Adrianne Lenker – Loud And Quiet 143

A. G. Cook, Loraine James, Eartheater, William Basinski & Preston Wendel, Hen Ogledd, Dan Deacon, Yard Act, The Golden Dregs, Jimothy Lacoste, Dorcha, The rise and fall of glam metal + more

issue 143

Adrianne Lenker

Social Distancing Champion

The New Album featuring ‘Trouble’ Out Now

OUT 6TH NOVEMBER

Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet Ltd PO Box 67915 London NW1W 8TH Founding Editor: Stuart Stubbs Deputy Editor: Luke Cartledge Art Direction: B.A.M. Digital Director: Greg Cochrane Sub Editor: Alexandra Wilshire Contributing writers Abi Crawford, Al Mills, Alex Francis, Alexander Smail, Colin Groundwater, Dafydd Jenkins, Daniel Dylan-Wray, Dominic Haley, Esme Bennett, Fergal Kinney, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Hayley Scott, Isabelle Crabtree, Ian Roebuck, Jamie Haworth, Jess Wrigglesworth, Jemima Skala, Jenessa Williams, Jo Higgs, Joe Goggins, Katie Beswick, Katie Cutforth, Liam Konemann, Lisa Busby, Max Pilley, Megan Wallace, Ollie Rankine, Oskar Jeff, Robert Davidson, Reef Younis, Susan Darlington, Sam Reid, Sam Walton, Tom Critten, Tristan Gatward, Woody Delaney.

Issue 143

In between issues 142 and 143, the Loud And Quiet podcast Midnight Chats returned for series 10. Tim Burgess featured on our second episode, where I briefly mentioned how lockdown made even those of us living in paradise feel sick of their surroundings (I really should call Radio 4 with this stuff). Big Thief leader Adrianne Lenker might not have agreed.

A wanderer by nature, she retreated to the wilderness as soon as all of her live dates were cancelled. “I could’ve been there for years,” she told Tristan Gatward in our cover story about heartbreak in quarantine and the two albums that she made in the middle of nowhere.

Stuart Stubbs

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

With special thanks to Annette Lee, Dan Carson, Duncan Clark, James Vella, Marcus Scott, Matt Harris, Sam Williams, Tom Sloman

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

Eartheater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Golden Dregs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Hen Ogledd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dorcha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Yard Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Loraine James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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

Adrianne Lenker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Rise & Fall of Glam Metal . . . . . .

Remembering the TIDAL launch . . . .

William Baskini & Preston Wendel . . .

YouTube comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A. G. Cook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dan Deacon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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12 16 18 24 26 30 35 52 60 64 66 72 74 78

The Beginning: Previously

Since the last edition of Loud And Quiet

We Are Not Divided by David Byrne On September 17th David Byrne launched We Are Not Divided via his online magazine Reasons to be Cheerful – a site dedicated to international collaboration and humanity in a very David Byrne way. Just as Reasons to be Cheerful reports stories of progress and togetherness in a world of perpetual bad news, We Are Not Divided is a six-week-long journalistic project happily out of step with the overriding mood of the years 2016 to 2020. Made in collaboration with The Guardian, Freakonmics and others, and continuing until November 2nd, the project explores our capac-

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ity to overcome division, via written features, infographics, video content and the odd doodle by Byrne himself. “There are people and initiatives out there that we can look to for inspiration,” says Byrne, “and boy do we need it.” Similar to his against-the-tide 2018 album American Utopia (the title was not meant ironically), We Are Not Divided finds inspiration in all corners of the globe, from the Congolese refugees in New York who ended a tribe rift through theatre, to the unlikely coming together of two Irishmen who helped legalise gay marriage in their country. Find it at wearenotdivided.reasonstobecheerful.world.

