Loud And Quiet 133 – Holly Herndon

Amyl and the Sniffers, Sistertalk, The Claque, The Horrors, Georgia, BABii, Aldous Harding, Leafcutter John

issue 133

Holly Herndon AI is not going to kill us

Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet Ltd PO Box 67915 London NW1W 8TH Founding Editor: Stuart Stubbs Art Direction: B.A.M. Digital Director: Greg Cochrane Sub Editor: Alexandra Wilshire Book Editor: Lee Bullman Contributing writers Abi Crawford, Aimee Armstrong, Andrew Anderson, Alex FrancisAlex WestonNoond, Brian Coney, Cal Cashin, Chris Watkeys, David Cortes, David Zammitt, Daniel Dylan-Wray, Derek Robertson, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Hayley Scott, Ian Roebuck, Joe Goggins, Katie Beswick, Liam Konemann, Luke Cartledge, Max Pilley, Patrick Glen, Rachel Redfern, Rosie Ramsden, Reef Younis, Sarah Lay, Susan Darlington, Sam Walton, Tom Critten, Tristan Gatward.

Contributing photographers Brian Guido, Charlotte Patmore, Colin Medley, David Cortes, Dan Kendall, Dustin Condren, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Heather Mccutcheon, Jenna Foxton, Jonangelo Molinari, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Nathanael Turner, Nathaniel Wood, Phil Sharp, Rachael Wright, Sonny McCartney, Timothy Cochrane, Tom Porter.

With special thanks to Annette Lee, Ben Ayres, Cath Hurley, Christian Fritzenwanker, Frankie Davidson, George Cochran, Sam Williams, Will Lawrence.

The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2019 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by Gemini Print Distributed by Loud And Quiet Ltd. & Forte

Issue 133

The first track I heard from Holly Herndon’s third album was a collaboration with Jlin called ‘Godmother’ and it scared the crap out of me, sonically and biologically, made as it was with an AI on lead vocals. The sound of ‘Godmother’ (a million insects beatboxing) is still a modern terror score, but I’ve been fascinated with Herdon’s album of machine learning since. I didn’t think I’d care, because, like everyone else, I’m too sceptical of all this computer technology that I’d be lost without. Maybe cynicism is something AI can help us with. These days, I’d give it a go. Because of the possibilities posed by Herndon. Although, it’s not quite so simple. When I told her that I’m not so scared by technology anymore, as I left her appartment in Berlin, she said: “Well, you should be.”

Stuart Stubbs

BABii . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Sistertalk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Leafcutter John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Georgia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 The Claque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Holly Herndon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Amyl and the Sniffers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 The Horrors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 What lies beneath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

03

NEW RELEASES OUT NOW

PATIENCE ‘Dizzy Spells’

Night School LP/LPX/CD Patience began as bedroom synth project for songwriter Roxanne Clifford after the break up of her acclaimed indie pop band Veronica Falls.

Produced by Todd Edwards (Daft Punk) & Lewis Cook (Free Love/Happy Meals) Dizzy Spells features all three long-sold out singles.

POW! ‘Shift’

Castle Face LP/CD Just when we thought we knew what to expect from POW! they surprise us with a vigorous and rabid LPs worth of moody cybernetic punk that’s frankly their best yet. For fans of Solid Space, Tubeway Army, The Units, The Screamers, and glittery black nail polish.

QASIM NAQVI ‘Teenages’

Erased Tapes LP/CD Pakistani-American composer Qasim Naqvi captures the sound of electronics living, breathing and mutating of their own accord – almost autonomously – with only subtle, sparing but perfectly-judged and masterful guidance.

RIYL: Sarah Davachi, Alessandro Cortini

CUBE ‘Decoy Street’

W.25TH LP Cube is the prolific and chimeric nom de plume of one Adam Keith, formidable tape experimentalist and artist / abraser currently operating in Oakland, California’s vibrant subterranea. RIYL: Prurient, Puce Mary and Alan Vega.

VIC GODARD ‘Mum’s Revenge’

GNU Records LP New album from Vic Godard (Subway Sect) recorded with Dave Morgan (The Rockingbirds, ATV, The Weather Prophets) the new long player features ten tracks including a re-work of the classic ‘Ambition’ single and current track ‘Nobody Knows’.

Released on Mothers Day 2019.

GUIDED BY VOICES ‘Warp & Woof’ Guided By Voices Inc. LP/CD

Following Guided By Voice’s sprawling double-album Zeppelin Over China, Robert Pollard has written and recorded another fulllength in record-breaking time. It’s Warp And Woof, exuberantly barreling through twenty-four songs in just thirty-seven minutes with a brevity similar to mid-90s GBV albums Alien Lanes and Vampire On Titus.

ZIG ZAGS ‘They’ll Never Take Us Alive’

VARIOUS ‘Brown Acid: The Eighth Trip’

“This album, our first with Riding Easy, was written over the last year. It’s reveals our longtime roots, our enduring love (all hail!) to the early punk of our hero(ines) Dead Moon and The Wipers (forever!) but friends, don’t be mislead...this is a METAL record - of the true blue, headbangin’, riff-ridin’, no-bullshit - kind.” – Zig Zags

Brand new edition of the Brown Acid series released this time out to coincide with RSD. Some super rare and firesome private press heavy rock and psych from the underground rock scene of the 1970's.

Riding Easy LP/CD

Riding Easy LP/CD

ON TOUR RIDING EASY... on tour Alastor 3rd May

LONDON, Desertfest

Blackwater Holylight

Oh Sees

18th May – Albert Hall, MANCHESTER 19th May – QMU, GLASGOW 20th May – Limelight, BELFAST 21st May – Button Factory, DUBLIN 23rd May – Tramshed, CARDIFF 24th May – Bearded Theory Festival, DERBY 6th September – The Troxy, LONDON

1st May 2nd May 3rd May

BRISTOL, The Lanes NEWCASTLE, Trillans LONDON, Desertfest

Electric Citizen

1st May 2nd May 3rd May

R.I.P.

1st May 2nd May 3rd May

BRISTOL, The Lanes NEWCASTLE, TRILLANS LONDON, DesertFest

MILTON KEYNES, Craufurd Arms BRISTOL, Zed Alley LONDON, DesertFest

Zig Zags

3rd May LONDON, Desertfest 22nd May MARGATE, Elsewhere

info@fortedistribution.co.uk

Travel

A weekend with Ludovico Einaudi

Seven Days Walking: Day One is the fourteenth studio album by classical minimalist composer Ludovico Einaudi. By the end of the year he’ll have released his twentieth. It’s the kind of productivity that makes you question why you snoozed your alarm twelve times this morning. But replacing the warm wet air of the London Underground with the warm dry air of the Italian countryside, his hometown of Dogliani in Southern Italy adds some grounds to the mammoth new project from classical’s suavest export.

It’s true: in the Venn Diagram of guilty pleasures and heartthrobs, you don’t expect to land two-footed in the subsection with an Italian composer and pianist in his early 60s. But where we are in Piedmont the allure among all the world’s tranquillity seems to make sense. Concentric lines of carefully cultivated grape vines snake through the rolling countryside. We’re lounging in semicomfortable wooden chairs while crisp brown leaves float in a swimming pool shaped like a wine bottle. Ludo’s luscious grey sideburns twinkle as the sun bounces off the blue waters. Slowly removing his navy crew neck sweater, he slips into something more comfortable. A full wetsuit and scuba flippers? I’ll leave that to your imagination. Goggles, for sure. He takes a brief run-up through the brittle sage hedges and executes an elegant swan dive into the sparkling waters. Not all of this happened.

Even between the competing landscapes of high-flying contemporary classical and shady purists who use emojis in online Hi-Fi forums, neither camp seems to accept good old Ludo as one of their own. He’s the most-streamed classical artist of alltime, but nobody seems to like that. He’s the catalyst behind your favourite streaming service’s Peaceful Piano playlist. He wrote the piece your friends walked down the isle to last weekend; the one from a BBC montage. How dare he come over here with his

words by tristan gatward. illustration by kate prior

stupid compositions and stupid minimalist song-structures and stupid melodies that all just sound so stupid good. But that liminal space between pop’s catchy sensibilities and classical’s illusion of high-brow has always been bridged with something a little less revered. It used to be Bocelli, singing ‘Time To Say Goodnight’ to Elmo on Sesame Street. Now it’s Einaudi, with a project that’s actually really interesting, and one that doesn’t involve offering some oily garlic bread to a puppet.

Walking with Ludo through his vineyard, he talks about the same route he took on seven different occasions that inspired this new collection. During a snowstorm in January 2018, view completely obscured. In the penetrating Spring air, nose-astreaming. In an Autumnal colour palette. You know, how seasons are different, and that. One day it’s windy, he says, on another day you’ll meet someone and on another you’ll discover something on the hillside. As he says this, he leans over and eats a handful of small flowers plucked from the grassy verge. It’s a type of Primrose and tastes great on a salad. The ideas from the walks connected him back with traditional forms of classical music, where suites and variations tease around a common route, with different surprises to face each time.

“I like the sunny days,” he says, “but it’s also nice to get lost in the snow. It’s such a beautiful feeling when it’s snowing so heavily that you almost disappear.” After four days of recording with his collaborators Federico Mecozzi and Redi Hasa, these seven musical walks had been recorded, starting from one place, circling around and ending back at the beginning. There was a different feel to each; there were slower passages; gaps of silence; experimentations into electronics. He said it was like looking out of the same window over the course of eight hours, noticing the different patterns of light. Like Cezanne painting the same mountain in France for twenty years.

At the Teatro Sociale in the neighbouring town of Alba, I watch him air these variations for the first time. The stage sits curiously in the middle of the old and the new part of the theatre, facing two audiences at once. There is not a typical Einaudi fan.

He’s got all ages covered from all walks of Italian life. As he thanks one half of the audience for their applause and warm reception, the other half falls silent. He knows the peculiarity of the space; it suits the curiosities you’ll find in the music that follows.

At the end, I tell him I love the lyrics and ask if he’s heard of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. He gives a humouring smile and nods. Back at the villa, his videographer infuses some boiling water with the sage from his garden – a fresh and cleansing drink.

Einaudi branded wine bottles stack the bookshelves of his house, and the wine cellar that sits conveniently underneath the swimming pool looks like an architect’s design from Thunderbirds.

Someone explains that the microorganisms in the grapes like to listen to Ludovico’s music to chill out. This has been scientifically proven. Who am I to disagree? It tastes delicious.

05

Environment

Gateway Pubs Just as heavy metal is grossly underrepresented and unfairly ridiculed as a music genre, despite its having far more in the way of radical possibility than almost any of the buzzy indie that so plagues much of the contemporary music press, so is its physical lifeblood: the metal pub.

In many small towns, not to mention the more parochial, less trend-conscious districts of major cities, the metal pub is the music venue. That was certainly the case in the town where I grew up, and the metal pub that’s most local to where I live now – The Bird’s Nest in Deptford – remains a bastion of a resolutely antifashion, largely working-class subculture despite the blundering encroachment of rapid gentrification into the area. It’s a classic example of its type: dark, a little dingy, with a cramped stage in one corner, tucked away from what little light gets through the Dickensian windows. Nearly every visible surface is adorned with stickers, posters, graffiti, and suspiciously miscellaneous discolorations, evidence of the enormous range of people – bikers, hooligan firms, anarchists, punks, and lots of metal bands – who have passed through the pub down the years.

Pints aren’t that cheap – this is, after all, a London boozer first and foremost – but the prices aren’t silly, and they pour the Guinness properly. The pub’s stoic troupe of regulars, the like of whom are conspicuously absent from the more on-point bars in the area, are perhaps evidence of that. There are a few customary old-school South London geezers, but beyond that, the clientele is much the same as in equivalent pubs the country. This is where the weirdos drink: the permanently stoned ex-roadies, the face-tattoo crusties, the translucent mutterers who exclusively live on Heineken, cigarettes, and the occasional bag of dry roasted. It’s a good crowd.

I’ve seen and heard some amazing stuff in The Bird’s Nest: riotous hardcore, frenetic garage, sweaty thrash, relentless jungle, euphoria-laced techno. I’ve also heard some absolute shite: flatulent indie lads, obnoxiously crap jump-up, heroically pissed Saxondales fumbling through utterly inappropriate guitar solos. I actually have a soft spot for the latter type – an unsettling glimpse into my future?

As utterly vital as campaigns to save the more directly essential grassroots music venues and underground industry players are (recent appeals to fund London music venues The Social and DIY Space for London, for example, or the grimly familiar appeals to readers of key publications such as this very magazine – it’s important to recognise the less glamorous parts of the new music ecosystem, too. Pubs like The Bird’s Nest might not be the places to go and catch the next big thing, nor are they designed to host much in the way of radical ideas per se, but they represent an indispensable entry point into rich seams of alternative culture that may otherwise be, if not inaccessible, certainly remote from the layperson. If the band’s good, the regulars might watch for a bit. If not, they might nip out for a fag.

06

The most likely outcome in either scenario is that the majority of drinkers will glance across briefly, pull the Motörhead t-shirt back down over that last sliver of belly, and return to their conversations. And that’ll be it.

My first real encounters with live music were in metal and biker pubs. I remember gingerly joining a family friend onstage in a room that, long after the smoking ban came in, stank and indeed looked like an ashtray, wobbling through a few chords on my £100 Ibanez, and squeezing back through the crowd of burly men in motorbike leathers, still trembling a little with pubescent nerves. When I got (slightly) older, the pub my friends and I used to drink in, way before we should’ve been able to, was a Bird’s Nest-like place in the middle of town, and the only establishment that even approached consistently functioning as a music venue.

Most of the acts were pretty suspect, but chances were that a night of shit rock and cheap beer in there would be more fun than the alternative: a few tinnies on the train into the nearest city, promptly followed by being turned away from a more illustrious show for being underage.

I think what makes these places so special is the utter lack of pressure. The drinkers in The Bird’s Nest have no interest in looking cool; if they were, they’d be drinking in one of the upmarket railway arch bars off Deptford High St. Who knows, maybe they’d even buy a new Maiden t-shirt. But pubs like this allow people to experience alternative culture in the most basic, introductory way, and as such play host to as much incidental brilliance as they do ham-fisted covers of ‘Back In Black’. Your local metal pub is an essential and underappreciated rung in the cultural ladder, and should be valued as such.

words by luke cartledge. illustration by kate prior

Ageing

Sweet 16: When Aldous Harding was getting stoned and dropping chocolate bars in urinals

This photo was taken in Quebec, Canada, in 2006, and that fellow with me is my cousin, Fraser. We were very stoned outside the supermarket, buying iced tea. And that was the day we got really stoned and we cut up a bunch of his dad’s old leather jackets and made moccasins and went through the forest. We weren’t serious; it was just a bit of fun, because when I get high I like to make things. And then we also watched this episode of South Park where the counsellor, Mr Mackey, tries desperately to find out who shat in the urinal, and we just found it the funniest thing ever, and everyone was getting really fed up with us because we were leaving broken up chocolate bars all over the house.

My aunty would come in and say, ‘what is this?’. Then we were like, ‘holy shit, we need to put one in the [Quebec supermarket] IGA’, so we went to the IGA and bought a load of chocolate bars and snuck into the bathroom and put broken chocolate bars in all the urinals.

The moccasins we made fell apart immediately; they were no good. I can’t remember what Fraser’s dad said when he found his leather jackets all cut up. I think it disturbed him more than anything – he was too disturbed to come at us about it. But my cousin and I were very close, and I don’t think I’ve ever laughed that much since.

My mum’s from Canada and all her family’s over there, so I went to live with them on the farm and worked in their restaurant, called La Rêverie. It was one of the happier times of my life. I didn’t speak French though, so I got by on my charm, and I wasn’t a very good waitress. I was a bit of a dropkick: I didn’t wash my hair and I stank of cigarettes and I was stoned a lot of the time. I think a lot

08

of tortured teenage girls go through that bonged phase, where they’re bonged out of their minds and just working so they can get stoned again. I know a lot of people who did that and are now teachers or operating heavy machinery, and I think, Jesus!

I definitely considered myself a tortured 16-year-old, and I feel so embarrassed to say it. It’s funny, because I would always say that I had a pretty good childhood, and then you go to a therapist and talk about some stuff. I’d always beat myself up; I couldn’t understand why I found it hard, and I think some people are just like that. Some people just have a hard time, and it’s so hard to know whether it’s hard or you’re weak. I never know whether I’m a bit shit or sensitive, and for whatever reason I couldn’t get my shit together for a long time.

My big interests were smoking weed, trying drugs, fucking with men’s heads and fucking with my head. I was pretty angry, and then that anger turned to sadness, because I never had a healthy way to express it until I found music. But I was never rude to my parents, because in my mind my parents were weaker than I was. I took it for the team because it was a tiny, sensitive team – it was just me and my mum.

Sixteen is the witching hours. And I remember growing up in a very small town, on an organic farm, and having an incredibly creative mother, and when we arrived there I toned it down.

I learnt to live like that, and when I went back to Dunedin [New Zealand] to finish high school I remember that all the boys had long hair and all the girls had short hair, and I was quite weird; I had long black hair and I got spray tans, so I was kind of like a goth but I had spray tans. See, I’ve never been consistent.

as told to stuart stubbs

Victoria Park London E3 24 May > 02 June Fri 31 May

Fri 24 May

BRING ME THE HORIZON PRIMAL SCREAM > HOT CHIP JON HOPKINS LIVE >

Kate Tempest > Spiritualized > Little Dragon > Roisin Murphy > Steve Mason > Danny Brown > Peggy Gou Presents Gou Talk > Optimo > David August > Josey Rebelle > Little Simz > Jadu Heart > Petite Noir > Maurice Fulton > Ibibio Sound Machine > Lane 8> Ge-ology > Sat 25 May

RUN THE JEWELS ARCHITECTS NOTHING BUT THIEVES WHILE SHE SLEEPS > IDLES

Alice Glass > Scarlxrd > Yonaka > Employed To Serve

Sat 01 June

Elder Island > DMX Krew

THE RACONTEURS > INTERPOL introducing

Johnny Marr > Jarvis Cocker JARV IS... > Courtney Barnett Fat White Family > Parquet Courts Connan Mockasin > Anna Calvi > Temples Amyl and the Sniffers > Angie McMahon > BC Camplight > Yak Dream Wife > Our Girl > Viagra Boys > Bakar > The Nude Party Willie J Healey > Demob Happy

LEON BRIDGES > DIZZEE RASCAL THE VACCINES Dermot Kennedy > Sam Fender Jade Bird > Gretta Ray > Dizzy

Sun 02 June

Sun 26 May

JAMES BLAKE > METRONOMY MARIBOU STATE

Kamasi Washington > Beach House > Honne > Kurt Vile and the Violators > Princess Nokia > Ezra Collective > Toro y Moi > Rina Sawayama > Bob Moses > Andrew Weatherall > Yves Tumor (Full band) > Joy Orbison > Baloji > Cuco > Moxie Presents On Loop > Octo Octa > Galcher Lustwerk > Paquita Gordon

MAC DEMARCO FIRST AID KIT JOHN GRANT THE TALLEST MAN ON EARTH Julien Baker > Snail Mail > KOKOKO!

+ More acts to be announced across all days

Interview

BABii

Things to make and do in Margate’s hidden world of miscellaneous crap, by Greg Cochrane Photographed by Timothy Cochrane 10

Interview

Turn off an unremarkable residential road somewhere in the stomach of Margate, Kent, and there’s a path bumpy with broken rocks that leads to a looming brick shed. On the outside, written in white capital letters: Fire Eye Land. The narrow alley that leads to the building’s side door entrance is cluttered with an assortment of items stacked against a wall – tatty garden chairs, a canoe, paint pots, a bicycle, splintered wooden pallets, a bathtub and, quite literally, a kitchen sink (rusting).

“Wolfff!” cries BABii as she opens the door and encourages a small white and brown dog to calm down. If the entryway is jumbled, then that’s got nothing on the accumulation of stuff that’s inside. Depending where you register on the spectrum, Fire Eye Land is either a panic attack-inducing mixture of disorderly junk or a treasure trove paradise of materials, knickknacks and miscellaneous crap. A cross between backstage at a surreal pantomime and a shipping yard boat builder’s, Marie Kondo would take one look and walk out.

It’s known locally as an affordable, relaxed and liberal co-working space for creatives. Downstairs, the naked concrete floor has been divided up into studios, haphazardly separated with colourful front doors that look like they could’ve been lifted from a local skip. There’s one huge room, a white cove photography studio where Wolf gleefully bounds around leaving pawprints on the floor. A scaffolding staircase leads up to a first floor mezzanine that reaches up to a sloping corrugated roof. On the landing before the attic, another studio, this one covered in artificial turf, belongs to jungle producer Congo Natty. Out the back in the garden the theme continues: more sheds converted into individual studios. Stuff hangs from trees and care has even been taken to artistically decorate the back of the door in the communal toilet. Returning inside, a corridor that travels to a communal kitchen is at overflowing. A wall decorated in miniature dinosaur figures is never explained, nor is the Christmas tinsel still hanging from the ceiling.

In comparison, BABii’s own room – where she works on music, visuals and semi-acts as caretaker of the building – is an oasis of minimalism. The four walls are painted white; a Mac computer sits in the corner by a desk supporting a keyboard and speakers. Comparatively, any decoration is sparse; the odd houseplant, Japanese artwork collected from her travels and a colourful rug on the floor. When she’s in Margate, this is where BABii is. Everyday, 12 til 12.

Fire Eye Land wasn’t always this way. Originally the purpose was much more simple – a workshop where her father would come and make driftwood furniture in his spare time.

When the picture framing business he shared the unit with liquidated he took over the building and set about turning it into the multi-functional grotto that it is today, albeit one with the hallmarks of a self-taught tradesperson hanging out of its walls.

“He’s a bit of hoarder,” BABii says, understatedly. While it’s chaotic, it’s also a building that says, ‘look, you can make anything you want today, just teach yourself how’.

