Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 58 / the alternative music tabloid
John Grant in Iceland
+ Tom Vek Sharon Van Etten Jeanette Lee The Space Lady Little Dragon Resident Advisor Quilt
contents
welcome
sharon van etten – 12 jeanette lee – 14 resident advisor – 16 quilt – 18 Tom Vek – 20 The Space Lady – 24 Little Dragon – 26 John Grant – 28
Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 58 / the alternatIVe musIc tabloId
John Grant in Iceland
+ Tom Vek Sharon Van Etten Jeanette Lee The Space Lady Little Dragon Resident Advisor Quilt
c o v er Ph o t o g r a phy Sp essi Ha l l b j ö rn sso n
I won’t pretend that I knew all about John Grant from the beginning. From his former band The Czars. From his 2010 debut solo album, ‘Queen of Demark’. From before the release of his 2013 album ‘Pale Green Ghosts’, even. I’m not the only one, and since the slow-burning success of that second record, more and more people have gradually discovered this highly personal musician from Colorado. As Nathaniel Cramp – the founder of shoegaze label Sonic Cathedral – says on page 8 of this issue: “It’s easy to forget that the records you release will be around forever. Most of my favourite records weren’t bought in the week of release. I wasn’t even born when some of them came out.” Still, music is one of those things that we never like to admit has passed us by – we’ve all bluffed our way through conversations about bands we feel we should know, when really we’re not even sure that the name rings a bell. It’s word of mouth that’s kept ‘Pale Green Ghosts’ ticking over since March 2013, and no one can be sure that it’s even topped out yet. It suits the man who made it and the long road to acceptance he’s been on since before he formed the Denverbased Czars in 1994. Grant has been through it all and more, and as a gay man growing up in a deeply Christian household, where to swear was to sin, he spent decades running away from himself, and headlong into drink and drug abuse. Never mind musical acceptance, John Grant has been searching for social and self-acceptance all of his life. This month, we were given the rare opportunity to travel to Grant’s home in Reykjavik, Iceland, where he wrote and recorded ‘Pale Green Ghosts’ with Biggi Veira of local electronic band Gus Gus, following his collaboration with Texan band Midlake for his previous ‘Queen of Denmark’ LP. The resulting interview is the most honenst we’ve ever published. Stuart Stubbs
Co ntact
Contr ib u tor s
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T hi s M o nth L &Q L o ve s D unca n j o r da n, e m m a p hil p o tt, J a m ie W o o l ga r , l a ur a m a r tin, l e a h w il s o n, m icha e l ka sp a r is , N ita ke e l e r , s te p he n m ur r a y, w il l l awr e nce The vie ws ex pre ssed in Loud And Quiet are those of the re spective contributor s and do not nece ssari ly reflect the opinion s of the magazine or it s s taff. All right s res erved 2014 Loud And Quiet. ISS N 2049-9892 Printed by Sharman & Com pany LTD . Di stributed by loud and quiet & forte
THE BEGINNING
Yorke’s Notes The month’s hidden headlines, revised / Aphex Twin fans resurrected a longlost Richard James album this month when they spotted one of five test pressings of James’ CausticWindow LP (from 1998 but unreleased) on sale at Discogs for $13,500. Via the forum We Are The Music Makers, fans started a Kickstarter campaign to buy the record in order for each backer to then receive a rip of the record.The physical copy will then be sold on Ebay with the money raised split three ways between James, the Kickstarter backers and a charity to be voted on. www.kickstarter.com
Try this at home
Illustration by Gareth Arrowsmith www.garetharrowsmith.com
Send in the clowns: Reef Younis’ horrorcore horrorshow / The anointed leaders of the Juggalos, Insane Clown Posse’s not-so-little empire has been built on outsider status, populated by the outcasts stepping in from society city limits, marked by their two-tone facepaint and armed with an angry frustration with life. The majority of Juggalos would argue that it’s all about love, music and a sense of belonging; others that it’s all about the family or simply going against the grain. Look behind the make-up and the ICP circus makes for great reading; an all-encompassing collective of 9-5ers, loners, stoners and the great disaffected, bound by their self-appointed misfit status, odd strand of sub-culture and the try-hard gutter lyrics of Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope.Throw in the Hatchet Gear uniform, a Juggalo-only social network to entrench the “us v them” mentality and a global gathering where the “the fam” can truly not give a fuck, and there you have the underbelly appeal. But scratch the surface a little further and you’ll get a hardcore element of fans that continually blur the lines between criminal and cult fanboy, spurring on-going lawsuits with the FBI and some of the most confused, played-out Christian messaging this side of the apocalypse. On a week of listening to ICP, I started by rewinding 22 years to the 1992 release of ‘Psychopathic’ with its message of “I’m hating sluts/Shoot them in the face, step back and itch my nuts/Unless I’m in the sack/’Cos I fuck so hard/it’ll break their back” and thumbed my Old Testament wondering what psalms Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope have been reading. Still, with songs like the Busta Rhymes-esque stuttering ‘I Stab People’,
and tracks like ‘If I Was A Serial Killer’ and ‘Imma Kill You”, it’s a familiarly erroneous message of love and vengeance. Looking at the more the playful side of the group’s make-up (geddit?), ‘What is a Juggalo?’ is a comedy monologue manifesto put to laid back gin’n’juice beats as the duo rap: “What is a juggalo?/Let me think for a second/Oh, he gets butt-naked/And then he walks through the streets/ Winking at the freaks/With a two-liter stuck in his butt-cheeks.” Combine that with the high-pitched comedy boom bap of the insightful ‘Santa’s a Fat Bitch’ or the thoughtful, ‘I Stuck her With My Wang’ and you’re soon treading an awkward, jokey line between beating girls up and squirting day-glo fizzy drinks in places they’re not supposed to go. Lyrics like: “I’d like to stick a Faygo bottle in her neden hole/I twist ya and turn ya, just to shake it up/Pop off the lid now it’s shooting out her butt” only add to ICP’s misguided mix of white-trash gangster rap and eloquent Christian messaging. It felt right, then, to finish the week on the much-derided ‘Miracles’; a song that stops to contemplate the magic of the universe by listing various objects, animals and weather-types in clumsy, classroom rote, with just enough room to celebrate the joy of miracles and stick a personal boot into scientists; those lying, logical, systematic bastards. It’s the full stop to the two-tone-hatchet-totingFBI-baiting-reactionary-subculture-status that underlines just how irrelevant the music really is. The worst of it is, the joke’s not even on them.
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Loud And Quiet has this year been announced as the print media partner of Croatia’s Unknown festival, taking place 8-12 September, and playing host to James Holden, Wild Beasts, Nile Rogers, Erol Alkan and more. www.unknowncroatia.com Speedy Wunderground, the time specific label from Dan Carey that sees the London producer cut limited 7” singles in a single day, celebrates its first birthday this month with a compilation of those works released on May 26th. It features Bat For Lashes, Steve Mason and 12 others over 14 tracks. www.speedywunderground.com Filmmaker Lucy Dawkins has shot a documentary on cult Bristol label Sarah Records. My Secret World: The Story of Sarah Records documents the indie pop imprint’s influential, anti Brit Pop history, from 1987 to 1995, via interviews with its founders and bands, and key players like Everett True and Calvin Johnson. www.storyofsarahrecords.com This month a new record store is opening in Peckham called Rye Wax. Housed in the basement of Rye Lane’s Bussey Building, it will be a record store and cafe by day and venue by night. Last month, Southend-on-Sea also got a new record store called South. www.facebook.com/ryewax Dom Yorke
books + other
The Shoe Testament Shoegaze label Sonic Cathedral celebrates its 10th anniversary this month with a series of special shows at Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen. Here, founder Nathaniel Cramp reads his 10 commandments of running a one-man indie label / Thou shalt not give up the day job, otherwise thou shalt starve. Running a label is not a way of getting rich quick, or even slowly. If you’re in it for the money, you’d be better off doing something else. This is a label/labour of love. Thou shalt not expect to have much fun. As proud as I am to have released some incredible records over the past few years (over 70, now), running a label isn’t always as fun as it might seem. When you’re filling in spreadsheets of metadata at 2am it can be completely soul destroying. Thou shalt not be short-sighted. With so much focus on the here and now – blog buzz and first week sales – it’s easy to forget that the records you release will be around forever. Most of my favourite records weren’t bought in the week of release. I wasn’t even born when some of them came out, but they speak to me more than anything. It’s a good idea to always keep this in mind. Thou shalt not chase success. If you release
records you don’t believe in, it shows. The good things always seem to happen organically – when one band leads you to discover another band. Fiveyear plans, or any plans for that matter, always seem to result in disappointment. Just go where the music takes you. Thou shalt not underestimate the importance of labels. The role of labels might have changed, but they’re still vital. There’s so much music out there, someone has to pick out the good bits. The best labels have always been the ones you can trust: Elektra, Factory, 4AD, preOasis Creation, Captured Tracks… Thou shalt not forget the small details.Take time over things like your logo, website, design aesthetic, catalogue numbering system and even what you etch into the run-out grooves. If you take care of these small details, they make all of the bigger details seem much better.This is a labour of love, remember.
Thou shalt not believe turnaround times. Always assume that everything will take about twice as long as you’d expect. Turnaround times of four weeks can soon turn into five, six, seven…The more time you give yourself, the less stress. Thou shalt not release a record anywhere near Record Store Day. See above and double it. Thou shalt not spend money thou doesn’t have. Try and budget sensibly at all times. It’s very easy to waste money on things you don’t really need; it’s a lot harder to make that money back – especially by selling records. Thou shalt not pretend to know what thou is doing. Over the past decade I’ve made every mistake imaginable, but I’ve learned from them. At the launch party for the very first single I released I sat at the merch table with a cardboard cutout of the sleeve, because the records didn’t turn up until three weeks later. I now realise that no-one really knows what they’re doing.
Skinheads 1979-1984 by Derek Ridgers
The People’s Song: The Story of Modern Britain in 50 songs by Stuart Maconie
Polygon Press
Pop music needs its darkside. It needs dim corners and sleazy reverb. It needs an escape from the over-exposed and the overlit. In short, it needs the Jesus and Mary Chain, even today. Even over 30 years since they first formed to fight on stage. Due perhaps to the Reid brothers’ famed reticence to play the game and cosy up to the music business there is very little out there in the way of an indepth look at the band, but Zoe Howe’s latest book (following the excellent Looking Back At Me Wilko Johnson biography) changes all that. Barbed Wire Kisses traces the tale of one of the coolest, most original and uncompromising British bands ever and serves as a fitting tribute to the men in black.
Omnibus press
Derek Ridgers has been the in-house photographer of choice to the London counter-culture for decades, and it was whilst snapping the dandy New Romantics one night in the late seventies that west London-born Ridgers met a skinhead called Wally. Skinheads 1979-1984 is the document of the following five years in which the photographer got to know the people who made up the scene (originally at great risk to himself), and helped to capture it on film forever. Culture has fractured to such an extent since these photographs were taken that tribes like the skinheads don’t really exist any more, rendering the few remaining chronicles of those lost worlds, such as Ridgers’ new book, all the more precious.
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ebury press
The People’s Song is a people’s history of modern Britain, told through shared musical memories that bind them. Each chapter takes an emblematic record, beginning with ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and ending with ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’, and covers seven decades of musical history, looking at the songs that capture a period in time or define a cultural shift, and revealing how our social and pop histories are inextricably intertwined. The book accompanies the landmark radio series of the same name and is characteristically Maconie – warm-hearted, funny and perceptive. No one writes as well about this eccentric isle of ours and its music as he does.
www.soniccathedral.co.uk
Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus and Mary Chain Story by Zoe howe
Sonic Cathedral’s 10th anniversay celebrations begin May 18
b y j anine & L ee b ull man
getting to know you
tUnE-yArDs We last met Merrill Garbus on a beach in Barcelona as she played Primavera Sound and featured on our front cover the following month. Almost exactly two years on, here she is to answer our Getting To Know You questionnaire in an attempt to prove that recording artists are people too / The best piece of advice you’ve been given “Go to sleep, Merrill!” Your favourite word DUDE Your pet-hate I don’t like when people pee on the seat. If you could only eat one food forever, it would be… WHOA, one? Rice would probably be a good idea, or a good potato.
The worst birthday or Christmas present you’ve received Slipping on my tailbone when I turned 35 this year... ouch. The characteristic you most like about yourself Curiosity. Your hidden talent I can do a good Elvis lip-curl. Your favourite item of clothing Scarf.
Favourite place in the world Unfair question! Too many and I’m lucky to have seen a whole lot.
What talent do you wish you had? I wish I could pick up languages faster. I want to talk to everyone!
The one song you wished you’d written ‘Stranger in Moscow’ by Michael Jackson
The most famous person you’ve met Yoko Ono.
The worst date you’ve been on I didn’t ever really date enough to have a worst one. Your guilty pleasure Junky celebrity mags. Eek.
How do you want to die? I don’t really want to die. Old age, in my rocking chair, surrounded by people I love. What is the most overrated thing in the world? Television What would you change about your physical appearance? Nothing.
Your style icon Any Muppet.
The thing you’d rescue from a burning building Anyone or anything living! Everything else is just stuff.
The best book in the world What?! Ulysses. And I’m saying that never having actually finished it. But you can’t ask a person that. In the world? I have not read the Bible or the Koran or the Talmud or anything by David Foster Wallace and I haven’t even finished a Gertrude Stein book. Best book in MY world? Probably The BFG by Roald Dahl. I also love Zadie Smith. What is success to you? Living in integrity: my life reflecting my values, my passions, my honest desires, my truths.
The worst job you’ve had Stocking groceries, shelving and re-shelving them. Every time someone bought something you’d have to bring the can or jar to the front. It’s definitely got some Sisyphus to it and after a few days of it, you’re quoting Waiting For Godot. The film you can quote the most of A tie, between A Chorus Line and Newsies.
Your biggest fear Fascism
Your biggest disappointment One time my parents took me and my sister to Los Angeles. The day after we were meant to leave there was a taping of my favourite TV show, Roundhouse, which no one remembers, but it had dancing and skits and was full of cool kids in plaid shirts and Timberland boots (it was 1995). I asked my parents if we could change our flight to see the show and they were like, “YOU ARE HIGH!” And I probably was, on teenage hormones. The celebrity that pisses you off most even though you’ve never met them Who knows who a celebrity really is
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What’s your biggest turn-off? When people are disrespectful to others. I see it happen all the time, people treating me well and attending to my every need and then being rude to people around them who can’t do anything for them, or who don’t have some kind of bullshit status. People are all equal, everywhere, and anyone who doesn’t act that way is living a big ol’ lie. What would you tell your 15-year-old self? Don’t worry about missing the Roundhouse taping, someday you’ll be on TV. Your best piece of advice for others I’m an older sister so I tend towards giving advice but I really don’t know shit. Be true to yourself!
Tell Me About It
Sharon Van Etten photographer: Guy Eppel / writer: nathan westley
“If I’m trying new things in the studio, I feel pretty vulnerable” I want to be around people who I don’t have to worry about, people I don’t need to feel self conscious around and who know my weird way of communicating, because I’m not trained, I don’t know about keys or time. I talk about vibe and I show them with my hands and stuff like that, just knowing that going into it that I can be myself helps make the album be very honest. Going into it, I really wanted this one to be more of a band centric record, because it felt different. For two or three years at least, it was the first time that I felt like I had a set group of people that I wanted to work with and who understood me. About half the record is live and then there was the whole thing of me being in charge; me producing the record, so the few people who did come in happened to be friends who were in town. I incorporated more electronics; there’s an Omnichord that we started using. For every record, I’ve wanted to do something different. I don’t want to put out the same record; if I don’t change my approach or who I am working with then they’d either sound the same or very close to it and I don’t want to do that. As far as progression goes, I’m older and I’ve learnt a lot more, I feel like I’ve come a long way as a person and with my writing, these songs are probably the most current of any record; the nearest to which I wrote them. With every other record, I felt like I looked back on things and it was like I was gaining perspective from something that happened a long time ago, where as these songs are about things that happened in the last few years and they are all very fresh, and I feel that in a lot of ways I probably won’t understand all of the meaning until after I’ve started touring around.
“Whenever I write it is to reconnect” I love New York but it can be pretty intense and you can feel pretty discombobulated easily and distracted easily and writing is a way that I recentre myself. I write at home usually and it’s been nice to have a home to do that in. I just moved to Manhattan in November. I’m learning that even in the craziest parts of the city it’s teaching me to reconnect, and when you’re surrounded by chaos that it is okay. The studio that we were working in for the record wasn’t really in New York; it was just over the Lincoln tunnel, the first stop after, and it was actually really nice to feel like I was commuting to work every day. I would take the train or the bus and it was like 40 minutes door-to-door and I felt like a normal person who was going to work. It was a bit like getting into a character, but still being yourself.
“If people want to say I sound like Patti Smith and Joni Mitchell then that is extremely nice.” But I also feel that we are all the sum of other people. Even if I don’t feel that I do sound like them, somewhere, maybe way deep down, there might be a little bit that you can hear. I think that you absorb all of your influences and that they come out in different ways. I don’t know, I think I’m still finding my own identity both in music and as a person – I think that is what growing up is all about. I really don’t mind when people compare me to other people or describe me as something that I don’t think I am, as that’s just the way that it’s going to hang.
