Artist Interviews

Q&A: ANR

By | Published on Wednesday 16 March 2011

ANR

Brian Robertson and Michael John Hancock formed ANR (a contraction of Awesome New Republic) in 2004, having met as students of the University of Miami. Critically-acclaimed debut album ‘ANR So Far’ was released in 2005 on now-defunct indie label Sutro. Hailed by the New York Times as one of the acts at the heart of Miami’s burgeoning music scene, the duo gained a reputation for eking out rich, symphonic soul sounds from a sparse live setup of keyboards, drums and vocal trickery.

Spurred on by this early success, they went on to release sophomore album ‘Rational Geographic, Vol I’ in early 2009, succeeded by its sequel ‘Vol II’ later that year on Honor Roll Music. Latest LP ‘Stay Kids’ is a more mature offering, combining a newfound gravity with the fevered alt-funk ethos of their previous work.

With the album due out on 21 Mar through Something In Construction, and a slot booked on the Drowned In Sound Stage at this year’s Great Escape fest on 14 May, we caught up with the band to glean their answers to our Same Six.

Q1 How did you start out making music?
We both started making music when we were really little kids. Mostly just messing around with keyboards, tape recorders, and sound effects.

Q2 What inspired your latest album?

A lot of the major events of 2010 (the oil spill, the earthquake in Haiti, continuing social uneasiness), and the overall vibe amongst people lately. Also, the general environment and culture of our locale, both the beautiful and the not so much.

Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?

Most tracks are composed on the computer. Building up riffs and loops and then singing phonetic nonsense. Then we clean it up, and write lyrics that work with the sounds of the nonsense, chopping up and producing the form of the song. Sometimes we write songs while practicing as well, pretty standard back and forth.

Q4 Which artists influence your work?

Mostly music that is very cinematic, like the Beach Boys, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Animal Collective and King Crimson. Likewise, a lot of our song ideas come from watching movies, so John Carpenter and stuff like that is also a big influence.

Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
“Thanks for listening”, and then let the music speak for itself.

Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
We’d like to tour a lot. Playing this material and some of the new stuff we’ve been writing live is what we are enjoying most as of late. We’re also involved in some short films that are based around music from the album. We’re both looking forward to doing more score-like versions of the songs for those.

MORE>> anrmiami.com



READ MORE ABOUT: