Would you care to introduce yourself?
My name is Steven Cossar and I make music as Pioneers Of Anaesthetic
How would you describe the music you make?
If I'm trying to describe it, I tend to come out with stupid stuff like, "Short songs for a long attention span", or "Cyclical bedroom FM folk-pop", but I guess I just make home-recorded stuff with obvious influences, but I try and approach the structure and arrangements a little bit differently.
How did you start out making music?
I started 21 years ago doing that whole two tape recorder dubbing thing when I was 14. They were really shrill recordings of what I thought was early REM combined with American Music Club or something. I remember the songs ended up sounding like barbershop because I was obsessed with layering harmonies. Pretty awful, but by the time I got into Sebadoh/Guided By Voices/Flying Saucer Attack I realized that you could make perfectly affecting music on shit equipment.
What process goes into the way you write songs?
It's a ridiculously 'no nonsense' approach. It can start as a Dictaphone message of me wailing a melody then wailing the Backing that I'm 'hearing' in my heid, but usually, I just find a guitar tuning I've never used and the first riff I play will usually sound fresh enough (to my ears) due to the new intervals in the tuning that I just go with it. I try and keep things back until the end of each song. It makes me feel a bit better about the listener's experience, if I don't smother them. Vocal ideas are almost always improvised - and I'm sure some of the more questionable lyrics are testament to that! The whole process never takes more than an hour or two. I just can't get too precious about spending time on stuff- despite contrary advice from literally all the dreadful music I hear, day to day. All the good stuff is just churned out - of the moment, Y'know?
What can people expect from your live shows?
Not a great deal at the moment.... Ha! A few other projects have delayed my live plans for solo shows. I'm hoping to be up and running again by the end of 2011. What tends to happen is that I rattle out a bunch of my real songs, followed by a bunch of Improvised tunes.
What are you all listening to at the moment?
Gaslamp Killer, Tangles, Kvelertak, Remember Remember's new one is fuckin' amazing, Tyler, The Creator (don't laugh), Happy Particles (of course), Off!, Kenny Process Team, Shabazz Palaces, getting heavily back into 60s psych after a period of obsessing over the Turkish stuff from that time.
What can we expect to see/hear from you in 2011?
I'm about to start Part 2 of a wee project I call Quantity Control. The idea is to increase output by limiting myself to 1 hour to write and record each tune. You can hear the (varied) results of Part 1 here.
Soundcloud
Bandcamp
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