Issue 156 Fontaines D.C.

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Issue 156 – June, 2024

There is unpredictability afoot. On a macro level, there’s obviously the fact that, by the time the next issue of Crack Magazine rolls off the presses, it’s likely the UK will have a new government. I don’t even want to hazard a guess at what nonsense a Euro 24 summer running directly parallel to a general election will bring, but suffice to say: Britain is not prepared. The streets will run wet with pilsner, political tears (from all corners, let’s be honest) and whatever it is Jack Grealish uses to make his hair do that. Good luck out there.

Closer to the ground, the stories in this issue are of people defying expectations; being expected to zig, and deliberately zagging. On their latest album Romance, Fontaines D.C. elbow their way out of the ‘post-punk poets’ narrative that’s ringfenced them since their 2019 debut. But the Dublin band aren’t rebuking their past as much as they are leaning into future-facing ambiguity with a body of work that is imaginative rather than confessional, where fantasy permeates everything and love is a physical destination. “It has a sort of lunacy about it,” guitarist Conor Curley tells Francis Blagburn for our cover story.

Meanwhile, experimental cellist Mabe Fratti talks about uprooting her life and moving to Mexico City, swapping her supportive but somewhat sheltered upbringing in Guatemala for new horizons full of curiosity and challenge. Similarly, Leeds-born saxophonist and bandleader Jasmine Myra has had to plot her own route after starting her journey as one of the only women on her jazz course, where improvisation tends to be male-dominated. “That comes from a wider issue where young boys are encouraged to make more mistakes,” she observes. The determination to push through trial and error led to her meditative and unorthodox new album Rising, whose expansive touchstones range from Grover Washington to Wes Anderson soundtracks.

The confines of one’s immediate surroundings don’t mean much to 23-year-old Downtown Kayoto, either, who conjures up glossy, mid2000s influenced R&B from his childhood bedroom in Hull. And for Ugandan producer and DJ Nsasi, music is a force to be reckoned with. Their blend of traditional and hyper-modern sounds challenges the conventions of club music and fights for space in their home country, where severe anti-homosexuality legislation is currently putting LGBTQ+ people at risk.

Music can symbolise a lot of things: subversion, survival, playfulness, liberation. In Nsasi’s case, it’s a “tool of resistance”. It can mean all of the above, and it can have no clear meaning at all, but the act of making music is a reminder of how malleable reality can be. You can create something out of nothing, build a world for yourself to live in. For a lot of artists in this issue, music is a means of beautiful insubordination. What can it be for you?

Emma Garland, Acting Editor

Fontaines D.C.

photographed by Holly Mccandless-Desmond in London, May 2024

RECOMMENDS

OREN AMBARCHI, GANAVYA, BRÌGHDE CHAIMBEUL MS RHEINFANTASIE, MONHEIM 4-6 JULY

PATTI SMITH

BRIGHTON DOME 25 JUNE

Monheim Triennale isn’t your usual music festival. A three-year cycle of events – The Sound, The Prequel and The Festival – it’s an ambitious project geared towards artists as pioneering and convention-breaking as its own format. This year, it’s part two of the cycle (The Prequel), with 16 artists gathering to workshop the solo and collaborative performances they will bring to next year’s festival proper. Among the musicians invited are locked-groove magician Oren Ambarchi, beguiling smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul, feted spiritual jazz and ambient artist Ganavya, Palestinian sound collagist and rapper Muqata’a and Terre Thaemlitz (a.k.a.

DJ Sprinkles).

BRUNCH ELECTRONIK FESTIVAL

HELENA HAUFF, BLACK COFFEE, SOULWAX PARC DEL FÒRUM, BARCELONA 9-11 AUGUST

Barcelona’s daytime party promoters have been filling our feeds with shiny happy people for over a decade now, but it was only last year that they flipped the switch on their first festival. It went down like a cold beer in a heatwave, of course, so here comes the followup, with Black Coffee, Fatboy Slim, Soulwax, Palms Trax, Dixon b2b with Hernan Cattaneo, Dee Diggs, Jayda G, Kampire and many more bringing the good times to Parc del Fòrum, Jardins Joan Brossa and Nitsa Club.

CHARLI XCX

HERE AT OUTERNET 7 JUNE

NEOPOP

SAMA’ ABDULHADI, OCTAVE ONE, JEFF MILLS FORTE SANTIAGO DA BARRA, VIANA DO CASTELO 8-10 AUGUST

22 JUNE

For three days and nights every August, the sleepy port city of Viana do Castelo, in Portugal’s far north, is transformed into the capital of techno thanks to Neopop. This 17th edition will see another busload of cutting-edge rave operators scheduled to arrive at the city’s waterfront fortress. Bringing the energy are Palestinian techno activist Sama’ Abdulhadi, avant trance and acid specialist Amelie Lens, Josh Wink and Detroit techno visionaries Jeff Mills and Octave One. Portugal’s DubLab will deploy mindmelting visuals for additional oomph.

CONDUCTA

CONCORDE 2 15 JUNE

WECANDANCE

SOULJABOY, VTSS, DJ GIGOLA ZEEBRUGGE BEACH, ZEEBRUGGE 3-4 & 10-11 AUGUST

Feel the sand between your toes at this Belgian seaside rave. With the help of spatial designers Studio Dennis Vanderbroeck, WeCanDance will transform Zeebrugge beach into a synapse-frying world that reflects this year’s theme, ‘Drop in the Light, Rise in the Dark’, over back-to-back August weekends. Looming large on the line-up is Soulja Boy, whose rowdy hip-hop swag will break up the continuum-exploring sounds of VTSS, Mama Snake, Sedef Adasi and Gabber Eleganza.

MEO KALORAMA

BURNA BOY, MASSIVE ATTACK, FEVER RAY PARQUE DA BELA VISTA, LISBON 29-31 AUGUST

MEO Kalorama brings Portugal’s busy festival season to a close in style. After impressing in 2022 and 2023, this Lisbon knees-up proves three is the magic number with a real zinger of a line-up. Following in the footsteps of megastar artists who’ve performed at Bela Vista down the years are Afrobeats don Burna Boy, trip-hop heroes Massive Attack and NY disco-punks LCD Soundsystem. There are standout names everywhere you look, though, including The Smile, Fever Ray, Gossip, Ana Moura and Ezra Collective. One final blowout in the sun? Oh go on, then.

MANNEQUIN PUSSY

THE GARAGE 22 JUNE

ICA 19 JUNE

ETHEL CAIN

ROUNDHOUSE 10 JUNE

GRACE JONES, NONAME, MASSIVE ATTACK KOBETAMENDI, BILBAO 11-13 JULY

We’re not sure what’s more impressive about this festival: the line-up –featuring Gallic pop royalty Air, UK rave behemoths The Prodigy and Underworld, and a packed middle order of Mulatu Astatke, Noname, Cymande and JPEGMAFIA – or its idyllic location on Mount Cobetas, within easy reach of one of Europe’s most cultured cities. Either way, Bilbao BBK Live is winning on most fronts, and comes with the added bonuses of a forested clubbing stage and the hula-hooping antics of pop’s most flamboyant septuagenarian, Grace Jones. BILBAO BBK

THE JAZZ CAFÉ 21 JUNE

BRISTOL SOUNDS

ANNIE MAC, THE BREEDERS, PLACEBO CANONS MARSH AMPHITHEATRE,

BRISTOL 22-30 JUNE

For one week every year, Bristol’s harbourside amphitheatre swaps the grinding of skateboard decks on concrete for a week of live music courtesy of Bristol Sounds. Pop and rock nostalgists will roll in this year for performances by Busted, James Arthur, Skindred and Placebo, while Gentleman’s Dub Club and The Skints lead a day of skanking. The closing weekend is where it’s at, though, with Annie Mac bringing her Before Midnight experience to a partyminded all-dayer, and indie-rock deities The Breeders topping a bill featuring Squid and Ty Segall.

OUTRO FESTIVAL

THE CAUSE 15 JUNE

SZIGET

KYLIE, RAYE, STORMZY ÓBUDAI-SZIGET, BUDAPEST 7-12 AUGUST

Sziget has a lot going for it. The sixday festival on the Danube has enough entertainment on offer to put a five-star holiday camp to shame, from arts and sports to a Budapest city pass and a full-tilt rave arena. And that’s before we get to the small matter of the line-up, which this year is one for the ages. We’re talking Kylie, Skrillex, RAYE, Big Thief, Blondshell, Stormzy, Teezo Touchdown, Fontaines D.C., Kiasmos… We’re tired just writing it all down.

【Words】

Jasmine Kent-Smith

【Photography】

Joe Howat

RISING

SOUNDS LIKE: STAR-POWERED POP-R&B WHICH DRAWS FROM THE PAST BUT THRIVES IN THE PRESENT

SOUNDTRACK FOR: SUMMER ROAD TRIPS WITH THE WINDOWS DOWN, OR LATE-NIGHT DRIVES WITH THE VOLUME UP

FILE NEXT TO: RIO RAINZ, THE KID LAROI, JORDAN WARD

OUR FAVOURITE SONG: CAME THRU

WHERE TO FIND HIM: @DOWNTOWNKAYOTO

When speaking to Downtown Kayoto, the 23-year-old singer, rapper and producer who dreams up sun-soaked R&B from his childhood bedroom in Hull, you get the sense that he’s not usually given to bouts of self-doubt. “I’m capable of everything and anything – my mum told me that,” he beams.

The fast-rising artist, born Chiko Chinyadza, recently tested this confidence by two-stepping out of his comfort zone to learn dance choreography for the video of his disarmingly addictive single Came Thru. The track opens with seductive whispering, reminiscent of N*E*R*D’s 2004 bop She Wants to Move – which isn’t a coincidence. Early-aughts R&B and hip-hop dominated the moodboard for his forthcoming EP Thinking With My Ears , hence the dancing. “I want to have my little Justin Timberlake, Usher moment right now,” explains Chinyadza, who did musical theatre as a kid but had zero dance experience. “I can’t just dabble in that world and reference the sound without bringing the energy, especially with where I want to go.”

