Run Simian run

Electro duo hit the ground running with their new Nike + Sport Music track and album

30 September 2008 - Simian Mobile Disco have made a 30 minute bespoke mix called Run which has been made to inspire people to get fit.

It's for the Nike + Sport Music series - resulting from a deal with EMI Music Publishing UK - which launched in London yesterday (Monday 29 September).

And it's not just Simian Mobile Disco, Warp Records signed Jackson and dub-step pioneers Skream have also created 30 minute music tracks for the series.

Designed to fit a 30 minute warm up, running workout and warm down the pace and BPM matches the runner's journey.

We caught up with Simian Mobile Disco's Jas Shaw at a London gym to find out how he went about creating the mix.

He told 6 Music: "I thought I was going to actually go on a run, take my heart rate try and score the BPM off the speed of my run – unfortunately I’m a rubbish runner.

"I made it about four minutes down the street and was almost sick, so I thought, ‘scrap that straight away.’ Then I thought I’d go back to making a piece of music because that’s really what it’s about and after that it went swimmingly I think – runningly infact, yeah runningly."

And Jas admitted that making it was actually quite hard work.

Speaking about how he came up with the concept for Run, the musician explained: "Running should be a psychedelic thing, the idea of you running - and I guess its more to do with clubs if I’m honest – but you know there’s like breathing at the start and then I kinda made is so that the chords come out of the breathing and it all kind of delays out and goes a bit magic and then slowly works into the track."

The other half of Simian Mobile Disco, James Ford, has been busy recording The Last Shadow Puppets and Klaxons new material so Jas did most of the work on this particular project.

A huge undertaking which he was quite worried about at one stage: "I knew it was going to be interesting and difficult.

"Half an hour of music is a lot of music – a lot of albums are only just over half and hour so it’s a lot of music to make – but it’s so rare to be offered to do something like this. It’s such an unusual thing to be asked that I think it’s probably unlikely that we’ll ever be asked to do it again."

Austin Wilde from EMI helped set the project up and says Simian Mobile Disco were an inevitable choice of artists to get on board for this.

Wilde told 6 Music that they were the perfect band to take on a 30 minute opus of this kind: "They understand the roots of electronic music from a dance background and also from a craft work perspective as well so being able to work with something that is much much longer than a normal piece of music was a real requirement of ours for the producers and we sat down and discussed with Simian and they felt confident that they could deliver something to us." 

All tracks can be purchased for £3.99 through iTunes Music Store.

Or sport fanatics can go the whole hog and get a pair of Nike + running shoes and a Nike + iPod Sport Kit or Sensor – then they can track their progress from one workout to the next by hooking up an iPod up to a compatible cardio machine at the gym.

"I kinda made is so that the chords come out of the breathing and it all kind of delays out and goes a bit magic and then slowly works into the track."
Jas Shaw

New album

Run is their first material since 2007's Attack Decay Sustain Release and Jas says that they are making headway with the follow-up album.

Plus, they’ve teamed up with all sorts of artists for their next offering: "I’d say we’re over half way there and so far it’s shaping up really nicely, we’ve got some really cool guests. Beth from Gossip has done a track for us and Jamie Lidell has done an awesome track for us."

And Simian Mobile Disco have also done a track with Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals.

Also in Neon Neon, Rhys went down extremely well with the dance duo, as Jas said: "He is such a legend. He came in and said, ‘I heard you guys like Todd Rundgren’ – so immediately we were like this is gonna be great."

And upon Rhys brandishing a drone box Jas went on to say: "He just had this amazing, weird kind of Todd Rundgren style, freak out, psychedelic, throw everything at it, overproduced – it was just everything that we wanted and he was just such a dude.  Plus he's a Super Furry!"

He also revealed that they have other collaborators in the pipeline, which can’t be mentioned yet.

In terms of the sound of the next album, we should expect more lyrics and singing: "I think it’s gonna be quite a vocal album, we’re really enjoying getting vocals on stuff so I guess that naturally makes it a bit more pop but that’s ok, we’re not scared of pop."

As yet, none of their 2009 offering is named but Jas assured 6 Music that it should be ready for release in April.

Georgie Rogers