The Beginning: Previously The Black Music History Library Writer and music journalist Jenzia Burgos has founded a new online archive called The Black Music History Library. Already home to over 1000 entries (including radio segments, articles, documentaries and podcasts), the library seeks to correct the minimisation and ommitence of the Black origins of popular and traditional music, from the 18th century to present day. Resources are organised by genre, making it just as easy to find an article about the importance of Bad Brains (in Punk) as it is Mongo Santamaria (in Cuban Roots & Jazz). Black authors are also highlighted in the library to prioritise accounts from those who have primary insight into the subject at hand, and signaling to institutions that there is a public interest in their work

The Quietus subscription service Independent music site The Quietus made it to their 12 birthday on September 1st and celebrated with the launch of a new subscriber service. Until now, the site, which genuinely features underground artists hardly seen elsewhere, has survived through donations received from its readers, but via a new partnership with membership platform Steady, supporters can now receive exclusive essays, playlists, podcasts, and music collaborations between artists who’ve never worked together before, like GNOD and industrial shoegaze lord Justin K Broadrick as JK Flesh. “It’s taken off really nicely, which we’re really chuffed about,” says co-founder Luke Turner, “and hopefully it’s going to put things on a more even keel in the future. If there’s a tiny silver lining to the giant cloud of Covid it’s that I think people are finally starting to understand that if you want culture that isn’t of the mainstream to survive you have to put your hands into your pockets and support it.”

Super Cool Drawing Machine Lead by Sam Tucker, independent live agency Yuppies Music has announced a new art exhibition that will make use of music venues currently laying dormant due to the pandemic. With live shows still off the table, Super Cool Drawing Machine (taking place in venues in York, Birkenhead and Margate in November, and Norwich, London and Bristol in January) is an art show that features the “other” work of musicians, from the likes of Leafcutter John, Richard Dawson, Lonnie Holley and Tara Clerkin, including the pinhole photography of This Is The Kit’s Kate Stables, the chairs (yep) of Cate Le Bon and everything in between.

Loud And Quiet x DRIFT Records club With Totnes record store DRIFT Records (who also curate the excellent Sea Change Festival each year), we’ve launched a new record club for our members. At the end of

illustration by kate prior

each month we’ll be selecting up to 20 albums released over the previous 30 odd days for the Loud And Quiet x DRIFT collection, where members of Loud And Quiet will be entitled to 10% discount. Another month will roll on and we’ll select another bunch of albums to replace those in the collection, which lives at driftrecords.com/loud-and-quiet. To cash in on the member’s discount – and also receive our magazines, playlists, merch and offers – sign up at loudandquiet.com/subscribe.

Save Stereogum ’00s compilation Stereogum has released the compilation it announced at the start of the pandemic, by a way of keeping them in business.

With its dedicated reader community, keen sense of humour, and encyclopedic writers, the US site has been a distinctive and much-loved voice in independent music journalism for over 18 years. Back in April, as Covid sent the entire world into a spin and we soiled ourselves accordingly, they hatched a plan to try and shore themselves up: to release a compilation of their favourite artists covering exclusively music from the 2000s, as the 20-year nostalgia cycle inevitably winds around to the era of wallet chains, Jackass and nu-rave. On Sept 8th the record was released, unveiling a massive and impressive range of contributors, from The National and Moses Sumney to El-P and Thou.

Music journalism can sometimes feel like a one-way affair, with publications pestering musicians who’d really rather be left alone; seeing fans and artists alike come together to save an outlet like Stereogum has been very heartening indeed.

The Resurrection of Channel U The original grime TV station Channel U will relaunch on November 13th, having been off air since 2018. The resurrection of what quickly became the only satellite music channel worth watching when it launched in 2003 has been made possible with the help of YouTube channel Link Up TV and the first ever grime movie Against All Odds, directed by Femi Oyeniran and Nicky “Slimting” Walker. 385 is the number you’ll need to see the premier of Against All Odds on launch day alongside a selection of old school grime videos curated by Link Up TV.

Palestine In America The underappreciated story of Palestinian punk Najeeb ‘Geeby’ Dajani was recently uncovered by journalist Sama’an Ashrawi, who posted a viral video last month of Geeby stagediving at a Bad Brains show in 1982. From having his graffiti tag immortalised in cult 1979 film The Warriors to personally inspiring the likes of Beastie Boys and MF DOOM, Ashrawi claims that Geeby was the first Palestinian kid (a relatively small and marginalised diaspora in the US) to be documented engaging with US counterculture.

Despite his enormous charisma and talent, his story is largely unknown, so Ashwari is trying to change that with a special issue of the magazine Palestine In America dedicated to his memory. More at palestineinamerica.com.

