LONDON'S ANDREA PARKER WANTS TO RECORD IN A SUBMARINE AND MAKES MUSIC THAT REMINDS PEOPLE OF "LITTLE GREEN ALIENS". TOBY MANNING FOUND HER LURKING IN THE LONDON AQUARIUM. By TOBY MANNING The moon jellyfish circle endlessly. An almost translucent pinky-purple in color, they're like some acid-inspired psychedelic projection. Except they're real. And deadly. "They can kill a person in seconds" Andrea Parker giggles, eyes wide in the darkness of the London Aquarium, one of her favourite haunts. "It's that feeling of being underwater" she says: "It's really atmospheric, so I end up coming up with loads of ideas for tunes. And it's just so nice and peaceful." One of Andrea Parker's ambitions is to have a studio in a submarine ("just think of all those metallic underwater sounds!"). Another - more realisable - ambition is to provide the music for an aquarium. "The trouble is, I'd probably scare the kids" she says. She looks around mischievously: "not that that would be such a bad idea." Because today is not one of the Aquarium's nice and peaceful days, the place being litered with kids in unfettered holiday spirits, clustering around the jellyfish in a flurry of crisps, limbs and near-hysterical laughter ("that one looks like Jennifer!"). If Andrea Parker's ambitions are not so typically techno, neither, for that matter, is her music. On her debut solo album not only does the former Inky Blacknuss technoiste sing - her voice the astrally-blessed love-child of Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan and the Cocteau's Liz Fraser - but she also plays the cello. Rather beautifully. "I wanted to have a mad crossover of electro beats, 808s, analouge sounds, strings and vocals", she says in a trademark, laughterfuelled rush. "Strings are used in films either for fear or for sadness. It doesn't matter what else is happening on a track, as soon as the strings come in, it's like darkness! The cello in particular. The famous one is on Jaws. It's not what's happening on screen that makes you scared - it's just the sound of that cello." Appropriately enough we're now in the shark room, and as if called by name, a huge hungry-looking brooder gazes at Parker with hungry intent (young men have been known to behave in a curiously similar fashion). Parker warms to her theme. "Right here by the shark tank would be particularly nice for my music. Like on 'Rocking Chair' when I go 'behind you ...' A Child looks up, startled, and clutches his mother's hand a little tighter. Parker chuckles gleefully. Parker's taste for the creepy and the aquatic means that her collaboration with string-arranger Will Malone was inspired not by his work on 'Unfinished Sympathy' or her label boss's UNKLE album, but an obscure seventies horror film he's scored. "The first time I met him he said 'Andrea, your music reminds me of little green aliens running around in kilts' and I thought - you're the man for me to work with ..." If it seems like the strings-and-electronics thing has gone as far as it can (after all, even the Kahuna Brothers are doing it these days) then listen to Malone's staircase-to-the-cellar arrangements on a revamped 'Rocking Chair', or to Parker's current single 'The Unknown' (a title for a horror movie, if ever there was one). Parker's music isn't all a matter of charting the murkly dephts though. Her last single - so underground nobody heard it - 'Ballbreaker' - was a volatile, hammeringly-percussive stormer. "Yeah, well that's my idea of a dancefloor tune" she laughs, "but it's most people's idea of the moment to visit the bar." Even when her mouth is kept firmly shut and her cello's locked in its case, the sounds Parker makes are strikingly distinct. "I don't go out of my way to scare people, I just like using sounds that no one else does. Music really bores me when I know what's going to come next." To this end, Parker has used the sounds of saucepans, forks, ping-pong balls, sneezes, and tyres on motorway cats'-eyes on the album. Having witnessed her driving, this last is a scary prospect. Parker still DJs (As witnessed by her superbly eclectic DJ Kicks album) but when she's not torturing kitchen implements, Parker is as likely to be found at the Planetarium as a club. "maybe I've just been clubbing too long, but you can end up with an overload of music, and so you just need other interests. I've got a very oldfashioned telescope at home. If maths hadn't been such a weak point for me, I'm sure I'd have been an astronaut." Dance music has waited a long time for her to arrive. Originally Appeared in Jockey SlutDecember 1998/January 1999 issue. Article OCR'ed by Sebastian  Herrfurth.