Born near Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, Chinyadza’s family relocated to England during his early years and settled in Hull when he was primary school age. Musically, his parents

international stars like Michael Jackson or Kylie Minogue he was exposed to first. This is why, he theorises, he sings in an American-leaning accent that belies his upbringing. “I was thinking about it the other day and like, I’m not from London, and so where’s my reference point?” he ponders. “I grew up in Birmingham, Grimsby and Hull, and never picked up the accent. So for the music, it was like: let’s go back. What do I remember? TLC, Usher, Timberlake… Those are my reference points. So that’s how I’m going to sing.”

On Thinking With My Ears , Chinyadza, who also completed a biochemistry degree last year, combines glossy touchstones with a raw-edged emo confessionalism; he’s both heartbroken and self-aware as he wrestles with the aftermath of a breakup. “The biggest theme of this EP was confident vulnerability – not shying away from displaying how you feel,” says Chinyadza, who glides from in-his-feels to in-his-zone across its eight tracks, ruminating on emotional needs and unsaid truths (Came Thru), misplaced trust (Trust U ) and shedding

7

7

bright as a soft-play centre. Where past releases like 2021’s NAVIG8 and last year’s Learning in Public captured a coming-of-age era marked by exploratory intentions and a wider creative toolkit (think distorted guitars, angsty vocals and fluctuating tempos), Thinking With My Ears feels more focused. It’s his tightest, poppiest release yet. “If NAVIG8 was me figuring it out, and Learning in Public was me getting it wrong, then Thinking With My Ears is me having figured it out and knowing where I’m going,” he asserts.

Chinyadza is unwavering in his pop stardom ambitions, envisioning Coachella slots, prime time TV appearances and the kind of auteur status conferred on his heroes like Tyler, the Creator and Pharrell Williams. He sees no conflict in marrying openhearted confessionals and everyday relatability with A-list charisma and high production values. And there’s no time to waste – he even aims to have

Francis Blagburn 【Photography】 Holly Mccandless-Desmond

Assistant】 Ian Blackburn

Assistant】 Joe Hunt

Director】 Liam John Hill 【Photography Intern】 Imogen Taylor 【Styling】 Jordan Dean Schneider 【Makeup】 Theresa Davies 【Hair】 Mike O’Gorman

On their fourth album Romance, FONTAINES D.C. are shedding their image as literary post-punks in favour of fantasy, love and extremity that defies over-analysis

“He was reading Ulysses to his baby, just for the craic, know what I mean?”

Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten is sitting in the living room of the flat he’s recently moved into, discussing a song from the band’s upcoming fourth album, Romance. The track in question is a swirling ballad draped in wistful strings and acoustic guitar called Horseness Is the Whatness , and it takes its name from a line in the James Joyce masterpiece.

Chatten is Fontaines’ primary lyricist, but the words for the song were penned by Carlos O’Connell, the band’s instantly recognisable pink-haired guitarist. O’Connell became enamoured with Joyce’s phrase while on holiday last summer with his baby daughter. He decided that whenever he read a book, he’d read it aloud with her. It’s a habit he’s curtailed since (she’s fond of ripping out pages) but for a couple of weeks on the French island of Île de Ré, she was calm. When we chat over the phone, O’Connell explains: “There’s this passage where [the novel’s protagonist] Leopold Bloom goes to the library and there are all these intellectuals discussing Plato and Shakespeare and whatever. Bloom says something like, ‘Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse.’” O’Connell laughs with delight at the words’ brilliance. “It’s the first break you have from all this intellectual overcompensation [from the other characters in the scene], and I just fell in love with the simplicity of it. What makes a horse a horse? Its horseness, and that’s it.”

Back in Chatten’s living room, the singer is reflecting on O’Connell’s choice of reading matter – and reading partner. It feels symbolic, almost. “It’s reading an old book which we’ve referenced or bandied around before,” he says. (A lyric on 2018 single Boys In the Better Land, for instance, describes a character having “a face like sin and a heart like a James Joyce novel ”.) “Ulysses is very much from this writer who comes from a stock that we associate with an old Dublin. It has the feeling of a relic now, in the context of reading it to a baby. There’s something there that fits with the theme of the [new] album for me.”

The band have long been heralded as scions of that old Dublin – Dublin City is, after all, what the D.C. in the band’s name stands for. Announcing their arrival onto the post-punk scene with the 2019 album Dogrel – a record named after doggerel, a type of poetic verse – the fivepiece made up of Chatten on vocals, O’Connell and Conor Curley on guitars, Conor Deegan III (or Deego) on bass, and Tom Coll on drums formed in the city’s BIMM college and were rapidly defined, and sometimes caricatured, as young punk poets. Inspired by the work of figures such as Patrick Kavanagh and Shane MacGowan, Chatten’s lyrics burrow under the skin of the city with a mixture of abstract symbolism and keen observations. The first lyric on Dogrel ’s opening track Big served as a statement of intent. Over synchronised downstroke guitar chords and a clattering four-four drum beat, he declared: “Dublin in the rain is mine/ A pregnant city with a Catholic mind.” All three albums to date have been defined in relation to Ireland: either as descriptions of it, or meditations on moving away.

When I speak to Chatten on a mild Tuesday in April, the sky is a translucent grey. The wet grass of the nearby park stands neon against the colourless London afternoon. Inside his flat, he’s tired after a bad night’s sleep, dressed down in adidas trainers, shorts and a black jumper –a toned down twist on the 90s skate-punk aesthetic he’s been flaunting in recent photoshoots –and surrounded by the bric-a-brac of a life that’s ready to be sorted into order. He only moved into the north London flat – unfurnished – with his partner a week before, which, as with many things Fontaines D.C., feels like a neat act of symbolism. We are standing in the middle of a fresh start.

“I haven’t really put my stamp on the place,” he says. There are the usual accoutrements of everyday living –plants on the windowsill, Burford Brown eggs, pesto in the fridge, redbush tea bags. But there are also fragments of his artistic interests. There’s a Rothkoesque painting named after W.B. Yeats’ poem, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, resting on the floorboards until it finds a home on the wall; a box set of Harry Potter audiobooks he listened to on a CD Walkman when his mind was racing on tour (a phone would only make it race faster); a metal cabinet filled with quaint crockery. “I had this idea of making the gaff look like a religious gothic granny’s house and getting, like, some church pews type stuff,” he says wryly, looking around at the pink walls. “I like the idea of somebody living here who just has a cross on the wall and fuck all else, know what I mean?”

“I THINK ART CAN BE A FLOATING NEVERLAND BETWEEN PEOPLE. EVERYBODY CAN REACH OUT AND TOUCH IT” – GRIAN CHATTEN

Carlos wears Sunglasses: GENTLE MONSTER, Necklace: CHOPOVA LOWENA,  Shirt: SIMONE ROCHA, Trousers: SIMONE ROCHA, Shoes: SOLID HOMME

Grian wears Sunglasses: GENTLE MONSTER, T-shirt: ICAN HAREM, Trousers: JORDANLUCA, Shoes: CHARLES JEFFREY LOVERBOY

Tom wears Shirt: AV VATTEV, Jeans: ARIES,  Shoes: GUCCI

Curley wears Sunglasses: GENTLE MONSTER, Coat: JORDANLUCA, T-shirt: JORDANLUCA, Jeans: CHARLES JEFFREY LOVERBOY, Shoes: STEFAN COOKE, Deego wears Sunglasses: CHARLES JEFFREY LOVERBOY, Hoodie: CHOPOVA LOWENA, Top: CHARLES JEFFREY LOVERBOY, Bottoms: ICAN HAREM, Boots: NEW ROCK

Grian wears Jumper: MAISON MIHARA YASUHIRO, Trousers: SOLID HOMME, Boots: ARTIST’S OWN, Tom wears Jacket: JORDANLUCA, Vest: AV VATTEV, Bottoms: ADIDAS X SONG FOR THE MUTE, Shoes: ADIDAS, Curley wears, Jumper: KENZO, Trousers: AV VETTEV, Boots: MAISON MIHARA YASUHIRO, Deego wears Top: ICAN HAREM, Bottoms: ICAN HAREM, Shoes: GROUNDS, Carlos wears, Suit: S.S DALEY, Hat: S.S DALEY, Shoes: SIMONE ROCHA

“WE WANTED TO TAKE THE ALBUM AWAY FROM BEING A DIARY OF WHERE WE ARE, AND TRYING TO MAKE PEOPLE CONNECT TO IT THAT WAY… LET THE IDEAS CREATE

THE PLACE”

– CONOR CURLEY

It’s one creative vision that won’t actually materialise. (“I get really excited about things for a couple of days and then… yeah,” he smiles.) But the band are not wanting for creative vision at the moment. Romance is their most dazzling, expansive record yet. Drummer Tom Coll refers to it as their “first studio record” – a bigger, richer, more multi-layered sound than they’ve ever dabbled with before.

If Big set out the band’s stall at the start, the opening title track here performs a similar role. The stage is set by an evil descending mellotron motif that recalls Korn, before it’s swallowed up by a grandiose, cinematic soundscape, and what guitarist Conor Curley calls big “Christopher Nolan movie” braaams . Cradled within it, Chatten’s voice is delicate. His guard is down, his usual defiance replaced by a pleading vulnerability. “I pray for your kindness/ Your heart on a spit ,” he begs, surrendering to the devastating power his lover has over him. We only get a blurry look at whatever has set the scene (an argument perhaps, or some more subtle internal strife), but the song bottles the highs and lows of love’s

delirium, beginning with feelings of being cast out (“into the darkness again, in with the pigs in the pen ”), before veering dizzily into hopefulness.

“It has a sort of lunacy about it,” in Curley’s words.

