Richard Dawson – Loud And Quiet 137

PVA, Sinead O’Brien, Scalping, BodyVice, William Doyle, Kojaque, Nathalie Olah on Steal As Much As You Can, An A-Z on the Nurse With Wound list

issue 137

Richard Dawson

Looks like rain

Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet Ltd PO Box 67915 London NW1W 8TH Founding Editor: Stuart Stubbs Art Direction: B.A.M. Digital Director: Greg Cochrane Sub Editor: Alexandra Wilshire Book Editor: Colin Groundwater Contributing writers Abi Crawford, Alex Francis, Alexander Smail, Colin Gannon, Colin Groundwater, Daniel Dylan-Wray, Dominic Haley, Fergal Kinney, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Hayley Scott, Ian Roebuck, Jamie Haworth, Joe Goggins, Katie Beswick, Katie Cutforth, Liam Konemann, Lisa Busby, Luke Cartledge, Max Pilley, Megan Wallace, Ollie Rankine, Rosie Ramsden, Reef Younis, Susan Darlington, Sam Walton, Tom Critten, Tristan Gatward, Woody Delaney.

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

Issue 137

Over the last year I’ve been increasingly trying to limit the amount of articles we print that start or end with “in these fucked up times...”, in the name of variety rather than disagreement. But in our issue that may still span the month of our Brexit bed-shitting, there’s an inescapable through line in L&Q 137, from Luke Cartledge’s impassioned environmental column against climate change inaction and reductive blame, through Fergal Kinney's discussion with Nathalie Olah about the decline of the working class in the media, to Richard Dawson's incredible new state-of-the-nation album, which speaks openly about just how fucked up these times are whilst doing us the courtesy of providing a key of black humour to unlock some sense of unity.

Stuart Stubbs

With special thanks to Anna Mears, Ben Ayres, Dan Carson, Isobel Fisher, James Crosley, Maddy O'Keefe, Michael Watson, Sam Williams, Will Laurence, Zoe Miller.

The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2019 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

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

Steal As Much As You Can . . . . . . . . .

Sinead O'Brien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Scalping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

BodyVice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kojaque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

PVA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Richard Dawson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

William Doyle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Nurse With Wound . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Environment

Look what you made me do The brass of David Davies – Conservative MP for Monmouth, arch-Eurosceptic, climate change denier and definite fucking goon – writing to The 1975 to accuse them of environmental hypocrisy really got under my skin. Putting aside my personal dislike of that band, there was something extra-toxic about Davies’ little note.

His tone set off the first alarm bell. From the quotation marks around ‘climate emergency’ near the beginning, to the risible postscript, daring the band to ask ‘Extinction Rebellion to block the roads in the cities where you play so that we can be certain nobody travels to one of your concerts by car’, the whole thing is dripping with the smirking, prefect-getting-the-bootin condescension that so often characterises Tory vernacular.

You can practically hear him tittering at his own brilliance as he dictates the letter to a fawning underling. Never mind that, now you say it, encouraging fewer people to drive to gigs might actually be a good thing; never mind that the value of having a band with such an enormous platform spreading these messages is considerable, and just maybe the personal actions of the messenger do not invalidate the message. Don’t worry about those things, David: as long as you get one over on the luvvies, the context is immaterial.

Get past the rugby club one-upmanship, and things don’t improve much. Bear in mind, this is a man who has repeatedly used his parliamentary profile to dismiss the mountains of evidence for our contribution to climate breakdown, mangling research in order to ‘prove’ his reactionary points. The fact that he’s even considered using words like ‘hypocrite’ in his letter given his own laissez-faire attitude to truth and principle tells you all you need to know. He is, after all, yet another libertarian enemy of the welfare state who was rather embarrassingly caught with his hands in the public purse during the expenses scandal – though he emerged from the ensuing scrutiny legally unscathed, a man who claims two grand from the taxpayer to and pays it into his family business while consistently voting to reduce government assistance of society’s poorest is on thin ice indeed.

We know it’s near-impossible for progressive arguments to be effectively made on the home turf of the reactionary, so it feels increasingly important to approach this issue with a positive outlook, a persuasive counter to the politics of fear that have played no small part in bringing us to this point. This seems as applicable to the music industry and its attendant community as it does anywhere elsewhere. We’re all in the same boat.

Yes, obviously we should all try to limit our flights and reduce our carbon footprint. Obviously going on a world tour and guzzling fossil fuel-generated power isn’t going to directly benefit the planet. But as we know, thanks to the inaction, diversion and dishonesty of infinitely more culpable agents in the climate crisis than one rock band – don’t forget, just 100 corporations are responsible for over 70% of the world’s carbon

words by luke cartledge. illustration by kate prior

emissions – unless vested interests can see a fiscally attractive alternative to their current MO, they’re not going to replace it.

More time needs to be spent arguing that a carbon-neutral world is not only existentially necessary, but can be materially better than the world we live in now, both on an individual level and in the public sphere. Leave the politics of fear to the reactionaries: there are effective, optimistic arguments to make about the reality of clean air, synthetic meat, renewable energy, and worldwide environmental action with benefits far beyond the elite of the global north. That’s not remotely to say we should play down the dangers of climate breakdown: simply that the benefits of a post-carbon future are real, and must be communicated.

I’ll let the experts make those big arguments, but I do feel it’s important to highlight what can be done by musicians and music lovers to contribute here. Systemic change requires society-wide action, building the alternative from the ground up. We can all contribute to that.

All the usual applies – drive less, fly less, eat less meat, don’t buy palm oil – but there are some music-specific initiatives that we should all be supporting. FEAT in Australia was started by a collective of musicians to invest in solar farms; increasing numbers of music events are going plastic-free and carbonneutral, as well as encouraging their attendees to use more efficient means of transport; Clean Scene offer an easy-to-use carbon offsetting tool to members of the dance music community, making vital offsetting technology more widely accessible.

There are many others, and they’re all doing essential work.

All these things are small and specific, but if we’re to win the argument on climate change these kinds of measures – which do not deny us luxuries, but instead mitigate their ill-effects and provide positive alternatives – are essential. Until that argument is won, infighting, pissing contests and snide letters only play into the opposition’s hands. Music is a powerful tool for building solidarity and organising for change; we should use it as such, even if it means sticking up for Matt Healy.

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Audio

The sound of books “This might sound weird, but the main reason I started Volumes stems from the fact that I hadn’t actually read a book in ages,” laughs Natalia Maus. Her project may be a series of soundtracks inspired by novels, but as a music video commissioner she’ll be the first to admit that her experience has always tended more towards film than literature. “If I hadn’t been given a book called Elmet by a friend last year then I don’t think that this would have happened. I just found myself sitting there thinking, ‘wow! What would this book sound like?’ I found a whole world in there that I could respond to, from the wilds of Yorkshire to the strangeness of the English countryside.”

Volumes has one rolling brief to its contributors, which is deceptively simple: create a mixtape or an original composition that is a response to a book or a short story. However, if you really sit down to think about it, the idea of creating a musical response to a novel is actually a fairly daunting challenge. I can’t think of many other art forms that can mess with your perception of reality like a great book. Written fiction can be both emotionally and narratively gripping without giving you any visual cues to go on whatsoever, and the result is that Volumes’ soundtracks feel more freeform than the typical film scores most people are used to. Unencumbered by thoughts of story-structures, moods and narratives, book soundtracks can instead explore themes, thoughts and emotions.

“The idea is that if you haven’t read the book then maybe the mix will interest you enough to read the book – and vice versa,” explains Maus. “So far, I’ve found that the best ideas

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come from people who have a good angle on the source material over people who can play an instrument or create ambient drone. Each and every book throws up a barrage of landscapes, thoughts and ideas that you can build on. I mean, for the first mix, I worked with the film collective Deeper Into Movies to create a soundtrack for Brett Easton Ellis’s Imperial Bedrooms. It’s a story that deals mostly in paranoia and betrayal set in the dayglow weirdness of Los Angeles and the concept was to create a collage of sounds inspired by the novel and the city it’s set in. I think, with its nocturnal drone and half-heard spoken word portions, the soundtrack really manages to immerse the listener into the world of the book.”

Standing at only three mixes so far, it’s safe to say that Volumes is still in its early days. But if there is one thing that is already poking through, it’s how much people can have a profoundly personal connection to a book. Like a perfect song, a good book can stick with you – sometimes they can even shape someone’s entire outlook on life. It’s something that Maus has also picked up on. “It’s struck me just how personal each book is to the contributor. It means that each playlist has been entirely shaped by their own perception of the book.”

Volume 3, an original score from former Maccabees keyboardist Will White, is remarkably personal. Responding to Max Porter’s award-winning novel Grief is a Thing with Feathers, the ambient noise and gentle folk echo the book’s themes of grief, memory and healing, set in a sparse London flat where two boys and their father struggle with the death of their mother until a crow decides to enter their lives. The score presents us with a stormy visage of the British landscape, where hope somehow still glitters from among the hedgerows. It taps into deeply personal topics for White, who lost his mother at a young age.

“The Will White mix is exciting,” says Maus. “Not only is it all original stuff, but it also comes from a place that is extremely personal for him. I’m just grateful he put that book on my radar as it’s brilliant and so, so unique. But then for him to put this heartfelt spin on it is just amazing. I’m really happy with how this one has turned out.”

It’s this ability to catch a glimpse of the world through someone’s else eyes that elevates Volumes from a collection of mixes into something more profound. Just as no two books are the same, no two people’s interpretations are the same, and it’s how these playlists represent windows into how other people see the world that is, for me at least, the most intriguing aspect about the series. “I mean, concepts like grief are usually lonely and extremely personal endeavours,” agrees Maus. “Being able to see how a work of art is reflected through the prism of someone else’s mind has been one of the most incredible things about doing this project.”

Find all of Volumes’ book-inspired soundtracks at www.volumessoundtracks.com

words by dominic haley. illustration by kate prior

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Ageing

Sweet 16: You already know what Steve Davis was doing in 1973

I used to play in the working men’s club, and I was a really good young player, so the committee decided to present me with a cue case for being good. It was at Plumstead Common Working Men’s Club, at the annual dinner and dance upstairs in the function room. My father loved playing snooker, and you had to go to social clubs to find snooker tables back then, and so I followed in his hobby footsteps opposed to any other footsteps.

It was the crappiest cue case you’ve ever seen. I look really happy though. That’s the happiest I’ve seen myself as a snooker player – I went on to be a really miserable bastard on television.

Going into the club at 16, which is such an adult world, was a breath of fresh air in as much as my father was quite well know, so I was welcomed into the cliquey club of the snooker people.

So very quickly I had a bunch of adult friends who looked out for me. There was a different type of humour there, so it was like a dual life between school and the club. It was a way of growing up quicker than sitting around at school with my peers.

As I started to get good and realise that all I wanted to do was play snooker, I was gravitating more towards the club than hanging out with my mates and doing what teenagers would have done. I lost a little bit of those latter teenage years of losing the plot with people who were the same age as you and finding yourself as an adult. I lost out on that in preference of a lone pursuit of trying to become very good at something I was drawn to like a magnet.

My mates at school weren’t even aware of what I was doing.

My French teacher knew I played snooker because on a Monday morning when we had a French class he’d be going around the

08

classroom asking what people did at the weekend and my pre prepared answer was “J’ai joué au snooker”. Everyone was like, “Great one. Good lie, Steve – where did you come up with that one?”. I’d say the same thing every week.

My only other interest was music, but snooker became allconsuming. If you’re going to be good at something like that it absolutely grabs you by the throat and you don’t have any choice in it. I’m surprised I did anything else, but I did manage to go to some gigs, although never a festival – festivals are something I’ve only started getting into now.

The music I was listening to was prog rock. Everybody knew about Tubular Bells and Genesis and Yes, but I sought out stuff and was a child of John Peel’s show and Alan Freeman’s.

The music I really liked was a band called Gentle Giant, another one called Magma, a Welsh band called Man. And then of course all of the Cantebury jazz rock scene that included Soft Machine, Caravan, Hatfield and the North and Henry Cow. When you look at this picture of my hair, when I did go to a concert – and I had an afghan coat that I’d wear – I looked quite normal there; a bit stranger in the working men’s club.

I certainly wasn’t a rebel. I’m now trying to live my life in reverse and be a rebel now, which is much more fun. When I was 16 I was going to bed with a glass of hot milk at ten o’clock so that I could get up early to practice; my aim is now to wake up face down in a puddle at Glastonbury in a heap. And that’s the way I want to go out.

Steve Davis’s electronic group Utopia Strong released their excellent self-titled debut LP last month on Rocket Recordings.

as told to stuart stubbs

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Literature

Steal As Much As You Can Nathalie Olah’s new book documents the decline and co-opting of working class voices in mainstream media, by Fergal Kinney

“I’m sorry to be rude, but it’s completely bollocks, and we can start to reject it.” The author and journalist Nathalie Olah is sat discussing the state of affairs that have snowballed over the last decade to culminate in her debut book, Steal As Much As You Can. It’s partmanifesto, part-self help book for those on low incomes in the arts, or just for anyone who cares about the presence of people from low incomes in the arts. Which should be all of us.

Nathalie Olah was born into a working class family just south of Birmingham, and was the first person in her family to go to university. “We didn’t have much,” she tells me “and I knew I was working class, but what’s interesting is that I wasn’t really aware of that fact until I went to quite a posh university. But more than that, it was working in the media where I felt really aware of my status as a working class person, and became exposed to how elitist it is.” Olah began to observe how her “predominantly middle-class, predominantly white” editors were commissioning work from people who looked a lot like themselves, for an audience who looked a lot like themselves, at the exclusion of those who – well – weren’t. “It struck me that there was a lack of work being made that spoke to my experiences, that shocked or amused me, or that I wanted to go to my friends and show. That was the thing I was really interested in.” Olah began to look at the same pattern emerging in other aspects of the media – the music industry, British cinema, television and publishing. Just what had happened?

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The timing of Steal As Much As You Can is important - coming at the end of a decade that began in earnest with David Cameron lustily welcoming Nick Clegg through the door of Downing Street.

The changes that have occured since in British society through austerity have been no less damaging, no less painful, than those that occured in the 1980s under Thatcherism. But where that decade had a vibrant range of working class voices across the culture to document the damage being reaped, think about how little the effects of austerity have been documented by those directly affected. This, Olah argues, is why the 2010s have been a culturally ‘lost decade’. A void. A gaping hole where audacious working class art has been shut out at the exclusion of pandering to a safe, middle-class consumer base.

If it’s your view that culture can be just as important to our politics as politics is, then you’ll understand the tragedy of a culture that excludes working class voices and tastes. The exhilarating positives of working class life go uncelebrated.

Its darker corners go unchallenged. The unique perspectives that working class people can bring to art, literature, music and cinema never arrive.

Grime is regularly positioned as a counter to this narrative, but Olah argues that in fact, the establishment media should be mortified by quite how long it took them to celebrate grime, and that we should observe the structures of power that caused that delay. “Grime complicates that narrative,” she tells

Literature me, “coming out of working-class communities and now enjoying a large mainstream presence. But its trajectory has been far more complex and fraught than other genres. It should have been getting this much mainstream airtime fifteen years ago, if not longer. Dizzee won the Mercury prize in 2003! And now this embarrassing thing is happening, where the liberal commentariat, mainly contained to within a mile of Hampstead tube station, are now finally declaring grime the music of protest, like they alone have just arrived at this profound conclusion. In 2016, when Skepta was already in his late 30s, when the genre had been maligned by the establishment for decades, there was this embarrassing collective fist-pump by the music industry and establishment media for his own Mercury Prize win. Of course it was great that he was finally getting acknowledgement he deserved, but there should have been a more profound sense of shame for how long it had taken and how arduous the journey had been for so many grime musicians compared with, say, redacted white middle class musicians. Fact is, the establishment media is now trying to use grime and UK rap as evidence of its inclusive credentials, and that’s completely hypocritical and disingenuous.”

In her book, Olah sketches a history of the British media’s complicated approach to working class voices. From the 1960s onwards, enough money was sloshing around in the media for risks to be taken on working class voices, an era that extended to Olah’s formative years growing up in the 1990s. “The 1990s was the last hurrah – you know, the end of history, this is the way that it’s going to be forever,” she explains. “You had publishing houses taking risks on working class people, some of which would make a splash.” The global financial crisis, coupled with a general decline in media revenue, changed all of that. With less money, the establishment media drew up the drawbridge. “That I think is undeniable,” she says. “The middle class consumer base is the one that gets adhered to, because that’s where they know they’ll make their money.” Olah uses the example of the lifestyle explored on Oasis’ ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ – alienation, self-medicated by narcotics – to the timid rebellion posited in the music of Ed Sheeran: the Gallagher’s “you might as well do the white line” provocation against Sheeran’s lukewarm “maybe I’ll get drunk again!”. But why do we now end up with the latter?

“They” – the white, middle-class media gatekeepers, says Olah – “know that what he sings about works for their middle class consumer base.”

“Oasis were writing about being on the dole, Jarvis Cocker spoke at the time about how Pulp wouldn’t have happened without the dole, and (that life) is a widespread experience. A lot of people experience the indignity of being on the dole, and the drudgery of having to sign on, but those experiences aren’t reflected. All this means that there’s a lack of solidarity because there’s a lack of people describing that cultural milieu.”

How taste rubs up against class is something that fascinates Olah, particularly when it comes to television. “Rules of taste,” wrote Susan Sontag, “enforce structures of power”, and this is the lens through which Olah is careful to observe televi-

sion. Consider the proliferation of makeover TV in the late ’90s and early ’00s – what Ground Force and Changing Rooms represented, the book argues, was the visual painting over of working class tastes and aesthetics. But if Alan Titchmarsh and Lawrence Lleweleyn-Bowen represent one side of the class war, who’s at the vanguard? Olah writes movingly of a childhood watching something like her own family reflected back at her through Caroline Aherne’s sitcom The Royle Family. “I absolutely love Caroline Aherne and think she was an amazing writer. Obviously her life was quite a sad story, but I can’t really think of an equivalent today. Every time I watch The Royle Family, I’m amazed by the quality of the writing, and how generous the writing is too.”

Likewise, Steve Coogan, from a similar background to Aherne, was able to create “the only truly effective satirical construct in British culture”. Now, however, you’re much less likely to see art created by working class people on television, and much more likely to see working class people as the subject of voyeuristic, “quite heavy handed” reality television and documentaries.

What makes Steal As Much As You Can so urgent isn’t just that Olah diagnoses these problems, but that she offers a roadmap out of this stagnation. The book ends with a call to arms for a coarse, unapologetic, creative working class culture, and how to achieve it. How to steal as much as you can from the system without enforcing it. Get a bullshit job and use it to allow you to create the culture you really want. Give up on wanting approval from the mainstream: “they’re not listening,” says Olah, “and there are ways of navigating it now – there’s independent media, there’s a whole plethora of independent record labels, it’s not hard to set up your own. The only thing stopping these from doing better is our own prejudice towards them.” Alienate your boss – reject office jargon and delight in your own slang and codes. “They’ll quiver in their boots,” Olah laughs, “they’re absolutely terrified by working class audacity and confidence and we need more of it.” Find working class artists who weren’t celebrated then, but can be held up now – tell their stories. “We need more working class audacity and confidence because it’s been eroded through decades of cultural capital, Thatcherism, Tony Blair, the current Conservative party,” Olah tells me, “that’s really going to affect people’s self esteem and their sense of worth. And it’s time for more people to feel emboldened and feel confident about who they are and the region they came from and the cultural milieu in which they were raised.” The 2020s cannot – must not be allowed to – repeat the mistakes of the last decade.

The lost decade. Steal as much as you can. Go.

11

Interview

Sinead O’Brien

Irish Sprechgesang punk to Dior and back again, by Greg Cochrane Photography by Matilda Hill-Jenkins 12

Interview

A couple of years ago Sinead O’Brien found herself comfortable.

She was briefly settled – living in a “cosy” flat in Hoxton, east London – and the feeling didn’t sit well. So she made a commitment: a pledge to disrupt her life and surroundings. “I had a year, it was called The Year Of The Yes Girls,” she explains. Encouraging a club of friends to do the same, she spent 12 months “saying yes”. It wasn’t some haphazard scheme to chase thrills; rather, it was about actively inviting opportunity and seeing what stimulation could come out of that. “It was putting myself into situations with absolutely no second guessing. I can very easily do things when I say I’m going to do it. I’ll just commit to it and make it happen afterwards.” The resulting period “took some twists,” she admits.

