Loud And Quiet 62 – GOAT

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 62 / the alternative music tabloid

GOAT Edwyn Collins Iceage Suicideyear Kindness Cooly G Peter Thompson

contents

welcome

Peter Thompson – 12 Cooly G – 14 Edwyn Collins – 16 suicideyear – 20 Iceage – 22 kindness – 24 goat – 28

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 62 / the alternatIVe musIc tabloId

GOAT

c o v er Ph o t o g r a phy A n d r ea s A n t e Jo han s s o n

We took a late summer vacation last month, to Rovinj, Croatia, for the second ever Unknown festival – a dance-centric blow out that takes place in the forests and on the beaches of the Adriatic Sea. The highs and lows are reported on page 45, but what Sam Walton fails to mention in his travelogue is that we saw one of Daft Punk without his helmet on. We think. Or thought. On closer Googling, it probably wasn’t him, but for a brief moment we were beside ourselves that we knew what others didn’t – Chic’s new keyboardist was one of Daft Punk, and we’d seen his face. We could tell because he had sung the vocoder robot bit on ‘Get Lucky’, and was then introduced as Russell Grant. We knew that Russell Grant was actually from Strictly Come Dancing. There’s not much that gets past us.

Anonymity breeds a giddy intrigue that can become obsessive, from Daft Punk to Burial to Jack The Ripper. We just need to know. It’s the Keyser Söze effect, and it’s become a big draw for GOAT – the Swedish psych jammers compelled by variety, unmistakable in their Eastern masks and cultish robes. GOAT take their anonymity very seriously. We’ve featured them once before, but like the few others that have interviewed the band before now, our questions had to be submitted via email, our photographs shot live at one of the group’s show.

With their new, second album – released last month via Rocket Recordings – GOAT (who have never even disclosed how many members make up their collective) have successfully managed to eclipse all of these theatrics with another album of tightly wound, around-the-world influences. For the first time ever, they agreed to a photo shoot, and while we had to compromise on a phone interview, rather than a face-to-face meet, the resulting article is what we wanted – the most open piece yet published on this band of ghosts.

Stuart Stubbs

Co ntact

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THE BEGINNING

Yorke’s Notes The month’s hidden headlines, revised / A month after Resident Advisor launched their own fan-to-fan ticket exchange to help stamp out touting, a new app called DICE has arrived, offering lovers of live music gig tickets minus those suspicious booking fees for the very first time. www.dice.fm Together with local promoters One Inch Badge, post-punk band Wire have announced a festival called Drill, which will take place over four days in December, in an assortment of Brighton’s venues. The bill so far includes Swans, Savages, East India Youth and Gold Panda. www.drillfestival.com

Try this at home

Illustration by Diogo Freitas

Euro Trash: Derek Robertson’s 7-day diet of Italo Disco / Ask the average person what they think of Italo Disco, and you’ll most likely be met with one expression; a blank, quizzical “What that then?”.

And who could blame them? Hailing from a time and a place – early ’80s mainland Europe – that’s routinely derided as the very definition of trashy, it’s easy to be snide about a genre whose calling card is simple repetitive beats, cheap synthesisers, and the type of sappy, saccharine love poetry – always sung in English – that would embarrass a ten-year old. It’s the type of pop that pushed Eurovision towards being a bad joke and conjures worse memories of school discos, the tinny clatter and four-to-the-floor thump providing the catalyst for fumbling teenage ineptitude.

But a week in its company led to some interesting insights. For a start, it’s been way more influential than I’d thought, and I’m not just referring to the Johnny Jewel-loving hipster brotherhood. Sure, its shadow looms large over Chromatics, Glass Candy and everyone else who partook in the great electro-pop revival post-2007, but some tracks are eerily prescient of Chicago House; anything by Klein & M.B.O., such as ‘Dirty Talk’ or ‘Wonderful’, or ‘Spacer Woman’ by Charlie. The latter track, all seven and a half minutes of it, sounds distinctly modern. ‘Robot is Systematic’ by ‘Lectric Workers, which is even longer at nearly nine minutes, could be the bastard lovechild of Chic and Kraftwerk, squelching synths and vocoder effects slapped on top of a disco-funk beat and a barely discernable Nile Rodgers guitar.

Get to around 1983, and it suddenly starts mutating. In a rush for mainstream chart success,

elements of Hi-NRG and pop were added, and subgenres such as spacesynth, eurobeat, and – I’m not making this up – discofox flourished. Sonically, however, things don’t improve. To listen to Ryan Paris’ ‘Dolce Vita’, Baltimora’s ‘Tarzan Boy’ and Taffy’s ‘I Love My Radio’ is to be submerged in some of the decade’s worst sonic crimes. Sabrina’s ‘Boys’, a tacky paean to summer romance whose video seems designed to get Nuts #ladz hot under the collar, was perhaps the apogee of Italo’s bad taste, but halfway through I have an epiphany; I’m listening all wrong. Viewed through the context of the times, these songs were catnip for teenagers, and represented a loosening of social mores and greater freedom of expression.

I search in vain for a track that deserves to break free of being labelled a “guilty pleasure”; it seems not to exist. Most Italo is purely functional, designed for a specific time and place, and, length and awfulness aside, it’s this that makes it such a tiring listen. There’s none of disco’s sleazy sexiness, or the glossy sheen that made the likes of Blondie such a cultural phenomenon, and nothing that really works on a purely musical level.

Sitting at home, on a wet Wednesday, it all sounds so cold, so processed, a musical Tin Man in dire need of a heart and soul. I don’t doubt that countless ironic club nights have played on its charms, or if you played Sagna’s ‘Call Me’ at 2am I’d be the first one down the front. But much like other 80’s cultural milestones, I just can’t enjoy it without tongue being lodged firmly in cheek; novelty and a cheesy grin are no substitute for smarts and pounding techno music.

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A new vintage guitar store has opened up in Shoreditch, London.

Vintage Guitar Boutique is located next to Rich Mix Cinema on Bethnal Green Road. www.vintageguitarboutique.com For The Record is a new, travelling exhibition of 7” sleeve artwork that launched this month with two London showings. Its curator Steve Rowland now intends to take the exhibition around the country for a year, occupying empty shops and “spare spaces”, encouraging as many artists, labels and designers as possible to get involved and celebrate the 7” single’s DIY history. www.fortherecordproject.co.uk Run The Jewels – the joint project of rappers Killer Mike and El-p – will make their new album, ‘RTJ2’, available as a free download from its day of release, October 27. Vinyl and CDs will also be available via the duo’s new deal with Mass Appeal. www.runthejewels.net Previous Loud And Quiet cover star and self-promoting Berkeley rapper Lil B has, in a brilliantly narcissistic move, launched an emoji app that generates emoticons of the Basedgod himself. ‘Basedmoji’ really is as dumb as it sounds. www.itunes.com Dom Yorke

books + second life

The Not-So Crooked Beat Reef Younis investigates what rock stars do next No.4: Terry Chimes / (“Confucius said ‘Find a job you love and you’ll never do a day’s work in your life.’). The latter deeper-meaning tweet hints at a spiritual side that was further revealed in his autobiography, The Strange Case of Dr. Terry and Mr. Chimes. It turns out that switching from bashing skins to moving bones wasn’t the only change in Chimes’ life; after watching a religious procession in Brazil, he felt compelled to buy a copy of C.S Lewis’ Mere Christianity and find redemption.

“I felt a presence coming through me in strong waves,” he wrote. “At that moment, everything material and concrete seemed like nothing compared to the power and majesty of this presence. Everything in my world seemed to be instantly shattered, leaving me feeling tiny, naked and exposed. At the same time I felt the most extraordinarily powerful love. This presence knew everything about me and yet still loved me.”

Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (for The Clash) in 2003, Chimes’ journey from (drum) sticks and (Mick) Jones to aching bones might be more about relief and redemption than excess in these latter years but as that Hall of Fame status confirms, he’ll always be a rock’n’roll (over onto your side, please) icon.

Terry Chimes played drums for some of music’s biggest hitters. As the original, and intermittent, drummer for The Clash, he also went on to smash the skins for Billy Idol, Black Sabbath, and Hanoi Rocks. But one day, in 1985, that all changed.

Before a gig with Black Sabbath, he overdid it with a three-hour bowling session that left him screaming in pain and unable to play shortly before the band was due on stage. Luckily Sabbath travelled prepared, and the band’s chiropractor leant a hand. It was to be a turning point for Chimes: he would eventually swap White Riots for white waiting rooms.

A few years later, he quit music and then, in 1993, opened up his own chiropractic practice in Essex. Now a teetotal vegetarian and qualified acupuncturist, according toTerry’s short but sweet Twitter activity, his days are spent speaking at, and attending, chiropractic seminars (“Flying to Paris in a few hours to speak at the ‘New patient maven’ seminar. Hoping these Frenchies can come up with some veggie food!”); criticising the Daily Mail (“The Daily Mail story about Chiropractics has all the academic rigor and gravitas of a random outburst by a drunk at the pub, and is less fun”); and offering philosophical food for thought

by j anine & Lee bu ll man

Jimmy Page

by Jimmy Page

Chapter and Verse

by Bernard Sumner

Genesis

bantam

Rather than write his story, Jimmy Page has collated and annotated a stunning visual autobiography; a hand picked selection of images covering everything from private photos to ticket stubs and passport pages, all beautifully reproduced and bound in one huge volume. He charts the transformation from rockabilly cat in two-tone shoes to the world’s most emulated guitarist in embroidered dragon pants, inventing stadium rock with a violin bow and still rocking the two-tone shoes. What’s more, Page’s take on the rock bio is fascinating, rich and strange. The care and pride he has taken in selecting the material pays off in spades and results in a world to get utterly lost in.

Following the demise of Bernard Sumner’s first band, what was left of Joy Division needed a new sound.They found what they were looking for in the precise electronic rhythms and body rock beats playing in the early-hours in disreputable nightclubs on both sides of the Atlantic, while many at home in Manchester still considered them elitist doom mongers with no sense of humour. Chapter and Verse is Sumner’s wry, sardonic, funny and engaging take on his career thus far. From his childhood in Salford through the invention of post-punk and Factory Records to the Hacienda debacle and E’s for England, this is a book that favours humility over arrogance and truth over myth.

loudandquiet.com

Touching From a Distance / So This Is Permanence

by Deborah Curtis (& Jon Savage)

8

Faber & Faber

Thirty five years on from the release of ‘Unknown Pleasures’ and these two books allow a peep over the wall of mystery and enigma that has grown up around Joy Division lyricist and singer Ian Curtis.

In Touching From a Distance, Deborah Curtis tells of life as Ian Curtis’ wife and offers unique insight into the contradictions that made up the man. It is not the happiest of tales but it is one that is told honestly and bravely. So This Is Permanence then collects together the handwritten lyrics, notebooks, letters, books and fanzines that Curtis amassed in 1970s Macclesfield and presents them for the first time in a beautiful and fitting tribute to an irreplaceable voice.

getting to know you

Baxter Dury 42-year-old Baxter Dury is the son of Blockheads frontman Ian Dury, and a musician in his own right. This month, the West Londoner releases his fourth album, ‘It’s A Pleasure’, via a new deal with the PIAS label. We asked him to fill in our Getting To Know You questionnaire to prove that recording artists are people too /

The best piece of advice you’ve ever been given “Run in a zigzag whilst being chased by an alligator”

The thing you’d rescue from a burning building I’m not going in.

Your biggest disappointment Not being in the first team at QPR. I could have made it but I had two left feet and three nipples.

What talent do you wish you had?

I wish I could sit in on an A&R meeting of my own album.

The worst date you’ve been on Hadlo McVitie. She was from a well known family.

She locked me in her grandad’s E-Type Jaguar when I refused to accept her racism.

Your Biggest Fear Being bitten on the toes by the unknown… or Eddie Murphy.

The worst present you’ve received A pair of funk 45s without the spiders.

The characteristic you most like about yourself My humour within tragedy.

Your favourite word Inventory.

Your pet hate Cats. They are disloyal bastards who would lick the sweat off your dead forehead.

If you could only eat one food forever, it would be…

Meat porridge, which is a Dutch speciality.

Your favourite item of clothing My communist shirt.

What’s your biggest turn-off?

Sneezing.

Your hidden talent Stretching the truth but making it feel that’s it’s acceptable.

The best book in the world is...

Down And Out In Paris And London.

Favourite place in the world Chiswick, as it’s the only place I know.

Your style icon Recently that’s been me.

Your guilty pleasure Fresh butter. I just want to rub it all over everything and everyone.

The celebrity that pisses you off most even though you’ve never met them David Dickinson. Week in/week out, he cons people out of their goods, the man’s a lunatic.

The worst job you’ve had English teacher in Barcelona a long time ago. I was ridiculed every moment I spoke.

The film you can quote the most of Some Like It Hot. “I’m a girl, I’m a girl,” something like that..

what is the most overrated thing in the world? “mel & sue”

Who would play you in a film of your life?

Ben Kingsley.

The one song you wished you had written ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ by nat burton

The most famous person you’ve met Paul McCartney. He ooooh’d at me.

What would you change about your physical appearance?

I’d create some symmetry.

What would you tell your 15-year-old self?

What you lose on corners you gain on the straights.

Your best piece of advice for others Relax your body when you fall.

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RECORD HEAD

Peter Thompson Quite unlike anyone else interviewed for our Record Head series, Peter Thompson has never been a stranger to the business side of running a record label. Explaining what PIAS is and does, however, has been a whole other challenge PHOT OGRAPHY: JENN A F OXTON / WRITER: IAN ROEBUCK

There is a large pane of glass behind me and to my left and right. I am sat in an office within an open plan office.

It’s just after lunch and people are slowly returning to their desks. I’m exposed. A bespectacled man walks in, hurried but cheerful. It’s Peter Thompson and his broad Northern tone feels welcoming. Peter is in charge of the label arm at PIAS and we are here to bust some myths, which he seems pleased about. We begin as work continues all around us. “I am sure when Domino or Rough Trade go and sign an artist they don’t have to explain thirty years of the history of the label, whereas every time we sign someone we do,” he laughs, as he mock rolls his eyes endearingly. ‘There is a lot of clarity needed for our artists to understand what the label is,” he finishes, handing me a cup of tea.

So to be clear as crystal, PIAS is a label. It’s called Play It Again Sam and has had various guises, such as PIAS Recordings and a lesser known dance label called Different. “That’s right,” nods Peter. “PIAS is a label but it has three distinctive repertoire areas.” He points all around him. “We’ve got the label here, then Co-op that side, we sign artists and they sign labels… and upstairs is the Sales and Distribution area that provides access to market for us along with lots of other labels as well like Beggars, Domino and Warp, OK?” Yep, got that Peter, it’s as clear as the glass around us.

An awful lot is achieved in this building I’m sat in. An enthusiastic Belgian named Kenny Gates is responsible for the PIAS we see today.

He began the label as Play It Again Sam in 1983 and never looked back. A varied roster that included national heroes Soulwax and an attachment to specialist dance imprints created an impressive contact book and when they branched into distribution and rebranded as Vital in 1993 a new road was forged. In 2005, now key distributors, they became PIAS once more and in 2012 the label was relaunched with Peter at the helm. “It’s only really in these last 2 or 3 years

when I started getting involved we made a very definite idea to go right that’s it, the label is going to be called Play it Again Sam run by me and based in London, let’s just follow those three basics and keep getting that message across. Obviously PIAS is the abbreviation; everyone thinks we’ve signed Fat White Family or Basement Jaxx [who’ve actually set up their own imprint’s via PIAS’s label services].

People we’ve dealt with for years are suddenly saying, ‘oh I never knew what PIAS stood for!’”

We both stop to sip our tea, and as if anticipating my next question, Peter says. “I work on a slightly different mindset.”

Peter is quite unlike others I’ve met in this Record Head series. He might have the wisdom of Mute’s Daniel Miller, the deep love for music like Bella Union’s Simon Raymonde, even the diverse musical taste of Rough Trade’s Jeanette Lee, but he also has a solid business backbone where such idealists felt it out as they went. “It’s funny,” he says, “as most record labels are run by ex band members or someone with an A&R background but that’s not what I have done, I come from a sales and marketing background so we have our own A&R man. As the label has grown I have felt I needed to get more engaged.

If I go into a studio I don’t tell people how to make a record. I don’t tell people what’s right or wrong. I can tell them whether I like it or not! Whereas a great A&R man will be able to do that, be able to change a record.”

Before Peter was the label boss he successfully guided the Sales and Distribution side of the company; Kenny Gates then handed him the reigns to his beloved Play it Again Sam label.

“I have been at PIAS since it started, I suppose. I think I have a broad knowledge of the industry as a whole – I know sales and distribution really well, which is still very important and I understand the retail side.To be honest, I do know the business side but I am still learning on the live side, which is becoming more and more important

as a label – what we can give to the artist on that front. Before, the artist did live and everyone else did there other bit, whereas now these roles are getting more intermingled. I think the whole record industry is learning more about what they can contribute.”

Peter is passionate about music. I know this as he gives more of his precious time than necessary at the end of our meet chatting about new and not-so-new bands on his label, such as CHAMPS and Enter Shikari. I also know this as he’s pounded every corner of this industry in the last 30 odd years, starting at Red Rhino Records in his hometown (York).

“Prior to Vital there was a period in York at Red Rhino,” he explains. “We were a little distributor and part of the Cartel; Red Rhino was the Northern hub of that, but then it went bust and Play It Again Sam bought Red Rhino.”

If you’re having trouble keeping up, the Cartel was an early distribution network that joined the dots of independent music in the UK at a time when they really needed joining. Peter explains: “The idea in the late ’70s was that records would be dropped off in the Rough Trade shop and they’d sell them over the counter. Then Rough Trade worked out they could sell these records to other stores and as it expanded nationally they couldn’t sell them to places like Newcastle, Liverpool and Edinburgh so they found a group of likeminded shops in all of these places that would become sub-wholesalers. Red Rhino would buy off Rough Trade, they would supply us with a couple of hundred records and we would then supply all other stores within a radius of 100 miles of York, so you had this patchwork of record stores selling to other record stores but all of our music was coming out of one source, from Rough Trade.”

It was at Red Rhino that Peter began to build a special rapport with artists.

“The first band I really worked alongside was The Wedding Present,” he says. “They were kind of my first signing. The band came in with a

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bunch of singles that they’d just pressed up, we would then sell them to other stores, and Cartel members, but then we had a stronger relationship with the band than others. I don’t know if it was a record deal, but we did a deal, and we released ‘George Best’ and it was probably one of our first success stories.”

Peter leans back in his chair and looks contentedly around his glass fronted office. Twenty seven years and he’s at the heart of things, working alongside artists once more.

“It suddenly dawned on me that actually I wanted to get more emotionally involved with everything we were doing,” he says, “and be able to work with artists from scratch and build their careers up.”