— Exploding teeth — My first contact with BABii’s music was in the incongruous surroundings of the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room; a mahogany-walled chamber with comfortable seats named after a 17th century composer. BABii was on stage whacking a drum pad supporting her boyfriend, Iglooghost, at his London headline show. The music was mesmeric: ice-cold cyborg electronica given a human heart with her whispy vocals. The low-end bass was so loud it created ripples in my drink. Truthfully, she puts it better: “Have you ever had a blissful, pastel-coloured, floaty dream where you want to punch someone so hard in their face that all their teeth explode? My music is like that.”

Later that evening she re-appeared as part of Iglooghost’s ingenious stage show that she’d co-conceived and helped create the costumes for. She was one of the characters dancing around.

Tamei, or maybe Mogu. The whole DIY production was proof that imagination is as valuable as any deep-pocketed budget, a philosophy shared by the other members of their amorphous online collective, GLOO, that includes other musicians like Kai Whiston and Umru.

“It’s our gang,” says BABii, simply; a group of online pals supporting and competing with each other.

The remnants of that show is here in Fire Eye Land today, the painstakingly crafted figures placed up in the loft. Iglooghost, wearing a pair of Crocs and a neon windbreaker, is too, politely introducing himself and plotting a new music video with a visiting friend. Their partnership goes back a few years to when the pair shared the bill at a show in nearby Ramsgate and hit it off instantly. But, for BABii, it has been a long route to get here.

Born in Yorkshire, some of Daisy Warne’s earliest memories are of running around the full scale medieval village her father had constructed in a giant mill in Batley. “It was lots of little houses or shops selling vintage furniture and different clothes,” she says, sipping an early-afternoon cider in a small bar located on Margate’s picturesque harbour arm. “My dad also put £500 worth of pennies into the floor because he thought it’d look cool.”

She continues: “There was a big torture chamber that he made in there as well that I would rollerskate around, and a bed of nails. I’m sure that wasn’t very safe. I was around a lot of artists. A guy called Bob got me to make a voodoo doll once, so I ran around the mill talking to customers and being like, ‘look, I just made a voodoo doll!’. I was quiet feral as a kid – dirty fingernails and a bit grubby – but having creative people around me got me making things. It was quite an aggressive and dark place to grow up as well as being amazing at the same time.”

11

Interview

“My dad made a torture chamber that I would rollerskate around” Music was present in these early years, too, but mostly in the form of her dad’s record collection and a bugle she’d been gifted and mostly used to terrorise visitors. “I used to drive everyone crazy,” she laughs.

At that point, things began to accelerate. First with a move away from Batley to Ramsgate where the family opened a store specialising in African instruments. Shortly after they upped sticks and relocated to Toronto (her father, as well as being a master handyman, is a Canadian former ice hockey player) where her sister was born. “I was so sad when we left,” she recalls. “It was the first time I’d really made friends because when I was younger I was just a bit too weird for kids to try and interact with me too much. In Canada the kids were all friendly.

The cool kids are the smart kids. I felt more comfortable there.”

But Ramsgate was beckoning again, and her teenage years were spent there by the sea. “It was run-down and rubbish, which meant there a lot of time to make things,” she says. At 16 she moved to Brighton, an early student at BIMM (Brighton Institute of Modern Music). She’d signed up because her best mate had, and once there she wrote her first songs, even if she’d sometimes tear up with nerves when she performed them in front of others. After that, BABii spent two years working as a chef, which she loved, but never saw as a long term plan. Intuition coaxed her back into education, staying in Brighton to take up a degree in Music and Visual Art. “I just like making pretty things and things that sound nice. I learned to bring concept into whatever it was that I was doing.” At the same time she was also working as a freelance music video director, and formed a band – electronic-pop trio Us Baby Bear Bones. That was going well after university until her bandmate quit when they were weirdly offered a support slot with Sophie Ellis-Bextor and it all fell apart. The same was true for BABii’s relationship at the time.

12

When that ended, she cut ties with the south coast and moved to Margate to begin again.

— HiiDE — At first the idea of making any more music was a big turn off. She would make it in secret, and eventually realised that much of it was actually about secrets. “In that relationship there were a lot of secrets, and I felt like I was a secret, so those things naturally came out in the songwriting. These were songs I was just writing because I needed to get rid of my brain garbage.”

The result is HiiDE, her debut album that comes out on Deathwaltz Originals in July. A couple of years ago dub music legend Adrian Sherwood had come across her music via an old family friend, and BABii part recorded the album at his studio under his tutelage. It’s a collection of songs that’re highly realised, but that’s no surprise given her history for ingenuity (she talks excitedly about one-day writing a touring musical but with “interesting music, not musical music”).

What sets the BABii project apart – the album, the aesthetic, the sonics and the GLOO community – is the uniform attention to detail; the pursuit for perfection, even when the tools to achieve it aren’t automatically to hand. Case in point: she mentions how she and Seamus (Iglooghost) recently spent an entire day decorating a harddrive as a boulder just because the online merch shop they’d just launched didn’t have a symmetrical amount of items for sale.

“We’ll go to that extent sometimes – we were in hysterics when we realised what was going on,” she laughs.

That ability to build something from nothing sounds familiar. “My Dad? Yeah, he’s never defeated, that’s his thing.

I guess there’s no point in doing something if it’s not special, right or good.”

Lanzarote

04/05/19 MOTH Club Valette St London E8

lanzaroteworks.com

Programming

Tuesday 16 April

HOOVERIII

#lanzaroteworks

Tuesday 16 April

LRO

mothclub.co.uk Friday 26 April Monday 15 April

LOST IN THE RIOTS

Wednesday 17 April

JESSICA WINTER

MELLAH Tuesday 30 April Tuesday 16 April

BENNY SINGS

BEE BEE SEA Friday 3 May

Wednesday 17 April

PENELOPE ISLES

MERMAIDENS Tuesday 7 May

Wednesday 24 April

MALENA ZAVALA Friday 26 April

BARRIE Saturday 27 April

CITIZEN Saturday 4 May

SHORTPARIS Tuesday 7 May

LOWLY Wednesday 8 May

CURRENT JOYS Wednesday 15 May

BODY TYPE

WIVES Wednesday 8 May

LEWSBERG Saturday 11 May

NICE BISCUIT Sunday 12 May

BE FOREST Tuesday 14 May

RHUMBA CLUB Friday 17 May

THE PSYCHOTIC MONKS

The Waiting Room 175 Stoke Newington High St N16 waitingroomn16.com

Thursday 18 April

DRELLER Friday 19 April

SPILL GOLD Tuesday 23 April

CAMERA Thursday 25 April

ZOEY LILY

Studio 9294 92 Wallis Rd E9 5LN @lanzaroteworks

Thursday 25 April

THE COATHANGERS Saturday 27 April

TEST PRESSING FESTIVAL: MOON DUO, A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS, WARMDUSCHER, SURFBORT Wednesday 15 May

DRAHLA

Friday 17 May

CHAI

Saturday 13 April

GIRLS IN SYNTHESIS

Shacklewell Arms 71 Shacklewell Lane London E8 shacklewellarms.com

Monday 15 April

CAVE

Saturday 13 April

CHRISTOPH DE BABALON Sunday 14 April

RANDOM RECIPE

Thursday 23 May

VIAGRA BOYS Saturday 15 June

PORTICO QUARTET Friday 28 June

METZ

Interview A post-punk band who want you to stand still at their shows,

by Ian Roebuck. Photography by Tom Porter

Sistertalk 18 months of hushed whispers don’t serve as preparation for this. I’m stood watching Sistertalk, a bustling Brixton bar (the Windmill, of course) behind me, five unassuming well-dressed young men up front. They’re playing their instruments well; pleasantly off-centre melodies crash around unsettling guitars that gently build tension. Suddenly I’m hurled stage right as the band change gear. I’m taken somewhere I wasn’t expecting to go, musically and physically. This continues until the band finish.

One week earlier, sat with Gabriel, his brother Daniel and long-time friend and bassist Thomas Harris, the mood was

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one of calm. On reflection though, tell-tale signs of the group’s willingness to subvert expectations crept into our meeting. In fact, this entire interview would act as a sneak preview to the sense of shock I felt so viscerally in Brixton. “We want to challenge the blueprint,” said Gabriel with a steely focus, “in terms of how a band can create and release music – that stereotype is so mundane. I’d be lying if I said we don’t feel any anger towards the industry.”

Sistertalk formed as a result of Gabriel’s disillusionment with his career, and there’s a painful honesty to his story and

Interview

downtrodden determination as he tells it: “I had been performing as a session guitarist and a musician 3 years prior to this and I had a really different relationship to music back then. It wasn’t until I began writing my own songs that I started to realise that this was my path.”

The path Sistertalk have taken is anything but conventional. “We know now how the industry wants to work,” grins Daniel. “You play five great shows, then release a song, and then everything blows up, but that would have been the worst thing to happen to us and that’s not how we operate.” Gabriel is shaking his head, looking just as exasperated as his brother. “We hate that blueprint, so after coming to terms with our individual roles and the music we felt compelled to write we wanted to manage ourselves and be more self-contained and in control.”

So instead of riding the initial buzz garnered from low-key, high-energy South London shows and releasing a single after a couple of months, Sistertalk retreated into solitude to hone and master their sound. It took them 18 months before they were happy to emerge once again, much to Daniel’s relief. “To be quite frank,” he says, “we’ve had people say why didn’t you capitalise on that early buzz, but I think we did the right thing as the song wasn’t there.”

— Vitriol — But now, the song is there. ‘Vitriol’ walked stealthily into the public consciousness in the last throes of winter and has been a word of mouth hit ever since. It has the expected young British post-punk tropes of angular guitar, dry vocals and a driving bassline but it is also strangely disconcerting, almost operatic in its storytelling and has an unusual three-part structure. It’s a crystallisation of everything Sistertalk stand for and a perfect single to launch their blueprint-burning catalogue with. “It is the first song we ever wrote,” says Daniel. “We had to work on it for a long time and decide how we wanted to record it because the notion of the song is so choppy and changey. It’s got very different sections, so we decided to record it in that way. Instead of recording it all in a studio we decided to record one section in my room, the other section in a studio, and I think that it ended up playing off each other really nicely. Each section holds up in its own way, but it holds together as a narrative.”

That narrative is one of a jaded performer; someone tired of folded arms and half empty rooms, and ‘Vitriol’’s warped structure is designed to accompany this bitter and twisted soul: everything is meticulously planned to disorientate and throw you off guard, exactly how I would go on to feel one week later.

“That’s true,” says Gabriel, “but I like playing with my own expectations more than others – if it takes me by surprise then that’s a bonus. We want people to listen and engage instead of

turning into each other. We would much prefer for people to look at us stone faced and absorb the process rather than thrash about with their elbows.”

“A lot of the sections that are heavier don’t last long enough for people to mosh,” says Daniel, “which is something we really like about it. You get that initial hit and before you have time to register it, it’s gone.”

In a weeks’ time I will realise their vision first hand and witness the short, sharp wave of movement they’ve naturally created, but for now it’s left to Tom to describe it in simple words: “A lot of or tracks, people aren’t sure how they are supposed to react, which I really like as its isolating them in a way, which I think brings about the theatrical aspect of what we are doing.

Us and them – the audience – we love to build a wall and create a show.” That said, despite the hard to predict bursts of sounds, people do mosh at the Windmill, circle pits do open up. A lot.

A band that wear suits is no new thing but insert that band into a Brexit-bashing South London scene and it becomes a more layered form of expression. “Being amongst all these great bands, there is an air of not giving a fuck when you are around those people and we didn’t want to do that. Some people see us and panic,” says Gabriel. “‘Oh look at the Tory scum’, which we are absolutely not. That’s entertaining for us – very knee jerk reactions.” I tell them I find this surprising, but Daniel reiterates just how unique this sartorial choice has been. “We will walk into a room with promoters sometimes and you can see it in their faces. We will go and shake hands and they think, oh god these guys take themselves way too seriously, and then maybe 20 minutes later after soundcheck we are hugging everyone.”

Tom, who’s currently the smartest of the three and wouldn’t look out of place ordering a steak (blue) somewhere in Canary Wharf, finishes off, “yeah, you get people being really vitriolic, no pun intended.”

So how long can Sistertalk strive to be different before a linear path is revealed ahead of them? “You think this is just an upward trajectory going straight up and maybe that’s the case if you release early and you get that buzz behind you, but we took our time, we started playing smaller shows and have let other bands come in behind us and take the buzz,” says Daniel, as his brother joins in: “It’s given us a reality check. That’s why we have taken to learning how to engineer and produce our own music, slowly building up our knowledge.” Impressively, the band have moved from studio shy novices to prolific producers of their own music in a short space of time, and as we pick ourselves up to leave they mention more releases are on their way. “I am cautious of us coming across as western monks who have reached enlightenment by denying the blueprint,” Daniel jokes. But if you see what this band are capable of first hand you’d understand there are no grand designs to follow for Sistertalk.

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Interview

Leafcutter John From the comfort of a thatched birdwatching hide perched just above north Norfolk’s endlessly flat Cley Marshes and gazing out beyond the empty fenland into the North Sea, “Leafcutter” John Burton – electronica auteur, noisenik contributor to experimental jazzers Polar Bear, builder of boutique microphones – interrupts his own story of playing guerrilla punk gigs while at art school, and gestures towards the horizon. “Erm, I think we’re about to see a murmuration,” he says, quietly excited, as several thousand starlings coalesce from nowhere on the skyline.

Seconds later, the birds begin soaring and swooping across the Saturday dusk as one huge black cloud, its outline constantly shifting like a lava-lamp blob, its density and colour pulsing to an inaudible rhythm with each synchronised figure-of-eight or divebomb. “That’s pretty cool, isn’t it,” Burton offers with childlike awe as he peers down a telescope clamped to the hide’s table to get a better look. “That’s really cool.”

Quite apart from its intrinsic magisterial elegance, it’s fitting that Leafcutter John should be so taken by the spectacle: after all, his new album, Yes! Come Parade With Us, is something of a murmuration in sonic form, the sound of individual elements – synthesisers, drum machines, field recordings and acoustic instruments – coming together and vibrating in loose unison, each ingredient simultaneously separate and inseparable from the whole, shifting and morphing over 45 minutes to create an uplifting, positive gestalt. Inspired by the weeklong hike he and his girlfriend took in the summer of 2017 along the North Norfolk Coast Path, a 60-mile stretch of sand dunes, salt marshes and sea air that links Hunstanton in the west with Cromer in the east (via the Cley Marshes Wildlife Trust Visitor Centre, where he will tonight debut the album to a mix of curious north Norfolk locals and die-hard travelling fans), the album is a love letter to the virtues of walking and being outside, and to a peculiarly English kind of unpredictable weather: its seven pieces boom with dark-skied thunder or beam with sunshine, gambol along with a spring in their step or lumber forward as if headfirst into a gale, all the while anchored by beautifully detailed field recordings that Burton made during the trip.

Not that this outcome was part of the plan all along.

Previous Leafcutter John records have been microscopically fascinated by their own form; explorations of sound undertaken from within the confines of a computer, which Burton freely admits were designed to satisfy little more than his own curiosity. At its outset, his new one was to be little different: “Like a lot of musicians, I’d kind of got into modular synthesis, and I’d made all these noodly things,” he explains of the record’s genesis, “and it’s quite magic, because if you let it, it’ll just

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lead you somewhere, but not always somewhere that you know what to do with. So I had lots of sketches – just recordings of me experimenting – but still wasn’t resolved about how I felt about them.”

Around this time, he met his girlfriend, who, after a couple of months together, suggested they do the hike. “I wasn’t the fittest – I usually just sit down and make music on a computer,” Burton confesses, remembering the idea originally being floated. “But my girlfriend said that there might be some good sounds, and I should bring my stuff, so I thought, if you’re volunteering to sit on a wet grassy mound for half an hour while I record, that’s great!”

Despite reservations, however, what ensued appears to have been rather life-changing for Burton. “I wasn’t expecting it to be so great,” he recalls of their week walking the coast. “I was a little worried: I wasn’t a seasoned walker, that’s for sure – I mean, I had to buy some waterproof trousers – but it turned out really fucking brilliant. It was the most energising thing.

“For some of the walk it feels like you’re a billion miles from humanity: you can’t hear anything, you can’t see anything, you’re just in the elements, it’s very raw, and it’s genuinely a little bit scary at times – and I guess, with that sense of scale, there’s that old chestnut of realising quite how important you are in the world – or how unimportant you are. You’re just another animal in that environment: we would just walk, and for about 10 or 20 miles seals were just swimming alongside us going, ‘what are you two up to?’.

“I had this physical reaction to the countryside, like someone’s whacked me and I’m resonating,” Burton continues, making a cartoon jaw-drop/eye-pop to demonstrate his sense of wonder. “It’s a ‘what the fuck is this!’ sort of thing.”

— Parade with us — Enthused and inspired, Burton’s new goal was to channel this broadening in perspective into his work, a particularly apt pursuit given the (relative) creative rut in which he had recently found himself. “I’d always been someone who just followed their fascination,” he explains of his traditional modus operandi, which had spawned five Leafcutter John albums that veered between musique concrète, noise art, and fractured folk music, “but then I stopped being able to thrill myself by just experimenting with sound: I just didn’t feel the thrill of raw sound anymore. So I kept thinking, how am I going to turn myself on by making weird sound, to rediscover the thrill? Then doing this walk somehow made me think that I wanted to make a record that makes people

Interview Isolation and field recording a hike made John Burton engage with society again, by Sam Walton Photography by Katherine Mager

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Interview feel like he’s had his view changed, and his whole vibe changed, then I think... I don’t know...” Burton falters, clearly a little sheepish about getting on a soapbox. “I’m not saying everybody should do a bloody walk, but I think it would be better if people got out. We experience a lot of politics from behind a screen of some sort, and going to demos and marches, for example, does make a political point: and you’re just one person among however many thousand people.”

As he gently proposes his manifesto – the joy of understanding your individual insignificance, the political satisfaction derived from contributing one tiny element to a bigger whole,

“I had this physical reaction to the countryside, like someone’s whacked me and I’m resonating”

feel a certain way. Up until this record, I’ve not really cared about audience, but that’s changed with this one.

“Before, I was in a weird zone with electronic music, where people try and make stuff that’s as horrible as possible.

But I thought fuck that, I don’t want to be confrontational. I want people to listen to it and go, ‘I like this’. I don’t know if it’s been successful – we’ll find out when the rest of the tour happens – but to me it feels like to make a record that deliberately divides people, at this point, in this climate, would be wrong. I wanted to try and do something that brought people together in a way.”

That’s not to say this is Leafcutter John’s Brexit record, though. Indeed, although he describes his inclusion of a field recording made in a Blakeney pub, in which the landlady asks her patrons if they want to “change their mind” while one chap hums the theme to Close Encounters and another muses that “ignorance is bliss”, as “emblematic” of the current dysfunctional state of British politics, the prospect of direct political comment makes him wince. “I’d probably not be good at making a kind of overt political record,” he admits, “but the energy I put into this record was very much wanting to create a space that feels good – not in a hedonistic, plastic way, but in a real, organic way.”

And from the record’s title – affirmation and collectivity combined – downwards, through its infectious, loping energy, Burton’s aim is clear: “I think if a 42-year-old bloke who’s sat on his arse for about 20 years doing music can walk 60 miles and

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which in turn makes for a beautiful thing – Burton’s admiration of the earlier murmuration of starlings crystallises further.

“This whole last few years has been very much about coming out from behind a laptop and, well, being part of society, being a bit more active,” he laughs, bashfully, perhaps realising a previous level of introversion that kept him from enjoying life in a way he clearly does now. Yes! Come Parade With Us isn’t explicitly designed to prompt that awakening in others, he says, but if his previous work was inward-looking, content simply to engage its author’s love of abstracted sound, this one is built for outsiders, bringing them into the fold and making the listening experience more social.

“I know I keep coming back to the walk,” he apologises, staring out at the path that runs in front of the hide, “but walking is dead easy, really – you just put one foot in front of the other foot – and this record’s like that: the rhythms are not designed to trip you up.”

Indeed they’re not – in fact, I suggest, you could even dance to this record, which would be something new for the Leafcutter John catalogue. But Burton’s not so sure, umming noncommittally as he mulls over the very idea. “Well, you can definitely walk to this record,” he relents, with a grin, before pausing, as if being reminded of the spontaneous goodness that imbues so much of Yes! Come Parade With Us. “Ah, maybe you could have a little dance.”

In conversation at The Great Escape 10 May 2019 at 10:15am Jury’s Inn Brighton

Interview How going to clubs sober can make for the best deconstructed pop music, but Mike Vinti Photography by Gem Harris

Georgia A lot has changed since the world last heard from Georgia Barnes. Known mononymously as Georgia, the now twentyseven-year-old singer broke out in 2015 with her self-titled debut album. A heady mix of electroclash, hip hop and global influences from her time studying ethnomusicology at SOAS, it introduced her as a critical darling and a daring new voice in the world of alt. pop. In places brash and often led by Georgia’s sensibilities as a professional drummer, Georgia was one of the year’s most in your face debuts and soon won her plenty of fans across the music industry.

She’s spent the last four years revelling in her newfound connections, making frequent trips back and forth to Oklahoma to write with Flaming Lips’ main man Wayne Coyne, as well as joining Africa Express for two recent projects and lending her skills to fellow up-and-comers like HONNE and Empress Of. “It’s been full on,” she laughs as we settle down in her home studio. Situated at the end of the garden in her family’s north west London home, it’s a space that’s served as a constant through all the changes in Georgia’s life of late, brightly painted with orange walls and sealed by two ludicrously heavy soundproof doors. It’s also where she wrote and recorded the majority of her second album, due for release later this year.

By her own admission, she has matured in the four years since her debut. “I’ve become a vegan. I’ve been taking my health seriously. I was sober for two years,” she tells me. A carton of strangely coloured juice sits on the mixing desk in front of her as we speak. After a stint at the BRIT School, cutting her teeth among some of London’s finest new talents and years of festivals and touring, Georgia needed a change. “I made a lot of choices and decisions making this record,” she muses thoughtfully.