Some of those experiences were fleeting – spontaneously going dancing on a night out – others more lasting. Like moving home. Or, perhaps most pivotally, when she said yes to an invitation to appear at New Gums, a night of spoken word performances, collaboration and music at south London venue the Brixton Windmill. At that point the writer didn’t even have a band, music or a plan, but still she accepted. “I think it’s a healthy exercise to challenge yourself,” she recalls, “saying yes to almost everything… well, what’s not possible then?”

That night, because of her vow, she roped in her fellow Irish friend Niall Burns from indie-rock trio Whenyoung to compose and perform some backing music. It went well. Around the same time, and through similar circles, she also met Yuki from noise-rock outfit Bo Ningen, who she’d go on to create some early, abstract recordings with, followed by Will White – producer and former keyboard player with The Maccabees – who she’d later collaborate with on her arresting 2018 debut EP A List Of Normal Sins. The momentum continued, and then, after a Gently Tender show in London, Holly Mullineau from Goat Girl introduced her to Dan Carey; Kate Tempest collaborator and label boss at Speedy Wunderground Records (alumni: Black Midi and Bat For Lashes). Together they’d go on to record ‘Taking On Time’, O’Brien’s punchy spoken/sung punk track released earlier this year. The song is a total tearaway; the kind of propulsive call to arms that urges people to fill the floor at an indie disco.

“I would love people to dance to it,” she says. “It’s the pace.

I always try to do things faster than anyone will let me, then it gets pulled back just a tinge. Runaway, that’s my feeling. Always.”

— John Galliano’s earplugs — This evening, O’Brien is sat in the shaded corner of a pub garden in Clapton. Straight from work, she’s wearing an immaculate suit, in smart contrast to the dog walkers and birthday

parties jostling for a picnic bench and the final crumbs of latesummer sun. This is close to where she lives now, but during her six years in the city she’s moved regularly (deliberately).

Those spaces have varied, from an old toy factory in Old Street to a disused convent building, and not long ago a mansion in Hampstead shared with 50 other people. One of those is where the track ‘Living With A Fugitive’ was born after a specialist police unit came knocking looking for a tenant. “I’m not overly precious about the soil and the roots,” she notes. “I’m happy to lightly tread between places.”

O’Brien was born in Dublin before the family moved west to Limerick where she lived until she returned to the Irish capital to study in her late teens. Her love of words and music began to develop at an early age, though they wouldn’t marry until much later. Sinead tells the story of how, when she was five or six, she would return from school with her ‘spelling book’ bulging with advanced new entries. Her parents grew suspicious and checked with the next-door neighbour (a primary teacher). “My dad was like, ‘she’s giving herself extra homework so that she can be better!” I was pretty keen on homework in general. I had a school bag before I had a school.”

Music wasn’t far behind either. “I was sitting in the car with my mum, I was six, and I completely remember. I just had this notion – I want to learn piano.” Initially, lessons were at a chaotic School for Music before she swapped those for the more formal private tutorials administered by a stern old-fashioned antiques dealer. “She took care of my hands,” remembers O’Brien. “Sometimes she would even take my nail varnish off. It was etiquette – you come like this to the class. I absolutely loved it.” She kept taking lessons until she was 18. “I’ve always done best under very tough teaching,” she says.

By her late teens the allure the big(ger) city – “my New York or something” – was growing. She had enlisted at college in Limerick, but after one year transferred onto a course in Fashion Design in Dublin – an intensive group with four teachers and twelve students. The rigorous mentoring style suited her, and towards the end of her studies O’Brien was selected to work at Dior in Paris for five months.

“John Galliano was fired right before I had gone there,” she says. “His earplugs were in the bathroom, it was that fresh [the fashion designer was filmed making anti semitic comments in 2011 and subsequently lost his job]. There was a strange atmosphere but I was quite intent on picking up on it and talking to all of the employees. They were all severely heartbroken for him.”

There, during her placement, she worked closely with Bill Gaytten (creative director), and assisted with fittings. “It just turned out that he liked the way I was working. I think I handed him a pin the right way around once instead of the spiky way.

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Interview would read her latest poetry. The esteemed magazine London Review Of Books would later publish a short story of hers; a long way from her early adventures in writing, the tales of “nuns and priests having an affair” that she used to concoct with her childhood friend Aoife. John Cooper Clarke even invited her to support him on his spoken word tour.

“I got a handshake, like a welcome to the firm, kid. He was so welcoming and incredibly sociable. We stayed up all night at the hotel singing Velvet Underground together. He’s the best conversationalist I’ve ever met while also valuing everything you say. He actually introduced me to the music of Mark E. Smith – probably one of my most valuable references ever.”

— A Thing You Call Joy —

We started to get along.” Style, and specifically tailoring remains a big passion for O’Brien. In fact, it’s an area in which she still works. “It’s a celebration, a craft. I’m obsessed by tailoring and suits, everything to do with clothing and costume.”

However, it wasn’t just in fashion where O’Brien became well versed in Paris. During any spare time she’d indulge in the French tradition of drinking in cafés and watching the world go by. “Cafés – my second home,” she quips. As a distraction she began writing short observational poems. “At first they’d be more humorous – they were my way of entertaining myself. I would laugh and then maybe share it with a friend or something.” Together with a pal they came up with a title for these playful short passages: Freak Watching In The City. Sometimes she’d share these stories with mates, posting her work on Facebook. They’d do the same. “I liked the back ’n’ forth.” Soon that work took a more philosophical turn, or in O’Brien’s words, “became a bit bigger than funny shoes or something like that… but still looking at the daily things. The grit of it. People’s coming and going.”

When her stay in France concluded with a sad ferry boat ride (her mate accidentally booked onto the wrong ship) she arrived in London to fulfil a plan of meeting up with her friends from Limerick, Whenyoung. They’d get together on Friday nights, catch up and drink. Music would be shared and Sinead

14

All of which brings us to now, and unlike the flux O’Brien sometimes likes to inhabit, her process sounds like it’s beginning to settle. She writes lyrics regularly, sometimes in transit and always to the backdrop of music. And she’s also careful to regulate her input, frequently attending theatre, art exhibitions and dance productions (“I would train in dance in a parallel life”) in order to ignite inspiration. “I want to be overwhelmed almost and then to let the more intelligent part of my brain select,” she reasons.

Sometimes that results in a creative streak. That’s what the noir-rock of her addictive recent single ‘A Thing You Call Joy’ is all about – experiencing a spell of intense creative flow and how, if possible, that can be retained. “I’m quite pure, I will never take anything in my life. I drink a little, but not much,” she says, having transferred to a quieter table inside the pub.

“Everything has to come from effort for me. The song is how to keep and maintain that state.”

The Sinead O’Brien live show is developing, too. When on stage she conducts the pace and intensity of the performance alongside bandmates Julian Hanson and Oscar Robertson.

This past summer they played at a number of festivals including All Points East and Electric Picnic, and will support Pond and British Sea Power during the autumn. Each show, she says, should never be the same.

“I’m interested in it being different each time. I want it to do with what kind of day you had and what the place is like. I’m not interested in repeating or getting into a frenzied state of it being identical each time. You want to feel like that was the only time that was like that.”

Now signed to Chess Club Records (Wolf Alice, Pumarosa, White Lies), there will be plenty more to come. After ‘A Thing You Call Joy’ more singles, maybe an EP, possibly at some stage an album. Who knows? “I change often, as I told you, with houses and things,” she says. “It’s going to be hard to pin me down.”

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Interview

Scalping

An EBM band inspired by Bristol soundsystems play with improvisation and obscene imagery, by Alastair Shuttleworth Photography by Mariana Sabio

16

Amongst Bristol’s vital avant-garde scene there is a current impulse to reconcile aspects of the city’s soundsystem culture with the theatrical, performed nature of live guitar music. With the most famous example being Giant Swan, who create industrial techno using guitar pedals and looped vocals, this has produced an extraordinary new wave of genre-traversing projects.

The latest of these is SCALPING: an audio-visual EBM group who – through the medium of a semi-traditional guitar band – create muscular, cerebral techno drawing from punk, post-rock and industrial music. Comprising James Rushforth (bass), Isaac Jones (drums), Jamie Thomas (guitar) and Alex Hill (electronics), the band has risen to attention principally through their stunning, heavily-improvised performances; these employ a large projection screen, on which visual artist Jason Baker throws striking live animations replete with grotesques, sci-fi imagery and shock-humour.

Since stumbling upon their first gig, I have been convinced of SCALPING’s destiny as the city’s next breakthrough act, appropriating them as standard-bearers for my publication The Bristol Germ and holding some of their first shows. This year I was proved right, with tours around their debut EP CHAMBER (out on Council Records) making them one of 2019’s hottest new bands. I reunited with the group in Bristol to reflect on how this remarkable project came into being.

Interview Part of the impetus, Rushforth explains, was “a frustration with seeing non-live elements in a lot of electronic music”. Sharing backgrounds in guitar projects, the members’ exposure to Bristol’s electronic scene inspired them to “find ways of reverse-engineering those sounds, and applying them to a band”.

“It’s a marriage of the things we enjoy most about both worlds,” Thomas adds. Rather than trade in the instruments they had learned in order to pursue electronic music, it proved “more interesting to adapt what we already know”.

“What’s weird,” Baker remarks, “is everything that’s brilliant about this seems obvious in hindsight.” The spectacle of dance music with live drums is, in itself, undeniable.

Playing to a click in Jones’ ear, SCALPING perform entirely live and without breaks, to a gradually increasing tempo. Initially requiring a laptop to play tracks, this was quickly removed by Hill in favour of a more hands-on electronic setup.

He says his desire to “create on the fly” was partially spurred by his research into post-war experimental music, consolidated in his remarkable record Ces Expériences. “Having stuff at your fingertips makes it a lot more reactive and chaotic live,” he says.

The sets have duly become increasingly improvisational.

Having played 22 festivals this summer (with no time for dedicated practices), this has emerged from simply trying things out at shows; Rushforth describes the unwitting development of a “rota of sounds” amongst them, organically taking turns to push their individual elements.

The ultimate goal of SCALPING as an instrumental project, they claim, is total escapism. Thomas points to his favourite band Sunn O))) as an example of this, “where you lose yourself in something meditative, or chaotic”.

— Vomiting entrails — Where conventional bands might rely on lyrics to imbue the music with subject-matter, in SCALPING this role is fulfilled

by Baker’s staggering visuals. These make their way into the sets based on how strong a reaction they elicit from the members, and point to an eccentric sense of humour: a recurring figure is a gelatinous, technicoloured humanoid, who is variously shown dancing obscenely, changing shape, dropping from the sky and vomiting entrails. “You can have grotesque stuff,” Baker says, “but if you light it with bright primary colours there’s an immediate juxtaposition there.”

“We always joke that it’s like watching fireworks,” Hill says, claiming the visuals help engage people who might not immediately appreciate “banging live techno”.

Baker was recruited to the project after Rushforth saw one of his AV performances with the excellent Kayla Painter. When I ask how working with SCALPING differs from creating visuals for other projects, Baker claims he is allowed to “push things” as far as he wants. “It’s all about how I can elicit an extreme reaction from people in that moment, be it disgust or a sense of losing your mind.”

Earlier this year, SCALPING faced the challenge of how

to bring this all into the studio for the CHAMBER EP. This featured two tracks and remixes by Bristol producers Bruce and DJ October, a figure Rushforth claims to have always looked up to, as having masterfully married industrial guitar music with EDM. The EP even gained a mainstream radio supporter in Huw Stephens. “It’s not the kind of music you expect to be played on daytime 6Music – at all,” Hill says.

“What’s even more insane, is playing shows and people tell you they’ve come because they heard you on radio,” Rushforth adds. “That seems like such an archaic way of ingesting information, let alone following it up and going to see it live.”

“It’s nice though,” Thomas considers, “that this more traditional, ‘punk-rock’ way of following music has managed to transpose itself onto what we’re doing… what we’re trying to do is bridge that gap.”

Equally, Jones notes its acceptance by the EDM community, being played at techno nights including a recent Boiler Room. “We never knew if it was actually going to work that way,” he says, “but it’s what we were trying to achieve – that it could sit in both worlds.”

“It shouldn’t be a strange thing for a guitar to come up on a dance-floor,” Rushforth adds. “It’s just another way of making a sound.”

This set of aspirations is something SCALPING attribute foremost to Bristol. “The city’s music has shaped this project more than anything,” Hill claims. “I don’t think there’s any other place where it would have happened quite this way.”

Thomas supports this, noting local artists’ disregard for ‘looking cool’, while Rushforth points to the quality of Bristol’s soundsystems in shaping an understanding of great electronic music: “Just being able to experience proper bass is a privilege a lot of people don’t have,” he says.

“Bristol gives you a confidence to not hold back when you do have ideas,” Jones adds. “You end up doing quite unusual things not because of a deliberate plan, but because there’s nothing to hold you back. There’s a collective confidence because everyone is being uncompromising”.

Accordingly, the group’s new single, ‘Ruptured’, is a far darker, more left-field track than those on CHAMBER; “it just gives a more rounded view of what we do,” Rushforth claims.

“That first one had to be a banger… this one shows we can play slower and make it a bit more production-focused.”

“I don’t know how people are going to react to it,” Hill says. “This one might require a bit more patience.”

“That’s alright” Rushforth replies, “got to separate the wheat from the chaff somehow.”

Beyond this, the group are uncertain as to where SCALPING goes next. “We never decided for ourselves what we’re going to end up being,” Jones claims. “We’re in an environment where it can grow into anything.”

For now, the focus is to “constantly be nodding to both worlds,” Rushforth says. “To see bands and dance music, keeping up to date with both sides, while still trying to be SCALPING… outside of everything.”

17

Interview Chronic pain as hypermedia performance art, by Sam Walton Photography by Gem Harris

BodyVice

Natalie Sharp – performance artist, costumier, provocateur and the musician sporadically known as Lone Taxidermist – is sat at her kitchen table on a drizzly mid-September Monday morning, wrapped in an oversized hoodie, explaining what’s going on with her back. “The last time I was checked, they said it was a ‘dehydrated disc bulge’,” she says, “but every time I go I get given a different result: it’s somewhere between a herniated disc, a slipped disc, a disc bulge, a degenerative disc, a dehydrated disc, or a form of osteoarthritis, depending on who you talk to at the NHS. That used to be frustrating, but it’s not anymore – I’ve given up on trying to understand what my condition is, because if you’re constantly trying to find out what’s wrong with you and how to make it go away, you’ll never come to terms with accepting that you have chronic pain.”

That phrase – “chronic pain” – crops up more than any other in our couple of hours together. Initially, it jars – the sort of phrase that automatically induces sympathy flinches on hearing – but little by little, as we talk, the repetition normalises it, until eventually it’s just there, as uncomfortable as it is immovable, with the only practical option, much like the condition itself, being to make lemonade: “For me,” concludes Sharp, “what’s been more relieving is to just accept what’s going on with my body, and then try to learn ways of helping myself feel better day to day.”

Sharp has had arthritis in her left ankle since childhood after an accident went untreated, but over time that has affected her gait to the extent that, now in her thirties, and to use Sharp’s own diagnosis that’s far more intuitively understandable than any she’ll get from a doctor, “it’s fucked up my back”. The upshot of it all is that she’s lived in constant pain for three years now, drugs are either uselessly weak or come with terrifying side effects, and the condition shows no sign of going away.

18

Anybody who’s seen Sharp perform before, whether with regular collaborators Jenny Hval and Gazelle Twin, or as Lone Taxidermist, during which crowds are routinely wrapped in cling-film, pitted against six-foot custard-spraying vulvas, or subject to acts of cake-sitting (Google it), may suspect that such a debilitating physical condition as hers is not particularly compatible with her stage presence. And while they’d be right, Sharp’s response hasn’t been to retreat. Instead, she’s confronted the situation by making a 45-minute experimental theatre piece that is directly about the experience of living with and treating her disability.

Step forward, then, BodyVice, a piece of chronic pain performance art, encompassing everything from the combined futuristic excitement/institutionalised coldness of MRI scanners, all techno throbs and disconcertingly calm safety warnings, to the raw physicality of the sensation itself.

— I would love to make a nipple synth — In the show, Sharp, with painted face and dressed in a leotard decorated with anatomically correct muscles and fascia that leaves her looking like a flayed escapee from Gunter von Hagens’ Body Worlds exhibition, moves through a loose narrative that involves being wheeled through hospital corridors, subjected to probes and scans, and finally possessed by a sort of demonic spirit that is simultaneously expressing and purging the intense pain that is emanating from her back. She triggers nightmarish musical cues by running her fingers down a medschool model of a spine that’s been modified to become a MIDI instrument, howls into a distorted microphone, and she and accomplice Tara Pattenden perform ritualistic coordinated choreography that invokes the mechanistic spinning of an MRI scanner’s magnets and the unsettling corporeal invasion that

Interview

19

Interview

“BodyVice is definitely not just music. I don’t think it’s even music at all, really – it’s internal pain” 20

Interview frequently accompanies medical inspection. In the background, a film shows gracefully rotating three-dimensional renderings of various body parts between blasts of abstract shapes that throb in time with the beats.

On paper, BodyVice may read like a horrorshow psychodrama. But in the flesh (and beneath it), the effect is less sensationalist. Sure, it’s urgent and dizzying, traumatic and confusing, but it’s also compelling and unexpectedly evocative for something so superficially odd: as field recordings of boomy hospital corridors and buzzing fluorescent lights zing from the speakers, one can almost smell, synesthetically, the unmistakable hospital aroma combo of iodine, military-grade bleach and industrial-scale catering; when Sharp is shrieking at the piece’s end, there’s a sense that it’s not a verbal encoding of her chronic physical pain, but an expression of the pain itself, whereby the nervous sensation has simply found a direct oral outlet, with no translation required.

Not that the show started out like this. “Initially, it wasn’t about chronic pain at all,” explains Sharp of the show’s genesis.

“Originally, it was about my experience inside an MRI machine.

When I was in there, it sounded to me like my whole body was vibrating and I was having this transcendental moment, so I wanted to make a journey about the experience of the machine, of being inside this massive magnet, and what that felt like for me. I wanted to see if I could bring together a device and a body, looking at all forms of technology – algorithms, neural networks – and how we can be consumed by AI, how we allow machines to help us, to marry what it is to be human with what it is to be machine.”

Things only became more personal when Sharp’s friend and instrument maker Tara Pattenden, aka Phantom Chips, got involved. “Tara – she’s the real scientist in terms of what’s going on with BodyVice, because she makes the synthesisers and noisy machines, she makes the haptic playable spines – had been reading a book discussing the idea that there’s no language for chronic pain,” explains Sharp, “so from there I started thinking about how we communicate that. Like, what does chronic pain sound like, how does it work, how do you express it through other people?”

Turns out though – who knew? – that finding words for something apparently supralingual is not an easy brief, and although Sharp admits that she’s still trying to work it out, she’s getting closer with each BodyVice performance. “I reckon by this time next year I’ll be a bit more crystallised about what the fuck’s going on with this,” she says with a smile.

How the show will actually look twelve months from now is anyone’s guess. When asked to compare BodyVice to the fetishy, sex-positive vibe of her Lone Taxidermist gigs, all cake and vulva, Sharp’s mind starts to race, rather gleefully: “I’m sure it’ll go that way, knowing me. Further down the line,” she dreams. “If I get more money – when I get more money! – I would love to make a nipple synth.” A what, now? “It would be this wall of skin with a series of tits coming out and on the end of the tit is the nipple, which would be the potentiometer. And you could

21

Interview

tweak it. I think it would be amazing,” she continues, thrilled by her own imagination. “And in the part of the show where I’m asking the MRI machine questions, there are some that apply to women only, so I might wear these LED knickers that Tara has made where there’s a light over where the clit is, so when I open up my legs it’d be like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction!”

— Queen of New Weird Britain — Considering flights of fancy like this, it’s perhaps not for nothing that Sharp has been annointed as the “queen of New Weird Britain”, a term coined by The Quietus’ John Doran aiming to throw a rope around the loose affiliation of artists who occupy the current UK experimental underground – Gazelle Twin, AJA, Snapped Ankles, Hen Ogledd, UKAEA, et cetera. The movement is based less around a common sound than it is around a common attitude, where willful strangeness and provocation is championed alongside a DIY spirit that compensates for the complete absence of budget. More pertinently for BodyVice, though, it’s a scene where gigs – usually utterly immersive and confounding – come far closer than recordings to realising the creative ambitions of the artists. Sharp’s into her title (“I was like, ‘I’ll have that! Where’s my crown! Where’s my fucking red carpet!’”), and rightfully so: after all, BodyVice would be a husk of its true experience were it to be rendered purely in audio form and pressed into a piece of vinyl for home listening.

