? As we’re all made of the same kind of stuff as it’s resonating with me then hopefully it’s going resonate with other people who are listening to it as well.”
On Nov.12th, Alex piloted a cataclysm of new abrasive sounds with his EP ‘Tephra’, released on Max Cooper’s Mesh imprint.
The ideas emerged from two months in the rugged, black volcanic surroundings of the Canary Islands, Spain. Banks armed himself with a restricted set of equipment taken from his studio in Brighton and set about focusing on the core of his musical expression.
The 5 track EP draws an abrasive array of intertwined melodic structures - one that could only be formed by an adept sound designers’ skillset. The title track and single ‘Tephra’, is woundingly brash, jagged and skull reverberating, it paints a mental landscape appropriate to where the tracks were born, in the context of a melodic hook line.
Following on from his second studio album, Beneath the Surface which was released on Mesh in 2019. Banks’ reimagines a different story, one of which was sculpted by his time witnessing unearthly volcanic landscapes. The change in scenery he recalls brought a welcomed ‘change of mindset’ than the earlier intense period of locking himself away in his Brighton studio with intermittent bursts of time spent by the coast to foster creative thought. It brought a different intensity to Banks’ sound, one that impressively finds a line between home listening and club-focussed dance-floor bangers.
Max Cooper on 'Tephra'
“Any words I can provide to say how large this release is are a weak reflection of listening to the music. The first time I heard the tracks the energy was just oozing out of them into my torso, and that hook line in Tephra, it's something. It's so hard to make a melodic structure like that which is so simple and catchy while also being engaging after so many years of people trying to make simple and catchy hook lines. It's a fine art of big sound Alex is onto throughout, classic references, full human expression, no holding back, it's a beautiful thing to experience with a full frequency response system”.