Those choices bought with them a new approach to her music, not least because she’d begun going clubbing sober for the first time. “When you’re sober in a club you suddenly see the importance of it,” she explains, her anthropological tendencies revealing themselves. “I was in Berlin at the Berghain, and that was weird… I was taking it all in, dancing, meeting people and chatting to them, and they were all off their fucking heads, but I enjoyed it.” Satisfied that she could enjoy Berlin’s most notoriously hedonistic club on nothing stronger than Club-Mate, Georgia set about exploring London’s nightlife

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Interview

solo and sober, making sure to catch the DJs she wanted to see rather than heading aimlessly into the night as so many of us do at the weekend.

“I suddenly realised how good DJs are,” she exclaims, laughing in the way only someone who’s just got it can. “It suddenly hit me how amazing the whole culture is. I guess before I was just wasted and hadn’t really thought about it.” Having rediscovered the dance music that sound-tracked much of her youth – Georgia’s dad is Neil Barnes, one half of Leftfield, whose iconic debut Leftism was made in her childhood bedroom – Georgia set about researching every strange tale and tune ever to emerge from the factories of Detroit and Chicago.

What she learned redefined her own approach to music and her understanding of modern pop. “[There were] all these pop stars that were going over there and being inspired by it,” she enthuses. “You had Depeche Mode, Madonna, U2. They’re seeing this scene happen, and slowly in the studios you see people like Eno bringing in drum machines for U2 and people like that… suddenly all this technology that’s been used to create techno and house being used in pop music!”

— Inner diva — “The first record was great,” she tells me, reflecting on her journey so far. “It set me on the way, it got me a record deal, and I’m still proud of it, but I knew for this one where I wanted to go with it, and I focused on achieving that.” Ever a fan of collaboration and musical collage, Georgia seized on the legacies of Kate Bush and other British electronic pop weirdos, be they Eurythmics or New Order, and started to build her own shimmering, techno-pop wonderland, folding in elements of the bratty electro-clash and punk that made up her debut as she went.

The result is a record that refracts the last thirty years of western pop music, from Mr Fingers to Kate Bush to Justin Bieber, in all directions. If on her first record Georgia saw herself as a producer that sang, on her second things are more balanced.

Inspired by the way production and vocals were so intertwined in the early days of Chicago house, Georgia embraced her inner diva.

“You get these vocals that come in and out and go all over the place, and I got quite influenced by that,” she explains. “There’s a moment on the record where I do really go for it with the vocals,

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Interview

and it goes quite jack.” There are even are a couple of ballads of the album’s tracklist where Georgia’s voice takes up most of the mix. “I really feel at the moment that I am a singer actually,” she says. “I never saw myself as that on the first record.”

While details about the album’s name and release are being kept under wraps, hints of what to expect have begun to emerge.

Of the three singles released so far ‘Started Out’ and ‘About Work the Dancefloor’ are the most indicative of the record’s sound.

Both tracks fuse pulsating 909s with writhing vocal melodies and flashes of the Londoner’s experimentation. The reaction has been almost universally positive, with ‘Started Out’ racking up plays on Radio 1 and clocking over two hundred thousand views on YouTube since November. When we meet up to chat in midMarch, Georgia is still being sent clips by friends and fans of the track being played in students unions, cars and clubs.

All this is something of a departure from her debut.

Praised for its eclectic sound, it saw Georgia grouped with long-time friends Kate Tempest, Kwes and other south London underground artists as part of a rebellious new movement.

Looking back over reviews of the album, grime and hip hop are cited as core influences far more often than house, techno or pop. “I’m not a purist really; I’m not ashamed of pop music,” she shrugs when I put it to her that people might be surprised by the shift in tone. “I think it’s a very British thing; I think we get bogged down in how cool it can be. It’s a hangover from punk.”

To Georgia, experimental artists flirting with the pop world is nothing new, and she again cites the likes of Bush and Depeche Mode as examples of ‘cult’ or formerly underground artists who broke into the upper echelons of the charts on a regular basis.

Not that she’s particularly interested in charting. For Georgia, it’s all about deconstruction. “There’s always been that element of sneering at pop music [but] I think it’s important to hear where all the sounds on Radio 1 are coming from.” As she

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well knows her strength so far has been her ability to dissect music and reassemble it in her image. On her debut album, she drew on the worlds of MIA and Missy Elliot, on her second it happens to be Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer.

Georgia hasn’t entirely succumbed to the glamour of Paradise Garage and glimmering synths though – this is an artist who is on record expressing her love for Death Grips after all. The raw energy that made her debut so vital still runs through every moment of her work, and I guarantee this is the only album you’ll hear this year that can turn a girls’ holiday to Tenerife into a work of brooding dystopian electro punk. The Georgia of her debut can still be heard in the album’s more chaotic moments, it’s just that in the process of recording its follow up she’s discovered new facets to herself as an artist. To borrow a metaphor from the video game universe, her new album is an expansion pack rather than a relaunch.

Throughout our conversation in the studio she praises the work of Kanye West, Frankie Knuckles and Cuban drum bands alike, flitting from one musical extreme to another in an attempt to explain the makings of her own work. It’s a personal, occasionally convoluted discussion, as you’d expect from someone who has spent the last two years dissecting their own musical taste and examining it for clues about what to make next. In the middle of it all, in a lengthy chat about drumming, she finds her thesis – “Groove is everything on this record.”

STATS WED 17 APR OUT SOLD SOCIAL BERMONDSEY CLUB THESE NEW PURITANS WED 17 APR OUT SOLD DOME TUFNELL PARK NANCY WED 17 APR THE ISLINGTON THE NATIONAL T THURS 18SOAPR LD OU ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL JACKIE CHARLES FRI 19 APR THE ISLINGTON THE ANTLERS UT TUES 23 SAPR OLD O UNION CHAPEL TIRZAH TUES 23, WED 24 & THURS 25SOAPR LD OUT SCALA

ELSA HEWITT TUES 7 MAY RYE WAX HAND HABITS WED 8 MAYOLD OUT S THE LEXINGTON DRUGDEALER WED 15 MAY TUFNELL PARK DOME FAT WHITE FAMILY WED 15 MAY O2 FORUM KENTISH TOWN W. H. LUNG SAT 18 MAY OSLO HACKNEY GEORGIA WED 22 MAY REDON LAURA JEAN FRI 24 MAY THE ISLINGTON

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THE STROPPIES THURS 18 JUL THE LEXINGTON SAM EVIAN TUES 27 AUG THE LEXINGTON BEDOUINE SAT 7 SEPT QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL PLASTIC MERMAIDS THURS 3 OCT SCALA SCALA BESS ATWELL THURS 10 OCT OMEARA ROSIE LOWE WED 23 OCT VILLAGE UNDERGROUND PALACE SAT 9 NOV ROUNDHOUSE SHURA THURS 14 NOV ROUNDHOUSE SIR WAS WED 27 NOV SCALA BC CAMPLIGHT THURS 28 NOV ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL

PARALLELLINESPROMOTIONS.COM

Interview

The Claque

The most listenable noise band in Dublin, by Max Pilley Photography by Aila Harryson-Lorrigan

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In 19th century French opera, theatre owners would often hire a claque – a body of professional applauders – to attend shows and to stand as one at the climax; a reliable ovation-generating machine that one suspects may not have entirely disappeared from the highest echelons of elitist artistic institutions. When Dublin trio The Claque finally make their live debut at an undisclosed location in their hometown at the end of April, the buzz generated by their debut single alone will negate the need for such measures.

‘Hush’, released on Any Other City Records in March, is an instant statement of intent. Guitarists Alan Duggan and Paddy Ormond duel scabrous noise-rock-indebted parts over a harsh, metronomic rhythm; a sterling take on a well-established

Interview musical tradition. What elevates the single into the standout category, however, is the juxtaposition of such a sound with the sparkling, honey-glazed vocals of Kate Brady, creating an aural dissonance that is instantly addictive.

“Singing to such noisy or gritty music, it’s just something that I wouldn’t usually have done in the past,” Brady explains. “I would have listened to that music and enjoyed it, but when we starting jamming along together it opened up a path to use my voice in a different way. It worked really well.”

The collision of hard and soft came as second nature for The Claque. Duggan, who as a founding member of Girl Band is no stranger to the world of noise rock, acknowledges that the trio were always going to sound the way they do. “It’s nice that you don’t hear it that much,” he admits, “it gives you scope on what it could eventually be. I just naturally play like that, and that’s just how [Kate] sings.”

“I feel like I probably would have sounded sweeter on other projects – I’m trying to get some grit going!” jokes Brady.

“But that’s how it is – the three of us come with so many overlaps in the music that we enjoy and enjoy making, but also we are different. I write melodic grooves and have this jazzy, sweet style of singing. It’s kind of an interesting fusion, but it definitely wasn’t something we thought about too much. That’s just what all three of us brought to the table.”

The three have been friends for ten years, dating back to their school days. “We were just hanging around town when we really should have been in college, just hanging out and going to shows, weaving around Dublin, having the same interests,” Brady reminisces. The Claque only came into its current form in 2017, though, when their mutual timings aligned. Whilst this is the first major musical project for Brady, Ormond has previously been a member of Postcard Versions and Jetsetter, whilst Duggan’s Girl Band, who he confirms are still active, have been the subject of major international acclaim.

The band’s songs tend to emerge from jam sessions, with Duggan and Ormond playing over a drum machine and Brady singing phonetic melodies that are later refined into lyrics. “It’s still very early, to be honest,” Ormond is quick to point out.

“It’s exciting to be still trying to figure it all out. The graveyard of our first songs is pretty guarded. There was one afternoon when something came out like a Marilyn Manson song, and we got terrified and took a two-hour break. I think it’s a blessing that I can’t remember what it was now.”

The band talk enthusiastically about the buzz when they know a song is coming together. ‘Hush’ is a song that first formed a year ago, from its origins as a mere chord progression in Duggan’s mind to a track that they would ultimately work over for six or seven months, indicating an impressively formidable meticulousness to their finished product that may stand them in good stead. “We were always happy for that to be our first track, the track that we introduce ourselves with,” says Ormond, betraying a justifiable pride in the song.

They are coy about how representative they expect the song to be of their eventual sound, although at this early stage

it may be reasonable to say that even they can’t predict where time will take them. Their live line-up will mirror their recording techniques in as much as it will make use of both live and programmed drumming, with a bassist filling in for the recorded parts that are shared between Dugan and Ormond, but with their debut gig still a number of weeks away at the time of this conversation, there is an exciting sense of the unknown still to their trajectory.

— Dublin DIY — The Claque are just one of a number of highly coveted bands to emerge from Ireland in recent times. “It’s great to see that other people are doing well – that’s brilliant, of course,” says Duggan, “but I don’t think it really has anything to do with us.

And that’s not in a distancing or disrespectful way, I just think a lot of the bands are very different.”

It’s an understandable point of view for a band that have yet to play their first show, but they are eager to point out that there is a closeness among their peers: “There is a community element to it,” Duggan adds. “Fontaines D.C. practise in the studio next door to ours. Dublin’s a small town and Ireland’s a small country, there’s only a handful of places to play.” Ormond has praise for Irish Arts Council funded projects like First Music Contact that offer support to emerging artists. “Our friends have a completely independent band with no label or anything and the government supported them to go on tour. Bands are eager to play outside of the country now.”

Ormond says that he can see how the band share some common ground with artists like Stereolab, Portishead and Broadcast. “I guess we’d like to be in that world,” he admits.

“They have elements that we like, but it’s not necessarily about trying to emulate them at all.” Brady refers to jazz and R&B as sources of inspiration for her vocal style, saying that she finds her natural register to be more naturally in line with those musical histories. She points to Lesley Feist as another artist who has been able to straddle the genre gap whilst still drawing on such traditions.

“At the moment, we have these tracks and we just want to play live and try stuff out,” says Duggan. “It’s going to be fun spending the foreseeable future playing gigs, seeing how these tracks take shape.” An album, they says, is obviously a long way off.

But while they may be still be in their infant stage, The Claque already have the self-belief to match the achievement of their debut single. Those professional applauders are going to have to find another, more needing group of artists to work for.

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Reviews

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Albums

Vampire Weekend — Father of the Bride (sony) “I don’t wanna live like this/ but I don’t wanna die,” sang Ezra Koenig midway through Vampire Weekend’s last album, during a song that referenced forbidden love while raising an ironic eyebrow at New York City’s affluent suburbs. Around it sat eleven other songs full of archly self-aware, rather elliptical observations about class, religion and millennial identity, written and performed with the kind of studied, nonnarrative precision that had become the band’s calling card. That line stood out, though: to keep on going, Koenig seemed to be saying, pinched and uptight, something must change.

Six years on, and having lost writing partner Rostam Batmanglij in the meantime, Koenig revives the line on Father of the Bride’s lead single ‘Harmony Hall’ – this time as the song’s chorus and spine – and the callback’s emphasis serves as an acknowledgement: change is indeed afoot for Vampire Weekend, and their fourth album bears all the fruit, both juicy and rotten, of this transition. Across an hour and 18 tracks, there are growing pains alongside beautiful rushes of metamorphosis, missteps among confident strides, and new voices, personalities and personnel all over. And while there’s plenty more than just an interpolated lyric to link listeners to the Vampire Weekend of old, the throughline from here to the band’s past is now the blurriest it’s ever been: on album four, their trademark concision is ditched for expansion, ironic self-detachment is replaced with sincerity, and where once sat a sophisticated, reductionist songwriting partnership trying to make tidy aphorisms from the post-internet cultural clutter is now a solo man in his mid-30s just enjoying the noise.

Perhaps appropriately, then, it’s when Father of the Bride is at its baggi-

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est that it feels most comfortable, its most welcoming songs also its longest.

The diaphanous Bruce Hornsbyisms of ‘Harmony Hall’, all nostalgia pangs and sighing wistfulness, find Koenig happy to stretch out, confident in the possession of such an undeniable earworm. Meanwhile, ‘Stranger’ is so assured of its chorus’ invincibility – and rightly so – that it both opens and closes the song, and while both tracks are addictively upbeat, a lyrical bittersweetness prevents them from ever becoming cloying. The breezy ‘Flower Moon’, too, a cross-pollination with The Internet’s Steve Lacy, while not so hooky, is just as easy-going, revelling in its hybrid groove and shimmy.

Then, topping everything, there’s ‘This Life’; the best thing Vampire Weekend have ever recorded, and one of those songs that leaves you baffled as to how, after 60-odd years of recorded pop, it was only written now. Built on a gorgeous call-and-response guitar chime and infectious rhythm section shuffle, and anchored by another confessional, regret-tinged lyric that adds welcome counterpoint to the summery melody, ‘This Life’ has its ancestors in the cheery melancholy of ‘You Can Call Me Al’ and ‘Help!’, but is no pastiche: instead, it’s a flawlessly constructed, glorious piece of modern but timeless pop music, accessible but unique, and dangerously moreish.

But while song length has become a virtue here, that’s not to say Vampire Weekend can no longer do miniatures.

Where Father of the Bride’s longer tracks are the most inviting, its shortest are the most intriguing, offering pleasingly muted hues between the explosions of technicolour melody. ‘Bambina’ and ‘2021’, each under 100 seconds, are crisply cleansing demonstrations of brevity, the former flitty and fidgety, the latter serene and sad, and the album’s succinct final pair, full of Harry Nilssonesque rueful romanticism, offer a calm sense of closure.

Were Father of the Bride to mine this pairing of statement songs with interstitial curios further, it would approach masterpiece status. Unfortunately, however, it too frequently

becomes bogged down in songs of indefinite character, either outlines in need of colour (‘How Long’’s generic strut; the inoffensive Travelling Wilburys sketch of ‘Big Blue’) or well-made compositions that feel simply out of place. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with the smoky crooner jazz of ‘My Mistake’, the flamenco of ‘Sympathy’, or the three (three!) country-fried duets with Danielle Haim that seem overheard from Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’ ‘Islands in the Stream’ sessions, none contribute to the album’s cohesion, and with 18 tracks on the running order here, their absence would not have been missed.

That said, the album’s most illfitting song is too significant to dismiss.

‘Unbearably White’ – on the surface a mid-paced ballad about thwarted love – is also an apparent answer to Pitchfork writer Sarah Sahim’s 2015 opinion piece accusing “indie rock” of being institutionally racist that cited Vampire Weekend (among others) as contributors to a conspiracy to keep people of colour from flourishing within the genre, and although Vampire Weekend themselves are no strangers to commentary on their supposedly “preppy” backgrounds – even cultivating that aesthetic in earlier days – Salim’s was a particularly scathing, if flawed, take. Disappointingly, though, while Koenig’s response is fairly gnomic, open to multiple contradictory interpretations and (one must assume) deliberately written thus, it doesn’t take an English major from Columbia University to interpret his words worryingly.

Early on, he appears to address Sahim’s accusation of Belle & Sebastian being “blindingly white” with the potentially threatening line “There’s an avalanche coming/ Don’t cover your eyes”; later, addressing Salim’s broader accusations of his own “bastardization” of African music, he pleads unavoidable cleverness: “Presented with darkness, we turned to the light/ Could have been smart, we’re just unbearably bright”. It’s not just in the lyrics, but the delivery, too: for the first time ever, Koenig presents himself as audibly vulnerable, and as the coda fades out – “Call it a day/ Call it a night/ Callous

Albums and cold and just unbearably white” – his charmless petulance feels uncharacteristic, in contexts of both Father of the Bride’s otherwise fairly mild-mannered mileu, and in that of Vampire Weekend’s historically strict self-control in general.

It’s tempting to read ‘Unbearably White’ charitably as Koenig at breaking point, desperate to refute the oftrepeated portrayal of his band as the very exemplars of whiteness (despite the fact that, until very recently, the songwriting duo was half Iranian), writing a wilfully antagonistic song to demonstrate his understanding of the many sides of this thorny issue. However, in 2019, creating something that, at least from one angle, could be read as flirting with white supremacism is fairly reckless behaviour, regardless of any irony, wit or nuance, and as the virtues of people in power listening to – and not contradicting – the marginalized are becoming increasingly obvious, a song this directly targeted could yet prove to be somewhat culturally deaf. Either way, though, the song leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, and is the album’s single biggest marker that Vampire Weekend is no longer what it was.

From one perspective, Father of the Bride is the worst Vampire Weekend album – it’s the only one to contain more than a few minutes of filler, it’s the loosest and the least charming. Then again, that’s in comparison with a hat-trick of predecessors as strong as from any band this century and, taken in isolation, it’s a perfectly enjoyable hour of Spotify fodder. From another, though, this is a Rorschach blot of a record, its appearance having the potential to shift depending on the listener. So a song as structurally perfect as ‘This Life’ seems built to reach far beyond Vampire Weekend’s existing constituency, and while the wider range of influences and increased biographical honesty may counter previous accusations of aloofness, that loss of ambiguity will also alienate others.

More than anything, though, Father of the Bride is – the aberration of ‘Unbearably White’ excepted – the most mild Vampire Weekend album. Where its predecessors were bratty or bullish,

the band’s fourth album is largely warm, personal, and not a little pleasantly middle-aged. For a man who’s only just turned 35, this maturation might sound untimely. For someone like Koenig, on the other hand, who’s always seemed advanced for his years, it reads more believably as simply the next natural step.

6/10 Sam Walton

Big Thief — U.F.O.F. (4ad) Big Thief arrive at the release of this third record with their copybook still pristine. It isn’t just that the Brooklyn-based four-piece have so impressively squeezed fresh life out of the incredibly well-worn juncture at which rock meets folk; it’s also that they’ve done so by putting out two wonderfully assured LPs in the space of barely twelve months and established singer Adrianne Lenker as a singular songwriting talent who, when also counting last October’s terrific solo debut Abysskiss, has a genuine claim to having personally written one of the calendar year’s finest albums in each of the last three of them.

Actually, make that four. Following 2016’s cheekily-titled debut Masterpiece and 2017’s superb sequel Capacity is U.F.O.F. – an album that makes a mockery of any suggestion that Lenker and her bandmates might have wilted under the pressure of keeping their remarkable purple patch going. Instead, the audience that their work so far has amassed, and the goodwill that it has bought them, appear to have granted them real creative freedom, as this is their most stylistically ambitious record yet. It’s softer than their previous work; the percussion is pillowy, and there’s something in the way that the deceptively complex vocal and guitar melodies cross over that lends the whole thing an airy warmth, with the excep-

tion of the ominous, relatively discordant ‘Jenni’, or the abrasive closing moments of opener ‘Contact’.

There’s an impressionistic bent to U.F.O.F., too. ‘Cattails’, the quiet hypnotism of which most bands would spend forever trying to get right, apparently came together in a few hours and was nailed in its first take. There’s a sense that the rest of the group have locked into a rock-solid groove with Lenker regardless of which avenue she chooses to go down stylistically – this is especially true of bassist Max Oleartchik, who’s nuanced playing throughout the album provides it with an elegantly unobtrusive beating heart.

Once again, though, this is Lenker’s record, scored through with a subtlety and intelligence that she has made her calling card. It encompasses the unique way in which she modulates her vocals, her complete harmonic command of her guitar, and her handsomely idiosyncratic lyricism, somehow at once both revealing and oblique. She is beginning to deftly position herself somewhere between Nick Drake and Bert Jansch, neither of which are comparisons made lightly.

How long can she keep the run going?

9/10 Joe Goggins

Amyl and The Sniffers — Amyl and The Sniffers (rough trade) Amyl and The Sniffers have built a fearsome reputation for their chaotic live shows, during which frontwoman Amy Taylor crowd surfs and pours whiskey down the throats of people in the front row.

It’s a frenetic energy that the Melbourne quartet, who emerged from a shared house as a joke, have applied to their composition technique: their debut EP, Giddy Up, was written, self-recorded and released in twelve hours.