Simply put, the show requires a stage. Then again, Sharp winces when I suggest she might’ve made something theatrical.

“I’m not a fan of that term – it just makes me think of tits’n’teeth, showbiz and jazz hands,” she confesses. “Really, though, I’m just done with being in a band and playing instruments on stage, or even watching people with their modular setup, like this” – she hunches over her kitchen table, making miniature typing gestures – “laptop, Apple logo, nothing else. I’m fucking bored

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of it. My nature is always to do more, and give more. I wish I could just turn up with a USB stick, and I have it done, but unfortunately it doesn’t work like that.

“I mean, BodyVice is definitely not just music,” she continues. “I don’t think it’s even music at all, really – it’s internal pain.” She pauses, then laughs at the melodrama of her last statement, but there’s an attendant darkness to that thought, too: Sharp had to stop touring her last project, Trifle, after it became too physically painful to perform, something that still upsets her now. Will BodyVice go the same way, adding a metaperformative irony to the existing emotional rollercoaster that the show already navigates? And if so, what of Sharp’s admirable pragmatism of embracing her pain, via BodyVice, and of using that acceptance to help herself feel better? Is there potential catharsis there?

“Well, doing the show is really painful,” she acknowledges. “I don’t know if catharsis is the right word though, because, actually, I feel more like I’m exorcising something: I get really upset and I start screaming a lot and I start throwing myself around the place and sort of convulsing. So it’s a tricky one. I feel like I can’t really answer that right now – or rather that my answer would change all the time.”

Later, she tells me that she likes to hang upside down using specialist apparatus rigged up in her bedroom to help her back – “You hang yourself up and it’s like traction, to stretch out your vertebrae,” she explains, and having witnessed her stage energy and embrace of the wild and weird, the thought of Sharp making like a bat in the privacy of her own home seems almost comically apt. “You’re supposed to do it every day,” she continues, “but I don’t, because I’m quite a lazy person.” The conversation moves on, but considering the imagination, bloody-mindedness, endurance, determination, stoicism, mental fortitude and artistic execution required to pull off something as singular as BodyVice, I start to wonder if that last statement is true.

PRESENTS

2019

2020

T I C K E T S AVA I L A B L E AT M Y T I C K E T. C O . U K

Interview

Kojaque The kids who grew up on Odd Future are now developing their own lo-fi rap identities, by Alex Francis Photography by Sophie Barloc 24

Interview Halfway through my interview with Kojaque he stops me.

“Sorry, but you look exactly like a fella I went to school with.

It’s so odd – I’ll show you after the interview. You’re the spit of this guy.” Afterwards we take a selfie on his phone. The picture’s going straight on the group chat. Kojaque’s world feels personal, even oddly intimate at times. Maybe ten seconds after he hears my name for the first time we’re talking about Truman Capote and moving to London as though picking up the threads of a conversation from a few days before.

Previous releases have seen the Dublin rapper bribing “the bouncer with a bump of charlie” (‘Last Pint’). Meanwhile, on lead single ‘Airbnb’ from new mixtape Green Diesel, he raps about having sex with a stranger and disappearing over a distorted Soundcloud-rap bassline: “Leave a review of the sheets [...] I always fuck it and leave”. That’s not the guy I meet, though – in person he hews much closer to the more introverted moments on debut album Deli Daydreams.

On ‘Love and Braggadocio’, he raps: “I’m a moody bitch, the pen only writes when the mood’s right [...] I could love myself, I’m just not there yet.” It’s that kind of quiet self-analysis he brings to the interview. More than once he picks up the spoon from his coffee absent-mindedly while thinking over a question, sticks it in his mouth and leans back, stretching so that the handle points straight upward for a moment, before jolting his chair back down to reality and answering. It never feels like he’s here to promote his mixtape. The effect is more contemplative, with Kojaque displaying the kind of reserve that comes from an adolescence spent preoccupied with music that people around him didn’t much care for.

It was the discovery of Odd Future that changed everything for him. “I saw them at a festival when I was sixteen. I’d probably only seen ‘Yonkers’ or something, maybe one or two of their other tracks. I went to the gig and was like, ‘this is crazy, I’ve never heard anything like this,’” he says. The DIY mentality and aggressive attitude of early Odd Future resonated with a lot of teenagers in the early 2010s (there’re relatively few other musicians who have had riot police called on an album signing at a comic book store) but it especially hit home for a young Kojaque. “Almost out of spite I was like, ‘fuck it, if they can do it I should be able to do it too.’”

The next few years saw him grinding out beats and recording childish raps alone in his bedroom. “All the lyrics I was writing were fucking gross and the beats were even worse.

Listening to [Odd Future’s] music, you can say that it’s simplistic but it’s hard to make though. Until you actually try and make that shit you don’t understand how hard it is.”

Those first few years proved formative, as he gradually found a style over jazzy lo-fi beats and began drawing subject matter from his own life instead of horrorcore cliches. By the time that he released his debut single ‘Midnight Flower’ at age 19, some of his major themes – depression, self-medication, vulnerable masculinity – were already well in place. The video also prefigures a concern with performance art, which would ultimately become a key part of Kojaque’s visual style. At the

time, though, the idea was simpler: “It was like, ‘ah, I’ve never seen anyone do a music video underwater and not take any breaths, that would be cool.’”

While the track plays, Kojaque mouths along while facedown in a fish tank full of water, dropping in a wrist watch and attempting to swallow pills when the lyrics call for it. In the final seconds, his facial expression turns and he bursts up for air, just as the video cuts to black. From the video it’s unclear exactly what happens, but Kojaque tells me he passed out immediately after they stopped rolling. It was the first take. He decided against a second: “We took a look at the footage and went, ‘sick, I pretty much made it to the end’. Looking back to contextualise it again, unbeknownst to me it was a performance art piece.

That’s the joy of doing stuff and not thinking about it too much, you only really work out what it is afterwards.”

— Soft boys — I mention that ‘Midnight Flower’ feels just as self-assured as his newer work, but Kojaque demurs. “That’s very funny, I didn’t feel confident or self-assured whatsoever. I was sitting on it for maybe two or three months before I actually put it out.

I wasn’t in a good place at all, so confidence and all, forget about it. I was battling with the idea that if I put it out it could very much fail and it’d be up there forever.” It was only when his brothers and close mate Kean Kavanaugh encouraged him that Kojaque built up the nerve to put the video on YouTube, where it racked up over 100,000 views in a couple of days. Soft Boy Records, cofounded with Kean, came soon after.

This wasn’t a recipe for instant success. After those views, no major labels or shoe brands came knocking, and it was back to basics for Kojaque. It didn’t help that at times the early days of Soft Boy could be fractious. In previous interviews, Kojaque has mentioned an inability to work well with Kean despite their close friendship. When I bring this up, he grimaces a little and explains, “We more just stayed out of each other’s way because we’re best friends and we didn’t take criticism from each other well. All he wants is, ‘oh, cool’, and I’d be like, ‘let me add some shit, let me get on the keyboards and play some stuff over your stuff ’. He’d be like, ‘no, you need to leave that the fuck alone.’”

It was only by bringing more people into the room in massive My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy-style sessions that the two began to “get past that initial brotherly rival shit” and feel able to work on each other’s music. Since then, things have begun to move faster for Kojaque and Soft Boy. Nearly half of the new mixtape was co-produced with Kavanaugh.

Yet Kojaque can still feel anxious recording and going on stage. “It’s still kind of a struggle. You just stop writing or gigging for a while, step back and go, ‘fuck, I don’t even know if I’m good at this shit.’ I don’t know, a lot of life is just getting past those feelings or getting up on stage while feeling like that.

Then, when you come off, you’re like, ‘fuck, glad I did that.’

I don’t know. You fail doing what you hate, so you may as well do what you like.”

25

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Reviews Albums

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Albums

Kim Gordon — No Home Record (matador) In a particularly boring conversation between Kim Gordon and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein four years ago, Gordon breaks into laughter at what she calls “the gift of Airbnb”. It was the enabler that gave her enough headspace to write the book that she was promoting at the time, Girl in a Band, but it quickly turned into its own advert for the couch-surfer and hotelier’s dream alike. For an artist, Airbnb was simply a cheaper way to go on a writer’s retreat: you’re in a clean space stripped of sentimentality, nostalgia and history. It’s harder to become distracted without a feeling of attachment to your surroundings; it’s not your stuff. And with that, you’re free to fake a new beginning, based on whatever uncannily intimate experience has been marketed at you with algorithmic precision.

Finding the artist’s utopia within an Airbnb stay has become a gradually less funny concept for Gordon in the passing years – it’s just what she does now. At the time of writing her book, she was working on a transitionary piece of visual art linking New York’s condominiums with noise bands and taglines: Thor, Fortress of Glassitude, Bauhaus inspired living. Absent landlords were devoid of time to oversee the beautification of a city they weren’t living in, and as their cash rebutted a will to integrate within the city’s culture, Gordon at least tried to incriminate the commerce within the dissident sounds of the city. New York was crudely left – in her words – as one large and expensive garden.

Earlier this year, too, as part of her first time exhibiting at the Andy Warhol Museum, she included a series of nude drawings on tracing paper called ‘the Airbnb Series’. They rendered the hotel room as a modern landscape that

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blended intimacy with publicity. Your most precious travel memories made and consumed within a thumbnail picture of the perfectly displayed towel rack. If John Constable were still alive and painting, you could forget the well-oiled canvases of Hampstead Heath. Here’s a triptych of rooftop terraces close to the city center, suitable for 4-6 guests, on wood and acrylic.

On Kim Gordon’s first solo album within a 40-year career you only have to make it past the opening track to hear the agitated rock intro of a new song, also called ‘Airbnb’. It suits the artistic trajectory of No Home Record to a T; freedom, fresh in a city to-be-discovered.

But pre-curiosity comes the quest of how you should enjoy it. Gordon sings through advertising pages of slated walls, 47-inch flat screen TVs and a lounging daybed, or the alternatives of cozy and warm apartments with blue tiled floors and a free water bottle from your super-host or super-hostess. A relief, at least, that her legacy can afford her a greater decision than picking between cardboard rooms in Bournemouth, advertised only by there being both a hot and a cold tap. A thrashing chorus begs for a cleansing space to start the record – “Airbnb/ Gotta set me free” – and it seems to have worked. Like every resistance to the formula from Kim Gordon before, this isn’t how you thought she’d sound.

Each song at its core orbits around this dichotomy of returning home – to a place that knows her as well as she knows it – and yet still yearning for that scantily-phrased new beginning. Thematically, it’s the same hymn sheet as the one she’s been all but singing from in the fissures between her musical output. But there’s only a certain amount of history you can get rid of when you’re Kim Gordon, regardless of any well-spent artistic allegiance to a lack of familiarity (and, for that matter, no matter how empty the Airbnb). Her breathy voice is as iconic now as it was as one of the first women of rock’n’roll, co-anchoring Sonic Youth at the forefront of an alternative noise rock scene for three decades.

No track panders to the confu-

sion as much as the re-contextualised ‘Murdered Out’ – the first song she released in isolation under her own name three years ago. A corrosive loop breaks over the carefully sculptured feedback to sexualize a bleak and tensile soundscape of a time in Southern California’s automotive past, where vehicle owners would obscure their windows with black matte spray-paint. Car brand badges and number plates are murdered out in an act of soul-purging, thick with a Downward Spiral-era Nine Inch Nails bassline and the frenetic electro gravel of Pigface’s Fook. Gordon’s seditious vocals are barely breathed over the top of a percussive beat from Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, funkier and more intricate than anything normally brought forward from Sonic Youth.

It’s the opening track ‘Sketch Artist’ that is still No Home Record’s unwavering, restless masterpiece – a piercing sonic exploration of a death stare through mechanised acerbic glitches, daring you to question its lyrical tics: “You’re a mystery, like a horse.” A less cryptic horse is ‘Paprika Pony’, at the other end of the sensuous spectrum: an industrial bump’n’grind cross-examination of female identity in the midst of a dancehall beat. Gordon’s rasping cadences barely break into song, discussing the loaded phrases that signify femininity: “What am I? Just not a girl. A woman.”

The enveloping motoric deadpan instills a similar instinctive urgency to ‘Don’t Play It Back’, itself an off-kilter club track with a similar wasteland urgency to the avantdiatribe euphoria of Robyn’s work with La Bagatelle Magique. Both hurtle back to Gordon, laced with anodyne licks and an unsettlingly expressionless, subtle politics: a sturdy experimental peer to the electrifying riot grrrl feminism of Bikini Kill and Brat Mobile.

Even without the politics, antimusicality and anti-precision are countered by a heavy and deft improvisational tone, never quite mastered in her work with Body/Head. No Home Record is spattered with tongue-in-cheek wordplay and a humour that has in part come from thirty self-confessed years of not

Albums knowing how to play an instrument. The battleground between ‘Cookie Butter’ and closing track ‘Get Yr Life Back Yoga’ puts condiments against each other. The former finds its amidst an abstract spiraling love story (“You fucked/ You think/ I want/ You fell”) and its only resolve is “cookie butter”. The final track instead annuls its sensual narrative with a kind of culinary petrichor, where “everyday things smell like dark chocolate cocoa butter”. But as you pick your favourite lard-based spread, the expansive Moroder-esque helicopter drones engulf you, and without Bill Nace’s softly sprawling guitar, Gordon sounds both like a sermonizing Patti Smith at the peak of her Beatific rock summit, or like Cosey Fanni Tutti sewing together the hiccupping synths of her post-Gristle comeback.

The only song free from Gordon’s political hand on No Home Record is ‘Earthquake’, a tender and – in the record’s context – almost obtrusively quiet love song: “This song is for you/ if I could cry and shake for you/ I’d lay awake for you.” Gordon’s wavering vocals are the centerpiece of the music for the first time, and it’s the first time too that you can hear a maturing fragility in her voice.

Does “sonic youth” change its meaning when you’re in an age bracket that gives you free bus travel?

No Home Record may be heavy with corporeal, corrosive loops and enough experimental flicks and discordant dynamism from Yves Tumor producer Justin Raisen to wilfully turn off the MTV faithful, but it still ends up with a definable melody at its close – not unlike the depths of alternative music culture that Gordon made strangely and critically accessible. Scraping away the advertised and commercial clunk from her reading of L.A., each track unspools as part of the mythical resistance to what you want Kim Gordon’s first solo record to sound like. It’s almost like she doesn’t see this as quite the occasion that her fanbase does.

The question of Nutella versus Biscoff doesn’t have an answer, and neither does anything else. It’s enough of a sonic clearout for Gordon to become rock’n’roll’s Marie Kondo, but as she’s previously

confessed, doing anything radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary from the outside. 8/10 Tristan Gatward

Danny Brown — uknowhatimsayin¿ (warp) Danny Brown is full of surprises.

2016’s Atrocity Exhibition was a thick forest of a record, listeners needing machetes to lop through its thicket.

Brown drew on production and instrumentation devices that are typically more at home in post-punk and industrial rock music, even down to its Joy Division-aping title. It was an expansion on ideas that had been percolating since 2011’s XXX (2013’s Old was a curious detour into more radio-friendly terrain).

After a three year absence, one could reasonably have expected him to have spent the time hacking yet deeper into the musical wilderness.

Wonder, then, at the manicured garden that is uknowhatimsayin¿. At eleven tracks and a little over half an hour, it is his most instantly enjoyable record to date, without losing any of the holistic vision that makes all of his prior albums noteworthy. The reason this time around for the cohesion probably comes from Brown allowing a second auteur into the mix: the legendary Q-Tip is listed here as the “executive producer”.

His fingerprints are everywhere, from the three tracks that list him as primary producer outwards. uknowhatimsayin¿ is nimble, flexing between moods and registers smoothly, never losing its central trippy clarity.

Lead single ‘Dirty Laundry’ gave an early flavour with Brown at play recounting recreational acts far too lurid for these pages, whilst Tip’s production acts as a gentle pacemaker. ‘Best Life’ and ‘Combat’ further display that the A

Tribe Called Quest man’s touch for a hazy, smoky arrangement is undiminished, the former making use of a string-laden old skool R&B sample, the latter resting on a single, looped brass line that will burrow its way into the rest of your day. They do more to recall hip-hop’s past than predict its future, but they prove difficult to resist.

Similarly, ‘Theme Song’ is based around a string base that calls to mind Dr. Octagon’s ‘Blue Flowers’, with sinister, barely-audible whispers adding to its creepy crawly menace. Ideas are here in number, but unlike before, they form an orderly queue; this is not the manic listening experience that intoxicated so many three years ago and consequently some will be disappointed with the straightforwardness, even familiarity, on offer, but it is an easy pill to swallow. “They say chances gotta make a champion, know what I’m sayin?”, is Brown’s last line on the title track, a sentiment that might have had more currency before than it does here.

The record is sprinkled liberally with guest spots, ranging from the blockbuster to the breakout. The album’s true galactic lift-off moment comes with the arrival of El-P and Killer Mike on ‘3 Tearz’ who provide a simple mantra with a steamroll punch. It may not be their most substance-heavy contribution to music, but they leave a dent like none of their contemporaries. At the other end of the career spectrum, Brown smartly anchors two of the album’s more circumspect tracks with vocals from London-viaNigeria spoken word artist Obongjayar, whilst one of hip-hop’s eminent current enfants terribles JPEGMAFIA lends both vocal and production duties.

All of which is not to say that all of Brown’s oddity has been airbrushed away.

On one of the album’s standout tracks, ‘Negro Spiritual’, he snaps into his tauter, more urgent, high-pitch cadence. For an MC that struck an early reputation based on his ability to incorporate a multitude of vocal speeds and tones into individual tracks, uknowhatimsayin¿ is content to allow Brown to operate in a direct and measured flow for the most part. It makes this ‘Negro Spiritual’’s divergence from

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Albums the mean all the more arresting, and the production of Flying Lotus propels the track through multiple further bloodpressure rising gears.

‘Belly of the Beast’ is another moment that allows a glimpse of the Atrocity-era Brown to shine through.

The gasping, ambient vocal treatments that provide the backing, together with the incessant, oddly-paced drumpad rhythms, are unsettling and prod the listener into asking questions rather than sitting back and relaxing into the safety of the rest of the album’s 90s-tinged psychedelic rap. It is no surprise to learn that the track is produced by Brown’s long-time right-hand-man Paul White, the twin brain trust that has seen Brown spend much of the last decade at hiphop’s vanguard. In truth, uknowhatimsayin¿ does little to expand that reputation, but it does provide one of the year’s most user-friendly and satisfying rap records.

7/10 Max Pilley

Battles — Juice B Crypts (warp) Now reduced to a two-piece after the departure last year of bassist Dave Konopka, New York’s Battles headed back to their hometown to make an album there for the fourth time. The end product is the giddily unrestrained Juice B Crypts, an LP both fast in terms of tempo and run time and fastidious when it comes to its construction; repeat listens and deeper analysis will potentially throw up some Easter eggs, with the record apparently “encrypted…with hidden codes and secret languages that only [the band] know.”

Still, it already feels as if there’s enough concealed gems revealing themselves on the first few spins; in an inspired move, the pair drafted in Sal Principato of ’80s NYC no-wave cult legends Liquid Liquid to bring a typically avant-garde vocal

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turn to the off-kilter funk of lead single ‘Titanium 2 Step’.

Elsewhere, Battles move furiously through a set of musical gears that feel genuinely fresh to them; the opening one-two of ‘A Loop So Nice…’ and ‘They Played It Twice’ is an exercise in shimmering techno, whilst there’s a controlled chaos to ‘Sugar Foot’ that, in another coup of collaboration, cements its credentials as the album’s closest flirtation with psych by drafting in Yes frontman Jon Anderson and Taipei experimentalists WWWW. There’s the odd nod to old Battles, too (‘Fort Greene Park’ in particular) but for the most part this is a band redefined; by the time Juice B Crypts closes out with the truly frenzied two-parter ‘Last Supper on Shasta’, it’s clear that Battles have taken the handbrake well and truly off. It suits them. 8/10 Joe Goggins

Blue Hawaii — Open Reduction Internal Fixation (arbutus) What do The Lion King, Charlie’s Angels and The L Word have in common? Very little, except for having been targeted by Hollywood’s insatiable appetite for reboots. Perhaps because global warming is so terrifying that we want escape into comforting memories of the past, most modern media seems to comprise revisitations of former hits.

Yet is this nostalgia ever a positive thing in creative terms? This is a question that recurs again and again when confronted with Blue Hawaii’s latest effort; fourth album Open Reduction Internal Fixation. Drawing upon the club hits of the early ‘oughts – particularly tracks working within genres such as trance and garage — the album’s textures promise to transport the listener to simpler, sweatier times in Ibiza. Songs such as ‘Can We Go Back’ foreground the nostalgia theme,

using the lovers’ laments familiar from house to transmute the pain of heartbreak into dance-floor ecstasy.

