Squid – Loud And Quiet 145

Ambient Flo, BackRoad Gee, Berwyn, Blue Bendy, Gary Indiana, Iglooghost, Julien Baker Karima Walker, Lucy Gooch, Viagra Boys, Virginia Wing, A Beginner’s Guide to MF DOOM

issue 145

Squid

What lies beneath

BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD FOR THE FIRST TIME

BICEP ISLES

LEON VYNEHALL RARE, FOREVER

TSHA FLOWERS

PVA TONER

ACTRESS KARMA & DESIRE

FRESIA MAGDALENA

BONOBO & TOTALLY ENORMOUS EXTINCT DINOSAURS

HEARTBREAK / 6000 FT

SOFIA KOURTESIS FRESIA MAGDALENA

Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com

Loud And Quiet Ltd PO Box 67915 London NW1W 8TH

This edition goes out to our team who scrambled to make it happen. Christmas always gets in the way of our first issue of a new year but we’ve never known logistical nightmares like those created by the third national lockdown. With safety of course the priority, interviewing artists in the flesh has become increasingly difficult to arrange, although you’d never know it from our writers’ abilities to make conversations over Zoom feel unnaturally not awful. Photo shoots are now their own fresh hell, but from Bristol to Stockholm, everything here was put together safely with the commitment of our team. And it’s a pleasure to start 2021 with Squid.

Stuart Stubbs

Founding Editor: Stuart Stubbs Deputy Editor: Luke Cartledge Art Direction: B.A.M. Digital Director: Greg Cochrane Contributing writers Abi Crawford, Al Mills, Alex Francis, Alexander Smail, Colin Groundwater, Dafydd Jenkins, Daniel Dylan-Wray, Dominic Haley, Esme Bennett, Fergal Kinney, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Isabelle Crabtree, Ian Roebuck, Jamie Haworth, Jess Wrigglesworth, Jemima Skala, Jenessa Williams, Jess Wrigglesworth, Jo Higgs, Joe Goggins, Katie Beswick, Katie Cutforth, Liam Konemann, Lisa Busby, Max Pilley, Megan Wallace, Ollie Rankine, Oskar Jeff, Robert Davidson, Reef Younis, Sam Reid, Sam Walton, Skye Butchard, Sophia Powell, Susan Darlington, Tara Joshi, Tom Critten, Tristan Gatward, Woody Delaney, Zara Hedderman.

Issue 145

Contributing photographers Andrew Mangum, Annie Forrest, Charlotte Patmore, Colin Medley, Dave Kasnic, David Cortes, Dan Kendall, Dustin Condren, Emily Malan, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Heather Mccutcheon, Jake Kenny, Jenna Foxton, Jody Evans, Jonangelo Molinari, Levi Mandel, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Nathanael Turner, Nathaniel Wood, Oliver Halstead, Phil Sharp, Sonny McCartney, Sophie Barloc, Timothy Cochrane, Tom Porter.

With special thanks to Andy and Barbara Thatcher at Portishead Open Air Pool, Ebi Sampson, Frankie Davidson, Jenna Jones, Jon Wilkinson, Lee Wakefield, Maddy O’keefe, Nathan Beazer, Nisa Kelly, Noam Klar, Sinead Mills, Tom Mehrtens.

The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2021 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

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

Julien Baker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Berwyn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Lucy Gooch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 BackRoad Gee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Blue Bendy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Gary, Indiana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Karima Walker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Squid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 A Beginner’s Guide to MF DOOM . . . . 60 Ambient Flo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Was Craig David robbed at the Brits? 66 Iglooghost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Virginia Wing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Viagra Boys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 03

The Beginning: Previously

Since the last edition of Loud And Quiet

Hey Moon Following the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, Swedish musician Molly Nilsson has reclaimed her largely disowned – but most well known – song ‘Hey Moon’. The track originally featured on Nilsson’s 2008 CDR debut album but found wider success when it was covered by John Maus on his 2011 record We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves. With Nilsson’s alt-pop talents forever underrated, many have always mistaken ‘Hey Moon’ as a Maus original, causing Nilsson to distance herself from it and abandon performing the track live. When an

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Instagram post confirmed that Maus (a shock) and Ariel Pink (less so) had both attended the Capitol Hill protest in support of Trump, though, Nilsson announced her reclamation of the song, releasing it as a 7-inch single with all proceeds going to Black Lives Matter. As Nilsson told Fader last month: “I was very happy to just take [“Hey Moon”] that maybe people feel has been a bit destroyed by these events, and put it in the opposite context.” So far the single has raised £4500 for BLM and will remain in print indefinitely. Copies are available via Night School Records and Nilsson’s own label Dark Skies Association.

The Beginning: Previously RIP MF DOOM New Year’s Eve 2020 / 2021 was never going to be one for the ages, but the news that reached us a few lonely drinks deep into the ‘celebrations’ didn’t exactly help. Daniel Dumile, aka MF DOOM, aka one of the greatest rappers and lyricists of his generation, had passed away aged 49. He had actually died a couple of months earlier on October 31, but his family understandably took a little time to themselves before making the news public. Outpourings from across the alternative music universe followed – he really was a special talent; a king collaborator. For an in-depth study of why he mattered so much, check out Oskar Jeff’s tribute on page 60.

Get Buzzin’ with Bez In early January, Bez announced his plans to launch a new fitness channel called Get Buzzin’ with Bez. It didn’t sound right at all, unless you’ve never seen Bez try to do absolutely anything.

On January 17, though, episode one dropped and a nation ate its hat. Key to Get Buzzin’ is that Bez isn’t leading the class at all – he’s lagging at the back to help you feel better about yourself. Capturing the true horror of exercise, Bez is close mic’d to make sure we don’t miss a single heavy breath, or the moment when he tells his PT, “I haven’t run since 1999”, or when he notes, “it’s like going to the toilet” as he’s shown how to do squats. He stops letting out an “ooooph” and giggling after the first three reps, once the pain sets in. Follow Bez’s quest to be less mashed on YouTube.

Sister Midnight Records In the couple of years prior to the pandemic, Deptford’s Sister Midnight Records became one of South London’s most cherished hubs of forward-thinking new music. This tiny basement venue (capacity 50ish, depending on how sweaty you’re willing to get) and the record shop-cum-cafe at street level was a focal point of this most celebrated scene, but coronavirus has forced the owners to rethink things. In January they announced that they’ll be closing the Deptford space but are hoping to reopen on the premises of an abandoned Lewisham pub, the Ravensbourne Arms, and open the venue up to democratic community ownership. In an age of closures and generalised anxiety, this is a beacon of hope. Get involved via sistermidnightrecords.co.uk.

The future of EU touring Now that Britain is no longer a member of the European Union, the arrangements British musicians had to allow EU-wide touring have expired. This has serious implications for the future of the music industry as we know it: 44% of UK-based musicians earn up to half of their income from work within the EU. To access those audiences, most will now have to pay prohibitive fees for visas and work permits; conversely, international artists coming to the UK will no longer be able to enter the country with the EU-wide arrangements they’ve made for the rest of the continent, which

illustration by kate prior

will have a knock-on effect on UK festivals and venues. Importantly, though, for many artists from around the world this is nothing new, and it goes without saying that already-marginalised groups, often from the global south, have always been hit hardest by such restrictive work and immigration policies. The campaign to restore working rights to UK and EU musicians must therefore also include solidarity with those artists as well.

For more on this, do check out the extensive Quietus.com report ‘Solidarity Beyond Borders: Why Artist Visas Are More Than A Brexit Issue’. Sign the petition for British artists to be granted Europe-wide visa-free touring permits at petition.parliament.uk/ petitions/563294.

Big Dada Since its launch in 1997, Big Dada has been at the forefront of UK rap and bass music, having released pioneering works by Roots Manuva, Speech Debelle, Jammer, Kae Tempest and many others. True to the origin of most of the music it releases, the label is now relaunching as an imprint run by Black, POC and minority ethnic people to work with artists from those same backgrounds.

In a statement on January 25, the label announced: “Working to amplify Black and racialised artists’ voices, Big Dada looks to shift the narrative around this music, bypassing stereotypes to allow and encourage freedom to express oneself for who they are and want to be.”

Recent Peal January ended with Wesley Gonzalez launching a new podcast called Recent Peel. It’s available exclusively on Spotify to make use of their ability to play complete tracks within show, and will now drop on the final Tuesday of every month, where Gonzalez – an encyclopedia of underground and excellent music – will share his favourite recent discoveries, old and new, from every genre you know of, and more you don’t.

SMtv Nobody was expecting live shows to return to the UK anytime soon, but the third national lockdown has also seen the cancelling of streamed gigs performed to empty rooms. After Sleaford Mods were forced to pull their planned show, The Demise of Planet X, at London’s Village Underground on January 9, they put together a TV special for broadcast the following week. The hour-long SMtv aired at 8pm on January 16 and featured the band in conversation discussing new album Spare Ribs, live footage from their 2020 100 Club show, some repurposed Sky News graphics and guests including Iggy Pop and John Thomson as his Fast Show ‘Jazz Club’ character. A few weeks later, Arlo Parks premiered her own pre-record special via Amazon Music, although only one of them featured Robbie Williams calling in to ask, “What colour is Tuesday?” and Jason Williamson responding, “Feces.” The show is now available on the band’s YouTube channel.

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Live from the Barbican Concerts streamed from our Hall to your home

Sun 17 Jan Moses Boyd Sat 23 Jan This Is The Kit Fri 6 Feb Paul Weller Mon 15 Feb Shirley Collins Sun 21 Feb GoGo Penguin Thu 25 Feb 12 Ensemble with Anna Meredith & Jonny Greenwood Tue 30 Mar Nadine Shah

The Beginning: Witness the Fitness

A brief history of our horrible workout goals

It used to be that we lived in caves. We feared our neighbours because they might eat our brains, so we killed them. We chased animals and killed those too. Life was hard. But boy, did we have great abs!

Now we shelter in houses instead of caves, and fear our neighbours for their germ-spreading rather than brain-eating tendencies. But our abs? They are nowhere to be seen, destroyed by our love of all things baked, fermented and sucked out of animals.

Luckily, a saviour was sent to help us recover those lost abs. A man with warm, chocolate eyes and soft, bouncy hair.

A man who looked a bit like Russell Brand but was even more annoying. A man named Joe Wicks.

Over the last few years Joe Wicks has become unavoidable. He’s in shops, staring at you from the front covers of books while brandishing root vegetables. He’s on breakfast television, sitting on the sofa like a well-trained poodle. He’s on your computer screen, jumping around and shouting in his unconvincing cockney accent. He’s inside your head, and he won’t leave until all of the crisps, cheese and grease are gone; until you are one giant, pulsating abdominal muscle.

But Joe Wicks is more than just an annoying man. He mirrors our ambitions, our lusts and our vanities. Each time he holds a head of broccoli in his hand and says “Cor blimey!” it means something. To understand Joe Wicks is to understand ourselves. But before we can, we must first look back into the past, to the people that created our modern fitness messiah.

Ever since our ancestors realised that horses weren’t just potential sex partners but could also be used as transport, humans have been growing fatter, and fitness coaches more popular. However, fitness gurus in the modern sense arrived with the advent of radio.

Joe Murgatroyd launched his radio show in the UK in the 1930s. Laughing maniacally throughout – his programme was

words by andrew anderson. illustration by kate prior

called Laugh and Grow Fit – Murgatroyd presented fitness as a way of suppressing emotions and avoiding imminent death.

Given that life expectancy at the time was about 55, and that crying was considered treason, Murgatroyd represented the repression and uncertainty of the age.

The first TV fitness gurus arrived in the US in the ’50s. They had exciting names like Jack LaLanne and Debbie Drake, while their bodies bulged and curved like Googie sculptures. Meanwhile in the UK we had Eileen Fowler, who promised that women could “stay young forever” so long as they did plenty of bouncing.

Fowler was symbolic of a country rediscovering its confidence after a decade of rationing and loss of international prestige.

The next big thing in fitness came in the ’80s with the advent of the celebrity home workout video from people like Jane Fonda. They sweated power, money and confidence, and sold you a dream: that you too could be a rich, famous actress with a mansion. In the UK, we were more realistic in our choice of idols.

Instead of Jane Fonda, we had Angela Lansbury – the voice of the teapot in Beauty and the Beast – whose video Positive Moves claimed that “there’s something to like in every body”. Clearly, Lansbury had not seen many British people with their clothes off, which is just as it should be.

Then in the ’90s the UK finally got a fitness guru we could be proud of: Mr Motivator. Real name Derrick Evans, Mr Motivator wore colourful spandex onesies and shouted at us during breakfast television. Sure, we were too busy stuffing our faces with Frosties and Pop Tarts to actually exercise, but Mr Motivator made us feel like we were getting healthy. And, as the ’90s proved, feeling that something is good (Britpop, New Labour) is almost the same as it actually being good.

The 2000s brought a darker aspect to fitness. Now it wasn’t enough to get healthy – you had to get really unhealthy first. So celebrities would eat and drink themselves to the brink of destruction, spend three months starving and exercising, and then release a fitness DVD in time for Christmas. This yo-yo approach was emblematic of a decade in which confidence and paranoia took equal turns at the helm. We are a world power! (So let’s invade Iraq) We’re total idiots! (Goodbye Northern Rock).

Needless to say Jade Goody – who was on Big Brother in 2002, launched her own perfume in 2004, was kicked off Celebrity Big Brother for racist bullying in 2007, and died tragically of cancer in 2009 – had her own fitness DVD. Today we’ve reached the era of Instagram and Joe Wicks, where fitness isn’t about being fit anymore. Instead, your abs are an essential fashion accessory, part of your brand. We have “wellness goals” and exercise programmes with militaristic names like XTFMAX, P90X and FOCUS T25. Your body is a fleshy enemy that must be vanquished by the forces of vanity. As the world disintegrates around us we retreat into the security of knowing we have a really nice arse.

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The Beginning: <1000 Club

The community outreach of Grimalkin Records

The <1000 club was formed to champion smaller artists who deserve better from streaming platforms, both in terms of play count and genuine industry support. Spotify, Apple, Bandcamp and Soundcloud all have a responsibility to the artists that keep their platforms afloat, and only one of those are currently meeting the moment in a meaningful way. This month’s entry highlights not just the duty that streaming platforms have to support artists, but the responsibility that labels have to support their communities.

Grimalkin Records is a queer arts collective that centres mutual aid, community outreach and education as its core values.

The label was founded on the idea of bringing greater inclusivity to the industry. It uses its releases to fund QTBIPOC civil rights organisations and grassroots social justice movements worldwide. It was founded by Nancy Grim Kells (AKA Spartan Jet-Plex), who was inspired while volunteering for mutual aid organisations like the Virginia anti-violence project.

“There is a lot of overlap between community organising, mutual aid and music in Richmond,” they say during our chat. “Since we’ve grown, we’re releasing a lot of people that are outside of our circle. Music is a bridge to community support, mutual aid. That’s really where our centre is.”

Grimalkin is non-traditional in its lack of a hierarchal structure. Its members are all involved in core decisions for the label. There’s an openness and transparency around finances that is rare. The decision to be so forthcoming with potentially sensitive information came from Grim’s own experiences as an artist. “I’ve worked with a label before and I was completely in the dark,” they say. “I didn’t know how much money my album made, and I didn’t get any money. That’s kind of the norm.

“I had no idea what I was doing when I started. I’ve been using the skills I’ve got as a Special Ed teacher for fourteen years and a guidance councillor for seven years.”

One of the recent decisions made as a collective has been to stream digitally as a label, with a view towards greater outreach, accessibility and exposure. Before, artists were given the funds by Grimalkin to stream on their own terms, rather than Grimalkin “taking a piece of nothing,” as Grim puts it.

Since forming several years ago as a passion project, the collective has blossomed in the past two years into a full-time

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venture, spurred on by incredible releases like Backxwash’s industrial hip-hop opus God has nothing to do with it leave him out of it, which earned international acclaim and amassed a large, unexpected fanbase. The label is now home to a varied roster of noise rock, twee electro-pop and club bangers.

Upcoming releases include Òrfãs, a new hypnagogic punk album from the Brazilian duo A/C Repair School, and As a Motherfucker, a sleek and expansive collection of R&B songs from Quinton Barnes. The two also have plans to work together on a project, despite the different musical worlds they operate in, which underlines the collective’s focus on collaboration and communal support.

As with the rest of Grimalkin, the thing that ties all of it together is a shared ethos of emphasising BIPOC and queer perspectives, as well as ethical distribution. “We all hope that Grimalkin will be an example for other labels,” Grim says. “Get to know what’s going on in your community. Find out who is involved in mutual aid. Build relationships beyond ‘this music is cool’. I think you need to get to know people and make sure your values align.”

Right now, the collective is in the process of applying for a $2,500 business grant that will allow them to establish the educational resources that have long been part of their ambitions. Despite growing public exposure, the collective hardly makes enough to break even, in part because they refuse to take a large cut of streaming royalties.

“I thought I was going to retire at the company I worked for,” Grim says, referring to their career as a councillor. “It was a huge blow to me when I got laid off. I went to a very dark place that I hadn’t gone to since I was probably in my twenties. I was devastated. But I had Grimalkin still, and after a few days I did what I normally do and picked myself up again.

I just poured it all into Grimalkin. Now I think that’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m a work-horse kind of person.”

Despite the stress and the financial struggle, Grimalkin has doubled their sales in a year. Their 2021 calendar is stacked with releases, without sacrificing their initial goal of community outreach.

“Maybe this is not a pipedream,” Grim says.

words by skye butchard. illustration by kate prior

Out Now NILS FRAHM ‘Tripping With Nils Frahm’

HERE LIES MAN ‘Ritual Divination’

TALA VALA ‘Modern Hysteric’

A legendary artist at a legendary location: Tripping with Nils Frahm captures one of the world’s most sought-after live acts performing at one of Berlin’s most iconic buildings.

The guitars are heavier and more blues based than before, but the ancient rhythmic formula of the clave remains a constant.

Tala Vala combine experimental recording methods bridging marginalised genres, synths, brass and strings, jagged guitars and primal percussion. .

CASSANDRA JENKINS ‘An Overview On Phenomenal Nature’

GUIDED BY VOICES ‘Styles We Paid For’

Erased Tapes LP/CD

Ba Da Bing! LP/ LP Ltd /CD

If Phenomenal Nature has a unifying theme, it’s the power of presence, the joy of walking in a world in constant flux and opening oneself to change. (From Purple Mountains; Craig Finn; Lola Kirke collaborator)

Riding Easy LP/ LP Ltd / CD

GBV Inc LP/CD

Styles We Paid For stands as a testament to this Year In Isolation, reflecting these dark days through Robert Pollard’s prism, with the band sounding as confident and authoritative as ever.

Number Witch LP

KID CONGO & THE PINK MONKEY BIRDS ‘Swing From The Sean DeLear’ In The Red LP/CD

In such uncertain times, one thing is most certain—Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds will always bring the party ...and the other world.

Dutchess Records LP/CD

The discovery and musical re-imagining of Mirabel Lomer – an artist’s unheard world which is emerging from the shadows into the light.

M.CAYE CASTAGNETTO ‘Leap Second’ Castle Face LP/CD

Peru-born artists debut album defies description but in parts feels like a forgotten incredible 70s folk album.

Coming Soon

BELL ORCHESTRE ‘House Music’ Erased Tapes LP/CD

THE FALL ‘Live at St. Helens Technical College ‘81’ Castle Face LP + 7”

MIRRY ‘Mirry’

PAINTED SHRINES ‘Heaven & Holy’

MICHAEL PRICE ‘Eternal Beauty OST’

WARRINGTON-RUNCORN NEW TOWN DEVELOPMENT PLAN ‘ Interim Report, March 1979’

RICHARD NORRIS ‘Music For Soundtracks Vol: 1’

Woodsist LP / CD

Dutchess LP

Inner Mind LP/CD

Castles In Space LP

info@fortedistribution.co.uk

The Beginning: Sweet 16

Julien Baker never wanted to be Homecoming Queen and the other kids knew it

It was such a wild time for me. There was a lot going on. I had just come out to my friends. I remember I had short hair before I came out to my parents and I was like, “how did you not know?”

I had moved in with my dad, as well. My mom and I were in a fight about something non-related to my sexuality. I was being a vindictive, mean little kid. I was like, “Well, I’m gay,” and my mom immediately without skipping a beat retorts: “I know.”

I thought I had been doing such a good job!

I was playing in the band The Star Killers [later known as Forrister]. We played every show offered to us. We’d play two house shows a weekend for three or four straight weekends. I quit my part-time job at Country and Western Steakhouse because we were supposed to play a show with a band called Joyce Manor, who I was obsessed with.

If you threw a dart at all the moments in that year of my life, there’s such a high probability that I’m just standing in some random person’s living room watching a band or playing a show. That’s where I felt most at home. All my friends were there. Instead of going to the mall, that’s where we congregated.

When we weren’t playing music we’d be hanging out at Taco Bell or the Waffle House.

I actually went to school out of town (Memphis). I would go out to this quasi-rural farming community to go to high school where the culture was a lot more hicky, but not in a derogatory

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way. I didn’t like school. I felt like I was always in trouble, but looking back I guess I wasn’t in that bad of trouble.

Around then I ended up in a weird situation of being Homecoming Queen of my high school – I had a bright red mohawk at the time. One of the people in my class nominated me to make fun of me. I didn’t know what to do. I guess I was like, “haha funny.”

Like, I was actually kind of pissed and really self conscious about it. It’s just classic: queer girl doesn’t know how to assimilate into, like, straight feminine normalcy trope. But that’s what I felt like, you know? I mean, there’s a photo of me where everyone’s wearing the straight up ball gowns, like for a pageant. And I didn’t get the memo on it. So I’m just wearing a day dress, which is already wild for me. Shoes I got from Goodwill.

I mean, it sucks, because I feel like that’s exactly the thing that gets made into the manic sexy dream girl trope – this ‘she’s quirky and weird’… but I was actually so uncomfortable. It was really uncomfortable to be around a lot of people who knew how to act in a certain environment that I was completely foreign to. It’s just so inconsistent with my personality, or the things that I value.

The homecoming reception was on a weekend, and then my band was releasing a record we’d recorded in our friend’s attic the following day. So there was me, playing in this church basement venue screaming at a whole bunch of house show kids and wearing the homecoming queen sash. Ridiculous.

I also got in a car crash around this time. I was driving this old school Honda Accord that got absolutely smashed to death.

I was fiddling with the consoles where all my mix CDs were. Like my Manchester Orchestra, Colour Revolt and whatever Christian adjacent indie rock I was listening to. I just didn’t look at the road like an idiot 16-year-old and drove straight into one of those giant concrete street lamps, and it collapsed onto my car. The pictures are wild because the entire hood of the car is caved in. But I didn’t get hurt at all. Zero injuries – and the car was entirely crumbled.

It was crazy. I was leaving evening church. The first person that got there was my dad and he just like sprinted up to the car.

I was just sitting inside and shocked. Its weird to talk about for many reasons, but then everybody stopped church to have a prayer circle until an ambulance came and made sure I was okay.

I was going through old memorabilia from this time and I’m looking at this heinously tacky belt buckle that says ‘music = life’. And it did. It was everything. It’s like a self fulfilling prophecy when you discover music as a child, and then you latch on to it being the only thing that matters.

Earlier than this age, I wanted to learn every instrument so bad that I used to sit and arrange little towels on my desk in the spaces approximately where I thought a rack tom, floor tom, a snare, and a hi hat would go, and try to mine play along to Fall Out Boy or whatever. I just thought about music.

as told to greg cochrane

Final Third:

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Berwyn

A young talent almost lost to immigration papers,

by Tara Joshi. Photography by Frank Fieber 12

“I clung onto religious belief because otherwise who are you gonna believe in? Men? It was men that was letting me down, men that was making the decisions that had me in my position, so how could I put faith in that?”

When Berwyn Du Bois picks up the phone, he skips over the hello part, launching straight into the warm joviality and loud belly laughs that brim over through most of the conversation. But in the midst of talking about things like the easiness of dancing alone to R&B in front of the mirror, every now and again he will offer something slow and plaintive that recalls the searing insight of his music.

A multi-instrumentalist, rapper and singer-songwriter born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad before moving to Romford, east London, aged 9, much of Berwyn’s life in England has been marked by precarity. The “men making decisions” were the home office, with his mother being sent in and out of jail while he found himself in a recurring state of homelessness, all because they didn’t have the right immigration papers. But, against all odds, he came out of 2020 with an acclaimed mixtape under his belt, a Drake co-sign and a coveted spot on the BBC Sound of 2021 longlist.

“None of what is happening [with my career] makes any sense,” he laughs with exuberance. “I don’t think I’m special, but this shit makes no fucking sense!”

Contrary to what he might say, DEMOTAPE/VEGA is in fact a very special listen. The story goes that Berwyn made the project in his bedsit over the course of a fortnight – a final shot at seeing what he could make happen with his music in the UK (if it didn’t happen he would go back to Trinidad). It’s a significantly more accomplished tape than that hasty roll of the dice backstory might suggest, marrying hymnal sonics with the leftfield, echoey end of rap and soul, all while speaking candidly of his personal history, using gilded vocals that wax and wane between spoken word and song; intimate rasps and silken runs to convey romance and grief, relationships and the realities of how he and his peers were getting by (“don’t let them catch you with the knife, don’t let them catch you without it”).

“With my immigration situation, I felt much futility in school,” he says. “I didn’t want to stay there, it didn’t feel like there was much point in my being there. So I picked music GCSE because I figured at least I wouldn’t have to try for no reason in that one lesson.”

And so, he had initially gone about his music lessons with the attitude that he could “not give a fuck”. His teacher was “the best guitarist in the world, but the worst teacher in the world – one of them ones,” he laughs. But then, after said teacher was fired for showing students The Human Centipede (obviously), teacher Di Russell joined and saw the potential in Berwyn. “Up until that point, the ‘options’ I thought I had [with my immigration status] were nothing to do with school,” he says, “But she put the time in and made me see I did have options.”

