Freeform Five
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Freeform Five
You could never plan something like Freeform Five. It’s a fluke, a happy accident, an affair of chances. Freeform Five defies mathematical law. For a start, there are really only four of them; lynchpin producer, multi-instrumentalist and chief songwriter Anu Pillai and vocalists Cabba, Tamara Barnett-Herrin and Nick Decosemo. And the music they make together is the sum of four individual subsets of random circumstances, past phases and meandering paths up to this point. So you do the math.
To those in the know, Freeform Five has long been a name to revere, synonymous for a series of classic, much sought after vinyl only releases; ‘Perspex Sex’, ‘Electromagnetic EP’ and the original version of ‘Eeeeaaooww’ to name but three, as well as a name amongst the premier league of dance remixers, a mysterious moniker associated with wildly enriched reworkings of hits like N*E*R*D’s “Lapdance”, X-press 2’s “Lazy” and even Elton John’s “Are You Ready For Love”. But in truth it has always been so much more than just that. To do what Freeform Five has always done - bring familiar tunes alive with raw musicality - requires a whole lot more than just a bloke with a Mac. It takes a deep pool of talented friends and acquaintances that you can confidently call upon, if only for the love of it.
Perhaps more than anything else, it was the much admired and oft-compiled re-fashioning of Isolee’s “Beau Mot Plage” from minimal techno gem into Brazilian-acid-funk-Key-of-Life house belter that alerted many to the fact that Freeform Five was no ordinary production outfit. Issued on Chicago house hero Derrick Carter’s Classic label – “Beau Mot Plage” featured no less than 11 musicians, old friends and associates every one, most significantly, the vocal stylings of moonlighting journalist Nick Decosemo, the second primary number in Freeform Five’s fluid configuration.
Pals for years, they met in the sixth form at school in Newcastle. Anu, originally from Kerala, Southern India, lived in the posh end of Toon, while Nick hailed from a depressed mining town further north “in Billy Elliot country” – but found common ground in music, forging a friendship over the three Ps; Prince, P-Funk and, perversely, the Pixies. “Anu did help form my music tastes, when I arrived from the backwaters I thought Erasure was the pinnacle of progressive cool,” admits Nick.
He couldn’t have asked for a better guide. Anu had been schooling himself in music since the age of 6. Not just soaking up the sounds of his parents’ classical and Indian records, but picking up instruments too. By the age of 12 he had his first synthesizer and was fully literate in Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”, Soulsonic Force’s “Planet Rock” and Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F” - “even the difficult two-handed syncopated bit!” But it was his youthful investigation of rap records that opened his eyes not only to the world of jazz and rare grooves, but to the super-heavy dopeness that can be conjured with just a cheap sampler and a stack of records.
At the age of 15 Anu had the full set – synthesizer, sampler and sequencer - and might have gone about making music all on his own if being in a band hadn’t sounded like much more fun. So Anu and Nick formed their first band. Playing a timely stew of Funkadelic and Stone Roses covers, the boys where still only 16 when they found themselves supporting Desmond Decker.
But then just as it was getting good, it was all over. Nick headed off to college in Scotland while Anu stayed in Newcastle to do an art foundation and put his record collection to good use with his first DJ residency - Friday nights at the (then) Riverside club. By chance, up in Dundee, Nick and two of his new friends, Gary and Roy, were about to attempt something similar with a night called The Spaceship. “We we’re mixing up house, guitar music, hip hop and whatever else, in a small venue with an incredible, loyal crowd. Because we were in Dundee no one took any notice.” Nevertheless it served all three of them well, Gary is now a bonafide rock star with Snow Patrol and Roy is now better known to millions as bootleg mash-up pioneer The Freelance Hellraiser.
By the time Spaceship was taking off, Anu had also left the Toon, heading for Cambridge “to DJ and do a degree on the side”. And so it was that for a while both men temporarily allowed their own music to fall by the wayside in favour of “playing other peoples records and having a good time”.
At the same time another Cambridge student, Tamara, was having similar extra-curricular experiences, discovering the joys of dancing around like a loon to house music. Although born in Britain Tamara had spent much of her childhood and adolescence in America, and although she did get involved in the music scene at High School, laying down vocals for a friend’s psych rock band, dance music was a fresh and exotic discovery when she returned to England to study. Despite diving headlong into the scene, throwing shapes to some of Anu’s infamous house party sets, the two didn’t really get to know each other until after they left. “After Cambridge I was searching. I wanted to continue performance but I didn’t want to go back to dance training. It was too late for that anyway...and then I bumped into Anu and the rest is history.”
At this stage Anu was working in music full time – on commercial soundtrack work by day and his own house productions and remixes by night. But was already brewing up a long-term plan to scale down both in favour of founding a conduit for his own song-writing skills and pop sensibilities. Keeping a constant lookout for new vocal talent was his way of investing in his future. “I had an idea for a song, ‘Break Me’, when Nick dropped into the studio. I got him to sing the chorus as a dummy vocal track to work with, but on playback it sounded great so I thought ‘Fuck it! I’m keeping it.’”
