Loud And Quiet 134 – Black Midi by LoudAndQuiet

Lungbutter, Manuel Gรถttsching, Martha Skye Murphy, Just Mustard, Biig Piig, Porridge Radio, Crumb, Jamila Woods

issue 134

A crusade against the unnecessary

Black Midi

Thu 13 Jun

Andrew Bird Wed 19 Jun

Conversations with Nick Cave Mon 8 Jul

Jรณnsi & Alex Somers: Riceboy Sleeps with the London Contemporary Orchestra Fri 19 Jul

Clint Mansell: Moon with the London Contemporary Orchestra

Sun 22 Sep

CHRISTEENE: The Lion The Witch and The Cobra with special guest Fever Ray Sat 28 Sep

Max Cooper: Yearning For The Infinite Wed 16 Oct

Holly Herndon: PROTO

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 Francis, Alexander Smail, Brian Coney, Chris Watkeys, David Zammitt, Daniel Dylan-Wray, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Hayley Scott, Ian Roebuck, Joe Goggins, Katie Beswick, Katie Cutforth, Liam Konemann, Luke Cartledge, Max Pilley, Megan Wallace, Rachel Redfern, Rosie Ramsden, Reef Younis, Susan Darlington, Sam Walton, Tom Critten, Tristan Gatward. Contributing photographers Brian Guido, Christopher Fenner, Colin Medley, David Cortes, Dan Kendall, Dustin Condren, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Jenna Foxton, Jody Evans, Jonangelo Molinari, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Nathanael Turner, Nathaniel Wood, Phil Sharp, Sophie Barloc, Sonny McCartney, Timothy Cochrane, Tom Porter.

Issue 134

Bands like Black Midi aren’t meant to cause the fuss they have, but over the past year they’ve made a gossip conga of the music industry, whose small talk went from “have you seen Black Midi yet” to wagers on which label would eventually win the bid to sign them. Apparently everyone piled in, for a band who had only released one (weird) 7-inch single, who had given hardly any interviews. The interest wasn’t disproportionate in terms of their experimental live excellence, but it was considering their commercial appeal – a victory for underground music and Black Midi’s anti-everything approach to forging a career in music. In Luke Cartledge’s cover feature, ahead of their debut album’s release next month, they deftly deny their own myth while inavertedly feeding it. Thank God. Thank the gossip conga. Stuart Stubbs

With special thanks to Andreas Wald, Ben Ayres, Cal Cashin, Dan Carson, Dan McCormick, Jamie Woolgar, Lauren Barley, Michelle Kambasha, Nathan Beazer, Rob Chute, Stephanie Duncan-Bosu.

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

Just Mustard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Martha Skye Murphy . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Crumb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Porridge Radio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Lungbutter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Black Midi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Manuel Göttsching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Jamila Woods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Biig Piig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 03

Technology

Pop’s Desolate Attic: Saving the Songs too Shit For Spotify Fulfilment, wrote the poet Philip Larkin, is a ‘desolate attic’. Having your desires fully satisfied is never fully satisfying. Living as we do in the era of digital plenty, many of us have forgotten – many of have never known – analogue scarcity. A song heard on a radio; irretrievable, quicksilver until its next broadcast (will there be another broadcast?) or wrestled to the ground by physical purchase. David Bowie’s now famous 1999 prediction that music would become “like running water, or electricity” typifies a present where over 35 million tracks can be accessed instantly on streaming platforms that have become kingmakers in their own right. There are, however, taps that are still turned off; boxes in the desolate attic that remain sealed. “We’ve all had that experience at a party where the wrong version of a song has come on, or a cheap cover version that’s the only one online,” Rob Johnson tells me. Johnson, a 35-yearold Londoner, set up the Twitter handle @Pop_Activism at the start of 2018, the feed a shop window for a project that aimed to plug the gaps in the digital surplus. What happens to the music deemed too shit for Spotify? The artists nobody remembered to remember to transfer online. For Johnson, things began when his friend – the trance pop star Jan Johnston, whose popularity was at its apex in the 1990s – was trying with little success to get her back catalogue onto streaming services. For artists who are out of the music industry it can be a highly complex process simply finding out who owns your work and art. Knowing that Johnson worked at a law firm and, crucially, was fanatical about ’90s pop music, she suspected he would be best equipped to help her out. She was right, and lit a spark that turned Johnson into an unlikely campaigner. “Fortuitously, parts of it were owned by the big three – Sony, Warner and Universal – so I just rang up the main switchboards of each, asking if they owned this music and would they release it. After a few months the music came online. A few months later I was moving over all my old MP3 playlists from iTunes and I just noticed how much music was missing. Why don’t I try asking those contacts I made putting this stuff up online?” Once his Twitter account was set up, Johnson began publicly pressuring labels on social media whilst privately doing the hard graft of untangling a vast web of publishers, record labels and management. He realised that there were already thousands of like-minded individuals using social media to get their favourite pop hits onto streaming services; they just weren’t being heard, and the disparate movement lacked a focal point. Johnson quickly became a figurehead, with people tweeting at him with requests for him to campaign for. Successes came early, but it would be July 2018 when Johnson claimed his most prized scalp – the first number 1 single

words by fergal kinney. illustration by kate prior

that he was able to digitally secure, Shanks and Bigfoot’s defining work ‘Sweet Like Chocolate’. It was the 8th biggest selling single of 1999; I was six years’ old when this was released and remember watching its animated video, singing its playground-ready chorus hook. “The rights had reverted to Shanks and Bigfoot themselves,” says Johnson, “but they had long since retired from the music industry. Other challenges can be that the rightsholders don’t actually have the audio – where they’ve acquired these off someone who’s been shoddy with the archive – so I’ve done a lot of frantically getting tracks off CDs.” How has the music industry responded to Johnson’s unlikely activism? “The response from labels has been…varied. The main three are on board – they get it and think it’s a good thing. Some of the independents are smaller and more agile and can get stuff on quickly, they’re quite keen. Some international labels I do have problems with – the US don’t seem to take kindly to a member of the public contacting people there.” Though taking a sabbatical from his activism to spend a few months travelling, Johnson is already hatching plans for his return. There are still prizes in sight. The 2001 Mariah Carey soundtrack to the film Glitter is one (it was released on September 11th; the world had other priorities). Another is Dana International’s 1998 Eurovision winner, ‘Diva’. For Johnson, there’s a romantic attachment to these forgotten pop figures, as well as some level of nostalgia. “There is a sadness about pop acts from years gone by and just how disposable the whole thing was many years ago. The LBGT community in particular love the fallen diva, or the flopped boy band, and there’s a frustration that people still have about these bodies of work sitting gathering dust in a record label vault. This stuff could be cherished by people if only it was out there. For artists, it makes you feel like you’ve brought some closure to them in getting their work back out there.”

Nature

Plant Fiction There’s a basil plant on my kitchen windowsill; the kind you buy, ambitiously, from Sainsbury’s instead of a plastic-wrapped single serving of the stuff, certain at time of purchase that this will be the solution to your fresh basil needs forever more, that the extra expense represents an investment, promising years of flavoursome food and transforming each loveless plate of pasta and sauce into a gourmet experience. The kind you imagine repotting into a cute brass plant pot when it outgrows the standard-issue plastic one, maybe giving it a name, its existence in your kitchen sparking a transformation from a functional room for cooking in, blighted by immoveable grease and mould, to an inviting, beautifully lit and seemingly self-cleaning creative space where delicious meals are only one part of an irritatingly smug tableau of seamless modern living. I say “basil plant”, but really I mean “ex-basil plant”: two weeks on from my daydream of a herb-based utopia, the poor thing is dead on the ledge, its leaves shrivelled and limp, a monument to the fact that the only times I remembered to water it were when I was back in Sainsbury’s, walking past its cousins, feeling guilty about the neglect and the waste, left only to wonder if it’s better disposed of in the recycling or the food-waste bin. If this sounds like a well-worn cycle, that’s because it’s not the first time I’ve lived it. Indeed, my inability to keep any sort of houseplant alive is on a par with that of Depeche Mode to get enough. With that in mind, then, imagine my delight at stumbling upon Mort Garson’s Plantasia, a 1976 instrumental album specifically written for plants, scientifically formulated to encourage their growth based on claims made in occult literature that houseplants could mind-read, predict earthquakes, and, most importantly, enjoy music. Plantasia was originally given away with every houseplant purchase from Los Angeles’s nowdefunct Mother Earth Plant Boutique. However, in recent years

the record has found new life as one of the earliest examples of an album played entirely on the Moog synthesiser, and its initially ultra-niche distribution model has been updated for the modern day, finally reissued on vinyl next month by the Sacred Bones label. I’ll admit I was initially sceptical of the record’s capabilities when I put it on in the living room. After all, the plantae kingdom predates human existence by half a billion years, and will also likely outlive our currently scheduled demise in 2034, so the idea that what plants have really been waiting for all this time is some easy-listening tunes played on an atomic age electronic instrument is slightly fanciful. But, reader, I shouldn’t have been. Barely seconds after the opening ditty bloomed into life, I sensed from the other room my spurned basil plant’s drooping stalks perk up, like a sleeping dog’s ears upon hearing “walkies”. By track two, the plant was fully upright once more, as if woken from deep statis, its leaves resaturated with colour and scent, and by the album’s midpoint its vines had begun to extend rapidly down from the windowsill, bypassing the washing up and slinking into the living room, drawn to the source of this audio lifeforce, tendrils hugging themselves around my speakers to squeeze out every last note of Plantasia’s resuscitating vibrations. Soon, my environment was more basil than living room, a cross between the Little Shop of Horrors and the carnivorous vines scene from Jumanji. Bound to the sofa, I became entangled with enough basil for a thousand and one nights of pasta and pesto. The record played on. Thank heavens, then, for Plantasia’s final track, ‘Music to Soothe The Savage Snake Plant’, which managed, as presumably intended, to quell my resurrected basil, loosening the plant’s grip on me and encouraging it to retreat to its windowsill home, returned to life and now ready to serve, and be served, in my next meal. Now, that story about Plantasia is not true. My basil plant remains very much dead, Garson’s half-hour Moog adventure just an enjoyable bout of hippie whimsy. However, what this tells you about Plantasia – that still resonates. When Garson powered up his synth, he dreamt of his music having a magical, transformative utility. He’s not the only one: there are bottomless Spotify playlists of algorithmically composed music to aid concentration or creativity, albums to relax your pet, tracks of supersonic drones to ward off bugs and teenagers. But Garson’s particular seam of pseudoscience is perhaps the purest: he didn’t strive to create a more efficient working day or a calmer dog, but to write music that would save the planet from ecological disaster. Ponder that as you cue up the next Parquet Courts. Back in Sainsbury’s again, as I pass the rows of pert basil plants waiting to be taken home and left to wither, I start to fantasise about Plantasia being played over the store tannoy, and about what could ensue.

words by sam walton. illustration by kate prior

END OF THE ROAD 29 Aug - 1 Sept

Larmer Tree Gardens Dorset

“A truly special musical celebration” ★★★★★ The Guardian

BEIRUT / METRONOMY / MICHAEL KIWANUKA / SPIRITUALIZED SPIRITUALIZED //

COURTNEY BARNETT / JARVIS COCKER ( ) / )/ SLEAFORD MODS / LOW / DEERHUNTER / INTRODUCING JARV IS

PARQUET COURTS / MITSKI / CATE LE BON / BAXTER DURY / DANIEL AVERY / WIRE / CASS MCCOMBS / BEAK> / GOAT GIRL / SERPENTWITHFEET / NUBYA GARCIA / LET’S EAT GRANDMA / JESSICA PRATT / ATA K AK / Y VES TUMOR / STEVE GUNN / KIK AGAKU MOYO / BC CAMPLIGHT / MOSES BOYD / BL ACK MIDI / KELLY LEE OWENS / KERO KERO BONITO / FONTAINES D.C. / GEORGIA / TUNNG / BCUC / KOKOKO! / T YLER CHILDERS / LONNIE HOLLEY / WILLIAM T YLER / NÉRIJA / STELL A DONNELLY / JADE BIRD / THE BETHS / & MANY MORE

Secret shows, art, comedy, cinema, literature, karaoke, late night dance floors, family friendly activities, award-winning food and real ale.

endoftheroadfestival.com

Ageing

Sweet 16: Carly Rae Jepsen used to go running in the woods listening to Tom Waits

I was 16 in 2001, living where I grew up in Mission, British Columbia. Mission is a very small, tightknit community, and I was lucky because they had this strong community theatre scene going on. I indulged in all of that. I grew up in two houses – my mum’s and my dad’s (we’d switch every two days), which were about 10 minutes away from each other, and separating their houses was this forest park pathway, so I’d play a lot in my childhood and my teens. I didn’t realise how special it was, but I’d be riding my bike on the trail and hiking up to the monastery there. There was a lot of nature. I was definitely a bit of a goody-goody, but that isn’t always easy. I had four parents who were all teachers or Principals of schools, so I was trying really hard to be good at school. I wanted to be the star of the musicals and get straight A’s. I was an annoying, perfectionist goody-goody. And I did get to be the star in the musicals: I got to be Annie in Annie, Dorothy in The Wiz and Sandy in Grease. That was my thing – at 16 I started to get into song-writing, but before that any opportunity to perform I was attracted to. My parents indulged me in all of it. I have one sister, who went to the other high school in town, where my dad was the Principal, and an older brother who went to the same high school as me, and thank god for him. He was extremely popular, and being a musical theatre nerd I don’t think I would have had it so easy if I hadn’t had a brother who was so loved by everyone. My most potent memory of Colin was when a bunch of kids were bullying a boy who was disabled and my brother went and stood up for him in front of everybody and shamed these kids, and it changed everyone’s perception of how they treated this kid for the rest of the year. That was a proud moment.

To describe me best, I floated around a bit – I wasn’t a popular kid but I wasn’t an un-liked kid either. I had a best friend who was in Basketball, and we got invited to the parties, but neither of us drank. She was religious, and I wasn’t but I attached myself to her for the safety of it. I was a bit of a late bloomer – it was an innocent, long, drawn-out childhood. All I wanted was to be a singer and a songwriter, but I didn’t know how to do that. I think my dad thought I’d be a music teacher, and I did go to music college for a year but then I got so into songwriting that that took over, and I got really into the bohemian, Vancouver lifestyle. The first song I wrote was a protest song when I was 9. It was called ‘They’re Cutting Down the Big Trees’. But the next song I wrote was a proper song called ‘Dear You’, for a boy, who I played it to. He was a gorgeous recluse who played chess, and I ended up taking him to prom, so the song worked. But I wasn’t into the music that the other kids were into in 2001; I was into Joni Mitchell and I’d go running to Tom Waits, which my dad thought was weird. He’d say that the contemporary jazz I like was for old ladies. The pop music I liked was Sinead O’Connor. And I had one hobby away from music, which was long distance running. It was something I bonded with with my dad over – we’d go running in the woods. It sounds like I was really mature, but there was a real innocence to all this. I wasn’t thinking to fit in and go to parties and drink – I think I went to one party ever and drank, and kissed one boy, and it was a really big deal for me. And then I moved to Vancouver and became corrupted. My parents put me in this sorority house, which we thought was going to be this safe sanctuary, and it turned out to be the biggest party house on the whole campus. I enjoyed the freedom.

as told to stuart stubbs

NEW RELEASES OUT NOW

PATIENCE ‘Dizzy Spells’

BLACK PEACHES ‘Fire In The Hole’

Night School LP/LPX/CD Hanging Moon LP/CD Patience began as bedroom synth project for songwriter Roxanne “an irresistible creation… a swamp-mulched country boogie, its Clifford after the break up of her acclaimed indie pop band Veronica slide guitar and pedal steel giving way to something funkier and Falls. Produced by Todd Edwards (Daft Punk) & Lewis Cook (Free more shamanic, a rising brazilian percussion with shades Love/Happy Meals) Dizzy Spells features all three long-sold out singles. of Dr John, can and little feat” - Q magazine.

ZIG ZAGS ‘They’ll Never Take Us Alive’

Riding Easy LP/CD “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

GUADALUPE PLATO ‘Three Demons’

Everlasting Records LP/CD “Spanish group Guadalupe Plata release their fifth album, titled Three Demons. The band describe the album as "a new attempt to go further and beyond, in our crusade for regression and the idea of creating our own personal 'Gris Gris'. Their music is the result of a chemical experiment that mixes the raw edges of Hound Dog aylor, Skip James, John Lee Hooker with the insanity of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and the post–modern sounds of Jon Spencer, The Fall, Captain Beefheart and Nick Cave.

KANDODO3 ‘K3’

SARAH DAVACHI ‘Pale Bloom’

THEE OH SEES ‘Hounds of Foggy Notion’

Rooster CD/2LP “Brand new studio full length from Bristol based sike-o-nauts, orbiting in The Heads’ realm and led by The Heads’ Simon Price.”

W25th LP/CD The prolific Los Angeles-basedcomposer returns to her first instrument for a radiant workof quiet minimalism and poetic rumination. RIYL: La Monte Young, Eliane Radigue and Eduard Artemiev.

Castle Face LP/CD Soundtrack to “live” documentary of beloved long-running band from 2008 now reissued after being out-of-print for years. From the Sucks Blood era.

WOLFMANHATTAN PROJECT ‘Blue Gene Stew’

JULIA SHAPIRO ‘Perfect Vision’

NIVHEK ‘After It’s Own Death / Walking In A Spiral Towards The House’

In The Red LP/CD This three piece features Bob Bert (Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, Lydia Lunch’s Retrovirus), Mick Collins (Gories, Dirtbombs) and Kid Congo Powers(Gun Club, The Cramps, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Pink Monkey Birds) It’s sleazy, swampy, trashy, no-wavey, weird and rocking! Lydia Lunch even makes an appearance, which makes this album that much more super!

Hardly Art LP/CD Perfect Version is a fully realized vision from a gifted songwriter finding a more intimate voice. "Shapiro is doubling down on those emotional complexities, exploring sexism, romantic disappointment and not giving a fuck, sometimes within the span of a single song." – Noisey. RIYL: Chastity Belt, Elliott Smith and Courtney Barnett.

W25th 2LP/CD Opaque assemblages of Mellotron, guitar, field recordings, tapes and broken FX pedals by Pacific Northwest artist Liz Harris (Grouper)

info@fortedistribution.co.uk

Interview Abstractions in trip-hop, rock loops and the score of The Favourite, by Ian Roebuck. Photography by Sophie Barloc

Just Mustard

Interview “It’s either music or Football in Dundalk; you’ve got to choose one or the other.” I’m getting a demographic breakdown of County Louth’s famous border town, sitting halfway between Dublin and Belfast. My ebullient guide is Just Mustard’s Katie Ball, proud of her birth place and her decision to hit the stage rather than the pitch. “Sometimes worlds collide though when an Oasis tribute band play in town,” she grins. “It’s got the best football team in Ireland but also the best small music venue in the Spirit Store, which is so supportive of young bands in the area. It’s just a really nice community. If you play at the Spirit Store at least 50% of the audience are going to be musicians so it feels really inclusive. And it’s a border town on the coast so it’s gorgeous.” Backed by the rest of the band we find ourselves within reach of the coast once more. Tonight Just Mustard play in Brighton as their tour with Fontaines DC – another Irish band riding a big wave – come’s to a close. “The crowds are going totally mad for them and they really have momentum right now,” says Katie, clearly enjoying the ride herself. “Instead of going for UK bands they’re choosing bands from Ireland to support them which is really positive,” says David Noonan, Just Mustard’s outspoken guitarist. “There are so many that haven’t come to the surface outside of Ireland yet.” A surprising blend of post-rock and twisted trip-hop beats has awarded Just Mustard an audience in Ireland that the rest of the UK are yet to catch up with. It’s Mezzanine-era Massive Attack by a band whose tour-bus playlist jumps from Aphex Twin to J Dilla. Their debut album, Wednesday, came out last summer to local acclaim, so much so they were nominated Irish Album of the Year at the Choice Music Prize. “There is a new panel every year of Irish journalists,” explains Katie. “They all pick their favourite album and the ones that are picked the most make the top ten shortlist.” Drummer Shane Maguire spells it out for me: “It’s pretty much the Mercury Awards but the Irish version.” Everyone nods as Shane continues. “A band called O Emperor won the album of the year, which was really cool because they were nominated three times and it was actually a swan song album as they’d just broken up.” Katie seems less enthusiastic after coming home empty handed. “Everyone was happy, but I think my Ma was annoyed as she said they’d broken up so why do they win! Anyway, how can you pick between two completely different albums and judge them?” — Wednesday — Wednesday is remarkable in its density and rawness, having been recorded in a collection of one-off passes with little time mixing. “It wasn’t a stitched together thing,” says David as fellow guitarist Mete Kalyon explains: “We talked about it loads. We wanted the listener to feel like they were in the room with you and we didn’t mind if it wasn’t polished and sounding absolutely true. We recorded it in our practice room and spent time getting it right but that live sound you hear is because of that.”

