The migration of Electronica has been interesting, progressively speaking. Over the years there has been a flux of musicmakers who have incorporated various digital applications into their work, thus creating a wealth of traditional instruments, many of which sound like near-flawless representations of their original string, wood, or wind instruments. There has also been experimentation juxtaposing traditional, live instrumentation (a.k.a. analog), too, and as such has been captured within the confines of a studio space. The latter is obviously far, far from being a new approach, but given the enormous proliferation of laptop melody makers who have been able to produce compositions on the fly, thereís something about an in-studio production that retains a certain sound that canít quite be reproduced electronically, in what has otherwise become a nearly all-digital universe. Yet music, in a general sense, isnít bound by boarders. If itís good and enough people like and appreciate an artistís creation(s), then it (should hopefully) sell.
It is a blustery, cold and wintery afternoon on January 28th, at the publicity and marketing events company located in Midtown Manhattan that is Big Machine Media, when I interviewed the affable Mr. Fogg, an emerging Electronica artist from the UK, a few days after the release of his well-crafted EP Keep Your Teeth Sharp. With spiky, light brown hair atop his head and deeply-recessed dark brown eyes, Mr. Fogg has a warm and inviting smile coupled with a humble disposition and thick English accent to boot.
Mike: How did you come to calling yourself Mr. Fogg?
Mr Fogg: Well, Phileas Fogg went around the world in eighty days
(from the 1873 book by Jules Verne, Around The World In Eighty
Days,), and my first name is Phil (ólast name, Barry). Thatís how I
came to be called Mr. Fogg, and it just developed into kind of a
little bit of a nickname, but not for any reason connected to it.
Initially, I wanted to be slightly anonymous because I had other
musical projects that I wasnít 100% committed to, and I wanted to make
it so that no one knew it was me. So it was only in my local area [of
Reading, Berkshire] that Mr. Fogg became a little bit known; I started
to get played on the radio, and nobody knew that it was meówhich
worked quite well for me. The music is not like [where Iím] pouring
out my heart kind of thing. Itís a bit more conceptual than that, and
so I wanted to make it separate from me, so that [the media] donít
write about me, they write about the music.
Mike: One of your press photographs has your entire head and face covered
in blue, green, and white, as if an Aborigine- yet looking quite
longingly. Whose idea was that?
Mr Fogg: It was mine. I kind of really pushed to have that because
again, I was calling myself Mr. Fogg. The record was made before we
had any imagery or videos or any of that stuff. Everything has been
inspired by that, but we tried to build a whole world, you knowÖ I
think the person that made that record should look like [that];
because people were saying, ëItís false, itís not really you,í ëYou
should just have a picture of youí and all this, but I wanted to try
and make something that had a picture, like a piece of art, or a work
in itself.
Mike: Who are some of your influences?
Mr Fogg: Right from the beginning, when I was 7 years-old, I was
learning the piano; I was playing my own melodies on a piano. I never
learned from other people or really took lessons. Iíve always been
into creating music and listening to it, [although] listening to music
and creating music are almost two separate things to me, and creating
music is the thing that Iím really, really into. To actually commit to
saying that I really love an artist to me is quite a commitment
(although Mr. Fogg appreciates Bjork); everything else I listen to in
bits and pieces. I donít have a massive record collection; I donít
know everything about David Bowie or whatever.
Mike: How do you describe your music writing process?
Mr Fogg: Lyrically, really, it is a mix of everything. It's stuff from
the news, from big world events to tiny things; like sometimes little
bits of conversations that I hear or people that I meet, that are
particularly interesting. Each person says three or four things and
Iíll blow it upóover-analyze it; to base a song around having
different points of view, [versus] one song about three different
people, speaking as it were, in a song.