Nurturing his talent, Russell would take Berwyn and his classmate James to a folk club every Wednesday night, thus keeping at least one evening a week free from the potential trouble from those “other options”. The three of them began

— Folking Young — Music, of course, had always been a big part of Berwyn’s life. In Trinidad much of the calendar year revolves around carnival and devotion to music and, at several points, Berwyn sings sweet soca and parang songs down the phone. His father, who had previously been a DJ, made him have steel pan lessons as a kid (“there are worse things to be forced to do!”), and it was through his parents that he also came to respect everything from Motown to soul to Mika. When he arrived in the UK, he quickly began to forge his own taste too, watching the music channels on his auntie’s TV, namechecking Mario, Ne-Yo and those golden era Ja Rule and Ashanti tracks as moments that led him to start writing his own songs.

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“With my immigration situation, I felt much futility in school. It didn’t feel like there was much point in my being there”

performing under the band name “Folking Young”, with Du Bois singing, as well as playing guitar and cajón. On other evenings after school, he was allowed to stay behind playing around with the music department’s singular Mac computer, with the caretaker checking in on him every couple of hours.

Although Berwyn still felt the underlying sense of futility about his future in the country, aware he wouldn’t be able to go into further education, he ended up studying music at college “for the love of it”. And while his friends disappeared to university, even self-releasing the tape he had put together in those two weeks was starting to seem impossible given his situation.

But in the midst of it all, he managed to stay afloat.

“You have to have hope, that’s so important in any situation in life,” he says. “I was raised in a very religious household, so that gave me the upper edge to look up at the stars. Nowadays it’s more things like affirmations that keep me going. Maybe it’s just psychological, but maybe it is angels or something? I do have faith in my dad – I don’t think he’ll ever let me down. But I also know the extent of his ability. So it’s nice to put faith in something else…”

— Glory — It was as if by cosmic or divine intervention that everything suddenly fell into place. XL Recordings behemoth Richard Russell heard his music and brought him on board for the second album in his collaborative Everything Is Recorded project (“a beautiful community!”). Berwyn signed with Columbia and, in June, he gave a stunning performance from home for Later… with Jools Holland, adding a harrowing new verse to his track ‘Glory’ with lines like “Lately I’ve been thinking a lot / How come cos I’ve never been shot my pain doesn’t count?”.

“It was a really weird space and time with my internal problems as well as everything that was going on externally,” he says of that performance, which came in the midst of the resurgence of global Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd. “I asked for two weeks to write something, because I wanted to let the dust settle – you can’t predict that level of entropy, you know? There’s nothing I can say on that.

But there had been some miscommunication and I found out the show was actually in like a day or two. So then I just decided to speak from my own story. And writing it was painful, but if I had been trying to write something with everybody’s weight on my shoulders I would have just given up. So I just said, ‘I’m gonna do this for the weight on my shoulders – it’s heavy enough.’”

In writing for himself, Berwyn’s work has still resonated with plenty of people. “There’s a girl who’s getting her cancer

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scan today,” he says, “and she’s been in touch with me through the treatment, because my music helped her get through. You know, I made those songs in two weeks, I was in no way expecting them to get on radio or for them to have this amount of reach!

It fills me with a great sense of responsibility because the world is crazy, but I really have a chance to be, like, a little superhero or something? It’s intimidating knowing that every step I make is so crucial in terms of the ripple effect it might have on the kids who feel influenced by me.”

Though he is potentially interested in entering the more political sphere one day, for now he is dubious of the greater awareness and objection people seem to have of the hostile environment and government immigration. “I think I preferred it when people weren’t talking about it,” he says. “Out of sight, out of mind. In my music, I can talk about it on my own terms, because ultimately for all we might think things are changing because of what we see in our little Instagram bubbles, I know from experience that’s not what the majority believes. Otherwise Brexit wouldn’t have happened, and I wouldn’t get plenty of other indicators when I leave my house on a daily basis.”

For now, then, the focus remains on his artistry. “I made VEGA a long time ago, when I was so far from knowing myself,” he says, before laughing. “I’m a much better producer now! The music I’m working on right now is a lot more ambitious, I’m working with a few different sounds – for example some R&B polish. But I like making things my own, I like being a little inventor making little rearrangements to try make a more advanced product.”

He’s also hoping to put Trini sounds back on the map, he says, explaining that he is tired of the global assumption of Caribbean culture being solely wrapped up in Jamaican output.

“There are such beautiful moments in soca,” he exclaims, “if I could just hone in on that. I would love to spend a year in Trinidad and build up an infrastructure with lawyers and labels and producers so that we could pave the way for the next global soca wave to take over. But that’s my little side job.”

Berwyn Du Bois might not believe in men, but maybe that doesn’t matter. He has faith in something else that has kept him going through it all.

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’Distractions’ available on indie stores only limited blue vinyl and CD.

On their debut LP ‘Dream Harder’, Hello Cosmos want to shake humanity out of the comatose, fearful and isolated world it currently lives-in and dare to dream of a new and utopian one that awaits tomorrow. Fusing sound and vision, art and activism, multimedia and technology; ‘Dream Harder’ encourages people to use technology and not be used by it.

First time ever on vinyl, the legendary compilation taken from the infamous Kings Road SEX shop jukebox. Curated

by Marco Pirroni of Adam & the Ants and SEX shop regular, a hand-selected treasure trove of underground/outsider classics – all of which were on heavy rotation throughout the mid-‘70s on Malcolm and Vivienne’s SEX boutique jukebox.

Brownswood are delighted to share this hotly anticipated “unofficial” follow up to ‘We Out Here’ and ‘Sunny Side Up’ which respectively showcased music from London and Melbourne. This time they turn their attention to the vital scene in South Africa, one of many effervescent movements erupting around the world.

Specially created recordings featuring some of most exciting post rock, avant-garde and improvised music emerging from Johannesburg’s scene.

BRIJEAN FEELINGS

JOHN CARPENTER LOST THEMES III

BLANCK MASS IN FERNEAUX

TINDERSTICKS DISTRACTIONS

HELLO COSMOS DREAM HARDER

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’Distractions’ is an album of subtle realignments and connections from a restless and intuitive band: where every detail earns its place. Upholding a career-long commitment to interior exploration - the sound of a band ever ready to stretch themselves.

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Influenced by Latin and Brazilian psych-pop and tropicalia, Oakland’s Brijean make rhythmic, dreamy dance music for the mind, body, and soul. ‘Feelings’ finds Brijean Murphy trusting in her strengths, collaborating with producer Doug Stuart and friends including Chaz Bear (Tory y Moi).

The album cultivates a specific vibe, a softness Murphy has come to call “romancing the psyche.”

On legendary director and composer John Carpenter’s first solo album in five years, his “soundtrack for the movies in your mind” is more vivid than ever. Collaborating with son Cody Carpenter and godson Daniel Davies, the trio builds richly rendered worlds with guitar and synthesizer.

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A Winged Victory For The Sullen, the collaboration between Stars of the Lid founder Adam Wiltzie and L.A. composer Dustin O’Halloran, are set to release new album ‘Invisible Cities’, the stunning score to the critically acclaimed theatre production directed by London Olympics ceremony video designer Leo Warner. The music was written for the MIF theatre production, which was loosely inspired

by INVISIBLE CITIES by Italo Calvino.

Lucy Gooch An ambient musician takes it to the movies, by Ian Roebuck Photography by Richard Luxton

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“I feel like I go from one place to another trying to shut the world out, even more so nowadays.” In a bid to shake off the all-toofamiliar Zoom fatigue, Lucy Gooch is explaining her curious double life. “Forgive me, I have cases of word vomit on calls like this and anxiety spirals but at the moment I work at night all the time and I need to get out of the habit.” It doesn’t take long for Lucy to realise that burning both ends of the candle is unavoidable right now. “Society tells us that we must be up at 8am and back to bed at 10pm,” she says, “but I have a day job and it’s a battle to avoid the two worlds clashing. I think a lot of people talk about this don’t they – the need to wait until the world shuts down before they can create.” She gesticulates as she throws speech marks around the word ‘create’. She’s expressive and more engaging in video calls than she lets on.

The double life she refers to will be familiar to many other struggling musicians – artistry by night and a 9-to-5 to pay the bills. “It’s not a nice feeling, being duplicitous and not being authentic,” she says. “I don’t talk about what I do at work and it would be really nice to not have that feeling. My head’s always elsewhere and I think a lot of people have that struggle. You have to accept work where you can get it if you’re a musician.”

Lucy’s frankness is refreshing as she balances an admin job at Bristol University with her light-footed, ambient music.

Ever since her dreamlike EP Rushing came out over 12 months ago she’s been capturing imaginations with an evolving, multilayered approach to her moonlight-made music. Now signed to Fire Records, and with a new body of work set for imminent release, Lucy is ready to emerge from her night-time daze into the light once more. “This time I have moved away from loopbased tracks and it’s more about songwriting and twists and turns whilst keeping that ambient space. When someone like Fire Records gives you confidence in what you’re doing you’re able to lean into it more. I am really grateful that people are listening. It’s made me pursue what I want to do, which is be more of a songwriter.”

— Powell and Pressburger — Surrounded by an ethereal fog, the new material is astonishing in its density. With echoes of Kate Bush and the Cocteau Twins, and driven by her remarkable, choral-like vocal, it’s somehow extremely dramatic but elegantly understated at once – not surprising when you consider her schooling. “I’m from a theatre background,” she tells me. “I studied theatre and visual arts but I never really went for it. I liked making puppets, painting and singing, and a lot of folk, but I never embraced making music until 2015. Then I bought an electric guitar and it changed everything. The next step was some loop pedals and that was the beginning of the songwriting journey for me.” This time around Lucy has looked to influences close to home. “All of the new songs are based on a series of films by Powell and Pressburger that have always stayed in my mind,” she says. “Black Narcissus and A Matter of Life & Death. There is so much passion in those films and they are very big and colourful. I saw them when I was a kid and I kept coming back to them through my teenage years.

They really focus on women and repression and those themes

are important to my music, so I used them as a vehicle to write with and in turn have made a bigger sound.”

Full of visual strangeness, you can identify Powell and Pressburger’s presence within Lucy’s music, but there’s something else that lingers long after consuming both, and that’s the impact of landscape. Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus is a Himalayan technicolour dream, just as the soaring sound of the fresh tracks from Lucy are influenced by her surroundings. “Yes,” she says. “I think this music feels full of colour.

There are more neons and brighter colours. Rushing was more ambient and pastels with an earthy iciness to it. I have always been quite isolated and close to my environment. Growing up in North Norfolk, I really liked my space, although I wasn’t doing any whimsical traipsing around fields or anything! Or maybe there was a bit of that.” She laughs. “I guess it just gets into your music, doesn’t it. I was imagining aerial photography and even nature documentary programmes, plus the feeling of flying over an amazing landscape, that’s something that we all have as human beings. It’s pretty stereotypical for ambient music isn’t it.” She laughs again.

— Orinoco Flow — The pastoral element of the music resonates more as you tune in to Lucy’s unique vocal. “From about the age of seven I was in a youth choir and it was run by a very scary woman that I was terrified of. She’d get mad and her eyes would go really wide so everyone would take a deep breath. She would make us sing religious songs but also more experimental music too, like maybe Native American music; it was a little bit ‘Orinoco Flow’ – she was inspiring but scary!” What’s interesting realising this is how Lucy has harnessed this memory and applied it to her work, layering vocal track over vocal track to re-create the church experience. “I think I just love the act of singing together and I always felt like I was free. A group of people singing is an amazingly powerful sound. I was never picked out as an individual, they didn’t know I existed and because music is so elitist and I am not classically trained it’s just a way of doing my own version of it, which I can be in control of.”

Before we say our goodbyes, I ask Lucy about going back to performing once the pandemic is over and her feeling of duplicity returns. “It does scare me,” she admits, “because I care about it so much. When you see a gig and it sounds exactly like it does on the record, that can be underwhelming, but when someone tries to do their own version of a song, that can also be disappointing, so you can’t win! That is my anxiety – do I try and emulate the record mathematically and accurately or do I do something looser? My conclusion is I just need to be true to myself and it took me a long time to get there last year; the minute I try to be someone else it goes wrong. It got to the point at the end of 2019 where I had been hating my day job and I told myself you have to start enjoying gigs, this is your time now.

I started to love it and it was a totally different experience. It was funny that just as I started to enjoy playing live everything shut down, so I am hoping that I will be able to hold on to that memory of being in the moment.”

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BackRoad Gee

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We’ve gotta go through the struggle with a smiley face,

by Joe Goggins. Photography by Sophie Barloc

Beyond repeating the same, single word, BackRoad Gee is cagey on what’s in his diary for 2021. It’s perhaps understandable: with the pandemic having upended the music world, he finds himself in a position different to that faced by artists who had major ambitions for last year, many of whom were stuck in a kind of purgatory, best-laid plans put on hold, and then torn up. Gee, on the other hand, went ahead and released his latest EP – the explosive, seven-track Mukta vs Mukta – and watched it meet with rave reviews, as some critics suggested that he seemed to be rearranging the very fabric of grime.

He then went on to work with a real hero of his, Burna Boy, after the Nigerian reached out to him personally, something he still sounds as if he’s having trouble believing (the proof is in the pudding, though, in a thumping rework of WizKid’s ‘Ginger’ that the pair put together). As the year has turned, he’s watched as his close friend and collaborator Pa Salieu come out on top of the BBC’s Sound of 2021 poll. And yet, in a country still ravaged by coronavirus, it’s hard to see too far ahead.

Which is why he keeps his forecast brief. “Greatness, man,” is the verdict as he lights his second joint of our Zoom call.

“Greatness.” That’s precisely what he’s had in mind for himself ever since he began to take the prospect of a career in music seriously; he’s cleaved closely to a vision that places artistic success higher in importance than its commercial counterpart. “From the beginning, the whole time I’ve been coming up, I’ve always said we had a plan. I’ve stuck to it, and I’m executing it. I just feel like I’m ticking things off as I go.”

To begin with, though, Gee had to be talked into thinking big. Growing up across London – moving between Tottenham, East Finchley, Stratford and more besides – his early musical aspirations were not something he readily shared: incidentally, the same is true of his real name. He was born to Congolese parents and exposed to the music of their homeland in his early years; before rap was even on his radar, he had aspirations of becoming a drummer in order to recreate the rhythms that floated through his childhood homes.

By the time he discovered hip hop – the same way any British teenager of his generation would have, through records like 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and DMX’s Year of the Dog… Again – it was only one of a number of stylistic doors that were open to him. UK garage was speaking to him, too, as was afrobeat, and when he started to experiment with making music of his own – throwing together these disparate ideas and cooking up something genuinely new – he kept it to himself. “It was my friends who saw the potential in me,” he recalls. “I was just doing it for my own enjoyment until other people told me I could do something with it. They got me together with my manager and it’s just skyrocketed from there. And now, here I am, with you.”

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Gee’s stage name is taken, as he tells it, from a dislike of “operating on the main road”, something you could take any number of different ways. Musically speaking, it fits with the sonic blueprint he’s mapped out over the course of a still-fledgling career that’s taken in Mukta Wit Reason, an 18-track compilation that he insists is not a mixtape, as well as Mukta vs Mukta. If the main road would have been to pursue grime – and it could easily have been, he says, as he reels off a list of genre royalty that his uncles exposed him to, including D Double E, Ghetts, Giggs and Dot Rotten – then the back road is the route Gee has taken.

Mukta Wit Reason marked him out as a drill rapper, although the indelible impression of early grime was palpable, particularly in the way he flowed: his bars were a kind of East London staccato, with a pace and bite that laid the groundwork for him to crossover into collaborating with the likes of JME and Lethal Bizzle on last November’s ‘Enough Is Enough’. It’s tracks like that that have really had aficionados sitting up and taking notice; it’s not often somebody comes along and breaks grime’s mould to fit his own purpose, which is precisely what Gee seems to be doing in blending it with drill so effortlessly.

“The thing I keep stressing to people is that I can’t be boxed in,” he explains. “You’re never going to get one type of sound from me; you’re probably going to get every type of genre. It’ll always have the same soul, but anything else about the sound could change.” Despite this, though, he agrees with

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the view that he has subverted grime for his own musical ends.

“They were right about that: that’s what man did. I fabricated my own thing. That was the goal when I sat down with the producer; combine everything. Let’s make it garagey, let’s make it afrobeat-ish, let’s make it…” He pauses. “Backroad-ish, you know? And people picked up on that, and I’m very appreciative of it. It’s a good reflection on the work.”

— Sonic bloodletting — One thing Gee knows for sure about 2021 is that he’ll drop his debut mixtape proper, tentatively titled Summer ina Da Winter. It will, he promises, be a departure from the highenergy chaos of Mukta vs Mukta. That EP was born out of his desire to knuckle down and take his career seriously after a stint in prison towards the end of 2019; the specifics are not something he’ll readily go into, but they seem to have initiated a change in mindset that is likely to manifest itself on the mixtape, with Mukta vs Mukta representing a kind of sonic bloodletting.

“Those are some very personal songs. I was in a dark place when that was coming out, but it was a good place for the music. A lot of people doubted the kid, and didn’t think I could do this, and get to where we are. But we did it, man. There was definitely a split personality thing going on. The songs were hectic; it was like they were all fighting against each other. I don’t know if it was a reflection of my mindset at the time. It might just be down

“From the beginning, the whole time I’ve been coming up, I’ve always said we had a plan. I’ve stuck to it, and I’m executing it” 21

to the fact that they were all bangers, crazy tracks – they make you want to jump, or dance, or whatever.”

When it does arrive, Summer ina Da Winter will represent a shifting of gears (he dislikes the term ‘change of pace’), both in terms of the medium and the message. Details are still thin on the ground, and Gee’s manager interjects to keep him from providing a rundown of the record’s producers and features; he’ll only say that it’ll involve “a lot of different people from different sides.” There is an obvious restlessness in him when it comes to exploring different avenues, though, and possibly even a nagging sense that he’s already over the comparisons with contemporaries in the grime scene. “That’ll always be there,” he says, “but I’m not just going to stay with that sound. I have an idea of what people expect from me now, and I’m still catering to my people, but I want to open their minds to other things, too.

It’s a whole different approach now.”

That could be down, in part, to the importance of his work with both Burna Boy – who he confirms will appear on Summer ina Da Winter – and Pa Salieu. In closely meshing his own music with collaborators both alike and apart in terms of style, he’s both flirting with the mainstream and making good on his talk of the mixtape representing the next stage of his creative journey.

He remains stunned that Burna Boy sought him out; the significance of working with such a figurehead of what might prove to be a golden age of afrobeat and dancehall hasn’t been lost on Gee. “He came to London, reached out to my people, and then I was talking to him, and quickly we were in the studio. I didn’t know what to expect – usually, when I go into the booth, I know myself, and I know how I want things to sound: I know what I’m doing.

And I can’t lie, bro: it was very, very organic. We just went in and came out with some crazy stuff. God works in mysterious ways.”

That particular pairing might have seemed like an unlikely hook-up; Gee’s relationship with Pa Salieu, on the other hand, seems like an obvious confluence. The two men are cut from the same cloth; Brits in their mid-twenties who retain strong connections to their African heritage, both of whom seem hellbent on reinventing this country’s rap language. Salieu’s signing to Warner, constant rotation on 1xtra and his Sound of 2021

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triumph will open him up – and by turn Gee too – to a whole new audience, but the latter talks only of their deep kinship, sounding almost choked up in the process. “Some things are not explainable. That’s my guy, man. I think, in life, everybody has somebody that their energy just bounces off, and that’s who he is to me. He’s my brother, you know? I love that boy with my heart.”

With Gee featuring so prominently on ‘My Family’, one of Salieu’s biggest hits, and with Salieu having made a telling contribution to Gee’s own breakthrough, the incendiary ‘Party Popper’, we can expect the pair to play a crucial part in each other’s stories as the year unfolds, even as Gee strives to lay down his own marker with Summer ina Da Winter. There will be more unknowns to face down the road – the road itself being one of them, with the pandemic having seen to it that Gee’s experience of performing live remains limited. “It’s a weird feeling,” he says. “It’s not as if I’ve missed it, because I haven’t really done that on a big stage yet. I would love to get on that, but obviously corona has mashed it all up for now.” When the prospect is raised of what the energy might be like when he finally does find himself up in front of packed rooms, he grins. “Outrageous! It’s gonna be outrageous.”

Until COVID-19 eases and lockdowns are consigned to history, though, the central theme of Summer ina Da Winter will remain a timely one; a far cry from the manner in which Mukta vs. Mukta pitted him so relentlessly against himself and his own demons, the core message from the mixtape is one of positivity, and standing tall in the face of adversity. “Light out of darkness – that’s the feel. Rising above the hardship, and still having a good time. We’ve gotta go through the struggle with a smiley face, bro.”

A monthly record club from Loud And Quiet and Totnes record store DRIFT 12 new LPs with 10% off for L&Q Members in February’s collection

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Committee meeting, by Jess Wrigglesworth Photography by Tom Porter

Blue Bendy A couple of weeks before Christmas Blue Bendy did something which has become rather unusual these days: they played an actual, real life show, to a real life audience, albeit one seated in a socially-distanced formation. “It felt a bit like a school recital, but in quite a nice way,” says synth player Olivia Morgan of the gig at Brixton’s Windmill. I recall the first time I saw Blue Bendy, a performance which felt like anything but – frontman Arthur Nolan meandering around his five bandmates as they vied for space on a makeshift stage, playing to a very rowdy crowd at New Cross’ now defunct Five Bells. A seated audience must have been quite a contrast. “I mean, we felt quite nervous about it for a couple of reasons,” Nolan admits. “I was thinking about how it would translate, if it was going to be awkward, but it was actually alright. Something about it kind of suited us, I think.”

It seems that the band has come a long way since those early show. Formed in 2017 by Nolan and guitarist/synth player Joe Nash shortly after both had moved to London from Scunthorpe (“I was just sort of making some music on my own and Joe had heard them. He approached me and said, ‘You’re amazing, can I start a band with you?’ and I said, ‘Yeah fine.’”), the band was initially completed by bassist Sam Wilson, Harrison Charles on guitar, and Oscar Tebbit on drums. “We asked [Oscar] to join because he could ride a motorbike and we thought that’d be a good idea. It’s good for posing with,” Nolan deadpans. It wasn’t until they’d been gigging for almost a year that Morgan joined the group, bringing with her another synthesiser and softlyuttered vocals that serve as the perfect counterpart to Nolan’s Lincolnshire drawl – think Laetitia Sadier meeting Mark E. Smith. “Since Olivia joined, it feels like we’ve been trying to make something weirder, and poppier,” says Nash.

Their first show as a six-piece was in June 2018, although Morgan was yet to learn all the parts. “I’d only been playing for a week or something, so I was kind of fake playing on stage,” she laughs. “No one knew.” More gigs followed, including coveted support slots with Squid, The Magic Gang, Scalping and Omni, which won them plenty of new fans, including Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos, who approached them backstage after the Omni show. “We came offstage and he was just there talking

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to us,” says Nolan. Do they keep in touch? “I think we sent him a meme,” quips Morgan. “We have a bit of back and forth with him on Instagram,” says Nash, “he’s a part-time commenter on our posts.” Surely enough, when a picture of the band crops up on my feed that evening, Kapranos has commented: “Great photo!”.

The band are planning on sending him their new music once it’s done, and they share a collaborator – the producer Margo Broom, who has worked with Goat Girl and Fat White Family, and at whose Hermitage Studios Blue Bendy have been spending increasing amounts of time. Broom comes up a lot over the course of our chat, and it’s clear that access to her and her studios has had a major impact in developing the band’s sound.

“She heard ‘Suspension’ and wanted to get us in,” Nolan recalls. “I guess she liked it to some degree and thought she could do a better job, basically.” Broom seems to be a kind of mentor and, at times, a seventh member. “I don’t think [she] would like me saying this, but we’re often sort of all over the shoulder, keeping an eye on what she’s doing. They say not to make certain things part of a committee, but it’s quite a lot of give and take, I think.”

— Slay your darlings —

Making things happen genuinely by committee, in a band of six, is no mean feat, but it is clear that each member has a real say in every aspect of Blue Bendy. “It’s democratic, isn’t it?” Charles says, as the others appropriately nod. “I think when there’s six of you, you’ve gotta realise – and it’s taken a while – that sometimes less is more. And you’ve just got to strip everything back.”

“I mean, we all have the same end goal,” says Nash, adding that having Hermitage Studios at their disposal has helped the group dynamic. “Before, you’d be in like a pressure cooker of a three-hour studio that you’re renting for £15 an hour. And everybody wants their part at the end of the day, and you’re trying to argue for it but also trying to think about it fitting into the song. We’re much better at it now, but in the past there have been times where you had to either stand your ground and stake your claim, or just think, ‘This isn’t worth it’ and accept the change.”

“There’s a lot of slaying of darlings isn’t there?” posits Nolan.

“There’s a lot of slaying of dreadful songs as well,” replies Charles, much to the others’ amusement. Even watching them interact over Zoom, it’s obvious how well and how easily they get along.

It must help that they all have a similar taste in music, although when I ask about their shared reference points they seem reluctant to name names. “I suppose we’re all Aphex Twin fans, or Radiohead fans,” Nolan offers.

“If you can make the argument of something having any sort of musical merit, then I think that’s probably something that we’re all into,” adds Nash.

A press release lists Arthur Russell, Boards of Canada, Tindersticks and Broadcast among their influences, but

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ultimately, Charles says, their musical references don’t feed into their output in a literal sense. “I guess it doesn’t really come into the creative process, does it? I mean, maybe there’s a couple of touchstones but mainly it’s about serving the general idea of whatever Arthur brings in. I think we’re all just kind of trying individually with our own instrument to serve that song as best we can.”

So far it seems to have worked as a tactic. While there are certainly echoes of those other bands in the four tracks Blue Bendy have currently released, they’ve established a sound all of their own – a hypnotic mesh of grungey guitars and whimsical Stereolab-esque pop brought down to earth by Nolan’s impassioned vocals, his delivery oscillating between curt spoken word and a melancholic croon undeniably indebted to Morrissey. Recent singles ‘International’ and ‘Glosso Babel’, the first products of their work with Broom, suggest they’re only getting better.