The final piece of the jigsaw was another chance meeting, another post-acid house musical vagrant and another exotic background. “I was born in London,” Cabba begins. “But we moved to Sierra Leone when I was six, then to Australia when I was eight. I had been in a hip hop band in Melbourne before I came over here. I was going mad in Australia so I had to leave and I ended up in London, I was seeking out the electronic scene here. I met Anu at a party. He helped me straighten my life out. I was looking for myself and I bumped into him on the way.” Almost as soon as he heard Cabba’s voice on his tape, the idea struck him. “I though ‘This would work all together’. It made sense with the range of music to have three different voices for it. It’s been a kind of haphazard process, but at the end, it all just fell into place.”
Freeform Five, the band, are confident that what they’ve made stands up as unique document of who they are and where they’ve all come from. As well as co-writing a song for the album with his old friend Gary from Snow Patrol, Nick was even vindicated in his provincial childhood music taste and got to record with his hero Vince Clark of Depeche Mode and Erasure. Meanwhile Anu himself was able to fulfil a personal dream, flying out to the States to work on the final touches to the album with funk and hip hop mixing legend and Timberland’s go-to-man, Jimmy Douglass.
The production as would be expected is peerless in its innovation and rich texture, but the real revelation is the songwriting. For an outfit previously known mostly for revising and augmenting other people’s songs, it comes as an almighty hallelujah that Freeform Five’s secret weapon is an arsenal of catchy choruses, melodies and hooks… It must be all very satisfying for Anu to see their vision come to fruition like this.
“It works. For me, the potential was always to try and make a Sign ‘o’ the Times, I want to make a Sign ‘o’ the Time, but with our own sound.” Their debut album is a musical journey through eclecticism without ever sounding muddled or methodically planned for effect.
From the blitzing digital funk of ‘Electromagnetic’ to the stripped down soultronica of ‘Slow’ or ‘Easy’, the dancehall swing of the new (smash-hit-in-the-making) version of ‘Eeeeaaooww’ featuring Bounty Killer, to the sex pop of ‘Losing My Control and the dysfunctional rock of ‘Strangest Things’, Freeform Five have made an album that is intrinsically their own with something special for each and everyone of us.
Once again Freeform Five defy mathematical law and leave the formulae to the kids.
Freeform Five
You could never plan something like Freeform Five. It’s a fluke, a happy accident, an affair of chances. Freeform Five defies mathematical law. For a start, there are really only four of them; lynchpin producer, multi-instrumentalist and chief songwriter Anu Pillai and vocalists Cabba, Tamara Barnett-Herrin and Nick Decosemo. And the music they make together is the sum of four individual subsets of random circumstances, past phases and meandering paths up to this point. So you do the math.
To those in the know, Freeform Five has long been a name to revere, synonymous for a series of classic, much sought after vinyl only releases; ‘Perspex Sex’, ‘Electromagnetic EP’ and the original version of ‘Eeeeaaooww’ to name but three, as well as a name amongst the premier league of dance remixers, a mysterious moniker associated with wildly enriched reworkings of hits like N*E*R*D’s “Lapdance”, X-press 2’s “Lazy” and even Elton John’s “Are You Ready For Love”. But in truth it has always been so much more than just that. To do what Freeform Five has always done - bring familiar tunes alive with raw musicality - requires a whole lot more than just a bloke with a Mac. It takes a deep pool of talented friends and acquaintances that you can confidently call upon, if only for the love of it.
Perhaps more than anything else, it was the much admired and oft-compiled re-fashioning of Isolee’s “Beau Mot Plage” from minimal techno gem into Brazilian-acid-funk-Key-of-Life house belter that alerted many to the fact that Freeform Five was no ordinary production outfit. Issued on Chicago house hero Derrick Carter’s Classic label – “Beau Mot Plage” featured no less than 11 musicians, old friends and associates every one, most significantly, the vocal stylings of moonlighting journalist Nick Decosemo, the second primary number in Freeform Five’s fluid configuration.
Pals for years, they met in the sixth form at school in Newcastle. Anu, originally from Kerala, Southern India, lived in the posh end of Toon, while Nick hailed from a depressed mining town further north “in Billy Elliot country” – but found common ground in music, forging a friendship over the three Ps; Prince, P-Funk and, perversely, the Pixies. “Anu did help form my music tastes, when I arrived from the backwaters I thought Erasure was the pinnacle of progressive cool,” admits Nick.
He couldn’t have asked for a better guide. Anu had been schooling himself in music since the age of 6. Not just soaking up the sounds of his parents’ classical and Indian records, but picking up instruments too. By the age of 12 he had his first synthesizer and was fully literate in Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”, Soulsonic Force’s “Planet Rock” and Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F” - “even the difficult two-handed syncopated bit!” But it was his youthful investigation of rap records that opened his eyes not only to the world of jazz and rare grooves, but to the super-heavy dopeness that can be conjured with just a cheap sampler and a stack of records.