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Albums The rough and ready nature of their debut album suggests the material was written with a similar disregard to forethought. Cramming eleven songs into thirty minutes, they sound like they’re having a blast while thrashing out threechord punk riffs in the style of AC/DC, and a little bit of Be Your Own Pet. Sweaty and free of pretension, their ’70s-influenced punk and pub rock is designed for mosh pits and Wayne’s World style head banging. Barely contained by the rhythm section (Gus Romer on bass and Bryce Wilson on drums), Declan Martens’ guitar playing is brash and fast in a way that’s intentionally cartoonish.

There’s a similar tongue-in-cheek quality to the hollered lyrics, which sound like Courtney Barnett imitating Joan Jett. Primed for audience shouta-longs, they’re largely built around repeated slogans and blue-collar streamof consciousness (‘I work in a bar every single day for the minimum wage,’ rages ‘Gacked On Anger’).

Their lack of frills has a fun immediacy, especially on the chanted backing vocals and breakdown of The Runaways lite ‘Got You’, but without the live atmosphere they often chug rather than party pop. 5/10 Susan Darlington

Drugdealer — Raw Honey (mexican summer) Raw Honey is the second album from Michael Collins’ Drugdealer project, following his merry 2016 debut The End of Comedy. The new release largely follows the trail laid out by its predecessor, enveloping the listener in a cloud of funky smelling smoke and transporting them back to the hazy days of Steely Dan and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. A cascade of chipper melodies and buoyant acoustic instrumentation,

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it’s the perfect soundtrack for lazy, warm summer days.

While The End of Comedy’s cover art placed Collins alone at the fore, here he’s – fittingly – surrounded by his collaborators: as the album’s press release stresses, “Drugdealer is more a collective than band”. Bringing into the fold many, many musicians and vocalists such as Shags Chamberlain, Jackson MacIntosh, Benjamin Schwab and Natalie Mering of Weyes Blood, there’s a palpable sense of camaraderie felt across the album’s nine tracks. You can picture them all sitting in a circle working on these songs together, passing around a joint or three as they air their troubles in good company. Approaching feelings of loneliness and anxiety with a refreshing sincerity, the album is a welcome antidote to our modern cynicism.

7/10 Alexander Smail

Jamila Woods — LEGACY! LEGACY! ( jagjaguwar) LEGACY! LEGACY! is a series of sleek homages to the various artistic and emotional lineages that Jamila Woods embodies; a neat conceit which holds the album together without dominating it. Often, these references can be quite loose, and these make for the best tracks. On ‘FRIDA’, the Chicago RnB singer takes the bridge that connected Frida Kahlo’s house to Diego Rivera’s and flips it into an elegant metaphor for trying to close emotional distance: “I like you better when you see me less/ I like me better when I’m not so stressed.”

Woods uses similar strategies throughout the album to get at her main theme: the difficulty of black independent artistic production in a historically racist society. ‘OCTAVIA’ holds the key: science fiction legend Octavia Butler found herself having to “[write] myself in” to a

uniformly white genre, “since I’m me and I’m here and I’m writing.”

Woods is doing much the same.

The histories left to her weigh heavily, but all she can do is write herself into the narrative, create something new, leave a legacy of her own. Listen again, and hear the hook made new: “I’m the truth, I am a fact [...] I write it down, it happens next.” 9/10 Alex Francis

Aldous Harding — Designer (4ad) The video for ‘The Barrel’, the lead single from Aldous Harding’s third album, finds the New Zealand singer-songwriter performing strange dance moves in an outsize Pilgrim hat. It has a light hearted aesthetic that comes as a surprise to those familiar with the other-worldly, gothic folk that marked her previous work.

Its breezy sensibility reflects the tone of the track, which has a richness borne of full band arrangements. Teetering between upbeat and melancholy, the loping bass and shaker lend it a beat that almost justify Harding’s choreography.

These qualities are indicative of the majority of Designer, which was written on the road and recorded with John Parish. Perhaps in reaction to the solitary life of a touring artist, she’s surrounded herself with a handful of musicians including Huw Evans (H. Hawkline) and Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo).

There was a move towards additional players and textures on 2017’s Party, although the mood of the release remained unrelentingly stark. Here, the feel is significantly warmer and has roots in ’70s weird folk. ‘Fixture Picture’, for instance, is punctuated by the folksiness of Clare Mactaggart’s violin, and the backing vocals on the standout ‘Treasure’ afford companionship to its relatively simple arrangements. The jazz-folk title

Albums track, meanwhile, flows like designer silk despite a slightly eccentric structure that continually breaks down to add or subtract instruments and shift its emotional mood.

The ambition of the release is more subdued than its predecessor – which encompassed folk, jazz and chanteuse – but its move towards a more fulsome sound is married to a newfound ease in her diction. More natural sounding than before, it feels like while Harding pronounced her words like they were foreign objects before, she’s finally mastered English as a first language and sings in one unified voice.

Her enunciation remains as clear as ever, giving full scope to her conversational and at times elliptical lyrics. “I get so anxious I need a tattoo/ Something binding that hides me,” she confesses in a sonorous voice on the plink-plonk piano of ‘Pilot’, the image unwinding an entire backstory in the listener’s mind.

The track closes the album alongside the spectral ‘Heaven Is Empty’, both of which are most obviously cut from the same cloth as Party. It’s a strange choice of running order, positioning her looking backwards rather than forwards, despite her positive assertion on ‘Weight Of The Planets’ that, “I can do anything/ No one is stopping me”. 7/10 Susan Darlington

Daniel Norgren — Wooh Dang (superpuma) The Swedish songwriter Daniel Norgren offers that least likely of things – a thorough and close reading of a genre from someone geographically well outside of that genre’s home. Americana from the vantage point of a nonAmerican; creating an uncanny sense of geography in location that brings out the specific and makes it general. Take ‘Rolling Rolling Rolling’, its litany of

smalltown observations could be from the US rust belt, but are actually grounded in his native south west Sweden. The album begins with a whimper; ‘Blue Sky Moon’ essentially a soundscape that bleeds into ‘The Flow’, where the piano swells slowly into view and introduces Norgren’s reedy, Neil Young-esque voice.

As is the case with this musician, authenticity is the goal, and ‘Dandellion Time’ is a pleasing battle re-enactment of a Bo Diddley stomp. The album was recorded in a 19th century textile farmhouse near Norgren’s home; “the interior looked like it hadn’t been touched for the past 80 years,” he explains. There’s a parallel here with what he produces; he offers no innovations to Americana past the recording of the Band’s ‘Music from the Big Pink’, but on his own terms continues to make music that pleases aficionados of the genre.

6/10 Fergal Kinney

Ezra Collective — You Can’t Steal My Joy (enter the jungle) 2018: the year everyone became happy because the alternatives were too bleak. Bands started penning the joyful resistance; ecstasy in the face of austerity; the creative industry’s peaceful protest. It only figures that sustained joy would be the next stage of the revolution.

Ezra Collective’s debut album comes in as a kind of positive digestion system, leeching off your falsified happiness and replacing it with their authentic alternative. In so much as the south London jazz scene has erupted in the last twelve months, the young five-piece has been the pulsing heartbeat of the afrobeat and grime fusion at its core. Happiness and friendship is key: not only can you not steal their joy, you have to listen to it unravel and become even more joyful.

What more did you expect from the band that wrote a slightly chic, breezy jazz-pop track about the Star Wars Franchise’s Mace Windu?

Bandleader Femi Koleoso on drums is the frantic spirit of the record, the convulsing centrepiece in ‘Why You Mad?’, the cheeky ska undertones that more than nod to UB40 in ‘Red Whine’.

It doesn’t matter that the key-driven ‘Philosopher II’ sounds like Tubular Bells for solo piano; ‘São Paulo’ strikes with all the rock’n’roll samba flair of Santana at Woodstock, while ‘Chris and Jane’ takes the Ninth Circle soul of a Danny Krivit club mix and filters it through Dylan Jones’s doleful trumpet in ‘People Saved’.

Then there’s the electric ‘Quest For Coin’ – an instant classic within the unlikely monster hits for a new generation alongside The Comet Is Coming’s ‘Summon The Fire’ and Moses Boyd’s ‘Rye Lane Shuffle’. It’s even enough to steal the headlines from the high-profile features of Loyle Carner and Jorja Smith, which make nice additions to the team sheet if nothing else.

You Can’t Steal My Joy is more than just a spiritual Mahavishnu marching band. As far as nu-jazz rising and jazz fusion will curtail, this is a pop album at its apex; a catchy and carefree excursion into joy. At the heart of a bubbling scene without a point of entry for many, Ezra Collective stand with their arms wide open. 8/10 Tristan Gatward

Jackie Cohen — Zagg (spacebomb) Handing out sausage samples at the mall was near enough the final straw for Jackie Cohen. After she graduated from a creative writing course at college she’d worked as a marketing consultant and an English teacher, until the L.A.-raised singer released a duology of EPs last year.

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Albums Produced by her husband Jonathan Rado (Foxygen), and with The Lemon Twigs forming her backing band, Tacoma Night Terror (parts 1 and 2) was an introduction to her characterful songwriting and cartoonish willingness to send herself up.

Tours will Alex Cameron and Mac Demarco followed, and felt like a natural fit.

Where those EPs were snapshots of sleepless nights, Zagg – a nod to her high school nickname – is a mainline plug into her unbroken inner monologue.

These are songs that swoon and sway and sweep and jive, even if the messages are of anxiety, heartbreak and dark morbidity. “Take me for what I am,” she sings on the opening track ‘FMK’. It’s all supplemented by the teamwork of Rado, and her label boss Matthew E. White on production means it all sounds vintage, expensive and not of this era.

The cover is drawn by Adam Green. The smudged portrait is comical and sad and vibrant and messy. An appropriate signpost as to what’s inside.

7/10 Greg Cochrane

Kevin Morby — Oh My God (dead oceans) Cult hero and indie-folk rocker Kevin Morby has returned, and this time he’s shirtless. Not only is he back to provide us with an intimate look at his torso, he’s here to talk to us about religion, albeit mercifully under the guise of his fifth album, Oh My God. As undesirable as an unsolicited knock at the door from a scantily clad man wanting to talk about the lord and saviour, whom simultaneously offers up a 14-track concept record on religion sounds, thankfully there’s more to this album than its surface value.

Despite Morby’s self-admitting abstinence from holding any firm religious belief himself, references to spirituality across his work are abundant. Taking

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direction from the repetitive vocal hook of “oh my god, oh my lord” on ‘Beautiful Strangers’, this latest work is an expansive deep-dive on religion and the most unequivocal indication of Morby’s interest in the nuance of faith. The influence of spirituality goes much beyond the lyrical themes and artwork direction, with the guidance of gospel music unmistakable, imbuing the record with a sonic flavor that those attending Baptist church on Sundays wouldn’t be unfamiliar with.

The title track, as indeed the entire record, is seasoned with warm choral harmonies that lift the disposition and provide support for Morby’s signature vocal hum. ‘No Halo’ is pervaded by more clapping than the polite appreciative response to a sweet strike of cork meeting willow on an English cricket pitch, while the organ work on ‘Nothing Sacred/All Things Wild’ and ‘Hail Mary’ almost prompts one to pull out the hymn sheet. Audibly, the musical tools used to construct this record are far more stripped back, forcing Morby out from underneath the heavy façade of rock and roll used previously, dropping him firmly into the spotlight and a position of vulnerability. It’s definitely a step forward for the now well-seasoned man from Kansas, even if previous album City Music was more instantly relatable.

7/10 Tom Critten

ALASKALASKA — The Dots (marathon artists) With spring starting to dissolve the grey of the rainy winter, the arrival of ALASKALASKA’s debut album couldn’t feel more timely – the balmy, shimmering atmosphere of their ethereal indie-pop feels like the musical equivalent of dipping into a warm pool after months of bitter cold. Led by singer, songwriter and guitarist Lucinda Duarte-

Holman, the south London five-piece have spent the last few years building a following from Goldsmith’s art college and beyond, helping to inform 12 tracks that feel youthful and playful, yet unhurried and mature.

Similar to Alvvays, Nilufer Yanya or Porches, ALASKALASKA put an oddball twist on pop sensibilities, with an imagination in their song writing that breathes vibrancy into every hook. The record flourishes to life with the title track, and elsewhere delivers grooves that you’d struggle not to call “jazzy”, and disco rhythms, with ‘Tough Love’ chucking in a wave of fuzzy riffs. Accompanying these eccentric instrumentals is Duarte-Holamn’s dreamy, occasionally warbled vocals, and her lyrics are anything but boring; tackling topics from the emotional whirlwind of PMS (‘Moon’) to the struggle of navigating an increasingly technological society (‘Meateater’).

There’s still room for ALASKALASKA to grow and refine themselves from the crowd, but The Dots is an extremely promising start, showing a young band who seem to have no interest in fitting into a stylistic mould, who instead are more content chasing down their own quirky ideas. 7/10 Woody Delaney

Patience — Dizzy Spells (night school) Former Veronica Falls frontwoman Roxanne Clifford has taken a turn toward the synthesised. Where her background was filled with bittersweet tales of love and comic death set to jangly guitars, her present finds her still fixated on the same bitter struggles, but now there is a spangly, ’80s pop flavour making up the sweet half.

Clifford, channelling a long Glaswegian tradition, has a flair for a tearstained melody. Tracks like ‘Living

Albums Things Don’t Last’ find twinkly synths clashing with forlorn lyrics sung in wistful reminiscence, and it is a measure of the strength of her writing that her fullbodied leap into the analogue synth world has seen her sacrifice none of that melancholic ecstasy.

There is nothing revolutionary about Dizzy Spells, but it would take effort to resist its charms. ‘The Girls are Chewing Gum’, produced by UK garage lynchpin Todd Edwards, is a stomping Chicago house-inspired indie disco throwdown, equipped to rub shoulders with the best of DFA or Creation. The pristine ‘Moral Damage’ sees Clifford in a bilingual duet with former Veronica Falls bandmate Marion Herbain, while Clifford’s wit shines through on album highlight ‘The Pressure’: “My friends tell me you asked for me/ The world could end before we agree”.

There is a formula uniting these ten tracks, but it is a robust one. The album, like so many in this tradition, is there to hold your hand through those moments of peak feels, whether at the end of a drunken night or in the despair of a lonely bedroom. Voices like Roxanne Clifford are unquestioning, non-judgemental friends that will support you when you would rather shut real people out. It is to be celebrated that she has survived the demise of her former band; she has a lot more to give. 7/10 Max Pilley

Kap Bambino — Dust, Fierce, Forever Review (because music) It’s been seven years since Kap Bambino’s last album, and on the surface of it, not much has changed. The French duo’s fifth record is the same wheelhouse of brash electronic punk that made up 2012’s Devotion and the vast majority of their records before that.

Full of relentless electronics and distorted vocals, it’s an album that recalls the glory days of Atari Teenage Riot and the excitement of Crystal Castles before we found out Ethan Kath was an (alleged) scumbag. However, over thirteen tracks with little variation in pace or tone, listeners will be reminded pretty swiftly why that sound fell out of the zeitgeist.

Moments of respite do come in the form of ‘Europa’, which takes a trancier direction than much of the record, and ‘Poison’, easily the catchiest track on the album, which shimmers prettily between bouncy vocal hooks.

However, run through the album cover to cover, and even its most sparkling highlights get washed away in a tidal wave of synth and percussion.

Dust, Fierce, Forever is hyperactive, bratty and in your face. While long term fans may be comforted that there are still some constants in these turbulent times, there’s little on it to entice new listeners. 5/10 Mike Vinci

Wand’s happy tendency to lose it with ‘Bubble’ easing into ambient melodies, ‘High Planes Drifter’ sounding as sweet as Beirut echoing through cobble-stoned Italian streets and ‘Walkie Talkie’ powering into an energetic flurry of frenetic drums and scuzzy guitar.

It’s that propensity for shifting through sounds and styles that makes Wand such a fun band to listen to. It’s captured perfectly on the zealously triumphant ‘Thin Air’ with Hanson’s slacker indie vocals and blasts of shoegaze creating something ecstatically brighteyed – one of those blissful tracks where everything comes down to the stamp and release of a guitar pedal to send everything into overdrive.

At 15 tracks, and light on disposable 60-second interludes, you’ll need some stamina to get through it all, and while they could have chopped out at least five tracks, there are enough highlights to make Laughing Matter worth your time.

7/10 Reef Younis

Wand — Laughing Matter (drag city) Blindly listen to the opening tracks of Laughing Matter and you’d be forgiven for briefly thinking someone slipped in Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool. That kind of channeling is no bad thing, but even as Cory Hanson cowers over the mic with Thom Yorke intensity on ‘Scarecrow’, and before ‘xoxo’ pulses into wavy, Theremin life, it’s important to note that Wand are a tribute act to no-one.

Their first three albums were testament to that, pinballing around psychedelic pop, punk and soupy stoner rock riffs, whereas fourth album, Plum tempered that energy into something a little more single-minded.

Laughing Matter falls somewhere in between that new-found focus and

Hannah Cohen — Welcome Home (bella union) Hannah Cohen’s latest project might never have come about if it wasn’t for the intensely crowded environment of her home city: New York. Stuck in a cramped apartment in Brooklyn, the 32-year-old was suffering from the frustration of being unable to escape her surroundings, spending months searching for a new apartment with her partner, only to be met with overpriced and “gross” offerings. The struggle put her in something of a creative rut, even recalling her small bathroom as the only space that could provide the solitude needed to focus on writing in the busy urban world that surrounded her.

It then feels natural that her third album – the aptly titled Welcome Home –

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Albums captures the uplifting experience of finally finding a new haven, and the 10 tracks here radiate a sense of freedom and ease that comes with feeling at home somewhere. Things start off with the blissful ‘This Is Your Life’, with its melody gently dancing like a mirage, lyrically showing where Cohen’s mental state is at, and her desire to stop the mundanity of life disrupting her happiness. Elsewhere, the bittersweet ‘Old Bruiser’ and ‘Build Me Up’ offer a nostalgic quality, and are some of the strongest moments on the album.

There’s a fluidity and lightness in Cohen’s songs, as her acoustic guitar and angelic, floaty voice are quilted in an oceanic dream-pop aesthetic, bringing to mind acts such as Kacey Johansing and Japanese Breakfast. Those searching for something more immediate might be left unsatisfied (it does all get a bit airy and overly delicate at times), but overall it captures a positive new transition, like waking up on a sunny Saturday morning.

6/10 Woody Delaney

Flamingods — Levitation (moshi moshi) For a band that once saw their founding member forced to leave the UK due to visa issues, the London via Bahraini outfit Flamingods are sure taking this Brexit malarkey pretty well.

But then again, even when Kamal Rasool packed up his things and left for Dubai back in 2014 he and his segregated bandmates still found a way to record and release their second album Hyperborea – an astonishing feat of logistics considering I can’t even work out when to take the bins out on time.

Their name-making third album.

Majesty, followed two years later, and despite harbouring a small but dedicated cult fanbase, Flamingods have maintained their image as somewhat a musical

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outsider. But that’s not to say their music isn’t inclusive: mixing retrospective tones of Middle Eastern funk and psychedelia, they consistently sound like a party in the desert where everyone’s invited. This unification of positivity and sun-soaked imagery translates to Levitation, where, even after three years of Brexit chaos, Flamingods still want to give us something to smile about.

You know they’re smiling too because during lead single ‘Marigold’, Rasool sings, “I feel alive/ the sun’s light is shining down on me”. Pretty much all of Levitation mirrors his delirious echoes of an idealistic summer, each track cavorting back and forth between tireless grooves and ringing spiritual transcendence. They’re having fun and Levitation reminds us why it still remains important to do so, even despite that niggling feeling that the world as we know it may be crumbling around us. 7/10 Ollie Rankine

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard — Fishing For Fishies (flightless records) King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard do not leave ideas half-baked.

The Australian rockers made this clear when they embraced everything from Tolkien mythology to improvised jazz during their remarkable (bonkers) run of five studio albums in 2017. When they returned this January with the futuristic ‘Cyboogie’ it sounded like they were preparing fans for a fully autotuned, Daft Punk-inspired concept album. However, Fishing For Fishies turns out to be a much more interesting record than that: its roaming songs imagine blues rock in the age of the robot.

The record shimmies into life as King Gizzard set off on their southern road trip. While Stu McKenzie and his band revel in vintage blues instrumenta-

tion, songs swing somewhere between a romanticised past and an unsettled future. The Texas blues edge of ‘Boogieman Sam’ malfunctions when its guitars short-circuit; likewise, warbled tones eventually break through the sunny surface of ‘The Bird Song’. The disconnect works well on an album designed as a comment on pollution: seemingly natural environments are anything but.

McKenzie also goes on to condemn waste on ‘Plastic Boogie’, although it doesn’t sound like the partying crowd is listening too closely.

Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s harmonica – a highlight throughout – is wielded menacingly on ‘Real’s Not Real’, as the album’s rustic façade is finally abandoned.

A murky desert rock sound emerges on the gripping ‘Acarine’, a track that seems to grow increasingly panicked in a hedonistic underground. ‘Cyboogie’ completes the album’s transformation, its dystopian yet irresistible groove reigning supreme.

8/10 Jamie Haworth

Foxygen — Seeing Other People ( jagjaguwar) “I’m never gonna dance like James Brown/ I’m never gonna be black/ and I’m never gonna get you back,” sings Sam France in one of the opening tracks to Foxygen’s sixth album. It’s not your traditional serenade of self-pity, but indicative of their new type of punk: free of cause and only really there to wind you up.

From all the acid rock glory of their breakout album We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors, Seeing Other People does more than put a damp cloth to the flame.

The California duo have never been free from pastiche, but the playfulness that endeared their first few releases has evaporated. The best they can do here is turn a Rolling Stones ballad into a Lemon Twigs diss track on ‘Livin’ A Lie’, or mask the

Albums vocal line of ‘The Thing Is’ with enough of the Sun Studio slap-back echo that you forget it sounds like a revved up tribute to Roy Orbison’s ‘Only The Lonely’.