“The sound of my childhood was ‘Born In The USA’” My Dad’s a vinyl collector and both my parents are music lovers, so we had a lot of rock’n’roll. My Dad was really into The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, Dylan, Led Zeppelin, all that stuff and my mum was into folk music and opera and classical and musicals; so at home we would listen to the local station on the radio and The Everly Brothers and Del Shannon; it was a mix and on top of that there was all of my sibling’s music, so they got me into a lot too.You start with this library and I think over the years you refine it, but it’s a lot of music to grow up with. I had lessons – piano, violin, clarinet – at a young age, but I never really pursued it to the stage where I got any good at it. I think it’s good to think about music with a different mind, you know? Playing drums is different from guitar and clarinet is different from violin. They’re connected but also they’re different. Chords on the piano are kind of similar to the guitar and you can try and knock it out, but the violin is really not that close to the guitar, as they’re tuned differently, but anything that you can associate with formation of the hands and stuff; it’s fun to learn. My mum used to make fun of me and call me the hobby girl, as I used to learn how to do things, but not so much that I’ll get too involved in it. Like, ‘Okay, Okay, I’ve got a basic idea’, and I’m over it. It was like that with other things too, not just music.
“Gaining a little knowledge of the music industry is almost as important as making your record.” My first job in New York was in a Wine Store and then I realised that I was a terrible shelf man. An old friend of mine had moved up to New York to work as an assistant to Ben Goldberg at Bada Bing! Records. He knew I was trying to do music and he hired me as an intern, just so that I could
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understand how to do it. I had got as far as booking my own shows and making my own CDs, but I had no idea what else to do, so thought that it would be interesting to see how a label ran on a small scale. It was pretty transparent that it is a lot of hard work; seeing what was being put into it, that you take on these bands that you really care about and work hard for and sometimes people don’t listen; the amount of work that can go into PR and interviews; sending out promo copies and following up; even the people you know might have really liked it might not because it’s come through originally at the wrong time of day – you can put your whole life into something and not get anything in return: that side of things is really hard. But I also think that if you put out something that no one even likes; it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t mean anything. You could have put your heart and soul into that record and I think as a musician you should make a record that makes you go, ‘I believe in this’, and of course you would want it to do well, but you can’t control that and people are fickle.Your number one priority is that you need to be proud of what you’re working on and that will help you get through it.
“Open mic nights help you know who your audience are and connect with them.” When I was in Tennessee at college, I used to work in a coffeehouse, but when I moved back up north, I used to play open mics and bars. I played at a place called Zebulon pretty often. I thought about doing that again as I warm up, as I have a lot of piano based stuff, but none of them actually have a piano. I’ve not played them for a few years but I’ve also been really busy, but maybe in a few years – it could be fun. When you start off playing those nights, it feels very personal and like you know why you are doing it; I kind of miss those days a lot actually. I think usually when people come to you and you can talk to them and find out what they’re all about; it’s a closer relationship.
Tell Me About It
This month, singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten releases her fourth album, ‘Are We There’, in the hope that it will supersede her 2012 breakthrough record, ‘Tramp’. Nathan Westley met the Brooklyn-based musician to let her do the talking
“I have a hard time communicating and talking about my emotions” I think a lot of people who are creative have a hard time in expressing themselves in day to day life, and writing, singing, drawing or painting, or whatever it might be, creatively, can help with that, in order to make an expression. It might be something that they don’t know how to talk about or maybe something that they just don’t want to talk about. They can create it in this form and it is a separate thing, they can compartmentalise that and move on; when they have a hard time articulating it. I don’t like sharing my thoughts with people and often retreat. Whether other people are similar, I wouldn’t know exactly, but for me it’s usually late at night, after I’ve been thinking too much about something that I haven’t made much headway on, I hit record and just sing a stream of consciousness into a tape recorder until I feel spent and most of the time those recordings don’t see the light of day, because they are just for me to work things out. If I see something in there that can then be shared with the world, which is maybe a universal idea, then I’ll work on it in a song.
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record head
Jeanette Lee
It’s Geoff Travis who is widely considered the driving force behind Rough Trade, but for the past 27 years, at Travis’ behest, Jeanette Lee has co-run the godfather of indie labels. Ian Roebuck met the record company’s lesser-known leader who’s played in PiL, sold suits for Don Letts and was introduced to Abba by Joe Strummer photographer: phi l sharp / writer: ian roebuck
“You know I have only ever had three jobs in my entire life,” laughs Jeanette Lee, but what jobs. Selling zoot suits for Don Letts at punk institution Acme Attractions, inspiring and conspiring with John Lydon as a manager and band member of Public Image Ltd and running Rough Trade Records with Geoff Travis – it’s quite a CV. What makes Lee and her career even more unusual is that she didn’t seek out this path; in fact she was practically hunted down for every role. “I don’t really know why! People for some reason have always come to me and I am really loyal so I stick with friends for a long time; you’d have to ask them why they would pick me though.” Maybe it’s her likeable way – a controlled naivety and the fact she ends nearly every sentence with a glorious giggle. “Now, I don’t really
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do many interviews so if I stop and stare into space you might have to prompt me,” I’m informed to another howl of laughter. It must have been pretty easy to say yes to Don, John and Geoff, I ask. “Of course, I was still at school really and I used to buy all my clothes in the Kings Road from SEX, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop, and then by complete coincidence I bumped into Don Letts and he asked me to come and work with him and that was a dream thing because I was already moving around in that scene. Towards the end of that punk happened, I knew all those people because we were all hanging out on the Kings Road and then John came to me and said after the Sex Pistols if I would come and work with him and PiL and that was a no brainer! After that Geoff asked me if
record head
I would work with him and that was the surprising one for some reason.” For 27 years now Geoff and Jeanette have been inseparable. Even as we chat, the Founder of Rough Trade Records sits just yards away in the adjacent office, but it took persistence to make that happen. “I had a call from a mutual friend saying Geoff Travis is asking if you would like to go and work with him, completely out of the blue, which was a bit baffling at the time and then two years later we ended up sitting next to each other at Vivian Goldman’s birthday party and we talked about that and I was like, ‘sorry, I didn’t mean to blank you, it just wasn’t the right time for me.’ I was having a baby and all this other stuff and we got on really well and we just decided we would try something out.” This was 1987, some 9 years after the labels birth, but it turns out Jeanette had been in training for the moment all along. “Working with Geoff was kind of what I was doing anyway,” she says. “Listening to records all the time, having strong opinions about things and tweaking things, and telling people to change little things here and there, which I thought would be better, it was a very similar kind of role and I realised quite quickly that that was actually the perfect role for me. It was kind of what I was doing unofficially anyway.” Jeanette and Geoff’s burgeoning musical relationship saw Rough Trade Records blossom as the decade came and went. Bands like The Sundays and Galaxie 500 joined The Smiths on their enviable roster as Jeanette settled into life as a label boss. “When I first arrived it was going really well and the thing I remember thinking was being really pleasantly surprised by some of the things that Geoff was working with at the time, like Jesus and the Mary Chain, straight away I got that and felt really at home with them. We had a mutual respect for each other so that was all good, so there was some really great things going on musically, which encouraged me to dive in.” Jeanette’s warming up. Her fantastic laugh remains (possibly a permanent fixture), but there is a fondness in her voice now as she reminisces. “I find that there are not that many people that you feel you are really on the same wavelength as when you’re talking about music. You know, people listen to music in so many
different ways – you might be listening to the drums and bass where as I might listen to the guitar; people pick up on different things and what I discovered quite quickly when I went to work with Geoff is that we had the same take on things and I think that’s quite rare. We never get bored and we’re always looking for new things and talking about new things – both of us get genuinely thrilled when we find something new and I think we sort of feed each other like that a bit in a way! I get excited about something and then he does the other way around.”
If something is as good as The Strokes you just have to act – The newly shaped Rough Trade Records journey came to an abrupt halt in 1991. “The distribution company went down and we lost all of our back catalogue,” says Jeanette. “We lost all the great things like The Smiths and there was a point where Geoff wanted to put money from Rough Trade back into it as it was a terrible, terrible thing, so the label just came to a stop. With everything going on it seemed appropriate anyway.” And yet the Rough Trade universe remained intact. Jeanette and Geoff had a promising side label in Blanco Y Negro (home to typically diverse artists like Dinosaur Jr and Everything but the Girl) to keep them creatively nourished, and it was at this point that Rough Trade management was born, which led to Jeanette engineering such acts as Duffy. “Yes I did, guilty!” she says. “The first people that we managed were the Cranberries, so we did that first album, which was a hugely successful record, and then shortly after the Cranberries we started managing Pulp, who we still manage today, and then a few little bits and pieces but nothing much, and then ten years later Duffy walked in.” Admirable in their unwavering taste, Rough Trade the label has made a name for its steadfast belief – if they like something, they like something. “With Duffy, I have always loved pop music as well as rock and roll and reggae and soul,” says Jeanette. “When I was a kid, the first music I really got into was Tamla Motown and soul and then from there I got into reggae and then from there it was punk, but I have
always had a soft spot for pop music and soul music. Even at the time when I was going to see the Clash and the Sex Pistols I liked Abba. Joe Strummer gave me the ‘Arrival’ album so it was allowed! He said to me listen to this it’s great and he handed it over and I loved it. He loved it too.” I contemplate asking if Jeanette got the same rush of adrenalin listening to ‘Arrival’ as she did The Strokes’ first EP, but ask instead how the New York band were instrumental in the label’s resurrection at the turn of the millennium. “Well, we weren’t really looking for backing [from another label], it kind of just happened. We went into Sanctuary who were trying to break into our kind of world with The Strokes and they got it – what’s not to get, really? So they suggested to us that we start the label again and we jumped at it.” The modern legend goes that Lee and Travis signed the band to the resurrected Rough Trade in 2000 down the phone. “I think they called up and played the demo down the phone, yes,” says Jeanette, “which was really super exciting and the next thing that happened was that they sent the CD in the post and when I arrived in the morning Geoff was already blasting it and going, ‘come here, come here!’ So I went in and you know it just sounded fantastic, so we got onto them right away and said we wanted to go and see them. It was the early days of the Internet and we were trying to look them up and suddenly something popped up and not only did they look really good but also they had these amazing rock and roll names that seemed like they must be made up. What? They look like that, they sound like that and they’ve got those names? Is it a joke? If something is that good you just have to act. I am going to rephrase that, you want to act, the minute you hear something that’s that exciting it’s just all systems go, isn’t it?”
We just take everything on by how it makes us feel. We’re like children – Jeanette and Geoff were back to their instinctive best, signing artists like The Libertines, Anthony and the Johnsons and Sufjan Stevens before another disaster was cleverly diverted.
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“Sanctuary started to go down and it was clear that it was a horrible nightmare again,” Jeanette tells me. “At that point we decided that we did need to go and speak to people to see if we could get partners and long story short, Martin Mills [head of the Beggars Group] was by far the most interesting and best fit for us, so we had quite a long negotiation about how it would work and eventually he took a chance on us being involved in Beggars Group and I must say it’s been absolutely brilliant. There is a total understanding at Beggars with what we do – that coupled with the fact that Martin is brilliant at business and that’s really great as it gives Geoff and I the freedom to do the A&R stuff that we do the best.” Recent signings Parquet Courts and Benjamin Booker get the pleasingly fanatical Jeanette beaming from ear to ear. “We just take everything on by how it makes us feel,” she says. “We’re like children. We’re looking for some kind of buzz that makes you feel elated when you hear something and that’s what we go on really. If we get that feeling we go for it, regardless of anything really, what genre it is… because it’s all over the place, our taste, isn’t it, and that really reflects how we listen to music – it really is all over the place and we would sign anything if we liked it enough.” We gradually come to a close as Jeanette admits she’ll have trouble reading any article about herself: “Oh my god I said that!” She lets out one more laugh, perhaps in relief that the interview is over, but not before she offers a final point. “I won’t say it happens in all independents, but I think there is an element of making it up as we go along, not that we’re totally making it up; we know what we are doing but there is an element of we just do what we love, we just find things that we totally adore and we don’t do any market research to see if people are going to buy into it or not. We just find ways of getting from zero to the finish. We get excited about trying to get other people to experience that love. All you do is try to beat your own path and try to find the way, to get to that point where everyone else is into it as well and that idea of being able to invent it as you go and write the rules is a great feeling. It’s not as much like that as it used to be but it’s still a bit like that around here!”
Love thy neighbour Resident Advisor founders Nick Sabine and Paul Clement discuss the new age of dance music that they’ve been so instrumental in promoting, and why EDM, despite what everyone else thinks, is no bad thing photog ra phe r: d an kend all / w r ite r: s a m wa lton
The Royal Academy of the Arts was founded in 1768 with the mission of promoting artists, both emerging and established, through a programme of education and exhibition. According to its founding document, it was to achieve this through “the establishment of a sound system of expert judgement in the arts and to arrange the exhibition of contemporary works of art attaining an appropriate standard of excellence.” Although commissioned by George III, it was entirely independently funded, and to this day its famously open-to-all Summer Exhibition will receive and review submissions from anyone, regardless of training or stature. Search online for the Royal Academy by its common abbreviation of RA, though, and a different organisation is now top hit – one far younger, sure, but like the Royal Academy, one that’s also self-funded and dedicated to openness, independence and the exposure of forward-thinking artistic endeavour. That organisation is Resident Advisor, founded in 2001 by a couple of clubbers from Sydney, Nick Sabine and Paul Clement, to document the news and views of their local dance music scene. Since getting it going with the equivalent of £300 thirteen years ago, Sabine and Clement have slowly grown their site to become a global hub for all things electronic music, with offices in London, Berlin, Tokyo and Ibiza. It caters for 2.3 million readers a month and runs the ticketing for 10,000 club nights a year. The chances are if you’ve been clubbing in the last five years, RA has had a man down there, sold you your ticket and written pieces about every DJ on the bill. “Personally speaking,” says Sabine, from the sofas on the mezzanine of their effortlessly hip Haggerston warehouse office, “there just isn’t another genre of music where I have the same level of knowledge or passion.” Clement nods: “Or interest!” It shows. After an hour and a half of picking apart everything from what makes interesting dance music to what makes interesting dance music websites, RA’s authority on the global scene – from internationally renowned super clubs to backstreet basements – appears to be backed up to the top of the organisation. That said, perhaps the most striking
thing to happen to dance music in the last five years has received scant coverage from RA. The stratospheric rise of EDM – electronic dance music, a genre whose very name is simplistic and bland – across the world has brought the concept of outdoor raves and synthesised beats to the kind of rockist American heartland that hitherto was untouched by Chicago’s, Detroit’s or New York’s endlessly pioneering dance music tentacles, and to the sort of people for whom the idea of going to a dimly lit underground room on a Friday night to dance in the dark wasn’t just socially unacceptable, but downright terrifying. “EDM and dance music are two different beasts,” Sabine wrote in the Huffington Post last month. “EDM is [dance music’s] mainstream, bigmoney cousin, amplifying electronic music’s more theatrical side without the subtlety or depth that endears so many electronic music fans in the first place.” As both an explanation for RA’s lack of inclination to write about EDM, and a primer on it, Sabine’s piece is ruthlessly efficient. But although the music itself is of little interest to Resident Advisor, what it means for dance music as a whole, and indirectly therefore RA, is crucial. Perhaps surprisingly, however, Sabine can only see EDM’s success as a good thing: “Here’s my point,” he begins, “in time, 95% of people who are listening to the EDM in the pop charts will go in whatever direction pop does, and pop will evolve. But that 5% that do want to dig deeper, that use EDM as their jump-off point, is a hugely significant number – probably more than our entire readership put together – and they’re the people who will provide our scene with fresh energy and excitement. “I don’t think EDM has sold Carl Craig any more records,” he continues, “but when those 5% are digging deeper and discovering more, then potentially they’ll discover Carl Craig and dive into his back catalogue. It might reinvigorate artists who are making music in our world.” Clement agrees: “There’s no reason that someone who finds house music through David Guetta can’t go deeper and end up in a little party in Berlin with Mr Ties,” he explains. “They can start at Calvin Harris, and then it’s
Disclosure, and a few years later it’s Levon Vincent. I do think it’s a natural progression.” Sabine and Clement’s positivity towards the rapidly changing face of their beloved genre is rather refreshing. After all, the stadiumisation of electronic music via EDM, coupled with the ever-mutating effects of the worldwide web on production, promotion and consumption of dance music, means that a movement that began in the bedrooms and warehouses of Detroit and Berlin 35 years ago now finds itself at a commercial and artistic crossroads, with plenty of commentators fearing for its future. The doom-sayers posit that the current generation of producers, confronted with the most risk-averse, cashstrapped A&R policies the industry’s ever known, are resorting to imitation over originality, using the one thing their predecessors never had – instant access to all music of all time – to imitate old records rather than innovate. When Guy Lawrence from Disclosure told Loud And Quiet last year that they got into producing music by “just trying to copy things like the first wave of UK Garage from the nineties”, the cynics will hear it as the death knell for a musical force that has been more consistently ground-breaking than any other since punk. The same critics will argue that the internationalisation of dance music, via global streaming of
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festivals like the EDM-heavy Ultra last month in Croatia, has created a global homogenous goop and stripped dance music of its local idiosyncratic communities and sense of geographic diversity; they argue that the evergrowing trend for eclecticism, and the rise of the dilettante encouraged by the likes of Spotify, has encouraged people to go wide rather than deep in their musical exploration, the knock-on effect being a lack of substance across an increasingly broad board. To précis every article discussing the current state of any given cultural phenomenon, then: the Internet’s got a lot to answer for. In that context, though, Sabine and Clement’s optimism shouldn’t be a surprise: after all, here is a pair of dance music devotees who have consumed most of their favourite music in the past decade – not to mention made their living – through the Internet itself. But not only do they argue that the popularity of EDM can give dance music its future pioneers, but that dance music itself is in rude health, and that the encroachment of the web on its dayto-day existence has helped, not hindered. For every web-enforced shift, they see reasons for enthusiasm: “Now, an artist or a night or label based anywhere can, without a huge amount of effort, build a network or a fan base internationally,” argues Sabine. “And equally, an artist in all of
Special Report
those places can access music from all those alternative points. Alongside that, though, the great fundamentals underpinning dance music haven’t changed – people still love going out and listening to music and getting excited about itthat will always be around.” Not only will that always be around, argues Clement further, but also the feared global homogeneity of dance music will never permeate the specific communities who consume it: “There are still big differences between, say, London and Tokyo and Sydney and New York – cultural differences,” he insists. “The way the Spanish go out is different to the Germans, so the way they consume music and go to parties is different: maybe two techno DJs can now end up playing the same sort of records simultaneously in two different continents, which might not have happened twenty years ago, but those two sets are still a different experience to the listener.” Clement’s point is perhaps the most enduring: for all the fetishisation of the producer and DJ in recent dance culture, and the increasing ease with which the media can make a celebrity of a faceless man behind the decks, it’s always been the clubbers themselves who have been the beating heart of any given local scene. And that geographically specific critical mass of bodies is something that the Internet is a long way from compromising, even with the increased prevalence of streaming-friendly high bandwidths and low-cost flights.
