After going to see the brilliant Pecker Shorts this month theAbsurd decided to fire some questions over to the Pecker guys to find out a bit more about them...

Pecker are all ex-art school students and we're drawn to films that are visually exciting. We also share a love of the surreal and the absurd, so our film choices tend to reflect this. We had previously written pieces for 'Un Chien Andalou' and 'Cabinet of Dr Caligari' and wanted to work on something more contemporary. Nick is an illustrator and has a particular interest in graphic novels, which is what drew us to 'Fear(s) of the Dark'. From that starting point we thought it might be interesting to work on a set of short films and animations. We are all fans of David Lynch and 'The Grandmother' was about the right length and has a number of short animation sequences. The 'Cowboys' animations by Phil Mulloy appealed because they offered a sharp contrast to the slick animation of 'Fear(s) of the Dark' in terms of style and we all loved their scratchy, hand drawn quality along with the satirical subject matter.

We all contribute to the writing, but there's no set formula or approach. Many of the pieces for 'Cowboys' come from songs that we perform in a traditional band set up and thought suited the films. We set up a DVD player and TV, surrounded ourselves with a pile of acoustic instruments (guitars, cajon, harmonicas, melodica, various bits of percussion) and played along to each film, re-working the songs to make them fit. Our approach to 'Fear(s) of the Dark' and 'The Grandmother' was quite different: for the silent films we'd done before we aimed to work in a similar way to the old cinema pianists / organists, reacting to the action on screen and providing an underlying mood for each scene. For 'Fear(s)' Nick wrote a score for the whole piece on the keyboard and Jon and I added parts - the guitar piece for the stuck record scene is one of Jon's tunes that has yet to be worked into a song and I provided a voice (grunt) for the hero. I took a lead on 'The Grandmother', writing the main themes and melodies on piano and then put together backing loops of beats and bits of synth on Garageband. Nick came up with the surf guitar chord sequences that accompany the scenes of the boy alone in his room and Jon produced all of the atmospheric noises and effects.

We'd like to take the soundtracks to a few festivals next year, so we're going to record extracts and produce a demo. It would be nice to play some of the festivals with a good reputation for films, so we might try The Green Man, Glastonbury and Latitude. Other than that, we will be recording a lot of new stuff over the next couple of months and aim to put together an album. Nick and I are both vinyl nuts, so we're looking into producing a 'proper' record, which is quite exciting.