It’s more concise than the 24-track trawl through 2014’s …And Star Power, and less self-indulgent than the glammedup baroque pop of Hang, but it’s got less sincerity than both put together. A saving grace comes with ‘News’ – a wistful slowjam brimming with surf rock revivalism.

Otherwise, even the brief glints of selfawareness are annoying; unrequited love comes with an ego-trip. “She’s so fly, she blows my mind/ But she don’t have any notion of who I am/ She surely don’t listen to Foxygen,” they sing in ‘Flag At HalfMast’. This collection won’t do a huge amount to convince her otherwise. 4/10 Tristan Gatward

Protomartyr — No Passion All Technique (domino) I never understood Protomartyr’s comparisons to the Stooges either. Maybe it was because of singer Joe Casey’s stage demeanour: more disenfranchised blue collar worker than the freaky sex alien of Iggy Pop. Or – more likely – maybe it was because I came to the band via an album that I presumed was their debut but wasn’t, and by the time Protomartyr started to breakthrough in the UK with Under Color of Official Right in 2014 they were on their way to emulating The Fall and Pere Ubu so well. But there was an album before, and as 2012’s No Passion All Technique is finally re-pressed for the first time, those comparisons to the Stooges make a little more sense beyond the two groups sharing Detroit as a home.

Here the band have a messier, more one-track garage sound, and, naturally, boring things like production value are on the more primitive and muddy side too,

as you’d expect from a punk band starting out on a label called Urinal Cake. But in tracks like ‘How He Lived After He Died’ (a spooky football chant of a song) and the cruising ‘3 Swallows’ it’s startling how close the band’s hidden melodies were to evolving from day one. Plus, ‘Jumbo’s’ – a groove about the band’s neighbourhood drinking den of the same name – remains one of the best songs they’ve ever written.

Yeah, Protomartyr were always the best post-punk band around, even when they weren’t yet. 7/10 Abi Crawford

Loyle Carner — Not Waving, But Drowning (amf records) Loyle Carner opens his second album with a note to his mother, reassuring her that he’s moving “out the south, out the house, never out of touch”. It’s a humble message that sums up the Croydon rapper’s approach to Not Waving, But Drowning.

Carner holds on to the human warmth that made 2017’s Yesterday’s Gone so special and channels his growing confidence as a storyteller in this stream of disarmingly honest songs.

Longtime collaborator Tom Misch provides vocals on ‘Angel’, while Jordan Rakei’s soulful backing shapes ‘Ottolenghi’. Carner captures the wistfulness of people-watching on a train, playfully nodding to Roots Manuva along the way. Like his debut, snippets of dialogue between Carner’s friends and family structure the record. ‘It’s Coming Home’ preserves hazy memories of last summer’s World Cup, while also signalling a pause before the album’s much stronger second half. The poet’s voice is enhanced rather than overshadowed by Sampha and Jorja Smith’s presences – the latter breathes life into ‘Loose Ends’, encouraging Carner to embrace newfound love. The album’s title track is a spoken word reflection on

the harrowing relevance of Stevie Smith’s 1957 poem, commenting on the number of young men who find themselves lost when the “joking pretence breaks down”.

Carner is self-critical and unsure at times, but emerges defiant on the moving penultimate track, ‘Carluccio’. Conversational interludes bloat the runtime to 49 minutes, but Jean Coyle Larner’s proud words to her son on ‘Dear Ben’ succeed in bringing symmetry and closure to this heartfelt record. 7/10 Jamie Haworth

Bibio — Ribbons (warp) Stephen Wilkinson is a man with a vast discography. Operating largely solo and a player of countless instruments, here is an artist whose musical talent and prodigious output is beyond question. Ribbons is his tenth album, where his restless stylistic wanderings have returned to what is essentially English folk music, with a few very interesting twists.

The opening track is almost monkish; a pastoral vignette with a hefty whiff of folk; a pleasant minstrel affair.

But this is a sixteen-track behemoth of a record and it’s the departures from the folk style that stand out – like the lazy funk-soul of ‘Before’ (a track that might easily become a hip-hop sample), with a vocal that echoes Phil Collins, in a good way. Another highlight comes with the uncertain atmosphere that pervades ‘It’s Your Bones’; a song cut through with a superb minor string section and a sense of unending longing. There’s a mirage heat rising from the funk riff of ‘Frankincense And Coal’.

Wilkinson’s vocals are generally high, light and fragile; a paper-thin presence floating over a richly textured backdrop. With this kind of music there’s always the risk that an insipid tweeness might creep in around the edges and

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Albums poison the cocoon of loveliness (as twee as that sounds in itself), and of course with an album of this length inevitably there’s the occasional dip. In this patchwork quilt of a record, though, there’s plenty of space to lift from it its choicest moments and discard the rest.

6/10 Chris Watkeys

Hannah Woods Broderick — Invitation (western vinyl) As a backing musician, Hannah Woods Broderick has an enviable CV. Over the past decade or so, she can list stints with Laura Gibson, Lisa Hannigan and her long-time collaborator Sharon Van Etten on her resume, as well as time spent in bands like Efterklang and Horse Feathers. What really marked her out as a good signing for anybody, though, was less her track record and more her own solo material. From the Ground and Glider, released six years apart in 2009 and 2015, were meticulously crafted and elegantly executed pieces of work that suggested that she had a striking, creative voice all of her own.

A long-standing member of Van Etten’s band, whom she is now back out on the road with as she promotes January’s Remind Me Tomorrow, Broderick took her friend’s hiatus from touring as an opportunity to carve out Invitation, which in large part is a meditation on life as a working musician; the toll it takes on relationships, bank balances, mind, body and soul. Broderick wrote and recorded Invitation surrounded by the stillness of rural Oregon and you can tell. It feels appealingly unhurried and is stylishly put together, all hushed vocals, string section flourishes, gracefully overlapping guitar and piano. There’s subtlety to its diversity, from the softly bluesy ‘Nightcrawler’ and ‘Slow Dazzle’ to the rolling panorama of ‘White Tail’ and the gently subversive

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‘These Green Valleys’. Over the course of it, the sense of catharsis as she figures out her place in the world is quietly overwhelming. Invitation takes its time to get its hooks into you; the investment of time and thought, though, pays off generously.

8/10 Joe Goggins

heartbeats or footsteps, not by a digitally perfect grid) and emotionally honest.

The result is a paean to the English countryside and the simple pleasure of being outside, romantic and utopian and, perhaps most lasting, full of a strange sense of hope. 9/10 Sam Walton

Leafcutter John — Yes! Come Parade With Us (border community) Leafcutter John’s fifth album is a something of a departure for the electroacoustic tinkerer and sometime electronics whizzkid in Polar Bear. Gone is the introspective, hermetically sealed soundworld mesmerised by its own abstract beauty, and in its place is music lodged inescapably in the real world, outward-looking and tangibly human. Inspired by a week-long hike along the North Norfolk Coast Path, and anchored throughout by field recordings of almost three-dimensional clarity made during that trip, the seven pieces here variously vibrate with the joy of rural escapism (the title track), throb with charmingly stoic determination (‘Stepper Motor’), or rumble thunderously as if cast under huge leaden skies (‘Dunes’).

There’s even a smattering of political observation in the snippet of pub chat – “Is anyone likely to change their minds?”

– captured on ‘This Way Out’ that, in the context of this curiously anthropologically minded album, is simultaneously chilling and rather poignant.

Built around a modular synth that Leafcutter John allows to fizz and morph around the tracks, not so much played as guided, and occasionally augmented with some gusty, gutsy drumming from his Polar Bear bandmate Seb Rochford, Yes! Come Parade With Us achieves those rare things in electronic music of feeling entirely organic (the pulses here feel informed by the imperfections of

Holly Herndon — PROTO (4ad) Type “Will A.I. replace?” into Google and its own complex set of code will auto populate a list of suggestions from doctors to teachers, lawyers to humans. “Musicians” doesn’t make the top ten but with artificial intelligence increasingly infiltrating the way music is made, it’s becoming an increasingly valid question.

For many it’s a frightening prospect; a dehumanization of something inherently emotional. But as the PR headlines of “first album ever created by A.I.!” become more frequent, how A.I. is incorporated into production is going to get more interesting. It’s certainly how Holly Herndon sees it; technology and modern computing consistent themes in her work. On her debut, Movement, Herndon created custom instruments and vocal processes using visual programming software. On its follow up, Platform, she experimented with everything from sampling her internet browsing habits to triggering Autonomous sensory meridian response (a tingling sensation on the skin that moves down the back of the neck).

Third album PROTO is no less technologically curious with Herndon creating an “A.I. baby” called Spawn to help comprise a choir of both human and A.I. voices. Presumably opener ‘Birth’ speaks to that genesis – the early moments of something not really living but learning to live; mimicking not because it understands but because that’s what it’s programmed to do.

Albums It’s indicative of the process behind the album with human touch and bias acting as the catalyst with the technology learning through data, custom hardcoded rules and any other measure of binary alchemy. And in that context, PROTO sounds both like and unlike the sum of its parts: impersonal but human, robotic but curiously beautiful.

‘Eternal’ strikes the balance between the contrasts of being and machine with vocals flashing and floating above dramatically dystopian dance tropes. That symbiosis is uglier and more honest in the garbled electronica of ‘Godmother’ but then unusually alluring in the digital paganism of ‘Frontier’ or the Enya-routed-through-a-modem drift of ‘SWIM’.

By the end, ‘Last Gasp’ captures an odd sense of death – like watching the LEDs go out of Johnny 5’s eyes. Because for all of the unsettling babbling and creepy imitation, Herndon doesn’t want to “live in a world where humans are automated off stage” and as such, Spawn often feels part of the ensemble, not an instrument of it. That contributes towards making PROTO a compelling, if not always a comfortable, listen, and perhaps less a question of “Will A.I. replace musicians?” and more “Do androids dream of electronic beats?” 7/10 Reef Younis

Tim Hecker — Anoyo (kranky) I like Tim Hecker’s music a lot, but there’s traditionally been a mile between his press releases and the music itself. Who among us could accurately guess the ideas behind Ravedeath, 1972 or Love Streams by the music alone?

I feel that duality only really got reconciled on Konoyo, which introduced Japanese gagaku music to Hecker’s repertoire. The result was an incredible blend

of churning electronics and traditional instrumentation, one which felt remarkably close to his stated intent of exploring negative space and restraint.

Even that album is topped, however, by the first half of its companion piece Anoyo. Konoyo impressed because it felt as though two diametrically opposed forms of music were coming together; here, they simply fit together as natural accompaniments. Particular praise has to go to the grandeur of ‘Is But a Simulated Blur’. Hecker’s drones have never sounded less artificial, and the gagaku ensemble’s responses to them gives the entire piece a real sense of cosmic scale.

That’s why it’s so frustrating when the two begin to peel apart from one another on the second half of the album.

The traditional instrumentation has nothing to say on ‘Into the Void’, and Hecker seems equally stumped on ‘Not Alone’. ‘You Never Were’ brings back pleasant memories of the first half but by the album’s end it simply fades into nothingness, without leaving a shadow of itself behind. 6/10 Alex Francis

is near faultless, with singles ‘Birdsong’ and ‘Pharaoh’ reaching D’Angelo levels of wonky greatness.

Written while Lowe was studying to be a therapist – a side hustle she won’t need to employ if there’s any justice after this record – the album’s lyrical content is considered and precise. Borrowing metaphors from ancient Egypt, comparing lovers to mangos and employing word play with a deft touch, Lowe brims with confidence throughout YU. As the second half of the tracklist unfolds and the musical world Lowe inhabits becomes softer and more atmospheric, some songs get lost along the way. ‘Royalty’’s post-dubstep production lacks a certain punch while closing track ‘Apologise’, the most stripped back song on the album, ends the record with a fizzle rather than a bang. However, these tracks only really falter thanks to the strength of the album’s outrageously strong start and it’s hard to imagine many records that could follow-up the one-two punch of ‘Birdsong’ and ‘Pharaoh’ unhurt. 8/10 Mike Vinti

Rosie Lowe — YU (wolftone) If the Soulquarians had taken up residency on this side of the Atlantic, the result would probably sound a lot like Rosie Lowe’s second album, YU. Produced in part by Dave Okumu and featuring a smorgasbord of UK neosoul talents including Jamie Woon (he’s as great as you remember), Jordan Rakei and Kwabs, it’s a triumphant return from the Devon-born singer and musician.

Swooning RnB melodies host everything from philosophical but flirty guest verses from elusive icon Jay Electronica to odes to Cleopatra and divine femininity. The album’s opening run of tracks from ‘Lifeline’ through to ‘Mango’

Mac DeMarco — Here Comes the Cowbow (mac’s record label) The opening track of this fourth LP consists of Mac DeMarco repeating the album’s title dozens of times, backed only by a repeated guitar strum and a rudimental drum tap.

In one sense, he evokes the sardonic spirit of Bill Callahan, the track a depiction of the pearly wise, whiskey-stained outlaw troubadour that Mac is morphing into, a lifetime of experience contained in a single phrase. Certainly that’s the sense DeMarco is gunning for. In another, far more honest sense, DeMarco is doing nearly nothing for three minutes.

Whilst the rest of the album’s thirteen tracks at least expand their visions

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Albums a little further than this, the sense of gentle uneventfulness is still overbearing. DeMarco has long been established as the modern master of the lazy, ambling slacker ideal in indie music, but where a record like ‘Salad Days’ had majestically written melodies to fall back into, ‘Here Comes the Cowboy’ forgoes such structure, indulging in the lethargic haze to the point, frankly, of boredom.

‘Little Dogs March’ again finds the Canadian stuck in a rather simplistic loop, as does ‘Hey Cowgirl’. Only on occasions does he muster the energy to break out of his fug, as on ‘Nobody’, which has some small measure of progression, or the closing track ‘Baby Bye Bye’, which at least gives itself some time to blossom into something degenerative and unpredictable for its wackily enjoyable denouement.

Devotees to the DeMarco catalogue may still find comfort in this over-simplification of his form, but at what stage does his ineffable stoner rock become nothing more than ignorable, repetitive muzak? 5/10 Max Pilley

Jeremy Dutcher — Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa (fontana north) MySpace recently revealed that it had – literally overnight – deleted 12 years’ worth of music posted to its servers. Over a decade of music history lost forever, just like that. It’s pretty sad, but it’s nothing compared to what’s been happening to the Wolastoqiyik – indigenous peoples of New Brunswick, Canada – who have had to watch a much more gradual dissipation of their culture. Over the years they’ve faced pressure from the Canadian government to shed their traditions in order to integrate, and as a result there are currently fewer than 100 speakers of their native language remaining. Enter Jeremy Dutcher. A classically trained

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tenor, and a descendant of the Wolastoqiyik, he has transcribed wax cylinder recordings of his ancestors’ songs from 1907 and brought them back from the brink. With the utmost reverence for his community, Dutcher fleshes out the music with contemporary flourishes and pop melodies amongst samples of the original recordings. These generation-spanning duets transcend the language barrier; you can hear every triumph, every heartbreak, Dutcher’s ancestors sang of over a hundred years ago in his bracing vocals. Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa is a living record of an endangered language but, more than that, it’s the preservation of stories that would have otherwise soon been lost to time. 8/10 Alexander Smail

Stealing Sheep — Big Wows (heavenly) We’re all living in perpetual boredom and only with access to an endless supply of consumable content are we truly satisfied. For the past three years, Liverpool’s all-girl three-piece Stealing Sheep have been pondering such an impatient habitual nature, and on their third album, Big Wow, they try to map out our machine co-existence through more than just a confused face emoji.

Big Wow is heaving with the sort of bold neon pop production that’s symbolic of the information overload we like to cram into our brains. Each track is a wellwoven mesh of sharp synths, cyber sung harmonies and thumping rave percussion. During the music video to lead single ‘Joking Me’, each member features as their own pixelated avatar in a distinct image of the kind throwaway digital culture Big Wow consistently refers to.

Stealing Sheep’s admiration for electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire remains apparent throughout. Engi-

neered mainly through sequencing and drum machines, the record humanises each robotic motion giving definite life to the concept of unique computer emotion.

This certainly isn’t the first album dedicated to the digital universe and it won’t be the last. But Big Wow provides its own relevant input to the conversation of its ever-evolving culture. 7/10 Ollie Rankine

Kelsey Lu — Blood (columbia) Unusually for an artist that’s one EP and several singles deep into their career, it’s still difficult to know what to expect from cellist/singer Kelsey Lu. That’s in part due to the range and prestige of the North Carolinian’s side projects, which have included arranging strings for Florence + The Machine, collaborating with Solange and Blood Orange, and participating in experimental live performances alongside Oneohtrix Point Never and Lafawndah.

Then there’s the eclectic influences that make up Lu’s musical DNA, meaning she’s as likely to reference Prokofiev or Rachmaninoff in her compositions as she is the work of Paul Simon, Thelonious Monk or Led Zeppelin. Most significantly, there’s the scope of her solo output so far, which has extended from the eerie, loop pedal-led intimacy of 2016’s EP Church to the expansive dream-pop of recent single ‘Due West’, which was produced by Skrillex, of all people. So while you might hope that Blood will finally help you decipher precisely who Lu is, it’s not especially surprising to learn that answers aren’t supplied all that readily and that, actually, Lu is the type of artist that deliberately defies neat definitions.

That’s not to say the spirit of Church is absent from Blood. The pizzicato cello runs and shivering violins make ‘Rebel’ as haunting as anything on Lu’s first EP, while the minimal combina-

Albums tion of chirruping birds, plucked arpeggios and heavenly vocal harmonies lend the interlude ‘KINDRED I’ a devotional quality consistent with Lu’s strict religious upbringing. But now that she is no longer constrained by a minimal set-up, or limited to live takes, her musical universe is significantly more vast.

Take ‘Why Knock For You’, the first of two Jamie xx productions. From its minimal beginnings, the song builds to a crescendo of syncopated keyboard, backwards tape loops and strings that swell in waves. Throughout, Lu showcases the versatility of her voice, which can soar with the delicate soulfulness of Solange, and is at other times characterful, with careful enunciation reminiscent of Joanna Newsom. Also fascinating is ‘Poor Fake’, a foray into symphonic disco that sounds like absolutely nothing else on the album, and a cover of 10cc’s ‘I’m Not In Love’ that’s surprisingly faithful to the original.

In interviews Lu has spoken of the message of hope in the face of adversity that she aimed to convey via this record.

It’s this forward-forging spirit that knits her diverse debut collection together.

And yet you get the sense she’s still only scratched the surface, stylistically. 7/10 Gemma Samways

Fat White Family — Serf ’s Up (domino) Since their inception in 2011, the south London soap opera that is Fat White Family have weathered an avalanche of internal crises, departures and – by the end of 2016 – near total implosion. Their fundamental problem, however, has never been the chaos that surrounds them. No; the problem has been the disconnect between talk and walk. The gulf between Fat White Family’s manifesto of transgression and the relative, well, conservatism of much of

the music they’ve actually produced. A terrifying and incendiary live act, to be sure, but ‘Champagne Holocaust’ and ‘Songs for Our Mothers’ were grounded largely only an inch to the left of many of the groups onto which they would (deservedly) pour scorn.

Back, then, to the end of 2016, where we last left a Fat White Family on their knees. Every single member of the band had developed some form of substance problem. Crucial part of their nucleus, guitarist Saul Adamcewski, had been thrown out of the band owing to a vicious heroin addiction. Their cultural impetus was waning; bland imitators were finding it pretty easy to knock up a similar cocktail of the puerile and the nihilistic at home. The band were knackered; the band were skint. The side projects that began emanating from this detritus began proving more appealing than the main meal. Look at the Moonlandingz, the glam-synth outfit fronted by Lias Saoudi across 2017 delivering tauter and hookier material than on either Fat White record. Look at Insecure Men, through which a postrehab Saul delivered a gorgeously realised record of woozy lounge pop.

So how, then, have Fat White Family found themselves on Domino Records and delivering their finest work to date?

At Sauodi’s insistence the group left the capital and relocated to Sheffield, setting up a studio from scratch.

Heroin and cocaine were banned from the premises, replaced by ketamine and weed (“far more creative drugs in my opinion,” sniffs Lias in the album’s press release”).

Adamcewski was inducted back into the band.

It’s quickly apparent that something of Sheffield – that city of brutalist electronica – permeates this record; an album marked by a dominance of synthesizers, drums slathered in reverb and thick Jah Wobble basslines. Having exhausted rock’n’roll’s capacity for menace, the group have instead found a debauchery in disco – as well as acid house – that’s more genuinely thrilling than anything on this album’s two prede-

cessors. More, they finally sound fully original. Listen to the dancefloor panic of ‘Fringe Runner’ – lifting from the pop rave of S’Express, it sounds fevered, brittle and paranoid. Opening track ‘Feet’ is aimed firmly at the dancefloor, and is at once sexy and almost spooky.

When the album’s most straightforwardly Fat White Family moment arrives – ‘Tastes Good With the Money’ – its louche, Glitter Band stomp arrives almost as reward after a minute of Gregorian chanting, playfully making this moment that bit more electrifying.

“All my faith slides right into place,” the group’s various factions sing in unison, “the air up here so fresh and clean.”

Lord, they might actually even mean it.

Baxter Dury appears with a phenomenal guest spot, deadpanning hallucinations of “the lobster red glow of the apocalypse… a big mushroom cloud of the middle classes”.

This speaks to a visionary, almost celestial fervour at work across the whole of ‘Serf ’s Up’ – in this sense, their first properly psychedelic record. Take ‘Kim’s Sunset’, a primal, CAN-aping riff that soundtracks the North Korean despot bringing the world to a nuclear sunset. The record summons a visionary horrorscape where world events collide with personal ruin and sexual euphoria. “My refugee is throbbing,” sings Lias in ‘Feet’, later, “I hope your children wash up bloated on my shore.” Though there was always a moral logic at work in their more uncomfortable lyrics – forcing empathy, forcing uncomfortable reflection – what they’re doing here is far more potent.

