The Beautiful Losers

Origins and Sound

Named after the book by Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers was Peter Wright's conception. This project represented the realization of his longstanding desire to work in a "traditional" band context - developing and improvising material with other musicians and, in particular, working with a drummer.

Peter's experiences with Nick Hodgson's CM Ensemble had occasionally involved percussionists but, compared with Beautiful Losers, Nick's vaguely avant-garde jazz/classical inclined project was quite different in both sound and style. Although atonal abstraction and improvisation had a role to play in our music, so too did melody and structure.

Beautiful Losers also constituted the latest in a long series of collaborations between Peter and myself which dated back to 1994 and the industrial rock 4-piece leonard Nimoy. For this particular project Peter (guitars) and I (keyboards) were joined by our good mate Rustle Covini (formerly of The Aesthetics) on drums and percussion.

Working with each other over the years, Peter and I had either used electronic rhythm generators (leonard Nimoy) or largely dispensed with rhythmic percussion altogether (DiS). Rustle's solid, but nuanced, drumming and open-minded embracing of experimentation and unconventional techniques (drumming with toy plastic shakers on Blackbody for example) was central to the music we produced.

In common with many projects spawned from the incestuous confines of the kRkRkRk recordings and/or Apoplexy labels, Beautiful Losers was of limited duration. The 3-piece lasted about nine months (June 2002 - March 2003) with its activities cut short by Peter's departure overseas and my return to tertiary study. Nevertheless, we managed to perform a trio of gigs (all at the Christchurch Media Club on Armagh St.) and to record about two hours of music.

What did this music sound like? Well like nothing else to be absolutely precise - although a number of bands on the Kranky label (of which all of us were fans) provided inspiration: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Stars Of The Lid, Labradford etc. not to mention late era Swans or that band's successor Angel's Of Light. What these projects had in common was a tendency to combine abstract dronescapes and electronics with more conventional forms of music. As far as Swans or Godspeed were concerned, on an album or even within the space of a single "song", smooth transitions between abstract atmospherics and soaring instrumental rock were not at all unusual.

After some years of experimentation with atonal and improvised music, melody and chord structures had made a bit of a comeback in Peter's music. One trigger may have been the purchase of a 12-string electric guitar around 2000/2001. His recent releases Distant Bombs (mid 2002), Catch A Spear As It Flies (2003 on Campbell Kneale's Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label) and Pariahs Sing Om (late 2003) clearly illustrate this trend. Rich, dense atonal drones are sensitively combined with simple, repetitive chord structures. There are even a few genuine "songs" on these albums - even if Peter appears to be wryly poking fun at the medium. Compared with the dark and earnest sonic pop, industrial rock and folk-noir compositions of the 1994-97 In Vitro/Coitus era, Peter's mature music is much more worldly; much more thoroughly unpacked and divested of any need to follow rules or conventions.

Funnily enough, even as Beautiful Losers saw Peter re-evaluating "structure" in music, for me it was a journey in the other direction. Having given up songwriting as a bad job with my third Drawing Room album - The Garden - I was keen to immerse myself in more ambient, abstract sound territories for the time being. Looking back on those earlier releases which still seemed worth the odd listen, it was the ambient/electro-acoustic projects which stood out. These included the early 2000 DiS Inferno album (a collaboration with Peter and Justine Sharp) as well as my 2 nd and 4 th Drawing Room releases: Evolving Sequence No.1 (mid 2001) and Music For Performance (late 2003).

Occasionally Beautiful Losers embarked on something of an Ennio Morricone trip - The Corridor and Yellow Light Reflected being obvious culprits in this respect. This had also been a feature of an earlier 3-piece with which I had played between early 1999 and mid 2000. Called BOCCTAHNE and featuring Ed Wilson and Megan Gallacher, this project superficially resembled Beautiful Losers although it did not use percussion and, musically, was somewhat more tentative and uncertain.

By the time the first few jam sessions took place, around July 2002 at Mariner St., Sumner, Peter had already made some preliminary recordings (on Tascam portastudio) which demonstrated his vision for the project. Some of these solo pieces were eventually destined for release with Beautiful Losers material created in a group context. Examples include Duplex and Turtleneck - both rather lovely guitar-driven instrumentals which evoke Roy Montgomery at his most melodic.

