Indie, rock and folk taken from the beach.

Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor takes listeners on a journey through water-themed music — from Neil Young and the Beach Boys to Rhythm & Sound and Palace Music — played on Devon Turnbull’s unique soundsystem at 180 Studios.

Hi everyone, my name is Alexis Taylor. Thanks to Jamie Harley, who's organised the sound here for this space and has been working with Devon Turnbull for quite a while on this project.

I've only ever used this system in the previous location at the Lisson Gallery when Devon had it there before it was brought here. As you can see, it's obviously a unique system that he's built and designed and worked on for a very long time. It's a real pleasure for me, as well as I imagine for other people attending, to hear music through this system.

I was asked to either pick a theme or a genre of records to play. Instead of going with a genre, I thought I'd go with a theme, and that theme was “on the beach.” Water-related music, surf-related music, beach-related music, things that sound a bit submerged and underwater, as well as things that literally refer to the beach. So you're going to hear quite different styles of music, but it is linked by that theme.

As you may be able to see, I've got something of a strange obsession with that Neil Young album On the Beach. There's four copies of it here. I think the first one I bought cost two pounds fifty in a charity shop when I was about 14, and that record has meant a lot to me over the years. It's still one of my favorite albums by anyone.

Yes, it is quite a downer of a record. It was part of his Ditch trilogy — Time Fades Away, On the Beach, and Tonight's the Night. They were his deliberate attempt to head for the ditch after he'd made Harvest, which was so successful that he didn't really know what to do with his life.

It’s funny, Neil Young himself was quite unsure about On the Beach for a long time. It wasn’t available on CD when CDs were the main format. It was just deleted and unavailable for years, perhaps because it was considered too depressing. For me, it's not depressing at all. I think it's really amazing.

When I was at school, my older brother had a philosophy teacher who lent him a bootleg tape of Neil Young at the Bottom Line in New York in 1974. A couple of years ago, Neil Young put that record out officially. It has Neil Young playing loads of the On the Beach album before it was released, to an audience enjoying it but also wishing he would play some of his hits.

There's this track on here which will help us link to another artist I want to play. He's played this song at the beginning of the concert which is six minutes long, it's brand new, really quite self-absorbed and depressing in a way, called "Pushed It Over the End." Then for a bit of light relief, he plays this brand new song that he's written about his car. People find that quite amusing that he'd write an ode to his car. You can hear them laughing when he sings about the Beach Boys and how maybe they've got the car now.

Just thinking about the Beach Boys, at that point when Neil Young's referring to them, I do feel like they were taken extremely seriously with mid-'60s records like Pet Sounds and Smile. Smile was meant to follow Pet Sounds but it never got finished at the time and seemed to send Brian Wilson into depression.

They put this album out called Surf's Up in the early '70s, an attempt to help them be taken a bit more seriously and also to address ecological issues. I recently covered a song from that record called “A Day in the Life of a Tree,” a very environmental song, a woke song before that was a term.

The track I'm going to play to you here is “Till I Die.”

Now we’ll listen to an alternate mix of that song by their engineer Stephen Desper. To me it's like a radical overhaul of the track. You get something similar to Arthur Russell records later in the '70s, where you hear one instrument at a time — the bass, the vibraphone, the drum machine — before it all comes in together.

Next, I’d like to play a response to that song — “Before I Leave” from Christian Fennesz’s 2001 album Endless Summer. His music is heavily processed guitar, sounding much more electronic. The title references the Beach Boys’ Endless Summer compilation, but this track is based on “Till I Die.”

I don't know if it's really that obvious that it's related to the Beach Boys song. I certainly listened to it loads before I knew that, but I can hear some of those chord changes. I don't know if he's sampled the organ or if he's just programmed a version of some of those parts to make his own version.

As we've gone from a '70s record by the Beach Boys to a more ambient, modern electronic take—I say modern, I mean it's made 25 years ago—take on it, I'm going to do something similar with the song we started with, the Neil Young song "On the Beach." This is a really amazing cover of it by Joachim, and it's the Superpitcher remix of that. So it's "On the Beach."

Neil Young made this record called Trans which was him trying to deal with his communication issues he was having when his child was born who was severely disabled, and he rigged up various bits of equipment that he tried to use as a means to communicate with his son.  