There’re other tricks too – the hazy exotica that typified ‘Insecure Men’ informs ‘Vagina Dentata’, and the obliquely state-of-the-nation, toff-baiting ‘Oh Sebastian’ sees Saoudi accompanied only by a string section and glowing backing vocals. At points, the album’s closest analogue might be the headachey, widescreen comedown of Pulp’s ‘This is Hardcore’. But where that album felt like the end of something, this record is a triumph that feels, just as the end was in sight, like a real beginning.

8/10 Fergal Kinney

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Live Amyl and the Sniffers Shacklewell Arms, Dalston 29 March 2019

Oneohtrix Point Never The Roundhouse, Camden 8 March 2019

Age Of, Daniel Lopatin’s 2018 album as Oneohtrix Point Never, saw the Brooklyn-based electronic composer venture deeper than ever into a genreless, kaleidoscopic musical plane, while confronting dystopian themes and sci-fi nightmares. This is something that he fleshes out further with his final performance of his ambitious M.Y.R.I.A.D. “concertscape”, that sees the 35-year-old combine his music with trippy visuals, installations and dance that further explores the apocalyptic themes of his complex eighth record.

Lopatin is flanked by fellow producers and multi-instrumentalists Kelly Moran (who released her own, more utopian sounding piano record, Ultraviolet, also in in 2018), Eli Keszler and Aaron David Ross, who are engulfed in fog from the smoke machines and Ross’ vape pen for the majority of the night, perched in front of giant shard-shaped screens.

High in the rafters above them hang two Xenomorph-like sculptures, which occasionally address the audience like insidious AI overlords, and onlookers are soon immersed in the surreal theatre before them.

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The ensemble work their way through the bulk of material from Age Of, from the ambient ‘Love In the Time of Lexapro’ to the harsh, industrial ‘We’ll Take It’ and the glitchy ‘Toys 2’, bringing to mind both Death Grips and Arca.

Lopitan himself remains vocally silent for the majority of the show, only lending his effect-laden, otherworldly voice to a handful of tracks such as the dark but dreamy ‘Babylon’ and the chilling ‘Black Snow’, the latter of which sees a troupe of masked country dancers parade the stage.

It feels like the centrepiece of the night, evoking imagery of a barren planet inhabited only by ghostly computer remnants and Videodrome-esque mutants.

They bring the evening to a close with an epic rendition of fan-favourite ‘Chrome Country’ before Lopatin mumbles into the mic: “This is an experiment. Let’s take a short ride into infinity,” and cascades into a dizzying performance of ‘Boring Angel’.

Inspired by the never-faltering rise of a technologically advanced society, Lopatin’s vision is often unsettling and mind-bending, but nonetheless engulfs the audience into the three-dimensional environment of his music. As fans filter back into the rainy streets of Camden, there’s something eerie in the way everyone quickly pulls their phones out and disappear back into our digital worlds.

Woody Delaney

Snot bubbles bursting from each nostril, saliva dribbling through gritted teeth and dangling from her chin: Amy Taylor is not letting anyone get away with standing idly still on her watch. For the past two weeks she and her band of Melbourne misfits have been rolling around the US, causing havoc at SXSW amongst other notable venues. It’s her tour’s first stop in the UK and already the sweaty remnants of her thick black eyeliner gushes copiously onto the bashed-up microphone she’s already impaled onto the stage canvas behind her. God knows how it’s still working, or maybe it’s given out completely? Taylor’s jaguar-like snarl is still deafening over her band’s four chord onslaught.

Amyl’s sound and live presence breathes life into the sort of archetypal punk that each member (and the majority of the crowd) are all definitely too young to have experienced. Fast, ruthless and forever on the brink of falling apart, The Sniffers deliver each track with relentless and uninterrupted pace. Taylor either paces the ranks of her mulleted bandmates or summersaults over the top of the frenzied crowd. Ollie Rankine

Nerija Oslo, Hackney 26 March 2019

Nerija are the closet thing the new London jazz scene has to a super-group. Fronted by saxophonists Nubya Garcia and Cassie Kinoshi, trumpeter Sheila Maurice Grey and trombonist Rosie Turnton, and completed by guitarist Shirely Teteh, drummer Lizy Exell and bassist Rio Kai, the group’s members have played on nearly every London jazz record worth listening to. And taking to Hackney’s OSLO to launch their first EP on Domino

photography by neil collins

Live Records, they prove why they’re so in demand with a set heavy on new material and blistering solos.

Witnessing Nerija live is a lesson the importance of each instrument.

Seven players could easily get lost, especially on a smaller stage like OSLO’s, but tonight (every night) they’re tight as can be, band members often graciously stepping off stage during solos to give each player their moment under the spotlight.

Solos from Teteh and Turnton highlight the skill of jazz guitar and the fact that trombones are still vastly underrated, while EP highlights like ‘The Fisherman’ proved transcendent, sending fans off with warm soulful jazz vibrating through them. Mike Vinti

Tourist Earth, Dalston 28 March 2019

“The first place I played in London doesn’t exist anymore,” says William Phillips – the man behind the Tourist moniker – about the venue fka The Nest in Dalston.

His well-spoken voice blasts through the ambient purple haze and enthusiastic applause for ‘Too Late’, one of the few tracks played from 2016’s U. It’s pretty

photography by will beach

much all he’ll say this evening. He played to 20 people that night.

His rising popularity sits peculiarly between the acclaimed end of the Ibiza dance floor and the more reserved side of British electronica, from a couple of anthem-led EPs and a Grammy for co-writing a Sam Smith song. Everyday, the brilliant full-length that followed in February, traded out the Made In Chelseafriendly riffs for something more fuelled with intent and prepared to lure you away from the party, into the low points of a daily routine.

Ambient album openers ‘Awake’ and ‘Emily’ are elongated through a tenminute build for all your woozy headnodding needs. A pulsing beat transforms ‘Someone Else’ into the perfect late-night dance track. The poppier moments on ‘Can’t Keep Up’ and ‘Holding On’ feel brash in their company. As the coolly progressive IDM bassline in ‘Too Late’ thunders on top of auto-tuned vocal loops and samples, you can forget for a minute that this is 9pm on a Thursday night in East London, and you’re not standing face-to-face with a sad-drunk Caribou.

As the crowd continues to talk between themselves though, it becomes clear that most people aren’t here for the more off-kilter moments of Everyday that made it so interesting. The best bits tonight are the ones most people seemed too distracted to notice. Tristan Gatward

Carla Dal Forno The Silver Building, London 29 March 2019

The Silver Building in London’s Docklands is an odd place to spend a Saturday night. A 15-minute trek along deserted roads, with only the sound of the Emirates Airline creaking overhead, when we eventually arrive at the former headquarters of British Oil and Coke Mills the place appears almost tailor-made for an evening of futurist electronica.

Once inside, navigating around is a bit like being Bruce Lee in the end sequence of Enter the Dragon. Almost every room us obscured in a haze of dry ice. Shapes loom forward and slip by to a soundtrack of sparse EBM and discordant avant-pop, giving the whole event a surreal and gently disorientating ambience.

After an hour or so, the smoke begins to clear, and like a wraith rising from the ether, Carla Dal Forno starts up in the main room. Delivered in her usual semi-detached tone, her skeletal electronic pop breezes across the speakers like a rush of chilled air, her set emerging from the dancier warm-up set like a tombstone coming out the mist.

Unfortunately, the impact is let down by the sound. Everything is just a little bit too quiet. The sheer minimalism of Dal Forno’s sound requires you be able to notice the Cathedral-size amount of empty space between the stripped-down backing tracks and her high-wire vocals. Therefore, trying to take it all in while simultaneously listening to the bloke behind me as he chats with his mates somewhat ruins the illusion.

It’s only when we reach the last couple of songs of the set that someone remembers to hit the volume knob.

Suddenly, everything makes sense. Closing song ‘Took a Long Time’ is a typical piece of breath-taking sonic drama; Dal Forno’s delicate, mournful lyrics suspended over an echoing, phantasmal bassline. It’s a thing of rare beauty – it’s just a shame that we only manage a fleeting glimpse.

Dominic Haley

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Film and Books

mid90s (dir. jonah hill) The release of mid90s is as well timed as the film is measured. I write this wearing a pair of Kickers.

Jonah Hill’s choice of footwear back then was different – Etnies or Vans or another shoe appropriate for the skate shop he worked in in Los Angeles. This is the mid ’90s that he recalls in his directorial debut, and while that’s probably not the ’95 that any of us lived through, certain strains of nostalgia, it seems, transcend

borders, while a coming of age story as lovingly made as this one remains universal enough to go even further.

So as Stevie (Sunny Suljic) navigates his early teens, we see a boy seduced by skate culture reinventing himself as a smoker with older friends while still sleeping under a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles duvet cover. His T-shirts go from Street Fighter II to Shorty’s; his wall posters are replaced by logos for skate brands like Toy Machine and pages from Big Brother magazine. What’s most measured about mid90s is how this nostalgic visual trail is sparingly laid out, which prevents the film from, at best, overtly winking at the viewer, and, at worse, turning into a theme restaurant of a movie.

Skating is the backdrop – and indeed mid90s is clearly Hill’s love letter to that culture as much as it is youth – but the heart of the movie is adolescent friendship, as Stevie escapes a home life where

his older brother beats on him, and finds acceptance within a group of four 17-yearolds with names like Fuck Shit and Fourth Grade. They’re the type of dumbass gang who are constantly hilarious, irresponsible, disrespectful and, as every 17-yearold is, seeded with a very real doubt about what the fuck they’re going to do with their lives. No doubt this is what makes mid90s so relatable, along with the fact that for all their bravado and petty crimes they’re clearly good kids. And there’s the performances themselves, too, all of which feel improvised, which, when you see these guys skate, makes a lot of sense (Hill has surely cast skaters over actors).

Fittingly, the whole thing cruises along, bumming around and not doing much, feeling longer than its 1hr 20min runtime. That how time works when you’re growing up and bored. mid90s captures the grand nothingness perfectly.

Stuart Stubbs

Keep Music Evil: The Brian Jonestown Massacre Story — Jesse Valencia (jawbone) Keep Music Evil plots the long and winding saga of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, the band that Anton Newcombe forged in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco in the early ’90s.

In doing so, Newcombe kick-started a psych revolution and inspired a raft of pseudodelic copyists in the process. As the book testifies, Newcombe is the real deal, touched by both genius and madness, and equipped with the drive and fire necessary to face down all of the breakups, breakdowns, successes and failures that the intervening decades could throw at his band. Lee Bullman

Defying Gravity: Jordan’s Story — Jordan Mooney with Cathi Unsworth (omnibus) Via her swathe of novels, Cathi Unsworth has been responsible for some of the best British fiction of the last ten years. Here, she hooks up with Jordan Mooney, the beehived, mascara’d shop assistant-turned-pop-icon who, working for Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, became as important a part of the punk aesthetic as any two-minute single or ripped t-shirt. Defying Gravity is Jordan’s oral history, pieced together from interviews with punk movers and shakers who provide a fascinating insight into Jordan and the movement she came to symbolise. Lee Bullman

Dayglo: The Poly Styrene Story — Celeste Bell and Zoe Howe (omnibus) X-Ray Spex, the band that Poly Styrene fronted, left behind a musical legacy that has aged far better than that of many of their contemporaries. In Dayglo, we see that punk formed only one part of Poly’s story, and within its pages get to fully peer into the life of the girl from Brixton thanks to interviews with everyone from Neneh Cherry to Thurston Moore. Beautifully illustrated throughout and co-written by Zoe Howe and Poly’s daughter, Celeste Bell, the book contains never before seen material and stands as a loving tribute to the original riot girl turned spiritual seeker. Lee Bullman

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The BesT New Music

ROse eLiNOR DOuGALL DANieL O’suLLiVAN A New iLLusiON FOLLY

V/A whiTe DeNiM FLOATiNG POiNTs: LATe siDe eFFecTs City Slang NiGhT TALes

GANG OF FOuR hAPPY NOw

Pioneering post-punk band, the Gang of Four were formed in the bricolage punk rock fallout culture of late seventies Leeds. Gang of Four tore up the template and made sense of the question marks thrown up by year zero.

Vermilion

O Genesis

The title track from Dougall’s third album sees her question the fragility of the constructed worlds we all make for ourselves, whether through relationships, love affairs, work or political beliefs through the prism of the chaotic world around her.

A noticeable shift in dynamic, ‘A New Illusion’ uses a different sonic palette to her previous LP, with soaring strings, propulsive pianos and impressionistic guitars, a modern classic with a gentle “fuck it” attitude.

‘Folly’ deftly illustrates O’sullivan’s ascent as a unique and multidimensional songwriter, moving from the familiar pantheon of experimental music and arriving upon a universal narrative probing the human condition from the inside out. Both lyrically and within the intricate lattice of arrangements, traditional forms are reshaped into transcendent pop symphonies.

Floating Points’ personal collection of global soul, ambient, jazz and folk treasures form the latest in the warmly revered Late Night Tales series.

eDwYN cOLLiNs BADBeA

BAND OF sKuLLs LOVe is ALL YOu LOVe

Late Night Tales

This Late Night Tales excursion into the depths of the evening reflects his broad tastes. The globally-travelled producer has collected untold treasures on his travels from dusty stores in Brazil to market stalls near his hometown.

white Denim follow up last year’s ‘Performance’ with ‘side Effects’, their wildest album in a decade.

“Returns them to their wigged out earlier records” aaaa Q “Punkier, proggier, jazzier, jammier” aaaa Mojo “scintillating” 8/10 uncut “Yet another quality album” The 405

“….a shimmering showcase for one of the most alluring and arresting female voices at work today” 8/10 - uncut

PRiNs ThOMAs AMBiTiONs

Smalltown Supersound

AED Records

So Recordings

chRis cOheN chRis cOheN Captured Tracks

Gill Music Ltd.

The upcoming album ‘happy Now’ is the perfect synthesis between a modern take on the classic GO4 sound — a pop touch with those timeless angular guitar lines and fractured rhythms — with a fast forward vision.

V/A NiGeRiA 70: NO wAhALA: hiGhLiFe, AFRO-FuNK & JuJu 1973-1987 Strut

‘Ambitions’ is Prins Thomas’ 6th album (released 5th April) and his second solo album for smalltown supersound.

‘Ambitions’ picks up from where he left off with ‘Principe Del Norte’. still ambitious, but the tracks are shorter, more melodic and more concise. Prins Thomas also offers up his first vocal track, lead single Feel A Love.

“Fantastic ninth album sees Orange Juice frontman recalling past glories. Collins’ first album since 2013 sees the singer in pleasingly superb form.” 9/10 - uncut “The man’s a marvel” aaaa - Mojo “A record of a very fine sort” aaaa - Q

Acclaimed British rock band Band of skulls will release their fifth album ‘Love Is All You Love’ on 12th April, via so Recordings. The follow-up to 2016’s ‘By Default’, the new album was produced by Richard X. includes the singles cool your Battles and we’re Alive.

chris cohen’s third album is a thoughtful, accomplished meditation on life and family, backed by dusky instrumentation influenced by the late evening beauty of Pat Metheny’s ‘The Falcon and the snowman’ soundtrack, and Thomas Dolby’s ‘The Golden Age of wireless’. it’s beautiful, but it’s also unflinching in its depiction of emotional turmoil.

Support Your Local Independent Retailer Check www.republicofmusic.com

The first new volume of the seminal ‘Nigeria 70’ series in over 6 years collects together more essential 1970s dancefloor highlife, Afro-funk and juju.

Artists include sir Victor uwaifo, Rex williams and sina Bakare, and all tracks are receiving their first ever international release.

Interview

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Interview

Interview

46

Interview

Holly Herndon’s new album – made with the help of artificial intelligence and a human ensemble – calls for us to reconsider our relationship with technology, and who’s running the show,

by Stuart Stubbs Photography by Dan Kendall From the moment Holly Herndon opens the door of her west Berlin apartment I have one eye scanning the place for her baby. “What’s she doing right now?”, I ask when we find her sat at the back of Holly’s desk, partially obscured by a monitor.

“She’s just chillin’,” says Holly, and we pass through into the next room.

When Holly is changing for our photo shoot, her PR and I go back and stare at the baby and agree how hypnotic she is. Her name is Spawn. She’s probably the height of any other baby out there but she’s square shaped and has a glass front, so you can see her heart beating in hues of pink, purple, blue and green. She’s an “AI baby”, which either makes everything I’ve said so far far less or far more creepy. That really depends on you, although, if you’re open to it, Holly and Spawn and the new album they’ve made together are capable of shifting your perspective on artificial intelligence and its place not just in music and art, but in our aggressively progressive world. To understand how we got to PROTO, though (out 10 May via 4AD), first we need to remind ourselves of how Holly Herndon became the only artist capable of delivering it.

— Vapour trails — For an electronic musician who makes music that’s as considered and complex as it is, Herndon’s influences are pleasingly simple to map out. “I’m definitely this weird combination of the idiosyncratic places I’ve found myself living in,” she says, hair & make-up by christian fritzenwanker

referring to the three key cities of her life, which appear like a vapour trail across her music; the furthest away the faintest to detect. So let’s start there, in the Johnson City, east Tennessee: a hub for a rural and religious community, 50,000 people strong, with nothing to do.

As a kid Herndon would sing in church, play guitar and take piano lessons, and then grow bored of her small hometown.

She’d go to a hardcore show when a friend would occasionally put one on, and a group of them would occupy themselves with ‘Food not bombs’ – a well-meaning soup kitchen drive, even if Johnson City had, like, one homeless guy, who was now fed for the entire year.

You have to burrow down through the abrasive electronics and processed vocals, but Herdon’s choir life and the folk music she grew up on are there in her thoroughly modern music, especially on new album PROTO, a record in which she overtly explores communal interaction. More apparent is the mark Johnson City has left on her personality. Photographs of Holly – our own included – paint a skewed picture of the woman herself, who smiles as easily as she bursts into laughter, and warmly welcomes us into her home. ‘Cold’, as electronic musicians and their music are often considered, couldn’t be a less appropriate word to describe her. And while every article about Holly Herndon inevitably descends into an academic paper suitable for a computer artist who this month will complete her PhD from Stanford University, she is neither as bookish nor condescending as jealous people like me so often project. It must be what they

47

Interview

“That’s the whole point, technology mean when they talk about Southern charm; supercharged, in Herndon’s case, by a desire to get out of there. So when she found out that her school offered one exchange program, to Germany, she thought, “obviously I’m going to study German then, because I want to get the fuck out of east Tennessee.

“It was so clear to me as a young person that I needed to expose myself to more,” she says, “and New York or L.A. wasn’t far enough. I wanted to forget that I was American for a minute.

I didn’t want to speak English for a minute.”

I suggest how confident she must have been as a kid, traveling to Berlin for the first time at the age of 16, and then again for a whole year at 18.

“That’s an interesting word,” she says. “I was curious about the world I was getting glimpses of.”

She says she’d see Tori Amos on MTV, greasy and grinding on a piano, and think, “whoah! That’s emotive sexuality that I didn’t even know existed.”

Berlin instantly offered her what she was missing most in Tennessee: freedom. “I put on my hideous platform shoes and went down to the disco, and it was an amazing experience,” she says. She laughs as she recalls ordering Amaretto on the rocks, because a 16-year-old American in a German club (or in any bar anywhere) is as alien as experiences on earth come.

At the weekend, the family she was staying with would drive to the German/Polish border to buy cheap cigarettes and knock-off Adidas, where Herndon bought her first trance compilations. “That kind of music is so designed to tap straight into the mainline,” she says, tapping the veins in her arm.

“Saccharine and synthetic, like, ‘this is amazing’.”

Berlin – spiritually when not geographically – hasn’t left her since. Even when she moved to Washington DC for college she used the tips she received in an upmarket steak restaurant to fly back to Berlin whenever she could, to meet her German boyfriend who she spent the entire summer raving with.

She describes the city’s club culture back then as “like going to church”, where everyone knew each other as minimal techno blew up thanks to DJs like Richie Hawtin and Ricardo Villalobos.

“I didn’t know the possibilities of electronic music until I came here,” she says. “I realised there was this whole other world.”

Berlin is the middle of the vapour trail and also its most recent and vivid part. Not just because Herndon lives here once again (with husband and collaborator Mat Dryhurt), but because the city’s electronic heritage has so clearly been the building blocks of her three albums so far. The obvious strains of techno that run through her music (as well as musique concrete: a composition tradition that often uses ‘non-musical’ recordings as source material – in Herndon’s case, how she recorded the

48

sound of a dancer moving through space for part of her previous album, Platform) run alongside the third key city of her life and everything she studied in northern California’s Bay Area.

Berlin had made her fall in love with electronic music; Oakland’s prestigious Mills College gave her the tools to participate beyond the role of a spectator. Most importantly of all it was the place where she chose her instrument and realised that that’s exactly what a laptop can be. Her music has been intrinsically linked to her studies and computer technologies ever since, from her 2012 debut, Movement (which balanced the precise minimalism of her classes with the club throb she missed from Tresor and Berghain), to Platform in 2015 – an album that used tech to hold tech to account, as it criticised the manipulative nature of centralised social media platforms.

“I didn’t know that I gave a shit about electronic music until I moved here [to Berlin],” Herndon notes, “and I didn’t know I gave a shit about technology until I moved to Oakland.

That’s the thing in life: you keep uncovering these things, like, ‘oh shit, that’s my jam!’ Who knows what that next thing’s going to be.”

Interview

should free us up to be more human”

Getting into Stanford, she says, “was a total surprise. A miracle. And it’s the next level when it comes to the technical level.” Which I guess is how she ended up here, with an AI baby in the next room, just chillin’.

— Spawn — Chances are your feelings about computer technologies range from the suspicious to the scared shitless. AI has always lived at the apocalyptic reaches of the scale; seemingly the natural end point of technology gone wrong being a robot that stops obeying its master and instead decides it wants us all dead.