Peter’s sympathetic outlook and friendly disposition mirror that of his company. In their label services and distribution specialty, PIAS have a rep for being a big brother to some of the chief indies around the globe. “It’s a very clever relationship,” he says. “I think it has to be managed very diplomatically. The simple basis is that most of the labels Co-op work with are basically A&R operations – all these guys, Geoff Barrow [from Portishead and the Invada label], or the guys at Moshi Moshi or Simon Raymonde; they’re all fundamentally music guys, A&R guys, so Co-op provides the backbone to what these guys do. So Jason (Rackham) who runs [Co-op] won’t get involved in recording the records or even with the presentation of the artists, he leaves it with the labels and they get delivered the tools, then they work with them in the UK or a broader international sense. It’s a balancing act for them, they provide the boring side of it with the services and the marketing, leaving the label to go out and get drunk with the artists!”

Sinking into our surprisingly soft sofas, we’re having a mid-afternoon lull. Time to ask an awkward question about his labels identity; that’ll perk things up.

“It’s really, really hard to get any sort of identity,” says Peter. He sighs

record head

and begins again. “PIAS is this big operation that does many things and when you go into Europe the work specs are even broader than they are over here. In Europe it can be really confusing. For example, PIAS used to do Domino in France so the Arctic Monkeys were probably seen as being on PIAS rather than Domino in a territory like that so the areas of work are pretty vague. Play It Again Sam was the name we inherited – that was the starting point of the company when Kenny formed a label, but it’s never had a consistent identity; it’s been based in Belgium and London and back.”

Doesn’t that get complicated when you’re pushing to sign an artist?

“Yes, I think it’s one of the more frustrating things for us when we sign someone [explaining that there’s PIAS, the label I run, and then PIAS label services, which distributes other labels]. But we are a relatively wellresourced label. When the artist comes in and sees us and they come in and they meet the team, it’s a personal industry, isn’t it.”

For that very reason, Play It Again Sam, the label, is a breath of fresh air.

Working with an array of acts, Peter’s business (and music) nounce has seen him pick up established bands like Editors or niche but well liked artists like Ghostpoet, giving the label a sense that anything’s possible. “As you probably know, you lose money on

‘I think the whole record industry is learning more about what they can contribute’

new artists until you get to the second or third albums,” he says. “As long as you work with them long enough you will probably see the dividends further ahead. There were times when you worked with an artist and they sold 100,000 copies and you wondered how you did it, well now it feels like it’s a bloody nightmare to get the thing moving. There seems to be a case of labels just getting music out there and then not knowing what to do afterwards. No strategy, no planning, no budgeting… just knowing what’s affordable and when to say no let’s stop there and move on to the next phase. You need all of those skill sets otherwise it feels like you are just sitting in the Wild West. I don’t know how the public copes; no-one is really thinking about the broader campaign it’s just next, next, next, next. I mean am I right or am I wrong?’

Using Peter’s Wild West rhetoric, the debate stopped there at fear of being shot down or thrown through glass by the experienced Wyatt Earp across the way. Instead, I ask about the infamous PIAS fire [the distribution company warehouse was torched in the 2011 London Riots, destroying the records of many labels who worked with PIAS to get their pressings into shops]; that felt a little Wild West itself… “Do you know, at that point I was running the sales and distribution,” he says. I was in America at the Grand Canyon, not at the South side, which is

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the bit that gets you to Las Vegas, but the North, which is very remote. When I go away from work I always say I’ll read my emails when I can but if you really need me you can text me, so it got to a point about ten days in where I was in the middle of nowhere I didn’t have any signal. One day right near the end I thought OK I’ll try my phone again and for some reason it worked, it was obviously fate. All of a sudden my texts were going mental, I just thought fuck, I have got 56 texts, what is going on. So I phoned the office and they said the warehouse burnt down in last nights riots, so I thought what riots?!

What on earth has been going on since I have been away. So it was actually quite exhilarating because I think it united everybody.You know when you do something wrong and you are having problems, it’s a worry, but when you have one big mother fucking problem, which nobody can do anything about, you go right OK, we’ve all got to pull together. I think that was almost a really great experience just to see everyone support us. Our competitors supported us, artists who had nothing to do with label supported us, everyone just pulled together.”

As I get up and leave, walk out of one office and through another, I can’t help but feel that that was inevitable.

PIAS and Peter Thompson do so much for everyone in the independent world; their payback was due.

G’s Unit

James F. Thompson gave Cooly G a house call to hear about the RnB singer and producer’s life as a single mother, making records for Hyperdub and realising that she needs friends to lean on Photogra phy: ga briel G reen / writer: james F. Thom p son

“Oh my God is that the time? Wow. Oh my gosh. Bloody hell. Oh my God!” Do you want me to stay here and wait for the photographer?

“Yeah okay. Argh!”

Cooly G is in a hurry, jumping out of her bedroom/recording studio and trundling down the stairs of her first floor flat in a South West London suburb. Her son finished school at three o’clock and although she only lives around the corner, it’s now quarter-past. The front door slams shut and I’m left to mind the fort.

If most interviews with musicians don’t end with an impromptu

housesitting session, that’s probably because most musicians aren’t single mothers with two young kids. As Cooly G, she’s been responsible for some of the most exciting vocalised dance music to come out of London in the last few years, but as the woman behind the music, Merissa Campbell has had to balance her burgeoning exposure with the realities of motherhood.

In the past, the Brixton-born singer, producer and record label impresario has been somewhat reticent with regards to discussing this, preferring instead to let the music

do the talking. The thing is, Campbell’s circumstances and Cooly G’s songs have always been deeply intertwined; the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Over the course of our time together, this becomes even clearer.

Still, I imagine the questions probably get really boring, even if they are unavoidable. “I don’t know how to answer them sometimes,” she admits, looking vaguely glum to be even discussing the subject. “You know, ‘What’s it like to be a woman in a male-dominated industry’ or whatever.

I don’t really think about anyone else. I do feel like there is some sort of

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tension sometimes with me being a girl and everything and doing okay though, like people saying ‘How come she’s out there?’ But you know, I don’t know what to say.”

Later this month, the 32 year-old will release her second album, ‘Wait ‘Til Night’, on Steve Goodman’s Hyperdub label. New single ‘So Deep’ is a slice of dirty R&B, aided and abetted by Campbell’s deep, sensual vocals. Musically, the rest of the record is gorgeously seductive, moving closer to dark synthpop than the more frenetic dub house of her first fulllength, 2012’s ‘Playin’ Me’. Lyrically,

it’s outright sexual, with track titles like ‘Fuck with You’, ‘Your Sex’ and ‘Want’. You get the idea.

It’s all quite a contrast from the world of soiled nappies and bedtime stories. Campbell is making no apologies whatsoever. “Fucking hell, well yeah, single fucking mum and no fucking dick,” she laughs. “So yeah, it’s more like fantasies and stuff. I’ve been keeping myself to myself lately because I think I’ve just gone into things too quick, like obviously I’ve had two kids and their dads…”

She chooses her words carefully. “I can’t really complain about my son’s dad because he goes there every other couple of weeks and he knows his dad and everything. My daughter doesn’t know her dad though; he’s just not about. He ain’t trying to help or nothing. Where I thought that was supposed to be a proper relationship — even people around me thought, ‘Oh my God this is going to be good, it’s cool,’ — it ended up being just fucked up, so I thought, right, I’m gonna chill, not fuck around and just be a nun.”

The final slot on the album belongs to ‘Three of Us’. What might be misconstrued for some wistful imagining of a ménage à trois is actually a painful dissection of Campbell’s failed relationship with her daughter’s father and the subsequent emotional fallout. It’s the only song in which she directly references her son (Nas, 7) and daughter (Tate, 2).

“The reality after all that in the album of being so sexual and whatever is that, at the end of it, I’ve ended up on my own,” she explains. “It was the last track I recorded because I couldn’t get it out; it was so emotional just knowing that I was going to cut her dad out. At the start of the track it’s me, my ex and the baby and at the end it’s me, the baby and Nas; the three of us.”

The family moved out to the suburbs a few years ago for the sake of the children but it was Brixton where Campbell spent her own formative years. Having initially got into DJing at the age of seven by playing songs on her dad’s sound system at parties and weddings, the precocious pre-teen soon developed a voracious record collecting habit. By the time she was 17, she was producing songs of her own and eventually found herself a job teaching music production and sound engineering.

For the next seven years, Campbell trudged between her house and the studio where she was working, honing her craft. “Everyone in Brixton knew what I was doing,” she remembers.

“Everyone just wanted me to go downhill to be honest though.

Especially when I had my son, they all

thought ‘Yep, that’s it, she’s gonna turn out like a piece of shit now.’ It just turned the other way, know what I mean?”

The turning point itself was ‘This Boy’, a fresh take on funky house that exploded across 2008 and 2009.

Around the same time, Campbell — already a mother — stormed into the DJ booth at a club and harangued the DJ for not playing her song until he eventually acquiesced. “He played it and the whole of fucking Brixton went crazy. So I was like, you know what, I’m fucking doing this. I’m not getting a job,” she proudly recalls. “Then I put it in a Soho record shop and I just started seeing my name all over the Internet. I loved it.”

Hyperdub soon came calling and before long Cooly G was one of the hottest tickets in UK dance. Well, for most people anyway. Sexism reared its ugly head amongst a sizeable minority of fans who simply refused to believe that a female could possibly be responsible for producing some of the finest beats around. Sensing that direct action was needed to stem the tide, Campbell took to the Internet and streamed a live video in which viewers could watch her produce songs in real-time.

It’s a faintly ludicrous, unedifying scenario and not one you could imagine any of her male peers being involved in. On the other hand, if such gestures can be used to bluntly refute prejudiced beliefs around female production abilities once and for all, perhaps the end justifies the means.

Certainly there can be no argument now that Cooly G is anything other than the real deal. Earlier in the year she performed a set on Boiler Room, nowadays seen as something of a watershed moment for any selfrespecting DJ. It’s a big deal, right? “For other people yeah,” she says, clearly nonplussed. “Everyone goes crazy. I was like…” Indifferent? “Well I’m more humble and oblivious to things.

I just do it because I have to do it. I don’t really understand the whole hype thing; I’m just doing it and having fun. Maybe the kids are going to watch it after and be like, ‘Mummy’s DJing’ or something. I’m more into thinking of it like that!”

I get the feeling Campbell knows full well how valuable the Boiler Room exposure is, though. She set up her own label — Dub Organizer — in 2010, looking to promote her favourite deep house artists. She made sure to bring them along.There are plans afoot to release five EPs (“One after the other, early next year”).

Between the label, the music and the kids, it’s hard not to wonder how

Cooly G ever sleeps. It turns out she doesn’t. Last month, attending the AIM Independent Music Awards in support of Hyperdub — who were up for (and won) an award in the Best Small Label category — she had a panic attack and collapsed of exhaustion. Her label mates were horrified, an ambulance was called and the Cooly G performance at Corsica Studios in London the following night was cancelled.

Worryingly, this wasn’t the first time. Campbell has been having stressrelated blackouts for years. More alarming still is that until very recently, she’s done her best to hide these from her friends and family as part of a kind of wider emotional coping mechanism.

“I’m gonna cry,” she says, holding back the tears. “My friends, my family… they don’t even know what’s been going on. They didn’t know until the other day. I’ve been having them for years. Now my cousin’s on my case, saying how we need to sort it out and all that.”

Isn’t it time to slow things down a bit? “My dad’s always been saying to me, ‘You need to have friends, you need to socialise with people, you need to have someone to talk to,’” Campbell sighs. “I was always like, ‘Nah man, I

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don’t want no friends’ but now shit, you know what? I do. I had people around last Saturday and we laughed the whole night. The whole night! I haven’t laughed for fucking years. I’ve been missing this shit. But I needed to lock away from people as well though, because I needed to make music.”

I feel tired just listening to Cooly G’s plans for the next few months.

Aside from the new album and running her own label, there are multiple video shoots in the works (“We’re going to do like Ruff Rider fucking skills”), gigs across the world (“I think I’m off to Japan”) and yet another new album (“I’ve got music to do, but I haven’t got around to it ‘cause I’ve been bare busy”). Oh and a radio show, plus the kids.

“I’m happier now though,” she insists. “The kids are happier that they can see me happier. Just getting their room done was the best feeling. I got the garden done – I decked it out with my friend – they’ve got a playhouse, slides. They can do all that now, then they can play PlayStation, they can read, the tutor comes… There’s loads of stuff for them to do now and they’re happy. That’s what matters.”

The Good Life When Edwyn Collins awoke from a severe stroke in 2005, the only phrase he could speak was ‘the possibilities are endless’. It’s inspired a new film about the former Orange Juice man, and while the road to recovery remains a long one almost a decade on, Collins’ wife Grace Maxwell insists that her husband has never had it so good Photogra p hy: g e m harris / writ er: dani e l dylan wray

Listening to Orange Juice has such weird, jolting memories for me. It is music that is the sprightly embodiment of youth: razor sharp, spunky and hip loosening. I once felt captivated by it.

The bug spread throughout many of my friends and the amount of party’s that would be jumpstarted by that jagged jangle of guitar and the nasal croon of Edwyn Collins were as frequent as the amount I attended where the very same songs would soundtrack the grinding comedown, or would – if you were lucky – give you the stimulus you needed once more at 7am, dragging a collective of drugged-out zombies to their feet to dance on top of cider-soused carpets in grotty front rooms as the morning sun seeped through the cracks in the curtain. It says a lot more about how I chose to spend the days of my youth but Edwyn Collins had a strange, lingering presence over much of it. Yet this was not during the time of Orange Juice’s existence; the band had already broken up before I was even born. This was slap bang in the middle of the mid noughties indie-resurgence and despite the retrospective hell-fest that much of that was, many groups proved to be most useful gateways to groups of old.

When the idiosyncratic, juggernaut lyrical propulsions of Edwyn Collins were really jolting me and my friends to life, he was already ill and, truthfully, we expected he would pass away. After all, he had had two brain haemorrhages and despite having little medical knowledge, that doesn’t sound like something someone lives through. I recall at the time what a strange juxtaposition it was: here’s this immensely youthful, invigorating groove that a huge number of us have collectively tuned into yet its chief creator is gravely ill in hospital unable to speak or even pick up a guitar.

However, almost ten years on I find myself staring at Collins and his wife Grace Maxwell, who are both in more than fine form.

When Edwyn Collins had his stroke in 2005 he was hospitalised for six months. Initially he was unable to

walk, speak, read or write. His memory had been effectively wiped. This is known as aphasia and is common to stroke victims or those who have had brain injury or trauma. As he lay in his hospital bed the only words that would come to his mouth were ‘yes’ ‘no’ ‘Grace Maxwell’ and ‘the possibilities are endless’. The latter is the title given to an upcoming film on Collins and its accompanying soundtrack. It is a beautiful, deeply cinematic film that eschews the conventions associated with Edwyn’s story. It is an ode to love, to life, to Scotland and to Edwyn and Grace and their son, William. The pair live in remote Scotland in Helmsdale, much of which is captured in glorious beauty in the film. I catch them just days after the referendum as we speak via a Skype video link (their first ever time using it). They wave and cheer giddily as we connect. “I’m in a post referendum funk but apart from that I’m okay. Edywn is feeling very positive though, he feels like it’s not over yet.

The beast has been woken,” says Maxwell. “The genie is out of the bag.

There’s a lot of people in Scotland who are not prepared to go back to sleep.”

They were both ‘Yes’ voters.

The warm crackle of their open fire can be heard spitting away in the background as they hunch up together on the sofa. The pair are truly delightful company. A real double act who know one another inside out and take the piss out of one another constantly.

They are very pleased with the film, which premiered at SXSW this year and is continuing to pick up rave reviews along the way as it continues to screen across the world. (It will premiere in the UK in October).

Maxwell says: “We decided that if they were going to do this, we’d just get out of their way. I mean Edwyn is a creative…”

“Genius,” he butts in.

“Yeah, genius! [both laugh a lot] and he doesn’t like interference. He doesn’t like things getting watered down. You’re a good collaborator but you’re sometimes under the opinion that too many cooks…”

“Spoil the broth,” Collins finishes,

very much setting the structure for how our conversation will work over the next hour or so.

Whilst still a documentary on Collins’ recovery, The Possibilities Are Endless is the very opposite to the 2006 BBC Scotland short Home Again, a more conventional, less cinematic film.

“Edwyn was doing this thing for STV, with the people who made Home Again, before he had his stroke and when they approached us again we weren’t sure because things were not quite as good [health-wise] as they are now.

They were around for over a year actually, following us around. It was a made for a TV thing, very straightforward. There would have been no point in doing something like that again. Edwyn is hesitant to talk about and go on and on about his stroke and recovery.”

“Dan, it’s too much my stroke,” he says. “I want to progress.”

“As he says, it’s so dull now to go over the stroke thing,” says Maxwell.

“We’re past that. The film that they’ve made here is much bigger than that; there are larger subjects being explored in this film. It’s more than a hard-luck story. What happened to Edwyn isn’t that unusual, it’s quite common, it’s no big deal.” Maxwell admits while watching parts of the film was “raw”, the impact of the events surrounding Collins’ illness have subsided. “I feel, for me, that I’ve replayed what happened to Edwyn in the first four, five years [since his stroke] I replayed it endlessly in my mind like a film, round and round and round in an endless loop. It’s quite a mad thing to happen in your life, despite, as I said, it being quite common. That’s the way you deal with trauma, you replay it over and over and again, so by the time it came to seeing the film, this is stuff that I’ve already replayed in my mind that I was able to set it aside.”

Collins tells me: “Dan, for me it’s much better. Because of aphasia I can’t remember things well enough, and it’s kind of better.”

“Sometimes I think what Edwyn’s talking about is that he doesn’t remember the stroke happening at

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all,” says Maxwell. “He’s got no memory of the scary days, when he was out for the count and we had no idea if he was going to make it or not – he’s oblivious to them.”

“I can remember hospital days,” he says. “The nurse forcing a tube inside me and I was physically sick, retching away and, oh, it’s a horrible situation.”

He twists his face with the memory.

A notably poignant moment in the film comes when a story is re-told of Edwyn going back into the studio for the first time since his illness and listening to one of his own songs (one he had been working on prior to his stroke) and how upset listening to it

made him. He says this stage has now passed: “No, not nowadays but back in hospital days, one song, ‘Home Again’, I cried and cried and cried.”

“It’s weird,” says Maxwell.

“Edwyn’s emotional self back then was – well it still is – so raw he could so easily be reduced to tears. It was weird because on the one hand you felt so much had been ripped away from him and he was having such a job to reconnect with his old self but on the other hand he was so hypersensitive to everything...”

Collins: “Back in hospital I couldn’t talk at all, just ‘yes’, ‘no’ and the ‘possibilities are endless’ over and over

again and it was frustrating the hell out of me, Dan. Oh, what can I say, it’s weird, it’s strange… it’s fucking… frustrating as hell!” As he recalls this period and fires out “fucking frustrating” his left hand curls and twists up, his mouth grimaces and his face reddens.

Maxwell: “It was very scary.

Edwyn’s began in recent years to tell me more and more, as he’s been able to locate the words better, what it was really like for him and actually some of it has been a bit of a revelation to me. It’s amazing what a job they’ve done [the filmmakers] of capturing that fear.”

