| Pedro - Mushed Up |
| Written by Carlisle Rogers | |
| Thursday, 15 February 2007 | |
 No, James Rutledge’s alias has nothing to do with Napoleon Dynamite. But it does have everything to do with crazy sound collages that mix a little bit of everything into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. 3D decides to vote for Pedro.Inventors, physicists, novelists and artists are always waking up with the most detailed new ideas half-remembered from a dream. For English noise pastiche artist Pedro (James Rutledge), his whole album was born in a dream, but delivered via methodical work in his home studio. The final product is an album of variegated layers of sound, beats, noise and samples that has drawn praise from all quarters. It takes in the best aspects of free jazz, hip hop, orchestral and rock music, puts them in a blender and touches ‘pulse’ for half a second - just long enough to jumble everything, but not so that it’s a homogenous mess. James says, besides dreams, his biggest inspiration swings between three things. “I think my long term/long suffering girlfriend has helped me back into doing music. That sounds corny. The second is my iPod on shuffle mode – I get given, sent and listen to lots of music, so don’t always give some albums the attention they deserve, and shuffle function helps me to single out bits of records that might have escaped my attention. I think the time that I get most of my ideas is when I go for a walk on a Saturday through London with my iPod on shuffle. It’s given me loads of ideas. Larry the cat helps out during the day. He’s thanked on my album sleeve. “All of the stuff for this record and everything else I’ve recorded is all done at home, on a very basic sort of set-up. I have an old synthesiser set-up, a real cheap one. And it’s just that home feeling that I get from really old software and then a lot of it is sample based lines that are chopped up and it’s a matter of playing stuff on my record player, editing and adding stuff over the top. Then sometimes you play records over the top of each other and you get some happy accidents. So I do all the mixing at a studio but I put all the songs onto a laptop. So it was all done in my home studio and was done in a way that everyone can do it, but it was very much a DIY effort. I think people rush out and buy all the latest equipment to fill a hole, really.” Originally playing live tunes with mate Dave Tyack in the Dakota Oak Trio around Manchester, Pedro got out of music for a while when Dave went missing on a holiday in Corsica. Dave’s body was discovered two years later, and it took that long for Pedro to get back into music seriously. They say that tragedy feeds art, and Pedro’s first demo was powerful enough to cause a new label, Melodic, to be set up to release it. James says that his relationship with Mush began as a way to re-release his first album. “They wanted to reissue my only other album, which had been done all wrong in the UK (sleeve, wrong master, etc). I got to remix/master it. Boom Bip had given Robert at Mush the album. That went well, and when I’d finished my new album they seemed like good people to do it with.” WHO: Pedro WHAT: You, Me and Everyone on Rogue Records / Inertia WHEN: Out now MORE: inertia-music.com MORE PEDRO There’s more Pedro music out there to find than just You, Me and Everyone and the soon to be re-released first album, if you’re ready to look for it. James Rutledge’s film soundtrack collaboration with Kathryn Williams was called “a landmark recording” by The Independent, Times and Telegraph. His work has been remixed by Prefuse 73, Dangermouse, Four Tet, Cherrystones and Koushik for the Fear & Resilience remix project. James also appeared on Prefuse 73's Surrounded By Silence and, if you listen closely, you can hear his guitar playing on some new Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine) material. |
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