Although as a group we produced a number of pieces just as tuneful and lulling ( The Corridor and A Square Across A Circle particularly stand out), having Rustle on board provided an irresistible impetus to let the music rock . Eventually, several extended pieces materialised in which quiet or meditative introductions gradually evolved (often over 10 minutes or more) into furiously intense and heavy hurricanes of noise and distortion. The tense and unstoppable build-ups on Yellow Light Reflected , Blackbody and November 9 are prime examples.

For our first recordings such as Yellow Light Reflected , First Room On The Left or The Corridor Peter already had music worked out to which Rustle and I were challenged to respond. Later pieces such as A Square A Cross A Circle , Blackbody , November 9 or Other People's Secrets/Perihelion were more truly collaborative efforts. Getting a nice creative rapport going was never much of a problem. Everyone approached jam sessions with an open mind - particularly Peter who saw some of his original ideas evolve quite dramatically before we were through with them.

Most of the music was recorded by me to Fostex digital 16-track at Champion St., Christchurch between August 2002 and February 2003. The methodology concentrated on getting a good recording of Rustle's drum performance. Peter and I would normally record guitar and keyboard tracks along with the drums which we felt free to discard and/or overdub if required. Realistically, of course, the drums could not be overdubbed.

As things eventuated some songs ( Yellow Light Reflected , First Room On The Left ) entirely retained the 7-track live recording (4 drum tracks, a stereo keyboard track and a guitar track) on which they were based. Peter would normally record at least one other guitar track to flesh out his initial performance - but the original guitar track was invariably kept. A Square A Cross A Circle is almost the only group recording on which there is only a single guitar.

A combination of technical inability and a desire to get good levels (Rustle naturally hogged all available compression gear) led to me generally re-recording my keyboard parts - usually by myself, in my own time. In some cases ( A Square A Cross A Circle , The Refugee Ship , November 9 ) this resulted in quite significant reappraisals of my initial performance. Many of our songs feature two, or even three stereo keyboard parts.

Peter's original idea was that Beautiful Losers make use of Hammond organ or Rhodes electric piano style keyboard sounds. Indeed I did make use of my Ensoniq sampler's Hammond simulation on The Corridor , although most of the "organ" sounds we used were, in fact, derived from my Akai analogue synth. Lacking a Rhodes piano sound I tended to use the Grand Piano simulation on the Ensoniq. This is quite an elderly sample piano now (1992 vintage), but I've always really liked its brightness and punch. Beautiful Losers provided opportunities to experiment playing it through chorus and delay effects (á la Harold Budd) or in a syncopated tremolo style. This latter was my attempt to produce a texturally rich, droning sound analogous to the harmonically dense drones Peter created so effortlessly (or so it often seemed) on guitar.

Peter used a variety of six and twelve string guitars on our music. Tremolo, delay and reverb were his favourite effects (pedals and Alesis Nanoverb - at least until its power socket broke, then it was back to the noisy Boss stomp box). As with his recent solo music ( Distant Bombs being a good example), Peter preferred to go easy on distortion effects and was not averse to recording a guitar track completely dry. Another favoured device was his recently acquired E-Bow - used most effectively on The Corridor and towards the end of Black Body .

Unlike my late 2000 collaboration with Peter, Confinement And Release (and much of Peter's own solo output - particularly recordings of live performances), with Beautiful Losers we never felt any compunction to record live exclusively or ban overdubbing. Pieces such as Yellow Light Reflected came together with a minimum of fuss. Peter added a further guitar track and that was it. The 16 minute Other People's Secrets/Perihelion sequence is a 7-track live recording with no overdubs at all - just a bit of "production" on the mixdown.

Other tracks required extended gestation periods. One of our most evocative songs, The Corridor , was among the first we recorded. However it was not finished for some months when Peter dreamed up the superb E-bow part. The piece was still in question right up until the mixdown stage when Peter hit upon the idea of drowning guitars and drums in a lush reverb - instantly we knew the track was made.