But even with the DJ/producer in mind, what of the supply side of the coin? Technology costs in 2014 are approaching zero, after all – a record can now be made on a producer’s free phone using a free app, uploaded to a free Soundcloud account and then played across the world, and the sheer quantity of available music is commensurately skyrocketing. “It will naturally take a lot more to be heard from the mess of content, sure,” concedes Clement of the new paradigm, acknowledging a signal-tonoise ratio that’s suggestive of a million monkeys at a million laptops all clacking away until one of them comes up with ‘Needin’ U’. “But with undoubtedly more people making and listening to music, there will be more talented, unique and interesting artists taking it up.” “And I think here’s where we’re playing an increasingly important part,” adds Sabine, bringing it back to the role of Resident Advisor (the clue’s in the name, after all): “We’re a filter. Hopefully we’re signposting people towards stuff that we think deserves recognition, regardless of where it’s from. And it’s worth remembering the good aspects of that: ten years ago, a DJ in South Africa would never have played anywhere other than in South Africa. Now, websites like RA have allowed them to build a profile and therefore a career that’s sustainable off international gigs – that’s a positive thing.” “It still needs to be good in order for that to work,” Clement points out, curatorially, “but therefore the
quality is increased along with the accessibility of it.” This sense of increased convenience, paired with more careful cherry-picking, is Sabine and Clement’s mantra. Their acceptance that the Internet has left its mark on dance music is clear (“fundamentally I don’t think we need to rate whether things are better now versus ten years ago – they’re just different,” points out Clement), but looking forward with enthusiasm, rather than backward with nostalgia, is the way that the scene as a whole is going to progress, they suggest. Far from being exclusivists or record-shop snob caricatures, Resident Advisor’s cofounders essentially seem excited that more people than ever are coming to their party. “I think underground culture is becoming easier to get to and to understand, just by dint of information accessibility, which is great,” says Sabine. “Five years ago, if I’d have tried to predict it, I wouldn’t have got anywhere near what has happened, but I think that these days maybe it’s more socially acceptable to go clubbing, and people are starting to realise that it’s not just about taking drugs and being off your face. I would say there are more people than ever listening to dance music now purely for the music.” Clement agrees: “I think the current trend is that better music is finding a bigger audience because there are more people making music, more people consuming music, and more
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people able to dissect and discover music,” he explains, almost scientifically. “If that trend continues and even more people are able to produce even more music, then the people who are good at it naturally will realise that and hone their craft, and eventually we’ll have hundreds of Todd Terjes producing hundreds of amazing albums.” And put like that, dance music’s future looks bright, all-encompassing Internet, earth-rattling EDM bass drops and all. The key, it would seem – and, perhaps fittingly, also the frequently envisaged hippie utopia at the dawn of house in the early ’80s – is inclusivity, accessibility and basically one big global rave: “At the end of the day,” says Clement, “whether it’s still underground or subversive or whatever, and whether we’ve sacrificed anything to be here, if we’re still able to write about stuff that we feel is good, then where’s the problem in exposing an artist to a wider audience? I don’t see there being a problem with 100,000 people, or 100 million, liking it. It’s not about some sort of exclusive club.” Quite how all this scales up in the future, with the inevitable financial, artistic and physical demands that will accompany it, is some challenge. The sense that there will be a future, though, rather than some halfheartedly rehashed version of dance music’s past, is enough. That it will be curated, at least in part, by the likes of RA as a cultural guardian not unlike its centuries-old namesake, is a welcome relief further still.
Gimme Splendor Boston New Psych band Quilt are in search of magnificence photographer: jenna foxton / writer: thomas ma y
Shane Butler and Anna Rochinski, the two founding members of Boston New Psych quartet Quilt, talk in a way that defies transcription. To capture their alternately excitable, erratic, wearing, obscure, fascinating, lucid, engaging meanderings as symbols on a page, delimited by anything as rigid as punctuation and clauses, feels like a crude disservice to their unkempt fluidity. “I think that we also, I mean for this record, the last record too, but more so for this record we wanted to make it like one long piece as opposed to, you know... I mean obviously the songs come in, but we do think about it in that cinematic way of it going through phases and going through stages.” In outlining the group’s approach to composition Shane could just as well be describing the profusion of ideas – revisions, transgressions, contradictions – that entwine and spar for primacy throughout our brief conversation. “So you can sit down and listen to the whole record through and the songs how they flow into each other, in the same way that when we play a live set we try to interweave a lot of the songs, as opposed to just song song song song...” John Andrews and Keven Lareau, newer members providing drums and bass respectively, sit back observing, content to offer a wry comment or two at artfully chosen intervals. Anna picks up on the train of thought: “I think the whole record has a narrative that’s fun to explore, too. It’s sort of open ended but I’ve had fun crafting a storyline in a way through the entire thing, because there’s so many questions that get asked in the record and then there’s
exploratory statements and they’re always like doing this to each other” – here, as words fail, she mimes a tussle between interlocking fingers – “and all the portals that are opened are sort of explored through different songs.” At “portals”, she begins to laugh, acknowledging the faint absurdity of the word, her enthusiasm’s vulnerability to cynical mockery. We’re discussing the group’s sophomore record, released this year by Mexican Summer, whilst sitting outside Brixton’s DIY venue The Windmill ahead of their performance later this evening. It’s an album comprised of a series of miniatures: mosaic-like as fragments of psych jams, folksy four-part harmonies, and late-60s pop interlock to create 40 minutes of music that vibrates with chaotic internal energy. It’s a potentially overwhelming experience that the album’s title attempts to encapsulate with the words ‘Held In Splendor’. “Splendor’s a really interesting word because it’s used in a lot of different ways. Like, some people use it to explain magnificence, but it could be magnificence like a visual magnificence, or it could be an emotional magnificence: so it explores inner and outer realms that have many different parts to them.” As Shane continues he arrives at perhaps the central idea underpinning the concept: “I feel like splendor is something that can’t be locked down into a singular experience but one that incorporates a lot of different feelings at once. When you’re caught in splendor it’s like ‘oh my god’, it’s like emotion that could be really up and really low, or be in a
landscape that’s just stunning in that way that it has a lot to it.” So it refers to a quantity of experience, I suggest. “Yeah, quantity of experience is a good way to put it,” he agrees before Anna says: “Think of those weird Jell-O moulds that old people eat that have fruit in them, and they’re stuck in this Jell-O and they’re just like suspended in this goo. And that’s sometimes what I think of when I think of being held in splendor, it’s like a state of suspension or something.” It’s a concept reminiscent of the idea of the “postmodern sublime”: a contemporary form of the aesthetic category outlined by eighteenth century philosopher Edmund Burke. A powerful form of pleasure, the “sublime” arises from the mixture of awe and terror – attraction and repulsion – that one feels when confronted with something infinite or incomprehensible. For Burke, the incomprehensible was embodied in the likes of gothic architecture; for Quilt, it’s felt in the unending and unedited data-streams of the digital economy. “It’s so easy to get overloaded with so called ‘information’,” Anna tells me, “and pay attention to all these things that you may or may not necessarily care about or even be in a position to properly get involved with, whether it’s political or it’s like celebrity gossip or just these images and facts that we’re bombarded with for no reason.” Elaborating, Shane notes specifically the strange synthesis of both positive and negative feelings that occurs during the experience of splendor. “It’s funny that you say overloaded with information, like that whole idea
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of being overloaded with information where it can be perceived as a negative experience. Because splendor I find to be an overload of a magnificence or an overload of ecstatic energy, at times.” Quilt’s psychedelic sound may well draw discussions of pastiche or retromania. But the prominence of this sense of informational excess within ‘Held In Splendor’ reveals them to be artists particularly attuned to the aesthetics of the contemporary moment. Across (pop) culture today, intensity and quantity of experience are emphasised over and above coherence, structure, or closed meaning: think of the world of Overly Attached Girlfriends and doges, the multi-coloured absurdism of Adventure Time, or Flying Lotus’s cut and paste “space operas”. Prompted by my mention of the latter, Shane continues: “Even as a guitar-based band, on some level we’re DJs. We do live in a cultural world where we have a history that we’ve been working with for a certain amount of time. For us, we don’t ever really approach anything and go ‘oh we wanna sound like this’ but we have all of this stuff that we’re filtering through our skill level at every moment, and so it becomes like we’re sampling in some weird way, I don’t know.” As a point of respite is reached in his stream of consciousness, Keven – up to this point silent – turns to his band-mate: “That was a great way to describe that, that whole phenomenon.” Immediately, John adds, “Except sometimes I want to sound like the Meat Puppets. Sometimes.”
What’s luck got to do with it? Tom Vek remains one of our most considered and meticulous recording artists photographer: phil sharp / writer: tom fenwick
Tom Vek is angry. “Is it just me? I kind of assumed that when all the artists I admired were being mysterious it was a deliberate thing, but it turns out that when you give people a platform to spout shit the majority of them will.” Okay, so he’s not that angry, but he’s more riled up than his unflappable demeanour might suggests and, as he’ll go on to explain, it’s this desire to channel very potent emotions and perhaps turn them into something constructive, that directly translates to his third record, ‘Luck’. But for now what’s causing him such ire is the idea of mismanaged celebrity social media. “I’m not really active on Twitter or Facebook,” he says, “to me they’re just tools. I have my art form. My music. And what I’m anxious about is; you have all these reasons to get people to like you, so why give someone a reason to not like you once they’re already onboard?” He elaborates. “I like brand integrity, it’s the graphic designer in me. I mean, your public persona is like a rarity and if someone had a rare record and ripped it on YouTube it would lose all its value and become as common as ‘Gangnam Style’.” It’s mid-afternoon on Good Friday and we are ensconced in the booth of a bustling and somewhat surly Brick Lane coffee house, just a short walk from Vek’s recording studio. East London is finally coming to its senses after the novelty and excess of a pre-Bank Holiday Thursday has left much of Shoreditch’s brightest and best in a fragile state. Tom Vek, by way of counterbalance to this, is looking the bright-eyed picture of health, perhaps as an implicit nod to his own
sense of ‘brand integrity’; from his neatly coiffured hair and simple but stylish attire to his intelligent and – when he’s not meandering down a rabbit warren tangential enquiry – rather considered answers. The last time Loud And Quiet caught up with Vek was three years ago, as he was in the throes of returning from an overly extended and by now well documented break from the limelight. At the time the question seemed to be what had happened to him during his ‘disappearance’ and why had his second record taken so long to make? Of course, as with all the best mysteries the answer was relatively simple: Vek was just getting on with life and work at his own pace. “It wasn›t a deliberate choice to spend that long on the second record,” he says now. “I’d always wanted to be in a situation where I could work quickly because I work alone. But I want my music to sound spontaneous and that›s what takes the time – you can work on something quickly and it can still sound laboured, so I have to keep doing stuff to try and catch that spontaneous moment. “Obviously releasing the album is the end reward. You’ve been pushing a rock up the mountain and then you get to watch it run down the other side. But I’m relatively uncompromising, so if I can’t do anything good enough, then I’m not going to bother people with something bad. “The problem is in the middle [of recording an album], when it’s lagging and people assume that nothing›s going on, because actually there are loads of things going on. But the
current structure says you have to wait until you’ve got eleven tracks and then just when fans start to wonder where you’ve disappeared to it’s like, ‘right, I’m back, now listen to all my fucking songs!’” Vek’s 2005 debut,‘We Have Sound’, transported him pretty quickly from making music in his parent’s garage and studying for a degree in graphic design to touring the world and making guest appearances on popular American teen-dramas, gaining an army of ardent and loyal followers on the way. So when in 2011 he announced his return to the spotlight after over half a decade of silence, the Internet’s natural response was – and this is a technical term – to lose its shit. The resultant album – ‘Leisure Seizure’ – brimmed with frothy electro, jaw rattling beats and a dusting of existential gloom, but despite – or maybe because of – the anticipation that surrounded its release, what could have easily been a breakthrough for Vek saw him garner only modest reviews and sales; pleasing established fans but not launching his career to dramatic heights. Yet, considering the time he spent making it Vek doesn’t remember it as an anticlimactic moment. “Not at all. I’m immensely proud of that album,” he says. “There was a point in the middle of recording it where I thought, if I can’t create something I’m happy with then there won’t be any more albums. There was always that possibility and that’s the standard I work to. The person I’m most worried about shares my opinions on the music, so I try to work
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within the limits of a snobby fan, but at the same time maybe I’m not doing enough to encourage casual listeners. “I’m a solo artist, so I have to be somewhat of a perfectionist because no one else is going to do that for me. That said, too much self-analysis is just as dangerous as not caring. I mean, there are some bits of music I’ve worked on and they just weren’t going anywhere so I stopped before I got the point where I began to resent the whole process. The real success for me was that I put out an album of new music at all.”
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ut to 2014 and as it’s announced that Vek will return with ‘Luck’ the general reaction seems to be not so much one of surprise that he was back, but that he has managed to come back so quickly this time. And while there’s little danger of him becoming prolific just yet, his recent collaboration with Dirty Projectors singer Olga Bell (two tracks released last year under the guise of Nothankyou, which took his music to darker places) suggests that he’s interested in drawing from a broad palette of sounds. It’s a sonic restlessness that he sees as part of his creative process, particularly in an age when we’re swamped in cultural influences. “I guess I’m just trying to be uncalculating,” he says. “It’s like, there’s a lot of ’90s nostalgia now and obviously I remember the ’90s, but we spent half of the time being frustrated because culturally, much of it was shit.
So maybe the most punk thing to do these days is not feel at the mercy of someone else’s culture. “In some ways the problem is that everyone is allowed to be creative at the moment. In fact it’s not just encouraged; we’re sold it. Everyone is told: you are a creative and unique individual. And while that’s great, people need to understand that real creativity can’t be forced. It’s not
competition. So people need to give themselves an easier time. “When I work, I’m not being guided. The music itself is just taking me on a journey and what I present in the songs is a documentation of those experiments. I would like to hope that people don’t think there’s any kind of contrived element to my music. I don’t really have a vision for what I want to end up with when I start.
“If I tried to make one specific type of music I would probably fail so I just start with an interesting sound and it either snowballs into something bigger or it doesn’t.You listen to so much noise when you make music that, for me at least, the excitement of creation is wrapped up in a refinement of that sound. My methods are quite brutal. All I’m allowed to do is edit but nothing else, the scissors are the only tool.”
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Talk of this cumulative approach to songwriting brings up one specifically memorable track on ‘Luck’; ‘The Girl You Wouldn’t Leave Any Other Girl For’. It’s a stark and surprising song built from little more than the repetition of a single lyric (the clue to which is in the title) and varying degrees of acoustic instrumentation that somehow manages to elicit as much emotion – if not more – than
Vek’s most lyrically well developed work; hanging together on nothing but the barest of bones. “That’s probably the song I’m most excited about on the whole album,” he says. “The construction of it involved lots of live experimentation, but with all the mistakes chopped out. Some people might have taken some chords and written a more conventional song, but I like starting with something unwieldy and refining it until it becomes interesting. At times that song felt so fragile, I thought it was going to fall apart, and that’s kind of the point – it was an exercise in how little I could do before I was happy. “I want my songs to include fragments of the writing process. To me demo is a dirty word. A song doesn’t get demo’d, it gets started and finished or thrown out. I never demo something because I think if you’re happy with it as a song then you’re happy with it. I have lots of incomplete songs, but it’s not because I’m lazy, there are just some things I can’t get past so they never get finished. It’s always been that way for me.” Another of the songs that stands out on the album – and not only because if its equally unwieldy title – is current single ‘Sherman (Animals In The Jungle)’. The ‘Sherman’ refers to the lead character in Tom Wolfe’s celebrated ’80s novel The Bonfire Of The Vanities. The song’s chorus is built
around a central hook based around Wolfe’s line “We’re just animals in the jungle”, a theme which resonated with Vek while he was in the midst of writing. “It’s the first time I’ve ever written from a point of reference, but it seemed to fit the kind of anger in the album.The book taps into something that I’ve always been fascinated with; that is to say, I consider myself to be quite a neurotic person, but some people seem blessed with a totally carefree existence. So the song explores the idea; are you more honoured to be humbled by worry or to exist without it? “It’s a sentiment that ties into a lot of things that come out in the lyric’s of the other songs, about controlling destiny, how hard you should try at something and whether you can try too hard or maybe force something that doesn’t work.” Vek pauses. “Plus, I just thought it sounded like a really cool line.”