“Those are probably the most collaborative songs we’ve done,” Nolan says of the tracks, which came together in Broom’s studios early last year, and which they self-released on Nash’s label Simonie Records. “The label was something I’ve wanted to do for a while,” he says. “We had these tracks finished and we wanted to get them out there, we just didn’t have anyone to put them out because everybody sort of went cold with coronavirus – that’s a strange choice of words, but everybody that we were speaking to sort of dropped off.”

Aside from being ghosted by record labels, the tumult of the pandemic hasn’t had too detrimental an impact on

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“I wanted to basically come out of lockdown a new band – to feel like we’re taking it up a notch”

their music. “I was kind of worried, you know, especially around sort of April time, thinking maybe it’s gonna go off the boil,” Nolan admits, “but from July onwards, it kind of feels like everyone – I mean, I don’t wanna speak for everyone, but it feels like everyone’s a lot more up for it at the minute, weirdly more than even before, I think.” Not having the time constraints and pressures of continually playing shows, Nash says it’s been liberating. “You think, ‘Well there’s nothing else to do. And we have this space available to us. Let’s get it all done. Let’s write loads more, and let’s record loads more than we’d normally have the time to do.’”

“I wanted to basically come out of it a new band,” says Nolan. “Lots more things recorded, nearly a completely different setlist – to feel like we’re taking it up a notch. And I think that’s kind of what we’re achieving, I think we are much tighter, I think we’re better musically than we were before.

We’ve never felt more cohesive. I certainly haven’t felt as happy with everything as a whole as I do now.”

Post-industrial malaise and French-language sprechgesang,

by Luke Cartledge. Photography by Will Shields

Gary, Indiana Between 1960 and 2010, the population of Gary, Indiana shrank by half. Today, despite the housing crisis 40km away in Chicago, it’s strewn with abandoned buildings, unwanted, untouched. Few groups are capturing the sound of such deterioration and malaise quite like a band from Manchester called Gary, Indiana.

At the time of writing, they’ve only got three singles out (the self-released ‘Berlin’ and ‘Pashto’, and ‘Nike of Samothrace’, with which they announced their signing to Brooklyn’s Fire Talk Records) but they’ve made an impact. Combining caustic noise with thunderous percussion and flickering sprechgesang vocals, the trio’s music doesn’t simply capture the surface aesthetics of post-industrial decay but expresses how it feels to live in a society that feeds, vulture-like, on that decay. This stuff is pressurised, disorientated, battered, occasionally beautiful, often gruelling. And really good.

We speak just before Christmas 2020, the UK still deep in its Covid-19 crisis. Gary, Indiana’s Parisian singer Valentine Caulfield is facing up to spending the holidays in Manchester.

“I’m not going home for Christmas for the first time in my

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entire life,” she says, sadly. “It’s been really stressful and quite weird. But [lockdown] has been quite productive for us.”

Caulfield first met her bandmate Scott Fair in 2016, when they were both playing in other bands. They were impressed with one another; slowly, what would become Gary, Indiana began to formulate.

“It started out just as me and Val writing together,” says Fair. “And we were lying in wait, until we were happy that we’d arrived at a place musically that we were excited to share with people. A lot of the early stuff was just figuring out a way to get to that place. We met at a gig in a place called Aatma, just off Stevenson Square in the Northern Quarter.”

“We kept in touch,” says Caulfield, “and when Scott was starting what is now Gary, Indiana he messaged me saying that he wanted a female vocalist who could speak French. I happen to be a female vocalist, and I speak French. We then spent quite a while refining what our songs actually are. It’s been a slow, interesting sonic journey.”

It sometimes feels like Manchester itself has been on a slow, interesting sonic journey in recent years. For many of the

city’s rock bands at least, the shadow of Oasis, Stone Roses and Factory Records seems inescapable; for every innovator plugging away at something new in a Fallowfield basement, there are countless revivalist outfits. But there has been progress.

“Yeah, I don’t think the Oasis-worshipping sort of indie rock band in Manchester is ever gonna go away,” says Fair.

“But now I think it’s much easier for people to engage with stuff that isn’t that. I’m really pleased with the way that people have started to embrace live music more, because of the collapse of the record industry. It’s great to see that people are willing to come out to smaller shows, buy a record, buy a t-shirt, whatever.

It did feel like that went away for a while. Covid couldn’t have come at a worse time really.

“Up until the pandemic, the scene was very healthy,” he expands. “There’s a lot of people putting on their own shows, a lot of really good small promoters, and in the surrounding boroughs and towns there’s a lot of good stuff happening.”

Fair’s words are spoken tentatively and anxiously, with reason. As the pandemic continues to suspend the music industry in limbo, the infrastructure that underpins DIY culture has never looked more vulnerable. In July, two of Manchester’s iconic small venues, the Deaf Institute and Gorilla, announced their permanent closure. To widespread relief, they were bought by new owners soon afterwards, securing their futures (for now). As ever with city-centre property developments though, there’s more to this story than meets the eye, as Caulfield is keen to point out.

“The thing is, they’ve been trying to sell it for ages. I’m not gonna go into a whole rant about them, but the people who run it own half of Manchester. They were clever to announce it just as lockdown was being lifted as being a consequence of Covid and everything, but they had been trying to unload Deaf Institute and Gorilla for ages.”

— Absolute filth — They’re an interesting pair in conversation. Fair is friendly and forthcoming, but chooses his words very carefully; Caulfield speaks less, but when she does, she’s a little sharper, happier to cut through the niceties with a pointed observation. That’s not unlike the role she plays on record – her vocals are used sparingly, with an unusual regard for timbre and rhythm taking precedent over clarity or catchiness. She’s not pushed to the front of the mix like a conventional pop frontperson; somehow, that commands one’s attention more acutely.

“I’ve done many different things,” she tells me of her vocal style. “I started with classical music, music school for 15 years, then I played in rock and punk bands. And I think the sound that we have at the moment takes from different sides of all of the things that I’ve done before. What I enjoy the most about playing in this band is that I get to do all of the things that I really enjoy.

But yeah, it’s in-between singing and spoken word, some of it’s full-on shouting; I do a lot of heavy breathing. It’s quite exciting.”

Fair agrees. “I was really drawn to Val’s voice when I saw her perform. Certainly, from a Brit’s perspective, French language sounds very musical and poetic, and there’s something

about juxtaposing the prettiness of that with very challenging noise music.” He’s not wrong: recent single ‘Nike of Samothrace’ sounds like Big Black wrestling with Einstürzende Neubaten, until Caulfield’s voice, artfully deadpan and distant, provides a completely unexpected focal point.

“I’d love to sing or perform in another language,” Fair continues, “because then for an English-speaking person, it’s less about lyrics and more about the sound of the voice and the sound of syllables and pronunciation. One thing that I really love that Val does is playing a lot with the rhythm of her voice, in parts where you might not have so much dynamism with pitch.”

Caulfield laughs. “I always really like people telling me that the French makes everything sound so nice – it allows me to speak absolute filth.”

— Ten-foot film nerds — As the project began to take shape pre-pandemic, record releases and live shows beckoned, and the pair decided they needed a drummer.

“I started talking to this guy at a party,” says Fair. “We were talking about music all night; we liked a lot of the same obscure bands. I was like, ‘You seem like a well-connected guy.

Do you know any good drummers?’”

He did, and introduced them to Liam Stewart, Lonelady’s touring drummer. He’s not able to join us today, so Fair takes the opportunity to sing his praises.

“Liam wasn’t the first. There were others. But we played Liam the demo, and the first time that we met him, at the end of that session, I was just like, ‘Oh, man, we need to play with this guy’. Because he’s really good.”

Their lineup thus complete, Gary, Indiana have big plans for their live show, whenever we’ll be allowed to see it. Selfconfessed film nerd Fair lights up when describing the visual ideas they’ve been working with.

“It’s all self-produced – the videos, the artwork, the music. And there’s this VR set: Liam was like, ‘Right, I can get a 360-degree camera, let’s set it up with some lights in the rehearsal space and see how it looks.’ It’s all in black and white, and then it’s like you’re in the middle of our circle of play. We noticed after we’d filmed it that we were all very close to the camera, and we look like giants. I remember showing it to my friend and he’s just like, ‘As intimidating as the music is, the fact that you guys are probably ten feet tall makes it even more intense.’”

“Visual media has a big influence on us,” affirms Caulfield. “I did a lot of opera when I was young – I like the theatrical element of it.”

We wrap up soon, and return to our respective lockdown Christmases. For the next few days I have ‘Nike of Samothrace’ on repeat. The way it channels the claustrophobia and unknowability of life at the moment seems appropriate. It increasingly feels like this band, named after a city whose time has long passed, may have arrived perfectly at theirs.

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Karima Walker

Between sleep and wake, folk and drone, by Sam Walton Photography by Holly Hall

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Karima Walker is not a morning person. She admits this to me at 9am Arizona time, squinting into a webcam with breakfast coffee steaming at her side and early light streaming into the room behind her. Dusk, meanwhile, encroaches around me, seven hours and five thousand miles east. “I love it when I’m up early,” she starts to explain from her Tucson studio space, before correcting herself: “Actually, I love it when it’s early and I’m already awake.

But I do not like waking – waking is a regular struggle for me. I could probably sleep for days if I didn’t have anything I needed to do. My natural rhythm is to stay up late and wake up late, even though I really wish I could be there for morning.”

Perhaps, then, crack of dawn isn’t the ideal time to be talking to Walker, whose own comfort zone – not to mention that of her new album of delicate folk songs intertwined with fragile, burbling tape loops – seems far more rooted in the small hours.

Then again, maybe it is: after all, said new record evokes that woozy period of coming round after deep sleep, not yet fully alert but nonetheless hazily aware of one’s surroundings, with its title, Waking The Dreaming Body, signposting that evocation directly.

Across its 40 minutes, it addresses that headspace both head on (in its quietly pastoral title track, Walker, breathy and quiet as if only just stirring, sings that “it seems like every morning starts the same way”) and also more obliquely: across large swathes of drone and field recordings, the strange internal logic of the hypnagogic brain is transferred into peaceful abstract sounds that, when assembled, feel like the aural equivalent of huge Rothko canvases: simultaneously edgeless and depthless and still, their meticulously-planned giant form residing beyond the realms of waking intelligibility, but only just. At their most impressive, as on a 13-minute album centrepiece that swoops elegantly from beatific synth surges into dense thickets of reed sounds and out into distant piano and environmental recordings of howling wind, the pieces are restorative and calming, sedate but teeming with life.

However, it’s when Walker combines these two forms – swaddling the warm orthodoxy of American folk music in noise and ambient texture, or using non-standard production techniques to subvert otherwise standard songs – that her music is at its most compelling. It’s an approach she first acknowledged while at college in the Midwest around the time of that region’s mid-noughties boom in what was initially called “alt-country”, essentially a retooling of traditional folk and country music with post-rock and experimental approaches. Walker recalls the excitement she felt after hearing Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born while in school, (in)famous for its penultimate migraine-mimicking epic drone piece ‘Less Than You Think’, and talks admiringly of the skewed attitudes adopted by records from around the same time like Master And Everyone by Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Jolie Holland’s Catalpa. “They were the people reinterpreting that tradition, but their trajectory away from it made a lot of sense to me,” she recalls.

It’s a trajectory that Walker has followed too. Where some musicians rely on strict compartmentalising of multiple styles, Walker’s preference is for the combinatorial approach. “The model of artists who will put all the lyrical songs on one side and then the instrumental pieces separate is something I like,” she

begins, explaining the conception of her album, “but I wanted these two worlds or genres to get an equal amount of attention.

“I think that depending on what genre you’re responding to, or what genre representative you’re in conversation with, certain styles get downplayed or featured,” she continues. “Like, from a more lyric-based standpoint, an instrumental song can feel like negative space, or it can feel like something’s missing, which makes sense to me: I’m fascinated by the ways that lyrics and melodies ground us in really helpful ways, and in ways that are really powerful and poignant. But I’m also interested in why our ear then interprets, through the lack of that, new territory or a negative space that frames the lyric-based songs. So in putting them together I wanted to keep some of that tension. I wanted to have the push and pull of where that tension goes when we move from something that feels more definite and structured into a place that feels maybe more dreamlike.”

— No listener left behind — Occupying the liminal space between two opposing phenomena without diluting the essence or veracity of either seems to be a sort of superpower of Walker’s, whether it’s that space between waking and sleeping or between familiar song and peculiar drone, between the conscious and subconscious or the structured and the stumbled-upon. But that occupation is not borne of striking skilful compromise, like a seasoned centrist politician, but instead comes from sensitive, empathetic juxtaposition, and welcoming difference, contrast and diversity.

That feels timely: five days before I speak to Walker, while listening to Waking The Dreaming Body and thinking about what to talk to her about, extremist supporters of Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol in perhaps the most shocking demonstration of the political divisions that the deranged president had stoked while in office. Then, after a night glued to CNN, I returned to her album and, on re-listening, couldn’t help but hear Walker’s embrace of in-betweenness as a super-subtle solution suggestion for America’s discord, a demonstration of how it may be possible for the spaces between the worlds of old American traditionalism and potentially discomforting progressiveness to be hospitable to all-comers, instead of zones that must be fought over and recaptured.

I acknowledge to Walker that the metaphor is a stretch, and that I’d be amazed if the intent of her latest record were some sort of political mediation, and she agrees on both counts. But she is interested in the parallels, and perhaps in the hope and comfort, if nothing more pragmatic, that might be sought from viewing global problems through such an alternative prism, comparing them to how she performs her material: “With the lyric and more melodic songs, they’re easy to grab onto, and they make more sense as a single or as something that’s going to draw people in,” she remembers of pre-COVID gigs. “So I felt really aware of what songs could refocus and recentre the malleable attention that an audience is generously bringing to a show, and would try and find the places where I might lose people and where I might draw people in, where I could ground us, and then where I could appropriately push into more dissonant spaces

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“My natural rhythm is to stay up late and wake up late, even though I really wish I could be there for morning”

that were maybe harder to listen to: where’s the threshold where I lose people, and who’s willing to come with me?

“Once I find that, we’ll reground together in something that feels comforting or beautiful, and then we’ll go back out, and it feels like this elastic exercise,” she explains. “The reason I talk about that, though, is because there are these questions of hospitality and otherness that I’ve been thinking about – when do people decide that they want to walk away, and where do they remain curious? What can I plant in the noisy places of my show to draw people out in ways that they wouldn’t have expected?”

She then tells a story of playing in a fairly sketchysounding rural bar in Oregon (Confederate flags flying, a rodeo happening in the background, cowboys propping up the bar) and using her no-listener-left-behind approach to win over her audience. “And I was like, wow, okay, so it works. It works to find this middle ground and still keep the tension of these differences.

And that’s something I will probably keep exploring, because I don’t know if these dualities can always be reconciled in a clean way. But they exist in the same world, so there is, and can be, a way in which they cohabitate…”

To be clear, Walker is still talking about musical performance, even if the applications elsewhere are beautifully apparent. But just as she’s sounding at her most hopeful and utopian, she checks herself: “At the same time, there is some serious shit happening that I don’t even totally know how to process, so I’m afraid of suggesting there would be a direct application of my music to the current political situation.

I don’t feel at all equipped to do that. But I do think, though, that these political questions of otherness are all about dual coexisting worlds, and that is absolutely a question I come back to all the time.”

There is a school of thought that characterises art as an act of reduction. It suggests that Michelangelo’s finished statue of David always existed within the block of stone in front of him, and his creativity lay in the removal of extraneous material until David appeared. Another, by contrast, sees it as an additive process, where the art lies in the combining of distinct notes or colours or words in a unique way. Walker’s approach, perhaps unsurprisingly, appears to lie somewhere in between those two schools, on the one hand whittling away at songs until elegantly succinct folk hymnals emerge, and on the other enmeshing those songs around burble and hiss, drone and dream, to make something fresh, reframed and reimagined. It’s a fragile union, at any time of the day.

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Reviews

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Albums

serpentwithfeet – DEACON (secretly canadian) Josiah Wise had already lived a litany of musical lives before his thirtieth birthday. His childhood involved stints in choirs, first singing classically in the Maryland State Boys Choir, which he found lacking in racial diversity, and then in the choral group at Baltimore City College, in which Black people were far better represented, and with which he went overseas to compete at an international level. The experience sufficiently turned his head to have him, as a teenager, dedicating himself to the dream of becoming a world-class classical performer: rehearsing for hours on end every day, taking lessons in opera singing, and learning French, German and Italian in anticipation of a career that would have him performing arias from across the global songbook.

It didn’t materialise. A series of make-or-break applications to graduate programmes were rejected, at what we now know to be a turning point; the moment at which he began to become serpentwithfeet. This was a transformation every bit as physical as musical, as spiritual as sonic. Shorn of the need to pay any heed to the clean-cut conventions of the classical world, he adopted a look that would become his signature, one dominated by an oversized septum piercing and a host of body inkings that, in just about as dramatic a break with his Pentecostal upbringing as possible, included one of a pentagram on the side of his head.

He performed similar 180-degree turns in swapping Baltimore for Brooklyn, and in exploring his own queerness.

All the while, he was quietly figuring out how to subvert a musical language that he had spent years mastering, only to be told he wasn’t fluent enough for the white classical world to find space

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for him. He dug deep, studied intently, worked out just how deeply rooted the history of classical in the United States was in the music of his African-American ancestors. He reflected on his own stylistic journey, ruminating on where the neo-soul groups of his college days and his occasional predilection for the gothic could fit in the songs he wrote moving forward.

All of which laid the groundwork for what would be a fascinating series of clashes in his early work – between his cerebral, highly academic understanding of classical and the primal nature of the gospel music of his youth, and in his suffusion of centuries-old sonic sensibilities with a lyrical outlook shaped by his experiences as a queer man in present-day America. His enlisting of The Haxan Cloak as his key collaborator on debut EP blisters was no accident; by selecting somebody at the cuttingedge of 21st century electronica he was hiring a sort of futuristic spirit guide who could make sense of Wise’s fundamental push-and-pull between the ancient and the contemporary. blisters was the sound of him working out these contradictions in real time. A quick-fire twenty-one-minute five-tracker that was so much more expansive than the running time suggested, it was ultimately held together not by the production, not by Wise’s scholarly background and not by the myriad influences being thrown into the pot, but by the literal and figurative power of his voice.

His pairing of classical inflections with modern effects felt like a genuine breaking of the vocal mould, whilst his conversational approach to storytelling fizzed with wit and glowed with warmth. It played like proof positive that none of the many different hats he’d tried on over the years were ever going to properly accommodate somebody so idiosyncratic – for him to express himself faithfully, he’d need to work in his own image, to his own design.

This is something reflected in his position on the outskirts of the mainstream; still a little too weird to command the broad appeal of Frank Ocean, too

committed to experimentalism – and even in the era of Ocean and Lil Nas X, perhaps too unapologetically queer – to have a crossover hit. His last album, soil, set down a marker in terms of how intrinsically tied it was to the idea of his ancestry, as well as to his ever-developing relationship with his faith. It was also an album defined by its complexity, taking a nuanced look at the messy intricacies of relationships as well as layering his vocals in a manner that often had him sounding like a choir unto himself.

This follow-up, DEACON, feels like an attempt to offer up a more potent distillation of what makes Wise tick, both emotionally and as a musician, whilst recognising that (like the rest of us) he remains a work-in-progress on both fronts. In a further indicator of his ongoing connection with his religious upbringing, it’s named after the position in some branches of the Christian church below that of a priest but above that of a layperson, often acting as a conduit between the two. In an abstract sense, Wise embodies that role throughout: like soil, DEACON is a treatise on queer love and interpersonal relationships; but unlike soil, it seeks less to counsel on the awkward aspects of them, with the deliberate exclusion of any songs that reference heartbreak. Instead, there’s more focus on the little things; it’s as if he’s realised that the biggest political statements can be the simplest. That’s why the gorgeously simple ‘Same Size Shoe’ packs such an emotional punch – it’s a handsomely woozy love song that inflects R&B with dream pop, built around the plainest of observations: “Me and my boo wear the same size shoe.” Lead single ‘Fellowship’, meanwhile, is a clear-eyed paean to the profundity of male friendship, on which he fittingly brings in Sampha and Lil Silva to back him.

In general, the compositions here are by a distance the lightest and airiest that Wise has yet put forward. Where soil occasionally threatened to overcook things with perhaps one too many ideas shoehorned in, the musical themes on DEACON are given ample room to breathe. Combined with cleaner, more

Albums restrained vocals and a stepped-down tempo, it means the record – only thirty minutes in length – floats by gorgeously, although repeat listens reveal the songs to be plenty elaborate beneath the surface.

With only three features on the album, Wise often approaches the tracks as if determined to accompany himself.

The way the pace subtly shifts throughout the hazy ‘Amir’ is a case in point, as is the softly uptempo ‘Sailor’s Superstition’. For an artist whose identity has been so informed by environmental factors – his education, his sexuality, his faith – this is the first release of Wise’s to be heavily imbued with a sense of place – Los Angeles, where he moved around the time the songs began to come together.

You can see the palm trees and feel the warmth of the sun with this collection – the change of pace from Brooklyn is palpable.

Elsewhere, there remains room for the skilful pushing of Wise’s own boundaries. Opener ‘Hyacinth’ might be the standout, weaving an impressionistic backdrop out of melodic, chiming guitar and deep, throbbing bass over which he smartly pieces together another multipart vocal, effectively duetting with himself as he spins an affecting love story.

Comparisons to Ocean have been made readily in the past, but had ‘Hyacinth’ made it onto Blonde instead, you never would’ve heard the end of it. On ‘Heart Storm’, NAO less guests than takes the stage Wise graciously sets for her; the cautious optimism of ‘Old & Fine’, meanwhile, might be the record’s most affecting moment.

That track also plays like DEACON in microcosm – this is an album of quiet ambition, one that treads softly in both sound and message. Its minimalism sets it well apart from both blisters and soil, but the spirit of self-discovery remains the same. There’s almost an irony to the fact that, both personally and musically, such a complex character with such a wealth of ability and knowledge seems to have expressed himself most succinctly by stripping away the accoutrements. He has made what is, at its heart, a genuine soul record. 8/10 Joe Goggins

FYI Chris – Earth Scum (black acre) When the news of MF DOOM’s passing broke on New Year’s Eve 2020, his legacy of incredible music was clear.

Not just his own, but that of the many artists he continues to inspire. A brilliant, if indirect, example of this can be found on Earth Scum, the debut LP from Peckham based electronic duo FYI Chris, which features beats found on a DAT in a skip near Honor Oak Park Overground, labelled ‘FAO: D Dumile’.

This anecdote is one of many related to this eclectic album by Chris Coupe and Chris Watson, two men who, one suspects, aren’t short of stories to tell, having spent the best part of a decade immersed in South London’s club culture.

Earth Scum is first and foremost a love letter to Peckham, peppered with references to Morley’s chicken shops, nights at Rye Wax, green parakeets, and features from fellow locals like MC Pinty and Simeon Jones of The Colours That Rise. It sounds like Peckham too, vital and pulsating, a hundred different cultural references thrust together in a way that can sometimes be overwhelming but is mostly pretty special, recalling the halcyon days of late-night buses, midweek comedowns and crammed dancefloors. 6/10 Jessica Wrigglesworth

Clark – Playground In A Lake (deutsche grammophon) Since making his debut in the early 2000s, Christopher Clark has earned his place

as one of London’s most consistently cutting-edge producers. From the versatile electronic textures of fan favourite Clarence Park to his eerie, pulsating score for last year’s indie-horror Daniel Isn’t Real, you can count on him to push boundaries with each new project. Now Clark has shed his skin once again for his ninth album, Playground In A Lake, which is likely to be remembered as his most ambitious, esoteric work to date.

Across 16 tracks Clark explores the concept of innocence lost, playing with imagery of a flooded planet. Yet it’s not as downtrodden as that may sound; there are many tranquil moments, inspired by Scott Walker and ’70s synth work.

Oliver Coates and members of Grizzly Bear and Manchester Collective lend their hand to the instrumentals, which are occasionally joined by choir boy Nathaniel Timoney, whose vocals help express the themes of childhood and innocence. Tracks such as ‘Citrus’ lull you into a state of calm, while ‘More Islands’ wouldn’t be out of place on the soundtrack to a moody sci-fi film, and the monolithic ‘Life Outro’ closes the record in epic fashion.

Playground In A Lake offers some stunning moments and is likely to be enjoyed greatly by Clark’s most ardent fans, but the casual listener may find the experimental sound design too sprawling. Regardless, he remains a veteran who can be relied upon to never pander to the ordinary. 6/10 Woody Delaney

YUNGMORPHEUS – Thumbing Thru Foliage (bad taste) Morpheus is one of the thousand sons of sleep in Greek mythology, and one of three named in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He would appear in dreams in human form, as the voice of reason, whilst brothers Phobetor

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Albums (‘Frightener’) and Phantasos (‘Fantasy’) would seek to deceive the dreamer. In essence, it is Morpheus who has the ability to calmly make sense of the chaos of the dreamworld.

YUNGMORPHEUS gets his name not from mythology, but because his teenage self would frequently don a pair of round shades like Laurence Fishburne’s Matrix character. However, across his fledgling discography, MORPH plays a similar role to the Greek dream-god: from beneath a blunted dreamworld of grainy beats, he emerges with irreverent bars that wilt personal musings into political commentary. Indeed, behind a veneer of sun-drenched boom-bap, he quips “Fuck all of my racist teachers” on recent single ‘Sovereignty’.

Following last year’s standout Pink Siifu collaboration Bag Talk, MORPH’s first 2021 release Thumbing Thru Foliage sees him team up with NY producer ewonee, who does a helluva job. At points, the delectably smoky boom-bap production is the star, and from opener ‘Ride Dirty’, wherein MORPH’s cackles are masked by a smokescreen of G-funk guitar, to glitzing West Coast closer ‘Johnnie Cochran’, the album is a delight that never outstays its welcome. Whilst it is in part the intuitive beat-making that earmarks this as an early 2021 hip-hop highlight, at the centre of it all is YUNGMORPHEUS – in the midst of the album’s abstract dreamscapes, he makes sense of the chaos. 8/10 Cal Cashin

Tindersticks – Distractions (city slang) There was a quietness to Tindersticks’ previous album, No Treasure But Hope, that clearly continued to resonate with frontman Stuart A. Staples, Nottingham’s enduring singer-songwriter and great white hope to sensitive souls in

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the 1990s who find themselves sensitive souls in the 2020s for an entirely different set of reasons.