I

saw Edwyn Collins perform in 2011. His voice sailed with an unexpected degree of fluidity and the performance was genuinely rousing.

He remained seated for much of the performance and I recall, as he left the stage in a thunderous sea of applause, a lifting up of his walking stick and a heroic saluting to the audience before disappearing backstage. But Collins’ return to singing and performing has not been as easy as he makes it look.

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“No. I practiced,” he says. “I used a book for songs like ‘Falling & Laughing’ and ‘Girl Like You’ and I practiced and practiced and practiced. I would say: ‘what’s that word again Grace, in ‘Shilly Shally’, in that middle eight? Oh I get it now, thank you very much Grace,’ and then practice and practice and practice.” He really hammers home the repetition of “practice” to reinforce and emphasise the time and effort spent.

“He has created quite an amazing illusion,” says Maxwell. “A lot of people say to Edwyn, ‘oh the singing comes easier than speaking’, and Edwyn says, ‘yes it does’, but in actual

‘I don’t want nostalgia, I look for ways to appreciate the world and carry on’

fact he’s had to put in a huge amount of work to get that fluidity you speak of. Every time we introduce a new song into his repertoire…”

“Ohhhh,” Collins chips in, sounding in pain, like somebody just punched him.

“He hates it. The new stuff that he’s just written he can handle that but the old stuff from his catalogue…”

“Especially the Orange Juice days, ohhh,” Collins says again.

“We’ll often think, oh shall we put this back in, and he’ll go, ‘oh God, no.’”

“For me Dan, I have no problem at all with the music but lyrics are hard,” he says. “Before my stroke the lyrics are easy, after my stroke they’re hard.”

Maxwell: “Lyrics for Edwyn was always something he could luxuriate because he was such a clever clogs and such a smarty pants…”

Collins: “Not any more.”

Maxwell: “He did like to show off in his lyrics…”

Collins: “Not any more. I’m daft as fuck.” They both laugh.

“You were fancy-dancy and that’s not what you do anymore,” says Maxwell, “you’re a lot more direct and to the point. That’s what aphasia has given him. It’s quite good, it’s an interesting thing. I was listening to the words that you wrote for a piece of music in the film called ‘Quite Like Silver’ because of this night on the beach [that looked silver]. I said to him before, when it was just a piece of music, ‘could you do some words for it?’ and he came up with these really simple but amazing words and I think some people who are into you think this new style of lyric writing is a new lease of life. You’re limited with your palette and…”

“Steady on Grace! Limited?! What do you mean, Grace?” he half shouts, incredulously, before they both descend into giggles.

“There’s a song called ‘Campaign for Real Rock’,” says Maxwell as Collins visibly winces and moans at its very mention.

“It’s too hard!” he shouts “… and I keep saying to him that one day he’ll do that song because people really like it but it goes on and on and on. It’s got a huge amount of lyrics in it and it has the most words in it than any other of his songs he’s ever written. When I mention that he just says, ‘oh god, no, no’. He’s in horror at the idea of me forcing him to learn this song but I’m going to do it.”

“Are you Grace? We’ll see about that, we’ll see about that subject,” he says, laughing.

Aside from having both a beautiful film and soundtrack recently behind them, the pair seem to have naturally hit a moment of stillness in their lives.

Long gone are the days of hospitals and worry.

“For us, we’re in the happy period of life now,” says Maxwell. “The fear, the misery, all that stuff that goes on at the beginning of it, we’re lucky, we’re the lucky people who survived it and triumphed. Edwyn’s got a great bloody life…”

“And so have you, Grace,” Collins insists.

“Yeah, but you’ve got a really good life. You’ve got a really, really good life [Edwyn laughs] you don’t have to worry about…”

“Fuck all” “You get to do all the things you love to do. You live the life of riley.”

“Exactly.”

“Honest to god Dan, he’s got such a good life you have no idea. For a guy who, let’s face it, is knocking on a bit, he’s got it all going on…”

“What about you?”

“Well, I’m knocking on a bit but I’ve got a lot of donkey work to do.

Edwyn is very busy and he creates quite a lot of donkey work, but he just floats around and everybody loves you.”

“Yes, they do,” he says, drawling out the “yeeeessssss” for comedic effect.

“We’re lucky, so lucky, and Edwyn appreciates that; there’s nothing about being alive that he doesn’t appreciate.

That life is an incredible, precious thing, it moves him to tears so often, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he says with a heavy smile.

“It does. He said to me a few years ago, ‘I want to live forever’. ‘Well, I said ‘you’re not gonna’. We do the best to make the most of this life because it’s brilliant. People’s struggles on this earth, it makes you appreciate how fortunate you are, but also that that pursuit of happiness thing is something that everyone is entitled to in this life.”

‘The Possibilities are Endless’. The more you ponder those words in the circumstances from which they appeared, the stranger they are. It’s difficult not to read more into them, as though they were some sort of subconscious mantra that Collins’ brain had set about achieving from the second he woke from his stroke.

“Dan, in the hospital days I was completely mad,” he says. “‘The possibilities are endless’ over and over again. The possibilities are endless, the possibilities are endless, the possibilities are endless, the possibilities are endless. I was completely gone, actually. I was

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completely off my head.”

“You weren’t trying to be deep, were you? It was just what came out when you were trying to speak,” says Maxwell, turning back to me. “It was a symptom of his aphasia, for a while all he could say was ‘the situation is…’ and that drove me nuts…”

“That drove me nuts too!” he jumps in.

“So I suppose the most poetic thing he came out with was ‘the possibilities are endless’ but once you’ve heard it about fifty times a day…

“What about me?!” Collins yells.

“It drove me mad!” As they always do, Collins and Maxwell fall into a union of laughter.

Nearly ten years ago Edwyn Collins lay horrendously ill in a hospital bed whilst a bunch of drunken youths clambered upon furniture in shitty student houses in Sheffield and danced endlessly, blasting out his voice and guitar to noise-complaint levels throughout the night. As I sit here this evening and talk to that person, that youthful, invigorating, inspiring and talented artist, I find him just as animated and excitable as he made us all those years ago, and still making new and exciting work to boot. There is a strange, beautiful symmetry to that that is hard to shake; not one dipped in nostalgia but one planted in evolution, and the beauty of progression and forward momentum; the same kind that Collins feels is integral to his life.

“I find a way now to understand the world,” he says. “I don’t want nostalgia, I look for ways to appreciate the world and carry on. I want to appreciate what’s around me… I want to progress. I want to try and find an identity to me.”

Wires In The Blood From the Deep South of America, SUICIDEYEAR is breathing human emotion into a new mix of trap music and tender synthesisers Photog rap h y : par k s vi n ce nt / w ri t er : david zammitt

“Oh, really? That’s cool!” It’s always nice to be the bearer of good news, and I’ve just revealed to James Prudhomme that his first LP for Daniel Lopatin’s Software Recordings has been released in the UK that very day, 24 hours earlier than its scheduled US denouement. It’s testament to his modesty and his sheer indifference towards success that he’s unaware, but his excitement is obvious.

“Man, that feels good,” says Prudhomme, who lives in Baton Rouge, the capital city of Louisiana, and records under the alias Suicideyear.

“It’s been long-awaited, to get ‘Remembrance’ out there. I’ve been sitting on it for a minute now.” While the 19-year-old’s sense of time seems a little different to my late-20s self, I can still empathise. “I started on it during May or June of 2013 and signed to Software back in February of 2014, or so, and I had the album pretty much done by then. So it’s very rewarding to have it out there now.” He takes a deep breath. “It’s a cathartic release.”

As we chat, he gradually reveals just how much of an understatement that sentence is. From Prudhomme’s laidback, cheery demeanour, you would never know, but, after some prodding, he begins to explain.

“Considering the time that I started working on ‘Remembrance’...” He stops to collect his thoughts before eventually, reluctantly, carrying on.

“Well, I had just gone through a relationship.” Given his youth, my mind starts to automatically – and, as it turns out, very much presumptively – fill in the blanks, conceitedly deducing that the tale he is about to tell me will more than likely hinge on mere teenage melodrama. But then he drops the clanger. “And I had also gotten home from a vacation and found out, like, that my house had burnt down.” It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it admission as

he tries to move on to the next topic, but I can’t really leave it at that. As I press him, he laughs awkwardly, almost embarrassed by the narrative that has played out over the last year. “Yeah, I’m like Dev Hynes. It’s crazy.”

Amazingly, Prudhomme has come to focus in on the silver lining of what is a decidedly foreboding cumulonimbus in the relatively short space of time since what he euphemistically refers to as, “the incident”. Perhaps his attitude is born of a youthful resilience, or maybe he’s simply wise beyond his years. Either way, his worldview is remarkably wellbalanced. “It kind of propelled me into having to do a lot of shit that I wasn’t

ready to do,” he says. “I wasn’t able to finish school because of it.” Again, he is keen to move on until I probe further. I feel bad, but it’s quite the story. As it turns out, he couldn’t finish school because he didn’t have enough hours in the day to go to classes and earn the money required to get by. A stint in pizza chain Little Caesars followed – of which he detested every minute, but blithely accepted as a necessary evil – and before he knew it he was signed to Software. Impressively, there doesn’t appear to be a shred of bitterness. But he says it best himself.

“I was paying tribute to a lot of terms of acceptance that come with life and shit, you know?”

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In doing so, he crafted a collection of sumptuous, emotive electronica of astounding maturity. ‘Remembrance’ places equal importance in grooves and poignancy, recalling Skam-era Boards of Canada and Richard D James’s early, more tender moments.

Influenced by the Trap music of the American south, the 8-track mini album sees Prudhomme yank the syncopated 808 beats from the hip hop he obsesses over and marry them to gorgeous, heartaching synthesised melodies. It’s clear that every single element of its minimalism is thought out as it glistens and soars with an ease and confidence that belies his years. All in all, pretty decent for a project that

was originally conceived as a T-shirt business. “It was going to be a clothing thing, yeah. I was going to do it in collections with people.” And then he drops clanger number two. “But, coincidentally, my house before the one that burnt down partially burnt down. It was a part of the house that wasn’t completely connected but I literally had all my t-shirt making supplies in there. So when that burnt down I just concentrated on music.

That was the main focus.”

Although he has slotted into a lineage more recently occupied by Balam Acab, Holy Other, and which traces its roots back to early Warp and Rephlex, Prudhomme initially leaned towards guitar-driven punk. “Growing up I didn’t have too much access to instruments and shit,” he says, yet despite that, it’s clear that he was a selfstarter from an early age. “I just… like, my Uncle literally gave me a knock-off $30 guitar one day and I listened to enough Weezer to teach myself guitar.

Eventually I got an electric guitar for my birthday and found a friend who had drums.” But it was then that he encountered his biggest hurdle, and one which led him to fundamentally change his approach to making music.

“He [his drummer friend] was a very conservative person and, like, didn’t like the music I played. I just couldn’t find anyone who liked my music. I lived in a prudent town in the woods.

That’s what helped propel me towards doing the Suicideyear thing as a solo project.” That said, it’s still too early to rule out that rock album. “All I still listen to is Nirvana, old My Bloody Valentine. I really want go back to making music like that eventually.”

Given that Suicideyear existed as a brand in Prudhomme’s teenage mind before it morphed into anything more grandiose, I ask where the term originated. It’s obvious he’s been asked this one before, and he takes another breath before commencing. “Alright,” he says with more than a touch of ennui. “I made it up when I was 15 and it was pretty much a spur of the moment. Anything I title is spur of the moment. It reflects how I was feeling at that point in time rather than overall.

I don’t know… I like the name but I don’t know if I’d necessarily agree with it at this point if I had a choice.”

It’s a sign of his age that a decision he made less than four years ago can seem juvenile already. “The name actually came from Tom Krell from How To Dress Well – when he did the series on Love Remains, one of them was ‘Suicide Dream.’” One thing is for certain, his choice of moniker isn’t as macabre as the music press might like to think, nor should his music be tossed into the lazily-termed ‘sadwave’ pigeonhole. “When it comes to the whole sadwave thing, I dunno,” Prudhomme ponders. “In 2012 I

named a few songs ‘Sad’ and I never thought anything would come from it.” He makes sure to take his time as he answers. “I don’t want people to ever tell me they feel sad listening to my music. If anything I want people to feel like they can relate or something, but I don’t want them to dwell on their sadness.”

Regardless of how they react when they do, it’s clear that people are listening. He had built up an impressive online following before he turned 18, and yet it still genuinely surprises him that he’s had interest from the other side of the Atlantic. “I’m shocked sometimes. I didn’t start too long ago.

A lot of people get connected to it. I’ve met people who came from two States across just to see my show! That’s really crazy to me. It’s intense. I feel that’s helped, the fact that people can empathise so much with it.”

That’s not to say his popularity has been without pitfalls. Having read a previous interview where he tentatively hinted at a collaboration with Lil’ Wayne, I ask him if we’ll ever hear the fruits of their collective labour. Before I get a chance to finish my question, however, I’m drowned out by Prudhomme’s halfembarrassed, half-amused fauxprotests. “Aw, Dude, no! I was so young. Someone was punking me out of so much music under some fake Lil Wayne email. It was horrible. It was a

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fake Karen Civil [influential hip hop blogger turned media mogul] email.

We had follow-ups and talked a bunch.” His frustration is evident as he reflects on the cost of his inexperience.

“It was ridiculous. They got a bunch of my music before it was released. I was bummed about it. But yeah, I was very susceptible.” While he never found out who it was, his dream of working with hip hop heavyweights remains undimmed. “I know Drake seems a lot more open about collabing with all types of people.”

Phony Lil Waynes aside, the future is blindingly bright for the young man from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, yet he’s staying composed, filtering the hype through his level-headed lens.

“Success?” he asks, “I don’t really care.

Success, to me, would be to see that people still react in a way that shows they honestly enjoy this. Success is when I’m not taken at face value. It’s something I think of a lot. Anyone who doesn’t take me at face value, and just treats it as a Soundcloud page or whatever; that’s success for me.” And maybe a luxury new pad for his mum and dad.

A scorching September afternoon in Paris – in itself an ominous meteorological oddity – turned out to be the first of several surprises that occurred during my encounter with controversial Danish quartet Iceage.

The genre-resistant, post-hardcorecum-no wave band have a fearsome reputation for becoming rapidly vexed and belligerent during interviews: a past exchange with Pitchfork lasted all of three minutes. The fact that the group’s PR coterie advises me to turn up liberally early only stokes my concerns of a traumatising ordeal.

As it was, I emerge out of the metro in Belleville, a neighbourhood characterised by its working class and immigrant underpinnings, to unusual hubbub. Not only is there the bustle of la rentrée, the frenzied French postholiday return, but it also turns out to be La Fête de la Lune, with many of the local Chinese population attempting to flog me small moon-shaped pastries.

Even so, for all this cosmic goodwill, I can’t help but conjure up images of hapless journalists ruthlessly discarded along the boulevards en route.

However, by the time I arrive at Matador’s French offices – based in an ex-1930s tennis kit factory – I’m ready to play hardball.

Two skinny, shabby-chic figures shuffle in and take seat. They are frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt and drummer Dan Kjær Nielsen. Even for young skin, they look well-worn.

Where are your other half, I ask. “I think the label are trying to spare some money and only took two. An economy visit,” volleys back frontman Rønnenfelt, in typically cynical style. I sense tension.

How does the relationship with Matador work?

“They come with suggestions, but they don’t have a say in anything. I think we had a bit of a hard time last time with those guys. But they’re more aware of who we are, and we’re more aware of ways around it.”

These don’t appear to be the seeds of a solid relationship, I suggest.

“Let’s just not talk about it. I don’t want to talk any more bad things about them in interviews.” So, we move on.

The upcoming ‘Plowing Into The Field of Love’ is Iceage’s third LP – and

second album with Matador – following 2011’s pulsating energybomb ‘New Brigade’ and 2013’s tarblack, dirt-punk sophomore ‘You’re Nothing’. This latest instalment sees the band keep their gritty, volatile, selfproduced edge, but now the songwriting is more spacious and considered (as well as the piano, the mandolin, viola, and organ have been added to the band’s repertoire). “The songs we were writing back then didn’t have space to add anything,” explains Rønnenfelt. “We had conversations about where we wanted to take our music: something more open, so there was room for other elements. But we always had the desire to add other things to the songwriting.”

‘Plowing Into The Field of Love’ is twice the length of its predecessors: 48 minutes, compared to 24 minutes and 29 minutes respectively (“When you’re listening [the length] makes perfect sense” pipes up Nielsen, on a rare interjection), perhaps thanks to their choice of location. “We heard about this old hippy guy that bought an old red wooden house in a Swedish forest back in the ’70s, built a studio and has been living out there. During recording, he came over and we cooked food for him sometimes. He would tell us how he used to record – how it used to be.” Compared to ‘New Brigade’, which was recorded in a city, the temptations and distractions of life were minimal. “[In the past] we’d book recording time, and then maybe someone’s hungover and doesn’t show up, so we’d have to record a song without them,” says Rønnenfelt.

The band have only recently made it into their third decade, aged either 21 or 22, and yet there is a tangible maturity (and cynicism) to Iceage’s demeanour, especially when compared to their emergence as limb-swinging teens. Rønnenfelt once spoke about the progression of each Iceage album as like a flower gradually opening on its way to full bloom. How would he describe the state of the flower with this album? “It’s just a metaphor,” he states, dodging the self-evaluation.

Instead, he offers a rather cryptic tale: “I have heard that there is some secret room in the botanical gardens in Copenhagen, where there’s an Iceage

flower. I haven’t seen it.” What sort? “I hear it’s a big, big voluptuous red one.”

Rønnenfelt’s atypical, gnomic lyrics are a prominent feature once again on ‘Plowing into The Field of Love’.

‘You’re Nothing’ was supposedly in part inspired by readings of transgressive French novelists Georges Bataille and Jean Genet, and on the latest album we hear of disenchantment, inner turmoil, alienation; even of mythological people who lived in perpetual darkness. “I don’t care whose house is on fire / As long as I can warm myself at the blaze / Of burning furnish, cherished photographs / Unrelated hell” chimes the vocalist on the opening track, ‘On My Fingers’. A more mature sound, perhaps, but Iceage’s nihilistic streak remains.

There are flashes of vulnerability, too. “You’re probably the only one, though it is hard to admit / That can save me / And I never liked to ask for a helping hand / But I do now” read the first lines of incongruously upbeat track ‘The Lord’s Favourite’.

The song is not a million miles away from the sloppy virtuosity of – whisper it – The Libertines’ indie ballads. But topics take a darker turn as the album progresses: ‘Forever’ speaks of a nihilistic self. “It’s not so much about actual split personality, which is something I’ve been going into on a bunch of songs,” elaborates Rønnenfelt, “it’s about how you can achieve these periods or moments of clarity, when the world has such meaning and bliss to it. Then there’s the other one where everything is a bit meaningless and it is hard to find a purpose to it with life in general. It’s about acknowledging that, and it’s written from the latter perspective, longing to get back to that. But it’s such an impossibility, because you can never calculate or project yourself into a state of lucidity.”