Interview

It’s a record that rewards with repeated listens, and Just Mustard have an uncanny ability of layering tracks, allowing you to unlock new rhythms and melodies all the time. “It is a bizarre song writing practice,” says Mete. “I think for parts of Wednesday, and the new material that we are working on, we start by trying to find a sound. Experimenting with different effects and then working everything in around that. Then Katie comes in with her lyrics.” Katie laughs. “I say silly stuff,” she says. “The other day we were writing and I said the melody smells like jam for one of the songs, and then I change the lyrics.” Despite the depth in sound Just Mustard are aiming for simplicity. “That’s true – we are trying to do the simplest song we can,” says David. “Whatever the source idea is we work from that, it could be anything, but typically it’s this one noise that acts as a beginning. “We also talk about songs in visual ways. I remember saying we really want to write a song that’s like the colour purple and then we went and tried it. A big warm purple sound. We really like film scores too, we take inspiration from people like Hans Zimmer.” Enthused, Katie bounces off David. “Whoever did the soundtrack to The Favourite, we loved that. We tried to rip it off. We spent a whole evening trying to get this loop right. The others came in and were like, this is really good… and we said, yeah, we know it’s really good, it’s the soundtrack to The Favourite!” An unusual touchstone perhaps, but when you hear the warped undercurrent of Wednesday it’s easy to imagine the five friends bounding out of the cinema inspired to create. “Dunkirk came out around the time we were recording Wednesday so the sounds of airplanes were a huge influence on us,” says Mete. — Frank — Loops, repetitions, beats; Just Mustard seem to share more in common with electronic artists than with their tour buddies Fontaines DC, and David can see that point of view. “It’s all about similar patterns,” he says as Mete jumps in. “It’s sort of

like playing with samples. Seeing if layering them on top of each other works. All of us really like electronic music.” The bands most recent release – a double A sided single called Frank/October – certainly hints that this is the case. “With Frank we wrote it saying, oh let’s make a Trap song but try and reverse it a little,” says Katie. “We could call it Trip Trap!” Katie laughs as the rest of the band scrabble to delete the interview recording from my phone. Frank’s unsettling loop is accompanied by a striking stop motion animation video by fellow Dundalk resident Tim Shearwood. “We all filmed it together,” says Katie. “The scene where the furniture stared moving, we were in this trance. We’d take a picture then everyone would move their own piece of furniture before taking another one. I think we took 1,000 photos by the end of the day. We painted the set, helped make it and edit it, so it was a really intense collaborative effort.” The overall effect is astonishing: Just Mustard and Shearwood manage to conjure up a universe inside a living room, as the track (and the characters within) spins in time with the juddering pictures. An easy reference to spot is David Lynch, who shares the bands fascination with the sub-conscious and sleep. Katie confirms his influence, saying that she loves his music and his paintings. “We much prefer the abstract surrealist take on things,” she says. “I like the looping, spinning rhythmic feel of it all.” Even the repeated lyric – “I watch TV to fall asleep” – implies an obsession with the midnight hours. “Well, I sleepwalk and dream like crazy,” says Katie. “I love going to sleep as I just have the weirdest dreams and I have been sleepwalking since last summer. I’ve never really done it before but this last summer I was doing it all the time. I would wake up in the hallway with my cat. My dreams inspire me a lot more than my real life.” Just Mustard played an incredible sold out show that night in Brighton before returning to the Spirit Store and Dundalk to work on new material. With their transient world of life on tour just starting, when I met them they reflected on a possible future of returning home to change. A border town where the choice isn’t just between football and music, but an ideological difference imposed by a physical border. “Yeah, Brexit would be pretty bad,” David told me. “I grew up right by the border and so it wouldn’t be nice to imagine there being a physical border again.” “I mean, some people have their kitchen in Northern Ireland and their living room in the Republic,” says Katie. “You can cross the border on a straight road, you know what I mean.” Mete kept the vibe positive and suitably vague in these confusing times. “Let me ask you, in fact let me ask everyone, do you think it will actually happen? A lot of people are in denial, but I don’t think it will actually happen. I have a bet on it!”

Interview

Martha Skye Murphy The happiness of a heartbroken chanteuse, by Tristan Gatward Photography by Ceidra Moon Murphy

Martha Skye Murphy is the kind of person you sit down with and feel like you’ve known for a very long time. It’s early evening. In the upstairs of the Maison Bertaux, a couple of streets away from China Town, she sits with a chocolate éclair and a mille feuille to share between us. Pressing her fork into the top layer of pastry, she watches while the flakes fly and the custard mushrooms from its sides. She’s a vegan, but when it tastes this good, it’s just too good, you know? The patisserie has been standing since 1871 – the oldest of its kind in London. Murphy’s parents and their friends used to hang out here in the 1980s when this part of town was more of an artistic hub, and places like this could be gathering points for musicians and photographers. Forty years later, questionable pieces of art still line the walls, up the staircase and around the small tea room on the first floor. There are vague outlines of life drawings next to blotched watercolours, all faded from the glints of sun coursing through the window. Another patisserie – a more problematic “artisan” chain – is closing down around the corner. “It’s amazing a place like this still exists in this city,” she says, in a way that feels like a small victory. Somewhere between the duality of her life as a musician and her other life as an actor, Murphy’s also considering a job offer here. She teaches English and History of Art as a tutor and sells vintage clothes at trade fairs, if only to ease her own addiction to buying clothes. “Any job is kind of a compromise on everything else that you’re about,” she says, struggling with some of the social politics behind the various worlds she enters, “like, I don’t feel fully comfortable helping privileged children get into Oxbridge, but you’ve got to play the game somehow.” Her debut EP, Heroides, was released last year on Slow Dance. A tolling piano grounds the heart of each track for Murphy’s ethereal vocals to dance with. It was recorded at Abbey Road, but she really doesn’t like The Beatles (“I mean, saying you like The Beatles literally means nothing”). It’s a world away from the music she made when she was 15, she tells me, all of which accidentally included the digital metronome in the back of GarageBand. Her work sits in good company with the likes of Amanda Palmer and PJ Harvey; there are hints of ‘Cloudbusting’era Kate Bush on the melodramatic vocals of ‘Soaked’. There’s a dark theatricality to everything that makes it feel like you’re being toyed with slightly – laughed at in a teasing way, similar to

Interview Aldous Harding’s Paganist contortions on a song about a party, or Jessica Pratt’s heavy-lidded dirge about just how fucking in love she is. You’re compelled to keep coming back, if just to prove yourself worthy. Take Murphy’s cover of Bill Callahan’s ‘Rock Bottom Riser’, which accentuates the line “I bought this guitar to pledge my love to you,” as she plays it on piano. It’s not ironic, though. You can hear her characters shifting deftly from the interior to exterior while still resonating with Amanda Palmer’s philosophy: stop pretending art is hard, just limit yourself to three chords and don’t practice daily. — Push the sky away — When we talk about the music we like, she takes out a notebook and eagerly scribbles down the names of artists and films to look up later. “Have you heard of Mary Garden? She was an opera singer in the early 1900s – there’s always something that doesn’t sound quite right with her recordings. Like, she was always missing the note, or there was too much vibrato in her voice. But I really love that eccentricity.” She talks about own her music with an academic interest, not only in the array of mythological references that appear in her songs, but in the concept of the characters she portrays. At one point she shows me a peculiar silent film made in Soviet Russia about space travel, that she describes as “sort of like a Man Ray photograph, sort of like The Clangers”. “When I go on stage, I’m still very nervous until the character takes over,” she says. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how French chanteuse like Édith Piaf have this real grandeur and dramatic element. I love the fusion of the melodrama and the completely raw emotion. Everyone’s obsessed with irony and satire at the moment, which is where I really don’t think I fit in. But then again with a lot of the irony I wonder how ironic it actually all is. Surely singing in an ironic voice something like, ‘it really upset me when I fucked you and then you left me the next day,’ is just disguising something personal.” She laughs. “Sorry, this is just me riffing lyrics. But that’s why I’m so vulnerable when I’m on stage, because I’m not really disguising that much.” She’s performed in some intimidating spaces, as well. In 2013, she lent her backing vocals to Nick Cave’s Push The Sky Away and the subsequent tour. “I was still young when we were going around,” she says. “I really admired his consistency in venue choice – every venue had its own historical context. We played this amazing building in Berlin, where it turned out Hitler used to go and watch children’s choirs… Nick told me that just before we went on stage. Watching how he curated a crowd was just the most formative, influential thing. He had about thirty people with him, but had this phenomenal power to be the only person anyone noticed.” Despite the clear lines of sight these experiences gave her into the world of music, there’s still a refreshing absence of pressure in Martha’s approach to writing. She’s unhurried, and the vast expanse is a space that her songs are inhabiting beautifully, with an assured but skeletal confidence. “I think pace is – who

cares? I mean, everyone has different methods of working. But I really respect people like Jason Spaceman from Spiritualized – you know, you’re lucky if you get an album in a decade. I really like that commitment to only releasing something once it’s ready.” — Black Eye — Her new release, ‘Black Eye’, is ready: a striking ballad, recorded at the 4AD studios with Fabian Prynn (Ex:Re). It’s seeped in second wave surrealism, from the artwork inspired by Francesca Woodman and Daisuke Yokota to the lyrics rapt in André Breton’s writing. “It’s loosely about the state of being drunk or being present at night, but being lost in memory or thought of somewhere else. Existing in the present but thinking about other things.” The opening line is taken directly from Paris Is Burning. “I like to re-appropriate things like this into this quite abusive narrative,” she explains. “When I showed people this song they would assume so many things about its context: that it was about an abusive relationship, or someone I had been in love with. I want people not being able to identify a specific narrative in it. You have gestures of narrative and gestures to cultural references, but these references don’t have to be made for it all to make sense. “We’re working on a music video at the moment actually, using that thread of the chanteuse and nouvelle vague cinema. The editor’s friend watched it back and apparently asked if I was just really depressed.” She laughs again, but I guess it’s not a wholly unreasonable question for a song whose hook demands to know what makes someone cry. “I just love that idea that he watched it and was like ‘ooooft, she’s saaaad.’ I don’t know, it’s good when you make people think and feel. It means they’re responding at least.” In terms of visual influence, she talks about a Diane Arbus photograph she saw recently at the Barbican, depicting a woman with a huge sword in her throat... When these are your stimuli, it throws up a few logistical problems. There’s no genre on streaming services for music that sounds like a crossbreed of a heartbroken chanteuse and the runaway circus. “And you can’t call it singer-songwriter because then you get put next to KT Tunstall; you can’t call it alternative because then you’re next to Beck.” Maybe that’s why Joanna Newsom still hasn’t got on board with the digital world, we think; she’s fine with the ethics of Spotify, but she’s been trying to press the upload button for seven years in the midst of an existential genre-ing crisis. “That was The Beatles’ problem as well,” Martha laughs, “they just didn’t know what to call themselves.” She adds, in a pitch perfect Scouse accent: “are we the greatest pop band in the world? Or are we just indie music?”

Interview

Crumb 16

Interview Delicate indie-jazz from a band contemplating luck, by Katie Beswick. Photography by David Cortes The day I speak with Crumb, the subject of luck is on my mind. I’m thinking about the way fortune coalesces sometimes, intervening in the trajectory of life, almost as if everything were fated – although we know, of course, that it probably is not. Dumb luck, like everything else, is random. Still, it’s difficult not to see divine intervention, especially when things are going well, or particularly badly. Indeed, how else to explain why the universe seems to poke us in precise ways, leading us to actions, until suddenly you have the story of a life – or, in this case, a band – that hangs together just so? It’s sometime in the 2010s and four disparate souls – three from New York, one from California – enrol at Tufts University, a private research college on the outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts. One of them, Lila Ramani, has been writing songs, developing demos using the production software Logic, and writing lyrics to melodies on her guitar – or sometimes setting music to the lyrics of poems she composed in a high school creative writing class. The others (synth, keys and sax player Brian Aronow, bassist Jesse Brotter and drummer Jonathan Gilad) have their own music practice. All four of these Generation Z-ers are into music from the ’60s and ’70s, and by reasons of fate, or dumb luck, they find themselves sharing accommodation and listening to one another’s Spotify playlists. “We became friends early on,” Brian explains to me, “and just played music with eachother, and then Lila brought in the songs, so we’d meet up and record them. We had the intention of just recording those few songs and moving on, and then… now here we are. We just kind of keep that process continuing.” “Yeah,” Lila says, “music was the first connection between us, I feel like. We were all just trying to play music during that

time, and that’s how we met each other and became friends and started a bunch of different projects, and that’s how this [band] came about.” — Modest beginnings — Here they are then: Crumb, a band, sort of effortlessly. After releasing two EPs of the songs they recorded in college (2016’s Crumb and 2017’s Locket), the subsequent critical buzz led to a short DIY tour (“like house basement shows, really low key… down the east coast”). Three years later they are still touring, having supported bedroom-rock musician Alex G. And now Crumb are about to drop their first album, Jinx; a strangely delicate psych-rock and jazz inflected record that has already been bewitching audiences at their live shows. It all seems to have happened quite quickly: the critical acclaim, the international tours – before they’ve even released an album. There are bands that work for years and years to build an audience base that allows for that kind of experience. I wonder whether there are moments when the four of them have to pinch themselves. Brian nods. “The past few years have honestly just been those moments repeating themselves continually. Our expectations were really none. Like really, so modest at the beginning, just focussing on the songs and what the band was gonna look like. So there’s a lot of those moments. Being able to play alongside bands we love very much, and connecting with bands and releasing music is always that. Yeah.” “The Europe tour was really crazy,” Jesse continues. “I hadn’t been to most of those places and to be there for one day at a time… I think we played twelve shows in ten different cities

Interview in fifteen days and it was just like one big snapshot. My memories are so… it feels kind of like a dream. I was there but I was half asleep. It was so cool to see like, families, children – like 9 year olds and parents coming to our show. So I think it was again those experiences over and over, seeing what your music has done in the world…” The highs of the touring experience sound incredible – playing to hundreds of fans in London, hearing their song lyrics sung back at them, tracing the footsteps of bands like Black Sabbath at remote venues in the mountain towns of Germany. Even the camaraderie sounds idyllic – Brian tells a story about how, travelling in a separate car from Lila and Jesse, he and Jonathan would play a game where they challenged each other to play tracks the other would hate, introducing one another to “weird free jazz”, and “heavy thrash” in the process. Still, the constant touring has been a learning experience, and navigating life on the road and a burgeoning music career, just out of college, makes it difficult to carve out a clear identity, and to engage with the wider world. It’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. “I think the last year or two has been a lot,” Brian says. “Like, we’ve been touring and making music non-stop and trying to balance that with being ourselves. Being people and being musical people, like, getting to have that, real life needs to be funnelled in as well. So we can enjoy all this. Because no one teaches you how to tour – you have to learn and there are a lot of good things and a lot of hard things.” One of the good things, Jesse explains, is the way being on the road forces you to scale down, and remember what’s important. “I think there’s something that empowers actually about reducing your stuff – your belongings, your property – to what you can bring with you. And you realise the insides are the stuff you bring with you. And I feel like in daily life it’s very easy to be surrounded by, like, your environment, your stature and what you feel like you hold onto. So just to break that apart, put it back together… see where you’re at.” Lila agrees. “I feel like I’ve just started to embrace that lifestyle, not really having a base. As opposed to just being in one place. It’s definitely a huge adjustment. And we all at the moment don’t have any other job besides being in the band so that’s an interesting thing to navigate, just structuring your time to live; to do the creative stuff.” — The creative stuff — The creative stuff is what they’re here for, and they are certainly embracing the opportunities touring has offered to develop their creative process. Not just playing with and learning from other musicians, but playing with and learning from their own songs. Lila explains that the band have particularly enjoyed the opportunities for improvisation at the live shows, riffing on that jazz tradition to give each audience a unique experience. In fact, the live shows are where they have developed the material for the album, taking new songs, experimenting in front of an audience and then taking the feedback from the shows into the

recording studio. They describe the writing process as a yearlong evolution. “I think it’s like having children of different ages or something,” Jesse tells me. “Uh-huh,” Jonathan laughs, “And some of them are going through puberty.” “I feel like each one is trying to find its final form,” Lila says, “And sometimes it takes a really long time, and sometimes it’s just already there.” The album recordings act as what the band call “time stamps”, rather than definitive versions of the songs. “It just gets stamped at a certain point. Certain things will just stay as they are for a period of time and there are certain songs that have been hanging around for less time but then in the studio something will change about them spontaneously, and that’s what’s there. And sometimes, even later on, like when we play our first EP songs on the road, we’re always kind of still changing things. Just still searching within each song for like, what’s this song about… So it’s always an evolving thing.” And, on the subject of evolution, we’re back to luck again. Even the title of the album, Jinx, suggests the ways the band are hyper aware of the role luck has played in their journey so far. “We’re lucky,” they say. “We’re an independent band, the listeners totally allow us to keep making music and we’re very aware of that and grateful for that. And also, just like our whole team, something we’re really proud of from our visual collaborators to people who come on tour with us, it’s all about the personal connections and shared admirations for what we all do. We’re really grateful for that.” They speak a lot about gratitude, and although it seems like a genuine sentiment, I also get the sense they are using gratitude as a shield, a talisman, to ward off the possibility that luck might run out. I suppose, as Crumb prepare for their first break in touring in almost three years, there is a sense of apprehension about what’s next. “We’re plotting things up right now, nothing official. But we’re taking the summer off to write, take some time out. Get back together in late summer, do some more,” Lila says. “We’re still evolving.” Brian reminds me. “This is just the beginning. We feel very fortunate. We’re a relatively new band – we’re really excited to keep developing as a group. It’s only been three years of working together… developing this project, and each year has looked very different. It’s been… beyond words for sure.”

