The Bristol Germ (Chapter III: 'The Nation's Eyes Turn!!')

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CHAPTER III THE NATION’S EYES TURN!!

DRAW CLOSE, dear friends…

LISTEN (Amazed and Inspired) To the PREVIOUSLY-UNTOLD STORY of a Vibrant, Eclectic group of ARTISTIC GENIUSES,

Bound together as a COMMUNITY of

Friends and Equals in the city of BRISTOL.

THIS ILLUSTRATED MUSIC MAGAZINE Documents and Promotes this exciting new moment in underground and avant-garde music, driven by a community of artists creating worldbeating records and shows, united by a fierce DIY ethic.

This document is comprised of

THE STORY SO FAR…

IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWS with the

(ALASTAIR SHUTTLEWORTH: CREATOR & EDITOR)

Cast of Characters driving this epoch,

…is complicated, being comprised of many different projects and voices over the course of the past decade. As it evades a clear ‘narrative’, this story will be told through a series of ever-intertwining interviews with the characters involved.

ORIGINAL ARTWORK by the city’s best illustrators and FOUR MANIFESTOS outlining iniquities

Chapter I: The Noble Crusade Begins!! presented the dramatic confluence of events which opened this story. An enigmatic circle of avant-gardists collectivized to form Young Echo, whose entrepreneurship and wild sonic experiments ushered in a new spirit of extremity. Compounded by Howling Owl Records’ maverick DIY heroics (which galvanized a new wave of emerging artists), this began a wild and unique adventure in contemporary music and art, populated by a vast family of sonic pioneers, ambitious labels and inventive promoters. However, due to the inadequacies and iniquities of the national music press, this story would go broadly unpublicised – its vital music withheld from the masses. This publication began an effort to spread this story, with some success.

Chapter II: New Ground’s Acquired!! continued these efforts, presenting a much wider cast of artists including Kayla Painter, Simon Holiday, Timedance, Wenonoah, EP/64, Bad Tracking and John Bence. As its platform grew, it would also champion new artists such as E B U and SCALPING, bringing both to perform in London for the first time.

Today, this story is finally moving into the spotlight. IDLES and Giant Swan (who in Ch.I were beginning their ascent) are now fully-fledged international breakthroughs, closing the decade together at Alexandra Palace. A new clutch of left-field Bristol artists following in their footsteps with their own meteoric rises (SCALPING etc.). A body of national coverage has been extended to this community of late, and I have had the honour of writing its first overview in a national newspaper (The Guardian). Our nation’s journalists, labels, radio stations and artists are starting to recognize this city’s renewed avant-garde impulse. The figures in Chapter III can be best contextualized as follows: Following the release of Ch.II, the city felt the emergence of a shadowy experimental collective called Avon Terror Corps – a prime-mover in which would be vital left-field dub label Bokeh Versions. This entity would release two of 2019’s landmark debuts: political noise project HARRGA’s Heroiques Animaux De La Misere, and industrial trap duo Kinlaw & Franco Franco’s Mezze Umani Mezzi Machine. Its forbearers Young Echo would experience their own vital changes: founding member Vessel released their masterpiece Queen of Golden Dogs to national acclaim, the enigmatic Manonmars finally released his first material (with O$VMV$M), and a new member was welcomed in experimental dub producer Sunun. The city also saw the arrival of vital new guitar projects Wych Elm and Pet Shimmers, emerging from the solo project of Oliver Wilde (Ch.I). Inspired by earlier promoters, Spinny Nights nurtured a new influx of left-field talent, from angular no-wave band Norman to industrial avant-pop artist Lynks Afrikka.

In this publication, (almost) every interview is done by email so that the interviewees’ crucially different voices remain as unmediated by my own as possible. There are no page numbers, to discourage readers from flipping to/over interviews; they are all connected, and must all be read. Artists are included if I think the public should know about them, regardless of whether they care about the publicity. While this instalment reflects progress in this struggle, the struggle does continue against its constant enemies: cowardice, nostalgia, complacency... Spread this vital story, and enjoy reading.

which influenced this magazine.

ENJOY, ABSORB, BE ENLIGHTENED.

LIST OF IMMORTALS (INDEX) Manonmars +O$VMV$M HARRGA Kinlaw & Franco Franco (Manifesto 9: Independent Press) Lynks Afrikka Spinny Nights Sunun (Manifesto 10: Popular Taste) Bokeh Versions Pet Shimmers (Manifesto 11: Collectivisation) Wych Elm Norman Vessel (Manifesto 12: Ideological Art)

MANONMARS & O$VMV$M

ENIGMATIC YOUNG ECHO RAPPER & AMBIENT PROJECT

Despite years amongst the ranks of sonic pioneers Young Echo (Ch.I), Manonmars has remained an enigmatic figure in Bristol’s music, committing hardly anything to record: the “only echo you ain’t heard before”, he declares himself on ‘Milk’. The rapper finally released his self- titled debut LP last year, with music produced by O$VMV$M: the low-tempo ambient project of Young Echo’s Neek (Sam Barrett) and DJ Jabu (Amos Childs). How did you become involved in Young Echo as Manonmars, and why have you avoided the spotlight for so long? How did you find the experience of finally releasing your first substantial piece of work?

Manonmars: I went to school with Amos and Alex from Jabu, who brought me to the early Young Echo radio shows. Between everyone’s different approaches to music it just never seemed important to look at it from a competitive angle, so finding a spotlight was never my inspiration. Releasing my collaboration with O$VMV$M was important for me because it felt like something that came together organically from the start.

Manonmars’ work is characterised by his deadpan, molasses-slow delivery. Combined with O$VMV$M’s hazy instrumentals, it gave the songs on this album a pensive, almost private quality. What influenced your vocal style, and what do you consider the effects to be?

M: It’s difficult for me to put it in a nutshell.

I think about how the words already rhyme, they just have to make enough sense to me within how they can be perceived by others.

The desired effect is finding something that people can relate to in one way or another. I like when people tell me they understand my references, especially when I’m aware they may never have heard my music before at a live show for example. You might not know me, but it’s my goal not to let that get between your ability to take what you can from the music.

The LP is comprised of very short tracks, only one of which cracks the 3-minute mark.

While this would seem unusual, O$VMV$M’s excellent trilogy of self-titled EPs (the third of which appeared a few months before Manonmars), were similarly comprised of short ambient pieces which I’ve seen termed “mood capsules”. What do you all consider the effects of this brevity, and what bearing does it have your lyrics?

M: People have increasingly short attention spans but 30 minutes can still take you through your morning off or your drive to or from work. Anything longer than that starts to push the limits of where and when people can find the time to listen.

Members: Manonmars, Neek, DJ Jabu Illustration: Manonmars

O$VMV$M’s work revolves around reverbdrenched beats and woozy, often forlornsounding ambient loops. How did this project come about, and how do you see it as relating to your work separately as Neek and DJ Jabu?

Neek: O$VMV$M just started through us linking up to experiment with some ideas. I had a lot of weird samples which I'd collected over the years but had never fit in with the music I was doing with Kahn, so they just were just building up on a USB. Amos said to come round and we just messed about with what I had collected initially. Going in with no set genre or idea really freed us up from having to worry about the purpose or usefulness of the tracks we were creating. We are still just collaging sounds and ideas together as we go, in a similar way to how we do a lot of the Young Echo posters and our own record artwork. It still relates to our separate outputs as Neek and Jabu in a way as it is heavily influenced by R'n'B, Rap, Grime, Hardcore and Dub, either through the choice of samples or the sequencing style of each piece.

While O$VMV$M’s EP trilogy explores many aesthetics, disassembling pop on tracks such as ‘4mor’ and ‘The Rain’, there is a recurring interest in creeping darkness which feels consolidated on Manonmars: the brooding opening instrumental ‘Blood’, the gorgeous melancholy of ‘Jessica’ etc. How did you approach making the music for this album, and what kind of atmosphere were you trying to create?

DJ JABU: It just kind of happened pretty naturally over a period of years, we would send things to Jack and he’d decide what he liked so a lot of the atmosphere was shaped by him.

Also Sam was watching and sampling a lot of B-movie horror things around then, so that definitely shaped the mood too. I’ve always been obsessed with the start of horror films before anything bad happens – there’s this weird energy that you can’t put your finger on and you know things are going to go wrong, but there’s so much space for sweetness and this weird comforting feeling about it. I think that’s probably something that’s spilled into most of the music I do to be honest.

Manonmars also produces intricate geometric paintings – a reference to these is made on ‘Milk’. I recently read a wonderful article by John Doran about artists who work across different media and disciplines to inform their various projects and evade writers’ block. Do you see your lyrics as relating your visual artwork at all?

M: Quite directly. I don’t approach writing with a finalised intention of what I want to achieve, so it’s like starting a blank canvas. I use grids essentially the same way as rhyme schemes, to ritualise the process.

Manonmars’ explanation of the term ‘Mumble Rap’ to an interviewer from Hyponik was my first time ever seeing the term used in a non-derogatory context, focusing on the merits of rhythm and naturalistic delivery over a rigid adherence to rhyme.

However, the album Manonmars is rich in meticulous, razor-sharp rhymes which seem to benefit from their slow pace. As a rapper, how do you see yourself as relating stylistically to the current landscape of hip-hop, and what would you like to see more of?

M: I feel comfortably absent. I usually feel more creative when I’m competing with myself or with my own achievements at least.

The album features four instrumental pieces, two of which open and close the LP. This willingness to let the instrumentals sit without lyrics is also indicated on ‘Red Dot, Green Light’ from the Young Echo album, on which Manonmars stops rapping a full minute before the end of the track. What do you think the effect is of giving the music these moments of prominence?

M: I think it leaves room for people to process what they hear in the lyrics. As well as what they don’t. A friend told me how his girlfriend liked that song when he played it to her even though she’s not into rap. Maybe she wouldn’t have liked it if I rapped over the whole song.

Across the record, Manonmars presents a self-view as an unrecognised/ underappreciated talent in a genre saturated with uninteresting music. You lament inattentive listeners on ‘Vacate’, denigrate inferior rappers and flashy displays of wealth on ‘Cherry’, and on ‘Luv’ contrast America’s absurdly lucrative industry with your unglamorous reality of getting coaches back and forth to Bristol; the album’s closing lyric is “from here on out, the rest is mundane”. While this paints a fairly bleak picture of hip-hop, on ‘Doll’ you present a hopeful view of this music as transcending borders. What did you hope to present lyrically on this album, and what do you think it says about you as an artist?

M: It’s about juxtaposition. I don’t depend solely on my past or present for inspiration but because of this I’m as likely to be inspired by my imagination and in turn I cannot trust you as the listener, not to confuse what I imagine with what I’ve been through.

How do you envisage this project as developing from here? Now that Manonmars has begun to release substantial work, how do you think this will affect the identity you’ve cultivated over the years as something of an enigma?

M: It’s hard for me to say.

HARRGA

POLITICAL CONCEPT PROJECT / NOISE & SPOKEN-WORD

Members: Dali De Saint Paul, Miguel Prado Illustration: Sophia Jowett

Harrga’s debut LP Heroiques Animaux de la Misère is a lacerating, harrowing concept album exploring the current migration crisis. Pairing the searing electronic compositions of Miguel Prado (Nzumbe) with multilingual spoken-word from Dali De Saint Paul, the album offers an urgent exploration of inhumanity, desolation and courage. What is the concept behind Harrga, and how have you tried to articulate it through this first album?

Dali De Saint Paul: There’s no concept behind HARRGA, only 2 individuals crossing paths at the right moment in their lives; expressing their desire for each other by playing music together.

Harrga has no aim but music – there is no political agenda. We are both extremely sensitive, and the music produced at this time is political for sure as a result, but this was never the aim; it arises not consciously, but because of our sensitivity towards the human condition.

I am deeply angry and will continue to be, as dehumanization is the ultimate goal of capitalism. Nothing new under the sun, you’ll say, as some people were always considered “things” by other people, but I can’t just accept people being treated like that. I need to say something about it – that’s my nature. This is something running deep inside me, as lava, I’m made of it! It is the most human music we can make in this digital time: visceral and cerebral!

You’ve explained that ‘Harraga’ is a colloquial term in Darija used to describe North African asylum seekers’ practice of burning their ID papers after crossing borders, while ‘Harrga’ itself means ‘a burn’ (in the sense of a wound). What was the inspiration for naming your project after this powerful word, and what do you consider its effect to be in the context of your music?

DSP: I choose this word as a clear reference to what life (and music) is – in experiencing it, you’ll be left with wounds! All these experiences you’ll like or hate, but they leave imprints that will make you. Therefore “Harrga” has a larger meaning, and “Harragas” could be a more or less distant reference.

Dali delivers her lyrics in a combination of French, English and the Arabic dialect Darija. What do you consider the effect of combining these different languages?

DSP: Exposing people to diversity is a real concern. I hope we can open channels, as it’s good for your own sake to accept alterity. Welcoming alterity is an opportunity to fertilise your own soil, where hopefully new fruit will grow and enrich your culture. Exposing people to alterity is a necessary experiment in life: being lost with no landmarks is a promise of discovery about yourself. Knowledge of rejection and exclusion is something to keep close to you in these times of selfishness, as a reminder to not to feel entitled in any way, if you don’t want to take part in the supremacy.

The title ‘Heroic Animals of Misery’ might be seen to set up the album’s complex presentation of migrants, pointing to both their popular dehumanisation (Dali opens ‘Artaud’ by screaming “Primitive!”) and the album’s aim of paying tribute to their struggle against unendurable conditions; you’ve noted how these are also competing narratives in mainstream news coverage. As a satirical project, how do you see Harrga as relating to the landscape of satire and political discourse around the migration crisis?

DSP: We are not migrants left facing death on the Mediterranean Sea; we are both privileged migrants with the right papers to settle freely in a lot of countries. However, I am well aware of the awkwardness of this situation: I grew up in France, the daughter of immigrants who were welcomed to rebuild the country and give their arms to developing it but are still not fully recognised as citizens. I am born and bred in a country where some people still ask twice or three times where I am really from, denying what I identify as my origins. I grew up on a continent we can consider a “land of plenty”, where people (and governments) are ready to apply moral values to only certain types of human beings. Western countries are considered open, but they are only selfish and live in fear of losing their advantage over others.

I do not agree with this attitude – I am not afraid of sharing what we have here, and I do not feel threatened by the way other people are living. I am not frightened by other human beings. I reject this far-right ideology! Racism is the most sterile attitude towards alterity. This is not an answer; it is a dead-end that condemns humanity! And it is now so well spread, in my country and all around the world, that I just want to say: “I disagree!”. Our music is, for me, a shout against this! When I shout Antonin Artaud’s words “Primitive...”, it is to remind people that talking about civilised versus uncivilised behaviour is questionable. The people who are tagged as animals are people, not zombies and not heroes – they are just trying to save their lives. I deliberately choose to project myself in a living nightmare; therefore, you can say I pay tribute to migrants, but in no way do I speak for them.

