Tunng - Biography
Much has been made of the fact that the founding members of London’s Tuung, Sam Genders and Mike Lindsay, got their start composing soundtracks for soft-core porn videos. Okay, well, we’ve all gotta start somewhere, and if Hungry Cougar and the Pizza Boy leads to Tunng songs appearing on the Showtime dramedy Weeds, then more power to them. It’s certainly not as if Genders and Lindsay can’t appreciate the wry potency of juxtapositions: Tunng’s entire sound is based on the ore-rich incongruities to be mined in the fissures between pastoral English folk music and a particular sort of stutter-and-glitch laptop electronica. And while the music tends pastoral sonic meadows, the lyrics generate enough desiccated British wit and 21st century recalcitrance to keep the entire enterprise lively and convivial beyond the initial, faint whiff of Nick-Drake-as-an-Android gimmickry.
The first album, This Is...Tunng: Mother's Daughter and Other Songs (2005 Ace Fu), was originally released in the UK, and amounts to a compilation of the group’s initial 12-inches. All of the basics are at the front of the stage, but the advanced stuff seams to lurk behind the proscenium. Frankly, none of the acoustic performances are going to clomp across the lea, ala Richard Thompson, and none of the digi-squeaks are going to put Boards of Canada — or for that matter, Christian Fennesz — out of business any time soon. Therein lies the success of Tunng. On outstanding tracks like “People Folk,” “Beautiful Light,” and “Song of the Sea,” Lindsay and Genders constrain both aspects of the group’s sound, maintaining a dynamic that is low key, understated, and subtle. When the obverse and reverse of the coin have the same patina, it’s hard to tell what’s heads and what’s tails.
Tunng expanded to a proper six-piece ensemble in 2006, and benefited greatly from the additional color on the periphery. The second full-length, Comments of the Inner Chorus (2006 Thrill Jockey), is a wonderfully rich album. The electronics are more sophisticated yet seamlessly integrated, and the trick of sampling acoustic instrumentation is deviously effective: it so completely blurs the lines between the two that much of the digital craft simply sinks beneath the threshold of perception. Extra guitars and female vocals add heft, too.
Tunng quickly followed with Good Arrows (2007 Thrill Jockey), which dramatically raised their international visibility. Throw the “folktronica” tag out the window, because Good Arrows is simply a brilliant pop album. “Bullets” (the song that made the Weeds soundtrack) could nestle comfortably in The Village Green Preservation Society; “Secrets” is as lovely and lilting and inventive enough to have snuck of a Syd Barrett platter. The instrumentation is wildly diverse, but you would have to take notes to recall it all by the end of any given song — that’s how committed Genders and Lindsay are to keeping the lid on any sort of showboating or aesthetic roughhousing. Mind your manners, thank you very much. It’s hard to believe these guys were ever involved in anything so overstated as porn.