It’s about this point that the band offer me a beer, after consuming a few during our discussion already, and I feel it would be impolite – neigh, unprofessional – to decline their gesture of hospitality. “I don’t care. We didn’t pay for it,” the pair assuage my hesitation. The thing is, Iceage’s reputation as a sadistic group of hellraisers is far from the truth. The only time that Rønnenfelt bristles

during the interview is when discussing genrification and generalisation: “I’ve always preferred if people could keep ‘punk’ as a term out of the conversation with regards to our band.”

The rest of the time he is eloquent, even gregarious, taking considerable pauses to locate the correct response, as if a librarian searching through his bookshelves. Meanwhile, Nielsen is leg-fidgetingly eager to contribute though somewhat laconic. It doesn’t seem to all add up: it can’t be a performance, they seem too open; too bluntly honest. So what do they make of this daunting reputation that precedes them? “I find it really hard to put myself in the mind of the listener.

I’m way too attached to the things I hear from an objective mindset,” professes Rønnenfelt.

Iceage’s thrilling, bloody live shows are certainly not uncommon amongst bands of their ilk, along with the masochistic fans in tow, but the decision to sell knives as merchandise did raise eyebrows. “It’s not our intention to make Iceage a puzzle,” says Nielsen.

The trouble is that Iceage have often been described as exactly that: enigmatic. Then, last year, Australian site Collapse Board thought that they had discovered the truth, claiming that Iceage were xenophobic, white supremacists. The music blog pointed towards Klu Klux Klan-like hoods in music videos, a tattoo of notorious neo-folk band Death In June, and Rønnenfelt’s teenage doodlings, amongst other examples. “It was a really sensationalist, pathetic attempt at creating a scandal,” enunciates a frustrated Rønnenfelt, “and you could tell that the journalist must have done a fair amount of research, because they had found all these things, but they completely ignored everything to the contrary.” The fact that drummer Dan Kjaer Nielsen is Jewish, for example.

But why not address these accusations head on, à la Dead Kennedy’s ‘Nazi Punks Fuck Off’?

“It was so damn low that we didn’t want to reduce ourselves down to that level of conversation. With journalists like that, I don’t think you can win. It’s better to just brush it off.

Is This Love?

Fearing the worst, Peter Yeung travelled to Paris to meet ICEAGE Photography: jeremy shaw / writer: peter yeung

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But if people have come up to us in real life at shows, making accusations, we’ll take them aside and shoot down their argument. But we won’t answer every single attack that comes our way.”

It seems that the overzealous, below-the-line fervour has calmed, I suggest, as a pool of spilt beer creeps towards my notepad. Has your relationship with the media become more palatable? “Sitting around talking about yourself for a day isn’t so bad.

It’s not like we’re cleaning the streets,” points out Rønnenfelt, level-headedly, but issues still remain. “There’s a limit

to what we will put up with,” says the singer. “The last journalist tried to read YouTube comments to us, and get us to comment on the comments. We had to say: no, you’re not bringing us down that road. But at least we got the fascist thing out the way now.”

Rønnenfelt concludes refreshingly: “There’s an art form in turning a bad question into a good answer.”

The band have recently returned from an eye-opening tour through Russia and the Balkans, and that sort of optimistic comment is indicative of the new eyes that the four Danes look

at the world through. “Every night, there would be some completely unforeseen experience with very depraved, but interesting people,” recounts Rønnenfelt. “In one week, we went from playing in Belgrade – where I got attacked by a junkie who cut open my eyebrow because he didn’t think we played long enough – to Croatia, where a man drinking at a gas station was telling us about the troubles of his sex change. The next day, we were in Budapest, hanging out with the son of Italy’s third richest man, who had the worst cocaine addiction

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I’ve ever seen in my life.”

In previous interviews, the band have always seemed a little reticent in committing to Iceage in the long-term.

I wonder if they have any plans, such as university, for the future. “Johann floated the idea of studying Theology, but that never happened,” replies Nielsen. Rønnenfelt takes some time to mull it over, eventually divulging: “I always had a really hard time in school.

I dropped out of high school, and I would like to say for myself that I think I had the brains to understand everything, but the idea of getting information forced upon you ... my interests can only be fuelled out of lust.

“Music might be a dried-up well of inspiration [for us] in a couple of years, but it might last for the rest of our lives. There’s really no way of telling. We’re just lucky that we’ve been doing an album, and then had some more ideas for another: so we had to make that. Then we had more ideas [for another album] so we had to make that. I think it’s important to act on those very natural impulses that tell you to create a particular idea. You can’t force it.” Then, out of nowhere, Rønnenfelt tells me something that could put Iceage fans on to high alert: “I haven’t had a single idea for a song since we finished this record. So, it might possibly be the end.”

By the sounds of it, however, it would be wise to take the frontman’s words with a pinch of salt: I doubt that Rønnenfelt’s creativity will be drying up any time soon. No matter how erratic and mercurial Iceage may at times appear, they are a band – on the evidence of their new record – who are on an upward trajectory, yet to reach the peak of their powers.

Now, on the eve on an extensive 23date North American tour, the young men that emerged from the Copenhagen DIY scene, with all their devil-may-care charm, are set to thaw out the hearts of even their most coldhearted detractors, with an album that’s more dynamic than anyone is expecting.

hoah, we’re getting into Sydney Morning Herald territory there.” Adam Bainbridge takes a walk across his prefab dressing room. I ham an inflated cheer; some new goal reached after 70 minutes of conversation.

Earlier, Bainbridge – Kindness, as he’s publicaly known – told me how yesterday he’d given the best interview of his life. When I asked him what made it so special, he told me how the journalist asking the questions “knew the balance between prodding me to answer a question I was reluctant to answer, and then he knew how to bend away from the thing that was becoming really heavy, bring it back to something comfortable and then spring another one on me.

“It was like, I don’t know what you’re doing, but this is the most efficient therapy I’ve ever had.

“He said: ‘You seem to straddle this fine line between making a lot of jokes and being super earnest’. And I’m like, ‘the jokes are a form of defusing the earnestness, because otherwise that could easily be my default setting, and that’s not a fun place to be.’”

In 2012, I interviewed Bainbridge twice – in February for our following month’s cover feature, published the same week that Kindness released his debut album,‘WorldYou Need A Change Of Mind’; and again in December, to

reflect on the year gone by. However artful, prodding would not have been appreciated on either occasion.

At the beginning of the year, Bainbridge, as he is today, was a thoughtful, candid, dry interviewee, who often delivered his answers after a long pause of consideration. He wasn’t about to agree with me just to keep the peace, and I liked that more than I thought I would. But he was also suspicious – of how I’d write him up, and why I cared what he had to say.

“Ninety-five per cent of everything you should want to know about a new artist should be in the record,” he told me.

By December of the same year, Bainbridge had been through the wringer. Commercially speaking, ‘World You Need A Change Of Mind’ had underperformed. Polydor had dropped him. It was the thin end of a wedge that had many misunderstanding Kindness, sometimes to the point of disproportionate abuse. Some openly told him that they loved his live show but not his record, presuming it to be a compliment. When he made a short film documentary for Vice about Washington’s Go-Go scene and late70s band Trouble Funk (a group Bainbridge had sampled for his standout track ‘That’s Alright’), one comment beneath the post read, ‘this would have been cool if it didn’t have that cunt in it.’ The sobering realisation

was that the music he was making (hifi neo funk, heavily inspired by ’80s RnB, pop and New York disco), and the way he was making it, had a much smaller audience than he’d first thought.

Erol Alkan’s suggestion was that ‘World…’ may have been “too all over the map” to be seen by many as cohesive. Bainbridge conceded: “I was assuming that a lot of people have the same musical background as myself. I suppose I always knew that there was a large, musically intelligent audience that would appreciate the record, but when you’re also aiming for the whole pop audience, that’s not necessarily what they’re coming to the table with.”

Hung up on the muck slinging, that December evening I left a downtrodden Bainbridge seemingly questioning what it had all been for.

And so when we received a copy of Kindness’ second album, ‘Otherness’, a month ago, I was surprised; not by its very existence, but rather by how it exists. If ‘World You Need A Change Of Mind’ had proven too obtuse for its intended pop crowd, ‘Otherness’’s refusal to dumb down accordingly is quite startling. It begs the question if it’s intended for a pop audience at all, or if Bainbridge has instead shifted the goalposts to suit himself. If at first you don’t succeed, it seems you can always redefine your own success.

Backstage at Unknown festival,

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Croatia, I find Adam Bainbridge in a sweet spot – between the high of having just performed and the anticipation of what’s to come: a headlining set by Nile Rodgers and Chic. Rodgers to Bainbridge is like Jackson toTimberlake, or Lennon to Gallagher. The night will end with the whole of the Kindness band front-centre during a stage invasion for ‘Good Times’, followed by a group huddle in the wings and heist cheers of disbelief.Yet Bainbridge seems contented beyond our here and now.

He currently lives in Geneva, with his girlfriend, a visual artist. Together they’ve spent the last year or so globetrotting, from one artistic residency in Texas to the next in India, with six months in Berlin already planned for 2015. Bainbridge has recorded ‘Otherness’ out of his suitcase, collaborating with friends all over the place. It’s been a far cry from the making of his first record– a regimented twoman job completed with Philippe Zdar, Phoenix Producer and one half of French duo Cassius. But most of all, Bainbridge seems happy to know what’s coming; to have already lived the album cycle once before; to have some idea of what is achievable with the kind of music he makes; to have read the shitty YouTube comments and essentially learnt to ignore them. He’s also ready to admit that there is now a reason to talk to him; that there is

The Other Cheek When KINDNESS released his debut album of hi-fi funk pop in 2012, his critics took a twisted pleasure in telling him where he’d gone wrong.

What else could Adam Bainbridge do other than go away and record an even more uncompromising record that shuns the mainstream world he previously attempted to infiltrate?

Photogra phy: ph il s har p / wr i t e r: s tuart s tubb s

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enough Kindness music out there to open a discussion worth having.

“Looking back at [2012] now, it feels like toughening up, in order to make this [‘Otherness’],” he says.

“Everyone needs a first record and the public aspect of putting your thing out there and taking the rough with the smooth. It’s not easy. But I wouldn’t want to be a coward. Even the stuff that was discouraging was encouraging, in a way, because you have to prove these people wrong; you have to show them that you’re planning on staying around for a long time. Fuck ’em.

“There’s a freedom that comes with having made a record exactly how you wanted to make it,” says Bainbridge, “and you’ve done those things and you’ve achieved what you set out to do.

When you start making music you don’t think beyond the first record.”

Kindness’ dream had been to record with Zdar, and in the producer’s Parisian studio the pair whittled ‘World You Need A Change Of Mind’ into a sharp, shiny, flawless whole.

‘Otherness’ goes the other way, embracing a one-take policy and celebrating human error. When I ask Bainbridge how he feels the two records compare, he says: “That’s a bit like comparing your children.”

I’m not after a favourite, I tell him, just how they differ from one another in his intended view.

“I guess by default, working with Philippe in one environment, you refine things,” he says, “and it sounds glossy and polished and in many ways it was the most final version of anything I wanted to achieve. And then with something like this, where you’re recording in different places with different people, and often not with the same level of technical luxury, there’s another freedom of, ‘fuck it, it’s raw and it’s the first take’. We’re not really going for glossy, we’re going for real, so after one take it’s like, well, that’s it, it’s finished. That’s how I see this record – a lot more raw, and lot more unfinished, but unfinished in a way that keeps everything exposed to people. They can hear the mistakes, and the moments when it’s out of tune or where someone’s voice is cracking.

When the saxophonist can’t land his run on the sax and he screams out of frustration, I want all of that to be there, because that is what I like about other peoples’ records.

“When Jay-Z says ‘turn the music up in the headphones’ [on ‘Dirt Off My Shoulder’], that’s my favourite bit of the song. You connect with the humanity of the individual.”

Did your first album suffer at the hands of editing, then? Would you leave in more of the mistakes if you could do it again?

“Fuck yeah,” says Bainbridge, later deciding that it is simply a different type of record. “I’ve told this story so many times now but it’s a really powerful affirmation of what I thought was true: Kate Bush is interviewed about this reversions record that she’s putting out where she’s redoing old material. A lot of this stuff is definitive in peoples’ minds, and she says, ‘I’m taking the opportunity to go back and correct all the mistakes that have bothered me for all this time, and yet I know that those mistakes are all the bits that people most like about those records.’ I guess I’m more reckless; I embrace that from the get go.

“This is a cheesy example, but in Kenny Loggins’ ‘I’m Alright’, there’s a mistake where he comes back in too soon, and they’ve left that in. It makes the track.”

Like ‘Polly’ by Nirvana, I suggest, but Bainbridge has to take my word for it – as he told me in 2012: “I don’t like indie music – culturally I have nothing in common with that.”

‘Otherness’ sure is rougher, but music so breathy, and with soul as its base ingredient, somehow feels smooth even in its most primitive state.

“But that might not be gloss,” says Bainbridge, “that might be attention to detail. You can leave something really chaotic and raw, but that doesn’t mean that you weren’t thinking about it. I’m still pretty obsessed with the way that things sound.

“Especially the vocals on this record, a lot of the time it’s just the person doing the thing for the very first time. Something like ‘Geneva’ [a barely-there duet ballad], Kelela’s vocal is a subtle element, but what you hear her adlibbing over the lyrics is the very first time we met, the very first time she heard any of my music, and I just played everything I had in one long take and she sat at the back of the room with a microphone and improvised.

“She gets frustrated with me, because she wants to get it right, but I’m like, ‘this is my party now, and my party is all about the first time.’”

O

ther guests on ‘Otherness’ include Devonté Hynes, vocalist Ade, Ghanaian rapper M. anifest and Robyn, who appears on ‘Who Do You Love?’, a bona fide could-be pop hit on a record that shirks mainstream acceptance. Much of ‘Otherness’ challenges you to find a hold, in fact, with tracks often consisting of extended instrumental parts, loose jams and an overriding theme of the interlude. Verse/chorus/ verse is completely done away with.

The ideas, while still high fidelity, feel sketched out. Lyrical refrains, once they do appear, are repeated almost mantra-like.

“I remember playing ‘Eighth Wonder’ to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and to this day they think I’m a nutcase. I told them that my Instagram was called TooDamnFunky, and I think Terry said, ‘TooDamnQuirky, more like.’ But I was trying to explain to them that I appreciate that pop music has a form, and they’re the masters of pop music and knowing how to balance just the right amount of words and communication in a song. And I told them that I would like to take a risk; I would like a song where the only lyric is ‘Thinking about my baby now’, nothing else. And they just raised their eyebrows like patient uncles. I mean, they’ve gone through everything – less lyrics, more lyrics, no lyrics. I could have done an instrumental album in some ways, so I thought if the music is already strong enough on its own, maybe just adding one line is enough, because it says exactly what I wanted to say.

“I’m a student of dance music on many levels, and there’s something about the organic repetitions on the ’70s and ’80s when people were making these edits of other peoples’ records. Like, there’s the Ron Hardy remix of ‘Let No Man Put Asunder’ by First Choice, and that record is perfect and in many ways better than the original because he realised that repetition is power, and there’s a number of times when repetition can build to the ultimate climax of something. Just one more time and it would lose everything and come tumbling down, and one less time and

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it wouldn’t have reached that climax at all. It’s having that natural instinct to know that repeating this one thing over and over again is going to make people lose their minds. I’m not trying to get to that ecstatic place, but I still come back to that breakdown in that song where he just repeats ‘baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby,’” he sings. “I mean, who thought of that!!??”

Of course, I can’t let Bainbridge meeting Jam and Lewis pass without questioning, not least because these guys – the writers and producers behind Janet Jackson, Alexander O’Neal and Mariah Carey, to name a few – have been so instrumental in Kindness’ musical schooling.

He says it was an “I-should-justquit-music moment, because in the pantheon of living musicians, there’s not much beyond them.” But Bainbridge didn’t just meet his idols in the same way that I once met Paul McCartney on a staircase (ask me about it sometime); he met them, liked them, and he, Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis and Robyn have all been working on a project together since.

On his phone, Bainbridge has a video of the duo playing ‘What Have You Done For Me Lately’ in the studio.

Cherrelle and SOS Band, too. “As rookie as that is, I knew for a fact that some people I know would not have believed it,” he says.

“It was like being one of the two giraffes that got to go on Noah’s Ark. It was like, ‘Me? There’s a lot of other giraffes out there. I mean, I won’t say no – show me the ramp; I’m walking up.’ I kept going to the bathroom and splashing water in my face, like, ‘good ideas, good ideas, that’s all they want.’

They’re going to read this, by the way.

They’re going to laugh at me.”

Bainbridge took some of his old material to Jam and Lewis, just as they’d taken some of theirs to him.

“I played ‘That’s Alright’ to Jimmy and Terry and I said,‘I honestly thought that this was a great piece of pop music’, and if people didn’t get that that was a great piece of pop music… I mean, I’m not even singing on that song, so I can just appreciate that it’s what was amazing about that Trouble Funk record and a vocal melody I wrote that sounds like Beyonce singing with Trouble Funk. If people don’t get that, they’re never going to get it. So I’m going to make the music that comes out now, because I went there; I went to that place, and if it didn’t work, fuck it.

“I just said that in the wrong way,”

he says. “I’m sounding negative, and I don’t want to…” out of character, Bainbridge trails off.

I ask if the process of releasing his first album had changed him – the accomplishments (there were plenty of those, also) as well as the disappointments.

“I don’t think the record has changed me,” he says, “but life has changed me. Records are an indication of where you are in your life. They’re very honest, telling snapshots of where you are, but your life is still the overriding thing.

“I read a really interesting review of these Kate Bush shows by Tracey Thorne today, and she was saying that Kate Bush’s development as a performer is not indicative of rehearsal or perfectionism, it’s just an indication that she’s lived her life; that she’s had children and felt deeply about something that isn’t her music. That’s the thing that allows her to put it all out there. You can’t rehearse that

honesty, it just happens.”

It’s honesty, I’ve come to realise, that propels Kindness more than anything else. When he’d had high hopes for ‘World You Need A Change Of Mind’, its success came with a caveat of truth. The reason he and Philippe Zdar had refined that album so aggressively was to strip it of all misdirection. It was important for Bainbridge to live or die by his work as seen through a microscope. As he once told me of his hi-fi record in an increasingly lo-fi world: “If you just present what’s there, you’re offering people a choice to say it’s good or bad.

With [‘World…’], people might hate it, but at least it’s been presented to them honestly.”

‘Otherness’ extends that manifesto in an even less forgiving direction.

“I think about the music that really moves me and it’s always when people took a risk and went somewhere almost uncomfortable,” says Bainbridge. “Whether that’s through

over-repetition or rawness of production, it’s just saying, ‘I’m being honest with you. There’s no smoke and mirrors.’”

I point out the obvious – that he seems a lot happier now.

“Oh yeah, yeah. I was confused when we last met. I still am confused really, but there’s this theory, and it’s a theory that no one at my record label would want to hear, but it’s called 1000 True Fans, and they say that if you have 1000 True Fans of what you do, that’s enough to sustain you. Only 1000 people need to buy your record but also come to your shows and invest in what you do, and that is enough to keep a musician’s career alive so they can continue. I think about that a lot. I don’t need to please a lot of people – I just need to make a really honest, passionate connection with people that get this in its entirety, and that’s going to make me happy and it’s going to make them happy… and fuck everyone else.