After three albums that dealt with place in a physical sense, Romance deals with the places we can create in the imaginary realm – through fantasy, delusion, love. “Maybe romance is a place,” Chatten sings on that opening track. Reality on the album feels malleable, fantasies permeate everything (dreams are mentioned in five out of the album’s 11 tracks). Some songs are explicitly nocturnal. Sundowner, which is spearheaded by Curley on lead vocals in a Fontaines D.C. first, cloaks the chorus’ refrain, “In my dreams ,” in languorous reverb, creating a woozy, liminal state. Others, like album highlight Death Kink, are more narrative-based. The song tells the story of a protagonist looking back at a toxic relationship, reflecting on the experience of being manipulated into self-doubt and self-destruction (“You took that shine to me/ at what cost? ”).

Its rhythm runs into itself with a “timing trick” Curley likens to the work of Pixies’ Black Francis – the skipped beat evoking a jumbled mind hurriedly trying to gather itself together.

As a songwriting mode, it’s imaginative, rather than confessional. “I’m reluctant to talk about my songs as being about myself, because I’m still a work in progress and I don’t really know who I am half the time,” Chatten says. “I don’t really like when I see albums marketed as ‘the most personal album yet’ or whatever – I don’t think art has to be like that. I think art can be a floating neverland between people. Everybody can reach out and touch it.” For Curley, this artistic shift was essential. “We wanted to take it away from being a diary of where we are, writing songs like ‘and this was over there’, and trying to make people connect to it that way,” he explains. “It’s trying to come up with a different setting, completely of its own. Let the ideas create the place.”

Chatten is reticent to discuss the influence of any specific books of poetry on his lyrics this time out. If you must know, he’s been reading some Dylan Thomas, but this feels less relevant than it might have in the past. After four albums, including his plaintive 2023 solo record Chaos for the Fly, which wrapped his voice in a blanket of acoustic guitars, drum machines and sweeping strings, Chatten has grown weary of his creativity being pigeonholed by a predictable process. It’s not a rebuttal to writers they’ve always adored, but a change in their approach to creating art. “You’re asked a lot about what you’re reading and what inspired the record, and you do your best to answer and think about those things, [but] it stops feeling like yours, you know what I mean?” he explains. “It starts to feel like ‘Album time, I better get into a new poet.’ I think I cleared the cache of those inspirations a bit for this and I started to think about the whole thing from a slightly different perspective.”

Intriguingly, the influences that are legible have come from the world of cinema, with Sunset Boulevard being a particularly pertinent example. There’s a strange inverted symmetry in Chatten – a 28-year-old in his career prime, finding inspiration in the story of Norma Desmond, an actor in the twilight of hers. But the clearest echo is the sheer scale of it: a grand, complex, doomed romance in an era where an on-screen kiss would be accompanied by an orchestral swell of strings. It’s not only films from the golden age that have left their mark on the band. Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is a more recent inspiration. “The size of that film, the scale of it, the grandeur of the emotion, the existential questions, the colours, and the romance. That really affected me,” Chatten says.

“Pretty much all of us have been getting really obsessed with different movies,” Curley says. “Honestly, my favourite place to watch anything is in the bunk of a tour bus. It’s like a sensory deprivation tank. You watch something and it becomes incredibly profound because you have Bluetooth headphones in and you’re just zeroed in on what this art is, and what these amazing film-makers or anime artists have created.” The band namecheck influences from Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire to animes like the neo-noir space western Cowboy Bebop and the cyberpunk epic Akira . In the Modern World, which Chatten says is probably his current favourite on the record, is defined by the latter’s depiction of apocalyptic emotion. “It’s a love tune but I feel like I can hear the buildings collapsing,” he says.

Romance may be an album about love and fantasy, but like their cinematic inspirations, it’s far from schmaltzy. The tone oscillates between darkness and light. Plenty of the imagery has a twisted, nu-metal melodrama (“When you said ‘I taste like sleep’/ I was dead ”, Chatten sings on Death Kink), but other tracks have more spring in their step, like Bug (“ they threw me out like I was a wedding bouquet ”) or the hook-laden closer Favourite. It’s not a straightforward divide, though. Chatten points out that the menacing opening track contains at least one note of hope in the lyrics, while the sonic brightness of Favourite is illusory – the lyrics are about hopelessness, focalised through a character escaping through booze. “Hope is heavy, and collapsing into delusion is impossibly light,” he tells me with a casual intensity.

Grand in scope, it’s an album that deliberately marks a moment of departure. They’ve now signed to XL Recordings and have even switched up their look. Gone are the oversized shirts with open cuffs and collars, replaced by sports jerseys, heavy boots, hair clips, hairbands and wraparound Oakleys. Both sonically and aesthetically, they’ve stepped away from the modern-day post-punk wave they helped set off, and towards a more extreme version of themselves that represents a desire for action, for doing something bigger and, also, lest we forget, enjoying themselves. “It’s just a bit of fucking fun really,” Chatten says.

Their earlier work was built around a philosophy of ‘if we can’t play it live, let’s not do it’ – an approach that was shaped under the auspices of producer Dan Carey. It was a perfect fit, but it’s time for a change. “It’s something we want to step away from, to try to not be a typical two guitars and a bass band,” Coll says. For Romance they linked up with James Ford, formerly of Simian Mobile Disco, who’s previously worked with Blur and Arctic Monkeys. His introduction of a more elaborate production style coincided with the band’s personal tastes spilling out across genres. From Coll indulging his love of “doomy, sludgy shoegaze”, like that purveyed by Texan band True Widow, to others getting into 90s stalwarts like Smashing Pumpkins and Deftones, the band’s inspirations bled directly into the techniques used to record the album. Increasingly influenced by electronic palettes, Coll attempted to replicate drum machine sounds, while Deego was interested in the way layering was used on Nirvana’s Nevermind to produce guitar and bass tones that were “really, really thick and huge”. “I layered-up multiple basses at the same time to produce a particular sound,” he says. Together with the string quartet, the effect is a more enveloping, sumptuous sound than they’ve worked with before.

Some of Chatten’s more contemporary listening habits helped hone the aesthetic direction of the project, with its intermingling of the analogue and the digital – the pink, crying heart on the album cover feels metallic and AIgenerated, but it’s painted. He’d become interested in the work of Shygirl and Sega Bodega, whose music has a “sort of half-human, half-machine feeling to it, but still a beating heart,” he says. “I think that thrilled me and kind of scared me at the same time.” It’s a feeling he gets from another influence that looms large over the record: Korn. “They’re so ostensibly angry, industrial and mechanic, and sometimes very produced, but they still have this vulnerability,” he explains. “I like the extremities of both of those ends of the spectrum.”

Extremity and confidence go hand in hand on Romance. “I’m conscious of liking my own voice more,” Chatten reflects, when asked about the shift in his vocal delivery. He’s singing more, in the sense of using his voice more melodically, exploring its range. “I don’t think about what I want to sing, necessarily. The song leads the way for me in that way. But I truly at times feel like I love my voice on this album.” Performance has always come naturally for Chatten – but it hasn’t always conferred confidence. He’s been characterised as an introverted frontman. “I have these things in me, I have since I was a kid,” he says, “this kind of performative nature which I’m often shy to get into, but I need to do it at the same time. I’ve always been like that.” Releasing four albums, and doing the press that comes with that, meant seeing a version of himself reflected back that he’s grown frustrated by: self-effacing, cautious, downbeat. It felt partial, like a fragment of him.

The warm reception given to Chaos for the Fly was a moment to celebrate. It showed the world was ready for a softer, more reflective iteration of his songwriting, but it also gave him pause. “There’s an extra density to the interviews and articles that were coming around that held a mirror to the person I had been in the public eye,” he says. He spoke in interviews about his struggles with mental health on tour and how gruelling that can be, but describing this sense of inertia couldn’t break him free from it. “I’m just incredibly bored of reading about myself being self-effacing and cautious about what I say,” he says. “I'm still doing that right now. It’s a knee-jerk thing, but I’m bored of seeing that.”

It was these feelings of frustration and immobility eventually culminated in a panic attack in St Pancras station, which forms the central theme of lead single Starburster. Such attacks used to strike Chatten frequently, before he received a diagnosis for ADHD and started taking medication for it. That day in St Pancras was before he’d received his diagnosis. He’d been on his way to record lyrics he wasn’t happy with, and rewrote the song as a way of breaking out of his stasis. “It was very much what I’m talking about in terms of mobilising yourself. The confinement of the panic attack – the inertia of that experience, when you feel overwhelmed,” he says. “I just wanted something to fucking happen and I think that’s why most of the lines start with the words ‘I wanna’, ‘I wanna do something.’ It’s a desire for action in general. Not even just action, but extremity. Extremity in many forms is the thing I pursue when I’m feeling sort of numb or overwhelmed.”

This explains, in part, his more playful persona now. “I’ve just been being myself, I suppose,” he says, “but I’m recognising that the self is something that you can play with as well. The bigger we get, it’s becoming an instrument of its own.”

Fontaines D.C. carved themselves a space by being smart, but not stuffy – literary, but also frenetic. Now they can afford to try being neither, or both, as they please. Their new chapter, in short, defies over-analysis. The kaleidoscopic sprawl of ideas on this record aren’t meant to sit neatly, or cohere, and yet somehow, when “funnelled through the cheese cloth that is this band” – Curley’s words – they do make a strange kind of sense. And this strange kind of sense is all that matters: to connect with a listener in a way that evades precise definition is what makes their poetry beautiful.

Which brings us back to horses, of course. As O’Connell puts it, as the light of a blue sky floods in on a bright Saturday morning: “You can spend your whole life studying ways to argue a point, but at the end of the day, horseness is the whatness of allhorse. You know?”

ROMANCE IS OUT 23

AUGUST VIA XL RECORDINGS

Music Crack Magazine Fontaines D.C.

【Photography】 Melissa Lunar

【Words】 Verónica Bayetti Flores

Guatemalan-born, Mexico City-based cellist

Mabe Fratti channels perpetual confusion at the world into a

playful,

experimental sound world that promises to reshape Latin America’s avant garde

“Sorry!” Mabe Fratti apologises, falling into our interview frantically and out of breath. A friend had come over to lay down some saxophone tracks, she explains, and they lost track of time. “You might hear it in the background,” she giggles. The cellist turned avant-garde songwriter, whose idiosyncratic melodies and chameleon-like vocals yield music as haunting and strange as it is beautiful, is chaotically charming. Speaking from her apartment in Mexico City, a wave of long, dark hair tumbling over her big red T-shirt, she sits on her furniture cross-legged as the early evening light filters in.