Miguel Prado: There is also something interesting here in relation to the notion of identity.

There is a ‘categorical fetishism’ which, in spite of remarkable academic critique, persists in dealing with the categories ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ as if they merely exist, out there, as empty vessels into which people can be placed in some neutral ordering process. The title presents a sardonic attitude omnipresent in the moral superiority of modern Social Democracy. There is an alarming tendency to mythologize refugees and migrants as eminently noble and heroic because of their pain and misery. The idea that suffering purifies you and makes you a noble person is just a spurious romanticisation of the fact that it makes you do anything you need to do to survive.

Narratives surrounding the refugee crisis are constructed. They do not simply emerge in a world ‘outside’, with facts ripe for the picking.

Conversely, narratives are based on specific epistemic and ideological presumptions. The images of the refugee crisis are predominantly ones of despair, where lives are imminently threatened. These images are often contraposed with positive stories of overcoming misery.

The hypocrisy of Europeans in their perception of migrants is such, that climbing rows of 20-foot-high barbed-wire fences (designed to penetrate flesh and sever nerves) surrounding Ceuta and Melilla is treated as a World War Z-like swarming, while the case of Mamoudou Gassama is understood as “Humble superhero: meet France's real-life SpiderThe Man” (Euronews). dehumanisation of the refugee is always a process of our own dehumanisation. It is important to remember that what makes human beings alike is the fact that - as JeanFrançois Lyotard said: “every human being carries within him the figure of the other. To banish the stranger is to banish the community, and you banish yourself from the community”

I’ve heard the album described as a ‘sonic Guernica’; rather than trying to represent or speak for migrants (as members of the Western middle classes), you are trying to present a picture of horror and inhumanity.

How do the elements of Dali’s vocals and Miguel’s compositions work towards this, and how would you like to imagine people reacting?

DSP: This record is not meant to please or to be played every day for sure, and it is a hardship to listen to it. Our music is an experiment related to the human condition and what is left of it in extreme situations. So, with this album, I’m making a hypothesis: what if it were me there, having to flee from war and hunger? From here, what my vocals are presenting is the struggle and the courage I could throw myself in this intensity created

by Miguel’s composition, but this has no other reality than the one produced during the performance. We wish to create emotions, feelings – you will deal with interpreting them.

That’s why it’s art, not politics.

As a stable project continuing indefinitely, Harrga has grown alongside EP/64 (Ch. II) – an ‘ephemeral project’ led by Dali which is now fast-approaching its final performances.

How has the ephemerality and unfixed nature of this other project influenced your approach to Harrga?

DSP: Yes, EP/64 has reached 56, so the end is approaching and it’ll be good! EP/64 is completely open to free-form improvisation, as the only thing is to pursue the exhilarating liberation created by the energy of music, in a full communion with the audience. Harrga is totally the opposite: lyrics and music are written, and our set is under control. The freedom belongs to the intensity I can experience performing as this “disciplined” Dali Miguel has helped me discover: knowing what I will be singing/ shouting/ talking about and performing it to produce a certain effect that we want.

Opening track ‘Melilla’ features field recordings from the country of the same name, which I understand is often used by asylum seekers as a passageway into Europe.

What are these recordings of, and what is their significance to the album?

MP: They are shouts breaking the early morning silence in the city of Melilla, one of Spain’s two enclaves in North Africa: “Boza!

Boza!”. “Boza” is a word meaning “victory” in the West African language Bambara. “Boza” is also the word used when migrants from subSaharan countries manage to cross the militarily secured European border. I would not consider them field recordings, but a sort of noise concrète.

Moor Mother has become a supporter of the project since you performed together at Howling Owl’s final NY:NN festival, and features on the album’s closing track ‘À Vif’ – a favour Dali returned in featuring on Moor Mother’s album opener. What was working with her like, and what do you think she brought to ‘À Vif’?

DSP: She is one of the greatest artists of our time, and a very approachable person. As women, I think we share anger against unfairness and oppression. We are certainly plenty, but there are not a lot of people talking clearly about it (rather than trying to please the audience to sell more wax). I am really honoured to appear on her last album, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, which is a masterpiece. At NY:NN, she was really interested in our music and genuinely wanted to hear more from us, so we exchanged music. Miguel had composed this music before on his own, she liked it and sent us these verses. Don’t ask me how, but I’ve associated his music to her verses as a deambulatory poem about the precarity of human life, with her words being those of the priestess of modern times to people on exile.

I wrote lyrics with a very persistant verse (attributed to) Virgil in my head: In girum imus nocte ecce et consumimur igni. “We are going in the night and the fire is burning us”.

MP: I really like that Dali has raised this point because I think encapsulates very well our attitude to performing music. This particular sentence is called "the devil's verse"; it goes beyond its possible interpretation as a metaphor of living endlessly consumed in desires, to become a cathartic experience of its comical and grotesque exhaustion. It is also the title of Guy Debord's last film (1978), which I adore. The movie is a scathing denunciation of the ever-increasing moral and material degradation of modern capitalist society.

Alongside his work as Nzumbe, Miguel has spent many years working on his project ‘Evacuation of the Voice’, consolidated in his study ‘Geotraumatic Evacuation of the Voice’.

This essay suggests that performatively ‘evacuating’ the voice can help us gain an outsider’s perspective of our subjectivity, endowing experimental vocal delivery with psychological, neurobiological and even political significance. I also know Dali to use a lot of non-verbal delivery as ringleader of experimental project EP/64.

While Dali’s delivery with Harrga is crucially verbal, how far is the unusual, challenging variety in vocal delivery in Harrga influenced by either or both of your separate projects?

MP: I am fond of the Evacuation of the Voice project. To some extent it resonates with the way in which Dali sings. Think about the geological strata and how this shows evidence of a complex of interconnected, continuous regional catastrophes.

This goes from the differences in fossil forms encountered in successive stratigraphic levels to the formation of our vocal tract, and continues through the speech technologies for human/machine communication. If organic constructions such as our body are to some extent a concatenation of accidents in the process of evolution, we can use our vocal apparatus as an opening for an evacuation which echoes this compendium of traumatic cuts: organic and terrestrial.

Dali, performing live, operates like this.

While I am a very static performer in HARRGA, paying attention to the sonic concretization of certain conceptual aspects, Dali brings all her own power in an organic ecstasy in which every bone and piece of flesh dazes everything around her and her energy.

You are affiliates of The Avon Terror Corps - a ‘gang label’ comprised of various Bristol experimental projects on which your album was released.

What attitudes do you feel you share with those other artists, and how do you see Harrga as relating to Bristol’s current experimental/DIY scene?

MP: We live a moment of incredible precariousness in the music industry.

Underground musicians don’t get paid. People only buy absurd vinyl recapitalism releases.

Platform vampirizes subcultures at a speed that we are not able to reach… it's much more profitable to spend your time as an artist collaborating on a fashion campaign rather than making music.

Music criticism disappears or degenerates into lifestyle reporting dominated by PR agencies. We should organize ourselves more in terms of a criminal organization, at least at the level of its collective problem-solving. Collective ideals enrich people that are integrated into strong, cohesive groups, which continue to protect their bonds.

DSP: We are them, they are us, and we are all together essentially because we are left alone. Who wants to invest in experimental music nowadays?

Who wants to produce, promote, sell or buy it? Since patrons are not supportive of the experimental scene, we must help each other. As artists engaged on socially precarious paths, we must take care of each other. Unfortunately, we can’t make a living from our art, but at least we can support each other encouraging creation. Since no politicians in this country (surely do not count on the Tories) will defend a real status for artists – as it exists in certain European countries like “intermittent du spectacle” in France – we’ll have to help each other. As artists we’re contributing to society, exploring different paths. For the consumerist society we live in, artists are “unproductive” and these societies will not provide the financial resources which are necessary to create. These people contribute to my life on a daily basis: they are feeding me with their art and it makes my heart beat. I love going out to gigs, seeing people performing, sharing emotions brought on stage. Music is the air I breathe, so they provide me with oxygen. I am thankful to this crew and a lot of people of Bristol. BIG UP ATC! Long Live Avon!

In our interview for The Quietus, Miguel claimed that “The sound of these songs walks a dangerously thin line between emphatic sonification of terror and the opportunities for regarding critically (at a distance, through the artistic medium) human suffering taking place throughout the world”. What do you consider ‘dangerous’ about walking this line?

MP: The complexity arises out of the fact that as members of the privileged middle classes of the West, we, of course, often wield an arbitrary authority. The hegemonic manipulation of conceptual power in the “world of art” translates easily into the hegemonic manipulation of real power in the world as such.

Again, this reminds me a famous story about Picasso’s Guernica. He painted it in June 1937 at his home in Paris, in response to the bombing by Nazi Germany of the Basque village from which the work would take its name. Guernica itself was a small rural city of only 5,000 inhabitants that declared nonbelligerence in the conflict. On 26 April 1937 at 4:30pm, the busiest hour of the market day in Guernica, the Nazis tested their new air force (the Luftwaffe) in an unprovoked attack. For three hours, the German planes poured down a continuous rain of bombs and gunfire on the town and surrounding countryside. One-third of Guernica’s 5,000 inhabitants were killed or wounded, and fires engulfed the city and burned for days. The painting was first shown at the world fair in Paris, supposedly as a showcase for scientific progress; the deaths of hundreds of civilians in a small Spanish town proved technology’s darker side. Years later in the 1940s, in an occupied Paris, a Gestapo officer who had barged his way into Picasso’s apartment pointed at a photo of the mural asking: 'Did you do that?'. 'No,' Picasso replied, 'you did'.

On its initial release, the artwork for ‘La Mer’ shows images of Bangladeshi migrants using DIY floatation belts to cross the river Padma. These are taken from an online guide to crossing borders illegally, published by Italian designer Marta Monge the previous year. How far do you think its nearcoincidence with your formation indicates a constructive reaction from the artistic community to the migrant crisis? What do you consider the importance of artists as reacting to current political events?

MP: I found The Every Migrant's Guide to Illegal Border Crossings by Marta Monge randomly on one media website. I read ‘product designer’ followed by ‘survivalist culture’; I thought it was so obnoxious that I had to read it. The photo that you mention is very powerful. Honestly, I do not follow her work. In this regard I like Goodiepal & Pals, a refugee organisation disguised as a contemporary Tek-Rock-Band.

DSP: The refugee crisis is one the latest ordeals for humanity and we’re all watching it. But this is not the end, this is the beginning: we have to be ready for more people trying to escape deprivation, wars, suffering – and they are right to do so! Artists have to enlighten dark corners. Again, Guernica could re-appear here, as a light bearer stands in the middle of the war scene. We can explore different ways, say we’re not afraid, expressing feelings, emotions, ideas, concepts and we’re talking about the world we live in.

There is no ethereal artist and nothing human is alien to me, as the Roman playwright Terence said.

The opening epitaph from this book, incidentally, is a Ray Bradbury quote claiming, “we need to be really bothered once in a while”, in order to understand and appreciate the gravity of important issues. How far do you think Harrga’s confrontational nature seeks to engage people in a constructive way?

DSP: Dehumanization again seems at work here, denying the right to feel and share emotions in society as decency rules. When I perform with Miguel, I’m following Antonin Artaud and his Theatre of Cruelty: in creating art, we don’t need to be polite, nice or pleasant. What we’re talking about is ugly, and presents the selfishness of our kind.

MP: There is a fast-growing trend of Hippie/New Age attitudes around spiritual individualism and eclecticism that I find particularly dangerous. How to obviate conflict, when we live surrounded by structural social conflict?

Given how closely bound the concepts behind Harrga and this album seem to be, what other narratives or events do you expect Harrga might come to deal with on future music? How do you envisage the project developing from here?

DSP: As I’ve said, Harrga’s meaning extends beyond its relation to Harragas. Being humans is our concern. If you listen to the music we like (including bands like Etant Donnés) you will see that we could also be keen to explore intimacy, but the next step will come with time and desire. We need to get together and share ideas, so we’ll create naturally. However, on 13th February 2020 we will perform

Héroïques Animaux de La Misère with Moor Mother at the Exchange Bristol; we are thrilled to be sharing the bill with her. The rest will follow as it will... friendship binds us, not business.

KINLAW & & FRANCO KINLAW FRANCOFRANCO FRANCO FURNISS QUARTET FURNISS QUARTET

CYBORG INDUSTRIAL TRAP

Members: Hamish Trevis, Franco Franco CYBORG INDUSTRIAL TRAP Illustration: Hamish Trevis, Franco Franco

In October 2018, NOODS Radio (Ch. II) released a video of Italian ‘Cyborg MC’ Franco Franco freestyling over a frenetic, unusual beat from Joane Skyler’s Serious Time LP. Celebrated experimental producer Kinlaw, who had released Serious Time on his Ceramics label two years earlier, can be seen grinning ecstatically at the performance. Since then, Kinlaw & Franco Franco have worked together to produce imaginative, bludgeoning industrial trap.

Rising to attention with gigs alongside SCALPING (Ch. II) and Jesuits (Ch. I), this was committed to record in your staggering debut LP Mezzi Umani Mezze Macchine. How did this project begin?

Kinlaw (Hamish Trevis): Blazer Sound System were visiting from New York, and they had played in Cosies on a Saturday I think. Miles Opland (Bokeh Versions) had reported walking down Stokes Croft and seeing this Italian guy freestyling outside Lick n’ Chicken. On the Monday, Miles was the guest on my NOODS Radio Ceramics show in the attic of Surrey Vaults, where Franco was volunteering.

During the show Franco asked if he could “jump on the mic”, and from there we started sharing ideas.

We discussed Castlemead at length, post-techno dystopias, nihilistic interpretations of technology and of course Goram watching over us from the hillside in Ashton Court. We quickly entered the studio and in three three-hour sessions had the LP. You appeared on Avon is Dead with the wonderfully unsettling track ‘Tactical Dawn’. Over Kinlaw’s sizzling electronics, Franco Franco slowly recites lines from a 2011 TV interview with an AI robot. The robot, which had been modelled on Phillip K. Dick, described enslaving humans and keeping them in a “people zoo, where I can watch you for old times’ sake”. Given that your album is also titled ‘Half Human Half Machine’ in Italian and features a track called ‘Cyborg MC’, how far is science-fiction an influence on this project?

Franco Franco: The voice was generated through an online algorithm based on my voice. For ‘Cyborg MC’ I had lyrics written years ago, but never used them. I ended up using the original idea, but entirely rewriting the lyrics about a Cyborg MC about to take over Bristol with its rap and moves. As far as I’m concerned, the sci-fi theme developed alongside the project itself.

