MEMOTONE
THE PERSON – tide life
28 Febbraio 2021
THEMES FROM GREAT CITIES 10 jahre celebration
4 Marzo 2021A bridge between past and future,
between cultures and traditions
Will Yates is a producer and polyrythmic instrumentalist from Bristol.
He gave us some information about himself and his label MEMORECS.
"I'm operating out of Bristol, UK - but I grew up in the woods of North Dorset/South Wiltshire. Bristol is a great city though, with rich ties to its folkloric history, being situated on the Avon Gorge, which was carved by the giant, Ghyston in a rivalry with another local giant, Goram, over the heart of a beautiful giantess, Avona.
Bristol is a small but culturally diverse city, with an excellent music community, driven by a D.I.Y ethos.
The label has risen out of the wider Memotone project (the label being called Memorecs) and is mostly for the purpose of releasing a higher volume of music over a shorter time.I still intend to release music on other, established labels - I have just always been fairly prolific and hungry to try many avenues and explore lots of ideas. Memorecs gives me the platform to do that and share it on a small scale with people that are interested.
I'm inspired by an endless amount of things, but I think, be it a record label, book publisher or clothing brand, I've always been drawn to projects that have a strong visual identity. So I'm trying to create something similar with the little label. Not a huge amount of projects, but everything interlinking in an interesting way, and having the artwork remain somewhat coherent... Having done all the artwork myself up to this point has certainly helped with that.
I'm not sure there is any real purpose beyond trying to reach listeners, share ideas, and remain fairly sustainable. My relative scale is usually based on the natural world, so it's tricky to work a bigger "purpose" in there. I suppose - on a human scale - I hope to just make something that in some way enhances or widens the human experience."
"The label is just started rolling, having put out my first limited cassette in 2019.I suppose a good indication of the sort of projects I'd like to do with the label comes from the first O.G. Jigg tape, where I've asked loads of artists I respect to jump in on remix duties, and in doing so I have in a way collaborated with lots of excellent musicians and likeminded individuals."
"O.G. Jigg is a musical project concerned with the exploration of the traditional folk and religious music of Europe, and sometimes further afield. It's not dedicated to any one time period but seems to pull as much influence from medieval and baroque instrumentation, as it does from 60's psychedelia.
This video is a live performance of a track that is sketched out on the new 'Scraps From the Edge' release.
It's based around a simple baroque-inspired guitar loop and made just to explore the different timbres and textures of the banjo. Mostly just for my own enjoyment, but I thought the sketched version had something about it, so wanted to include it in the collection. The live version is more "energetic" let's say, with a lot more expression pushed through the banjo."