At the age of 15 Anu had the full set – synthesizer, sampler and sequencer - and might have gone about making music all on his own if being in a band hadn’t sounded like much more fun. So Anu and Nick formed their first band. Playing a timely stew of Funkadelic and Stone Roses covers, the boys where still only 16 when they found themselves supporting Desmond Decker.
But then just as it was getting good, it was all over. Nick headed off to college in Scotland while Anu stayed in Newcastle to do an art foundation and put his record collection to good use with his first DJ residency - Friday nights at the (then) Riverside club. By chance, up in Dundee, Nick and two of his new friends, Gary and Roy, were about to attempt something similar with a night called The Spaceship. “We we’re mixing up house, guitar music, hip hop and whatever else, in a small venue with an incredible, loyal crowd. Because we were in Dundee no one took any notice.” Nevertheless it served all three of them well, Gary is now a bonafide rock star with Snow Patrol and Roy is now better known to millions as bootleg mash-up pioneer The Freelance Hellraiser.
By the time Spaceship was taking off, Anu had also left the Toon, heading for Cambridge “to DJ and do a degree on the side”. And so it was that for a while both men temporarily allowed their own music to fall by the wayside in favour of “playing other peoples records and having a good time”.
At the same time another Cambridge student, Tamara, was having similar extra-curricular experiences, discovering the joys of dancing around like a loon to house music. Although born in Britain Tamara had spent much of her childhood and adolescence in America, and although she did get involved in the music scene at High School, laying down vocals for a friend’s psych rock band, dance music was a fresh and exotic discovery when she returned to England to study. Despite diving headlong into the scene, throwing shapes to some of Anu’s infamous house party sets, the two didn’t really get to know each other until after they left. “After Cambridge I was searching. I wanted to continue performance but I didn’t want to go back to dance training. It was too late for that anyway...and then I bumped into Anu and the rest is history.”
At this stage Anu was working in music full time – on commercial soundtrack work by day and his own house productions and remixes by night. But was already brewing up a long-term plan to scale down both in favour of founding a conduit for his own song-writing skills and pop sensibilities. Keeping a constant lookout for new vocal talent was his way of investing in his future. “I had an idea for a song, ‘Break Me’, when Nick dropped into the studio. I got him to sing the chorus as a dummy vocal track to work with, but on playback it sounded great so I thought ‘Fuck it! I’m keeping it.’”
The final piece of the jigsaw was another chance meeting, another post-acid house musical vagrant and another exotic background. “I was born in London,” Cabba begins. “But we moved to Sierra Leone when I was six, then to Australia when I was eight. I had been in a hip hop band in Melbourne before I came over here. I was going mad in Australia so I had to leave and I ended up in London, I was seeking out the electronic scene here. I met Anu at a party. He helped me straighten my life out. I was looking for myself and I bumped into him on the way.” Almost as soon as he heard Cabba’s voice on his tape, the idea struck him. “I though ‘This would work all together’. It made sense with the range of music to have three different voices for it. It’s been a kind of haphazard process, but at the end, it all just fell into place.”
Freeform Five, the band, are confident that what they’ve made stands up as unique document of who they are and where they’ve all come from. As well as co-writing a song for the album with his old friend Gary from Snow Patrol, Nick was even vindicated in his provincial childhood music taste and got to record with his hero Vince Clark of Depeche Mode and Erasure. Meanwhile Anu himself was able to fulfil a personal dream, flying out to the States to work on the final touches to the album with funk and hip hop mixing legend and Timberland’s go-to-man, Jimmy Douglass.
The production as would be expected is peerless in its innovation and rich texture, but the real revelation is the songwriting. For an outfit previously known mostly for revising and augmenting other people’s songs, it comes as an almighty hallelujah that Freeform Five’s secret weapon is an arsenal of catchy choruses, melodies and hooks… It must be all very satisfying for Anu to see their vision come to fruition like this.
“It works. For me, the potential was always to try and make a Sign ‘o’ the Times, I want to make a Sign ‘o’ the Time, but with our own sound.” Their debut album is a musical journey through eclecticism without ever sounding muddled or methodically planned for effect.
From the blitzing digital funk of ‘Electromagnetic’ to the stripped down soultronica of ‘Slow’ or ‘Easy’, the dancehall swing of the new (smash-hit-in-the-making) version of ‘Eeeeaaooww’ featuring Bounty Killer, to the sex pop of ‘Losing My Control and the dysfunctional rock of ‘Strangest Things’, Freeform Five have made an album that is intrinsically their own with something special for each and everyone of us.
Once again Freeform Five defy mathematical law and leave the formulae to the kids.
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