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Interview

Interview A DIY band learn to take their time, by Ollie Rankine. Photography by Christopher Fenner

Porridge Radio Sitting sheepishly in a pub in South London, I’ll admit I’m feeling a little apprehensive. Moments ago, two very large tattooed and men in nylon tracksuits had been scrapping it out in front of a crowd of jeering onlookers before finally being forcibly removed by police and the pub staff. Some of those involved continue to lurk and here I am, in no man’s land, upon the scattered debris of the broken glass and shrapnel; a pale skinned and scraggly haired spectator with laptop ajar, hopelessly failing to disguise murmurs of involuntary nervous laughter. The situation seemed abundantly clear: nothing screams “punch me” quite like a MacBook douchebag in a rowdy Weatherspoon’s beer garden. Dana Margolin doesn’t seem to mind though. Sitting quite unconcerned and oblivious on the opposite end of the table, she’s amused as she lifts her stripy trouser leg to reveal a pair of flame-patterned socks. “Me and our drummer, Sam, are matching again today. I gave them to him for his Birthday whilst we were on tour and told him we’ve got to match for our last show. We forgot about it for about a week and then on the last day of tour we both got in the van and I was like, oh my god, you’re wearing the socks. I thought it was pretty cool, anyway.” Scoffing down the remnants of her lukewarm veggie burger, the rest of her band, Porridge Radio, are sitting huddled around a table further from us. As far as lousy band names go, Porridge Radio sure isn’t one of them. Practically anyone prior to doing this interview who could be bothered to listen to my spiel had agreed with me: something about the imagery of cereal based broadcasting just sounds right and essential. Dana’s still not so sure and whilst scrunching her nose at me, she says, “I reckon everyone else thinks it makes us sound twee. But we’re not. We are definitely not twee for fuck’s sake.” This is a point of fact that she repeatedly tells me she’s keen to circulate. — Wholesome as fuck — When Dana isn’t trying to convince me of her band’s anti-stance on their contrived quirks, she’s reminiscing about her childhood and her time growing up in North West London, particularly in Jewish summer camps. “From the age of about eleven I would go on these summer camps. Loads of Jewish kids would go and of course we’d pray and sing Jewish songs together,

but I loved it. I’d go every year, all my social group growing up was from camp and it taught me a lot about what it means to be Jewish.” As she delves further into her heritage, it becomes clear just how much Dana identifies with Judaism and the significant part it’s played in her upbringing. “It’s just always been a really big part of my life and who I am. It’s my community; it’s how I learnt to socialise and how I learnt about value in family being important. I love it, it’s wholesome as fuck.” She’s confident yet completely unassuming, but I can’t say that’s much to my surprise. Her band is the product of her teenage infatuation with song writing, and time after time it’s been the topic of significant praise and attention. Even back in 2015, in the band’s early days of gigging around Brighton’s pubs and small music venues, the esteemed and eccentric music journalist Everett True crowned Porridge Radio “the best band in the world” on the basis of hearing just half a song. “He missed the entire set, but he fucking loves us,” says Dana. “He’d come out to see this Australian band called Blank Realm who we were supporting. He admitted after the show that he’d only caught the last 40 seconds but said he still knew we were ‘the best band in the world’. Since then we’ve always considered ourselves to be ‘the best band in the world’. It’s our little idealist motto. “I think you have to go around thinking you’re ‘the best band in the world’,” she says. “Even if you’re playing a tiny show in the shitty upstairs of some pub for no money at all, you have to believe what you’re doing is special and important because otherwise it’s just the most self-indulgent hobby in the world. You have to mythologise yourself slightly, otherwise you’ll lose any hope of getting somewhere.” — Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers — After a long run of very fortunate coincidences whilst studying at university, Porridge Radio ended up being the culmination of four very strenuous and bizarre connections between bandmates. Blossoming from Brighton’s DIY scene, they released their first album in 2016. Made from humble beginnings (being recorded on an 8-track in a shed), Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers showcased Dana’s opaquely raw, tangible and completely unconstrained emotion. Always gulping desperately at the air of

Interview

“Everyone else thinks our names makes us sound twee. But we’re not. We are definitely not twee for fuck’s sake”

her final breath, her music not only invested deeply within her herself, but also her audience. She explains: “I’ve always wanted to make music to be vulnerable. I want to allow people to see my vulnerability through the things I make and that is where I’m most honest. I think you should be as emotional as you can be because maybe it will help others access that in themselves which I think for a lot of us is quite a difficult thing to do.” Porridge Radio’s new album will continue to harvest Dana’s projected vulnerability, but this time through a cleaner, more discernible lens. “Everything about this time around was so different,” she says. “We actually demoed it, can you believe. We went into a studio and recorded it properly. We got someone really amazing to mix it and then got it mastered by the same guy. We actually took our time with it. We didn’t just record it all on an 8-track in a shed. We actually got the chance to give feedback on the mixes to ensure it sounded like we actually imagined it to.” Both of the new singles, ‘Give/Take’ and ‘Don’t Ask Me Twice’ are clear testament to Porridge Radio’s development, and have a bit of The Cure about them. Released just this week, ‘Don’t Ask Me Twice’ showcases the sort of punky complexity Porridge Radio have before now been sitting on whilst Dana tells me that ‘Give/Take’ is a sort of watered-down glimpse at the rest album’s mammoth full body. Pondering years past and the struggles of gradually pulling a record together, Dana often found solace with her ultimate muse: the sea. “The sea will always be a big part of how I make things,” she tells me. “It’s such a huge, overwhelming force. When you’re at the sea, you’re at the edge of land and you’re at the furthest you can be from anything and that’s really power-

ful and strong. I think there is something quite religious about going underwater too. In Jewish tradition, you go in a Mikvah, it’s like a baptism. When you go underwater, you’re refreshed and your body changes. Your heartbeat slows and physically you change. There’s something very powerful about that.” But making this record has not sounded easy. Most significantly, in October of last year the band announced that they would no longer be working with MJ, the producer and former leader of Leeds band Hookworms, due to shocking allegations of sexual assault. For the first time, Dana’s exterior hardens, but candidly she tells me, “it affected the album in a huge way because MJ was going to mix it. Mixing is a huge part of crafting the sound of a record and it would’ve sounded really different if he’d made it. But I’m really happy with how it sounds now. It sounds how it needs to sound, but it would’ve sounded different if MJ had done it.” Not yet signed, it really feels like Porridge Radio might just be on the cusp of something bigger than Dana is yet to realise. But record deals aside, she explains why the DIY scene remains paramount to her band’s evolution. “It’s always going be important because it’s where we came from. People saw us as a shitty band with chaotic songs who couldn’t play our instruments, but they still said, ‘that’s a band who’s going to mean something to people’. Nobody from the music industry saw us and thought that’s a band we should get behind. Only the DIY community said we’ll put you on and help you out. People go out of their way in that scene and don’t expect much in return because they enjoy it and believe in what they’re doing. I’m really grateful to have been a part of that for so long and I will evolve out of it to move to the next level.” Whatever lies in store for Porridge Radio doesn’t worry Dana too much, but she’s apprehensive to go on blabbing about it. “I watched Sigrid do an interview the other day. She said, ‘I don’t really want to tell people my dreams because what if they don’t come true’. Yeah, I can relate to that.”

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Interview

Lungbutter

Too heavy for grunge, by Joe Goggins Photography by Thomas Boucher

A quick visit to one of the internet’s most invaluable resources gives you an idea of what you’re in for with Lungbutter. They take their name, apparently, from “that nasty greenish/yellow goo that smokers cough up in the morning.” Once you get past the initial revulsion, you realise there’s something quite endearing about euphemisms like that – they’re attempts to ameliorate something harsh. They’re rough, but they’re appealing. There’s a reason, then, why it seemed an appropriate moniker. The Montreal trio are no strangers either to each other or, for that matter, to similarly striking band names; over a number of years spent in the thick of their hometown’s thriving experimental noise rock scene, they’ve spent time, between them, as members of such outfits as Femmaggots, Harsh Reality, Wreckage and Nag, among others. “There was this moment, a few years ago, where if you’d named any three people within

our extended friendship group, they’d probably played a show together,” laughs vocalist Ky Brooks. “Everybody was in three or four bands at the same time.” Collaboration, of course, doesn’t have to mean compromise, and Lungbutter’s debut full-length is proof positive: it is a relentlessly adventurous piece of work, thrilling in its ambition. It shifts shape constantly over the course of its eleven tracks, but the basic foundation is Kaity Zozula’s growling discordant guitar, too heavy to be grungy but too keenly aware of its capacity for melody to be metal. Brooks takes the same approach to her vocals, half sung, half shouted, somewhere in between sharp sloganeering and stream of consciousness. Behind it all, Joni Sadler provides gleefully off-kilter percussion, pummelling the drums in a manner that almost sounds like a response to the sonic chaos unfolding around her. The title Honey was chosen

Interview for its ambiguity, and sure enough any sweetness to Lungbutter’s sound is certainly not obvious in the traditional sense. What it does possess, though, is a fierce confidence in its experimental nature, the product of a refreshingly fearless alternative arts world in Canada’s second-most populous city that has nurtured them and provided them with a platform. They were all drawn to the city for different reasons and found themselves pulled into its music scenes from different backgrounds. “I was in the classical world for a long time,” says Brooks. “Punk music had a strong appeal to me because there’s a lot of possibility to it – you can just do it. That’s a long way from where I came from, performing choral music, where it’s very rarified and super competitive and everybody you meet is like a musical athlete. I felt like the experimental scene had the same level of virtuosity, but without the competitive bullshit edge.” Zozula’s motivations for entering into the anything-goes world of noise rock were similar. “The style of playing that produces straightforward rock music, or even punk to a certain extent, it all requires a certain level of technique that I never felt capable of,” says the guitarist, who reels off a list of avant-gardists like Bill Orcutt, Keiji Hano, Robert Fripp and Ted Falconi when talking about her influences. “That’s probably in part a gendered thing, and in part being exposed in the past to certain styles of guitar playing where everybody expects you to have intense technical knowledge and be a real gearhead before you can even think about playing in a band. I felt like experimental music provided a platform for me to really develop my own style and not feel constantly self-conscious about it. It’s really empowering.” When they began working together in earnest, Lungbutter were all looking to continue in that same independent vein – they were all looking for something musically different to what they were used to. For Zozula, that meant teaching herself how to write towering riffs; for Brooks, meanwhile, it was an opportunity to push the boundaries as far as possible as a vocalist, “within a band dynamic – I was doing a lot of super weird, improvvy stuff that didn’t have enough structure to be satisfying all the time,” she says. It also meant embracing thematic diversity. “I wanted to write in ways that are abstract and nonlinear. A lot of my previous projects had felt more contextual, as if every song had to be about this or be about that. I didn’t want to go there as a writer. I liked the idea of ambiguity.” Accordingly, Brooks’ preoccupations run the gamut across Honey’s eleven songs from the environmental concerns that dominated their 2014 cassette EP Extractor through to stinging takedowns of modern society (‘Flat White’) and odes to similarly eccentric artists (‘Henry Darger’). You get the sense that this is as confident and free as Brooks has yet felt as a lyricist, partly because of the icily detached manner in which the words are delivered and partly because of the swings from one topic to the next without too much regard for cohesion or an overarching narrative – working that way, it seems, would dilute some of Honey’s intensity. “It’s a complicated thing to talk about,” says Brooks, “There’s shared imagery and material between the different

songs, but I think that’s more a product of what seems urgent in the world than any particular goal to have a message running through the record and to keep that on track. When we made Extractor, everything revolved around the same ideas – extractivism, and The Pipeline Project, and that was because we wanted to put those things out there. This time it was more fluid. It could have been as simple as me saying, ‘oh, here’s this weird thing I saw the other day.’ It’s all jammed in there together.” — A liveable city — As much as anything else, Lungbutter are a product of their surroundings: it isn’t just the supportive and flexible nature of Montreal’s noise scene that helped foster an audacious streak in the band, but the experience of living in the city as a whole. They all ended up there for different practical purposes (Sadler to study for a physics degree, for instance; Zozula to take up a new day job) but it’s clear that the three never would have been able to gel so effectively in a creative sense if they’d formed Lungbutter more or less anywhere else. “It’s a really liveable city in a way that is rare nowadays,” Zozula explains. “In terms of the rent being extremely cheap compared to a lot of other places in North America, but also the way that translates into the music scene. If you don’t have to work around the clock just to make rent, then you have time to pursue creative projects without the specific intent of professionalising it, which then means more places to play, and more shows being organised. In other cities, there’s a pressure to have some kind of return on it, for it to generate an income. That doesn’t exist in the same way here.” Sadler agrees. “There’s a track record of the city being supportive of art from outside of the mainstream,” she says. “When I first moved here, it struck me that there was an interesting show happening every night of the week. There’s an enthusiasm for the new that makes Montreal really special. People are willing to take a chance and spend ten dollars on a weird show with three experimental artists they know nothing about.” That kind of backing is something that’s grounded the trio, and the slow burn from that first EP five years ago to their debut album now means that they’re level-headed about where to take Lungbutter next. They’ll play sporadically across Canada this year and hope to venture further afield in 2020, but the main priority seems to be to strike while the iron is hot and continue on their current writing streak. “We want to strike a balance between band commitments and everything else we have going on – work, academic stuff, real life,” says Zozula. “It’s important that everything we do with Lungbutter feels sustainable. We want to structure everything in a way that feels as good as possible; we worked hard to get to this point, so now we want to enjoy it.”

The BesT New Music

ROse eLiNOR DOuGALL DANieL O’suLLiVAN A New iLLusiON FOLLY

V/A DRAhLA FLOATiNG POiNTs: LATe useLess cOORDiNATes Captured Tracks NiGhT TALes

Jesse MAc cORMAcK NOw

Jesse Mac cormack’s astonishing debut album ‘Now’ arrives unhurried: a work of ardent, kaleidoscopic artrock that is at once a dazzling premiere and the culmination of a meticulous five-year evolution.

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

sTuART sTAPLes MADONNATRON Music FOR cLAiRe MusicA ALLA DeNis’ hiGh LiFe (O.s.T) PuTTANescA

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.

Leeds-formed Drahla have defined their own vital subset of art-rock with ‘useless coordinates’ , a debut album that’s as fearless as it is enthralling An uncompromising but deeply rewarding debut where the internal and external, cerebral and visceral coalesce to quite startling effect.

Secret City

Don’t miss his show at The waiting Room, London on May 22 in London, uK.

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

FLAMiNGODs LeViTATiON Moshi Moshi

international psych explorers Flamingods are back with brand new album ‘Levitation’, via Moshi Moshi Records. inspired by the disco, funk and psychedelic sounds of the Middle east and south Asia in the ‘70s, the album channels these influences through a vision soaked in mysticism, positivity and sun-drenched imagery. Available on limited coloured vinyl at all good independent record stores.

AED Records

City Slang

“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” -Q

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Trashmouth

claire Denis’ highly anticipated first English language film ‘high Life’ will be released in the spring of 2019.

having moved forwards emotionally from the wilds of dystopian stalking and associated hobbies, Madonnatron, on their second album, have instead been found The soundtrack to the film frolicking through the green was created by stuart A. pastures of gangsta pimps, staples of tindersticks, and hindu God wars, cyber Men includes willow, performed by tindersticks and featuring guest invasion, loveless nightclub hook-ups, and revered screen vocals from Robert Pattinson, goddess elizabeth Taylor. Think which was written for the final of them as post-punk lab rats in scene of the film. the secrets of Nimh, feasting Available on limited vinyl and cD dubiously on back-dated episodes of Top of the Pops. via city slang.

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

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.

Reviews Albums

Albums

Slowthai — Nothing Great About Britain (method) To my mind, there’s a finite number of creative projects that manage to sincerely capture both a specific societal experience and the cultural disposition surrounding a particular place, at a certain period of time, in its authentic entirety. These cultural commodities are rightly thrust into the highest tiers of public conscious, primarily because their themes are relevant to so many of its eventual audience. Filter down even further to products emanating solely from the UK and the pool is even smaller. And let’s face it, managing to apprehend the intricacies of what it is to be British, taking the essence of our cynical shared outlook, weaving in some sardonic dry humour, and distilling into a digestible package, is no easy exploit. In terms of musical ventures, Mike Skinner’s debut Streets album and Dizzee Rascal’s pioneering of grime with Boy in da Corner are two projects that have managed to effectively package this representation, and, as a result, these works hold the highest forms of relevance in their own worlds, whilst not being contained within them. Nothing Great About Britain should be considered in the same regard. The artist is Slowthai – a moniker formed by fusing real name Tyron Frampton and a childhood nickname denoting his wandering attention span and speech impediment. It’s a name that since the release of prefatory single ‘Jiggle’ in 2016 has been placed on a simmer of ever-increasing interest and attention. Fast forward a while, past the cumulative progress milestones of being selected as a BBC Sound of 2019 artist, releasing heavy hitting crossover single ‘Doorman’, and being lined up to appear at this year’s Glastonbury Festival, Slowthai sits primed, ready to deliver one of the most anticipated debut records of the year.

With the title of the record already decided before any of its contents had been written, its direction is unquestionably with an agenda. Straight from the condemning conclusion that there’s “nothing great about Britain” on the album’s opener, no time is wasted in outlining the paradoxically incongruous nature of British culture, examining our strained relationship with the monarchy while pointing out the tenderness towards binge drink culture with the line, “bottle of bucky in Buckingham palace”. Underlining the diverse culinary delights on offer while exposing our distraction with antisocial behaviour, Slowtai attests, “all I tasted is korma, ASBO, restraining order”. Lauding our efficient transport options and our infatuation with nicotine, he spits, “waving a cab, munching a fag”. On the surface, Buckingham Palace and taxi cabs are what’s expected of British culture, but delve a little deeper and you find a sleazier, more sarcastic underbelly, and in this contradiction Slowthai admits “hand on my heart” he’s proud to be British. His astute lyrical intellect is showcased quickly, while the most immediate moment on the album comes from ‘Doorman’ – a track that exceeds beyond expected channels by virtue of the distinctly audible crossover appeal with the growing punk movement, strategic support slots with Slaves around the time of its original release, and a dynamic and dexterous bassline garnering widespread airplay from a range of radio stations. As the titled suggests, it’s a track on the surface that concerns an unruly night out – bouncers, more fags, more binge drinking and chasing girls. But it’s woven latently to serve as a caustic reprimand of high society and the seemingly everwidening gap between the haves and have-nots. More demure and tender moments are also planted across the 11 tracks here. Album closer ‘Northampton Child’ is the most unconcealed autobiographical recount of an upbringing troubled by financial hardship and domestic struggle. Soft strings and yielding piano keys take the place of brash electronics while

Frampton details the sheer hard work extolled to survive as a member of the town’s working class, compounded by the impact of the untimely death of a sibling to a progressive muscular disease. ‘Gorgeous’ is cut from the same emotive cloth; a tender adoration to growing up in Northampton, itemising his boisterous relationship with the city. Conceivably the soundest testament to the quality of the record is that the notable feature of grime stalwart Skepta on the Tarantino-inspired ‘Inglorious’ recedes into relative insignificance in relation to the musical potency displayed on rest of the album. Despite the album title, on the whole the content isn’t as overtly political as some of Slowthai’s peers’ output has been (tune in to Friday’s Pyramid Stage headliner set to hear “Fuck Boris” exclaimed to 200,000 people). And while some may level criticism at this, particularly given the plethora of source material provided by the current omnishambles our elected officials are overseeing, the confrontation is more nuanced. The desire for Slowthai is for Nothing Great About Britain to sit as a longstanding cautionary statement of ever-present corruption and rising inequalities that threaten to further the divide between the population. By transcending microscopically scrutinising the perils of a specifically outlined time period, and avoiding dissecting specific political or social blunders and the problematic people involved with them, this project is instilled with a timeless quality. Considering there’s a discretion to underline specifics, Slowthai is certainly ready, willing and definitely able to highlight pertinent and personal concerns on this record. Brutally honest and amusingly witty with his flow, aggressive and dynamic with his production work, and captivatingly appealing with his charm and charisma, all taken together it assembles a hugely impressive, compelling and socially important listen. And whilst it’s a damning verdict on the current climate, all hope is not surrendered – after all, a full scale disavow of Britain does not feel like it’s reached in his prose. In moments,

Albums formed with a reflectively sentimental tone to British culture and its peculiarities, it serves as a love letter to being British, as a way to connect all categories, tribes and people. While the proclamation is that there’s nothing great about Britain, it doesn’t mean that it’s not still pretty good. Provided people and politicians can all strive to do a little better. 9/10 Tom Critten

Bad Breeding — Exiled (one little indian) “The urge for fascistic violence is slowly winked at and nudged forward,” point out Bad Breeding in discussing their third (and best) album. “Because no one is saying the obvious it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be said.” Just what is it that Bad Breeding want to say? Taking a sweeping view of British guitar music, the most striking and noted response to the current political moment has been what the writer Michael Hann termed “angry surrealism” (think Sleaford Mods and work from there). On Exiled, Bad Breeding sound too indignant to find anything remotely funny about the state of the nation, their taut sound echoing that starkness of fury. Much of the album’s soberly expressed disgust has been directly influenced by the band’s observations on their native Stevenage; describing a “marginalised, stagnant, ignored” town, where widespread poverty and homelessness sit “just thirty miles from one of the richest cities on Earth”. Though anchored firmly by their anarcho and hardcore sensibilities, Exiled does represent some progression: doused in feedback, tracks like ‘Theatre of Work’ and ‘Breaking Wheel’ take on a faintly psychedelic noise rock element and palpable Sonic Youth influence. It’s better for it, sat alongside two-minute

punk attacks like the pile-driving ‘Repossession’. And while they offer no solutions here, no shiny empowerment, in describing their fate they have managed to defy it. 7/10 Fergal Kinney

Bamboo — Daughters Of The Sky (upset the rhythm) The 11-minute epic that’s at the heart of ‘Daughters Of The Sky’ is a distillation of Bamboo’s ambitious sound. In part a homage to ’70s freak folk, ‘East Of The Sun, West Of The Moon’ also alludes to new age ambience with its combination of medieval singing and intricate layers of electroacoustic instrumentation. Drawing influences from the Far East, the track’s delicate folk cadences are unexpected given that its originators are Nick Carlisle of synth-punk outfit Peepholes and Rachel Horwood of postpunk trio Trash Kit. Reuniting for the third time, the pair have swapped the storybook concept of 2017’s ‘The Dragon Flies Away’ for recurrent themes in natural life cycles (“Branches dancing, bud stems growing, fibres swaying, arms unfurling,” as Horwood puts it on ‘The Deku Tree’). These chime with the crystal shop aesthetic of ‘Off World Colony’, which mixes contemporary beats with hazy synth-flutes, and ‘Memories All At Once’, which sounds like Dubstar without a hook. This tendency to drift along on a bed of choral style harmonies, electric banjo and wistful samples is counterbalanced on a couple of occasions with sharper focus. Opening track ‘Diamond Springs’ uses a glockenspiel to update classic ’80s synthpop while ‘A World Is Born’ matches its sunny, upbeat disposition with call and response saxophone lines. The album ends on a curiously inconclusive note, with the 45-second

instrumental ‘Tenebrae’ sketching out an introduction before it floats away to meet its younger sibling in the ethereal sky. 7/10 Susan Darlington

