Manual (Odense, Denmark)

Manual aka Jonas Munk Jensen is a producer from Odense, Denmark. After more than seven years of playing guitar & piano he just started to combine electronic with 'analog' instruments. Manual doesn´t improvise very much (you can guess it from the name!), all his songs are composed without using a computer. Manual uses old-school synthesizers and sometimes samples in combination with guitars and pianos to create well structured songs and soundscape-like compositions. You can read more about Manual at AMG and it's possible to hear a track in RealAudio format at M.DOS.

Jonas Munk writes:

I’m into a lot of different music styles; ambient, avant-rock, new romantic, post-rock, pop, electronica, kraut and a bunch of other styles, but I haven’t got a clue of where to situate the music of the late Talk Talk. One could sit down and analyze Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock and come up with a list of 20 – 30 genres that could be found in their music, but one would not even be close to describe the essence of their music. It’s like their music is much more than the sum of the parts involved – way more! When listening to Spirit of Eden it seems to me that every single guitar feedback-squeak coming from Hollis’ amp is pure magic easily flying above the rest of the music and every single viola and clarinet note makes perfect sense even though it sounds random.

For me that’s exactly one of the most fascinating aspects of their music; the way the song structures and timbres sounds improvised and random but yet so disturbingly complex and structured. It takes true soul to construct songs with many parts and layers of layers of sound and yet make it sound like the most obvious thing in the world. And Talk Talk does sound as the most obvious thing in the world – it’s like nature; it’s just there and it somehow makes perfect sense but you won’t even try to figure out the complexity of it. Even when Talk Talk sounds the simplest (for instance on after the flood) there still is something I can’t quite put my finger on – something that just makes it special and magic. In Talk Talk’s music there is never too much neither too little. Every little squeak and every single note fills out a purpose.

I never paid much attention to the lyrics – for me it’s just something that’s there melting perfectly with the music. Instead of analyzing every single word I like to keep some sort of distance to what is being told – to keep the magic there somehow.

One of my all time favourite Talk Talk moments is the opening track for Laughing Stock, ”Myrrhman”: the track opens gently with amp hiss, then moving into a very slow ”verse” part with viola and acoustic bass. For some minutes the track glides from tone to tone, not really going anywhere, but never standing still enough for the listener to find something to hold on to. Then suddenly, almost 4 minutes into the track, the structures breaks down completely and the most beautiful string part replaces it. It comes completely out of nowhere and it gets under my skin every time. It is so amazing and I have never heard anything like it before. It’s perfect because the song seems to be heading in every other direction than to suddenly change into a release like that.

It’s general for Talk Talk to create this sort of tension in the music.  Specially on Spirit of Eden where almost every song seems to shift between some sort of tension and release. The album opens in the most perfect way possible: my favourite part of the album is perhaps the first two minutes of ”The Rainbow”, where a very minimalist string chord  lays the bottom for layers of odd sounds. I still don’t know what to make of it because it is like it balances between some sort of peace of mind and a disturbing tension. For me it’s just very intense.

The way Talk Talk have influenced my own musical work is not as much directly as it is an approach to the music. To me Talk Talk is a symbol of how much the structure of the songs means and how important tension in music is; tension between the complex and the simple and between the random and the organized. I tend to construct my songs out of many parts and use many layers of different timbres but I always try to make it sound like the most obvious thing in the world.