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Words: Kingsley Marshall
After a quiet couple of years at Ninja Tune subsidiary N-Tone Finian Greenhall, the producer behind the Fink moniker has really started making waves. The "Ever Since I Was A Kid" single, released earlier this year,provided a first taste of his debut album with sleepy eyed synths backing a sample which neatly captured the condition medically known as turntablism -"No matter how many records I get I?m never going to be satisfied" this is like being a junky.
In its eagerness to defy categorisation the album itself, 'Fresh Produce', twitches between genres in attempt to encompass all forms of music. Check the opening 'Tubb Journey' whose soft keys and post-d&b programming step from a dub intro before collapsing in a dusty heap of electro or the curiously titled 'Bristol Switch,' where opposing loops mash together in a sleepy eyed fusion. Kingsley Marshall caught up with the Finkster in North London.
Originally an acoustic guitarist playing in a variety of jazz funk bands in Bristol, Finn was swung to electronic music in the early nineties during a spell at University. "The first round of applications saw me being rejected from most of the colleges that I really wanted to go to and I ended up travelling for a year," he explains. "Eventually I got a place at Leeds and, being from the West Country went up there fully armed for three years of chilling out. I started chatting to a guy called Lee Jones in one of those first-week-of-college bonding sessions. We got on really well and did a few things together musically, using our student loans to buy some studio equipment."
Following some folk influenced tracks, the pair recorded an ambient breakbeat album which eventually surfaced on Kickin? Records in 1995. "That was a great experience," says Finn. "The record did quite well and the label were eager for us to record a follow up, but they wanted more of the same and by this point we had each grown increasingly into our own material. We spent the summer thinking about what we wanted to do, Ninja Tune had licensed one of our cuts and asked us to submit some demos and from there I ended up with them while Lee signed to Inertia as Hefner."
"Although they had signed me on the back of a proto-jungle type track, as the music moved on I lost interest in what I had been doing and was lucky in that they let me get on with what I wanted to make - which I guess is best described as instrumental R&B. Though initially they weren?t too enthused, when I delivered the first EP they loved it."
From here it was a short conceptual step to a full-length artist LP. "Ultimately Ninja sign artists to do albums, and I?d go as far as saying that they find releasing singles a pain! With this album I started out by approaching the tracks in the same way as I had with the singles, but it wasn?t long before the thoughts of an overall vibe kicked in and I started to focus on the bigger picture. It effectively raises the game of you as an artist when you have seventy four minutes to entertain someone."
Finn took around a year and a half to complete 'Fresh Produce.'
"I?m lucky that the label is so patient and their reaction to the album floored me," laughs Finn. "I am the freshest signing they have and was expecting quite a low key response but they have been really supportive. When I was putting it together I was eager to include and experiment with as many different styles as I could. When you make music it takes time to step away and understand what you?ve done so I wanted to see what would hit the spot most and for me the tracks which really stand out are the more r&b orientated, sparse production pieces and I hope that when people listen through they?ll be able to hear the music that I was into whilst growing up in Bristol. Its funny as on some of those tracks you can occasionally hear me doing stuff as I was mixing the tracks down, the desk was on its last legs and I literally had to use a hammer on the buttons to get them to work, I love that Scratch Perry principle, music being all about vibe and if you have that then everything else becomes irrelevant."
The final words go to the Fink, in describing the album he thinks for a minute before stating 'Sexier than your average trip hop.'
Fresh Produce' is available now on N-Tone.