Simon Kenny has dabbled in several genres of music over the years. As Si Schroeder, he has just released his debut album, Coping Mechanisms. To his mild shock, people actually seem to like it.
“I was pleasantly surprised at the reaction to the album,” he says, confessing that initially he thought people just wouldn’t get it. The press has labelled Coping Mechanisms an electronic record, something which Simon is bewildered by. “I don’t really consider this record to be an electronic record but the press for it has been exclusively discussing electronics. To my ears it sounds more organic than that. So the electronic thing is always a surprise.”
In the past, Simon was partial to making what he calls “straight-up electronic music” with Schroedersound, which could be a reason for the pigeonholing of the new record.
Calling this collection of music electronica does not do it justice. Simon has learned from experience that soul and emotion are very difficult to articulate with a computer :“It’s hard to make electronic music have any kind of a soul or expression. It’s very limiting and not that expressive.”
He learned that this was especially true of live shows and enlisted the help of a band to inject some brio into the performances of the new material because, let’s face it, a guy with a laptop just doesn’t exude that raw live energy. To quote Bobby Gillespie said, “If I wanted to watch some c**t sending emails, I’d go to an Internet café.” The omnipresent laptop is accompanied by a drummer and a bassist, making for an altogether more interesting live performance. “Some songs had to be changed, to be made a little more rock I guess, you have to grab people’s attention.”
He describes Coping Mechanisms as a “mish mash”. Cramming in all the different genres of music he listens to was a specific aim of Simon’s. Whether it was classical or traditional or jazz or blues, he wanted to represent a milieu of sounds. He is passionate about old music. Really, really old music. There is nothing he likes better than listening to archive recordings of traditional and classical music made before stereo was invented. Traditional “crockery throwing” dance music from the '20s and ‘30s set the mood for the creation of the record.
In the mid ‘90s, Simon was one half of MBV/Sonic Youth impersonating act Schroeder’s Cat, signed to LA label Emperor Norton. His experiences of being signed to the label in America make him appreciative of his current home, the independent Trust Me I’m A Thief records.
“I had very little communication with the label in America and I’m talking to the label here virtually everyday,” he enthuses.
Living and working in Dublin gave Simon a lot of inspiration for the songs on Coping Mechanisms.
“ The city is expanding beyond its means and there’s a lot of aggressiveness that has developed in Irish society. It’s just exhausting.”
Si likes to think that each song on his record could provide an antidote to the chaos of life in Ireland. “The record was a fantasy of mine that each tune would be a tablet that people could take to make them feel better.” A nice gesture to a society whose mental health Simon describes as “fragile at best”.
The rest of 2006 looks set to be a busy time for Si Schroeder. With plans to tour in Berlin in September and a trip Stateside pencilled in for winter, Coping Mechanisms will be providing musical therapy outside the boundaries of the constricting Irish scene about which it was written. Simon is optimistic about how it will be received abroad, owing to the fact that audiences outside Ireland tend to be a little more open minded about their musical tastes.
“London and Berlin are two cities where I think the music process is open minded. Here, music is put in different contexts and people outside of an elite feel a little threatened as they think it’s pretentious.” He will be feeling a little more adventurous in terms of experimentation for his shows abroad. “There are lots of things I’d like to try that might look a bit ridiculous here,” he says. Like what? I wonder momentarily. On second thoughts, it’s probably best I don’t know.