The Beatroot Road is a boundary-pushing musical project that’s quite unique in style, format and culture. Releasing new material every six weeks, the undertaking is spearheaded by musicians Hazel Fairbairn and Mark Russell. Founded in October 2024, Beetroot Road will release their first album this Spring. In speaking of the work, they say: “This music is not rooted in any one period of time or in any one culture. It comes from the love of travelling and exploring, and on a life long musical conversation with artists from many cultures.” We spoke with Mark recently about the music, the project and the recent work.
Congrats on the new album. I read a description saying, “this project combines the wrong instruments and the wrong styles with the right intentions.” Can you elaborate on this?
Many thanks! This project has been cooking for a long, long time, so it’s great to be finally serving it up now. This question is the hardest one to answer. It really goes back to my own vintage musical upbringing. ‘The wrong instruments’, apart from the obvious eyebrow raising notion of playing dub or funk music on a bodhran and fiddle, rails against the fact that nearly all modern music styles rely on the same digitally corrected or replaced instrumental line up of drum kit, bass, guitar, – and keyboards. At a time when there could not be more opportunities for artistic expansion, there is a serious dip in creativity compared with the second half of the 20th century.
‘Keyboards’ play nearly all of the sounds and instruments that aren’t drums, bass and guitar, as they can now digitally produce the sounds of all other instruments accurately and cheaply, complete with pre recorded ‘expression’. They genuinely sound good. I mean they can play an entire orchestra convincingly if programmed with skill. To be fair, creativity in sound is certainly alive and kicking – particularly in EDM, but nearly all from the imaginative use of programmed keyboard ’samples’ or synthesis – not live instrumental performance. We could have programmed the violin and bodhran parts on a synthesizer, and made them both sound ‘perfect’ much much quicker than it took to play and record them imperfectly in a mid range studio on an old goatskin drum and a violin. There is still a strong argument that avoiding any cheaper, quicker and ‘better’ option is simply wrong, but logic and art have never been friends, so we pay no attention. We have decades old relationships with our instruments that you simply can’t get from a sample pack on a computer. I should say we absolutely do use modern editing and recording tools, but they are applied to performances, not programmed in.
The wrong style is a bigger criticism at the loss of genre development. To put it in perspective, from the time I first heard beat music on the radio at the age of five in 1964, to when I was 20 years old and playing in a touring band, the following genres came into existence: Soul, RnB, Motown, Surf, Ska, Funk, Psychedelia. All the rocks: Glam, Southern, Soft, Progressive, Folk, Country, and Art. Heavy Metal, Disco, Punk, New Wave, Reggae, Afrobeat, Salsa, Electronic, Hip-hop, and Rapping. That is more than one entirely new major genre for every year of me growing up (and I will have missed a bunch).
As we remember, it happened because every single act wanted to produce something unique and new. From rock and roll onwards, it was an ongoing rebellion against the entertainment industry’s false-smile, commercial, slick, polished, expensively-costumed cabaret performances with dancing girls – which was really aimed at Las Vegas grannies with cash. Sound familiar? – this is what now passes itself off as pop music for teenagers (with cash). I naively thought it would all carry on as it started out, so I never stopped ignoring the style restrictions that rule the world of commercial entertainment.
We’re not out to belittle career minded entertainers who will play and sing whatever pays the rent though – we’ve both done that too, but now we simply want to offer one of many possible alternatives to listeners where creativity is the boss, and not profitability. Music lovers have been short changed with the experience of an industry controlling their content too. For this musical adventure, we deliberately chose easily accessible beat music – because we find in a lot of other ‘experimental’ musics it’s hard to figure out where the tune starts. I always reckoned it was aimed at people who are cleverer than me.
These two points combined, we believe mean we have the right, or at least valid intentions in this musical journey.
Can you tell us how the Beat Root Road came together? How did you first decide to make music together?
Different answers as we started playing music together many years ago – busking together with fiddle and bodhran outside Cambridge University, then later in a touring EDM-Folk-Jazz-Reggae fusion band where I (Mark) played drum kit, and finally in a commercial trad Celtic band before we moved to BC. Hazel was also studying South Indian violin with Chandru in London UK, whose musical wisdom broadened both of our musical horizons as well.
This project was supposed to start when we moved from the UK to Canada in 2012, but life got in the way as it does, so it’s taken until now to reach the finishing stages – and it’s still evolving. The collective of The Beatroot Road is only possible through the rapidly expanding global network of Internet artists and musicians, who all have technology that can record and upload art and music to our studio in the forest in BC for mixing. This process absolutely demolishes all the previous barriers between artists in the past. I (Mark) email someone a track to sing over, they record themselves at home when they have a moment and send it back, I mix them in and the job is done with zero real expenses or hassle either side– just paying for time and skills. It’s absolutely fabulous.
How did you find your style and tone as a melding of your talents?
When we met I was making and playing House, Dub and Dance music and Hazel was in a Celtic folk group, now she is playing electronic violin and I am playing bodhran and learning congas, so we must have crossed in the middle at some time!
But it’s the same fusion of acoustic and electronic genres that we love. I am currently enthralled with the possibilities of new recording technology, and Hazel is experimenting with immersive surround audio just now – which is still in its early days. We both have a curiosity for the undiscovered country, which is one reason we call it a journey– you never know what’s around the next corner, but we’re excited to find out. I guess the honest answer is we are still developing a style, and probably will continue to experiment together until one of us falls off our perches.
