Grasscut

Otherplace At The Basement, Kensington Street, Brighton, Wednesday, June 17

A SENSE of place has always been central to Brighton electronic duo Grasscut's work.

Debut album One Inch Half Mile soundtracked a trek across the Sussex Downs to the lost village of Balsdean.

And its 2012 follow-up Unearth was launched with a treasure hunt - dedicated fans followed Twitter and YouTube clues to locate cassette tapes containing alternative versions of songs.

Latest release Everyone Was A Bird sees songwriter Andrew Phillips inspired by important locations in his life - and he is encouraging fans to submit their own videos and stories of important places for a future Grasscut project.

"All the songs on the album are about places I have lived or have connections with," he says. "Islander is about the north coast of Jersey, and the Channel Islands where I grew up.

"There are a couple of songs about Sussex, and the rest are about mid-Wales where a lot of my family came from. They are places which represent a sense of belonging, they are a part of me."

This piece of musical psychogeography is accompanied with liner notes by author Robert MacFarlane - a pioneer in the literary movement connecting a sense of place and history with text.

The song Snowdown was inspired by the Sussex whiteout in 2013.

"I went for a long walk across the Downs through the snow," recalls Phillips. "The song is about that day, and the quietness when the city shut down because of the weather."

The creation of the album was very different from previous Grasscut records, which were based around Phillips and keyboard player Marcus O'Dair collaborating in the studio.

Instead Everyone Was A Bird started out with a live band of five musicians - including live drummer Aram Zarikian, and a string section of Emma Smith on violin, and Vince Sipprell on viola working with Phillips and O'Dair.

"If you're a producer and writer these days you are faced with endless choices in the digital world," says Phillips. "You can pretty much do anything you want - Matthew Herbert made a record out of chopping vegetables.

"To write for five people was more of a challenge, placing limits on myself. We didn't do any more than three takes on anything - because if it wasn't happening in three takes maybe the song wasn't right."

As a consequence the move from the studio to the live stage has been much less painful than the previous two albums.

And Phillips admits he was pleasantly surprised with the results.

"As a producer the more you let go the more you get surprised by what other people put in," he says. "It's really enriching.

"Lots of people are working with laptops and electronic music. Nobody else is using live instrumentation and adding electronics for texture - we have turned it around a little bit to do something organic."

He feels Grasscut bucks the expectations of electronic music.

"Electronic music is seen as very urban - but people say we are about the countryside," he says. "There are some field recordings on Islander and Red Kite as part of the texture of the record.

"There is no real wilderness in the UK anymore - there is always a history of human presence. If you're standing on a piece of grassland you'll find out it was a farm 200 years ago. Often a wilder landscape has been let go deliberately. We have a need for wildness to get away from our own world - but it's getting harder to do."

Phillips has been working with film-makers including Pedr Browne to create accompanying videos for each of the eight album tracks which will be projected during the band's live show.

"We wanted to take the audience to the places about where the songs were written," he says. "It has been brilliant - we spent a lot of time freezing out arses off making the films."

*To submit a film to Grasscut about an important location visit www.grasscutmusic.com/

Support from The Creaking Chair.

Starts 8pm, tickets £10. Call 01273 987516.