.
Ghost Carriage Phantoms - The Boy Lives More details here.

AmeriCymru: Hi Michael and many thanks for agreeing to be interviewed by AmeriCymru. How did Ghost Carriage Phantoms come into being?

I'd been in a band for a long time and it had made me very very unhappy. then when we split up i was, paradoxically, even less happy. at around the same time i started having conversations with my friend mark estall about how we would go about doing things were either of us to get back into music again - he'd had a similar experience with a band he'd been in for many years and so we were in the same shaped boat - eventually we decided we may as well put our ideas into practice and start a band populated only by people we loved and wanted to spend time with, one that had no secondary motives - meaning nobody is looking to get famous or rich and nobody is looking to take the spotlight or get involved in power struggles or ego clashes - the usual stuff that makes being in the wrong sort of band an horrendous experience.

We wrote up a set of rules, like a manifesto and there were all kinds of ridiculous things in there that we never even tried to stick to. but it said something about us that that's the approach we wanted to take - away from the music business, away from the egotism of rock bands, away from the constant disappointments of the exploitative promoters and industry people we'd all had such a poor experience with. so it was myself, mark, a guitar player and filmmaker called shaun grimsley , our drummer stuart and kate quigley playing bass who has since left us to live a proper life but who I hope shall return to at least record with us at some point down the line.we just wanted to spend more time together and enjoy making music without any kind of goals or concerns about outside opinion. actually we didn't really care if we were any good or not either, just as long as we were happy and there was no element of dishonesty to what we were doing. most bands are liars you know? they'll pretend to be about the music or about the work but there are other agendas at play - same as with almost everyone in the business - there's always an element of dirty self-promotion and cruel ambition under the nails of even the most clear-hearted seeming people. anyway we went along like that occasionally rehearsing, bringing in stranger and stranger sounding material and we were working under the name Grace Cathedral Park , named for the red house painters song rather than the park itself in san francisco (none of us has ever been there). we couldn't fix on a genre, we couldn't settle on what anyone was really doing in the band even...it was fantastic to be honest. we tried to write a set that consisted entirely of a cover version of an old a-ha song with stretches of it improvised and pulled into post-rock. that must sound awful. it never quite came off happily for all involved.

We ended up finding this old great western railways logo that an artist who collaborates with us called lucy williams re-shaped to read GCP and so we realised that everything from there on in would use those initials and that's the plan now. we've played some shows as grace cathedral park - we've only ever played at one venue in south east London the fox in lewisham (because the people who run the place are people we trust) and every time we play the set is totally different. each set is purpose-written and the last twice that's meant performing a single song that lasts 30 minutes whereas before we've done 6 song pop sets and even a full hour set of mostly acoustic misery accompanied with video and artwork. we did a fully improvised electronica set under the name great carpathian poets where i got to wear a lion hat and mark dressed as an eagle. that was good. people didn't enjoy that if i'm honest though. never mind.

Ghost Carriage Phantoms came into being, to finally answer your question, because i was writing songs and recording them on garageband and mark was ready to produce something unlike that which he had produced before. we saw it could be another incarnation of GCP and pretty soon we were making the record in mark's bedroom. The songs didnt suit grace cathedral park so they found another life here. not wildly dramatic i'm afraid.

AmeriCymru: From your press release we learn that your first release The Boy Lives is - based around the conceit of making a record that would sound like the ghost of a robot child. Care to tell us more?

I really like the film AI . it has a bad reputation but that film reduced me to tears. the last 40 minutes of that film are pure poetry. that was kind of in the back of my mind when we started asking ourselves how the album should sound. mark sums it up really well by saying that it's the sound of nostalgia from the point of view of someone who is old enough to appreciate that the past is never coming back. i'm obsessed with things sounding slightly otherworldly, slightly out of place. it doesn't come much more 'other' than trying to sound like 'the ghost of a robot child' i suppose. it's really pretentious but we laugh about it as much as we take it seriously. i think it does sound like that but who knows?

AmeriCymru: We also learn that at some point during the recording you "went through the process of tearing out all elements of singer-songwriter bullshit". What exactly did that entail?

I'm a rudimentary musician at best so the demos were scratched out on my girlfriends acoustic guitar. Very simple songs with very simple strummed chords and the occasional arpeggio part that I probably couldnt even play well enough to record for an actual record. so what we could have done is record a straightforward acoustic singer-songwriter record and maybe shaun would have played my guitar parts or something. doesnt that sound wildly unappealing? It does to me, so we went entirely the other way sub bass, beats, synth, lots of percussion, auto-tune mark just got in there and used his immense production and arrangement skills to turn these weird shells of songs into even more strange and strangely appealing metallic creatures. id keep insisting as we went along that I wanted to make a dubstep album and that all the vocals should be auto-tuned out of all recognition. luckily mark didnt listen too hard to that. though theres always the next album

AmeriCymru: OK the usual boring question about influences. The album as a whole reminded me of early Magnetic Fields ( and is at least as good ). Who do you feel that you have been influenced by?