For added chill Hollywood will give these disobedient killing machines human form so lifelike as to be undetectable in the street, plunging us into a world of absolute mistrust and perpetual fear. From Blade Runner to Ex Machina, to Postman Pat: The Movie, we’ve repeatedly been told to distrust AI since at least 2001: A Space Odyssey’s murderous spacecraft pilot HAL 9000.

Herndon and Dryhurst firmly reject such kitsch ideas of a possible dystopia but agree that we should all be critical of tech-

nology, and certainly those who control it. The tech threat they have always focused on is more real than HAL 9000, and already upon us.

When I ask Herndon if she ever feels scared by technology, she says: “Of course. We all are. With Platform, the whole album was about the power of these [social media] platforms, and how much they shape our lives, and a few years later Facebook swung the election. It’s not even a joyous thing like, ‘I told you so’, but at shows years ago we were like, ‘leave Facebook’. It wasn’t a surprise – this shit has been clear.

“The internet was the wild west; now it a mall,” she says.

“That wasn’t the cyberpunk dream. And then you see Congress trying to grill Mark Zuckerberg and they’re asking him how their iPhones works. That’s a different company! You’re not going to be able to take care of this.”

The use of Spawn on PROTO is likely to lead some to be instantly dismissive of it. After all, the big headline of the record is ‘Holly Herndon’s made an album with AI’, which is not just open to oversimplification but false assumption too. That assumption is essentially this: Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst built an AI machine and called it Spawn, which then did all the work for them and spat out this record of weird, twisted electronics – as if it wasn’t bad enough that she already makes all her music on a laptop. For some, the fear of AI here is even greater than a killer-bot uprising; it’s taking away our precious music: the purest expression of mankind; the closest thing we have to magic, no more legitimate than when wire strings are stretched across wood and pressed with real life fingers.

It’s a little woolly, but I get it… although it’s not true in this case. Because while PROTO was created using elements of AI, Herndon and Dryhurst weren’t interested in automation (that assumption comes from a narrow view of what AI can be used for). In fact, if manual labour is a currency of authenticity in music, PROTO is more legitimate than most guitar records I can think of. As Herndon explains to me exactly how Spawn works, she notes that Spawn is only one member of an ensemble of around 15 that includes Dryhurst and developer Jules LaPlace.

The remaining members of the group are vocalists who would meet to “feed” Spawn by singing and talking to her.

Perhaps it’s worth us defining what an AI (or, to be more accurate, ‘machine learning’) is before we go any further: broadly speaking, it’s a machine that receives information and from that interaction gains some more information that it can then do something with. The original information you feed into your AI is called a data set, and usually comes from an open source online. But Holly wrote her own data sets, which she then taught to her ensemble who then read and sang them to Spawn in an attempt to teach her to not just repeat what she heard, but to learn more of the language from. PROTO’s purest

49

Interview example of this is a collaboration with footwork producer Jlin called ‘Godmother’ – a wilfully ugly sounding track of stutters and hisses. When I inevitably ask Herndon if she feels affection for her AI baby, she says she felt it most on ‘Godmother’, when Spawn started to sing in her voice, where it sounds like she’s beat-boxing like Timberland. “And believe me, I have never beat-boxed,” she cries. “I was horrified when I heard it. But it was also hilarious, because it’s the mix of singing and speech and her trying to make sense of that.”

Typically, PROTO was made thus: once Dryhurst had put Spawn together in a gaming PC, and LaPlace had begun developing her without learning parameters, Herndon and her group of vocalists would sing and read to her for hours (including one public training performance of 300 people, to teach Spawn how to create music from a large gathering of voices). For two years this went on, originally delivering mostly noise, until one day, after 6 months, “we thought, finally, something that doesn’t sound like shit. Which is why a lot of people aren’t fucking with AI,” says Herndon, “because it’s annoying, and there was the first 6 months when everything sounded like ass.”

The project’s breakthrough moment features as PROTO’s opening track, ‘Birth’ – a holy tone over which Spawn garbles to life in Herndon’s voice. “That was when we were first really excited,” she says. “There were words in there that I wasn’t even saying.

Like, she says ‘cunt’. Kids say the darndest things,” she laughs.

Where ‘Birth’ is minimal and only 75 seconds long, the rest of PROTO’s production could only just begin. Using the tradition of musique concrete, think of it this way – Holly Herndon could have sourced a bunch of sound as material from anywhere within an hour and then started to make her third album with it, beginning the process of tirelessly iterating and drawing on her own compositional skills to add her own elements. There would have still been months of work ahead of her to create a record as emotive and unique in sound as PROTO is. Instead of that, she spent two years generating her source material by educating herself in AI and training an AI baby with a community of people that at one point totalled 300 at Berlin exhibition hall Martin-Groupius-Bau. “So it’s not about automating the composition process or trying to replace that at all,” Herndon stresses. “It’s about trying to find what’s aesthetically interesting and new with this new technology which can be used in a compositional environment.”

She points out that most AI experiments in music have gone down a far simpler route of imitation of composition, rather than using sound as material. So a study teaches an AI how Bach would use notes (their pitch, length and rhythm) and set the parameters for the machine to learn from that and create their own Bach-like pieces of music. “For me, that’s really not interesting,” says Herndon. “That leads to this retromania and repetition of itself. We were much more interested in sound as material. And it’s more personal because you’re training it on a person and their sound.

“Putting the ensemble together was part of the broader PROTO approach,” she goes on. “We saw how fully automated

electronic music was becoming – and of course I’ve been part of that: drum machines, computer music etc. – and we wondered where that can go and where the human fits into live performance, especially within these super synchronised AV hybrid DJ sets. We were questioning where do humans fit into this. What things are worth preserving and what things are worth automating? To do that I wanted to work with humans, still working with the computer as the brain. And so that’s why we started the PROTO ensemble. And we saw Spawn as part of the ensemble, and Jules [LaPlace]. Part of that was having them over and us singing together, which I’d record, and a lot of that I’d train Spawn on. Then I’d cook for everyone, which sounds really hippy.”

Having taken German at school solely to “get the fuck out of east Tennessee”, these elements of a record that seems so technologically advanced are rooted in Herndon’s earthy upbringing, from singing in choirs to making soup for others.

After two albums of little face-to-face interaction (Movement was very much a solo album, while the collaborators on Platform were largely reached online) Herndon missed people. She says: “One of the reasons I wanted to do it was because I was really lonely in the studio. Of course there is still a lot of that – after the recordings someone has to sit there and listen to every single take for hours – but that human contact was a huge part of it.”

So rather than PROTO being a symbol (and warning sign) of how humans could even be made obsolete within music making, it’s quite the opposite – Herndon is using tech to get more human interaction into her life.

“That’s the whole point,” she says, “technology should free us up to be more human. That’s what it should be doing, so we don’t have to go through these machine-like motions. The human body has been like a machine since industrialisation, so how can technology get the body out of these machine-like motions so we can be more human together. That’s the vision.”

It brings to mind Herndon’s views on collecting vinyl – something she doesn’t do, much to the horror of some. But her argument in her defence is not just pragmatic but honourably egalitarian as it sticks up for modern technology. Put simply, digital music has made music instantly accessible in every corner of the world, more regardless of wealth and class than ever before. Even in terms of sharing music with a friend, they don’t need to come over to pick up your LP anymore. Should that convenience not be celebrated? Is that not an example of technology freeing us up to be more human?

— Finding ecstasy — The resulting album is not always the most comfortable listen, although Herndon’s music never was, even before she started fucking with AI. Still, when you consider how it was made, it’s something of a miracle how ‘musical’ so much of it is, while on tracks like ‘Eternal’ and ‘Alienation’ Herndon is the most human and accessible she’s ever been.

PROTO was a bold new experiment, and it plays out like one, with all elements of Herndon in there. After her baby gibbers

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Interview

to life on ‘Birth’, ‘Alienation’ is one big down-tempo build of dark ambience and Enya-like, semi-decipherable vocals. It takes no time for it to reach euphoria.

Other digestible moments come in the dreamier ‘SWIM’ and ‘Last Gasp’, which grooves not unlike Massive Attack to close the album in a melancholic and human way after all the science that’s gone before it. ‘Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt’ is more machine than man, yet is perhaps the album’s prettiest track: a flutter of ascending robo voices. ‘Bridge’ is a disturbing boot-up accompanied by ghosts speaking nonsense, and ‘Godmother’, as I say, is wilfully ugly and best not listened to with the lights off. The remaining five tracks are where the PROTO ensemble really flies, especially on ‘Frontier’, where the group vocals are goblin-fied and sound like early Yeasayer, and live training track ‘Evening Shades’: presumably the result of the 300-person learning exercise, it sounds like a hymn at a rugby match with a sound delay that makes everyone slur a little drunkenly.

Trying to work out what voices have come from Spawn, Herndon or elsewhere is practically impossible, which is kind of the point.

Late into the day I ask Holly what she hopes people get from this record. It’s the only question she pauses at before answering.

“I want people to feel like they have a sense of agency in their lives, and I feel like right now people don’t have that. It feels like these insurmountable titans are controlling our lives, so by having this DIY intervention into something that feels monolithic feels like having a little bit of a say about it. And hopefully some ecstasy as well. I wanted it to be ecstatic, and it’s a communal record; a record of people in space enjoying being together.

“I’m not a religious person,” she says, “but I grew up in religious ecstasy, and this feeling of public ecstasy is something that I feel music can provide that a lot of other fields can’t.

“I think it’s really easy for us to think of ourselves as a kind of other, separated from technology, just like we do from nature,” she says. “We think we’re outside of it, but we are part of nature, and through our nature technology is something that’s come out of us.”

We do appear to be rapidly building technology while simultaneously rejecting it, and washing our hands of any responsibility. Which is why the common AI narrative is a dystopian one about machines rising up and wiping us out, seemingly without anyone thinking to say, “why don’t we just not build them, then?”.

It extends to our pessimism towards technology as a whole. We’re quick to deride advances as “too far” (driverless

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cars) or elitist and not for us (Oculus Rift), rarely considering the daily benefits of boring things like parking apps, emails and, simpler still, traffic light systems. Technology is Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and who wants to be like those guys. It’s surveillance and infringements on our freedom. It’s a trap. Of course, we’ve been given good reason to feel like this, but with a shift of perspective and some plain optimism Herndon believes it can be different.

“One of the things about being the Bay Area was that there was a lot of DIY technology,” she says, “and that gives you a very different feeling than when you’re thinking of technology as this hyper capitalist American monolith that’s controlling your daily life and surveying your every move and trying to sell you shit. That is technology for a lot of people, because it’s how it’s applied in a lot of our lives. But it doesn’t have to be like that.

“Especially in electronic music it’s so cool to be dystopian and revel in that fucked-up-ness of it all. And I’m not a utopian but I think we have to be able to have vision of what this can be other than that if we’re going to have any demands. Otherwise we’ve already given up. This project is trying to break it up. And there’s tonnes of melancholy on this album as well – frustration and being lost and sad, and mourning. But there also has to be, like, what do we want it to be then? If we don’t want this, what do we want it to be? And we need to get our hands dirty.”

Support Loud And Quiet from £3 per month and we’ll send you our next 9 issues 2019 marks the 14th year of printing Loud And Quiet as an independent magazine that we’ve always given away for free.

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Tell me about it

Amyl and the Sniffers Amy Taylor in her own words,

by Dom Haley Photography by Matilda Hill-Jenkins 54

Tell me about it Amy Taylor may have a reputation for being a firebrand, but she’s actually looking fairly sheepish this afternoon. Gulping down the last of a bottle of water, she shoots me what can only be described as a regretful grin. “Sorry – too many bloody espresso martinis last night.”

Grabbing the attention of UK audiences with a string of shows and festival appearances last year, on-stage Taylor is almost the exact opposite of the friendly, polite women who’s sitting across from me at Rough Trade’s west London HQ. Watch Amyl and the Sniffers live, and you’re confronted by Taylor in full-on singer mode – a tirade of explosive energy, wild anger and profanity-laden outbursts. “Being the singer is so great for me, as I love power and I love control,” she tells me. “It’s like I get to do anything I want when I’m up there. I mean, I could fucking choke a guy out and people would love it!”

Based in Melbourne, her band have emerged from Australia’s east coast fertile punk scene with a love of hot pants, mullets, faded metal t-shirts and a sound that sits somewhere between AC/DC, The Runaways and Dolly Parton. However, while the band’s fashion sense and musical influences might recall the low-rent thrills of the 1970s pub rock scene, Amyl and The Sniffers mostly blow through any misplaced nostalgia with a Ramones-like commitment to playing punk rock that is loud, fast and razor sharp.

Due to release Monsoon Rock, their debut album, on Rough Trade in May, Taylor is the first to admit that the band is currently in the middle of a transitional period. Writing, selfrecording and releasing 2016’s Giddy Up EP in the space of 12 hours, they’re trying to take a little bit more time in the studio these days. Then again, if the recently released title track is anything to go by all the added tea breaks have done nothing to dull the band’s relentless, breakneck energy.

“It’s kind of funny to listen to that first EP now,” laughs Taylor when we talk about how the band has developed from their first few releases. “I mean, I know it’s only been a couple of years but we couldn’t even play our instruments properly when we started. It’s crazy to think how far we’ve come.

“Then again, we’re all pretty hard workers, I suppose,” she continues, before opening a new bottle of water and taking a thoughtful sip. “I think we would have pushed it naturally.

I mean, if I were working at a supermarket, I’d want to be the manager; and this is basically the same thing, right?”

“I grew up in this hippy town” It’s called Mullumbimby, which is in New South Wales. For the most part, it’s pretty chilled, and there wasn’t really all that much to do there, but there was a bit of a hardcore scene. Most of the shows were all-ages, and it wasn’t like there was anything else to do, so I used to go down whenever I could and thrash around. I’d be like this tiny little girl crashing into all these big blokes.

For the most part the bands were all local and toured up and down the east coast. When most bands tour in Australia they just run up and down this one highway. There’s only so many cities in Australia, so almost every band plays a couple of shows in little small towns, and luckily enough Mullumbimby was a good place to stop.

I used to love being in the pit and thrashing around; I really liked the idea of being this little girl who could beat up all the big boys. I think my parents used to think it was a bit weird when they came and picked me up and what not, but mostly they were fine with it.

“My family is really Australian” I don’t know how to say this without coming across like a bit of a dickhead, but my family are like, really Western Suburbs. Even though we lived in a really hippy spot, we were all about beers and cars. Basically, we were ‘us’ if you know what I mean?

My dad is a crane driver, so he gets to work all over. When we were kids, he used to work the tip, and I remember him bringing back all this cool shit; like stuff that he found in the skips or whatever. Mostly it was just random shit like couches, but I can remember him bringing back some really cool stuff like bikes and whatever. One time he brought home a billy cart, which was really fun, and I can kind of remember him bringing home a big carton of out of date Coca Cola for some reason.

My dad loves old cars, so our lives revolved around eating ice-cream and looking at fucking muscle cars, which, to be fair, I really loved growing up. I think that seeped into my parents’ music taste. I mean, they both have a great taste in music, but they’re not music nerds or anything like that. Mostly they buy records with titles like ‘20 of the best beer songs’. Y’know, like the ones with a picture of a beer can on the front that’s just old rock, like KISS and Toto and what have you.

“I love living in Melbourne” I moved there when I was 18 or 19 or whenever and I absolutely love living there. I don’t get to be there all that much these days, but whenever I’m back home in Australia I try to spend a least a couple of days there. There’s always plenty of really good up and coming bands to check out and plenty of people who are up for fucking about and playing music.

When we first started, we all lived in the same house together. The boys all played in other bands, but one night, as I had a drum kit in my room for some reason, we started fucking around making music, and our group has started from there.

It was all pretty casual originally – we just wanted to play house shows and maybe for our friends from time to

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Tell me about it time. One thing’s for sure, there was definitely no ambition to do anything with it. Now, don’t get me wrong, everything is fucking awesome, and I wouldn’t change any of it, but we didn’t really have ideas of touring or playing massive shows or whatever. I can remember when we got offered an opening slot for the Foo Fighters, we were all like, ‘fucking hell; how did this happen?’.

“Our manager used to manage Chopper Read” I absolutely love [convicted criminal, gang member and children’s author] Chopper; he was like the Ned Kelly of our time. So when we were looking for a manager and the guy said he used to manage Chopper Read he was instantly in.

He’s actually got this one really cool Chopper story. Basically, our manager was owed some money, and the guy kept ducking him for some reason. Getting really pissed off, he eventually calls up Chopper and was like, ‘Chopper, I want you to do me a favour’, and Chopper was like, ‘yeah, no worries – what do you need?’.

The plan was to call up this guy who owed them money and say that he’s just dropping by with one of his clients and bring Chopper with him. Now, I don’t know what it’s like in the UK, but in Australia, you’re not allowed to stand over a person – it’s illegal. Like, it’s against the law to intimidate people to get them to do something. Anyway, the next day they both show up to this guy’s place, and Chopper just walks in, sunnies down, arms folded and sits on the couch. Doesn’t. Say. Anything. Our manager is like, ‘look, mate, I really need that money’, and the guy looks at him, looks at Chopper and just goes, ‘yeah, no problem’.

“Punk allows me to get out my anger” I’m an angry person. I’m not going to apologise for that, that’s just who I am. It’s a bit like being a champagne bottle; if you don’t pop the lid off every now and then, the whole thing will eventually explode.

Growing up, almost everyone I met was so calm and positive and shit. I don’t know what it’s like for dudes, but if you’re a chick and you’re angry all you get is ‘you need to chill; you’re being hysterical’. I never got that, as my life, in general, has a lot of things to be angry about. Without even getting into the whole state of the world, there are certainly loads of things that piss me off. For example, when people go, ‘you’re only up there because you’re wearing short shorts’, or when people don’t listen to you because you’re a girl or whatever. Like, try dealing with casual sexism all the time without getting a bit fucking aggro.

I think that’s why I’ve always been attracted to punk. I can remember the feeling of finding this space where you were allowed to be really gnarly and shit, and being like, ‘oh shit, this is what I need’. I mean, playing live lets me get this aggression out of me. Don’t get me wrong, I try to treat everyone with respect – like give people the benefit of the doubt or whatever – but if people are being an arsehole, I don’t kind of see it as fun. It opens up a new avenue for a bit of rage.

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Retold 10 years of Primary Colours: the left-turn album of our lifetime that changed how everyone felt about The Horrors,

by Fergal Kinney. Photography by Faris Badwan

Who Can Say “We were doing the final mix of the album in Hackney,” Horrors guitarist Josh Hayward tells me, “and I remember walking to do the mix and thinking that if a car came in front of me I could just push it out the way. We were completely intoxicated by it.”

A spring afternoon in the beer garden of a Stoke Newington pub, and the five markedly different personalities that make up the Horrors are slowly assembling; gossiping, fiddling with roll-ups, ordering drinks. They’re here to talk about Primary Colours ahead of a tenth anniversary standalone performance of the record at the Royal Albert Hall on May 9. Not ones for nostalgia, this afternoon is the first time the group have sat down and discussed the record that would transform not only the world inside the Horrors, but the landscape it entered into.

This exploratory, psychedelic record – throbbing with violent electronics and doomy soundscapes – would act as an antiseptic to the post-Libertines landfill still dominant in 2009. Its role in ushering in a British psych revival has been under acknowledged, too. For the band themselves, it took them from hyped

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garage rock fetishists with the wardrobe of an amateur Rocky Horror production to something of an indie institution, with crossover hits and festival headline slots. Just what happened?

Faris Badwan, the group’s faintly diffident, faintly static frontman is the last to arrive – dressed in grey pinstriped suit and black Crombie, he looks for all the world like a 1950s racehorse spiv. The band are already busily chewing over their disputed memories of the time surrounding Primary Colours.

“You have to have people who extremely hate you,” explains Faris, extending an eye over his bandmates, “for you to get the other side as well.” Something about the early incarnation of the Horrors rubbed people up the wrong way. Their 2007 debut, Strange House, certainly found an audience (“we were probably one of the last bands that influenced or inspired kids and fans to really get into the look and come to the gigs looking a certain way,” Rhys Webb tells me. “There were queues around the block of people in drainpipes and polka dots and spiky hair or whatever.”) but the hype (they were NME cover stars before

Retold

having released an album) and their heavily stylised image forced a potent counter-response. Q magazine called the record “disappointingly insubstantial”, whilst Rolling Stone sneered that the ‘attention-grabbing’ band lacked “the soul to be weird”. Strange rumours abounded: “Some people genuinely believed that we were a jazz band who had heard that indie rock was a goldmine,” Faris scoffs. Tom Cowan, the band’s synth and keyboard player, points out that had someone manufactured the Horrors it would have been a pretty dismal business move. “We still owe Universal £500,000,” says Faris, “and I’m not even exaggerating.”

— Missiles and war paint — I myself vividly remember, as a teenager, watching the Horrors, at the tail end of 2007, supporting Arctic Monkeys at Manchester’s cavernous G Mex arena. The mood of the (largely male, largely intoxicated) crowd towards them seethed with rancour: DIY missiles and bodily fluids rained onto the stage.

“Those gigs were quite a surprise,” Rhys beams.

“I got £30 in change for the taxi home,” laughs Faris.

“They threw all sorts of stuff. Rhys had a black eye – there was an aeroplane seat belt thrown at us; specifically an aeroplane one.” “…mobile phone batteries, coins heated up by lighters,” continues Rhys. “Before walking out to the second gig, I remember literally getting my eyeliner and smearing it like war paint.

Whatever they didn’t like, we just ramped it up and shoved it back in their faces.”

Just what gave the Horrors such nerve; such faith? In rehearsals, both the roles within the group and the sounds they were making were in profound flux. A whole album of material was demo’d and then scrapped; all five members knew that this was the necessary but difficult birth of something new coming into being. In the van, at rehearsals, in the early hours of the morning, they were coming into contact for the first time with ’70s German records, Brian Eno and acid house. “I remember hearing records after nights out,” Tom explains. “Hearing PiL and thinking, hmm… there’s a bit more going on here.” Soon, they were feeding all of this into their rehearsal space in Kings Cross and running around the capital picking up vintage synths.