Franco Franco makes liberal use of strange vocal effects to change pitch, sound like a robot or – as in the break on ‘Cyborg MC’ – give greater emphasis to the use of his own, unaffected voice. What inspired this, and what do you think your use of vocal effects brings to your music?

FF: Around the time I made my appearance on that Ceramics show, I used to go every now and then to NOODS with my Italian mates when there weren’t shows on, putting on tunes and having no-brain freestyle sessions. One day I was doing this with a good friend of mine, and I started using the CDJ’s effects to mimic different MCs battling against each other. From those effects the hi-pitch one was my favourite; I used this formula when I did the Ceramics session with Hamish and we thought it was cool. For the record we wanted to keep the vibe as close as possible to that original setting, and I guess it reinforces the sci-fi thing.

Members: Hamish Trevis, Franco Franco Illustration: Hamish Trevis, Franco Franco

Kinlaw has been a vital figure in Bristol’s left-field electronic music for years. Across your substantial back-catalogue, you have explored genres spanning pop (Chorus), hardcore (Corfe) and ambient music (Ash Drip); in fact, your gritty slow-burner Drax was released the same day as Mezzi Umani Mezze Macchine. How do you see your music for this project as relating to your solo work, and what inspired the caustic, industrial setting of this album?

K: Usually a release will take form after various different routes have been taken; it’s very dependent on sample packs and spare time.

Tracks will exist for a long time before surfacing, and a lot of my releases feel almost like compilations of ideas. For this release production and recording was rapid; rudimentary ideas were formed and sculpted in the studio. Franco came to me with these ideas surrounding AI and technologies assisting rap; he had been writing his dissertation on these themes and they fascinated me. I’ve had this sense of existing in the science fiction novel for the last two years, and I guess this fed into the tracks I was making.

‘Eric Draven’ is the protagonist of comic book series The Crow, in which a vigilante is resurrected from the dead by a supernatural crow to avenge his own murder. What inspired you to give his name to your album’s opening track, and what drove you to book-end the album with instrumental pieces?

FF: ‘Eric Draven’ was an improvised thing. We were in studio recording, Hamish put that on and I just felt to shout on it: ‘I’M A CROW’. I’m a big fan of the film, and I must have re-watched it around that time; as soon as I heard the sound the brain shouted that out, and that was it.

Your shows are highly physical affairs, and my first time seeing you at The Arnolfini felt rather a lot like a punk gig. What do you try and present with your live performances?

FF: I guess the main point is to be physical in terms of sound. It’s not about the rap or performance itself, I think it’s more about creating a situation where stuff is sonically and visually chaotic or confusing, but still rhythmic and (in a way) danceable. I’m a big fan of punk, but unfortunately never managed to be involved in anything directly. My hometown friends were massively into grindcore as teenagers and formed bands, but at the time I wasn’t hanging out with them at all. I’ve since heard shit loads of mad stories and went to some of their concerts towards the end of that era, and it was real – like 10 people in the audience, but everyone killing it for the sake of it. So yes, I want to give it all when I’m doing it. As visceral as possible.

K: For me, most of this energy is due to Franco’s delivery and the audience; if a bunch of local skaters stop by for a free show at the Arnolfini they are going to wreak havoc, and we would like to encourage this. We also have a tendency to disregard the sound, and relish in it being uncompromising.

Franco Franco raps in a combination of Italian and English, giving the lyrics a degree of inscrutability to non-Italian-speakers whilst emphasising the languages’ rhythmic differences. What do you consider the effects of using different languages in this way, and are there any rappers who have shaped your style? What do you like to write about?

FF: Mixing the two languages is not too sophisticated a choice. There are English words that I now use every day, and if the Italian version doesn’t fit metrically or sound good I use the English one.

Most of the time I use the English root of a word, then end it with an Italian desinence; there are plenty of Italian rappers doing this. To my knowledge the group ‘In The Panchine’ made the use of Italian/English rap a proper style – early 2000’s super sick stuff. In terms of my style I don’t know... more than deliberately shaping it, there are people that I highly admire for their uniqueness in the delivery. DJ Gruff, Esa, Cricca dei Balordi, Paura, Neffa, Clementino, Inoki and Joe Cassano are definitely recognisable for their style straight away, and most of them are sick lyricists. This is all old stuff but it definitely inspired me. Recently through Hamish I’ve discovered MC Sensational and in my head that’s just the next level of confidence.

I mostly chat about what happens in my life, but I don’t live nothing crazy or dangerous, so I guess it just turns into the classic themes like frustration, boredom, existentialism and pointless (but fun to write) ego-trips. I love swear words too, so most of the lyrics are packed with them. Sometimes I like to set a specific theme, whether it’s story telling or analyzing something; songs like ‘Cyborg MC’, ‘Loom Weights’, ‘No Chill’ and ‘Reality Check’ are the most thought-out (to an extent), while the others are more like written freestyles or actual improvisations.

You are listed as members of Avon Terror Corps – a ‘gang label’ composed of various Bristol experimental projects. If the poignantly-titled compilation Avon is Dead acts as a manifesto for Bristol’s current avant-garde scene, it also seems to reject the city’s enduring identification with its musical past (trip-hop etc.). How do you see yourselves as relating to Bristol’s musical landscape, today and historically?

FF: Before moving to Bristol I was into rap and electronic music in general; stuff like Trip-Hop and Illbient opened my view about the correlation between rap and music which is made differently.

Living in Bristol and meeting people that knew their stuff drastically twisted and influenced the perception of music that I had by then. In this sense, I’d say that I relate to and rely on what has been done here in the last 3/4 years. Super fresh.

K: I still struggle to comprehend the gang assembled; the numbers are strong, and there are so many weapons stored in the arsenal. We formed from the collapse of a very special place which brought a lot of people together (The Surrey Vaults).

“Avon is Dead” was a declaration of sorts, but also a realisation and celebration of the talents we have surrounded ourselves with. It’s hard to answer the question of Bristol’s musical output and importance, and our place within it, without sounding conceited.

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WHAT SUCKS ABOUT MAKING YOUR OWN MERCH IS THAT YOU HAVE TO FIND A PRINTER AND THEN YOU HAVE TO PICK THE RIGHT BLANKS AND THEN YOU DONʼT KNOW WHAT TYPE OF PRINTS ARE AVAILABLE AND EVERYTHING COSTS “EXTRA” AND THEN THE MERCH IS LATE. THEN YOU GET YOUR MERCH, AND IT DOESNʼT LOOK QUITE RIGHT AND THE PRINTER TELLS YOU THAT THEY FOLLOWED YOUR INSTRUCTIONS, BUT HOW WERE YOU TO KNOW THAT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE SCREEN COLOURS AND THE PRINT COLOURS WOULD BE SO PRONOUNCED? THEN YOU HAVE TO SET UP YOUR ONLINE SHOP AND WHICH PLATFORM DO YOU CHOOSE AND WHAT ARE MERCHANT FEES? HOW DO YOU SEND THE MERCH? IS A PLASTIC BAG FROM MORRISONS/BIN BAG OK? WHERE IS YOUR NEAREST POST OFFICE? THEN YOUʼRE AT YOUR SHOW AND IT RAINED WHILST YOU WERE LOADING IN AND NOW THE BOX HAS A TEAR IN IT. FIVE PEOPLE WANT THREE DIFFERENT SIZES AND YOU CANʼT FIND THEM AND TWO OF THEM NEED TO PAY ON CARD AND YOU DONʼT EVEN HAVE ANY CHANGE. YOU DONʼT KNOW HOW MANY SHIRTS YOU SOLD LAST NIGHT AND YOUR KEYBOARD PLAYER HAS ALL THE CASH, BUT MIXED IT WITH HIS CHANGE AND THEN WENT TO A SQUAT PARTY, SO…

YEAH, ACTUALLY, THEREʼS NOTHING FUN ABOUT MAKING YOUR OWN MERCH...

9 DEFEND The precious, free functions of our

INDEPENDENT PRESS Which in cultural discourse, as in all matters, constitutes our sole trustworthy friend In this stagnant, ARTLESS hellscape, All manner of Iniquities and Inadequacies can be traced to

A DECLINE IN CULTURAL CAPITAL! Today’s Aesthetic Disputes are determined in FINANCIAL CAPITAL As the press FLOUNDERS – INSUFFICIENT TO ITS OFFICE!

THE DEATH OF THE

BBC Approaches, as a body of public information and entertainment funded by (and solely responsible to) THE PUBLIC. Between the current political climate, the newly-threatened decriminilisation of not paying license fees and the rise of streaming, it seems certain that the BBC will not survive its next remit renewal.

Lest all radio becomes commercial radio…

WE MUST MONETISE OURSELVES!!

IN 2020 WE MUST ACCEPT: 1) Advertising space is not a sustainable means of monetising a music website.

2) Most people can find ways of justifying not paying for information.

3) Music publications relying on artists/readers sharing their articles to support their content utterly discredits their views, and nullifies them as an authentic voice.

For valuable music criticism to thrive, it must find new ways to support itself INDEPENDENTLY!

LOOK to models such as Bandcamp Editorial, supported by revenue from a paid service it provides for music listeners around the world – its authenticity and agency remaining intact.

INVENTION IS REQUIRED!!!

LYNKS AFRIKKA

INDUSTRIAL QUEER AVANT-POP

Rejecting the grey stoicism of contemporary club culture, Lynks Afrikka (the brainchild of producer Elliot Brett) is a bombastic and unapologetically queer avant-pop project merging music, drag and theatre. I understand that it emerged from the ashes of your old folk project, which you abandoned in frustration after your laptop was stolen from a gig. What inspired you to embark on such a radically different project, and how do you see it as relating to your old music?

Elliot Brett: There was actually a 3 or 4-month overlap between the two projects. I didn’t just throw my guitar in a skip, put on a mask and whisper ‘this is me’ in the mirror (though that will be in the biopic). I first did Lynks Afrikka on a whim at a dumb little gig in my friend’s basement. I’d had this very abstract idea of a club-kid/club-music fusion act floating around in my head for a while so I thought ‘fuck it’. The gig was in two weeks, so I searched through the annals of my Logic history and found five serviceable beats. I wrapped myself and three backing dancers in bin bags, whacked some Snazaroo on us and flailed around a bit.

The thing that really stuck with me was that the entire audience’s faces were plastered with smiles. I’d never had that at one of my gigs before; nods of appreciation, but never smiles. It made me think “fuck – surely this is the point of being an entertainer? To entertain? So what the fuck and I doing with my sad-boy shit? Let’s put some Snazaroo on baby!”. I still perform two of the songs from that first gig today: ‘Don’t Take It Personal’ and ‘How to Make a Béchamel Sauce in 10 Steps’.

You have described the character of Lynks Afrikka as a ‘mask’; in a literal sense, you perform entirely disguised in elaborate costumes, with past examples including a peacock-inspired ensemble and a set of tentacles made from loft insulation. How would you characterise your relationship with this character?

EB: There really isn’t a character; there’s that old saying “give a man a mask and you will see the real him” and that’s all there is to it. I used to get really terrified on stage when I did music as myself, to the point where it would ruin the night. I’d come off stage and just feel dumb, even if it had gone well. Now I’ve kinda drawn a line in the sand between myself onstage and offstage which is super-liberating. There’s an expectation of how a guy acts on stage, but there’s no pre-requisite for a masked demon in a cycle-helmet. Whatever I do ends up being properly natural and impulsive, and after I’m done performing I can just take it all off and go back to being my everyday self.

You have developed a great deal of attention over the past year off the back of your ecstatic, eccentric live shows – these have included baptisms, choreographed dances and a ‘fragrance launch’ in which you gave out Buckfast in spray-bottles. What inspires this approach to live performance, and what would you like to think people take from your shows?

EB: For me it feels like a lot to ask an audience to pay £6 (or £3 cheaplist bbz xoxo) to watch me sing along to a backing track. There’s so much you CAN do on stage, so I always try and think – “if I was in the audience right now, what would make me totally lose my shit?”. I just think we’re in an epidemic of misery right now, and we need more spaces where people feel they have permission to throw their body around, laugh, hug strangers, dress up and all the rest of it.

Members: Elliot Brett Illustration: Luke Dye-Montefiore

You’ve described your single ‘Str8 Acting’ as dealing with the ‘masc4masc’ ideal in queer culture, subverting the idolisation of 'straightness' to find a renewed power in queer identity. Could you tell me more about the creation of this song, and the ideas behind it?

EB: The idea of ‘Str8 Acting’ was to flip the script on what Straightness actually is. We’re told that Straightness is the norm and that Gayness is anything that lies outside that, but that obviously isn’t the case. Think of it as a Venn Diagram, with a Straight circle and a Gay circle. The reality is that they’re almost entirely overlapping, with only a little slice of things being exclusively Straight or exclusively Gay. We’re told that Gay identity is only that tiny little exclusively Gay slice, whereas Straight identity gets to be the whole Straight circle. This song basically tried to flip that and show how ridiculous it would be if we saw Straight identity in the same way. I don’t know how many straight people are aware of this, but on Gay dating apps, every like fourth or fifth profile will say “str8 acting looking for the same” or “masc4masc” or some bullshit. It really pisses me off, because it is actively making Straightness the norm. By definition, if you are gay and act in a certain way, that cannot be ‘str8 acting’. You are gay acting, because you’re fucking gay mate! Get over it!

A common feature of your music – particularly on songs such as ‘Str8 Acting’, ‘Don’t Take It Personal’ and ‘Arts & London’ – is a dry, sideways sense of humour. What do you see the role of humour as being in conveying serious messages about art and sexuality?

EB: I very rarely go into a song trying to make some big point about anything. I find humour is a really great entry point to writing, and once you have a joke at the centre of a song or a verse it kind of writes itself. However, I also think that stuff you are passionate, scared or angry about is always the juiciest mine for comedy, so when I’m sitting in my room thinking “hmmm what would be a funny idea for a song?” the stuff that normally comes to mind is really fucking dark at the heart of it. I’ll normally realise I’ve made a serious point about 95% of the way through the writing process and then massively lean into it. That’s what happened with ‘Str8 Acting’: I was just ripping on shit straight clubs and then I clocked there was something a bit deeper in there, so went back and re-wrote it.

It has been really helpful for me as well.

Whenever I get into a dark place, I’ve got this list of things that I need to do – stuff like “call this person” or “go for a run”. On that list, as cheesy as it sounds, “write a song about it” has become the big one that always seems to work.

I’d been feeling really guilt-ridden and useless about committing my time to art while all my friends started getting real jobs; I wrote a song about it and it’s barely crossed my mind since.

Another time I was looking in the mirror in my boxers and hated what I was looking at, so I wrote a song about looking sexy but only from behind. Now whenever I look in the mirror and get those feelings, that song comes into my head and those feelings go. Humour is an underappreciated healer for sure.