It’s joined by ‘All the Things’ and ‘Still I Miss U’ as the album’s most successful tracks, harnessing some of the sentimentality associated with trance to deliver a necessary emotional punch.

However, this sense of a greater depth or quality of feeling is sorely missed on the likes of ‘All That Blue’ or ‘On A High’, which, without the catharsis that is so central to the club experience, feel somewhat lifeless and repetitive.

Whilst a contemporary perspective can sometimes provide new insight to old favourites, ORIF shows that needing to “go back to go forward” is a myth. 6/10 Megan Wallace

Floating Points — Crush (ninja tune) After a decade of Floating Points, and a restless evolution of styles that’s made Sam Shepherd’s work such an intangible touchpoint, Crush might not represent a producer coming full circle but there’s a propulsion to this set of tracks that has him focused on the dancefloor.

As Floating Points’ sound has evolved, so has the clamour to return to the roots of early tracks like the ‘Nuits Sonores’ and ‘Vacuum Boogie’ as Shepherd meandered through cerebral takes on anything that took his cratedigging fancy.

That shift might have felt dramatic but Shepherd’s dexterity and curiosity as a producer has always been such that even as his sound explorations have become more diffused there’s always been muscle memory; the glorious potential of a wallop rising from his explorative states.

Mutation is a word often thrown at his kaleidoscope sound, but it’s always felt a bit ugly and abrupt, as if there

Albums was no control of the end result. Crush is pure intent. “I was trying to create something that pulls you in,” Shepherd explains, “like when you’re in a club and all the elements combine to create this amazingly immersive moment, something you can’t escape from.”

And while Shepherd doesn’t deliver back-to-back bangers, in his own words it “evokes a slow violence” that reveals itself in shades throughout. It’s there on the choppy trip-hop beats of ‘Last Bloom’, gets condensed into the 2-minute analogue tune up of ‘Karakul’ as synths engage in a stuttering conversation of disparate clicks and pulses, and it proves to be the detonation for ‘LesAlpx’ as its skittish hi hats snap into focus before the low-end destroys everything in its path.

If that was a reminder that Shepherd still knows how to threaten with a thunderous intent, the rest of Crush is an exercise in finding the perfect balance.

Where ‘Falaise’ is a mournful little thing – a fluttering, floating ephemeral miniscore – ‘Anasickmodular’ blooms, blips and bursts with a twisted amen breaks; where ‘Environments’ feels like Shepherd engaged in a happy battle of wills with his equipment, ‘Bias’ is another slowburner that locks into a moody two-step beat and nods to Shepherd’s formative years in Manchester listening to his local blare UK garage.

Together, it’s a showcase of his unrivalled ability to take man vs machine and create Morse code from another planet. Whatever wavelength Shepherd is on, Crush is the almost untouchable proof that no-one else is anywhere near it. 9/10 Reef Younis

Angel Olsen — All Mirrors (jagjaguwar) Themes of reflection and projection run throughout the lead single and

title track of All Mirrors. They can just as easily be applied to the entirely of Angel Olsen’s fourth album, which is as unexpected as the artist herself. Despite her lyrical honesty she remains unknowable, evolving with each release and holding up a cracked lens to reveal a new side of her creativity.

The single initially suggests a continuation of ‘Intern’, the icy ’80s synth track that opened 2016’s My Woman.

Yet while it retains languorous traces of Lana Del Rey it explodes into dramatic, ominous strings that are usually equated with a Bond theme.

The 14-piece orchestra is one of the defining features of the album, which was initially conceived as a dual record: one set of solo songs and another of full band versions. She eventually decided to proceed with just the latter but the sheer scale of ambition, and the complete integration of Jherek Bischoff ’s arrangements, mean there are only a couple of tracks where the raw versions can be glimpsed: ‘Summer’, a dance worthy number that could be stripped back to country guitar, and ‘Spring’, which opens with the familiarity of Carole King before being hijacked by a slightly woozy synth.

The bridge between the two sounds is ‘Chance’; a last dance at the party that starts with just voice and piano before swelling into something akin to ‘Unchained Melody’. This is a good reference point throughout, with its cavernous drums, wall of sound instrumentation, and brooding romanticism all coming from Phil Spector’s school of production.

As with Olsen’s previous records, however, she takes these vintage influences and makes them her own. ‘Impasse’ is another key track: it opens with restrained voice and dark, low string swirls. As the percussion crashes and the strings build, however, the big sound pushes her impressive vibrato to new heights of emotive power.

Anyone looking for the grunge-pop of ‘Hi-Five’ will be disappointed, with the most immediately commercial tracks being vaguely unsatisfying. The Motown

beat on ‘Too Easy’ and whooshing strings on ‘What Is It’, with its over familiar sentiment of ‘it’s never too late to admit that you just want to feel something again’ don’t fit into the moody flow of the album.

For the most part, though, this is her biggest sounding release to date and it could have been given the alternative title All Ambition. 9/10 Susan Darlington

Anna Meredith — FIBS (moshi moshi) In the three-years since Anna Meredith emerged with her outstanding debut album Varmints she’s had a stab at reworking Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on the experimental Anno, released her first soundtrack (for Eighth Grade) and even got Big Liz’s attention – it’s now Anna Meredith MBE, in case you didn’t know.

From Last Night of the Proms to high-fashion ads, contemporary classical to art pop, techno and ambient, Meredith’s ability to straddle the different worlds was a characteristic that made her aforementioned debut so compelling.

And that cavalcade of orchestral ambition, compositional cleverness and a playful ear for melody makes its successor no different, but equally brilliant.

All those years of writing, composing and creating music for others is transposed here; the balance of avant garde and pop sensibility at the heart of what makes Meredith’s music so engaging, and ultimately what makes FIBS a lot of fun.

You’ve got the joyous stomp and wailing guitars of ‘Paramour’, the off-kilter, theatrical synths, tumultuous rhythms and twisted time signatures of ‘Sawbones’ and the more traditionally classical ‘moonmoons’ adding a dark, dramatic tension; an expressive soundtrack to a piece of performance art you’re yet to see.

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Albums Meredith talks about the concept behind FIBS being “Lies. But nice friendly lies. Little stories and constructions and daydreams and narratives.”

That sense of mischief plays out in the melodic pop and vocal hooks of ‘Killjoy’, it’s jagged, rhythmic switches teasing and tantalising in a Dirty Projectors meets The Futureheads kind of way. Or take the satisfyingly dubby groove of ‘Calion’, beefed up with a surprisingly substantial bass womp as it slips into red-lit neon and slinking shadows: the electronic gossamer track Chromatics might’ve written for the Bronson soundtrack.

Elsewhere, ‘Limpet’ treads heavily in the world of rising rock rhythms, ‘Ribbons’ bops along with an art pop delicateness and the stop-start ‘Bump’ stutters and jerks as the most abstract track on the album. But far from feeling like a jumbled assortment of styles, FIBS feels more like a sprawling spectrum that hits a spot somewhere between the irresistible and the intriguing. 8/10 Reef Younis

Cigarettes After Sex — Cry (partisan) If Beach House is the meal, Cigarettes After Sex is now the faint neutralized waft of flavor when you begrudgingly wash the dishes, scraping off the residue of old food and dried gravy. A variant of this tasted good, once upon a time.

Their self-titled debut became one of those records that appeared from nowhere, that everyone thought they had discovered before everyone else.

The cinema noir sensuality was infectious; Greg Gonzalez’s reverb-drenched androgynous croon sounded like an extraterrestrial clone of C86 culture with a greater knowledge of shoegaze’s starryeyed principles.

Sadly, Cry is as big a casualty of second album syndrome as they come.

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The debut’s intrigue is replaced with a slapdash eroticism and an overdose of the ‘nice guy’ complex. Even the tracklisting reads as a poetry index for softboi anti-heroes – ‘Don’t Let Me Go’, ‘Pure’, ‘Falling in Love’, ‘Cry’. The latter contradicts its sleepy bassline with a lament that the singer is too complicated and can’t be faithful (“I wish I could”). He says he will only make you cry. But it’s ok, because him telling you this is self-aware and romantic.

On ‘Kiss It Off Me’, this nice guy is now a roadside voyeur from the school of hard-knocks. Sure, “Could you love me instead with all the boyfriends you get? I could make you forget about all of those rich fuckboys” is more well-intentioned than a white van wolf-whistle, but its subsequent lament that she’ll probably break his heart is a fair few entitled steps along the road to the middle-aged man falling in love with a waitress because she’s been polite.

Without listening too hard, it’s easy to be washed away in the twilight reverb.

The Cigs haven’t changed it up much, despite apparently taking inspiration from ’90s El Paso country instead of ’50s romantic pop. The trouble comes with the subtext now being one of toxicity rather than adventure. 3/10 Tristan Gatward

Big Thief — Two Hands (4ad) Emerging from the wake of Big Thief’s third record, U.F.O.F, released only a few months ago, Two Hands is perhaps the band’s most cohesive and down-to-earth work yet.

Lead singer Adrianne Lenker conceives of the records as non-identical twins; one “celestial”, one of “earth”.

The two serve to justify and contextualise each other, as well as to contrast – where U.F.O.F is hazy and dreamlike, Two Hands feels pure, tangible and

raw. As ever the fragility of Lenker’s voice contrasts beautifully with the polished virtuosity of the instrumentation, creating a tension unique to the album and the band.

Two Hands is a musical treat, full of aching fervour; sincere and honest without feeling overwrought or affected.

It sinks into the lullaby-like opening track ‘Rock and Sing’, followed by a soaring, uplifting ballad, ‘Forgotten Eyes’, on which Lenker implores, “Everybody needs someone and deserves protection”.

It all feels extremely considered, more a carefully put together selection than a showcase of the newest music. The climax is reached midway with ‘Shoulders’ and ‘Not’, both of which have appeared in live sets for the past couple of years, finally finding their home on this record.

“Two Hands has the songs that I’m the most proud of,” says Lenker in a statement. “I can imagine myself singing them when I’m old.” It devastates and uplifts in equal measure, a testament to how a band can explore new ideas and styles without losing their distinctive sound.

9/10 Katie Cutforth

Black Marble — ‘Bigger Than Life’ (sacred bones) Chris Stewart’s morning commute sounds like a rollercoaster of societal sightseeing. Having migrated from New York with his longterm project Black Marble to his new LA studio hideout, his daily bus route winds through the high-rise bustle of the city’s business district and then down the dilapidated streets of Skid Row. It’s the relationship between these two contrasts that’s inspired his third album, Bigger Than Life, a record that wholeheartedly accepts the great disparity between people by recognising what ultimately connects them.

Albums Whereas Stewart’s previous two releases (his 2012 debut, A Different Arrangement and 2016’s follow up, It’s Immaterial) scrutinised the darker corners of his own consciousness, Bigger Than Life reflects selflessly on the observations that surround him. This new outlook unveils a pensive, more discerning stance between Stewart’s lyrics. Each track sifts through motoric beats and vintage synthpop melancholy that leaves a lasting impression.

His retrospective ethos to making music mixes staccato analogue technology with untouchable simplicity, giving Bigger Than Life unmistakable character and identity throughout. His voice sounds distant but immediate and stands resolutely at the forefront of the production making the vocal hooks most memorable. It’s a maturing, more adventurous instalment and one that highlights Stewart’s unique song writing savvy. 7/10 Ollie Rankine

Clipping — There Existed an Addiction to Blood (sub pop) When Memphis rapper La Chat asks “you ain’t scared is you?” on ‘Run For Your Life’, she must surely know the answer already. Because yes I am scared – pretty terrified, actually – by the new record from hip-hop trio Clipping. The moment comes around halfway through There Existed an Addiction to Blood, a concept album homage to the cult ’80s horror film Ganja and Hess that begins ominously and descends from there.

Taking sonic inspiration from classic ’90s horrorcore and clouding it in industrial chaos, this grating record sees the experimental LA group revel in taking things too far. Daveed Diggs sets the scene early on, delivering a warning over a sparse beat on ‘Nothing is Safe’.

The multi-talented rapper, who also performed in the original Broadway run of Hamilton, thrives in his role as narrator.

Noise music has rarely featured so prominently in hip-hop, thanks in part to its presence on Yves Tumor and JPEGMAFIA’s acclaimed 2018 albums. Here, producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes skilfully forge beats out of anything from machine gun bursts to carrion flies.

They also drive for unbearable extremes: I let out a gasp of relief after realising I had survived ‘La Mala Ordina’.

‘Run For Your Life’ is the closest the record comes to providing a conventional single, while fans of Bill Gunn’s original 1973 film can find Easter eggs hidden throughout. Some songs run on too long, but criticising this album for a lack of brevity feels like missing the point: an album that ends with an 18-minutelong composition of a piano burning is a test of patience. In an era of easy-listen playlists, Clipping should at least be applauded for creating a record so thoroughly demanding. 7/10 Jamie Haworth

Common Holly — When I Say to you Black Lightening (dalliance) Brigitte Naggar – AKA Common Holly – treads bolder territory on her second LP while keeping the emotional sincerity of 2017’s Playing House firmly intact. Here, she submerges herself in darkness and dissonance: it’s rougher, looser and more atonal, while eliciting a similar kind of intrepid vulnerability that oozes from the likes of Haley Heynderickx’s and Aldous Harding’s work.

When I Say to you Black Lightening is an exploration of the human condition and the various ways we all experience pain, fear and self-delusion, and how we can learn to confront those feelings courageously. There are moments that

really shine, particularly within Naggar’s lyrical prowess – both witty and astute: the closing track, ‘Crazy Ok’, borrows form the canon of loud/quiet indie rock, and confronts mental health in a way that’s playfully flippant, while songs like ‘Central Booking’ and ‘Measured’ denote a fondness for the eerier side of folk. The melodic despondency of ‘Uuu’ is where Common Holly really prevails.

As a whole, however, Common Holly’s second album lacks fluidity. Its ideas are all over the place: from gothic folk and indie rock to dainty, introspective singer-songwriter. In theory this should work, but it feels confused here. This may also be where the appeal lies, too. Still, Naggar’s assimilation of humanity’s emotional challenges is to be commended. In spite of its faint flaws, this is a brave, well-wrought album where its creator’s potential begins to fully unfurl. 6/10 Hayley Scott

DIIV — Deceiver (captured tracks) DIIV’s last album, Is the Is Are, was a dream pop exploration about recovering from addiction. Yet within a year of its 2016 release lead singer Zachary Cole Smith was living in rehab. The Brooklyn band’s new record, Deceiver, is Smith’s attempt to dig deeper into the wounds of drug use and critique its impact on those around him. Reinforcing their rhythmdriven shoegaze with sturdier instrumentation, it represents DIIV’s most full-bodied album to date.

The record keeps to the band’s blueprint in terms of song structure, demonstrating once more a patient approach to texture and atmosphere-building. DIIV’s third LP does, however, see the band develop a more muscular edge. Opener ‘Horsehead’ wheezes into life before skulking into a potent groove, while Jeff

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Albums Buckley haunts the excellent ‘Between Tides’. Rare glimmers of light on songs like ‘The Spark’ keep the listener willing DIIV on for the album’s duration.

From the abstract artwork to shapeshifting tracks like ‘Lorelei’, Deceiver is set up for fluid interpretation – it wants listeners to find their own moments of impact. It’s fitting, then, that DIIV leave the victor unnamed after opposing impulses wrestle for control of the album’s draining finale, ‘Acheron’.

8/10 Jamie Haworth

Girl Band — The Talkies (rough trade) The Talkies opens on a panic attack. All laboured breathing set to a looming, claustrophobic drone, it sets an unsettling tone but one that feels intentional after a disjointed few years of cancelled shows and singer Dara Kiely’s open issues with mental health.

It’s a 110-second distillation that says nothing but kind of everything about Girl Band’s journey to date; Kiely’s fierce presence is a significant part of what makes them so enthralling but it’s not the defining factor because here The Talkies is about looking forward.

So, while they kicked and clattered their way through discordant debut Holding Hands with Jamie in 2015, this follow-up swims deeper into a sound and fury you feel only emanates from the basements of Russian delicatessens and the brutality behind heavy metal doors.

‘Shoulderblades’ takes the bulging adrenalin of The pAperchAse and collides it with clanging, industrialism and walls of layered, ambient reverb to create something that’s both manic and essential, ‘Couch Combover’ hits with equal heft as Kiely’s ferocious vocal contorts over mangled guitars, and ‘Salmon of Knowledge’ writhes with dissonant, pulsing electronics that throb to the surface in the

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album’s brief moments for pause.

Recorded in a stately home, The Talkies became an expression of the house itself with the drums captured twice (once on the landing and once in the cellar) to provide options in the mix. It’s an approach that comes to life on ‘Aibohphobia’ as the percussion rattles and echoes around empty space and static and a haunted, drawling Kiely sounds like he’s clawing his way through the walls.

Things are similarly vivid on the cataclysmic air raid siren of ‘Akineton’, which is less of a warning klaxon and more the instant realization you’re deep into a sub-2-minute frenzy of scattergun noise and disorientation while ‘Amygdala’ is equally as brief as Kiely mumbles and howls in garbled tongues over simpler, stripped-back guitar.

The Talkies hits you with vacillating confrontation, panic and anxiety but there’s more in play than pure, thumping menace and the ugliness of it all. From the intensity of opener ‘Prolix’ to the exhale of ‘Ereignis’, there’s a clear trajectory, and while Girl Band don’t exactly find peace, they excel here in this erratic calm. 8/10 Reef Younis

Empath — Active Listening: Night On Earth (fat possum) In a recent interview Empath explained that ‘Soft Shape’, the opening track on their debut album, was created when they sped up the beat from Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ and added a counter-rhythm based on the riff to Diana Ross’ ‘I’m Coming Out’.

The description gives some indication of the Philadelphia quartet’s randomised approach to music making but it doesn’t quite capture their messy idiosyncrasies Largely written as acoustic folk songs by Catherine Elicson, they’ve

mutated beyond recognition into lo-fi noise-pop that sound like it’s been recorded at the bottom of a well. Tracks crunch to an unexpected close and squirm out of focus just as a melody seems to have surfaced, with bird song or howls of Sonic Youth style guitar breaking through the mix.

Their willingness to tear up the rulebook is exhilarating fun, with the ringleader being former Perfect Pussy drummer Garrett Koloski. He clatters around with the enthusiasm of a hyperactive octopus, creating an intense backdrop for songs that deal with anxiety and abandon.

The exception is ‘IV’, an instrumental that draws on ambient music.

It breaks up the relentless mood of ‘Active Listening: Night On Earth’ while suggesting deeper thoughts at play. 6/10 Susan Darlington

Hana Vu — Nicole Kidman/Anne Hathaway (luminelle recordings) If you were to guess Hana Vu’s star sign after listening to her latest effort, double EP Nicole Kidman/Anne Hathaway, you’d probably say the DIY artist was a Gemini.

The sign’s duality, represented by the symbol of the twins, seems to play out on the release, which skits between melancholia and ethereal dream pop textures to fragile optimism and thumping beats.

Co-existing opposites recur throughout the album, particularly in a sense of the strange existing within the familiar, like an unshakeably eery sense of deja-vu. This sensation becomes particularly striking in a distorted, lo-fi cover of ‘Reflection’ from 1998 Disney feature film Mulan and the tongue-in-cheek lyrics of ‘At The Party’ (which would be at home in any pop song about shitty exes), set against an oneiric soundscape.

Albums It would be easy to conclude that these contrasts are a result of Vu’s tender age (she’s still at the tail-end of her teens, knee-deep in a process of experimentation and self-discovery) but this feels somewhat over-simplistic. Rather, it seems like the L.A. resident’s pointing to the fractured nature of identity itself. By naming the EPs after two women who literally make their living from pretending to be who they’re not, she’s clearly passing comment on the masks that we all too often find ourselves hiding behind.

This latest effort seems like a lesson in inconsistency; concluding that rather than straining to exist coherently, the ‘self ’ must allow itself to encompass human nature’s contradictions. 8/10 Megan Wallace

Nils Frahm — All Encores (erased tapes) In rounding off his Encores trilogy of EPs by releasing them as one fulllength package, Frahm invites questions about whether or not they were always designed to fit together, as well as an obvious pressure that he initially seemed to have avoided by opting for short-form releases – All Encores, inevitably, will now be judged against last year’s superb All Melody LP. Frahm’s calling card has always been his mastery of subtlety and, whether he intended it or otherwise, Encores 1, 2 & 3 tessellate impressively neatly. The throughline between them has less to do with the instrumental palette – although the fact that all three of them, whilst fundamentally different, are similarly minimalist helps – and instead is more indebted to mood and atmosphere.