Album opener ‘Man Alone (can’t stop the fadin’)’ sees Staples burrow deep into this minimalism, crafting one of the most impressive moments in his back catalogue. Sounding like Nick Drake lost in the club, it builds, pauses, allows for bursts of wailing anxiety and then shows its hand in the final two minutes. This sets the pace for an album that uses its smallness effectively, never the wrong side of engaging. Its only misstep is a cover of Dory Previn’s ‘The Lady With the Braid’ that never quite knows what it’s doing – a sparse arrangement doing little other than shedding the song of its interesting parts, its sexuality and menace. No matter: on their thirteenth album, Tindersticks sound warm, close and very human indeed. 7/10 Fergal Kinney

Pauline Anna Strom – Angel Tears in Sunlight (rvng intl) Throughout the 1980s, the music of Bay Area electronic composer Pauline Anna Strom (released under the name Trans-Millenia Consort) opened minds to the possibility of sonically fusing our ancient brains with recording technology to create a singularly beautiful sound.

Blind from birth, Strom’s delicate compositions faithfully translate her rich inner-worlds, which were brimming with Dali-like manipulations of the deep past and the shocking present. She would channel this timeless craft through an array of synths she kept in her San Francisco apartment.

A devoted Reiki healer, Strom’s work feels therapeutic. For a long time she laid dormant musically, but re-emerged last year to announce her first new release

in three decades. Tragically, shortly thereafter, Strom unexpectedly passed away at 74. Angel Tears in Sunlight, then, becomes her parting gift to a world that needs healing more than ever.

Across the album’s nine tracks, she blends her fascination with ritualistic organ, German classical, Krautrock and nature to produce an album that feels as cosmic as it does tropical, flowing readily like a leaking ethereal tap. The naturalistic beauty of ‘Equatorial Sunrise’ is eerily idyllic, whereas the humidity of ‘Tropical Rainforest’ is cooled by the pixelated waterfalls crashing through the track’s surface, and ‘Temple Gardens at Midnight’ is the wondrous sound of neurons fading like fireworks in the sky.

Angel Tears in Sunlight is a mesmerising final tour of a fascinating mind and a fitting farewell to truly a one-of-a-kind visionary. 8/10 Robert Davidson

Matthew E. White & Lonnie Holley – Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection (spacebomb/jagjaguwar) When instinct and serendipity collide it’s imperative to act fast. In those rare moments where something akin to magic presents itself time can feel as though it’s slipping through your fingers like sand in an hourglass. When producer and musician Matthew E. White showed Lonnie Holley a series of demos he’d shelved in 2018, he quickly realised that the Alabama-born artist and performer was the missing piece he needed to transform those sonic sketches into three-dimensional compositions. As White made his way through the instrumentals, Holley searched pages of his notebook for penned thoughts. Led purely by feeling, these lyrics were seamlessly set to arrangements he’d never heard before. Four hours later, Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection was captured.

Albums The septuagenarian’s ad-lib approach reflected White’s attitude as he prepared to return to the studio following his 2015 LP, Fresh Blood. Wanting to switch up his songwriting style, White assembled an accomplished septet of musicians which he led in sessions of improvisational freeplaying. Across Broken Mirror, White’s production echoes aspects of how Danger Mouse and the late Richard Swift (who coincidentally produced Holley’s 2020 release, National Freedom) drew inspiration from the psychedelic fusion of jazz and rock during the 1970s. An alluring spell of celestial keys, drawing inspiration from Miles Davis’ early exploration in electric instrumentation that predated his Bitches Brew eruption, casts a brighter glow on anchoring dub beats. Furthermore, woven throughout the music are a variety of immersive motifs and influences from David Byrne’s propensity for dynamic African-influenced beats on ‘I’m Not Tripping / Composition 8’, which precedes the glorious cascading glockenspiel notes that twinkle amidst the rumbling thunder of ‘Get Up! Walk With Me / Composition 7’. It’s difficult to isolate one particular stand-out movement or song from the record. Everything here is a triumph.

The immediacy of Broken Mirror’s compositions culminates in a timeless and timely record, and the collaborative partnership between Matthew E. White and Lonnie Holley is a natural one – a case of the right place at the right time leading to the creation of the right songs for this moment. 9/10 Zara Hedderman

Karima Walker – Waking The Dreaming Body (keeled scales/orindal) There’s been plenty of time to think lately.

By now we’ve all been stuck inside for the better part of a year, and once bread-

making has lost its charm the only thing you’ve got left is pondering your place in the universe.

In Karima Walker’s case, the lockdown has clearly been a period of deep self-reflection – and a pretty productive one at that. Originally intending to record at the tail end of 2019, first personal illness and the global pandemic ended up kiboshing all that, forcing the Arizona native to record this from her home studio instead.

Shut off from her usual collaborative way of working, Walker found herself trapped between a yearning for others and the outside and thoughts of her Tunisian heritage and American upbringing.

The result is that Waking The Dreaming Body is an album that feels filled with tension channelled into what feels like a forty-minute fever dream. Each song oscillates between rich, ambient textures and melancholy poetry, ebbing and flowing between moments of stark lucidity and blissful ethereal haze.

Mostly, Waking The Dreaming Body is a record that somehow feels grown out of Arizona’s deserts and mountains. From the lonely campfire folk of ‘Softer’ to the sound of howling wind that underpins ‘Windows 1’, each song evokes a landscape in some way, inviting you to lose yourself in the sheer open vastness.

Trust me – that takes some pretty powerful magic. 7/10 Dominic Haley

Brijean – Feelings (ghostly) The jazzy electric keys, conga-led beats and buoyant bass that colour Brijean’s Feelings all gently lead to the poolside. It nails its sun-drenched atmosphere, as you’d expect from percussionist Brijean Murphy and bassist Doug Stuart, veteran session musicians who’ve used timeless tropicana grooves as the centre of their jams on many a record. Close your eyes,

and you could be drifting away on a lilo; listen closer though, and it’s not just carefree escapism that drives this record, but connection and self-assurance.

With the sturdy backing of her band to handle the grooves, Murphy dives freely into bolder songwriting and personal reflection. Her voice is gentle but commanding throughout, and her verses are peppered with subtly moving mantras. Like the best party music, it works just as well in a solitary setting, where you can soak up its details.

That’s not to undersell the instrumentals though. These are seriously well-crafted tracks, every corner filled with clever flourishes and strong interplay. Stuart gets a moment to shine on ‘Wifi Beach’, with its playful, propulsive bass lick. The interlocked bass and drum grooves anchor the project and act as a response to the introspective lyrics.

Feelings is a reach outwards as well as inwards. 8/10 Skye Butchard

Otzeki – Now is a Long Time (akira) Whether crammed inside backroom pub venues or behind the decks of blaring nightclub sound systems, London-based electronic duo Otzeki remain ambivalent as to exactly where their music belongs.

The cousin duo, whose early drunken jam sessions were stripped back to guitars and a semi-functional drum machine, have since cultivated a trademark brand of indietronica that succeeds in unifying praise from late-night ravers and sticky basement gig-goers alike. Back with their first new music in two years, the pair’s second album, Now Is A Long Time, reclines into the foundations carved out from their debut by continuing to transmit a socially-engaged message of hope and sanity to a world still struggling to get back to its feet.

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Albums Textured guitars and intricate layers of sparse electronic programming spill into ’90s trip-hop and lo-fi house rhythms. Mike Sharp’s cloudbusting falsetto establishes itself from the get-go as it glides above the dense production on ‘Sweet Sunshine’. Rarely does anything sound sedated, the duo’s euphoric sound refracted through rich, permeating waveforms. Flat-out infectious, but always challenging the conventional pop structure, they indulge in hookier grooves on ‘Max Wells-Demon’. Otzeki’s impulse to be catchy yet confrontational sure feels like a thrilling mission statement. 8/10 Ollie Rankine

Middle Kids – Today We’re The Greatest (lucky number) Today We’re The Greatest, the second album from Sydney trio Middle Kids, is touted as a pluckier, more personal outing than their impressionistic debut, as the band decamp to LA for haughty recording sessions and songwriter Hannah Joy adopts a less veiled approach to her lyricism.

Personal? Certainly. Joy expresses heavy pangs of sentiment as she gushes through songs written during early stages of pregnancy with her first child (with husband and bandmate Tim Fitz). While unearthing topics of trauma, marriage, and parenthood, they double down on the saccharinity; ‘Run With You’ concludes with audio taken from their unborn child’s 20-week sonogram, in what I can’t quite resolve as an endearing inclusion or a moment that feels more Mumsnet influencer than indie rock.

Sonically, the record is also bathed in gooey romanticism, with glossy production bolstering acoustic foundations. The shimmering guitars of ‘Cellophane’ reveal arena-sized dynamism, whilst the slow burn of ‘Bad Neighbours’

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provides potential for a lighters-out, loved-up encore. On ‘Lost in Los Angeles’, Joy shows off a powerhouse vocal, but the posturing banjo gives off the same feeling of indie rock cosplay as Taylor Swift’s Folklore. Unfortunately, this artificiality is found elsewhere too – ‘R U 4 Me’ sounds like Noah And The Whale were tasked with writing music for a banking advert in 2009.

Although it’s a sunshine-soaked affair, dripping in syrupy sentimentality, the album’s wrestle between indie rock, all-out pop and an almost overbearing pleasantness amounts to an experience that proves a little cloying. 5/10 Tom Critten

For Those I Love – For Those I Love (september) Oftentimes when I listen to music I am transported to another time in my life. I might remember something I felt years ago, or I might have some sort of crazy epiphany, or the long-coming solution to something nagging me in the back of my mind might finally come out of the shadows. I love this about music – that it can take me back to moments that may have seemed insignificant when they happened, but hold wisdom in hindsight.

Rarely, though, do I hear an album for the first time and feel myself spirited away into the body and psyche of someone else and our emotions mixed and melded.

On his debut album as For Those I Love, master sonic collager David Balfe has achieved this impressive feat.

Written over the course of several years, including after the death of his best friend and musical co-conspirator/soulmate Paul Curran, with this album Balfe manages to make me feel the life-sapping and destroying depression and sorrow of loving and losing someone so close. Then, rolling up and down on emotional highs

and lows that feel somewhat like being at the mercy of an expanding and raging ocean tide, Balfe’s record resuscitates listeners. He injects life and hope back into me with his own memories. This intimate record uses old WhatsApp voice notes, lines of Curran’s poetry and dance samples intertwined and tangled up with Balfe’s spoken-word storytelling to bring listeners into the heart of his past, from his sometimes dark childhood in a suburb north of Dublin to the highs of knowing real love and brotherhood with Curran and the young men’s other friends.

Each track is unique and there’s not a bad song here. Conversations between mates, exclamations about the demise of punk and unique beats wind themselves around the listener’s mind until it is completely claimed, fertile ground for an outpouring of pain and love and the unfairness and bittersweetness of history. The standout track is ‘To Have You’. It’s a reminder that even in sadness the memories of loved ones and better times are something to be cherished instead of pushed away. The song’s energy is rolling and sparkling, bringing to mind the catharsis found on a dancefloor – not a distraction from everyday life but a time to let your more abstract, primal feelings have their moment in the sun. Feel first, think second. Otherwise the darkness will ruin you from the inside out. 9/10 Isabel Crabtree

Jane Weaver – Flock (fire) Recent years have seen Jane Weaver push into spacier territory. 2019 saw the release of Fenella, a reimagined soundtrack for a 1980s Hungarian animation, as well as ambient remixes of her two previous solo albums on Loops of the Secret Society.

Her new album Flock is intended as a self-conscious away from those abstract

Albums releases and towards more straightforward pop music – though of course, as a Jane Weaver record, that doesn’t preclude self-professed influences from 1980s Russian aerobics videos and Lebanese torch songs.

The album makes good on that promise. Outside of the interlude ‘Lux’, which is all new-age chimes, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith-style vocal looping and an extremely Tangerine Dream synth flute, every song here will try and stick in your head – and will probably succeed. A particular highlight is ‘Sunset Dreams’, a psych-pop tune with a head-nodding bassline that will have you missing the summer that never was.

But for all its retro stylings, Flock is a record that is invested in the production of a better future. Weaver has a clear-sighted sense of genuine optimism which doesn’t neglect the seriousness of the issues that she deals with. On ‘Modern Reputation’, she’s accompanied by a bittersweet 303 as she spins an argument for genuine change. “How many heartaches must we feel? Want to smash the patriarchy, I’m tired of your industry… We must invent some new ideas,” she sings, and you feel like if we put Jane Weaver in charge things could actually get better. 8/10 Alex Francis

Ice_Eyes – Vicious Circles (hypermedium) Life is tense at the moment: overwhelmingly serious, incredibly fastmoving, toxically static. Doing anything can feel pretty difficult under these conditions, but doing nothing isn’t much easier.

In this context, this six-track release from Athens production duo Ice_Eyes feels appropriate. It’s hectic, antagonistic, restless, and captures the feeling of stumbling from one catastrophe to the next pretty efficiently.

There are several styles at play here, from fairly straightforward, chilly techno to wild-eyed gabber and Rephlex-y breakbeat. The production is hardly subtle – all drunken kicks and gassy blasts of bass – but what it lacks in grace it mostly makes up for in intensity. Opener ‘Hydro’ flickers from one phase to the next on a bed of kinetic synths and a drill-like stalk, while title track ‘Vicious Circles’, the sleekest tune here, gestures towards mid-2000s UK bass music, suggesting that Ice_Eyes could find a comfortable home on one of Hyperdub’s Ø Corsica Studios bills if we’re ever allowed into nightclubs again.

‘Crystalbody’ closes the first side of the record, its most paranoid and uneasy cut by some distance. The second half of Vicious Circles doesn’t quite match up to the standard of the first, the ultra-heavy production becoming a bit of a grind in the absence of new ideas, although fifth track ‘Folded’ includes glimmers of the kind of restrained elegance that would take Ice_Eyes’ sound to a new level. This is an imperfect record, but a compelling one – they’re not there yet, but it feels like Ice_Eyes are closing in on something special. 6/10 Luke Cartledge

Genesis Owusu – Smiling With No Teeth (house anxiety/ourness) It’s early days yet, but Smiling With No Teeth might be the best debut album of the year. The first full-length from Canberra’s Genesis Owusu, Smiling... is a thrilling introduction.

Wildly ambitious in scope, there are moments where it snaps into industrial grooves worthy of Trent Reznor, and others where Owusu transforms into an Aussie D’Angelo. His collaboration with Kirin J Callinan, ‘Drown’, sounds like King Gizzard with Bruce Springsteen writing the hooks.

Across the record, the Ghanaian-born artist maintains the air of a bandleader, charismatically guiding listeners and musicians alike through fluid changes in style and genre. On some tracks he sings, on others he raps. Elsewhere, he delivers self-aware passages of spoken word, punctuating his verses on ‘Waitin On Ya’, for example, with gems like, “Your alarm can’t disturb you in an eternal slumber, baby.”

Owusu’s gift for bars is obvious throughout Smiling With No Teeth.

The album’s title alone evokes both the tight-lipped resentment of forced pleasantries and a bloody-mouthed grin of defiance. Meanwhile, on tracks like ‘I Don’t See Colour’ and ‘Whip Cracker’, he ditches metaphor in favour of direct, sharp-tongued attacks on racists, abusers and bigots.

It’s lead single ‘The Other Black Dog’ that’s arguably Owusu’s finest moment, introducing the record’s central metaphor of the “black dog” as a symbol for the ills (mental health struggles, racism, the general chaos of the world) that haunt Owusu and serve as a constant thread through the album’s shifting styles.

A triumph from top to bottom, Smiling... sets the stage for Owusu to become a potentially generation-defining star. 9/10 Mike Vinti

Sons of Raphael – Full Throated Messianic Homage (because) The title of this first full-length from West London duo Sons of Raphael suggests little interest in doing things by halves, and comes complete with a frequently preposterous and occasionally dubious backstory that veers from The Exorcist (they were run out of the chapel where they filmed the video for ‘Eating People’ and denounced as devil worshippers) to Uncut Gems (they staked

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Albums this record’s entire budget on a basketball game, won, and promptly spent the take on drafting in a 35-piece orchestra).

Clearly capable of talking the talk, Full Throated Messianic Homage also suggests a capacity for walking the walk, playing like a woozy whistle-stop tour through the last decade or so or off-kilter psych-pop. ‘On Dreams That Are Sent

by God’ recalls Wondrous Bughouseera Youth Lagoon, while the spectre of MGMT’s Congratulations hangs heavy throughout, especially on ‘He Who Makes the Morning Darkness’. It is unquestionably indulgent, and occasionally a sharper editor would have worked wonders – ‘Let’s All Get Dead Together’ is a pace-killer – but there’s always room for a couple more genuine characters in this corner of this musical world.

Sons of Raphael have started strongly, both looking and sounding the part.

7/10 Joe Goggins

William Doyle – Great Spans of Muddy Time (tough love) For a tour of perfectionism in music, William Doyle’s Your Wilderness Revisited could have written the guidebook. Layers of sonic ecstasy exposed a painstaking attention to detail within the strange shadows which the record cast on suburban life; a rainstorm of synths, labyrinthine guitars and playful arpeggios like electronic artillery paid their uncanny debts to Doyle’s native suburbia, composed like a giant game of KerPlunk. It was a psychic reset from his years writing as East India Youth, catapulted into a critically-lauded world beyond his knowing, with a few remarkable albums under his belt; here was a world he knew intimately.

The second album released under his own name, Great Spans of Muddy Time, is, in many ways, Wilderness

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Undone – a body of work as remarkable in its sound as in its composition, caught in between adventure and apprehensive relaxation. Dotingly named after a quote

by Monty Don in an episode of Gardeners’ World, the record dives into the sludgy endlessness of mental health’s disorientations and lockdown’s idiosyncrasies; channels occasionally drop out and crackles of feedback consume gorgeous homespun melodies, all the result of a hard drive failure where his original recordings were lost or saved only to cassette tape, liberated from his ability to tamper with them.

Even the accompanying artwork is a paean to the notion of the artist stepping back. ‘The Floating Feather’ by Dutch painter Melchior d’Hondecoeter is unofficially named for the detail seen on the water beyond the artist’s own meticulous studies of birds.

From the rich arrangements and approachable art-pop of lead single ‘And Everything Changed (But I Feel Alright)’ to the crisp catchiness of Zapotec-era Beirut on ‘Nothing At All’ that eddies and swirls into malaise, or the harboring electronic fug of ‘A Forgotten Film’ and bass swells of ‘Shadowtackling’, Great Spans jettisons reference for dizzying experience. Foraging further into the wilderness, Doyle has uncovered a maximalist Lynchian heaven from the undergrowth.

10/10 Tristan Gatward

The Natvral – Tether (dirty bingo) Palate cleansers. Fancy restaurants can’t get enough of them, but in music they’re a completely foreign concept. Until now.

Tether, the debut album from The Natvral, attempts to bring the idea of the cleanser into the world of indie rock, one reverberated guitar strum at a time. The new project by Kip Berman (formerly of Pains of Being Pure at Heart fame) offers

up nine tracks of super soft-scooped Americana, expertly cleansing the remnants of his shimmering indie past with each and every mouthful.

While successful in creating a clean slate, the record does suffer from its vanilla nature. At first there’s real promise. The soothing organs of ‘Why Don’t You Come Out Anymore’ and ‘New Year’s Night’ shine bright, perfectly blending the concept of the cleanser with music that’s enjoyable in its own right.

However, these moments are few and far between. Due to the rest of the album’s distant hollowness things quickly become somewhat unmemorable, leaving the listener with nothing more than an aftertaste of Neil Young. With Tether, The Natvral has succeeded in creating the world’s first aural palate cleanser, but at what cost? Sometimes you’re just better off with a bit of flavour.

6/10 Jack Doherty

Cheval Sombre – Time Waits for No One (sonic cathedral) Eight years on from his last solo release, New York poet and songwriter Cheval Sombre (real name Chris Porpora) returns with Time Waits for No One, a collection of spacedout ballads that aims to encase listeners in a sonic sanctuary. By no means a creation of the pandemic, but somehow fitting to the times all the same, the record is an homage to slowing down, to encountering the world without rush or expectation.

Written over many years, the record comprises eight original songs and a dream-like cover of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘No Place To Fall’. The music is anchored

by Porpora’s hypnotic vocals alongside simple open-tuned acoustic guitar, encircled by keyboards, strings and cosmic effects. Gentle and repetitive, the songs have a way of bleeding into each other,

Albums running with ideas for longer than might be expected, so the listener might lose track of where the song began and when it might end.

Time Waits for No One feels like the hazy space in between dreaming and waking – calm, ethereal, and at times unmemorable – but perhaps this was Porpora’s intention. “Music doesn’t have to be so ambitious all of the time,” he said of the record. “There is a place in music where we might suggest something eternal, a refuge.” That he has certainly achieved – close your eyes and let yourself sink into it. 6/10 Katie Cutforth

Dry Cleaning – New Long Leg (4ad) Dry Cleaning’s debut album, New Long Leg, is both a lockdown record and an unsettling reminder of pre-’rona normality. On the title track, vocalist Flo Shaw’s spoken-word lyrics deal with sunburnt skin and travel toiletries. In the slogging yet slick ‘Leafy’, Shaw muses about “a tiresome swim” and “knackering drinks”, among other workaday activities and distant memories. The mood she succeeds in creating isn’t one of nostalgia or sentimentality, but one of weariness and, to a lesser extent, new found appreciation for the mundane. Shaw’s off-beat selftalk and stream of consciousness vocals encourage us to consider that while lockdown has been crap at best and devastating at worst, there were elements of life before that are better off consigned to the past, and others, dreary though they may be, that ought to be held dear.

New Long Leg wasn’t written or even demoed in lockdown, but, aided by the introspection of the resultant global standstill, it did come to life during that period. While guitarist Tom Dowse used the time to experiment with noisier, more aggressive guitar tones and bassist Nick

Maynard played around with fine and bouncy basslines, Nick Buxton, the band’s drummer, tried out drum machines.

Shaw, on the other hand, tightened her lyrics, explaining that, “I found the lockdown played into some of the themes I was interested in anyway: living in a small world, a feeling of alienation, paranoia and worry, but also a joyful revelling in household things.” In June, the band spent two weeks in rural Wales at producer John Parish’s Rockfield Studios, where, guided by his expertise and enthusiasm, they recorded the album.

The album that emerged is a record of greater confidence and refinement than Dry Cleaning’s two EPs, Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks. Here, triviality and meaning compete to create a compelling portrait of ordinary life, one littered with acerbic wit, intricacy and yawning negative space. Nowhere is this demonstrated better than on the album’s opener, ‘Scratchcard Lanyard’, a springy song disconcertingly layered with abstract lyricism and upbeat melodies. On the track, Shaw laments the superficiality of the social media age. No doubt inspired by the topsy-turvy “new normal” of lockdown, she reminds us that commodifying our experiences for the sake of Instagram and increased social capital is simply “to do everything and feel nothing.” 7/10 Rosie Ramsden

Django Django – Glowing in the Dark (because) Writing a band’s bio is a very subtle chiseling job: to master it, it’s necessary to balance the most compelling storytelling with fascinating, truerthan-true pieces of information to render an idea of natural talent mixed with the group’s hard work.

It’s thus peculiar to learn from Django Django’s official introduction to

their latest effort that “several tracks for Glowing in the Dark were written specifically to fit precise junctures in their set (which is, as Vinny says, already crafted ‘to draw a line of links from acoustic stuff through the electronic, rhythmic thing, through to something more raucous and rockabilly’).” What good can an album of self-described fillers really be?

Yet, the British four-piece have managed to pen another excellent LP – their most distinctive and mature so far, anticipated by singles remixed by, amongst others, MGMT and Hot Chip, and featuring the vocals of Charlotte Gainsbourg (on ‘Waking Up’, one of the best songs here). Multifaceted and polyhedral, the sound of the thirteen tracks is cohesive and coherent, blending together some of the most interesting genres of the last six decades – psych-pop, space rock, garage, krautrock, Madchester, the ’00s indie revival, even folk – with ease and lightness, like Psilocybin-induced visions.

Just like the luminescence emitted by a substance that has absorbed the energy around it, Glowing in the Dark beams softly, sparing us from the obscurity of present times. 9/10 Guia Cortassa

Julien Baker – Little Oblivions (matador) A lot has happened to Julien Baker since the release of her last album, 2017’s Turn Out The Lights. The Memphis musician formed supergroup boygenius with Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus.

She reassessed her attitude to alcohol and, burned out by touring, she returned to college to complete her degree.

Returning to the studio upon graduation she adopted a band approach for third album Little Oblivions. The themes of booze, bars and faith remain true to her confessional style of writing but she’s swapped the fragility of her

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Albums earlier releases for a more full-blooded sound. The tracks come wrapped in synths, banjo and drums that she mostly performs herself.

Stylistically the change isn’t as dramatic as might have been anticipated.

She was already adept at creating build and using dynamics, which have just become more dramatic here. This follows the musical arc of Bridgers, with whom there are obvious similarities on ‘Bloodshot’ and ‘Favor’, and who guests on backing vocals alongside Dacus.

There’s also plenty of continuity, with ‘Crying Wolf ’ and ‘Song In E’ having a stripped-back sound that prioritises synth and piano. In widening her sonic palette, however, she’s given herself more scope for welcome emotional catharsis.