Fratti first visited Mexico City in 2015 for a residency at the GoetheInstitut and quickly became enamoured.

“The energy of the city bewitched me,” she notes, comparing it to the energy of the improv jazz concerts she loved to attend when she was younger – tumultuous, meandering and surprising. “I love to wander around here.” But it was the community of musicians who challenged her creatively that compelled her to move to the city permanently. “They awoke a spark of curiosity in me that was very beautiful. The papers were a whole other matter!” she jokes. “But in the end it was done.”

Born and raised in Guatemala, Fratti describes her early years as somewhat sheltered. “The last time I said ‘censorship’ my mom got really mad,” she laughs, explaining that her mother, a deeply religious woman, exposed her only to explicitly Christian or instrumental music. “Let’s call it curation.”

Raised at a time when crime and insecurity dominated public life in Guatemala, it’s no surprise that her mother, who raised her in the neo-Pentecostal church, would try to protect her through any means possible. But, despite the limitations imposed on her, Fratti’s early life was rich with musical influence. A look of awe washes over her face as she describes the classical section of the record store she frequented in Guatemala with her mother, and how fancy it felt compared to the other sections. “It had carpet!”

As far as her own playing goes, Fratti bounced around a number of instruments before settling on the cello. When she was very young she played the piano, but was often found sitting at the keys, drawing rather than practising. When respiratory issues ruled out the saxophone, which she was considering next, she went to the music school where her sister was learning the violin to explore her options. The moment she saw the orchestra director playing the cello, she knew it was the instrument for her. She was eight years old.

As a teenager exchanging music with friends, Fratti was exposed to a world of sound hitherto unexplored. She had the friend who sent her emo, the friend who sent her punk. Through these friendships, and the eventual discovery of Limewire, she ended up with an eclectic array of tastes, from reggaeton to Radiohead. “I like the reggaetoneros who have deeper voices,” she says, talking about the Puerto-Rican legend Don Omar.

She kept at the cello all the while, going through moments of great commitment to her instrument, and moments where she decided she was done. But whenever she quit, she felt a horrible emptiness and would always come back to it. “Just because Guatemala doesn’t have the [music industry] infrastructure for something else,” she explains, “with the cello you either become part of the symphony or you have to pick a career that’s gonna make you some type of money, you know?” So she prepared for a life in the

symphony – her only frame of reference for playing the cello professionally. To this day, Fratti is grateful for her immersion in classical music. “It gave me a colour palette that I could have fun with, but also destroy.”

This doing and undoing in service of arriving at core musical elements is present in Fratti’s fourth solo album, Sentir Que No Sabes . Produced and co-composed with her partner Hector Tosta (who also operates under the names i La Católica and Titanic), the album is experimental and meticulous, swinging from Jacob Wick’s riotous trumpet in Kravitz to the careful melodies of Oídos . Fratti uses her vocals as a versatile instrument, which, much like her cello-playing, has tremendous personality and range, from operatic to childlike, whispery to grand.

Unlike in Fratti’s previous work, where composition was the foundation of her process, for Sentir Que No Sabes, words were the starting point. It was Tosta who suggested an unusual arrangement: what would happen if she wrote a poem and went from there? “Sometimes… Well, often, I didn’t listen,” she laughs. “But that was the plan. To really concentrate on the words.” And Sentir Que No Sabes – which translates to feeling like you don’t know –explores Fratti’s somewhat fraught relationship with certain ways of communicating.

“I’m not a person who is able to make a lot of imperative declarations,” she explains. “It’s very difficult for me to arrive at that point.”

The album became a meditation on perpetual confusion: with the world, with events around her, with the words used to describe them. “Being confused all the time is a little delicate, because it makes you very vulnerable,” Fratti says. “But being vulnerable can be very beautiful, because it allows you to learn. It keeps your ego in a healthy place. Maybe it can go too far, but it can help.”

of a blue screen error to explore the overwhelming sea of information and knowledge available to us, and our capacity – or perhaps, lack thereof –to process so much information. “The more we know, the harder it is to land a thought, you know?” she laughs.

This deeply collaborative album was conceptualised in detail by Fratti and Tosta. “My last albums were more like blurry paintings,” she explains. “This one has more definition.” While her creative process is often playful, and about finding what she likes and then executing it with her instrument, Tosta, with his background in formal composition, tends towards precision. “I know that I like to talk with people about music, and to feel unsure about what I’m doing with music, creatively,” Fratti explains, when asked if she prefers collaboration. “But I also like solitude. I like to return to my self-reflection. My own critique and transformation.”

Now that the album is out, Fratti and Tosta are having fun reinterpreting the tracks live. They want to lean on live instrumentation as much as they possibly can, and take risks. They’re landing, she insinuates, on something quite special – where the songs remain the songs they wrote, but continue to shift in the way they sound.

Despite Fratti’s relentlessly playful attitude – to both life and creativity – she approaches her work with total dedication, driven by a steadfast commitment to self-reflection and self-discovery. Even when she’s having fun with her process, she remains primed to fight off stasis – as is abundantly clear in her ever-shifting music. When Sentir Que No Sabes was finished, though, Fratti found herself feeling something almost akin to post-partum depression. A strange feeling of loss as she let go of something she had poured herself into. “I drank as if someone had broken up with me,” she laughs. “Or maybe I was just celebrating.”

In Kravitz , she explores the pressure to pronounce our opinions and wonders if, gripped with anxiety to make declarations, people are speaking from a place that is true to them, or one that’s shaped by reaction. In the melodic Pantalla Azul, she uses the metaphor

SENTIR QUE NO SABES IS OUT 28 JUNE VIA UNHEARD OF HOPE

Mabe Fratti

“ Being vulnerable can be very beautiful, because it allows you to learn. It keeps your ego in a healthy place”

Mabe Fratti

【Words】 Emily Bootle

【Photography】 Derrick

With the expansive, meditative jazz of her new album Rising, Leeds-born saxophonist and bandleader Jasmine Myra is swimming against the current of the modern world

“It’s almost like a voice,” Jasmine Myra says of the saxophone, an instrument she’s been playing since she was around 14 years old. After trying her hand at the piano and the violin, which she persevered with but never really connected to, something about the saxophone just clicked. School lessons turned into private lessons, which turned into bands, which turned into a place on the jazz course at Leeds Conservatoire. But maybe all this made complete sense. Myra has always been drawn to emotive music – the kind that expresses something of the person writing or performing it. And for her, the saxophone –with “the way it feels in my hands, the sound of it” – unlocked that innermost expression.

This expressiveness can be found throughout Myra’s music. At 27, the Leeds-born saxophonist and composer has just released her second album, Rising, an uplifting, meditative record of soft saxophone melodies, crystal-clear harp and strings, and cascading swirls of rhythm. It follows 2021’s Horizons – a similarly expansive album written primarily during lockdown, an intense period for Myra that, despite its challenges, also represented something of a rebirth.

Both albums were born out of periods of development and growth, personally as well as musically. When the pandemic hit in 2020, Myra was freelance, not long out of university, juggling playing, teaching and writing. “I’d not been looking after myself that well, and I’d been ignoring a lot of the things that had been going on in my head,” she says. “Lockdown meant suddenly I had nothing to think about, but all this space to think. On top of that, I was having an identity crisis because my music had stopped and all my self-worth was tied into it.”

“It was really tough,” she continues, “but also really important. It was a crazy opportunity to have all this time and space to unpack everything and get to know myself. Writing the album became this escape. It was a cathartic experience. By the end of it, I just felt this massive weight had been lifted.”

The sense of transcendence and relief, rather than the raw, rough messiness of working it all out, is what comes through in Myra’s music. Rising builds on Horizons ’ foundations, musically and spiritually. “I felt I’d got through it all, but I wanted to keep working on my self-esteem, try to be more confident and love myself more. It’s such a long process,” Myra says. She hopes that listeners will feel “positive and uplifted”, and “relieved of stress”. It’s enormously effective –the kind of album that manages to take the edges off our near-constant snafu existence.

As well as being an emotional excavation, Myra’s work so far has represented a settling into her own creativity. She grew up on a mixed musical diet: reggae and jazz from her dad, Take That from her mum, and pop with her friends. Now, almost ten years after she started writing her own music, her work is described by critics as “spiritual jazz” – a term that is definitely retrospective for Myra, but which began to resonate after releasing Horizons . “I’m quite a spiritual person, but at the time I hadn’t made that connection – until it all came together,” says Myra. “The album felt really connected to me.”

Jazz, of course, is a hugely broad genre – and it hasn’t always felt like Myra’s natural home. “At school, I liked playing jazz, but then when I’d listen to it I’d think, yeah this is fine, but not my thing,” she says. Then she discovered Grover Washington’s Winelight – an album of chilled funky sax playing released in 1980. When you listen to it, you can hear its influence on Myra’s work even now. Her sound is worlds apart from other ‘new wave’ jazz artists like Ezra Collective, The Comet Is Coming or Kamasi Washington, who are rhythmic and punchy. Instead, she rests alongside the likes of the Belgian-Caribbean composer Nala Sinephro or even the more classical end of Bonobo –understated and transcendent. Her songs often build on short phrases repeated over and over, like the harp motifs on Rising ’s title track and on Knowingness , which form the foundations for gradual expansion from Myra’s saxophone and the rest of the band.

