Credit: Found On Internet

Tunng, Buck 65 and Serafina Steer are half way through their residency at the Trans Musicales festival in Brittany when Music Towers grabs a moment with them. Tunng’s founders Mike Lindsay (guitars/gadgets/vox) and Sam Genders (vox/guitars) represent the septet with Serafina and Rich Terfry aka Buck 65 huddled together, baffled and bamboozled by the media frenzy in which they find themselves.

The project was set up by Trans Musicales’ ever-enthusiastic head-honcho, Jean Louis Brossard, who invited Tunng to take part in a one week collaborative project with three days’ rehearsal time and 4 days of performances. Tunng promptly invited in two musicians seemingly at polar opposites but both in fact inspired by folk; Canadian hip-hop DJ/producer Buck 65 and the classical harpist/ singer-songwriter Serafina Steer.

Tunng’s Mike Lindsay explains how they came to invite Buck 65; “I met Buck 65 two years ago when we supported Rich in Scotland. We got talking and thought maybe one day it’d be nice to do something together. When Tunng got asked to do Trans Musicales and to collaborate with whoever we wanted, I immediately thought about phoning up Rich.”

“I am big fan of Tunng, no question,” adds Terfry. “I’ve bought all their albums; they’re part of my music collection.”

Serafina Steer explains why she was involved; “Me and Mike met when he came to a gig. A friend said he might like my stuff. He left his card. I did some playing on the last two Tunng albums and in exchange he helped me with my album.” As she suggests, their collaboration was already established.

Three days isn’t long to try to find ways to combine these three disparate elements. Sam Genders describes how they approached the challenge: “It happened pretty instinctively over the time, we tried a few things and stuck with them. We didn’t have a lot of time to try lots of ideas. We all had our favourite songs that we wanted to bring to the project.”

Steer picks up his thread; “We each brought a fairly clear catalogue of sounds.  I mean, it’s not likely I’m going to start free-styling over the songs! It’s more likely Buck will. We knew where to leave space for different inputs.”