First heard of this guy via the Hafler Trio part of the book of interviews Tape Delay and assumed he was a fiction until he turned up at my place of work three days ago, taking a seminar in the archaeology of sound. Didn't get to hear his lecture (there was a minor student explosion in the Senior Boys Common Room which required more or less instant attention) but I did get to speak to him in the car-park afterwards and we discussed his work with the Hafler Trio or "Half-wits," as he affectionately calls them (something about the royalties for a recording of an turtle synapse). They sound like a wild bunch; Chris Watson recording the precise moment (the mathematics went beyond me after the first graph, drawn in the air with a frazzled claw) that he became addicted to parmesan ("a parmesan addict is the perfect metaphor for control"), Andrew McKenzie catching himself lost in music while taping the silences off daytime tv, all three of them catching a temporary strain of marburg while fishing for crabs in a Creech St Michael pond...
He smiled as he told these stories but he seemed a little bitter at how things had worked out. The Hafler Trio became a multi-million selling band only after he left (no real surprise; sadly he's not a poster boy) and he blinked a little too much when I mentioned the impending Hafler's Big Tops greatest hits release, soon to be ripping through the Christmas album charts.
Still, he warmed a little when he talked about his work with the Blank Workshop and I said I'd help spread the word.
Some Hafler albums (Ed said you should download everything you can because they deserve it - I, of course, couldn't possibly comment except to say that, with these big boys, the music and the packaging are a seamless whole):
Don't want the Halfer Trio to become another GutterGate.