What do you hope listeners will gain from the music?
Just a slightly different angle on the world to consider, new sounds to listen to, and maybe to discover that people won’t point and laugh if you like something that makes new connections. (Actually, I just heard of a genre called ‘post genre’ that may well apply to us, which is quite encouraging.)
Oh, and we really hope they enjoy it! – to the point where it helps them through their day in some way. Music by some artists makes me ecstatic, and cures the darkest blues and I’d love to think we could at least lift up someone’s day a little bit with some of ours. In an ideal world, some young musicians might get an idea that it might be more enriching to do something crazy and new in hard rock with their mate that plays the Shamisen, rather than try to totally nail the latest metal guitar amp simulation sound to make it correct to everyone else.
The music is not just a melding of sounds, but a melding of cultures as well. Why is this so important?
There seems to be a lot of loud talk about wall building between cultures going on here in the west particularly in the last decade or so. My understanding is that it is far, far too late for that – every single one of us except for the most remote hunter gatherers live a multi-cultural life whether we like it or not. Personally, I absolutely love it. Food, clothes, traditions, music, movies, you name it – there are global influences that absolutely enrich all of our lives. My formative childhood was in Khartoum, I grew up in Scotland, playing African and Jamaican music. My favourite food is called British Indian Restaurant cooking, as it is not British or Indian. Hazel grew up on a street in England where most of the residents were British South Asians. My Levi jeans were designed in Switzerland from French material by a Californian company and are made in China, Japan, the USA, Egypt and Bangladesh – and more. I could go on, and on. We are integrated now, so we all need to just suck it up and find better ways of making that a good thing. Anything else is like digging a ditch to stop the tide coming in. Much more fun to change into your bikini or budgie smugglers and rush into the surf if you ask me. The time of European Empires is over, so everyone has no option but to deal with the complicated mess that it has left us. The good news is there is nothing to be frightened about unless you make it. The Beatroot Road is just splashing about in the sea.
Vancouver plays a big role in the cultural melting pot that inspires your music. Why is Vancouver such a rich, vital part of who you are and the music you’re producing?
Same kind of answer as above – Vancouver is known as ’the world in a city’, and is the least racist place I’ve lived. There will always be people frightened of people they don’t understand, but here we all have to at least make an effort, as the population is roughly ⅓ European, ⅓ South Asian, and ⅓ East Asian, so there isn’t really a majority that can effectively gang up on a minority. However I can’t not mention that all of us who aren’t First Nations are here illegally as no treaties were every signed in BC, so no one here has any right or reason to engage in the usual European self righteous primate territorial stick-banging-on-the-ground of ‘we invaded first so it’s ours’. The only people entitled to be racist on the land I live on are the T’sleil Waututh nation, whose territories us immigrants simply stole. They seem to be making a better job of living with us than we are living with them, which is absolutely humbling. Attempts at reconciliation are being made, but they are pitifully small still. We are trying at least. Must try harder.
What is next for you? What are you working on now?
We are a bit behind on the album with another two tracks to release before finishing off the remaining five. We’re making an album as it’s an artistic format we both know and like that can offer a perspective wider than a track in a playlist. The idea is that it will be a journey through genres and countries. As I said, we aren’t going to make much money out of it, so we stopped worrying about what we are supposed to do and started doing the art we want to in the manner we want. I’d like to expand that further, and am always looking for new like minded musical nut bars to work with. We have the recording resources and internet connections to develop further.
If you could envision the success of Beetroot Road years from now, what does this look like?
I guess a larger network of collaborators and enough cash to get a really nice pair of speakers would make me happy, but we have most everything we need now. I’d like to broaden the palette of music lovers, and inspire other musicians to do the same, but in their own style. There is a genuine opportunity for honest art to simply leapfrog the world of digital smoke and mirrors that is controlling and replacing performers in the entertainment industry. That’s our idea of an ideal outcome. We love doing it already, so success is an ongoing journey if you look at it that way. We are too old and wise to believe the carrot in front is going to be tastier than the one we are enjoying now.
I have to say, the freedom of this project came from simply stopping looking for a living out of it. There isn’t going to be any money in creative music for anyone until either live work opportunities return and become better paid, or people go back to buying some kind of physical product. Because music used to be something you bought and valued, the music business had reserves in the past to invest in artists. These days, 1000 streams gets you up to $4 between everyone, including expenses. That’s not even funny. I mean there is no way in hell anyone would have heard of Kate Bush these days; she was paid a wage by EMI to develop her own art in her own style for several years before she recorded. She is a professional artist, now we just have paid entertainers with a self built following, and that’s a shame. But the good news is that those of us interested in creativity can access the same opportunities to create and share art that the commercial world has, without the need to compromise in any way to the industry’s ‘commercial pressures’ – which we have all always hated doing. They will go their own way – presumably further and further into AI versions of music – they are already halfway there without most people knowing it. And we will go ours, unpaid but happy, doing what we love to do….Can’t finish without applauding people like you at Splash Magazine who are spreading the word for non-mainstream art. It’s all out there and available, but gets lost in the millions of offerings of ‘normal’ music. Without you guys we are invisible to people who might enjoy something a bit different, so you have our heartfelt thanks for this interview today.
Official Website: www.thebeatrootroad.ca
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