Julia Shapiro — Perfect Version (hardly art) Julia Shapiro has long been a cornerstone of America’s West Coast music scene. Her bands Chastity Belt, Childbirth and Who Is She?, formed alongside Seattle area musicians from bands such as Pony Time and Tacocat, have their roots in stinging satire and a cut-throat, mordant humour that have come to be Shapiro’s signature. In light of this, her latest musical output and first solo endeavour is all the more striking in its forthrightness. Stripped back in both essence and musicality, Perfect Version is an album forged from the depths of despair and crisis. In autumn 2018, while in the midst of Chastity Belt’s international tour of their third album, I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone, Shapiro decided she couldn’t continue and cancelled the tour, returning home to her Seattle apartment. The breakdown of a serious relationship and various health issue had resulted in debilitating depression and utter disillusionment with creating music and playing live shows. She explains, “I was really depressed. I felt like I couldn’t sing or be a person.” In the space of ten songs, Shapiro manages to capture a profound and selfaware examination of her place in a world of her own making, unlike anything she has created before. 29 A combination of layered vocals and rippling shoegaze guitars serve to heighten the emotional depth of Perfect Version, though its real success is in making the listener, too, question what it might be like to truly ‘love yourself ’. Intimate though never

Albums schmaltzy or saccharine, Perfect Version is, above all, a realist’s guide to selfreflection. 7/10 Rosie Ramsden

The Rhythm Method — How Would You Know I Was Lonely (moshi moshi) The most tantalising thing about How Would You Know I Was Lonely is that the record it clearly aspires to be – a witty, warm, warts-and-all portrayal of the (sub)urban millennial youth experience in post-crash, austerity-era broken Britain – is exactly the record we need in 2019. After all, no band since The Streets has reflected its own generation that honestly, and given that Original Pirate Material came out closer to Live Aid and the entire career of The Smiths than it did to the present day, an update is sorely required. Unfortunately, though, after four years of hype, the Rhythm Method’s ego is now writing cheques their music can’t cash: despite their initial promise (the absence here of genuinely arresting early singles ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘Party Politics’ is keenly felt), their debut album rather bottles it, presenting instead a series of superficially amusing but ultimately bland songs that prefer puns and cheap pop-cultural reference point-scoring to anything more incisive. Accordingly, we get ‘Ode 2 Joey’, which starts to look at disassociation and quarter-life crisis ennui but gets bored midway and namechecks Oasis simply to tell us how long ‘Cigarettes And Alcohol’ is, or ‘Single Life’, a song that aims to discuss sexual rejection among the generation having less sex than ever but which selects its lyrics for apparently no greater reason than because they rhyme with one another. “I’m single lower-middle, white and male”, runs the hook in ‘Wand-

sworth Plain’, but never does The Rhythm Method seek to explore what’s interesting about that particularly ignored seam of modern masculinity, despite clearly wanting to try, while nearly every song on the record is overrun with tiresome nonsequitous quips: “There’s light at the end of the Blackwall Tunnel” runs an aside during a song specifically about west London; the otherwise striking ‘Cruel’ (the best thing here along with boozer ballad ‘Local Girl’) can’t resist a spurious line about “a police car named Desire”. Perhaps what ultimately does for How Would You Know…, though, is that at various points in its brief existence, it manages to sound exactly like so many other acts it evidently admires – The Streets, Blur, Madness, Squeeze, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Pet Shop Boys, even Chas & Dave – but never better than any of them. Instead, it pulls its punches; the album equivalent of a BBC One panel-show joke, or a drive-thru McDonalds: far from the record we need in 2019, but maybe the one we deserve. 4/10 Sam Walton

NOTS — 3 (upset the rhythm) It can be difficult to fill the hole a departed band member has left behind – especially when you might not be so willing to re-recruit. Following the departure of keys player Alexandra Eastburn in 2018, all-girl Memphis noise rock outfit NOTS have keyed in a Caps Lock on their name to mark the beginning of a new era, accepting to downsize and move forward as a three-piece. Now that four has become three, the title of their new record both references their restructuring as a unit as well as the album’s chronological position in their discography. 3 maintains a stark resemblance of what proceeds it, albeit being a little more washed-out.

Instead of relinquishing the sprawling synth-led texture that featured heavily on 2016’s Cosmetic, frontwoman Natalie Hoffmann has adapted her role to disguise any inkling of an unfulfilled void. On singles ‘Floating Hand’ and ‘Half Painted House’ she replaces her guitar with the kind of modular drones ripped straight from some vintage Doctor Who audio FX board. When she does resume her usual role, her guitar is often lathered in a thick layer of delay and reverb that both warps and elongates her familiar riff power’s razor-sharp edges. Swirling around tracks like ‘Surveillance Veil’, the writhing distortion creates the kind of overwhelming textures you might expect from your typical noise rock outfit but ultimately leaves a lot of 3 sounding oddly bleached and compressed. Manging to retain their overbearing style and power, it still feels like NOTS are trying to compensate for something. 6/10 Ollie Rankine

Gnoomes — MU! (rocket recordings) Ngan! Tschak! MU! Such has been the trajectory of Gnoomes, each exclamation point denoting one of three releases thus far. Collectively, they read as an onomatopoeic sequence, a comic book fight scene. Appropriate, given Gnoomes’ journey into Europe as exiled heroes was beset by turbulence. The other referent, especially in the case of latest instalment MU!, is more directly related to the motorik-ish post-kraut sound therein. MU!? More like Neu! This, Gnoomes’ most confident release to date, sounds especially jubilant in the way of later Krautrock, the grainy guitars of ‘Sword in the Stone’ and ‘Ursa Major’ ebullient with skyward electricity. But the true antecedent of MU! would prove to be the other great Klaus Dinger outfit – La Düsseldorf. The stumbling

Albums tom-toms of ‘Since Waves Are Good For Your Health’ (charmingly mistranslated in the lyrics as “good TO your health”) and ascendent fuzz of ‘Progulka’ seem almost tone for tone lifted from La Düsseldorf, accelerated by a bit of psych rock welly. Fortunately, it’s been a long while since we’ve heard anyone restart that vehicle quite so well. The implicit project of Krautrock was a sort of fantastical European utopianism through sound, where an ongoing motorik beat was tantamount to humanitarian progress. Even if the dream has long since faded into dull and unending copycat psych rock today, the Gnoomes of MU! are still happy to thrive in it, re-assessing and extrapolating on its sonic boundaries. 7/10 Dafydd Jenkins

The St Pierre Snake Invasion — Caprice Enchate (self released) On their second album, Bristol hard rock band The St Pierre Snake Invasion confront both the personal and the political. Caprice Enchanté is about romanticism and defeatism, about losing your identity and about not growing up to be the person your teenage self thought you would be. On ‘The Safety Word is Oklahoma’, frontman Damien Sayell struggles with selfhood and conviction against a blistering musical backdrop, screaming “there’s no one listening but that’s no excuse to pipe down.” It is the reigning sentiment on an album grappling with the politics of others, and testing the strength of its own principles again and again. This energy is most effectively deployed on the thrashingly theatrical ‘Things to Do in Denbigh When You’re Dead’. It’s no secret that rock has a masculinity problem, and here the band take on depression and ‘real man’-hood to eviscerating effect.

Throughout, there is also ego to tangle with, not least across the title track as Sayell realises his romanticism – an intrinsic part of his identity – doesn’t serve him. The sharp, heavy instrumentation and raw vocals are practically a bloodletting. Caprice Enchanté is The St Pierre Snake Invasion letting out the sickness – visceral, and powerful. 8/10 Liam Konemann

The National — I Am Easy To Find (4ad) Who, do you think, are album short films actually made for? Earl Sweatshirt made a good one and everyone talked about Beyoncé’s and Vince Staples’s for exactly three days after they came out, but other than those everyone may as well go home. Who really finished listening to Pure Comedy and thought to themselves, you know what, I really need another twenty-five minutes of this? Not that I begrudge the National their own foray into cinema: their particular brand of muted grandeur has often had a visual quality. That’s something that’s only brought into sharper relief by I Am Easy To Find, which sees the band paring their style down while simultaneously further exploring the grand, sacral sounds that have long lurked in their strings. Most of the tracks here rely on a common palette of female backing vocals, pale piano, indistinct horns and strings that could have wandered off a Christina Vantzou record, all in service of Matt Berninger’s rich vocal performances. Often, it feels like Bryan Devendorf ’s drums are all that’s stopping the whole affair from slipping away into full-blown ambience, though there’s always another moment of swelling National stateliness around the corner to shake you out of your chair.

Berninger also steps back completely for several interludes featuring the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, to mixed effect. ‘Her Father In The Pool’ is a liturgical moment of pause after the swell of the title track which recalls Grouper at her best, but ‘Dust Swirls In Strange Light’ quickly loses its charm by being extended to three minutes when it could have been one. That’s a nitpick, though: essentially, this album is up there with the National’s best. The one-two punch of ‘Where Is Her Head’ into ‘Not in Kansas’ is unbeatable: these are the tracks that everyone will be talking about. ‘Kansas’ in particular is masterly, a seven-minute opus which deftly switches between the hazy summers of late childhood and political alienation. That sounds like a strange combination, but it’s not. We’re all ageing into a world that doesn’t make sense anymore, where the political climate and the environment have changed so much that the future no longer matches with the past. It’s this lack of consistency that the National mine to such great effect. Berninger sounds on the edge of tears as he reflects on the rise of “alt-right opium” and smiles through the pain as he reflects on the safety of a childhood spent “eternally unalone”. “I am not in Kansas/ Where I am, I don’t know where,” he sings, and the dislocation hurts. 8/10 Alex Francis

Sacred Paws — Run Around the Sun (rock action) Sacred Paws’ debut album, Strike A Match, was created over a distance of 400 miles, with guitarist Rachel Aggs living down south in London and drummer Eilidh Rogers residing up north in Glasgow. These circumstances contributed to an eclectic sound; a varied

Albums corpus of songs darting across, and bringing together, indie and Afro-Beats. Two years on, Run Around the Sun is bigger and brasher. Finally living in the same city, the duo sing their piece against a background of up-beat guitar riffs, lightning speed drum rhythms and a bustling horn section. It’s no-holdsbarred music that seeks to take up as much space as possible, with Aggs’ idiosyncratic guitar style and Rogers offkilter drumming culminating in a joyful cacophony of sound. Album opener ‘The Conversation’ jolts to a start with scratchy, riot grrrl-style feedback, before modulating into well-timed harmonies and a tight, rhythmic melody. On ‘Almost It’, ‘Life’s Too Short’ and ‘Write It Down’ the brass elements peppered throughout Strike A Match are amped up to create a robust, textured sound. Lead single ‘Brush Your Hair’, meanwhile, is an unexpected departure: more mellow than what we’ve come to associate with the duo, with contemplative lyrics like, “When the seasons change/ it makes me think of you” ruminating on the lasting impact of past relationships. Yet even in these moments of vulnerability, the noise doesn’t stay muted for long. In a world where genuine emotion is increasingly scarce, Aggs and Rogers are feeling in stereo. 7/10 Megan Wallace

Lungbutter — Honey (constellation) Those of us living outside of Montreal, Quebec, can only imagine how long the dense soup of Lungbutter’s Honey has been left on the boil – so long you reckon you’d be able to see the bones by now. The vox-guitar-drums noise rock trio have spent the last six or so years honing their own individual strengths

with various other local acts, presumably letting in precious Lungbutter sessions during exhales. That’s perhaps the most remarkable thing about this debut – we’d like to think the likes of no wave legends DNA played any old shit, awakening their primitive instincts by harnessing the power of lightning. Lungbutter know better than to treat glorious noise as something that just happens. The interplay of Honey is like a playacted battle for the music’s soul, Kaity Zozula’s pulverised guitar resisting definition in lieu of rusted steel, kept in check by drummer Joni Sadler’s earthbound pacing. It’s a contrast that works well enough, if not better than most, but it’s in vocalist Ky Brooks’ deadpan narratives that the album becomes affecting, whether in the crushing listicle of ‘Flat White’ or the hapless futility of ‘Solar’. She interprets the abstracted dark heart of gentrified spaces, each document of so-called civilisation also one of barbarism. The sentiment of the Mark E. Smith inflected-ah ‘Vile’, revived from a 2014 cassette release, ought to invoke familiarity in anyone who’s been flat hunting in London. “What am I searching for? This is a building on fire”. We’ll take it. 9/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Carly Rae Jepsen — Dedicated (interscope) For the faithful, Carly Rae Jepsen’s career has always seemed shrouded in injustice. There was her third place finish in Canadian Idol and 2008’s largely-ignored debut, followed by the viral success of 2012’s addictively-bubblegum ‘Call Me Maybe’ – a single so ubiquitous that the accompanying album, Kiss, could never compete. Then, just when “one-hit wonder” was all but nailed-on as her epitaph, the British Columbia-born singer conjured

one of the most lauded pop albums of the decade in 2015’s excellent Emotion, featuring contributions from Dev Hynes, Sia and Rostam Batmanglij. And yet, as critical adoration ultimately failed to equate to actual record sales, Jepsen’s status as the perennial underdog was underscored once more. So, at this juncture, Jeppo finds herself in a pretty unusual position for a pop star, facing unenviably high levels of artistic pressure, yet comparatively low commercial expectations. The perfect opportunity to trade that relatable charm for a slightly edgier reinvention, a la her excellent post-Emotion collaborations with Charli XCX and PC Music’s Danny Harle? Well, no. Dedicated largely offers a slicker take on Emotion’s intimate, 80s-influenced pop, shorn of those left-field collaborators and wonky production touches, be it hypnagogic synths or distorted sax. The perfectly serviceable singles are the least interesting things here, overshadowed by the gorgeous, glittering synth groove of Noonie Bao co-write ‘Too Much’ and ‘Feel Right’’s buoyant combo of cowbell, piano and brass. Better still is ‘The Sound’, its delicate piano arpeggios semi-submerged beneath strutting bass and dreamy vocal harmonies. As solid a collection as Dedicated undoubtedly is, it’s missing the magic that made Emotion such a cultural phenomenon. Without it, Jepsen seems destined to remain a cult curiosity for the foreseeable future. But then perhaps that’s how she likes it. 6/10 Gemma Samways

Flying Lotus — Flamagra (warp) It’s been five years since Flying Lotus’ last album, but when you’ve been scoring Blade Runner anime, directing your own

Albums horror movie, collaborating with Kendrick Lamar and producing for Thundercat, pulling together a carnival of collaborators for your sixth studio album takes time. From David Lynch to Solange, Anderson .Paak to Little Dragon, the album’s all-star cast helps make Flamagra another indeterminable odyssey straight down the rabbit hole of Steven Ellison’s brain. According to the man himself, Flamagra only took thematic shape after he heard David Lynch at a party – and fire and eternal flame subsequently became the organising thought. And while ‘Fire is Coming’ serves up the album’s darkest moment with its hanging piano chords and Lynch’s apocalyptic spoken word, you can easily overlook the fact it’s supposed to be the fulcrum because Flamagra’s restless programming is what makes it so compelling. A grab bag of hip-hop, funk, soul, free jazz and the LA Beat scene, there’s the busy, accelerated BPM of opener ‘Heroes’, the woozy ‘Yellow Belly’ and classic boombap of ‘Black Balloons Reprise’. Then there’s Anderson .Paak hitting an effortlessly mellifluous flow on ‘More’, Thundercat’s chunky basslines and soft-edged soul on ‘The Climb’; the roaming, free jazz adventure of ‘Heroes in A Half Shell’; the beat-heavy dreamscapes Ellison specialised in before he started getting freaky on ‘Remind U’. The list and the beat goes on – and you can’t catch a breath. Here, Ellison is firmly in his own orbit: twisting, pivoting, never stopping. Not everything sticks first time but there’s always a flicker, a catalyst, a different thread to unravel or frequency to decipher. Sure, it might lack the more established themes of Until the Quiet Comes and You’re Dead! but while Flamagra doesn’t feel as defined, it feels more unencumbered, more uninhibited: Ellison unleashed. At various stages you’ll think you’ve pinpointed the purpose but then Solange’ll drip into your ear on ‘Land of Honey’ or you’ll ease into the twisted vocals and hallucinogen beats of ‘Debbie is Depressed’ or the sweet, languid falsetto

and astral melodies on the Toro Y Moi collaboration, ‘9 Carrots’. This unfiltered, even more unstructured version of Flying Lotus might not sit with those searching for the deeper meanings of its predecessors but sometimes things don’t have to make perfect sense to be special – Ellison’s work here, and over the last decade, is the cerebral proof. 8/10 Reef Younis

Vanishing Twin — The Age of Immunology (fire) All the shit that’s going on at the moment is put into perspective when Cathy Lucas’s one heartfelt wish for her new Vanishing Twin album is “that one day we’ll all be part of the United Federation of Planets”. It’s not just meant as a casual metaphor for “let’s all get along”. The Age of Immunology is a psychedelic space-race of scientific activism, asking us to confront a deconstruction of reality and embrace the pluralism that’s being needlessly destroyed in contemporary politics. The album plays like a futuristic estate agent trying to pitch a life in an alien world. The rippling sci-funk ‘Planète Sauvage’ lets you befriend a giant blue humanoid in a cult French animation, and album opener ‘Krk (At Home In Strange Places)’ might begin with Croatia, but it ends with a hallucinogenic Sun Ra-esque score to a cinematic Western. It might just be the fullest sounding track to have ever been recorded on an iPhone – it’s good to know Apple has made it to the next reality. A Bauhaus-flecked photograph of the band with hypnotists and hands raised promotes the album, looking like they’ve just stripped the colour from Sonia Delaunay. It’s a rare occasion where image and sound join up perfectly. Sorcerous crackles lead you through spiritual future-jazz musings on ‘Cryonic

Suspension May Save Your Life’. The lowtemperature freezing of human corpses is a surreal leap, sure, but made feasible by Susumu Mukai’s hypnotically swirling basslines and Valentina Magaletti’s krautrock percussion, realising the same sonic lift-off as in their early work with Floating Points and The Oscillation. The futuristic worlds on Immunology are both ominous and tantalising, like staring into Kaa’s eyes or spinning yourself dizzy, imagining your brain to detach slightly from your skull. Vanishing Twin have only been playing together for four years, but they’ve somehow managed to invent and soundtrack the intergalactic afterlife. 8/10 Tristan Gatward

David Allred — The Cell (erased tapes) David Allred’s first album, The Transition, only came out last November, and the idea that he’d be in a rush to get another one out as soon as this month would surely seem comical to anybody familiar with his work. It is steady, slow and deliberate, with a meditative quality that makes perfect sense when you find out that he made that album in between shifts at a care home near to his hometown of Sacramento. You surely couldn’t do a job like that without having a keen sense of your own mortality nagging at you and whilst it’d be inaccurate to suggest that Allred is audibly at peace with it, the sense that you do get from The Cell is that he has a kind of measured handle on it. Across seven stately tracks – some short, some long, but all handsome – he offers thoughtful reflections on love, life and loss. It’s never really his voice, figuratively or literally, that’s the star of the show; instead, what stands out about Allred’s songwriting is his ability to craft an emotional ballast so effectively.

