Machine Translations Special

Trawling the archives & really sweet launch gigs for "Seven Seven"

Noah catches up with Greg Walker AKA Machine Translations to discuss the recent re-issue of “Seven Seven” and the gigs he played to celebrate the release

It must be a pretty cool scenario to have your 2007 album 'Seven Seven' given a new life with the recent re-release on double vinyl in Australia by Half A Cow and in the US by Happiness. Can you tell us how the concept to do this came about?

This really started when Salim Nourallah from Happiness reached out as a long time MT fan and was keen to do, I guess, a boutique vinyl re-release of the album in the US. I think it's his favourite record of mine and he wanted to get this music out to his friends and people he thought should hear it. Seven Seven had never been out on vinyl before and neither of us wanted to cut tracks out to make it fit on a single LP, so then we decided it should be a double LP and I started down the long and winding path of finding unreleased material from that era to flesh out the 3rd and 4th sides. Once we knocked it into shape Half A Cow were keen to do the Australian re-release so it kind of opened it's own doors in a way.

It's been a busy patch for you and the band playing shows to promote the album in VIC and NSW. Can you tell us what the reception has been like, and how it’s been to get some of these old hidden gems gig-ready?

It's been really fun. In a weird kinda way I've gravitated back to some of the production and sounds from that time so it didn't feel like that big a stretch to play this material. Also the people I play my music with are unbelievably great musicians and they can pretty much handle anything I throw at them. I ended up having this strange but great scenario where almost a totally different band played the Sydney launch to the Melbourne one. Both those shows felt really sweet but in totally different ways. I got to see a lot of old familiar faces and also meet some fans that have been in touch online but I hadn't met before. All up yeah it was great experience to get out and play this stuff again.

How did you decide on the previously unreleased tracks that have made their way onto the re-issue?

I really just trawled the archives and I was surprised to find how much unreleased stuff I actually had. I guess my process is very recording-driven so there's a lot of stuff that doesn't quite work out and then some things that I might have decided didn't quite fit on the original release. Listening back I really liked some of those things and I found enough material that it fitted quite well on the back half of the double LP. There's some tracks that are acoustic-based but have a variety of different modes to them. Some songs that stood up pretty well I thought. There was also a stand-alone single 'Telepathic Head' that sat in with the other stuff nicely.

Is there one song on the album that you are most connected to, and which is your favourite to play live?

This changes a lot depending on where my heads at. I go through a lot of phases with songwriting and production and playing old stuff can sometimes not feel quite right, but I always really liked playing Telepathic Head. When the Melbourne band plays that song it's got this irresistable rhythmic thing to it. Also everybody laughs when Robin Waters does the alien vocoder chorus so that's fun.

I first heard your music on a spunk sampler, La Révolution De Spunk from 2005, just two years before the original 'Seven Seven' was released. The song on the sampler was called 'Miss China'. I immediately fell for the melancholic pop tones and angular guitar work as the song floats along beautifully with great melody and flow. I am intrigued how you came to form that sound and what music you had a strong connection to when you were writing for Machine Translations in that period?

A lot of stuff goes into the pot I guess. When you listen to Miss China I reckon you can hear Hendrix, My Bloody Valentine, maybe also the fact I spent a year living and studying in Shanghai. I remember I was really happy with that track because it had a long, winding verse vocal melody that made sense of some pretty nuts chord changes. I love that about people like Elliot Smith, also people I worked with over the years like M Craft, Jordan Ireland and Zillions who explored that collision of guitar rock, folk music and more exotic ideas and unusual textures. You could probably chart my whole career as a kind of engineered collision of rock, folk and those more experimental and sometimes also ethnic elements. I studied Stockhausen and Music Concrete in high school, all that stuff stuck too. Lyrically I still take a lot from the forms and ideas of Chinese poetry - the way they can say two things at once. Their economy of thought and imagery has so much in common with the kind of song writing I like. You know, I love Indian classical music and I love Howling Wolf and I love the classic 60's and 70's songwriters, but then I'm also always trying to escape all those influences too. Hopefully I've found something that's truly my own along the way.

What is next for Machine Translations, will there be another re-release on the cards?

I'm not a nostalgic person and I tend to prefer looking forwards to looking back, so I think the next thing will be a new album or albums. I've got a lot of new material in all kinds of states of completeness and incompleteness so I'm trying to work my way through it and get the band to help finish things off and re-record things. I've released a lot of music so one of my main aims is to not repeat myself with the next thing I put out. We'll see where we get to with that...

Finally, who are your favourite local Melbourne bands at the moment or who would you like to see interviewed for Tempo?

Ah where do I start? Being a long-standing regional VIC person I'm going to go into bat for a couple of local artists down in my neck of the woods in Gippsland. We're about to release an album by an old friend and long-ago label mate Chris Ferguson. Some of your readers may remember him from The Fergs and Mississipi Barry. Chris has had Parkinson's Disease for over 20 years and, with the help of a great music community down here, he's made this brilliant, classic, funky and chaotic album called 'Did I Tell You 'bout My Years In The Wilderness'. It's warm, rocking, totally uncompromising and is also kind of a musical window into that condition. There's a real story to tell there. I'd also highly commend the Strzelecki Stringbusters. They're this roaming bunch of hillbillies from out in the ranges east of me and they are the rarest thing in this day and age, a genuine folk band. People go batshit for people like Gillian Welsh, and rightly so, but when 20 or 30 of these guys turn up at a gig or at their regular the Yinnar Pub and start playing and singing, it'll send a shiver down your spine. I've had the privilege of working with both these acts and I can vouch for the fact that they are completely and utterly singular. There's really nothing like either of them and I love the fact these kind of artists can exist way out beyond what's left of the 'Music Industry'. Both of these acts also have very unique stories to tell.