Encores 1 sets the proverbial stall out – piano, harmonium and not a great deal else – and now, with the benefit of a little bit of distance from its release, feels like a reaction to the density of All Melody.

The progression on Encores 2 is clear; scratchily recorded so as to pick up an underlying layer of ambient noise, there’s a touch more urgency to the compositions, more of a sense of the piano melodies actually leading somewhere.

The destination is Encores 3, released now for the first time, and its pointedly experimental approach to electronics – whether that be on the beguiling glitchy vocal interlude ‘Artificially Intelligent’ or either of the quiet behemoths that follow; soft tympanic menace characterises the neartwelve minute ‘All Armed’, whilst ‘Amirador’ plays like the uncertainty after the storm, all murky, barely-there synths. In doing so, it leads us neatly back to where we started with Encores 1, to the ominous hush of wide-open spaces. All Encores demands to be heard in its entirety; this is no companion piece, but a thoughtful progression all its own. 8/10 Joe Goggins

Headland — What Rough Beast (agitated) The moniker Headland refers to a collective of eleven Australian musicians, writing and performing music for surf films. Founded in 2013, the group set out to create a soundtrack to found footage from the 1970s: a window into the surf and coastal culture of Lennox Head, Australia. The spirit of the place comes alive on the collective’s latest record, what rough beast, a charming and atmospheric anthology firmly centred upon the themes that define the band.

Perhaps the record’s biggest strength is its collaborative feel; it is the wholesome creation of a caring and talented group of friends with a shared passion. What Rough Beast is also in part a tribute to legendary guitarist Spencer P. Jones, a friend of the band who sadly passed away as the record was coming to life. ‘Ode To A Death Trip’ honours Jones

– one of his melodies set to instrumentals

by Murray Paterson, Headland’s leader.

While at times it swirls with the vivacity of the tide, the record can feel slightly repetitive, lapsing into the background, although this is often the nature of music designed to be a soundtrack.

What Rough Beast is nonetheless what it set out to be: an homage to a place, a culture, a passion. 6/10 Katie Cutforth

Gong Gong Gong — Phantom Rhythm (wharf cat) It could just be the group members’ immense decade-long pedigree in local underground scenes, but it’s still difficult to believe there are so few elements to Canadian/Chinese, Beijingbased duo Gong Gong Gong’s terse chemistry. Like the muted hypnotism of Konono No1 or the white hot intensity of Arto Lindsay’s solo shows, the best of their full-length debut, Phantom Rhythm, is testimony to fearsome psych rock by the slightest means, where little more than Joshua Frank’s bass and Tom Ng’s guitar and commanding vocal can invoke such a clatter as to outdo groups three times their size.

The percussive elements of each song comes courtesy of nothing more than struck strings (a phantom rhythm, if you will), bringing to mind any number of krautrock masterminds – Ng’s libidinal yelps, little more than grunts on ‘Wei Wei Wei’, even sound just shy of Faust’s JeanHervé Péron at his most incantatory. But unlike the fringe practitioners of improvised noise music, there’s an undeniable groove throughout the likes of ‘Some Kind of Demon’ and ‘Moonshadows’ that makes Phantom Rhythm a crusted blues rock party album from start to finish. For a Cantonese-speaking and understanding audience, one wonders how this might differ slightly, as Ng’s declarative vocal

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Albums style sounds like that of a storyteller, especially on ‘Inner Reaches II’.

But there’s an overriding confidence that rings true, and a rare kind of intimacy you don’t often find with driving, ramshackle funk. There’s an impression that Gong Gong Gong could fall apart any moment, sending the groove to shit.

But as with this sort of thing, a shambles would be fine too. 8/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Lightning Bolt — Sonic Citadel (thrill jockey) There’s an amount of certainty that comes with a Lightning Bolt record, and their seventh is no different. The Rhode Island noise rock duo have seen little deviation from form in their 20 year existence: as always, there’s Brian Chippendale on drums, his microphone bound into a sort of makeshift Lucha libre mask, and Brian Gibson on bass guitar, adapted to include a banjo string, surging with more than enough raw energy to power a short distance railway. As always, you’re left wondering just how they do it.

But it does them little justice to seem so dismissive; they’re still the gold standard for controlled chaos using as few material elements as possible (west of Japanese zeuhl giants Ruins, in any case), while still being something your dad might call “too busy”. Like living in any state of overstimulation, you’ll start to hear things akin to doppler effects and other auditory tricks. The skipping CD patterns of ‘USA is a Psycho’ drag behind where the brain hears the beat, and the slides and slopes of ‘Blow to the Head’ start sounding like a fuzzed rendition of Kiss’ ‘I Was Made For Loving You’.

But where the order of the day deviates from musical ground zeroes and levelled surfaces of pre- or extra-musical rubble you’ll find the tense space rock

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of ‘Halloween 3’ and ‘Don Henley in the Park’, precious ‘breathers’ before the 9-minute all-out of ‘Van Halen 2049’.

All said, if this sounds like your shit, welcome aboard, because Sonic Citadel is as good an entry point to their discography as any. 8/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Richard Dawson — 2020 (weird world) When Richard Dawson’s last record Peasant became a key fixture of 2017’s end-of-year lists, it was hard to think of a less likely culprit. Peasant was a dense kaleidoscope of 6th century character studies (‘Weaver’, ‘Beggar’, ‘Prostitute’, ‘Soldier’ and so on) set in the kingdom of Bryneich, known today as Dawson’s native North-East.

In interviews at the time, Dawson wondered aloud about the “feeling that times are right next to each other”. It’s this feeling that Dawson has followed to its logical conclusion, another album of individual portraits set in the present moment – or, as the title would suggest, the very, very near future. He does, of course, his best to dissuade you that this is what he’s doing by performing quite the sonic volte-face. Where Peasant was spidery, Beefheart-influenced avant-folk, 2020 is Dawson utilising pop at its most base iteration. Big gaudy major chords smile unsettlingly, whilst the redemptive ‘Jogging’ at one point threatens to spill into ‘Eye of the Tiger’. But where Peasant sounded like 6th century Britain, this album too conjures the sounds you can imagine blaring in the backgrounds of the kitchens, offices and pubs that make up the topography of Dawson’s Britain.

To understand quite why Dawson is such a unique voice, take opening track ‘Civil Servant’. Under lesser writers, the track’s day in the life of a civil servant whose job involves explaining “to another poor soul

why it is their disability living allowance will be stopped shortly” would feel like sneering at an easy target; the ‘kick-me’ sign as lyric. Instead, Dawson’s empathy, and his actual proximity to the characters he’s writing about, acts as prophylactic.

The accumulated weight of queasy imagery mounts and mounts; Zoopla, beta blockers, vape shops. Anxiety is pervasive, people have stopped smiling, floods destroy sleepy villages and a local butcher wants you to turn against your neighbour. But listen harder – squint – and look, there’s hope. ‘Fulfilment Centre’ is a ten-minute odyssey through the eyes of a warehouse worker, his alienating, robotic labour underlined by gargling vocoder and repetitive lists of products. But the narrator breaks from his spell and Dawson suggests a revelation. “There’s more,” he sings in reedy falsetto, “there has to be more to life than killing yourself to survive.” And our friend the civil servant? “I refuse to do this filthy work anymore.” He’s screeching, fevered, at breaking point – “Refuse! Refuse! Refuse! Refuse!”. 9/10 Fergal Kinney

OTTO — Over The Top Orchestra (bureau b) Looking at the artwork for this release you could understandably be mistaken when forming a first impression, visually appearing as a long forgotten, artistically misinformed release of a substandard ’80s indie synth-band that didn’t quite hit the mark, eventually finding its way out of an optimistic fan’s record collection and into the charity shop reduced to clearance section. But just as perseverance is required to flick through the endless stacks of frayed and yellowing sleeves to unearth an ultra-rare disc of wax, OTTO’s Over The Top Orchestra obliges a similar approach.

Albums The pair appearing on the artwork are Alexander Arpeggio (not since Donald Trump has a last name been so apt) and Cid Hohner. Together, from their base in Germany, in recent years they have been specialising in releasing small-scale 12-inch singles of electronic compositions. These works are heavily informed by synthetic organ and rhythmically complex drum arrangements, which amalgamate to form what can only be described as Electro-Kraut.

Now, looking ahead to a full-length debut, tracks like ‘Auto-Disco’ continue to craft an imposingly intriguing electronic soundscape of intertwining synthesised strings, organs and drumbeats, which manage to sound both vintage and new at the same time. On ‘Schuss im Schampus’ they work toward purveying a propulsive rhythm, punctuated with exacting trills of electronic oddity. Overall on this impressive debut, OTTO add to a string of absorbing singles and efficiently present more organ than a butcher shop floor, more groove than a furniture workshop and more electronic eccentricity than Michael Faraday. Overlook the artwork and you’ll find a prize that demands repeat listens. 7/10 Tom Critten

Penguin Café — Handfuls of Night (erased tapes) There’s an interesting story behind Penguin Cafe’s latest album: it’s inspired by bandleader Arthur Jeffes’ trip to the Antarctic. It must be beautiful and terrible there; ice in every direction, the sun that never sets, the awed horror at our planet’s ongoing destruction. You’d think it would have a real impact on an ambient album, especially given the genre’s history with arctic-ambient landmarks like Substrata. But it doesn’t.

Jeffes’ expedition south pretty much just stays in the press release.

What you actually get are a few pretty soundtrack-adjacent compositions which will slot neatly into Spotify’s chillout playlists. There are cuts to enjoy, like ‘At the Top of the Hill, They Stood’, but it’s closer to Animal Crossing than it is to Polar Sequences.

There’s an emotional disconnect between what the record wants to be about and the pretty neoclassical compositions that actually make it up. There’s nothing inherently wrong with pretty neoclassical compositions, but it feels disingenuous to make a record about this landscape without musically acknowledging what humanity has done to it. ‘Pythagoras on the Line’ gets close to this, with an urgent underlying rhythm alongside the usual musical wallpaper, but it’s not really any more intense than the soundtrack to the last ITV crime drama you watched.

Handfuls of Night could have been intense – it could have responded to our time in history on the brink of an ecological disaster unprecedented in the history of life on Earth – but it doesn’t.

Instead, it’s a collection of perfectly nice songs apparently set in a wonderful land where penguins hang out and everything is fine. That choice is political. We deserve better. 3/10 Alex Francis

William Doyle — Your Wilderness Revisited (the orchard) How refreshing to encounter, in the age of algorithmically engineered instant Spotified gratification and an unstemmable torrent of albums that barely demand a single play, a proper old-fashioned grower, intriguing enough to stick with after the first spin, and increasingly rewarding with each subsequent one. The fact that William Doyle’s first commercially available album under his own name (and his third including those as East India Youth)

is only a shade over half an hour certainly helps its moreishness, but even more so is the abiding spirit of upbeat stoicism, the knottily nuanced symphonic arrangement and the knack for nagging melody that peppers the entire record.

It’s also rather pleasingly unpigeonholeable, too: opener ‘Millersdale’ starts with flourishes of static and reverberating arpeggios that hint at something potentially sterile before exploding halfway into ecstatic squawking sax and thrumming percussion; equally, ‘Nobody Else will Tell You’ gently hints at electronica without ever turning Full Bleep, and both ‘Zionshill’ and ‘Full Catastrophe Living’ develop bucolically folky textures – all field recordings and softly caressed acoustic instruments – before taking them into the studio and commencing deconstruction by mixing desk.

The opening of ‘Design Guide’, with its strange, abstracted spoken slogans (“distinctive and positive identity”; “an understandable layout”, etc.), feels slightly conceptually confused, but the pleasure in complexity and attendant euphoria is quickly restored with a gambolling guitar solo and Doyle’s layered one-man choir, and it’s far from fatal for a record that clearly revels in its own addictiveness, content that its idiosyncrasies will intrigue, not repel. 8/10 Sam Walton

Tony Njoku — Your Psyche’s Rainbow Panorama (silent kid) I love experimental music, but so much of it never really hits me in the chest. It’s rare to come across an album that both genuinely experiments and retains the knack of pulling at you emotionally. There’s maybe a couple albums a year that do this.

Recently, that’s been Daniel Bachman’s The Morning Star, Caterina Barbieri’s Ecstatic Computation and Liz Harris’s

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Albums Nivhek project. And now, Tony Njoku’s Your Psyche’s Rainbow Panorama.

What a joy it is to listen to a record like this, as accessible to a pop audience as it is satisfying to synthesiser dorks like me. Nowhere else are you going to find indie songwriting holding together Drukqs drums (‘CONFIDENT’) right next to wild Deli Girls cyberpunk (‘FURIOUS’) and bubbling Caterina Barbieri synths (‘BAFFLED’). The great thing about this record is that it has all these vastly different moments, but Njoku’s vocal performances keep them grounded and feeling part of the whole.

What you get isn’t just the abstract pleasure of great sound design and weird song structures; it’s an intimate portrait of self-attacking masculinity and insecurity, which pulls the listener deep into the guts of these emotions without spouting the usual patronising talking points around male mental health.

There are minor missteps – a slight overreliance on vocal effects at moments when an unprocessed performance would resonate slightly more, perhaps – but this is basically me being pedantic for the sake of balance. Your Psyche’s Rainbow Panorama is masterful. 9/10 Alex Francis

Warish — Down in Flames (ridingeasy) The brainchild of Riley Hawk, son of world-famous vert skater Tony Hawk, Warish is not the kind of band to do subtly. Inspired by the punk and spacerock of their native southern California, the three-piece’s teaser output has tended toward weed-hazed psychedelic rock and sludgy proto-metal.

That makes it slightly surprising that the band’s debut, Down in Flames, is all low-slung garage thrash. Kicking off with a ‘Healter Skelter’ – an electrifying punk rock rager, with zeitgeist capturing

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Charles Manson references, it launches out of the blocks at 100mph and mainly stays there.

Down in Flames isn’t a radical record in any sense really. With its heavydistortion, thudding drums and reverbdrenched vocals, it leans on a tick list of well-trodden hard rock and punk metal influences, from Ram Jam and Black Sabbath through to Big Black and The Misfits. However, Warish clearly aren’t trying to be all that clever. Luckily the band’s evident love of the source material and tight, breakneck delivery means you’re mostly too busy nodding along to notice the more telegraphed call-backs.

The best way to think of Warish’s debut is as a solidly constructed piece of old-school Californian skate punk. OK, it might not be as free-wheeling and inventive as Ty Segall or Thee Oh Sees and it sticks way too rigidly to the hard-rock end of the spectrum to pull off any real curveballs. But if Riley Hawk’s objective was to make an exhilarating record of thrashpunk bangers then you have to admit he’s pretty much nailed it. 7/10 Dominic Haley

Yeule — Serotonin II (bayonet) On her debut album, yeule rings in the apocalypse with synths and a Launchpad.

Conjuring a dark spectre of the future, the London-via-Singapore producer disappears into gothic pop reveries, blurring the line between illusion and reality.

On ‘Nuclear War Post IV’ she deftly evokes a barren dystopia with ambient sounds of thunder and gusty winds, before the nightmarish ‘Veil of Darkness’ takes that carefully crafted atmosphere and blows it up. Soft piano keys accelerate into a blast of discordant, thoroughly unpleasant electronics that is far scarier than any mushroom cloud.

Pulling away from visions of death

and destruction, yeule’s thoughts turn to fantasy. “I wanna leave the world I was left in,” she sings over a twinkling synth and glitchy vocal loops on ‘Pixel Affection’, asking for her heart to be poured “into simulation”. Escaping into this digital universe gives rise to some of Serotonin II’s most human moments. ‘Eva’ is a beautiful, blunt meditation on revealing long-hidden scars, scored by cascading electronics and spacey pads. “When I’m with you/ These demons in my head ain’t got no place to go,” she sings, for a moment forgetting her personal apocalypse.

Rejecting reality and drifting further into cyber simulations, she finds herself in purgatory. “There was a time when she could tell/ The difference between dream and life,” she laments on solemn album highlight ‘Pocky Boy’. The sound of a gun cocking sets off a stomping beat as she repeats the words “Finally, finally die”, her vocals drifting through pulsating electronics like a ghost in the machine. 7/10 Alexander Smail

Patrick Watson — Wave (domino) Canadian singer-songwriter sophisticate Patrick Watson’s sixth album starts more strongly than anything he’s ever done. In fact, so promising are the opening three songs – the seductive ‘Dream for Dreaming’ with its gauzy orchestral stillness, the muffled piano and nuanced melancholia of ‘The Wave’, and ‘Strange Rain’, all delicate texture underpinning a gorgeous melody line – that by 12 minutes in you start to wonder if we’re entering all-timeclassic territory here.

Spoiler alert: we’re not (a series of tracks in the second half that trade bewitching atmosphere and melodic flourishes for rather distracting studio circus tricks waft by inconsequentially), but even so, Wave has plenty up its sleeve.

Albums Centrepiece ‘Broken’ hints at both Moon Shaped Pool-era Radiohead and For Emma-era Bon Iver in its heartbroken, insular tenderness, its subtle electronics building a perfect platform for Watson’s yearning falsetto, and the closing pair of ‘Drive’ and ‘Here Comes the River’ – the latter, particularly impressively, coming on like a Disney theme written by Sufjan Stevens – are an easy match for Wave’s masterful opening. It all adds up to a mature, refined and expressive record about grief, loss and self-reflection which, at its (frequent) peaks, is one of the most affecting albums you’ll hear all year. 8/10 Sam Walton

Wives — So Removed (city slang) ‘I couldn’t sleep last week/ I had problems,’ drawls Jay Beach on ‘Waving Past Nirvana’.

His laconic delivery on first impression suggests a post-grunge slacker mentality.

The track is nonetheless about someone who’s reached a state of enlightenment and wants to trade it back for a painful life.

This blast of reality is at the heart of New York quartet Wives, whose debut album looks at anxiety and contemporary dread. Filtering personal experience through narrative-driven fiction, the band – which features DIIV’s Andrew Bailey on guitar – take pot shots at ‘people [who] go blind/ to be servants to the right’.

The lyrical concerns update a welltrodden musical path, with the band drawing extensively on Pixies’ mix of dark post-punk and strong melodies.

On ‘The 20 Teens’ they counter this motherlode with the honky-tonk piano of the Velvet Underground. Elsewhere, ‘Workin’’, which was played in one take, opens with squalls of Sonic Youth guitar, and ‘Whatevr’, which clocks in under the two-minute mark, has the ragged quality of The Ramones.

Throughout it all the presence of ’60s style backing vocals seed the tracks with a tunefulness that goes beyond the scrappy recordings. Yet it’s with closing number ‘The Future Is A Drag’ that it all comes together, drawing on oldfashioned rock and roll to create a track that’s Bruce Springsteen for millennials.

It proves that, far from being so removed from modern life, they crave it in all its caustic optimism. 6/10 Susan Darlington

Sui Zhen — Losing, Linda (cascine) “All I know are things from another life”: Sui Zhen’s new venture into the sound of human experience leads to the post life.

For her latest album, Losing, Linda, the Australian artist (“musician” is way too reductive) created a brand new avatar, after the Susan of her previous LP; a digital creature dealing with human feelings, wandering the path of loss and grief in a digital age.

Losing, Linda teaches us that it has become impossible to separate human and digital, inspired by both Laurie Anderson and posthumanism, and drawing from Inuit throat singing and cyborgs. Listening to the songs this impossible division is even more tangible: laid over beats, Sui Zhen’s vocals add a warmth that only a living body allows. This way, electronic tracks are intertwined with bossa nova; piano and brass meet synths and drum machines, perfectly mirroring the everyday experience of a person having to deal with their online presence, a splitting of the self never fully breaking apart, symbolised by having songs like ‘Natural Progression’ and ‘Mountain Song’ side by side without the result being confusing or incoherent.

Tracks like ‘Being a Woman’, with its Lorde-meets-nineties-RnB sound and empowered lyrics, the Yaeji-ish ‘Perfect

Place’, ‘Night River Rider’, which recalls fellow Australian Alex Cameron, and the jangle guitars of ‘Mountain Song’ are all facets of a songwriter and performer who embodies her zeitgeist without fear of mixing and matching genres and styles.

