Loud And Quiet 72 – Boots

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 72 / the alternative music tabloid

In search of

BOOTS

Pop's new enigma

+ Alan Vega Ex-Easter Island Head Floating Points The Sound Anna Von Hausswolff King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

contents

welcome

ALAN VEGA – 12 THE SOUND – 14 ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF – 16 EX-EASTER ISLAND HEAD – 20 FLOATING POINTS – 22 KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD – 26 BOOTS – 28

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 72 / the alternatIVe musIc tabloId

Co ntact

Contr ib u tor s

A dve r tising

i n fo@lou dandq u ie t.com

ale x wisg ar d, Amb e r M a ho ne y, Amy Pe ttif e r , Chr is Wa tke ys, dav id zammitt, Danie l D y l a n- W r a y , De r e k Rob e r tson, Elino r J o ne s, Edg ar Smith, hayle y s co tt, he nr y wilkinson, IAN ROEBUCK , jack dohe r ty, J AMES f . T ho m p so n, Janine Bu llman, j e nna fo x to n, je nnif e r Jonson, joe g o ggins, jang e lo molinar i, le e bul l m a n, liam kone mann, Gab r ie l G r e e n, g ar e th ar r owsmith, Ge m ha r r is, Mandy Dr ake , Nathan W e stl e y, P hil Shar p , Re e f You nis, S a m co r nfo r th, samu e l b allar d, Sam Wa l to n, so p hie b ar loc, tom f e nwick

a dve r tise @l o uda ndquie t.co m

In search of

BOOTS

Pop's new enigma

+ Alan Vega Ex-Easter Island Head Floating Points The Sound Anna Von Hausswolff King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

c o v er ph o t o g r aph y n a t h a n i el wo o d

The first time I listened to Boots’ debut album it was around 1am through headphones. It was the production that got me, especially on a track called ‘C.U.R.E.’ – a vaguely Eastern, bass-heavy song that I instantly imagined El-P and Killer Mike rapping over. I knew that Boots had been involved with Run The Jewels’ last album, and I’m sure that that played a big part in my immediate liking of ‘Aquaria’, but nonetheless, Boots’ own record is impressively meaty away from his associations – varied, too.

I was also listening as someone who knew that this guy had produced a majority of FKA Twigs’ ‘M3LL155X’ EP too, and that there was some kind of Beyoncé hook-up, although when the names of mega stars accompany those of breaking musicians, it’s usually because they maybe played a show together once, and little more.Turns out not to be the case with Boots, who co-wrote and produced 9 of the tracks from Beyoncé’s most recent, eponymous album. With that in mind, he’s done an incredible job of keeping a low profile, refusing to confirm his real name until recently, skulking in the shadows of his videos and appearing as a cold blur on his forthcoming album sleeve.

That’s not exactly why Sam Walton travelled to Los Angeles to spend a day with Boots – to discover who the hell this guy is – but it quickly became an unavoidable question.

Boots, as you’ll read, is a purposefully mysterious fellow. The business with Beyoncé – and how he got the gig – has become his biggest secret, although it’s hard to decipher why. Sam’s few hours with him pose the question if the ‘why’ really matters at all, and as the pair spar about the value of truth and secrets in the world of pop music, you’ve got to give Boots credit for not shutting down the conversation where many other artists would have. The more Boots talks, the less we really know, beyond how much fun there is in continuing to guess.

Stuart Stubbs

Lo ud And Qu ie T PO Box 67915 Lo ndon NW1 W 8TH Ed itor - Stu ar t S tu b b s Art Dir e ctor - Le e Be lche r Sub Editor - Ale xandr a Wilshir e fi l m e ditor - Andr e w ande r son Bo ok Editor s - Le e & Janine Bu llman

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T his M o nth L &Q L o ve s B e n H a r r is, J o hn H o w e , ka te p r ice , na tha n be a ze r , sim o n m o r e l y, ste ve p hil ip s

The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessari ly reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff.

All rights reserved 2015 Loud And Quiet LTD. ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by S harman & Company LTD .

Distributed by loud and quiet LTD. & forte

10 Years of Loud And Quiet

Did I Love 2005?

Ten years ago, The Pipettes upset a lot of people as they dared to construct a conceptual bubblegum pop project from the DIY playbook. Rose Elinor Dougall recalls a pivotal year of a group who stood up against skinny, white indie rock A s t o l d t o s t u art s t ub b s

It’s been an interesting process trying to piece together the events of 2005. I had only just moved to London at the end of 2004 and was living in Camberwell, studying at Camberwell College of Arts, but The Pipettes were already well underway by this stage. 2005 was definitely a pivotal year for us as a band. Lots of different things happened that year. One of the original members, Julia, left the band and was replaced by Gwenno (Saunders).

We signed to Memphis Industries, went on our first proper tours and recorded our album. I remember being really chuffed when I got £100 as an advance.

I was discovering London, particularly London at night, through the prism of playing shows all over the city, but I definitely remember feeling at odds with the prevailing music scene, as that was the height of the Camden/Libertines scene… We were thrust into that live circuit but it really had nothing to do with us as a band. We felt like outsiders in that way, a bit like we’d snuck in through the back door.

I particularly remember a show we played at a small festival in Sweden called Emmaboda. We weren’t particularly high up the bill, but even before we’d played there were hundreds of people there waiting for us to come on. It was the first time I thought, ‘shit something’s going on here’, when there were girls crying and desperate to meet us after the show.

In terms of lowlights, Glastonbury that year sticks firmly in my mind. We had 4 shows booked for the festival, but there was a series of events that begun with our then manager eating too many magic mushrooms and ill advisedly parking our

van (containing all our equipment) in the middle of a production area.This led to it being driven off site and left open in a field somewhere, not long after a torrential downpour. Somewhere along the line our sixty-year-old driver got locked in a Portakabin by a crazed stage manager on PCP, all of our gigs got cancelled and ended with me throwing my keyboard in a bog during a cheap whisky-fuelled tantrum.

I suppose those were the last years where there was still the money in the industry, and the economy in general, for lots of bands to really get a chance at a proper bite of the cherry. Erroneously or not, London felt like it was at the centre of things for a little while, and we wanted to exist naturally and unapologetically.

My understanding of feminism developed very rapidly throughout that time. It was only really then that I experienced the sharp end of chauvinism and the ugly side of that particular breed of male music industry type, but it served to strengthen and define our ideas. I was only 19, and I think I chose to ignore quite a lot of that energy, but also I was only really just starting to understand the power and vulnerability that comes with putting yourself on stage. I know Becki and Gwenno, who were a little older than me, were much more sensitive and aware of all of that shit.

Feminism is a far more prominent part of the general discourse now, in the media and beyond, but I think all of the same issues still exist, just perhaps in a slightly different shape, and I certainly think it would be very hard for a band like The Pipettes to find a record deal now.

We stood out, as there weren’t really any other

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bands doing what we were doing, but there were loads of misconceptions about us, many of which we welcomed. We were quite a strange band, in the sense that we were very ambitious, wanting to be in the charts and be a proper pop band, but coming at it from a DIY background and perspective. We liked being confusing. That dichotomy was probably one of the things that drove the project forward, but perhaps it made it hard for people to know where to position us. The thing about the band for me was that it was an exploration of the concept of ‘pop music’ and how those classic ideas could find a way to exist 50 years after their inception. We found all of those guitar bands of that time so dreary – that skinny white boy with a guitar so limited – we wanted to escape all that; not compete with it. It meant that some of the reviews we got were savage – we were a pretty easy band to hate, but we developed a really ardent, loyal fanbase, which was all we really cared about.

For me, the ‘role’ [of being a Pipette] morphed quite dramatically throughout my time in the band.

In the end, I found the expectations from the label we were on (by this time Interscope) impossible to reconcile with what motivated me to be in the band in the first place, which led to me leaving at the start of 2008. I had such an amazing experience with that band over the 5 years I was part of it – those were truly my formative years as a musician and a young woman, and I’m immensely proud of what we achieved. I just feel that it was only ever meant to exist for a certain moment in time, and it was inevitable that I would have to go and explore different ideas.

books + second life

Rambling Stone Reef Younis investigates what rock stars do next No.14: Bill Wyman / From Wroxeter to East Anglia, Cumbria to Mold, he’s been the length and breadth of the country in his quest for treasure hunting success.

With a haul of over 300 coins, rare silver seals, and 3,000 year old blades, Bill took his interest, and over 15 years detecting experience, to the next logical level: the Wyman Signature Detector.

Released in 2007, and armed with the latest in location technology, it promised an unrivalled combination of features designed to put any aspiring dectorist “on the road to treasure hunting success” and positioned Wyman as a dectorist of some authority – Brian May’s got that guitar he designed; Wyman has his detector.

So while Jagger and friends continue to wheeze around the globe, you’re more likely to find Bill Wyman rambling the British countryside, curating new tips (“try detecting after a big rain, when the ground is soaked… wet ground has more conductivity”), re-jigging his Top 10 locations (“The area around York provides fascinating potential for dectorists”) and proudly adhering to the Code of Conduct set out by The National Council for Metal Detecting. Rule 10 states: “Never miss an opportunity to explain your hobby to anyone who asks about it.” Cheers Bill.

From 1962 until the early 1990s, Bill Wyman was playing bass in one of the world’s biggest bands, but after almost 30 years of touring the world, he stepped back from The Rolling Stones in 1990, and officially left in 1993. With time on his hands, he set about establishing and playing in the pretty naff Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings, made a handful of special appearances for a few other acts, and cranked out a handful of music-related books, primarily about his time being the odd Stone out (see Stone Alone, Rolling with The Stones and The Stones: A History in Cartoons). But it was actually his non-music-related book, Bill Wyman’s Treasure Islands, in 2005 that unearthed a buried passion.

Inspired after purchasing his Suffolk Manor House in 1968 and continually finding fragments in the ground,Wyman shifted from rock ‘n’ roll excess to a cleaner-cut triptych of archaeology, history and metal-detection.

“I’ve been a serious detecting enthusiast ever since and was delighted when my daughter Katie showed an interest in the hobby,” he says on Billwymandetector.com. “I’ve found gold coins from the 1300’s which are worth £1,000 each but I’m not interested in their monetary value, it’s the history that’s important to me.”

b y ja ni n e & L ee b ullma n

Dream Baby Dream: Suicide: A New York Story

by Kris Needs

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

by Vincent Bugliosi & Curt Gentry

omnibus

Arrow

Kris Needs, gonzo veteran of the frontlines of punk rock and acid house, whose first ever interview was with The Ramones, is uniquely placed to tell the Suicide story. He first saw the band perform their stark, futurist rock ‘n’ roll as support act for The Clash and recognised within their confrontational and divisive sound something new, important and completely original. Forty years later, he is as much a fan of Martin Rev’s and Alan Vega’s band now as he was then. Given that he was there in person, it is no surprise that Needs manages to bring the squalid beauty of ’70s NewYork to life, capturing not just the story of a single band but documenting a chapter in the musical life of an entire city.

Ever since coming to public attention by hitting the peace and love hippie dream in the head with a claw-hammer, Charles Manson has woven himself into the culture with his half-monster/half-messiah shtick, and shows no signs of leaving our collective nightmares anytime soon. Helter Skelter is the forensic investigation of Manson and his followers by the man who put them behind bars. Vincent Bugliosi was the prosecuting attorney whose job is was to sort the facts from the myth and form a picture of what was really going down in Death Valley as the sun set on the summer of love.

Exhaustive and iconic, Helter Skelter is as terrifying now as it was then.

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M Train

by Patti Smith Bloomsbury

It is forty years since the release of Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’ changed the way that rock ‘n’ roll looked, sounded and felt. Her latest literary offering follows 2010’s Just Kids (which documented Smith’s relationship with photographer Robert Maplethorpe), and is every bit as unique and unconventional as you would expect. The book soon slips the chains of its opening in a Greenwich Village coffee shop and allows Smith, in her own unique way, to offer a wistful, prosaic and poetic account of her life thus far. The void left by the death of her husband is covered honestly and bravely, as is the world-changing attack on her beloved city in 2001. M Train is gentle, considered, beautifully written and whip smart.

getting to know you

Jenny Lee Lindberg It’s always been hard to pinpoint the most striking element of Warpaint’s music. This month, Jenny Lee Lindberg releases ‘Right On!’, her debut solo album, and puts forward a legitimate case for it having been her semi-doomed bass guitar all along /

The worst date you’ve been on I haven’t been on one.

Your favourite word 2 words... “Right On!”

The thing you’d rescue from a burning building I don’t think I would risk my life for anything other than animals or people.

Your guilty pleasure Crappy TV and trash magazines.

The one song you wish you’d written?

‘Love to love you baby’ by donna summer

Your favourite item of clothing My overalls.

The best piece of advice you’ve been given Here’s a couple… Be yourself. Be kind. Be your own best friend. And strive for excellence.

The film you can quote the most of

It’s a tie between Muriel’s Wedding and Ghost.

Your pet-hate Judgmental people.

The worst job you’ve had I was an extra, more than a few times when I moved to LA. I got treated like such crap. It was a bummer.

If you had to eat one food forever, it would be...

Oysters.

Your biggest fear Death.

Your hidden talent Design.

The best book in the world The Twilight series.. ha!!! I never read so quickly in my whole life – a page-turner.

Your biggest disappointment Quitting dance classes when I was little.

What is success to you?

Being grateful.

What talent do you wish you had?

Culinary talent!

People’s biggest misconception of you That I have it so good, and that I am living it up 24/7.

The most famous person you’ve met I would have to say Leonardo Dicaprio. I met him when I was 15 and at that time he was everywhere... super famous. It was at his house for new years – he was sweet.

What would you change about your physical appearance?

My hair!! I wish I had big, curly, large-and-incharge hair!!!

How would you like to die?

Something instant… preferably in my sleep.

Your first big extravagance A car.

What is the most overrated thing in the world?

Money The characteristic you most like about yourself My sense of humour.

Who would play you in a film of your life?

Emmy Rossum.

What’s your biggest turn-off?

Bad breath.

Your style icon punky brewster

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

Everything is here to help you!!! (Matt Kahn)

Favourite place in the world I really loved Istanbul, Turkey. It was gorgeous, and the people were gorgeous – an extremely sexy city!!!! Made me feel alive!!

Your best piece of advice for others Everything is here to help you!!! (Matt Kahn)

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Tell Me About It

ALAN VEGA Suicide’s Alan Vega remembers his friend Alex Chilton and the improvised album they made together with Ben Vaughn Photogra phy: Guy Epp el / writer: alex wisgard

Twenty years ago, Alan Vega stepped into a New York studio with Alex Chilton of Big Star and New Jersey musician Ben Vaughn and improvised an entire album over the course of two days. A couple of years later, the “band” that made ‘Cubist Blues’ played two shows of the material – one in New York, one in France – and promptly went their separate ways. Having slipped in and out of print, a curio even within the cult discographies of all three artists, Light In The Attic and Munster Records are reissuing ‘Cubist Blues’, along with recordings of both live shows, this month.

The recording from the 1996 show in Rennes is particularly revelatory, with Vega – then well into his fifties – having no recall of the original songs, and making up new, stream-ofconsciousness lyrics for each number based on the titles on the setlist. So ‘Dream Baby Revisited’ becomes a valedictory barrelhouse piano romp and ‘Fat City’ an even more scathing indictment of an increasingly unrecognisable NYC – a subject which still rankles Vega today. And while ‘Freedom’ on record is an eerie anthem, Vega preaches it in concert like a shamanic Elvis impersonator: “There are a lot of fucked up things, man…

As long as you got this fuckin’ thing called freedom – to be free, man, it’s everything, it’s like good health.You’re fuckin’ blessed with this shit.”

Fast forward two decades, with Vega reminiscing about the work he did with Chilton and Vaughn from his New York home, and there are times when it feels like I’m talking to the ghost of the ghost rider. At 77 years old, and having undergone surgery following a heart attack and stroke in 2012, Vega does sadly sound his age.

That said, while he may have lost some of his fire, his cutting Noo Yawk wit remains in tact, and his memories of two fleeting days in 1995 are as razorsharp as they are heartfelt.

While his peers have come and gone, or made the leap to becoming respectable heritage artists, Alan Vega has always been seeking out the next sound, the next project. Fuck age and fuck ill-health – you can tell that Alan Vega will never stop seeking out the

next piece of sidewalk trash he can turn into art. “‘Cubist Blues’ belongs somewhere else…”

It sounds great. I was surprised by it, y’know, how intense it was. I had to understand how, like, I thought it was so commercial. But it’s not – it belongs somewhere else. I don’t know what it is, but it’s somewhere else. And it sounds great. It’s really a great record!

I’m really proud of it right now – I could listen to it over and over again and be like “Holy shit!” I don’t know how I did it, but I did it! I really did it! I really hate to say it, I kinda wish it was shit, but I really amazed myself. I didn’t realise I’m as much a blues singer as I am. It’s like, I’ve been able to do a lot of sounds – crazy sounds with Suicide – but a blues singer is basically what I always was.

And it’s great to hear.

“We called Alex Chilton ‘The Silver Ghost’”

He used to disappear all the time. He always disappeared. I got to know him a little bit, but that was Alex. He reminded me a little of Martin Rev, but he was Alex Chilton. And the funny thing is, as soon as you’d try to say something to him… Y’know, at the beginning of the first set, I said to him: “Y’know Alex, maybe we could do this another way…” – he gave me a look, and that was enough to say: “Shut the fuck up!” And I didn’t have to say another word. He didn’t say much, but when he said something, it was always right on! Alex was Alex, and he was great. He knew what the fuck he was doing.

Just being with him was great, and I feel terrible that he’s dead… but it was great knowing the guy. When I used to be at CBGBs, on the right side there was a garage, and I never knew

that it was Alex [hanging out there] until about a few months later – “Oh that’s Alex Chilton! Holy shit! From the Box Tops!”

I was surprised to see the guy I eventually came to know as Alex at CBGBs; I never saw him at any Suicide shows outside New York, and I never thought he knew any of our music.