It's extremely kind of you to draw a comparison between us and magnetic fields . I strongly believe that stephen merritt is a latterday one-man bacharach and david , just with added weariness and spite. Which only makes me love him more. mark, lucy and I saw them play recently and it was one of the highlights of my year I think. so yes, they are an influence for both myself and mark but not, I think, as prominent a one as people like mark kozelek , leonard cohen , john cale , paul simon there are influences that are reflected specifically in the phantoms endeavour that dont necessarily shine through in the other gcp incarnations people like james blake , squarepusher , radiohead , aphex twin , r stevie moore . In grace cathedral park we probably show off a little more of our appreciation of bands like mogwai , slint, swans sometimes a little bit of superchunk , afghan whigs ..that kind of thing (not that I would compare us to any of those bands we just like them!) i think im most inspired by whats going on around me shaun, mark, stuart, lucy, their work and what they bring to the room influences me. other bands i know and respect, people we've played with or spent time with like flash bang band , sweetheart contract , vaelium , the understudies , civil love . mark and I run our own label and we put out a record for blue balloon this year and rob who plays in blue balloon and now plays in the live incarnation of ghost carriage phantoms is the songwriter id say has had the most influence on me in recent years. the guy is an actual, legitimate genius. gcp as a whole is as influenced by filmmakers, artists, comic books, charlie brown and cm punk as we are by bands though. The DIY ethic of minor threat and the straight, unbending, music for music's sake attitude of shellac are perhaps the two facets of modern music I look up to the most if we need to get musical/political about it.

AmeriCymru: Your lyrics resemble poems that have been set to music. Which comes first for you ? The words or the music?

Well when springsteen did an acoustic show followed by a Q&A in the states he said hed answer anythingexcept for what comes first, the words or the music? so that question made me laugh. i used to write a lot of bad poetry as a teenager and I think thats still evident in some of my work. I often look back on lines and think really? Are you sure thats good? and sometimes the answer is a hefty no. not so much on this record though, i actually like most of it quite a lot.

The process is as simple as this a melody comes out and if it sticks with me then the guitar gets picked up and the words fall in line into that melody while I try to keep up on guitar. so everything comes at once, almost every time.

With grace cathedral park its entirely different anything can happen I might bring in a whole set, or shaun might or we may bring in half a dozen songs between us or literally write from scratch based on a drumbeat. thats the stuff I enjoy most.

AmeriCymru: What can you tell us about 'The Projectionist'? Shades of John Cale?

When I was a child i saw the formative films of my youth at the castle cinema in merthyr tydfil . The building had its ups and downs turned into a venue briefly, a bingo hall, back into a cinema and finally fell into disrepair. rather than sort it out the council demolished this enormous, beautiful palace of a building that loomed large in the hearts of anyone whod been old enough to go there. it makes me sick when you see these astonishing places, cinemas and theatres, with this rich history turned into branches of wetherspoons so people can drink themselves to death while funding far right politics but the actual mindless lack of imagination involved in destroying something as wonderful as that just seemed even more inhuman. so i conjured this sad man whod been working at the cinema for his whole life and in exchange for his life being taken from him hes going to finally break from reality and murder everyone he can lay his hands on. theres so much rage in there even though it comes across as quite prosaic.

Again, very kind of you to mention mr cale. the boy is a hero.

He and a few others have done spoken word very well so I thought id just have a go because it suited what I was trying to say.

AmeriCymru: Where and how can people obtain copies of 'The Boy Lives'?

From marketstall records, from our bandcamp, from our shows..they can ring me and ask me for one, they can take hostages and demand one, they can stalk us on facebook and hack our hotmail accounts until we surrender a copyideally one of the first three options though. if people buy it instead of ripping it off the internet then well get to make another one. if they dont, we wont. simple as that. and also theyll get to own something beautiful and handmade even if you think were terrible the packaging is neat.

AmeriCymru: What are you listening to at the moment? Any recommendations?

I'm listening almost exclusively to prefab sprout at the moment. paddy mcalloon may be the most undervalued songwriter of the last 20/30 years. Id recommend blue balloon to anyone (even though thats on our label so very cheeky of me to say so) and you cant go far wrong with a bit of low now that its getting nice and wintery.

You're based in portland is that right? do you know ross cowman and his label bicycle records and his band june madrona ? That band is just perfect. hes an amazing human being too.

AmeriCymru: What's next for Michael Hall?

We'll play a bunch of shows as ghost carriage phantoms. I doubt any two shows will be quite the same but they will have songs from the album on the set list. weve reined ourselves to that. well try to break even on the record and then well be releasing the first grace cathedral park album which may be a double album in spring 2013, thats called ante rock and then I hope well work on a second blue balloon album for rob. shaun and i are writing scripts, we just had one optioned by a little uk studio, were making music videos, well make films. im still hoping to get a book of photography by anni timms with accompanying writing by myself published somehowtherell be another phantoms record at some point too i hope. Im still writing a lot about music for various placesi know mark is getting more and more production work were busy. we just want to stay legit and create and make and make and create and enjoy the process that we all love so much. more of that, forever.

AmeriCymru: Any final message for the readers and members of AmeriCymru?

Thanks for reading this far.

Interview by Ceri Shaw Ceri Shaw on Google+