Bouncy Castle

A bouncy castle is the perfect entertainment for a children's birthday party. The kids pile in, jump around, and you get to sit there with a beer.

Well, there's a Bouncy Castle for adults, too. They put out albums like Home Studio Consortium and dabble in the whole studio ethos. Big toys for big kids exploring music and having a lovely time doing it.

"It's a coalition of people," explains main bouncer David Turin. "We do a lot of experimenting in the home production and home studio realm. Our priority isn't high-calibre sound, although one of us is a great engineer. The importance is in acting we're a band, but doing it the inverse of the old way. We pass tracks around and host sessions at each other's studios, then choose the tracks that have worked the best - which are usually the ones that have circulated the most."

"I like to have as many mandolin players as DJs, for example."

The music they release is an odd mix of things, from spoken word with electronics, to ‘folk' music with a similar naivete to, say, Sixties' hippies. In fact, calling this lot digi-hippies might be the best way of describing them. They just all happen to coalesce in their home studios around the globe.

"The Bouncy Castle ‘band' is a pretty talented one," explains Turin. "It's not as loose as it seems. I organize things, and it needs that. But I pieced the situation together as I met people, and chose people who were doing rad things, like Dorit Chrysler, a singer in New York. She has a band called Halcyon, who are into being very independent. She added a lot to this record. But for me, everything had to be on a folk level, more than an engineering level - I like to have as many mandolin players as DJs, for example."

So can an ethos like that work? Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and Home Studio Consortium is very tasty indeed. It's not one thing or another, but at the same time it's not self-consciously mixing genres. It's music of the people, for the people, by the people. Whic makes it folk music.

"The Incredible String Band, Pentangle, people like that, had a sense of nature magic, and I love that aesthetically," says Turin. "And I also like the serenity of late night electronic manipulation. Electronic folk music is what we've been called, but I'm not sure of it. I talked to Joe Boyd, who said there isn't such a thing as ‘folk music' - there's just music that I like and it seems to be called folk music. I think of folk music as something everybody likes, whether you're listening to metal or whatever, everybody feels pre-natal about folk music."

Before you think some of these people have spent far too long in California, it's worth knowing that Turin has a professional music background, having worked with a number of rock bands as a producer.

"I think folk music appeals to me as an idea, since it left its artists with some integrity, and somewhere to go when they got older. It was about playing rather than sounding good. I believed there was a new kind of folk music brewing that had something to do with electronic music and its tribalism. It's a morphing equation. Some of its coming from spoken word, some of it's coming from the freedom people have in their home studios, and I see it happening all around me. It's a sound that challenges - although Bouncy Castle sounds pretty normal to me."

Normal, of course, is all relative. But one of the most charming tracks on the record is Lisa Bentley, recorded, of all places, at Tansad's studio in Wigan. Are Tansad now part of the home studio conspiracy?

"I was with my wife Kate (Garner, former Haysi Fantaysee singer) in Manchester. I heard Lisa in a meat section outside Wigan. She was arguing with her brother. I approached her, and said I wanted to write a song with her. Kate knows John Kettle, and he had a studio in a factory where he was living, and we went there. I'd written this song with Lisa in her living room. I still don't know exactly who Tansads are, actually."

So there you have it, a record whose cast list goes from the moderately famous (Milla Jovovich, actress and singer) to the completely unknown. It's mad, but not bad or dangerous to know; in fact it's rather sweet. Bouncy, bouncy, bouncy. Go on, have fun....

This article first appeared in Folk Roots

Bouncy Castle

"I like to have as many mandolin players as DJs, for example."

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