Albums There are no words on the album’s centrepiece, ‘Full Moon’, just hums, whistles, and a sea of reverb that packs a thumping emotional punch. The swells of brass on closer ‘Lexington Hills’ serve a similar purpose. There are lapses onto roads too well-trodden (‘Fading Away’ is very by-the-numbers) but there is plenty here to suggest that, in Allred, we have a new master of minimalism. 7/10 Joe Goggins

Mort Garson — Mother Earth’s Plantasia (sacred bones) In Los Angeles in 1976, if you bought a houseplant from Mother Earth Plant Boutique on Melrose Ave, a heap of bumf came with it: a plantcare booklet, a “remedy chart” to diagnose disease, and, most curiously, an LP, specially commissioned by Mother Earth themselves and designed to be played in proximity to your new photosynthesising friend to encourage it to grow. That record, ‘Plantasia’, was only ever distributed in tiny quantities, and largely ignored by its greenfingered owners as a promotional gimmick. But when a rip of it appeared on YouTube earlier this decade, it drew a cult following as one of the earliest records to be performed entirely on a Moog synthesiser. But Plantasia is no cold exercise in electronic music boffinry, despite its pseudoscientific aims. Indeed, its sleeve branding as “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them” is about right: this is half an hour of inviting, soft-edged utopianism where tunes straight out of an easy-listening compilation are buffed to a sparkle by thereminlike sweeps and space-age twinkles, the Moog’s distinctive soundworld rendering everything dreamlike and quietly radical. And while this album holds appeal as a crate-digger curio on account of its

provenance, it is also, more broadly, just a wonderful piece of pop composition, whose moreish Bacharachian melodies could just as easily be performed by a huge Hollywood pops orchestra, despite composer Garson’s clear love for the potential of his chosen futuristic instrument. Repotted into the pop landscape of 2019, Plantasia gleams and thrives, itself a flower revived. 8/10 Sam Walton

Erland Cooper — Sule Skerry (phases) There’s no fast way to get from Orkney to London but Erland Cooper doesn’t mind, particularly when the lure of his childhood home continues to compel. Stressed and claustrophobic in London, with the safe haven of his recording studio in the city providing some respite, Cooper was looking for release. He initially found it in naming improvised piano recordings after Orcadian dialect for island birds, names like tammie norie (puffin) and cattie-face (short-eared owl) pulling him back to the island he grew up on. Ultimately, that innocent nostalgic exercise manifested itself in an album trilogy shaped by the air, sea and land of Orkney. Last year’s Solan Goose began the series with its avian-inspired instrumentals pulling in elements of ambient, electronica and contemporary classical as Cooper’s almost meditative approach instilled the wistful sense of peace he was searching for. But taking the album’s theme to literal extremes, it wasn’t one that soared like you might expect. There wasn’t the sky-high panorama that makes the world feel small or moves to create any faux sense of drama, just a series of subtle, tonal shifts in Cooper’s genial soundscapes. And while Sule Skerry, the second album in the triptych, switches the over-

arching theme to the North Sea, the method remains delicately consistent. Again, there are few ambient theatrics as Cooper explores reverberations and field-recordings: from tides coming in at dusk under a lifeboat pier where he used to hide as a boy, to capturing the shutter closing the moment the album cover was shot, to passing fishing boats and synths reaching an oddly symbiotic thrum. “It’s a record about the sea, our relationship with the outside world, forces outside of our control,” he explains. “But it’s also about creating a nest within that, nurturing and protecting our own sea havens, those sheltered bays, those safe places. Always returning back in some form, as we step in and out daily.” This commitment to storytelling and dovetailing details makes Sule Skerry feel like a “sonic postcard” according to Cooper, and the result is a series of idiosyncratic love letters to home. At 9 tracks long, it’s not an album that feels overwrought or overthought with Cooper getting the balance right. The tracklisting isn’t as structured as quiet-loud-quiet but where the brilliantly-titled ‘Groatie Buckies’ pushes heavy on lingering piano chords, ‘Lump O’Sea’ cuts through with a flash of tension as contrasting piano lines lean on somber strings and siren songs. Then where ‘First Of The Tide’ feels as bright and breathless as evading the waves on the beach and ‘Spoot Ebb’ dances around with a fleeting softness, ‘Flattie’ stirs as the album’s most dramatic track with Kris Dreyer’s Scottish burr adding gruff weight up front before the thunder clap of percussion shifts into the dissonance of frothing seas and storm-battered cliffs. “Now all I want to do is tell people about Orkney and go back and take people with me,” he told the Guardian earlier this year. “Nature and Orkney in particular is the one true reset for me. There’s something about the longitude and latitude, the air is different, the light is different. It’s the one true thing I constantly go back to.” It’s that delight in his slight return that makes Sule Skerry such a lovely piece of work—considered, crafted and explor-

Albums ative of details that only someone with a true affinity can delve into. If Cooper’s intent was to create an insular kind of magic, he does so here with the interview snippets and Orcadian dialect, peppering tracks with a sense of folklore and nautical culture. And just as the tracklisting for Solan Goose provided satisfied an inquisitive desire to discover and decipher, track titles like ‘Haar’, ‘Sillocks’ and ‘Spoot Ebb’ are further invitations that only add to the charm of Cooper’s magnified focus of home. Wish you were here? 6/10 Reef Younis

Surfbort — Friendship Music (cult) The punk scene continues to rage across the UK, flourishing under pertinent source material and societal angst provided by Tory austerity and Brexit induced disarray. As a result, there now seems to be an ever-increasing appetite for socially conscious, energetic freneticism in our music, and perhaps more than most, us Brits seem to possess an insatiable liking for people shouting over loud guitars. Not satiated with home-grown offerings, such as the ascent of Idles or the mounting crusade from the Dublin, the import trade of punk bands is strong – Amyl and the Sniffers have most recently smuggled their dynamic vigour across the border, and still no sign of let up in public interest. Enter: Surfbort – a Brooklyn based four piece whose feverish racket is aspiring to exploit the current mood across the pond, apprehend our current disposition of political malady, and petition for our support by canvassing to our quintessential British trait of revelling in the face of insecurity and unrest. Friendship Music’s seventeensong duration may seem a daunting and drawn-out affair, but with the lengthiest track clocking in at a diminutive 2:27, it’s

all over within a furious 13 minutes. At its best, it’s a record befitting of a night of careless debauchery. At its worst, it’s a reworked release of old themes offered decades earlier by first wave punk bands. But you probably already knew that. While it’s an undeniably fun and dirty listen, it’s not until the cold light of dawn that you realise you’ve left your wallet in the taxi and you’ve spent all your money on cheap whiskey. 4/10 Tom Critten

Hayden Thorpe — Diviner (domino) The music of Wild Beasts always did have a mischievous streak running through it and now, even after they’ve been laid to rest, that spirit apparently lives on in Hayden Thorpe, who put this first solo record together in secret after telling Q in his band’s exit interview that he didn’t see a future for himself in music. The big question that was always going to hang heavy over any individual effort from either Thorpe or the Kendal outfit’s other vocalist, Tom Fleming, was whether the songs could stand up without Wild Beasts’ calling card – the strange alchemy that occurred when Thorpe’s flighty falsetto clashed with Fleming’s thunderous baritone. To the former’s credit, he showcased a comprehensive vocal range across his old group’s five fulllengths and, whilst there’s the occasional throwback to the vaudevillian theatrics of Limbo, Panto here (‘Love Crimes’ is probably the best example) this is an album that vocally most resembles Smother or Present Tense. But that, in terms of its voice, is a fresh proposition entirely. Diviner runs its way across the rawness scale; at some points, as on the meditative ‘Straight Lines’, Thorpe is quiet and reticent, whilst at others – the stinging ‘Human Knot’, for instance – the

album feels like an open wound. At the heart of it all is the sound of him struggling to find his feet again after a break with his former life that, for all the kept-that-onequiet cunning about the construction of this record, you still get the feeling was not something he saw coming. Without Fleming as a foil, it’s as if he’s singing to himself for the first time; getting his ideas out of his head in order to better make sense of them. That comes across musically, too. A key reason for keeping the template so minimalist is surely to push the themes and ideas to the forefront, but part of it, you suspect, is that he doesn’t want to make any false moves so soon after the dissolution of Wild Beasts. Much of the album, then, is characterised by sparse landscapes: flecks of piano here, looped moody synth there. It’s not enough to make up for the collapse of the band; that they announced their split a few weeks before the rise of the #MeToo movement still feels like a cruel joke, given that nobody deconstructed the nature of masculinity so intelligently as Wild Beasts. It is, though, sufficient to put to bed any doubts that they might have called it a day because there was no juice left in the tank. Thorpe’s supply, at least, is clearly bountiful. 8/10 Joe Goggins

Yeasayer — Erotic Reruns (yeasayer records) With their scattershot sonic collages, Brooklyn art-rock trio Yeasayer were one of the emblematic bands of unbridled ’00s indie experimentalism. But as “genre-defying” loses all meaning as a descriptor and Billie Eilish dominates the charts it seems that their mishmash of electronic sounds, “world music”, psychedelia, and roots might be not be such a unique combination after all. In this post-genre landscape, then,

Albums Yeasayer’s fifth album has embraced a much more cohesive aesthetic. Picking up on the sleazy (and often cheesy) nature of the rock genres which populate the album – most noticeable on psychedelia-inspired ‘Blue Skies Dandelions’ and indie bop ‘People I Loved’ – there’s a consistent preoccupation with love and eroticism. Indeed, an overt yet inoffensive sexuality runs throughout the record (think “daddy” Jeff Goldblum) established via the album title and picked up on songs like ‘Let Me Listen In On You’; a plaintive slice of krautrock whose hook, “I could make your dreams come true/ if you let me listen in on you,” resonates with sensual sacrifice. It seems like the spirituality of previous albums has been funnelled into romantic and sexual themes, made particularly acute on ‘Ecstatic Baby’ where erotic and religious ecstasy are playfully intermingled with tongue-in-cheek lines like “loving you is my only religion”. Overall, Erotic Reruns is a pleasant and inoffensive listen, particularly to the uninitiated listener. Straying dramatically from the band’s previous efforts, however, it will no doubt prove divisive amongst Yeasayer faithfuls. 6/10 Megan Wallace

Urochromes — Trope House (wharf cat) Ironically, for a band who are literally named after the colour of piss Trope House frequently feels like a detonation of different colours. Urochromes’ first full-length is a record that is as manically energetic as it is head-scratching. Then again, Urochromes have always done ‘punk’ a little bit differently. Since 2015, the duo has taken the triedand-tested guitar-and-drum macho punk ideal and have slowly subverted it by adding layers of Devo-like surrealism. Trope House sees the New York

band wander even further down this experimental path. Kick-off track ‘Milieux’ and single ‘Hair So Big’ might be old-school classic punk rock, but over the 10-tracks Urochromes manage to visit some pretty weird and trippy places. ‘Rumshpringa’ is probably the closest you’ll get to a ballad, while the cover of Bikini Kill’s ‘Resist Psychic Death’ is gloriously unhinged. In the hands of most other bands, this balancing act wouldn’t work, but Urochromes have a secret weapon in Dick Riddick. Effortlessly inspired and inventive, he always seems able to throw Stooges influences, tape fuzz and guitar licks together and come up with incredible-sounding sonic ratatouille. With all of its bizarro twists, Trope House is this genius cut loose. 8/10 Dominic Haley

Siskiyou — Not Somewhere (constellation) As with Misty’s breakout from Fleet Foxes, the success of Colin Huebert’s getaway from Great Lake Swimmers suggests the clean-cuts aren’t always the voices people most want to hear. Huebert’s style is a little more discreet. It contains all the rural wistfulness of Swimmers, but as Siskiyou moves on to become his out-and-out solo project, the hushed twilight-folk of Not Somewhere sounds more suited to an existential campfire-for-one than a poptempered barn dance. Turns out drummers are people, too. His ruminations on happiness join tentatively titled tracks ‘Temporary Weakness’ and ‘Dying Dying Dying’. The off-kilter timbres of Told Slant or Eskimeaux in ‘Nothing Disease’ and the vocal woofing in ‘What Ifs’ could be the butcher’s scraps of a Mark Kozelek record. A film commission that resulted in album opener ‘Stop Trying’ isolates

a sample of dialogue: “trying is the problem; you’re trying to get somewhere as if you’re not somewhere”. It all settles around some laissez-faire answer that a lack of happiness comes from misdirected ambition; you just need to give yourself a little more credit. The downcast lo-fi melodies become painfully nostalgic at times: a family home with a thatched roof stands in front of a sunburnt yellow lawn. Some songs are built-up from the noises of a school playground, others are singed with 1960s sunshine pop. The additions of cellist Rebecca Foon (Saltland/Esmerine) and Destroyer’s JP Carter makes ‘The End II /// Song of Joy’ burst open with all the childhood magic of a toybox. For the most part, Siskiyou’s ruminations feel directionless but inexplicably familiar. It’s a feeling that really doesn’t grow old. 9/10 Tristan Gatward

Younghusband — Swimmers (opposite number) Four years on from their last release, Younghusband have re-emerged still doing what they do best: crafting smart, modest indie-pop tracks driven by slick guitars, padded drums and the down-trodden vocals of Euan Hinshelwood. Hoping to find some fresh perspective, the band retreated to an old Greenwich barn to record and self-produce Swimmers. The eccentricity and isolation of the setting is felt in the record’s sound, which is more spacious and minimal than previous ventures, their shimmer undercut by a subtle melancholy. Sadly, Swimmers is mostly repetitive and uninspiring. At least half the songs are forgettable and the driving drum-bass-synth sound is fairly constant throughout, to the point of sounding somewhat mechanical. There are a few

Albums saving graces – ‘Modern Lie’ is instantly charming, opened by an irresistibly iridescent riff. ‘It’s Not Easy’ is a sad, syncopated gem which concludes the record, surmising its minimalism and melancholia. Moments bring late Beatles to mind – the pop-rock boy-band formula with a polite touch of surrealism – but nothing sticks around long enough to overcome the overwhelming averageness. No doubt what Younghusband do, they do well; but this promising band seem to be playing it too safe to really impress. 5/10 Katie Cutforth

Sinkane — Dépaysé (city slang) Dépaysé is a French word meaning “to be removed from one’s habitual surroundings”. It’s a phenomenon that Sinkane leader Ahmed Gallab knows a little bit about: as a child, he and his family fled Sudan following the 1989 military coup, settling in the States. During the current travel ban-shamed period of US history, living as a Sudanese-American has become complicated, and this album is a defiant first-hand cri de coeur. Remarkable, then, that it is such a joyful listen. It is Sinkane’s seventh album and easily their most jubilant and celebratory; a nine-track, 40-minute fiesta of crosscultural inclusivity. Heck, the opening two songs even go by the names of ‘Everybody’ and ‘Everyone’. Gallab knows that the most effective means of overcoming the power of the cemented minds that seek to control us is to prove that bringing together different traditions generates positivity. On Dépaysé we get funk, afrobeat, reggae, acid rock, Sudanese pop and countless other forms standing shoulder to shimmying shoulder. The soaring, ’70s electric guitar of the title track, the playful vocal harmonies of ‘Ya Sudan’, the anthemic chorus of ‘Be

Here Now’ – it is futile to resist any part of it. Dépaysé is the sound of our major cities, the sound that humans make when they champion their history and choose their own future, whether their leaders like it or not. It is now more needed than ever. Rejoice in it. 9/10 Max Pilley

Cate Le Bon — Reward (mexican summer) It is an intriguing image conjured by Cate Le Bon: days spent learning to craft furniture, evenings spent forging her latest record with nobody around to hear it. She withdrew for a year to live alone in the Lake District, an isolation that was everything she needed and didn’t need – “enforcing an absence in order to mourn it.” Reward is arresting and absurd; a rigorous examination of the self, with just a hint of the madness that often comes with seclusion. The lead single ‘Daylight Matters’ is as catchy as it is devastating, with all the bittersweet cheerfulness of a country ballad undermined by confusing sonic disarray. “Love you I love you I love you I love you/ But you’re not here,” Le Bon laments calmly, soaking in the sorrow while appearing removed from it. Despite elaborate and daring instrumentation, she remains ever central and powerful, her vocal variation and eccentricity reminiscent of Kate Bush or Aldous Harding. Her voice drifts easily from otherworldly on ‘Magnificent Gestures’ to down-toearth on ‘You Don’t Love Me’, yet the record is impressively cohesive considering the sonic and stylistic variation, and the use of familiar structures and sounds amongst all the oddity serves only to add to the absurdity of the soundscape. There is a closeness in the songs too, and the sense that they would remain as compelling were it still just Le Bon and her second-hand Meers piano, singing

into the silence. The most tender moment arrives with ‘Meet The Man’: stark but for mournful low piano and a single unsettling, unrelenting saxophone. The record is a window into the mind of Cate Le Bon. But behind that window are mirrors, and it is that multiplicity and objectivity that makes this record so magnificent. “Everything is slowly losing its meaning,” warns Le Bon, attempting to cling to that meaning. “Always keep your hand behind the chisel.” Reward is just that: the precious, well-earned outcome of patience and introspection, and the bravery to be wholly yourself. 9/10 Katie Cutforth

Keel Her — With Kindness (o genesis) With over twenty albums and EPs uploaded to her Bandcamp in the past eight years it’s clear Keel Her has one hell of a work ethic – and not much of a filter. Real name Rose Keeler-Schäffeler, her prolific musical output began as a way to make herself feel better when she was in her teens, where she would write a song every day as a form of self-therapy. This stream of consciousness caught both the meditative and the mundane details of her life in its net, and she’s a better songwriter today for it. With her latest collection she continues to use music as a release to process pain. The results are predictably – and appropriately – messy. Recorded during a time when she was stuck in a rut, the songs here are unpolished and deeply intimate. “I look out and all I see is misery,” she admits on ‘Self-Sabotage’ over jittery guitar chords and droning electronics. Yet despite the heavy lyrics, it wouldn’t be accurate to call the song, or any others on the album for that matter, bleak, as Keel Her’s caustic sense of humour shines

Albums through on even its darkest moments. On ‘Two Thoughts’, she sings about feeling detached from reality but, with her deadpan delivery, it comes off as darkly comic rather than unsettling. Even in With Kindness’s weaker moments, Keel Her is an empathetic, witty and honest storyteller. 6/10 Alexander Smail

The Mattson 2 — Paradise (company) Jared and Jonathon Mattson have never been ones to play it safe. Uniquely in tune with one another as only identical twins can be, the pair have pushed the boundaries and explored new corners of their sound with every record they’ve made. They’re the duo that covered John Coltrane’s most acclaimed album without so much as picking up a saxophone, after all. Their eighth record, Paradise, sees the pair adding vocals for the first time. Wonderfully hazy and firmly sat on the right side of jazz fusion, Paradise is an album that glimmers with Californian sunshine. Pieced together from alternately needling and reverbsoaked guitars and backed with effortless, springy rhythms, it is LA jazz via the psychedelia-lite of Mac DeMarco and Tame Impala. Its complexities are often hidden away beneath deceptively simple sounding riffs and refrains. Take second track ‘Wavelength’ – a breezy, sun-soaked road trip of a song that cruises along playfully until it opens up into a series of hypnotic solos. Likewise, ‘Essence’ bears all the hallmarks of slacker pop but balances its lo-fi qualities with far more musicality and ambition. In places, Paradise may be too breezy, and the laidback nature of its tracklist does mean that the album can get lost in its own pleasant haze if you’re

not paying close attention. However, given the Mattson’s history, even Paradise’s less-than-enthralling moments feel intentional. 8/10 Mike Vinti

Injury Reserve — Injury Reserve (loma vista) Coming from Arizona, experimental trio Injury Reserve felt free to roam between music scenes as they worked out their own identity. They took lessons from punk, jazz and house music, with their early mixtapes displaying an embrace of old and new hip-hop alike. Following Denzel Curry’s lead in signing to Loma Vista last year, the Phoenix group set about pinning down their diverse influences into something more coherent. The result is a razor sharp and nonconformist debut, elevated by its playful self-awareness. ‘Koruna & Lime’ sets the tone for the LP, introducing Injury Reserve’s wonky yet focused sound. Instagram influencers are ridiculed on ‘Jawbreaker’, before New York rapper Rico Nasty refines the song’s critique of a misogynistic fashion industry. Her presence marks one of several effective collaborations on the album – JPEGMAFIA and Cakes da Killa are also drafted in to confront a suffocating industrial soundscape on ‘GTFU’. Injury Reserve is full of nods to internet culture. Coding malfunctions kill off multiple tracks, while ‘QWERTY Interlude’ attracts a virus with the mere mention of Limewire. Every line of ‘Jailbreak the Tesla’ brims with wit as Ritchie With a T remembers hacking an iPod Touch and imagines doing the same to an electric car; Portland rapper Aminé’s guest verse adds further edge to a track. Riffs on this debut are exciting and varied. The rolling piano that buoys ‘Gravy N Biscuits’ sounds immediately

recognisable, while there is a jittery, paranoid quality to the chimes of ‘Wax On’ – a standout track that builds pace subtly before it unfurls. Stepa J. Groggs raps with refreshing clarity on ‘What A Year It’s Been’, granting the album’s final third a chance to turn inward. Injury Reserve have proven their versatility with a debut record that is sometimes manic, sometimes spacious, yet captivating throughout. 9/10 Jamie Haworth

Pixx — Small Mercies (4ad) Hannah Rodgers’ debut album as Pixx was an inward looking journey into her experience of anxiety. For her followup the London-based musician has flipped her gaze outward and to a world gone mad. The 13 tracks are built around personas that explore, amongst other things, religion and environmental destruction. Musically, there’s also been a shift. Where 2017’s The Age Of Anxiety was rooted in the ethereal electro of Morcheeba and Zero 7, the Brit School graduate has now expanded her influences and gained an interest in big pop hooks. There isn’t quite one style for each character but the tracks have multiple reference points, with ‘Funsize’ being the closest in spirit to Pixx’s debut. The synth-centric numbers time slip to the ’80s, especially breezy opener ‘Andean Condor’ and the title track, the motorik groove of which recalls Stealing Sheep. ‘Duck Out’, meanwhile, combines these elements with a gothic sensibility via its early New Order bass line. In addition, the personas have demanded a shift in instrumentation through the introduction of guitars. The punk-pop attitude of ‘Bitch’ sounds like Du Blonde baiting Nirvana; ‘Hysterical’ is

