The Brag

Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs
Asking For Trouble
By Alasdair Duncan

From Pet Shop Boys through to Hot Chip, there’s a tradition of English musicians who blend cutting-edge electro pop with a certain sense of literate melancholy. Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, whose debut album Trouble came out earlier this year, is the newest entry in that particular canon. The album is full of scrappy melodies and heartsick lyrics about domestic disturbances and lovers who got away, grafted onto immaculate minimalistic techno and house. I ask Orlando Higginbottom, the producer behind the project, if he sees himself as part of a lineage with these particular artists, though he seems abashed and a little unsure. “I don’t know, I haven’t really thought about it like that,” he says. “I certainly feel like those bands gave me the confidence to make the kind of music I want to make, to start singing and writing the songs. It’s definitely very important to me that they existed and were able to be successful.”

The young producer hails from Oxford, where his father conducts a choir at the university – unsurprisingly, this means that he had a rigid training in classical technique. “Classical music was my first love,” he tells me. “That’s all I listened to growing up. I played piano and sang in a choir.” While the continuity between classical and club music isn’t necessarily obvious, Higginbottom insists that a lot of the music he makes now is the product of this early training, and his solid education in classical music. “I think Bach is my favourite composer of all time,” he says. “In electronic music or pop music or whatever you want to call it, we’re using a lot of the same ideas, the same theories, the same harmonic ideas as those composers. We’ve had hundreds of years to explore their music, but it sticks around for a reason. I aspire to create something like that,” he continues. “We should look up to classical music more.”

Higginbottom began listening to club music in his early teens, and from here, an infatuation blossomed pretty quickly. “That was the time I really started actively chasing electronic music,” he explains. “Around that age, I started getting into a bit of stuff from the Ninja Tune label – some Kruder & Dorfmeister, DJ Shadow, stuff like that. I quite like that, and I was interested in it, but then I heard jungle music and I was completely hooked.” He started splitting his time, spending half of it playing piano, and the other playing club records. His early electronic experiments found their way to Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard, who was impressed enough to sign his first three records to his label, Greco Roman, and to act as something of a mentor to Higginbottom. “I really admire Goddard, and it was really great to be able to hear his opinions of my early tracks. I’m on a different label now, but I’m still incredibly grateful for those early experiences.”
A lot of electronic musicians say that their songs start via experimenting with gear: a synth might do something unexpected, and that becomes the basis for a track. It certainly works this way for Higginbottom. The album’s stuttering beats and shimmering, ever-shifting synth loops are the result of an enduring love of studio gear. “I love that moment when things go wrong and you make something entirely new out of it,” he says. “I’ve bought new pieces of equipment specifically to get that moment.” Not knowing what sound you’re going to get, he says, can be really fun. “There are times I’ve switched on every bit of gear in the studio, hit record and then just run around playing all of it. After that, I can go back and listen to an hour of me just fiddling around, and often I can find some really exciting things coming out of that.”

The gear itself doesn’t matter, Higginbottom is quick to stress. You can use the most expensive equipment out there, or the cheapest; there are interesting discoveries to be made with both. “On the album, there’s no one bit of gear that I relied on,” he says. “Everything comes through pretty evenly. If someone was starting up as a producer and wanted to know if there was any particular keyboard or bit of software to buy, I’d tell them just to buy something, whatever, and not worry about it. I don’t believe that any one bit of gear is essential to making a good sound; you just have to find your own way. If you’re going to make good music, it will find a way out.”

Moving to London is a rite of passage for many young musicians, but it’s never been that attractive to Higginbottom, who prefers to remain in his native Oxford. “London seems to be this epicentre of everything that’s cool, and I don’t like that,” he says. “I live an hour away, and I try consciously to steer clear of what’s happening and what the new trends are. I guess everyone’s just kind of into house music at the moment, that’s what’s happening, but I go out of my way not to get too caught up in that.” Oxford, he insists, has a thriving scene in its own right, from which he can get everything he needs. “There are loads of bands, loads of DJs, and everyone just kind of has their head down and is working,” he says. “Nobody’s competitive, and everyone is really supportive. There’s some great music here – I mean, Foals are based here. Everyone feels free to do their thing.”
While reviews for Trouble have been overwhelmingly positive, critics are divided on whether Higginbottom is a singer-songwriter who uses the medium of club music, or the other way around. “I think that people have a real difficulty when they come across something that doesn’t fall evenly into one camp,” he says, when asked what he makes of the division. “I mean, why do I have to be either a singer-songwriter or someone that makes club music? I like both, and I make both, so that’s what it is.” He clearly doesn’t have a lot of time for hype or being cool – in fact his stage name, and his signature dinosaur outfit, came about as a direct result of this. “The first thing I came up with was the name Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, and when I had that I decided, well, obviously I’ve got to dress up. The name, like the costume, is all about just having fun. It’s about letting go of the idea of underground music and street cred and being cool and all that crap. I wanted to already be not cool, and just have fun with it and relax.”

I ask Higginbottom if he feels bound to being a dinosaur forever, or if at some point his musical menagerie might expand to include other types of creatures? “For now, this is my project,” he says, “but I’d like to make music until I drop, so I’m sure I’ll do other things one day!”

What: Trouble is out now
With: A secret special guest and Future Classic DJs
Where: Oxford Art Factory
When: Thursday October 4 (sold out)