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n terms of explicit influence, Tom Wolfe seems to be the exception on ‘Luck’ as Vek continues to remain idiosyncratic to a fault, although he acknowledges patchwork elements from other artists that give him inspiration; the vocal intonations of
Soul Coughing; the guitar lines of St. Vincent; the drums of Kendrick Lamar and the riffs of Deftones. “I’m aware that a lot of my influences are starting to date so I’m always listening to new music,” he admits. Of course, when I ask if he can pinpoint a favourite moments in his own work on ‘Luck’, his answer is more clear-cut. “Of course, the whole LP is a collection of things I think are cool. But when you finish a record and begin a new one it’s like a blank page, so I’m particularly grateful for the early songs, the ones that came first, so I’m very fond of ‘Broke’. Even though I know what started it off, when I first listened back to it I almost couldn’t remember how it came into being. So I guess I’m proud of it because I’m still surprised by it. I also love ‘You’ll Stay’ which incorporates elements of Jungle. I really love Jungle music, but I’ve never been able to get near it, but I was just doing something and the tempo was right and I was like YES!” he exclaims. “I’m making a jungle record! Unfortunately that didn’t pan out,” he says with a wry grin. “But I’m still really proud of that song.” Maybe Vek’s greatest trick on ‘Luck’, though, is how he manages to make it sound exactly like a Tom Vek record, yet utterly distinct from his previous two LPs. This resultant progression has led to possibly his most bombastic and captivating work to date; synths and shuddering beats fluctuate over pitching guitars and industrial rhythms, while his lyrics convey a very distinct emotional landscape. Vek’s usual themes of sadness and anxiety are filtered through an abrupt almost sneering tone, which lends itself perfectly to Vek’s vocal delivery. “It’s a Grunge record,” he states halfway through our conversation, and you can see his point. It certainly has its roots in the confrontation, frustration and pain that Grunge tried to harness, but refracted in his singular, modern lens. “It’s about channelling anger, but being objective about it,” he tells me. “Getting perspective on what frustrates you and giving yourself permission to rebel. Everyone is looking for permission to do what they want; there’s always a reason. So if you’re unhappy about something and you’re not doing anything about it then take the bull by the horns and try to sort your life out,” he explains. “I guess the music is just a way for me to have the kind of attitude that I would like to have about everything. That voice on the record is one side of my personality, that the other side of my personality
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would let down in any circumstance other than having hours to replace words and get things right. “But the character in the songs is only a representation of me, an abstraction because I wouldn’t want them to be too personal. I tried to refine the lyrical sentiment on this record so I pose questions but don’t necessarily provide solutions. It’s sloganeering, because I think that’s what makes it sound potent.” He pauses again. “Mostly, though, it’s just me thinking aloud. So if that means I touch on some accidental profundity, then maybe someone else will relate to it more so than if I was being very specific. Maybe that makes it a self aware rock record?” he ponders for a second. “Maybe it’s kind of... metaEmo?” he says laughing. With a new body of work that feels more highly charged than anything that has come before, as well as tours and projects in the works for the rest of 2014, it seems like Tom Vek is going to be busier than ever. Of course, you have to wonder if this will last, or whether his itch for perfection might take him away from the spotlight once again, and if so for how long? He seems cautiously optimistic. “I feel more connected to my creativity now than before,” he tells me, “but I have to treat it with respect, being three albums into my career feels great, but I was thinking recently, all my favourite acts only made three albums.” “But I suppose I don’t feel like I’m pinned down as an artist just yet and I think all you can hope for is that if and when your sound does gets pinned down it’s by you. I’m just pleased if I do enough to make it my own, because to me the coolest thing is still when people listen to my music and say; this sounds just like you. Because that means I’ve done my job... it means I’ve achieved something.”
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utside Rudolf Steiner House on the West Side of Regents Park, a suitably eccentric venue for tonight’s show, The Space Lady and Eric, her husband and ‘space manager,’ climb out of their touring craft, an unassuming red minivan, and stare at the pay-and-display instructions, dazed after the drive from Sheffield. For The Space Lady, real name Susan, this is her first time in the UK and this is her first print interview. “It’s even greener than I imagined, and that is going some,” she says. “I always had a picture of beautiful meadows and winding roads, streams and hedgerows, and [England] is exactly that only more so. I was born and raised in Colorado. The Arkansas River ran through the town but the climate is so arid that the green ends within probably a mile on either side and then it’s flatland desert.“ That town was La Cuidad de Las Animas Perdido in Pergatorio, or The City of Lost Souls, where she was born a year after the Roswell incident in the adjacent New Mexico desert. There is certainly a benign ghostliness to her and her music; a happily lost quality that makes her Casiotone tinkering intensely bewitching. Steeped in echo and phase, her original compositions and revelatory cover versions from the psychedelic, rock and pop universes are perturbing and entrancing metaphysical sirens. For anyone yet to be seduced by them, here is some back-story: after hitting Haight-Ashbury in time for its pinnacle of free love, acid and pacifist resistance, Susan doesn’t return to rural Colorado but turns folkloric underground hippy renegade as the wave of idealism breaks and rolls back in the ’70s. She resurrects the dream in 1980 as a (now) legendary street musician and winds up on Irwin Chusid’s seminal compilation of ‘Outsider music’ ‘Songs in the Key of Z’. “People used to ask me, ‘What kind
of music is this?’,” she says. “I was really stumped for a while, but I finally came up with the term ‘Primitive Futurism’. That stood for a while until Iwrin Chusid labelled it ‘Outsider music’ and that hit home for me, like, ‘Yes! I’m an outsider, that fits.’” The Space Lady might well be the epitome of the genre. Whatever the merits of dividing music along these lines, it’s a term that’s made something of a come back recently. “It has, it’s in vogue!” she laughs. Interest had hummed quietly
throughout her busking career in Boston and San Francisco but it took the exponentially amplifying effect the Internet had on word-of-mouth phenomena in the ’00s to break her cult status, just when Susan had retired her flashing winged helmet and Casiotone MT40 and got a job as a nurse to support frail parents. She’s back thanks to the encouragement of her husband and Michael Kasparis of Night School Records, who released her ‘Greatest Hits’ in autumn last year. Now, Susan is playing the twelfth date
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of a UK tour, in her first ever run of club shows, aged 66. The legacy of the ’60s is easily discernable, not just in the retrofuturist space theme and choice of covers (tonight she opens with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and the Electric Prunes’ ‘I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)’), but she says the main reason she’s doing these shows is “as a stand for peace and love.” “I had no idea of the cultural revolution that was going on in the Haight Ashbury until I got there,”
Out of This World
Aged 66, on her first visit to the UK, street musician The Space Lady talks of Haight-Ashbury in ’67, surviving Boston and her unexpected resurgence as a figurehead of outsider pop photographer: roy j baron / writer: edgar smith
Susan remembers. “Oh boy, I was never the same ever again!” she laughs. “It was March, I believe, when I got there in ’67 and flowers were blooming all over Golden Gate park. Bands were popping up unexpectedly, and people were expressing love, you know, unabashedly.” Susan wants to dispel the impression – made by some blogs – that she has basically just stayed there busking ever since. In fact, she has been all-over, treading a singular path of acute highs and lows after going on the run from the reactionary forces that rose up and crushed a decade of youthful optimism. Full of noteworthy resilience and hardship, it’s like a realworld Forrest Gump, if that wasn’t such a horrible and impossible notion. “I met and common law-married another hippy who was hiding from the draft, so that was Joel, Joel Dunsany.” Her voice is reverent and a little cracked – he died last year. “So we went underground, destroyed our IDs and lived in a cave for a time, and ended up in Boston.” Meanwhile all around them, the dream of a cultural and political renaissance was burning down fiercely. “We were at least under the illusion that people were listening and that we were having a huge impact on the world, that love and peace was right around the corner. Uh,” she sighs. “It didn’t turnout that way… a few years later resignation set in, and disappointment, bitter disappointment… that the Vietnam War just carried on and on and on and other wars were popping up. It seemed like these very small vestiges of the hippy culture remained and most of them were incorporated into commercialisation.” Case in point was the “downtown, schlepping world” of the very squaresounding 1970s Boston, MA. “It was really a far cry from San Francisco,” says Susan. “I knew it had
had a hippy subculture during the ’60s but it wasn’t really apparent anymore. In the ’60s we had a community and we established a kind of safety zone. At some point that got so disrupted for many of us that there was no safety anymore, no safe place to trip, or to experiment with psychotropics. The world got so dangerous or seemed so dangerous. It seemed like we were targets for the much larger culture of greed and scheduling and, you know, time demands and restrictions. We really felt like strangers in a strange land and subsisted on selling artworks and little books of poetry and panhandling for the greater part of those years until I discovered I could play the accordion and began my street music career in 1980.” This proved surprisingly lucrative. It’s hard to imagine it happening now, but Susan was able to start saving money. In ’82, The Space Lady as presently constituted took its first form when she went electric. “When they first came out with the Casiotone MT40, there was another street musician playing it and I was just fascinated, thought it was marvellous,” she gushes, “and coincidentally my accordion was destroyed by a drunk on the subway. You know how they say you have to have an empty cup for it to be filled? So my cup was empty then, I had no instrument, and the universe supplied one and the whole future of the Space Lady emerged. “The whole time between ’72 and ’84, just longing to get back to the West Coast, finally we were able to thanks to my street music. We had two children by that time and amassed enough money to get bus tickets across country. They had a summer bargain where one parent and one child could go for $99 so for two hundred dollars we got back.” How did it compare to Boston? “San Francisco was waay more
receptive to me than Boston had been – people actually started asking me my name.” She lets out a delighted laugh. “And I’d never had the occasion to come up with a name other than Susan, so I pondered for months, and finally Space Lady just sort of evolved out of the public’s perception of me. I liked it.” But, despite becoming a treasured fixture on the gay scene, releasing a record in 1990 and her appearance on Chusid’s comp, this episode ended sadly too. “I was getting pretty discouraged,” she says. “We had three children, they were in their teens, kind of disgruntled with our lifestyle, and it was costly. I had to buy batteries every day and I couldn’t get out of the elements; if it was raining I couldn’t go in the subway and play through an amplifier so I went back to accordion… it was just a struggle. My Parents were entering their nineties and needing help, my marriage was… not working. So I took my younger daughter and we went back to Colorado and I left Joel and called it quits.” Thankfully, it didn’t end there. Michael Kasparis tells me: “Like a lot people, I first heard The Space Lady on Irwin Chusid’s compilation ‘Songs In The Key Of Z’. I was at a party, pretty inebriated, and ‘I Had Too Much To Dream’ came on; I was transfixed. I bought her homemade CD online and emailed the contact address, asking whether she would be interested in releasing a vinyl edition of her music. She never replied so I let it lie.” Meanwhile, Eric whom Susan had married in 2008, was persuading her of her music’s worth, even while she couldn’t bear listening to it. “I didn’t realise I’d made an impact on the world really, and Eric recognised that, just because I was still getting emails from people… wondering where I was playing,” “In the year that followed, I started
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a record label called Night School and roughly a year and a half after asking, I got an email from Susan and Eric expressing an interest,” says Kasparis. “I can remember the first conversation I had with both of them, over a crappy Skype line. A year later, I found myself driving across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco with the sun setting, and Susan giving me a Space Lady history lesson.” “It’s transcendental,” laughs Susan, “to think that my music is still relevant! It’s surprising to say the least but gratifying as well. I just… I can’t even begin to express how thankful I am that you, my fans, have breathed new life into a career that I thought was long since over.” Why do terms like ‘Outsider’ or ‘World’ music still have any currency? Haven’t we surpassed the patronising fictions they’re based on? It’s probably something to do with the turgid predictability of officiated music, the polarisation of culture and lack of each-way communication between alternative music and the mainstream, but apparently we haven’t. This arbitrary distinction seems clearer than ever. With many aspects of our culture seeming to slide backwards (vis. the nostalgia for the nostalgia that was Britpop), figures like The Space Lady serve as an antidote to clueless cynicism and as a hopeful reminder of what is possible.
Everything Is Swedish R&B band Little Dragon ask us to fill in the blanks around their forthcoming fourth album ‘Nabuma Rubberband’ The clock strikes 9am as I sit in the dining room of Little Dragon’s hotel, listening to beardy keyboardist Hakan Wirenstrand attempt to get excited about the fourth series of Game of Thrones. Who does he want to claim the Iron Throne? “The dragon lady,” he shrugs before humming the monotonous theme tune. All the while Erik Bodin, the band’s drummer, is pushing cold scrambled egg around his plate with his fork and front woman Yukimi Nagano – usually so effervescent on stage – stares at the phone in her lap like a kid trying to hide it in school. It’s clearly too early in the day for this Swedish quartet. What they need is a topic of discussion to get excited about – something along the lines of abandoning a member of the group. Yukimi looks up gravely and starts what bassist Fredrik Kallgren Wallin describes as a “sad story”. “When we were going over the border from Canada to the US we were having a party on the bus,” the 30-something singer begins as Hakan adds that you have to get off the bus at passport control. “I had to go to the loo,” he says, “and when I got back I saw the bus disappearing.” It took everyone two hours before they realised he was missing. “I phoned my girlfriend,” Hakan continues, “because it was the only number I had in my head and she was calling my phone on the bus and everyone was getting annoyed that I wouldn’t pick up my phone.” The group all laugh at this, except Hakan, who, with a straight face jokes that someone got fired that day. At least I think he’s joking. This four-piece seem so staid the majority of the time, which could be down to their current fatigue, or the fact they take their work very seriously. Since their formation in 1996, when the foursome met in high school, Little Dragon have been selfsufficient as artists. Around 2004 they
built their own studio in an old house run by a commune in the centre of Gothenburg, where they’ve recorded and mixed each of their four albums to date, although it’s not the most ideal studio space. “When trams go by it messes with the electricity,” says Fredrik. “On the first [self-titled] album, we mixed it and the guy mastering it was like, ‘where are all these frequencies coming from?’ because the trams send out this electrical current that the computer picks up. We can’t hear it, but there are really sharp mountains in the frequency counter. But we love it, we want to keep our bubble.” On May 12 ‘Nabuma Rubberband’, the group’s fourth record, is released and it’s the first time they’ve allowed someone else into the fold. Not just anyone, mind; De La Soul’s Dave Jolicoeur, who co-wrote the lyrics for ‘Mirror’ – the album’s ominous opener that boasts lost-in-space echoing and sparse percussion. “We met [De La Soul] on the Gorillaz tour and kept in contact,” Fredrik explains. “It naturally happened,” Yukimi keenly expresses, as opposed to management offering artists up on a plate. “People we work with,” she elaborates, “if you say to them, ‘oh I love that person’s music’, they ask if you want work with them or meet them. It’s not like I necessarily want to meet them or work with them, I just want a perfect relationship with their music.” That’s probably why it’s taken more than a decade for Little Dragon to loosen the reins when it comes to letting others in. “We’re used to doing everything ourselves.” Hakan explains that they’re more secure in their opinions as a collective now, which makes it easier to accept outsiders’ ideas. “I think it’s healthy to get some fresh air into the bubble,” he says. This new approach has resulted in something refined, if a little over-
polished. The overall feel, while maintaining Little Dragon’s soulful electro dance, is less choppy than their previous efforts, with more moody atmospherics, except for the 9-second seventh track ‘Lurad’, which apes cheesy Eurodisco, concocted from the mind of drummer Erik, who grins at its mention. “I was trying to express this kind of grey-skied, Eurodisco, Dutch feel. Like ‘oomph, oomph, oomph’ pumping, and me talking fake Dutch. I thought it’d be great to have an intro that has nothing to do with the next song – just epic Eurodance.” The next song he’s referring to is the title track of the LP, a laidback ballad of sorts accompanied by strings from the Goteborg Symfoniker, which took a touch of inspiration from Erik’s eldest daughter, who can be heard shouting ‘Lurad’ – translated as ‘fooled you’ – at the beginning. Another influence that has been talked up regarding ‘Nabuma…’ is Janet Jackson, which isn’t a surprising comparison when you consider the sweeping R&B vocals of third track ‘Pretty Girls’, but it wasn’t the first likeness to spring to mind for the band. “I just want to say that she wasn’t the influence,” Fredrik is quick to point out. “The thing was,” interjects Yukimi, “in the interview for the press release, I was having a moment with Janet Jackson, but if you imagine the whole evolution of making this record, this was one day of inspiration out of a whole year of inspired days.” So if not Janet, then who? “Eighties R&B is a huge ocean of undiscovered music for me,” says Erik. “I really like the soundscapes, the drums, the melodies and all the ’80s sounds. Because ’80s R&B wasn’t really played in Sweden, so going through YouTube is my little weakness.” Yukimi describes hers as random places in the US. “I like when you go to America and
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there are so many different radio stations there,” she enthuses. “I love the way they play Motown hits and so much music that’s not just Katy Perry or Rihanna, which you can hear in grocery stores. You can hear ‘Sexual Healing’ in Whole Foods in The States, or you’ll hear The Supremes in the gas station.” “I’m a little bit confused by the word inspiration actually because it has two sides,” says Erik. “One side is the feeling you get when you’re into something – inspired to create – but inspiration could also mean influence.” “Inspiration is an output from ourselves and influence is our input from other places,” says Fredrik, authoritatively. “Life gives me inspiration to create, it’s rare that a specific thing inspires me.” I turn to Yukimi who looks like she wants to get a word in. “For me,” she starts slowly, “it’s inspiring to hear music that makes you feel like, ‘this is just for me’. The Frank Ocean record – and I’m not saying this is the inspiration behind [‘Nabuma…’] – I felt it was so good lyrically. That was enough to make me want to write myself. It made me think: ‘I’ve gotta go and do something now because I can’t just sit and listen to someone else’.” Little Dragon’s music is having that exact same effect on listeners too, if their fans are anything to go by.Yukimi reveals that they were given a poem three pages long in Germany and have seen their fair share of Little Dragon tattoos. “I feel proud that it meant something and hopefully they don’t regret it,” she offers modestly. “There was one guy,” Fredrik adds, “who discovered us through his girlfriend. She was calling him to breakup and in the background she was playing [one of the early singles] ‘Twice’, so he told us he discovered the band through the breakup call.” It suddenly dawns on me that I have no idea what on earth ‘Nabuma
photographer: G em H arris / writer: DK G ol dstein
Rubberband’ means. “What does it mean to you?” asks Yukimi playfully, but I’m as stumped as the band were at the start of the interview. She helps me out. “Well, actually, it means everything. When we were looking for names, we felt that had a special tone to it.” Hakan informs me that they also have a friend called Nabuma and that it’s a Ugandan girl’s name. Yukimi carries on: “We were looking at ‘Mirror’, but Justin Timberlake has a song called ‘Mirrors’, so thank God we didn’t use that. I like that you can give your own meaning to ‘Nabuma Rubberband’ – it could be a rubber band factory, the name of a girl, a ghost, a state of mind, a country, even yoghurt or aliens.” It’s a mysterious answer, but unsurprisingly so, because when it comes to naming things, I’ve seen Little Dragon give different answers to
“It’s inspiring to hear music that makes you feel like, ‘this is just for me’”
the same questions before. Their name for instance, is stated as Yukimi’s nickname on their Wikipedia page, for her renowned tantrum-throwing days, but Fredrik has previously said they picked names out of a hat and Little Dragon is what came out. “It was Game of Thrones!” Hakan says to me. “We were so inspired by the little dragons, so that’s why.” Again, he’s not smiling, but I assume he’s joking – a feeling that’s solidified when Fredrik cuts in: “The real story is that we’d been jamming out for a while and living together. Then we recorded songs and a good friend of ours wanted to release them for us on his new label Off The Wall. So we thought, ‘ok, we’re going to need a band name’. It was very nearly Yukimi & Friends.” All but Yukimi burst into giggles as she shakes her head and denies it. “Yukimi Quartet!” Fredrik shouts. “Yukimi
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With Trio!” calls Hakan. Yukimi implores me not to trust them as Erik offers “Horny Corner” and suddenly the four stern songsmiths I first met this morning have dissolved into a puddle of amiable babble. When Fredrik pulls himself together, he admits that he doesn’t know who came up with the name. “I think we just liked the dynamic of a dragon spouting fire, except it’s tiny and cute. That’s how we felt – that we have a fire inside, but we’re not aggressive.” Little Dragon’s role as a pillar in the electronic alternative music community is down to this dynamic – their ability to stick to their roots and not get swept up in giant record label madness. It’s kept people listening for the past seven years and ‘Nabuma Rubberband’ definitely feels like it will be their most widely accepted record yet.