“With making a first record, you don’t know who your audience is going to be, or how far it’s going to go, or how much support there’s going to be for what you do. Now I see that there is potential for things to go to a certain place, but whether it does or not, I’m going to be happy because I’ve made the record I wanted to. It was the same with the last one, I just didn’t know where it would go.”

We sit around and discuss Kate Bush – a subject that Bainbridge is well versed in. “Did you know that when she signed her record deal with EMI she told them that she didn’t want to do anything for a year, just take French lessons and dance lessons?” he says.

“And they let her. I think that’s what every label should do. It’s the perfect gestation of an artist before they are given to the world. Twigs is kind of the modern example of that,” he notes.

“She’s a physical presence, she’s a musical presence, she’s a visual presence, and you didn’t expect any of this shit, but here she is.”

Kindness, I argue, had a similar foresight. In 2009, when his limited debut single was met with the kind of premature, absurd praise that many artists have before now spun into a hastily delivered debut album, Bainbridge went to ground. He wasn’t seen again until a month before the release of ‘World You Need A Chance Of Mind’.

“Buzz is the kiss of death,” he says.

“I was happy that it subsided. I think there will be records from this era that will be re-seen through the lens of

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reality as opposed to the lens of buzz and it will be a pretty brutal vision. I have a 1-year test. Apart from the things that I search out willingly, everything else in the contemporary sphere, I don’t really give a shit about, and then if my friends are still talking about that record a year later, it’s probably worth checking out.”

Chic are due on, but before I go I note something that doesn’t quite seem to sit with the Adam Bainbridge of 2014 – the contented Bainbridge; the prepared Bainbridge; the Bainbridge free of overblown expectation; the Bainbridge who happily resides in Geneva with his girlfriend, who travels the world making lawless, dreamy RnB however he likes, and who collaborates with his heroes on his days off. Despite all that, ‘Otherness’ feels a damn sight sadder than ‘World You Need A Change Of Mind’ did.

“Yeah, it’s pretty sad,” he says.

Because it was written at a sad time?

“No. I’m just a sad person,” he half laughs.

Where does that come from?

“Whoah, we’re getting into Sydney Morning Herald territory there.”

I cheer.

“You mentioned Nirvana, for example, and I think that very often writers that have an inherent weigh tthat they’re carrying around with them can put those things in a context that seems fairly universal – maybe it seems that they’re about love and relationships, but it’s about everything.

The window dressing is that it’s about love, but it’s not about love, it’s about everything that affected you: how your life is unfolding, everything from the past – you can’t really get away from that. I don’t even want to get away from that because it’s made me who I am.”

Are you really a sad person, I ask, or is this the joke Kindness?

“That’s not the joke Kindness,” he says, “that’s the honest truth, and it’s not necessarily a palatable one. I mean, music for a lot of people is a cathartic thing.You can dress it up as a love song, but it’s about everything.”

Radical Swedish psych band GOAT have never posed for a photo shoot until now, and have chosen to conduct the small number of interviews they’ve given via email. In Sweden, the fluid collective allowed us to photograph them, but insisted that our questioning was done over the phone – a compromise that we willingly accepted. Here, Thomas May discusses with what we can only presume is the closest thing the group has to a figurehead, the band’s insistence on secrecy, the commune that spawned their concept and freedom from individuality Photography: Andreas Ante Johansson / writer: thomas may

“Oh I don’t know, we call ourselves all, like, different things all the time,” the hesitant voice tells me from the other end of a struggling international phone-line. I’ve asked my anonymous interviewee how I should refer to him in the present article, a question that seemingly catches him off-guard.

What I had thought would be a passing formality before our conversation really begins becomes a sticking-point, a stifling atmosphere of awkwardness quickly emerging. “But you can call me…” He trails off to silence.

With the sole exception of Christian Johansson, who gave a handful of interviews in the band’s infancy, the identities of Goat’s members have remained veiled in mystery ever since they emerged into the public consciousness two years ago. Although, to refer to them as “members” is probably overly prescriptive. Supposedly hailing from a commune in the remote north of

Sweden, Goat functions more as a continuum of ideas and musical activity than a strictly delimited group: a fluid collective of individuals coalescing – albeit temporarily, perhaps fleetingly – around a shared sensibility, a shared music.

“It doesn’t really have a beginning and an end, maybe, you know,” my interviewee tells me later, once our ungainly conversation has begun to flow more easily. His fractured English is spoken fitfully, the musicality of the Swedish accent straining against an unforgiving foreign tongue, his economical clauses strung together with heavy silences and verbal tics.

“But it’s more of a way of... A view of the world maybe, a view of music, or of cultures, that everything belongs to everyone, you know? To be influenced from, or to enjoy all cultures, all music, everything. And Goat is mainly somehow a tradition, a tradition of how to live, maybe, how to view

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things, how to look at things. And that probably doesn’t have a beginning or an end.” Within Goat’s internal logic, the concepts of identity, of authorship and ownership, become irrelevant – if not totally meaningless – as the individual is subsumed and dispersed within the collective.

“You can call me…” Again, he pauses. Floundering, he eventually asks: “I don’t know, what did Rachel say?” By this point, only a minute or so into our conversation, we’d both chosen to ignore my catastrophic blunder of addressing him by his real name, which had been relayed to me by my PR contact Rachel prior to the phone call. (“Hi, is that X?” was my ham-fisted opener. “No… It’s not X,” suspicion palpable, I’d clearly miscalculated, “but is this, er, is this from a paper?”) His name now an open secret, the only option was to plow on in earnest. “Well, she told me to ask you,” I replied with pained and

openness

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insufficient jocularity. Another pause.

It’s hard not to be reminded of Rudi van der Saniel, a minor but particularly well-rendered character from the surrealist comedy series The Mighty Boosh, during our conversation.

Played by Julian Barrett, Rudi is a jazzfusion guitarist and High Priest of the Order of Psychedelic Monks, seeking to attain spiritual nirvana via his mastery of the phaser pedal and soaring, axe-hero solos. And when, at their first meeting, Noel Fielding’s Vince Noir enquires as to Rudi’s identity, he responds: “I go by many names,” before a long silence. “Well, what are they, then?” Vince eventually prompts. “Some call me Shatoon, bringer of corn. Others call me Mickey Nine, the dream weaver. Some call me Photoshop. Others call me Trenoon, the boiler.” The list goes on and on, culminating in the final pseudonym: “Others call me R-r-r-rubbady Pubbady.”

Of course, Rudi’s character acts as a metonym for the utopian pretentions of late-60s psychedelia, allowing the hipper-than-thou duo of Fielding and Barrett to poke gentle fun at its naïveté, jibing – albeit fondly, one suspects – at its contrived mystique. Throughout his appearances in the series, Rudi’s commitment to the dictum of the Order of Psychedelic Monks – his unerring belief in the power of music to offer blissful loss of self – is continually made quaint by his selfconsciousness, his numerous cognitive dissonances, and the unavoidable absurdity of his appearance. In the aforementioned episode, Barrett appears particularly ridiculous: his head and arms poke through a carnival cutout done up to make him look like a disproportioned Jimi Hendrix, in his hands a miniature Fender Strat.

And whilst Goat are less explicit in their guiding principles than the politically charged music of the Woodstock era, the group’s unashamed adherence to an almost mystical sense of universalism places their music within the same category of art striving, perhaps naively, to tear down barriers between people – be they personal, political, spiritual. “There is only one true meaning of life and that is to be a positive force in the constant creation of evolution,” states a heavily-reverbed voice during their new, second album ‘Commune’, released last month on Rocket Recordings. And the group’s

intrigue is only amplified by their strictly guarded anonymity: the seductive pull of the unknown emanates from their music, itself wideeyed and intangible in its eclecticism.

“He said to ring him any time, and if he’s free he’ll talk,” I was told, somewhat ominously, after a long period of attempting to pin the group down for an interview. But just as Rudi’s ambitions and cultivated aura are undermined by his unavoidable silliness, my conversation with this member of Goat is coloured by similar juxtapositions of the lofty and the amateurish. When I finally made contact with my elusive interlocutor I found a modest family man attempting to contain his marauding three yearold in the background. “Do you have kids?” he asks me later over the noise of what sounds like a full-scale riot in the background. “You can never do

something, you always have to interrupt something. But it’s great, but you have to be… especially when they’re” – emphasising each syllable – “three years old.”

And these traces of the quotidian – the messy, the unguarded – at the centre of Goat’s elaborate game of smoke-and-mirrors lends a sense of charming artlessness to my interviewee’s responses, keeping his occasional ambiguity from becoming tiresome schtick. It’s not until the end of our hour-long conversation that I finally press him again on his chosen pseudonym. “Just call me… just call me…” pausing, and then, almost apologetically: “Just call me Goatman.”

He stops again before adding, “Probably people have used that before but it’s all I can think of now.” Goat’s enigma is clumsy, ill-formed, and, above all, human.

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W

ell, it’s like ‘World Music’– like with the first album – [which] begins with the same melody and it ends with the same melody actually. And we did the same thing with this one but in another way. It’s just a nice way to make it circular, you know?”

Goat’s latest record, ‘Commune’, is bookended by a hushed bell-like sonority – the sound of a Buddhist prayer bowl, Goatman informs me. A subtle gesture, but one which lends gravity, a sense of obscured significance, to the unkempt music within: the repeated tone forms a frame that draws the album’s disparate sound-worlds together in tentative and partial synthesis. “It ends

“We call our music ‘world music’ because it belongs to the world and it comes from the world”

with the beginning somehow,” Goatman elaborates, “and it gives a good wholeness to the album, I think.

It’s a musical thing to make it whole, like a piece of art, you know, it sticks together all around.”

And the desire to create a musical experience of tangible, yet fleeting, unity was embedded into the group’s approach throughout the process of writing and recording ‘Commune’.

“We worked more with the wholeness from the beginning,” Goatman tells me. “With ‘World Music’ we worked with the wholeness afterwards, somehow, to make it as an album. Now we could do it more from the beginning. And ‘World Music’ was maybe more spontaneously recorded, this time we recorded it – we’re better with the studio now as well – so we recorded it more as an album: we knew it was going to be an album.”

Goat’s debut album, ‘World Music’, was released in 2012 after Rocket Recordings stumbled upon the group’s music online. “We recorded two songs – I think it was ‘Goathead’ and ‘The Sun and The Moon’, it was called – and those songs were... a friend of ours, I don’t know if they’re a friend of me really, but some friend, some friend’s friend or something…” As he often does throughout our discussion, Goatman briefly tangles himself in a moment of self-revision and contradiction before continuing. “… made a video for those songs, two videos, one for each song. And they put them on YouTube, I think, and Rocket found them, I think it was like that.”

As our conversation returns to ‘Commune’, Goatman offers a second motivation – aside from the purely musical reasons he initially noted – for his group’s desire to cultivate a unified

musical experience. “And it’s also because, you know, our music sometimes – it’s a spiritual thing, all music is a spiritual thing. It somehow fits, I think. It fits the context of the album, I think.” As his explanation becomes increasingly fragmented, his sentences disintegrating into unfinished clauses, he laughs: “I don’t know how to explain it in English.”

It’s about expressing a completeness that is nevertheless coloured – even defined – by difference, I suggest.

Something larger, more elaborate arises from the multiplicity of constituent parts. “Yeah, exactly. That’s what I think both of those albums do.

Because they start and they end in the same way, and the song structure – we’re very, you know, this is the thing that we’re very careful about, or we put a lot of thought and feeling into getting the sequencing of the albums to be good, so it’s not just a collection of songs, it’s a wholeness that is bigger than the pieces in a way. That’s the main reason of it in a way – to get a bigger spiritual experience from listening to the wholeness of the album rather than picking songs out.”

Drawing on everything from Afrobeat to druggy psychedelia, from funk to Middle Eastern sonorities, both of Goat’s albums vibrate with internal energy, invigorated by dissonances and contrasts, but also fleeting moments of harmony, between the multitude of genres and traditions that comprise the collage. As such, Goat describe their music, defined as it is by such an eclectic approach to recombination and juxtaposition, using the somewhat loaded term ‘world music’ – which was also, of course, the faintly provocative title of their debut album.

When I broach the topic of the label’s undesirable associations, at least in British English, of post-colonial Western consumerism, Goatman concurs, saying: “I don’t know how it’s used exactly in Britain but in Sweden the term is used to…” At this point he pauses, laughing: “my son is trying to speak English…” He continues: “The term here has been used to put together all music that is non-Western, non-European, non-American music.

And you put all those different musics together and you call it ‘world music’.

You know, if you look at a record shop, and you look at ‘world music’ and you find music from every country that are not nearby. And that is, I wouldn’t say

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it’s racist, but it’s, it’s really... stupid, in a way.You know what I mean? Yeah, it’s not racist, but it’s ignorant, in a way.

“And so, we also feel that, like, genres are pretty, pretty – I mean, sometimes you need to call things stuff – but it’s pretty old-fashioned also, you know? Because things are mixed up now, things are mixed up all the time and are getting mixed up more and more and more. The world is getting more global and connected with each other. All music exists in all music, so the genres we talk about today are so silly sometimes. And so we call our music ‘world music’ because it belongs to the world and it comes from the world, as simple as that really.

You know, it comes from the world and it belongs to all parts of it. That’s how we want to use the word.”

Goat’s use of the term, then, is an intentional attempt at reclamation: an attempt to imagine a way of listening in which music from a culture foreign to one’s own is not heard simply as an exoticism but rather as part of its own nuanced and complex history of aesthetic practice. “I hope so,” Goatman agrees. “And I hope people can, not through us, but I hope people can discover or can change their opinion about music from other places, and not call everything ‘world music’, which does have negative associations over here as well. Music is music, wherever it comes from. Let’s call everything ‘world music’, you know. In a way, everything should be called ‘world music’ – you shouldn’t just call music from non-Western places ‘world music’.”

Given their sensitivity to the myriad complexities surrounding our consumption of music from around the world, it’d surely be a simplification to label Goat’s music – and, in particular, its use of African and Middle Eastern sounds – as an example of crude, or politically suspect, cultural appropriation. Yet, the fact that this charge is not uncommon in discussions of their music is more likely due to the subtlety of the distinction – between Goat’s ideal of ‘world music’ and the more common meaning of the term – than the shallowness of their listeners.

As The Guardian’s Michael Hann wrote in his review of ‘Commune’: “After all, the notion of a bunch of Swedes taking African-styled guitar melodies and welding them on to droning psychedelia could easily be taken for cultural appropriation. But then Goat,

“A commune is the natural way for people to live, and people today need to be aware of that more” free to do whatever they like. So not all people are featured on all songs.”

So Goat’s aesthetic of ‘world music’ – one which could spark so much theoretical wrangling – is perhaps merely a symptom of the group’s openness to new ideas in the compositional process. I suggest to Goatman, though, that an intangible sense of a political stance – a sense of what is right, of what is worth creating and working towards – can arise naturally from any aesthetic object, however supposedly insular it may be.

“Yeah, I guess so, I guess so,” he concedes. “The only thing I would like to point out is that… Ah, here comes my girlfriend, finally. I can concentrate on one thing…” – his son now receiving the undivided attention he’s been clamouring for – “Collectiveness; collectiveness and togetherness is one thing in our minds, you know. But it’s worth pointing out, we don’t have a political agenda or anything like that.”

with their masked players on stage, are reliant upon appropriation for their exotic sense of otherness, which is key to their appeal.”

Hann’s equivocal stance is understandable: Goat’s cultural tourism may well have pure motivations, but their music is nevertheless in continual danger of being consumed almost as a contemporary form of blackface, at least at the extreme end of the scale.

Even within the context of our broader discussion of his conception of the term ‘world music’, I still feel a twinge of discomfort at the occasional turn of phrase emerging from Goatman’s otherwise impeccably considered explanations. (Perhaps most strikingly: “if you feel something appeals to you, use it: it’s yours.”) And if these instances are merely attributable to our not-inconsiderable language barrier, then perhaps that only reinforces this point: communication is never free from the spectre of miscommunication, especially within the semantic haze of musical meaning. And, in that sense, Goat’s game is a risky one.

In any case, Goat’s vision of an idealised ‘world music’ can be seen to lend a political edge, an urgency and force, to their otherwise abstract songwriting. Is Goat’s music intended

to evoke such an image of a utopian society, one in which differences are woven together into a complex, yet harmonic, whole? “Well if you think like that or if other people think that, it’s fine,” Goatman responds. “But it’s nothing that we have planned or strived for. It’s just what we wanted to do and what sounded right. It’s not like we have a political agenda that we want to bring forward or anything like that, it’s just – I can understand that people feel like that – but it’s not planned.

“It’s just that we listen to a lot of music and if you don’t control your creativity in a certain direction, it comes out the way it comes out,” he continues. “And this is the way it comes out. But we don’t try to create something really – it just happens when we put down a lot of jamming into songs.” Goatman goes on the elaborate on the group’s recording process: “It’s just the people who are involved at the time – it could be two people, it could be ten people actually.

It’s, you know, if someone brings a friend to the recording session, it’s like, ‘if you want to do something then you can do something’. But also, the people who can operate the studio: they are the bunch of people who mostly are involved. But some people can be there and the other people are

T

he sense of radical openness – to other people, to other cultures and musics – so integral to Goat’s way of operating can be traced to the shared sensibilities of the broader collective to which the group belongs. For, the name “Goat” refers not to a band but a commune situated in the village of Korpilombolo in the far north of Sweden. “I’m not even from the North, actually,” Goatman tells me. “I’m am not from the original Goat commune, but I’m part of the commune now, I’ve been travelling up there since I was small. My parents knew – I’m from Gothenburg originally – my parents knew people up there, we would travel there and then I’m part of that and the band now. But the band consists of younger people and Goat are a lot more people than that.”

Embroiled in mystery and rumours – largely provoked by the group’s infamous first press release – of voodoo-based religious rituals, Goat’s official backstory is tinted with playful ambiguity and evasion, always withholding far more than it reveals. I suggest to Goatman that, as such, the group – as a concept, as an entity – appears to hover somewhere between reality and fiction: an enigma enmeshed within a chaotic slippage of meaning. “Maybe it is, maybe it is,” he

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laughs, guarding his answers carefully.

“I don’t know. It’s hard to say.” He continues: “Maybe people are really disturbed by it, they can’t put their finger on it. Maybe they don’t know if it’s true, as you said. They don’t know.

And maybe they hate it because of that but maybe they like it because of that.

“But it’s not constructed,” he continues. “I understand what you mean. But it was nothing, it was nothing planned. We told Rocket about ourselves and they made this press release, which was part” – emphasising – “part of our story. But it was part, it wasn’t the whole picture. I guess because we embraced spiritualism and religions and all that, you know, it gets probably a bit unreal for people. But it’s nothing we’ve sat down and had a meeting about, you know, how we’re going to do this. It was just happening quite spontaneously.” He pauses before arriving at his conclusion: “It’s the music: if you like the music, you like the music. If you don’t, then you don’t.”

