Creativity and adventure at heart of Beth Orton’s music

Groove Tube with Jimi McDonnell – tribunegroove@gmail.com

Beth Orton’s voice has a quality that manages to be both delicate and strong, something that suits electronic or folk arrangements.  The English singer returns to Galway City’s Róisín Dubh on Monday, February 5, where she will be showcasing songs from last year’s Kidsticks as well as drawing from the albums that launched her in the late 1990s. Her debut, Trailer Park, and its follow-up, Central Reservation, were nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize, and she won a Brit Award in 2000.

But Beth Orton’s music is more low-key than limelight chasing, and she has continued to release esoteric, interesting work. Recorded in LA, Kidsticks is a maelstrom of electronics and vocals that she created alongside Andrew Hung from noiseniks Fuck Buttons.

“We sat together for 10 days, just having fun really,” Beth says. “He is an experimental sound person, and I was playing the keys. We made little loops, and we’d got through all of them on the various machines.  We ended up with about 25.

“Then I started to write around them and bring in some more instruments. Chris Taylor from a band called Grizzly Bear got involved, and he and I worked together for a week or so. Then there was a point when I wanted to bring in some live instrumentation. It just kind of grew, which was great.”

Did Beth have songs ready before she started working with Andrew, or did she respond to what he was doing in the studio?

“I basically started to write in the moment, simple chord progressions that I relate to,” she says. “I very naturally gravitate towards certain ideas more than others. That I was how I started the writing process really.”

Petals is a stand-out track from the album, a song that starts out moody and delicate before finishing in a wall of noise.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.