And sure enough, I didn’t realise – he sat down in the lotus position to play music, and he did ‘Cubist Blues’, so he could do anything. Because Alex Chilton of course knew his shit.

“I actually heard a lot of Alex’s music for the first time since he died.”

I was really sad when he died, because he was really wonderful. I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe he was dead. We did a show for him, we did two songs, ‘Rubber Room’ – I really love that song. To me, that was pure Alex. I’m glad I did it. When my wife and I left that show, and we were waiting for a cab right outside, and this one guy from the Deep South came up to me – I thought there was going to be a big fight or something, because I wasn’t getting a great reaction from the audience – he came to the entrance, and he said: “Man, this evening was so great, and that song you did, ‘Rubber Room’, was the best I ever heard Alex Chilton.” And that was enough, it was a great honour – a guy from the Deep South [saying that]. The reaction I got was as proud a feeling as I could ever get. It was a beautiful thing. I really wanted to do service to Alex Chilton, and I feel I did. God bless him.

“I nearly got into a fight over this thing...”

… with a French guy at the Cubist Blues show in France. I’ll never forget him – I’ll never forget his shirt; I can’t forget anything about him. And we went to him: “Outside. Let’s take this outside,” and we almost got into a fight. And he said: “Oh no! I’m sorry!

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V e g a i n h i s n ew y o rk h o me n ea r b a t t er y pa rk.

F a r L ef t : w i t h s u i cid e b a n d ma t e M a r t i n R e v

my brain is on fire.” I really felt it! I couldn’t do another song. I don’t know how we did it. Now I realise I really could have done more! I’ll do it myself – I just feel like singin’ the blues!

“I really feel like now, maybe it’s time for a real, real change.”

I’ve done several rockabilly songs – one was very sensational, and a big hit, the second one wasn’t as bit a hit.

And I really want to go to rockabilly or blues. Suicide is a different thing in itself, and I love doing Suicide, but I love doing all kinds of things. I was told I could probably sing into a New York City garbage can and sing as good as anybody, but the blues – they ask me what I consider Suicide, and I say: “It’s New York City blues.” It always was, it always will be, and whatever I sing, it doesn’t matter.

“I get a lot of kids come by that want me to hear music.”

I’m sorry! Blah blah blah.” And the band were amazed that I nearly got into a fight over this thing.

There’s a good memory I have of Alex – we did the show at the venue in Rennes. He didn’t [usually] say anything to us, but the one thing he said was: “Man, with all the time I’ve spent on the plane and the cab and the car, we could have been in Japan!” It’s true – we spent sixteen hours travelling, and we could have been in Japan! That’s all he said. That’s all he had to say! It’s so true.

“Guys, I can’t sing another song, because I feel as if my head is on fire…”

I knew ‘Cubist Blues’ was different – you can’t tell exactly what it was, but I knew it was different. It was almost country and western, but it’s something else. It’s Alex Chilton music; it’s Ben Vaughn music. That album was done in a day. And I swear to god, I’ll never forget the last moment. We were gonna do two songs, and that was gonna be it. We did twelve songs – the last one was ‘Dream Baby Dream’, and I said: “Guys, I can’t sing another song, because I feel as if my head is on fire,

Occasionally I find something, but not very often. There are two guys who do really, really good shit, who cut a song for me. Two guys, believe it or not, like Suicide – one’s the drummer, one’s the keyboard and guitar player [note: I think he’s talking about Sonic Cathedral act The Vacant Lots]. They play in New York a lot, and they’re really incredible.

They hang out here, and the lead singer’s got a gorgeous girlfriend. ARE Weapons was one thing a few years ago, and I have this band, and they really are good. I wish them well, I hope they’re gonna do something, especially the lead singer, because he’s a real artist – he paints, he does sculpture. The drummer’s great too! I love ‘em. They’re real sweethearts.

“People want to spend a lot of money on me!”

I mean, $100,000 to play Australia! $100,000 – can you believe that shit?!

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And Sweden – a lot of money, just for one night! A part of me wants to go and do it, and part of me wants to retire already. I mean, I became a sculptor, and I love sculpture, and now I’m painting again. So go figure. Who knows what I’m doing anymore. I’m retired anyhow, I don’t give a shit. But anything could happen.

“Time for me to drop dead, I guess.”

I don’t even [feel like I] live there anymore. Everything has changed. The landscape has changed, the people have changed, there’s all these stupid yuppies and dogs and cats and people and shit. I have a wife, and a kid, and they’re both beautiful, and I mean, I don’t give a shit. There’s nothing you can do about it, man. It’s really nothing like my… my thing anymore, and it really upsets me. I’ve always had a place on 4th Street that I call home.

I’ve found my little niche, but right now, I’m not part of the New York scene anymore.

I’m thinking of moving somewhere, but I don’t know where.

It’s all the same shit to me. There’s nothing anymore. The streets used to be full of garbage, and I’d take some of that and bring it home with me to wherever I lived – I must have lived in about thirteen different places in New York, and I used to keep piles of shit in my house and use it for my sculptures. As it is now, the older people are dying out, right in front of me, and I can’t describe it anymore. I don’t belong anymore. I don’t belong anywhere anymore. Time for me to drop dead, I guess.

“There’s a book out about me now.”

It’s hard to read that shit because I did it! I mean, it’s not telling me anything I don’t know. [laughs] Who knows, maybe there’ll be stuff I’ll find out.

There’s a guy doing a piece on me for his PHD. A PHD... for me! For christ’s sake, what will that get you?

retold

Words Fail Me Why do The Sound remain a lost band when they made some of the best records to come from the first wave of post-punk? writer: james f. thompson

In the crisp early morning air of Monday 26th April, 1999, Adrian Borland threw himself under a train at Wimbledon station in front of a platform full of horrified commuters.

He was 41 years old. Months later, local newspaper The Wimbledon Guardian would report the verdict of suicide from Westminster Coroner’s Court, detailing at length Borland’s ongoing psychiatric problems and the distressing final hours before he took his own life – including a fateful phone call with an ex-girlfriend.

Perhaps almost as tragic as his passing, though, was that the newspaper story completely omitted to mention Borland’s role as lead singer, songwriter and guitarist for the Sound, the greatest lost British band of the 1980s. In death, Borland was denied the courtesy of even a footnote about his life’s biggest triumph. For anybody lucky enough to be familiar with the Sound, their perennial lack of recognition was and continues to be as galling as it is utterly heart-breaking.

This month marks 35 years since the release of the band’s debut album, ‘Jeopardy’, a forceful, bumpy, slaloming tour around the darker extremities of the likes of XTC and U2,

the strength of its tunes undiminished by the cheap, rough-and-ready production throughout. In a five-star review for Melody Maker, Steve Sutherland said: “[They’ve got] the edge over U2, the Bunnymen or the Teardrops as Britain’s brightest hope.”

Unfortunately, we know now where all of that early promise ultimately lead. For a few short years though, Borland and the Sound would craft some of the most melodic and affecting rock music of their era; Borland’s soaring, tormented vocals invariably counter-balanced with smart pop s ensibility. Second LP ‘From the Lion’s Mouth’ was a bona fide masterpiece; arguably one of the bestproduced post-punk records ever and easily equal to their peers’ albums – even if the Sound didn’t have the sales to show for it. “Twelve months ago they steamed in with a remarkable debut that knocked spots off those by fellow newcomers like U2, the Comsats and the Bunnymen,” said Mike Nicholls in The Record Mirror in 1981. “Since then, all the aforementioned have put out second albums and once again, the Sound lead the field.”

So why did Adrian Borland die

with the Sound all but forgotten whereas U2 ended up on top of the world as global superstars? When a deserving rock group fades away without success, the finger gets pointed at some of the usual suspects: label hassles, bad management, personal circumstances, drug addiction and, of course, material.

Perhaps one of these was to blame for stymying the Sound’s success?

In fact, as Borland’s spry 81 yearold father Bob explains to me in a lucid, lengthy conversation at his South West London home, all of these factors and more besides conspired to unjustly fate his son’s band – one of the best of their generation – to obscurity. “A lot of myths have been spread,” says Borland Sr. in reference to the myriad reasons offered up by the Sound’s small and loyal internet following. “Even the band themselves seem not to have understood what the real situation was.”

A

drian Kevin Borland was born 6th December 1957 in Kilburn, London, the only child of Bob, a theoretical physicist at the National

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Physical Laboratory, and his wife Win, an English teacher. By the time the young Borland was in his teens, the family had moved to Wimbledon and Borland was already in love with the electric guitar. In 1975, he formed proto-punk outfit Syndrome, who would soon rename themselves The Outsiders, after Albert Camus’ philosophical novel The Outsider.

At the height of the punk movement in 1977, The Outsiders released ‘Calling on Youth’, a snarling but ultimately harmless and naïve document of the era (sample lyric: “I’m a rock and roll terminal case!”).

Borland Sr. created a label – Raw Edge – to put out the album, thereby giving the Outsiders the distinction of the first-ever self-released punk LP. More records would follow. “Tuneless, gormless, gutless... I like them a lot,” raved Tony Parsons in NME. Others were rather less supportive – in the same magazine, Julie Burchill trashed the first album and took aim at the band’s looks and middle-class roots.

“Adrian wasn’t really a punk,” Borland Sr. concedes.

No matter, the Outsiders made steady progress, supporting people like The Jam at London’s famous Roxy

T he Sou nd, L- R : C ol vin “ Max” Maye rs , A d r ian Borl and, Mike D ud l e y & Graham Bail e y .

club. One night, the band were piling through a Stooges cover only to find Iggy Pop himself had jumped up on stage and was enthusiastically joining in. Eventually, Borland’s childhood friend Graham Bailey would join on bass, thereby beginning The Outsiders’ transformation into an entirely different band, one that would revolve around Borland and stretch well beyond the self-defined punk rock archetype.

To be sure, the progression between The Outsiders’ releases and ‘Jeopardy’ is staggering. Unshackled from punk’s three-chord, guitars-only template, The Sound’s first LP is still full-frontal but layered, nuanced and brimming with ideas. A new drummer was on the scene in the form of Mike Dudley but it was the full-time addition of Benita “Bi” Marshall on keyboards that really broadened the group’s horizons, just as keyboards made their impact on Joy Division around the same time.

‘Jeopardy’ had already been recorded before The Sound signed to Korova Records, an imprint of major label Warner Brothers. Dudley – eight years older than the rest of the band – had wanted The Sound to take a deal offered by EMI and pursue rock stardom but the rest of the band felt Korova would be more focused on promoting independent acts; their only other signees were Echo and the Bunnymen. As it transpired, this was both a blessing and a curse: The Sound got to tour with and support the Bunnymen, but they were also constantly living in another band’s shadow.

“When we signed to Korova, the first thing that happened was that we were each given a copy of ‘Crocodiles’, which was about to come out, and we all thought that because that album sounded so lush and full, that we were going to be taken to a studio and allowed to re-record,” remembered Marshall in another interview. “We were really, really upset [when that didn’t happen]. We knew that comparisons would be drawn with the Bunnymen, who were the only other act on Korova, and who had this fantastic album with phenomenal production.”

Critics loved ‘Jeopardy’ – bargainbasement production values and all – but with limited promotion and distribution, it bombed. Fans at gigs outside of London frequently

complained about being unable to find the album, which infuriated Borland and the group. “It was about that time that things started to go wrong for us,” Marshall said last year. “[Adrian] started to feel the pressure delivering ‘the next product’ as he called it, and almost overnight The Sound ceased to be fun.”

Borland Sr. thinks that, privately at least, around this time his son was also beginning to wrestle with the schizoaffective disorder that would haunt him the rest of his life, his mental anguish already hidden in plain sight within his lyrics. “When he says, for example, in the song ‘I Can’t Escape Myself’: ‘Left alone I’m with the one I most fear,’ he is referring to this other person in his head with whom he can communicate. [He’s having] a twoway conversation. He wasn’t really talking about another side of himself, he was talking about another person, and I don’t think people understand that. It was a different person, inside his brain.”

After the first record, Borland fired Marshall – a casualty of the band leader’s nascent paranoia – and brought in replacement Colvin ‘Max’ Mayers, before setting to work on completing album number two: ‘From the Lion’s Mouth’. Produced by Hugh

somebody else. The Sound’s man was responsible for European gigs and the other one was responsible for UK gigs.

In reality, of course, The Sound’s agent could have got the other one to arrange UK gigs but he didn’t, he kept them in Europe.”

The result was that in those crucial early years, the band never built up a head of steam on their home turf (though they did build a sizeable fan base in the Netherlands, just as the Comsat Angels did). All the more’s the pity, because the band were a seriously formidable live proposition – legendary live document ‘In the Hothouse’ is testament to that much.

After their second LP failed to shift enough units, Korova first asked the group to produce a single for the next album, then made the decision to drop them entirely, only to be rebuked by the European Warner Brothers branches. “Everybody said, ‘You can’t drop the Sound!’” Borland Sr. laughs.

“I think they were taken aback by that – [Warners] realised the strength of feeling was so strong, so they decided to continue.”

Improbably in fact, Charles Leveson, the head of Warners in the UK at the time, somehow brokered a deal for the band to be managed by the prestigious E.G. Management, who at

“Adrian seemed to always reject these opportunities for making a lot of money and being more successful and I don’t know why” Jones, who was also responsible for records by the Teardrop Explodes, the Bunnymen and Simple Minds, ‘From the Lion’s Mouth’ is the Sound’s high watermark and the album that should have made them famous. Each lugubrious track is astonishing for its prescience, pointing the way for modern disciples like Interpol and Editors with a snappy, prominent bass line, punchy drums, soaring treated guitar lines and a welcome lack of the tinny production that plagued other deserving albums of the era.

Again, ‘From the Lion’s Mouth’ received rapturous reviews from the critics but was summarily ignored by most of the record-buying public.

Borland Sr. puts this down to a lack of touring in the UK and a misguided focus on the continent instead. “They had an agent working for [talent agency] Asgard and he always told them it was very difficult to get gigs in the UK, which was a load of rubbish,” he says. “The truth was of course that there were two people working for Asgard; The Sound’s agent and

one point or another had looked after people like T. Rex, King Crimson and Roxy Music. As luck would have it, Ferry was leaving the E.G. roster and a vacant slot awaited The Sound – E.G. would only ever manage three acts at a time. “What they lacked really was good management,” insists Borland Sr. Here was a golden opportunity to rectify that.

Yet far from seizing it with both hands, Borland snubbed the offer, declining to even meet E.G. face-toface. “Typical Adrian,” says Borland’s father. “He seemed to always reject these opportunities for making a lot of money and being more successful and I don’t know why… I think he was afraid of the pressures of commercialisation; of what stardom might mean.” Having managed the band himself up until this point, Borland Sr. felt unable to continue in the face of such obvious spurned chances for success. Instead of looking elsewhere, Borland Jr. took on managing The Sound himself – an unnecessary exacerbation of his

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increasingly troubled mental state.

Korova did go on to release The Sound’s third LP in 1983 – the oppressively bleak and almost comically uncommercial ‘All Fall Down’ – if only to fulfil contractual obligations, with no promotion whatsoever. The Sound were immediately dropped thereafter, signing with independent label Statik the following year. An EP (‘Shock of Daylight’) and LP (‘Heads and Hearts’) would follow, both of which were excellent and offered a brighter take on the template established by ‘From the Lion’s Mouth’ – even if their songs often retold Borland’s disturbing selfconflict. In any case, few were left paying attention and to add insult to injury, Statik went bust in 1986 – by which point Bailey and Mayers were also using heroin, while Borland was drinking very heavily. One last album, ‘Thunder Up’, came out on Belgian label Play It Again Sam in 1987, before the Sound finished for good the following year.

Truthfully though, in the band’s final years Borland’s psychological problems had progressively become more pronounced until the situation was simply untenable. “It was December 1986,” Borland Sr. confirms.

“Until that time he seemed to me perfectly normal.” Borland suffered a complete breakdown and was sectioned in Springfield Hospital. He attempted to commit suicide by smashing a window in his room and lacerating his throat with the glass.

Two further such attempts would follow over the years as Borland moved between hospital, his parents’ house and renting elsewhere, until he eventually succeeded on his fourth attempt that sad day in 1999.

Borland was of course deeply troubled, but to characterise his life after The Sound as exclusively revolving around mental anguish and repeated suicide attempts would be to do a grave disservice to what became a long and fulfilling solo career, with several collaborations (including a record with punk legend Jello Biafra for starters). Borland also had multiple relationships after the band had parted ways.

Independent film makers Jean-Paul van Mierlo and Marc Waltman are producing a documentary celebrating Borland’s time not just with the Sound but right up until the end. Walking in the Opposite Direction is set to be released next year and the project is still accepting donations on indiegogo.com.

Forces of Nature

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Opp o sit e pa g e: V o n ha usswo l ff at the Gl ypt o t eket museum, Co pen ha g en .

Left : at the cit y’ s Tho rval d sen museum.

I

At the heart of Anna Von Hausswolff’s latest, doom-heavy record is an enormous 9000-pipe organ, but it’s a secret landscape in Sweden that’s informed ‘The Miraculous’ most of all

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feel like – and I’m sounding like a hippy – that nature is listening and if you want to be heard then nature is a good place to go to.” So Anna Von Hausswolff tells me over the roar of intense background noise and endlessly screaming children, as she sits in a Copenhagen café. It’s not the sort of words one might have expected to hear from someone who has been described as “Sweden’s bad vibes queen” and who, as a musician, is capable of creating compositions so vast and amazingly immersive that they swallow you whole – organ-led drone pieces that are like stepping into a dense moorland fog, only to be met with a soaring, surrounding vocal that somehow feels as enormous as it does contained.