Recent singles ‘Str8 Acting’ and ‘On Trend’ also demonstrate feelings of frustration or anger: an emotion you’ve previously said you find challenging to express, suggesting that gay men in our society aren’t allowed to be ‘angry’ – only ‘sassy’. Could you elaborate on this, and the role of anger in your art?

EB: That’s totally a thing. The world’s got a way of dismissing minorities’ anger so they don’t have to feel bad about themselves. You’re gay?

You’re sassy. You’re a woman? You’re bossy.

It’s totally fucked up, and it makes you feel like you can’t really express your emotions. That being said, there is very little room for anger in Lynks Afrikka, it just ain’t the vibe. Peace ‘n’ love, amigo.

Whilst essentially pop music, your productions incorporate elements of deconstructed club, industrial and field recordings (identifiable with the current landscape of Bristol’s experimental/DIY music). What do you try to achieve with your music, and how do you think being self-taught has influenced you as a producer?

EB: Whenever my properly trained music friends see my Logic files, they practically have an aneurism. I have to physically restrain them from fixing all the blatant errors, so it seems I basically don’t know what I’m doing. I started playing around on Logic at 15, and seven years later it’s finally developed into something resembling good music. I think the upside is that all those mistakes and fuck-ups have collided to create a sound that I think is quite unique, if very unpolished. I’d call it charming.

Recent single ‘On Trend’ presents the contemporary experience of having “crisis as the zeitgeist” (looming ecological collapse), while gently lampooning the young liberal intelligentsia’s ways of dealing with it: mindfulness, veganism, Pilates etc. Can you tell me more about this track?

EB: Fuck wellness man. It’s a way of profiting off the obsessive-compulsiveness of vulnerable people who feel like control is slipping through our fingers, and then they dress it up as ‘self-care’ when in reality it’s quite the opposite. When you’re faced with inevitable annihilation of course you’re gonna want to claw back six extra theoretical months of life expectancy by cutting out all the foods you enjoy eating, and doing butt clenches at your desk, and paying £12.99/month + VAT for it. Fucked up.

Dance plays a huge part in your shows, and you typically perform with backing dancers. How would you characterise the relationship between the music and elements of dance in your shows?

EB: The idea is to make the audience feel like they have permission to properly dance. When I’m watching gigs, I can feel too awkward to do anything more than a 1-2 step because gigs are this mega-cool space where you might want to avoid sticking out. If we dance around like absolute morons, hopefully the audience will feel like they can too; no-one will be able to think they look like an idiot when there’s some twat flailing around on stage wearing mops.

SPINNY NIGHTS

DIY PROMOTERS CHAMPIONING BRISTOL’S LATEST WAVE

Emerging around the launch of Ch. II,

Spinny Nights’ ambitious and eclectic DIY shows augured a new burst of activity in Bristol’s DIY musical landscape: forming a lodestone for vital young talents such as Lynks Afrikka, Jemima Coulter, Norman and Zebrafi. How did you start Spinny Nights, and what did you set out to achieve with it?

Rafi Cohen: We were both organising gigs before we started Spinny Nights, all that actually ‘started it’ was making the Facebook page: I always think it’s funny how thin that line is between an official entity and a disorganized assortment of people.

Arthur Cross: It’s only natural that individual artists who all share a deep interest for creating and performing music should form a community; we wanted to make a space for smaller acts to play in front of the excited, welcoming crowd that now come to our nights. I feel so lucky that we now have the trust of both musicians and audiences – it’s not something we take for granted.

I’ve always felt that the city’s nonspecialist student community wasn’t as engaged with Bristol’s DIY music scene as one might expect. As a student-led project, Spinny Nights have helped to galvanise these people, who form most of the crowd and artists at your shows (from Park Motive to Docking). How did you do this, and did you ever experience this disconnect yourselves?

RC: When I arrived in Bristol I was quickly made aware of many exciting bands, projects and nights; it didn’t take long to get involved. Everyone’s friendly and welcoming, and a stupidly large number of people make great music. So for me, no, there wasn’t much feeling of disconnect. There is certainly a DIY music culture among students, but almost all of it is directed towards club nights and DJ-ing (though that’s equally important).

The ‘alternative society’ at UOB was important in galvanizing our year. Gareth from LICE (Ch.II) gave my band our first ever gig at one of those, and advised on bands, promoters and nights to follow.

I’m pretty sure most of the early Spinny Nights acts first found their feet on that same stage.

AC: I think it’s important for students to break out of well-trodden areas and explore Bristol properly; we want to help people with that, when it comes to new artists, sounds and places. I guess our nights do offer an alternative to cursed predatory clubs and un-exploratory soundscapes, and this is clearly what a lot of people want. I think the rush of new blood into this Bristol DIY scene comes from this passion for music, but is also a reaction against shit nights and bad blokes. Also, who wouldn’t want to see a band as terrible as Docking.

Members: Arthur Cross, Rafi Cohen Illustration: Alisha Bradbury

Along with emerging artists, you’ve also held shows for established acts such as Yama Warashi and ORO Swimming Hour (Ch.II). How do you locate what Spinny Nights does in the context of Bristol’s vital DIY/experimental music scene, and how far do you think what you do has been influenced by your experiences here?

RC: There’s no doubt that the music scene here has opened up my ears to more avant-garde and electronic sounds. The sheer variety of acts means that you are constantly reminded of the great creative heights that music can reach, and the impact which live music can have on you. From going to Breakfast Records (Ch.I) gigs when I first arrived, to Illegal Data nights more recently, I have had so many “fuck, this is amazing” moments. Yama Warashi and Oro Swimming Hour (Ch.II) were my two favourite artists in Bristol; I went to see them at other shows and always came away feeling inspired to create music, certain that I had witnessed something I would remember forever. I guess incorporating them into Spinny Nights is just a way of trying to give other people that same feeling, as well as making myself feel like I was involved in something that I thought was amazing.

AC: I think it’s important to note how young we are within this community, and how much we look up to other promoters such as Howling Owl (Ch.I), Gravy Train, 1% of One etc. for all they do. We have totally been influenced and supported by everyone here.

The backdrop for this activity is the city’s ongoing venue exodus, with The Hy-Brasil Music Club (formerly Start The Bus) having most recently been turned into an O’Neils. What do you consider the challenges of being a small promoter here?

RC: I can’t think of many better places to be a small promoter. Everyone’s super friendly and will link you up with whoever else you want to know if you want to make something happen. I think the impact of independent venues closing has yet to hit us, partially because the glorious Old England remains open – we are so heavily reliant on this beacon of DIY music energy. Long live Bruce (and Matt on the sound)!

AC: I think I only truly understood the importance and the magnitude of people affected by venue shutdowns when I was at the Surrey Vaults protests two years ago – I was really moved. We have been very lucky that there are many other grass roots venues around – especially The Old England who have been very supportive from the start. This isn’t to say that venues closing down doesn’t affect us: these things slip away until none are left, so it is important to stand up for them.

What would you like audiences to take away from your shows, and what do you get out of your nights?

AC: I would like people to take away that creating and performing should be easy and accessible, and that anyone can do it. It is such an uplifting and hopeful feeling to see friends perform, and I hope it makes people want to get involved too. It’s why nights like the Alt-Jam at The Old England (where anyone can get up, grab and instrument and join in) are so important, and it would be so nice to know people at our nights can get a similar feeling. To be inspired to create, chat to those around you and make projects together is one of the best things. To be a part of that journey is definitely an aspiration.

Spinny Nights also started releasing music this year, beginning with Lynks Afrikka’s ‘Str8 Acting’. What made you want to branch out into this, and how did you find that experience?

RC: We just want to assist good music, and becoming a ‘label’ was at the back of our minds from early on. I saw Lynks play at The Old England and I was instantly struck by how addictive, funny and entertaining that song was; immediately after the set I asked Elliot if we could release it and he gave us his blessing. Even now, having heard it a billion times. it still puts a smile on my face and makes me want to dance. To be honest, the experience of releasing digital music is fairly insignificant, but I am so proud to have that song on our roster. We have physical releases in the works for other artists and I think the actual process of releasing those will be far more memorable.

While continuing to champion Bristol’s young emerging artists, you’ve established yourself as quite an outward-facing project, holding increasingly regular shows in London. How has your activity outside of Bristol affected your outlook as promoters?

AC: I think putting shows on in London has made me truly appreciate what we have here in Bristol as something new and interesting. There is undeniably a community feel here, maybe due to the smaller nature of the city. Having said that, there are pockets of exciting acts, projects and platforms in London which have really blown me away, especially the whole Slow Dance community.

Some of the artists you were first to champion have begun to gain attention beyond the city, such as Lynks Afrikka (who has become a phenomenon in London’s underground circles). How do you reflect on that, and how has this success influenced your future aspirations for Spinny Nights?

RC: In terms of Lynks’ success, I’m just happy that people outside of Bristol rightly recognise its sheer genius and originality. Aside from that, I guess it makes us have faith in our own taste, and gives us hope that other projects we’re passionate about will be received just as well. Already ears seem to pricking up to the amazing sounds of Norman, and we hope the same will happen for Park Motive.

AC: Lynks just shows how infectious it can be when you bring an element of playfulness into music, and how that is a great way to start writing and performing.

I think their success has shown me that it’s worth sticking at something if you’re confident in yourself that it’s worthwhile. If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t matter – you’ve still had fun along the way.

What would you like people to take away from what’s currently happening in Bristol’s new left-field/ DIY music, and how do you hope Spinny Nights have contributed to furthering the promotion of this impulse?

AC: This moment is precious, and can continue to grow if more people get involved; creation and collaboration can be a vital way for people to find purpose. It doesn’t matter if your creation is weird, ugly, noisy or beautiful; just making something is important. I ultimately hope that Spinny Nights has pushed people to delve into an underground cultural landscape that is criminally underrated, and that it inspires new people to put on nights, support local artists, and lose themselves amidst all this mess.

SUNUN

EXPERIMENTAL DUB PRODUCER

Influenced by global rhythms’ sociological significance

and mediated through a singular approach to mixing, Sunun’s astonishing and unusual dub compositions have marked her out as a vital new force in Bristol’s experimental music. How did you begin producing as Sunun, and what first brought you to the city?

Sunun: This city was where I found myself musically – I think a lot of people could say the same. I first moved here in 2008 on a teenage whim, squeezing ten of our close friends into a Pinch and Loefah-addicted flat (classic Bristol story?). They used to be big into D‘n’B, when Neverlution used to host upstairs at the Black Swan. I remember stumbling into Dub Club downstairs with two systems opposite each other, closed in around two dancers… it felt like light. I moved to London to study for a bit, and then I woke up one day and just felt really strongly that I had to come back: for the music, and the devotion so many people here seem to share for it. That’s when I started making music again. I used to play percussion and piano when I was really young and always felt it was what I needed to do, but gave it a break as a teenager. I was always too worried about attaching money to something that felt so special.

Your research into the role of drums in religious and political events from around the world was consolidated in your NOODS Radio (Ch. II) show ‘Everything Is A Drum’. What inspired you to pursue this field of research, and how do you think it has influenced your music as Sunun?

Sunun: The radio show started from a record I found in Plastic Wax called Music of the Infitada. It’s a collection of chants surrounding the Palestinian resistance: living under occupation, the idea of freedom and determination. Some of the vocals have fiddle or drum accompaniments, but it just screams raw expression. It started me off researching how people had used music for social change, to spread messages, or in historical resistances. I think obsessing over field recordings for the radio has influenced the sound of my music: the lo-fi recordings, the wandering drums in the background everywhere… Some of the music I was finding felt too sacred (or somebody else’s business) to sample, but it has definitely shaped my sound design; some of my tunes are just brackets around sounds that give me the same feeling as, say, the Infitada record.

Ooid is a captivating and disorientating debut, rich in woozy electronic textures and organic, off-kilter drum arrangements. While your Cold Light record CL003 shares important elements, it might be considered more abstract and divorced from traditional dub sensibilities (such as on the sparse ‘Don’t Fuck With The Pluck’).

How do you see these EPs as relating to each other?

Sunun: They are two sides of a personality – maybe mine? Ooid is frantically creative, overthought, reflective and obsessive, and CL003 is the pure sense of peace that balances it out. They were made in different ways: Ooid was two years of sound design and recordings of instruments, sometimes with friends lying on the floor listening, infused with the influence of Cosies and the people there. CL003 was mostly MPC outbursts based on intuition. A good friend of mine said “we make music to alter our reality – to give us a preferred state to what we are feeling”, which I think is really positive. That’s what happened with ‘Away’, ‘X’ and ‘How Not to Use an MPC’: they became mood lifters for me for months afterwards, whereas Ooid was brutally honest. ‘Msg Inna Stab’ was written the morning after I recorded ‘Untitled Lvlz’ to calm me down from the intensity of the studio.

Illustration: Miles Opland & Sunun

Ooid was released by Bokeh Versions (Ch. III), whose interest in dub’s capacity for temporal and geographical ‘blurriness’ seems aligned with your own. How do you see your music as relating to the landscape of dub music in Bristol, today and historically?

Sunun: In my head it’s in the middle between the traditional, ‘put it through the desk for the dance’ style that Roots Injection and Dubkasm have always shown us, and the newer extremes of Bad Tracking, Giant Swan and Kinlaw.

There is dub in there, the FX make it scream. Those FX are from dub. The noise they make is no coincidence, which is how they manipulate it so well.

Bokeh Versions is so good at recognizing that, allowing that interpretation to swell and swell.

There is an interview with Peter Tosh where he describes climbing a tree to be able to hear the tunes from a system dance in his neighbourhood, and how the skanks were bouncing off the branches. You can imagine that feeling, can’t you? Especially when you hear an Ishan dub stab. So, for my own tracks, I like the skank high up in the mix, and traditional triplet delay to be heard under everything, dictating a sub rhythm. Everything released so far was recorded through a desk – an accidental homage. My intuition works there best.

The opener on CL003 is titled ‘How Not To Use An MPC’, (presumably) nodding to your unconventional approach to live mixing. Your sets see you employ live instrumentation (harp, vocals, drums) and mix it ‘old-style’; Bokeh Versions’ Miles Opland has described you as using the mixing desk in a way nobody else does. What inspired your approach to live performances, and what would you like to imagine audiences taking from them?

Sunun: I remember about 9 years ago listening to Romare’s Live Set for Boiler Room and knowing I wanted to do a live set. It’s the first time I really noticed something evolve while continually referring to some of the same sounds the whole way through; samples from the first tune are scattered throughout the whole 45 minutes, which keeps bringing you back in like deep breaths. He must have been using a sampler or something, but I didn’t know about that at the time as it was before I go into electronic instruments. I locked myself away for a month and experimented to see what I came up with using the sounds I had already made. Once I had a conversation with Vessel about my set being like a big tantrum. I hope audiences feel the inclination towards an (emotional? psychological? physical?) explosion, and then the calm after the storm when you’re stronger.

