The Forgotten Music Of Felix Ookean opens with a sinister track reminiscent of the 1970s psychedelic soundtracks German band Popol Vuh did for Werner Herzog. “I like that sort of music but I’d never tried to make it before,” says the man behind the project, Rohan Long. He adds that the band embraced a different way of working for this record. Starting with his guitar track, Long gave guidelines to the other members and let them explore through jamming in the studio.”
The album was recorded at drummer-turned-flute/sax player Jem Savage’s home studio. “I wrote bits and pieces and then we went into Jem’s to work it out,” explains Long. “We’d never done that before; working it out as we go. A lot of it was improvisation, which we don’t normally do. So yeah: it’s all home made.”
Long’s fascination with nature documentaries seems to spring from his background in palaeontology. But the idea of paying tribute to the music that is such an integral part of these documentary films came to Long when he discovered the soundtrack to the 1970s David Attenborough doco Life On Earth. “I really like nature documentaries: I like old ones, so I listened to all this music and I thought ‘I like this so fucking much, I want to make music like this but I don’t know how yet.'”
The Forgotten Music Of Felix Ookean features an expanded lineup of the band, (previously a traditional guitar / bass / drums three-piece). For this release they’ve expanded to a five-piece, with members playing multiple instruments. Long stresses it’s something they may only perform once in its entirety. “We’re pretty loose; we record an album and do a gig to promote it. We don’t really play that much.”
Long says something he really wanted to capture on the record were the flute sounds that really stand out on all those old docos. “That creates that really ’70s vibe; nothing does that like a flute.” It’s mentioned that it could also bring a Jethro Tull vibe to the band. “Not just Jethro Tull,” he replies, “soundtracks. Every soundtrack from the ’70s had flutes – both movies and TV. It’s the same with the sax as well. It’s great to see Jem out the front doing all that stuff.”
As well as performing The Forgotten Music Of Felix Ookean at the launch, the band will be throwing in a couple of covers from their favourite Australian documentary soundtracks. “I love the Australian thing; there’s all these weird jazz guys in the ’70s. When people made television in the ’70s they turned to the jazz guys – there’s nothing like it today. There’s some great soundtracks out there”
Any recommendations? “One I get very excited about is one called Innerspace, by a guy called Sven Libaek, which goes for hundreds and hundreds of dollars on eBay [the original vinyl]. It’s a shark documentary, made in the mid-’70s. It’s really cool jazz with lots of wah pedal. A lot of the obscure collectors really dig that, and the fact that it’s a nature documentary is kind of secondary to them, but I really like it.
“I particularly like the ‘Australian-ness’ of the old ones,” he adds, as apparently the Australian doco soundtracks are distinctly different to the Attenborough British school of documentary soundtrack. “The Australian ones are all jazz musicians from a fairly cohesive group of jazz players, that all played on each other’s albums. The Attenborough ones were just individual people. The first one is by a guy called Edward Williams and it’s kind of a classical soundtrack, with a little bit of electronic experimentation. The next one in the series Attenborough did was all about early synths.”
The synth sound is something The Cambrian Explosion are also exploring for the first time with this record. While the band sound like they’re playing vintage synths, Long admits that “it’s mostly just done on computers. We didn’t really worry about authenticity much – the mellotron sounds and all those all old key sounds are patches on a computer. To get the theremin sound on the final track we actually used an iphone theremin app. We probably should have used something ‘cooler’… but it did the job perfectly.”
For the album, Long has compiled extensive liner-notes, detailing Ookean’s career and seminal works, with all of the songs on the album colour coded to correspond to four documentary films. Since leaking some early recordings online, Long has been contacted by people looking for rare Felix Ookean material. “I’ve put up a few bits and pieces on the web and I’ve already had people speculating as to who Felix Ookean is. I had a guy on my blog contact me and say ‘dude, have you got a Felix Ookean CD? Email me.'”
I’m not sure if Long had the heart to tell them that The Cambrian Explosion actually invented him. “To make this music you need to have a documentary to score, so we invented a guy, and invented documentaries where the songs came from,” admits Long. I mention trying to keep this whole thing under wraps, but Long insists they’re not trying to pull off some sort of hoax, but simply Felix Ookean is more of a device to “encourage good writing.”
