The Reduction Agents are celebrating the 10th anniversary of their first and only album, The Dance Reduction Agents, by remastering the record and (finally) putting it out on vinyl. With that in mind, we asked Lawrence Arabia aka James Milne to look back on where it all started.
The Reduction Agents: Jol Mulholland, James Milne, Ryan McPhun and Ben Eldridge. Photo: Supplied
This is part of a regular series called Verse Chorus Verse which sees local artists break down the stories behind their music. For more, click here.
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Cold Glass Tube
In this song I imagined my high school common room and all the indignities that went on there, somehow transcended by the act of being sucked into one of the fluorescent lights that hung above the room. On one of my first days at school, four of us third formers were made to sit under one of the fluorescent light fittings, at which point one of the seventh formers threw a rugby ball at the fitting, causing the tube to crash onto the carpet, just to our right. Later, as a senior, my peer group took to using the fluorescent tubes as ad hoc javelins, hiffing them not-so-discreetly out of the third floor window down to the quadrangle below. The institutional memory of these bulbs lingers on to this day.
80s Celebration
I moved to Auckland in 2002 and my first proper flat there was at 412 Richmond Road right by the West Lynn shops. When I moved in I didn't own any furniture, so I slept on a small single mattress that was lying around the flat. Waking up in my new bedroom for the first time, I discovered a cluster of maybe thirty extremely itchy insect bites on my hip. In an attempt to solve this, I wrapped the mattress in a large piece of clear plastic, but further bites appeared the next morning. A flea bomb failed to rectify the problem, at which point I finally gave up on the infested mattress. It was in this same bedroom that I wrote 80s Celebration.
Mississippi Moonshine Girls
I would have been 19 when I wrote this song. I dreamed that the lyrics to the chorus would lead to a lucrative placement in a Montana wine commercial.
Last Night's Love
A song about some youthful “romance.” On a visit home to Christchurch sometime in 2002, I played this song for the first time at a solo show at the Wunderbar and my friend Eddie Castelow from Dictaphone Blues heckled me about my “getting some.”
Freeways
I fell in totally silly and reckless love at the end of 2003 and this song was a perversely sabotaged way of expressing it. Musically, it was probably slightly informed by my Flaming Lips obsession of the time.
Urban Yard
Towards the end of my fateful first year in Auckland, I joined The Brunettes. Being in this band made Auckland come alive for me. I was no longer depressed, I had a great girlfriend, I was in one of Auckland's coolest and wimpiest bands, and I was on the scene!
This probably seems a bit lame to most of you, but if you knew what I was like at the time, this was all a big change for me. Picture a boy out of Christchurch, an entire childhood of single-sex schooling behind him; all of his friends nerdy, sexually-frustrated, non-committal potheads whose big activities were making interesting looking bongs and pipes and then using them. Every student allowance day, we'd go to the Grey Lynn Woolworths and buy a cob loaf, some Indo Mie noodles and a 1.5 litre bottle of Coke and go nuts. We'd go to bars and sit on one drink looking at groups of girls and turn away when they looked at us. I'll get to the point of this depressing anecdote during The Pool.
Sweet Ingredients
I recall being in the aforementioned flea bedroom when this song was written. Another unfortunate incident that occurred in that bedroom also comes to mind. My flatmate, Anna, had a cat called Meena. One day I returned home from another bleak day at university to find that Meena had chosen my bedspread as a place to go to the toilet. Having learned no domestic skills or basic common sense during my teenage years, I simply took the soiled duvet out onto the front porch and left it there for a few days until Anna finally offered to wash it for me. In retrospect, perhaps my inaction on this matter was a symptom of depression. Anna and I later became boyfriend and girlfriend and I wrote this song.
Our Jukebox Run Is Over
My friends Kip, Aidee and Paul lived in a flat in Mount Albert which they dubbed “Te Wharf” because its entrance way looked like a jetty. I'd often stay at Te Wharf because I would get too high there to consider making it home and Auckland felt scary at night in that state. I woke up one morning there and wrote this song in their kitchen.
The Pool
So, back to where I was describing Urban Yard. The crux of what I was trying to get to was: one of the great things about being in The Brunettes was learning about (mainly) old music. Jonathan Bree had an enormous CD collection which he'd accrued during his time working at Marbecks, full of extensive fifties rock'n'roll compilations, box sets and complete discographies of people like Lee Hazlewood, Jonathan Richman and Serge Gainsbourg. I chewed through rock biographies, geeked out over bass guitar sounds, and thrilled to horrific stories of Phil Spector's psychotic behaviour. I also really discovered The Kinks. Urban Yard and The Pool, written in quick succession, were my attempts to express this rush of excitement at really clicking with a band's music (aka ripping them off).
Waiting For Your Love
We had a party one night at my flat on Richmond Road and the flea bedroom became a bit of a conversation zone for a while. Ben Eldridge from Heavy Jones Trio was there, talking to my flatmate Katie, who was from Palmerston North and worked hospo and whom I found pretty full-on when we first met. They hit it off, and three years later they were the first of my friends to have a baby. Ben joined The Reduction Agents and Ben and Katie are still married and living in Christchurch with their two wonderful children.
Couldn't Anymore
When we recorded this song, I think Olly Harmer (who was engineering) thought the performance of this song was probably a bit of a write-off – there's definitely a couple of vague moments during the early stages – and during the intense section at the end of the song he started mucking around with the tape speed on the reel-to-reel machine. Even though the beginning had been a bit sloppy, by the end we'd reached a magic level of intensity that I felt we couldn't reliably re-attain. But the recording had these unremovable pitch shifts caused by the movement of the tape speed during the performance.
I was kind of mortified by this at the time. But in the end this turned out to be an act of instinctual production genius by Olly, and when I mixed the recording I just cut the end of the song hard just after the pitch shifts started happening. At about seven minutes it was plenty long enough.
Cabinets And Mountaintops
Steve Mathieson from Lunavela/Collapsing Cities compiled a cassette of all analogue recordings in 2004 called Analogue Attack. For my “all analogue” recording of this song, I made a recording in ProTools, took some of the highs off the EQ then bounced it to cassette and gave it to Steve. Sorry Steve. The album version was analogue though.
The Dance Reduction Agents reissue is available now (and Lil' Chief Records are throwing a party tonight at Golden Dawn to celebrate).
Hear more about how the album came together via RNZ.