I’ve heard your music praised as possessing a particular ‘human’ character, which I have interpreted as either referring to your organic approach to live mixing, or your interest in the social contexts of sounds and rhythms. How do you interpret this?

Sunun: I think it is because making music is all based on instinct. I play the drums to train my instinct; it’s where I get the most clarity, which then heightens my sense of rhythm, which then comes out in the music.

The mixing desk is like a big drum for me, everything on there is a rhythmic opportunity. And playing the drums, or your instrument, is like talking (if you’re Alice Coltrane or Cecil McBee). The mixer is a tool to communicate with, and the FX are the voices in a way. I’m not sure what the original sounds are in this metaphor I’ve been playing around in. It’s really touching to hear that perception, as that’s something I value in music I listen to.

Your recent track ‘Pluckscape’ for Limbo Tapes is built around an arrangement for harp (intersected by snippets of recorded conversation). This unusual instrument appears in different capacities across your recordings, from its raw prominence here to its nearunrecognizability on ‘DRK BLNT’. What influenced your use of the harp in your music, and what do you consider its place in your work?

Sunun: The sound of that harp grabs me like a good sample every time – I still start tunes from it today. I bought it from a tiny music shop in Brazil, so not only is its off-key resonance weirdly addictive, but it also brings me back to watching the man who sold it to me pressing down the string to detune the decay while he plucked it: the moment of “please don’t destroy the note!” versus the endless possibilities created by destroying the note... I tuned it to the Hirajoshi Scale and it’s been the same 5 notes ever since. It is my instigator for melody, which I then bounce off with other sounds or samples. The scale reminds me of the first time I heard Dubstep for some reason: it gives me that vigorous, electric feeling. Call it dread if you want.

At the start of 2019, landmark experimental collective Young Echo ( Ch. I) announced you as the circle’s 12 member. How far has your affiliation with this collective influenced your approach to your art, and how far do you consider yourself part of a community in Bristol’s experimental landscape? th

Sunun: They are inspiring, encouraging, and like real family. Their attitude and musical language gives me confidence, and confidence is the basis of good exploration. I was so excited when they asked me to be a member: 20-year-old me was definitely jumping.

After I started making tunes with Amos, I freaked out cos I felt like I had copied him – I could feel his influence in my tunes (not a bad thing!), but then we had a conversation about how it happens between all of us. If it’s true, it’s so unintentional and second nature.

I think this could be said for the whole community that is creating innovative music. We are all good friends, open, and excited for each other, so we all touch each other sonically in one way or another. We are all in rooms getting off to EP/64 (Ch. II) together; we’re going to take some of that blazing energy home, and something is going to come out in Ableton.

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10

DISMISS The pernicious, reductive fiction of

POPULAR TASTE Which paints our people with cowardice, backwardness and ignorance WHAT DRIVES our cultural ARBITERS to CHAMPION the SIMPLE & FAMILIAR? Notions of POPULAR TASTE, rooted in ill-begotten views that the Public are FEARFUL, IMPATIENT and PETULENT.

The PANICKED TENTACLES of the Music Industry Destructively Flail in pleasing this FALSE GOD!!!

STRONGER IS THE PULL OF EXTREMITY On our SPIRITS… INSPIRING & DRIVING our faculties to GRAND IDEAS AND

CEASELESS ACTION. OUR PEOPLE LOVE TO BE CHALLENGED! This COMMUNITY (varied in background and taste) PROVES IT SO.

BOKEH VERSIONS VITAL LEFT-FIELD DUB/ INDUSTRIAL LABEL

Helmed by Miles Opland, Bokeh Versions is a record label specialising in left-field dub and industrial music. Admired for its line in bizarre, challenging records (from the likes of Jay Glass Dubs and Mars89), the past year has also seen Bokeh Versions double-up as a principal conduit for the Avon Terror Corps – a ‘crew label’ comprising local experimental artists such as HARRGA, Kinlaw & Franco Franco and Giant Swan. How did Bokeh Versions begin, and what influenced your choice of Seekersinternational as your first release?

Miles Opland: I felt like I was living in SKRS’s NoPrinciple tape on NoCorner for a while.

Truth: artists you love are struggling in some way, pledge yer sword to them - if there’s anything stopping more music coming out (and there usually is) then you can help with that. I wanted it to be alive for other people in the way it was for me. I was very caught up in the mythology of it all, and I wanted to hear more. Seekersinternational was really something you could escape into. There were these fake liner notes I never wrote for LoversDedicationStation, that felt very important (almost cosmic ha).

I don’t know how much of what the label’s become is just an extension of this grand mystery Seekersinternational have led me on, which was something I missed about the cult around the guitar bands I grew up on (kill yer parents and follow me etc. etc.)

I understand that ‘Bokeh’ (a Japanese photography term for ‘blurriness’) refers to the disorientating or abstracting effects of the music you release. What do you find so rewarding about these qualities in music, and where did your interest in left-field dub come from?

Members: Miles Opland Illustrations: Miles Opland & Gordon Apps

MO: I never thought about that parallel but yeah there’s a lot of ways that dub is like time travel. Or at least it isn’t too interested in obeying normal laws of time. But yeah, you must realise dub is basically the least pretentious form of ‘experimental music’ you’ll find (why can’t we be weird and not have our reasons?).

I think emotional responses to music are usually underplayed. They feel more important than anything rational or academic to normal people. It’s fun to use feelings and emotions to anchor the label rather than limiting rules about when or where things were recorded (‘we are a reissue label’ / ‘we only release new music in this category etc’). I love labels like ROIR where it seems like this total mess, and you start digesting and there is a narrative. It’s important to have a narrative - like running a label should feel like creative and collaborative work.

I like the promise of music to take you to places you’ve never been before - that’s what half all rave tunes were about, and all the fliers. So I guess if we make things blurry and imprecise and not rational then it’s easier to fit things together - things that we’re told don’t belong in the same space.

What is your favourite release on Bokeh Versions so far?

MO: Jay Glass Dubs - Jodorowsky In Dune In Dub. I just wish more people could hear it......or maybe that shit with Todd. But it’s just his lawyers who’ve heard it and they’re assholes (although one did message me afterwards for a Captain Ganja download).

MO: The dub CDs were in the same rack as stuff like Jane’s Addiction and My Bloody Valentine and you needed 3 to unlock the 3 for £21 special and sometimes there weren’t always 3 jangly indie things you wanted. And it all seemed kinda the same at the time.

An important contribution to your label has been made by visual artist Patrick Savile, who created your logo and sleeves for records including Mars89’s End Of The Death (which was accompanied by a VR video). How did you start working together, and how do you think his style relates to what your label does musically?

Your interest in ‘blurriness’ extends to the geography and temporality of Bokeh Versions’ releases. This is seen in your professed love of re-issues (such as The Bush Chemists’ 1990’s track ‘I Came I Saw’) and spatially disorientating works like Abu Ama’s Arabxo Ishara, which uses traditional Turkish music, Indonesian field recordings and scraps of UK pub conversations to powerfully unsettle the listener’s sense of place. What do you find interesting about that, and how do these interests as a label relate to the general role of manipulating time and place in dub music itself?

MO: I remember getting some early logo design and sending a lot of weird disjointed references like promo posters for Highlander 1, Fantazia shit and probably Omni magazine, something with very human touches of the future. And it’s a very weird vibe to get, but it’s one that’s totally Patrick’s own. Anything I design myself has a fair bit of Patrick in it because him (and Mystery Forms) showed me visually what this music sounded like. It’s hard to have ‘leaders’ when information is relayed so quickly, but I always think a lot of people rip on Patrick’s style.

I have seen Bokeh Versions referred to as ‘futurist’ in its outlook; do you see this more in terms of down-with-the-past avant-gardism, or as a creative identity influenced by your enthusiasm for science fiction?

MO: I love the past - 100% down with that, books and shit. We’ve also had this ‘hauntological’ thing forced on us ha. I think the huge power in science fictions is its ability to positively envision futures - by broadcasting these ideas out you can make changes in receptive people. And that’s magick.

That’s why I fuckin despise dystopian stuff - it’s so miserable and easy and self-indulgent, like that tone in people’s voices saying ‘I just don’t know if I want to bring children into this world anymore’. What’s hopeful is your ability to organise yourselves into collectives and families that don’t have to be determined by biology or your place in the world or nation states - and you are able to build worlds together. By exchanging ideas, or literally crafting augmented reality zones for strangers to disappear into for a while.

That’s what sci-fi always meant to me, and there’s definitely a lot of that thinking that’s gone over into Bokeh.

The first time we met, you mentioned an idea for putting fake records on Discogs with over-the-top press releases – I think we were discussing how the identity of music is mediated through PR. How would you describe your experience of running Bokeh Versions in the current climate for DIY labels, and independent music in general?

MO: I think 24/7 PR and social media have revealed a lot of people who could’ve been your heroes (artists, DJs, writers, broadcasters) to be very mundane and neurotic individuals. It’s like we have all these new amazing tools to communicate and collaborate and all you want to do is check into wine bars and ‘omg Black Mirror, so real’? I’m positive there’s loads of overlap with the people who complain about the fact that music doesn’t excite them anymore.

You take press shots in front of graffiti brick walls because you know that will be usable , constantly putting your personality on the altar.

ATC played with this amazing crew Occult Punk Gang in Macao in the garden of this derelict slaughterhouse. I bow down to that stuff for being so off radar, totally not concerned with anything but selling 10 euro tees and getting by and playing to the people who just get it. There’s never been a better time to be DIY. I’ve got a portable scanner and a mini Kaoss pad - you can move mountains with that stuff. With Avon Terror Corps we are mostly trying to avoid any kind of PR, and the tension between that and the perceived ‘industry clout’ of our membership is a lot of fun right now. Hopefully we can keep a wall up.

You have been a prime-mover in the actions of the Avon Terror Corps, which was first declared with the release of the Avon Is Dead compilation.

What was the idea behind the Avon Terror Corps, what do you think has united its members, and how far is it driven by – as its name would suggest – anger towards nostalgic views about ‘The Bristol Sound’?

MO: It’s a line from local folklore: ‘Avon Is Dead, Long Live Avon’. But yeah I think we have to kill this idea of golden ages too. Super nostalgic music views are usually from a lack of real life experiences (that’s why keyboard warriors are very nostalgic). There’s this improv band here called EP/64, you can get a bigger buzz off them than seeing kvclvnklvsldf back in the day at dlfjsdlkfjwe iconic venue if you really want to. And that does make them a better band, not whether the powers that be say that they’ve made a canonical record (or that they’ve made a record at all). Go outside.

So yeah I’d say Avon Terror Corps is bigger than trip-hop. I’m not even ever going to say everything I know about Avon Terror Corps, no-one knows all the members and there are things happening all the time under its umbrella that we’ll never be fully aware of. That’s its power.

Avon Terror Corps has released two albums to date - Kinlaw & Franco Franco’s Mezzi Umani Mezze Macchine, and HARRGA’s Héroïques Animaux de la Misère. What drew you to working with these projects?

MO: HARRGA were a band that Adam from Schwet had been supporting, he was the first to put them on anyone’s radar I think. They’re part of the schwetwave movement - we only find out about music cos he brings these acts to town. I was brought in to do the artwork because it might save some money, full credit to the schwetsound here!

Kinlaw & Franco was a Surrey Vaults project, I think the whole of Avon Terror Corps is really.

This is what happens when you take our buildings away – it was painful when it shut so I think we started making stuff together more.

Dub techniques, you discussed in a 2018 interview with FACT, have influentially permeated various strands of popular music.

Along with dub, your most prominent field of interest musically is industrial – how do you see the two as relating to each other, both in general and in the context of Bristol’s new music?

MO: They’re both about technology in ways that were much more human than things like Max MSP or algorave. Dub found religion down a wire and industrial was really pissed about mechanical takeover (it’s true, I saw it in a doc). I think we know tech is taking us towards a weird place, so looking back on dub and industrial for guidance makes total sense. Be more angry with your machines (or more pious ha).

What’s next for Bokeh Versions, and the Avon Terror Corps?

MO: Avon is expanding all the time.

I suppose at some point we need to talk about citizenship and separatist status, which will be hard as everyone’s so spread out. Once that’s sorted, I’ll probably just flip Bokeh into a t-shirt brand.

You have released several excellent records by the Greek producer Jay Glass Dubs, including New Teeth For An Old Country. Around the release of that record, he stated in an interview that he believes “the environment in which a piece of work is done definitively leaves its mark on the work itself”. How far do you think Bokeh Versions’ relocation from South London to Bristol influenced your approach to being a label, and how do you think Bokeh Versions relates to Bristol’s current musical landscape?

MO: While researching their much clicked on documentary ‘Keep Bristol Weird’ which I absolutely refused to show my face in, Boiler Room asked me who I thought my main competitor in town was.

Competitor?! Kinda demonstrates an attitude that it’s just really rare to encounter down here.

I don’t know where I fit in in a wider sense, it’s hard to know anything when you’re so immersed in it. I suppose I fit in the bit of the crowd, the bit at the front where Kinlaw & Franco are playing. Lots of people in the current musical landscape will be there too. Flesh and blood kind of people who don’t want to be on your promo list or talk to you on Twitter ‘we’re just really into your stuff maaaaaan’.

I’ve been so totally changed by everyone (I had a hunch they might be here): Slack Alice, Surrey Vaults, Giant Swan, The Brunswick, Rewind Forward, ATC - there’s only so much space for tattoos and then you die. Their influence on me is just... total. We feel like we’re part of something that we can’t explain, that’s very important to us it’s so fucking surreal, it’s like trying to explain the logic of dreams.

PET SHIMMERS

WOOZY LEFT-FIELD FOLK/POP

Members: Oliver Wilde, Lexie Jennings, Will Carkeet, Ellie Gray, Mig Schillace, Florrie Adamson-Leggett, Richard Clarke, Helena Walker Illustration: Amy Gough

Creating warm, complex pop music incorporating folk and glitch, Pet Shimmers has been one of this community’s major recent breakthroughs. Emerging from the solo project of Oliver Wilde (Ch.I), your use of field recordings, vocal harmonies and warped electronics might be seen to develop aspects of albums like A Brief Introduction to Unnatural Lightyears into a project that stands entirely on its own. What drove Pet Shimmers’ creation, and how do you see it as relating to Wilde’s solo work?

Lexie Jennings: Oliver’s solo work certainly paved the way for this project. Some of the songs (‘Angel Made’, ‘Supernatural Teeth’ etc.) were already in the making in the late-summer of 2018, with the intention of going in the next OW record. Even when the songs were in their infant stages though, they had a much less serious feel to them (despite their subject matter). After a difficult summer, with a push from the relentlessly chipper Richard Walsh, we decided that the best way to move forward was to go down a more traditional band route and produce something that had influences from sources of light rather than darkness. Forming a supergroup of broken-but-talented individuals looking for a purpose was kind of how it all came together; we quickly forged a strong collective consensus of what we felt Pet Shimmers should represent.

