The Speed Of Sound return with A Cornucopia: Minerva, an album of modern garage/power pop that is one of the best of the year. It's dark, disturbing, but never excessive or depressing.
John Armstrong, lead guitarist and songwriter for the band, was kind enough to answer a few questions for me.
Andrea Weiss: Who were you listening to while making Minerva?
John Armstrong: The writing process was quite long. It started in 2019 and I have pretty wide musical taste, including a lot of classical and jazz, so I don’t think there was anything in particular that sparked Minerva. However, I did think a lot about album shape and trajectories. I like albums. Listening to one should be an adventure rather than just a bunch of songs thrown together. So the last and first chords of each successive piece compliment (and occasionally contrast) each other, giving an overall shape to the listening experience. The physical edition is gapless, with the final chord fade of one piece going straight into the next one – not a full-blown, continuous ‘suite’ or medley, but it does give a sense of continuity to the album that might not be there otherwise, with its extensive experimentation.
AW: The themes of your album – resistance to mainstream cultural dominance, individual identity, and artistic creativity – are wonderful, and are all expressed with joy and anger at the mainstream. Is this music the way you chose to fight the power?
JA: It can seem a bit like ‘yelling at clouds,’ but I think this stuff needs to be said and the ‘music-industry’ really has no interest in music, which is why so little of their Product is interesting.
I also have a radio show,Tuning Up on Mad Wasp Radio, and I know from the quantity and quality of submissions that there is as much, if not more, excellent music being released now than at any time, but the major labels don’t have any interest in it. For anyone who digs (in both senses), there is so much music to be found and enjoyed.
AW: How does the goddess Minerva figure into the album?
JA: The transformation of Athena into Minerva and then, with the addition of a trident, into the Britannia figure is interesting, and means she also represents a formative stage in modern day Britain. The three albums within A Cornucopia all have different personalities; Minerva and Victory are essentially the yin and yang of the same thing, viewed from different perspectives. Minerva’s belligerence fits the tone of these pieces, asserting creative independence in the face of mainstream dominance, whereas Victory is more resolved and at peace with its surroundings, achieving independence by seeing the mainstream as irrelevant and ignoring it, enjoying the community aspect of independent sub-culture instead. Weaving is among Minerva’s diverse god-portfolio, and my first job, as a guide in a silk mill museum, involved demonstrating hand loom weaving, so despite my not being religious in any way, I feel an affinity for her.
AW: There is just as much garage rock as jangle pop on Minerva. Did you want that kind of balance?
JA: I do like that mix. Our natural approach is a combination of crunch and float, a kind of Power-Jangle.
AW: What were you reading, from any source, for the album?
JA: I don’t have anything like as much time for reading as I would like, but during the album gestation I did read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, some of which will have filtered through into at least "Clickbait" and "X-Y Axis" (on Victory). Some of the things the tech companies are doing is really shocking. There is an element of corporate entitlement and unregulated ‘mad scientists’ doing stuff purely to see if they can, rather than asking themselves if it is a good idea first. And she does write really well. “We can not put this existential toothpaste back in the tube” is a great phrase in relation to the inability to un-invent technologies once they are out there.
AW: “Clickbait” is a great anti-internet song. It also says a lot about mass culture. Is your message that all internet technology is inherently bad and we would be better off without it?
JA: The promise of the internet hasn’t materialised, as far as independent artists are concerned. We were told it was supposed to ‘level the playing field’ and give everyone the chance to reach anyone, which hasn’t happened largely because of the algorithms. Instead all the internet does is make the things that are already popular much more widespread, smothering everything else. Its not the technology itself, but the unimaginative way it is engineered. Search engines don’t really search, they just find what is either paid-for or ‘popular’. The default tech-bro mindset doesn’t think much of artistic endeavour in general and would happily replace all of it with AI.
AW: “So Faux” is also great. Do you believe all mass culture is phony, or just what’s on the net?
JA: There’s a pervading superficiality to most mass culture, as though striving for neutrality while maintaining a fake smile. It doesn’t have a lot to say. Looking back to the drab ‘family entertainment’ of the 1970s that hasn’t changed. However the difference is now you really have to dig to find anything else. The lack of substance is worrying, because there is nothing there to last; current mass culture has no long-term cultural contribution and it is preventing counterculture from being heard. I can’t imagine any instagram viral hit or meme still carrying cultural weight in 50 years. We are in an age of mass short-termism and nostalgia. Something needs to shake things up again.
AW: Are you planning to tour?
JA: The economic reality is it's virtually impossible to break even playing live. We have played a lot over the years and there’s a lot of pleasure to be had from it, but with limited resources it's a question of priorities, so we’re concentrating on recording instead. We’ve done a lot of sound experimentation in the studio with A Cornucopia that you just can’t do in a live, or even rehearsal situation.