7/10 Susan Darlington

Meemo Comma – Neon Genesis: Souls Into Matter² (planet mu) Neon Genesis Evangelion is a ’90s anime TV show about a sad boy who pilots a giant robot – kind of. Owing to its use of imagery lifted from mystical traditions (crosses, the Kabbalistic tree of life, the peppering of names like Adam, Eve and Lilith) the post-apocalyptic premise is so steeped in ambiguity that nobody can really say what it’s “about” other than the search for higher meaning in an entropic world. Having studied Kabbalah to connect with her Jewish identity – as the ancient-modern cadences of Kenji Kawai’s Ghost in the Shell score played quietly in the background – Lara Rix-Martin, aka Meemo Comma, cryptically addresses the same eternal question with Neon Genesis: Souls Into Matter².

Superficially, the LP bears a closer resemblance to her first Meemo Comma album, Ghost on the Stairs, in its emphasis on computerised beatmak-

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ing. While Rix-Martin has always been a gifted musical storyteller within the often immutable and tricky mode of ambient music, ‘Neon Genesis Title Sequence’, ‘Tohu & Tikun’ and ‘Tif ’eret’ benefit from inventive exercises in drum and bass, dub and techno, tied neatly together by the album-length thread of looped vocals and angelic choruses.

Neon Genesis Evangelion’s final episode ends on a note of selfactualisation amid all the chaos; a momentary release that feels woven throughout Souls Into Matter² in name, sound and concept. It feels like the result of an artist dedicated to exploring her own selfhood through art, which is all you can ask of an album featuring cosplay on the sleeve. 7/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Mogwai – As The Love Continues (rock action) 25 years. That’s how long Mogwai have quietly (and loudly) been doling out guitar-heavy detonation at the stamp of a Stuart Braithwaite overdrive pedal. After all that time, there’s undoubtedly a method to Mogwai, but the beautiful noise they’ve made over the years has only stood because of their dedication to reimagining the potential of sheer volume and plunging walls of noise.

As The Love Continues has all of their hallmarks (the plaintive lulls, the booming peaks, the whirling anger) but as tried-and-trusted as those structures are, there are a few unexpected subtleties that make Mogwai’s tenth album a surprising listen.

‘Pat Stains’ and ‘Drive The Nail’ provide the flashes of the calm-to-crashing rage that made 2017’s Every Country’s Sun feel so tense and brash. ‘Fuck Off Money’ and ‘It’s What I Want To Do, Mum’ go deep to refresh the tumbling, vocoded melancholy of the band’s Happy Songs

for Happy People era, and ‘Midnight Flit’ erupts into a sweeping crescendo of guitar and orchestra that clashes, soars and plummets to blockbuster effect.

But it’s the chiming delicateness of lead single ‘Dry Fantasy’ that really hits home.

Dreamy and melodic, it drifts like the opening bars of an M83 opus, switching out the power chords for raining synth and chunky reverb that’s drizzled on deliciously thick.

It’s Mogwai as you’ve always heard them, but also as you’ve never heard them before. Three decades in, and their evolutionary guitarmageddon still continues to surprise. 8/10 Reef Younis

Fimber Bravo – Lunar Tredd (moshi moshi) A magnetic force at the beating heart of protest music for nearly half a century, steel pan wizard Fimber Bravo speaks to the resistance with a new compulsion on the opening seconds of Lunar Tredd, strengthened with experience: “They ban our street voice and they choke we, we still shout ‘you can’t control we’.” The pulsing metallic beat and undulating grooves of his first new music in seven years tumble around his politics, brazenly collaborative and emboldened in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement across the globe. His production sounds more joyous than ever, weaving his own fusion of afrobeat and highlife with the glossy sheen of Western synth-pop and electro from the album’s family of players.

It’s likely that you’ll have heard Fimber Bravo’s music in some capacity before, if not his first widely-released solo album in 2013, Con-Fusion. The melody in Gwen Stefani’s ‘Hollaback Girl’ was snatched from his 20th Century Steel Band’s ‘Heaven and Hell is on Earth’, sampled by Salt-N-Pepa, the Black Eyed Peas, LL Cool J and – best of all – J Lo’s

Albums ‘Jenny From The Block’ (“Everybody’s got to earn a living”). He led fellow nightclub musicians on Steel An’ Skin’s ‘Afro Punk Reggae Dub’, steeling reggae and disco rhythms with his Trinidadian-by-South London twists, turning seven minutes of hypnotic funk into a veritable cult classic.

Lunar Tredd is a carnival at its heights and at its most reflective. The only constant across its twelve tracks is Bravo’s steel pan and refreshingly easy vibe, offering a deep inhalation above its neon-drenched interior. Senegalese percussionist Mamadou Sarr’s propelling rhythmic drive harvests the record’s textures, from the wallowing introspections of Susumu Makai-written ‘Santana’s Daughter’ and neighbouring ‘SingO’, which recalls a Woodstock-era Santana on its bouncing thrum. Alexis Taylor’s synths reverberate around psych meditations, beautified by The Horrors’ Tom Furse and Vanishing Twin’s Cathy Lucas on ‘F.Pan Landing’.

As with many of the new sounds entering the world in its current paralysis, dance music reverberates with a particularly uncanny echo. Even with the spellbinding bass of ‘Hiyah Man’ and addictive drones of ‘Tabli Tabli’, Fimber Bravo’s weathered vocal is the centrepiece, unifying the record’s strands of tradition and experimentalism, from Calypso and West African Kaiso to sickly sweet autotune. On Lunar Tredd he leads both a drowsy dance and a festival elegy, longing to be distilled.

He’s a master of his craft, and it’s best when it’s all him. 7/10 Tristan Gatward

Noga Erez – KIDS (city slang) If we have anything in common it’s that we were once all children, and Noga Erez’s second album seems to argue that we still are. From the title track addressing “Naughty boys, now you naughty men” to

the album cover’s shot of Erez in an oversized jacket, this record knows what it’s about. It represents childhood like a child would: by being loud and bombastic, full of energy until it tuckers itself out.

Whilst Erez often gets compared to Björk, the artist I keep coming back to is Kendrick Lamar. Like the Compton prophet, Erez knows that her voice can be powerful; not just in a political sense but in a literal musical one. Her delivery goes from childlike to confrontational, fitting playground anthems and punctuating insults. Production often sounds like a mid-2000s ringtone, all simple beats and a bass that chases you.

The crux of the album is ‘NO news on TV’, a playful, ironic ditty toward the end of the album that’s about wanting to distract ourselves, needing to consume so we don’t think about what we’ve consumed. I’m not sure it’s the album of 2021, but it’s definitely the feeling of it. 8/10 Sam Reid

Ocean Wisdom – Stay Sane (beyond measure) So much of the talk about Camden rapper Ocean Wisdom the past five years has been about the rapidity of his flow. And it’s true: he’s got lungs like a whale and officially spits words quicker than Eminem, according to Guinness World Records. That skillset saw him attract collaborators as esteemed as Method Man and Dizzee Rascal, and comparisons to speed-merchants like Busta Rhymes. While there are some impressive sprints on his fourth album, it’s not simply an exercise in flashy velocity. In fact, it’s when Stay Sane is cruising that it’s most compelling – think Childish Gambino rather than, say, Twista.

Single ‘Drilly Rucksack’ is a case in point – the fictional tale of a magical rucksack that shields its owner from the evil

of Tories, albeit in a violent way – where Wisdom artfully glides between gears and modes. Opener ‘Gruesome Crimes’ is similarly ear-catching, marrying goofy U.S. college rap musicality with a British sense of humour. Maverick Sabre adds a soulful flourish to ‘Uneven Lives’, an ode to the healing qualities of time off and time away.

It’s ‘Racists’ though, featuring the recognisable Novelist, that’s perhaps the most arresting moment; an honest, depressing and lasting reflection on British bigotry: “Racists they come and won’t go… I hope you drop down dead while you’re shoveling cocaine up in your nose,” he rasps. For one so quick with his delivery, it’s now that Ocean Wisdom’s steadied the pace that his output grows in power. 7/10 Greg Cochrane

Virginia Wing – private LIFE (fire) It isn’t immediately obvious that private LIFE, Virginia Wing’s fourth album, is their most engaging album to date.

Anyone might think it’s ‘just’ Ecstatic Arrow Mk. 2 – and neither artist nor listener would be to blame, given how the Manchester group’s 2018 release represents such a strident leap forward that it would be inadvisable to do anything too off-piste for the follow-up.

The two LPs are linked by a similar strain of ‘fourth world’ production, covertly masking what is essentially pop in the avant tradition of Peter Gabriel.

Vocalist Alice Merida Richards’ speaksing approach fits the bill too, sitting at a Laurie Anderson monotone until errant emotions permit a melodic flight to the upper register, complementing her lyrical desire for escape. “Paradise became a motorway,” she sings on ‘99 North’, neatly summating the thrill of movement now that the prospect of far-flung travel

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Albums has all but vanished – deeply resonant to someone who spent New Year’s Eve 2020 in joggers with the Hootenanny, who fears that 2021’s celebrations might somehow shake out to be even worse: “I’m reaching, I’m holding out, holding out for something.”

Aside from its tighter presentation of Virginia Wing’s existing sound, private LIFE benefits from a doubled-down dedication to the specific wild abandon only pop can offer. ‘Moon Turn Tides’ swaggers like a reimagined version of Gal Costa’s ‘Relance’ remixed for club consumption by Timbaland, its wheezing organs playing against stomping marching band horns. ‘St. Francis Fountain’ and ‘Half Mourning’ harken back to Yellow Magic Orchestra, sealed with the sophistipop gloss of saxophonist Chris Duffin, his smooth licks swirling across the mix.

All this, and it’s still difficult to say why private LIFE is as great as it is. Overt comparisons to past work seems detrimental to what a group produces presently, but in Virginia Wing’s case, what they’re doing right now elevates their career as a whole. They’ve outed themselves as having been onto something all along. 9/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Arab Strap – As Days Get Dark (rock action) According to Aidan Moffat, As Days Get Dark is about “resurrection and shagging”, “hopelessness and darkness”.

As if that wasn’t what every Arab Strap album was about.

Nobody does horny, hungover, misanthropic filth quite like Moffat and Malcolm Middleton. This is their first album since 2005’s The Last Romance, but their aesthetic is so singular that it feels like they’ve just picked up directly from where they left off. Perhaps this is helped by their consistent activity

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throughout the intervening years – solo albums, collaborations, documentaries, the lot. They’ve kept busy, and they sound it – this is the reanimation of a merely dormant project, not a dead one.

There’s little here which will surprise long-term Arab Strap fans, but that’s not necessarily a criticism. Most of the music is built upon an artful tessellation of Middleton’s arpeggiating guitars and creeping drum machines, with Moffat delivering his grubby monologues over the top. The atmosphere remains as sticky and dank as ever – you can practically hear the sweat dripping down the flanks of each track – but Moffat’s characteristically seedy vignettes now play out among the soft furnishings of middle age (“In Tesco with your buttons undone, I saw you; hand in hand as we do the school run, I saw you”). Not that this jars with the rest of the Arab Strap catalogue: even in his twenties, he had a prodigious talent for being a dirty old man. He’s really grown into it now. 7/10 Luke Cartledge

Indigo Sparke – Echo (sacred bones) Although it’s by no means all you need to know about Indigo Sparke, a good place to start is that she’s the protege of Adrienne Lenker from Big Thief. As expected, this means her debut album is full of reverbdrenched lonesome melancholic balladry, songs about solitary women smoking while walking down desert(ed) highways, plenty of spectral fuzz from simple electric guitar strums, and acres of empty space.

And when it works, its tremendously affecting, full of small-hours half-cut wistfulness and intimacy: the ghostly ‘Bad Dreams’ feels like an excerpt from an epic murderballad, its lyrical brutality underpinned by its delicacy, and the final third of the album makes for a gorgeous triptych of poise and atmosphere, the combi-

nation of battered background piano and brittle vocals on closer ‘Everything Everything’ is particularly haunting.

Unfortunately, though, Sparke occasionally pushes too eagerly on the button marked “eerie” and comes out a bit am-dram: midway through ‘Dog Bark Echo’, she whispers, urgently, “Listen! Do you hear? Howls! A beast is opening its mouth!”, and then she howls. On ‘Golden Age’, too, multi-tracked “oohs” and “aahs” yearn to evoke the sort of mysterious quasi-paganism/profound sadness at which PJ Harvey often excels, but the delivery is too self-aware to believe there’s much genuine abandon going on here.

Were Sparke to lean into the sparseness and interiority of her songwriting, Echo would be consistently spine-tingling. As it is, although there’s plenty to admire here, it’s too precious to be perfect. 6/10 Sam Walton

Lady Blackbird – Black Acid Soul (foundation) There is very little about Black Acid Soul that is identifiably 2021, nor any other year. Marley Munroe, the woman behind the Lady Blackbird moniker, announces her arrival with a debut album that is difficult to believe is not the culmination of a six-decade career, such is the depth of wisdom, expression and control in her voice.

Coming nominally from a jazz background, this album does not belong to a genre, but to a singer with the scope to oversee where different genres meet.

She takes a set of eleven tracks – seven of them cover versions – and finds truths that apply to her, so that in turn they may apply to us too. ‘Beware the Stranger’ is a version of a 1973 track by The Voices of East Harlem, and while Munroe’s version channels just a taste of the song’s gospel funk roots with its choral backing,

Albums all accompaniment is powerless in the shadow of Lady Blackbird’s towering vocal. ‘Collage’, meanwhile, is a track with a rock history (penned in 1969 by the James Gang) and yes, there is a driving momentum to this arrangement that points to where Munroe could move in the future should such conventions be of interest to her, but what is clear is she will not be knocked off course before she has even begun.

It is not just that Munroe has a powerful vocal, or that she can convey great, centuries-old pain and struggle, but that she can eke out nuance from every turn of phrase; it is often possible to read her delivery of a single word in multiple ways, she layers such meaning into her performance. Munroe realises that there is more to be said by someone who can tear the house down with ease, when they choose not to. 8/10 Max Pilley

Blanck Mass – In Ferneaux (sacred bones) On his latest project In Ferneaux, Benjamin John Power suspends us in limbo. Much of his previous work as Blanck Mass derives its power from the brute force of its sensory overload – this is incredibly visceral, physical music, designed to be played out over churning crowds, terrified and exhilarated in equal measure. In Ferneaux mostly breaks from that mould, mirroring the retreat we’ve all had to make from such spaces in the past 12 months, yet traces of previous sociality are discernible in every note. It’s those traces that make up this music’s central eeriness – its tangible absence of something beyond the familiar – and make it so intoxicating.

The raw components of the record are recognisable enough – Power’s hyperactive synths are pursued by his customary snarls of digital distortion and white

noise, intermittently broken up by scatty field recordings and disarmingly open piano chords – but it’s their presentation that’s so captivating. It plays out over two “phases”, each 20 minutes long and dense to the point of disorientation. One could just as easily describe the album as having 20 “tracks” as two, although none of it is neatly separable into discrete segments.

The record starts with the opening arpeggios of ‘Phase I’, which shift quickly between barely-suppressed tension and not-quite-release, two modes of being which I’ve definitely had to get used to as the pandemic has ebbed and flowed.

It’s a compelling opening salvo, a sort of apocalyptic game show theme that soon starts to decay and break apart, Power never having been an artist to let an idea outstay its welcome. Just as the loops are about to collapse entirely, a thunderous four-to-the-floor seizes the initiative, and we’re briefly plunged into the middle of an equally end-times psytrance rave.

When this recedes, we find ourselves on a shoreline somewhere, boats and buoys clanking in the surf, a welcome reprieve.

Much of this phase continues accordingly: fleeting moments of tranquillity interspersed with corrosive heft, snatches of genuinely arresting beauty that are swept aside by torrents of something far more ferocious and unyielding. A decade’s worth of field recordings, captured over the course of Power’s travels with his solo music or as one half of Fuck Buttons, ground his production in the material world, lending the album a certain physicality that makes the demonic synths and broiling sheets of discord all the more invasive and unavoidable. There’s something about the record’s restless pace and distracted intensity that conjures up the feeling of grasping at half-memories in moments of desperation, or indeed of staggering through the pathologies of our embattled present themselves. It’s at once horrifyingly brutal and even more horrifyingly familiar.

‘Phase II’ begins just as savagely, all clipped screaming, indistinct chatter and long-wave interference, before the noise subsides to allow an earnest,

yarn-spinning monologue into the foreground, framed by elegiac pads and flecks of reverb. It’s tempting to describe this passage as dreamlike, but that’s to slightly underplay its semi-conscious, somnambulant quality; it’s more evocative of the experience of beginning to wake up on an already-busy morning, the conversations of passers-by outside or the natter of a clock radio wheedling their way into your slumbering brain. Like those brief periods of half-sentience, this section finishes all too quickly, and we’re in the throes of hiss and corrosion again, passing swells of discord and pacification as we’re dragged along by the unrelenting current. Power doesn’t let up at any point – it’d feel rushed and messy were each passage not so rich and minutely detailed.

The album’s press release describes Power as working with “the immanent materials of the here-and-now”. This doesn’t quite capture what’s going on here. Perhaps there is a sense in which the sounds that populate the record are immediate and inherent to the present moment, but only to the extent that they were literally to hand at the time, having been recorded earlier or extracted from equipment that Power already had. Their prevailing affective quality has much less to do with the here-and-now than it simultaneously has with the recent past and a hoped-for near future. It regards pre-pandemic society without any real nostalgia or sentiment, more a clear-eyed observation that the previous status quo has been irrevocably altered. What’s so powerful about it, though, is its sense that elements of that status quo will be returning, and not all of them good. Its eeriness, its central absence, is at once temporary, as it looks towards a future to which some of the things we miss will return, and fundamentally permanent – after all, there are a lot of things, namely an abjectly large and growing number of people, that will not be coming back when the virus finally loosens its grip. For those of us lucky enough to be in limbo for a while, this is a moving, unsettling piece of work from a singular talent; for far too many others, it may at least be some form of tribute. 9/10 Luke Cartledge

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Live as Albarn tinkers on a small synth, recalling the inception of hit single ‘Clint Eastwood’, the camera spins back round to the main stage for a truly animated rendition of the classic UK garage remix featuring MC Sweetie Irie. As the credits roll, I am left with a huge grin across my face.

Oskar Jeff

Jerskin Fendrix Cafe Oto, London 20 December 2020

Gorillaz Song Machine Live from Kong 20 December 2020

On entering Kong Studios, the implied location of tonight’s livestream, I was pleasantly reminded of hours spent online in my youth, exploring the virtual sometime-headquarters of Gorillaz, engrossed by the interactivity and playfulness on display. Retrospectively, there is much to admire about how the project presented itself in its earlier years; a canny amalgamation of anarchic visuals, cross-platform world-building and zeitgeist-conquering pop. The sensory overload of it all certainly held the attention of a generation, though the barrage seems somewhat minor in comparison to the now-familiar digital landscape it foreshadowed.

I am snapped out of my nostalgic haze by the intriguing sight of none other than Robert Smith, himself coyly channelling the vigour of The Cure’s 1980s heyday. One of many guests to appear in person, his appearance on the opener is a welcome reminder of his unmistakable presence as a vocalist. As the group rattles through the next few tracks, it is clear that the performance is primarily a showcase of the recent album. Alter-

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nating between effective-enough prerecorded holograms of the likes of Beck and Schoolboy Q, and more lively cameos from Leee John and Kano, the show strikes a healthy balance not dissimilar to the band’s usual live performances. The focus on the new album certainly emphasises that it is one of their more engaging releases in recent years.

Visually, while there’s a smattering of Gorillaz ephemera strewn throughout the set design, and animations of the fictional band implanted intermittently, the focus is clearly on ringleader Damon Albarn and his slew of guest stars. This is at no point clearer than when Slowthai, Slaves and Albarn (inexplicably grinning in novelty pineapple shades) are pogoing around like cider-addled teenagers to the single ‘Momentary Bliss’, the result falling somewhere between infectiously joyous and gratingly irritating.

It’s the playfulness of the affair that shines through brightest, and when suddenly a be-robed Matt Berry appears for a rendition of deep cut ‘Fire Coming Out of a Monkey’s Head’ my dormant nostalgia is once again piqued. As the camera weaves round to an intimate acoustic stage, what follows is pure fan service: a run through of old favourites including a rare performance of debut track ‘Dracula’ and the choral finale of sophomore record Demon Days. Finally,

In July of 2020, with live streamed gigs still in a flap somewhere between excitement and terror, Nick Cave did a very Nick Cave thing and proved that it really wasn’t rocket science. For his Idiot Prayer performance, he hired the vast Alexandra Palace and a grand piano, and stripped twenty-two Bad Seeds songs down their essence on the single instrument. Easy for him, though – he’s Nick Cave. But easy for Jerskin Fendrix too, it seems, even if his end-of-year show was a reduced Idiot Prayer from every angle, apart from the man’s talent.

We get just 5 songs, in Café Oto rather than a grand palace, with Joscelin Dent-Pooley – a man who does not enjoy playing live with or without an audience – in a red puffer jacket and Yankees cap, not a Saville Row suit. Amazing what Fendrix can do in such a small space of time, though, and even more impressive how far his songs had to travel from ADHD electronic melodramas down to one man and a piano in an empty bar. ‘Onigiri’ had the furthest to go – a pitch-shifted banger of brilliantly dumb drops on debut album Winterreise; here, a rinky dink show tune for its author to casually showboat his classical piano chop over. No longer obscured by layers of beats, drones and indulgent production tricks, just how well Fendrix can play is astonishing. The line in ‘Oh God’ (also performed tonight) says it all – “If only the girls in here could see me play piano” has never made so much sense.

Live The plaintive chords of ‘I’ll Clean Your Sheet’ looks set to be the festive high point, but then he closes with ‘Ice Cream’; a Christmas collaboration with Black Midi. It doesn’t have the noodling band coda anymore, just Fendrix’s minor keys for a hook of “It’s always Christmas time, when I’m with you”. Naturally, it sounds crushingly sad, even when paired with video images of a young mother playing with her son in the snow. He can do it all, and inside twenty minutes. Stuart Stubbs

Vanishing Twin Presents: Pensiero Magico 21 January 2021

So much of Vanishing Twin’s work seems to exist in its own universe; a timeless, weightless cosmos resembling our own but somehow other. With this in mind, their new live show, titled Pensiero Magico (translated as Magical Thinking) is an intriguing prospect.

We’re thrown straight into the action, the band filmed in intimate, homemade style in soft-focus monochrome. As a basic look it complements their heady blend of psych, pop, prog and funk nicely enough, but after a while a few of the details start to grate a little. The screen is filled with polka dots, mannequins, kitschy objets d’art and retrofutur-

ist costuming, all of which is fine on its own, but adds up to a rather hackneyed reworking of the kind of psychedelic whimsy that moth-eaten vintage shops and The Mighty Boosh rinsed the charm out of many years ago now. Of course, some of this goes with the territory – early Pink Floyd, King Crimson and Can all cast significant aural and visual shadows over much of Vanishing Twin’s work, as much as other, more contemporary semi-revivalists like Broadcast and Stereolab – but it does feel a bit tired.

But everyone’s options are limited at the moment. Fortunately, the band’s musical performance largely outweighs any aesthetic shortcomings: they inhabit the worlds they create superbly, their playing lithe and reactive. Drummer Valentina Magaletti is particularly impressive, her understated style allowing her to shepherd all manner of subtle flourishes and flavours into each groove.

Tracks like ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ and ‘The Conservation of Energy’ are just beautiful, Cathy Lucas’ vocals beaming out across the mix, perfectly weighted against the shapeshifting instrumentation. ‘Language Is A City (Let Me Out!)’, towards the end of the set, is perhaps the pick of the bunch, heavier and more purposeful than the album version – exactly the kind of human, real-time difference that gives live music its particular magic. It’s exhilarating stuff, tinged with melancholy, and makes me miss gigs all the more. Luke Cartledge

These New Puritans XONE.1 4 December 2020

The working practice of visionary sound sculptor Henry Dagg is best summed up by the title of a 1980s BBC profile of the man: Anything That Makes a Noise.

Dagg’s work conjuring the musicality from found objects teaches us important things about music – that the experimental and the joyous are not enemies, that sound is what interests us, not necessarily instrumentation, and to be suspicious of sonic cliché. It’s these lessons, too, that are learnt from the music of These New Puritans, across each of their four highly distinct albums. It’s their second record HIDDEN and its 10th anniversary reissue that tonight’s stream is commemorating (with all proceeds going to charity Survival International). All Japanese taiko drums and barely suppressed violence, HIDDEN was the Barnett brothers’ first serious breakthrough.

Beginning the stream with ‘We Want War’, there’s an inspiring sense of people at work here – no fuss, everyone just grafting to lay down various percussion tracks which lock into George Barnett’s astonishingly visceral drums, accompanying the faintly surreal sight of Dagg (the least menacing man alive) in cosy jumper sharpening knives into the microphone. Another HIDDEN standout, ‘Hologram’, is given a gentler rendering, turning that track into something more like the neoclassical warmth of their third album Field of Reeds. Similarly, ‘Where the Trees Are On Fire’ – from last album Inside the Rose – is rendered more sparse, showcasing a song that’s equal parts eco horror and romantic ballad.

Live streams can be lose/lose for bands – they feel that they should do something, but the result is an often expensive way to spend several weeks’ work, for a product that can be less than the sum of its parts. Avoiding this, These New Puritans offer a thrilling glimpse into their practices – always evolving, always interesting. Fergal Kinney

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Film and Books Michael Cumming. Like his past work on Brass Eye, the film has a satirical relationship with the idea of what a rock documentary could be – talking heads wilfully contradict and deny one another to the point where we can attain no fixed truths, apart from that we will go away listening to the Nightingales and Robert Lloyd with very different ears indeed. Fergal Kinney King Ricker (dir. michael cumming screenplay by stewart lee) In Jonathan Meades’ TV film on Birmingham, he suggests that Britain is divided by an ‘Irony Curtain’, with Birmingham being the site of this fault line. Above Birmingham, Meades suggests, chests are beaten and civic pride abounds, but get to Britain’s second city and people begin to talk against themselves. This might go some way to suggesting why, if you turn on 6Music right now, you will likely hear four well-meaning youths trying to sound like the Fall, Gang of Four, Wire, but not the Nightingales.