Oliver Wilde: I guess it’s a shame that it has taken this long slog to discover the importance and value of shared experience; the wondrous feeling of invention only really means anything when you can share it with people you love. Before Pet Shimmers, I felt like the only connection that really mattered was of that between me and people listening. Maybe it’s turning dirty thirty or just being way happier, but it just feels like the right time to throw out the loneliness of floating down the solo stream in exchange for a wild, dysfunctional musical family, with all the great challenges that come along with collaboration.

It’s just more meaningful and memorable in every way to me. That’s not to say I won’t make more solo music, but as a minimum obligation we should at least attempt to evolve as artists, and Pet Shimmers is totally my evolution.

Pet Shimmers quickly gained attention beyond the city, receiving national radio play on debut single ‘Persona Party’ before even playing a gig. When you later did play your first live show, it was a Maida Vale session for 6 Music. How do you account for this quick ascent, and how far do you think it reflects a wider shift in attention towards the city (despite an enduring lack of industry infrastructure here)?

LJ: Oliver contacted someone at 6 Music and simply said “I have a new project, this is it, here’s a song” and that was it! The session itself came as a complete surprise though.

We were all incredibly grateful to be given such an amazing opportunity, it was terrifying and it pretty much blew our fuckin’ minds; that just doesn’t happen to bands these days.

Obviously Bristol has always been on the musical map as it were, but right now there seems to be a lot of emerging talent across a broad spectrum of genres.

We’re lucky to have venues that offer much needed support to local bands too; without them our band simply wouldn’t exist (big up The Louisiana). If the industry is paying attention, I think we’re going to see a lot more Bristol bands making waves in the wider world.

OW: It doesn’t hurt to collect London numbers and save them for rainy days. It was as simple as sending a text really and not spending a tonne of coins, especially when – as you say – there is a lack of infrastructure here in Bristol. People are people, and the personal touch goes a long way I think. Dear pals IDLES and Giant Swan have proven that they don’t really need the industry to throw them table scraps: they are seeing their visions through on their own terms, and the industry machine is enabling their trajectories whilst holding on for dear life. I think the city’s widely-publicised attitude towards eclecticism and diversity might make us slightly intimidating to bodies of business; I guess labels need to experience the relationship between an artist’s art and its audience. Giant Swan mean one thing on record and another as a live band – until you experience both, maybe it’s problematic to risk a bunch of cash on two strange folk and their fairy-lit table of magic rage buttons. Bristol bands seem to be less ready to compromise on their craft, which in some ways is its own undoing in the frame of industry success, but most importantly is what makes it such a great outputter of the unusual and challenging.

Following a clutch of singles, you have just released your debut album Face Down In Meta: a stunningly imaginative and emotive record, moving deftly between frenetic pop (‘Mortal Sport Argonaut’) and woozy balladry (‘Cheat Codes’). What subjects and emotions do you see this record as dealing with, and how would you like to imagine people reacting to it?

LJ: For me it’s like being sucked into an iPhone and shat out the other side, having been bombarded with extreme highs and lows. I guess it’s inspired by the messed up nature of the internet and social media; its memes, the desire for instant gratification, gaming, sex, loneliness... everything. We as individuals have all suffered from some form of anxiety or depression at some point, and I think the record touches on those themes and the causes of them in many ways. I would suspect that people might relate to those themes, but also a lot of the songs are just fun (on the surface), and if all people get from them is having a fucking great time listening to them then that’s awesome too. We have had so much fun making the record, and even though we’ve heard these songs a thousand times we still enjoy them. It’d be a shame if the finished product just bummed people out right?

OW: Everyone is born with a license to express themselves; every living being has a point of view. Some societies and support-frameworks in people’s lives don’t nurture the relationship between those two concepts. When they are both dependently acting out together, art is made. It’s that issue and idea that has inspired most of the themes and feelings this record deals with. It is a pure celebration of our privilege to be able to express our point of view.

The political climate, generational indifference, sexuality, civil unrest, online social politics, societal ambivalence and unrepresented voices etc. all weave their way into the songs – this is the voice and language of Pet Shimmers. We are documenting the process of understanding perspectives that don’t directly affect us – a depth of empathy we only benefit from exploring. Even if people choose to question our sincerity because of the ways we talk about these things, know that there are no accidents on this record, whether it seems like it or not.

To us, it is perfectly imperfect and a reflection of what we wish to hear in music. As is in the nature of any artists that deal in the business of interpretability, we don’t and can’t tell anyone to feel a certain way, we listen – it’s way more interesting. The coolest reaction our music could ever wish to illicit is just purely authentic and true, whether positive or negative, even though it can be kinda sad to be totally misunderstood. I hope our record gets 0/10 reviews or 10/10 reviews – both are rewarding in their own ways. It’s the middle-of-the-road scores where I would feel most like a failure.

My favourite song of yours is ‘Nobody: Me:’. Could you tell me more about this song, and the ideas behind it?

OW: I really love those memes that are like ‘Nobody:’ followed by an image of a perfect scene of a well-groomed pooch or whatever, followed by ‘Me:’ where it shows a shaggy dog eating a cake out of a puddle or something. I do think it’s harmful and irresponsible to falsely portray or glamourise mental health struggles through social media rather than using these platforms as a safe sharing spaces. Memes can offer a bit of safe light-hearted selfdeprecation: it’s mostly funny and doesn’t attempt to find beauty in genuine suffering. Us and a bunch of our friends use these kinds of memes to express aspects of their mental health. ‘Nobody: Me:’ is just a long winded version of my own pretentious conceptual meme, looking at how to share our own flaws and vulnerabilities without actually saying them when you feel like you can’t.

It’s funny to think of memes in such high esteem, what’s wrong with me.

While ‘Cheat Codes’ is perhaps the album’s most heart-breaking moment, it is marked apart from sonicallysimilar works in Wilde’s solo oeuvre (‘It Was Nice To Have Met You’ etc.) by a wry sense of humour, discussing emotional vulnerability by way of combat in a Street Fighter-esque arcade game. This points to an offkilter use of humour across the record, not least in titling one song ‘Post-Dick Circle Fuck’.

What do you see the role of humour as being in Pet Shimmers’ music?

OW: ‘Cheat Codes’ is about defencelessness against other people working you out, and noticing your patterns. I like the way love hands you the truest version to yourself to take a look at; it hurts sometimes but ultimately it makes you a better person in the end, I think.

Sometimes life can feel like a total joke, like all there is left to do now is laugh at the shit show unfolding – I am a fat, ugly loser trying to carve out a space in the most shallow, dismissive industry in the world. That’s funny, I think.

LJ: I think anyone that has ever had to deal with any form of depression or anxiety has probably used humour as a floatation device. ‘Duvet Day’ is probably the most uplifting song on the record for me; even though it does refer to staying in bed and avoiding people, it has playful connotations that offer moments of light. ‘Post Dick Circle Fuck’ actually has a more subtle use of humour where, even though the title is slightly outrageous, some of the lyrics again touch on some more serious subjects like body dysmorphia and dealing with how we are percieved as individuals in society.

Members of Pet Shimmers also have other projects in the city (including Robbie & Mona, Swallow Cave and Herbal Tea), while drummer Mig Schillace runs landmark Bristol venue The Louisiana. How do you locate Pet Shimmers in the context of Bristol’s new music community, and how far do you think this city’s music has influenced the band?

LJ: Right now I’d say the Bristol music scene is really strong. More specifically, the bands that people seem to really relate to (Giant Swan, IDLES, Beak>, Heavy Lungs, SCALPING etc.) offer their listeners some form of release whilst engaging people in ways that are both visceral and intellectual. But there’s still plenty of acts that fit a slightly more pop/ indie mould that are smashing it right now (Katy J Pearson, Lazarus Kane etc.) I would say we sit somewhere in the middle.

We aren’t afraid to sound ‘pop’ but we do like our sound to be a little rougher around the edges.

Face Down In Meta ends with ‘Crash Test Dummy’. What do you consider the effects of closing an album of dense, lyrically-driven pop songs with a largely-instrumental 10minute epic?

OW: The ten-minute instrumental that closes the album is a moment of reflection where people can shut off from words and explore their own thoughts and feelings. It may not appear so, but I really appreciate music that contains no words and I massively respect my peers who use noise and sound to convey as much emotion as possible. In ‘Crash Tense Dummy’ we choose to celebrate that respectively. Although I’m not necessarily in the business of manipulating emotions, we have purposefully allowed the room at the end of ‘Face Down in Meta’ as an enveloping closing sentiment for the record, which is hopefully a nice one.

I’ve considered before that, given how more optimistic (warmer, brighter) Pet Shimmers’ music broadly seems when compared to Wilde’s solo work, the process of going from being a soloist to being part of a stable, collaborative band has changed Wilde’s outlook as a song-writer. How far do you think this is the case?

OW: The reason I got into songwriting in the first place was an effort to untangle my experience of life. Although I haven’t abandoned this attitude and still exercise that form of catharsis, I have grown to believe that the bare minimum responsibility of a songwriter is to give a voice to those who are unheard.

Not necessarily exclusively to victims of society, but to voice all the things we are thinking but no one likes to say. I’m not quite as confident as my good friends like Joe Talbot who are fierce and direct with their rage; I have to bury mine beneath interpretability and fidelity, but it’s still rage.

LJ: It’s definitely changed how he writes. It feels like there isn’t a lot to be optimistic about at the moment, given the impending doom of human existence and all the political upheaval we’ve been dealt over the last few years.

Oliver’s songwriting is still as profound as ever but it’s been packaged in a shinier wrapping whilst the music remains thoughtprovoking and at times deeply moving. Either that or we’re just delivering a broader spectrum of emotions through angelic threepart harmony and computer game bleeps.

What are your future ambitions with the project?

OW: I just want to have my own little fam, detach myself from judgment, meet interesting people, have fun, travel and put off growing up for as long as possible whilst using music as a vehicle for inherent goodness and positivity for anyone who wants it. I think we’re still working this all out and I don’t really know if a destination exists. I have a hunch that our quest for inner peace will be realised by failing at something we love, rather than failing at something we hate.

I do however personally feel it’s important that when any band is given a voice within the wider listening pool of the community it was raised in, that it aims to in some way pay it back. In Bristol our successes and failures can hang on the community, so supporting it back should be the mode of operation, just as we all saw with IDLES and Giant Swan at Ally Pally – that’s the dream no?

What a night it must have been to see some punk and techno all wrapped up in love and respect; for me that’s what music should look and feel like.

11

HEED The vital powers of

COLLECTIVISATION Empowering and Protecting our Avant-Gardes amidst this Cultural Slug-Crawl Oh friends, what Misfortunes are afforded THOSE who devote their gifts to the noble work of

Experimentation! Subversion! Expansion!

Obscurity. Mockery. Exclusion.

Since the EARLIEST ITERATIONS of this aeshetic dispute (which echoes continuously through all lands) Artists have

COLLECTIVISED, UNIFIED, COLLABORATED. Enriching their work and Strengthening their resolve,

Les Barbus, The Lukasbund The Pre-Raphaelites The Italian Futurists The Vorticists…

MAY this city’s focus on

ALL HISTORY RATTLES With the same impulses, the same pressures, the same collectivisation for security, support and strength.

COMMUNITY provide the masses with a SHINING EXAMPLE of the imagination and dedication that flourishes in FAMILIES.

WYCH ELM

MACABRE NOISE-ROCK/GRUNGE

One of Bristol’s brightest young projects, Wych Elm’s caustic and emotive guitar music has been quick to win the respect of the city’s new music community. Debut EP Rat Blanket is a visceral opening salvo, exploring death, paranoia and disillusionment. What inspired the sound and themes of this record, and what statements do you think this first release makes about the project?

Caitlin Elliman: Rat Blanket was mostly mental illness-induced, mixed with weird and macabre stories we’ve come across and felt we had a relationship with. I think it makes a statement about mental illness in adolescents these days... about how weird and fucked up things can get.

I often find people praise Wych Elm in terms of its causticness, making fashionable associations to noise-rock as opposed to the more nostalgic label ‘grunge’. However, what I find most special about your music is the use of melody – the songs are full of sad, emotive guitar lines and chord changes, without which Rat Blanket would lose its cinematic pull. What kinds of emotions do you try and convey through your music?

CE: I agree! We’ve always said melodies are important to us... to have a really disgusting, dirty backdrop behind something that’s beautiful. We’re trying to convey our personal problems, not just through the lyrics, but through the music. by making it strange, uncomfortable and melancholic.

Caitlin’s lyrics often employ linear storytelling, with my favourite example being ‘Susan Smith’ – this relates a 1994 murder case, in which a woman rolled her car into a lake with her children trapped inside. However, the song claims she left a suicide note and died with her children, whereas the real Susan Smith staged it as a kidnapping and is still alive in prison.

What inspired your use of this story?

CE: I’ve always wanted to be asked this!

Yeah, it was inspired by the murders committed by Susan Smith. At the time I was interested in a lot of post-partum depression cases where mothers had murdered their children, but I wanted to write it from the perspective of an unreliable narrator – whereby maybe that didn’t happen in her case, but it’s definitely happened in others. There have been many cases where parents have murdered their children – going against their maternal instinct, or maybe not having one at all. It’s an illness that actually affects a lot of women after giving birth, and it’s happening more than one might think. I just find it really interesting.

Members: Caitlin Elliman, Jack Hitchins, James Brocklesby, Joe Frost Illustration: Caitlin Elliman

The imagery and stories in Rat Blanket deal with various kinds of female experience, ranging from motherhood (‘Susan Smith’, ‘Greasy Fringe’) to sexism and female empowerment (‘Woman’, ‘1983’); early song ‘Bag of Worms’ was also lent to a short film about fashion communication titled ‘Girls Will Be Girls’. How important is ‘womanhood’ as a subject in your lyrics, and how do you try to explore it?

CE: I’ve always written with maternal themes.

It’s just something that came naturally in my song-writing. I use it to describe all sorts of things. When it comes to writing about sexism, it’s definitely from a personal point of view; ‘Woman’ and ‘1983’ are some of the few songs I’ve written that came straight from how I was feeling after suffering from it. ‘Woman’ was written about how I felt I was made to grow up faster than my brother, despite him being older. ‘1983’ was about being sexually harassed by my teacher and how nothing was ever done about it, and how I find it hard to trust men. I’m really glad ‘Bag of Worms’ was used in “girls will be girls” because that’s what I think that song was intended for. I wrote it about how when I was in primary school, I felt singled out from the weird boys because it was so much more awful to be a weird girl. I’ve never made a conscious effort to dissect female experiences, I think it’s just happened because that’s where a lot of my problems have probably stemmed from.

You are an accomplished live act, and without a booking agent were ‘voted in’ to playing both Green Man and TRUCK festival last summer.