True Grit ‘Pale Green Ghosts’, the second album from former Czars singer JOHN GRANT, was unquestionably the sleeper hit of 2013; a record that is still being discovered by many today. But as a gay man growing up in a deeply Christian home, Grant’s rise to acclaim hasn’t been easy, hindered by self-loathing, depression, drink and drug addiction and more recently an HIV diagnosis. Now living in Reykjavik, we travelled to the singer’s Icelandic home to hear his incredible story in an interview that couldn’t be more candid PHOTOG RAPHER: SPESSI HALLBJÖRNSSON / WRITER: DANIEL DYLAN WRAY
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When approaching to interview a band or artist, the desired aim is often to break down the barrier between artist and human, between person and persona, to excavate and reveal a personality and pick and scratch at the brain that shaped the musical output of their alias. Often this is a fraught, exhausting and occasionally futile exercise because many artists build safety walls to protect themselves.They create characters, wear masks and operate from the screened-off comfort of mystery and darkness. Others, like John Grant, bulldoze down that wall, merging and solidifying the human being and the artist as an indistinguishable one. Neither one is ‘right’ or ‘better’ but merely a means to be more reflective and indicative of the artist at work, a truer representation – and there is no truer representation of John Grant than the truth itself. A year after the success of ‘Pale Green Ghosts’, an album scattered with fluttering electronics and gutwrenching moments as frequently as it was with lyrical frankness, tenderness and scorched bile, it was a breakthrough
album that superseded Grant’s supposed breakthrough album, his 2010 debut, ‘Queen of Denmark’. Grant finished highly, often top, in the end of year 2013 accolades and even ended up with a Brit Award nomination for International Male Solo Artist, squaring up against Bruno Mars, Eminem, Drake and Justin Timberlake. In 2014, his 46th year on the planet, Grant finds himself receiving his highest level of praise, success and achievement no doubt with more on the way. However, the road to success for Grant has not so much been a rocky one, but – from a personal and mental journey – one more akin to a trip along the Gaza strip. For the last two years Reykjavik, Iceland, has been home to Grant after he fell in love with the Capital when working on ‘Pale Green Ghosts’ with Gus Gus’ Biggi Veira. There is a feeling of serenity to Reykjavik that makes it easy to see why somebody would settle here. The sea air is crisp and fresh and it gently whips through the city streets, landing deep into your lungs; the towering mountain skyline, coated
with snow, glistens and twinkles under the shimmering spring sun and it is a constant source of beauty and magnitude every time it meets your gaze. The people are endlessly kind, gentle and helpful, something that seems to permeate within the culture and general attitudes here – whilst walking the streets the evening before meeting Grant I stumble across a bar (a themed Big Lebowski bar no less) and in capital bold black letters on the front of the door it reads: ‘If you are racist, sexist, homophobic or an asshole, don’t come in.’ I meet Grant for lunch and we settle down for a big bowl of sustenance. “I’ll be human once I eat this,” he tells me, still somewhat tired after a few busy days, some of which were spent in Paris playing as part of a Rough Trade Record Store Day event. After lunch, we head back to his place, taking a detour past a local bakery. We then walk past a giant pond filled with ducks and swans and Grant recalls how, the previous evening, he saw three swans on the water, at sunset, perform an almost synchronised
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swimming-like series of motions under the rich changing colour of the sun, moving gracefully atop the gently rippling and sparkling water. “It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life,” he says, clearly enamoured by his surroundings. We enter his basement apartment, a neat, cosy and welcoming place filled mostly with books, records and musical equipment. On the wall are homages to the music of his formative and defining years via mounted album covers from the likes of Devo, Missing Persons, Nina Hagen and Yello. We flick through books together, gush over a shared love of Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and obscure documentaries and we listen to Carter Tutti remixing Chris and Cosey which, through his infinitely superior speaker system to mine, sounds like pure, untainted, glorious bliss. He brews up some fresh coffee, plates up the traditional Icelandic desserts we picked up from the bakery (one of which is called grandma’s snail) lights a candle and we sit down in his kitchen for what becomes a
three hour interview, plunging deep into the life of a man who’s been through more than most. “This is the first place I’ve had to call home since 2008,” he says, looking around his place contentedly. “Iceland is the first place that I’ve been to – maybe that’s why I feel so comfortable here – where I didn’t feel like I was treated any differently.” Grant is openly gay and I mention the bar sign I’d seen the previous evening. “Yeah, and that’s like a mainstream sports bar that you’d see in the States, you know? It’s not some weird little artsy fartsy holein-the-wall. But yeah, this is the first place where men literally did not see me differently after knowing about my sexuality. They didn’t turn away from me in the showers at the swimming pools.” Issues surrounding Grant’s sexuality have long plagued him. Growing up in a strictly religious home where even swearing was considered a serious sin, he ended up having a lifetime’s worth of homophobia instilled in him before he could even fully come out as a gay man. It was these traumatising years that set the ball rolling for a substantial period of mental anguish, confusion and self-inflicted shame that followed. He recalls the period with unease. “I’m just thinking back to the high school stuff,” he says. “I just wish I could have gotten out of that state of fear I was in – if everybody knew [I was gay] then my parents would find out. I remember being attacked at my house one night physically, one guy was waiting for me to get home and I remember pissing my jeans because I was so surprised by the attack and I remember going into the house, humiliated, and unable to say a single word about it because I knew it would raise questions about why this person was attacking me and it would become my problem. So, I just remember walking upstairs and going to bed and that was such a humiliating experience for me because I should have been able to talk to somebody; I should have been able to say something to my parents but I was too ashamed and I knew that I couldn’t afford to have my parents ask any questions.” Grant left high school and moved to Germany where he would live for six years studying German and Russian, but an escape from his home soil would not alleviate the issues he
was having. “In Germany my depression really started to blossom with anxiety and horrible panic disorder. My depression and anxiety were worsening by the day and getting more pronounced and there was no way that I was going to be able to stand up in front of people and interpret. I couldn’t concentrate on the studies because I was so terrified to be around people – I don’t think I’ve ever really expressed it like that before, I always talk in interviews about how I went back to the States because my mother got sick with cancer – and to some extent it’s true – but part of it is also because I was tired of being terrified and tired of being around the stress of people who were doing well at their studies and I was struggling with mental issues.” His time in Germany did hold one important milestone however; he sang in public for the first time. “I was encouraged. I wasn’t laughed at. I was super drunk but that was the only way for me to do it. I felt super uncomfortable but there was
commercial success. The band lasted a decade, finally disbanding in 2004, but it’s not a period that Grant looks back on favourably. “I worked in restaurants and record shops because that’s all I could get. The band was doing well on the local scene but man I was just so terrified, I was scared all the time – there was a lot of shame because I was gay, I couldn’t get over that. I could not get past that. That’s what had been instilled in me. People would call me faggot all the time and it was made clear to me that I would go to hell if I indulged in that lifestyle, that ‘choice’. I guess I heard that for so long that when I was free of those environments I was unable to get away from it inside my head. So, the Czars period is a particularly painful one for me because that’s me at my most awkward, even after I’d been able to come out I still wasn’t doing anything because I still couldn’t accept myself. So, I saw that as a failure.” Sadly, ‘failure’ is a reoccurring word Grant uses to describe himself during various stages in his life. At
“My mum had died and I just went into boozing, I was finally coming out” also a rush, people really took me seriously when I was singing – more than they did in any other context, it seemed like.” Grant returned home to the States where his Mother’s lung cancer diagnosis was worse than first thought. “She died within the year,” he says. “That’s when I was given this antidepressant for the first time called ‘Paxil’ which I’m still taking twenty years later and that changed everything for me back then. I became social and I immediately went into power drinking. My mum had died and I just went into boozing, I was finally coming out, I was twenty-five or twenty-six and coming out for the first time.” In 1994 he would form the Czars, a group who experienced some critical success but fairly minor
times the urge to get up and give him a hug and assure him he is not is hard to shake. Self-loathing has, and largely still is, something he’s battled with enormously. “I saw myself as a huge failure during that entire period [the Czars] and it took huge amounts of alcohol for me to get on stage and do that,” he says. By this point booze was a major factor in his life and soon the drugs would come too. “When the depression and anxiety was happening in Germany, it was easy because they had really strong beer and you could have it non-stop everywhere and everyone was doing it, so I got really into drinking in Germany and when I came back to the states I had access to a car, I wasn’t living in a little village anymore; there were gay clubs. So that
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was the first time I got let loose and I felt comfortable with myself to some extent – with copious amounts of alcohol. Then it wasn’t until the 2000s probably that I started to get into cocaine; that was very quick. I mean, I never had the money to have a constant habit but it got to the point where as soon as I would smell beer it was like ‘okay, where are we going to get coke from?’ and then the horror of another sunrise without sleep. It got to the point where it was like, ‘oh god, it’s happening again’ and again and again and again. I went to the emergency room several times with heart stuff going on. That was quite scary and then I started smoking crack. Not because I wanted to but because that’s what people had and I started to notice that I really liked that too.” After several years like this something snapped. An encounter with crack cocaine, sex and two men (one with Aids and the other with syphilis) led to him clean up. “I’ve talked about this many times before – and there is still some shame connected to it – but if I hadn’t got syphilis by going to the clinic to get it treated… it was pretty humiliating because I didn’t know that I had syphilis and I’d had it for such a long time that all these spots were all over my body which don’t occur until a second or third stage of syphilis when it’s starting to get really into your system.Then they brought in all of the student doctors to look at me because it was such an advanced stage that they would never get the opportunity to observe it. That was sort of humiliating, it was like something out of a Woody Allen movie – ‘do you mind if we bring in the entire team of students to observe you because we’ve never seen anything like you before’. So, that was the day I decided to start going to AA.” This proved both a useful and successful step for Grant. “AA was great because I got a lot of perspective,” he says. “I heard about people who had it a lot worse than me. That helped me through a lot of that time, just hearing what other people had been through. I found them very helpful and I still do… besides, I wasn’t a good drunk, I wasn’t particularly interesting. I was just rotting on the inside, silently. “To be frank, I don’t know what the
fuck my problem was. We can look at all the facts and say that it’s a perfect cocktail of you not ever being able to have any self-esteem because you were always told it wasn’t okay for you to be who you were from the earliest times but still there’s people who go through that and come out okay. So it’s sad when I think about it, it feels fucking sad, it’s pathetic because it’s just more of the same, it’s me continuing to put myself down now for not being able to get past all of those things when I was younger. Like, why didn’t you stand up for yourself or fight back? But I guess it makes sense if you feel like you weren’t even considered to be a human being… It seems like in retrospect that nobody was as hard on me as I was, at least not after a certain point. My parents, the church and people at school got me started; they got me started with the zero self-esteem and I took it to great new heights punishing myself continuously for not being a real man or being able to really do anything.” Leaving behind his music, booze and drugs Grant moved to New York, he says to “get away from constantly being faced with my own failure.There was so many great things going on in the world of music and I thought ‘you’re not part of this’.”
I
t took several years and many attempts from Texan band and friends Midlake to coerce him back into music. This finally came in 2010 with the release of ‘Queen of Denmark’, a 1970s AOR-indebted record filled with sandpaper-dry humour, acerbic takedowns and plenty of personal pain and torment. It was a surprise success story, which led to an even greater success story in 2013’s ‘Pale Green Ghosts’. However, somewhat typical to Grant’s luck, it would appear, there had to be a stumbling block. Between albums Grant was diagnosed as being HIV Positive. In representative form, true to his newfound commitment to completely being himself and not being ashamed of it, he announced it on stage at a show with Hercules and Love Affair at Meltdown festival in 2012. Being so open, both personally and musically, is in many ways rooted
in a need to overturn so many years spent living in shame and keeping things held in or hidden. “There is a part of me that enjoys talking openly about myself because of all the hiding I’ve done,” he says. “So, it’s fun for me to talk openly. A lot of people say, ‘oh, don’t you feel like you’ve made yourself overly vulnerable?’ Like, to what? You going to blackmail me with my HIV status? How’s that work? What you going to do? I don’t really see the downside. I just feel like if there are people who don’t want to have anything to do with you because of who you are and because of your status and things like that then I guess this is a great way of getting those people out of the way before I even have to encounter them.” However, as someone who is living through a life-changing diagnosis, the public discourse can also act to benefit Grant too. “There’s a lot of selfish motivation here, too,” he says, “because I’m looking to make contact with people who have gone further than me. Like, one of my great friends, Holly Johnson from Frankie Goes to Hollywood, he was diagnosed back when things weren’t so good and was on his death bed to some extent, not doing very well at all, and he made it through that and came through that
nightmare and made a life for himself in spite of that and helps the youngsters like me, of which I am slowly not a member of that club any more! But I’m looking for connections with people too and I’m finding a lot of them. Sometimes I wish I could be one of those guys that hides and doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve but that just isn’t me.” Grant continues in relation to this and how it is again an extension of eradicating the old him. “That was one of the things I was trying to destroy with the alcohol and the drugs – I didn’t want to be sensitive, I wanted to be a strong man like I was supposed to be, who didn’t show emotion. Sometimes it’s a pain in the ass, like I don’t want to be an emotional cunt, I want to be one of those people who is very measured and reserved when it comes to emotion, but that’s just not who I am and it’s good that I am who I am, as much of a pain in the ass as it can be sometimes. “Being a character like David Bowie is a dangerous thing for me. I don’t want to come back from that. I wouldn’t want to, that’s been my method of operation my whole life, to disappear into something. I feel like it might be dangerous for me or difficult for me to come back from a character
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in music.” It doesn’t help that Grant’s diagnosis can be linked to some of the poisonous, homophobic rhetoric he would hear as young man, though. “That was my fear in talking to my family about having HIV at first,” he says, “hearing that, ‘well, you got what was coming to you’. Then I started asking the questions, like, ‘did Mom get what was coming to her?’ I mean, I knew a Christian woman who believed that she got Breast Cancer because – she was a very loving individual, she was very good to me this woman, she was the mother of one of my best friends in high school, she was a really wonderful lady – she felt that she wasn’t submissive enough to her husband. Because of the stress that that had caused in her life, by not letting him take over the role of things that he should have been doing and that she shouldn’t have been doing, that caused the stress in her life that eventually led to that cancer and I just remember thinking…” A very long, thoughtful pause takes place as John seems a little lost in the pain of the memory. “That’s heartbreaking,” I say. “It is heartbreaking,” he softly and sadly replies. “I took a step-back from her at that point because she was the one that told me that now was the time to get out of the gay thing before I got the punishment that was coming my way and even though I really, really loved her I just had to distance myself; I didn’t want to hear that kind of thing.” I ask about Grant’s feelings on religion these days considering the impact some of it has had on his life. “I consider myself to be someone who believes in God in spite of my upbringing,” he says, but then starts and stops multiple sentences, not quite finding the right words. “I think maybe I wanted to be an atheist but after a lot of things I’ve seen, I think there is a world out there that can’t be explained. So yeah, I do believe in God but I’m very vague about how I define that. I need to keep it that way because God was used against me for so much of my life.” Similarly, I enquire, can much – if not all – of Grant’s personal difficulties in life be attributed, fundamentally, to institutionalised homophobia? “Hum,” he says, almost laughing somewhat. “I wonder about that. I
think it’s a combination of that and my natural pre-disposition. As there are some people that go through that, it’s the way you react to it. But yeah, I mean, let’s face it, you’re not considered to be a human on the same level as other people are human and that’s just a fact.You’re considered to be mentally ill at best. It’s a very difficult subject for me because, yes, that should be my natural inclination and to say ‘fuck that shit’ because it was only used to hurt me, but I’d be hard pressed to sit here and tell you that I know how things are because I don’t feel like I do.” Much of the anger in Grant’s previous work has been centred around the pain of relationship fallouts he’s encountered but he currently finds himself in a lot more positive place in this respect – he has met an Icelandic man. “It would be nice to have a healthy relationship with somebody. Of course that scares the shit out of me as well. It’s definitely a step in the right direction, this relationship. It’s great to meet somebody who just really likes you how you are, just thinks you’re fantastic and isn’t intimidated by any of your baggage. That’s pretty cool. Although, I definitely feel like running away from it a lot of times, just because it’s difficult. Relationships are difficult, even when they’re great and healthy. I do find that to be a challenge but there’s no time like the present. I’m not getting any younger here!” Things are on the upswing for Grant and, pleasingly, he seems to be aware of this too. “Even though I’ve felt really worn out lately, I still feel like I’m continuing to go up and continuing to understand and get more tools – and this is so fucking revolting – to become that better version of myself that I always knew I could be.” And the anger?