“Birmingham has a great history of rejecting its culture,” explains Stewart Lee at the beginning of an ambitious but gorgeously realised rock documentary that uses a piece of 1970s Birmingham public art (a much maligned statue of King Kong) as a metaphor for the career of UK post-punk’s never men the Nightingales, led by the mercurial Robert Lloyd.

From 1979 onwards, the Nightingales released three brilliant albums of oblique post-punk that leaned into Lloyd’s immense talents for everyday surrealism and Beefheart-esque country infused discord. King Rocker becomes a document of failure, failure, failure – the Nightingales split, a solo career doesn’t work, a video production career doesn’t work, and Lloyd snatches defeat from the jaws of victory in a potential comedy career, all of which viewed at different angles can look an awful lot like self sabotage.

We’re taken on a serious of set piece discussions – at a Stone Circle, a curry house, and most poignantly outside a flat where Lloyd lived during a particularly dark time in his life. There is darkness in this film, but it’s never the main event, and sympathy is never mined. Instead, King Rocker has all the playful sharpness and visual gagging that you’d expect from director

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Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls — Lisa Robinson (henry holt & company) Women in music endure some serious shit. Bad deals and unfair expectations, sexual assault and domestic abuse. This should be obvious by now, but unfortunately it’s a point that needs to be repeated over and over again, because people don’t seem to internalise it. Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls is a catalog of these inequities, as well as a treasure trove of great anecdotes from author Lisa Robinson’s epic career as a music journalist.

Robinson has worked as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair since 1999, a capstone gig on some 50 years working in and writing about music. She’s toured with the Rolling Stones, interviewed Beyonce and racked up a portfolio of profiles of the uber-famous. Her critical perspective is informed by the access journalism of big glossy magazines, which gives her insight into a truly impressive swath of superstars.

Context and comparison form the central structure of Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls. Robinson writes successions of paragraphs about how different artists engage a particular topic.

Aretha Franklin, Adele and Mariah Carey on family, or FKA Twigs, Gwen Stefani and Katy Perry on fame. Some great anecdotes come out of this, along with

some spicy editorialisation. She describes Taylor Swift as, “something buzzing around you that you want out of your range of vision,” and notes that celebrities fetishise grocery shopping.

The most memorable moments of the book are the darkest, though. Over the course of her career, Robinson has heard and seen things that range from gross to horrifying. A talent agent tells her that women don’t have number one songs after having children (Robinson corrects them – remember Beyonce and Adele?). Noted scumbag Gene Simmons kept numbered Polaroids of girls he slept with on tour. Things get especially ugly when business seeps into romance, forcing women to stay in dangerous arrangements. Bette Midler recounts how she stayed in a relationship with Aaron Russo to keep him on as her manager, only to have him exploit her financially and beat her in front of Elton John.

Critically, sexual harassment and assault take place away from the spotlight, too. It was an open secret that iconic record exec Ahmet Ertegun was a known creep, to put it lightly. He would allegedly masturbate behind the desk in his office, and women knew not to get in an elevator alone with him. For every story Robinson is able to share, countless more go untold.

All this makes the artists in this book all the more worthy of celebration.

It’s inspiring to read about Tina breaking away from Ike and Rihanna owning her masters. These musicians have overcome tremendous obstacles, and their success is a testament.

Among all the women Robinson writes about, one seems to stand above the others: Joni Mitchell. Again and again the author returns to Mitchell’s talent and grace while navigating industry and celebrity. The Mitchell story that really stands out comes from another titan, Stevie Nicks, who remembered telling the other members of Fleetwood Mac to go away when she was listening to Court and Spark. “All the guys realised she was not only a great singer but she was also a great songwriter and a great musician,” she said. “It was like, ‘Oh my god, this girl is better than us.’” Colin Groundwater

A sense of unease

How Bristol band Squid found unity and joy in the making of a debut album so strange and bleak, by Daniel Dylan Wray Photography by Stuart Stubbs 52

QUID’S SINGING DRUMMER Ollie Judge was 7 years old when 9/11 happened. Like many generations of British people before him, war and catastrophe was something that became a background part of day-to-day life. Although his parents’ generation may have been terrorised by the threat of nuclear annihilation – practising safety drills of hiding under tables in classrooms, receiving pamphlets through the door about radiation fallout, and seeing it unfold in harrowing dramatisations on television via films like Threads – the relentless televised coverage of 9/11 and the ensuing War On Terror was new terrain.

“After 9/11 I was terrified of being bombed,” Judge tells me.

“It made me an insomniac for at least two years. I’d lie in bed and read and if I heard a plane go overhead I’d go under my covers and just be like, ‘Alright this is it. We’re getting bombed now.’ I’d have to try and imagine all the people on the plane going on holiday.”

Believing this to simply being part of normal life because he knew nothing else at such an age, it wasn’t until years later that Judge began to unpack this experience and how it had burrowed into his psyche. “Having what I now realise was really bad anxiety at such a young age particularly struck a chord with me in 2020,” he says. “I can’t imagine what the pandemic is doing for the mental health of young children and that thought is what brought me back to write about those intense feelings of anxiety.”

This experience was the foundation of one of the songs on Squid’s debut album; a track called ‘Global Groove’. The lingering anxiety from childhood mushroomed when Judge was watching a documentary. “After watching Adam Curtis’ Hypernormalisation I started thinking how we’ve become numb to violence and death through televised wars,” he says.

“The ending to ‘Global Groove’ features a story that I told into a dictaphone. This story is broken up by segments of television presenters laughing maniacally as if someone is flicking between TV channels.” It was something Judge felt a glimmer of himself after he finished Curtis’ documentary. “I watched that and it was incredibly harrowing and it was just before bed and I was like, ‘Oh god, I can’t get to sleep now,’” he recalls. “So I just watched an episode of The Simpsons and everything was fine. It was like: ‘This is fucking awful. I’ve just watched people dying and now I’m watching The Simpsons and everything’s okay.’”

This is a perfect distillation that embodies the experience of young people who have grown up in an almost exclusively digital world, where the endless scroll of online life blurs the boundaries of sincerity and irony, death and comedy, tragedy and farce – and in the process, as Judge points out via Curtis, it can lead to a numbing sensation of life’s most extreme events whilst still being hyper-aware and emotionally strangled by them.

Given the generation that Judge belongs to are often mocked and denigrated by an older generation (one often obsessed with a war they played no part in) it’s interesting to reflect on how little is spoken or thought about the impact on children being brought up in the era of the 24-hour news cycle during endless wars and conflicts. Easier for them to thoughtlessly bang on

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about young people being spoilt because they have smartphones and fancy coffee, I suppose.

While this subject matter might feel like an unexpected shift or drastic escalation in tone from previous work, there has always been a tension and sense of unease creeping into Squid’s music and lyrics – it’s just largely been buried under how infectious and fun a lot of it is. It’s easy to forget just how intense, twitchy and wonky their knockout single ‘Houseplants’ is, such is its endlessly propulsive groove and catchy skip. Yet Squid have always been very good at submerging the weird within the accessible, working in experimental and unpredictable characteristics to music that 6 Music Steve Lamacq dads can happily nod along to on the radio after Blur has been played.

Often unfairly lumped in with the crop of modern postpunk resurgence bands, many of whom seem interested in little else other than mimicking Mark E. Smith, Squid have always been a much broader outfit. Their output of post-punk-funkrock-kraut-jazz feels more in sync with the wild energy of Ohio outfits like Devo and Pere Ubu than any of the 1970s UK moody raincoat crew.

— Bright Green Field — Their debut album is called Bright Green Field (coming May 7 via Warp Records) and very much feels like a continuation of their trajectory to date, albeit with even greater emphasis on the experimental side. Perhaps not as many easily digestible bangers to gulp down for the 6 Music dad squad. “We’ve ended up making a really fucking weird record,” Judge told DIY magazine, and despite having an amazing run of singles in recent years (‘The Dial’, ‘The Cleaner’, ‘Sludge’ and ‘Houseplants’) they’ve opted for all fresh material on their debut. “The album had to speak for itself as a whole,” Arthur Leadbetter tells me, who makes up the band along with Judge, Louis Borlase, Laurie Nankivell and Anton Pearson. “To do that we couldn’t include songs from the past. They’ve had their life and we’ve moved on.”

The album came to life with the song ‘G.S.K.’ and began to take shape and form from there. Referring to the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, Judge found himself staring at the HQ building one day and got sucked in, vortex-like, to an imaginary world that unfolded around it. “I was on a MegaBus from Bristol to London,” he recalls. “It was the day we were supposed to withdraw from the EU and I was reading Concrete Island by JG Ballard. The news was coming in and I was going over the flyover and everything was just so horrible. The idea that we are living in a complete dystopia at the moment settled in.”

This was something that chimed with him even more due to recently reading the work of Mark Fisher on hauntology and lost futures. “I started writing down what was going past me,” he says. “I imagined being the protagonist in a modern day Concrete Island, looking up from underneath the flyover and seeing businessmen, new developments covered in netting, discarded rental bikes, a proper real-life dystopia. It really clicked and set the tone for the rest of the album. Then it kind of spiralled out of control and just made me think about things that had already happened but were incredibly dystopian.”

“This is fucking awful. I’ve just watched people dying and now I’m watching The Simpsons and everything’s okay”

However, despite being Ballardian in tone, both musically and lyrically, Bright Green Field isn’t a concept album, nor is it a warped reflection of the strange and unravelling times we find ourselves in during the pandemic. “It’s not usually a conscious decision to write a song about what the world is doing,” says Nankivell. “The way we compose is much more about listening to each other musically. Whether that’s been influenced by the world is usually a subconscious thing rather than being: ‘We’re gonna write a song about climate change, Brexit or Donald Trump.’

“There is a sense of real uncertainty and bleakness but it’s certainly not being reactionary to a microcosm of bad stuff going on. I think it’s kind of unspoken that the music we’ve been making has ended up having an atmosphere of a certain sense of dystopia. The new music just happened to pre-empt a certain feeling.”

Nor would the band go as far to call this a political record, despite it touching upon socio-political terrain. “I’m always kind of reluctant to describe our music as political,” says Judge, who writes the majority of the lyrics. “I’m not educated enough to be this kind of mouthpiece. I feel I’d be doing people a disservice. I’m definitely not the bastion of the disenfranchised youth.

There are always going to be political references but it’s not the main talking point.”

What Squid would call the album is something of a coming of age record, with that period of quite profound and intense change that can come as you hit your mid-twenties and begin to reflect on things and see things changing all around you. “A big thing was definitely seeing friends really quickly achieving a lot of what they wanted to achieve in a short space of time,” Borlase says. “And then seeing the changes of lifestyle. It’s kind of a coming of age record but it’s also a kind of coming to terms album – more around the awareness of the reality that we’re living in.”

— Joy in delivery — As a group of young musicians living in Britain right now, the band are undeniably part of a generation that has inherited a pile of shit plopped squarely onto their plate to stare down at. Despite Judge’s claims that he’s no political mouthpiece, he

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becomes quite animated on this. “There’s no question that we’ve been completely fucked over at every opportunity,” he says, “but I feel like we’ve been living with getting fucked over for ages. I always track it back to the university tuition fees issue. In my eyes that’s when it all started. I hate to say it but we’re almost desensitised to just how much our generation gets fucked over on a daily basis.”

One could quite easily argue there’s grounds for complaint here, despite the band being keen to point out how lucky they are in the grand scheme of things. As a heavily active touring band prior to lockdown (Squid are almost defined by how much they play), and with the entire industry clinging on by a thread via the government’s callous indifference, further news about lies and catastrophes over European touring visa issues post-Brexit are clearly going to impact on the band in the long run. “There’s a lot of anger at the minute around the news about the UK touring industry,” Pearson says. “They’re fucking snakes, man. The situation isn’t great and it’s all just an ongoing tarnishing of the way you feel about where you live. There’s a dark cloud over the British Isles that is hard to see going away anytime soon.”

However, despite some of the conversation around modern life in Britain understandably veering towards the sour, the album they’ve created during this period was one that a great deal of energy, intensity and joy went into. When lockdown measures eased over summer, the band got together and holed up for five weeks to write the album. They then connected with their long time producer Dan Carey to record it in his modest studio in London. “It added this intensity to the process that you would never normally get because they’d had all this time living together just playing over the set,” Carey tells me on the phone.

“We spent a couple of days setting up so that we had this perfect sound in the room and then they just played the whole album.

I couldn’t believe it – it was just amazing to hear all these songs properly for the first time. They had done lots of work on the dynamic flow of the record. Sometimes when you’re recording new material there’s a slight uncertainty over what’s happening but there was none of that. Everyone knew exactly what they were doing.”

So, how do the band all land on the same page given that there are five of them, they instrument swap, share lyric duties, and seemingly operate as a cohesive unit? “It’s like any decision, we have to just trust each other,” says Leadbetter. Pearson adds: “Artistic and creative ownership is split equally. Nobody has had to compromise; it’s been an amazing, shared project.” For Borlase, letting go is as important as what comes out of the end result. “It’s been really important for us not to be too attached to a certain idea,” he says. “It doesn’t need to be an assumption that lyrical content or a certain specific musical approach is unanimous. I like the idea that there’s still a large amount of interpretation that takes place between us. This music means something slightly different to each of us.”

From an outsider’s perspective, Carey backs this up.

“What’s really lovely about them is that they give consideration to every single idea that anyone presents,” he says. “So there’s no sense of hierarchy or ownership. Everything gets examined.

Often with bands that are super democratic it leads to indecisiveness. Usually I think it’s better when there’s someone who kind of just pushes it along and it’s like their band, but somehow with Squid they have completely nailed the way of just being able to kind of co-own everything.”

Carey has a reputation for creating a unique atmosphere in the studio. For his Speedy Wunderground singles club recordings he insists the song is completed in a day, there’s no lunch break, the lights are turned off and lasers and smoke machines

“I hate to say it but we’re almost desensitised to just how much our generation gets fucked over on a daily basis” 57

are turned on. For this recording Squid were working in the middle of a heatwave. “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a gig that hot let alone a recording session,” says Pearson. “The air con was turned off because it would make noise. You’ve got all the amps, the mixing desk, the bodies, literally everything in the room was a heater. We were just dripping with sweat and playing furiously. At some point we became slightly delirious.” Guest saxophonist Lewis Evans, of Black Country, New Road, would step up to record his parts and every time his sax would be out of tune due to the melting heat. “It makes me wonder if Dan was just thinking, let’s make them sweat,” reflects Nankivell. When I put this to Carey he just laughs and offers up a “maybe”.

The result is an album that is very much a complete piece.

The band didn’t just focus on individual songs and would often rehearse playing the entire album, and the decision to avoid earlier singles was the right one. Ironically, for a band with such a set of distinct and singular previous tracks to their name, their inclusion would have been a jarring distraction. Instead songs like recent single ‘Narrator’ – featuring Martha Skye Murphy – unravel over nearly 9 minutes of agitated rhythms, overlapping vocal melodies, immersive sound design and utterly unpredictable tonal shifts before bleeding into the slick melodies and spiralling guitar groove of ‘Boy Racers’ to create a world that feels both disparate and interconnected. Which makes sense given the album is rooted in the idea of imaginary dystopian cityscapes, as what could be a more accurate depiction of a fractured yet inherently connected place than modern city life?

— Squid: a medicine — Bright Green Field operates on both a micro and macro level, sometimes zooming in on details and real-life people and at other times pulling back to examine wider issues and themes.

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The closing ‘Pamphlets’ – which unfurls like something from In Rainbows-era Radiohead, albeit with a more angry and aggressive charge – imagines a person getting their only source of news from right-wing propaganda pamphlets. ‘2010’ simultaneously addresses London’s housing crisis and the mental health of an individual slaughterhouse worker.

‘Documentary Filmmaker’ is an example of this dual microscope and telescope approach. “It was written about a loved one who was admitted to the Phoenix Ward of St Anne’s hospital with anorexia,” Judge says. “It’s the same ward that Louis Theroux visited in his documentary about anorexia. I used to visit the ward most days and walked past a photo of Louis with the hospital staff. They’re all looking really happy in the photo and then you look around and everyone is just really sad. It’s a weird contrast of that picture and what actually goes on on the ward. I imagined that Louis was there every waking moment, for months and months, with the patients experiencing their time on the ward in extreme realism.”

It’s not an explicitly personal song and the lyrics remain cryptic, nuanced and coded, but it comes from a place of emotional turmoil in Judge’s life. “It was nice to see that person getting better on the ward but it was also quite a horrible way to spend most evenings,” he says. “Just seeing a lot of people on the wards that are kind of beyond help. Seeing people that have given up hope and have come to terms with the fact that this illness will kill them. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder in adolescence.”

The band’s ability to digest and distil such a broad range of ideas, themes and topics makes Bright Green Field a bold and ambitious debut. One that is unafraid to take risks and keen to avoid coasting on previous successes, even if it’s resulted in some slight anxiety about putting it out into the world. “I’m a complete worrier,” says Judge, before Borlase adds: “And I’m a

With thanks to Andy and Barbara Thatcher at Portishead Open Air Pool

complete panicker. I’ve had bad dreams about negative reviews.

I listen to the album occasionally and just think there’s so much in here to either love or hate.” While they have tried to ignore the fact they are something of a buzz band, from BBC Sound of 2020 Poll to a record deal with Warp within a year, it is something that trickles into their thought process. “People tend to be a bit more critical with hype bands,” ponders Judge.

On paper Squid and Warp records may initially seem an unlikely pairing, given the label’s history of being synonymous with a lot of electronic music, but the band’s post-genre and experimental approach is a snug fit. “When we got the Warp offer it was a bit like, ‘Oh that’s weird,’” says Judge. “But it kind of makes sense. It wasn’t the most obvious choice but it kind of is at the same time. I’ve also been a fan of Warp since I was really young. We used to have a lodger at my parents’ house and he was super into Aphex Twin. I remember him giving me Come to Daddy and being absolutely petrified.”

The process of making this album has helped solidify a sense of identity in the band, too. “When you first start a band you just want to be a band and then as you progress you start to ask yourself what kind of band do you want to be,” says Leadbetter. “I think we started to realise what we want to do is to be in a position where we’re comfortable enough that we can just have as much fun and make whatever music we want. That means that we’re able to do things like this album where things are kind of drastically different.”

Despite some members worrying about how it may be received, there’s a natural confidence in the band in what they’ve created their debut. Leadbetter, who is endlessly positive in conversation, is also thrilled he managed to get his dad on the album. “He’s a professional musician and researcher,” he says. “He specialises in medieval rock and renaissance instruments, so he played the rackett on the album. Which is a bit like a squashed bassoon. We had this idea to layer him alongside the synths to create this mega drone.” There’s also a number of guest vocalists featured, although true to Squid’s form they appear in such a mangled, treated and distorted way that they aren’t recognisable.

With the UK currently in a state where normal service is far from resuming any time soon, it leaves the band in a position where a typical album launch and supporting tour aren’t really possible. Bizarrely, the subject that kicked off the tone and feel for this whole album – the GSK building and pharmaceuticals – is one that Judge is sort of thinking about again, albeit in a different context. “I always like looking at weird merch that bands do,” he says. “I want to do a limited run of vitamins to keep people’s immune systems up.” The band have found a website where you can design and construct your own vitamins.

Squid’s very own medicine. “We’re going big pharma,” Borlase declares with a laugh.

Despite the bleakness that currently surrounds so many of us, and with much of it permeating through the mood of this album, the band are feeling hopeful and optimistic. “If this climate keeps taking a downward trend our music isn’t going to keep descending into the pits,” Leadbetter says, but then stops himself for a moment and asks with a laugh, “or maybe it will?”

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A Beginner’s Guide to MF DOOM, by Oskar Jeff

ALL CAPS when you spell the man name

As the tragic passing of underground hip hop icon MF DOOM draws an endpoint on a prolific and creatively unparalleled career, the urge to make sense of his somewhat labyrinthine back catalogue grows stronger than ever. As a fan, this is of course a part of a continuous process, shaped and coloured by album cycles, initial points of exposure, developments in taste and personal factors. The death of an artist draws a line in the sand, and we for the first time reflect on the collected works as a finite ecosystem, and what they have come to represent both personally and in the broader musical landscape. And with the outpouring of love and condolences from across the wider music world comes the curiosity of those who are yet to immerse themselves in the strange world of DOOM: who is this man in the mask and where possibly to begin? Here we hope to offer a brief introduction to some of his finest work to those of you asking those very questions.

— Anti-heroism —

The perception of DOOM, real name Daniel Dumile, as a mysterious and evasive figure hasn’t come from thin air, and the man himself tended to that fire with jubilant glee. The countless pseudonyms, the many live appearance no-shows, and the fact he chose to obscure his face with a metal gladiator mask for the best part of 25 years, certainly paint a particular image. Interestingly, these choices reflect not only a style of curated anti-publicity – a more common gimmick today – a forthright attempt at total image control and cross-project world-building, but also an innate shyness largely seen to have stemmed from the passing of his brother Subroc in 1993. The pair had performed together in the group KMD, an early nineties New York hip hop crew not dissimilar to peers such as De La Soul; sample-heavy boom bap with lyrics somewhere between thoughtfulness and playfulness.

This is not to downplay the groups more radical edge, which is clear on their final album Black Bastards, which was left shelved for years, allegedly due to label concerns over its overtly racial topics and controversial album cover. This combination of tragic familial loss and backhanded industry interference forced Dumile to retreat from the industry for several years.

On returning from his self-imposed sabbatical in the late nineties, Dumile had constructed the character of MF DOOM, his most enduring guise, and the name for which he became synonymous. An amalgamation of his surname, masked Marvel Comics villain Doctor Doom and the aforementioned rejection of industry norms smelted into a vessel for fantastical storytelling. Debut album Operation: Doomsday, released in 1999, introduced listeners to a seemingly fully realised alternate reality.

Samples both luscious and unconventional are looped with uncomplicated precision, be it the yearning Isaac Hayes strings on highlight ‘Dead Bent’ or the hacked Scooby Doo subversion on ‘Hey!’. Throughout the album, snippets of Doctor Doomreferencing cartoons are spliced, used as vague narrative cues to tie the project together. Each borrowed element is reconfigured as set design for DOOM’s endlessly engrossing narrator to guide us through with wry absurdist humour. The title track revels in pantomime character-establishment, “Definition: super-villain: a killer who love children / One who is well-skilled in destruction / As well as building” while featuring a chorus hook ladened with disarmingly autobiographical allusions: “On Doomsday / ever since the womb / ’Til I’m back where my brother went / that’s what my tomb will say / Right above my government, Dumile / Either unmarked or engraved, hey, who’s to say?”. Throughout his career, elements of his personal life would continue to bleed into his characters, further blurring the distinction between fact and fiction, and comedy and tragedy.

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— The Illest Villain —

A key entry point for many is the now legendary Madvillainy project, released in 2004, which sees DOOM teaming with producer and fellow rap oddball Madlib. With Madlib laying the musical framework, DOOM was allowed the freedom to hone in on his verbal and written dexterity. A track like ‘Meat Grinder’, built upward from it’s confrontationally off-kilter bass line, displays bewilderingly expressive wordplay, with lyrics as gloriously enticing as they are bluntly opaque. This is a recurring method employed by DOOM throughout his work: an establishment of setting and tone conjured through vivid imagery somewhere between street politics, madcap comic-book fantasy, dated pulp dramatics and stoned kitchen sink observation.

There’s a literary density to the lyrics that allows the listener to extract a variable level of information, an image that fades in and out of focus and is dependent on the user’s forensic engagement. The cultural references and recurring motives create the illusion of narrative structure, but this is no self-indulgent concept album, more a master class in setting and mood.

Lyrically, tracks jump from topics as disparate as the sociopolitical ramifications of state-sanctioned warfare (‘Strange Ways’) to the grand opening of a small time bistro (‘Bistro’). But everything makes sense through the prism of the supervillain(s) – who better to speak on the ills of those in charge than our pantomime villain himself, and what better way to introduce a rogue gallery of alter-ego side-characters than a café grand opening.

The album was marketed under the joint moniker Madvillain, highlighting the uncanny symbiosis on display and grounding the project in its own insular microclimate. Key elements from both artists’ oeuvre are on full display: the use of irreverent narrativedriven audio collage, the globe-spanning sample eclecticism, and of course the establishment of loosely outlined yet vividly coloured character role-play. When questioned on the process of building the album, both collaborators were quick to highlight the relaxed nature of the recordings, each of them alluding to a combination of shared partying but solitary creation, a process of two halves under one roof. A follow-up was long teased, and even standalone tracks such as ‘Monkey Suite’ remain some of the strongest work in either discography, but sadly due to DOOM’s untimely passing, this looks to remain their sole full-length statement.

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Madvillainy was but one of several key projects released during a particularly fruitful period in the early noughties. Despite the proximity, each release possessed its own particular angle, with each album authored under a different alias. Dumile explained his unique approach: “The thing is to be able to come at things with a different point of view… My albums are all characters and together they’re part of this lineage of stories… each album, each character, is its own experience.” This explains the fact that characters seemed to overlap and interact on each album, with one key persona taking the spotlight. 2003 saw the release of Take Me To Your Leader under the alias King Geedorah (in reference to an adversary of Godzilla), an album which saw him undertake a more production-centric role, inviting guest MCs to appear as various characters within the world of the record.

Though any true narrative arc is hazy at best, the Geedorah creation is characterised as an extra-terrestrial view of life on earth. The album features some of Dumile’s finest production moments; with the effortlessly smooth saxophone sample on ‘Next Levels’ and the b-movie anthemics of opener ‘Fazers’ being particular highlights. Also, despite appearing on few of the tracks, Dumile’s vocal presence is at its peak; gruff, confident and assertive, especially when pitted alongside guest vocalist Mr Fantastik on ‘Anti-Matter’, a tour-de-force of vocal acrobatics and lyrical wit. With Dumile happy to retreat to the mixing desk as Geedorah, allowing guests to take the vocal spotlight, Take Me To Your Leader stands out as a singular entry in his back catalogue, and at that, an intriguing document on underground hip hop at the time.

