WHEEL ME OUT issue three

Wheel spent some quality time with multi-instrumentalist Ben Jacobs before his persona Max Tundra embarked on a North American tour, armed only with a new album of electronic mini- masterpieces and some cans of kosher soup

Interview by Ananda Pellerin

We’re in the Resonance 104.4 FM studio in London with Ben Jacobs, aka Max Tundra. Hi

Ben, tell us who, or what, is Max Tundra? Max Tundra is a strange little man who has been making music in his bedroom since he was a child whilst all his school friends were out riding bikes and playing football. He has released three albums, about eight singles and hundreds of remixes of other bands and done a few gigs as well.

He recently finished a big UK tour with Hot Chip, playing very scary, large venues such as the Brixton academy.

How was that? It was very exciting but I had to have an emergency glass of wine before I went on stage at Brixton, which is quite unusual for me. I really had no idea how my stuff would go down. Over the course of the tour we played 14 shows — I would have played in front of 20,000 people and I got about 1,000 new MySpace friends as a result, which is 5% of people who go to Hot Chip concerts. You can tell I’m sad, I just sit at home working out these statistics.

Those are indeed some nice rock ’n’ roll stats. This tour has also been on the heels of a new album hasn’t it? That's right. Parallax Error Beheads You, which came out on Domino. You can buy it on vinyl, CD and can of soup.

Let’s talk more about the can of soup — you only get that with the download right? Yes. Everybody likes to collect things so we thought it would be fun to have this real tin of kosher chicken soup with a code on the label which you type into your computer and then download the whole album — and a bonus album as well, which is not available on the other formats.

There’s a YouTube video called Cooking with Max Tundra where you're putting together what looks like a very nice chicken soup. Is that what you get with the download? That’s what you're supposed to think, but it was actually a cheap job lot of kosher chicken soup from a Golder's Green delicatessen. We peeled off the labels and re-stuck it as Max Tundra product.

In Word magazine’s recent progressive rock special they compared you to Frank Zappa. Stuart Maconie also mentioned you on-air in a prog context. Do you see the connection? You get these prog rock documentaries where people talk about bands like Pink Floyd and Hawkwind who specialise in repetitive music with long guitar solos. But the prog I like, Gentle Giant for instance, keeps changing in tempo and is often quite funky. The trouble with Frank Zappa is half his stuff is incredibly inspired and the other half is the aforementioned silly guitar solos and rude lyrics. I think if you like certain bits of Frank Zappa you'll like Max Tundra but if you like the bits with the solos and the smut you probably won't.

Some moments on the album sound like they’re from 70s’ and 80s’ TV shows. Every once in a while we’re thinking “that sounds like Dallas!” Loads of people mention the TV themes thing to me. I’ve never sampled any but I am influenced by them and I don't know why! It’s kind of accidental but there are a few moments where there’s a big sort of 70’s cop show thing going on — albeit a very strange 70s’ cop show.

There are also strong traces of 10cc. Well it's funny with 10cc. Because of radio stations like Magic FM, people think 10cc only did I’m Not In Love and they write them off. That’s an amazing tune but unfortunately we’ve all heard it about 400 times so we’re all sick of it. But if you scratch the surface of 10cc there are all these really bizarre, rhapsodic pastiche tracks that just completely change — tracks like Clockwork Creep where there’s just so much going on, it’s like an album’s worth of ideas in one track.

You DJ as well don’t you? From time to time. I DJ stuff like what you might hear on my Resonance FM radio show.

Like what? Whatever I like. There’s a really good station in New Jersey called WFMU with all these eclectic and obscure shows where for three hours a DJ will play just anything and it tends to be amazing stuff. I wanted to have a show in this country that was an alternative for people who didn't want to hear I'm Not In Love by 10cc on Magic FM four times a day.

That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing but you’ve got a point. Easy Lover by Phil Collins four times a day might be a worse fate. ‘Guilty pleasures’ is a horrible term that’s been doing the rounds for a while. You know people play stuff because it’s ‘really crap’ or ‘stupid’, or secretly they really like it but they’re too afraid to admit it. I think irony has wrecked the clubbing scene in this country to a certain extent, it’s kind of getting back on its feet now but it was looking pretty bad for a while. The guilty thing implies there’s a type of music you should be listening to.

So we need to just embrace our love of I’m Not In Love? Exactly.

Going back to your new album, did it really take six years? Yes.

Did you know that’s longer than World War One? That’s a long time. It’s a long time. Hot Chip released their first record and had three albums out in the time it took me to do this record. The Kaiser Chiefs have three albums now; they didn’t exist when my last album came out. To write interesting music you can’t force it, you have to wait until you're in the mood or you hear some kind of musical idea. I find it really hard to write within time constraints.

It was recorded at home and one of the reasons it took so long is I kept running out of money and would do a couple months of boring office work here and there to pay the bills. When you come home from a job like that you just haven’t got the energy to be creative. I was also being a total perfectionist about it. I really went to town with the production. I wanted to get away from the homemade sound of the first two records so I learnt all about how to get it sounding professional — slick like bands I love like Steely Dan. Hopefully it shows but I don't think I'll do a record like that again.

You’ve mentioned MySpace during this interview and social networking sites also make an appearance on the album. Is that your bag? The funny thing with the MySpace and Friendster references is that I started recording as early as 2003 when a lot of those websites were in their infancy — when it was quite a cutting edge, fun thing to do. Now that five years have passed, it’s a different world. I thought, well let's just see what people make of this anyway.

There are a few fan videos using your music on YouTube. There's a very nice one for Merman, the first track off the second album. Someone has edited together loads of old cartoons and it works remarkably well so I see that as an official video for that song. There’s a link to it on MySpace along with the other official videos.

The picture of you with your school steel drum band, when was that taken? When I was at primary school in South London. Mrs Samuels our music teacher taught me a lot about how to love and play music. I used to really enjoy that band. I hired a steel drum for a track on my first album but since then I haven't been ‘at the pans’ as it were. Maybe I’ll get one with all the money I make from the soup cans, or I could make a steel pan from the unsold ones. WMO

Max Tundra’s very own site

www.maxtundra.com/m

Max Tundra on myspace

myspace.com/maxtundra

Make some soup! Cooking with Max Tundra

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckacMFFCI_Q