Albums a throwback to Long Blondes guitar pop. The extremities of these disparate sounds don’t always gel. ‘Bitch’, in particular, is a strong track that could have been cut from another album. For the most part, though, ‘Small Mercies’ is a marked step forward from her folk-edged beginnings. 6/10 Susan Darlington

Skinny Pelembe — Dreaming is Dead Now (brownswood) Dreaming is Dead Now is a curious release from Skinny Pelembe, a South African born, Doncaster raised artist channelling eclectic musical influences to offer a meditation on the state of the nation. The album purports to celebrate “flawed, post recession Britain”, and certainly the track titles are evocative and political, calling on the UK’s history of manufacturing and consumerism (‘Gonna Buy a Car Today’), racism (‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’), stiff upperlip aristocracy (‘Ten Four, Good Friend’), bawdy sexual comedy (‘Spit/Swallow’) and inherited wealth (‘Blood Relations’) to paint a picture of a nation floundering in the shadows of its imperial history. There’s a clever, if bizarre, mash up of musical influences here – rock pop meets futuristic electronica on the title track, while ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’ has a kind of ska-inflected sound that calls on the race history the song’s title evokes. And the whole record is washed in a heavy dose of reverb. I like the effect this has, particularly on ‘Spit/Swallow’ where the bouncy baselines mellow into something more fluid after the opening bars – a kind of dreamy funk nostalgia that has an occasional Eurythmics flavour. So there’s plenty to admire in the concept and composition. The problem, if there is one, is that the album doesn’t really deliver on the political critique that the song titles promise. We’re immersed

in a sense of something vaguely British, sure, and though Pelembe makes us feel that Britishness, he doesn’t ultimately give us anything new to consider. 7/10 Katie Beswick

Brandt Brauer Frick — Echo (because music) Brandt Brauer Frick’s universe is one imagined through flesh and through machine. A full decade on from their debut, the Berlin trio have yet again gone about deconstructing club music, stitching together drum machines and synthesisers with strings, piano and brass for their latest album, Echo. The arrangements here are, uniformly, fine. At times, the intricately edited beats stutter in sonic ambiguity: too lacking in serrated knife-edges to entrance club music aficionados, too devoid of washing textures to enrapture even the most liberal of neoclassical heads. Ultimately, the songs struggle to give the impression that they are anything but stargazing remixes of existing club tracks. Rather clumsily, ‘Fuel’ aims for cacophony but instead unravels with overcompensating acoustic touches, like an acoustic iteration of an average-todecent Bicep dancefloor hit. But Brandt Brauer Frick are nothing if not chimeric, moving nimbly between nourishing orchestral passages and the synthetic, synapse-flickering heft of great club music. Album opener ‘Rest’, an apt sign of some of the richness contained within, is rigged with delirious, stalking rhythms and billowing strings. ‘Chamber II’, meanwhile, sounds as though super intelligent AI has perfected live instrumentation, implied by the way the featherweight piano shimmers so ominously and so ponderously, a creator confused by their own creation. Echo casts Brandt Brauer Frick as

durable stylists. In a way, the trio’s dedication to restless, passionate production becomes diluted because of their reluctance to venture away from – or beyond – the collision of two materially divergent worlds. Triumphant instrumentation rarely rings so hollow. 5/10 Colin Gannon

Peter Perrett — Humanworld (domino) You wait forty years for a bus and two turn up at once. When Peter Perrett returned from oblivion in 2017 with How the West Was Won, just as surprising as the album’s actual arrival was quite how good it actually sounded. Following the disintegration of the Only Ones in 1980, Perrett withdrew into the addictions that would subsume his life for decades, but Humanworld continues his previous record’s upward trajectory. It’s a record of Stones-esque power pop with few surprises, but that doesn’t stop it being skilfully executed and even remarkably cliché free, much to the credit of his band. ‘Heavenly Day’ – a clear highlight – is redemptive without veering into schmaltz, as Perrett reflects: “We were the only people alive that moment/ If only I could freeze that moment”. As with any great rock’n’roll vocalist, simple lines take on uncanny power and offer multitudes of meaning – his vocal, now weathered into a ragged Dylan snarl, contains a surprising amount of power for a man who once claimed that his lungs were so wracked by crack that he couldn’t finish a song without an oxygen mask. Perrett represented a Johnny Thunders cult of elegantly wasted oblivion that’s rightly gone out of fashion, and here those years are referenced at points with no small amount of pathos. It’s a dated vision of rock’n’roll, sure, but Perrett wears it well. 6/10 Fergal Kinney

Albums Live

Test Pressing Festival Various venues, Hackney Wick 27 April 2019

City festivals: we have enough of them, right? Well, not really. Not city festivals that are done properly. East London’s Test Pressing Festival sets out a clear mission for itself and fulfils it with panache. If only more events were able to do so with such apparent ease. Spread around a clutch of venues in Hackney Wick, ranging from wellequipped club spaces to a characterfully ramshackle former public bath, Test Pressing is a straightforward beast, focusing on little else but a carefullycurated line-up of techno, noise-rock, post-punk and experimental electronica. It’s a simple formula that works perfectly. We begin the day in Studio 92 for sets from Woom and Sylvia Kastel. The former, a remarkably stripped-back vocal group, weave their harmonies together with stunning intricacy and precision, qualities that are sadly lacking from the latter’s disappointingly static set. On record, Kastel creates soundscapes in which one may get entirely lost; today, they simply get lost themselves, blighted by a combination of dodgy sound and a rather conservative approach to live electronic performance.

Afterward, to Grow to catch CC Honeymoon. Asher Preston’s synthdriven goth-pop project is realised live with relatively few elements – a backing track of sparse 808s and kitsch-rich midi strings accompany his single live vocal – yet his physical performance offers no such restraint. This is emphatically a good thing: his absurd, sensual presence is by turns commanding and hilarious, highly reminiscent of similar electro eccentrics like John Maus and Apostille, and he shares their vital lack of irony as he preens and peacocks to his Vangelis-like sonics. His joyous show sets us up perfectly for one of the day’s heavy hitters: a characteristically muscular, uncompromising set in Studio 94 from New York noise titans, A Place To Bury Strangers. Next door in Studio 92, Lust For Youth provide an elegant highlight, their balletic new wave drenched in a distinctly hard-edged, chilly romanticism. Frontman Hannes Norrvide cuts a matinee-idol figure onstage, all Brando jawline and theatrical lope, as his bandmate Malthe Fischer contours each track with elegiac guitar lines. They’ll tire of the comparison, but live the Copenhagen natives serve as an intriguing negative image of their fellow handsome post-punkindebted Danes, Iceage: for every seething guitar line from the latter band, LFY

have a tender arpeggio; for every psychosexual snarl, a faraway, vulnerable croon. Less exciting, unfortunately, are Surfbort. Their speedy garage punk is spirited enough, but it’s just so derivative, every other riff apparently lifted from either the most Ramones-like Sex Pistols tune, or the most Pistols-like Ramones tune. At their most adventurous, they hint that they may perhaps have heard half a New York Dolls record. No matter. We head back to Studios 92 and 94 for the brutal one-two of Scalping and Schwefelgelb. The former overcome an initially muddy live mix to break into a formidable tech-punk groove, at times evoking a demonic collision between LCD Soundsystem and Vatican Shadow and hinting towards enormous potential; the latter create iron-fisted industrial techno against which resistance is futile. Like all the best artists in their genre, the Berlin duo produce a monstrous sound that feels at once thrillingly futuristic and elementally primal, timeless yet startlingly new, grindingly mechanical yet red in tooth and claw. It’s a fitting end to a superbly-assembled day in the capital. Luke Cartledge

Apparat + KÁRYYN Barbican Centre, London 27 April 2018

Apparat’s a funny one, isn’t he? For every conceptually brilliant track there’s a sixminute blast of Eurovision rock with the kind of pitch perfect vocals you’d expect to hear on a DJ Sammy remix. His first solo music in six years, released earlier this year on Mute, was a palliative and welcome step away from the dancefloor: LP5’s melancholic techno was both his most stripped-down and psychedelic release. Another polarizer, but generally speaking, pretty good. Sadly, the downbeat intricacies of ‘VOI_DO’ and ‘HEROIST’ at the Barbican are undone by the volume dial, as if Apparat was catering to an

photography by luis kramer

Albums Live audience purely in search of the builds and structures of his finest former pop ballads. Regardless of the setlist’s suitability, sharply serrated neon lights cut through any ambience, and decibel upon decibel unravel the best gradations of his newer material. The support set from KÁRYYN was spectacular. All-too-easy Björk comparisons are there to be made, but you’ll hear the lurching abstractions of the breathiest acapella merging with her Syrian heritage and Arabic influenced folk music. She didn’t need amplification at the end; she was shouting the closing lines to ‘EVER’ into a pitch-black audience. Tristan Gatward

The Good The Bad & The Queen London Palladium, London 19 April 2019

Bruce Forsyth is buried under the stage of the London Palladium. His ashes, at least. Genuinely. None of us would have known this if Damon Albarn hadn’t so genuinely saluted the floor at the start of a show that clearly means a lot to him. Every project seems to be mean a lot to Albarn these days, in fact, but the Palladium has definitely got his misty, English eyes going

photography by jody evans

– and of course there is no venue more perfect to bring to life The Good, The Bad & The Queen’s Merrie Land than this historic, vaudeville theatre, steeped in nostalgia as that album is, as it attempts to unpack Brexit in a very polite way. The band make use of the place as Westend shows do, the drop of the safety curtain marking an interval after Merrie Land is played in full, and in order. Like the record, it only occasionally drags, and when you do get bored you can simply watch Tony Allen and try to work out how you’re hearing that dubby drum beat from a man so utterly motionless. They use the fly at the back of the stage too, hoisting the cyclorama (of a faded pier) to unveil the 44-strong Penguin Choir from Wales, first on ‘Lady Boston’ and then again on and off throughout the evening. It never fails to get a cheer. With the curtain back up Albarn announces “Part 2”: the band’s debut album, again in order, and not too shy of the whole thing. If Merrie Land politely wishes for the clocks to be turned back, the eponymous LP does just that, although it’s remarkable how connected the two albums feel 12 years apart, in their skanking tone and dusty beauty. Albarn has a grand time throughout, smiling more than I’ve seen before. When the curtain drops again we boo it for staying down. Stuart Stubbs

Black Country, New Road The Lexington, London 11 April 2019

We don’t know much about Black Country, New Road, but they did form from the ashes of Nervous Conditions, who split last year amid abuse allegations against their singer. And we do know of their south London connections, and that they feature members of Ugly, Jockstrap and Goat Girl. They’re sometimes a six piece, but tonight a seven piece. There’s senseless sax and gratuitous violins (this is an old Sparks gag I’ve been waiting a while to try out). Another thing we know: singer Isaac Wood is an astonishing lyricist. His sweet spot is the gulf between everybody else’s pleasure and his own. This can be in sex (‘Athens, France’ being about “chronic fear of intercourse”), or this can be in leisure pursuits (“Everybody’s coming up,” he twitches at one point, “and I guess I’m a little late to the party!”). Oh, and it’s pretty meta also – Slint are clearly a bit of an influence, so naturally Wood describes the band as “the second best Slint tribute act”. See also another track which asks: “What are your sexual preferences? Have you seen Black Midi?”. His vocal delivery can be a Jarvis Cocker deadpan, before suddenly quivering and breaking from baritone to an almost hysterical, fevered falsetto (think Jonathan Richman on plenty of caffeine and hardly any sleep – it’s great). Curiously, much of his lyrics seem set in a late era Ballard world of international wealth and privilege, gilded environments to which he appears something of an outsider, gravely intoning about “dark rings around her eyes, and a Four seasons towel around her head”. The band are sonically expansive – proggy, even – but they’re never saggy. This is not wigging out, and rather most interesting of all is how much this group can do: often within the same song, there’s ideas from jazz, neo-classical, and even at one point Turkish funk. We don’t know much about Black Country, New Road, but God they’re good. Fergal Kinney

FilmAlbums and Books

Eight Grade (dir. bo burnham) When Kayla (Elsie Fisher) signs off her YouTube videos she presses her thumb and forefinger into a circle and, adorably and awkwardly, enthuses “Gucci” into her webcam. It’s nonsensical beyond its ambition for branding greatness and a dream of popularity. It’s how the debut film from Bo Burnham (a former YouTuber himself) opens, setting in motion your complete and utter love for this cripplingly normal 14-year-old in the

final week or two of middle school. If you don’t feel that way instantly and continually, you’re a bad person. Eighth Grade is a truly modern coming-of-age movie beyond its obvious zeitgeist of parents embarrassing their kids by referencing an irrelevant Facebook, a teacher with an appalling dab three years too late, and the film’s undercurrent of young people forging their identities with the aid of iPhones, social media profiles and YouTube channels with struggling numbers. All of that stuff stokes the film’s anxiety only because the performances (especially Fisher’s) are so brilliantly tongue-tied. Kayla, for examples, often fluffs her video signoffs, which were directionless and bumpy in the first place, much like most of the conversations she has at school where she’s mortified to have been voted ‘The Quietest Girl’ of the year group. Her single-parent father – a cool dad – is nowhere near as awkward, of course, but Josh Hamilton

plays the role equally as naturalistic as a beautiful father/daughter relationship becomes an island of safety between Kayla trying so hard with her peers. It’s in feeling so off-the-cuff that Eighth Grade feels so special and different to all other teen movies. Or – more accurately – it’s a high school film that revels in the normality of it all. It neither invents melodrama nor doubles down on the comic bleakness of adolescence like ‘credible’ teen movies do, instead allowing those small moments to feel as significant as they are when you’re 14. I’ve certainly never rooted for a teen as hard as I have Kayla before. When she pleads for more people to subscribe to her channel, dear God, I hope she gets them; when she makes a cool older friend, I’m proud; when a sleazy little shit tries it on with her, I feel helpless and sick. My nerves would never be able to cope with having a teenage daughter. Stuart Stubbs

Fried and Justified: Hits, Myths, Break-Ups and Breakdowns in the Record Business — Mick Houghton (faber) During his post-punk career as a music business publicist, Mick Houghton worked with everybody from The Ramones and Talking Heads to Bert Jansch and Elastica. Fried and Justified traces his journey through an industry that no longer exists, cutting his teeth on The Undertones and Liverpool’s seminal Zoo bands, Echo and the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes. It’s Houghton’s lack of cynicism, love of music and determination to help outsiders go mainstream that make this such a funny and fascinating read. Lee Bullman

NSFW: Laurent Benaïm’s Transgressive Photography — Dian Hanson (taschen) In an age where everybody from 12-years-old upwards carries a state of the art camera and uses it to Instagram everything they eat, it is astonishing to come across photographs that retain the power to shock and provoke. Laurent Benaim’s images investigate the alt side of desire and are produced via a dreamy process that evokes the forbidden side of a time long past. The images contained within the collection look like Nine Inch Nails sound: dark and beautiful, gentle and harsh, and belie the fact that for all of the technology at our fingertips, we are, ultimately, still animals. Lee Bullman

Then It Fell Apart — Moby (faber) At the outset of the second volume of Moby’s memoirs we find the musician everyone likes to snark at catapulted into the middle of the dream. Critical acclaim and commercial success come calling and, via the success of his 1999 album Play, fame on a scale he could never have dreamt of is suddenly his. Soon existing on a daily diet of class A drugs and vodka, Moby finds himself in a world inhabited by David Bowie and Madonna where he is lauded at every turn, making this the volume you want to read. Unflinching and searingly honest, Then It Fell Apart warns that we should be careful what we wish for, just in case we get it. Lee Bullman

W. H. LUNG SAT 18 MAY OSLO HACKNEY GEORGIA UT WED 22 MAY OLD O REDON S LAURA JEAN FRI 24 MAY THE ISLINGTON ESYA THURS 30 MAY THE GLOVE THAT FITS LUCY DACUS WED 5 JUNE EARTH HACKNEY GUIDED BY VOICES WED 5 & THURS OUT6 JUNE SOLD VILLAGE UNDERGROUND CATE LE BON MON 10 JUNE VILLAGE UNDERGROUND WASUREMONO WED 19 JUNE SEBRIGHT ARMS

THE STROPPIES THURS 18 JUL THE LEXINGTON SAM EVIAN TUES 27 AUG THE LEXINGTON BEDOUINE SAT 7 SEPT QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL STEVE GUNN TUES 17 SEPT OMEARA NATALIE EVANS THURS 19 SEPT THE ISLINGTON PLASTIC MERMAIDS THURS 3 OCT SCALA BESS ATWELL THURS 10 OCT OMEARA

SKINNY PELEMBE WED 16 OCT MOTH CLUB ROSIE LOWE WED 23 OCT VILLAGE UNDERGROUND PALACE SAT 9 NOV ROUNDHOUSE SHURA THURS 14 NOV ROUNDHOUSE KATHRYN JOSEPH MON 18 NOV EARTH HACKNEY SIR WAS WED 27 NOV SCALA BC CAMPLIGHT THURS 28 NOV ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL

ROZI PLAIN TUES 15 OCT VILLAGE UNDERGROUND

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Interview

Thrilling pursuit While the whole of the record industry has been scrambling over the most unlikely hype band you can think of, Black Midi have been chasing continually awkward sounds to please themselves, by Luke Cartledge. Photography by Matilda Hill-Jenkins 44

Interview

Interview Whether

they like it or not, Black Midi are an enigma. Since I first heard about this group, a year or two ago in a South London pub, I’ve been intrigued by the idea of this band. “Yeah, it’s like math rock but with better riffs and a weird singer,” the rumours would go. “Like some mad jazz/punk thing”; “incredible drummer”; “they look about 12”, and so on. How was a group like this, apparently so difficult, elusive, and challenging, being touted as a hype band? We’re not talking about Viva Brother here. I’ve seen them play a few times since, and each time I’m left with a cocktail of emotions: partly awestruck by their sheer technical prowess – particularly from drummer Morgan Simpson – partly thrilled to see a genuinely awkward band inspire such a reaction in people. Yet most lastingly, I’ve been a little reserved as to how truly revolutionary this group could be, even with their teeming ideas and obvious ability to make caustic sonics appeal to a diverse audience. Yes, they make a formidable racket and can really fucking play, but it’s been difficult to silence the insistent voice telling me that Black Midi are essentially a pretty good math/noise band who happened to have stumbled across the zeitgeist. Also, a female friend had this to say about them, and whether or not it’s entirely fair, it stuck with me: “If they were women, or a couple of years older, there’s no way people would be taking them this seriously”. I’ve always been very keen to have my mind changed on these reservations though, and as I listen to their debut album while preparing for my interview with the group, I think it has been. Schlagenheim, their first LP, comes out on June 21 via Rough Trade. The title literally translates from German as “hit home”, and if that’s the record’s mission statement, it’s certainly fulfilled. As debut albums go, this is uncompromising, cleareyed stuff, and all the better for it. Whatever criticisms one may have of Black Midi, there’s no questioning their intensity and clarity of purpose. This record makes an impression all right. The LP focuses some of the more outré elements of the live show, trimming the fat from the mid-song jams and placing a greater emphasis on consistent grooves and impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness vocal work. It’s in these more streamlined moments that Black Midi truly excel: the brutal climax of debut single ‘bmbmbm’, for example, or the vertiginous, desperate rush of ‘near DT, MI’, for my money the album’s standout track. The jury’s still out on other parts of the record. As technically masterful as they all are, they do have a tendency to obscure the direction of their tracks in the service of showy flourishes and pushes. It’s a shortcoming that’s compounded by the fact that when they do regain their sense of cohesion, such as on closing track ‘ducter’, their playing is fabulous, astonishingly precise and bristling with invention. And for all the album’s occasional extremity, it’s often difficult to identify an emotional core with which to fully engage; frequently, you’re left admiring the abilities of Black Midi, but not entirely falling in love with them.

