MIKE LINDSDAY of British electronic/folk group TUNNG likes a good read, but prefers a good tune, he tells RICHARD MACFARLANE.

Hearing Tunng’s new record Good Arrows is like opening a good book. Or several good books at once, a compendium of fantasy, whimsy and adventure. Within their songs are hidden worlds in the forms of stories and narratives, words tell stories in very much story form. But it’s their proclivity for sounds that governs their music; texture and tone take precedence over narrative on their new record, Good Arrows.

“Good Arrows feels like a record about togetherness, people and everyday life. There is storytelling, but it seems much more rooted in today rather than fantasy worlds. There’s a general theme of taking what ever life throws at you and dealing with it.”

I should probably take it easy on the book angle, but talking to Mike, it’s clear he’s a pretty literate dude. A track from their previous (second) album Comments Of The Inner Chorus is called The Wind Up Bird and Mike confesses to being a fan of acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

“It was an influence on the last record, for sure. At the time I had never read anything like it. It took me on journeys.  I’ve also just read Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, which is a great take on a fantasy underworld. Books are amazing, no matter where you are or what’s happening around you, you can just open a book and enter into another world.”

Good Arrows is rich and dense with references to books and art and places, but most of all, it carves out it’s own diorama with each track – Mike and the band’s approach deliberately varying for each song.

“Maybe it starts with an instrumental that I worked on, which then transforms into a song, which then gets structured. Or maybe the other way around. But generally, we put songs together in the studio like a jigsaw puzzle.”

In terms of their jigsawed, cut and pasty approach, allow me one more comparison – surrealist artist Joseph Cornell. He made strange little boxes filled with cut outs of birds, collages, knick-knacks… wooden worlds of wonder, filled with textures and imagery. Tuung apply a process of collage using computers to layer all the different little sounds they collect. Samples, a ton of different instruments and soft-spoken vocals are all weaved together via computer.

“The way we work in the studio is very textured. It may start as a simple tune with Sam [Genders, the other key member of Tunng] and a guitar, and end up being layered with field recordings and other voices to create a new flavour. It’s usually a lengthy process, we always have so many sounds to somehow put together.”

Somehow they translate the difficult to replicate set-up to a live setting, too.

“It was a studio project first, but we didn’t want it to be just performed with a laptop and me and Sam. So the live show now is a lot fuller, with a lot of us up on stage.  There are bigger beats and more smiles, three guitars, percussion/clarinet/glockenspiel/sea shells/keys… then there’s Phil triggering live samples and everybody sings. Sometimes there’s even a bit of dancing!”

TUNNG’s GOOD ARROWS is out now on POD via Inertia.

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