Whilst there is an overtly ‘dark’ tone to what Hausswolff produces, often because of the naturally gloomy tone of the organ used – along with a propensity for using drone techniques to create funeral-like churns – it’s really only a surface level assumption (and largely inaccurate) to associate it with any inherent bleakness. You only have to look at ‘Mountains Crave’ from her 2013 album ‘Ceremony’ to see the sort of pop-tinged material she is capable of producing, or any number of moments on her latest record, which go from doom metal blasts to inspired, almost traditionally structured

P hotogr aph y: jenn a foxton / writer: d aniel dyl an wr ay

song craft. Her most recent album, ‘The Miraculous’, opens with a booming pipe organ, one that blasts like an angry foghorn, like a boat’s offcourse warning signal as it sails towards an inevitable collision. The album however, is not inspired by an impending sense of doom; it is more a sonic realisation of the power of nature, imagination and improvisation.

Hausswolff and her band travelled to Pitea, a small town in Northern Sweden, about 14 hours drive away from Gothenburg and with a population roughly around the same size as Retford. Within this town is one of the largest pipe organs in Scandinavia, consisting of 9,000 pipes.

The instrument features a built-in glockenspiel, vibraphone, celeste and some forms of percussion. It also contains a sort of built in water feature in which some pipes are half covered in water, creating a bewitching howl in the hands of Hausswolff, rather than the fluid ambience you may expect from such a set up. As an instrument it’s a towering presence over the album but, says Hausswolff, its magnitude was a tough thing to tackle. “The organ just sucked everything up,” she notes, “so we had to work super hard to get the drums and guitars to come through in the compositions to make the details be there and not drown. That was a struggle but I don’t think we could

have done it better.” Another child screams in the background with the intensity of someone who has just seen their parents kidnapped.

Another integral environment to the album’s existence is based on the album’s title – a secret place that Hausswolff has visited regularly since she was a child and now refers to as ‘the miraculous’. She won’t tell anyone it’s real location, or actual place name, instead describing it as a place steeped in rumour, beauty and mysticism, as well as bloodshed from a historic uprising that left many dead atop of its picturesque site. Hausswolff talks me through her experiences of the place, saying: “It’s an open place, it’s for everyone but it’s also a very private place for me. I go there every summer and have done since I was a kid and sometimes in the winter or when I miss it. For me it’s a fantastical place; it has a very deep and dark history to it.

It’s a very weird place; I was told a lot of stories about it; my family told me lots of stories about it and I don’t know if half of them are true. It’s like this uncertain idea of what’s really been happening there. It’s strange because I think I know this place very well but my aunt can come up to me and tell me a different version of a story and then I can meet someone in the village who can then tell me something completely different to that. So the

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history is twisted and it’s constantly changing and it seems like the history of the place is really important to people but none of them have a clear idea of what’s been happening there.

It’s a place you want to tell stories about for some reason.”

Whilst spending a great deal of physical time in this literal space in Sweden, it’s also the time spent there imaginatively in Hausswolff’s mind that has led to a great deal of inspiration for this new record. “It’s a blurred line between fantasy and reality.You start to create your own stories and your head starts to do twisted things to other stories and you then change those….

This place boosts my creativity and puts me in a different state of mind.”

“I like to romanticise a lot about it,” she continues. “Sometimes I go there and I don’t understand why I’m so fascinated about it, I don’t get it, it’s like, ‘oh, it’s a beautiful landscape, what else is there?’ But then I always – when I come home after a few days or a week or something – start to long to go back to it and begin to romanticise the landscape again. ‘Oh, I remember the smell there and the noises of the wood cracking under my feet,’ and this love and romanticising takes over. I think it’s an important detail of the record because I did all the writing in Copenhagen, not there, so it’s like the idea – I like the idea of this place a lot,

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it’s the idea that fascinates me.”

‘The Miraculous’ feels too far spread and multifaceted to be a record that follows one particular line of thought. Hausswolff has taken influence not only from the depths of the Swedish landscape and its literature but also from cinema and particularly the 1985 Soviet war film Come and See Me. It was within the bloody murder and societal turbulence of the film that Hausswolff forged a connection to the fantastical landscape of the miraculous place she has visited and thought about so often.

“When someone tells me a story about a place that is stirring up my emotions, that place becomes a person,” she tells me. “It becomes more than just nature, more than just trees and flowers and the things that you see. You become emotionally connected to the place and I think it is important to have people tell stories about these places. The more brutal or horrifying a story is the more sad or scared you get – those emotions are very strong. That’s why this film speaks to me and why this place speaks to me because there has been so much horror and sadness there, so it stirs up a lot of emotions that makes me connect to the place on a more personal level.”

That said, the songs didn’t present themselves fully formed, swept away by the power of influence – Hausswolff starts in the abstract, she says, adding: “You have shattered thoughts or shattered songs, small pieces all over.

Then you realise these pieces are connected and it becomes a puzzle.”

“I feel that nature is like my God, and I’m not religious but I think going out in nature is probably the best thing for me to do” ‘The Miraculous’ seems to manage to somehow feel both of a place and also removed from one, existing in some sonic middle ground between Hausswolff’s blurred explorations of reality and fantasy. Yet when asked about the impact of the physicality – ultimately the real world – and the role of nature, it’s clear it has a crucial place in both her life and work. “I think it’s extremely important for me to feel that I have some sort of purpose or that there is more than just nothingness,” she says. “I feel that nature is like my God, and I’m not religious but I think going out in nature is probably the best thing for me to do when I need to rationalise my thoughts or become more connected to myself – it’s just like a good place to be heard.”

Like a lot of what Hausswolff is involved in creatively, there seems to be a thematic connection to be made here. Three of the album’s nine tracks occupy almost half an hour in duration, and are pieces that reflect the enormity – the engulfing omnipotence – of nature and its endless possibilities. In creating these pieces – such as ‘Come Wander With Me / Deliverance’, which was built up, grown and

stretched out on stage, live – Hausswolff creates pieces that become huge overpowering compositions; ones that seem intent on eradicating boundaries and overtaking the role of the composer. It’s something which, thankfully, Hausswolff seems to agree with as I try to spit out my point over the sound of screeching infants. “I think that’s a very good description of how I work and what my goal in general with music is,” she says, “it’s to make it larger than myself, so that sometimes I feel like I have no control over the material – I like that feeling.

Not always but sometimes, I think it creates a space where as a musician I can go forward with my writing. To not be scared of embarrassing myself and not be scared of trying out new things, if I’m fascinated by something I try it, maybe I feel super uncomfortable but at least I’ve tried it. That’s why I love playing live because you have the chance to squeeze in these little moments of experimentation.”

It was one of these little moments of experimentation, albeit not on stage, that led to Hauswolff’s favourite track on the album – the ten-minute title track. “For me that song stands

out for the reason that it’s improvised,” she says. “I wasn’t thinking about recording it but when we recorded the organ I had one hour left and I had recorded everything else so I wanted to try that out and maybe it was going to turn out shitty but I thought let’s just see what happens and that just happened and it was fun. It was a funny contradiction to the lyrics I had, which were about growing old and losing your present self to the past, to nostalgia, and then I think this song was the one where I was most present because it was all an improvisation, completely unpredicted, it became a symbol of finding a miracle. That sounds cliché but it was just both totally unpredictable and completely right at the same time.”

I ask if the overall process has been something of a spiritual one.

“It is like a sort of meditation to me, to channel certain emotions or certain energies, so in that sense it’s a spiritual thing.”

Taking a 9,000 pipe organ on the road is not something that is feasible for Hauswolff’s upcoming tour dates, but that’s not to say a pipe organ tour won’t happen in the future. “My dream and my vision is to do concerts with pipe organs, but I have to work a little bit more [to reach that stage] so now I’m going to do rock club settings and I have a really nice synthesiser organ with pedals. It’s two different things, the club environment and the organ and church environment – those two things are very separate from one another. At a rock club you are facing the audience and you maybe become more extroverted and when you’re in a church or concert hall I have my back to the audience and it creates a more introverted mood, for both me and the audience.”

As we wrap up an hour of conversation that whilst sincere and open, is also punctuated with many moments of laughter and jokes, I query if Hausswolff really is the bad vibes queen of Sweden. “Maybe people want to think of me as the bad vibe queen but I can’t relate to that. I don’t know, maybe – I think I’d rather be the bad vibe queen than the good vibe queen, I’d rather stir some emotions up than sooth them.”

a n n A v o n ha uswo l ff a t t he Tho rva l d sen museum in co pen ha g en , d en ma rk, d ed ica t ed t o n eo cl a ssicist ic scul pt o r B ert el Tho rva l d sen .

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Whilst My Guitar Gently Sleeps Ex-Easter Island Head are re-appropriating their instruments to make neo classical ambience in the basement of an old nursing home P hotogra ph y: danny p ayn e / wr i te r: dan ie l dylan wray

There’s a sort of sonic gravitational pull in seeing Ex-Easter Island Head perform. When watching them during Tramlines festival in Sheffield earlier this year, they occupied the centre of the room in a basement of a 1920s theatre, the crowd circled around them and their set-up (consisting of horizontally-laid and treated electric guitars) gawping in silence as the trio filled the room with shimmering ambience, punctuated by mallet strikes and gentle drums, filling the room with sustained drones and polyrhythmic grooves. It was the sort of performance that seemed to send whispers through the venue and gradually the room filled with more and more people, the bar staff left their posts to see what was going on, before the kitchen staff soon did the same. It was a glorious moment in which the natural curiosity of witnessing a nonconventional set-up was actually matched by the uniqueness and experience in the sounds it produced.

The group are a Liverpool-based project ostensibly led by Benjamin D. Duvall, with Ben Fair and Jonathan Hering making up the trio. Although depending on the album, project or

commission, Ex-Easter Island Head have included various people over their five-year incarnation. Watching the group perform it would be an easy assumption to make that you were watching the project of three guys with their roots in music academia and classical training, such is the precision and complexity of what they produce, but in fact the opposite is true. “We’re all self-taught musicians with odd patches of music lessons thrown in over the years,” Duvall tells me, “but we’ve mainly learned everything we know through playing in lots of different bands for about the last 15 years. We’ve all been in some pretty odd bands, running the gamut from horror punk to ludicrous synth prog and drone, and quite a bit of communal music in a scratch orchestra – all ages and musical abilities – which has given us a crash course in quite a lot of interesting 20th century experimental music.”

‘Classical music imagined by rock musicians’ is a description they’ve had applied to them and one that’s not completely off the mark, as Hering confirms. “There’s definitely an element of truth in that,” he says.

“There’s also an element of punk in the fact that we have just decided to make this music on our own terms – we’ve never worried about whether we’re ‘qualified’ to enter this musical tradition. We’ve had reviews that have sniffed at how ‘crudely’ we approach minimalism, but that not only presumes to know what kind of music we’re aiming to make, it also presumes that we wouldn’t actually choose to make music that sometimes sounds crude or brash.”

The group is one that feels as though it has a core ideology at hand, a sonic mission statement of sorts. I put to them what the aim and principled idea of the project was to start with.

“The project started with the simplest idea – laying the guitar horizontally and wondering how you could go about making music in that way, and it has just carried on from there. There have been some self imposed limitations to guide it over time – no effects processing on the guitars for example – but it’s been a wonderfully organic thing of always finding new sounds or techniques to add to our vocabulary and these then

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suggesting the direction we want the music to go in.”

The area of classical music the group explores is a loose strand – more indebted to the minimalist movements as explored by more contemporary and experimental composers that eschewed the bombast flurry of more traditional classical music. “We’re heavily influenced by minimalism,” says Duvall, “which I’d define in this case as any music that does a lot with limited means, or employs a simple process to get complex results. But yeah: Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham etc. have all loomed pretty large in our influences at different points.”

The group all live together, with a number of other friends too, in an old nursing home. Here they eat together and rehearse together. “We’ve lived here for about the last six years with a big group of our friends and it feels like the spiritual home of the group,” says Duvall. “We’ve got a pretty basic but very handy rehearsal space in the basement and that’s where we’ve written and rehearsed since the very early days. I think having that space has been a stroke of really good fortune

opposit e page , f r om L- R: Be n Fair, Jonath an He r ing and Be nj am in D .

Du vall in th e ir r e he arsal s p ac e .

and pretty integral to how we’ve developed our way of doing things.

There’s been a lot of hours spent down there attempting to learn how to play percussion... it doesn’t have much beyond a power socket, a single bulb and an old mattress to tame ear damage but its free and we can make noise most of the time. When you’re not watching the clock in a pricey rehearsal room it gives you a bit of space to stretch out and spend a lot of time on ideas that ultimately might not even go anywhere but are good to pursue nonetheless.”

Whilst the group play multiple guitars in their set-up, they are used as percussive instruments, not traditional rhythmic ones. It’s a self-imposed restriction that they’ve found to be incredibly fruitful, as Duvall points out” “I find it interesting that you can still find new uses and approaches for a technology that has remained essentially unchanged for nearly 70 years. Theoretically we could have been making the music we do now in 1950. An awful lot of our ethos is built around just playing around with the

physical materials at hand: what does a knitting needle sound like under the strings of a Telecaster? What happens when you thread it through one-way and not another? What happens when you have two knitting needles of different lengths? It’s a very hands-on process using just mechanical alterations to the instrument as opposed to digital processing – I feel it makes you a lot more aware of the simplicity of the instrument and how much of a blank canvas that represents.

When it’s at its best it feels very much like being a kid sat in front of a big pile of Lego: the possibilities seem pretty exciting and endless.”

These endless possibilities have led to some incredibly interesting and unique situations, with the group being asked to take part and perform in a huge variety of idiosyncratic musical events, including a residency in an 18th century tower in Northern Ireland, playing Supersonic Festival with 16 guitarists onstage, collaborating with the BBC Philharmonic for Sounds from the Other City festival, performing around an actual Easter Island Head with thirty musicians aged 18-70 and playing in the library of a tiny isolated Scottish island.

Under the core of what the group do – create beautiful, engulfing music, often with oxymoronic characteristics, such as being primitively complex – there is a side that is less, well, serious.

“It sometimes feels like a bit of a dirty secret that we’re such daft people in day-to-day life.” Hering says, with Duvall stating: “I think the key is to take the music very seriously and to apply exactly the opposite to yourself.”

It’s a template that many more bands could do with adhering to, but I wonder if having such a unique sound and set-up, no doubt requiring specific environments for it to work fully, the audience always take the music as seriously as they do and give

it the time, respect, patience and – most crucially – the silence it mandates? “We’re usually very lucky with attentive audiences, and playing off the stage without using the PA often gets people to focus,” says Hering. “I’ve also perfected a death stare that can burn a hole through the head of anyone chatting in the front row.”

“We’ve been lucky enough to play in a couple of cathedrals over the last few years, which is an experience akin to performing inside a massive boutique reverb pedal,” says Duvall, “and we also love playing super intimate, on-the-floor shows with no P.A. as we have to crank the amps, so it ends up as a bit of a harder edged show. We’re waiting for the day one of our guitar tables falls over/splits in two, but so far have managed to avoid any major live disasters beyond the odd occasion of trying to pedal 40 minutes of microtonal ambience to a room full of indifferent, pissed people.”

But with a group who has forced

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limitations and an intentionally minimal set-up, how do they evolve and grow as a group from album to album? Duvall notes that each composition informs the next, and that going from writing and performing a piece for sixteen guitarists to making music as a three piece was “a pretty radical re-scaling that got us thinking very much about the essentials of our sound and what we could afford to lose.”

“There tends to be a lot of discussion and listening to music together over food or away from the practice room,” he says, “but when we’re actually there with our instruments we tend to work stuff out through lots of playing and improvising and a minimum of detail.”

“We always start with the ‘rules’ and then improvise from there,” there says Hering. “There’s often an element in which we’re each trying to find a way to play that will put the other two off what they’re playing.”

A new album lurks around the corner in 2016 and also a second residency at Salford’s Islington Mill.

They have grand plans for their return, as Duvall tells me excitedly: “We’re going to be working with between 1520 musicians from Manchester and Salford’s experimental music scene to make a new, large electric ensemble piece. We want to close the gap between what we do as a trio and how we approach our large ensemble pieces so we’re planning to use exclusively tabletop guitars so that all the players are starting from the same skill level and starting more or less from scratch.

We’re still finalising who’s going to be involved but the response we’ve had from the musicians we’ve approached – all people we have immense respect for artistically – has been really positive and makes us think this is going to be something really special. Having already done a piece with a load of guitarist before and learned the hard way about just how bloody loud that is, we’re going to buy a big box of earplugs this time too.”

Between the library and the club A former BBC Young Composer of the Year, Sam Shepherd turned down London’s Royal College of Music to have an epiphany at Fabric and become FLOATING POINTS Ph otog rap hy: j onang e lo m olina r i / wr it er: sa m walton

An hour with Sam Shepherd should come with a glossary. Modernist composers, jazz pianists and arcane disco session players all whizz by, alongside specific discontinued turntables, microphones and mixers, obscure musical instruments, modern soul re-edits and long-defunct club nights. Even if he’s talking about something else entirely, it seems Shepherd’s brain is still doing background indexing of all the musical information he’s ever been exposed to.

At one stage, while he’s explaining how he made the transition from being Sam Shepherd, pharmacology undergraduate at UCL, to DJ and producer Floating Points, he interrupts himself: “Oh man, Donald Byrd, ‘Lansana’s Priestess’,” he says, out of nowhere, pointing at the ceiling as the bar’s music changes. “Good record!” A beat later, as the tune bursts into life, he corrects himself with a shake of the head: “KILLER record! I play this all the time. Sick. It’s so good with an isolator because you can just throw the bass back in there when the flute comes in and it SLAMS!” He starts mimicking the bass – b-ba, b-ba – and drumming on the table with his index fingers. “It’s SO good…”

Then he checks himself, suddenly sheepish. “Sorry, where were we?”You get the impression this sort of thing happens rather a lot.

Far from being pretentious, however, Shepherd’s musical reference-point diarrhoea is rather infectious. It’s not that he’s trying to point-score or show off, but more that he wants you to feel what he feels, like some proselytising minister (apt, perhaps, for the son of a vicar): when he unleashes a flurry of album names, it’s because he desperately wants you to hear them, rather than desperately wants you to know that he already has.