Winelight is a classic – but still a far cry from the canonical jazz education that young instrumentalists are usually fed. “Even when I got to uni I was still almost pretending to like some of the musicians that other people did, like John Coltrane,” says Myra. “It just went a little bit over my head at the time. Then I listened to Cannonball Adderley for the first time and I thought, this I like. It’s a bit more simple compared to all the mad bebop stuff. It just wasn’t trying to be too clever or complicated – it was really soulful.” In this vein, Myra is also drawn to electronic and contemporary-classicaladjacent music – Floating Points, Ólafur Arnalds, even Wes Anderson soundtracks. “They’re quite quirky and silly, but I love the layering of all the parts,” she says. Polyphony crops up often across Myra’s work, too – it’s like a delicate musical web, each strand as

“You have to get stuff wrong. IF I’D TRIED TO SIT DOWN AND WORK OUT WHERE I WANTED MY MUSIC TO GET TO, if I had it all planned out and decided before starting, I WOULD NEVER GET THERE”

sparkling and crucial as the last. During her time at Leeds, Myra got into artists like Shabaka Hutchings and Soweto Kinch – saxophonists who combine jazz with hip-hop, soul and stylistic mashups that defy categorisation. “When I joined Leeds Conservatoire there was a lot of hip-hop jazz fusion music happening in the city, so I was in a few other collaborative bands where that was the style,” Myra says. “I was genuinely really into it but I don’t know if it ever felt like me. I was kind of just doing what felt right at the time.”

The conservatoire was supportive, inclusive and communal –less competitive than many specialist music institutions have a reputation for being. Yet it’s an almost inevitable consequence of being part of the jazz scene, which is overwhelmingly male, that Myra began to notice her gender. “It was never something that bothered me – I never felt intimidated by the boys at school,” she explains. “When I got to uni I started to be asked about it. And then one day I realised, I’m one of the only girls on the course – one of the only instrumentalists on the jazz course. I started noticing it even more when I started writing music and trying to lead the project. I was one of the only women doing that in my local area.”

This is a problem in jazz learning, despite the best intentions of most tutors and participants. “It’s the improvisation thing,” says Myra. “If you were a shy girl and didn’t want to have a go, the teacher would almost just shut you off and not encourage you to come out of your shell. The male students were given more space to have a go and get it wrong. That comes from a wider issue, where young boys are encouraged to do that more in life in general, and are encouraged to make more mistakes. So when they’re learning an instrument or going off to uni, they already have a different mindset where they’re not as afraid to try.”

Crack Magazine Music

Jasmine Myra

“Quite often they have that base level of confidence,” she explains. “That’s why when women enter this space, first of all they’re terrified of fucking up, and second, they’re already on the back foot because they’re intimidated, and there are fewer people who look like them. I’ve noticed that particularly at jam sessions – even though they’re super inclusive and nobody is intentionally doing anything. My male musician friends are all super emotionally intelligent, super feminist, super encouraging, but it’s such subtle and abstract things [that are] happening that it’s kind of difficult even to explain to them.”

Being prepared to make mistakes and learn through trial and error has proved to be a crucial part of the composition process for Myra. “I definitely didn’t know how to write an album, and I didn’t know what I wanted it to be about,” she says of Horizons “But it has to develop and grow, and you have to get stuff wrong. If I’d tried to sit down and work out where I wanted my music to get to, if I had it all planned out and decided before starting, I would never get there.”

All of this comes to life playing the music live on tour, where she can see people connect with it in real time. Myra is self-managed, and explains that it’s the administrative side of things she still struggles with: “I feel like I’ve screwed up a load of times and can be really hard on myself,” she says. It helps that her eight-piece band – replete with a harpist – are old friends, and have played together for years. Toting a harp and a double bass around the UK in a van doesn’t seem like so much of a chore when “it’s so easy spending this much time together”. And although it can be tempting to cut down the size of the band to save money, it wouldn’t be worth it: “it just sounded so beautiful on stage with everyone”.

Throughout our interview, Myra is grounded and relaxed – sanguine, almost. “I just wanna keep doing what I’m doing,” she says when I ask where she sees her career going. But as she leans into her identity as a composer, she sees herself writing for bigger ensembles, perhaps developing her shows to incorporate lights and visuals, creating an immersive experience for her audience: “I’d like to get to the point where we’re performing my music but it’s about the whole atmosphere –where it creates an entire world.”

Produced exclusively for Crack Magazine by Christophe Synak

Energy

Nsasi’s uncompromising club music is borne out of a necessity beyond simply making people dance – it is a beacon for shared worldviews, and a symbol of resilience

Source

【Words】 Isaac Muk 【Styling】 Anita Kevyn 【Photography】 Louis Headlam

When Nsasi stepped on stage to close out the second night of experimental Madrid festival Electrónica en Abril, they were feeling nervous. It was just three weeks until the release of their debut solo LP Coinage, and they were performing a hybrid live and DJ set that would draw heavily from the new album, most of which had never been tested on a crowd.

As people filtered from other stages and venues into the La Casa Encendida’s high-ceilinged main room for the finale, Nsasi unleashed a relentless barrage of industrial percussion and wild, time-signaturewarping polyrhythms. Dancers instantly took to the floor, never letting up until the final kick. “The line-up only had genre-bending artists,” Nsasi, real name Thomas Turyahikayo, recalls from Vienna over Zoom a fortnight later, in the middle of a European tour. “It wasn’t a festival where you felt like you needed to compromise your sound, and we just went on a journey into the unknown – I thought: ‘This is a special experiment.’”

For Nsasi, that moment was freeing – but also gratifying. Coinage, released in May via Kampala’s Hakuna Kulala label, is their most expansive and personal solo work to date, with most of their previous releases coming as part of compilations or collaborations. It’s also their most challenging. Its nine bone-rattling tracks subvert many of dance music’s most established practices, with freeform percussive rhythms and chaotic track structures that break free from the 16-bar, build-up-then-drop formula that so many tracks are built from. Seeing people move to these clubunfriendly creations was validation for refusing to compromise their singular brand of experimentation.

Breaking norms is deeprooted in everything Nsasi does, and who they are. As a young queer person growing up and attending a seminary school in the town of Kabale, in the deeply conservative western Ugandan region of Ankole, they had to find their own ways of expressing themselves. “Culture and tradition back home was never an accepting space for myself – because of my sexuality, of course – so I always thought I had to create a certain role to exist in these spaces, and for me it was always with music,” they explain.

Although Nsasi’s parents separated during their childhood, they introduced them to disparate musical styles from a young age. Nsasi’s father leant towards country and folk, but

they found themselves more drawn to the rhythmic East African sounds their mother preferred – particularly Congolese Lingala music – which naturally revolved around celebration, community and dancing. “Being defiant for me started at an early age, from not being in sync with my father’s tastes [and] what my father wanted me to be,” says Nsasi, speaking in a soft and measured voice. As with their music, there’s deep thought and pointed intention behind everything they say.

“It inspired me to always not be afraid of being different, so if I have to be defiant to stand my ground, I will push boundaries.”

In the mid-2010s, they relocated to Kampala, where they immersed themselves in the city’s burgeoning queer party scene that had begun to form around the experimental electronic music collective Nyege Nyege. It was an electric time, crackling with underground energy and surging with new possibilities. Eventually, they struck up a close collaborative relationship with similarly subversive artists Turkana and Authentically Plastic. In 2018, the trio formed their own collective and label, ANTI-MASS, and began to throw parties that sought to create safe, celebratory spaces for their community.

Nsasi

“We had been going to a wellknown gay bar, but it was constantly raided by police,” Nsasi says. “This kept happening until we decided that we needed to start thinking about creating our own space. We started having nomadic parties, from house parties in people’s backyards, to venues beginning to host us for our events. It’s been really organic, but also based around the community.”

Created by queer artists for queer folk, those early ANTI-MASS parties were halcyon moments of selfexpression for an LGBTQ+ community that has been heavily stigmatised, marginalised and oppressed in Uganda for decades. “That time was mindblowing,” Nsasi remembers, their voice a rising tide of excitement. “The urge to exist in these spaces just increased how much enjoyment [we had], and there was so much awareness about things like safety.”

Facing the threat of police repression, or violence from outsiders misaligned with their values, the crew chose to carefully curate every detail of these parties – from the venues and homes they hosted events in, right down to the music. It’s how the uncompromising sound developed by Nsasi and the rest of ANTI-MASS was forged – borne out of a necessity beyond simply making people dance.

“We knew what and who we didn’t want in the space, and, literally, the music itself helped with creating that environment because having a specific sound kept specific people out,” Nsasi says. “[The music] is meant to attract an open-minded energy, because you’re coming into this heavily experimental space and you expect to feel something and to have fun. The idea is to be able to sync in the same space, that’s why I choose the sound that I go for.”

Since then, the situation for Uganda’s LGBTQ+ community has become significantly more dangerous. In March 2023, the Parliament of Uganda passed the controversial Anti-Homosexuality Act, which reinforced the criminalisation of consensual same-sex relations (already illegal under colonial-era law). It introduced severe legislation that could see “LGBTQ+ activists” face up to 20 years in prison, and contains provisions allowing the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.” After being challenged by rights groups, the ruling was upheld by the Ugandan Constitutional Court in April of this year.

“[My music] is meant to attract an openminded energy. The idea is to be able to sync in the same space”

“The news made me feel stripped. I felt without soul. I felt empty. At the time, I was in Uganda and I remember wondering to myself, ‘30 years of my life I’ve been in this country and I haven’t lived anywhere else – this is home,’” they laugh nervously, as if they are still in shock. “The news reminded me and my collective to stop – like, we cannot be doing the work that we do. Redefining these possibilities has taken so much out of me.”

Over the past year, Nsasi has been moving between Uganda and the UK, where they have relocated “in exile” for safety, but those ties to home remain. “While not in Uganda I’ve

been exploring how much resistance we can put out, and how much is even relevant at a time like this,” they sigh. “Sometimes I check in on my friends, and I cannot talk for the entire community, but things are so bitter –the fact that your landlord should evict you if you are queer, that leaves you with no roof over your head. The bare minimum. I think it’s going to happen in more African countries because, to me, this is a continuation of neo-colonialism.”

It’s in this bleak, heartbreaking context that Coinage was created. While some of the tracks date back to the end of 2019, when Nsasi first began producing electronic music, much of the project was finished while they were on the move. They didn’t have access to a studio, and the tracks were mostly made hunched over a laptop with headphones – which is wild to think, given the precision and layered complexity of the LP.