The first breakthrough was the writing of ‘Three Decades’, the earliest track that would make the cut on ‘Primary Colours’.

“That song felt like a signifier,” says Tom. Around this point, Tom was absent from rehearsals one day and Rhys – previously the organ player – decided to pick up the bass. It would be this day that the group wrote ‘Mirror Image’ and ‘Do You Remember’ (he remains, wisely, on bass to this day). “When you started playing bass it was more or less starting from scratch,” Faris tells Rhys,

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Retold “I thought we’d written one of the greatest records in the world, which I think you can only think at that age” — Josh Hayward

“for me that was what was so cool about it. There wasn’t any fear, it was just instinctive; those songs were written so quickly.” The pace upped and the band were writing four/five songs a week.

“I was literally coming home from rehearsals thinking that whatever has just happened was absolutely amazing,” Rhys says, still exuding the rushing spirit of that moment. “We didn’t ever have a conversation about doing something different – it wasn’t even that we needed to stop doing that – there was just this moment of transition where we were progressing.”

And then, at the start of 2008, the Horrors were dropped

by Universal. The band had played their label bosses ‘Three Decades’, as well as the track ‘Primary Colours’. “We thought they were going to love it,” Faris grimaces, “and they just said, these will not get on the radio. The end.” A pause. “I’ve no idea what they actually wanted us to sound like.”

— Geoff Barrow and the demos — Buoyed by blind faith alone, the band knuckled down and continued. Their management held their nerve, and in the end The Horrors would remain unsigned for just fourteen days.

They were booked to play London’s Astoria in February 2008, and chose to debut a raft of new tracks. The visionary head of XL Records, Richard Russell (who has released his own music with the likes of Sampha and Damon Albarn), went to the shop knowing that the band were now out of contract.

“He just said he didn’t care what we wanted to do next, didn’t want to hear the demos, he just wanted to sign us,” explains Rhys.

“He came to the rehearsal studio, we turned off all the lights and played him what we had,” Tom remembers. “He said it was one of the most powerful experiences he’d ever had in his entire life.”

Signed to XL, the group made contact with Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, who had booked the Horrors for his band’s curated ATP festival in 2007. The Horrors had been sharing demos with Barrow, who quickly offered to produce them. Far from being the Svengali-like auteur behind the record that some would paint him as, Barrow’s role was actually one of reigning in the group’s experimentation, and holding a fidelity to their original demos.

“We were all a little disappointed having been excited to get this massive dose of Geoff and all the things he loved,” says Rhys, “when the first thing he said to us was that we should do exactly what we’ve done on the demos.” Rhys concedes now that this was completely correct.

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Retold “He said people are going to think that I did this and there’s nothing you can do about that,” recalls Tom, “he anticipated that. But really, his whole thing was saying ‘no’.”

Infatuated with all things electronic and any available studio gimmick, the band remember “driving Geoff insane” during recording. Barrow, meanwhile, spent no small amount of time twiddling knobs to get guitar parts sounding exactly as they did on the demos.

Weekdays were spent recording in Bath, and then, on Fridays, the five Horrors would pile in a car and hurtle up the M4 towards East London for long, thoroughly forgotten weekends of partying. “I can remember us all driving back from London and feeling absolutely terrible, everyone on comedowns,” laughs Rhys, “then getting woken up to go and record a bass part. I think this is important though; we were still really at this point of freedom where everything was happening and songs felt like they were writing themselves, and it’s a magical time that doesn’t last forever. We’d get to a certain point at the end of the day and feel, like, wow what just happened there?

What’s going on?”

The high point of recording, the band all agree, was the seven-minute Krautrock-infused opus ‘Sea Within a Sea’. It would be the first track released from the album. Though the band would be painted as connoisseurs pouring over the minutiae of German obscurities, the reality was that their knowledge of bands like CAN, Neu! and Harmonia was actually pretty sketchy. This gives the record much of its character, its spirit; the zeal of the newly converted conveying a first missive. Tom points to the Talking Heads track ‘The Overload’, which conjures an uncanny impression of Joy Division based not on ever having listened to the band, but on what they might sound like having read about them in the music press.

Of course, British bands have been referencing the electronic utopia of Krautrock since the late ’70s, but the internet afforded those records an ease of access which had always been absent – former collectors items are now just a click and an aux cable away. Simon Reynolds’ post-punk study Rip It Up and Start Again was read within the band too. “Just reading that book gives you ideas for ten different bands,” says Faris.

“That book was really influential for me.”

They hadn’t heard CAN’s soaring ‘Mother Sky’, nor Neu’s manifesto of minimalism ‘Hallogallo’, but in ‘Sea Within a Sea’ created something that seemed to explicitly reference those records. “That kind of feel,” evokes Rhys, “that kind of rhythm, we hadn’t heard a lot of that music but we just wanted to go for it.” Viewed as a highly considered crystallisation of influences, Primary Colours was anything but. It was a series of first impressions and happy accidents – even the album’s sleeve was

a polaroid carelessly taken impromptu at a photo session. As the character Lees puts it in Alan Moore’s From Hell, “I made it up, and it all came true anyway.”

— Self-belief and standing still — Upon completion, the band were evangelical about the value of what they had recorded; consumed with intoxicating self-belief. “I thought we’d written one of the greatest records in the world,” reflects Josh, “which I think you can only think at that age.” Rough mixes of Primary Colours were handed out to friends, who were startled at the band’s progression. “They thought we were going to do something good,” remembers Tom, “but not as good as this.” The music press too was taking notice, whispers spreading across offices about the novelty band who had shed their skin. (Why does the music press love the narrative of a band they once derided changing tack? It vindicates their platform and status. Look, it says, you listened – and we were right.)

Once the glowing reviews came in, Faris remembers feeling mournful and nostalgic for their former Marmite appeal.

Their biggest challenge, however, would be translating the record live. Faris’ frenetic onstage nihilism was perfect for their first incarnation; not quite so for elongated cosmic excavations. The band debuted the record at a sold out show at London’s Rich Mix cinema. “For me, personally, it was a bit confusing what to do on stage,” Faris explains. “Before you could just hurl yourself around the stage and it would be this violent thing, but for that gig in particular I remember my head was kind of split in two.”

The tracks from Strange House had, for Faris, “stopped making sense” – they were tacked on as an encore, and were quietly retired from the set soon after. “We had a crowd of people at the gig who had maybe heard ‘Sea Within a Sea’,” recalls Rhys, “but hadn’t heard anything else. They were quite taken aback, they were used to thrashing about.”

Reflecting on the record, for the band it’s the intensity of that moment that burns brightest. “For me,” Rhys explains, “that album is particularly special because it still feels at the point of youthful freedom, and really being surprised and excited beyond belief at what we were doing.” It was, too, the last album in which they would ever be young.

“In terms of how everything fell into place,” Faris says slowly, “it’s certainly Primary Colours. And… it’s not really within your control whether a record has that.”

LOUD AND QUIET ZERO POUNDS / VOLUME 03 / ISSUE 05 / 100 PERCENT SURPRISING

The Horrors What a difference a year makes

THE XX MAGIK MARKERS GRAHAM COXON KAP BAMBINO WILD PALMS BANJO OR FREAKOUT NO PAIN IN POP PASSION PIT DIRTY PROJECTORS PEACHES

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What lies beneath 62

Essay When an artist’s origin story is as good as Abul Mogard’s or Martin Zeichnete’s does it matter that it’s probably completely false? by Daniel Dylan Wray Abul Mogard was born in Belgrade, Serbia, and spent most of his life working in a metal factory. When he retired he began to miss the clunk, clatter and rhythm of the sounds that punctuated his day. So he began to make music, experimenting with a synthesizer to reimagine the lost sounds of his environment – the whirs, immersive drones and hissing ambience. The results were incredible and releases began to stack up. Glowing reviews came pouring in and you could read gushing articles, such as a deeply personal essay on Medium that someone wrote entitled “The Calloused Hands of Abul Mogard”, in which the author talks about how he relates to the Serbian’s music due to the working class ethics and approach that permeates throughout his records.

The music of Mogard didn’t so much replicate the literal sounds of factory life but instead captured a tone and presence that was absent in Mogard’s life since he left; the music represented a longing and loneliness felt since he stepped out of factory life as he spent his days at home alone. It was a nostalgic musical tribute to the beauty of the toughness of factory life.

This sense of isolation was not just clear through the eerie, dense atmospheres and engulfing clouds of thick electronics that coat the records like a moorland fog, but also due to the fact that Mogard never truly embraced his newfound role as a celebrated cult artist. Interviews were sparse and whenever they took place were clearly done via email. Live shows were just as rare and when he did appear to perform at Berlin Atonal in 2017, he did so under a blanket of smoke and lights so dense that he was barely recognisable.

However, to look at the image of him from that show, behind all the smoke and lights, it starts to resemble a much different shape and form to the photograph of Mogard that exists: a bald, stocky, elderly man. Combine this with the very prolific nature of Mogard and the incredibly contemporary tones that emanate from his records and people began to question this story and character. Asked for comment from Mogard and his record label about his identity around yet another new release (the remix record ‘And We Are Passing Through Silently’) and there’s a big fat ‘no comment’, as there always has been.

Rumours are plentiful about the true identity of the supposed

factory worker, but the underlying consensus in the world of underground electronic music is that this is a load of bullshit and there is no Mogard.

Mogard is just one of many artists that have taken this approach over the years – to essentially create a fake identity to filter music through. Another recent similar example is the Kosmischer Läufer records, the first volume (which now stretches to four) of which was released in 2013. The story goes like this: In East Germany in the early 1970s, Martin Zeichnete worked as a sound editor for DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), the state-owned film studio. Like many young East Germans of the time he would listen furtively to West German radio at night and became infatuated with the Kosmische Musik or ‘Krautrock’ epitomised by the likes of Kraftwerk, Neu! and Cluster emerging from his neighbouring country. Martin, a keen runner, hit upon the idea of using the repetitive, motorik beats of this new music as a training aid for athletes. He thought it could benefit the mind as well as the body with the pulsing, hypnotic music bringing focus. A ‘borrowed’ prototype of Andreas Pavel’s Stereobelt showed Martin the technology to provide music on the move already existed and could easily be adapted for runners.

After sharing his concept with colleagues Martin was taken from his studio to East Berlin, quizzed by the authorities about his ideas and, fearing the worst, was surprised to find himself put to work by the Nationales Olympisches Komitee immediately. Installed in a cold Berlin studio with the few electronic instruments the state could supply (Martin asked for a Moog but was refused), he began one of the strangest journeys in music. Known to the government as State Plan 14.84L, Martin and his fellow musicians informally called it ‘Projekt Kosmischer Läufer’ (Cosmic Runner).

For the next 11 years Martin would be spirited to Berlin to work on tracks with little notice. He created hours of music fusing traditional rock instruments with synthesisers, early drum computers, tape slicing and looping techniques he and his engineer formulated themselves. His output included tracks for running at various paces, warm up pieces, ‘ambient’ music to play in gyms during training and pieces for artistic gymnastic routines.

— That’s the story —

01 Abul Mogard 02 Goat 03 & 04 ‘Original’ artefacts from the Projekt Kosmischer Läufer exhibition 05 Kosmischer Läufer Volume 4 06 Marvin Pontiac Greatest Hits

This hoax was so elaborate they even made fake original cassette tapes and set up an exhibition that included such items as clothing that athletes wore in the supposed athletic program.

The music has received rave reviews, many editions are now sold out, and it has been performed live by a band including

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Essay Yann Tiersen. Then there’s Prurient’s Dominick Fernow releasing music as Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement that was initially described as being part of a series of cassettes found in Papua New Guinea – lost recordings of a group of missionaries that supposedly disappeared back in the ’80s. And there’s the Seattle-based composer Norman Chambers, who dreamed up a story of the scientist Jürgen Müller making electronic music out at sea.

Then, back in 1999, there was the remarkable story of Marvin Pontiac, about how he was hit and killed by a bus in 1977.

Born in 1932, he was the son of an African father from Mali and a white Jewish mother from New Rochelle, New York. The father’s original last name was Toure but he changed it to Pontiac when the family moved to Detroit, believing it to be a conventional American name. Marvin’s father left the family when he was two years old, but when his mother was institutionalised in 1936 his father returned and brought the young boy to Bamako, Mali, where Marvin was raised until he was fifteen.

The music that he heard there would influence him forever. At fifteen Marvin moved by himself to Chicago where he became versed in playing blues harmonica. At the age of seventeen, Marvin was accused by the great Little Walter of copying his harmonica style. This accusation led to a fistfight outside of a small club on Maxwell Street. Losing a fight to the much smaller Little Walter was so humiliating to the young Marvin that he left Chicago and moved to Lubbock, Texas, where he became a plumber’s assistant. Not much is known about him for the next three years. There are unsubstantiated rumours that Marvin may have been involved in a bank robbery in 1950. In 1952, he had a minor hit for Acorn Records with the then controversial song ‘I’m a Doggy’. Oddly enough, unbeknownst to Marvin and his label, he simultaneously had an enormous bootleg success in Nigeria with the beautiful song ‘Pancakes’. His disdain and mistrust of the music business is well documented and he soon fell out with Acorn’s owner, Norman Hector. Although, approached by other labels, Marvin refused to record for anyone unless the owner of the label came to his home and mowed his lawn.

Reportedly, Marvin’s music was the only music that Jackson Pollock would ever listen to while he painted. In 1970 Marvin believed that he was abducted by aliens. He felt his mother had had a similar unsettling experience, which had led to her breakdown. He stopped playing music and dedicated all of his time and energy to amicably contacting these creatures who had previously probed his body so brutally. When he was arrested for riding a bicycle naked down the side streets of Slidell, it provided a sad but clear view of Marvin’s coming years.

In 1971 he moved back to Detroit where he drifted forever and permanently into insanity.

“There were a few journalists who were duped by the hoax and they were angry” 64

The album came loaded with hyperbolic quotes too.

“A Revelation,” according to Leonard Cohen. “A dazzling collection,” said David Bowie. Whilst, apparently, Flea grew up learning bass to his records. The reality was much more straightforward, however: there were no fights, institutions, moments of insanity or anyone from Africa singing. It was all a project by John Lurie, the actor and artist best known musically for co-founding the jazz outfit the Lounge Lizards.

Whilst the stories of alien abduction might have been a red flag for some, people – including several journalists – did believe the hype and the story, and ran reviews accordingly. Years later Lurie told Perfect Sound Forever: “There were a few journalists who were duped by the hoax and they were angry. Mostly white guys [Lurie is white] saying it was wrong to pretend to be black, but I found out that two of them had done these rave reviews on it until their magazines told them that it was me and that it wouldn’t be credible to run their article about the insane African bluesman who had been rediscovered.”

— J and T — There is of course perfect validity in suggesting Lurie adopting the character of a deceased mentally ill African man to sell records is crass, even if he felt the whole thing was nothing more than a giggle at the time to avoid the repetitious mundanity of the album campaign press cycle. “I had to send bios to people [for the record],” he said of the decision. “I hate beyond hate doing that. It was immensely more fun to do it this way.”

Twenty years later, time of course has changed and whilst Lurie returned as Pontiac in 2017, he did so under no pretence; no longer trying to keep up the story.

You would think this is because during current times being a white artist essentially pretending to be black in any context is a no-no. However, sadly that hasn’t stopped other artists adopting such images in recent years. Remember when the only promo photo for the mysterious unnamed duo Jungle (known simply as J and T) was a photograph of two hip-looking black men? Only after endless buzz and being dubbed “the hottest band in Britain” – i.e. when they had traded off the image of being black for a sufficient enough time that they had succeeded – did they reveal their true identity: two white dudes with laptops who were having a go at making funk-tinged electronic pop after their previous self-described “indie dross” had failed.

Bafflingly, it seemed to – and continues to – not bother anyone. The press kept coming; the gigs; the reviews; the creeping up the festival posters. However, would the music of Jungle really, truly have taken off in the way it did if it was presented honestly by the creators from the off? Would two white guys from a failed indie band who went to a £20,000 a year private school, knocking out generic laptop music, have been the buzz band of the year?

Similarly, as fantastic a live band as the Swedish psych outfit Goat are, would they have reached such prominence

Essay Jungle’s first press shot. And the sleeve for Norman Chambers’ alter ego Jürgen Müller.

and attention if it weren’t for the elaborate tribal outfits, face masks and accompanying press releases claiming they are from a remote village and practice voodoo (an unconfirmed story that remains so because they refuse to do anything other than email interviews, with the exception of very rare phoners)?

— All views welcome — Anonymity is of course a magical and alluring pull in music. Just look at an artist like Jandek, the cult avant-folk/blues musician that has been releasing records as an unknown entity since 1978, and who didn’t perform publicly until 2004. Between those dates he had conducted just three interviews. Over that period of time his status as the ultimate reclusive artist was so embedded into his musical output that the concept of him existing as a public figure seemed at odds with what people had spent decades immersed in.

Identity is a complex thing in the social media age. There are of course perfectly valid arguments that even artists who present themselves under their own name still do so through an elaborately calculated and managed sense. In an era when bands and artists spew out meaningless hashtag politics to score online woke points, is it any less fake to simply lie about your entire existence under the guise of character? It balances an interesting and occasionally perilous line between exploring identity and being exploitative; between wily marketing and desperate tactics to do what it takes to get yourself heard and seen. So it asks the question: playfulness or perniciousness?

When I spoke to BBC 6 Music presenter Mary Anne-Hobbs in 2017 for The Quietus’ Baker’s Dozen feature (people pick their 13 favourite albums of all time) she selected ‘Circular Forms’ by Abul Mogard. “I don’t actually care if it’s a fictional story or if it’s true,” she told me. “For me that narrative and the nature of the music work perfectly harmoniously. I love it. I was a factory girl myself – when I left school at 16 I worked in a factory for

a year. There’s a romance to it. Usually once a story has been contested then the truth will float to the top, but with this instance the truth has been contested with me several times and no alternative truth has been presented as yet, so I like to buy into it.”

So does buying into the myth, as long as the music is good, supersede a need for truth? Does authenticity matter if the yarn or the art is good enough? A cursory glance at Kosmiche Laufer’s Bandcamp page suggests not, with various albums, T-shirts, cassettes and packages all glowing red in the words: Sold Out. Drew McFadyen of Unknown Capability Records (the likely person behind the music) was willing to speak about the project.

“Everyone is absolutely entitled to their opinion on this music and its origin,” he says, adding cheekily: “Sometimes I don’t believe Martin’s story myself.” He tells me that they have never had a single request for a refund or a complaint that the project is fake. Whether people willingly buy this knowing it’s fake but love the music anyway, or are clinging on with a slither of hope that it might be real, it makes no difference to McFadyen. “If people take Martin’s story at face value and think it’s some art project, or a steaming pile of sauerkraut but still love the music, we are happy to accommodate. All views are welcome here.”

The underlying question around all of this remains, of course: why? Pretending to be a retired Serbian factory worker is of course not the same as racial or cultural appropriation but they are linked and the answer is somewhat axiomatic in the fact that articles like this are being written. More pieces have been written about this kind of music because of both its backstory and its likely fakery than ever would have been written if some Scottish band started knocking out some retro 1970s German music. The real answer to this approach arguably comes when McFadyen is asked about the ongoing success of his project, as volumes continue to sell. “It’s been very satisfying to see the music spread naturally through word of mouth. Thankfully, as the advertising budget has been, and remains, zero.”

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You do remember Rob Thomas, right?

He was the guy who sold a hundred million copies of his song ‘Smooth’ with Santana. It was state-sanctioned that you had to own it, because, in 1999, it was the best song to ever be recorded. You remember. You’d listen to ‘Smooth’ twenty-five times, or daisy-chain that and ‘Dance the Night Away’ by The Mavericks. Back and forth between the two, for hours. The guy that looks like a sexy bin man. ROB THOMAS! He’s got a new album coming out this month and the artwork is really working for him.

Not the lettering, so much. I can see that he’s gone for the whole anti-design approach but it looks a bit Funkypigeon.com on account of Rob insisting that his name is a little bigger. All lowercase, though – a nice, modern touch that looks promising for a new album by RB THMS in a few years time.

But let’s address Rob’s pose, which really plays to his strengths. If Rob was here right now he’d be smiling, I’m sure, and say something like, “is that what you call my arse?” (Rob loves his arse). I’d struggle to deny it.

It’s probably best if we gloss over the single hand on the back of Rob’s head. I mean, it’s smart – the way it

shows off his friendship bracelets and somehow makes us think about Rob having his nob out – but I don’t like to think of Rob stood in a photographer’s studio like this, with the photographer saying, “that’s really nice, actually”.

When Rob posted this sleeve online last month, Twitter lit up with over 118 comments. The fans are very much into it. “Welcome to the Hot Buns Club,” said @JPMusicLuvr, attaching Springsteen’s Born In The USA cover and a still from George Michael’s ‘Faith’; “Now that’s a tight booty!!” wrote @ DeeluvsRob, whose whole feed is dedicated to Rob’s arse. Mostly though, people were losing their minds over the jacket and – literally – begging Rob to sell them at his shows (except for @nickVrusson, who commented: “Not a fan of the title or album cover, but at least we know the release date now” – c’mon Nick, play the game: this feed is for bum and jacket chat).

Rob would be a complete mug to not sell these jackets at his shows, not least because once he loads in at Dingwalls he’ll be able to sweep Camden market for them and, judging by the enthusiam of @MaryAdams20 et al, mark them up by 500% to £25. By the time his fans are sick of explaining to aging Rolling Stones fans that it’s a Rob Thomas jacket actually, he’ll be halfway up the M1 mooning cars on a dare.

1001 things you didn’t know about Rod Stewart

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illustration by kate prior