“I still feel a lot of anger. I think you need to stay angry to some extent but I also think the next twenty years are going to be more that period where hopefully I’ll learn to let go of a lot of that stuff. I like a lot of angry sounding music but I’m not sure how great it is when you’re living that, when you’re living that life. I want to continue to express anger in music but I don’t want it to be what I’m feeding off in my everyday life. That takes a huge toll on your health.”
G
rant does, for the first time in his musical life, feel a sense of pressure. “It’s a bit daunting,” he says. “The pressure is just in your head but there are a lot of people around now who are expecting something that weren’t there before. That’s a really good problem to have, obviously – it’s great, but I want to exceed people’s expectations. I want to challenge myself vocally and not become a different singer but go out of my comfort zone and still be doing what I know fits for me. The possibilities are endless.” While ‘Queen of Denmark’ relived Grant’s ’70s childhood sounds and ‘Pale Green Ghosts’ his electronicinfused adolescence, can we expect the next one to follow suit? “I don’t know, that’s the question. There’s definitely going to be a German element to it. The beginning of the adult horror movie began in Germany for me. I remember the anxiety that was just so crippling it is like a horror movie. You don’t ever have that heart attack and you don’t ever pass out, it just keeps happening. You feel like you’re dying but you don’t and that’s worse. I
remember the horror of that coming back to the States with me when that first started to happen because I thought this was happening to me because I was homesick and because I was culture shocked or I’m having a difficult time. Then I remember having my first panic attack – a crippling, mind-numbing panic attack – sitting at dinner with my own family back at home and I can’t tell you how horrifying that was for me because I knew then that even the safest environments for me were no longer anywhere near safe. So, I feel like I will write about that because I feel strongly about that and so I do feel it will sort of continue on into the young adult, into the twenties. Which is good. Then we can call it a trilogy or a triptych or something.” Grant has procedures put in place to escape the pressures, too. He says: “I did a good job on the last two records. At least when I was up at night worrying what people would think of the record – I would keep that away from the studio. You know, worry about it at home, freak out, lose sleep but when you go into the studio, no way. I’m going to write that song about Vladimir Putin that’s called ‘Smug Cunt’ and not worry about the fact that people think that I am swearing too much because you can’t really swear enough in this current world.” We retire to the living room, listen to more music and Grant turns some of his many synthesisers on and begins to play them, creating oozing, rushing swirls of dread, menace and beauty. His eyes light up. “Most of the things you see in this room, it’s all I ever fucking wanted. All those years with the Czars, in the years before them, all I ever wanted was a bunch of synthesisers and a way to record.” In 2013 he told the Quietus that the next
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record may sound like a cross between Einstürzende Neubauten and the Beach Boys, I tell him that sounds like a fucking dream to me – “Yeah, me too” he says smiling widely. “There might be elements of it but I need to go in a certain direction and that sounds like a dream to me. I would like there to be a lot of darkness and a lot of beautiful harmonies and a lot of electronics but I want to explore really nasty, giant walls of sound as far as guitars go too. I want the album to sound like a horror movie score as well but with lots of great electronic stuff going on and I’ve started to write the songs and put down ideas and make loops and just play with sounds. I really hope to go in-depth from a musical standpoint this time, it feels like the last couple of albums were just more about me getting things off my chest and lyrically they were so important and it’s not like the lyrics will be less important on the third album but I really want to come at it more from the direction of the music than the lyrics, or at least have them equal. Whereas it seems like the music has always just been supporting the lyrics. I want there to be some pop elements on there but also a lot of darkness and I really love the noisemakers out there in the world like Add (n) to X and Throbbing Gristle – I would love to have those elements, maybe just as interludes connecting the songs. “I want it to be another big journey. I do believe I will start to tell other people’s stories on this record too. I’m really excited about it but I do hope I can continue to ignore this pressure that I feel about it right now because it’s not really real and I have to remind myself how much I’ve loved it when artists I love just do whatever the fuck they wanted.”
Reviews / Albums
0 4/ 1 0
The Horrors Luminous XL By s AM WAL TON . I n store s MA Y 5
Of all the haircut bands that filled the hype-vacuum left by new-rave’s implosion at the end of 2006, you’d have got long odds on those five weirdos from Southend being the ones still making relevant music nearly a decade on. After all, the Horrors were initially a flash of outsider bravado – the ultimate A&R man’s folly – using their blunt eyeliners and hastily signed majorlabel contracts to deflect suspicions that they couldn’t really play or write songs. Perhaps the most cartoonish of all their peers, with their Halloween hair, cheaply punned stage names and guest appearances on The Mighty Boosh, the Horrors were so clearly, delightfully, learning on the job that their music almost became of secondary interest to their plight: a reality-TV style fascination grew up around how long this gang of oddballs were
going to get away with it for. In that context, then, it’s quite the achievement that eight years and four albums later ‘Luminous’ is their first true dud. Where their previous albums have documented the state of their instincts at the time – ‘Strange House’’s graveyard hysterics, ‘Primary Colours’’s teutonic magnificence and ‘Skying’’s high-buffed swagger – ‘Luminous’ is the prosaic sound of the Horrors using their heads rather than their hearts, playing safe with a collection of songs that only recall older, better ones, and a sound palette that aspires towards ‘Loveless’, but comes out closer to ‘Leisure’. Indeed, Blur’s patchy debut is invoked here not just in ‘Luminous’’ shonky welding of break beats to guitarpedal acrobatics but also in the almost comically bland, faux-hippie lyrics. While sure, not all great pop
needs to achieve a Nick Cave level of literary dexterity, the sound of Faris Badwan singing endlessly about seeing the bright sun and feeling the cold wind hardly inspires hope. That said, ‘Luminous’ does sporadically find its own voice. ‘Change Your Mind’ is a wonderfully strange, yearning ballad, its serpentine melody, lyrical ambiguity and waltz-time lilt offering welcome respite from the surrounding meat-and-potatoes 4/4 bludgeon. Equally, for all its bluster, ‘Chasing Shadows’ strides down the album’s opening minutes with gleeful malevolence, all pregnant pauses and huge guitars. More of this contrast and ‘Luminous’ would be as pleasingly odd as its predecessors. As it is, though, the running order feels interchangeable and, while most of the songs are perfectly competent in their own
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right, they make for a boorish whole. ‘Luminous’ is not a bad record – there’s nothing here as hubristically mediocre as Beady Eye, say, or as tragically deluded as Kasabian’s thin rabble-rousing. But given the Horror’s ascent from sideshow curio to genuinely confounding musicians in the last eight years, its nods towards those lager-rock, postOasis touchstones is a shame: having earned the right to do what they like after three artistically intriguing records, they’re exercising it to make the safest music of their careers. Whether that’s out of laziness, boredom, block, complacency or straight-up fear is unknowable. It does, however, mark out ‘Luminous’ as less another bold statement, and more of a distress signal: whatever, or whoever, sprinkled the magic on the Horrors up to now needs to make a comeback.
Reviews 08/10
Parquet Courts Sunbathing Animal Roug h tr ad e By Jo sh sun t h. In sto r es June 2
There’s a post on Parquet Courts’ blog that runs through every time they have been called slackers. It’s a lot of times. The Brooklyn-based garage rockers have been pursued by the word since their inception in late 2010, somewhat encouraging the stereotype with song titles as straight-up couch potato as ‘Stoned and Starving’ and ‘Donuts Only’. But the regularity of their output (not to mention the witty and observational bent of their songwriting) should have proved to most listeners that it’s just a musical aesthetic. If not, then the verbose, slightly exhibitionist tunes of ‘Sunbathing Animal’, their fourth record and third LP, will.
Contrary to what their ‘Tally All the Things That You Broke’ EP might have had you believe, ‘Sunbathing Animal’ sees the garage rock sound from their debut left relatively intact. Opener ‘Bodies Made Of’ is an uncompromising piece of punk, changing in and out of gears with practiced efficiency before transitioning into the yelped ‘Black and White’, the second of this visceral, highly enjoyable one-two punch, whose spaceage breakdown is a fleeting moment of futurism on an otherwise retro-sounding album. They may well have forgone the sonic experimentalism and stuck with the punk vibe but the way Parquet Courts write lyrics and build
songs is far from safe. Since the limelight was flung upon them, the four-piece have built a reputation on being difficult, and ‘Sunbathing Animal’ wholly reflects that. Not only are many of these tracks unabashed reactions to media frenzy and feeling like a product (“In the depths of strangers glances lies the most ferocious spark,” sings Andrew Savage on the title track), but they’re so verbose and tightly wound with meaning that you have to listen and re-listen to get any sense of the sentiment behind them. On the other hand, Punk has always been an immediate genre, and the high-velocity blasts of sound and melody, with repeated riffs,
motifs and verses catchy enough to be choruses mean that ‘Sunbathing Animal’ is still incredibly easy to get to grips with. It’s as if the band – who are as adverse to popularity as any of their contemporaries – have gotten used to the idea of people actually listening to their music. On ‘Instant Disassembly’ Savage sings: “Kept repeating, kept repeating myself / In my native tongue / The parlance of the problem itself.” It sums up the dilemma Parquet Courts are faced with: they shun the limelight, they shun being commodified by the music press, but their native tongue is music, and ‘Sunbathing Animal’ sees them come even closer to mastering it.
Some of the best musical partnerships have transpired out of timely happenstance – a propitious chance meeting of minds; an opportune moment to fill a void. North Carolina’s Sylvan Esso are a case in point: having both worked on successful projects in their own right, Mountain Men’s Amelia Meath and Megafun’s Nick Sanborn similarly felt that something vital was absent from their respective work. Following their encounter, Sanborn went on to render a track
called ‘Play It Right’, which Meath originally crafted for Mountain Men. Here, the duo coalesce the best of both worlds: Meath’s proclivity for depicting melody syncs seamlessly with Sanborn’s crisp and colourful electronica pulses and muscular drum beats. But despite the wonderfully modern and active production, this is not a demonstration in electronic enlightenment – instead, ‘Sylvan Esso’’s appeal is predominantly characterised by Meath’s dulcet, rhythmic refrain, while Sanborn’s
instinctive response serves as a backbone and perfect lyrical bait for the singer. Opener ‘Hey Mami’’s jaunty effervescence is a pleasing first impression: buoyed by uninterrupted handclapping as the prevalent melodies juxtapose the weighty basslines. Elsewhere ‘Play It Right’ and the concluding ‘Come Down’ are a more subtle, softer and ambient interpretation of the pair’s merged aesthetic, which is defined by a glistening ability to conjure emotion and capture a melody.
08/10
Sylvan Esso Sylvan Esso Par t i san By H ay ley S c ot t . I n sto res MAY 12
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Albums 06/10
0 8/10
07 /10
08/ 10
Bo Ningen III
Yvette Process
The Acid Liminal
Amen Dunes Love
S tol en
To ug h L o ve
I nfe ctio us
S ac r e d B o n e s
By J Oe Goggi n s. In stores Ma y 12
B y Da n ie l D ylan w ra y. I n sto res Ma y 5
By S a m C o rnf o rt h. I n sto r e s J u n e 2
B y Da n i el Dy la n W r a y . In sto r es Ma y 1 2
To put it mildly, the first two records from Bo Ningen suggested that they might not hold subtlety and restraint in especially high regard. The process of making ‘III’, which saw the band afford more attention to songwriting and production than previously, seemed to hint at less of an unchecked maelstrom of aggression and noise than the London-based Japanese foursome have managed in the past. That’s partly the case; the guitars on ‘Inu’ merely imply menace, although Taigen Kawabe’s initially reserved vocal is borderline maniacal by the end. ‘Maki-Modoshi’, meanwhile, begins in steady, restrained fashion, but the drums quickly collapse and so does any hint of a time signature. ‘Slider’ sees a first foray into English lyricism, but is far more notable for its furious instrumental break at the midpoint. ‘Ogosokana’, scored by walls of reverb and echoed vocals, is probably as close as Bo Ningen have ever been to balladry, but closer ‘Kaifuku’, with its constant changes of pace, sums up ‘III’ neatly; not quite the controlled brand of chaos the band were apparently hoping for.
The menacing shadow of Swans looms heavily over ‘Process’, but the roaring atmospheres and industrial thud emitted here comes from just two guys recording in a garage. With a whiff of early Godflesh, this is an album that kicks you fiercely in the gut, its whole execution – and the subsequent waves of thrashing sound that spew forth – immensely corporal. That said, while it can be a squealing, clattering, charging assault of an album, it’s also one that knows the importance of space and restraint and employs the succinct and tactful techniques that Wire, at their finest, so seamlessly exude. The album therefore rockets back and forth between burning, screeching balls of static, acerbic stop-start guitar stabs and ghostly yet gristly atmospheres that weave from the grainy to gliding. While it can occasionally border on the repetitive in its approach, it’s mostly a consistently engulfing and evershifting LP – a throttling and throbbing record that chokes you by the throat and will send your neighbours spiralling into madness if you play it loud enough.
Anonymity is a commonly used ploy in the music industry. The Acid are one of the now endless number of bands that have opted to shroud themselves in secrecy (although it has now been revealed that the project belongs to Ry X, Adam Freeland and Steve Nalpea). Once the shadowy smokescreen disperses on a group, usually all that is left is the mundane music and the ordinary appearance of the creators. However, withThe Acid this couldn’t be further from the truth, as mystery nestles itself into every throb of percussion, every ornate synth, every shuddering beat and every time Ry X delivers his impassive vocals. ‘Ra’ is a rare outpouring of emotion with the singer’s delicate croons feeling like they are trying to grab you and tell you a secret. Elsewhere though, besides the odd glistening synth, this monotonous album is like a possessed and emotionless surgeon drilling away at your skull in a strangely compelling way. Mystery, it seems, wasn’t some cheap trick for this detached trio – it’s something that is infested throughout their cloudy debut.
On paper, with contributions from Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Colin Stetson and Iceage andVår frontman Elias Bender Ronnenfelt, ‘Love’ is a record that is as potentially exciting as it is curious and unpredictable. However, the results are not quite the sprawling mass of oddness they could be. Instead it is song- and structure-heavy, recalling ‘golden age’ classic rock via the zeitgeist looking-glass template adopted by the likes of Kurt Vile and the War on Drugs. On ‘Love’, Amen Dunes becomes more than just the solo project of the Brooklyn-based Damon McMahon and more band and collaboration focused, resulting in a refined, polished affair with production that endlessly shimmers. It’s an album that captures hazy mornings, with sun seeping in through squinted eyes as clearly as it does secluded, wintery isolation surrounded by a glistening morning frost. It has a radiating hue, a firm sense of presence and atmosphere and, above all, it’s a record packed with subtlety and delicacy; one wrapped up in endless bounds of wistful layers.
Last month, Owen Pallett wrote a 1,200-word essay for American culture website Slate about ‘Get Lucky’, using degree-level musical theory to explain, with exacting precision, why Daft Punk’s monster is so addictive. His piece also, perhaps unintentionally, acted as something of a primer for ‘In Conflict’, his first record in over four years: it revealed a man who views the problem of a track as viscerally insistent as ‘Get Lucky’ as a scientific phenomenon to be unpicked. And in
that context, ‘In Conflict’ feels like his latest contribution to the field. Accordingly, here is an album of delicious musical sophistication, full of richly accomplished, detailed and unusual flourishes, all spread across jaw-slackening arrangements and virtuoso tightness. Unfortunately, though, where Pallett’s natural peers – the likes of Jonny Greenwood or Sufjan Stevens – imbue their strikingly complex work with commensurate emotion, the strongest musical moments here –
even the yearning, insistent melody of ‘On A Path’ – still feel strangely synthetic and lifeless. Occasionally, as on ‘Sky Behind the Flag’ and ‘The Riverbed’, Pallett combines his highfunctioning musicality with delivery, and the result is a tantalising treat. More often, though, the theoretical intricacies are outweighed by the lab-grown coldness of academia. Ultimately, for all the undeniably impressive technical flair on display here, one is left frequently longing for the texture of unpredictability.
0 7/ 1 0
Owen Pallett In Conflict D o m in o By S AM WAL T ON. In store s MA Y 12
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Reviews 0 7/ 1 0
0 7/10
07 /10
03/ 10
Paws Youth Culture Forever
Teleman Breakfast
The Phantom Band Strange Friend
Pure X Angel
Fa t C a t
Mo shi M o shi
Ch e mi k a l Un d e rgro un d
F a t P o ss u m
By J ames West. In sto re s June 2
B y Ch r is Wat k e ys . I n sto re s M ay 2 6
By S am Walt o n. I n sto re s J u n e 2
B y Th o m as M a y . In sto r es M a y 1 9
This hedonistic ’90s soundtrack is like a messy college party; the sort that the band probably dreamt about, but only ever really experienced through glossy, coming-of-age films. Beer bongs, sweaty fringes glooped to foreheads and trashed mansions – that’s where this happy racket lives and it’s difficult not to want to be single-mindedly adolescent in its presence. While the scuzzy punk pop of Paws’ debut (‘Cokefloat!’) was fun but mostly derivative, sophomore ‘Youth Culture Forever’ sees the Glaswegian trio conjure something bigger and bolder out of all that Blink 182 brattiness. Recorded in the woods outside ofThe Big Apple, their glorious noise this time veers between those trademark bursts of heart-on-sleeve melody (‘Tongues’, ‘An Honest Romance’) and something more dark and brooding, which adeptly flits between thunderous clatter and pin-drop silence (‘Erreur Humaine’, ‘War Cry’). However, despite the added depth those drawn-out deviations give their return, it’s still the dumb spurts of energy that best woo and lure repeated visits.
