We Can Create

Maps is the brainchild of one James Chapman, a Northampton-based bedroom experimentalist turned dream pop auteur who, if you believe the stories, wrote this - his Mercury Music Prize-nominated debut album - single-handedly in his room with little but a mini-mountain of instruments and a 16-track recorder.

Certainly, he's not without his inspirations: these eleven woozy, heavily embellished, echo-soaked songs recall past gems from the history of shoegazey guitar pop, from the opiated guitar fuzz of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless to the trippy orchestrals of Spiritualized's Ladies And Gentleman We Are Floating In Space.

When it came to recording We Can Create, Chapman chose to leave the seclusion of his bedsit studio and travelled out to Reykjavik, Iceland to work with veteran Bjork/Bonnie 'Prince' Billy producer Valgeir Sigurdsson. Importantly, though, this isn't an album that relies on studio muscle to the detriment of plain good ideas. Take the opening 'So Low, So High'. It surges forward on a feedback wave that could have washed in straight from My Bloody Valentine's "Soon", but soon, plunging violins and shimmering choral voices take it somewhere quite different, Chapman relating a tale of recent heartbreak in a hushed sing-whisper: 'Think I lost my girl/But I'll run it off/Spending most my time/Forgetting at all cost'. The beautiful 'Elouise', meanwhile, deals with similar matters of the heart, borne along on shimmering organ and a stuttering, baggy-tinged beat - but before long, an unexpected line-up of instruments loom out of the mix - violins, cellos, trombone, and even flugelhorn; indeed, a small Icelandic orchestra, submerged under the feedback like divers under ice.

There are moments where Maps tone down the songcraft and seem content to lose themselves in the beauty of droning synths and fuzzed-out textures - take the eerie

'It Will Find You', a gloomy black icicle of sound pitted with strange electronic whooshes and bleeps. But ultimately, it's the songs, and their heavy emotional content that makes We Can Create a keeper. --Louis Pattison

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"Marvellous hooks and infectious mantras make this terrific debut more resplendent with each listen" (4/5)

"Something really special"

"A near faultless debut" (8/10)

"A very impressive debut" (4/5)

"A work of bedazzling wonder"

MAPS (aka Northampton-born James Chapman) delivers his debut album, recently shortlisted as a NATIONWIDE MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE Album of the year.

A bedroom genius in the truest of senses, the other-worldly atmospherics of Maps are even more amazing for the fact he recorded the whole album without computers, preferring the painstaking process of splicing sounds together on his battered 16 track recorder in his Northamptonshire bedroom. The results were subsequently co-produced by Valgeir Sigurdsson (Bonnie `Prince' Billy, Bjork) and mixed by Ken Thomas (Sigur Ros, Hope Of The States).

A hugely ambitious, widescreen and epic record that recalls everything from the far away electronics of Basic Channel and Carl Craig, through the skewed songwriting of Postal Service, Flaming Lips and Grandaddy to the euphoric sound-scapes of Sigur Ros and My Bloody Valentine, We Can Create is a work of heart stopping extremes.

Maps started at the end. The end of the night, the end of the music. When the last beat was dropped and the needle finally slipped off the groove, a lost soul began drifting through empty Northampton streets in the vague direction of home. Alas, he never arrived. For it was during his euphoric twilight stumble that this particular ending gave way to a bright new beginning; it was here, in the half light of a joyously desolate Sunday morning, that Maps made itself exist. Spinning through Earth's orbit, he was the first audionaut of our generation. In reality, it was in a drowsy little village somewhere in the outer reaches of a nondescript midland satellite town that Maps came to exist. Floating through these most uninspiring of surroundings, Maps motherbrain James Chapman came upon a sound that was at once monumental and intimate; glorious and uplifting yet strangely melancholic. His debut album We Can Create - recorded in his tiny bedroom, then co-produced in an Icelandic moonbase with Valgeir Sigurdsson (Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Björk) and mixed by Ken Thomas (Sigur Rós, Hope of the States) - is a work of heart-stopping extremes. Its eleven tracks run the full length of the transmission spectrum, from euphoric space-rock to folksy, downtempo whisperings and clattering, thudding noise-pop.

