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Artist Interviews
Q&A: Sisters Of Transistors
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 9 December 2009
The brainchild of 808 State’s Graham Massey, Sisters Of Transistors are an all female ‘combo organ’ quartet based at the South Manchester Museum of Keyboard Technology. They play a selection of fully working exhibition organs, with an emphasis on the Italian models from the early 1970s, directed by Massey and sometimes accompanied on drums by museum curator Professor Vernon World. Having just released their album ‘At The Ferranti Institute’ via This Is Music, we spoke to Massey about the whole project.
Q1 How did you start out making music?
As a teenager in the 1970s music had a lot of value. I became very open to all sorts of music and it was not long before I wanted to get involved. I got a Woolworths guitar, and then an electric violin, which gained me access to a band at school, playing proggy music, for which I was ill-equipped. That made me think that some kind of virtuosity was needed to succeed. But a lot of my friends had bought ‘The Faust Tapes’, a 49p budget album on Virgin, and that planted the idea in my head that music is sometimes just organised noise, which was a beacon of hope. It made me realise that I could be included and creative, and not just be kicked out at the first audition.
Q2 What inspired your latest album?
When we set out to do the Sisters project, we began with some deliberate parameters. It was to do with a collection of specific keyboards known as combo organs. The organ has a lot of bad cultural baggage due to its life as a nightclub instrument – every Conservative or working men’s club seemed to have one through the 70s and 80s. But on a positive side you have combo users like Sun Ra, Miles Davis in his mid 70s Agatha period, Fela Kuti, and Sly Stone. Context is everything. Combos are outcast instruments in need of re-appraisal.
Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
Generally someone takes the bass role, often on a moog synth, then it’s a case of using three other organs in a way that doesn’t get in a tangle (not easy). The girls will change to different organs through out the set, as certain organ models handle certain roles better. There are about ten different kinds of transistor organs on the album and each has its own tonal character. That said, we only take out four when we play gigs, plus maybe a spare one, as, being forty years old or more, they often conk out (the organs, not the ladies!).
Q4 Which artists influence your work?
No one directly, we are just following the parameters of having to use these instruments and compose for four organ players. Sometimes we get labeled as prog, but it has as much Michael Jackson and 808 State in it as it does Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Again, people hear an organ and lump it in with The Doors or Focus or anything else they’ve heard with an organ in it.
Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
We are really sorry! We won’t do it again.
Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
Obviously, we would like to be wildly successful and cruise around in a luxury tour bus to constant ovations every night, but if that was what we were really going for, we would probably not have done this kind of music – it would be wrong to think of it as Girls Aloud gone wrong. Though, I must say, it’s the closest I’ve been to pop music by accident in a number of years. I have, of course, been close to pop music on a number of occasions before, all of which were complete accidents.
MORE>> www.myspace.com/thesistersoftransistors