Given his background, though, Shepherd’s unswerving conviction

towards all things musical is perhaps understandable. Born into a household brimming with church and choral music (“indoctrinated” is the word he uses at one stage in relation to his father’s imposed listening choices), given piano lessons from an early age and then sent to the prestigious Chetham’s Music School in Manchester, Shepherd’s biography is a world away from that of the self-taught bedroom tinkerer whose frame of reference rarely extends to daily academic musical study. Instead, at Chetham’s, Shepherd did music GCSE and A-Level a year early and, while the rest of the national curriculum was adhered to, “every other living breathing second is spent doing music.”

Soon enough, however, Shepherd grew tired of classical music, and hit the first of his two major musical-life turning points: “When I was about 13, I realised I wasn’t so rubbish at piano and I started being able to decide what I wanted to play,” he remembers. “So when my music teacher gave me this Scarlatti sonata, I was like, ‘this is horrendous!’ so I played a lot of Debussy, and Bill Evans, and Messiaen instead.”

Thankfully, Shepherd found solace for his adolescent rebellion in the school library at Chetham’s, which had a giant collection of vinyl. “I used to spend all my time in there,” he explains. “I studied composition at school too, so it would be: research a Toru Takemitsu symphony or whatever – it wouldn’t be just ‘standard classical music’, it would be really challenging stuff, from Schnittke to, well, all sorts of weird stuff.

“The web spun out of control very quickly from then,” he continues fondly. “There were really cheap record shops in Manchester so I was buying entire crates of old records I’d never heard before for the price of one Keith Jarrett CD, and that helped me find out

actually what I was into.”

Suddenly, Shepherd’s ears were opened – jazz and avant-garde classical blew out the boundaries (“harmonic and rhythmic complexity and variation, instrument combinations that didn’t exist pre-1850, Stockhausen and music concrète stuff, I mean, Mozart wasn’t writing for tape machine…” to use one of Shepherd’s dreamy streams of consciousness), but, more importantly, he was able to express himself. “Having the freedom to improvise, and seeing your instrument as an extension of how you can express yourself was important,” he says, “because I was at school with a bunch of people who were technically far better than me, but I would always go to the piano and hear something in my head before I played anything, and now I was allowed to.”

Within a couple of years, Shepherd had won the BBC Young Composer of theYear award (“It was some pastiche-y version of Shostakovich quartet no 1, which I tried to copy”, he says, blithely, of his winning piece, written aged 15), and while everyone around him was trying to persuade him to go to the Royal College to read composition, Shepherd had other plans: “I got in, but it just didn’t feel like my vibe: the curriculum in the first year was Bach chorales and harmonisation, and I felt like I’d done as much of that as I wanted. At this point I’m listening to Dutilleux and Bartok every day – I was the guy walking around with folders that had bits of magnetic tape stuck to paper rather than sheet music.”

So instead, incongruently, Shepherd applied to do Pharmacology at UCL – “it was such a last-minute thing to apply there, but I was into science, too, and I really wanted to be in London” – and on his first night in halls, musical-life turning point number two happened. “That very first

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day I was here, I went to Fabric,” remembers Shepherd. “I bumped into someone in my corridor, he said let’s go out, so we went.” Despite being an avid dance music collector for years before, Fabric was Shepherd’s first clubbing experience: he danced 10pm to 7am, on two bottles of water.

Within months, Shepherd was DJing at student nights and had won a competition to open for Andy C at The End while simultaneously making tracks in his student bedroom with the equipment he’d won as a prize for being Young Composer of the Year. A few years later, after founding various club nights around London with fellow UCL students, he began releasing his own electronic EPs as Floating Points, became a resident at Plastic People, embarked on a PhD in Epigenetics – the study of how our genes can be affected by environment – and begun work on ‘Elaenia’, a symphonic instrumental album whose release is finally here after five years.

“A PhD is just so time-consuming that you can’t really do anything else at the same time,” explains Shepherd of his debut album’s long gestation. “But once I finished the PhD [in January this year] I was able to actually finish the rest of the album really quickly.”

It’s perhaps telling that despite Shepherd’s runaway conversational style when talking about other people’s music, he’s quieter when discussing his own. He talks elliptically about some of ‘Elaenia’ being the musical expression of going down a black hole, how one track, ‘Nespolé’, was inspired by an unusual fruit tree in his garden, and how a lot of the writing happened in the aftermaths of bad days in the lab, but there’s also the sense that Shepherd feels he’s said all he can about it via the record itself.

That’s probably just as well, too – one of ‘Elaenia’’s attractions is that it’s abstract and multi-genre enough to

Sam She phe rd at barbican, lo nd o n.

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invite listeners’ own projections. It doesn’t draw much from the same palette of any of Floating Points’ discography hitherto, although the most obvious commonality is a painstaking ear for detail and highfidelity recording.

When I mention this, he begins talking about the technical side of his record – all EQ units, compression and mic placement – and is instantly more comfortable. It’s not boffinism for its own sake, though: “It’s worth striving for the best recording quality you can get, so that even if the sound does get watered down further down the line, you’re giving the music a fighting chance.” – it’s as if every one of Shepherd’s actions is based around an unyielding and devotionally pure respect for music.

Anyone with huge knowledge of a topic walks a fine line, when trying to share it, between supercilious berk and disingenuous faux-naivety. Sam Shepherd walks it well by acknowledging that the opportunity for him to learn new things is still all around him; as befits someone who’s spent the past four years trying to unpick new discoveries from one of

the most niche branches of microbiology conceivable in an environment that fetishises new information, his mind is simply programmed to receive, never to broadcast: “I never go into my set thinking that I’m educating the audience,” he says, of his DJing. “I don’t think it’s right. If you do, they’ll quickly leave you. Thing is, also, just as an example, when Four Tet and I were playing together recently, he played this amazing record I’d never heard before and I was like, ‘what is this!’, and he was like, ‘dude it’s the Supremes’. It was a one-dollar record that I should own. Then simultaneously, these people are coming to gigs who know Bileo and rare modern soul records because they’re all digging for music on YouTube. They know these rare cuts already because they’re super switched-on, and the information is there if they just look. It’s so easy.”

Framed like that, it’s hard to disagree: all the information is there – all that’s required is a voracious appetite and a knack for research, a combination that’s served Shepherd well. On that basis, perhaps he needn’t come with his own glossary at all.

Floating Points of reference A selective list of every musician referenced by Sam Shepherd between 6:10pm and 7:25pm on 30 September 2015

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) German baroque composer; pioneer of counterpoint Bela Bartok (1881-1945) Hungarian modernist composer; founder of ethnomusicology Bileo (1979-1983) American disco session group James Blake (1988- ) English electronic songwriter and producer

Bill Evans (1929-1980) American jazz pianist and band leader Aretha Franklin (1942- ) American soul singer with 112 Billboard chart entries Four Tet (1978- ) English post-rock and electronic musician and DJ Glenn Gould (1932-1982) Canadian classical pianist

Donald Byrd (1932-2013) American jazz trumpeter

High Contrast (1979- ) English drum’n’bass producer; former Fabric resident

Claude Debussy (1862-1918) French Impressionist composer; pioneer of atonality

Mark Hollis (1955- ) English songwriter; former leader of Talk Talk

Chick Corea (1941- ) American jazz pianist; responsible for electric jazz fusion

Keith Jarrett (1945- ) American jazz and classical pianist and composer

Keb Darge (1961- ) Scottish northern soul and rockabilly DJ

London Elektricity (1971- ) English drum’n’bass producer; co-founder of Hospital Records

Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013) French Modernist composer; former head of production for Radio France

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) Austrian romantic composer; work banned by the Nazis

Manfred Eicher (1943- ) German record producer; founder of the influential jazz label ECM

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) French Modernist composer

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), German classical composer; bane of all piano teachers’ lives Theo Parrish (1972- ) American techno DJ; former Plastic People resident Players Association (1977-1981) American disco session group Sun Ra (1914-1993) American jazz pianist and band leader; originally from the planet Saturn Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) Russian romantic composer Steve Reich (1936- ) American minimalist composer; pioneer of tape collage Pharoah Sanders (1940- ) American jazz saxophonist; pivotal in free jazz movement Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) Italian Baroque composer; wrote 555 piano sonatas Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) Russian polystylistic composer Mr Scruff (1972- ) English electronica DJ and producer

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Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) Russian modernist composer; blackmailed into becoming the General Secretary of the Communist Composers’ Union Simbad (1982- ) Swedish broken-beat producer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) German avant-garde composer; wrote a string quartet to be performed in four helicopters Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) Russian Modernist composer whose ‘Rite of Spring’ incited a riot during its debut performance John Surman (1944- ) English free jazz saxophonist and synth player Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) Japanese avant-garde composer Ron Trent (1973- ) American house DJ and producer Kenny Wheeler (1930-2014) Canadian jazz trumpeter; free jazz pioneer

Outside My Mind Fuzz In their latest quest to evolve the garage band archetype, KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD have dropped their electric guitars in favour of flutes, clarinets and pastoral pop P ho t o graph y: J a mie Wdziek on ski / writer : Dom hale y

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t’s funny. I don’t really think of us as a psych band,” laughs King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s Stu Mackenzie, almost knowingly. Even from 30,000 miles away I can sense the polite resignation that inevitably comes whenever a journalist asks a band to pigeonhole themselves as one style of music or another. “Early on we were more influenced by classic rock and old ’60s pop, and after a while we started to feel like we needed to experiment a bit more and kind of play around with the things that we we’re doing, so I guess the psychedelic thing slowly crept its way in.”

You can see where he’s coming from – in a way, psychedelia is the laziest term in music. Since the midto-late ’60s it’s a catch-all that has been gleefully slapped on almost anything that deviated from the mainstream pop a little; from the pulsating hypnotic jams of Cream and Pink Floyd, right up to the idiosyncratic house of Phuture or Bomb the Bass.

Thing is, though, it’s a term that fits King Gizzard perfectly. Since emerging from Melbourne’s fertile music scene about five years ago, the band has built their name on sprawling, far-out rock recalling some of the godfathers of the psychedelic scene such Mothers of Invention and Hawkwind.

Unsurprisingly, King Gizzard’s gateway to the obscure end of the rock spectrum began in the garage rock revival of the late 2000s, when the likes of Black Lips and Thee Oh Sees were at the height of their powers. “I think garage is a kind of music that really appeals to teenagers – in a good way,” muses Mackenzie, describing the band’s beginnings. “It’s loud and fun and sort of careless, which I at least was when I was a teenager.”

While garage rock’s brash, give-afuck attitude is liberating, the music can sometimes be pretty rigid and King Gizzard soon looked to expand their horizons. “I felt that I needed to dig deeper and get into weird obscure stuff, that’s how I got into middle

eastern garage comps,” says MacKenzie.

“I still feel like we can do a lot with garage rock – in a way, you’re free to add whatever you want to it as long as you keep the same attitude. It’s more like, ‘what would happen if we add this kind of sound, or play it this kind of way?’”

A dedication to the ‘release and be damned’ ethos of garage rock lies at the very core of King Gizzard’s approach to music. Their music might be miniature space operas filled with reverb, tape echo and over-layed vocals, but the band’s release schedule is brutal to say the least. Since putting out their debut album, ‘Willoughby’s

Beach’, in October 2011, King Gizzard have released a new album at the rate of roughly one every six months. They even seem to be accelerating – 2014 saw ‘Oddments’ and ‘I’m in My Mind Fuzz’, while 2015 has already seen the critically-acclaimed ‘Quarters’ realised, with the band’s follow up, ‘Paper Mache Dream Balloon’, due to drop in the next few weeks.

Most acts would kill to be so prolific, but for MacKenzie it’s all just part of the process. “We’ve never really spent that much time or money on a recording, so I feel that we maybe approach it a bit differently to some people. We don’t really make the kind

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of music that you can polish that much – super polished rock songs sound a bit weird to me. We try to make songs that have a certain kind of vibe to them, and you can do that over any timescale or budget.”

This punishing workflow has resulted in a remarkable ramp up in the band’s evolutionary process. Over a three-year period King Gizzard has covered more sonic territory than some bands manage in their entire career. However, while last year’s ‘Oddments’ and ‘Mind Fuzz’ saw them tame and perfect heavy, hypnotic space rock, 2015 has seen the band shoot off down some unexpected tangents.

‘Quarters’, released back in May, saw King Gizzard move into more pastoral planes, with four extended jams and a sound that owed more to Can and Sun Ra Arkestra than Zappa. The band’s forthcoming ‘Paper Mache Dream Balloon’ sees them veer off into sugarcoated sunshine pop, composed with a vast array of acoustic instruments and recalling the gentle Californian folkbeat of Crosby Stills, Nash and Young and the Beach Boys during their ‘Smile’ experiments.

“Every record we’ve made we’ve tried to have a bit of a theme or explore a path,” explains MacKenzie as we talk about the band’s recent evolutions.

“With ‘Quarters’ we were trying to explore longer song formats without going into heavy music. We wanted to make it melodic but also drearily repetitive and see what that does to people’s brains. It has been the most jammy record we’ve done in a lot of ways – the songs weren’t really written before we recorded them, we just went to the studio with these ideas and tried them out in whole heap of different ways and stitched them together later.”

The reason behind this radical change of style is as much to do with reaching a creative dead end as it is searching out new sonic horizons. “‘Mind Fuzz’ was the record we worked on the most and spent the most energy on,” MacKenzie offers,

t h e s l eev e t o ‘P a p er Mâ c h é D r eam B a l l o on ’ , ‘Qu a r t er s ’ a n d K i n g G i zza r d ’ s ‘T h e D aw n o f G i zzf es t ’ f a n zi n e, a l l d es i g n e d b y J a s o n Ga l ea .

thoughtfully. “We spent a lot of time touring, both in Australia and overseas and I suppose we’d burned ourselves out in a way. I think we naturally gravitated towards doing something that was a bit more relaxed, a bit more chilled and even a bit more free. With ‘Quarters’ none of us knew any of the songs until three days before we were meant to record – it was really creative way of working and actually quite liberating: definitely a cool way to make a record.”

As well as exploring new horizons for the band, ‘Quarters’ has also had the unintended consequence of expanding King Gizzard’s critical appeal, with the record even being nominated for ‘Best Jazz Album’ at this year’s ARIA Awards. “That was surprising, I never would’ve considered it a jazz album,” laughs MacKenzie when I mention it. “There’s definitely some jazz influences in

there, but by the modern definition of jazz, it’s definitely not jazz. But, y’know, I’m flattered we were nominated, but I don’t think we’ll win – though I’m sure the rest of the nominees are all horrified.”

‘Paper Mache Dream Balloon’ is an even more radical sounding record for King Gizzard than ‘Quarters’. While the latter saw the band take their conceptual approach to record-making in strange new directions, ‘Paper Mache’ sees the group completely reject the whole idea of conceptual music. Bursting with delicate pop hooks, sunshine melodies and joyous flute and clarinet solos, it’s almost the complete opposite to the hard-rocking space rock the band has made their name with.

“I guess they both kind of explore the quieter side of the band,” says MacKenzie in his typically understated way. “‘Paper Mache’, again, comes back to being a bit bummed out with the way we were making records. After ‘Quarters’ we immediately began work on another heavy, concept album but found that we’re a bit tired of making concept albums. Sometimes intellectualising rock and roll is kind of dumb, and I think we needed a break from doing that stuff and this was the break.”

The development of King Gizzard’s visual identity over the last 12 months has been as remarkable as their sonic evolution. Beginning as a conceptual project, the band’s sonic exploration has often been linked with a strong sense of artistic direction, and you can always count on the band to package their records in a bold sleeve. “It’s always been important to us to work with people who get where we’re coming from in a visual sense. It’s

something we’ve always thought about, and it’s funny how seeing a visual interpretation of music can sometimes change the way you hear it,” stresses MacKenzie, who is keen to link King Gizzard’s artwork to the music. “Humans are visual animals; it’s our primary sense. As much as most of us love music, we still visualise everything and it’s interesting and cool to manipulate that idea.”

From the start, the band has worked almost exclusively with Melbournebased artist Jason Galea, who has built a striking visual language for the band.

Mixing old horror tropes and Saturday morning cartoons, his warped pastiche of the psychedelic record covers of the late ’60s and early ’70s is as recognisable as a part of King Gizzard as the band’s love of hypnotic space rock.

“He’s a very clever man,” beams MacKenzie as the conversation turns to the band’s long running relationship.

“He tours with us and does our light show and is a big part of the band. He’s always involved in what we’re working on and what direction we’re going in and we usually have some concepts and ideas for the visuals long before a record is finished.”

Describing the band’s relationship with Galea as “very hand in hand”, MacKenzie is fascinated to see how the

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artist has began to quietly subvert his own back catalog with the artwork for King Gizzard’s last two records. “I can’t take any credit and Jace is really amazing and what he does,” he says excitedly. “With ‘Quarters’, it’s got the four panels and each one represents each of the songs with lots of subtle references to the songs. With ‘Paper Mache’ I was showing Jace some of the early demos of some of the songs, he got really pumped on this idea of making these little, tiny plaster models of us. It had this weird, quaint model trainset kind of vibe.”

So if 2015 has been a something of a holiday for the band, will 2016 see them getting back into ‘heavy’ music?

It’s a prospect that MacKenzie is clearly excited about. “We were always supposed to release a heavy record straight after ‘Quarters’, so it was always the next logical step,” he says.

“I think one of the guys was pretty wasted at the Australian Independent Music Awards and he gave some potentially true or potentially sarcastic comments. I think he said it was ‘heavier than Slayer’ which is definitely not true, and musically unlistenable, which is pretty funny. I’ve got a soft spot for Motorhead and things like that, but yeah, we’re not going to suddenly go heavy metal.”

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jor dan asher aka bo o ts o n t he por ch of h is e agle rock stu dio, L os A nge le s .

Who the hell is Boots?