7/10 Guia Cortassa

JOHN — Out Here On The Fringes (pets care) First you couldn’t avoid the articles calling this a continuation of the IDLES wave, now you can’t avoid the articles pointing out that you can’t avoid it. Where does that leave us? Somewhere within a mundanity complex that Crystal Palace two-piece JOHN benefit from highly. Repetition and concision is a currency underused in the outwardly literate punk class of 2019, but Out Here On The Fringes takes political brevity hostage with a new and acute ferocity.

Self-described as an idiosyncratic view of the everyday, the title track lures you into a danceable riff and steady kick drum, before a thrashing multi-track assault on austerity society and leisure living cripples any counter-narrative, with a refrain about bodies lying outside Tesco’s. Brutalizing post-hardcore jam ‘Dog Walker’ praises our use of anti-plastic plastic bags to save the world with a sharp acerbic bite – “we’re so pragmatic!” hits with the best of Fucked Up’s caustic growl – while ‘Laszlo’ is veritable sludge-rock with a delectably muted outro, leading into the ambient cinema-vérité lulls of ‘Midnight Supermarket’, a dreamlike outlier jabbing at consumerism’s thrall.

Like a horror film that builds its suspense through the absence of an image – the Babadook was terrifying until you faced its wonky papier-mâché smile – JOHN’s second album teases the storm coming from a mile away. 9/10 Tristan Gatward

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Albums Live We’ll never take the piss out of Wake Up Singing again Over the years we’ve developed two childish obsessions around EOTR’s wholesome workshop itinerary: the Spoon Whittling classes and Wake Up Singing have become the butt of our silly jokes and we’re sorry. We’re sorry because we went to Wake Up Singing this year (and the following Extinction Rebellion Choir – both involve you singing in the woods with strangers in Crocs) and, actually, it’s fucking brilliant. We can’t explain why, but what our photographer Gem Harris said about her xxxxxxxx class sums it up: “A couple of years ago I would have been way to cynical of this shit, but now I think, fuck it.” So yeah, sorry Wake Up Singing.

No other British festival would have booked BodyVice End of The Road Festival Larmer Tree Gardens, Dorset 29 August – 1 September 2019

Each year our summer ends with us not just attending End of The Road festival but getting stuck in as one of their two partners (along with The Line of Best Fit). We host our podcast live on a stage in the woods, present the music in the Big Top on the Saturday, and throw a dubiously themed party each year. Then, like everyone else at the festival, we eat our way through three days of independent music that’s getting progressively more experimental with each EOTR, deciding what queue we’ll join next from the back of the vegan sushi line.

That sounds like a bad joke at the expense of a festival renowned for its loveliness, where toddlers are dragged around in trailers covered in fairy lights and you’re more likely to find a guy dealing pork sausages than coke. But it’s not.

EOTR is an enduring festival because of its civility on the ground and it’s growing disturbance on stage.

There’s still plenty of beautiful folk music and holy psych rock that built this

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festival on offer, but EOTR also grew a little weirder and louder in 2019. This is what we took away from it.

People still like listening to music from 1999 more than music from 2019 This was quite a depressing thing for us to realise, as a magazine that only writes about new music. Worse still, this revelation was delivered whilst we were on stage, DJing, at our own party. This year’s dubiously theme L&Q party was an opening night silent disco where we exclusively played present day music on one channel and songs from twenty years ago on the other. It did NOT go well for the new stuff (unless we played Fontaines D.C. or Lizzo). Fair enough – how can you compete with ‘No Scrubs’ and ‘Forgot About Dre’, but at one point ‘Man I Feel Like A Woman’ absolutely battered Little Simz. As long as people were listening to one of the channels though, right?

For the third (and possible final time, amidst BBC cuts to this show’s schedule), Radio 3’s Late Junction programmed the Tipi Tent on Friday night and, as the broadcaster’s torchbearers of experimental music, outdid themselves with in the weird stakes by booking Lone Taxidermist’s new project BodyVice. An almost sickening two-hander between Nathalie Sharp and Tara Pattenden, consisting of a horror soundtrack made from buzzing MRI scanners and the two artists wearing their organs on the outside, it’s a powerful display of just how far away EOTR has come from wall-to-wall indie guitars.

Jockstrap started and ended with a string quartet London duo - cum - however - many people - they - like - collective Jockstrap were the first band we saw on the opening night, an hour before we found out that no one likes new music anymore. That sucks for Jockstrap even more than it does for us, because they’re doing things that I’ve not seen anyone else do before: they’re drawing on everything, at the same time, from jazz improv that inspires a breathy flute solo that’s brilliantly confident (and

photography by rachel juarez-carr

Albums Live long) whilst being completely terrible, to Bossa nova pop, to weird hymns, to live rap remixes. It’s bookended by an accomplished string quartet who sit out the rest of the fun, and while there’s a good chance that Jockstrap are up there taking the piss, their complete freedom makes them a highlight of the weekend.

There’s still only one place you can get a Sleaford Mods (anti)show Sleaford Mods are a duo that continue to thrive not despite but due to their utter reluctance to change. That goes for their music (which does all sound the same but remains impossible for anyone else to ape, so unique is it to them) and their live show, which rejects the most commonplace elements of a band on the up. Where the pair have always had an aversion to playing in front of their own logo printed in white on a black backdrop, as is the industry norm, especially on festival stages, they now demand that the backdrop isn’t even black but off white, transforming the Big Top stage into a grotty pub backroom like those they started in. Still Andrew Fearn presses play on his laptop, clutches a beer and rocks back and forth; still Jason Williamson spits and twitches and cancans his way through ‘Stick In a Five and Go’, blowing raspberries and telling everyone and no one to fuck off. It’s so distilled and furious, and still so much more exciting than anything else, hopefully they’ll never feel the urge to change a thing.

Squid finally played EOTR A lot of new post-punk bands played EOTR this year (Black Country, New Road, Black Midi, Crack Cloud) but it meant the most to Squid who’ve been coming to the festival since they were kids. It was fitting, then, that they drew the biggest crowd of all, shutting down entry to the Big Top after one song.

Kate Tempest unexpectedly turned up and made everybody cry Kate Tempest was a last minute addition to the EOTR bill after Beirut cancelled. It

proved to be the moment of the weekend – kind of enjoyable and overwhelmingly empathetic. It starts with a few bouncy old numbers including ‘Marshal Law’ and ‘The Beigeness’ from Everybody Down, and ‘Ketamine For Breakfast’ and ‘Europe Is Lost’ from Let The Eat Chaos – hardly frivolous hip-hop bangers, but tracks with solid beats that people can zero in on if they don’t care to fully focus on what Tempest is rapping. Then she announces that the dancing is over and the she’s going to “go deep” for the remainder of the set, which she does, performing the latter half of new album The Book of Traps and Lessons to an awed silence. It’s impossible to not listen to her words now that the beat is either missing or detached from her flow, and what she’s saying on songs like ‘Hold Your Own’, and especially the closing ‘People’s Faces’, is that despite everything that’s going on right now, there is hope if we remember to love one another. And while that seems trite recounted here, coming from an artist like Tempest, loaded with her raw sincerity, it made everyone cry, lost somewhere between despair that she’s needed to say it at all and the belief that we do have a say in the future. Stuart Stubbs

Lhasa Barbican Centre, London 17 September 2019

“We’d like to dedicate this song to all the scary men in the audience,” said Lhasa before playing ‘Fool’s Gold’ in Reykjavik in 2009. The recording that night, of her childlike stories of deception, hurt and misplaced trust, was one of her best… and one of the last. She died a year later following a 21-monthlong battle with breast cancer, aged 37.

The same song is the last played by the whole group on stage tonight, celebrating the strange lyrical dexterities that Lhasa freely toyed with. Heartbreak is only an excuse for a pun: “You told me that you’d stay with me and shelter me forever/ That was a hard promise to keep, I can’t blame you for the bad weather.” The National’s Bryce Dessner is offering a steady support on guitar as his wife Mina Tindle sways, laugh-crying, arm-in-arm with Leslie Feist, La Force and Emma Broughton.

Andrew Barr (the only one on stage to have recorded with Lhasa) recounts the first joke she told him about two whales in a pub; Alexis Murdoch does a rendition of ‘Bells’ in such solitude that you can hear his guitar pedals click. ‘Pa’llegar’ is a cocksure gypsy folk anthem in Mélissa Laveaux’s hands.

You’re as likely to see Feist hitting a big steel can and Dessner sitting down with a couple of maracas as you are to see them centre stage.

This project only started when Mina Tindle’s phone broke and she and Bryce were only able to play their son one song all summer. (That song was ‘Is Anything Wrong’, which Mina opens the evening with as a three-chordsand-the-truth tearjerker.)

Feist’s rendition of ‘I’m Going In’ is the lasting memory, though, where we truly face the tragedy and brilliance in Lhasa’s work. In all of Feist’s solace, voice and stark piano, nobody realises that we’ve all been crying for the last five minutes. Tristan Gatward

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FilmAlbums and Books

Monos (dir. alejandro landes) Taking the Columbian Civil war as a vertigo-inducing jump off point, and hurtling into an abyss of revolution, gender and violence, arrives Alejandro Landes’ Monos. The promising South American director’s third film illustrates the surreal nature of war, tracking eight young soldiers – and we’re talking very young – watching over a hostage and a conscripted milk cow. The epic scale of Landes’s vision and raw dissection of society at its most destructive has been compared to Apocalypse Now, but with its exploration of identity there are more similarities with Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. Those parallels continue with Mica Levi’s absorbing score: much like her work on Under the Skin, the composer uses small measures of sound to craft a world of heightened terror.

Each of Landes’s memorable characters, named in simple terms – like Dog, Rambo, Boom Boom and Wolf – carry their own unique noises. Whether its Levi blowing on bottles or a shrieking whistle every time we meet mysterious bootcamp leader The Messenger, the effect feels organic and mesmerising.

We’re introduced to the group on an awe-inspiring mountaintop, shot on location in Columbia at the Chingaza páramo in Cundinamarca, initially each of the kids indistinguishable from one another, the group attacking, shape shifting and moulding itself in animalistic fashion. As the film continues, they grow as individuals, and it’s a remarkable feat that Landes manages to make such deep political statements whilst his film remains so entertaining.

A mushroom enhanced moment produces blackly comic hysteria in a psychedelic scene that spirals from flower gazing into brutal warfare in a matter of seconds, all softly guided by the director and his impressive cinematographer Jasper Wolf.

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Psychological mind games are played with the group’s hostage, performed beautifully by Julianne Nicholson, and just like her captors, she too feels lost in transition as both the children and her fight for freedom. In fact, all the performances are stand-out, particularly as most are none-actors plucked from obscurity by Landes and his team. Despite having no leads, it’s Rambo whose journey you most cling to, originally cast as a male, it wasn’t until the director met Sofia Buenaventura that he realised gender fluidity would be such a driving force of the narrative.

The dreamlike design of Monos and its visceral take on war edges closer and closer to home. We move from the mountaintop to the jungle, and finally we glimpse city life – within it you will find warning signs of a global world in disarray.

Ian Roebuck

It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track — Ian Penman (fitzcarraldo editions) Have you ever been trapped by a graduate student at a party, a concert, a rave? Has this man (he’s almost always a man) pulled you away to the bar to talk? Has he explained how he doesn’t normally care for this sort of thing, but that it “makes one think of Baudrillard, does it not?”? Did his eyes roll when yours glazed over?

This unfortunate fellow is a bastard descendant of Ian Penman, and he does his forefather a disservice. Penman is music criticism’s consummate intellectual. When he started writing for NME in the ’70s, his aggressively learned tone raised the bar for his genre with its heavy references to politics and critical theory.

Since then his work has served as a vital bridge between the radio and academy.

His work is easy to imitate – you can read the books, know all the names – but extremely difficult to match. Our grad student may have all the right pieces, but he lacks Penman’s wherewithal to put them together in such a rigorous but accessible fashion.

These days, Penman writes for highly regarded publications like London Review of Books and City Journal. His new book collects eight essays from those outlets, most of them reviews of biographies of iconic American musicians – James Brown, Charlie Parker, Frank Sinatra, Prince, Donald Fagen, John Fahey.

Penman has a knack for going beyond these men and their music to capture their meaning in the culture: “Sinatra combined all the contradictions of postwar America into one immaculate figure,” or, “Maybe what mainstream America embraced and accepted in Elvis was a magic switcheroo of black politeness and white carnality.” Admittedly, when Penman, an older Englishman, begins to postulate on African-American singers and their experience, things can be, momentarily… uncomfortable, as when you hold your breath when a senior starts to mention politics. (To be fair, he acknowledges this discomfort in a brief passage about Charlie Bird’s biographer Stanley Crouch and Clint Eastwood’s biopic Bird.) But Penman consistently turns delicate topics into smart critiques.

‘Did He Feel Good? James Brown’s Epic Life and Career,’ in which he weaves together the singer’s many contradictions, is a perfect example and a standout of the collection.

True to its author’s style, It Gets Me Home, This Winding Track is riddled with cultural references. It takes its title from an Auden poem. His essay about Prince has not one but three epigraphs (from Walter Benjamin, Fernando Pessoa, and Gertrude Stein, respectively), and frequently references the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. But you don’t need to know that or understand every reference within to take away a great deal. Regardless of whether Penman should be on a syllabus, he should be required reading. Colin Groundwater

12 hours of your favourite females. #foundationfm

@foundation.fm

Interview Who needs to release an album anyway? by Dominic Haley Photography by Jody Evans

PVA Today is Josh Baxter’s birthday, but his bandmate Ella Harris seems more excited about it than he does. “Do you want your present now?” she asks, rummaging around in her bag. PVA’s lead singer glances at the gift and then glances at me as I fiddle with the recorder. He thinks better of it. “Maybe we should wait until afterwards?”

With drops of rain falling, we duck inside a small South London bar, and drummer Louis Satchell heads over to buy Baxter his first Birthday beer. The Waiting Room, across from Deptford train station, is one of those kinds of coffee shops turned bars that doubles as a workspace during the day and a place to drink cocktails at night. It’s an area that means a lot to the members of PVA. It was just down the road from here at the Bunker where the band played a couple of legendary early shows. “We just suit the Bunker,” beams Satchell as he returns with an arm full of beers. “We headlined two nights there, and they were like these really sweaty, intense experiences. They were amazing.”

PVA’s reputation as a live band is undoubtedly one of the most significant factors behind the band’s rapid rise. However, having a continually evolving sound that’s as captivating as it is hard to pin down helps too. Rooted in dance music, their music mutates and warps around an array of genres, from ’80s synthpop, Balearic house and nosebleed techno to brooding post-punk and industrial noise. The band are a refreshingly unique listen – both brutal and dripping in underground cool, but accessible and, most importantly, totally danceable.

Therefore, it makes complete sense when Harris tells me that she met Baxter at a party. “I just bumped into him at a friend’s house party about two years ago. I kind of knew him already, as Josh used to play in a band with another mate of mine, and we just ended up chatting.”

“I have to say it was pretty good timing. I’d just made some demos for what eventually turned into PVA,» says Baxter. “I was telling Ella that I was thinking of playing them live and she was like, ‘well, I’ve got this event coming up in about a month – shall we just play them there?’ We were like, ‘sick, let’s practice and make sure it’s done by then’.”

With songs and a gig lined up, the only thing the pair needed now was a name. “I cannot tell you how much trouble we

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had with that,” recalls Harris with a knowing sigh. “We didn’t have one until about three days before the show, and I couldn’t even announce that we were playing. We bickered for ages, I think we had about three weeks’ worth of rehearsals and about four weeks’ worth of fighting about the name. We tried out random name generators, everything. I mean, at one point we had Josh and the Sex Instructors, which was so crass.”

“No! It was so good,” Baxter fires back, feigning outrage.

“We also had Joshua’s Midnight Evangelists. You liked that one at the time.”

Interview

“Yeah. I don’t know why though. Looking back now I’m so glad we didn’t go for that one.”

Eventually landing on the name PVA Presents before cutting that down further to just PVA, the band has embarked on a whirlwind18 month’s of shows. Adding Satchell on drums in March this year, in time for a support show with Black Midi, the three-piece have built an audience on the back of just playing gigs. From slots at local haunts such as Brixton’s Windmill, they have gone onto festival appearances at Green Man and Test Pressing, and club shows in Manchester, winning more and

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Interview more fans as they go. This has resulted in PVA being a slightly weird position at the time of writin – they’re perhaps the first band I’ve come across who can sell out pubs off the back of only half a song of released music.

When I put this to the band, Harris just shrugs. “For us, the live show definitely comes first. We’re not trying to be aloof or anything like that, we just want to make sure that the first release really encompasses everything we’re about as a band. Our live show is all about harnessing the energy of an audience – it’s just finding a way that we can translate that into a recording.”

“I think it’s also helping us in a way,” adds Baxter. “Not having all that much music online, means people have to come and see us to get what we’re all about. I’d rather people come to the live show than just listen to one song on Spotify. Besides, the live show takes just as much of our energy as recording. We really care about getting that right.”

— The album as an advert — Just like their sound, PVA aren’t about to take a straightforward approach to making music. Baxter and Harris’ theories on how a band should operate in 2019 look towards the grind of networking over album reviews. The concept is elegant in its simplicity: build your rep by putting on live shows, impress the

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hell out of the audience and then rely on word of mouth to bring more people. When I ask if the trio’s grassroots success means that we might be waiting a while for a PVA album Baxter is happy to take things further. “Y’know what, it’s almost like the recordings and the albums don’t really matter as much as they used to,” he tells me. “They are more to advertise your live show, which is a massive flip from 50 years ago when you would have to tour to promote your album. I kind of like that. It’s created live music to be this experiential thing. “ A philosophy that puts experience above all other things is the key to understanding PVA’s whole take on music. Not only does it inform the way the band’s act, but you can also find it in the band’s live performances. Driven by motoring arpeggio synth, mechanical basslines and auto-tuned vocals, their sets are a carefully constructed weave of different moods and tempos.

The band’s sets are also nothing if not inventive. Often starting with bleak industrial noise, 45 minutes later you’re usually spat out with a slice of Daft-Punk style pop. PVA want your attention and work hard to make sure that they have it.

“One of the things that have always attracted me to dance music is that it has something that is really immersive about it, which other types of music don’t really have,” explains Harris when I ask her about the work that goes into the band’s sets.

“Yeah, maybe you could go to a punk show and let out your aggression and find catharsis, but dance music is a lot more euphoric.

I think it’s just about exploring the different ways you can make music that is dance orientated while bringing in the other influences that we have. We’re still working on it, and we’re still refining it, but it’s really exciting to be able to try out new things.

“I think it’s all about creating these special, unique moments. I mean, every gig we play has its own energy. I love the way we can take an audience on a journey from a kind of techno-hell landscape to this really euphoric place. Even though all the songs are different and don’t really conform to one style or another, I think the cohesiveness comes from having this unifying driving force behind them. It shouldn’t really work, but somehow it really does.”

After a summer spent tweaking and perfecting their set, it feels like PVA are about to enter a period of transition over the Autumn. Partly this is down to circumstances – Harris has recently moved to Manchester, leaving the band split between Croydon, Holloway and the north of England – but I also get the impression that the group are itching to start tinkering.

“It has changed the dynamics a little bit,” admits Baxter when I ask him about his bandmate’s move. “It’s definitely made it a bit more difficult to practice and write, but we’re finding a way to work around it.”

“Maybe it’s a good thing when you think about it,” offers Harris. “Maybe it’s meant that we haven’t been able to become complacent. I mean, we want to create an even more impressive live set for 2020, and this situation kind of forces us to have some space to be able to look back on the set so far and work with fresh ideas. It might be a really good way of working, or it might be a really terrible way of working – only time will tell, I suppose.”

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Interview

This

RICHARD DAWSON’s new state-of-the-nation album refuses to sugar-coat a broken society whilst allowing us our number one coping mechanism in these bleak times,

by Max Pilley. Photography by Jonangelo Molinari

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Interview

is

2020 49

Interview

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Interview

Richard Dawson believes in the power of

song. “The song is magical,” he says. “I mean real magic.

It can affect things, at its best. That’s what a song is capable of.”

The words come softly from his mouth, gently spoken, humble and understated. Dawson is all of these things, although if it were up to him, you would never know that he himself is one of the most empathetic and incisive songwriters of his generation.

“I don’t mean to suggest that any of these songs necessarily do that,” he continues, referring to the ten tracks that make up his astonishing new album, 2020. “Although it’s got to be the aim. I feel like maybe the aim with a lot of songs you hear is not to change things, but to sell things.”

He has a point. We talk across a table at one of his favourite cafes in his native Newcastle-Upon-Tyne a few weeks ahead of the release of 2020, his sixth studio album. After the relative breakthrough of 2017’s Peasant, an album set in Bryneich, the kingdom that occupied the North East of England over 1000 years ago, this record is, on the face of it, a marked departure.

