Amp - Biography
Amp is an ambient space-rock band from London, England, that first came on the Bristol scene in 1992 after Richard F. Walker—a.k.a. Richard Amp—put together his first foray in Green Sky Blue Tree while a student at the Royal College of Art. Since that time, French vocalist Karine Charff has become a mainstay in the electro-cinematic set, with an extensive rotation of collaborators joining in through eight full-length albums. As the duo of Charff and Walker have said about Amp’s sound, “if pushed, one could imagine a more experimental Radiohead . . . or a punky Sigur Ros.”
Walked hatched the idea for Amp after having collaborated with Flying Saucer Attack’s David Pearce on The Secret Garden and the Distance project. The two had a track called “November Mist” which gained them attention in 1992. Walker put together the short story/audio tape Green Sky Blue Tree (recorded with Ray Dickaty of Spiritualized) that inspired the French singer Charff, before returning two years later with a set of musicians—Charff, dark folk artist Matt Elliott (guitar) of the Third World Foundation and experimentalist Matt Jones, of the band Crescent. With this iteration of Amp, they recorded in Wales and released a handful of 7” singles on obscure British labels such as Linda’s Strange Vacation Records—including “Get There” and “Le Petit Chat”—and eventually self-released a lo-fi album called Sirenes (1996). The album listed eight musicians in total, and contained all the reverb-heavy shoegaze/Kraut-inspired elements of subsequent works, fitting well into the so-called “Bristol sound.”
Jones and Elliott left Amp shortly thereafter, yet Charff and Walker collaborated with Guy Cooper and Gareth Mitchell (both of The Secret Garden) on their debut effort on the Kranky label, Astralmoonbeamprojections (1997). Without a ton of fanfare, the album was full of spacey guitar drone and feedback, and songs such as the 11-minute “One Hopes in Uncertainty” and the 22-minute “Celestial Return” drew comparisons to Spaceman 3.
As a part of Darla Records “Bliss Out” series, Amp—this time primarily Walker and Mitchell—returned in 1997 with a four-track, two-disc set of atmospheric percussion-less charge called Perception. Recorded in a single day and later remixed, the album’s flowing mood was altered by the rainy day it was set down on, and in fact the sound of rain opens the title-track. The drove-heavy, feedback manipulated sound on Perception would become the cornerstone of Amp’s sound.
Amp had two releases in 1998—Passé-Présent (Enraptured Records), which was a collection of the band’s obscure singles, and trance-inducing Stenorette (Kranky). The latter was produced by former Loop guitarist, Robert Hampson, and Frenchman programmer Olivier Gauthier—who’d go on to help on other Amp albums—added to the rhythms. Walker would also put out an album under the name A.M.P. Studio called Syzygy: Music for Misfits & Malcontents in 1999, which was basically a solo effort which didn’t stray too far from the ambient oceanic drone/echo music of his collaborative efforts. Walker would follow-up this venture with a sequel of sorts, Unconscious Country (Fourth Dimension), though this time A.M.P. Studio was a shared effort between him and Guy Cooper.
Amp didn’t have any output for a couple of years, but Walker and company returned in 2001 with the live-recordings of Saint Cecilia Sinsemilla (United States of Distribution). Essentially culled from two European dates in 1999, the 10-track set features Walker and Charff in a stripped down version of Amp, performing mostly distorted noise songs from the Stenorette album as well as a couple of others, such as one of its earliest singles, “Get There,” which features Charff’s singing. There is also a radio session for VPRO Radio 5 in Amsterdam. The track “Hum Field Modulator” was also a highlight on the album, with waves of feedback zenithing through the amps.
The band toured Europe extensively in 2002, and released Lamour Invisible (Space Age Recordings) in the summer of that year. They’d later collaborate with Marc Challans, Donald Ross Skinner (of Julian Cope) and Ray Dickaty of Spiritualized) for an album called US (Very Friendly) in 2005.
Amp would put out its most critically acclaimed album to date in 2007 with the mind-blowing three-disc All of Yesterday Tomorrow (TBC), a third helping of the original singles from Passé-Présent, this time presented as an aesthetically-pleasing chronology. As such, the release touches on the full-range of Walker’s drone, as well as the many variations of the band from fleshing out hum-and-noise purveyors with amplifies rampant to minimalist spacescapes of the first order. There are even earlier tracks that didn’t make Passé-Présent or Tomorrow, such as the Dave Pearce collaboration on “Moon Tree.”