Sam Walton went to LA to spend the day with Jordan Asher – the man who co-wrote Beyoncé’s eponymous album, has produced FKA Twigs and Run The Jewels, and is the most enigmatic new talent in pop Photography: nathaniel wood / writer: sam walton

When Jordan Asher was eleven years old, he chucked a fire extinguisher through a plate glass window. He was alone, having a bad day and wanted to see what would happen. As he watched the pane shatter, a baby started crying across the street; Asher sat down on the kerb and calmly waited for the City of Miami Police Department to turn up.

He received a community service sentence and was made to repair the window.

Thirteen years later, after relocating to New York to try and make it in music, Asher – now going only by the name Boots – received an email from one of Beyoncé’s fixers inviting him to attend a week-long writing session with Mrs Carter herself. He was living predominantly out of the back of his van, occasionally sofa-surfing, and doing bar work to make ends meet.

One week with Beyoncé became two; by the end of the second, Jay-Z had signed Boots to the publishing arm of his Roc Nation entertainment business.

Six months after that, on 13 December 2013, Beyoncé’s eponymous fifth album appeared, unannounced, on iTunes. It sold 1.2 million copies in its first week, and Boots, still entirely unknown, was

credited as co-writer and producer on nine of its tracks. In the small handful of media appearances he was obliged to give over the subsequent months, Asher talked gushingly about working with Beyoncé but refused under persistent questioning to reveal how someone living on the side of a street in Brooklyn had managed to get the attention of American pop’s biggest star. Initially, he even declined to confirm his real name.

The past two years of sporadic, gently probing interviews, alongside carefully triangulated Googling by gossip blogs and rabid Beyoncé fansites, have unearthed splinters of Boots’ biography. He spent his late teens in sub-par blues rock bands in Miami; he had a brief buzz of indiepop success in New York hype band Blonds; he toyed with becoming a chef when no-one was answering his calls in music. However, Asher himself has remained deliberately opaque on the most tantalising aspects of his – superficially, at least – remarkable story, clearly relishing the mythbuilding and the sewing-circle rumours that ensue. It’s a clever trick: now with his own debut album, ‘Aquaria’, primed for release, Asher’s

stubborn secrecy has rendered him far more intriguing than most of his tellall peers. Then again, perhaps it’s less a trick, more just how Jordan Asher operates: aloof and provocative, with the sly smile of someone in possession of a master plan.

This is a story about the sort of personality that performs knowingly goading, very public stunts for no greater reason than to garner wider attention and to generate curiosity in himself. This is the story about a day spent in Los Angeles with the superstar collaborator who acts entirely on his own terms. This is a story about one of the most inscrutable men currently operating in pop.

T

he lobby of The Line hotel in Koreatown, LA, is the sort of vast space that hipster hoteliers love to declutter.

In one corner there’s a bijou cocktail bar. In the other, there’s a takeaway bakery counter selling “LA’s best cookies” alongside live-clean smoothies that come in flavour combos like green apple with kale and celery. Between them is a set of

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minimalist couches under abstract photographs of empty swimming pools, and it’s here that I have been told to meet Jordan Asher, at midday.

From here, I’m informed, we’ll go to Asher’s studio, a couple of blocks over, where he recorded much of ‘Aquaria’, eat lunch together, and then Asher will show me round Koreatown, where he also has an apartment, while we talk. A couple of minutes before midday, I take a pew.

It’s a seasonal 32ºC and sunny, and hotel guests are coming and going from the lobby in t-shirts and shorts.

Even the bellboys are in gentle slacks and open shirts. Just before 12:30pm, a short, lean man walks in wearing a sharply fitted charcoal suit over a jet black dress shirt done up to the collar.

His jacket is buttoned, and the gold buckles on his patent leather boots shimmer in the lobby’s sunlight. Not looking around, he takes a seat and stares blankly into the middle distance.

Given Asher’s enigmatic approach to publicity, it’s unsurprising that there aren’t many photographs of him in circulation. What’s more, those that are tend to picture him in dramatic chiaroscuro, wrapped in polythene or with a hood over his face, so I’m

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anticipating there being an element of guesswork to our introduction. As it turns out, it doesn’t take Holmesian intuition to deduce which of the 15 or so people present in the lobby left their apartment that morning with the intention of exhibiting themselves as a pop star.

“Jordan?” I offer, with a smile.

“Great, I thought it was you,” replies Asher to a point just over my right shoulder, without removing his sunglasses. He shakes my hand, and continues. “I’ve just got back from tour, so I want to go and see some art.

You want to come to LACMA? Mat will drive us.” Mat is Boots’ PR guy, waiting outside in the sort of estate car on monster-truck wheels that would draw withering looks in British towns, but which in LA feels as natural as a cop’s holstered handgun. “Sure,” I say.

Asher instructs me to ride up front with Mat, while he stretches out in the back.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a grand, modernist building on LA’s Miracle Mile, the largest of several public museums and arts institutions in the area, and is currently hosting an exhaustive retrospective of the architect Frank Gehry, full of expressive sketches and meticulous architectural models. As we walk from the car park, I compliment Asher on how well turned out he is. “I’m done with wearing the same shit every day,” he says, not quite accepting the compliment, explaining that on tour he wore the same t-shirt every night for six weeks. “So this is just what I thought I’d wear today.”

Asher buzzes around the exhibition with his shades on and jacket done up, ten paces ahead of me and Mat. He glances briefly at each object, nodding sagely, while other visitors eye him up quizzically, wondering if he might be a “someone”. Periodically, he turns round to engage us about a particularly inspirational drawing, or to remark at how cool it is that the hundred or so trees in one maquette are made simply

from scrunched-up green crepe paper and brown lollipop sticks. He professes admiration that Gehry must have made and placed each individual tree himself, ignoring the accompanying giant photographs of the architect’s studio teaming with scalpel-wielding assistants.

W

e speed back into Koreatown, and out the other side. As we join the lunchtime traffic on the hulking Glendale Freeway that crosses the dried-up Los Angeles River and snakes out behind the Hollywood Hills, Asher tells me that we’re heading for a studio in Eagle Rock, a neighbourhood 15 miles north-east into the sprawl of LA from where we initially arranged to meet. I start to get the impression that all the plans that were hatched in advance were never anything more than a diversion tactic; realistically, we were always going to be at the mercy of Asher’s whim.

Given his past, though, that’s to be expected: Asher has always bounced from place to place as he saw fit, never wishing to be pinned down by anything too structural. He started playing in bands when he was 18, and as soon as he “figured out how to tour” he left south Florida for the first time, only returning to generate enough cash to get out again. When he made it to Atlanta, he “couldn’t believe there were places like that out there”, and became even more determined: “I thought, I’m going back, I’m getting as many jobs as I can, I’m going to save up as much money as I can and if I’ve got enough for New York, I’m going to New York.”

By 2007, aged 20, New York is where he’d arrived. Predictably, Asher’s work-to-live approach is what led to him living out of a his van, driving around Brooklyn each night looking for friendly side streets. “But at least I wasn’t doing the nine-to-five,” he

replies, when asked what benefits his homelessness afforded him. “At least I wasn’t doing that. Nine-to-fives always made me want to blow my brains out, because the immediate question I had was ‘why are we doing this?’ Because we have to pay bills? No, we don’t. We don’t have to do anything we don’t want to do. I’d rather be uncomfortable and doing what I really wanted than be worried about losing a job, and then worried about keeping an apartment if I lose that job.”

A month’s work here and there, pot-washing and bar-tending, suited Asher far better. “It was easier for me to just budget out my life based on what I needed and what I didn’t need,” he explains. “Do you need food? Yes. Do you need water? Yes. Do you need to lay down and sleep somewhere? Yes, sometimes.”

He pauses, admiring his own puritanism. “That’s pretty much still how my life goes. It’s still where I base myself from.”

We’re finally in Asher’s studio, sitting on either end of a luxuriously wide, low-slung couch, surrounded by mountains of exotic musical instruments and equipment. Before the studio was Asher’s, it belonged to Dangermouse; before that, the “fourth Beastie Boy” Mario Caldato Jr had the keys. For a man in possession of an immaculately tailored suit and

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membership to LA’s biggest art gallery to sit in his own musical palace and insist he only cares about life’s bare essentials is clearly a touch disingenuous, I suggest. “Well, normally I don’t wear suits,” he counters, “but what you’ve got to remember is that I’ve only got to this point of comfort in my life on my own terms.” It’s the least cryptic thing he’s said all day.

N

ot long after Asher arrived in New York, he adopted his childhood nickname of Boots – on account of his garish basketball footwear – and quit playing in bands. “I couldn’t stand having bandmates anymore,” he says, plainly. “People kept injecting too much of themselves into a song, just for the sake of injecting themselves. It was all ‘my guitar’s not loud enough’ – and I’d be like, fuck off man, you’re not listening to the whole song. I mean, I’m a greater-good, best-forthe-song kind of person.”

Obviously, ego levels in any band are a subjective phenomenon, and there’s every chance that, given Asher’s bombproof self-belief, his stated desire of wanting the best for a song simply manifested itself in the elimination of musicians he perceived as less able.

BOOTS a t the p ian o and against the wh i t e wall of his st u di o, wh ic h was for me r ly owne d b y Dange r mo use

After all, here’s a man who exhibits a preternatural level of musical selfconfidence: he recalls entirely unselfconsciously teaching himself to play the guitar in the space of a single morning, before school (“I just looked at it thinking, if you put your hands somewhere on this, it’s going to make a sound, and then it clicked and I thought ‘I can play this thing,’ immediately”), and says he mastered the programming of a Roland 808 drum machine, with a click of his fingers, “just like that”.

But whatever his reasons, striking out alone under a new name gave Asher a renewed lease of musical life.

Free of imposed band roles, he felt for the first time that his complex ideas had time and space to breathe. “It was then that I started doing my best work,” he says, “and it was that work which eventually got me an email from the Beyoncé folks.”

As he says the B-word – the first time she’s arisen in conversation – Asher’s tone shifts. Up to now, he’s been cooperative but distant, a study in combined control freakery and social unease played out in streams of consciousness, or in tinkling at his piano. Now, however, Asher looks focussed, as if ready for battle. His eyes widen a touch, and he sits forward in anticipation of my next question.

“Since you bring it up,” I begin, “I see you’ve made the truth about exactly how your music got in front of Beyoncé into something of a $64,000 question. But…” “$64,000!?” he corrects me. “It’s the million-dollar question, man!”

I smile, and press on. “But instead of that, what I’d actually like to know is…”

“You feel lucky right now, don’t you?” he interrupts again. “You’re rolling the dice!” We both laugh at the ridiculousness of his excitement, combined with the futility of any direct questioning.

“I know you’re not going to tell me who hooked you two up,” I admit.

“But while we’re on the topic,” I ask, opportunistically, “am I right in thinking you’re old friends with a guy called Gambles?”

Matthew “Gambles” Siskin is a New York socialite, songwriter and web designer who has been cited in various profiles as belonging to Beyoncé’s inner circle. At the ‘Beyoncé’ launch party in December 2013, Siskin tweeted a picture of Asher with the caption, “Celebrating with my dear friend BOOTS who wrote and co produced 80% of the album.” (The tweet has subsequently been deleted,

along with Siskin’s entire account.)

Asher doesn’t answer. “You knew Gambles before you got involved with Beyoncé, right?” I ask.

He shrugs coquettishly. “Did I?” “I don’t know,” I say. “I’m asking you.”

“You’re asking me,” he echoes, narrowing his eyes, “if I knew him beforehand.” A smirk crosses Asher’s face. “Maybe,” he says. “It’s possible.

It’s quite possible.”

As far as revelations go, “quite possible” will do. (Later in our conversation, Asher inadvertently confirms that Siskin’s Upper East Side sofa was one of his regular crash pads after moving to the city, and that he did know him well before Beyoncé

came calling. He declines to confirm anything more.) It’s an enjoyable, light-hearted exchange, but while the identity of Asher’s matchmaker is an absorbing treasure hunt for both parties, it’s also a textbook MacGuffin.

Far more interesting is why Asher has made so much of the secrecy.

I suggest two possible options: that the Beyoncé connection is so embarrassingly dorky, or nepotistic, that it would strip Asher of his credibility, or that Asher’s whole rags to riches tale is bogus marketing fodder.

“Well the first one’s reasonable,” he concedes. “I’m sure there are people who are embarrassed that they met their significant other through Tinder

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or whatever. And like that, this is a story that I’m happy to tell only to my friends and family, but that’s all.

“Like, I wouldn’t tell you where or when the first time me and my girlfriend realised we were in love. I wouldn’t tell you where the first time we kissed was, or the first time we had sex, because you’re a stranger,” he continues. “We live in a day and age where everyone feels like they have to know everything. The idea that it’s possible to go from being a homeless street rat to working on a top-level thing is exactly the reason why people mustn’t know everything.”

I ask him to clarify that last sentence, but he declines. I suggest that it’s unusual to associate a big

�

career break – normally an inescapably public thing – with something as intimate and private as falling in love.

“But they’re both things that you think about since being a kid,” he insists. “Falling in love versus the first time you have an opportunity and a chance to work on something that you want to work on. And I never thought that my world would cross with [Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s] world, so when it did, it hit me like a ton of bricks.”

Asher then drifts into the story of their first meeting – he was wearing his best suit, Blue Ivy’s playpen was in one corner of the studio, he decided just to be true to himself – but the ardent description of the moment doesn’t ring true. For one, he has been publicly ambivalent towards Beyoncé before and since working with her: he told Florida’s Palm Beach New Times in January 2012, while being interviewed about his short-lived Blonds project, that “singers like Beyoncé are good, but they’ve never impressed me because they don’t have too much character beyond just being able to sing their ass off”, and admits to me later that although he “liked a lot of [Beyoncé’s] singles, the albums never really hit me. I’ll go on record and say this and have every person in Beyoncé’s fan club want to fucking kill me.”

For another, though, Boots is happiest working autonomously; the idea of being in thrall to any other musical project is alien to him. “I’m grateful for the opportunity that Beyoncé gave me, but I never wanted to produce anyone else’s album except my own,” he says, while batting away the suggestion that his secrecy surrounding Beyoncé is masking a great big phony marketing story. “I mean, I’m not a fucking Lana Del Rey. That nearly makes me angry enough to want to tell you how it all happened!

But actually I couldn’t give a fuck if people think I’m real or not, because I know how real I am. If people listen to the music, they’ll hear I’m real. I’m straight up. We don’t need another plastic, fake idea in front of our faces; we need people who are telling us the truth, and I’ll keep doing that.”

Of course, the “truth” in pop music is a philosophically slippery concept.

Asher undoubtedly talks a great game, but just like Dylan, Bowie, NWA or even the X-Factor before him, his “truth” is no more than his own carefully curated version of the truth, merely context to be drip-fed over his music as it suits him, just as he’s dodged some of my questions, and omitted information from answers to others. That’s his prerogative, obviously, and actually far more fun

will, his enthusiasm for selfactualisation is understandable. The only issue, I suggest, is that it’s alarmingly cynical.

“I’m not trying to convince anyone that the world is shit,” he reassures me.

“I’m just saying that there are people out there that will try to take you down, and I’m saying beware of those people. That’s all I’m saying.”

“ “It’s the million-dollar question, man! You feel lucky right now, don’t you? You’re rolling the dice” than an act baring all on Twitter. But to insist that he’s telling the whole truth is kind of rich.

“No, I mean in my music,” he fires back. “Everything you need to know about me is in my music. Everything that I need to say or have wanted to say is in there.” With that, he gets up and walks to the studio door. “I need to use the restroom.”

A

s Asher returns, he points a finger at me. “Carefully curated version of the truth,” he quotes me. “Explain yourself.” He’s not affronted, rather puzzled, as if, up to now, he thinks he’s been 100% candid. We discuss the tradeoff between honesty and privacy, and whether he considers himself to be a public figure, how much context is needed to help understand art and how shocked he was to suddenly become hounded, both online and in real life, the minute the Beyoncé album dropped. “I just wanted to reset,” he pleads. “I didn’t want to be known for anything I had done before.”

Asher is dismissive of all his preBoots musical past, and has done his best to purge it from the Internet.

Google his old bands and you encounter broken YouTube links and “not available” Spotify tags gently rocking on the hinges of dusty blog posts from 2009. Try and buy anything

by Stonefox or Blonds or Young Circles or Blonde Fuzz, and you’re met with 404 errors and “notify me when back in stock” buttons.

That revisionism, alongside his insistence that becoming a producerfor-hire was an accident, makes ‘Aquaria’ something of a Year Zero for Boots. It certainly feels like a debut

album: full of ambitious statements and a ready-made worldview, it plays seductively like something that’s been dreamed about for years. Drums clatter around imposing guitar lines reminiscent of DJ Shadow and Massive Attack, and despite the intensity of some songs, Asher manages to imbue the record with a grand sense of space.

A pair of tracks towards the end, too, invoke Thom Yorke’s digitally fractured lullabies, and the overall effect is an engaging, haunting, conscientiously constructed if stylistically incoherent album full of unfettered natural talent.

Thematically, though, ‘Aquaria’ is not a restful experience. There are bulletholes in chests and sewn-up eyelids, zombies on the evening news and legs being pulled from the bodies of bugs. A fug of dystopian paranoia lingers. It’s alienated, detached and cut off. Why? “Because I feel alienated and detached and cut off,” says Asher, bluntly. “My whole manifesto is that we should be taking our world back.

I’m talking to every person who’s been told that they’re not allowed to do something, or that there’s a wrong way to do something. We’re all held down by old ideals, and that’s not fair to people who are intelligent enough and driven enough to fix their own lives.

People have the tools to do that themselves, but they’re told no, take this pill, eat this shit instead.”

It’s imagery normally reserved for street preachers, or the kind of politico wacko who crashes out early from the US Presidential race after talking too much about witches. Asher constantly refers to “people”, too, but it’s clear he’s talking about himself. Then again, given his recent past, and the success he’s largely brought on himself in that time through little more than sheer

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L

ive in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard,” advises Baz Luhrmann’s novelty ‘Sunscreen Song’ of folksy truisms.