— Fillet-O-Rapper —

2004 saw the return of the MF DOOM character in full gourmand mode, with the release of second album proper MM… FOOD. A highly enjoyable set of tracks loosely based on the theme of food, we find the villain joyfully contort the schtick to fit whichever scenario he sees fit. Classic hip hop tracks are inventively skewed several times, including a Whodini-flip on ‘Deep Fried Frenz’, with DOOM lamenting the often shallow nature of friendship, and a genius beatbox sample from J. J. Fads’ ‘Supersonic’ on ‘Hoe Cakes’. Mr. Fantastik makes another welcome appearance of ‘Rapp Snitch Knishes’, a precision-cut takedown of rappers who unwittingly self-incriminate on record, as the chemistry between these two begs the question of why they never released more music together. There’s an inherent playfulness to the record, with Dumile clearly having enjoyed the process of dismantling the novelty structure he’d set up for himself, a sense of creative problem solving. Hip hop has always dealt with the malleability of the spoken word, but there is a specific freedom to how Dumile explores language and double entendre, and the whimsical nature of MM…FOOD only accentuates that. The result is one of DOOM’s most instantly gratifying records.

Both Take Me To Your Leader and MM…FOOD make incredibly liberal use of the experimental sound collage technique made up of found sound and pop cultural detritus. Not only as introductions, or weaved throughout songs as on his other albums, but as numerous standalone tracks. Dumile stated

that: “Collecting these voices is not as easy as it sounds… I gotta watch hours and hours of old vintage footage, listen to hours and hours of lectures. It’s a real tedious process, but as I’m writing songs I’m collecting pieces, and I’m collecting pieces that pertain to the songs, and then I condense them and make the story. I like to put an intro so people get a feel for what’s going on. It sets the tone, almost like scenery.”

DOOM’s artistic output slowed considerably following this period, and his final solo album Born Like This arrived in 2009. This would be Dumile’s final definitive statement under the singular DOOM name, though throughout the following decade he collaborated with numerous artists including protégé Bishop Nehru, producer Jneiro Jarel, duo Czarface and others.

In some ways, Born Like This is like a Madvillainy that groans when it stands up; gruff life lessons delivered with a greater sense of world-weary pessimism, atop a mismatch of beats new and old. There’s still humour, but it’s a bit more twisted; there’s still blunted beats, but a bit more broken; there’s still sampleladen skits, but one of them is a straight up Charles Bukowski monologue. The superhero theme tune schtick is evident on tracks like ‘Rap Ambush’ or ‘Supervillains’ but it seems borderline unhinged. Whereas the J Dilla produced ‘Lightworks’ and ‘Gazillion Ear’ couldn’t ask for a more suitable MC to navigate their punch-drunk hallucinations. The real highlights have to be the crooked ‘Absolutely’, a cold lesson in criminology, and ‘That’s That’, with its taut, melancholic strings, triple-stacked bars and warbled sung outro feeling inexplicably mournful in light of recent events. There’s a real thrill to its imperfection, and it’s an album that rewards repeated listens, containing some of the most intriguing fragments of his career. Perhaps not the best place to start, but fascinatingly rich once you’re acquainted with some of his earlier work.

There’s of course much more to uncover of the wider DOOM catalogue, but these are certainly the places to begin, and should offer clues to uncover the rest for yourself. For an artist often spoken of as enigmatic, he emitted a great warmth and humour through his music and interviews. His music has been incredibly far reaching, with an audience stretching well beyond the realms of hip hop. An iconic outlier of the rap scene who continued to work on his own terms till the end. He will be greatly missed. R.I.P. VILLAIN.

Henchmen: Five key DOOM collabs Gorillaz – November Has Come (feat. MF DOOM) Damon Albarn’s cartoon troupe seem a perfect fit in hindsight for the animated linguistics of DOOM. One of the finer album tracks on the groups second album Demon Days, with DOOM in fighting form on the verses and Albarn on chorus duties the track is sure to have been many peoples introduction to the villain.

The Avalanches – Frankie Sinatra (feat. Danny Brown & MF DOOM) DOOM and Detroit eccentric Danny Brown were the faces of The Avalanches return after 16 years. The lead single to the Australian’s second record sees the rappers trading bars over a jaunty calypso sample, culminating in an almost circus-like affair that sees all involved play to their strengths.

Dabrye – Lil Mufukuz (feat. DOOM) DOOM in full rap statesmen mode, lamenting on modern childhood while dressing down a generation of young rappers. Dabrye, also known by techno alias 2AM/FM, lays a cold, gloomy beat for the villain to vent over. One of the finer late works by the MC. DOOM – Gazillion Ear (Thom Yorke Remix) One of two collaborations with Thom Yorke of Radiohead, a noted fan of the rapper. The bombast of the original track is stripped-back to a tense smattering of hi hats and nervous atmospherics – an intriguing reworking. Yorke said of DOOM: “He was a massive inspiration… for me the way he put words was often shocking in its genius.”

Flying Lotus – Masquatch (feat. DOOM) A short burst of grimy villainy put together for Lotus’ Grand Theft Auto radio station. A snapshot of a collaborative pairing that clearly had more to give.

On the new of DOOM’s passing, Flylo confessed he and the MC had been working on an EP, yet another glimpse at the tantalizing vaults left behind.

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Final Third: Infinite Login How Brian d’Souza used the pandemic to launch a radio station for the good health of its listeners and the bank accounts of its artists, by Skye Butchard

Natural fit Brian d’Souza never intended to create a radio station. Ambient Flo began its life as a series of impromptu livestreams filmed in his back garden. When the world shrunk into itself during the first lockdown, and we were all looking for ways to reach outwards, those livestreams offered connection and calm for its viewers.

As a maker of warm and richly textured dance music as Auntie Flo, as well as a killer DJ, it would be natural for him to create a virtual club space, as many others have. Instead, he curated ambient music sets; a welcoming place to breathe and filter out the noise.

“For me, it was the obvious choice of genre,” he says.

“Isolation calls for tunes that help you escape, feel calm and maintain sanity. For me, this is ambient music.

“Dance music needs a sweaty crowd and large soundsystem in a dark room… I figured I’d play music that had helped me find some inner peace, and do it in the mornings too, when no one else seemed to be streaming.”

— A paradigm shift — Those sets morphed into a 24-hour radio station that offers not just gorgeous music but a sustainable source of income for the artists it highlights. Ambient Flo was designed using an Artist Profit Share system that places emphasis on collective support and fair pay, where 300 selected tracks are played an equal number of times each month. In a time of deep uncertainty and upheaval for our industry, the site looks for a new way forward, emphasising longevity and artist-led initiatives.

The website itself is a dream to use. Each month, leading voices in the genre curate playlists, separated into Morning, Daytime and Nightime that offer distinct atmospheres. Morning is bright, gentle and reassuring. Daytime brings a stronger sense of rhythm and melody. Night is vast and otherworldy. There is even the option to mix in natural sounds like birdsong, which can lead to surprisingly moving moments, like one moment this afternoon where gentle bird calls seemed to harmonise with Henrietta Smith-Rolla’s piano.

None of this was in view when Brian d’Souza first started recording.

“The first lockdown was a bittersweet time,” he says.

“Obviously, everything stopped – there was massive and very

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serious health implications, which I don’t want to belittle. But for me personally, it was a paradigm shift moment.

“A level of stress that I wasn’t really aware of that had built up over years suddenly lifted. Plus, the weather was nice, and I got to enjoy the change of pace in life. Doing the livestreams gave me a focus for the week – I bought so much music and really loved sharing it with everyone who tuned in.”

The move from livestream to radio, though now clearly a good one, stemmed from humble beginnings, it turns out. The time and space required for the project became a problem for his family. “My young son loves playing on the decks,” Brian explains, “so my wife had to take him out when the live streams where on otherwise the nice ambient flow would have been interrupted by him scratching the records!”

He started thinking about ways to bring it to a larger audience.

Frustrations with the economics of the music industry were also becoming more noticeable. Despite being an established name who’s released award-winning records (the excellent Radio Highlife from 2018 took home the Scottish Album of the Year), Brian doesn’t make any money from streaming.

Final Third: Infinite Login “The only way I’ve really made money in music is through DJing.

Not live gigs, not promoting events, not through my records and not really through any publishing or sync stuff. So when DJing was taken off the table as an option I started to look more closely at where the revenue gets distributed. The issues are the same as they’ve been since day one of the music industry – the creators always get shafted.”

Ambient Flo relies on direct audience support, which has been an early hurdle, as it has been for many musicians having to reinforce the perceived value of art in the pandemic. “I think fans have a responsibility to be aware of how this all works,” says Brian. “If they pay £10 a month for Spotify, that is fine if you feel you only get £10 worth of value out of all the music you listen to. If music plays a much bigger role in your life, figure out ways to pay more.” Accordingly, Ambient Flo is a free station, but listeners are encouraged to support it, with their money being split between the monthly featured artists and the running costs of the site.

— Someone on the other end — Ambient Flo is proudly about the power of human curation. Though working with music often used for background listening, there are distinct voices, moods and cultures playing out. January’s selections were curated by KMRU, who is currently one of the most celebrated figures in the genre. His selections have a distinct tactile quality, filled with gorgeous decayed melodies and an ineffable eeriness. Even the most cavernous and blurry music on Ambient Flo has a deep sense of human connection for the listener because you know someone on the other end chose this music for you to hear.

“We always seem to crave efficiency over excellence, and with an algorithm you might save some time, but you lose the human touch,” says Brian.

“I want to build a relationship with the listeners to Ambient Flo and select songs with care and attention, in the same way I’d do with a DJ set. This way allows me to bring a far more diverse, interesting and unique selection every month.”

So what have been his favourite picks as a fan?

“It was great to get Keith [Optimo] in as the first guest curator,” he says. “I’m forever in awe of his music knowledge and taste and knew he’d do an amazing job.

“His compilation Miracle Steps helped introduce me to so many amazing artists across the ‘4th World’ and that helped me with a lot of the selections so far. Including John Hassell songs also feels very poignant. He’s the original originator, and it blows my mind that he is still releasing incredible music to this day.”

Nature and healing are both prominently featured on the website, and it was the direct response from his audience that led to birdsong being featured so prominently.

“I did those from my phone microphone, so it picked up the sounds of my garden, as well as the music. The birds were in full voice in those months, so they really became a feature for a lot of people. I realised that a lot people don’t have much access to nature whilst in lockdown, and that is so important.

“There is a whole field called Biophilic Sound that promotes the benefits of listening to natural sounds. That certainly resonates with me.”

Brian’s background as a psychologist has also influenced the project. Personally speaking, before lockdown I was a bit of cynic when it came to meditation and the power of nature, in part because of the corporate sheen around the culture of it.

It’s disheartening to go to your GP while in a deep depression due to factors outside of your control just to be told to download Headspace because the NHS doesn’t have the funds to deal with you. Ambient Flo has been one of the key things that’s helped me untangle that attitude. It offered an accessible and welcoming way into meditation.

“I’ve learned a lot more about music theory through studying sound therapy,” Brian says. “Understanding intervals, frequencies and resonances help me understand at a deeper level how a song affects us.

“Of course, a song contains much more information than its constituent parts, whether that’s the culture or scene that the creator belongs to or the genre that song fits, so it’s important to recognise all aspects when it comes to music curation.”

— Something different every time — That the station manages to be so distinct and personal while working with music made for background listening is completely remarkable, and I’m keen to ask Brian about how an ambient artist approaches those competing sides.

“There are merits for some of this music to be made as ‘wallpaper’ or to be played in the background,” he says. “That was the essence of what Eno was talking about when he coined the phrase. On the other side, there are obvious merits from listening to music more actively, where the composition, layers and dynamics reveal something different every time. I’m trying to find a balance between these two competing paradigms – functional music, but at the same time beautiful and timeless, and for every song to stand up on its own merits as a piece of art, not bland and functional for the sake of it.”

This music has been close to Auntie Flo for his whole career, it turns out.

“Ambient was my first route into Dance music in the mid ’90s. I was obsessed with Warp records and all the classic releases they put out at the time… I also loved Ninja Tune with the Xen comps, and remember booking Funki Porcini for a club night around 2002. He played a set so chilled he even fell asleep in the club!”

Diving into Ambient Flo has been a great tool for my own productivity. It’s given me a way to focus and relax simultaneously. It’s also given me a handful of new artists to fawn over.

I’ve fallen deeply for Ana Roxanne, KMRU and Pauline Anna Strom while listening. For Brian, it’s, “Tim Hecker all day long.”

“I have 4/5 of his albums downloaded onto my phone and they are basically all I listen to. The composition is so fluid and layered that the music sounds new every time I listen.”

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Final Third: Cold Take

Fill me in Was Craig David really robbed at the 2001 Brit Awards? by Abi Crawford

Awards season isn’t upon us because nothing is. But it should be. If 2021 was playing by the rules the Grammys would have opened its doors on January 31 as planned and currently be reaching its halfway point, with its ‘Best Use of Footwear in an Alternative Rock Song Video with Vocals’ category. The Oscar nominations would be full of films too good to have opened in the UK, yet proudly showing in the back of seats on BA flights, while the BAFTAs would have been and gone, with a Cirque du Soleil opening routine and, actually, some pretty big celebrities thank you very much, Hollywood (Andy Serkis and Olivia Colman). But upsetting us most, of course, would be the Brit Awards. I haven’t watched it for years. I did have it on last year, but it was very much on in the background. And the year before that I think there was literally nothing else on. But I don’t watch the weekly lead-up shows on ITV2. Hardly ever.

You’ll be able to resume your own questionable relationship with the Brits on May 11, but it’s a previous, cruel, sinister Brits that’s brought me here. The Brit Awards of exactly 20 years ago. The Brit Awards that inexplicably shut out Craig David.

Today, you might think of David as a figure of fun, be that due to television show-turned-national-bullying-campaign Bo Selecta (named after one of his songs), his 18-30s pool party DJ sets (as TS5), or the very nature of being someone who was massive once and now isn’t. But it’s impossible to overstate his success at the turn of the century, commercially and culturally.

Just as Nirvana didn’t necessarily invent grunge, UK garage wasn’t all Craig David, but he made sure the whole country heard it. From the release of ‘Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)’ in late 1999 – a track by Artful Dodger featuring David on vocals – UK clubbing changed forever. Black British music soundtracked every night out where shirts and shoes were obligatory; Ben Shermans and Base loafers if you could get them. It sounds kind of horrible, but whether you liked it or not, by summer 2000 the cab to the club, the club itself and the kebab shop afterwards were all endlessly playing Craig David.

When he released his debut album Born to Do It in August, it sold 225,320 copies in its first week, making it the fastest selling debut by a British solo male – a record that stands today. So as the Brits rolled around in January 2001 it came as no surprise that Craig David was the most nominated artist, showing up for all six of the categories he was eligible for. What was a surprise was that he won none of them.

The national news became who didn’t win a Brit rather than who did, and many howled at the snub. Maybe that was (and is) our cynical, British way, or maybe we were just sick of

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hearing nothing but Craig David songs. But what were the Brits thinking? There has to be an argument there for flat out racism, and while the awards continues to strive for better representation and equality on that front, a dominant Stormzy has thankfully not suffered a similar fate in recent years. The official line from the Awards at the time was that it had been an “unfortunate coincidence” that David had had such a poor night. At least he knew what he was in for – the results were leaked the weekend before the ceremony at Earls Court, allowing him to change a lyric in his live performance of ‘Fill Me In’ to: “Six nominations but no Brits this evening”. (Oh yeah, the Brits also invited him to sing at his primetime humiliation.)

Or have I got it wrong? Away from my nostalgia fog of Aftershock and beige trousers, was Craig David fairly beaten six times over? Twenty years on, here’s what beat the king of UK garage, and if it was actually a fair cop.

BEST ALBUM Born to Do It Vs Parachutes by Coldplay This is closer than it looks. First you need to completely forget how Coldplay dressed at the time. Get that image out of your head, and Craig David’s 2001 look too. One act arrived at the Brits styled by the V Festival’s £5 stall, the other wore a shark skin trench coat, baby blue beany and overshirt, and ice white jeans. Neither of them should have done either of these things, but the big album prize was all about the full body of MUSIC, not bad fashion choices. Parachutes is better than you think it is. I won’t go on about the perfection of ‘Yellow’ because it’ll only push you further away from it. One day it’ll be covered on a John Lewis ad and you’ll get it, along with the good 60% of the album.

Born to Do It is patchy too, although ‘Fill Me In’, ‘Rewind’ and ‘7 Days’ and ‘Time to Party’ all count as double. Two decades later it still comes down to whether you want to sleep with the person at your dinner party or not. For that reason, I’ll let Parachutes ride and give this one to the Brits. It won’t last.

Final Third: Cold Take

BRITISH SINGLE OF THE YEAR ‘7 Days’ Vs ‘Rock DJ’ by Robbie Williams Let it be said that ‘7 Days’ isn’t even the best song on Born to Do It, but by virtue of the fact that it isn’t ‘Rock DJ’, Craig David has been robbed here (don’t laugh). There’s a reason that YouTube’s algorithm wants to follow ‘Rock DJ’ with ‘The Bad Touch’ by Bloodhound Gang – those horrible disco-in-a-can beats perfectly sync for a mix down the SU as half the rugby team get their bums out. ‘7 Days’ meanwhile became part of the national psyche, defining Craig David the top shagger and spawning a million and one crap punchlines whenever his name is mentioned. It’s also superbly put together as David raps his own call-and-response.

Robbie raps on ‘Rock DJ’ too, coughing up the less than seminal likes of, “Wave your hands if you’re not with the man / Can I kick it (yes you can)”, half of which isn’t his. ‘Fill Me It’ would have buried ‘Rock DJ’, but ‘7 Days’ should have easily done the job.

called arrogance. That’s no disrespect to David, who was still only 19 at the time and, for all his beautiful honeys with beautiful bodies, was a pretty shy young man. Whatever Robbie’s brand is, it pales in comparison to what Craig David had cultivated.

For all intents and purposes, he was UK garage. Where the Brits fucked this one was by plumping for what it knew. Williams was on his third (and worst yet) solo album in 2001; Craig David had become a cultural phenomenon with a fastest selling debut album. If the Brits had had any interest in supporting the new and exciting, this was their chance, and they shat the bed.

BRITISH BREAKTHROUGH ACT Craig David Vs A1 I imagine Noel Gallagher’s following comment at the time was in defence of also-rans Coldplay rather than Craig David, but it very much applies to our guy: “This awards ceremony over the years has been accused of having no sense of humour, but when you see A1 taking an award, you know they’re taking the piss.”

BRITISH VIDEO OF THE YEAR ‘7 Days’ Vs ‘Rock DJ’ Now that we can agree that ‘7 Days’ is the far superior song, we can completely forget about the audio in each of their videos. Ask yourself which of these is the most impressive, visually. Is it Craig David talking to his barber? Or is it Robbie Williams popping up at a roller disco full of women, trying to get their attention by dancing, then stripping, then peeling off his own skin, then tearing off his muscles and throwing them at the walls, then dancing as a fucking skeleton? Barbershop or a man ripping himself apart?

The video that cost £200 or £200,000? Credit where it’s due, Robbie. Even when you factor in ‘7 Days’’s Groundhog Day narrative, where David’s exit from purgatory isn’t via moral redemption but getting laid by “a beautiful honey with a beautiful body”, it’s not even close. The guy pulled his skin off!

BRITISH MALE SOLO ARTIST Craig David Vs Robbie Williams Ffs. Okay… Well, can we first a take a minute to ask what this category means? If ability in album-making, song-writing and talking to your barber/pulling your skin off have been assessed elsewhere what are we judging here? ‘Brand’? Charisma? On the latter, Robbie has it, even if his charisma is so charismatic it’s

BRITISH DANCE ACT Craig David Vs Fatboy Slim Maybe down at The Honey Club in Brighton it was all about ‘Weapon of Choice’, but round my way the Fatboy Slim boat had sailed with You’ve Come a Long Way Baby in 1998. ‘Dance music’ was no longer only a master DJ playing big beat and techno; it was also a sometimes-master DJ playing a 2-step beat for an MC to attack. A lot of it was pretty awful, but it was unavoidably the sound of something new in provincial towns across the country. I don’t even hate this decision in the Brits’ most tokenistic of categories (it’s no A1), but for how Craig David transformed Saturday nights out I’ve got to go with him here. And by that count, I rule that our boy Craig definitely deserved a minimum of two Brits in 2001; four would have been fair; to receive none was, as I thought, well out of order.

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Final Third: In Conversation

The Universe is Expanding

Builder of worlds Iglooghost has completed his second solo album of mind-bending computer music.

But Lei Line Eon – a dramatic shift from his warp speed electronics of the past – is of course so much more than that, as he tells Skye Butchard over Google Chat 68

Final Third: In Conversation

Iglooghost proudly makes laptop music. The abundant universe of characters and huge genre-smashed sounds that fill up his multi-sensory musical world all came together while staring into a screen. These are alien vistas so vast and believable that it’s surprising to know they came together on a Macbook. It’s art piece, magic trick and in-joke rolled into one.

But there’s always been a beating organic heart at the core of Iglooghost’s music – sometimes a strange, alien heart beating twenty times a second, but a warm-blooded one nonetheless.

His second full length solo album emphasises the warmhearted pull of his music. It’s teaming with gentle piano lines, sweet lilting vocals, and gorgeous violin arpeggios from Vivek Menon. The drums, while lumbering and gigantic, are surprisingly minimal. Quiet hand claps are used just as much as 808 wubs. Fans will know he is as influenced by delicate Steve Reich pieces and the Breath of the Wild soundtrack as he is by hyperactive bass music. Combining those two worlds so intuitively has long been part of his skill as an artist.

But it’s not enough for him to merely combine separate musical worlds. Lei Line Eon is part of an ever growing Iglooghost Extended Universe that tells the story of tiny gods from another realm, capable of magical acts far beyond our understanding. Now, thanks to his documentation of strange phenomena in his hometown in Dorset, we’re finding out more about how their existence overlaps with our own.

It’s an album about the magic right there in front of our eyes.

The music and deep visual material surrounding it is presented with childlike glee – and by extension, half of the fun with Iglooghost remains allowing yourself not to question where fact becomes fiction. After 2019’s bombastic and gloriously silly Gloo album XYZ with his closest musical companions Kai Whiston and Babii, Lei Line Eon is a more reflective and spiritual release, without losing any of Iglooghost’s mysterious charm that filled his 2017 debut, Neō Wax Bloom; a record about a gelatinous worm in a witch hat named Xiangjiao.

I interviewed him back then, in a conversation that switched from the telephone to Google Chat within its first few minutes.

This time, we went straight for the text option, for me to learn more about the strange lost tradition that he’s been documenting in Dorset; the latest add-on pack to the Iglooghost universe.

Skye Butchard: How have you been over lockdown?

Iglooghost: It’s been hazy and weird and okay. I think I’ve made the most shit I’ve made in my entire life, because there’s no way to switch off. I live in a weird secret converted MOT garage with my gf that doubles as a studio space, so I think the work/ home dynamic is blurred from the jump.

I finished my album in lockdown but now I’m addicted to making microscopic void dwelling angels on Blender, and the album feels like a million years ago.

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Final Third: In Conversation It’s definitely added a lot of petrol to the fire, and turned me into a hyperfocused recluse, which is probably the same for a lot of people whose personality type teeters into that kinda thing.

I just wanna see how far this shit can go.

SB: That was actually something I was going to ask you.

I remember back when Neō Wax Bloom was coming out, you said your work process was pretty intense. You were constantly creating. It’s like a lot of people in the world are in that headspace now. Do you still find moments for downtime?

IG: I’m a muppet and I haven’t learnt shit! I remember distinctly leaving a note for my future self when I finished my first LP when I was, like, 19 that I should never do that again.

You go outside and swim in waterfalls, but before you know it you’re back in the dungeon getting loose off your own fart gas and fucking your spine up from staring into a dim LCD

screen. I definitely didn’t follow my own advice. But I do think the process feels different the more hurdles you jump. I work so much faster now and can divide up the things that pop into my head way quicker. Making stuff seems to advance in this weird exponential vortex where the more I grind the faster everything works & even more dopamine-inducing it gets.

I was a dumbass when I made my first album so it just felt so sluggish – and I definitely wasn’t aware that it gets faster and faster. I thought it was gonna be boring slow motion shite forever!

SB: I wanted to ask you about Lei music. A lot of people might not be familiar. Can you tell me a bit about that tradition?

IG: Lei music is a weird subgenre that’s been practiced around where I was born in the west country for eons. My mum and dad and almost everyone I grew up with screw around with

“I’m either making mind-bendingly thought-out multimedia work or deranged forbidden cathartic joke music with my mates”

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Final Third: In Conversation it to a varying degree. It’s essentially a type of music that toys with using specific combinations of sounds and arrangements to summon these strange morphing inkblot beings. When the music is played with specific sequencing and combinations, different entities appear, and their appearance corresponds with the music.

It’s nuts, but doesn’t really get spoken about outside of Dorset. There’s a huge amount of scene history and lost material that just hasn’t been researched properly, so I’ve been using all this new free time to try and do it justice.

SB: What’s that documenting process been like, for you?

IG: So I had to build a physical research space with some mates and it’s called the Gylph Institute. Took a long time, but it’s a good location to post up in – it kind of looks like a humongous shiny nautilus shell building. Lots of windows too. We’ve been trying to reverse engineer Lei Music techniques and figure out how this shit actually works in controlled test domes, but we still manage to smash a lot of shit up by accident.

I’ve been archiving tons of musical notation too – it’s all super bizarre with these sprawling scribbly gylph zaps and blots. We’ve got a lot more to figure out but I’ve been periodically publishing my findings on the Glyph Institute site.

SB: What’s a Lei Disk? I hear there’s a whole trading circuit?

IG: Lei Disks are the medium that the music is stored on.

Nowadays they generally look like credit card size, see-through little data chips with iconography and splashes of colourful decals, but they’ve changed throughout history. Some of the Disks we’ve managed to reconstruct range from woven tapestries to coral etching.

They play back the music and a miniature recording of the summoned entity, almost like those old music boxes with a little ballerina toy – I forget the name.

They also get traded around seedy black markets and hoarded on P2P trading networks – shit is a blast.