Indeed, despite the aura surrounding the group and the story of its origins, the Goat commune is actually made to sound remarkably quotidian and non-mysterious in Goatman’s descriptions. “A commune is just a bunch of people living together, sharing the same beliefs, somehow,” he tells me. “But it’s also the natural way for people to live. All people live together with other people all the time, you know what I mean?

And people today need to be aware of that more, I think. People of today need to be aware that we are all part of different collectives – your family, your friends, your work, your society, your country, your city, your whatever... your village – we’re all part of collectives or communes and the more we recognise that, the more we can personally play a positive role in our communes or collectives. Which is really our purpose. Don’t live for yourself, live together.”

So what does the band’s music share with the music played within the commune? After a pause, Goatman replies: “It’s not the same. It can be whatever, but music is pretty free up there. There’s lots of [styles]. Like in the ’70s there was prog rock, probably, but in the ‘80s, I don’t know, actually – but still it’s a lot of instruments, a lot of drums, lots of rhythms, lots of dancing, lots of like pretty natural, natural…” he trails off, searching for the right word. “Natural music. You

know what I mean?” laughing, “Natural music is not the right word... it’s a stupid word but... don’t write natural music…” I did, but only because I think the term is probably more precise than Goatman feels: the Goat commune and its music seems oriented around an ideology of authenticity, of music and expression arising organically from unconstrained self- and group-expression, free from pretence or individualism.

“Like, simp... not simple music” – still struggling for the best description – “But people play together, you know, jamming with drums maybe. Or the next day, people jamming with drums and a guitar. It doesn’t really matter.

Mostly jamming but they pop up like bands or stuff like that – groups that want to do their own music like we have done. And then some young people from up north moved to Gothenburg and hooked up with me and some other people and... So it’s not just people from here influenced by other music. It can be punk rock or whatever, you know. So influences are brought in, it’s the openness for it that is the thing, in a way.You mix whatever you like with whatever you like in the songs and it’s your own expression.”

I mention that there seems to be a subtle, and paradoxically constructive, interaction between tradition – in the commune’s approach to collective music making – and the erasure of tradition – in the desire to incorporate sounds from elsewhere. “Yeah,” he agrees. “I would say that [the latter] is the musical tradition, basically.

That is what the tradition is: to stay open, to travel, to explore, you know.

To explore cultures and music and, if you feel something appeals to you, use it: it’s yours. That’s the tradition, maybe, in a way.”

And it’s this goal of forging a purity of musical expression – one which arises from the spontaneous and egoless meeting of individuals – that drives Goat’s desire for anonymity.

“When we play together wearing masks, wearing something that expresses our sense of the music, we feel more united, we feel more like one person,” Goatman tells me. “It’s more easy. It’s more easy to express something when you know that your face is not there, when your identity is not there. It’s just music coming out.

It’s easier to let it out, because there are people watching you.

“And, yeah, it’s also about the individualism of our time because it’s that individualism that we want to get away from. You know, we’re not individuals, Goat is not consisting of individuals.” He pauses briefly and laughs. “It is of course consisting of individuals but it’s not the way we want to be seen, that’s what I mean.”

It’s almost as if the anonymity is a form of secular sacrifice, of the individual to the larger group, I suggest.

“Yeah, I agree with it, yeah,” says

Goatman. “It’s a hard word to use, but at the same time I think it’s pretty correct. That’s what Goat is mainly about: you have to give up something for the greater good of the group, of the collective or the commune or whatever. We give up: it’s for the music in a way.”

Goat’s anonymity, then, is an integral part of the group’s selfconcept as a commune, allowing the individual to surrender their ego, their

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desire for ownership or recognition.

“Exactly,” he concurs. But then, in a characteristically self-contradictory move, he adds: “And also, you know, you can’t forget that a show is a show.”

His laugh punctuates and halts his train of thought. Refraining from elaboration, Goatman merely leaves the statement to hang briefly between us in all its opacity and knowing ambiguity. After a pause, he adds simply: “That’s also true.”

Reviews / Albums

09/10

Scott Walker + Sunn O))) Soused 4AD By dan i el dy l an wray. I n store s O ctobe r 20

The surprise announcement of this collaboration was mouth-wateringly tantalising. Attempting to guess what Scott Walker will do next is futile, while Sun O)))’s reign as a shape-shifting avant-garde powerhouse is well-established, to say the least. The potential for this record to smash through barriers and rocket through the ceiling of oddness instantly became a palpable possibility. However, what thuds home from the opening glass-shatter shrieks of Walker and the earthsplitting bass cracks of Sunn O))) is just how wonderfully, perfectly natural this collaboration feels. This is not two divergent extremes butting antlered heads, it’s not them throwing grenades into the tar pit and it’s not a ‘reveal the curtain and step into our shrine to the abnormal’.

‘Soused’ is a record made by artists astutely aware of the impact of their

own sonic extremities, who have subsequently gone about making a record that creates ample space for one another to work around.

Walker sounds electric on the opening ‘Brando’, like an operatic hyena howling into the pitch black of the night on the edge of a mountaintop, whilst Sun O))) ring out perhaps the most melodic guitar line of their careers – terror-instilling, dissonant melody of course. The sheer physicality of the record is immense and often washes over you with powerful, immersive force.

On ‘The Drift’ Walker pounded rare slabs of meat with his fist, on ‘Bish Bosch’ he scraped and sparked machetes like the hungry wolf ready to tuck in; on ‘Soused’ he utilises a bullwhip to impart menacing winces, striking unremittingly like a punishing ringmaster. Walker’s recent records (greatly aided by co-

producer Peter Walsh) have sounded miraculously like full, coherent works with the construction still visibly taking place: people still knocking in leftover nails with hammers, tightening screws with drills whizzing and whirling. It is the work in progress of a Foley artist yet also the finished score of the composer – the contrasting two seamlessly melded as one. This seeming affinity for surface noise and the joys of loose rattles, squeaks and hisses fuses devilishly with Sun O)))’s deeply textural approach and together the album screeches around between early industrial brute clanks and horror-flick intensity before disappearing into dark ambient sink-holes and then reemerging into the individualistic, esoteric and starkly original sound this collaboration has bore.

Walker’s lyrical explorations,

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whilst often succinct and punchy, are also vast and mysterious and, as always, the inflections and accentuations of his vocal delivery are pinnacle to the project – darting between swift, acidic bursts and yelps to lingering, echoing churns.

The more you pry open the guts of this record and stick your head in amongst the bloody entrails, the more of a marvel you realise it is.

Collaborations like this are of course rare; even rarer though is them occurring at precisely the stage in which both artists careers have naturally arrived at a creative point where they can both extract, and inspire, the best out of the situation, and one another. ‘Soused’ is an inciting, persistently challenging piece of work in which its sheer existence is riveting enough, but where its final outcome and mastered execution is truly astonishing.

Reviews 08/10

Flying Lotus You’re Dead War p

By Reef Y ou n i s . In sto re s Octobe r 6

The beauty of Flying Lotus is that we’ve genuinely come to expect the unexpected from Steven Ellison, having been through his personal gamut of hazy despair, sci-fi funk, jazz, soul and the pulsing futurism that has come to define his playground sound. We’ve jumped on the groundbreaking ‘Los Angeles’, bounced around the condensed ‘Cosmogramma’ as it danced between ideas and extremes, and fell in love with the sumptuously psychedelic ‘Until the Quiet Comes’ as it unpacked everything with beautiful simplicity. The latter set a fresh FlyLo benchmark but for the few naysayers who felt that the brief track times made more for exciting

sketches than fully-formed songs, and it’s a similar approach that makes ‘You’re Dead’ both a fascinating and frustrating listen.

Away from the brilliance of lead single ‘Never Catch Me’ we get Thundercat’s digit-defying bass setting a frenetic pace on ‘Tesla’, the chameleonic guitar riffs and arpeggio-blitzing sax of ‘Cold Dead’, and the subtle, Santana-esque guitar that lends ‘Fkn Dead’ a Latin, lounge feel in its 40 fading seconds. Further on, ‘Turkey Dog Coma’ jerks with stops, starts and ever-changing time signatures, and ‘Dead Man’s Tetris’ throws together Snoop Dogg and Captain Murphy into a rough-cut world of samples, computer game

snippets and 8-bit beats that feels like an alter ego in the context of everything else.

It’s a familiarly meticulous construction, as if each track is a single rib that protects the album’s beating heart. It’s a process that helps make sense of ‘You’re Dead’s’ roll call of one- and two-minute instalments, and lets Ellison weave his celestial magic. Behind that laconic persona, though, there’s a fastidious control, not just over every frantic surge of jazz fusion, slowbumping melody or genre-hopping switch, but a fundamental way of programming us to approach every element as part of a whole.

Fixing these 19 tracks into 38

minutes was always going to be a familiar FlyLo point of pride. He makes no secret of wanting his albums to be treated as long players for the twilight hours; 21st century beats created to creep, seep, and bleed into one fluid, ever-evolving journey.

It’s a risky desire to create albums that, if dismantled down to their individual components, rarely make standalone sense, but it’s a bravery that’s consistently rewarded.

‘You’re Dead’ might be less an immediate celebration of Ellison’s restless creativity but on this evidence, his innate ability to orchestrate worlds of far-out fantasia is still unrivalled.

It’s fair to say that UK Hip Hop has been a little quiet as of late. The dust has long settled on Young Fathers’ explosive mercury prize nominated debut album and this last month has brought us absolutely nothing (Professor Green doesn’t count).

Nothing apart from Ipswich-born rapper DELS’ latest offering, that is.

‘Petals Have Fallen’ has come at the perfect time and it’s pretty good too.

Combining thoughtful stream-ofconsciousness poeticisms with weird, dark and occasionally off beat

production (much of which comes from long-term collaborator KWES), DELS makes for an interesting listen.

Kieren Dickens’ voice is appealingly lazy, almost conversational and his lyrics effortless. ‘My boys are arguing like politicians/this house of commons is full of endless contradictions’ he raps in the lilting third track that’s peppered with Nintendo bleeps and the odd schoolboy chant.There is the occasional too-simple line (“Religion

clashing with science/I feel to seek to the truth”), but when it’s buried amongst brilliantly layered instrumentation and lyrical sincerity, it comes across as more appealing than naïve, and it’s often skewed with wit: “Some say I’m anxious / I just think I need to eat cheese less.”

‘Petals Have Fallen’ presents itself as a rich second effort from DELS and it could well be the answer to a much-needed upheaval in UK Hip Hop. Whoever thought it would come from Ipswich?

0 7/ 1 0

Dels Petals Have Fallen Bi g Da da

By Dai s y Jon es . I n sto re s No v e mb e r 3

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Albums 06/10

0 7/10

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07/ 10

Torn Hawk Let’s Cry and Do Push Ups at the Same Time

Philip Selway Weatherhouse

Cooly G Wait Til Night

Last Ex Last Ex

B e ll a Un io n

Hy p e r dub

C o n s t ell a ti o n

B y D avi d Z ammitt . I n s t or e s O c t o b e r 6

By J o e Go ggi ns . I n s t o r e s O c to b er 2 0

B y Th o ma s M A y . In s t o r es O c t o be r 1 3

Not many musicians manage to launch a solo career in their early 40s, but it’s fair to say that Philip Selway had a hint of artistic form.

Despite forming one fifth of the most innovative band of the last 30 years, however, 2010 album ‘Familial’s elegant acoustic ballads came more as a pleasant surprise than an exploration of any untilled ground.

Selway returns here, however, clutching several sacks of extra ambition, so that while that first album felt like a separate project altogether, ‘Weatherhouse’ feels as sonically pioneering as the music he makes with Messrs Yorke, Greenwood and O’Brien. It lives in the same dark corner as Radiohead’s most haunting work, and though ‘Let It Go’ and ‘It Will End In Tears’ soar with Technicolor, lighter-in-the-air choruses, where it really succeeds is in its many bleaker, more unnerving moments. They place it closer to trip hop than folk so that lead single ‘Coming Up For Air’ throbs with Bjork’s ‘Post’-era angst, while ‘Miles Away’ has the strident menace of late-90s Massive Attack. For all its forboding, it’s all the more satisfying.

In her own little corner of the world – both musically and geographically – Merrisa Campbell has already enjoyed plenty of success; her debut album, ‘Playin Me’, did something genuinely different with UK garage and, accordingly, won her recognition beyond Brixton, where she’s long since been a fixture in the area’s house scene. This follow-up has the potential to make a breakthrough into public consciousness, even if ‘Wait ‘Til Night’ still plays, in large, like a record that might have been fit for the radio back when the likes of Aaliyah were dictating the modern R&B scene. Perhaps predictably, there’s tracks that nudge towards Blood Orange-style ‘indie R&B’ (‘Like a Woman Should’, especially), but elsewhere Campbell blends a consistent dubstep sensibility to her beats with icily-delivered, detached vocal lines and an admirable desire to play around stylistically. It doesn’t always work (‘Dancing’ features jarring electric guitars and the hugely minimalist ‘Want’ meanders), but there’s still more than enough on this overtly sexual record to keep Cooly G’s star on the rise.

It opens with the ‘Hotel Blues’ and ends with a ‘Hotel Kiss’. And Last Ex’s hotel stands mostly empty. It’s a lonely place between places, frequented by the rudderless and the melancholy, and haunted by dreams of elsewhere and elsewhen. The instrumental duo’s debut album flits between nostalgia and dream with enigmatic poise. Arpeggiated guitar chords punctuate keyboard haze, shuffling bass lines lapped by jazzhaunted beats. It’s an approach to whole-group melodic harmony that recalls Constellation Records labelmates Do Make Say Think, if only they’d spent more time getting stoned listening to Morricone and Badalamenti than sitting around a campfire. An off-shoot of Timber Timbre, Last Ex’s music began as a soundtrack for a horror film, a project long since abandoned. But the absence of images and narrative cohesion is felt less as a deficiency than an evocative incompleteness at the heart of the music’s semiambience. ‘Last Ex’ is a remote album, veiled in aloofness that can frustrate, shrouded with mystique that can often seduce.

Like Katy B, Jessie Ware is a former Rinse FM hype girl who finds herself in 2014 following up an unassuming but surprisingly successful debut album, with a bold bid for pop stardom. But where B’s effort earlier this year set all phasers for Radio 2 listeners growing impatient for the next Adele album, ‘Tough Love’ takes an altogether more fashionable approach and, in doing so, creates an easy sense of continuity from its predecessor.

Accordingly, album one’s central

touchstone of Sade has now been replaced with Beyoncé in full Mrs Carter honking balladeer mode (‘Say You Love Me’ and ‘Pieces’), and the shadow of Dev Hynes looms large (‘Want Your Feeling’) alongside breezy Fleetwood Mac-isms and nods to ’80s AOR (‘You and I Forever’). Indeed, much of ‘Tough Love’ feels as if Ware’s already distinctive and appealing aesthetic has simply been streamlined and updated here for the current season.

For all the on-trend styling,

though, what really shines throughout ‘Tough Love’ is its substance, in the form of a series of utterly irresistible melodies. Save for the aimless final track, which results in the album petering out somewhat, every song here could be a big radio single – one gets the impression that was rather the point – and while that does occasionally rob the record of an ebb and flow, it’s difficult to fault something constructed from such gorgeous constituent parts.

s of tware

By Sam Corn f orth. In st or e s Octo b er 20

The first track on Luke Wyatt’s third album as Torn Hawk (a project inspired by a love of indie flick soundtracks) is surprisingly idyllic; the drum machines and guitar work glisten alongside each other on ‘I’m Flexible’ creating a climax that evokes a glorious sunset. It is a million miles away from the harsh sounds you’d expect from an album called ‘Let’s Cry And Do Pushups At The SameTime’. Fear not, though – if you’re a gym freak who likes a good old weep, the rest of the album toys with darker and more desolate soundscapes, best achieved on ‘Because of M.A.S.K’ and ‘Under Wolf Rule’ that prod at you with their abrasive and grinding sounds. The vast noises that Wyatt conjures up are initially difficult to digest, and although once it has been fully absorbed it has some fascinating moments, ‘Let’s Cry…’ doesn’t convincingly manipulate your emotions like a very memorable instrumental album needs to.

Contrary to Luke Wyatt’s aim, it is hard to fully invest yourself or shed a tear to this third Torn Hawk album.

09/10

Jesse Ware Tough Love PMR / I s l an d

By Sam Walton . In sto re s Octo be r 6

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Reviews 08/10

0 7/10

09/10

08/ 10

Deptford Goth Songs

We Are Shining Kara

Gum Takes Tooth Mirrors Fold

Caribou Our Love

3 7 Ad ven t u r es

Ma ratho n Ar t i sts

Ti ge r t r a p

City Slang

By H en r y Wi l ki nso n. I n stores November 3

B y S am Co rn forth . I n sto res O c tober 2 7

By Dani el D yl a n Wra y. I n sto r es O ctobe r 6

B y Reef Yo u n is . I n sto r es O c tobe r 6

‘Songs’. It’s the most simplistic of titles; the most basic of descriptions.

One that you would be forgiven for assuming contains a certain amount of irony, wielded by some experimental noise band with a wry sense of humour. However, as the title of Deptford Goth’s second album it seems not only fitting, but sincere. Here are eleven tracks, meticulously assembled as a celebration of simplicity, where vocals, synth and shuffling beats are pieced together slowly and in varying orders to give a lesson in minimalist sculpture. Whereas ‘Life After Defo’ was smoky, ‘Songs’ is warm and bright throughout. ‘Lovers’ is like an early morning How To Dress Well, with pastoral and poetic lyrics on the unity of family while ‘Code’ is similarly optimistic, percussion scuffing its feet through a yearning elegy on being human. It could all be a bit depressing, but somehow even the repetition of “soon you will be dust” on ‘Dust’ sounds oddly lifeaffirming. This is an album from an artist (Daniel Woolhouse) who has made peace with the world, and it is all the better for it.

We Are Shining have been in the studio with Kanye West and have cowritten a song with FKA Twigs.

They’re big names in 2014, but they don’t really need to be dropped in WAS’s case, not when they have at their disposal a fiery melting pot of psychedelia, soul, tribal beats, hip hop and electronica. That eclectic array of influences may look a bit overwhelming, but duo Morgan and Acyde manage to expertly weave them in and out of their refreshing songs. The bluesy Hendrix-esque guitar licks and stomping beat on ‘Road’ is a chaotic lift off, ‘In The Moment’ is a hedonistic psychedelic gem, and album finale ‘Wheel’ expertly captures the sense of fun that this album oozes. With the exception of ‘Breaks’, which is strangely devoid of the energy and charisma the rest of the album possesses, this production duo have defied the current trend of their peers and created a multi-dimensional debut that wants to be loved. Usually having music bubbling with too many ideas is a band’s downfall, but somehow We Are Shining manage to get away with it.