Jordan Asher ditched New York in February. He moved to Los Angeles to get into writing film soundtracks and screenplays, buoyed by the success of his musical collaborations (he’s also become the right-hand-man of Run The Jewels, and producer to FKA Twigs) and his newfound solo incarnation. He also felt that in New York, he kept “going toe-to-toe with the city”, and was tired of fighting it.

“That city will either crush people into a piece of coal, or into a diamond,” he explains. “It just depends on how you do under that pressure.

“I’ve always been the kind of person that takes to that kind of pressure nicely,” he adds. With that in mind, I suggest that perhaps LA will suit him. After all, despite the globally exported image of California, all healthy living, beach life and yearround sunshine, Tinseltown isn’t the most welcoming of places to a newcomer. Asher is equivocal. “I think anywhere that your feet can take you, you can go,” he says. “That applies to New York, or LA, anywhere. And that’s kinda metaphorical for my whole life: you don’t need anything or anyone apart from your will.”

After our interview, as Jordan Asher stands in the parking lot outside his studio being photographed in the evening sunshine, I remember something he said about first meeting Beyoncé. “When I started working with her, I wore my one amazing suit,” he said. “If you’re wearing a suit, you feel like you’ve got an aura to you. It’s like a great big shield against real life, and you’re presenting what you want to be.” As he smoothes out his jacket in anticipation of another pose, the penny drops, and suddenly I wonder whether all of today was one elaborate performance.

“Live in Southern California once, but leave before it makes you soft,” runs Lurhmann’s follow-up line.

Earlier, Boots compared himself to a diamond; softness is a while off yet.

Reviews / Albums

0 7/ 1 0

JennyLee Right On! Ro u gh T r ade

By Hen ry wi lki nson. I n store s d e c 11

When you think about it, it’s surprising that a band as influential as Warpaint have only released two albums. Having recently celebrated their tenth anniversary, a decade in which they’ve established a name synonymous with modern incarnations of dreamy, understated indie-groove, it’s quite incredible that their output has been so paltry.

With a third effort not on the immediate horizon either it’s lucky that someone decided to try their hand at a solo effort; ‘Right On!’ is the work of bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg, and with it we catch a glimpse of the dark beating heart of Warpaint.

Released under the shortened moniker Jennylee, ‘Right On!’ sounds, for the most part, like what you’d expect. An often stripped back affair with guitars frequently overshadowed by bass, percussion

and the silent voids between sounds, it’s the result of taking the bassist out of the band and giving her free reign and centre stage. Like the cover art, Lindberg stands alone amidst ever encroaching darkness, producing bursts of colour from deep inside the night with a half knowing, playful smirk. ‘He Fresh’ stands out in this way for its shuffling RnB beat and dead-eyed, pouting croon: “He’s smooth like butter/I’m rubbing over my skin/He’s so fresh/He’s so fresh.”

It’s stylish, sexy, and brilliantly confused, like Jessie Ware playing dress up with Robert Smith’s wardrobe. It’s the midpoint of the album, sandwiched between opening and closing slow-burners ‘Blind’ and ‘Real Life’, which establish the album as taking place in some kind of dreamland or imagined Narnia.

Personal ingredients brought to the table and usually diluted down in

Warpaint reveal themselves starkly and unimpeded throughout – Siouxsie and the Banshees,The Cure and Joy Division are the most noticeable tags left behind on the cold and barren warehouses of ‘Right On!’, ‘Boom Boom’ and ‘Never’ being particularly stark. Both are built around chugging basslines and minimal yet precise instrumentation, the latter striking ‘Unknown Pleasures’ in its tempo and production, and the former sounding even more industrial and bleak as Jenny sings “Society is anxiety” in a vocal all the more ominous for its silken delivery. Everything hangs together delicately and the odd stray note or stunted lead riff adds to the precariousness.

‘Long Lonely Winter’ is similarly sparse, reminiscent of those artists spawned in Warpaint’s wake – Tamaryn, Still Corners etc. – but when those synths

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buzz and the first snare hit rings out, each beat, pulse and pluck leaves behind an inky trail.

In ‘Bully’ this approach strikes out too close to the transitory side of the spectrum and it comes and goes without much impression, but followed up with ‘Riot’ and ‘Offerings’, two fiery Sexwitch incantations, and all is forgotten.

This is the other side to the album – a sinister doppelganger of double tracked yelping and satanic screeching, culminating in the pagan dark-wave of ‘White Devil’. Though it’s cathartic and menacing, it’s also delivered a little through the eyes of childish wonder; the stray giggle halfway through encapsulating this balance that lies at the core of ‘Right On!’s appeal. For every grinding bass line and neo-noir soundscape there’s a splash of child-like frivolity round the corner.

Reviews 08/10

Oneohtrix Point Never Garden of Delete Warp

By S am wa l t on. In sto res No v 13

On Daniel Lopatin’s last record as OPN, 2013’s ‘R Plus Seven’, he managed to squirrel away elegantly tuneful passages of electronica within a bramble of synthesised sonics, and in doing so created a record that felt more like an addictive treasure hunt with which the listener actively engaged, than something passively encountered. On ‘Garden of Delete’, Lopatin repeats this trick, but even more jarringly: the opening ‘Ezra’ interrupts its fizzes of electronics for the kind of darkly evocative guitar figure that DJ Shadow once made his calling card, before diving back into frenetic synth programming; equally, there’s an extraordinary moment midway

through ‘Freaky Eyes’ where the entire ambient throb is overcome by a snippet of balladeering yacht-rock – again, Lopatin lets the sample take over for several seconds, then plunges back into the tangle. The effect is discombobulating, but also quite thrilling: the deliberate, almost virtuoso discord prompts an auditory double take, even on repeated listening, and while it would be a stretch to describe anything on ‘Garden of Delete’ as welcoming, it’s certainly enough to force a level of engagement that’s frequently missing from other records cut from the same musical cloth.

Thankfully, Lopatin doesn’t overplay his hand, and plenty of

‘Garden of Delete’ comprises of consistently knotty and complex electronica with no circus tricks. The album’s centrepiece, ‘Mutant Standard’, cycles through several frenetic movements that each build on the previous one’s harmonic structure until it resembles a distorted bastard of a trance record being played in the woods, at night, by whispering android witches. The inappropriately titled ‘Child of Rage’, too, is a rather beautifully romantic, almost schmaltzy piece of supermelodic composition based around piano and guitar timbres and delicately decayed percussion, and – lest you think Lopatin’s gone soft – ‘I BiteThrough It’ features fearsome,

stabbing barrages of avant garde noise; the attraction lies less in its musical endeavour than in its brazen confrontation.

Much of the music that’s released within the broad genre of experimental electronica suffers from impenetrability due to a lack of human touch and an overly serious, studious approach. Thankfully, Lopatin appears to grasp this, and ‘Garden of Delete’ is a terrific example of a meaty, complex electronic album that employs just enough stylistic quirks to remind you that it’s made by man rather than machine. It bangs and clangs when it needs to, and its densest moments stand up to scrutiny.

A full year after its US release on Goner Records, ‘We Are Nots’ finally arrives in the UK courtesy of Heavenly Recordings. For a more Zeitgeist-reliant band, this break in momentum might well have proved fatal; luckily, the Memphis-based group give precisely zero fucks for fleeting trends, and about as few for our aural well-being.

Like fellow Goner alumni Jay Reatard and Ty Segall, the quartet deal in vehemently lo-fi punk-rock, albeit powered by the righteous

aggression of riot grrrl rather than the testosterone-fuelled fury of the garage tradition. Their Doug Easleyproduced debut is essentially a love letter to the simple pleasures of repetition. This is both as thrilling and exhausting as it sounds.

Most songs follow a similar formula: Charlotte Watson’s breakneck sticks-work is bolstered

by Madison Farmer’s stabbing bass lines, then Alexandra Eastburn trowels on weirdo synth sounds, and Natalie Hoffman tears through

distorted power chords, or lays on discordant guitar effects, and drawls/bellows over the din.

Unfortunately, a large proportion of the lyrics are submerged, muddying the message.

Nots are at their best when they abandon the script entirely, with the brutal brevity of ‘Monochramatic’, or on a terrific Thee Oh Sees-style romp called ‘Televangelist’. It’s a damn shame they don’t deviate more, because 20+ minutes of the same thing is headache-inducing.

06/10

Nots We Are Nots H e ave nl y

By Gemm a S amway s. I n sto res No v 27

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Albums 0 7/ 1 0

0 6/10

07 /10

04/ 10

Traams Modern Dancing

Josephin Öhrn Horse Dance

Ringo Deathstarr Pure Mood

Baron Torpor

fat cat

Ro c k e t

Cl u b AC 30

S va r t

By gu i a c ortas s a. In st o re s no v 13

B y J am e s F . Th o m ps o n. I n s t o re s N o v 6

By h ayl e y s c o tt . I n s t o re s N o v 2 0

B y J o e G o g g in s . I n s t o r es N o v 6

In the recent post-punk wave, TRAAMS are Britain’s golden ticket to break the American and Canadian monopoly. Spinning this, the band’s second album on Fat Cat Records, Ought’s is inevitably the first name that comes to mind: the trio from Chichester follow the Canadians’ footsteps into contemporary neurosis, but without the tension and claustrophobia of their production.

And if ‘Succulent Thunder Anthems’ and ‘Sister’ are the closest they get to the fast paranoia of their fellows, in the remaining tracks of the album Stu Hopkins and his bandmates sharpened their indie-rock sound to a fast post-punk.The kraut influences of previous record ‘Grin’ have gotten a bit lost in the process, but the pop echoes that always marked TRAAMS’ songs are still there to add a melodic touch to a songwriting that closely resembles Modest Mouse’s, as they openly admit themselves. The slow, hypnotic sounds of the title track stand side by side with the fast guitars of ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme Gimme (Love)’ and ‘Two Sides’ for 39 minutes of strong ’90s rock revival.

Things like omens ought to matter when your band is a psych-rock outfit with a name lifted from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and last year, they certainly looked good for Josefin Öhrn and Fredrik Joelson. The ‘Diamond Waves’ EP pointed to a lineage running from scuzzy Hawkwind-style wig-outs and tribalism through to Trish Keenan’s delicate cooing with Broadcast and bagged the Swedish pair a live slot supporting acid-fried compatriots Goat in the process. Yet here we are with a first full-length which betrays the early promise of all that freeflowing psychedelia and melodicism in favour of monochrome motorik that would be better suited to chugging along the M1 to than dropping acid on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. Sometimes the refracted krautrock works, like on ‘Talk’ – which nakedly lifts its rhythm from Can’s ‘Paperhouse’ wholesale – along with lead single ‘Take Me Beyond’ and the dance-punkish ‘Green Blue Fields’. In the main though, it’s easy to wonder why Öhrn and Joelson didn’t just follow last year’s omens.

Even before the release of their debut EP in 2007, Ringo Deathstarr were understandably lumped in with the endemic ‘nu gaze’ scene, infiltrated by bands that merely showed a predilection for reverb and distortion.

Of course, there’s nothing ‘nu’ about this, but shoegaze’s fuzzy, spectral exterior has never really gone away, and the most bands can do now is retrofit it into something of their own.

Ringo Deathstarr have always managed to do this with conviction, and you can always tell the difference between them and their contemporaries. ‘Pure Mood’ carries on sonically where 2012’s ‘Mauve’ left off, but it’s also the dark, pensive counterpart. The aptly titled ‘Dream Again’ tricks you into thinking this record is a ghostly, low-key affair, until you’re hit with the dirge-y ‘Heavy Metal Suicide’, which is more in line with the album’s overall tone, while ‘Stare AtThe Sun’ has a unique pop sensibility that’s unlike anything the band has previously done. Ringo Deathstarr combine angst with fragility here, and it’s a daring, brilliant hybrid. ‘Pure Mood’ is surprisingly genre-defiant.

A word to the wise – probably best not to describe your own album as a ‘fully realised masterpiece’ unless it is, you know, a fully realised masterpiece. On this second album, Baron have fallen into exactly that easily avoidable trap, although credit’s due for their having labelled it appropriately; ‘Torpor’ is a fitting title for an album on which they’ve wrongly assumed that recording (partially) in a medieval hall and letting everything unfold at a snail’s pace is enough to generate genuine atmosphere.

Baron do show occasional flashes of understanding the power of the slow-burn (‘Stry’, far and away the standout, is a stormer), which makes it frankly baffling that they’ve given themselves over to self-indulgent noodling in such wholesale fashion elsewhere.

‘Mark Maker’ never gets going, ‘Wild Cry’’s twinkling synths are a tinny distraction, and, on the predictable ‘Deeper Align’, the Brighton outfit sound as if they’re second-guessing themselves. It’s this lack of conviction throughout that trips ‘Torpor’ up; it’s barely even fully realised, let alone a masterpiece.

Former Très.b guitarist Olivier Heim’s debut finds the Dutch American in transition. His previous solo incarnation, released under the pseudonym Anthony Chorale throughout 2012 and 2013, was a folksy affair, but ‘A Different Life’ sees him dip his toe in sunnier waters, taking a diversion into hazy, soulful pop.

Much of what you need to know about this album is held in the opening track. ’Far Apart’ sees Heim drench his vocals in reverb and

washes of languorous rhythm, driving the song along with a springy guitar hook. Heim then rinses and repeats that formula with varying pace, all the way to the final bars of closer ‘Drive By’, which is essentially a bit of a problem.

There are highlights (the mournful surf-rock of ‘Italy’, the ambient flutterings on ’Dive’ and the shimmering ’80s jam of ’A Different Life’) but it’s hard to pinpoint the pinnacle of the album, especially when songs begin to feel like they’re

fading into a single morass somewhere between ‘Ocean’ and ‘Pasadena’.

Heim’s sound falls somewhere on a spectrum between Washed Out and Mac DeMarco: he’s looser than the former but lacks the clever conceptualism, and cleaner than the latter but lacks the wit and sheer lifeforce that masks the Canadian’s limitations. The end result is a pleasant thirty-minute hazy pop ramble, which might be rather charming, but is also rather unremarkable.

06/10

Oliver Heim A Different Life Oh r ec or di n gs By tom f en wi c k. In sto re s D e c 4

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Reviews 06/10

0 7/10

08 /10

06/ 10

Disappears Low: Live in Chicago

Chorusgirl Chorusgirl

Sim Hutchins I Enjoy to Sweep a Room

LeRoy Skläsh

Son i c ca th edr al

fo rtun a po p

N o p a i n i n po p

Sc h am o n i m u s ik

By da n i el Dy la n wray. I n sto re s nov 20

B y g e mma s a mwa ys . In s to re s no v 1 3

By d e re k rob e rts o n. I n s t o r es n o v 1 3

B y r eef y o u n is . I n s t o r es de c 4

It doesn’t need stating what a potentially perilous move covering one of the greatest albums of all time in its entirety is, especially when its

by David Bowie. We know it, Disappears know it. Their impetus for doing so – beyond for fun or tribute – however, remains a little murky. Sadly, not a great deal of fun is had from the off. ‘Low’ has always very much been a record of two halves and Disappears’ interpretation of it is no different.With the exception of a rousing, Wire-esque ‘What in the World’, the A-Side here is a scrappy, stick-to-the-original rendition that offers little other than bemusement and disappointment, including a straight-up awful version of ‘Sound and Vision’, but once they are free from the more structured material the group do offer some interesting re-workings, with ‘Warszawa’ aligning with what Martin Hannett might have extracted from the album when applying it to Joy Division’s aesthetic, whilst ‘Weeping Wall’ broods with dystopian menace.

Comparisons to the original are futile but, in short, the second half is worth investigating.

Following releases by all-male quartet Girl Band and lone female U.S. Girls, this mixed-gender, female-fronted four-piece are the latest act to confuse music writers everywhere with their wilfully misleading moniker. To Chorusgirl’s credit, they’ve then incorporated another layer of complexity via the nervy, androgynous tones of Silvi Wersing, which are a double-take between Pete Shelley, Ellis Jones of Trust Fund and Lush’s Miki Berenyi.

The influence of Lush here extends far beyond wispy, multi-tracked harmonies. It’s there, in layer upon layer of lovingly-smudged guitars and in the opalescent shimmer of melodies like ‘Sweetness and Light’, while counteracting any potentially cloying, indie-pop sweetness are Wersing’s words, which are variously rooted in isolation, heartache and grief.

There’s some lovely songwriting here (see the noir-ish surf-pop of ‘No Moon’ and the squalling outro of ‘This Town Kills’) and most of it falls in the first half of the record. If Chorusgirl can just improve their stamina, their second album should be very special indeed.

One glance at some of the song titles on Sim Hutchin’s debut album is enough to tell you that here’s an artist attempting to be more political than your average rising IDM talent.

A visual artist as much as a musician, his aesthetic and music chime perfectly with his subject matter; ambient electronica and experimental techno that is by turns woozy, unnerving, and steeped in feelings of Millennial malaise. Part post-club come down, part William Basinski transposed to the grime of inner city London, there’s a trancelike quality to these nine tracks; an incessant buzz bubbling under the stuttering beats and glitch-heavy effects. Lovingly produced, too, there’s a richness here that eschews the cold, metallic sheen of much of Hutchins’ peers, and it sounds fantastic through headphones – that locked-in sense of claustrophobia perfectly reflecting the record’s overall mood and themes. Original without being difficult, enjoyable while being distinctive; that ‘I Enjoy To Sweep A Room’ triumphs without compromise is a testament to just how assured Hutchins has become.