Yet maybe that’s all part of the allure, and I’ll gain a great deal from speaking to them at length, discussing their motivations, contextualising Schlagenheim on a more personal level. Maybe. — In plain sight — We meet at the band’s studio in South West London – a small room in a grandly dilapidated terrace, on an overcast April morning. They arrive one-by-one, raffish guitarist Matt Kelvin first, then quiet, polite bassist Cameron Picton, gregarious drummer Morgan Simpson, and finally, de facto frontman Geordie Greep. Once they’re all assembled they waste no time in striking up into an improvised “private set”, myself the sole audience member. What follows is pretty special. Without a word as to what they’re going to play, they slide into a lithe, sprightly groove, Simpson’s painterly drumming providing a sleek counterpoint to the droning, gaseous textures conjured by his bandmates. From there, they move through a remarkable procession of moods and timbres, improvising masterfully in a way that recalls the “spontaneous composition” of forebears like Can and Talk Talk. They have that way of playing together that verges upon the telekinetic, each note nestling snugly against the next, each groove greasing the wheel of another. Perhaps it’s the early hour, but their playing seems relatively tranquil to my ears, markedly more serene and restrained than I’ve seen at their frenetic gigs. A little unexpectedly given this band’s noisy reputation, this comparative lightness of touch rather suits them. After twenty-five minutes or so, they gradually conclude their improv, each member finding a graceful way of disentangling himself from the jam. Picton picks up the handheld recorder next to him, that I hadn’t noticed until now, and grimaces. It’s not been working for most of their set. This, it turns out, is how they set about writing their complex, restless music, as Kelvin explains. “We’ll record everything, then listen back to that for things we really like and take it from there. Latch onto a single bit at a time, then take other bits, and mash them together.” “There’s a lot of scaling down,” says Simpson. “We’ll listen to the recordings individually, and different people will like different bits, which makes it kind of cool.” Each improv session will usually last around two hours, with each initial phase of a new composition being entirely collaborative and spontaneous. “We just get in the zone,” says Greep. “Usually the first hour of jamming is rubbish, then after that it gets good. You warm up, and then it all just gets going. You need to get to a point where you just stop thinking about it.” They’re an unusual bunch in conversation. Simpson and Greep do the majority of the talking, and their manner contrasts sharply, the former relaxed and effusive, the latter rather more intense, prone to a withering stare or a monosyllabic answer when my questions don’t interest him. He’s a puzzling presence throughout, steely-eyed and detached, yet not unfriendly. At one

Interview

Interview point during the interview he produces a packet of obscurelynamed biscuits from somewhere within his long, Cossack-style overcoat, and offers them to me sweetly. I politely decline, slightly wrongfooted by his sudden shift in character, to the visible amusement of his bandmates. I suspect that this slight oddness, the occasional incongruities between the four band members, has only added to their secretive reputation. I ask whether they’ve actively cultivated that air of mystery, and whether they like the label now that it’s been attached to them. “No, and no,” asserts Picton sharply. Simpson expands. “It basically just came from one article. We never set out to be hard to find. I guess the whole mystery thing is the lack of activity on social media, but that’s not a lack of anything – we’re posting what people wanna see, just the information that’s needed.” It’s true: look at their social media presence, and it is fairly sparse, but they do share all their live dates and link to where their music is available online. They’re not hiding anything. “But yeah, that NME article, saying we’re mysterious, was one of the first things that was written about us, so it set the tone for what followed,” says Simpson. “But it’s just made up.” Picton laughs wearily. “That article was funny as well, cos they were like, ‘the band have no recorded music whatsoever, you can’t hear them anywhere’, and then at the bottom it linked to the NTS session, which then linked to three other tracks that you could’ve listened to at the time. They were all studio quality too – it was a live recording, but it was in a proper recording studio.” I can tell how irritating they find all this, but they seem glad of the opportunity to dispel a few misconceptions. Greep, however, is relatively conciliatory about the media’s representation of the band. “They need some angle to have it, so ‘mysterious’ is the angle innit. But we’ve just done everything we thought was necessary and nothing we thought was not necessary. So that’s it.” He catches my eye, and repeats. “Nothing unnecessary.” This becomes a theme of our conversation. Black Midi’s approach to many things is driven by a certain pragmatism, a matter-of-factness that’s far more straightforward than any of the contrived secrecy with which they’ve been caricatured. They have little time for the excesses of the music industry, and are unsentimental about their work, repeatedly saying how they just want to keep moving forward and changing things up, referring to songs by humming their tunes rather than using song titles, which Greep dismisses as “throwaway”. — Modes of expression — The four members of Black Midi met at the BRIT School in Croydon. Billed as the UK’s leading performing arts school, it’s not a fee-paying institution, but its star-studded list of alumni (Adele, Amy Winehouse, The Kooks, Katy B) means that places are in high demand. Despite this hit parade, the band are quick

“We’ve just done everything we thought was necessary and nothing we thought was not necessary”

Interview to point out that the school is still very encouraging of more awkward, experimental modes of expression. “The stereotypical image is always gonna be of the people who’re most successful, which is never gonna be the ones doing crazy stuff,” says Greep. “But really there’s a lineage of people doing interesting stuff, and it’s encouraged to play different types of music.” “Again, the public view isn’t really representative,” sighs Picton. They all commuted to BRIT from different corners of London and the surrounding area: Greep from Walthamstow, Picton from Wimbledon, Kelvin from South Croydon, and Simpson from Hertfordshire. Greep says that they “jammed with loads of people”, but the project that would become Black Midi was the one that really stuck. In the beginning, it was just he and Kelvin. “We were doing a droney, Godspeed, Swans, Boredoms thing,” says Greep. “Just with guitars, and originally when we were jamming I’d play an organ patch on a pedal, doing this ambient guitar stuff for three hours at a time. It was funny.” He describes everything as funny. “Me and Matt went to BRIT for four years, the others for two. When Morgan joined it became a more like rock/funk thing, but it didn’t come together fully until Cameron joined, a month before our first gig. Then we rehearsed all the day beforehand, and did it at The Windmill.” The Windmill, a semi-legendary independent venue halfway up Brixton Hill, has become the focal point for much of the scene from which Black Midi emerged eighteen months or so ago. Synonymous with the early shows for many breakout South London acts (Fat White Family, Shame, Goat Girl et al) over the past five years or so, it proved the perfect place to develop their nascent sound. “Tim [Perry, Windmill booker] gave us so much good advice,” says Picton reverently. “Without any specific allegiances apart from just protecting the interests of The Windmill and making sure it thrives as a venue – he wasn’t trying to manage us or anything. All he wants is for the bands that play at the Windmill to do well. We didn’t really play many London venues more than once, but we kept coming back there.” Greep nods along. “They always have interesting people on.” “Great Dad, Jerskin Fendrix, Black Country, New Road…” lists Picton. “We kind of saw Damo Suzuki from behind, cos we played with him, that was amazing,” adds Greep. The band performed as “sound carriers” for the legendary Can frontman last year at one of his semi-regular improvised sets. They’re typically nonchalant when I ask how that came about. “Tim just put us forward for it,” Greep shrugs. In another characteristically unsentimental move, the band are keen not to overplay the “South London thing”. As they’ve already mentioned, they’re not all from the area, and although they owe a great deal to two South London institu-

tions – The Windmill and BRIT – they’re tiring of what they see as yet another act of lazy pigeonholing on the part of much of the music press. “That whole South London scene thing – I’m sure many bands feel pissed off that they’ve been categorised in that way,” muses Picton. “There’s obviously a scene, but to categorise it into a sound is difficult. Lots of those bands aren’t even from here – we’re not really. It’s obviously good to have a scene, with lots of good venues that support new people making music. Independent venues are important for any town, and I think you’ll find a version of the scene here in any place with a good independent venue, with music that’s just as good as what’s coming out of London. It’s just that this is the city where the music industry… hovers around.” Not for the first time, the music industry is characterised by Black Midi with hostility, a leech-like distraction from the important business of making work. They may not love the industry, but it certainly loves them. Although few of the details were made public, countless whispers spread about record labels and booking agents alike piling into a bidding war for the band, the magnitude of which is rarely seen in these apparently lean days for the music business. After months of negotiation, the band eventually signed to Rough Trade – a legendary label, yes, but with its Smiths/Libertines indie pedigree (or baggage, depending on your point of view), it’s not necessarily the most obvious choice for this altogether more caustic group. Every time I approach the specifics of their relationship with record labels though, the already-reserved band clam up even further. Clearly, this isn’t of interest, so I don’t force the issue. Yet they don’t resist the wider industry entirely; they’ve all worked variously as session musicians, and Simpson in particular continues to do so alongside his main project. “I grew up playing gospel music in church, so the idea of playing in a band like this would never have been in my mind ten years ago,” he enthuses. “But my parents play, my sister plays, and I used to play with them every week at church, but they were session musicians on the secular circuit as well. At a very young age I was fortunate to learn how to play with people, which a lot of people don’t get exposed to until they’re teenagers. “Essentially, I’ll play whatever. I try to do it alongside this as much as possible, ‘cos I enjoy it. It keeps things fresh, gives me a different way of thinking. I wouldn’t be able to play this kind of stuff in a pop gig though – I’d get chucked out in a couple of seconds!” He laughs heartily. Greep chimes in, suddenly animated. “It can yield some funny results, doing this and then doing something else. One time I was doing this church gig, and I’d adjusted my pedalboard for something we’d been doing at school, and I forgot that I’d changed it all. We were in the middle of a song, and I went to do this nice chord – ‘briiiiinnnggg’, yeah? – and thought, I’ll add a bit of chorus, that’d be nice. But I turned on the ring modulator by accident, it made this crazy noise and everyone just looked at me, like ‘what the fuck are you doing?!’. That was peak.”

Interview — Schlagenheim — After their initial shows at The Windmill (“The only place we played for a good six months,” says Picton. “Nobody else was interested.”) and a handful of higher-profile support slots, Black Midi formalised their relationship with the venue with a residency. As they were putting together the bills for each show, they spotted an opportunity. “Tim Perry kept recommending this guy Dan Carey to us to record with,” says Greep, “so we decided to get Dan to come and play one of the nights. He played on the first night, and his band, Scotti Brains, were really good. We played, he liked it, he said, ‘yeah, come over, I wanna do that song that goes boom-boomboom’, and that was it.” He stops abruptly. He does that a lot. Carey, a highly influential figure in the development of many new South London acts, runs cult indie label Speedy Wunderground. ‘bmbmbm’ – another example of a more formal song title being shirked in favour of basic onomatopoeia – became their first single, released in May last year to rapturous acclaim. By that point, word had spread about this thrilling new band, partly thanks to the aforementioned NME article and NTS session. They paid little attention to the hype, though, and kept working at their craft at a frenetic pace, gigging relentlessly and finding time to work on more recorded music in between. Predictably, this impressive pace simply seemed like the natural thing to do for the four young men in the eye of this media storm. “By the time it got to the point of making the album, we just recorded the songs we’d been playing at gigs,” explains Greep. “Most of them went through that process of scaling down and tweaking live, but by the time we were recording them for the album, we knew them really well.” I ask if the songs feel old to them now, whether they’re keen to get them out into the public eye and move swiftly on now that the album is done. Greep: “Yeah, but the way we’ve recorded them is different to how we play them live. We set out to make this different from the live thing; make the recordings stand on their own.” “They don’t feel old, but we just want to keep moving,” adds Simpson. “At no point are we like, ‘cool, we’ve got these songs, let’s chill out’. Not that we’re not happy with what we’ve got, but there’s a natural drive forward.” Somewhat unbelievably, some of the album tracks go all the way back to Kelvin and Greep’s brief stint as buskers in suburban Bromley. I find it hard to imagine hearing songs like ‘ducter’, the album’s jerky, shapeshifting closer, on my way to Gregg’s. “We had all the parts [to ‘ducter’] and everything,” says Greep. “We were just jamming on the street, making it up. We worked out a lot of the arrangement there and then. We didn’t learn it as a band for ages. Just with electric guitars, a portable amp, delay pedal… it was funny.” All four band members are enthusiastic when talking about making Schlagenheim with Carey. Greep lays out the process: “We did all the main stuff live and then added overdubs. Dan had this way of mapping the tempo onto the changes of the

track so we could still sequence stuff onto it properly. He doesn’t try and direct us too much, but he’s not an Albini-style ‘just capture what’s in the room’ type either. He lets us do our thing but he has his own sound. It’s like the Beatles or something, making a recording for its own sake.” “It’s a collaboration,” contributes Picton. “We’ve worked with other producers, with varying degrees of success, and it tends to be that the more relaxed the sessions are, the better. The best one that wasn’t with Dan was just in this guy’s bedroom, but we’ve done other ones in high-end studios, strictly to click, and we struggled. We’d get mixes back and they’d be lifeless.” “Not to say those people aren’t good at their job – it just didn’t work for us,” Simpson reiterates, ever the diplomat. Greep fixes me with another hard stare. “There’s a bit of an obsession with tempos not changing, and the isolation of instruments,” he says. “But if you put on any sick album, and count along with the tempo, it speeds up and slows down all the time and no one notices. Same with the isolation thing – no one cares.” Simpson agrees. “It’s not the main focus. It doesn’t need to be.” They’re all emphatic about the record being a standalone artefact; an entirely separate entity to the live experience. “We all played different instruments on the album,” says Greep. “I played synths, piano and accordion, Matt played banjo… the whole point is we don’t wanna reproduce the album exactly live.” “And it’d be impossible,” adds Simpson. “We’d have to hire four or five different musicians to do it. But it wouldn’t make any sense to be in a studio environment and not use what’s around you to enhance what you’re making.” Greep is clear on this. “I don’t like paying to see a band and hearing something I could’ve heard at home. When you start trying to do that you’ve lost the energy. It’s pointless.” Again, they’re at pains to distinguish between what’s necessary and what isn’t, what’s valuable and what holds no interest for them. Their clarity of vision is striking. The other thing I want to raise with the band is their technical accomplishment. Alongside Greep’s unhinged, squawking vocal style (a product of his desire not to simply ape “that macho thing that all the other guitar bands do”), it’s one of the aspects of the band’s sound that most divides opinion. They’re clearly technically excellent, but some people – myself included – aren’t always convinced that they manage to strike the balance between using those skills to serve their musical context, and simply flexing their considerable instrumental muscle. “It’s not really a consideration for me,” says Greep, a little dismissively. “If you’re playing a lot, you’ll get more able. A lot of the music that I’ve liked over the years has been more demanding to play, and I just wanted to be able to play like that.” I put it to him that limitations, however, can breed creativity, and sometimes being able to play whatever you want can be a little overwhelming. “Yeah, for sure,” he replies. “But in the same sense, those limitations don’t necessarily make it good either. I know what

Interview

Interview you’re saying, but neither one is always good. It’s like the whole thing of drugs or no drugs making you more creative – neither is a guarantee.” On Schlagenheim, Black Midi’s technical skill allows them to move through their innumerable ideas extremely quickly and fluidly. Throughout, I’m reminded more of the compositional style of electronic producers like Blanck Mass and Aphex Twin than the milieu of punk and garage bands from which they’ve emerged. Simpson agrees with this. “Absolutely. We’re obviously a guitar band, but we don’t look at it like that. Don’t necessarily label things – the moment you do that, there’s only so far you can go. It’s the same with what we’re influenced by.” “I don’t know if we’d go full Kraftwerk though, and ditch our instruments completely,” says Greep. “We need more control. But maybe for a couple of tunes, you never know...” As I wrap up the interview, we discuss what comes next for the band, once this album is released. In a good-humoured way, they’re a little evasive, keeping their cards close to their chest. “Hopefully it’ll sell a million copies,” Greep says, his deadpan tone inscrutable as ever. After all, it’s unlikely that a band as challenging as Black Midi will truly break through to the arena-level mainstream, but their rise has been meteoric so far; stranger things have happened. “Then we’ll retire and chill out.” “We’ll all go and live all over the world and rehearse like twice a year,” suggests Picton. “Make an album out of that and put it out whether it’s shit or not.” Simpson is a little more sincere. “An album is literally just a snapshot of an artist at that time. Up til the release of the album, that’s been our sound. Hopefully in two years’ time, it’ll be different.” “As long as it keeps changing, we’ll keep going,” agrees Greep. “Don’t wanna be zombies playing the hits.” — Onwards —

“It’s just that this is the city where the music industry… hovers around” 52

Walking back to the train station after the interview, I think I finally get it. Black Midi’s appeal lies in their central contradiction: not only are they a preternaturally adventurous, progressive group, but a flawed, human one too. As determined as they are to push forward and create something truly new, they seem unafraid to throw their ideas around, using whatever resources they have to hand (instrumental technique included), and see what sticks. In a way, their motivation is very simple: the pursuit of a thrilling, original sound. Whether they cause dismay or division along the way is immaterial, because soon enough they’ll have transformed again, discarding all but the most forward-looking elements of their craft in the service of continuous discovery. If there’s one quality that most characterises this band, it’s a commitment to the necessary; perhaps most impressively of all, they have an acute understanding of what qualifies as such that belies their youth. Regardless of one’s opinion of their output so far, that commitment alone makes them a group to cherish.

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Retold

Accidental

Masterpiece The story of E2-E4: Manuel GĂśttschingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s improvised, one-track album that foresaw the coming of minimal techno as early as 1981, by Tristan Gatward

Retold “I have a lot of tapes from these times,” says Manuel Göttsching on the other side of a crackly telephone line from Berlin. “A lot of tapes from the second half of the 1970s. I once released a series of CDs called The Private Tapes from a lot of the sessions I made around those years. But yes, something about how I recorded and produced E2-E4 in a way felt special.” For many a proto-techno masterpiece, E2-E4’s release in 1984 felt like a left-turn even for one of Berlin’s most experimental musicians. “The newspapers said I have not understood anything in the modern developments of electronic music,” Göttsching says of the initial reactions from Germany. “They said I should better listen to Depeche Mode.” The Berlin Magazine apologised to Göttsching a decade later, saying they probably made a big mistake. The piece itself (a single, continual track, 58:40 long) was recorded almost three years before its release at the end of a long tour, in one hour-long sitting with three humble intentions, none of them related to releasing music: practice, placating the post-tour comedown of no longer performing every night, and to give Göttsching something to listen to on an upcoming trip. As he says, he’d do this a lot, but this time was different. The story goes that, having played a solo concert for only himself, completely on the fly, on listening back, Göttsching discovered that he had accidentally made the perfect record. The music flowed in total balance and even once he had played it over and over he couldn’t pick out any errors – even the levels were all they should be without his trying. “I listened back right after recording, and I listened to it quite often,” he says. “This was the end of 1981 when I was already working on a new solo album. This was not what I had in mind, but it was strange as there weren’t even any of the usual technical glitches such as distortions and level changes. I wanted to compose something more orchestral in this direction; this was just a session I’d recorded. I listened back and I just thought, ‘oh, not so bad.’ But that was more or less it… And then I played it to my friends who said, ‘wow this is great’.” — Inventions for electric guitar — Berlin in 1981 felt like the height of a cultural renaissance, where experimentalism in music was the new currency, and to hell with structure. Some people were writing twenty-minute compositions about knitting machines and typewriters, while others played Beethoven symphonies at various different rpms, all at the same time. From Göttsching’s work as one of the founding members of pioneering space rock band Ash Ra Tempel in 1970, to the Rolling Stones covers band he played in at school, to his minimalist classical electronic album Inventions for Electric Guitar in 1975, to the now cult techno masterpiece E2-E4, the one constant value in his work has always been the freedom to invent. Ash Ra Tempel had been called the James Brown band on acid, flowing locks of hair obscuring expressions. They could play for hours without having written a note, and without needing to so much

as look at one another. There was even a collaboration with the counter-culture LSD academic and psychologist Timothy Leary in 1972. Göttsching speaks fondly of the sanctuaries others have found in his early compositions that have since led to many a krautrock and psychedelic exploration. Once he was part of the loudest band in Berlin – literally shaking the building of his first record label in a studio with no fades and an overly complacent engineer – but at its heart it was just the same principle as free jazz. “I was trained in improvisation,” he says. “I started playing improvised music at the end of the 1960s with the first blues band – Steeple Chase Blues Band – later it was Ash Ra Tempel. The first Ash Ra Tempel album is completely improvised. I did a lot of mixing – sometimes improvisation and sometimes composition, but I like both elements. For E2-E4, I just took the instruments and prepared these two chords and some basic bassline, and then I started playing with it, improvising with the chords and the sequencers and the loudness of the chords so it makes a shifting event. I just played it.” Where E2-E4 became a seismic start button for techno is in the second half of the hour-long track, where looped guitar noodling sits calmly on top of all the synthetic pulses of minimal electro. It was something that people would hear remixed in clubs in the ’80s, most famously becoming a staple of Larry Levan’s at the Paradise Garage in New York City (“I was a bit surprised people were actually dancing to it,” says Göttsching now. “I didn’t record it in the sense of a dance piece. The drums were very in the background, and it’s not really a ‘bom bom bom’ bass”), and yet it wasn’t a tone to alienate a classical audience, despite being an instrumental moment for rave, and a defining moment of analog production in electronic music. “Originally I was a guitar player,” Göttsching remembers. “When I was a child I trained in classical guitar for many years, but I became interested, of course, in other instruments – in keyboards and synthesizers. I started not only to build my studio but also to collect more and more instruments. I started to compose for keyboards for my second album, New Age of Earth [originally released as Ashra in 1976], and then I started with different analogue synthesizers and sequencers. I built equipment that I used as one instrument. I just played every day and every night in my studio, recording sessions, and that was in 1981. E2-E4 was never intended to be a production or a new record, I just recorded a session like I’d recorded all the years before, and somehow this session was really great.” — A new game — It took almost three years for E2-E4 to be released. Virgin Records, which had been a very experimental label for young and untested music over the years was becoming more and more commercial. Göttsching’s contract with them was coming to an end, but there was an option to extend it. “I did not expect that this would be the right thing to release it on,” he says. “It

Retold

photos: ulrich kilian; kmd. copyright mg.art

was 60 minutes but at that time the CD was not a format, it was still only vinyl. How to make 60 minutes on a vinyl where each side only fits 20 minutes?” He laughs. “Just one piece and two chords for them? I thought maybe not. They would have bought it, sure, for tradition or old friendship, but I think it would have never seen the day.” Nonetheless, the friendship still led Göttsching to Richard Branson’s houseboat, where he played him the piece. After all, Manuel was stuck with an odd problem: he had already begun work on his second album, setting aside a year for it to be made, grand themes and concepts and all. And now, by accident, he’d written, recorded and produced a faultless album in the space of an evening. Where did that leave him? Should this record be he second album? “Richard was not really anymore with the record side of the business,” he tells me. “This was now Simon Draper who ran the music part of Virgin Records. But I went to see Richard on his houseboat and played him a short track. He had a new baby and the baby fell asleep very soon. He said, ‘this music is perfect, you’ll make a fortune!’. Well, I’m not a businessman, but that was the language of Richard! Of course it was a compliment. It was a statement which said I should continue to work with this piece and get it released somehow and spread it all over the world.” Still, Göttsching dwelled on the recording for the next two years until a friend of his told him he was starting an independent label and would love to release something with him. Manuel titled the piece E2-E4, after one of the most common moves to start a game of chess, and it was out. “The funny thing is, it’s one of the very few cases where I had a title but no music in the beginning. The title came up when I was working with the first home computer – I had an old Apple 2 and I was starting to write programmes with it. You get used to the simple programming languages and commands like hex numbers and html systems. The other part was, ‘ok this looks very much like a chess game, when you have numbers and letters to dictate your next moves’. E2 to E4 is a very simple opening for any chess game. But it could also be written as a kind of programme for a computer.