Striking a pleasing amalgamation between gut-screech noise, acidbleed walls of gloopy psych and transfixing (almost tribal) rhythmic propulsions is no easy feat but Gum Takes Tooth have created such a potent concoction of these elements on ‘Mirrors Fold’ that it almost feels coldly scientific. Yet that would of course ignore all the wonderfully human, earthly components that make up this record (although the busted-up spaceship hurtling towards its own death sonics are a constant, juddering blast). The record’s breadth is vast, it has punch and vigour yet it has space and tranquillity, and the ground it traverses and hovers over is just as interesting and exploratory. It reels in the occasionally unrelenting, blistering ferocity of the group’s live performances for something far more suited to the album format – it’s a complete, poised and balanced recording. Any record that can, on occasion, sound like Lighting Bolt locked in a room being forced to collaborate with Amon Düül, with Death Grips on production, is well worth your time.

In 2010, ‘Swim’ set a glorious benchmark for Caribou and Dan Snaith. It was a confident step away from the ambient grandiosity of previous releases and an album characterised by staggering clarity.

Each track felt beautifully defined; mini labours of love that were buffeted, polished and left absolutely pristine, and ‘Our Love’ is another similarly striking step forward.

Channelling the minimal energy of ‘Swim’, the dark corners of ‘Jiaolong’ and the grab-bag spirit of B2B sets with Kieran Hebden, ‘Our Love’ is a sparse, soulful collection of songs that exist on the dancefloor’s edge.

From weary, blossoming shades of RnB on the slowed BPM of ‘Second Chance’ and the heartbreaking bump of ‘Dive’ to the blooming, sad synth hug of ‘Silver’, there’s a sense of space that comes through in Snaith’s echoing vocal and uncluttered arrangements. By Snaith’s intricate standards, it’s a meticulous simplicity that helps ‘Julia Brightly’ radiate ‘Swim’’s beaming warmth, and allows his tentative falsetto on the hushed delicacy of ‘Back Home’ to find new, tremulous depth.

The music of Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie is littered with spellbinding accomplishment, and his most recent project with pianist and composer Dustin O’Halloran is no exception.

2011 saw A Winged Victory For The Sullen’s self-titled debut introduce the duo as architects of a delicate ambient landscape; beguiling instrumentals carved into potent desolation. But while that LP took two years to craft, its follow-up was conceived and written in just four months – a sudden burst of creativity

spurred on by choreographer Wayne McGregor’s request that the duo soundtrack a piece of long-form contemporary dance.

Perhaps it’s this intense period of labour – combined with total creative freedom – that allows ‘ATOMOS’ to surge with such coruscating clarity.

And while they may still make sounds redolent of their debut, from the billowy piano on ‘ATOMOS III’ and dense orchestration of ‘ATOMOS VIII’, to the intense melancholia of ‘ATOMOS II’, it’s the

shrewd addition of synths and subtle touches of electronica that add new emotional depth here.

There’s a warmth at the heart of this album that’s powerful enough to imbue ‘ATOMOS XI’ with distant hope, while leaving tracks such as ‘ATOMOS VI’ to sound like a world crumbled to dust.The result is eleven pieces of music (‘ATOMOS I - XII’ although curiously missing ‘IV’) that ring with a mini-maximalism unique to AWVFTS, enveloping you deeper in their splendour with every listen.

09/10

A Winged Victory For The Sullen - ATOMOS Er ase d T ap es

By T om F en wi c k. In stores O ctober 6

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Albums 08/10

0 8/10

07 /10

03/ 10

Zola Jesus Taiga

Dean Blunt Black Metal

Peaking Lights Cosmic Logic

Wampire Bazaar

Mu te

ro u gh t ra de

We ir d Wo r ld

Polyvinyl

By James We st. In sto res Octo be r 6

B y stuar t st ubbs . I n sto re s N o ve mb e r 3

By J o e go gg in s . I n sto re s Octo b er 6

B y Dav id Z ammitt. In sto r e s Oct o ber 2 7

Brooding, enveloping, challenging.

These are the words you anticipate using after inhabiting the muchextolled macabre world of Zola Jesus. But ‘Taiga’ is something of a rebirth, a comparatively accessible listen that by her own admission feels like her “true debut”. Of course, it’s not that those plaudit-winning traits are absent from fourth studio album ‘Taiga’, but there’s a glossy touch throughout, from the demure cover art to the brassy synth that drives ‘Hunger’ (honestly, it could be the intro to Beyonce’s latest empowerment anthem). ‘Go (Blank Sea)’ treads a similar plank, with a refrain that flirts with the idea of being as unabashed as Icona Pop, but Nika Roza Danilova’s vocal is shrouded in enough mysterious atmospherics to keep it from diving off into the FM deep. Similarly, massappeal and morbidity collide beautifully on ‘Ego’ and ‘Lawless’, with the latter’s post-chorus strings coming on like a laudably morose Carly Rae Jepsen. It’s a thin line that ‘Taiga’ treads, but it proves to be liberating for both artist and audience.

This being Dean Blunt – a former half of shadowy sample duo Hype Williams and renowned teller of tall tales – the title of his second solo album, ‘Black Metal’, is as inaccurate as its contents is unexpected. The Pastels and C86 are hardly Venom, and it’s these decidedly un-Blunt sounds that influence ‘Black Metal’, until they’re ditched for a disjointed mix of stoner dub (‘Punk’), red light district sax wheezing (‘Hush’, ‘Grade’) and a misplaced interlude of violent radio waves (‘Country’), which is pretty unlistenable. There’s also a brilliant, shuffling 14-minute centrepiece that you could easily mistake for aThese New Puritans art installation. The less experimental, C86 stuff (especially ‘100’; a duet with Joanne Robertson who offsets Blunt’s flat vocals on a number of tracks) demonstrates the extent of this artist’s contrary nature, by being so joyously accessible that you might question why he couldn’t stick with that. The same goes for the opening ‘Lush’, which showboats Blunt’s skill for synthesised orchestrations. But, then, that wouldn’t be fucking with us enough, would it?

After their third album, ‘Lucifer’, both cemented their place as critical darlings and saw them play to the biggest audiences of their careers to date you might have been forgiven for worrying that Peaking Lights’ next turn might be a wrong one – a more commercial sound perhaps, or an overly polished studio approach.

Such fears go unfulfilled on this excellent fourth record, which was self-produced and recorded at the husband-and-wife duo’s LA home in Echo Park. It’s an album that, at least on the face of it, seems to pay less attention to subtlety and nuance than both ‘Lucifer’ and breakthrough ‘936’ did, instead prioritising a bolder sound over plain old complexity.

There’s still a handful of what sound like eighties pop throwbacks crossed with 16-bit video game soundtracks (‘Everyone and Us’, ‘Bad with the Good’) but the really interesting moments involve genuine inversion of the group’s sonic palette – the melodic guitar against squelching bass on ‘Infinite Trips’, for instance, or the marimba-synth pairing on ‘New Grrrls’. Uneven, sure, but certainly endearing.

Wampire are the perfect example of that strange post-millennial breed of bands who seem to exist with the sole modus operandi of throwing post irony at facsimiles of their influences. They did it on their debut LP, ‘Curiosity’, and, a little over 12 months later, they’ve done it again. If everything from ’60s psychedelia to ’80s yacht rock was filtered through their lo-fi cassette tape production on that album, they’ve trained the crosshair of their retro Super Soaker on something even more specific with ‘Bazaar’. In fact, it feels like they’ve got their hands on The Traveling Wilburys’ Best Of and simply worked back from there. ‘Fly On The Wall’ and ‘Life Of Luxury’, for example, do a solid job of exhuming the late-80s supergroup for one final encore, ‘Bad Attitude’ and ‘Sticking Out’ are Tom Petty heartland rock reproductions, while ‘Too Stoned’ and ‘Millennials’ are perfect duplicates of Jeff Lynne’s idiosyncratic sci-fi pop. In an era of streaming immediacy, it begs to question why you would sit through ‘Bazaar’ rather than revisiting any of its constituent touchstones.

It’s easy to understand why Chaz Bundick thought this was a good idea. On emerging asToro y Moi back in 2009, the South Carolina producer was immediately branded with the “chillwave” iron and herded along with the likes of Neon Indian and Washed Out. Five years on and Les Sins is intended both as a danceorientated outlet and a sort of reclamation of identity.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of deal-breakers.

First, relatively recent Toro y Moi

tracks like ‘Say That’, and others on 2013’s ‘Anything In Return’, have already thrust Bundick out of the bedroom and on to the dance floor, thereby rendering the Les Sins moniker slightly redundant (just as Nile Rodgers doesn’t have a pressing need for a disco-funk alter-ego).

Secondly – and perhaps a consequence of the above – Bundick tries too hard to distinguish this debut from his Toro y Moi releases.

Verse-and-chorus structure has been purposefully eschewed, any

semblance of bass has largely been stripped out and vocals have been dispensed with save for a few fractured samples.

The result is a sterile, oddly anaemic album, which, in the main, makes for rather a boring listen. The tracks that do work are those that cleave closest to Bundick’s usual style, like the bouncing synth-pop of ‘Why’ and soulful slow-burner ‘Bellow’. Otherwise, you’ll hear better dance records this year, probably from Toro y Moi.

0 4/ 1 0

Les Sins Michel C o mpan y / C ar pa rk

By J ames F . T h om pso n. In sto re s No v 3

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Reviews 0 7/ 1 0

0 8/10

09/10

06/ 10

Kele Trick

Wyes Blood The Innocents

Virginia Wing MEasures of Joy

Meatbodies Meatbodies

L i lac

Me x i c an S umme r

Fi re

I n T h e Re d

By James West. I n sto re s Octo be r 13

B y Jame s F. Tho mps o n. I n s t o re s O ct o b e r 2 0

By D ani e l D y lan W ray. I n st o r es N o v 3

B y H en r y W i lk in s o n . I n s t o r es O c t o ber 2 0

It wasn’t exactly a triumph the first time Bloc Party’s frontman strutted into view with a solo offering in tow.

Like a contemporary splatter flick, ‘The Boxer’ lacked substance.

Fortunately, he’s exhaled and ‘Trick’ feels contemplative, soulful and more significant as a result.

Plundering the same RnB goldmine as Deptford Goth and Kindness, this is emotive bedroom music, albeit if Kele’s place of kip was the back seat of a Bow-bound night bus. The air is almost Burial-esque in parts, a moody salute to the sullied crevices of England’s capital with a more commercial twist (see ‘Coasting’).

It’s a stall he sets out early on with ‘First Impressions’, an indication of the steady grooves and subtle hooks to come.There are also a few nods to his day job too, in ‘Closer’ and ‘Stay The Night’, the latter of which bleeds the kind of opinion-splitting earnestness that will have the band’s yeasayers swooning and their critics wincing. Nonetheless, ‘Trick’ is a spellbinding retort; one that suggests that the announcement of his next solo output will be worthy of more than a sigh and a shrug.

Apparently, Natalie Mering chose the Weyes Blood moniker in homage to gothic writer Flannery O’Connor.

The author’s disturbing tales of the grotesque are certainly a useful reference point for the Pennsylvanian singer-songwriter’s own haunted melancholia. Serviceably eerie song titles like ‘February Skies’, ‘Bad Magic’ and ‘Requiem for Forgiveness’ only reinforce the spookiness. The really scary thing about all of this, though, is Mering’s voice; a deep, full-bodied moan that sounds far closer to the androgyny of Nico than it does to any folksy songstress.

Tracked in multi-part harmonies with herself and armed with some unnerving lyrical couplets (“I’m as broken / as a woman can be”), Mering weaves her way around ten dark interludes of spectral psychedelic folk.The pastoral sounds of medieval instruments float atop bubbling brews of electronics, tape effects and sound collages, to brilliantly disorientating effect. Occasional missteps – the maudlin ‘Bad Magic’ and the superfluous ‘Montrose’ – threaten to break Mering’s spell but ultimately, we’re all powerless.

There is an undeniably Broadcastmeets-Stereolab-shaped cloud that hangs over much of ‘Measures of Joy’ but often, like those same groups at their most playful and experimental, there is a lovely, wriggling sense of never sitting still for too long; fleeing away from any immediate comparative grasp you attempt to place on them. Virginia Wing appear open in their influences but project a refusal to be defined by them. They float through genres as frequently as they do tempos and constantly create thick shades of atmospheres that weave between eerie billows and echoes to warm fogs of colour and bustling life. The album cover is a wonderfully apt representation and projection of the record: abstract, absorbing, complex and something that can appear full of life and vivacity in one moment, yet quickly turn to minimalism, isolation and a reflective and contained feeling of alienation and seclusion.

‘Measure of Joy’ is a piece of noirpop majesty that constantly pushes its own boundaries and frequently shatters the listeners’ sense of expectation.

Guitarist for Mikal Cronin’s band and bass player in Ty Segall’s Fuzz project, Chad Ubovich is something of a go-to musician for psychedelic rock. Meatbodies sees him step out of the shadows to beat us round the head with a debut album of lung busting party rock released on L.A’s legendary garage label In The Red Label. It’s a record bursting with gristly guitar and ineloquent vocals chomping away over fat, RSI inducing riffs. ‘Mountain’ is composed of a seismic bass rumble padded out with lysergically chugging power chords and fuck loads of cymbal, while ‘Him’ delivers a torrent of sludgy guitar, poured over the odd sunshine psych reference à la White Fence. ‘Tremmors’ is heavier still and by the time you get to ‘Gold’ you realise that Meatbodies are a group perennially on the offensive.The first real switch in tempo comes in ‘Two’, a full nine songs in to the album.

Eventually ‘Dark Road’ sees Chad slurring out a confession of insanity as shit finally gets real. It’s an album that demands attention, although it must be said, unfortunately not for its variety.

How do the words ‘double album’ make you feel?

Excited?

Apprehensive? Does your heart leap in anticipation, or sink with weary resignation? Let’s face it, there have been very few albums in the history of rock music that actually had the quality necessary to sustain themselves, and their listeners, across two discs. Foxygen are the kind of pscyh-pop peddlers, perhaps, who’d be inclined to produce an album of this length, but ‘… And Star Power’ seems destined to join that

pile of double disc-ers clearly marked ‘self-indulgent’.

The album seems fundamentally lacking in originality – single ‘How Can You Really’ is engaging, melodic pop with a sixties vibe, summer highway cruising music, cool and hooky, but it’s also one of those songs which could have been released at any point between circa 1966 and yesterday. Meanwhile, ‘Cosmic Vibrations’ is almost a parody of its own name, and ‘Wally’s Farm’ is hopelessly meandering.

There’s little enough here to fill one disc, let alone two, and what is here could have been dug up from a time capsule.

It’s genuinely mystifying why in 2014 a band would wish to make a record so backwards looking and so shamelessly retro; if this is the era of music you love, then why not just play sixties pscyhedelia classics in a covers band?

Of course, the same can be said of Foxygen’s last LP, but at least ‘...

Peace and Magic’ felt tightly edited rather than misguidedly ‘free-form’.

03/10

Foxygen ... And Star Power Jag jagu war

By Ch r i s Watk eys. I n sto re s Octo be r 13

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Albums 03/10

Julian Casablancas & The Voidz Tyranny Cu lt

By Ch ris Wa tkeys. In sto re s Octo be r 13

What can you say now about Julian Casablancas, the ice-cool frontman of the band who, over ten years ago, were arguably the coolest group in existence? Over the succeeding decade it has become more and more difficult to get excited about any release byThe Strokes, or any of their members, and given the solo form of Casablancas thus far, it’s difficult to approach this new album with any sense of relish or excitement.

But you can’t decry Casablancas for trying to be original. And in ‘Tyranny’, you get the feeling that he has tried very hard indeed to be just that – in fact to a perversely distorted degree. There is a cacophonous feel to this record; not in a manically

energetic, entertainingly chaotic way, but in a confusing, disjointed and intensely frustrating way.

It’s very difficult, for example, to grasp what the band were aiming for with ‘Dare I Care’’s snippets of middle-eastern woodwind and fuzzy random vocals. ‘Father Electricity’ is so fleeting and incoherent, it’s almost impossible to grasp. And, typically of the album, there might be perhaps fifteen hopeful seconds, somewhere mid-song, of a decent-sounding refrain, before it flies off in several (terrible) directions at once. It’s as if Casablancas, with destructive illwill, has petulantly forced his record collection through a blender.

There are brief segments of hope

and respite; the eleven-minute ‘Human Sadness’, with its sweeping strings, pervading melancholy and a mid-section, which sounds strikingly reminiscent of the Blur classic ‘Sing’, is a genuine highlight. But by the honkingly awful, bloated slab of cacophonous self-indulgence that is ‘Zerox’, all patience, interest and hope is truly gone. And towards the very end of the album, the listening experience becomes nothing short of torturous. Did nobody, at any stage of the recording process, tell the chief songwriter that ‘Nintendo Blood’ just does not need to be six minutes long? The record as a whole feels like a sonic representation of a tortured and unstable mind, or a

toddler orchestra let loose in a rehearsal lock-up.

You have to be a genuinely exceptional artist to escape the quicksand pit of diminishing returns; you also need to be capable of reinvention, of progression, and of embracing the new. In ‘Tyranny’, Casablancas has comprehensively proven that he is none of these things. Nobody expects nor wants another ‘Is This It’ – a record truly of its time, unrepeatable and enshrined in its moment and its era. That the Strokes-like ‘Johan Von Bronx’ is this record’s high point is testament to the notion that outside of that narrow, decade-old vision, Julian Casablancas is hopelessly lost.

“I’ve always had a sense that I was split in two,” Elias Rønnenfelt declares at the opening of ‘Forever’, foregoing his now-characteristic off-kilter bark for a measured singspeak – a delivery that characterises this third record, surprisingly, no doubt. It’s a fitting lyric, at least insofar as Iceage’s third album embodies such a dualism. For, if early records ‘New Brigade’ and ‘You’re Nothing’ embraced the total dissolution of the self in an ecstatic assault of noise, then ‘Plowing into

the Field of Love’ finds the group’s utopian/dystopian drive constrained by the imposition structure, arrangement and pastiched genre.

Horns and strings play ornament to Rønnenfelt’s anguish, warped barroom piano adrift amidst airless guitar dischord. But the Copenhagen post-punks have hardly gone all Grizzly Bear on us; ‘Plowing into the Field of Love’ has no pretentions to elevate – whatever that would mean – their form with such elaborations.

It’s more that the punk’s dream of an

anarchic loss of ego remains just that – an ideal to be strived for but ultimately, and tragically, unattainable.

And therein lies the beauty of Iceage’s newly formed approach: this is music split in two, at war with itself, poignantly acknowledging – but by no means resigned to – its inevitable failure.

After a few years of providing an exhilarating escapism, Iceage’s bold, knotted music has finally found something to fight against.

09/10

Iceage Plowing Into The Field of Love Ma tador

By T h om as may . In s to re s Octobe r 6

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Reviews / Live

Ezra Furman Band On the Wall Manchester 22/ 0 9 / 20 14 wr i ter : Paddy Kinsella Ph oto gr aph er : Roy J. B a ron

A man forever compared to musicians of the past – think Tom Waits, Velvet Underground – and quite happy to be so, there is no way Ezra Furman can possibly be compared to anyone else tonight as he strolls on stage fifteen minutes late in a barely knee-length dress with equally brave red lipstick on.

