Lemon Jelly reaches sonic perfection

  XL Recordings Electronica group Lemon Jelly is releasing
its soothing debut album, "Lemonjelly.ky," a collection of E.P.s
released over the past three years.

By Antero Garcia
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Electronica group Lemon Jelly has found a unique niche in the
music world: The duo has infants hooked.

“I have a lot of friends who have got little babies who
say by the end of our song “˜Nervous Tension’ they fall
asleep,” group member Fred Deakin said in a phone interview
from his studio in London. “It’s better than both
whisky and valium. Old people like it too, like my grandparents. We
want to focus on really, really old people. The over 70 and the
under 5 (crowds) are the key markets.”

Lemon Jelly, now releasing its debut album, has been taking its
time to make music, and this can be seen in its recent debut
“Lemonjelly.ky,” which is actually a collection of
three limited E.P.s produced over the past three years.

“We want to leave everything until it’s
right,” fellow Lemon Jelly member Nick Franglen said in an
interview from his cellular phone in Sussex. “We like to take
our time until we’re really comfortable with everything.
Unless it’s absolutely right, we don’t want people to
see or hear it. It’s got to be perfect, or else it’s
not worth doing.”

Unfortunately, Franglen had to learn this fact the hard way.
Prior to being a musician, Franglen was a landscape gardener and
was responsible for causing an accident involving former Queen
vocalist Freddie Mercury.

“I’d been working in this garden for about six
months building a Venetian canal; it was really over the
top,” he said. “There was supposed to be this bridge
over the top of the canal, and we really weren’t very good at
what we did. Freddie was standing on the bridge when it collapsed.
He didn’t fall in the canal, which was good. He could have
gotten his trousers wet or something which would have been an
absolute disaster. Heads would have rolled!”

Having learned from his mistake, Franglen has since thrown away
any gardening aspirations he had and has worked with a myriad of
other famous musicians. Over the past couple of years, he has
played keyboard and programmed drum tracks for such artists as
Primal Scream, Björk, The Spice Girls, Blur and even some
tracks for the forthcoming album by Pulp.

Franglen has taken his experiences of working with an assortment
of groups and incorporated them into his input in Lemon
Jelly’s music.

“The Spice Girls and Björk are two different groups
altogether, and Primal Scream is very different from Blur,”
he said. “And all of these people may be brilliant at what
they do, but they are all still very different. It’s been the
diversity that I really liked. One of the things I like about Lemon
Jelly is it doesn’t feel like we’re standing still at
any time. If it ever feels like we’re going down the same
path, we’ll just leave it.”

While Franglen has been collaborating with the top names in the
music world, Deakin has also kept himself busy.

“My background is the club culture because I’ve been
DJing for a long, long time in a whole lot of places,” he
said. “Also, I have a huge record collection, about 20,000
records.”

Despite the fact the Deakin is known for his DJing ability and
has performed in clubs all over the U.K., including the Ministry of
Sound, he is also a very capable artist. In fact, he designed all
of the artwork for the “Lemonjelly.ky” CD sleeves.

“We kind of try and create something appropriate for the
music,” he said. “We try to make something special. I
wanted a package that reflected the amount of time we put into the
music, something special and

personal.”

Deakin is also responsible for all of the art and animation on
Lemon Jelly’s Web site, www.lemonjelly.ky, which was
registered in the Cayman Islands in order to get the fitting
Internet suffix. The site includes sound samples, screen savers and
animation.

“It’s kind of something we want to pursue, the whole
Internet thing, hopefully with videos and live stuff,” Deakin
said. “We’re just two guys, we’re not very
interesting to look at. It’s kind of nice to create something
just for the fact of creating it.”

This idea of creating just for the sake of creating is actually
how Lemon Jelly makes its music.

“We very rarely decide on anything,” Franglen said.
“We just try things out. We don’t really prejudice a
track or have a firm idea of what is going to happen in a track. We
used to have this rule that if something makes us smile, then it
has to stay in. If there is a grin, then something is
working.”

A place where that certain something can be found is on track
three of “Lemonjelly.ky,” a track narrated by a random
record sample which claims to be searching for a Patagonian sea
elephant. However, it’s not the trumpeting of an elephant
that will confront listeners on “A Tune for Jack.”
Instead it is the indecipherable mumbling of a young toddler, whose
looped diatribe seems to fit perfectly in sync with the track.

As for its future plans, Lemon Jelly has its work cut out.

“Make another album, have something to eat and then paint
something bright pink and put it up on the top of a hill,”
Deakin said.

Franglen confirmed Deakin’s plans about making a new album
““ but he never mentioned anything about bright pink, or a
mountain.

“We’re working on a new record now,” he said.
“The KY compilation is quite old for us, so we’re
writing a new record now, and our plan for the moment is to tour
for that one. What we really want to do is to make it a proper
event so that the senses are bombarded by Jelly-ness.”

Ultimately, a Lemon Jelly touring experience is not necessarily
about mosh pits and raging crowds as much it is about taking in the
music.

“I remember reading some interview with a fan at a new
metal jock-rock concert,” Deakin said. “He said
it’s not as much about the music as it is about who can rock
the hardest. I’m not really sure that is the way forward.
That’s not our goal. We rock occasionally, but mostly we
wobble.”

MUSIC: Lemon Jelly’s album
“Lemonjelly.ky” is available from XL Recordings.