SB: It’s obvious how huge of an undertaking the project has been, thanks for uncovering all of this! Lore has always been a big thing in your music. Are you someone drawn to deep lore dives as a fan, too?

IG: I think lore can provide rich, dizzyingly complicated networks of storytelling and mythology, but is also often used for cynical never-ending franchise cash-grabs. I think mainstream cinema is saturated with a really nefarious and boring type of lore – just huge mega corporations who own IPs and rehash another pointless prequel/origin story every other year to cash in on nostalgia. ‘The year is 2025 and Netflix Presents – Paddington 9: Untold Legends’.

Saying that, I literally woke up to a tweet from Warner Bros announcing a fucking Willy Wonka origin story movie this morning. I can definitely see this becoming a trope people get proper sick of in the next few years & I hope it leads to people seeking refuge in new stories.

SB: Why does every character need a gritty origin story as well? It sucks out a lot of the magic and mystery. One thing

that stands out to me about your storytelling is that you balance mystery and deep detail. How much time do you split between the sound and everything else to strike that balance?

IG: That’s sweet, thank you! I am really drawn to that liminal space between a complicated story and a fever dream.

I love the idea of revealing the tip of a complicated nexus but intentionally leaving modular/interchangeable gaps in specific places. I think it makes you feel like a baby.

Balance-wise, I used to worry that developing visual work around music kinda clamps everything into these strict inter-related parameters, but I’ve kinda come to realise making compelling music is a contrived process anyway.

People talk about uncompromised expression but I genuinely think if I just have free-range in a DAW, I end up making drill beats with kazoos and 4x4 kicks and Red Hot Chili Peppers guitar licks cos it’s funny and immediately gratifying.

These days I’m either making mind-bendingly thoughtout multimedia work or deranged forbidden cathartic joke music with my mates. I think by doing that it lets your brain exercise everything it wants to do. Maybe there’s something cool in between though.

SB: Was what you made with Gloo part of the former?

Have Kai and Babii been a big influence on this project, or is this more of a solo thing for you?

IG: Obviously our bread and butter is making really longform concept driven stuff, but the Gloo stuff definitely scratches an itch that would be kind of off-topic in our solo shit. I think when Soundcloud was popping, there was always this fun but competitive arms race between everyone, where kids were just trying to make the most immediately alarming and unexpected beats. You’d press play and shit would drop immediately into some kind of overly bass-boosted, warped neo-Timbaland shit that sounds like a punch in the jaw. Obviously nobody was really making albums, but that was fine because this shit served a way different short-form, bite-sized purpose.

People even tried to get their waveforms looking absurd – like I’d always be clicking on tracks with enormous silent gaps and drastic peaks because even visually it looked mad, and that’s when you knew it was gonna slap. I think that’s what the Gloo shit is – it’s like just weaponised dumb ass beats that you smash shit in your bedroom to.

SB: There’s a real grounding of nature on the new album, and also a unique take on folk stories and spirituality. What’s your own relationship like with your hometown, and what made you want to explore something with grounding on earth?

IG: I feel like when I was a kid, my inner world was always competing with whatever mundane scenario I was actually in, and I think it’s the same for a lot of people. You can almost project/compose crazy fantasies into your actual vision in a way that feels like a locked-off feature as an adult. The place I grew up now feels like a big, used canvas for all that stuff, and even just smelling the air of bonfires & cow shit gives me intense flashbacks to stuff that never actually happened.

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Final Third: In Conversation SB: There’s a definite sonic continuity on the new album that really connects everything. How quickly did you settle on the ideas for the sound of it? And were there a lot of ideas left on the cutting room floor?

IG: I’ve got like three albums in the bin that were supposed to be LP2. One of them was called New Gėn, and I guess it got so far that people online knew about it & were collecting snippets and bits from it. I think a huge part of the process was wrestling with all my older shit and trying to make something that worked next to it that was still exciting to me.

Eventually, I started to feel like it was dumb and redundant as hell to be like 23 and trying to make art based on what I thought was cool when I was 18. I think it’s bizarre and boring that the first thing you make that clicks publicly usually has to dictate your work forever.

There was a point where I just deleted the albums I was working on and approached it as best I could without preconceived notions of what I was supposed to be doing.

And weirdly, it doesn’t even feel fully inappropriate. I guess there are archetypes and motifs that you subconsciously orbit around... so I think there’s a few things that ended up connecting with the first era of my stuff. Wish I knew that from the fucking start though. Hahaha, whoopsie!

This album is definitely obsessed with weight and hyper slow motion though, so I know a good amount of people who want the ADHD warp speed shit are gonna be fuming. I am so glad it exists now though.

SB: From the outside looking in, it feels like you’ve cultivated a fanbase that can appreciate new sounds and ideas, so I

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do hope they connect with it. A lot of the tracks here definitely are more subtle and neo-classical influenced. Were you nervous putting that out given people know you for the beat-oriented stuff?

IG: Yeah I’m shitting it! I’m curious how people in different terrains & worlds think about it. I find it impossible to detach it from big wet chalky valleys & smoky bonfire druid air, so I don’t know what the fuck someone in LA is gonna associate it with.

Sometimes I divide music I make up into the category of whether my mum or my dad would like it. My mum likes expressive twinkling pianos and spindling harp arrangements, and my dad likes big loud brutish distorted obnoxious bangers. This album’s for my mum but maybe the next one will be dad music.

SB: The tools for music creation are getting more and more accessible, and reaching out to artists is easier than ever with stuff like Twitch and Discord. What advice would you give to a young kid who’s maybe overwhelmed about where to start with beatmaking?

IG: I think shit is becoming near open-source at this point, and the elite few who used to hold the keys to making techy morphing shit don’t really hold any power or clout in doing so now.

Even like 2 years ago it would be pretty unthinkable to share a project file or stems with a release, but now that’s just another normal part of the process. It’s a bit extreme, but I see people getting called gatekeepers for not sharing their stems.

That said, I’m well into it though. Fuck it – everyone’s working so fast and efficiently like a hivemind right now. I do think in this newer era where myself and my closest buds have all started sharing our tools, I wonder what it must be like on the receiving end at square one. It’s probably mad enticing to just hop straight on Splice and bust 99999 credits on hyper-textural mutating 2030s sound design before you can even compose a track.

I guess I’d just highlight the fact that it’s a huge superpower to be able to compose boring mundane beats before anything else. I think you can always hear when someone’s trying to run before they can walk, and it’s proper important to have a grasp on basic sequencing and manipulation so you can do your own thing with this abundance of tools.

I promise learning the boring shit only takes like four months though! As soon as you can make convincing mediocre music then you’re absolutely fucking on to something.

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Final Third: The Rates

Virginia Wing

Each month we ask an artist to share three musicians they think have gone underappreciated, and three new names who they hope will avoid a similar fate. Experimental pop trio Virginia Wing discussed theirs with Fergal Kinney 74

Final Third: The Rates “It’s about personal stuff,” explains Virginia Wing vocalist Alice Merida Richards. “We were clearly all going through personal stuff. You have to pretend it won’t, but it will get in there. Of course it comes out and you’re screaming and crying, but for a small amount of time you just have to pretend that it isn’t.”

Since forming in 2012, Virginia Wing have been many things, one of the most important of which has been coping mechanism.

“It’s like Merida’s going through your bins and is giving you life advice,” says saxophonist Christopher Duffin, who completes the three-piece alongside Sam Pillay. Perhaps the only sonic constant across four records now is Richards’ glacial sprechgesang; a lyricist who can veer fluently between the philosophical and the motivational. Just don’t mistake that for detachment – it’s anything but.

When the group formed – originally Richards, Pillay and another member now lost to the world of German post-war philosophy studies – it began a period of reckoning with the weight of gendered assumptions both internal and external to the group. “When we started, I’d made music with women, and it was really free and silly,” explains Richards, “and I felt very self-conscious making music with men, that it had to be really serious. But I came to realise that was stupid and you’ve just got to be human – that’s what people connect with.”

This fed directly into 2018’s breakthrough album Ecstatic Arrow; a serious record that established the band as one of the most progressive and interesting groups operating in Britain today. It chimed with its times whilst sounding entirely outside of its contemporaries, and was widely acclaimed as such – not least by this publication, who made it album of the year that December.

Continuing on the band’s superb new record private LIFE, Ecstatic Arrow had a sonically all gates open approach, where 1980s American art hybrid pop (think Laurie Anderson or Tina Weymouth in Tom Tom Club) was thrown into the pot with the leftfield jazz of Yasuaki Shimizu, bright sparkling skies of analogue synthesisers and a passionate and deep understanding of black R&B. “All of our production comes from black music,” says Pillay, “but the most we ever get is a reference to ‘pulsating beats’. It’s sad.” All of which is rendered with a crispness and clarity that evokes ideas of utopia; it sounds like a better reality to be in.

“We try and make big tunes,” says Pillay. “We try and make big records that have a place in people’s lives, and are shooting for things. We don’t need to follow that up by doing all the cynical stuff that’s associated with it.”

Serious about being serious about their work, without being po-faced, the band clearly think deeply about the role of a band in 2021 and varying definitions of success. Their last album’s doing so well could have afforded them an opportunity to work towards a different kind of success. “We’re not trying to cool guy it, we don’t think we’re above it,” offers Pillay. “There are a lot of people who want to level up – they’re playing Yes in Manchester and they want to play Gorilla. So there’s this expec-

tation that we should enter into that stuff more, to have a hot take on every political thing. Now, we all have the exact political leanings as you can imagine we would, but I don’t like everything being filtered through the prism of the band. It’s not a conscious thing but it becomes the mindset. Everything in life can be through the context of being a musician but it’s not realistic.”

Social media is a concern too, and the album’s press release makes reference to “daily reminders of what happened a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago, it’s without question eroding our capacity to be happy with ourselves, or know who we are.” Is it worth the larger commercial success for zapping your energy on the band Twitter account? Virginia Wing suspect not, and Richards points to the band’s monthly NTS show as an example of what this band is really interested in – contributing to a larger framework of creative people engaging seriously with art. Sharing of music between the three of them is, for Pillay, “the number one thing. The people I want to impress the most in this world are these two.” So I spoke to Virginia Wing about their Rates, starting with their three older artists.

GABI DELGADO Pillay: He was the singer in DAF and I always liked how he looked. That stuff is really cool, but it’s very stylised and I find extremely stylised music with super icy post-punk… I find it fatiguing when it has such a defined sound and aesthetic. Whereas Gabi Delgado’s Mistress, I wanted the excuse to be into him.

Duffin: It’s oddly charming. The horn lines all sound like they could come from a cartoon show or Prince’s Black Album.

It’s dark and it’s about sex and there’s weird sex noises, but then this Looney Tunes horn section. So there’s a good sense of humour about it. And the mix! It’s like Sly Stone’s Fresh. It sounds inside out and unconventional; it wasn’t built up from drums and bass upward.

Richards: I find it quite unconvincing when men try and be sexy – apart from Prince – but he pulls it off in a funny characterful way, that sultriness.

Pillay: He pulls it off without being… there’s something about Gainsbourg or Leonard Cohen on Death of a Ladies’ Man, where it veers into the seedy, which is obviously intentional. But Prince, he was a dirty bastard but it never seemed malevolent,

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Final Third: The Rates

“In its world, it isn’t underrated. In the world of jungle, A Guy Called Gerald is the cornerstone” and I get that from this Gabi record. When you start discovering Conny Plank, that stuff just got rinsed a few years ago. This is a bit more slickly put together but has the collaging nature of Holger Czukay.

A GUY CALLED GERALD Pillay: I don’t like ‘Voodoo Ray’ and I don’t particularly like 808 State, but I do like jungle. Now, when I moved to Manchester, a friend of mine recommended me Black Secret Technology by A Guy Called Gerald. And when I listened to it, it was everything I wanted at the time, something about it appeals to everything I want from music. We’re opposite Alexandra Park now, just on the verge of Whalley Range and Moss Side, and he’d listen to the mixes whilst walking around Hulme Park. It’s not a club record at all, so things like Timeless [by Golide], that was really blowing up at the time, and that stuff sounds unreal in a club as it’s mixed for it, but Black Secret Technology isn’t. It’s so singular as a result, even though it can sound shit (the album has suffered numerous mixing problems over the years). To go back to Gabi Delgado, it’s completely its own thing and Black Secret Technology is like that – in its world, it isn’t underrated. In the world of jungle, it’s the cornerstone. Even down to the shitty mix, it creates a world. Sitting on the edge of Moss Side now and the idea of it, I hear Princess Parkway, it’s just a world.

Duffin: Have you read that book Join the Future by Matt Annis? There’s a whole section on A Guy Called Gerald. I first heard of him when he played on a really bad Herbie Hancock record! I think I first heard of ‘Voodoo Ray’ because it was a Pete and Dud sample. He was a trained classical jazz and contemporary dancer, and when he’s making music it’s almost like synaesthesia;

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he can hear how people would move to it. He wasn’t influenced by going to the Hacienda, it was all the black footwork crowd and the jazz dancers who brought house music in. When the white guys started taking pills and it was house all night long, they thought, “fuck this”. That sound progressed. D&B and jungle was a reaction, a protest against what was going on.

Richards: There’s videos on YouTube we found of people just dancing from Moss Side, and they’re incredible.

Pillay: People didn’t know how to dance to that stuff yet, so the videos are incredible.

THICK PIGEON Richards: There’s a theatricality – it’s silly in a serious way – which I love. There’s one compilation that has the worst artwork you’ll ever see [above]; it’s called Too Crazy Cowboys.

It’s not by any means a flawless lost classic, but I’ve always had a keen interest in post-punk and no wave, things of that genre, and particularly the female made things in that. I thought it was strange that I’d never heard of her before – she was in a band with Kim Gordon. It’s not perfect, no, but it’s such a good vibe,

Final Third: The Rates and I’ve never seen it mentioned anywhere. She did Wheels Over Indian Trails too [under her name Stanton Miranda].

Pillay: That’s really like a New York classic. Thick Pigeon, it’s a bit of a footnote, but the other person in the group was Carter Burwell, who does all the soundtracks to the Coen brothers’ films. The thing I get from Thick Pigeon is a sort of Bongwater thing – I was really into Bongwater eight years ago and the thing is, with us, you can go as arty as you want, go for it, whatever, but you’ve got to have a sense of humour.

JOHN FM Pillay: We’re very basic people when it comes to house and techno. It’s got to be black and it’s got to be rugged – like Moodymann, that’s what does it for us. We’re not coming to this as authorities on house and techno. I hear John FM and from a production point of view it really resonates with me, I don’t know why. There’s just something about the production on this that just is very comforting. The important thing for us is to make something that we can be proud of and that is authentically ours – we’re not really part of a scene, or riding a wave, because that’s not the type of people we are or what we would be into. When there are waves of things, like Squid and Black Country, New Road, people get pissed off about black midi, now it might not be my cup of tea but it’s hilarious that they got nominated for the Mercury as their music is genuinely bizarre. I wouldn’t want to critique that at all! But we want something singular, and John FM does that, and that American Spirit EP is the one.

Richards: That’s why we picked solo artists, it just comes out. It’s not a group of people working out their influences.

Duffin: I don’t think Virginia Wing fits into anyone’s venn diagram of toolkit touchstones, so I think that’s why people feel we’re viewed as underrated. Three miserable people talking about their addictions and how sad they are, that isn’t a genre is it?

JUU & G JEE Pillay: Trying to find information on this one is really hard! One of them used to be a biker? Their album is called New Luk Thung anyway.

Duffin: This is a really old man, uncool thing to say, but I used to love Tom Waits and he said about Beefheart that first

hearing it was like blood on your clothes – you can’t get it out.

And then you think, why the fuck are you not doing something like this? Sam played us this record, and I was like, yeah, everything else sounds a little bit tame.

Richards: Some things are so out of your comfort zone that you can’t stop thinking about it, and the more you listen to it the more it makes sense. And then it becomes just pop music.

Pillay: There’s a lot of music that does blag my head immediately, but what I get from this is there’s a lot that it does for me.

Lots of signifiers that I’m into already. I’m a sucker for the black notes on a keyboard. Because I’m shit as a musician, my role is production, and I’m really into the melodies they use on this.

J. MCFARLANE’S REALITY GUEST Richards: Julia McFarlane is wicked. She was in a band called Twerps, but my friend heard her record as J. McFarlane’s Reality Guest and then it came out on Night School Records. The original pressing sold out very quickly, so probably not underrated, but I never hear people talk about it. It’s got so much humour in it – the lyrics are really funny. It’s really playful and I think it deserves more kudos.

Duffin: The thing that gets me about that record, from the first track I thought, would I have said that take is alright?

Would I have thought that’s the one or would I have re-recorded that? Even some Neil Young guitar solos, I’m like, would I have the confidence to think that’s the one? And I’m really pleased that they did, they are right, and I like that bravery. I don’t want that to sound condescending.

Richards: No, I agree. It’s nice when you’re put in a place where you don’t know if it’s naïve because the person lacks experience or it’s naïve out of personal choice. Not knowing that difference is a really good place to be.

Pillay: There’s not one benchmark for success. When people call us underrated, or say the record was slept on, that isn’t how I feel! We got on Pitchfork, in the Guardian, played the South Bank, went to America, played End of the Road where people were singing the lyrics and crying and shit. But people would be like, “Oh they’ve got 1000 followers on the internet!”

Nah man, that’s limited thinking.

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Final Third: My Place

Socialism and Spam At home with Viagra Boys singer Sebastian Murphy,

by Liam Konemann. Photography by Dan Kendall

It’s early January, and that means release week for Viagra Boys’ second album Welfare Jazz. The record is an exercise in postpunk, continuing the musical satire that carried their debut Street Worms, once again leaning into Viagra Boys’ tendency to make the mundane strange. It’s snidely political and lovingly absurd, and singer Sebastian Murphy is ready to be done with it.

“I’m looking forward to it coming out,” he says. “We recorded it over a year ago, so I’m over it. I want to move on to the next one.”

At the moment, the whole ‘moving on’ thing is complicated. Naturally, there’ll be no touring this record internationally in the foreseeable future. With most of Europe still closed down, Welfare Jazz is largely an at-home experience.

Home, for Sebastian, is the Södermalm area of Stockholm. Having lived in the States until he was seventeen, with a Swedish mother and an American father, Sebastian’s stuck around Sweden ever since. (When asked why he simply says “socialism”, to which I have to say: fair enough).

Stockholm is a cluster of islands at the south-western end of Sweden, peppering the Baltic Sea as if the country has simply started to disintegrate into the water. Södermalm, which literally means ‘Southern Island’, is where the hipsters live. It was once the working class area, Sebastian says, but gentrification has crept in here just like everywhere else. These days Södermalm regularly crops up in lists of Europe’s coolest neighbourhoods, praised for its cafes, its fashion, its unflinching good taste and underground Shuffleboard clubs. By all accounts, there are worse places to ride out a pandemic.

That being said, there’s not much ‘riding out’ being done in Södermalm. In fact it’s business as usual in Stockholm, more or less. Unlike many other places, and despite daily case numbers over the 30,000 mark in the first weeks of 2021, Sweden hasn’t gone into lockdown. It’s still a Scandinavian winter out there though. The end result is more or less the same.

Sebastian gestures to the square outside his bedroom window, blanketed in snow.

“It’s so fucking cold here,” he says. “No one really wants to go out.”

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He’s been spending most days with his girlfriend, just hanging out. Otherwise, he stays at home in his self-described “gaming cave”.

“That’s all I really do, is play video games,” he says.

It’s a laid back time, and he’s happy to keep things local.

Why wouldn’t you be, if your house was in the epicentre of Stockholm’s creative hub? You might as well hang around.

“I don’t think I ever really leave this island,” Sebastian says. “It’s where I feel at home and where all of my friends live.

It’s a nice place to be.”

For the rest of us, confined to our houses, Södermalm sounds like a dream. Imagine being able to leave your house and wander around Stockholm’s southern island. Winter or no winter. For anyone not already in Sweden, that seems like a dream of a bygone era.

Thankfully, we can still snoop around a little bit at a safe distance. Sebastian let us comb through his apartment, one piece of Viagra Boys ephemera at a time.

Final Third: My Place

Comic Books This one’s called Megahex by Simon Hanselmann. It’s a really good comic book. My girlfriend writes comic books, so she showed this to me. She’s friends with him. She’s gotten me into a lot of comic books lately.

I used to read a lot of that shit. And I used to draw comics as a kid as well. So I’ve always had a love for comic books.

I remember my dad always used to get pissed off at me because if he wanted me to get a book from the library, every time I went I would get a comic book. And he would get all pissed off because it’s not a real book. But it’s just a bit more visual, which I prefer.

I have too much ADD to read. I very rarely read actual books.

Tennis Racquet I actually play tennis once a week. Actually, three of the guys in the band all play tennis. We all started playing in this group.

There’s a lot of other musicians like that in the same group, and it’s super fun. We’re all trying to get healthy.

Playstation 4 / PC My main console would be the PC. But sometimes when I’m in my room I’ll just play Playstation because the PC is out in my living room. I play a lot of Dark Souls and Metal Gear Solid, and stuff like that. I’ve put in way over 200 hours on literally every single Dark Souls game. Same thing goes with Metal Gear Solid. I’ve played every single game in the series. Finished every single one. You get the picture.

Banjo I play all sorts of instruments, but I’m not good at any of them. I have a bunch of guitars, and a banjo, and bass, and I have a huge collection that’s in boxes because I don’t have room for it here.

Playing and making music in the studio all day kind of makes me tired of it, and I don’t want to do it at home. When I’m at home I want to do other shit. The banjo doesn’t feature on any Viagra Boys tracks. Maybe in the future. My solo album will be just me and a banjo.

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Final Third: My Place Sebastian Murphy Action Figure This is by this dude named Mr Cook’s Customs. Really nice guy.

I met him in Northern England somewhere, I don’t remember where. But somewhere in England. He made that for me, and it’s just cool. I don’t collect that much Viagra Boys shit, but I did keep that one. I didn’t request [for it to be made]. I never thought in a million years that I would be an action figure.

Magic the Gathering Cards and Dice I play Magic the Gathering with my friends like, once a month maybe. We just get together and drink beers and play Magic.

I play with a few other tattooers out here in Stockholm as well.

It’s a common hobby among certain tattooers, I don’t know why. I think it has a lot to do with [the fact that] the imagery is really cool.

I got into Magic when I was like thirteen, and I played a couple of Friday night Magic games down at the card shop in California. Back then I was a little bit into it, but I wasn’t super into it.

And then, six years ago a friend of mine was like, ‘oh man, I started playing Magic’ and I’m like ‘oh yeah, shit I used to play that as a kid’, so I started playing again as an adult and I just thought it was super fun. It’s the best. It’s the best game ever created. It’s super, super fun. Some people call it the best game ever created after chess. Chess is number one, and I think Magic is number two.

Portrait of Waylon Jennings That’s [country and blues musician] Waylon Jennings, painted by a friend of mine for me because he knows how much I love Waylon Jennings. Waylon Jennings is my musical hero. I love the way he sings, and I’ve always loved his lyrics, and his songs, and just the way he lived his life. He was a true outlaw. He kind of settled down in the ’80s before he died. He promised his wife, Jessie Coulter, that he’d never take cocaine again. And then since that day, he never did it again.

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Spam and incense burner I love Spam. I think it’s really tasty. So a friend of mine was back in the States a few weeks ago and I asked him to bring some Spam back for me. So if there’s an apocalypse, I’ve got really salty food to eat. And hopefully some water.

That thing with the swastikas, I’ve collected a lot of Buddhist shit from India. It’s just some shit that somebody brought back for me from India and I think it’s for burning incense or something like that. It’s just for decoration.

Final Third: My Place

Flipper Record My record collection is pretty small. I’ve acquired a few records along the way, but honestly a lot of them are stolen from my dad.

Sorry dad. I bought the Flipper ’45 in the states as a teenager.

They’ve always been one of my favourite bands, from the first time I heard them as a fourteen-year-old. ‘Ha ha ha’ was actually one of the first songs I tried to learn on a guitar.

Wifi Router I’ve got good internet connection [laughs]. It needs to be there because I live with another guy and he needs it to go to his room and I need it over in my room. So we need to have it in the middle of the floor.

“Some people call it the best game ever created after chess.

Chess is number one, and I think Magic is number two”

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Rock tortoise Ringo Starr is releasing a new album! It looks like it’s called Peace Now, but it’s not at all – it’s called Zoom In and it features Ringo stood in front of a massive camera lens, ironically (perhaps even on purpose) a little out of focus.

For the record, I love Ringo, and anyone who says that he wasn’t even the best drummer in The Beatles can go fuck themselves. I must admit though, I’ve not been such a good fan at keeping up with his solo work. But perhaps that’s about to change. The cover looks interesting, doesn’t it?

Ringo’s cavalier disregard for what graphic designers term “quality” should be applauded here. This guy was a vital component of the most iconic sleeve of all time – 54 year later, this is exactly where he should be, stood in front of a massive camera lens, slightly out of focus. It just feels right. When the photographer asked him if he wanted to try a couple of shots where he wasn’t so boldly showing off his Peace Now T-shirt, in case it detracted from the actual album title, Ringo didn’t even respond. He just stood as you see him now. For a full hour. “And make it look like there’s a big peace sign behind me,” he shouted as he cycled away from the studio.

Some will think that he should have called the album something to do with peace (like Peace Now), while others will look at this sleeve and think, ‘I had a Make Trade Fair band too’. My takeaway is simply that Ringo Star has an excellent new album, and it’s called Peace Now.

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Who’s that behind the mask? LOVE IT! What a fantastic mask! I bought it by accident when I was watching The Masked Singer and I logged online, searched for ‘horse head mask’ and ordered it. Hilariously, it’s quickly become my most prized possession. It looks exactly like a horse. Very realistic, from the feel (rubber), to the lifelike hair, which actually looks a bit like my own.

Because it’s made from latex, it does smell, but somewhat less than when you put a condom over your head and blow it up with your nose. And don’t worry if it’s a little tight – after 5 minutes in the mask you entire head and face will be so covered in sweat it’ll slip right off! Perfect!

Inside the “You were recently involved in an accident” call centre operating from Westminster

illustration by kate prior