Opening songs ‘And Maybe God is a Train’ and ‘American Soil’ are haunted by sound issues, but the angst-ridden Ezra and his surprisingly less flamboyant band, the Boy-Friends, successfully

wrestle the elements to create a seemingly perfect chaos – fitting of the singer’s personality, if his early stage antics of throwing his socks off are anything to go by.

It takes him just a few minutes to reveal himself even further, when he plays a self-deprecating new song, plainly titled ‘Piece of Trash’, which pulls together all the best bits of his work; saxophone solos played disconcertingly yet perfectly alongside some of the most depressing lyrics you’re ever likely to hear. And it soon becomes clear that

Furman plans to provide no light relief tonight, as he talks about failed suicide attempts before careering into ‘I Killed Myself and I Didn’t Die’.

Still, in typical style he manages to take the incredibly depressing and make it unfathomably joyous.

Throughout the rest of the night Furman both confounds and amazes at the same time. At some points, he looks like a shy teenager with his cap peak drawn over his eyes, while at others he’s more confident than ever, screaming down the microphone.

Teetering between the two, one

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question remains – how is it all going to end? It could end with Mac DeMarco-esque stage antics, as Furman’s shoves drumsticks up his arse, or perhaps with him being on the edge of a mental breakdown.

Tonight we see a glimpse of both sides, and yet one thing is clear – Ezra Furman, unlike any of his past musical influences, is the only man who can throw his socks off one minute, hide behind a baseball cap the next, and pull it all together to create one of the most exhilarating, emotional shows you’re likely to see.

Reviews

Carter Tutti Void Oslo Hackney, London

Vacant Lots Shacklewell Arms Dalston, London

15/ 0 9 / 14

2 4 / 09/ 2 01 4

wr i ter : T ho mas m a y

w r it er : T h o m as m a y

“Just enjoy like we enjoy. OK?” A strange request, not least because neither Chris Carter, Cosey Fanni Tutti, nor Nik Void really seem to be enjoying themselves at all. Dour to a tee, the group’s set at Hackney’s Oslo is an exercise in brutalist functionality: it’s all four-to-the-floor minus the euphoria, barbed guitar noise with all traces of viscerality erased. Enjoy it I did, though, especially when they decided to turn it up a notch or two halfway in.

Pushed to such extremes of repetition and abstraction, music that’d otherwise be meditative becomes suffocating and intoxicating. Comprised of members of Throbbing Gristle and Factory Floor, the group’s semi-improvised pieces take cues from both: there’s no release, only continuation; there’s no resolution, only the sudden halt of the all-consuming beat.

Despite one of their co-frontmen conspicuously adopting the surname of Antonin Artaud, The Vacant Lots’ live show is hardly a theatre of cruelty.

Instead, the spectral presence of the French playwright feels somewhat contrived to establish the duo’s cultivated aura of coolness. But, of course, the music of the psych revival advocated by labels like Sonic Cathedral has never had any pretense to shock or unsettle with the radically new: The Vacant Lots are concerned with subtly re-tooling well-worn signifiers, bestowing them with relevancy to the contemporary. And if their set at Dalston’s Shacklewell Arms never really ignites, it’s not an indication that they’ve failed to realise this goal, even though their Spacemen 3 noise-outs could have done with some more bite. Rather, it’s the vision itself that’s of disappointingly limited scope.

Juan Wauters Old Blue Last Shoreditch, London

White Manna Shacklewell Arms Dalston, London

Woman’s Hour Village Underground Shoreditch, London

Teho Teardo, Blixa Bargeld Howard Assembley Rooms Leeds

11/ 0 9 / 20 14

15/09 / 2 0 1 4

2 3/ 0 9 / 2 0 1 4

2 6 / 09/ 2 01 4

wr i ter : Jame s f. Thomp so n

wri te r: Ed gar S mi th

w ri te r: S am wa l to n

w r it er : Da n ie l Dy l a n W r a y

Given how comparatively unembellished Juan Wauters’ songs are, it’s something of a surprise to see the Uruguan’s hired hands painstakingly erect a ludicrously ornate backdrop before the show, replete with a light-up logo referencing his debut LP, ‘N.A.P. North American Poetry’. If Wauters felt like he needed some visual distraction from his stripped-down acoustic ditties, he needn’t have worried.The Beets singer has always been more than the sum of his parts and from opener ‘Let Me Hip You to Something’ onwards, he has the room in the palm of his hand, albeit with the notable exception of a few Spanish-language songs. No matter; tonight’s crowd are generous, hilariously somehow instigating a mini mosh pit by the end. Incidentally, the logo was great; it flashed in time with his songs and everything.

White Manna’s songs are long, hot, indulgent, a bit arcane and, like taking a bath, they can make you pass out. The Californians avoid space rock’s party bag of genre tricks, no ‘gathering menace’ buildups or headbanger blatancy in their drive to ecstasy. They use Wooden Shjips-via-Comets on Fire’s tool set – gravel-drag overdrive and canyonesque delay – but make it their own with a loose, fat sound that cartwheels at the boundaries of regular time. The keyboard-flautist sticks Todd Rundgren locks through the Shacklewell stage’s cubbyhole, kids TV-style, to get a cue from an equally cool-looking drummer.

Meanwhile their biggest, drunkest fan in the world screams ‘Die! Die! Die with me!’ A bit annoyed, the crowd nonetheless appreciates his sentiment as he falls face flat on the floor during ‘X Ray.’

The first third of tonight’s show suggests Woman’s Hour’s recent rise might have been a touch too meteoric: singer Fiona Burgess struggles to offer any inter-song observations beyond quite how many people are in front of her, and sings with an overcompensating forcefulness that belies the sweet purr of her recorded voice. Similarly, the rest of the quartet appears tentative: pregnant pauses precede songs performed stiffly rather than with the expressiveness that their elegance demands. Then again, on the opening night of their biggest tour to date, Woman’s Hour can be forgiven for a few nerves – and when they settle, they sparkle: the yearning melodies that elevate their debut LP consume the cavernous space rather seductively, and their inspired interpretation of ‘Dancing In The Dark’ is a bewitching surprise.

Blixa Bargeld’s reputation as being something of a figure of the dark side is certainly reinforced as he emerges to the stage, dressed head to toe in black with slick-back hair, clutching a glass of wine. Yet he begins with a humours anecdote about Einstürzende Neubauten stealing equipment from a building site in Leeds back in 1983. Good humour marks a great deal of the performance tonight (performed with Italian composer Teho Teardo), but so too does beautiful cello work, atmospheric guitar play that switches between static hum and thundering clout and an expert vocal performance from Bargeld that takes in howls, hisses, screams and an irresistible baritone croon, as heard on the duo’s 2013 album, ‘Still Smiling’. They then bring in a string quartet and finish with mighty power, oozing both flare and grace.

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Live

Unknown Croatia Rovinj, Croatia 0 8- 12/ 0 9 / 20 14 wri ters : s am wa lto n Ph otog raph er: phil sha rp

As long as blue skies remain more a British summer hope than expectation, the allure of the foreign festival looms ever larger in the collective imagination: why toil in the trenches of Glastonbury drinking £6-a-pint perry when a couple of hours from your short-haul airport of choice there lies a festival Eden where the money’s different enough that it doesn’t feel like you’re spending it, the beer’s served in session-friendly halves and sunrise is a thing to embrace, not dread?

At least that’s the theory – and nowhere more so than at Unknown, a festival at an upmarket beach resort a mile up the shore from a scruffily beautiful fishing village in northern Croatia, among enchanting forests and craggy coastline. At Unknown, though, it’s a week of abandon rather than just a weekend – a Monday-toFriday rave that takes the slow-andsteady approach to losing your shit: DJs play out leisurely by the pools at the start, and five days later you’re hugging strangers in a woodland clearing. Indeed, the entire festival is geared towards being a marathon not a sprint, and as I arrive in 35° heat on Monday afternoon, the slow pace is a godsend.

That said, my first glimpse of Unknown’s central hub feels more like the location for a BBC Three documentary than any mythic Shangri-La. In front of a beach bar, two luxurious infinity pools are hosting an entanglement of waxedchested boys in pink shorts and orange girls in denim hot-pants, while a pair of anonymous DJs deliver student union-friendly classics. By no stretch is this scene cool or subversive, but as night falls and the DJs begin throwing out chart-friendly house and club classics to the reddened masses still in their swimwear, there arises a sort of offthe-leash majesty to proceedings, a pungent sense of anticipation: “this is going to be the best week of my life”, I overhear one lad proclaiming to his mates at the bar.

On day two, I take in an island party. These are one of Unknown’s power-up attractions where you pay a little extra to be whisked off with 100 others for an afternoon on a volcano-shaped island twenty minutes out to sea, upon which are conveniently already marooned

some of the world’s best DJs. Waiting for the water taxi there in the baking midday heat I meet Gordon.

Gordon hasn’t been to bed yet, but despite that he remains chatty, telling me with meticulous and close-quartered insistence about how Daniel Avery and Erol Alkan are about to blow our minds.

Unfortunately, by the time we make land the sun has sapped Gordon’s energy – and everyone else’s – and it’s not until it hangs lower in the sky that the party really gets going. From then on, though, Avery does his Orbital-meets-burbling-acid-house thing with aplomb, and the setting is heavenly: perched atop a Tracey Island idyll, in a tiny minority of people who still have their top on, I watch the sunset to crisp techno. A muddy dance tent in the West Country is scarcely imaginable.

Meanwhile, back on the mainland, the festival’s only live stage is up and running. The Unknown site is essentially an outdoor superclub, with four separate DJ areas curating nightly bills of varying subtlety and popularity, and the result is that each evening’s live line-up feels more like an added bonus before the fun really starts than a star draw in itself.

Accordingly, when Nile Rodgers, arguably the greatest living hitmaker, strides on stage with his militarily drilled Chic Organisation band and delivers two hours of bulletproof

disco pop, the awe that his songs command is heightened by the sheer unexpected euphoria. Indeed, so rapturously is the parade through the last 40 years of Rodgers-helmed dance music that by the time of the stage invasion encore, no one has noticed that it’s started to spit.

However, the weather soon disintegrates into downpour, and while DJ Harvey’s delightfully errant set of space disco and snapping techno does its best to deny the elements, there’s no avoiding the washout that persists until the afternoon of day four.

With the site now a far more familiar British quagmire, I set sail again, this time on one of Unknown’s boat parties, another add-on that takes 100 or so seafarers on a sixhour cruise around the bay while DJs entertain above deck. As with the island parties, there’s a sense that the boat trips live or die not just on the strength of the performers but also the enthusiasm of the crowd, so when our boat is commandeered by the festival’s entire Scottish contingent, all of whom seem to know that day’s host collective Tweakaholic (the wedding DJ alterego of Glaswegian Jackmaster and two of his prankster Weegie mates) personally, there’s a palpable sense that things are likely to get quite daft for the next few hours. And lo, the tone is set as we cast off to the

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strains of Enya’s Orinoco Flow and the assembled mass of Yes voters belt “sail away, sail away, sail away” to the vanishing harbour. What follows is an evening of joyous, exquisitely crafted silliness: Tweakaholic’s carefully navigated populism – they play songs you know, sure, but also plenty that you’d completely forgotten existed – combined with their deceptively skilful mixing generates an irresistible lightness and bonhomie that’s so often missing from the clubbing experience. Very simply, theirs is a set to grin to, and as the rain clears and the SS Irn-Bru bobs around the Adriatic to Luther Vandross and Ce Ce Peniston, all gorgeously mixed with flair and humour, it’s hard to recall a more jubilant way to listen to dance music.

Back on dry land later that night, Simian Mobile Disco’s sunrise set is a valiant and stirring blast of bigroom electro that eventually spirals into delicious Balearic hippie wigout. Despite the returning soft drizzle and expending stamina, the hedonism of day one has clearly endured for enough of the Unknown faithful. In the queue for the transfer back to the airport the morning after, I overhear another lad, who may or may not have been the same one from day one. “Best week of my life,” he enthuses. Turns out he was right all along.

Cinema 09/ 10

Baby, it’s dark outside

by Ian Roebuck

Down By Law dir ec t or : J i m J a r m u sc h S t arrin g : Tom Wai ts , J o h n Luri e R ober t o B enig ni

October is the month the clocks go back, so what better way to welcome the fall of darkness than bathing in it with a good movie.

Here’s a selection of Autumn and Winter’s upcoming cinematic treats, in order of anticipation, from ten down to one.

10.

Nightcrawler Jake Gyllenhaal’s skinny frame mirrors his wiry personality in Nightcrawler, a biting satire on predatory journalism. Gyllenhaal’s new look as the creep ball character Louis chasing down ambulance after ambulance, filming all kinds of horrors to please his salacious boss, is unnerving. The news editor in question: an energised Renne Russo directed here by her husband Dan Gilroy.

09.

While We’re Young The follow up to Frances Ha, Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young looks to be a savagely funny take on life in your 40s compared to your 20s – ripe material for a writer/director who feeds on the malaise of modern life.

Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts are the couple taking stock, Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried are their younger tormentors.

08.

Young Ones We’re suckers for a film set in the near future so Jake Paltrow’s Young Ones is hard to resist. Gwyneth’s younger brother hasn’t got much of a CV (his debut feature The Good Night received a lukewarm reception), but for Young Ones he’s drawn in Nicholas Hoult and Michael Shannon, two undeniably great actors, and has produced a tantalising trailer full of dystopian desert scenery.

07.

Babadook A spooky pop-up book called Mr Babadook causes a fraught family more trouble than they bargained for in Jennifer Kent’s chilling Australian psych-horror. If you’ve witnessed the trailer you’ll know the sense of dread that drips through this one. Seen through the eyes of the young Sam (Noah Wiseman), it leaves you second guessing if the nightmarish Dook is the real deal.

06.

St. Vincent A charming looking film that might as well be called ‘Bill Murray’ with the man himself playing an alcohol soaked war veteran hired by his neighbour to look after her 12 year old son. Naturally, the strip club and a local race-track are where it gets thrilling for Murray’s deadbeat.

05.

Interstellar So the trailer looks schmaltzy as hell – Matthew McConaughey spreading the syrup thick with his southern drawl on the voiceover and one teary eyed shot after another – but remember, this is a Christopher Nolan film. The sci-fi elements could well be wrapped up in human emotion and revealed closer to the release in November, although from the 3:30 on show it is hard to see where the promised elements of time travel come into play.

04.

Wild With Dallas Buyers Club, Jean-Marc Valle proved he had a sensitive touch.

His next film, starring an unrecognisable Reese Witherspoon is Wild, a loose adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling memoir. Once again the Director confronts pain,

illness and the human spirit as the film follows Witherspoon’s trail from Mexico to Canada on foot after her mother dies from cancer.

03.

Birdman Ever since Hitchcock’s Rope the continuous take has fascinated.With Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) Alejandro González Iñárritu utilises this cinematic magic trick to tell the story of a washed up actor’s assault on Broadway. Sure the Mexican Director has the luxury of CGI, something Hitch of course couldn’t rely on, but the tease we’ve seen of Michael Keaton running starkers through a packed Times Square is hugely impressive.

02.

Winter Sleep Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s follow up to Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is yet another melancholic love letter to theTurkish countryside. Winter Sleep sees Anatolia as the backdrop again as Ceylan ploughs through another three hours of familial power struggles on the westernmost plateau of Asia. The director seems deeply drawn to this location and you either thrive in his aran landscape or become stranded searching for the nearest exit.

01.

Inherent Vice Glimpses of PaulThomasAnderson’s Inherent Vice have been few and far between but the screen shots of a sullen Joaquin Phoenix, glorious in vintage attire and hair to match, have really wet the whistle. Thomas Pynchon’s offbeat, wistful and often bizarre novel about a private detective in too deep is the perfect fodder for Anderson and to top it all off Joanna Newsom also crops up…I can’t wait.

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Jim Jarmusch once famously said, “the beauty of life is in small details, not in big events” and the Ohio born Director seems to have meticulously applied this thinking to his body of work. Nowhere is this more evident than his 1986 prison break classic, Down By Law. Jarmusch takes a well walked narrative arch and uses it as a background in what is basically a buddy movie about nothing and, well… everything. That nearly half of it is set inside four prison walls matters little. A lurid and energetic New Orleans is the heart of the opening, as the Director’s two musical muses, Tom Waits and John Lurie, slowly come to the fore. Lurie’s incongruous soundtrack driving the sequence of vignettes that introduce us so effortlessly to Zack and Jack, played with surprising vibrancy by Waits and Lurie respectively.

Of course it’s not long before these up-to-no-good radicals find themselves in jail and that’s when Jarmusch’s wicked humour sinks down to the gut. Belatedly joining our troubled stars is Roberto Begnini’s Bob, a gloriously naïve Italian oddity of such purity that he leaves Zack and Jack bewildered. After his wonderfully awkward introduction it becomes a journey of discovery for the men who soon realise that breaking out might not be the end of their struggles.

Jarmusch’s real skill is occupying one uproarious scene after another with real pathos – whether it’s Bob cooking rabbit alfresco like his mother used to or Zack and Jack’s desperate fight that precedes it, both the actors and the Director employ a beautiful simplicity to every line.

Even under the cool Louisiana moonlight, there is warmth to Down

By Law that is captivating.

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Impress your friends by listening to the Loud And Quiet issue 62 mixtape only at www.loudandquiet.com Featuring this month’s featured artists

Party wolf idiot tennis Game. Set. Twat.

catchphrase Say what you see

Paul Chuckle

IDIOT

Barry Chuckle

Chucklevision

FAME

Chucklechucklevision

“To me”

MOST LIKELY TO SAY

“To You”

“Let’s just think about this, because we’re faffing”

LEAST LIKELY TO SAY

“Yes, let’s”

Slipping on a banana skin

IDIOT POWER PLAY

There’s a rumour that this one is the other’s father

Oh dear

GAME, SET & MATCH

oh dear

crush hour Finding love in a hopeless place

Celebrity twitter

To the woman who told her kids ‘if you don’t behave I’ll leave you on this bus’, on the number 8, well, did they behave, or is it worth me giving you a call?

Shy guy in brown shirt

Jason Orange @JasonFromTakeThat Guys? I’ve left Take That

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Jason Orange @JasonFromTakeThat : Reply

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48m

I’ve left Take That To the tidy blonde piece I hit it off with on the last train back to Southend, am I missing a digit in the number you gave me?

00090789241118609f4890 Dazza (in the Base loafers)

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I wanted my followers to be the first to know that it is with a heavy heart that I have decided to leave Take That : Reply

To the girl who was looking at Tinder as we approached Liverpool Street, you swiped right on a guy who looks just like me, only with what looked like teeth. Drink? ‑ with lazy eye

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Jason Orange @JasonFromTakeThat I wanted my followers to be the first to know that it is with a heavy heart that I have decided to leave Take That : Reply

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( ... I’m dying, Ian

( Are those Mr Dre speakers?

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Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious Catchphrase answer: That’s riiiiiiight!!!! It’s ‘Covering your arse’

Photo casebook “The inappropriate world of Ian Beale”