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

Sat 10 Oct Erland Cooper Wed 14 Oct The Divine Comedy Sat 17 Oct Emmy the Great Sat 25 Oct Richard Dawson Thu 29 Oct Nubya Garcia Sat 14 Nov SEED Ensemble plays Pharoah Sanders Part of EFG London Jazz Festival Wed 18 Nov Shabaka Hutchings with Britten Sinfonia Part of EFG London Jazz Festival

The Beginning: Transferable Skills

L.D. Rey, poet

Poetry collections by popular musicians invite cynicism. More often than not, they are bad – bloated, brazen cash-grabs only picked up by publishers thanks to the guaranteed returns on celebrity. From Tarantula (the amphetamine-fuelled dreck Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan wrote at the peak of his career) to Jewel’s A Night Without Armor, the overlap between music and literature is littered with utter fucking duds of the poetic variety. When an artist ventures into this cow pasture at the risk of seriously stepping in it, you know they either have something to say, or, more often, something to prove.

Enter Lana Del Rey, who published a poetry collection in September called Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass. She released it as an audiobook, with some gentle musical accompaniment, earlier this summer. Her debut book arrives at a strange moment in her career in an undeniably strange year, when one might argue she actually does have something to prove, or should at least say something. Violet Bent Backwards comes with some considerable torque from the turns in Del Rey’s career across the past 12 months.

To review: in August 2019, she released the astounding Norman Fucking Rockwell, her best work to date and an album of the year. This May, though, she posted controversial remarks about sexism, feminism and the music industry on her Instagram. A new album scheduled for early September, Chemtrails Over the Country Club, has not appeared as of this writing. A book could be a chance for Del Rey to outline some kind of political position as other musician-turned poets – from Serj Tankian to PJ Harvey – have done, or simply explain herself at length.

Thankfully, Del Rey doesn’t do either. Instead, she’s written about the same themes that have interested her since the start of her career: romance, California, American luxury.

It’s pretty good stuff, as far as the poetry-by-musicians genre goes. On par with Patti Smith or Leonard Cohen (who, it should be noted, were poets before they were musical icons) it is not – there are some real clunkers. All the same, Violet Bends Backwards Over the Grass is an interesting addition to the larger body of Lana Del Rey’s work.

Her poetry is at its best when it grapples with the central tension of her music: the gap between Del Rey the person and

Lana the character/narrator of her work. Last year the former made headlines when she responded to a review by tweeting: “Never had a persona. Never needed one. Never will.” The comment was met with some incredulity. While it’s certainly unfair to say that ‘Lana Del Rey’ is an elaborate charade by the woman born as Elizabeth Grant, clearly not everything she writes is explicitly autobiographical. Thus, the eternal frisson of Lana – how much of what we hear (or read) is “real”?

Depending on what you mean by real, Del Rey would almost certainly say, “all of it.” That certainly seems to be the case in one standout poem, ‘SportCruiser’. “I took a flying lesson on my 33rd birthday instead of calling you,” she begins.

Somewhere between ars poetica and Ted Talk, it’s a long narrative piece about a person processing a breakup through sailing and flying lessons. “I’m not a captain / I’m not a pilot / I write,” she writes. It’s an earnest conclusion to some serious self-affirmation. Throughout Violet, Del Rey declares herself a Writer of songs, poems, and identity.

But while her identity is serious business, especially in ‘SportCruiser’, Del Rey is at her best when she has some fun with it. ‘LA Who am I to Love You?’ begins as a dramatic Ginsbergian ode to her spiritual home, but accelerates into an amusing turn at its end: “Actually I’ll do very well down by Paramahansa Yogananda’s Realization center I’m sure... I’m good on stage as you may know, you may have heard of me?” This is one of Del Rey’s more direct references to her celebrity, and certainly her funniest. The endless questions about her so-called persona are best addressed with a wink and a nod.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the collection’s best poem, ‘Tessa DiPietro’, which finds Del Rey reflecting on Jim Morrison with a healer, the titular Tessa. Tessa tells the poem’s narrator, “Singleness of focus is the key to transmission”, before imparting some wisdom about the late Doors singer.

Oh – and Jim died at 27 so find another frame of reference when you’re referencing heaven And did you ever read the lyrics to ‘People Are Strange’?

He made no sense.