“Oh, and the other influence on the title was the first Star Wars movie that had just come out. This little robot was called R2-D2, and R2-D2 could also be a programme. It’s just a good title for a music track that I wanted to use one day. For me this recording was opening a new game. It was also the first record I put my own personal private name on; it was not released as Ash Ra Tempel or Ashra. Ashra always had this connection before, because I wanted to keep a little remembering it of it all. I’d used it as a pseudonym for my solo records, but this time I didn’t use it at all.” The album artwork also replicated a chess board. “I insisted that nothing was written on the back of the original cover,” he laughs. “You can actually use it as a chess board if you liked.” I ask him if he’s ever played a game on the album sleeve (of course he has), and if it has the same effect as playing a game of football at your home stadium. The advantage of familiarity. He’s modest in his reply, but I’m sure he always wins. “I’m a good chess player,” he tells me. “I’m not as good as my father was, though. He trained me when I was young. We played a lot, especially end games and specials – when you don’t have so many figures and it’s a game of tactics. My father could actually play with just the numbers and the codes in his head; he could do a whole game without having a chess board in front of him.” As for now, Manuel Göttsching and his wife – a well known film director – have set their minds on a re-working of E2-E4 for the ballet. Collaborating with the director of the Berlin State Ballet, Gregor Seyffert, they have found some games of chess that have been archived from the 1890s and 1900s that lasted roughly an hour. The aim is to recreate a match on stage with a special LED-lit chess-board floor, while Göttsching plays the music behind the dancers. His eight-year-old Leonard is a good dancer, too, he tells me. “And I’m teaching him classical guitar. Of course he wants to maybe play some rock’n’roll or some rap, but we’ll have to see about that.” As legacy goes, maybe this album is enough, though. Its revival in recent years is testament to that. “E2-E4… It was just another thing,” he says. “I feel like an inventor. I like to see myself as someone who invents music, and this was perfect.”

SOLD OUT

Tell me about it

Tell me about it As a vocalist, poet and songwriter, Jamila Woods could easily fit into the “millennial multi-hyphenate” category. However, she’s a world apart from the inexperienced figure (i.e. the dilettante dabbling in podcasts) that such a term might conjure up. Rather, she’s a serious, considered artist who has cultivated her skills through years of creative practice. Not only are Woods’ talents broad and varied, but she’s generous about sharing them: alongside work as an activist, she’s also involved teaching high schoolers the poetic craft in a

role as Associate Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors. In 2016, the melodic singing and fresh neo-soul showcased on Woods’ solo album, HEAVN, proved irresistible. Now, she’s back with the excellent LEGACY! LEGACY!, a powerful exploration of Black Excellence and identity through songs profiling the legacies of figures such as blues musician Muddy Waters, science fiction writer Octavia Butler and visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The week of LEGACY! LEGACY!’s release, Woods spoke with me over a transatlantic phone call.

Jamila Woods The Chicago artist in her own words, by Megan Wallace Photography by Bradley Murray

“It was always natural for me to want to impact a younger generation” Chicago has a lot of community spaces so I came up in different artistic programmes that I think helped shape me as an artist. I did a lot of poetry in high school and that definitely impacted the way I write music. [My involvement with Young Chicago Authors] just felt very natural because that’s the way that I was taught. When I was in high school I was in a project called Gallery 37 and it was really cool to be in a learning space outside of school. My school environment was very rigid and there were a lot of rules but not a lot of seeing myself reflected in what I was learning. But the poetry programme was taught by young artists of colour and I could see myself in them. “I’m constantly inspired by black people, especially black youth culture” Black people are constantly evolving and creating new meaning and new, different words to describe things. It’s very seamless, effortless poetry that’s being created. Especially with me getting to work with young people a lot, it’s really cool to witness that and it’s constantly inspiring to me. Young people are underestimated across the board, across the world, particularly young people of colour, so I really get inspiration from their resilience. “Poetry gave me more confidence in my voice as a solo singer” My mom played music growing up and I was in my grandma’s church choir, and then later the Chicago Children’s Choir, so I always loved music and singing. But when I got to poetry in

high school it changed my perspective on what I could do as a singer. Before that I was always in choirs and didn’t think I had the voice to be a solo singer. Through poetry I started writing for my voice, and having a message or a story I wanted to tell. The way that I approach songwriting now is definitely influenced by my work as a poet. I teach poetry to high school students and so a lot of times when I’m writing I’ll give myself prompts or apply the things I do with my students to myself in order to prompt me to write. I use a lot of sampling and allusion that happen a lot in poetry, and a lot of the references that I use in my poetry I also use in my songwriting. “Making LEGACY! LEGACY! was a pretty organic process” Before I realised I was writing a new album I was just trying to write new songs. I was giving myself different prompts, so at first I gave myself the prompt to cover one of Nikki Giovanni’s poems, ‘Ego Tripping’, and that became the first song, ‘Giovanni’. Then one of my friends asked me to cover his poem about Muddy Waters and I did a lot of research on Muddy Waters and wrote a song called ‘Muddy’. So then it was just me making a list of other writers, visual artists and musicians who have impacted me. I didn’t end up making a song for each person on the list. It was really just once I got into reading about and watching a lot of interviews with these people who appealed to me in the moment, it was kind of just like what songs were able to come and I didn’t force the ones that weren’t able to come. I watched a lot of interviews looking at how these artists were able to express themselves and talk about their work and their personal lives in

Tell me about it

“Young people are underestimated across the board, across the world, particularly young people of colour”

the interview setting – that was really inspiring to me. I worked really closely with the producer Slot-A and it was really cool to try to create instrumentals that reflected the work of the people as well. “My phone storage is constantly full because I have so many notes” I love to have a lot of material to pull from. Usually I keep a notebook and if I have a thought I’ll just write it down. When I’m looking through journals or reading and I see a quote, I’ll write it down. When I’m writing I usually like to work with a producer and listen to some of the sounds that they’re making and then I’ll look through all my notes or look through my journal to try to get an initial spark of an idea that will help me start. At home I have a bunch of poetry books and visual art books that I look through sometimes. It’s a process of collecting that I’m doing constantly. Then when I sit down to write it’s like I’ve already been playing with various ideas, whether it’s in my journal or in the notes on my phone, so the ideas are ready to cook at that point. “The most important thing is the freedom to be as uniquely yourself as possible” I feel like it’s important for artists to feel like they can be authentic in themselves and I think that’s what’s cool about creating in a moment where there’s more opportunity for independent artists to not feel like they need to compromise about their image or what they want to say or how they want their music to sound. So I think the most important thing, especially for artists from marginalised communities like artists of colour or queer artists, is for there to be as much authentic representation as possible. Otherwise you’re just getting manufactured stereotypes and limiting the representation of what a black artist is or what a queer artist is. “I think I’m still discovering what my legacy is; I’m still living” I like one of the quotes from Miles Davis, he says something like: “don’t call me legend until I kick the bucket.” I can’t remember his original quote but I like this idea of having the permission to evolve and discover who I am. I think this whole project has been really inspiring to look into the legacies of what other artists have left and how they’ve influenced me. I feel that it’s more important to not limit myself and to try to be authentically myself.

Lanzarote

05/06/19 MOTH Club Valette St London E8 mothclub.co.uk

lanzaroteworks.com

Programming

Monday 13 May

CABLE TIES + MEGGIE BROWN

#lanzaroteworks

Thursday 16 May

BLUE AMERICANS Friday 17 May

Wednesday 15 May

BODY TYPE

Tuesday 14 May

RHUMBA CLUB FT. BYFYN

PROJECTOR Followed by

MEDLAR Friday 17 May

CHAI

Friday 17 May

THE PSYCHOTIC MONKS

Saturday 18 May

YAWWN Saturday 18 May

CROCODILES Sunday 19 May

AKUA NARU

Saturday 18 May

SUNWATCHERS Saturday 25 May

TAMARYN + COLD SHOWERS

Tuesday 21 May

XENO & OAKLANDER + VOID VISION Wednesday 22 May

JONATHAN BREE Sunday 26 May

VISIGOTH Wednesday 29 May

CHRIS COHEN Friday 31 May

SLOW MAGIC

Sunday 26 May

THE DUNTS Monday 27 May

WARM DRAG Tuesday 28 May

PSYCHIC GRAVEYARD Thursday 30 May

GNOOMES Friday 31 May

DEATH AND VANILLA

Followed by

AGNES AVES + ANASATANA Monday 20 May

SODY Tuesday 21 May

THE BONNEVILLES Wednesday 22 May

JESSE MAC CORMACK Saturday 25 May

ANU Tuesday 28 May

JOLÃ&#x2030;

Studio 9294 92 Wallis Rd E9 5LN

Saturday 1 June

FUJIYA & MIYAGI

Shacklewell Arms 71 Shacklewell Lane London E8 shacklewellarms.com

Saturday 11 May

NICE BISCUIT

The Waiting Room

@lanzaroteworks

175 Stoke Newington High St N16 waitingroomn16.com

Thursday 23 May

VIAGRA BOYS

Monday 13 May

EMILIE KAHN

Saturday 13 June

PORTICO QUARTET

Tuesday 14 May

CAGEWORK

Friday 28 June

METZ Sunday 12 May

BE FOREST

Wednesday 15 May

THANDII

+ FEELS + US NAILS

My place

Biig Piig

A mellow rapper’s mellow world, by Stuart Stubbs. Photography by Tom Porter There’s a guy who lives near Jess Smyth who keeps bringing random shit to her house. She tells me about this when showing me yesterday’s drop – a blue carrier bag full of old Will Young CDs. It’s a story that she casually puts out there and smoothly glides away from, which befits the music she makes as Biig Piig: storytelling hip-hop that’s slow and heavy-lidded, and nonplussed by fussy details. Just as ‘Perdida’ has Smyth gently singing, “I just wanna lay here/ And smoke my cig/ And drink my wine/ And think”, stopping to question who the guy with the Will Young CDs is, or what the hell he’s playing at, is not really important. I’ll ask about it later. Smyth has lived in Peckham for the last six months, but over the 21 years of her life she’s been prone to big moves – from where she was born in Cork, Ireland, to Marbella, Costa del Sol, back to Kerry and Waterford in Ireland, and then to West London where she became Biig Piig and started rapping as a member of the nine8 collective; a group of young musicians that includes her chief collaborator, producer Macwetha. For now, the arts scene of Peckham seems to work well for Biig Piig, who at the end of last year put on a show at the local

working men’s club and packed it with a bunch of friends and fans who dreamily nodded along to her Big Fan of the Sesh, Vol 1 EP. She tells me there was a completely different feel to her more recent show at the much bigger Village Underground in support of her new EP, A World Without Snooze, Vol 2 – it was leery. Smyth’s room – in a house she shares with three friends currently studying graphic design and film – is as minimal as her music is. Her walls are plain but for a couple of film posters, a framed print she found in the street and a makeshift washing line with a few items of clothing pegged to it. While we’re talking she peels the back off of a Rebellion Extinction sticker from the recent climate change protests and slaps it on the wall too. There’s also a painting of Eve by the daughter of a family friend, of which Smyth says it wouldn’t feel like home without, and a small stack of books (“but I’m not a reader”). It’s a calming, clutter-less space, where found items are here and there, and a deck of cards which hark back to Smyth’s previous double life as a late-night poker dealer. She demonstrates her impressive shuffle, reads my tarot cards (also dropped off by her neighbour), and then talks me through her new home and the things in it.

My place Electric violin I bought this two weeks ago. I’m going to learn to play it through YouTube videos, unless I get really stuck and then I’ll get a teacher. At the moment I don’t play an instrument really, just a little guitar [Smyth’s first gig was an open mic night at Battersea Arts Centre playing ukulele]. Mostly, I’m vocals. I feel like [choosing the violin] might be a [Irish] roots thing but also I just find it an interesting instrument because there’s a whole stigma behind being able to play it – it seems like you have to be the best if you play it, or you have to play classical, when really there are so many genres that incorporate it. The Irish fiddle has always been a love of mine in traditional music, but yeah, I would love to see what happens being self taught with an instrument that has so much history. Playing cards I can still shuffle pretty well from my job as a poker dealer. I used to work in the Empire Casino in Leicester Square but it was too much money for an 18-year-old to be earning – it would be 3k a week, and a lot of that would be in tips. Then you’d get people saying, ‘cover your microphone if you want to make some real money’. I wasn’t allowed to play myself in my casino but I’d go next door to the Hippodrome, and I got pretty good, but then I started drinking while I played, which was a big mistake. You’re just in there tipping all the waitresses.

Love poster Have you ever seen this movie? There’s a lot of sex scenes in it – it’s really cool, but maybe watch it on your own. Even with a partner is a bit weird. It’s about this fella who’s addicted to opiates who has a wife and a kid, but he’s only got that because he had a threesome with his girlfriend. It’s really sad, but it’s beautiful to watch. Independent films are my kind of thing; I can’t watch horrors films.

Tarot cards I’m literally just getting into tarot cards and doing readings. I had mine read once before in a market in Scotland, but it wasn’t very accurate. These came from this old fella who keeps dropping stuff off. We don’t have any real exchanges, he just says, ‘hey, how are you doing,’ and then gives you a bag of something. Yesterday he dropped in that bag of CD, which is mainly Will Young and Westlife albums. The first thing he left on the doorstep was a mask, which was pretty scary. But he also bought a corkscrew round once, which was actually useful.

My place Ballinamore calendar My aunty bought me this from Ireland. Ballinamore is a tiny town where some of my family is from. When we moved there from Costa del Sol we didn’t have much but it was the best time because we were young and came to a small town and all my cousins were there in Ardmore. We were blissfully ignorant to the situation, I guess. We lived in my auntie’s house so there were 13 of us including her kids and the grandparents in a 5 bed for the first year or so. So this is basically a tourist calendar of there, but there’s nothing in Ballinamore so they’ve got SuperValu on there and the local library and Fresh Today. Extinction Rebellion protest sticker I camped out for a couple of days the other week. When you can get that many people together and for everyone to be so respectful of each other it was really nice. There was a rule of no drink or drugs, and that was really cool. I went with my fella at the time. Sleeping in a tent on Oxford Street will test your relationship.

Memory box I feel like I’m going to lose my memory at some point, which is really sad, but I hope that this box is going to revive a few things in my mind. There’s all sorts in here. I’ve got an old leaf from the night I first met my friend Olly, and there’s a ticket from the first festival we did as nine8 – Standon Calling in 2016. It was kind of unofficial because Ava’s (aka Lava La Rue) dad put on a stage there. It was sweet – we were 16. I’ve also got letters from exes because I’m a crazy bitch. I write letters but I never send them back. I write them to get it out, but I never want to open the conversation again. There’s also a ticket to TINA, the Tina Turner musical. It was incredible. Insane! I was crying – bawling my eyes out. I’m a musicals fan, but I went to one recently where they were singing the whole time and I couldn’t be doing that. But in TINA they don’t sing all the time, but when they do they’re absolute bangers. And this pink note is from Connor – he’d taken M-CAT [Mephedrone] by accident and had a really bad time, so we hung out until it was fine. He’s a good friend.

My place

Guardian baby We don’t know who this baby is but we found this on the ground on our way here one day so we put it up there and called her Barbara. She’s our equivalent to Goat Girl’s ghost when you did this feature at their house. She’s just watching. Is it weird that we have this? It is weird, isn’t it. She doesn’t take no shit. Kimono I bought the Kimono in a charity shop. I wear it all the time and it’s what I’m wearing in the ‘24k’ video. We shot that at Ava’s house in Ladbroke grove. We got the nine8 crew to redesign the whole house. I still go over that side of town but haven’t for a while – you forget how big London is.

“There’s a lot of sex scenes in it – it’s really cool, but maybe watch it on your own. Even with a partner is a bit weird”

I realise I’ve got a bit of a boy-whocried-wolf situation on my hands here. The sarcasm of some of my previous reviews will no doubt make what I’m about to say appear disingenuous, but I’ll say it anyway: this album sleeve is absolutely fucking fantastic! A hard 10! Like, blinking-while-being-photographed-spaffing-good-champagneat-a-family-wedding excellent. I really mean it, and if you don’t believe me, let me tell you that it’s for a record called Bismillah by a band called Peter Cat Recording Co. who I’d never heard of and therefore have yet to harbour a deep resentment for. I’m not sure what type of music Peter Cat Recording Co. play, or if this CD I’ve received is actually a CD-ROM of screensavers spreading unbridled joy, but it doesn’t matter because the photo on the front is doing all the work. While you fire up your laptop and find a shot of it online to get a better look, I’ll break down its big positives: Biggest of all is obviously your man on the left. He’s dressed up in one of those silk shirts from All Saints that cost a fortune, and he’s just popped a bottle of bubbles, only he’d never describe champagne as “bubbles” like people who say “holibobs” do. Somehow he’s managed

to make the spray do that, but the real movement in this image is in his face. The surprise of the cork pop has forced his eyes closed rather than open (a much classier way to style out shitting your pants), and you just know that the sound he involuntarily made wasn’t an ugly shriek but the glee of a Teletubby being given a balloon. From now on, only use the heart-eyes emoji under pictures of this guy, ok? And I love the other guy too. The Tom Cruise guy. He knows exactly where the camera is and he’s not blinking for shit. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but let’s face it, we’re all the guy in the middle when really want to be the guy on the left. Before selfies maybe we were. And check out the woman eyeballing the camera in the purple sari – the one with the wash of champers covering her forehead. She tells the true story of this endless wedding, where the flowers are crushed and tablecloth is wrecked, and Tom Cruise is hovering with two champagne flutes, and Po is going ‘oooh’, and no one needs anymore to drink now anyway, and now some prick is taking a photo and she’s in shot for fuck’s sake, and they’re only opening another bottle because the camera goaded them into it, and that All Saints shirt will get ruined if people aren’t careful. This might be the last photo in existence of a genuine moment in time. I will be trying to recreate it.

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Loud And Quiet 134 – Black Midi

Articles inside

Issue 134