“It’s usually free-flowing for me,” they explain of their production process. “I’ll try and play around with melodies and synths to fit with the percussive pace and the rhythm, but it’s all ear-guided. I want to find that element of enjoyment and fun, but I want to bring up conversations like: ‘What was that ?!’ I want people to ask questions about what that track they just heard meant.”

The album isn’t just meant to challenge us, or push music in new and exciting directions (though it definitely does that). With the situation that Nsasi and the Ugandan queer community find themselves in, each thudding kick, scatty synth line and intricate drum pattern is an expression of resistance. Like the menacing, rallying gqom cry of Tribune, or the urgent call-toarms of Gabvla – all frantic, cathartic percussion that somehow comes together in a unified, four-to-the-floor techno stomp.

On Penetencia , the eighth and penultimate track on Coinage, the insistent volley of drums gives way to a moment of pad-filled dreaminess. It’s the most reflective track on the album, and provides a deeper look into Nsasi’s psyche. “In my local language, penetencia translates to penance, like [one of] the seven holy sacraments in the Bible. I have a background in the seminary and [the track] is retranslating my new way of seeing, and relating, with sound,” they say. “I see sound as a very big tool of resistance, if fully utilised.

“I have moments where I let things happen,” they continue. “But there is control in this chaos, and for me that is resilience. So most of my tracks are driven by that resilience, driven by that resistance, and driven by a very unconventional approach.”

THE CLICK

【Photography】 Niko Studio

When Britain finally admitted we were in a pandemic, I’d just finished my album A Call to Arms , which would become the last release under my Visionist alias. I left London to stay with my granny, who has offered me escape and peace so often in my life. Being in a village, surrounded by fields, still offered a sense of freedom, but after completing my album artwork I was left to wonder how I would cope being in the city again. I decided to return so I would be ready for whatever future I may have. A few months later I got the news that my granny had passed, and my world quickly became one I couldn’t contemplate. I never got to show her the images I made while staying with her.

I was dealing with so much loss on a personal level, but also, releasing an album during that time made it impossible to have a traditional show schedule. I needed control of something. I knew that moving forward I wanted to reaffirm the communication around my artistry, and stripping away my alias would remove all barriers.

The narrative I originally gave to my alias was about trying to create something futuristic, centred around the deconstruction of club music. The future was a place I felt comfortable speaking about because it was more removed from personal matters. But by doing that, I noticed that some listeners preferred to connect to musical characterisations, either questioning or ignoring the more introspective journey I was going through with each record. When I was young, I was very good at containing my feelings, and in later years having an alias became symbolic of that. It’s scary to let go of something you’ve had for so long, but ultimately, I feel I’m my most free and aligned self now, artistically.

My first venture as Louis Carnell is 111. I’ve been described as a recluse, but actually, I’ve always sought connections within the music community. To continue and celebrate that, I wanted to work with people I’ve formed close relationships with over the years, musicians who have inspired me along the way, and to seek out a new array of artists. I also wanted to give power back to the listener and return to that feeling of discovery – of picking something up in a record shop, listening, and seeing the ways we connect. If anything, 111 is a result of A Call to Arms , as we all need to be embraced.

35 LOUIS CARNELL

In his own words, Louis Carnell recalls the artistic freedom and control he discovered when he let go of his alias –and other people’s expectations

THE Your favourite artists’ favourite new music

36

SPEEDY WUNDERGROUND AFFILIATED PURVEYORS OF JAZZ SKRONK. CHOSEN JOINTLY BY JOE HENWOOD AND TASH KEARY.

BRUNO BERLE NO REINO DOS AFETOS 2 FAR OUT RECORDINGS

We did a show with Bruno Berle last year at Sur Le Lac, a festival in Switzerland set between a beautiful green forest and an epic lake. He’d flown out from São Paulo with his collaborator Batata Boy for what was one of his first European festivals. No Reino Dos Afetos , his debut album, went perfectly with that landscape: lo-fi, summery sounds with light-but-intricate harmonies, and soft, beautiful vocal melodies. This release, … Afetos 2, is a much more high-fidelity record with lush pop-style production. But it has the same peacefully euphoric sound – a combination of washy acoustic guitars, almost-breakbeats played with brushes, susurrus-like percussion and gentle vocals. A favourite album of 2024, already.

GHOST PISS DREAM GIRL SOCKHEAD RECORDS

Dream Girl is the debut album from twisted dream-pop artist Ghost Piss, a.k.a. River Allen, who’s based in Brooklyn. Out on Sockhead Records, the Vancouver label founded by punk band Destructo Disk, this release has some hallmarks of punk and DIY paired with more unexpected instrumentation – like mellow acoustic vibraphone, steel pan and xylophone, which are dropped into classic dance beats and basslines. The lyrics are cutting, funny and downright relatable, such as this, from Hardcore: “I don’t give a fuck about hardcore/ I just give a fuck about a good night’s sleep/ I don’t give a fuck about your punk shit/ I’m in bed by 11 every night of the week.” Also, what a band name.

NIA ARCHIVES

SILENCE IS LOUD HIJINXX / ISLAND

Crowded Roomz , the first single from Silence Is Loud, was all over BBC Radio 6 Music when it came out and got us incredibly pumped and energised every time it came on – including, once, during a 7 a.m. rainy drive to the airport. Frantic jungle and tech-y drum’n’bass beats are to be expected from Nia Archives, but this release also has a load of cathartic ‘fuck you’ ballad moments, dark dingy chord sequences and punk influences. Its softer tracks, like Silence Is Loud (Reprise) and Out of Options , are welcome moments of calm, meaning the beefy jungle beats never lose any of their punch. So Tell Me… is one of my favourite album closers, with optimistic harmony and a classic indiepunk bassline.

【2】

ICEBOY VIOLET + NUEEN

MANCHESTER RAP SHAPESHIFTER AND RISING MADRID PRODUCER, RECENTLY JOINING FORCES ON HYPERDUB.

NAEMI DUST DEVIL 3XL

Years of dedication culminate in what could be the magnum opus of the 3XL/West Mineral Ltd/Motion Ward universe, guided by naemi (formerly Exael) and accompanied by a host of collaborators and friends including Pontiac Streator, Huerco S., and Shy. This album showcases haunting guitar melodies, thunderous, fuzzy drums, and serves as a boundless wellspring of inspiration. – Nueen

An album full of fragmented heavens on the best label in the world, featuring a who’s who of digital softness. But this isn’t your mum’s ambient album – the range here is breathtaking, from slowly crawling textures to frantic flurries of memories and feelings. Yet another reminder of the ‘endless horizon road’ beyond antiquated ideas of easy listening. – Iceboy Violet

BFTT HORSIN’ AROUND! YCO

BFTT’s Horsin’ Around is a wild ride through filter house and nu-disco beats. It’s like riding a rollercoaster in a neon-lit carnival. With clean and sharp sound design, each track brings something new to the table. – N

BFTT has always excelled at mixing the synthesised and organic, creating squelching, breathing biotechnic music, disconnecting, reconfiguring and then reconnecting the body and mind. The title track is definitely the highlight – five or so minutes of the silly, joyful experimentalism that has become the YCO signature. It’ll surely be chasing you around dancefloors all summer long. BFTT horsed around and brought filter house back, oui oui. – I.V.

GRIM WHAT A LIFE! THISISSOMEGRIMSHIT

This debut album from the Manchester up-and-comer borrows the neon-drenched euphoria of Pi’erre Bourne and deep-fries it, making it as dizzying and exhilarating as a fun fair trip on a cold autumn night, or being a teenager tempting fate with a bottle of cheap spirit. The sampling of rave classics is audacious in the best way – a hands-in-the-air irreverence that results in some of the most fun beats I’ve heard in a while. This energy is mirrored by Grim’s sense of humour and pen full of quotables, which are often delivered in a deadpan style – his staccato both matching and rooting the liquid instrumentals. This is 25 minutes of high-octane joy. – I.V.

【2】

【3】

MDOU MOCTAR

TUAREG-INFLUENCED BAND, KNOWN FOR SCORCHING RIFFS. CHOSEN BY MIKEY COLTUN, BASSIST AND PRODUCER.

VARIOUS ARTISTS

RETRO GLOBAL SURF (DJ MIX) RADIO IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY

There’s a digital radio station called Radio Is a Foreign Country that puts out incredible mixes. They have a mix that’s just sounds of cicadas from different parts of the world, which I think is really beautiful. And then there’s this one, which is surf music mostly from the 60s and 70s – from Mexico to Japan, and everywhere in between. A lot of surf music is really blown out, which I like. It’s super raw and distorted, and the splashy guitar sound is super cool. There’s a lot of amazing stuff on there and I don’t know what most of it is, so it’s great for discovery purposes but it’s also just a fun thing to listen to, which makes it accessible to people who might not be into that surf sound generally.

WATER DAMAGE IN E 12XU

I think the title of this one is a play on Terry Riley’s In C. With Water Damage, it’s cool to hear that same restraint in songs that are repetitive and trancey, but also super aggressive. That’s not something you hear very often. Minimalism is usually mellow and building, but this fucks you up right off the bat. I think it challenges that term of ‘contemporary classical’. Not that they’re calling themselves that, but if Terry Riley’s In C is this long-form piece that repeats and morphs, In E is kind of a response to that in a different scene. With Mdou Moctar, we play these long jams live and I like the nuance of morphing into different kinds of rhythms, but it’s all within the same groove. I think that’s happening here, too. There’s like ten musicians playing all at once – guitars, drums, percussion, I think a violin. It’s hard to tell what’s going on or what instruments are being used. It sounds like it was recorded to cassette tape in a room where everyone’s playing live with a couple of mics – and I mean that in the best way. It captures the band in the rawest form.