Morrison’s poetry, in some ways, may be the closest analogue to Del Rey’s. Both collections were released mid-career (Morrison published a double header, The Lords and the New Creatures), both authors wanted to assert a literary dimension to their work, both were better songwriters than poets. But at its best moments, unlike Morrison’s work, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass displays humour and self-awareness, something much poetry lacks, whether it’s written by musicians or otherwise.

Whether you call her a poet or not, Del Rey is certainly a Writer – sometimes wry, always heartfelt.

words by colin groundwater. illustration by kate prior

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The Beginning: <1000 Club

Spotify preaches speed, Bandcamp delivers it

Spotify have a reputation of not paying their artists a fair cut of streaming royalties. Spotify CEO and Jeff Bezos lookalike Daniel Ek sees it differently. A few weeks ago, Ek claimed that a ‘narrative fallacy’ had been created. “Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape,” he stated, going on to say that, “you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.” As you can imagine, some musicians were angry. It sounds like turning artistic expression into content farming, and as someone who works in an industry that lost its shame over doing that to journalism about twenty years ago, it’s a bit cringe-inducing.

But let’s be fair and balanced. This is journalism, not content! Maybe Ek has an insight into how the kids are making tunes. Maybe that business model suits future generations. For this <1000 club, where we help a small act get over their first big streaming hurdle, I spoke to the founder of Speak & Spell Records, Josh Fortune. Josh set up his Cambridge-based electronic label when inspired by friends he’d met online through a Discord server.

“I had already built up this giant group of music friends who I love, and a couple of them were artists. I was trying to be an artist myself,” he says. “I wanted a place to put all of it together, and hopefully build a space for artists with an electronic theme.”

Speak & Spell are now a sturdy collective, and have gone on to release impressive, forward-thinking electronic music with a DIY flare. Shye makes gorgeous, playful mood music built on toy pianos and kalimbas. Her album Obscura is a true highlight on the label. Then theirs Vale-Smith’s hyperactive and richly-textured tapes which flip club music into introspective motifs. Under the name Russolo Collective, Josh is making explorative beat collages that emphasise the rough edges; an artist in the editing room.

“I make all my music on my phone,” Josh says, candidly.

“The Tape 1 stuff was made on my way to work, on the train, in a coffee shop. I find that sitting down to make music doesn’t work too well for me. It’s very DIY. I grab samples from wherever I can get them. I try and make it as smooth as possible, but I know it’s clunky in places. I kind of like that.

“I use synths and instruments in my band but when It comes to electronic music, the faster I can put stuff together the better. The more accessible the tools are the better.”

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Talking to Josh, it’s clear he makes music instinctively, in quick bursts. That speed is what Daniel Ek sees as the future of music.

But Spotify isn’t Joshua’s go-to favourite platform.

“Bandcamp provides the space for it,” he says. “It’s so easy to upload. It’s free. You can add merch. The aesthetic of it is just wonderful. It’s easy for people to go on there and just buy stuff. When it comes to other streaming services – and we’ve done this with Vale-Smith and we’ve done it with Shye too – it takes months to get it on there. We don’t have that time. We don’t wanna wait three months.

“If it wasn’t for Vale-Smith I don’t think I’d have my music on Spotify. I don’t really care. If someone wants to listen to my music, I want it on Bandcamp, nowhere else.

Radicalise / Breathe is the only Russolo Collective release currently on streaming. It’s a caustic collection of freeform electronic tracks, not the kind of thing that was made to do big numbers or get playlisted, and for Speak & Spell that’s not the point. They’ve already harnessed a community of creatives and passionate fans. Connection and exploration is clearly more important to them than capital.

Perhaps it’s wrong of me, but I can’t help but wish they all crack the 1000 plays mark soon anyway. Legitimacy through a play count is a silly idea, but there’s no doubt that there are plenty of people who would enjoy these projects who aren’t going to find them unless they get dropped at their feet through the algorithm. Some people just aren’t into spending their nights scrolling Discord or music boards. But those of us who care can tip the balance in art’s favour by supporting it, whether that’s directly on Bandcamp or on streaming. Probably both.

I can’t help but ask Josh what he makes of Ek’s comments.

