Psychedelic, experimental . . . the music of Peter Kember, otherwise known as Spectrum or Sonic Boom, is anything but clinical. On the eve of his first New Zealand tour, he explains his twisted methods to Shane Gilchrist.
Verse, chorus, bridge . . . many songs have an anatomy that is obvious and, thus, easy to dissect. Listen to the music of Peter Kember, however, and the task is much more difficult.
His music is often dense (but not dumb), involving layer upon layer of sound; it is experimental.
It is also, like a difficult child, hard to ignore.
With its psychedelic swirls and foggy lyricism, it is music more suited to early-hours escapism than after-dinner ambience.
For an early hint of Kember's methodology, look no further than the title of the album he and his former Spacemen 3 cohorts originally released as a bootleg in 1990, Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To.
Though the influential and celebrated Spacemen 3 went their separate ways in the early '90s, Kember and fellow founding member Jason Pierce continued to produce music.
Pierce formed Spiritualized, while Kember went on to release a solo album, titled Spectrum, using the alias Sonic Boom, a pseudonym he first adopted while in Spacemen 3. Sonic Boom then recycled the Spectrum title as the name of his new band.
Other projects have included Experimental Audio Research, a loose configuration of musicians that featured Kevin Shields, of My Bloody Valentine.
Under the Spectrum guise, Kember is touring New Zealand for the first time. The seven-date visit includes performances in Dunedin and Wanaka next week.
Also on the bill is Dimmer, headed by Shayne Carter, who Kember met in Los Angeles last year.
‘‘I've wanted to come and play for some time,'' Kember explains via phone from San Francisco last week. ‘‘We get to do the North and South Islands. I'm really looking forward to it.''
Kember will be performing solo, playing keyboards and guitar while utilising sampled loops, an old drum machine and some old analogue synthesizers.
‘‘I'm tending to do the songs that suit that approach the most. Some of the songs originally were very much just a rock band sound; I'm doing less of those,'' he says, adding the repertoire will include songs by Spacemen 3 as well as Spectrum.
A prolific writer, Kember has a few projects on the go. A Spectrum album is due out later this year and he's been working on an album with producer and musician Jim Dickinson, whose credits include the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Big Star.
‘‘It's a mixture of his songs, my songs and songs we did together. We play on each other's stuff. It's a really interesting mix of stuff. It goes through some blues and country elements, mixes some of those Southern styles in with what I do . . . Jim was in the Jesters on Sun Records; he has quite a pedigree.''
Kember (42) grew up in Rugby, England, and still calls the town home. Though it has no venues, Rugby (population about 60,000) offers an uncomplicated life that suits him when he is not on the road. There, he has his New Atlantis Studio, which houses all manner of musical gear, old and new.
‘‘In Spacemen 3 I was lucky to be able to minimise it down to one amp that had effects in it and one effects pedal and my guitar. It's just grown, really, the more I've experimented to get the result I want.
‘‘I've found it has been useful to have more equipment. Some of it is very expensive, top-end custom stuff and some of it . . . you can buy from the nearest thrift store or pawn shop. That has always been my theory: whatever it takes to get the job done.''
For someone who references the famous mathematical Fibonacci Sequence on his website, Kember's initial method of song construction is quite basic - normal even. Though he laughs at the suggestion he sits in his lounge with a cup of tea and a guitar (‘‘It's more likely to be a stiff vodka''), the image is not far from the truth.
‘‘A lot of stuff is written in a pretty traditional way . . . the stuff I like about song-writing, the time changes et cetera, I work that in afterwards [as well as] some of the more abstract, psychedelic elements.
‘‘The general theory with Spacemen 3 and Spectrum stuff is to take rock 'n' roll, blues-based, pop music back from three or four chords to one two or three chords. It's always been about simplification. In that sense, there is deconstruction going on - or at least a retracing of something that possibly existed anyway before the '40s or '50s.''
Essentially, it is an attempt to get to the heart of the matter.
‘‘That's something that is really important to me about my songs - that I get over the essence of the song in as minimal and evocative way as possible; kind of like the Kraftwerk thing where they never have more than four elements, but each of the four elements are always genius so it works fantastically.
‘‘I don't think I'm quite as succinct as they are, but it's along those lines.''