Blackbody , too, was problematic. A scorching live version (not recorded unfortunately - we do have a somewhat less inspired recording of it live on mini-disc) simply could not be reprised in the "studio" (ie: my lounge on Champion St.). After several attempts, over a period of weeks, we were on the verge of giving the piece up as a bad job. The version we eventually recorded was, in fact, our last ditch attempt to get it down. The song needed to quickly build to a furious initial climax early on, then, after winding right back, gradually evolve to a second, lesser state of completion to finish. We just could not get this right. Finally, a combination of relaxing our vision of that "legendary" live performance and some fortuitous intuitive decisions made on the spot, during the last attempt to record it, produced something usable. In fact, Blackbody became our most overdubbed composition. In addition to my quartet of re-recorded stereo keyboard parts (sample piano and analogue synth), Peter added at least three further guitar tracks to his original guitar performance. Peter also came up with the idea of adding extra percussion (in the form of a toy glockenspiel played by Rustle and suspended, chiming cutlery wielded by Peter) in the second half of the song. The result was a 12 minute epic, catapulting the listener through a wildly divergent series of moods which, nevertheless, flowed naturally and logically from start to finish.

With the exception of Peter's solo recordings ( Turtleneck , Duplex et al) and a portastudio 4-track recording made in Sumner ( First To The Sun ), most of our music was engineered and produced by me. However Peter always intended to formulate ambient segues and linking pieces in order to produce an album of seamless music which (á la Godspeed or late era Swans) swept effortlessly from abstraction to rock. So it would be most accurate to say that we pretty much shared the sound engineering and production responsibilities.

Among Peter's ambient "interludes" were The Beautiful Losers , Monday and The Bells - mostly created using shareware Pro Tools on his Apple Powerbook. Tracks such as these occasionally contained field recordings or snippets from our gigs - even much processed segments of rough mixes which I had previously produced and which Peter took home on mini-disc "to play with".

One of Peter's neatest post-production touches was the introduction to Airtight . Heavily reverbed, drums, synth and guitar fade in slowly - and then suddenly make a dramatic transition, becoming loud, clear and almost dry as the song "gets going". Other nice contributions included the swirling machine-like ambience at the end of The Corridor and the extended, abstract drone leading into Blackbody .

Although Beautiful Losers was primarily intended as a recording project, we did manage a few live performances. These all took place in the cheesy, fake Louis XIV-style lounge bar of the Christchurch Media Club on Armagh St. The first performance (21.12.02) also included spots by Greg Malcolm and Jenny Ward as well as ex-members of Barnard's Star. The other gigs featured Ed Wilson and Scott McCaslan of Lahar (14.02.03) and a rare outing by Peter and J-mz Robinson as Brainlego (22.03.03).

Minimalism was the byword for these performances. We eschewed the use of a PA (unnecessary in such a small space anyhow) and created atmosphere by dimming the lights and strategically placing a couple of lava lamps about the place.

Although marred by innumerable flubs, false starts and wildly fluctuating volume levels, the Beautiful Losers performances were well received by the small audiences who bothered to attend. George Churton (from Christchurch electro-punk trio Gas) videoed the final two gigs whilst Peter recorded bits and pieces on mini-disc.

By the time Beautiful Losers wrapped up in March 2003 we had about two hours worth of recordings all mixed and mastered and ready to go. Our original plan was to release one or two limited edition CDRs. In the event, all that initially appeared was a souvenir "bootleg" CDR EP which Peter put together to give away at our final performance.

This included "finished" versions of Airtight and A Square A Cross A Circle , a couple of live tracks and a four song appendix containing Beautiful Losers solo demo recordings made by Peter between August 2001 and June 2002. This contained early versions of Yellow Light Reflected and First Room On The Left - two pieces for which Peter had music substantially worked out when Rustle and I jumped on board.

Currently (mid 2004), the music is being initially released as a double full-length CDR album entitled Beautiful Losers. It will be available on both kRkRkRk Recordings & Apoplexy - although it will not have a label "number" for either. This is because Peter felt the music did not really fit with the sound of either label. Originally, the intention was to create a third release vehicle, independent of both kRkRkRk & Apoplexy. In the event this looked like too much work & so the somewhat inelegant compromise described above has been chosen.

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