Floydian slips

Banco de Gaia's worldly techno

by Tristram Lozaw

Any techno-nerd with a sampler can heap found sounds in layers of texture, add a few beatbox blasts, and come up with a dense dance-floor barrage of texture. Banco de Gaia, one of the featured acts on the technocentric "Big Top" tour coming to the Wallace Civic Center a week from Saturday, prefer a starker, more subtle fusion, highlighting and developing the sounds themselves. Water drips and bells become vehicles for melody; footsteps and chugging train steam are worked into rhythms much as Pink Floyd once did. Some have even called Banco de Gaia's new electronica gem, Big Men Cry (Planet Dog), a Dark Side of the Moon for the '90s. But then, Pink Floyd are a rock group. And Banco de Gaia are, well, actually, what are Banco de Gaia?

"That's a good question," says Toby Marks, the synthesizing, sequencing wizard behind Banco's curtain.

Banco de Gaia started as a London-based techno group but became Marks's sole property when his partner moved on. He's been a one-man band for seven albums, starting with 1992's Medium. Now, as he prepares for Big Top, which also features Moby, Loop Guru, and 808 State, he's put together a touring band, including a bassist, drummer, saxophonist, and percussionist. Plus he has plans to record an "unplugged" album of Banco de Gaia material.

"I used to be a musician," says Marks, who drummed and played guitar in what he refers to as "dodgy metal band," abandoned jazz because it was "far too much hard work," then set his sights on the electronic dance scene. "These days I feel a lot more like a composer and producer. On stage, it got to the point where I just felt like a technician, and I actually got lonely out there sometimes. So even though over the years I got very used to working alone, doing stuff exactly the way I wanted to, I wanted to do something spontaneous again. Working with a band, there are interactive grooves, and the set can have a different feel every night."

Marks's early Banco de Gaia material fell into the realm of house and techno, but he's gradually moved into more ambient terrain. With Big Men Cry he has traveled farther away from the nonstop dance grooves and grandiose moments of previous albums. "The electronic scene as it exists stems from the dance scene. There were the Tangerine Dream and Stockhausen people before this, but most people making electronic music now grew up on the dance scene -- techno, house, hip-hop, whatever. I'm taking the opportunity to make dance one element of what I do, not the heart of it. And for me, that makes it a lot more interesting to listen to. I'm a bit old-fashioned in that I like to build a piece slowly, with an intro, main body, and outro. A lot of techno artists just think about the core of the song. That goes back to the DJ culture -- the end of a tune is there only for the DJ to mix the next tune over. Whereas I'm always hearing the whole of the tune."

Reminiscent of Can's "Ethnological Forgery Series," Banco de Gaia's electronic constructions employ a goulash of world-music samples and influences. Marks spent considerable time in the Middle East absorbing the region's musical culture, especially its Arabic melodies and drumming syncopations. Indian, Indonesian, Sri Lankan, and Nepalese overtones also snake through his music. "I tend to plunder anything I come across -- Albanian folk singing, Balinese gamelan, North African rhythms, all sort of obscure bits and pieces. I don't sit down and think, I'm going to use a North Indian early-morning raga here. It's more a matter of, if I love the energy of a sound or texture, I'll use it."

Marks shares his affinity for world music with Pink Floyd, whose influence weighs heavy on Big Men Cry. "Drippy," the album's lead track, owes much of its feel to "Echoes," from Pink Floyd's Meddle. "Celestine" borrows a Floyd organ sample and also features the distinctive sax work of Dick Parry, who played on Dark Side of the Moon. Marks admits he listened to Pink Floyd tapes "endlessly" in his teens, playing Wish You Were Here and Meddle over and over. Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn was the first album he owned, so his "idea of what was normal rock was twisted from the start." He adds, "I've never met Pink Floyd, but I suspect I have similar views, ideas, and outlooks. So I find the comparisons of Banco de Gaia to Pink Floyd quite flattering."

He got similarly excited when a US radio DJ announced that you could play Dark Side of the Moon as an alternate soundtrack for The Wizard of Oz. "I thought, what a brilliant idea. So I tracked down a video of the movie and put it on with my vinyl copy of Dark Side, but I just couldn't get it to work. I did get the idea, though. One day I'll write my own secret soundtrack."

Banco de Gaia join Eat Static, Grooverider, Emperion, Moby, 808 State, System 7, Headrillaz, Loop Guru, Joey Beltram, and BT next Saturday, August 30, at the Wallace Civic Center in Fitchburg; call 423-NEXT.