Some albums feel made to play out in the confines of headphones and it’s here, trapped somewhere between the neurons and grey matter, that the lo-fi funk and lowend electronics of ‘Skläsh’ satisfyingly thrum. The work of Leroy Skläsh (aka Leo Hopfinger), his mix of dubby krautrock, erratic instrumentals, and experimental jams create a constant sense of winding down, as this odds and ends collection of tracks happily drift with the unencumbered spirit of a bedroom recording. “I see this album more like a collection, a musical chronicle… like a DJ who is digging some strange tunes, no matter which era they are from,” he says. It’s a sentiment that gives ‘Skai’ its chiming, clattering pace, ‘The Beach’ its wonky ebb, and leaves ‘Untitled Long Time’ just a 4/4 beat away from being something unassumingly great. And while it’s an arcane, easy-going approach that supplies plenty of confined charm, the lack of direction makes ‘Skläsh’ a curiously diverse journey to anywhere that’s ultimately heading nowhere in particular.

When Alan Vega compliments Alex Chilton halfway through the relentless nine-minute chug of ‘Fat City’ (“Cool, Alex!”), you can hear sincerity and surprise in his voice.

‘Cubist Blues’ is littered with candid moments like this – the hour-long album is the sound of three musicians refusing to accept that there could be such a thing as a bad idea.

With Big Star’s Chilton and Ben Vaughn (a sometime Jonathan Richman-alike, who currently makes a living scoring TV shows) switching

between drums, piano and guitar, the only real constant presence is Vega, who does what he does best: be Alan Vega, rockabilly shaman/showman extraordinaire. The pace rarely lets up, though the crawling synth-led ‘Freedom’ – ‘Unchained Melody’ reimagined as David Lynch soundtrack material – may be the best thing here.

As ever, Light In The Attic (working in unison here with Madrid based label Munster Records) have done a great job of rescuing an

obscurity like this – three cult icons improvising over a marathon twoday session – and giving it the respect it deserves. The title, though, is a misnomer. The notion of ‘Cubist Blues’ calls to mind Beefheart at his most, well, Beefhearty. Improvised over two days in 1994 during a pair of marathon sessions, the record is closer in spirit to bebop in its free, sprawling unpredictability. If that sounds completely off-putting, just think of it as a more rock and roll Suicide.

08/10

Alan Vega, Alex Chilton, Ben Vaughn Cubist Blues Lig ht in the atti c By alex wi s g ar d. In sto re s d ec 4

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Albums 0 7/ 1 0

0 5 /10

06 /10

05/ 10

Sievehead Sievehead

Fufanu Few More Days To Go

The Saurs Magic Shape

evi l h oodoo / M il k Ru n

on e l i ttl e i n d i a n

Teeth of the Sea Highly Deadly Black Tarantula

By j ames f . th omp so n. In sto re s De c 5

By chri s wat k e ys . In s to re s No v 2 7

E l S e g ell p r im av er a B y h en r y w ilk in s o n . In s t o r es n o v 2 0

Rocket B y al e x wi s g ard . In s to re s N o v 6

The past few years might have seen a new wave of post-punks crashing across the British indie landscape but none have quite matched the splash made by Leeds-based quintet Eagulls, whose cannonball riffs and glowering attitude have clearly rubbed off on at least one band down the road. A trio of ale-supping skaters going by the mononyms Joe, Bry and Dave (or rather, “Dirdsbead”), Sievehead got their start playing Sheffield DIY punk venue and practice space The Lughole and already have a cassette and 7” to their name, to which can now be added this solid, if slightly derivative, debut LP. Beyond their West Yorkshire forebears, the references are at least impressively diverse, merging gloomy lateseventies local fare like the Comsat Angels (‘Try the Mirror’) with the surf-punk of Agent Orange and the mid-eighties Californian SST label roster (‘Dream Snatchers’, ‘Weakened’). The result is an enjoyable, curiously transatlanticsounding LP that’s equally suited to a sunny skate video soundtrack or a rainy Sheffield commute.

‘Few More Days To Go’ opens with ‘Now’, which sounds like Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster took a couple of tranquilisers, picked up a book about dark melody and headed into the studio. It’s an uncomplicated but many-layered sound that eventually explodes into fiery rock and roll, and is a promising opening to the debut album from Icelandic duo Kaktus Einarsson and Gulli Einarsson.

The pair started out doing experimental techno, so the fact their sound is so conventionally guitarbased is a surprise, but at times they carry it off superbly well (witness the doomy, brooding ‘Circus Life’ that slow-builds to a cataclysmic climax), which makes it all the more disappointing that this album only sporadically reaches such peaks. The ponderous and over-long ‘Blinking’ could well have been left at the rehearsal room, while ‘Plastic People’ sounds like a pastiche of a bad earlyseventies Doors cover band, proving that Fufanu are at their best when fiery, apocalyptic and wordless, like on closing track ‘Goodbye’, which recalls Black Rebel Motorcycle Club at their cool-as-fuck best. Listen selectively.

This might be the most oppressivesounding album of 2015. Every sound on the record – squalling feedback, cavernous drums, even unexpected trumpet interludes (sometimes mariachi, sometimes Last Post) – spews a pall of blackness out of the speakers. While the prevailing atmosphere is more akin to the recent wave of horror soundtrack reissues, ‘Animal Manservant’ and ‘Field Punishment’ are less Death Waltz than death disco. The latter even borders on New Order territory, though this doesn’t exactly seem like an intentional tribute. Eleven minute closer ‘Love Theme for 1984’ expand Teeth of the Sea’s sound even further, a single compelling beam of light breaking through the clouds for the first and only time.The band carry it off well, and only ‘Have You Ever Held a Bird of Prey’ seems indulgent, opening with four minutes of oscillating white noise that sounds like a slow-moving train, which undermines its transition into one of the album’s most sinister synth grooves. Not an album to be taken lightly.

Life seems incredibly simple for Barcelona three piece The Saurs: Form a band, write some songs, put out a few EPs, play some major festivals, record an album and continue to do what you do best. And what exactly do they do best? Freewheeling, twisting garage rock, all screeching guitars, wailing vocals and furious hair-snapping rhythms.

Their garage rock is a kind adorned with posters of The Stooges and Axl Rose, though, and they’re probably too busy playing an old copy of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater to even consider going out surfing. A celebration of head-banging and, to their credit, unpretentiousness, ‘The Magic Shape’ is a debut album that works its way through all of one gear as if any break in tempo will allow the swamp of distortion and feedback to catch up and devour all before it.

There is the psychedelic tinge of ‘Melting Castle’ and… well, that’s mostly it. Undeviating commitment to the cause – you can play pin the tail on the single with the track listing, but the truth is that it’s a cause most of us ditched a while back.

“‘Nothing’ is Kode9’s first solo album,” reads the PR brief that accompanies this release, “and is about nothing.” If this at first seems a little terse, then it’s worth bearing in mind the LP’s context, for this is not a debut in the conventional sense.

Steve Goodman’s long-time collaborator and friend, The Spaceape, aka poet and MC Stephen Gordon, passed away this time last year at the age of just 44, forcing Goodman into a period of

introspection and creative evaluation. Shorn of his music’s voice, he has chosen to foreground the resultant space and silence rather than attempting to plug the gaps, and in doing so he pushes some of the work back on to the listener, encouraging his audience to reflect as well. But while it’s hard to disentangle the work from its biography, it’s easy to see that is yet another remarkably inventive release from a label that specialises in remarkably inventive releases.

‘Nothing’ grafts strangled J-Pop to straight-up grime and dubstep (see ‘Holo,’ ‘Casimir Effect’), while fleeting moments of deconstructed Chicago house (‘Vaccuum packed’, ‘Mirage’) pierce through blocks of static and musique concrète. It’s no surprise that a man who’s written a book on the use of sound in igniting fear has created another bruising, haunting piece of work, but look closer and there’s also a gentleness that sits between the lines of this letter to a lost pal.

08/10

Kode9 Nothing h y per du b By davi d zammi tt. In sto re s n o v 6

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Reviews 09/10

0 5 /10

08 /10

06/ 10

Anna Von Hauswolff The Miraculous

LA Takedown LA Takedown

Suburban Lawns Suburban Lawns

BOOTS AQUARIA

F ur t uri s m o

c o lu mb i a

By G ui a c o rta s sa . I n s t o re s n o v 2 0

B y dav id z amm itt. I n s t o r es N o v 1 3

It takes guts to drop your debut album as a 41-minute single track, even more so when it rarely feels like one. Take L.A. Takedown’s self-titled debut (ultimately the work of Aaron Olson that’s been brought to life with the help of six others) in the normal isolation of your headphones or speakers and it’s a disparate collection of instrumentals ranging from sultry bump ‘n’ grind to buzzing, battling synth. Watch it with its accompanying stream, however, and its audio-visual combination makes perfect sense with footage of LA’s postcard features adding a breezy, sunset context that brings the music to life. In that respect, ‘L.A. Takedown’ is more of an audio-visual project, the two mediums complementing each other but to a point of fatal co-dependence.

Streaming the album ahead of release was smart, but lose the context of the concrete and smog, the sunsets, the sprawl, and the stagnant traffic and ‘L.A. Takedown’ loses the spirit of the city it’s trying to capture. And when that happens, it becomes something else entirely: a score without the story.

Hailing from Long Beach, California, Sue Tissue, Vex Billingsgate, Frankie Ennui, John McBurney and Chuck Roast, aka Suburban Lawns, are the early ’80s best kept secret.

Their only spot of celebrity came in 1980, when Saturday Night Live aired the video Jonathan Demme directed for their track ‘Gidget Goes to Hell’, unveiling a new Californian punk, made of hammering bass and sandy beaches. With this reissue of the band’s self-titled and only album from 1981, New Wave’s sunny side comes back into the light, enhanced by 5 songs from their 1983 ‘Baby’ EP; gems remained hidden until Futurismo’s re-discovery. Putting together the mood of the Pacific Coast with the coeval hitting British sound, and finishing it off with a twist of pop and Tissue’s hollow voice, the band took art punk to a whole new meaning, made of Devo, surf, and trips to (or, rather, in) the desert. Singing of stale Doritos, janitors and computer dates (!), Suburban Lawns add a new point of view to California’s legendary noir facet, leaving a clear lipstick trace in New Wave’s forgotten history.

You might not be aware of it, but you probably already know BOOTS. In fact, if, like me, you enjoy listening to music, you’re probably intimately familiar with his work. A young producer, songwriter and uppercase typography zealot who lists Run The Jewels, FKA Twigs and Beyoncé (including backing vocals on ‘Drunk In Love,’ no less) on an alreadyimpressive curriculum vitae, ‘AQUARIA’ is his debut album proper. And while he’s done a strong job of creating a cohesive sound, the collection stays interesting by nimbly sliding up and down the full spectrum of modern pop. Shades of hip hop (‘Brooklyn Gamma’ and ‘C.U.R.E.’ sound like they were conceived in an RTJ brainstorm), trip hop (see ‘Gallows’), pounding electronica (‘Bombs Away’), straight forward rock (‘In Run Roulette’) and even piano ballads (‘Only’) ensure that boredom is kept from the door.

The fact that BOOTS possesses a tenor vocal remarkably akin to Josh Homme doesn’t hurt. A solid first outing without being brilliant, ‘AQUARIA’ suggests that there’s much more to come.

Like Dananananaykroyd and Does It Offend You, Yeah? before them, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s smirking in-jokey name does them no favours in terms of approachability.

Couple that with ‘Paper Mache Dream Balloon’’s sleeve – an ironically knowing pastiche of 1970s children’s LPs – and presentationally the whole package is in hot water.

That’s a shame, as the Australian seven-piece’s seventh record since 2012 is a quietly inviting, charmingly ramshackle record with far more

warmth, and depth, than its selfsatisfied appearance suggests, as the group strays from its usual garage rock template.

The opening trio of ‘Sense’, ‘Bone’ and ‘Dirt’ all trip along breezily on jazzy flute licks and West Coast psychedelia, while ‘Cold Cadaver’ and ‘NGRI’ contain among them two of 2015’s most insistently endearing melodies; sitar drones fuel ‘Bitter Boogie’’s blues-meetsBeta-Band swagger, ‘Most of What I Like’ is elegantly hazy indie pop, and

the overriding impression is of a group playing within themselves, but deliberately, almost so as to be more welcoming. It’s brief, too, which is a virtue: the lack of bloat gives the record confidence, and also helps render the recurring similar song arrangements as more of a bid for stylistic consistency rather than a paucity of ideas.

It all makes for a loveably quaint and intriguingly skewiff album, at odds with its first impressions: a record to be heard rather than seen.

c i ty s l a n g By der ek r ober tso n. In sto re s nov 13

War. Death. Nature. The weight of history. Big themes to wrestle with in one’s art. Anna von Hausswolff takes on all this and more with ‘The Miraculous’, covering similar territory as PJ Harvey’s ‘Let England Shake’. But where that album was all pastoral elegance and folky introspection, this is an apocalyptic storm, blacking out the sky. From the deep, foghorn blasts that open ‘Discovery’ to ‘Come Wander With Me / Deliverance’’s organ drones and prog-rock guitars, it’s a widescreen, heavy listen. Recorded over five days in Piteå, northern Sweden, on the colossal 9,000-pipe Acusticum Organ, nothing about this album is small; even Hausswolff’s voice has been unleashed, stronger and more confident than on previous album ‘Ceremony’. Most impressive is the way that dialling back the volume doesn’t ease the mood, for the quieter moments carry just as much dark tension; ‘En Ensam Vandrare’, updating Ennio Morricone for the 21st Century, is as haunting as anything here. Brooding, epic, and utterly captivating then; the Dark Side has never sounded so appealing.

Ri bo n B y re e f yo uni s . In s t o re s nov 2 0

08/10

King Gizzard Paper Mache Dream Balloon he av en l y By sam wal ton . In sto re s nov 13

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Albums 06/10

Molly Nilsson Zenith n i g ht s ch oo l By j oe gogg in s . In sto re s ? ? ? ? ? ?

So far, Molly Nilsson has walked very much to the beat of her own drum as far as her solo career’s been concerned. She writes, records and produces her albums entirely by herself in her hometown of Berlin.

Her eclectic mix of pop influences suggests both an admirable imperviousness to current trends and that she places a desire to follow her own musical nose before any other considerations. Lyrically, she evidently has little issue with wearing her heart firmly on her sleeve, and beyond that, the sheer frequency of her output is in itself an indicator of how out of step she seems to be with a musical climate increasingly obsessed with sharp

presentation and strategicallyplanned releases.

In many ways, ‘Zenith’ is not particularly far removed from the rest of Nilsson’s solo work to date – as well as it adhering to the above criteria, it also aims to toe the line between the personal and universal with a complexity that belies its straightforward pop appeal – but it does feel as if she’s trying to make a little bit of a step forward with this album, in terms of immediacy if nothing else.There’s experimentation and dabbling here, sonically speaking, but not to quite the same extent that we’re used to; Nilsson appears to have reined that side of her approach in a little bit, and the

results are mixed in the follow up to her last, faultless EP, ‘Sólo Paraíso – The Summer Songs’.

On the one hand, there’s no question that ‘Zenith’ is a pleasingly cohesive piece of work; the synths are largely chirpy, even if it feels like there’s a touch of foreboding to them here and there – ‘Bus 194 (All There Is)’ is a case in point, whilst the keys match the atmosphere on the introspective ‘H.O.P.E.’. As usual, Nilsson’s detached, almost passive delivery is the record’s one true constant, but the electronic percussion is gentle throughout, too, and there’s a thoughtful, almost brooding mood in evidence from start to finish.

What this also means, though, is that ‘Zenith’ feels a little bit less adventurous than what we’ve grown accustomed to from Nilsson. The calypso-tinged instrumental interlude that pops up around the midpoint, ‘Intermezzo: Palimpsest Galore’, is the only concession to her natural predisposition to stylistic wanderlust, and given that the run of tracks that follows (‘Happyness’, ‘Lovers Are Losers’ and ‘Clearblue’) feel a little too similar for comfort it does have you wondering whether as polished, accomplished and endearingly low-key as ‘Zenith’ is, is Nilsson working with a reduced sonic palette akin to her clipping her own wings.

Prolific is not a word you could use to describe experimental chanteuse Charlotte Marionneau; this is her first album for a decade (her second in total, following ‘I Killed My Best Friend’), notwithstanding a standalone EP released a couple of years back.

An idiosyncratic character who sings in a mixture of French and English and who has a loose and occasional association with My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields, Marionneau’s elusiveness seems to

pervade her music as well as her character. Opener ‘Born To Lie’ is typically ephemeral, and sounds something like Nirvana’s ‘Something In The Way’ sung by a stoned pixie at the bottom of an enchanted glade.

This is swiftly followed by ‘I LoveThe Living You’, a simple but beautiful acoustic effort with plaintive, Elliot Smith-esque vocals, while a high point comes in ‘Le Petit Chevalier’, which is atmospheric and beautiful, something like Nick Cave at his storytelling best.

But for all this, ‘I Wish Dee Dee Ramone Was Here With Me’ is a very frustrating listen. The whole record has an overly whimsical feel, of beautiful ideas translated poorly between conception and execution.

‘Rusty’ is rough-feeling, incoherent and aimless, while ‘Lazy’ sounds like a toddler’s music box mashed into a car alarm.

Marionneau’s obvious talent and artistry shines through at odd moments here, but is more often obscured by overly gauche delivery.

Le Volume Courbe I Wish Dee Dee Ramone was Here with Me p ic kp o c ke t

By Chris wat keys. In store s nov 13

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p h o t og r a p h y : j en n a f o xt o n

0 4/ 1 0

Reviews / Live

Yo La Tengo Shepherd’s Bush Empire London 20 / 10 / 20 15 wr ite r : ale x wisg a rd Ph otogr a ph er : Da ni Q uesa d a

Alone but for his guitar, some cue cards, a turntable and noise machine, Gruff Rhys’s endearingly rough opening set spans his entire career this evening. Although heavy on material from last year’s highconcept album ‘American Interior’, there’s also a rare rendition of ‘Fuzzy Logic’ highlight ‘Gathering Moss’.

He may also be the only man ever to request “more metronome in the monitor” and actually get it.