It got him very interested in how you can change your voice and how you can use machines to communicate in some ways. The record he made from it in 1982, was a real departure from his own classic sound and was essentially a Kraftwerk-inspired, vocoder-based electronic Neil Young record, which I think his record label thought was absolutely terrible, but it's gone on to be quite a cult classic.

Neil Young himself has made a record featuring vocoder, which is the means to make your voice sound quite robotic and play notes using a keyboard to process the sounds you're making but your voice is still an essential part of the signal that sends out the information that the notes are based around. Even though Neil Young has done that, he obviously didn't do that with the song "On the Beach," but many, many years later Joachim made this cover of it where he uses vocoder himself to cover that song "On the Beach," and this is the Superpitcher remix of it.

Although a lot of what I've picked out is linked from one song to the next, and mainly about the idea of the beach or water, I wanted to play some music which I just think makes me think of being underwater or being submerged.

I'm going to play some records by Rhythm & Sound. These records are produced by Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald, and they were made in the late '90s and early 2000s—Berlin-based production duo who had done lots of amazing techno records as Basic Channel.  Then they started to make some dub techno records where they would do the production and invite Jamaican vocalists to sing on these records, which were very much related to dub music and reggae music, but that were moving things into a techno-influenced place at the same time.

That was an odd hybrid of dub and techno… but the records they made as Rhythm & Sound and Basic Channel have gone on to be massively influential—it’s almost its own genre in record shops. Just  started primarily by those two people. There are some of their records which are vocal-led and I've got some of those over there.

We may have time to listen to them, but I thought I would play something that's a bit more ambient and dubby and strange and submerged-sounding and which follows that Superpitcher remix we just heard quite well in terms of the space it occupies.

All of their records I find worth listening to if you like that kind of thing, if that interests you. There's so many good ones out there by them. This is another of theirs, called "No Partial.

As well as the incredible bass on those records, I really like the surface noise being pushed to the forefront in the mix so that every record of theirs sounds like it's got loads of noisy artifacts and hiss and textural elements that some people would really want to get rid of in music. They would see it as obstructive to some other element you want to focus on.

However in those Rhythm & Sound records—this is another one here called "Smile"—they seem to be enjoying the noisy aspects and distortion and things that are ambient and textural, but they're quite extreme in their own way to be so prominent in the mix.

I’ll play you a bit of this Congos record produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry. Here's “Fisherman.”

There's a really good alternate version of the whole album where Lee Perry mixed it differently with a lot more echo and delay, being more xperimental with his mix. That version that he did was really hard to find for years because it was an original Jamaican pressing that he did where it has yellow paint hand-painted onto the cover, so you could sort of tell if you had the real one because it had this paint on it.

It was extremely expensive and hard to find, but then a few years ago a company has reissued it and it probably has this original classic mix plus the Lee Perry different mix, so that's worth investigating if you're interested.

I'm going to play this track by Palace Music. The writer and artist is Will Oldham, known as Bonnie Prince Billy now, but back when he made this music he was under the name Palace Music. Obviously I've chosen lots of records which are related to the ocean or being on the beach or to a sense of place. And he made this song, "West Palm Beach," and the B-side of it called "Gulf Shores."

To me, they’re very enigmatic songs—they’re quite hard for me to fully understand why they're so evocative. He spoke about how he wanted to write some music which was all about place and he was doing that as a bit of a songwriting exercise. He was inspired by this very famous American musician, Jimmy Buffett, who is well known for his song "Margaritaville" and the quite corny chain restaurant and bar called Margaritaville.

I once asked Will Oldham "Why were you inspired by Jimmy Buffett? Is there a really good Jimmy Buffett record to check out?" And he said, "I'm not sure there are any good Jimmy Buffett records, but I just wanted to see if I could make a song that was all about being at a particular place. And that was my exercise."

It seemed to work because I really have been fascinated by this song for years, but maybe Will is quite unique in being able to channel music that he finds uninteresting and make something quite good in response to it.

Well, I think we're out of time. Thank you for coming to this and thanks to 180 Studios for letting me come in and play these records and talk about them a bit.

‍Find out more about the Devon Turnbull Listening Room at 180 Studios here.

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This conversation has been edited for clarity.