Mann Alive

Few artists in Australia can move people the way Paddy Mann can. Critics and fans alike savour the organic complexity of his project Grand Salvo, and his sixth album arguably tops his previous efforts. Slay Me In My Sleep is a song cycle following a young boy and elderly woman who pine for each other romantically, but not quite in the expected form. It's more about flux and longing than anything else, with the two characters stranded at opposite ends of the age spectrum.

Being Grand Salvo, anything that might initially sound pretentious is done with a mastery that silences one's inner cynic. His work has a sweeping quality yet is intimate too, finding the grandiose in the tiniest details. “I definitely try and base everything on a very quiet vibration,” he admits. “I did want bursts of excitement, but I wanted it to be slightly uncontrolled and childlike. More ramshackle and not so much that epic kind of pop/rock ballad vibe. It's still just guitar and quiet vocals, with stuff on top.”

While Mann's “quiet vibration” is very much preserved on Slay Me In My Sleep, he's planning a “large ensemble” launch in Melbourne that will try to capture the breadth of the album's arrangements. Mostly recorded in Berlin with composer Nils Frahm, who played piano on it, the album features cello, saxophone, backing vocalists and the recorder ensemble Quartet New Generation, whom Frahm called “the Kronos Quartet of the recorder world”. Mann hopes to bring a lot of that instrumentation to the stage, with around 15 singers and musicians total.

“When I launch an album,” he muses, “I try and recreate it, I guess. I always try and have, if not exactly what I had on the record, then something at least approaching it. I don't play that much any more, so I may as well make it an occasion. It's about the only time I really enjoy organising a show, actually.”

Mann lived in Berlin with his girlfriend while working on the album, taking advantage of the city's famed artistic receptivity. “Everyone seems to try it once,” he says, now based in Melbourne again. “I wasn't so much into touring or playing a lot of gigs, but I did really want to record and write while I was there. And it was a pretty good place to do that, [with] a lot of open-minded people.”

Like that recorder quartet, for instance, who insisted on not taking payment for their services. They lend the songs a distinct character that veers close to the medieval. “There's passing references to medieval sound,” agrees Mann, “but it's all the way you write for it. I guess [with] recorders, you're either gonna sound a bit twee or a bit medieval.” Laughing, he adds, “Actually, I fall into both. But I really enjoy writing dense counterpoint. A kind of poor man's Bach.”

Self-deprecation aside, previous albums like Death and Soil Creatures have confirmed Mann's unique vision. And Slay Me In My Sleep fits right alongside them, with a three-act structure and scene-setting song titles that can run for several sentences. “I had to have [them] on the album, because it was just integral to it,” he says. “Instead of just writing it on some liner notes that no one would probably see anyway, I thought if I made them song titles, they were permanently attached. I thought I was gonna cop a lot of shit for it, actually.”

For all the album's narrative and textural surprises, one of the best is also one of the simplest: an electric guitar solo on track 13. “I guess there's a reason why guitar solos have been so popular for so long… before they were abused for so long,” he reckons. “I tried to make sure it wasn't coming across as a cynical, ironic sentiment. I was imagining myself as a guitar hero when I was doing it.”