Pump Up The Jams

Befitting a band that live, love, work and play together, Blues Control – the tape-looping, saturated-sounding instrumental duo of Russ Waterhouse (guitar) and Lea Cho (keyboards) – have an endearing habit of finishing each other's sentences. When talking about their seventh full-length (though, if you're a stickler, possibly only third 'proper' album), Valley Tangents, they put it thus: Waterhouse: “Up until this record everything was done live in the studio…” Cho: “Where we'd just play together…” Waterhouse: “Do several takes and just pick one. This time, we kind of constructed things…” Cho: “The way people normally record.”

Valley Tangents' title refers to a recent move, which found the band – once based in Brooklyn, then in Philadelphia – retreating to the Pennsylvanian countryside. “There's no curfew,” Waterhouse surmises, of the new digs. “We're in a house set away from our neighbours, so we can pretty much do what we want when we want, and it's not an issue.”

The influence of the area is felt on the album, but not in some obvious rural twang; instead, it comes up with references to industrial music to summon the area's long history of steel-centric heavy industry, and, with Iron Pigs – a jam, Cho says, “influenced by stadium rock, sports anthems by big classic rock bands like Queen, industrial music like Laibach” – a titular reference to the area's minor league baseball team. Speaking of sports, is Love's A Rondo a shrine to the passing skills of the Boston Celtics' Rajon? “No, not at all,” Waterhouse swats away. “It had nothing to do with basketball, I'd never even heard of the player Rondo until the video came out. It was all about comparing the cycle of relationships to the musical structure of a rondo.”

Though they're often considered a noise band, there's a definite compositional sense to Blues Control's instrumentalism, with Cho's piano played with dexterous fingers, not punk thump. The band were born in 2006, spun off the “ambient new age” project Watersports; conceived as a “piano rock” trio where the third member was “tapes”, the magnetic, non-existent member providing both the rhythms and “psychedelic vibes”.

“We just kind of merged Watersports into Blues Control; the same ideas were happening,” says Cho. Continues Waterhouse: “We were doing it as a duo, but we wanted our music to sound like a full band, so we used a lot of tapes. Everything was done through a mixer, always going through the mixer; it was like a collage.”

After exploring stasis and “environmental” ambience in Watersports, Blues Control suddenly needed to be more dynamic. “The spirit of it is the complete opposite; not introverted, but completely extroverted. It's louder, more physical and more demonstrative: we're out to put on a rockshow,” Waterhouse says.

Due, perhaps, to the fact that people “want things to be loud”, Blues Control soon found themselves in demand; and found themselves stuck with a half-joking name that Waterhouse had invented before there was even the project. “We didn't know the name was going to exist for more than one show,” Cho sighs, “we certainly didn't think we were going to exist as Blues Control for the next six years.”

The punning handle was coined when the duo were buying old albums from Polish second-hand stores in Brooklyn, and feeling attracted to old blues rock and classic rock. “Blues was on the mind at the time, and back then – and since then, and maybe forever – it's never been cool to like blues-rock,” Waterhouse laughs. Now, it's an uncool continuum Blues Control are a part of. “There's all those '70s blues-rock records that're like Blues Image, Blues Magoos, Blues Project, Blues Creation,” Cho says. “It's kind of a cool…” Waterhouse: “lineage to be a part of.”

Blues Control will be playing the following shows:

Thursday 4 October - The Gasometer, Melbourne VIC
Friday 5 October - Liberty Social, Melbourne VIC
Wednesday 10 October - Black Bear Lodge, Bribane QLD
Thursday 11 October - Pica Bar, Perth WA
Friday 12 October - The Square, Sydney NSW