It has, according to Chapman, "been a weird kind of a journey." He was lost from the very beginning, and spent his late teens spiralling aimlessly through indie-rock bands and baggy-revivalism. "Then I went to university and I hated it," he explains. "All I wanted to do was music and I thought it was never gonna happen and I got a bit depressed. I was ill for a bit and music gave me hope. There was time when I didn't do anything at all but lay in bed and listen to music." Holed-up in the self-made airlock of his bedroom, Chapman's turntables acted as a compass and helped guide him through his emotional turbulence. The day he finally found his bearings - the day Maps found its true north - was the day Chapman discovered electronic music. Soon, Aphex Twin and Two Lone Swordsmen began clashing with The Stone Roses and Spiritualized on Chapman's stereo, causing sparks to fly and starting a fire that rages within him to this day. (Chapman is honest about his record collection, which only spans as far back as 1989; his Year Zero. "I don't listen to old stuff," he explains. "I start in '89, with The Stone Roses. I just get more excited about the new stuff, the stuff no one's heard before.") Using songwriting as a form of therapy, Chapman began slavishly honing a new sound - a heavenly, otherworldly racket that expanded and unfurled until it filled every inch of his increasingly cramped home studio. Often he'd work right through the night, his delicate drone-rock seeming to flow more freely and smoothly in the twilight hours. Astonishingly, Chapman recorded We Can Create entirely without computers, preferring instead to work on a battered old 16-track recorder - his personal equivalent of the mixing desk at Lee Perry's Black Ark. Some of the songs came incredibly easily ("I just woke up singing Elouise," says Chapman, presumably explaining the 'Glory Verse' lyric: "These songs, they seem to write themselves"); others took weeks and months of sketching and repairing and re-recording. "It's like a little puzzle," says Chapman on his singular approach to songwriting. "You have to work it all out and fit all the pieces together." Often, the last piece would be the vocals. Frequently on We Can Create, Chapman contrasts sparse, seemingly simple lyrics with deeply complex, heavily layered instrumentation. In 'Don't Fear', a single phrase is repeated over and over until it takes the form of a mantra. "It's all I wanted to say," he explains. "'Don't fear the sun.' I didn't feel like saying anything else." When Chapman finally did emerge from his home studio to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, he brought with him a remarkable stockpile of new material. He announced his arrival in grand style with 'Start Something/To The Sky' (issued on his own Last Space Recordings imprint), a pair of towering shards of electro-psychedelia that drew comparisons ranging from the obvious (Granddaddy, The Postal Service) to the obscure (Simon & Garfunkel, The Byrds). Along with subsequent releases 'Lost My Soul/Sparks in the Snow' and 'Don't Fear', the EP sold out within weeks of going on sale. And so, in early 2006 Maps finally began transmitting, Chapman's new sound acting as beacon for lost souls and like-minds, his relevance was found in the scale and ambition of Spiritualized, the single-mindedness of My Bloody Valentine, the vibes and good times of the Chemical Brothers, the electronic exploration of Carl Craig and in the fazed out melodies of Mercury Rev. A perfect storm of critical acclaim followed. The Guardian attributed Chapman with writing "some of the sweetest, darkest, most heart-meltingly beautiful melodies you will ever hear." Time Out were equally effusive in his praise, adding: "(Chapman's) music gives the impression that he spends much of his time, like Spacemen 3, with his head in the clouds, viewing the world in soft-focus." 'Don't Fear' later polled at 26 in NME's top 50 singles of 2006. Soon, Chapman was swept into the orbit of legendary Icelandic producer Valgeir Sigurdsson, and together the pair set about transforming the bedroom sessions into Maps' debut album. Ensconced in Sigurdsson's studio in the outskirts of Reykjavik, Chapman once again found himself isolated with music his only form of escape. Over the following months, Iceland's moonrock terrain providing the perfect backdrop for Maps' swirling electronica, We Can Create gradually metamorphosed from a collection of demos recorded on a tatty 16-track recorder into the first truly epic album of 2007. "When I was recording in my bedroom, I always had a vision to make it, you know, as big as it could be," says Chapman. "And I think me and Valgier did that." And so in 2007 the world finds Maps poised on the edge, the edge of who knows what exactly, but certainly, if his already growing army of plaudits are to be believed, it's the beginning of something very glorious indeed. From the pages of the nations music press to the likes of Radio 1's Colin Murray who made Don't Fear one his singles of '06, Maps has be roundly tipped as one of the most innovative and forward thinking artists to emerge for sometime. "It will find you," he sings optimistically on the song of the same name. If you're reading this, it already has.