What do you hope people take away from your live performances?

CE: A girl once told me we’d really inspired her and how she wanted to make music like ours. I’ve had people tell me what we’ve made is important and meaningful to them, and how it’s helped them through difficult times. I think having people relate to our music is the nicest response. That’s how we want people to feel after watching us - not alone.

I understand that Wych Elm emerged – through various line-up changes – from a band called Magic Spells, which in turn developed from Caitlin’s solo music. How has the music changed through those iterations?

CE: I learned guitar when I was 13, and by the time I was 15 I’d released an EP on my own. I would play electric guitar on stage on my own.

Eventually I wanted a band - it was getting lonely. I recruited two of my friends and we went through a few names before settling with Wych Elm. I don’t think I even asked them what they thought, it was just like - this is us now. The name just felt right, and it still does!

Before Wych Elm we were too soft. I wanted to be more angry and loud. I still don’t think I’m as angry or loud as I want to be, but we’ll get there eventually.

The band’s interest in darkness recalls local noise-rock group Spectres, whose bassist and guitarist respectively produced and co-released Rat Blanket – the record arrived on a label titled Post Mortem Records, in a sleeve styled after a body bag. Where did this interest in dark subject matter come from, and how did you find releasing your work with people that share it?

CE: Like I said, I was playing guitar and writing my own material from when I was 13. One of the first songs I wrote was called ‘Burning House’ and it was about how I felt myself deteriorating from the inside or something. That’s how I remember it anyway. It’s always somehow related back to my mental state. It’s always been cathartic for me, and I’m not ashamed to admit that. I find writing about things... helps keep things manageable.

I’ve watched you receive support from many artists who were rising themselves when I first moved to Bristol 5 years ago, including Oliver Wilde (whose new band Pet Shimmers had you perform at their first headline gig), your producer Dom Mitchison (who compared you to his highly popular, now-defunct band Velcro Hooks), and Post-Mortem’s co-founder Adrian Dutt, also of local game-changers Howling Owl Records. How have you found the experience of starting out in this city, and how far do you think the local music community has influenced you?

CE: The community in Bristol have been so helpful and kind towards us... it’s really been quite emotional.

We knew we were awful when we started gigging, but it was so nice seeing people have faith with us, and eventually want to work with us! We spoke to Dom before he recorded us, and he said he wanted to because he reminded us of his old band. I went home and listened to the whole album (Velcro Hooks’ selftitled album) and I knew I needed him to be the one to record us. I fell in love with Velcro Hooks. Joe (our drummer) bought me their vinyl and I cried my eyes out. It’s on my record player right now. Without Adrian and Marie Dufrenoy (Post Mortem) we wouldn’t be where we are. They’ve supported us from the very beginning, and have never doubted us despite how reckless we’ve been. They put so much faith in us when nobody else would. We hope we get to work with them more in the future! We’ve made plenty of friends as well, such as Owain and Richard, and all the great bands we’ve crossed paths with. We owe a lot of people a lot of thanks.

What are your future ambitions for Wych Elm? CE: Well, we really want to tour. We want to tour the UK, then Europe, then the US. We wanna go everywhere we possibly can. We just want more people to hear our music. We’re still writing stuff for our next release - whatever that’ll be. But it’s no secret we’re already talking to Dom and Post-Mortem about what ideas we have. I’m hoping it’ll be soon, but with how long Rat Blanket took I have a feeling it’ll be a while. However, I did have to have heart surgery in the middle of that which prolonged the process quite a bit, so it probably won’t be such a wait this time around.

Unless something else in my body goes haywire.

NORMAN

WRY, ANGULAR NO-WAVE

Members: Jack Ogborne, Megan Jenkins, Natty Reeves, Henry Terrett, Harry ‘Iceman’ Furniss Illustration: Finlay Burrows

One of the city’s most unconventional new

guitar bands, Norman draw the off-kilter crooning of Scott Walker and spindly textures of Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis into agitated, wryly humorous no-wave. A composite of local projects Tropic and The Fumes, Norman emerged under the influence of Spinny Nights (also in this issue).

What inspired the bizarre, difficult direction of this new project, and how did you begin making music together?

My favourite song of yours is ‘Normal Haircut’, which opens with a wonderful double vocal. Ogborne’s crooned lines (“All I want is a normal haircut, some bread in a tin…”) are paired with sharp spoken word from Morris (“it’s hard to play guitar in a dissociative episode / Too sad to wank!”). What are the lyrics to Norman’s music designed to deal with, and what is the role of humour in your music?

Jack Ogborne: For me, I guess the more left field aspects of the band are influenced by witnessing artists like Giant Swan, The Naturals, EP/64, Bad Tracking etc. in Bristol when I was a teenager. That stuff really impacted me in a big way, even if it isn’t obvious in the music. I try to carry over that intensity into the songwriting. As you mentioned, we all met while playing shows together in separate bands around Bristol as teenagers. Meg and Henry kicked off the band, then I joined and we met Natty later on. It became apparent that Natty had a similar taste in music and haircut. Iceman is the most recent addition to the group.

JO: For me personally, the lyrics generally just deal with anxiety. Music can be a good outlet for anxiety.

There’s a general religious theme going on too, there’s quite a lot of ground to cover with that. Sometimes they come hand in hand.

You’ve begun working with Harry Iceman Furniss, leader of vital experimental jazz troupe The Iceman Furniss Quartet (Chapter I). How did Iceman join the band, and (as a performer with his roots in improvisation) what do you think he has brought to the project artistically?

JO: Harry has brought buckets. He adds a whole new level of intensity. He’s been a real blessing. We asked Harry to play some Cornet on a demo, then he ended up playing a show with us the day after we recorded.

The rest is history.

Henry Terrett: I love that Harry has added an improvisational nature to the live set; you never get the same set twice. He makes us all react differently each time we play the same songs.

I understand the original New York no-wave scene to have been a major source of inspiration for this project. How did you find the experience of performing with James Chance?

JO: An absolute dream. James Chance is a hero. Me and Natty bonded over Teenage Jesus and The Jerks the first time we met.

The whole groove-based chaos thing of The Contortions has really impacted our music.

Other people in that scene have influenced our songwriting equally though: Lizzie Mercier Decloux, Suicide, Glenn Branca, The Lounge Lizards etc.

Natty Morris: In ‘Normal Haircut’, the humour in those lyrics isn't really about not taking yourself seriously but rather using humour to make the sentiment more believable and genuine. Life is pretty absurd and I feel humor is an intrinsically human way of dealing with it, sometimes the funniest lyrics can also be pretty visceral and cathartic.

Set-closer ‘New Year’s Eve’ revolves around an ascending bass hook, slowly delivered vocals and a fizzing electronic drumkit (which in live performances is placed on the guitar and played through the pickups), before descending into a brief freak-out. This points to how Norman’s music more broadly seems to alternate between warm, complex grooves and frenetic cacophonies. How do you see those elements as relating to each other in your work, and how would you like to imagine people reacting to your music?

JO: Incorporating soft, warmer sections into songs or a live set is really important when you’re trying to create something anxious, there needs to be contrast in order for the intense sections to hit harder, like a false sense of security or something. In terms of people reacting, I like to think the songs will give you something to think about even if you don’t like it.

HT: I love seeing people react to parts of songs that catch them off guard, the kind of ‘woah, wasn’t expecting that’ look, I think that’s really cool. It goes back to that idea of contrast and a false sense of security, I’d like for us to keep surprising people.

Live sets are peppered with brief, colourful instrumental elements (shakers, cowbell, samples) which point to a desire to move beyond the traditional guitar band setup. How do you envisage your live set developing over time?

JO: Despite being a ‘guitar band’, almost all the songs are written (or at least start) on a piano. Maybe we’ll get a piano involved further down the line. I’m really keen to explore bigger arrangements and more varied instrumentation when it comes to recording an album. Maybe some of those arrangements will be incorporated into the live show, I’m not sure. I’m also collecting kids’ toy instruments at the moment, so I'm sure they will make an appearance at some point. We’re just trying to nail the set-up we currently have at the moment before we move onto the advance stuff (kazoos, triangles etc.).

Over the past year, a series of highly unlikely breakthroughs on the national circuit have started to draw mainstream attention to this kind of angular, left-field guitar music. Accordingly, Norman have quickly gained attention beyond the city in a manner that is highly unusual for a 2010’s Bristol-based avantgarde guitar band. How have you found this experience, and what are your future aspirations for the project?

JO: It’s been amazing. We feel super lucky to be playing in London a lot, that’s been really helpful for us. Everyone has been friendly and supportive. I didn’t know how the band would be received outside of Bristol, but so far it’s been positive. In terms of future aspirations, we’re set to release a 3 track mixtape in spring, so we’re looking forward to seeing if we can reach some more people with that. We recorded all of Harry’s parts at The Old England one morning in the summer. My laptop completely died as soon as we got there, so we ended up having to record using my phone. It came out pretty well anyway.

How do you see this project as relating to Bristol’s current DIY/ avant-garde scene, and – having all grown up in this city – how far do you think Norman has been influenced by the music community here?

JO: Bristol has been a crucial influence for the band.

There are so many people & places to be inspired by.

No one expects any kind of financial reward or critical acclaim, they just make stuff out of necessity and enjoyment. It’s not at all contrived. Since the 1970’s Bristol has always been in a different universe to anywhere else in the UK, musically. The ethos of those earlier Bristol bands like The Pop Group, Maximum Joy and Glaxo Babies has had a huge impact on us, but there’s still just as much to be excited about at the moment.

NM: Growing up around the musical community in Bristol has really nurtured a sense of exploration when it comes to writing and listening to music. Any night of the week you can find gigs showcasing so much awe-inspiring and envelope-pushing music, it really makes me quite proud.

VESSEL

EXPERIMENTAL PRODUCER / YOUNG ECHO CO-FOUNDER

Members: Sebastian Gainsborough Illustration: Christalla Fannon

From their early days in the original Young Echo circle, the extraordinary soaringly imaginative sonic and experiments of Sebastian ‘Vessel’ Gainsborough have characterised the past decade of Bristol’s avant-garde music. Subverting settled ideas around dance music with an early run of gritty, unusual EBM records, the past two years have seen Vessel carve out a new direction in classical music with the ingenious Queen of Golden Dogs, and stunning collaborations with violinist Rakhi Singh.

How did you begin producing music as Vessel, and how did you first become involved with Young Echo?

Vessel: I first started using the name Vessel when I was about 16/17 – a couple of years after I’d started fiddling about with computer music. I was playing in a rock ‘n’ roll band with Joe McGann (Kahn), Sam Kidel (El Kid), Paul Zaba and Patrick Duff, but we were also making and playing electronic music. Young Echo evolved out of two new strands of friendship – one with those guys, and the other with Amos Childs (DJ Jabu) and Chris Ebdon (Ishan Sound). We all started getting together in my bedroom at my mum’s place, when I think we were probably around 20. It was basically an excuse to hang out, fuck around, be silly, and play all the stuff that we wanted to play but felt we couldn’t platform in club scenarios.

Your debut LP was 2012’s Order of Noise. A darkly beautiful dub-facing album exploring gorgeous ambient (‘Vizar’) and skittish industrial textures (‘Scarletta’), this points to some of the shared ideas presented on Young Echo’s collectively-produced Nexus the following year – both in superficial sounds and in its proposed subversion of conventional dance music. It was also, to my understanding, your first and last album employing any conventional means of production (with your approach to subsequent LPs being more technically complex). How do you reflect on this first album, especially in relation to your work since?

V: I guess my first response would be that I don’t reflect on it at all, and I can’t remember any of it, but of course it’s in there somewhere… even if it was just a station stop along the way. I was asked by Triangle to make an album completely out of the blue – I’d never even considered it.

It was my first experience of working on something consistently every day, day-in day-out for months on end. It’s kind of amazing and beautiful looking back on it – being in that process for the first time, and actually becoming quite addicted to it.

I left it for a week, rebooted everything and started again – the first thing I did was that piece of music, which looking back feels like a very serendipitous crisis.

It’s definitely still charged with a lot of feelings for me, beyond that incident. There were a lot of things going on in my life at the time, and that was one of those rare, clear moments where you can channel something into a decent piece of music.

Your visceral 2014 follow-up Punish Honey signalled a shift into even more fervently experimental territory, with many of the sounds created with instruments you had built yourself. What inspired you to do that, and how did this influence the album?

This period also saw you embark upon a number of side-projects and collaborations, of which my favourite is your work with spoken-word artist chester giles as ASDA. Can you tell me about that project, and how you see it as relating to your solo work?

V: If I make something I feel is derivative or isn’t forcing any new growths, I have a physically kind of nauseous reaction. I was looking for a way to put myself in a position where I was deeply uncomfortable, and I didn’t know any of the rules.

I can’t quite remember how I stumbled across the idea of making instruments. It might have been through the band Swans; the drummer Thor recommended a book, and that sparked off some ideas. I do know that, once I’d begun, it was so alien and everything I made was so terrible that it gave me a real fire to continue. That feeling of doing something completely unexpected which surprises you is really addictive.

Following on from Order of Noise, that was a feeling I needed to have – a feeling of newness.

You described that album as trying to move from more cerebral music into music that was more focused on the body. Perhaps the track most clearly representative of this is ‘Red Sex’ – can you tell me about that song’s creation?

V: My computer had died, and I had lost four months’ work. I’d been in my bedroom for three straight days trying to salvage what I could, and finally realised I was going to get nothing. I can very clearly remember going downstairs, very calmly telling my mum what had happened and requesting that she didn’t talk to me.

V: chester and I are both really fascinated by grey areas and nuance. It was, and is, an attempt to explore a big mess of feelings around vulnerability, tenderness, anger, the difficulties of love, boredom, fucking and so on; all the stuff that we would just lose ourselves talking about for hours and hours. I think it is at its best (and sometimes at its worst) when it’s live; it’s the one totally volatile, unpredictable ‘live’ project that I’ve done, and it’s a very dear project to me.

Your 2018 masterpiece Queen of Golden Dogs saw you pursue a wildly different sound, driven principally by classical music.

Combining modern synthetic with classical textures instrumentation, fed by a wealth of literary and visual sources, this highly complex and conceptual record seems to tie up interests and inclinations (particularly electro-acoustic music) which began around Punish, Honey.

What inspired your shift towards classical music, and what did this record aim to deal with thematically?

V: I met someone who is a classical violinist, and it was kind of a perfect storm – I had been receding from electronic music for a long time, and feeling great hunger for something completely different.

She opened me up to a whole universe of expression. Thematically, it’s more or less about the joys of complexity and change, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff wound up in that for me – it’s extremely personal.

I wanted to make something that explored colour, complexity (and how fucking difficult it is), and love.

