Hungry for looped loopiness? Dinner is served…

Foodsoon might be Alex MacSween’s latest project, but its seeds were planted long ago. MacSween, whose other musical endeavours have included Bionic and Detention (to pick a couple engagements from opposite ends of the rock/experimental spectrum), was urged to hook up with friend/avant-guitarist Bernard Falaise and experimental player Fabrizio Gilardino, but you know how it is, “a couple of years before even getting together,” then for every reason (but none of them particularly good) “having one jam and then eight months go by before the next one.” The point is, the trio is not just happening on a casual level, but is playing shows with recorded material in their pockets. After finally making it happen, Foodsoon, according to MacSween, is as loud and free-falling as he’d hoped. Structured around the novel idea of replicating the tape loop madness of defunct British band This Heat, the band revolves around, let’s say, structured happenstance within loose and breakable rock parameters. “Gilardino is particularly inspired by this primitive sampler that would use banks of cassette decks, all triggered with a homemade keyboard. The beauty of it was that you could have tapes playing on all these decks with left and right channels… and could tape the band live while they were playing and play back stuff,” says MacSween. With some variation on this theme and the addition of Falaise’s guitar concept and MacSween pounding away whichever way he sees fit (“There’s a trance aspect in it for me… kinda in the tradition of Dale Crover [Melvins]”) the outcome is, well… “Too many words are coming into my head to describe it… But I can tell you that what I get out of playing in this band is the same thrill I get out playing in a rock band,” he says. “Except it has the room to stretch like an improv group.”