Its songs are rooted, as the title suggests, in the here and now. Each told from the perspective of a different character, they make up a patchwork of contemporary England, and not a positive one. Homelessness, zero hours contracts, the indignity of work, the cost of living, fear of climate change, all made fearsomely real.

“If you’re really not well off, even if you’re doing reasonably comfortably, you’re still struggling. Even if you’re quite well off, you’re still struggling. It’s across nearly all spectrums,” Dawson explains. “One aspect of the album that I wanted to be there was this idea that people can exist so close to each other but have such different situations. That feels like something that’s quite part of the fabric of society.”

Pay a little more attention, however, and it’s clear that these subjects have always been at the heart of Dawson’s writing, whatever century the setting. “I joked on tour with Peasant that it was a pre-medieval album as a metaphor for our current times, and the next one will be set currently but will be a metaphor for the pre-medieval times. I like the contradiction – maybe you have to step outside your own section of time to get more connected.”

It most certainly feels connected, both to this time and to the real lives of the people all around us. That has always been Dawson’s skill, dating back to his earliest recordings. After establishing a cult local following with albums such as 2011’s The Magic Bridge, his exposure rose to the next level with the release of Nothing Important in 2014, his first for Weird World Records.

His free range, hyper-personal storytelling, as evidenced by the 16-minute opus ‘The Vile Stuff ’, which documented a real school trip from Dawson’s adolescence that descended into alcohol-fuelled debauchery, seized the attention of several corners of the music press and made Dawson one of the buzziest names in British alt. music. His live shows, a blend of primal, eviscerat-

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Interview It speaks to his naturalistic songwriting style that simply ing expression and down-to-earth conversations with the audiholding a conversation with Dawson is like stepping inside one ence, only cemented his reputation.

When he set about writing the songs for this album, he of his songs; the greasy spoon setting for our meeting could be started speaking to people: friends, family, but also people that a typical backdrop too. At one stage, in a lull between the clathe would meet after gigs or in his everyday life. “Certain things tering of piled plates coming from the kitchen, and with the kept coming up,” he says. “You want to be careful with people’s chatter of the neighbouring tables falling quiet, Dawson experiences and certainly not trivialise them. You know, like, lowers his voice, eager not to draw attention to himself as he there are some writers that are like vultures, they just vampire talks about his work. He is somewhat reticent to discuss the your experiences for their own gains – I hope it’s not like that. music in any great depth, preferring to let it speak for itself.

It’s a fine balance between being faithful to your own experi- “Potentially, I could undo something I’ve worked hard on,” ences and that of your friends, but at the same time you have to he explains. Partly, you suspect, he is surprised that anybody should care to ask. follow where these characters want to go.”

The acute embarrassment is heightened by the prospect It is this dedication to his characters that sets 2020 apart.

Whether assembled from genuine real-life stories or spun out from of out photoshoot – for somebody so rooted in the regular order Dawson’s fertile mind, he has created his own dramatis personae, of a working class city, such demonstrable acts of self-recogeach role fleshed out in touchingly honest detail. From the jogger nition seem like a violation of an unspoken social contract. He who fruitlessly searches for properties he can’t afford on Zoopla suggests we leave the café to shoot in an empty field instead – empty, that is, save for a small herd of to the civil servant who fantasises cows, an audience that prove to care about smashing his colleague’s skull in very little about Dawson’s modest level with a sellotape dispenser, each one is of fame. deeply relatable. Dawson voices them “What I’ve found is that One subject that recurs throughall himself, from the perspective of the out the new record is the issue of characters’ inner voices, at their most the most ridiculous mental health. The aforementioned private and intimate. things on the record are protagonist of the album’s lead single “I like the idea of maybe having ‘Jogging’ introduces himself with the something that functions more like always the saddest lines, “Recently I’ve been struggling thought, more like that blooming, lines. Nothing’s in there with anxiety/ To the point I find it hard misty process,” he explains, when to leave the flat.” Several of Dawson’s asked how he begins to access the to be funny, but I know other characters display similar signs innermost thoughts of these characit’s funny to hear certain of ill health. ters. “It’s not crisp, it’s poetic in its “Certainly in terms of mental own way, the way we think, but it’s not words sung.” health struggles, we all have them to usually wordy or that erudite. At least a lesser or greater degree, a lot more my thought isn’t. And it’s not fast.” people to a greater degree than at any The result is a convincing depiction of our normal stream of consciousness – the lyrics sound like other time,” says Dawson. He agrees that we are just starting our thoughts. “It’s funny that people aren’t afraid of that stuff in to have a better public discourse on the matter, before adding, novels or films. I think there’s something strange that’s happened “Whether that’s because we’re learning to look after ourselves a bit more, or whether it’s a reaction to things getting more confusto song that people underestimate what it can do.

“I don’t know why that is, whether it’s because it’s become ing, I’m not sure.”

If this is all sounding a bit bleak, then it should be noted a functional thing for getting people to work, or for allowing for there to be adverts in between them so it has to be short and direct that 2020 is, as with all of Dawson’s work, laced with humour and warmth too. Take, for example, the track ‘Two Halves’, the and simple. Is it people’s attention spans? I don’t believe that.” most recent single. Our leading man this time is a young man playing amateur football in the park, his dad screaming instruc— An audience of cows — tions from the touchline, all in vain. It is a sweet, quotidian tale, The more time Dawson spent focusing on writing these where the pathos comes from the familiarity of the situation.

“That’s quite a happy song,” Dawson agrees. “It’s not songs, the more naturally he was able to write in the voices of these characters. “With the lyrics more and more, it’s not that happy for the kid going through it in that moment, but I think I’m writing it, it’s that I’m asking, ‘What does this person want it’s a joyful thing. I guess you think that the dad is a total bellto say?’ I think a lot of writers have this experience, you just end, but he has some pretty good advice in the end.”

One of the consequences of depicting the innermost find the character and then they write the song. That really felt like what was happening more acutely with this one than with thoughts of members of the public is that you will inevitably stumble across the strains of humour that litter all of our converprevious albums.”

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Interview

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Interview sations, our number one coping strategy. Intriguingly, Dawson has found, though, that the lines that at first might seem funny actually conceal some of the harshest darkness.

Take the song ‘Heart Emoji’, which sees the lead character recount the early days of his current relationship. His mind travels back to the day they met, whilst both working in the bar of the Carling Academy, and she was “giving him a bollocking for pouring a Guinness wrong”.

“What I’ve found is that the most ridiculous things on the record are always the saddest lines,” says Dawson. “Nothing’s in there to be funny, but I know it’s funny to hear certain words sung.

I think because that person – this is before they’ve even started a relationship, right at the start – that one person is already being dominant over the other, over such an unimportant thing.”

— Words and politics — It’s very clear when talking to Dawson that his passion for language is boundless. “The written word and the sung word, it wasn’t always available to everyone like it is now, it was the province of the educated, which would be religious people and the upper classes. So it’s definitely a good thing that the word is available to all now, although I wonder whether it’s been misused, maybe for advertising.”

It’s not just words that he takes seriously, either. For this album, he undertook to play every part on every instrument himself. He explains, “That felt important for this one. I can’t play drums, so I had to do it one drum at a time. It’s ridiculous, it took a while, I think we were recording for a month or so.

“I like the tense feeling that it gives, it sounds a little bit stilted. It’s the first time I’ve used the rock drum sound and I wanted this to appear as a straighter album, but actually it still needs this awkwardness. So how do I get that? Well, maybe I get someone who can’t play drums to play the drums!”

Only for the final moments of the closing song does Dawson allow any other musician to be heard on 2020, the rousing finale of ‘Dead Dog in an Alleyway’. “I think the content of the album and especially the last song is quite difficult, with some abject moments,” he says. “But at the end of the last song, I’m joined by Rhodri [Davies] and Sally [Pilkington, both from Hen Ogledd] and Nev [Clay], and they appear just as I’m starting to fade out. I thought after being alone all the way, for my friends to come just at the end, it’s a very happy thing.

Even if it’s not apparent, it’s still there and the energy of that means something.”

Reckoning directly with the state of the nation, as Dawson does here, means eventually having to address the politics of the day. The album never resorts to naming and blaming, but the all-pervasive effects of nearly ten years of austerity politics, twinned with the confusion following the re-alignment of the country from traditional left and right to a poorly defined axis of leave and remain are writ large in every song.

“I watch the news every day, it’s my first thing. I’m fascinated by parliament,” Dawson explains, the cold irony being that he

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Interview speaks on the very day that Johnson’s Conservative government choose to prorogue for five weeks. “I’m really frightened at the minute about stuff, even to the point of thinking like, if things go a certain way, I think that I might just think about leaving the country. At what point do you make that decision, if there is some kind of horrendous coalition. I just feel quite frightened.”

Dawson admits that his fear and anger partly fuelled the album: “I suppose so, yeah. Why isn’t anybody making an effort to try and wake people up a bit? I feel like we’re all switched on to Brexit and we’ve fallen asleep to all the other things. I wanted the start of the album to be an alarm clock, or a bell.”

I remind Dawson of the first time I saw him play live, at the Islington Mill in Salford, almost four years ago to the day. It was in the immediate aftermath of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader and Dawson himself was full of hope that day.

“Regardless of what’s happened since, something major did happen, something did change,” he says. “Whether it’s the thing that we thought, it was a positive thing, that’s not altered.”

2020 arrives at a time when more and more British musicians are taking it upon themselves to speak out; slowthai, Kate Tempest and Idles amongst the most visible of them. One of the voices that Dawson particularly enjoys is that of Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson. “To me, he’s a great writer. It’s good writing because it’s personal. It’s not political, it’s heartfelt.”

What he has less time for is the more brazen end of political songwriting. “There’s a danger with protest music, it’s usually bad. It needs to be something else first if it’s going to have any effect. If you’re being polemic and you’re telling people what to think, it’s a reaction, it’s not a response. It has to be open and generous.”

He admits that this was a concern when making this album. “It’s just one thing you’ve got to watch out for. It was really tricky for this one, because I always want to watch out for clichés,” he says, returning to the subject of finding the true voices of his characters. “But then I realised that we think in clichés quite a lot. We tend to have quite black and white thoughts, at least in the first instance. So my thing is if I’m going to be faithful to these people, then I have to be faithful to some moments of thought which aren’t me and some things that I have trouble singing.

“I always want to over-write everything,” he continues.

“So, Peasant was really enjoyable to write because it was really chewable, lots of words. Whereas this was really hard because all of those lines, I’m just [tempted] to put clothes on them. But we need to get to the point, instead of dressing it with all this wordiness, people don’t think like that. It’s barely words that we think in as well, it’s images, words, sounds, smell. I don’t know how you would write that.”

— Local pride and Lionel Messi — One way in which Dawson is able to ground his characters’ thoughts in real life is by dropping everyday pop culture references into the lyrics: Ready Brek, Nintendo Wii, Lionel Messi,

Classic FM and Match of the Day, to name just a few. It’s certainly a far cry from the vassals and villeins that constituted Peasant.

Dawson is amused by the idea that there should be anything unusual about his use of such commonplace references.

“It’s pretty strange because it’s the most everyday stuff, but you don’t get it in lyrics, so it seems like, ‘Woahhh’. I don’t know why.”

When asked whether there are any writers he can point to that do similar things, he refers to the cult Newcastle songwriter Nev Clay. “He’s not really known outside of the North East,” he says, “but he’s a master songwriter, a beautiful man and a good friend. But he’s lyrically unafraid. For instance, I’m thinking of one of his songs, and it’s carrier bags and stamps and asking to borrow tabs off people and off licenses. Because that’s what he sees so he writes it.”

Few if any interviews with Dawson ever pass without dwelling for a period on his Newcastle background. He has lived all of his 38 years in the city (“I toyed with moving maybe twice, but I haven’t lived anywhere else yet”), but he feels that may have been overplayed.

“I kind of understand why [it is brought up], because I mention a lot of place names and stuff. And I just went along with that, but I started to think about it and started to realise that it’s not quintessential to the music. You don’t have to be from the North East to enjoy the record, hopefully. I’m sure it’s in there, but it’s not something I’d really go along with.

“So it was a conscious thing with this record that the locations, there are a lot in Yorkshire and right up to the Scottish border. But some parts are Southern as well – there are place names from London, Nottingham and Coventry. A broader, non-descript swathe.”

The notion of local pride or anything that could approach patriotism has become something of a divisive issue, given the current climate. Dawson is clear that he does love his part of the country – we later go on a pilgrimage to St. James’ Park – but is clear to remain unambiguous. “I think that it’s a very knifeedge thing, how to be correctly proud. You go some places and they’ve just got it right. Some of the atmospheres are increased in certain places. But certainly there’s nothing wrong with being proud of where you’re from.”

Indeed, the Newcastle music scene has been very good to Dawson. He is a member of the group Hen Ogledd, alongside Sally Pilkington, his partner, and Rhodri Davies and Dawn Bothwell, who have recently wrapped up a tour. Dawson loves balancing the group’s work with his solo career: “It’s such a different energy,” he says. “I find my solo stuff is quite draining, whereas Hen Ogledd, I find that quite energising. I find I’ve got more energy from doing both, it feels good at the minute.”

It was in fact Pilkington that introduced one of the key elements of the making of 2020 into Dawson’s life: a newfound love of pop music.

“I’ve always liked bits and pieces but I’ve never known too much about it,” Dawson tells me, “but she’s got an encyclopaedic knowledge of ’80s and ’90s stuff and I started to really like a bunch of sounds, like the crisp, unadorned synth sounds,

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Interview

not on the kind of cool side, not like John Maus, but more like the synths in Sign o’ the Times. It really opened up my ear to Erasure and all that stuff, and just the beautiful craft of how you can move so much in four minutes.”

Dawson is a self-confessed music obsessive, but for the last year, between recording this album and juggling the Hen Ogledd project, his listening habits have been focused between three artists: Scottish experimental producer SOPHIE, free jazz demigod Sun Ra and his personal favourite, the Finnish prog rockers Circle, who he concedes he can hear bits of creeping into his own music now.

But it’s the evidence of the pop influence that is more prominent, if not quite front and centre, on 2020. Tracks like ‘Two Halves’ and ‘Dead Dog in an Alleyway’ make use of bold melodies to convey their emotional power. When Peasant was released two years ago, it was judged by some to be Dawson’s pop album, but this one surely takes that mantle now.

“Yeah, why not!” is his response to that suggestion. “I really wanted the choruses to be big, anthemic, but then the words would not be that, they would be in opposition to that. You know, there’s this pull on Peasant with the music [going one way] but then this other layer with the violin and the free stuff really pulling it apart [in the other direction]. I had to think how to achieve that on this album. It needed to be much more spacious and crisp, so how do we achieve this tension? I hope the lyrics being in opposition to these melodies can make it snap somewhere.”

All of which underlines quite how hard it is to understand why Dawson continues to be tagged as a folk musician. It is true that for years his live sets would be peppered with folk songs from the North East, but his songwriting and musicianship does

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not fit neatly into any such tradition. “I don’t really mind, it’s not something I think about, it’s not important for me.”

What Dawson finds surprising is that he is often described as something of an outsider, or at least in possession of a uniquely distinctive style. He does at least concede that his method of playing the guitar is not in keeping with most conservative conventions: “There’s very much a way of playing a guitar, so if you deviate from that… But that’s not to do with what the guitar is capable of, that’s just to do with expectations.” Certainly, he isn’t overly concerned about meeting any new listener’s expectations. “I’m always surprised that people might find it distinctive.

I’m not worried about trying to be distinctive or anything like that. It’s just more about whatever the piece needs.”

Whatever the formula, Dawson’s career has been on a steady upward trajectory for the last decade, with 2020 the third album he has released on Weird World, the Domino imprint, a label about whom Dawson is effusive with praise.

He is still getting used to the idea that there could be a demand for his music, though. “It’s still a surprise,” he admits.

“As much as I don’t set out to do something odd, I’m kind of aware why people could hear it that way, maybe the singing is abrasive or something. So it’s always a surprise. But at the end of the day, it’s not the thing, the work is the thing, and that’s out there. What’s the David Lynch thing – keep your eye on the doughnut and not the hole?”

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Tell me about it

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Tell me about it

William Doyle Back to the suburbs in the artist’s own words,

by Ollie Rankine Photography by Tom Porter

It’s been a while since anyone’s heard much from William Doyle.

A previous Mercury Prize-nominated, enigmatic prodigy immersed in a world of ambient and electronic music, it’s been four years since he decommissioned his previous moniker of East India Youth due to touring fatigue and struggles with mental illness. Managing to kickstart a career through a chance meeting with the prolific music journalist and creative force behind The Quietus, John Doran – who eventually set up his own label solely to promote Doyle’s music – his ascent to cult stardom accelerated just as rapidly as it came to an abrupt, self-imposed end. Burdened by recurring bouts of depression and anxiety, Doyle’s been busy trying to make sense of his past through a meticulous introspection of his formative years living in habitats of English suburbia.

Born and raised in a 1930s semi-detached house in Bournemouth, the wake of his father’s death when Doyle was 12 years old catapulted he and his mother inland to the more secluded, labyrinthine setting of rural terraced life. Mourning and disoriented, this strange and unfamiliar landscape would eventually go on to fill the backdrop for his forthcoming album recorded under his own name, Your Wilderness Revisited; a record he tells me has been ten years in the making. As he retraces his steps down winding streets of picket fences, washing lines, tiled roofs and redbrick repetition, his tangible narration of sadness and wonder is vivid and real. Also, with a spoken word feature from Doyle’s friend, artistic ally and career-spanning muse Brian Eno, it’s a testimony worthy of suburban mythology.

Perhaps it’s fitting that the street where we meet, somewhere deep in the peripheries of South London, is lined with the familiar drab exteriors of a residential utopia. Unlike the warped, stony-faced portraits of previous album artwork, Doyle’s beaming, candid and softly-spoken demeanour feels disarmingly laidback.

My dad was deaf in one ear and I definitely have a loss of high frequency in one ear too. It’s a nice reminder in a weird sort of fucked up way.

I once read this thing about Nick Cave’s dad dying and how it left a hole that he tried to fill through his work and not just through his various transgressions and addictions. He’d tried to write his father into existence – I can really relate to that.

It was a horrible circumstance, but I often think I’m very grateful for the journey that I’ve been able to go on. I feel like that seismic shock and the loss of his role in my life has all contributed to the strange life I’ve led so far.

Moving from Bournemouth to a residential development was a stark change for me The dark brown bricks, the way the roads were laid out; these cul-de-sacs spread out from the main road in many different arteries. When I started to wonder around, that’s when something opened up to me. I stopped looking at it as just ‘the suburbs’. My friend [Quietus co-founder] Luke Turner has just written a book called Out Of The Woods and one of its main thrusts is how nature isn’t a binary thing. Despite how people treat it, you don’t go to nature, it’s everywhere around us.

When I was younger, I mostly kept to the same routes that I used to go to school or the shops, and I never really deviated from them. Then one day, when I was out getting some fresh air, I just kept on walking. I remember thinking, I don’t know where this road goes but I’m just going to keep walking up here.

Nothing really amazing happened along the way but when I got back to the house I felt really different.

I got back to my room and even though I was familiar with everything in there it felt like everything had been moved by about half an inch. Everything was the same, but different. It felt like some psychedelic experience.

I met John Doran at a Factory Floor Gig at the Village Underground in August 2012. It was one of the most important meetings of my life I recognised him there – he was a very distinctive looking guy at the time: big beard and long hair. I handed him a CD and told him that I was a big fan of his site and how it’d been a big influence on the music I’d made through the various stuff I’d found there. The only reason I was at a Factory Floor gig anyway was because of The Quietus.

He got back in touch about a month later. My demo had been sitting in a pile of CDs that he’d eventually got around to listening to. I guess he really liked it and the rest is history.

It’s like I bypassed that thing where you’re the ‘artist’ and they’re the ‘publication’. That dynamic hasn’t ever been there.

They’re just people I love and cherish.

My interest in electronic music was accidental. I’d never really listened to dance music Working with software and using synthesisers was a new lease of life. I no longer had to carry on with that linear way of writing

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Tell me about it

vocals and guitar melodies. It was about creating soundscapes and instrumental pieces. It was a completely different music to what I was doing before. It was liberating that I could step out of one thing and go into something completely different.

Playlist culture makes everything a streamline experience Where there’s not many peaks and troughs. It’s a cultural phenomenon where it’s like being in a shop all the time – people want it to be a consistent experience and I don’t want that. I like friction and trying to make things butt up against each other.

I like the jagged edges of when harmony goes up against more atonal bits.