“I don’t wish to speak ill of other performers, because that would be untoward…” Ira Kaplan mumbles halfway through Yo La Tengo’s twenty-one song set, “but see how many Bonzo Dog Doo Dah

Band covers are played at the Johnny Marr show.”

It’s hard to imagine anyone here being too disappointed at missing Marr’s performance across town, though. Shepherds Bush Empire is so reverentially hushed that, while you may not be able to hear a pin drop, the sound of security guard’s shoes shuffling is clearly audible.

Tonight, YLT are bolstered by new-old recruit Dave Schramm on lead guitar, with Kaplan not going near an electric guitar all night.

James McNew, on the other hand, makes his way around a double bass, an instrument he only started playing a year ago. Despite the extra body

onstage, the set remains a marvel.

Regardless of its surprisingly cool response from some quarters, the Spartan beauty of new album ‘Stuff Like That There’ truly reveals itself live. While no one dares whisper during the songs, the atmosphere onstage is loose and amiable, which throws sadder material like the deceptively jaunty ‘My Heart’s Not in It’ into sharp relief. Meanwhile, recast from its status as an indie disco floor-filler, the Georgia Hubley sung ‘Friday I’m in Love’ breezes by like a longforgotten ’60s AM hit.

But it’s reworked versions of the band’s own material that provide the

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biggest surprises; gorgeous versions of ‘Ohm’ and ‘Our Way to Fall’ are one thing, but did you think the tenminute dronefest ‘Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind’ would work acoustically? Me neither.

“We’re gonna finish with a Kinks song,” says Kaplan, before a heartand show-stopping rendition of ‘Oklahoma USA’. “Because what else were we going to do?” He needn’t be so down on himself.

Whilst they will never be the pop success story we all secretly still want them to be, tonight’s show proves that no other band gets how pop music works quite as intuitively as Yo La Tengo.

Live

Shopping The Victoria, Dalston

Destroyer Islingston Assembly Hall

0 7/ 10 / 20 15

3 0/ 1 0/ 2 01 5

wr iter : Pa tr i c k G le n

w r it er : A lex W isg a r d P h o to g r a ph er : S c a r le tt d ello w

For an artist who claims to loathe touring, the ‘Poison Season’ revue has been a relentless globetrotting affair for Dan Bejar. Fresh from a slot at Pitchfork festival in Paris the previous night, Destroyer’s frontman looks as bedraggled as ever, but his louche demeanour fits a set that’s heavy on material from his Sinatragone-boho tenth album. Older material like ‘It’s Gonna Take an Airplane’ and an extraordinary closing version of ‘Rubies’ are welcome surprises, and the ‘Kaputt’ material is greeted like an old friend, but it’s the newly road-tested ‘Poison Season’ tracks that hit hardest.

Reluctant Springsteen anthem ‘Dream Lover’ kicks into even higher gear here, and the encore performance of album highlight ‘Girl in a Sling’ robs the Islington Assembly Hall audience of breath for three stunning minutes.

The Victoria has a long dark backroom that fills as each band plays – like flies to sherbet. Good Throb kick off with an intense slab of noise that sometimes reaches hardcore thrust and, at others, razorish guitar meets more rhythmic bass. Then Joey Fourr, feistily unpretentious, makes a considered show of erratic influences. He sings like Alex Chilton – that is a compliment. Shopping are the big (unlikely-looking) stars though, as they combine post-punk chops with comic book enthusiasm and songs full of sideways observations and askew wisdom. Even without that added depth you get the impression people would have still turned up.

The drums drive along busily with competing bass and guitar rhythms, while the trio enjoy themselves without any hang-ups in what makes for a pretty empowering scene.

Du Blonde The Deaf Institute Manchester 11/ 10 / 20 15 wr iter : Pa ddy Kinse lla

What does Du Blonde’s self-titled album make you think of? The front cover or the songs? If you need reminding, the front cover features Beth Jeans Houghton, breasts out with only a merkin covering her vagina. If this is your first thought, as it is mine, rather than the songs, then that’s a shame. One can only wonder, what image tonight’s performance will leave in our minds. Tonight the songs rise above the persona; ‘Black Flag’ and ‘Young Entertainer’ are full-throttle energy bursts and show that Houghton’s transition has definitely worked musically. Halfway through the set, though, she feels compelled to take her top off, despite the fact that she’s hardly broken a sweat. In the midst of such great music it’s a bewildering move – with tracks this good, Du Blonde definitely doesn’t need to strip to sell records.

Beach House Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London 30/1 0 / 2 0 1 5 wri t e r: J am es F. T h o mps o n P ho t o g ra ph e r: S oph i e Barl o c

Putting out two records in as many months takes no small amount of chutzpah and Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally carry their supreme confidence from the studio to the stage with a lush set that borders on the truly sublime. A plain white backdrop washes over with kaleidoscopic visuals that ebb and flow with Legrand’s swirling keys as she and Scally – plus two friends – bounce around their burgeoning back catalogue. ‘PPP’ and ‘On the Sea’ sound especially beguiling and majestic, though like a lot of the tracks some of the subtlety is slightly lost in the thunderous live drums. Whatever – the crowd lap up the bombast and by the time fan favourite ‘Myth’ arrives after nearly 90 minutes, they’re in raptures. Just as well, since they might not make it through the next Beach House gig – at this rate of release it’ll need to last all night.

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Live

Promising young bands play to single-figure audiences across London every night, but for it to happen to a critically acclaimed, cult-adored Japanese musician signed to a well-respected indie label is unusual. Unfortunately, that’s the hand that’s been dealt to Grimm Grimm on the Wednesday of freshers’ week at Goldsmiths College’s local pub venue, as he battles against a gaggle of excitable art-school teenagers, who leave midway, to entertain the remaining handful of ears. Given the circumstances, though, it’s a success: Grimm Grimm’s ethereal pedal-heavy acoustic guitar is arresting enough to elevate itself from a character-free pub at the end of the A2, and his accompanying bleeps and loops make pleasingly abstracted daydream music. Despite that, though, it’s hard to ignore the weak pitter-patter of applause that arrives, a beat too late, after each track, and the blokey banter drifting over from the pool table. Grimm Grimm manages to do so, and with admirable stoicism, but the overriding impression is that this is neither his time, nor his place. Tough gig.

Grimm Grimm New Cross Inn New Cross 0 7/ 10 / 20 15 wr i ter : S am Walton Ph otogr aph er : Sa m Wa lton

Speedy Ortiz The Dome, Tufnell Park

Jamie xx Brixton Academy, London

Cat Power St John’s Church, Clapton

Kwabs Concorde 2, Brighton

21/ 10 / 20 15

15/03/ 2 0 1 4

28/10/2015

1 6 / 1 0/ 2 01 5

wr i ter : gemma sa mwa ys

wri t e r: Padd y K i ns e ll a

wri t e r: c hri s watk e ys

w r it er : n a t h a n w estl ey

“I had a baby,” announces Chan Marshall almost as soon as she steps on stage, followed up by more jovial chat. The warmth of Marshall’s approach is matched by the intimacy of the venue, and early on in the set it’s clear that this is a markedly more settled performer than the Cat Power of old, whose live reputation oscillated between the sublime and the frankly god-awful.Tonight we see an artist on top form. She’s retained that singular ability to make the simplest of components (an incredible voice plus either guitar or piano) feel fleshed out and whole, but during tonight’s mammoth set (which, in truth would have benefited from a little more editing), backcatalogue heavyweights like ‘Fool’ and ‘Maybe Not’ are played with a twist, adding an exciting newness to songs which are already written on your soul.

It may only seem a short while since London based neo-soul singer Kwabs first started to catch peoples attention by posting a handful of covers on Youtube, but tonight in this sea-facing venue he demonstrates that it is a past that is well and truly behind him. The release of his debut album has ensured that focus can now be fully turned to his once neglected, original material and it arrives dripping with soulful overtones. Tonight’s measured performance sees Kwabs rich baritone vocals ride over tightly wound futuristic RnB where intricate piano lines gently fall over minimal rhythms and throbbing bass lines, which ultimately reach its high peak when hit single ‘Walk’ receives a rapturous reception during tonight’s encore. Kwabs is a firm reminder that Youtube hasn’t only given us Ed Sheeran.

P hoto grap he r: El i no r J o ne s

Affixed to the walls of the Dome are flyers publicising Speedy Ortiz’s “Help Hotline”. Set up by the band to provide assistance to audience members should they feel unsafe, it also acts as a deterrent for any disrespectful behaviour. The band’s no-BS ethos is further evidenced in tonight’s brutally direct display.

Despatching 17 songs in 45 minutes, the quartet channel all the vigour and economy of punk into complex melodies that characteristically intertwine two lead guitar lines simultaneously. The swampy ‘Puffer’ is particularly fierce, as is ‘Raising The Skate’, as Sadie Dupuis’ vibratoflecked howl slices through caustic feedback. Hearing the whole room hollering back the song’s feminist, “I’m not bossy, I’m the boss” refrain only emphasises why we need forthright, socially conscious artists like Dupuis more than ever.

It’s fitting that Jamie xx has chosen to tour his poignantly nostalgic homage to the last 20 years of UK dance music not with some highkicking live show full of virtuoso musicians but with a series of DJ sets and a massive light show. After all, what made ‘In Colour’ so touching when it arrived back in June was its sense of collective spirit rather than muso chops, and that’s exactly what he brings tonight.

Across a two-hour, lovingly ramshackle set, he drops not only the highlights from his own album but also the Artful Dodger, The Streets, and more than enough lovingly familiar bangers to unite the room.

There’s an element of cliché to it all, sure, right down to the obligatory confetti-drop finale, but if thre is any lingering cheese it’s more than trumped by the glorious collectivity of it all.

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Singing Pictures

W r i te r : A n d re w A n d er s on

Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2005)

Finest rapper of his decade, misogynist, survivor of a poor and violent childhood, slurring idiot, brilliant businessman, bullet receptacle, gangster. All of these labels and many more have been used to describe 50 Cent, but who is the real Curtis James Jackson III? Luckily for us, back in 2005, he had the Curtis-y (geddit?) to tell all in the semi-autobiographical film Get Rich or Die Tryin’.

Like all the greatest films ever made (Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard, Mission Impossible III) GRDT begins with the ending (well, near the ending). We see 50 Cent and his gang robbing a local shop. The shop isn’t the only thing being robbed, as 50 Cent’s sidekick Bama (played by Terrence Howard) steals the scene too with an atrocious piece of overacting. “I kill motherfuckers,” he says, “but I love you – I’ll do anything for you!” etc. Fiddy is not impressed, and tells him to calm down and stop shooting innocent people. This makes you think the film is going to portray Jackson as a good guy who happens to be a gangster, but, to be fair to him, he doesn’t try that shit with us – in fact, this is the only time you will see him acting with anything other than relish about the prospect of someone getting shot.

Anyway, they balls up the burglary and Fiddy gets shot himself – yep, you guessed it – nine times. As he lays dying on the pavement we hear him in voiceover: “I’d been looking

for my father my whole life…” Cue a flashback through Fiddy’s entire life and, let’s be honest, it’s a tough one: his mother is killed while selling drugs, he has no idea who his father is and his entire community gets torn apart by crack cocaine (the fact that he sells crack himself is conveniently ignored). The kid they get to play young 50 Cent looks convincingly like him and plays the part perfectly – half innocent, half tough.

Kid fiddy starts to rap at this point, and comes up with a song called ‘Best Friend’ which he uses to seduce a local girl. It features the lyric: “I see something special when I look in your eyes / With your legs way back I see this pussy is mine.”

The girl is about 10 at this point, so her parents are understandably a bit upset. The result is she gets sent away to live with some distant relative while Fiddy gets in no trouble whatsoever. He seems to just accept this injustice, and has little to say about the female shame/blame culture, possibly because he is too busy harping on about how many times he’s been shot (yeah, yeah – nine).

At this point I should reveal a few things about myself. I am a white male from a privileged middle class background. I play guitar in a garage rock band and know almost nothing about hip hop beyond a few records

by Public Enemy, De La Soul and the Beastie Boys. In other words, I am in no way qualified to discuss the talent – or lack thereof – on display in 50

Cent’s rapping. However, I am going to do that anyway because that’s what white privileged people do.

One of the unfortunate side effects of 50 Cent being shot nine times (other than the fact he won’t shut up about it) is that it gives him a slight speech impediment. Being the driven man that he is, he turned this trouble into a trademark and his slightly slurry style made him millions, but the truth is that 50 Cent isn’t a very good rapper, which this film (accidentally) makes evident.

Strip away the beats and you’re left with a man who sounds like he is learning to read. He is slow, hesitant and monotonous, with laughable rapping in several scenes.

What he can do, though, is write a hook. Sure, Eminem and Dr Dre have played their part, but even so it is clear that Jackson has an innate ability to come up with something catchy. ‘Candy Shop’, ‘In Da’ Club’ and even the aforementioned ‘Best Friend’ all begin to loop in your head after just a few listens.

Where were we – oh yeah... so when Fiddy grows up he decides to become a gangster. This means selling drugs, shooting people and having sex with women. Eventually he gets sent to jail where he realises his true ambition is to become a rapper – a quest aided by his newfound prison pal Bama (the scene-stealer from earlier). When he eventually gets released he decides he is going straight – no more crack.

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He is still up for robbing, though, so off they go to rob a shop, where the shooting happens, and now we’re back to the beginning of the film.

Phew.

But wait, that’s not the end, because while he does get shot somewhere between eight and ten times, Fiddy survives. He hooks up with his girlfriend (forgot to mention this: remember that girl he drove into exile earlier? They now have a baby together) and becomes a rap superstar, shooting most of his enemies and symbolically removing a bullet proof vest on stage to show he is no longer afraid and he is just going to be true to himself. Hooray!

It’s similar to Eminem’s Eight Mile – hardly surprising – but while GRDT has an equally compelling story it is hard to look past this one central fact: 50 Cent can’t rap. Given his affinity for getting shot he’s not much of a gangster either.

Promoting yourself as a musician based on the fact you got shot nine times is like being a flower arranger whose brand is that he once got a light bulb stuck up his arse: interesting maybe, but irrelevant to the craft. You’d only wonder ‘why doesn’t he talk more about the flowers and less about the lightbulb?’

This film succeeds because it unintentionally gives us an accurate portrait of Curtis James Jackson III: a crap rapper who openly promotes violence, misogyny and homophobia – but boy can he write a hook or two.

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Party wolf 007 - 0012: Why hasn’t anyone ever asked the question ‘Who’s the best James Bond?’

SEAN CONNERY

George Lazenby

Roger Moore

Timothy Dalton

Pierce Brosnan

Daniel Craig

AKA: The original.

AKA: The best answer on Pointless.

AKA: My smooth uncle.

AKA: The actor.

AKA: The Nintendo 64 one.

AKA: Mr Potato Head.

HAIR CUT: What Donald Trump is still aiming for and very much missing.

HAIR CUT: The kind of hair you’d like to take home to mother – thick, full and RADA-trained. Bravo!

HAIR CUT: The hair that they give you on day one of starting at Foxtons.

HAIR CUT: Finally! A Bond with hair too short to comb while he murders people.

FASHION crime: Bond’s most unbelievable plot-twist occurs when he picks up Halle Berry’s Jinx in a semi-Hawaiian shirt that can only be described as ‘Jacamo’.

FASHION crime: The swimming trunks, right? He wears them well, but you can totally see where he’s concealing his gun.

HAIR CUT: The receding public schoolboy.

FASHION crime: I can only presume that Connery’s baby blue playsuit, cut off so high you can see his M&S underpants poking out the bottom, was Bond’s cover at a bellend convention that was cut from Goldfinger.

TOP KILL: The Aston Martin ejectors seat. Man, if I could choose one way to go...

BAD BOND: I’m really not down with Bond ‘becoming Japanese’ in You Only Live Twice.

COOL POINTS:

He loved a snout. New Bond doesn’t even vape after a kill.

HAIR CUT: A slighly shitter version of Connery’s, thus starting a trend.

FASHION crime: Connery got a bowtie; Lazenby got a lace cravat, and he still didn’t bite down on his cyanide capsule.

TOP KILL: His career as 007 in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Sorry George, that was cold.

BAD BOND: He’s a little too handson with Moneypenny for my liking.

COOL POINTS:

Fair play, George, when you’re stranded on beach and say “This never happened to the other fellow,” that was good.

FASHION crime: Moore was 57 when he made A View To A Kill, explaining why he looks so at home in his I’ve-just-come-straightfrom-my-Monday-club velour tracksuit.

TOP KILL: Moore inflates a man with a shark gun pellet, who flies around the room like a balloon and explodes when he hits the ceiling. We’ve all been there.

BAD BOND: Beyond the fact that he’s clearly taking the piss?

COOL POINTS:

Moore’s ability to make the shittest jokes somehow shitter.

FASHION crime: Bond get’s sacked in A Licence To Kill for bitching to M about his mate Felix, NOT for his British Home Stores, Alan Partridge daywear.

TOP KILL: He sets fire to one guy.

It’s actually quite upsetting.

BAD BOND: He purposefully uses a topless woman to distract a gunman.

COOL POINTS:

Dalton went method on Bond, reading every one of Ian Flemming’s books to get inside the mind of 007. He’s only in two films!

TOP KILL: Brosnan electrocuted a hitman with his Ericsson phone, at a time when even texting ate up your Pay-asYou-Go credit.

BAD BOND: “I thought Christmas only came once a year.”

Shame. On. You. COOL POINTS:

Remember when he sang ‘SOS’ at Meryl Streep?

TOP KILL: “Who does number 2 work for?” He drowns a man in a toilet.

BAD BOND: In Skyfall, Craig slides down the middle of the escalators at Westminster station, WITHOUT touching his Oyster!

Double ummm.

COOL POINTS:

For a James Bond, Craig treats the girls well. He cries when a house falls on one of them.

Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious

Photo casebook: The unfortunate world of Ian Beale

I can do it!

No, Ian! Please! No more parkour!!!

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