Whatever they go on to achieve over the next few years, F*** Buttons can content themselves that millions of people have heard their music.
Danny Boyle picked Surf Solar and Olympians to soundtrack the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. Sundowner, by a spin-off project, Blanck Mass, was even chosen to accompany the Olympic torch arriving in a speedboat.
Boyle shocked a few observers choosing music by an unknown London electronic duo, not least the band themselves, Andy Hung and Benjamin Power.
“It was a bit of a surprise when we first saw it used in context at the dress rehearsal,” says Hung.
“And we were just as surprised as everyone else on the night – especially when our phones were going mental as the tracks came on.”
Listen to the tracks from 2009 album Tarot Sport and the idea that their inclusion might be risky is idiotic. They might be played more regularly in clubs to nodding, bug-eyed ravers, but the gradual building to an intense, individual euphoria fits the Olympic ideal.
Boyle’s decision-making teed things up nicely for the band’s follow-up, Slow Focus, which they were working on during the Olympics.
“We would probably be lying to ourselves if we said it hadn’t had any impact, but it was not noticeable from our end because when the Olympics happened we were so focused on writing,” adds Power.
Hung and Power formed the band in 2004 at art school in Bristol, where Hung did fine art and Power studied illustration. On graduating, they moved to London.
Power first taught himself to play guitar when he joined punk bands in his teenage years. But it wasn’t until Hung learnt to make music using electronic instruments that the pair saw how their combined approaches and joint love for the noise scene might make for an “interesting turning point”.
“F*** Buttons is about the collaboration between Andy and I,” says Power, with the pair proving as much by using Hung’s phone’s speakerphone to do a joint interview. “It couldn’t exist without both of us.”
The art school ethos still informs their approach. Not only does Power do the artwork and Hung do the videos, the pair think visually about tracks.
“It is a visual, aesthetic idea to accompany the overall mood of the record,” he says about naming Slow Focus.
“Once Andy and I have finished writing a track, and there is a solid idea on a collection of tracks that becomes a record, we like to sit down to discuss visual ideas the overall thing might conjure up for us.
“This time around it felt like waking up after a very deep sleep and that moment your eyes take to readjust. That’s why we named it Slow Focus.
“One rule we have is Andy and I have to both be present when anything creative is happening regarding F*** Buttons, and who is to say in future that couldn’t be more of a visual thing.”
Both have side projects: Power runs Blanck Mass, who opened for Sigur Rós earlier in the year, while Hung is Dawn Hunger.
Evergreen DJ Andy Weatherall produced 2009’s Tarot Sport. Mogwai guitarist John Cummings manned the desk for F*** Buttons’ 2008 debut, Street Horrrsing.
But Hung and Power self-produced the hypnotic seven-track third album (it clocks in at 51 minutes), which Resident Advisor and The Guardian rightfully awarded four stars.
More confident in their technological knowhow, based for the first time out of their own studio, they had the freedom to work at their own pace. And with only two creative minds in the room, they achieved their aim to reduce outside influence.
The experience was invaluable, says Power, because it allowed them to find their own process.
“One thing that made us aware we could self- produce was realising that production was already inherent in the writing process.
“We find sounds from anywhere [in the past they have used kids’ karaoke machines and mashed-up vocals for extra layers].
“We accumulate all kinds of things that generate sound, then get together in a room and play around with combinations of things.
“As soon as it gets into a groove, we start crafting it, turning it into something that could be a song or a track.
“So it starts off with finding sounds, rhythms and textures we enjoy – and you could construe that as production – and turning it into music."
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