When I create, it’s escapism. I was doing it because it felt good. I wanted to make music to pursue that feeling and I didn’t care what happened to it. I think once you unburden yourself from whether it’s going to be successful or not, it just flows out of you easier and people tend to respond to it in a more visceral way.

The second East India Youth record didn’t go very well for me I needed another stark change, which I think is a reoccurring theme in my life. I finished East India Youth and just like that it was over. For better – but probably more for worse – that’s just how I deal with things.

There wasn’t really much of a gap in between those two [East India Youth] albums and halfway through touring Culture Of Volume I was really burnt out. I couldn’t really do anything.

I wasn’t making music; I didn’t have any interests or anything on the go.

I started to record music under my own name so I could make something that wasn’t under the same scrutiny. I had to find my way back into making things but I didn’t want to do it in a way that was under the spotlight of that thing that carried so much baggage.

It’s like being sat at the back of a cinema and watching your life go by You’re noticing everything but you feel removed from it. On the first track of the new album, I talk about seeing things on a tilt.

I once saw an interview with Leonard Cohen where he described clinical depression. He said the room is on a tilt and you’re thrown off balance. Everything was floating and not in a good way.

I remember sitting in Kings Cross and having this episode that ended up lasting weeks. I was looking around and thinking this doesn’t feel real. My vision had become doubled and I was disorientated. I felt like I wasn’t really there.

There’s this misconception that artists draw from the negative things and I really didn’t want this record to be that. I had to find the joy in what I was talking about.

I don’t really want to make things in that space anymore now. People start to associate you with it and think your work is defined by those means. I’ve definitely seen it being used disingenuously by artists as a way of selling a record and it’s fucking bollocks.

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Brian Eno makes something everyday You don’t have to go to his studio and there be a project in mind; you just go to his studio and get involved with anything he’s working on that day. It’s just a constant production factory.

He really throws you into it. He’ll have an instrument thing already set up and he’ll demand you play sometimes without telling you what to play. He’s helped me become a better player.

He doesn’t want you just to play a guitar line; he’s interested in sound and textures. It forces you to think in a very abstract way.

When you relate to someone’s work in a serious way, you’ve probably got something to talk about. The same reason why you put stuff out there is the same reason why he does it, and just because his work is very successful and famous, it’s ultimately driven by the same desire to communicate.

If you only just explore your surroundings, they’ll present themselves to you It can make you think about yourself and the world in a very life changing way. In the US, a lot has been made of the suburbs – look at Arcade Fire or David Lynch and Mike Mills films. There’s an American documentation of it, but the British version just hasn’t been related in the same way.

I think even though I’m drawing from very specific emotional experiences, the same epiphanies and profound moments that I found are also capable for others living in similar territories. The title of the record opens it out to them and suggests this isn’t just a one off.

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A–Z An A–Z of the most obscure acts on the infamous Nurse With Wound list, by Daniel Dylan Wray

Need, Need, Need

“Sorry...I’ve got a couple of pet Vietnamese pot bellied pigs and they were just chased by a horse,” says Nurse With Wound’s Steven Stapleton, after he returns to the phone. He’s speaking from his remote home in Ireland and the image of horses chasing pigs around his garden is entirely fitting with the kind of unique persona he’s built up over the years.

40 years ago his band Nurse With Wound released their debut album, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella – a three-track album of hissing noise and throbbing industrial churns that came to be considered one of the pioneering avant-garde/industrial albums of the era.

The artwork for the album was just as interesting and innovative, containing a huge list of 236 artists that had inspired the group in any way in the run up to their debut release. However, the artists where some of the most obscure and experimental of the era, spanning free jazz, prog, industrial and avant-garde – a general ragtag bunch of outsider artists. For the band’s second album they update that list to 291. Some of the artists featured are more commonly known these days (Can, Nico, Throbbing Gristle, John Cage, Captain Beefheart, PiL, Yoko Ono) but the vast majority of them still remain as unusual and unheard to many all these decades on.

Teaming up with Finders Keepers records, the list is

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beginning to be released via multiple compilations. The first of which, Strain, Crack & Break, collects a selection of French artists that featured on the list, such as Pierre Henry, ZNR, Horrific Child and Lard Free. “It’s been really exciting to get this thing together,” Stapleton enthuses. “It’s something that I always thought would be a good idea if I could do it but chasing up copyright and things like that is a nightmare. I would have liked to do it on my own label years ago but the sheer amount of effort involved in finding copyright from those obscure artists on now defunct labels was just ridiculous. But Finders Keepers are good at what they do and it’s seemingly all coming together.”

The list was inspired by the jazz artist Wolfgang Dauner and his 1969 album Für, on which he credited influences, and the band were also aware of Frank Zappa doing the same on Freak Out! three years earlier. “We wanted to say thank you to these artists that had inspired us to make our records,” he says. “They had given us so much pleasure in the past. So we sat down and bashed out a list and then argued about it for 6 months.” He’s not exaggerating when he says the list was discussed for that period of time. “There were heated discussions over who should be in it and who shouldn’t.”

The list was made up of hours lost in record shops. “I was just totally into outlandish music,” he recalls. “Stuff that

A–Z was strange and unusual or peculiar and bizarre. I found the best place to find this stuff was second hand stores. London was fantastic for them at the time. I worked in Soho and there were a dozen within a 10 minute walk. So every lunchtime I would go and I got to know the people there and they would save anything that looked unusual. I built up a collection like that. I met John Fothergill [of early period Nurse With Wound] in a record store doing the same as what I was doing. We became best friends and started scouring for music together, basically – maybe over a five-year period before we put the list together.”

The list has taken on a life of its own over the years.

Becoming like a shopping list or a collectors dream for those in search of such oddities. It took time to have an impact though.

“I started to notice it about fifteen to twenty years later,” says Stapleton. “Nobody initially thought the list was of any interest at all, really. Then at record fairs and things you’d start to see stickers on albums saying part of the NWW List. Then weird things started happening, like reissues of artists that were featured on the list would have stickers on the front, or in the sleeve notes it would be saying it became known because of the list. It was like, wow, because of this little obscure thing we did stuff is really taking off. Then it went global. I’ve been in record shops in America that have sections just of albums featured in the Nurse With Wound list.”

Some of the music was so rare or weird sounding that many thought some artists were simply made up. This is a myth that Stapleton happily toyed with for years. “I have done several interviews over the years and I’ve always said there’s one or two names on there that are made up and, to be honest with you, there isn’t. They all exist but I just wanted to throw a bit of intrigue into the mix. I will say though that there’s one artist on the list who never made an album or a single – they just appeared on a compilation.”

40 years on, the list still remains an immaculate collection of outsider music and the artists are still ones that Stapleton considers to be of extreme importance and significance. As for the record collection itself that inspired this list? Well, it turns out it literally paid for his house. “About 25 years ago I stopped playing vinyl and switched to CD. Then I sold most of them on eBay and basically swapped them for a house. I thought they might be worth £40/£50 each and I’d end up getting thousands for them.”

The new compilations allow access to owning this music in a physical format that isn’t at inflated prices aimed at collectors, but beyond that Stapleton hopes the music will have just as much of an impact now as it did then. “There was all this wonderful, brilliant, vibrant stuff,” he says. “I think there’s a wealth of stuff there that people should investigate. I feel really chuffed and feel really good about these releases. A lot of those records would have just been lost to obscurity otherwise.”

As previously mentioned, some of the names on the list have become relatively well known and celebrated, but here’s an A-Z guide of some of the acts that, for the most part, remain firmly on the undiscovered side of history all these years on.

A — AGITATION FREE A German krautrock band from the early 1970s who have not quite been elevated to the status of peers such as Amon Düül, Can or Tangerine Dream. They lean more towards the unravelling full jam band approach more than tight focused hyper rhythms, and at times end up closer to Grateful Dead-esque wig outs.

B — BRAINTICKET When psychedelic krautrockers Brainticket released their 1971 debut, Cottonwoodhill, the album’s sleeve notes warned: “After Listening to this record, your friends may not know you anymore. Only listen to this once a day. Your brain might be destroyed!” Tune into ‘Brainticket, Pt 1’ and you may get a sense of what they meant by that.

C — CHROME A San Francisco post-punk outfit that sounds more like they may have come out of Sheffield in 1976. Merging wobbly tape hiss, sputtering electronics, harsh vocals, destroyed guitars and a punk meets industrial edge. Released in 1977, their debut, Alien Soundtracks, still sounds like a glorious chaotic assault but its place in history as a pivotal record of the time remains somewhat lost in the shadows of the usual CBGB crew.

D — DEDALUS Listening to tracks such as ‘Santiago’ today and you’d be forgiven for thinking Dedalus was the latest signing to Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label. It’s jazz meets funk meets neo-soul; super smooth and rich and warm but also improvisational and unpredictable. They released two records by 1974 and broke up before reforming with new members in the ’90s.

E — ETRON FOU LELOUBLAN A French trio active between 1973 and 1986. Their first ever show was opening for prog giants Magma but their style is much more eclectic, shifting between folk, punk, rock, jazz and anything else they seemed to wish to glide into. The 18-minute ‘L’amulette Et Le Petit Rabbin’ perhaps most perfectly capturing this bonkers mix.

F — FLOH DE COLOGNE Another German band who loosely get lumped in with the krautrock lot of the era but whose sound was at times more rickety and garage-like, as well as being more melodic and pop-like at others. They were also a fiercely political and satirical band, with their debut 1968 album Vietnam acting not only as a critique of the war but also seeing all album proceeds donated to a linked charity. You may need to speak German to get the humour but the groove of their sound lives on.

G — GROUP 1850 1960s Dutch psychedelic rock that struck a nerve in their own country but got lost a little outside of it. Initially beginning life as a fairly safe rock outfit – with whiffs of Hendrix and Floyd – they

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A–Z became increasingly more experimental as they plunged deeper into guitar-squealing psych rock and heady immersive prog.

which point they had become Cluster and already released some of the most deeply immersive, textural and pivotal ambient electronic space rock of the decade.

H — HORRIFIC CHILD The project of Jean-Pierre Bernard Massiera, the only album released under this moniker was released in 1976. The 2016 reissue aptly described it as: “A schizoid sonic sketchbook. A disturbing mix of dismembered tape samples, paranoid poetry and cosmic chaos.”

I — INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER Now known as Träd, Gräs & Stenar, this Swedish band released just one album as International Harvester in 1968 and before that they were Pärson Sound. It’s almost like they were trying to work their way onto a future list of oddballs. Their album is a strange mix of low-key, almost folk-like, meditated ruminations alongside more lively psych rock-tinged eruptions. It captures a changing world of the time with its clashing styles, tempos and chants about Ho Chi Minh.

J — JAN DUKES DE GREY British psych/acid/prog folk from Leeds. Now considered something of a treasured act amongst heads in this world, their genrehopping blend that mixes sax, flute, guitar, wild percussion and other restless sounds meant they never found a huge audience at the time despite supporting the likes of The Who and Pink Floyd. Their three-track 1971 album Mice and Rats in the Loft is still more likely to bring up rodent removal tips from a Google search than a link to a record, but it still sounds like little else of the time or even now.

K — KLUSTER Not so much of an obscure rarity but the German outfit of HansJoachim Roedelius, Conrad Schnitzler and Dieter Moebius still remain hugely underappreciated. Only 300 hundred copies of their 1970 debut Klopfzeichen were initially printed but their drone-filled industrial hisses and crackling atmospheres laid a blueprint for many industrial bands to pick up years later, by

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L — LARD FREE 1970s avant French jazz-prog outfit led by multi-instrumentalist Gilbert Artman. A group who strike a nice balance between groove and discordance, as displayed on tracks such as ‘Warinobaril’ which bounces along with rolling bass lines and is peppered with eruptions of skronking sax and screeching guitar.

A–Z M — MAHJUN — More 1970s French prog but this time mixed with a touch more folk. The band merged intricate and innovative songs with strings and brass nestled up against the crashing drums, disruptive guitar and often pop-like vocals. They were originals on the pioneering Saravah record label.

N — NIHILIST SPASM BAND An outfit from Canada who embraced entirely homemade or modified instruments and set about improvising with them in a wild and unruly way. The result is a challenging mix of free jazz, riotous noise, demented shrieking and the general sound of insanity put to tape.

O — OPUS AVANTRA An Italian outfit that blended prog, classical and experimental.

Their 1975 album Lord Cromwell Plays Suite For Seven Vices is a concept album about the seven deadly sins that, whilst ambitious and boundary pushing, is also pleasingly tranquil and delicate at times.

P — POISON GIRLS A 1970s anarcho-punk band that were closely linked to Crass and released on their label. A fiercely political and issues-based band but also an eclectic one who jolted between taut postpunk, scrappy lo-fi, weirdo punk and, as on tracks such as ‘The Offending Article’, the occasional voyage into the melodic and well-produced.

R — REFORM ART UNIT An Austrian free jazz group that formed in 1965 and who continue to be an ever-evolving ensemble that over the years has welcomed over 200 musicians. Avant-garde and continenthopping explorations, along with wild improvisations have been constants in their work.

cloaked in strings and brass-led doom. Most perfectly captured by the stirring and brooding track ‘Jack the Ripper’.

V — VERTØ A French outfit operating around the work of Gilles Goubin and Jean-Pierre Grasset who, in the mid 1970s, released albums such as Krig/Volubilis that sits neatly between prog and rock with some jazz-inflections and occasional overspills of electronics and waves of synth.

W — WOORDEN A Dutch outfit that released one album in 1968 and combined poetry and political theatre with their musical explorations that took in psych, jazz, folk and esoteric rock.

X — XHOL CARAVAN Another German outfit that often find themselves lumped in with the krautrock crew and, whilst influential in that world and certainly containing that key groove, they also incorporated a lot more jazz, blues and soul into their unique concoction.

Z — ZNR A French duo of Hector Zazou and Joseph Racaille whose 1976 album Barricade 3 remains a truly indescribable release. Sometimes-mangled/sometimes-clean vocals sit on top of eerie woodwind, hissing synths, wonky pianos and occasionally beautiful soundscapes. The album also features artwork from another person who made the NWW list: Don Van Vliet (also known as Captain Beefheart).

S — SMEGMA Make sure you include the word ‘band’ after their name if you don’t want to end up with something rather different than a US noise collective coming up from your Google search. They’ve remained active since the early 1970s, have collaborated with the likes of Merzbow and Wolf Eyes, and have generally traversed the spectrum of weirdo noise rock and back again.

T — TECHNICAL SPACE COMPOSERS CREW A duo comprising of Can’s Holger Czukay and Rolf Dammers.

They released just one album in 1969 (the same year as Can’s debut) called Canaxis 5. It’s a mix of Stockhausen electronics (both studied under him) with Vietnamese vocals, immersive drones and a cinematic tone that sucks one into an equally bewildering and beguiling world.

U — UNIVERS ZERO A Belgian prog outfit with a tendency to explore darker, deeper and denser textures in their work. 1979’s Heresie is an album

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Interview

In the world of political spin, governments do this thing where they store up their biggest steamers for when we’re all distracted. When the Strictly Express has just left its glittery skidmark across our screens, or when someone makes a cake on T.V., or when a bomb goes off in a residential street in the Western world, funding is probably being cut to your nearest hospital or school. This past month, I almost respected Warner Records for the way they played the Tory government at their own game by waiting for Boris to go full Mr Tumble before they flytipped a boxset of 14 solo Rod Stewart albums the same week Mr Tumble prorogued parliament.

It really was an excellent tactical plop – especially as this sleeve (the only one of Rod’s that most people can bear to look at because it predates him making us watch him prepare for sex) was omitted from the release. That’s because the proud Scotsman (born in Highgate, London, and residing in L.A. since 1975) released five albums before his glory years with Warners, with An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down being his first in 1969. (The others included Gasoline Alley, which features a picture of the floor, and Never A Dull Moment, fronted by a drawing of

Rod sat on a particularly dull chair and enduring an extremely dull moment.)

What I love about this sleeve is that it shows us a completely different side to Rod than the one we’ve come to tolerate. “Raincoat”, as Rod never called it, charted at 139 in the US and was evidently too punk to even register here in the UK. Its sleeve depicts Rod being dragged across a field by a choirboy. (It does not depict Rod terrorising a choirboy by chasing him across a field, although I understand how you’d come to that.)

It’s a beautiful moment in time that seems inconceivable to us with the benefit of hindsight: the young boy wouldn’t have been aware of who Rod Stewart was, or what he would become; Rod, not yet a star, would have simply been happy to be on his first album cover shoot, for a record of his own music, including ‘Street Fighting Man’ by the Rolling Stones. He would, of course, become a master in the dark arts of selling cover albums at Christmas with photographs of him about to have sex with a pair of woman’s legs, if not a whole woman, remove his trilby and slip on his owl hair. But here, in 1969, Rod is being dragged across a field by a laughing choirboy, happy in the knowledge that he’s got his Celtic underpants on and that which football team he supports is his little secret that maybe one day he’ll mention in an interview or two.

16 hilarious photos of toads wearing adult clothes

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illustration by kate prior

The BesT New Music

DiiV DeceiVeR

Captured Tracks

On their third album ‘Deceiver’, DiiV collaborate with producer sonny DiPerri (Protomartyr, Trent Reznor, MBV) to craft a soundtrack to personal resurrection under the heavy weight of metallic catharsis, upheld by robust guitars and vocal tension that almost snaps, but never quite…

MOON DuO sTARs ARe The LiGhT Sacred Bones

The seventh LP by the longrunning Portland psych band sees them synthesizing the abstract and metaphysical with the embodied and terrestrial, embracing disco as a grooveoriented departure point and chief inspiration.

On tour in the uK this autumn!

Sacred Bones

Dais

LiNDsTRØM ON A cLeAR DAY i cAN see FOReVeR

Given the horror and viscera of her previous album ‘Blood Bitch’, the Norwegian multidisciplinary artist’s latest solo album is almost subversive in its gentleness, considering intimacy from all sides and incorporating elements of ‘90s trance music.

The first solo album in over 35 years from cabaret Voltaire’s frontman stephen Mallinder (wrangler / creep show). An exercise in playful simplicity, ‘um Dada’ is an energetic and mischievous album fusing leftfield house and abstract electronics.

in the autumn of 2018, Lindstrøm composed a commissioned piece for Norway’s premiere art centre henie Onstad Kunstsenter. sketches from the sold-out performances became the foundation for the new tracks on the album.

JeNNY hVAL sTePheN MALLiNDeR The PRAcTice OF LOVe uM DADA

“space disco doyen jettisons the beats for a set of craggy analogue synth escapades, inspired by Matching Mole and opera” uncut Magazine.

Available on limited grey marble colour vinyl at all good independent record shops.

wiVes sO ReMOVeD

eMiLY cAPeLL V/A The TiMe FOR PeAce is cOMBAT FROcK Boho Records NOw

City Slang

Luaka Bop

‘The Time For Peace is Now’ compiles fourteen songs that, while recorded over four decades ago, speak now more than ever.

The tracks are a subset of 1970s-era gospel, undeniably soulful, passionate, and urgent songs from obscure 45s, dug up from a long dormancy in attics, sheds and rated across the American south. compiled by Gospel guru Greg Belson.

emily capell is a singer/ songwriter from North west London with a story or ten to share. emily’s approach to song writing is eclectic. Featuring a mixture of blues, indie, pop and punk. her musical stylings draw from a pool deep and wide and is affectionately described as sounding like the adopted daughter of Jamie T and Billy Bragg, and a distant relative of The clash and The Libertines.

Smalltown Supersound

The latest fit in a long lineage of gritty New York punk. singer Jay Beach’s delivery can be traced to his love of Bukowski and Rimbaud. while musically, both the noisy dissonance of sonic Youth and the clever, cerebral sneering of The Fall simmer as touchstones within the soundscapes the band conjure.

TeLeFON TeL AViV DReAMs ARe NOT eNOuGh

susuMu YOKOTA cLOuD hiDDeN

Telefon Tel Aviv returns with ‘Dreams Are Not enough’.

Josh eustis revives the storied southern Gothic electronic project, a decade after founding member charlie cooper’s passing, in the spirit of what they started. The fourth Telefon Tel Aviv album offers a textured vision of twilit modern pop and devotional industrial abstractions.

‘cloud hidden’ is an album of unreleased material by the late susumu Yokota. The tracks were discovered on a DAT tape by Mark Beazley of the group Rothko, who sent them to Lo Recordings label founder Jon Tye. Tye added additional elements and production to complete the ‘cloud hidden’ album. The result is classic Yokota - deep, mystical and endlessly resonant.

Ghostly INTL

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