"Like some Velvets of the Wild West..."they said on the INDY ROCK site.
In fact, JPS - Peter Wix and Juan Ais live a hundred miles apart at different ends of County Valencia, East Spain, and while we both dig Lou Reed and the tingling mind-body rub of that whole New York underground thing, I guess we try to probe sensibilities in a more direct way that ends up sounding European, if not curiously British. What we do just keeps getting compared to people we never really listened to, like Kevin Ayers and Pink Floyd.
We got this together in 1998 after first trying to start a subversive counter-cultural magazine that was going to be called KIKIRIKI, which is how the cock crows in Spanish. All our anxieties about waking people up to the way they behave ended up in the songs, first on LOVELY CARDOONS (Vile Beauty/DOCK), which won us the right kind of friends, and then with slightly wider recognition, THE RECALL CODE (through Zebra in Spain; internationally through DOCK). The latter was produced by David Sheppard (State River Widening, Ellis Island Sound).
The poetic Spanish equivalent of Reuters, EFE, called The Recall Code "a brave and open-eyed stimulation of the truth of our times, a warning about the loss of human sensitivity." Now, you can't say fairer than that, can you? And there we were, just strumming a few kind and transient-sounding chords.
It's great to get comparisons with giant souls like Kevin Coyne and Serge Gainsbourg, but for the time being JPS is on ice while Juan rusts out a few sheets of metal and dirties up crucifixes to fulfil his ambitions in the plastique arts, and Peter teams up with David Sheppard and Javier Marti in CONTINENTAL FILM NIGHT, and pursues his own songwriting dalliance as TELLERMAN. The first release from these projects, a sumptuous mini-album on our own new TINHORN label, TINHORN HOME COMPANION LIBRARY VOL.1, is out now in Spain. You can buy this from anywhere in the world for 9.50 euros at www.borderdreams.com.
At the heart of all this: friendship, which is not just a parlour game!