BIG BRAVE A CHAOS OF FLOWERS

THRILL

JOCKEY

This record is so interesting because Big Brave has been playing very droney guitar music, for the lack of better term, for years – but they’re trying something new here. It has this folk thing going on, but it’s still heavy and blown out at the same time. They’re very simplistic songs at their core, but there’s a lot of interesting sonic stuff surrounding them. I’m especially stoked about the production, which is done by Seth Manchester who mixes the Mdou records with me. I think his use of distortion and sidechaining is super cool. There’s a directness to this album that I think Big Brave has always had, but when you take away the heaviness of the amps and drums you can feel their intensity more. I think Robin, Mathieu and Tasy are such great songwriters and lyricists, and stripping the sound back gives more space for those things to come through. It sounds like the same band doing something completely different. Not a new identity, exactly, but it feels like a new chapter for them in a way.

【3】

CRACK MAGAZINE

IBIBIO SOUND MACHINE PULL THE ROPE MERGE

Ibibio Sound Machine are on a transformative journey with their latest album Pull the Rope, as they move their signature Afrobeat electro-pop into new sonic territories. Collaborating with producer Ross Orton has brought forth a more refined sound with an industrial techno edge. Each track balances socio-political commentary and infectious rhythms, with songs like Political Incorrect addressing “antisocial media”, and others, like Got to Be Who U Are, channelling empowerment and self-worth. There’s a palpable energy across the album, which coaxes listeners on to the dancefloor with futuristic synths and tribal chants. Pull the Rope stands as a testament to the band’s growth and versatility, showcasing their ability to evolve creatively while staying true to their trademark vibrancy. – L.R.

LAMUSA II DON’T EXTENDED TECHNIQUES

Lamusa II – real name Giampaolo Scapigliati – has long been a beloved figure in the Italian experimental music scene, known for his abstract electronic, ambient and industrial productions that draw from 80s synthpop, 90s electronica and grunge. With his debut album, Don’t , the Italian musician and producer pairs trip-hop and percussive electronic influences with distorted guitars from mysterious music duo Assembly Group and moody, multilingual vocals courtesy of ItaloArgentinian singer Zara Colombo and his longtime collaborator Marie Davidson. Conceived and crafted in the streets of Milan, the project’s murky, pulsating beats seem to speak to the city’s industrial heart, depicting a metropolitan ennui exacerbated by consumerism and loneliness. The overall impact is woozy and surreal, a hypnotically dark and dreamlike voyage through the city streets at night. – S.L.W.

JAWNINO 40

TRUE PANTHER

The culmination of years spent positioning himself as a serious – if anonymous – threat among London’s new generation of young MCs, Jawnino’s full-length debut, 40, is a fitting embodiment of life in bleak Britain. Agile and chaotic, the mixtape paints a vivid picture of city life built around drugs and partying. Featuring the likes of NYC giants MIKE and EvilGiane, plus Londoners Ojerime, Jesse James Solomon and Bok Bok, it’s clear that the South London rapper set out to create something more than a grime album here. By fusing elements of drum’n’bass, house, jungle and hyperpop with effortlessly charismatic bars, Jawnino has blessed us with a quintessential UK rap record – D.M.

FEATURED REVIEW

【Words】 Emma Garland

On their fourth studio album, the New Orleans duo continue to mine the trenches of the human experience while inching closer towards the light

In a crowded field of underground rappers informed by mental suffering and substance abuse, $uicideboy$ offer something distinctive. New Orleans duo (and first cousins) Ruby da Cherry and $crim blend cloud rap, witch house and southern horrorcore to confront the world demons-first, mapping the psychic landscape of a generation raised in an America that is online, in crisis, and addicted to opioids.

Emerging from the primordial soup of early-2010s SoundCloud, $uicideboy$ sit somewhere between the environmental violence of “phonk” revivalists SpaceGhostPurrp and Lil Ugly Mane, and the interior distress of emo rappers like Lil Peep and XXXTentacion. Their sound is murky and cold, manic and downtrodden, switching from rapid-fire bars about glory and excess, to slurred confessions at the crossroads of personal crisis and societal indifference.

Their fourth studio album, New World Depression, doesn’t reach for new subject matter as much as it reframes the old. After constructing their mythology around addiction and suicide (the project began with a pact: they would either become successful,

or they would kill themselves), Ruby and $crim got sober a few years ago. Their sound has taken a lighter turn since then. The grittier surfaces of their production have been smoothed over with flurries of late-night brass, jazz piano and strings, and their paranoid bars have given way to a sense of clarity – they often talk in past tense, of how things used to be. There’s a fresh sharpness to their delivery on New World Depression, too; a weightless calm washes over the whole record that would previously only appear in flashes.

The album has its fair share of afterparty introspections (Lone Wolf Hysteria) and beat-riding homages to Cash Money Records (Drag ‘Em to the River (Totalitarian Remix), which revolves around a sample of Drag ‘Em N Tha River by fellow Louisiana natives U.N.L.V.). However, it also features some of their most conventional songwriting to date. Reflective single Are You Going to See the Rose in the Vase, or the Dust on the Table? is as close as they’ve come to pop song structure, replete with melodic verses and an actual chorus (something they don’t typically bother with).

When darkness intrudes, it’s often a result of the outside world. The hazy Misery in Waking Hours opens with a news anchor introducing an interview with Mississippi ‘truck stop killer’ John Hughes. The minimal All of My Problems Always Involve Me is interrupted by a disclaimer stating they don’t want their unreleased music or videos to be released after they die –something that happens with frequency in their genre, which has seen an alarming number of young substancerelated deaths.

In the face of oblivion, $uicideboy$ have been living fast. Since their formation in 2014, they’ve released 35 EPs and 300 songs before their first album, not to mention the decade they spent making music separately (Ruby in punk bands, $crim as a DJ and producer). The most impressive thing about them, then, might be their consistency. While their appeal is evident in billions of streams and a rapid fanbase that unpacks each new release with a Reddit ‘mega thread’, the duo has always operated outside of the mainstream. They don’t get radio play, they don’t do much press, and they self-release everything through their label G*59 Records

(though they have a distribution deal with The Orchard). As a result, the duo still hops on each release like they have something to prove.

In response to fans saying they missed the “old” $UICIDEBOY$ – something that tends to happen when cult favourites switch it up –their previous album, 2022’s Sing Me a Lullaby, My Sweet Temptation, was a deliberate table-flip. A mutant showcase of everything they were capable of, it featured a gentler sound overall, as well as experimentations with Auto-Tune and lyrics that gestured towards a light at the end of a tunnel they had spent years crawling around in. New World Depression takes that same grab-bag approach, refines it and continues its journey towards deliverance. The darkness is still there, but perhaps they’re learning to live alongside it rather than under the weight of it.

RETROSPECTIVE ULTRAVIOLENCE LANA DEL REY

【Words】 Niloufar Haidari

LABEL: INTERSCOPE / POLYDOR

ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: JUNE 13, 2014

Arriving as pop feminism reached fever pitch, ULTRAVIOLENCE held a mirror up to the quiet misery that underlies heterosexual love for so many women. It brought Lana Del Rey closer to her audience, while setting her even further outside the mainstream

“Lana Del Rey’s moody torch songs found their muse in feminine abjection, a clarion call to the melancholic for whom the girlboss era’s imperatives left something to be desired”

– Meaghan Garvey

“You say that you want to go to a land that’s far away/ How are we supposed to get there with the way that we’re living today? ” growls infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones during a March 2022 episode of InfoWars , as the opening chords of Money, Power, Glory, the hymn-like eighth track from Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence from which he’s quoting, play in the background. “The real money, power and glory is just a side-effect of freedom,” he counsels his listeners. As the song fades out, he seamlessly transitions into one of his trademark rants about globalists and psychological warfare.

Jones is not who immediately comes to mind when picturing the average fan of Lana Del Rey, a modern pop icon predominantly associated with teenage girls experiencing their first major breakup, and young women unable (or unwilling) to learn the obvious lessons from countless dalliances with men that aren’t any good for them. This hasn’t stopped him, however, from playing the track over 25 times on his show. She is, in his eyes, the embodiment of everything he loves: patriotism, liberty, America.

After more than a decade and nine albums, it’s easy to mock Jones’ literal reading of Del Rey’s art, but he’s no more of a fool than her earliest critics, who dismissed her music as the pathetic mewlings of a self-destructive dilettante who had evidently missed the entire third-wave feminist movement (and wasn’t too interested in the fourth-wave either). Ultraviolence was Del Rey’s third album, and it’s perhaps her most beguiling, taking her usual themes – devotion, fantasy, American mythology – into an ever dreamier realm that entrenched her aesthetic while further obfuscating her standpoint.

Produced by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys and recorded in live takes with a Nashville band, Ultraviolence swapped the experimental pop and hip-hop of Del Rey’s previous records for jazz, guitars and psychedelic rock. Cinematic strings and her soaring, sweeping vocals take centre stage as she serenades the listener with ballads about bourbon, broken men and her unsuccessful efforts to fix the latter. Pitchfork called the record “a Concept Album from a Concept Human”, and ten years on, it still feels like the idea of Lana Del Rey at its most fully actualised, haunted by sorrow and drowning in reverb.

Critical reception for Ultraviolence was largely positive, at least compared to the diatribes about ‘artistic authenticity’ that followed the release of her debut, Born to Die. But this goodwill only extended to the record’s sound – reviews were not as forgiving when it came to its subject matter. Commentators continued to frame her as a passive, pouting victim who had now run out of worthy things to sing about. The Independent claimed Ultraviolence was “more of the same, but less”. The Irish Times referred to her as “a role model of bruised and damaged goods”, and The Guardian bristled at its “collection of alternately feeble and awful women”. It seems noteworthy that two out of three of these reviews were by middle-aged men.

This isn’t to say that the record was a flop, far from it. It debuted at number one in 12 countries, including the UK, and held the record for the largest first-week album sales by a female artist in 2014, until it was overtaken by Taylor Swift’s 1989 (of course) five months later. “There’s something hugely cheering about the way Swift turns the persona of the pathetic female appendage snivelling over her bad-boy boyfriend on its head,” wrote yet another middle-aged man,

remarking on a track from Swift’s album, which he believed “bears a hint of Lana del Ray” [sic]. But in a musical climate then awash with club-ready paeans to self-esteem, Ultraviolence set Lana even further outside the mainstream.

