no distractions Manchester trio No Ceremony/// are finally ready to talk about their melancholic, semi dance music with Reef Younis photographer - elinor jones
Two years ago No Ceremony/// were a band determined to go against our raging age of over-information. Content to create and give away tracks online but reluctant to accompany them with any PR fanfare, it wasn’t quite anonymity but it was certainly a guarded self-protection. On the strength of the weight and beauty of tracks like ‘Hurtlove’ and ‘Feelsolow’, though, the spotlight that’s shone so gratuitously on so many became a searchlight for No Ceremony///. It became a very modern Catch 22 where no information can be just as delicious as too much and it’s an irony that hasn’t been lost on James, Kelly and Victoria. In 2011, they were firmly focused on just getting their music out into the world with as little fuss as possible, but now, with their self-titled debut album set for release this month, they finally feel like they have something to talk about. Reef Younis: Was it frustrating that your decision to avoid doing the usual PR buzz became so much of a focus early on? James: “It was but at that point we didn’t really do any interviews and just kept quiet to get on with the music. It was a hard one to judge but I remember we played a festival and were listed as ‘Anonymous’, which is an interesting genre to be part of. “We didn’t do it as a way to generate interest, we did it because we just didn’t want to engage with writing press releases, doing interviews and photo shoots and stuff. We wanted to shape our sound, write, and spend our time and energy doing that. It takes a lot out of you and I guess when you do press releases you have to… not cheapen, but justify it, and I don’t think that’s healthy for a new band. You want to explore every avenue of your sound without worrying about the implications or how you’re going to justify it later.” RY: You emerged with a few free singles a couple of years ago – that can be an eternity in terms of how quickly the landscape can shift.Was it a decision to wait and build up to this point? J: “Yeah, we wanted to do a lot of touring because that’s been a big aim for us – to travel and take the music out live. We certainly didn’t want to rush ourselves because in the genesis of something, you don’t want to sell yourself short when you could be experimenting and doing something interesting. With production, you
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tend to get pushed into sounding a certain way, and we wanted to produce it ourselves, which was a big part of the reason in setting our own parameters, finding our sound, and just following the different threads to just see what we could do. We’ve been writing the whole time and it’s interesting it has been two years. We started touring about 6 months after we gave ‘Hurtlove’ away online and I think it’s been good for us as a band to take that time.” RY: Listening to the album, there’s a lot of weight and melancholy to it as a whole. Was it the intention to make it sound so profound? J: “I think the sort of music we all grew up with has that sort of melancholy in it, and that thread running through it. You can mix in quite hooky melodies with sad lyrics or a dejected mood and I think someone like Joy Division had that juxtaposition of heartbreaking lyrics with a catchy melody and it’s an interesting space to occupy. “We were also listening to a lot of dance music from Germany at the time and we wanted to make a track that brought that influence in. I think it’s also kind of got that slightly industrial, slightly gloomy side to it.” RY: It also feels like there’s a kind of dreamy element to it… J: “We definitely wanted to capture a certain mood, something quite nocturnal. I don’t think it’s dreamy but there’s definitely a shifting sense to it. We’re into stuff like Burial, Four Tet… and I really like the nocturnal, beautiful atmosphere that those records have. I like the slight vague unease, and threat.You get tracks like ‘Dog Shelter’, which is really hazy, dark music but it’s quite beautiful at the same time.To be honest, we didn’t really sit down and have an agenda; the mood from the album just came out of the songs themselves.” RY: Some parts also feel like subtle nods towards the dance-floor too. Did you aim to give it that energy? J: “Yeah, we wanted to do stuff that people could dance to that was quite considered and thoughtful but had a slight rave element to it.We didn’t want to go ’90s house or anything, just more in between the space of certain genres and not sitting in one particularly. We all kind of grew up listening to The Prodigy and it’s quite intense and challenging but there’s lots of interesting stuff like Pantha Du Prince, which is dance music but not quite. Sometimes it all just locks in on a track like
‘Black Noise’ where everything hits a groove three minutes in and you don’t really know where it began or where it ends. I think it’s a really interesting challenge listening to it. I think music like that is quite confrontational in a lot of respects and Flying Lotus does that really well: you’re not sure whether to just listen to it or dance to it.” RY: You mentioned touring was a big focus for you early on: did it help give you an idea of how you wanted to make the album? J: “Yeah, but it was pretty unorthodox. Some of it was mixed on headphones in the back of a van travelling between countries and some of it was done quite traditionally in the studio.There were definite blocks of time where we’d just cut off and work on specific tracks but it was quite a continuous process and I really enjoyed letting the tracks develop and breathe. Some of them we’d start and come back to later, some we’d produce really quickly and get them out because we always wanted to give away free tracks. I wouldn’t say there was a set way of how we put things together.” RY: Some bands enjoy the prospect of blindly hurtling into a debut, where you were a bit more considered. Was there anything that challenged you more than you thought? J: “I think working with [Pixies guitarist] Joey Santiago was really interesting because he definitely took the song in a very different direction to what we had, and we loved that.‘Heartbreak’ was written as a fairly gentle song on piano and developed into this heavy, bassdriven dance track with awesome guitar sounds. Originally the chorus was a piano riff so it’s nice to be open to changing songs like that and not be too rigid.” RY: You alluded to it earlier but it sounds like you have no problem getting tracks done and letting them go quickly… J: “I think you need to learn to not squeeze the energy and life out of them. We work with a brutal ethos: if we don’t all agree, we don’t use it. It’s quite painstaking in some ways, but I think we’re quite harsh and unsentimental in terms of our own music. There were a couple of tracks we went back to several times, like ‘Away From Here’, which [Irish singer songwriter] James Vincent McMorrow contributed vocals to, and that went through various iterations. Other tracks like ‘Feel So Low’ came together in a matter of days.”