It must be difficult, these days, for an indie-pop band to sit down and come up with a sound that isn’t totally stale before they roll into the studio. Teleman, though, have made a pretty good stab at it here; the London fourpiece, featuring a couple of former members of Pete and the Pirates (and what’s more indie-pop than that?), are the kind of band that 6Music loves, and you can see why with songs like current single ‘Cristina’; it’s twee, poised pop with an undeniably sharp hook – carefully constructed melodic fun that will surely become an indie disco floor filler. ‘Steam Train Girl’, meanwhile, is vaguely robotic synthpop, loosely akin to Kraftwerk covering Belle & Sebastian. Largely, it works. A highlight then comes with ‘23 Floors Up’, which is hugely Suedeesque (and therefore admittedly not without a whiff of stale indie about it, depending on your persuasion), and as close as this band will ever get to sounding epic. Bar the odd, almost obligatory duffer, this is a brilliantly written bunch of tunes – indie at its most pop. It’s not a record to shift your soul, or even thrill the senses, but it is a barrel-load of hooky fun.
After four years away, Scottish troopers the Phantom Band are billing ‘Strange Friend’ as their nononsense, back-to-basics album. That’s not to say things have got any simpler: across its 45 minutes, coilsprung post-punk gives way to thunderous heavy metal, Velvetsy garage-band scratch and burbling electronics, and there’s even a dabbling with the kind of quiet Americana. However, where things have become more streamlined is in the melodies – for all ‘Strange Friend’’s stylistic restlessness, there’s a wonderfully addictive, bluntinstrument insistence running through Rick Anthony’s tunes here: his baritone croon cuts through the surrounding complexity and offers a continuity and cohesion to the record. It doesn’t always work – ‘Sweatbox’’s sweetness is dulled by overly forced cleverness, and stretching ‘No Blue Shoes’’s one good idea over six minutes is not the Phantom Band’s finest editing decision. But when the musical density and melodic simplicity coalesce, as on ‘Doom Patrol’, the results are charming and impressive.
‘Angels’ is what you might call an “atmospheric” album. That said, Pure X’s third LP seems only to fit such a descriptor by virtue of its failing to be, well, anything else. Sure, there’re melodies and lyrics, but both are so vague you’ll have a hard time noticing either. Sometimes-rhyming inanities are delivered alternately in a limp, strained tenor and an equally strained, even limper falsetto. I think Nate Grace was gazing across a “valley of tears” at one point, an image which might (just) have passed as clumsily poetic if only he had seemed to give even marginally more of a shit than I did. Occasionally, the simplicity and emotional numbness of ‘Angels’ call to mind Kevin Drew at his most downtrodden, especially if imagined filtered through Kevin Barnes’ awkward sexiness. In fact, make a concerted effort and you could find verses, even choruses; given time I managed to unearth a handful, but to a regrettably meagre payoff. After three albums that have considerably dipped from the band’s 2008 debut, it’s all work, no play. Dull boy.
Former Vivian Girl Katy Goodman is fed up of writing sad songs, and, she says, writing songs alone, not that you could tell that from this third album – her first since the split of the band that made her name. Her last two albums under her La Sera guise have been about break-ups and although they were both brimming with her trademark bubbly melodies there was a broken heart that rotted away at the sun-bleached indie rock. Whereas in the past Goodman’s knack for pop songcraft has been
obscured by desolate themes or hidden by gritty noise, here it is transparently on show as streamlined songs prevail with generous amounts of personality and charm. Listening to this LA musician’s joyous and energetic fizzling pop is like a glorious day after a particularly miserable winter. It’s very much that overused term ‘lush’, and highlights are plentiful. ‘Losing to the Dark’ is a sharp burst of noise pop that sets the tone, ‘Running Wild’ is one of the catchiest songs that Goodman has
inked and title track ‘Hour of the Dawn’ is radiant like the first shards of summer sunlight. Essentially none of this third solo record from Goodman treads new ground, but it does reiterate her status as a master of her craft. With the Vivian Girls breaking up and heartache pushed firmly to the side, Katy Goodman has succeeded in freeing herself and rekindling the fun factor of making music once again. She has got a spring in her step and it is infectious.
08/10
La Sera Hour of The Dawn H ar dl y A r t By S am c or n f or th. In sto res June 2
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Albums 0 7/ 1 0
0 8/10
06 /10
06/ 10
Gentle Friendly KAUA’I O’O A’A
Hamilton Leithauser Black Hours
Teen The Way & Color
Napolian Icursio
Fat C at
Ri bb o n
Ca rpa rk
S o f twa r e
By T om Fen wick. I n sto re s May 26
B y Ja me s F . Th o mps o n. I n s t o re s Ma y 5
By J ack D o h e rt y. In s t o re s May 5
B y R eef Y ou n is . I n s t o r es Ma y 2 6
After what feels like a prolonged absence, experimental noisenik duo Gentle Friendly return with their first release in three years – the rather awkwardly titled – ‘KAUA’I O’O A’A’. It’s an album of raw and energetic clamour that sees the pair intentionally obfuscate melody in favour of rampant eclecticism; offkilter electronica drowned in violently intrusive drumlines, overlaid with David Maurice’s reedy vocals. When it shoots wide of the mark – on tracks such as ‘As In The Wind’ or ‘Rip B’ – it can feel unrelentingly obtuse; an almost circular void of noise. But retune your brain to their singular wavelength and peculiar charms begin to reveal themselves; the ceaseless drive of ‘Autumn Nite’, the oddly oppressive hope of ‘No Future’ or – with harmonics that rise like some otherworldly surf rock – the eccentric rhythms of ‘Cloudbusting II’. It’s this intriguing and boundless energy – reminiscent of the south Londoners’ debut – that manages to balance out the album’s imperfections, leaving just enough disarming thrills to keep you coming back for more.
In many ways it’s a surprise this took so long to materialise. The Walkmen put out their first album 12 years ago and since then, the band (and especially the voice of Hamilton Leithauser) has faced endless comparisons to U2. Why wait until now to challenge everybody’s preconceptions? One explanation is the singer-songwriter was too busy with Walkmen duties until the group entered an “extreme hiatus” last year. Another is that Bono’s shadow never particularly darkened Leithauser’s mood. Certainly, ‘Black Hours’ isn’t any kind of radical departure fromThe Walkmen. In fact, listening to its 10 lushly-arranged tracks, it’s easy to listen to this album simply as another release from the New York post-punks. The energy has been ratcheted up, though, and the infectiously raucous single ‘Alexandra’ is closer to Arcade Fire than 2012’s languid ‘Heaven’. Appearances from an array of indie rock luminaries also lend ‘Black Hours’ a richer sonic palette. Ultimately though, this is the Walkmen: Continued. No bad thing, for sure.
Frontstroke or backstroke? They both have their pros and cons. Frontstroke is faster but you have to get your face a bit wet, and no one likes that. Backstroke meanwhile lets you chill out, but then you can’t see where you’re going, and no one likes that either. It’s a tough call. Not for Teen, a trio of sisters and one other formed by ex Here We Go Magic keyboardist Teeny Lieberson. The group’s second album, ‘The Way and Colour’, sees them stroking backwards down the English Rivera towards a much less loving bay than the one Joe Mount told us all about, to anguished synths and parping brass, and, on the opening ‘Rose 4 U’, what sounds like live vocal sampling. ‘Breath Low & Deep’ and the closing ‘All The Same’ take their leads from Metronomy the most, skewed and offbeat, the latter feeding our ears with underwater, blubbing harmonies and nods to Minnie Riperton. But, then, for the most part,Teen feed us that standard hipster R’n’B nonsense, suggesting they’ve backed the wrong seahorse one to many times. A little more frontstroke next time.
At 19, Ian Evans (aka Napolian of Los Angeles) is another young producer in an ever-growing glut of beatpushing protégés. Fresh-faced and future-focused, ‘Incursio’ is a measured journey that picks up where previous EP ‘Rejoice’ left off, working through a 21st century selection of ambient, trip-hop and synthetic R&B. Set to a backbone of crisp percussion, meticulous synthfunk, and a clinical ear for composition, tracks like ‘Escobar’, with its slow, syrupy rhythms and flashes of broken beat, and the easygoing boom-bap percussion and synth interludes of ‘Is It Love’ showcase Evans’ constant willingness to switch it up. At a brave 15 tracks, there’s both depth and detraction but it’s an album that never stops striving to push beyond safe hardware-based instrumentals. From the industrial jolt of ‘DARPA’’s driving mechanical clanks, wounddown reverb and the black hole ambience of ‘Peace and Safety’, and the dark, clanging piano chords and busy offbeats of ‘L O B B Y’, Napolian’s strictly beats set plays out like a restless, android dream.
With Maya Postepski excusing herself from the Trust table to focus her considerable energies on Austra, you might expect this second album to mark somewhat of a watershed. However, despite now existing as the solo project of Robert Alfons, the first problem with ‘Joyland’ is that it takes the lead entirely from its predecessor, 2012 debut, ‘TRST’.The second is that it’s unfortunately not as good. To be fair to ‘Joyland’, from a purely aesthetic point of view it’s very hard to fault. Its slick electronics
are well-executed and it does a solid job of conjuring up that murky, motion blur of a dark, dank club at 2am. In Alfons’ world the air seems perpetually thick with desire, the vodka-infused sweat cooling and condensing against the cracked basement ceiling.There are moments of acid house (‘Peer Pressure,’ ‘Lost Souls/Eelings’) but they crucially lack the soul of an 808 State or a Phuture, while the attempts at techno (‘Geryon’, ‘Rescue, Mister’) are, ironically, given Alfons’ titular
selection, a little joyless. Its rhythms opt for precision over groove and what really makes the collection so turgid is that it takes itself so relentlessly seriously. Respite comes in the form of opener ‘Slightly Floating’’s oceanic shimmer and the title track’s sugar-coated synthpop, but their relative exuberance isn’t enough to counteract 40 self-conscious minutes of navel-gazing. It doesn’t even feel like something Postepski could necessarily fix.
05/10
Trust Joyland Ar ts & C r af ts By Davi d Zammi tt. In st o re s Ma y 5
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Reviews 06/10
0 9/10
08 /10
07/ 10
Tacocat NVM
Hiss Tracts Shortwave Nights
Alice Boman EP II
Beaty Heart Mixed Blessings
H ar dl y A r t
Co n st e l l a ti o n
Happy De a th
N u s ic / C a r o l in e
By Ja mes F . T hom p son. I n sto re s no w
B y Th o m as MA y. I n s t o re s May 1 2
By David Z ammitt . I n s t o r es J un e 2
B y T om F en w ick . In s to r es M a y 1 2
All roads from Tacocat seem to lead right to Nirvana. The Seattleites are signed to Sub Pop offshoot Hardly Art and pay homage to ‘Nevermind’ with their sophomore album title. Surprisingly though, the palindromic foursome sound nothing like their angst-ridden forebears. Ironically, the lineage of their pop-punk-cumgirl-group stylings can be traced back to Shonen Knife; one of Kurt Cobain’s favourite bands. Yet that bonkers Japanese trio purveyed nonsensical songs with titles like ‘I Am a Cat” and ‘I Wanna Eat Chocobars’. Here, the saccharine riffs are paired with slightly more grounded goofiness and a smattering of feminist sentiment. ‘Psychedelic Quinceañera’ tackles coming of age (via LSD), ‘You Never Came Back’ covers boy troubles and as for ‘Crimson Wave’, well, you get the idea. It’s a good thing Emily Nokes writes imaginative lyrics too, because the tunes here are laughably rudimentary. If you’re not in the demographic, you’ll probably get bored, but if you’re having a bad day (and especially female), these 13 perky tracks might be just the tonic.
A microphone by a roadside. If Hiss Tracts betray an affinity to musique concrète, then it’s found more in their sensitivity of listening than their occasional use of field recordings. ‘Shortwave Nights’’s droning forms exist within an eternal present, one that’s multi-faceted and infinitely detailed: this is music that throws open the aural dimension. On its cover, a microphone sits by a roadside. But it’s not just about deep listening: ‘Shortwave Nights’ is hardly documentarian, and never Cageian. Hiss Tracts’ soundworld is as intentionally constructed as those of their previous work with the likes of Set Fire To Flames and Godspeed You! Black Emperor – the former’s atmosphere of prettified dejection and conflicted nostalgia for the rural being an especially close reference point. On its cover, there’s no microphone, no road, only their aestheticized image – indistinct, suggestive. And all this makes ‘Shortwave Nights’ a rare, beautiful thing: an ambient album that’s neither anonymous in its abstraction nor stifled by its glimmers of compositional intervention.
As interest begins to build around Alice Boman, the young Swede’s delicate, splintered brand of songcraft has been reductively described as ‘simple’ by a band of writers who appear to confuse the efficient with the rudimentary. While Boman’s music and words are refreshingly direct, her economy of instrumentation is what allows the strength of her melodies to soar. She possesses a rare skill that can propel music from the everyday to the transcendent; that deftly disarming split-second shift from major to minor that causes the bottom to fall out of a song and, as a wonderfully visceral consequence, the listener’s stomach. ‘Be Mine’’s organ-driven, spectral sing-along and the shuffling, tinny drum machine on ‘Over’ evoke Beach House at their dreamy peak, but it must be said that Boman is beginning to create something that she can genuinely call her own. ‘EP II’ is an Ubi sunt to fading memories of love, but while the hand of melancholy is felt throughout, its concise statement is hopeful rather than morose. 21 completely worthwhile minutes of your time.
How many drummers does it take to form a band? In the case of Beaty Heart the answer may surprise you. If having three out of a potential four members devoted to percussion sounds like a recipe for disaster, prepare to be surprised, because the quartet’s debut is a breathless and buoyant record that jangles with rich guitars, complex rhythms and falsetto harmonies. It owes an undeniably huge debt to the music of Africa, but filters this through a myriad of styles, bounding from reverb soaked psychedelia (‘Kanute’s Coming Round’) and expansive off-kilter art pop (‘Get The Gurls’) to squelchy ambiance (‘Opal Shred’) all at a breakneck pace, although it’s the LP’s more subdued tracks that garner the best results; the enchanting undulation of ‘Kinder’ or ‘Muti’ with its twinkling piano being particular standouts. This musical salmagundi is a hectic and unexpected mix that, while on occasion threatens to overwhelm, manages stay on course by sheer virtue of charisma, crafting a debut that shimmers with youth and exuberance.
No longer a ‘pop artist’, now a ‘singer-songwriter’. So declared Lykke Li in the run up to her latest, third album – the Swede who’s been shaking off ‘cute’ ever since her 2008 debut. Curious, not least because the Swedish artist continues to write songs that are as pop as ever. The real shift here is in tone: ancient history is the quirk and bounce of debut ‘Youth Novels’. ‘I Never Learn’ is instead marked by an aloof cynicism, a steeliness guarding a deeply felt sense of betrayal. I’m
‘Never Gonna Love Again’, she mourns. I’ve got a ‘Heart of Steel’, she laments. And the sweeping, quasi-orchestral arrangements show she ain’t kiddin’. In less skilled hands, this could all get pretty tiring; tiresome even. Or perhaps I should say more tiring: certainly, the widescreen majesty of ‘I Never Learn’ can seem stifled by the obsessive monotony of Li’s emotional tenor. She’s fatigued, yes, and she’s not content just to describe how that feels. But what Li might
have lost in personability, her music’s gained handsomely in melodic elegance. These songs are intensely focussed, soaring with the grace of ‘Hounds of Love’ and, occasionally, even the sparkle of ‘Vespertine’. It’s all poise and precision, complemented by a suitably cavernous, wall of sound production. Still, as an artist that first stole hearts singing about ‘Dance, Dance, Dance’-ing, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish she’d lighten up a bit.
0 7/ 1 0
Lykki Li I Never Learn At l antic By T ho mas May . I n sto re s M a y 5
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Albums 08/10
tUnE-yArDs Nikki Nack 4AD By C h r is Wat keys . I n sto res M ay 5
When you’re known for startling originality, a determined DIY aesthetic and songs that slap the listener around the face whilst exhorting them to get up and dance with the limitless energy and abandon of a manic five year-old, you’d think that three albums in, if you were tUnE-yArDs creator Merrill Garbus, you might be feeling the pressure a little bit. How to maintain that runaway musical momentum? Slow down? Speed up? Learn and master yet another obscure instrument (this time round, it’s a boula, a small Haitian drum) to throw into the mix? As a follow-up to 2011’s occasionally jarring but infectiously
energetic ‘W H O K I L L’, and another step removed from the pure DIY of the recorded-on-a-dictaphone debut ‘BiRd-BrAiNs’, Garbus certainly hasn’t taken the ‘slow down’ option. You’ll likely already have heard the ultra-catchy single ‘Water Fountain’. Punctuated by percussive yelps and a relentless, bursting energy, it’s the sonic equivalent of an exploding jack-in-the-box, benign and highly colourful noises flying out in all directions. Album opener ‘Find A New Way’ manages to be simultaneously disjointed and flowing, the whole song carried forward by an irresistible current. Rapid spoken word passages, gospel backing and
acrobatic lead vocals, soaked in tribal vibes, clash and compete over a recklessly melodic backdrop. The breakneck pace drops very slightly with ‘Time of Dark’, whose searingly soulful vocals sit astride a poignant minor key. The song is home to perhaps the album’s most powerful lyric: “Oh little child, understand a single thing / Your music’s in your pocket with a power you can’t even imagine it would bring.” ‘Nikki Nack’ is a joyful sonic menagerie – there’s so much energy here that listening to it can go one of two ways; you’ll either be exhausted or inspired by it. Either way, its hooks and rhythm cannot fail to invade your senses. Very occasionally, the joy
and vibrancy ebbs away from the music, leaving only its cacophonous shell, as with the high-speed and pitiless grind of ‘Sack O’. Yet ‘Wait For A Minute’ is the only moment at which tUnE-yArDs becomes anything even remotely approaching conventional on this record, featuring as it does a straightforward, beautifully simple vocal melody. ‘Nikki Nack’ is sonically a far cry from Garbus’ dictaphone-wielding beginnings, yet in a sense it really isn’t a far cry at all, her unquenchable energy still in-your-face. tUnEyArDs remains a creative volcano of a project, something sublimely barmy, joyfully brash, fearlessly brave, and utterly original.