“The pop music of the time hinged around themes of empowerment, ‘feminist’ in a sloganeering, socialclimbing way,” says music journalist and writer Meaghan Garvey. “Lana wallowed at the other end of the spectrum. Her moody torch songs found their muse in feminine abjection, and were a clarion call to the melancholic for whom the girlboss era’s imperatives left something to be desired.”

Amid all the hand-wringing about Del Rey’s obsession with (and reliance on) men, and her alleged glamorisation of violence and abuse, few seemed to consider that rather than perpetuating or promoting harmful stereotypes about passive femininity, she was simply holding a mirror to the quiet misery and degradation that underlies heterosexual love for so many women. Del Rey understands that to be a woman who loves men, or at least a certain type of woman who falls for certain types of men, is to suffer. Why not add swooping violins and turn that suffering into something beautiful?

“I like that luxe sound of the word ‘ultra’ and the mean sound of the word ‘violence’ together. I like that two worlds can live in one,” Del Rey mused in an interview with Complex around the album’s release. On the title track, in which she controversially references The Crystals’ He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss), she also sings “I could’ve died right then/ Because he was right beside me,” leaving it up to the listener to decode whether this is because of uncontrollable delight at her lover’s presence, or if the same presence is a threat to her life.

Perhaps, then, Lana Del Rey’s true talent is her ability to play two audiences at once with the same message. Just as her constant allusions to American Romanticism and cultural myth are as much heartfelt elegies as they are ironic, self-mocking digs at the ways we fool ourselves when swept up in the dream of an ideal, so Ultraviolence is a self-aware meditation on what it means to be the type of woman for whom love and surrender are inextricably linked. Or, as she puts it herself on Brooklyn Baby, a winking homage to America’s past fused with a perspective entirely rooted in the present: “If you don’t get it, then forget it/ ’Cause I don’t have to fuckin’ explain it .”

44

SLEEVE NOTES

Artwork, annotated

I AM JORDAN

I. JORDAN:

The first time Aries and I met was in their office, and I was like, “I have an idea that came to me at 6 a.m. I don’t know if it’s any good, but this is kind of the direction I want to go in…” I was really unsure about what the visual element was going to look like, but I knew the album was going to be called I AM JORDAN, and I knew the artwork needed to feature a bit of me – I just didn’t want it to be my face. Testosterone brings many, many changes – I hate my face from six months ago – and I wanted the artwork to have a more timeless feel. So we zoomed in on personal elements that highlight my gender euphoric parts of my body. I wanted the cover to feature my hands, because I like my tattoos. On testosterone, your neck grows a bit and your Adam’s apple moves, so that’s a part of me I wanted to show as well. A lot of my jewellery features in the artwork – chains, rings – and that’s something I wanted to come through, so the moodboard had a lot of monochrome and metallic vibes.

The colour turquoise is hugely significant in the campaign. I’ve been obsessed with it for as long as I can remember. If you open my wardrobe, all my clothes are just black, white and turquoise. It feels like a part of who I am. It’s definitely a part of my identity, so it was really important for my debut album to have that as something people associate with me.

When you think about the album being about joy, and the artwork being really serious, it seems like a bit of a contrast. But it’s about joy in the sense of my own joy, and the imagery is expressive of that too.

ARIES MOROSS:

I think some designers really want it to be their vision, but I prefer to work with as many references as possible from the artists themselves. Jordan had all these colour and material references. There were a lot of metals, and I really was enjoying the mixture of the hardness and the fluidity of that. We put a lot of those ideas on the inside of the gatefold, which was an opportunity to be our most creative beyond the cover of the record. There’s the huge metal set name, and I drew these sort of organic shapes to reference some of the tattoos and other visual language aspects, and then created them in 3D. I wanted the photography to be really high contrast and quite graphic. There’s a layer of turquoise and metal specks of liquid in the background.

From a design language point of view, if I’ve got a simple rule I can follow that makes everything fit together, then I’m happy. Colour is great for that. You can work on a campaign where you’re like, “This is a red song, everything’s red,” “This is a turquoise campaign, everything’s turquoise.” With this, we actually started much more black and white, and I’m so glad we added the colour! I’ve always found that, as much as it sometimes sets you back when a musician asks you to change something significant, 99 percent of the time it always ends up being better.

I worked on the project in my studio at home, so I did it in quite an intimate way. And I wanted that to be the way it was made. Because it’s a personal record for Jordan, I wanted to go through the same process.

I. JORDAN, ARTIST ARIES MOROSS,

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

THE GRIND

MUI ZYU’S FAAN KE DAAN (番茄蛋)

SUGGESTED MUSICAL PAIRING: THE RULES OF WHAT AN EARTHLING CAN BE

Although eggs have been a part of Chinese cuisine for thousands of years – not including century eggs, which are maybe only 600 years old – cooking eggs with tomatoes was a result of mixing Chinese and western cuisine, and became popular in the early 1900s. My family would often make ‘faan ke daan’ (tomato egg) when I was a kid, alongside other dishes to share, such as gai lan (Chinese broccoli), lap cheong (Chinese sausage), pickles and of course rice – usually basmati, as that was my dad’s favourite.

This sweet, tangy and savoury dish is super-easy to make. It’s really comforting to me, and it’s my go-to when I’m missing my family’s cooking.

INGREDIENTS

– 6 medium tomatoes

– 3 spring onions (just the tops)

– 5 medium eggs

– 1 tbsp sesame oil

– 1 tbsp Shaoxing wine

– ½ tsp salt

– ½ tsp MSG

– 1 tsp brown sugar

– 2 tbsp vegetable oil

– 1 tsp cornflour

– Cup of water

DIRECTIONS

– You can peel the tomatoes or keep them unpeeled depending on what you like. Peeling them makes the dish juicier. Sometimes I go for a mix of peeled and unpeeled.

– Cut the tomatoes into small wedges, making sure to cut out the stems. Chop the ginger into thin strips and finely chop the spring onion tops.

– Crack the eggs into a bowl, add the Shaoxing wine and sesame oil, then whisk.

– Mix the cornflour with a tablespoon of water.

– Preheat your wok or pan to about medium-high heat until you see a bit of smoke. Add one tablespoon of vegetable oil, making sure it’s spread evenly.

– Add the egg mixture and keep it moving until it’s about 80% cooked. Then set aside.

– Add another tablespoon of vegetable oil to the wok and turn up to a high heat. Add ginger and stir-fry for about ten seconds – make sure it doesn’t burn! Then add the chopped tomatoes and continue to stir-fry for a few minutes.

– Once the tomatoes break down add the salt, MSG and sugar. The sugar helps balance out the acidity of the tomatoes. My dad adds twice as much sugar, but I prefer a little less to keep the tang and tartness.

– Once the tomatoes have broken down a bit more, add the cornflour mixture and stir.

– Mix in the cooked eggs and spring onions, cook for another minute, and it’s ready to serve!

PIN-DROP

Nene H has her finger on the pulse in more ways than one. The Turkish-born, Berlin-based producer and DJ serves up breakneck techno with a bubblegum twist, weaving infectious beats and cultural commentary into club slammers that welcome you to the dancefloor and then hit you with a punchline about modern life. Taking inspiration from memes and digital discourse, warped self-image and mental health crises, her latest mini-album, ISSA SCAM, incorporates everything from rubbery basslines and whiplash jungle breaks to squelchy acid house and flirty Eurodance vocals. The tracks shift as rapidly as culture itself, finding joy in chaos and closeness in hysteria. The all-in-it-together feel of her music reflects the role of community in her daily life. Here, she takes us to the place that grounds her most: her family home.

ISSA SCAM IS OUT NOW VIA LIVE FROM EARTH

NENE H

【Words】 Emma Garland 【Photography】 Nene H

WHERE ARE WE?

We’re in my home in İzmir, Turkey, where my family lives. It’s an apartment in a busy residential area outside of the city centre. It’s not a very rich area, let’s put it that way! It’s very humble.

CAN

YOU DESCRIBE THIS PLACE THROUGH YOUR SENSES?

Home smells like my mum’s amazing food, always. People visit without a heads up, so our living room is always full of guests coming and going. It can be a very calming space, but it can also be very chaotic – like ten women yelling over each other, telling stories. You’ll hear the doorbell at least once a day, and we always have chai, Turkish coffee and food ready to serve. Birds come to our balcony and they’re so used to us feeding them that they knock on the window when they’re hungry!

WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU’RE HERE?

Home is all about coexistence and community. It’s where we’ve had moments of grieving, like after my father’s passing, when we had the 40-day funeral prayers there. And it’s the place where I have the most beautiful memories, like the henna night before my wedding. My partner’s family – who are from Kenya, Denmark and Peru – came to meet my Turkish and Azerbaijani family. The Azerbaijani side of my family played accordion and we all sang songs. We have different styles of traditional dance, so we did the Azerbaijani dance, the Anatolian dance, the dance from the Black Sea region, where my mum is from. I was wearing the ceremonial clothes and everyone danced around me with candles and put the henna on my palm. It’s meant to be sad, because it’s like a goodbye from the family, but we were just laughing and having fun the whole time.

WHY IS THIS LOCATION SO SIGNIFICANT TO YOU?

When you tour so much, you make home the place that you’re in for a short amount of time. You have to be very adjustable. But my family home is where I feel connected to myself the most. My individuality doesn’t exist any more, because it’s all about existing for each other. There’s no boundaries at all. All the lines have already been crossed 10,000 times, which means there isn’t any privacy – but there’s good aspects to that. In more westernised cultures the sense of individualism means people don’t cross those lines as often, but sometimes you need people to do that to get to you. There’s not a lot of ego in our family. Success or money aren’t important, which keeps me grounded.

WHAT’S YOUR LASTING MEMORY OF THIS PLACE?

The feeling of our religion is basically everywhere in our home. There’s always a Nazar sign to protect from evil eyes. There are prayer ornaments and beautiful pieces of Islamic art everywhere. You know right away it’s a home to devoted Muslims. That’s the most characteristic aspect of home for me.