Your juxtaposition of classical and modern electronic sounds relates to a wider interest, you’ve suggested, in exploring the intervening space between contrasting aesthetic ideas; this is something you’ve previously located in the literature and art that informed the album, such as Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts and Remedios Varo’s surrealist paintings.

Could you elaborate on this idea in relation to the album?

V: It comes down to what Roland Barthes called ‘The Third Thing’, which is a magically charged space that opens up when you look for the middle ground between two ideas. That’s more often than not what excites me. I don’t think I’m original at all, but I love perverting, contrasting and comparing strong ideas and feelings, often in quite a blunt way. I want to see what happens when those ideas meet, and how they relate to each other.

That sounds really intellectual but it’s totally physical – it becomes a whole organism for me. Taking the ideas of Maggie Nelson, and feeling them as sound in relation to a painting from Remedios Varo – it seems very abstract, but it doesn’t feel like it in the moment.

In the album you give the track names dedications; in the cases of the songs dedicated to the above influences, this might be considered designed to direct listeners to your artistic reference-points.

How do you think investing the listener with an understanding of your source material might influence their experience of the record? More broadly, how would you like to imagine listeners reacting to this album?

V: I would happily say that I don’t know how it would influence them, but that’s what I would want. I find the whole idea of press releases and explanations, especially of instrumental music, totally fucking repulsive. If you have to do it, you haven’t done your job well enough. That’s one of the few strong opinions I have about this whole music-making thing.

It’s too complicated to talk about what those pieces meant to me, or did to me, but one of the main concerns I had was opening up a space for listeners to play in and explore. Naming the tracks like that was both an act of gratitude and a desire to, as you put it, point the listeners to a different kind of experience if they wanted to have one.

‘Torno-me eles e nao eu (For Remedios)’ is a vocal led track, delivering a piece from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet; what relationship does this text have with the album, and what inspired its use?

V: The translation of that poem’s title is “I don’t know how many souls I have”.

Pessoa came up with this idea of heteronyms – he had multiple personalities, tens of them, and all of them had creative output and personalities which were incredibly distinct from one another. I became absolutely fascinated with this, because in my personal life I’d felt the edges of this as well; it was a deeply inspiring text that summed up how I felt about the ideas I was trying to communicate.

I have been struck by how your descriptions of classical music often fit its ideas into very contemporary parameters for defining ‘experimental’ music – the album’s erraticism, for example, is something I’ve seen you relate to 15th century composers like Don Carlo Gesualdo. While ‘experimental music’ and discourse around it usually focuses on being ‘futuristic’ (or at least extremely ‘current’), I think one of Queen of Golden Dogs’ most interesting qualities is a real temporal uncertainty, flitting between sounds and ideas from different periods.

How do you characterise the record’s relationship with time?

V: I think if you’re going into any act of creation with the aim of making it sound ‘futuristic’ you’ve already shot yourself in the foot; it’s often those creative products that sound dated the quickest. I’ve got no interest in trying to make anything futuristic at all (and I actually don’t listen to a lot of contemporary music), but then it gets filtered through me and I’m a product of my age.

Sometimes we look back on a piece of work and we think it’s prescient, or see how wonderfully it evokes or plays with ideas from the past, but I don’t think you can contrive that. I think if you overthink that stuff, that can undo a work quite quickly. I think a listener’s perception is much more valuable than mine.

You collaborated with Rakhi Singh for your new project Written In Fire, which I understand was written as a response to Leoš Janáček’s ‘Intimate Letters’. Can you tell me more about this project, and the experience of performing it live? How does it relate to your work on Queen of Golden Dogs?

V: Rakhi is my significant other and she’s a violinist.

We’d been together for a little bit, and I was starting to explore classical music. One day I was in her flat and I heard her housemate, who was a cellist, playing this music with her string quartet. I was kind of walking past the door, and it just… rooted me to the spot. I sat on the stairs and listened to them play it.

Eventually I found out what it was and spent the rest of the afternoon listening to it.

It’s this piece by Janáček, and it’s an incredibly charged, elastic piece of music… it’s just full of life. He was absolutely obsessed with a younger woman, and he wrote this piece over three weeks. It’s just full of pop music and hooks, and the structure is mindbending. That was the moment I heard a piece of classical music which completely blew my whole world open.

Fast forward a year: Rakhi and I had been talking about doing a project together, and we hit upon the idea of doing a response to this piece. Over the next few years, we wrote this piece and have now toured it quite a bit as well. It’s a string quartet and electronics; it consists of the original Janáček piece, and then we play our piece without any break.

We’ve now written three pieces together which will be released this year.

Now residing beyond the city, with your last album produced in Wales, discussion of your work has broadly shifted away from being firmly contextualised by Bristol. However, along with remaining a member of Young Echo, you are still discussed as an influence and mentor to Bristol artists like Giant Swan; from your personal output to your contributions to other projects, you have left an indelible mark on the past decade of Bristol’s music. A full decade on from your first work here, how do you see yourself in relation to the city’s music today?

V: Not having lived there for some time now, I’ve got quite a scant idea of what’s actually going on beyond my circle of friends. When I go back, I do hear about all these amazing new projects like the ones you’ve mentioned: EP/64, E B U… From what my friends tell me, it’s buzzing again, in a really good way.

So I’m a tourist – that’s what I am to Bristol now musically, I think.

57 - 59 North Street Bristol BS3 1ES friendlyrecords.co.uk

12

CHAMPION the far-ranging forms of

IDEOLOGICAL ART Springing from vital Ideas, Notions and Principles To Improve our Cultural Landscape

HOW CAN IT BE, that such a weight in MUSIC is Written, Funded, Recorded, Mixed, Mastered, Pitched, Released, Championed

Without a considered point, subject or notion in sight?

(Cannily fabricated in retrospect for PR, PR, PR).

May we devote ourselves to promoting music commensurate in THOUGHT and ASPIRATION to its privelige of being recorded.

FOR IN THIS CITY OF BRISTOL Artists of all genres create music which: Meaningfully contributes to our current artistic universe.

Engages us with new voices, perspectives and discourse.

Surprises, unsettles, uplifts.

As THE NATION’S EYES TURN TO THIS VITAL COMMUNITY May its example be followed on principles, attitudes and concepts, rather than standardised aesthetics.

CHAPTER III ENDS

(AS MORE EYES TURN TO THIS MOMENT IN MUSIC THAN EVER BEFORE!)

AN ISSUE CAN ONLY BE SO LONG. These projects are just threads in a larger, grander tale.

There are many, many more to show ye.

THE BRISTOL GERM WILL INDEED RETURN, for a glorious fourth issue, exploring more ARTISTS, LABELS, and PROJECTS from this GREAT EPOCH. THIS HISTORIC MOMENT IN AVANT-GARDE MUSIC Will indeed, finally, be delivered to the masses, chiselled into the popular consciousness, and marked in the annals of history.

THE STARS ALIGN; Eyes turn to the city as several Bristol projects (IDLES, Giant Swan etc.) break through on to the national stage, and new projects emerge at a startling pace.

The Landfill can’t obscure it much longer. The junkyard prepares to be re-shaped.

AND WHAT OF YOU, DEAR

READERS?

LISTEN to these artists, for this epoch must be

heard to be understood. Writing, good as it can be, is always a compromise for the first-fact of musical/aesthetic beauty; only in encountering it firsthand will you know its dazzling brilliance.

PROTEST the cultural treason of complacent music journalism, and hindrances to the promotion and experience of great art.

SPREAD the news of this community, and SPREAD THIS GLORIOUS DOCUMENT!!!

THE NOBLE CRUSADE CONTINUES!!

CREDITS Artists/Projects: Bokeh Versions Harrga / Spinny Nights Kinlaw & Franco Franco Sunun / Pet Shimmers Wych Elm / Norman Lynks Afrikka / Vessel Manonmars & O$VMV$M

Created, Written, Designed & Edited by: Alastair Shuttleworth

Illustrators: Harry Wyld / Adrian Dutt Miles Opland / Gordon Apps Sophia Jowett / Manonmars Kinlaw & Franco Franco Amy Gough / Alisha Bradbury Luke Dye-Montefiore Christalla Fannon

O Friends! Look ye in HORROR

OOFriends!

Friends!

At the LANDFILL around ye! You are beset on all sides; It is each day pushed, SALT-LIKE, into your ears and eyes!

Look ye in Look ye in O Friends! Look Look ye ye in in HORROR AtAt the aroundye! ye!of You beset onsides; all sides; The PARASITE COMPLACENT, At theLANDFILL LANDFILL around ye!

You areare beset on all all sides; the LANDFILL around You are beset on

HORROR HORROR

It isItIteach day pushed, into your ears each day pushed,SALT-LIKE, SALT-LIKE, into into your ears andand eyes!eyes! isis each day pushed, SALT-LIKE, your ears and eyes!

REACTIONARY MUSIC JOURNALISM At the LANDFILL around ye!

You are beset on all Has committed many heinous crimes against ye…

The PARASITE COMPLACENT, of The PARASITE COMPLACENT, of The PARASITE of COMPLACENT, It is each day pushed, SALT-LIKE, into your ears and eyes!

REACTIONARY MUSIC MUSIC JOURNALISM REACTIONARY JOURNALISM

REACTIONARY MUSIC JOURNALISM

1) A constant, nostalgic lamentation of the ‘state of guitar music’ (the knackered horse!), which propagates lazy, insipid four-chord rock, along with the lightweight ‘fuck thatcher’ pop-political ramblings and leather-jacket misogyny of its flabby, aging evangelists.

1)2) A The constant, nostalgic lamentation the ‘state of music’ propagation of talentlessofindustry for whom ‘state‘sleeper of guitar guitarprojects’, music’ (the (the knackered horse!), which propagates lazy, insipid four-chord rock, insipid four-chord rock, in music magazines is essentially pre-booked.If the discovery of space 1) A constant, nostalgic lamentation of the ‘state of guitar music’ (the along with the lightweight ‘fuck thatcher’ pop-political ramblings and pop-political ramblings and new talent ishorse!), simulated, howpropagates authentic can new talent be? rock, knackered which lazy,the insipid four-chord misogyny of its flabby, aging evangelists. evangelists.to use their resources t 3) leather-jacket The failure of mainstream music-publications along with the lightweight ‘fuck thatcher’ pop-political ramblings an 2) The propagation of talentless industry ‘sleeper for whom ‘sleeper projects’, projects’, for whom adequately review music played/produced further than 10 miles from leather-jacket misogyny of its flabby, aging evangelists. the discovery discovery of space in music magazines is essentially pre-booked. pre-booked.IfIf the their London offices 2)new propagation ofhow talentless industry ‘sleeper projects’, for whom talent is simulated, authentic cancan thethe new talent be?be? of The new talent is simulated, how authentic new talent 4) A patronising, purely-relational style of reviewing which promotes inofmusic magazines is essentiallyto the to discovery space 3) The failure mainstream music-publications use music-publications topre-booked.If use their their resources resources derivation (which is easy to explain) over experimentation (which isn’ adequately review music played/produced further 10 miles from to new adequately review music played/produced further than 10 miles talent is simulated, how authentic canthan the new talent be?

London offices from their London offices 3)their The failure of mainstream music-publications to use their resource 4) A patronising, purely-relational style of reviewing promotes reviewing which which promotes adequately review music played/produced further than 10 miles fro derivation derivation (which (which is is easy easy to to explain) explain) over over experimentation experimentation (which (which isn’t). their London offices isn’t) 4) A patronising, purely-relational style of reviewing which promotes derivation (which is easy to explain) over experimentation (which i

Has committed many against ye…ye…

But nonemany so heinous Has committed heinouscrimes crimes against Has committed many heinous crimes against ye…

great as to But none none so so But hide from ye But none so great as to awful the glorious great to ye hideas from ye from hide news of… the glorious glorious hide from ye the news of… of… news the glorious THE HISTORIC EPISODE IN UNDERGROUND news of…

MUSIC WHICH IS OCCURING IN BRISTOL: THE HISTORIC HISTORIC EPISODE IN UNDERGROUND UNDERGROUND THE EPISODE IN An Inspiring, Dramatic and Strange MUSIC WHICH IS OCCURING OCCURING INCoalescence BRISTOL: MUSIC WHICH IS IN BRISTOL: THE HISTORIC EPISODE IN UNDERGROUND An Inspiring, Inspiring, Dramatic and Strange Strange Coalescence Persuasion of ARTISTS of Every into a An Dramatic and Coalescence MUSIC WHICH OCCURING IN BRISTOL: EveryIS Persuasion of ARTISTS ARTISTS of Every into aa COMMUNITY. Persuasion of TIGHT-KNIT of into AnDIY Inspiring, Dramatic and Strange Coalescence Heroic Labels, TIGHT-KNIT COMMUNITY. TIGHT-KNIT COMMUNITY. Heroic DIY Labels, Labels, DIY Persuasion ofHeroic ARTISTS of Every into a and ART of Bold Promoters & The MUSIC Bold Promoters Promoters && ArtistsTIGHT-KNIT Bold The MUSIC and ART of The and ART of COMMUNITY. Ground-Breaking ThisMUSIC Historic Moment is shown in Ground-Breaking Artists Ground-Breaking Artists This Historic Historic Moment Moment isis shown shown in in Heroic Labels, (Noise-Rock,DIY Post-Punk, Dub, Psych, This THE BRISTOL GERM: (Noise-Rock, Post-Punk, Dub, Psych, (Noise-Rock,Industrial-Techno, Post-Punk, Dub, Psych, Garage-Rock, Jazz THE BRISTOL BRISTOL GERM: GERM: THE Bold Promoters & Garage-Rock, Industrial-Techno, Jazz Garage-Rock, Industrial-Techno, Jazz The MUSIC and ART of An Inclusive, Eclectic and Honest etc. etc.) ABOUND! An Inclusive, Eclectic and Honest Inclusive, Eclectic and Honest ABOUND! Artists An etc.)ABOUND! etc.etc.) etc.

Ground-Breaking This Historic Moment is shown in Document of this Community, Document of this Community, Document of this Community, (Noise-Rock, Post-Punk, Dub, Psych, Down with the Landfill, Down with the Landfill, THE BRISTOL GERM: made ENLIGHTEN Down with the Landfill,Jazz made made toto ENLIGHTEN andand Garage-Rock, Industrial-Techno, to ENLIGHTEN and Down Downwith withComplacency, Complacency, INSPIRE with Complacency, Down INSPIRE MASSES. An Inclusive, Eclectic and Honest INSPIRE thethe MASSES. the MASSES. etc. etc.) ABOUND! And And(yes, (yes,dear dear friends)… friends)…

Document of this Community, And (yes, dear friends)…

Down with the Landfill, made to ENLIGHTEN and ON WITH THE NOBLE CRUSADE!!!

UPwith ON WITH THE NOBLE CRUSADE!!!

Down Complacency, INSPIRE the MASSES.

And (yes, dear friends)…