Reviews of Sharon Van Etten’s 2012 breakthrough, ‘Tramp’, afforded so much credit to her range of collaborators that it almost didn’t feel as if you were reading about a solo record. That might have been the motivation for her approach to ‘Are We There’; she’s chosen a producer (Stewart Lerman) of considerably lower profile than The National’s Aaron Dessner, and relocated to New Jersey to record, perhaps hoping to avoid all those pesky friends of hers who kept
dropping by her Brooklyn studio last time around (Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner, Beirut’s Zach Condon and Dessner’s twin, Bryce). The result is a triumph for a young songwriter who is no longer suggesting that she’s one of America’s finest, but demanding to be acknowledged as such. The instrumental rationale is clear – allow guitars and piano to form a gentle backdrop and let Van Etten’s sumptuous vocals do the heavy lifting. The orchestral flourishes are
tremendously well judged, from the fluttering strings on ‘Afraid of Nothing’ to the mournful horns on ‘Nothing Will Change’. Best of all, though, is the manner in which she’s managed to create what feels like a mood piece; her elegant approach to emotionally candid lyricism is nimbly matched by the sound of the record throughout. Van Etten’s executed her vision for ‘Are We There’ with impressive assurance; she can enjoy the lion’s share of the praise for herself this time.
09/10
Sharon Van Etten Are We There Ja g ja gu wa r By J oe G oggi n s. I n sto res M ay 26
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Reviews / Live
These New Puritans Extended Barbican Centre, London 17/ 0 4/ 20 14 wr ite r Tom F en wick Ph otogr a ph er Ro y J B a ro N
Arriving early at The Barbican we take a moment to lose ourselves in its labyrinthine network of Brutalist architecture. The vast wonder of tonight’s venue – with its experimental and uncompromising aesthetic – is perhaps a natural home for These New Puritans; a band who have always seemed caught between indie rock and an art place. We’re here for a one-off event that will see band recreate last year’s masterly, understated ‘Field Of Reeds’ in an “expanded” format. Not
a group to do things by halves, the Essex trio – Barnett brothers Jack and George, and long-time friend and extra pair of hands Thomas Hein – are duly joined onstage by the immaculate talents of Portuguese jazz singer Elisa Rodrigues and a 30 strong troupe of musicians; a lineup not so much expanded as formatted for widescreen. Openers ‘The Way I Do’ and ‘Fragment Two’ are a deft couplet to start the night, their subtle melancholia echoing around the auditorium’s stark walls. Although
it’s not until the strains of ‘The Light In Your Name’ that the music comes to life; waves of discordance swaggering with menace toward the evening’s first highlight. What follows is the spellbinding triptych of ‘V (Island Song)’, ‘Spiral’ and ‘Organ Eternal’, each song more intense and hypnotic than the last, Rodrigues’ vocals on ‘Spiral’ imbuing it with startling perfection. Of course, it’s not flawless. There are moments towards the end that drag their heels and on occasion the vocal mix feels wrong, Barnett’s
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mumbled lines crushed amid the orchestration. Whether this is a stylistic choice or just an error is unclear, but whichever it is, it can be forgiven when you consider the band’s greater achievements onstage tonight. A feeling made manifest during the cacophonous encore of ‘We Want War’ – its Sturm and Drang heightened to feverish proportions as George Barnett’s shadow is cast high across the Barbican walls. Rhythmic eruptions – almost too intense to bear – form a rapturous finale.
Reviews
Tim Hecker & Merzbow Oval Space, Hackney
School of Language The Lexington, Islington
14/ 0 4/ 20 14
2 3 / 04 / 2 01 4
wr iter : T homa s M a y
w r it er : S a m Wa lto n P hotogr a ph er : S a m Wa l ton
As befits David Brewis’s latest album of ’80s white funk and slinky melody, the School of Language frontman takes the stage tonight channelling somewhere between Duran Duran and Young Americansera Bowie, all suit jacket and t-shirt combo and hair so slick that Greenpeace are mobilising troops. The music largely matches, too: the five-piece (including various Field Musicians and Futureheads) rattle through faithful interpretations of ‘Old Fears’, augmenting them with synchronised finger clicks, Top of the Pops dancing and plenty of nonchalant charm beside Brewis’ trademark self-deprecating humour. When his heartfelt acknowledgement of the incredibly obedient Lexington crowd’s “patience and politeness” is answered with a light-hearted heckle of “Get on with it ya fucker!”, there are smiles all round.
On stageTim Hecker is merely a halfpresence. No more than a vague form in the shadows, all but oblivious to his audience as he works intently at his laptop. Leave cynicism at the door and all these anti-theatrics come to serve as an apt frame for the Canadian artist’s now-familiar Music For Crumbling Airports. Just like his on-stage demeanour, Hecker’s music is all suggestion and mystique, its seductive allure located in its spaces, its absences. Ghostly forms – pianos, flutes, organs – flicker on the edge of perception, coalescing fleetingly before melting once more into the swooning gauze of noise. That such sonic detail and subtlety are recreated in the live context is admirable. That his music is simultaneously augmented with such expressive force, such sweeping romanticism in a cavernous warehouse setting, is just silly.
Timber Timbre The Roadhouse, Manchester
Sohn Village Underground, Shoreditch
17/ 0 4/ 20 14
17/04/ 2 0 1 4
wr iter : J oe G oggins
wri t e r: C h ri s wa t k e ys P hotog ra ph e r: A nd re as Wal d schue t z
Manchester’s Roadhouse has long since fallen out of regular favour with the city’s top promoters, but it feels like the perfect fit for Timber Timbre. The underground setting lends just a touch of sleaze, the sound system is uncommonly clear and the insistence on an eager smoke machine all contribute positively to the atmosphere the Canadians are clearly keen to cultivate; they send the assembled photographers packing, and frontman Taylor Kirk breaks into an anti-camera rant midway through the set. Those keen to experience the show at face value, however, are treated to quite the performance. Cuts from new record ‘Hot Dreams’ are relayed with fitting menace – samples filling in where the standard triage of guitar, drums and bass can’t – and a slew of older material is aired too, including ‘Magic Arrow’, which cropped up on Breaking Bad.
Like a fallen monk, the hooded figure of Christopher Taylor’s SOHN stands silhouetted against the blood-red light, an evangelist of the euphoric. Front and centre of his sound are those incredible vocals, no less pure in the live environment as they are polished in the studio, but his reinvention of ‘Tremors’’s album tracks tonight shows a performer who isn’t prepared to just regurgitate his record to a crowd. ‘Tempest’ opens with an a-capella, stunning falsetto before dropping into a slowed take on the album version and eventually morphing into something approaching genuinely epic.This is the kind of set you can easily imagine soaring out to a massive festival audience on a Saturday night, and on the strength of this showing, Taylor deserves to get there. At times, this is unsullied, synth-laden joy at its purest and most moving.
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Live
Should any gig, ever, be three and a half hours long? Probably not. But there aren’t many careers in pop music that defy logic quite like The Cure’s – the dress-up goths who’ve strategically dropped a calculated amount of massive, purposeful hit singles to keep the show on the road in any way they please. They tried this at Primavera Sound in 2012, to a festival crowd in a windy car park in Spain. It didn’t go well. Safe to say, it’s much more suited to the velvet commune of the Albert Hall, to hardline fans who appreciate the b-sides more than ‘Love Cats’ and ‘CloseTo Me’.There’s half of each, by the way, mixed together, and to find fault with any of them is to miss the entire point of a three and half hour Cure show. I mean, they weren’t going to do ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ 45 times, were they? It might be the comfy seats and red wine, but the time actually flies. There’s a feeling of long-haul flight to it, as content neighbours become more comfortable with each other without ever speaking. There’s zero spontaneity, just songs to the letter, but you’d be surprised how institutionalising The Cure can be.
The Cure Royal Albert Hall Kensington, London 29 / 0 3 / 20 14 wr i ter : Stuar t stub b s Ph oto gr aph er : Andy Pa ra dise
Marissa Nadler Cafe Oto, Dalston 23 / 0 4/ 20 14 wr i ter : T homas Ma y
Mike Watt & The Missing Men The Harley, Sheffield 17/04/ 2 0 1 4
Forest Swords Oval Space, Hackney
The Nightingales The Cluny, Newcastle
0 4/ 0 4 / 2 0 1 4
2 4 / 04 / 2 01 4
wri te r: J a m e s F. T h omps on
w r it er : J a c k Do h er t y
Creeping into the dark, cavernous hall of St. Luke’s and peering down from the rafters, it’s hard not to feel vaguely voyeuristic. Two shadowy figures stand facing one another.The pair seem as though they are locked in their own private musical ritual. One is playing bass. The other is Forest Swords. For barely 45 minutes, Matthew Barnes fills the night with the elegantly foreboding sounds of last year’s well-received ‘Engravings’ LP and more besides. The 18thcentury church setting lends itself perfectly to the music, enhancing the sense of eerie malevolence as Barnes draws otherworldly squawks and obfuscated beats from his (surprisingly minimal) kit. The music loses some elasticity when the bassist disappears off stage and indeed, this isn’t a game-changing performance. It is, however, a darkly beguiling one.
Reformations, they’re all the rage. Every band and his dog seems to be “burying the hatchet” and “giving it another go”. But while the majority of these reformed bands reek of cynicism, every once in a Brummie moon a group comes back with some sort of purpose. The Nightingales have been gloriously slumping around the country since they decided to “bury the hatchet” and “give it another go” in 2004, and hardly for the money. Tonight they find themselves in a sparsely populated room in the North. But that doesn’t stops them from going for it. The group attack each song with a surreal sort of intensity, removing every whiff of nostalgia in the process. It’s the opposite of what reformed bands do, but it’s exactly what they should do. If everything was as miserable as this, music would be in a better place.
wri te r: D an i e l D yl an W ray
“Was it a dream?” Marissa Nadler asks, lingering over the final syllable in a languorous melisma. “Or something sinister?” comes the reply from either side, her backing singers’ voices dispassionate, distant. Tonight’s performance is somewhere between the two. Heavyeyed and sensuous, Nadler’s songs inhabit a faintly surreal space between wake and sleep: evoking a state in which every sound, every texture, every thought, is deeply felt, if not understood. The accompanying duo of cello and viola provides the requisite eeriness, softening the edges of Nadler’s handpicked steelstring, echoing the melancholy of her vocals. Nadler’s are the melodies that Liz Harris is too coy to write: noir-lullabies that are both bold and nuanced, conceding to abstraction just often enough to maintain the sultriness of the atmosphere.
It’s testament to the musical and historical impact of Mike Watt that, ostensibly, people are just here to see a man play bass; a box-ticking exercise, seeing one of the greats thrash their chosen instrument with personality and charm. While seeing Watt may not have the widespread popularity or supposed gravitas of someone recalling hearing the roar of John Bonham’s drums in the ’70s, in the independent and underground world of DIY guitar music, it by far supersedes it. Watt – and his Missingmen – is more than just a spectacle, though. Still imbued with the fast, loose and rambunctious, they swat between the wild, tenacious and spunky, to broken down, gentle jams, aided by contorted whispers. A brief encore of the Minutemen tracks closes the set, still sounding as infectious and punchy as ever.
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Cinema 09/ 10
Marker of G enius by Darren Chesworth
Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat A n Ex h i b i t i o n at L on d o n ’ s W h i te C h a p el G alle r y . A p r il 1 6 - j u ne 2 2
In honour of the new Chris Marker exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, Darren Chesworth runs down his top 10 films from the French Director.
10. Sans soleil (1982) In an attempt to express the inexpressible Marker approached his subject (life, the world, himself) as though from outside, as though he were a Martian (one of his sobriquets), or more pertinently, a time traveller, using words, images and sounds to report on an alien environment. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Sans soleil. It is sometimes as impenetrable as the world Marker explores, but never less than mesmerising.
09. La Jetee (1962) Thanks in part to Terry Gilliam’s ‘remake’, 12 Monkeys, La Jetee is Marker’s most famous, and perhaps most untypical, film. While Marker’s work is usually digressive, multilayered and blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction, La Jetee is a wholly fictive, single strand narrative. However, both the story (a time traveller haunted by an image from childhood) and the way it is told (photo montage) is uniquely Marker.
08. Lettre de Siberie (1957) Lettre de Siberie is one of a number of travel films (including Dimanche a Pekin and Cuba si!) Marker made during the 1950 and ’60s. It includes the famous sequence in which Marker plays the same footage three times with three different narratives – ‘communist’, ‘capitalist’, and ‘objective’ – thus highlighting the illusiveness of truth; thus highlighting why nobody should ever call Marker a documentarian.
07. AK (1985) Like Truffaut, Godard and Rivette, Marker wrote about film in the pages of Cahiers du cinema before making films himself. But even after becoming a filmmaker he continued to be interested cinema as a theorist: exploring the nature of the moving image and making films about directors, Tarkovsky, Medvedkin, and, in AK, Akira Kurasowa.
06. Les Statues meurent aussi (1953) Made in collaboration with Alain Resnais, this early effort already contains many of Marker’s hallmarks: A philosophical, witty narrative, a refusal to present a simple message, and an investigation of museum, art and colonialism. Both Marker and Resnais went on to make some of the greatest ever films, but even in such company Les Statues meurent aussi holds its own.
05. Ouvroir. The Movie (2010) Marker’s works contain the same themes, images, and voice, yet, for all that, every piece is unique. Ouvroir is as good an example as any. It’s a movie only in that it moves. In (virtual) reality it’s an ingenious piece of new media, a virtual museum, containing excerpts from (as well as being part of) Marker’s oeuvre, which we are shown around by the avatar/cat Guillaume-enEgypt.
04. The Last Bolshevik (1993)
recently deceased friend, to explore Medvedkin’s (and Russian) politics and cinema, as well as investigating one of the most tumultuous periods in Russian history.
03. A Grin Without a Cat (1977) It is easy to say what interests Marker: time, travel, museums, revolutions (particularly of the left), etc. but discerning his own opinion of these things is far more difficult. A case in point is this three-hour film about the revolutionary movements of the 1960/70s. While inspiring it is never dogmatic, and while containing the finest editing seen since Eisenstein, nobody could ever call it propaganda.
02. Le Joli Mai (1962) Marker’s interest in people shines through in every film he made. Indeed he travelled the world to show that we are all different; all the same. In Le Joil Mai he, and co-director Pierre Lhomme, turn the camera on the inhabitants of Paris, during May 1962. The result is an astute record of a society about to face major upheavals in the decade to come.
01. Le Mystere Koumiko (1965) During the 1964 Tokyo Olympics Marker follows Koumiko Muroaka, asking her questions about life, love and Japanese society, in order to discover who she is. Of course there is no definitive answer, there never is with Marker. The pleasure for him, and for us, is in asking the questions.
One of Marker’s (or anybody’s) masterpieces. The Bolshevik in question is Russian filmmaker, Aleksandr Medvedkin (1900-1989). Marker uses the film, dedicated to his
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Chris Marker was a filmmaker, writer, photographer, artist, editor, new media pioneer, traveller and who knows what else. It is not just that he was polymathic, although the term could have been coined for him alone, but that the works he made within each field defy easy categorisation. For example, how should one describe the movies he fashioned over a sixty-year period? Essay-film seems to be in vogue, but watch a single sequence created by Marker and one quickly realises that this designation, as with most others, is largely inadequate. One can only wonder, then, at the audacity of the curators who attempt to summarise Marker in the time it takes to circumnavigate a gallery, and wonder again that they almost manage to pull it off. This fine exhibition includes seven films, five multimedia installations, a display of the Petite Planete books Marker edited, and a number of photographs and prints. While this is a tiny percentage of Marker’s oeuvre, recurring motifs and images are discernible. Photographs appear in films, films appear in installations, and themes, such as time, cinema, and revolution, recur as though on a loop. It is by concentrating on particulars that the exhibition works in the same way Marker himself worked. His film Le Joli Mai is about Parisians in May 1962, Sans soleil about a traveller sending letters from each place he visits, and A Grin Without a Cat about revolutionary movements in the 1960/70s, but really all are about that most universal subject: what it is to be a human being. So, yes, we may regret a specific film is absent, such as the astonishing The Last Bolshevik, but while the exhibition is a mere excerpt, what we come away with adds up to so much more. www.whitechapelgallery.org
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To the mysterious guy who reads his horoscopes everyday at Wapping Station, can I see my moon rising in your bedroom? A Leo with a crush
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Oh my god! And the size of the mice!!! Truly disgusting! : Reply
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To the girl who saw me get stuck in the barrier at Baker St., my balls did that :P Big Larry
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NigelFarage @Justsayno In France to see just how right I am about Europe. It’s pretty fucking gross! : Reply
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Oh no. I know for a fact that Ian can’t do that
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No! How about it’s YOU that fucks off!?
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To the fit girl I gave up my seat for at Kentish Town, it was like that when I sat down Nervous Traveller
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To the stunning 3 blondes cracking up at my jokes all the way to Ruislip, what am I like!? Guy in green Crocs
Fuck off, Ian!
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Oh hang on, think I’m in Euro Disney.