“It baffles me,” he says. “How can you run a music streaming platform and be so out of touch?” Of course, Ek is coming at this music thing from a business angle, not a passion angle, but what Bandcamp and Speak & Spell demonstrate is that those ideas don’t have to compete – that following the interesting stuff benefits everyone. It certainly benefitted me following this unique group of artists through whatever ideas they dream up.

Vote with your attention, and give it to Speak & Spell. Let’s get them >1000.

words by skye butchard. illustration by kate prior

The Beginning: Sweet 16

In 2015 Jimothy Lacoste was the best dressed guy working your house party

I think I turned 16 in 2015. I think it was winter. I can’t remember because I don’t really do birthdays – I know my age, but I forget when my birthday is. I was with my boy Teo. We were just walking around. I’d already discovered my style a year ago, and I was really happy, loving life. Life was just so good then – I was so excited. I’d been reunited with my boy Teo – used to know him when I was 10, hadn’t seen him for years – and now he’s about to introduce me to all his friends. I think on that day we just hung out on a casual one. I’d just started drinking and I saw this bottle of Grey Goose, emptied out. I knew about Greg Goose because my older friends would brag about it. I was like, “Hang on, that’s a Grey Goose bottle; that’s one of the best bottles out.” I was like, “Teo, take a photo of me.” I posted it on Instagram, but I don’t know if people knew that I was joking. Loads of girls liked the photo, so I was like, “ok, this works.” It definitely wasn’t a weekend, because every weekend when I was 16 there was a house party going on. It was pure bliss – I would never worry about the future.

I was living in Primrose Hill [north London]. My hobbies were mainly graffiti-ing and I think by 16 I’d already dropped my first song. Music came naturally straight away. It came naturally and there was no one around me to judge me. There’s always been this thing with me where I’ve wanted to be different. So every time I did something I never thought, this doesn’t sound finished or like something on the radio. That really helped my confidence.

I was listening to a lot of indie music and a lot of garage. I loved old school hip-hop and I just got into trap in 2016, because I’d always hated trap – it was so boring to my ears. Then there

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was this one guy, Playboi Carti, and I actually liked the beats he was using.

I did not have fun in school. Primary was the most fun, but at the same time it was the most difficult time in my life. Oh my god, I’ve got to wake up and go to this place where I don’t like anyone.

I don’t like these teachers, I only like these two kids, and sometimes these two kids go off and play football and I’m there on my own for hours. And then secondary school was absolutely awful – the teachers there, I’m sure they were just doing their jobs, but them doing their jobs really, really irritated me. Then people were like, “Don’t worry, you’ll love college.” I hated college. I hated it even more than secondary. But as soon as college started, that’s when there were house parties every Friday, every Saturday. At first it was Teo’s friends’, and then friends’ of friends, and then you’d just crash them. You’d always get in. We maybe only failed to get into two, and they were boring apparently.

When I was even younger, my social skills were just terrible. And then all of a sudden, I just woke up one day and started living a certain life, started finding myself, then being at house parties I’d be really outgoing. I’d be the only one talking to everyone, like, “Yo, what’s your name, let’s chill.” I’d be the only one doing that, and I’ve stopped doing it recently. I need to get back into that mindset, because I was more outgoing when I was 16 and 17 than I am now. The only thing that I wanted was to feel good and have fun. That was literally my motive – I’m going to do what makes me feel good. If it gets me killed or gets me somewhere, I don’t care. I feel like that attitude is what gets you places.

as told to stuart stubbs

Out Now SPECIAL INTEREST ‘The Passion Of’

RIVAL CONSOLES ‘Articulation’

OSEES ‘Protean Threat’

Night School LP The Passion Of... takes you on an odyssey, from celebrating the highs and lows of hedonism, to dystopian anthems and disillusioned love songs. Ending in a powerful final decree offering visions and desires for futures to come. “a blistering vision of punk as possibility.”

– Pitchfork ‘Best New Music’ 8.4

Erased Tapes LP Articulation follows 2018’s Persona LP on Erased Tapes. During the writing process Ryan drew structures, shapes and patterns by hand to try and find new ways of thinking about music, giving himself a way to problem-solve away from the computer, creating an expression of a moving structure and conjuring a dreamy motorik energy.

Castle Face LP / CD John Dwyer (Oh Sees, Thee Oh Sees, Osees): “THIS RECORDING IS AT THE APOGEE OF SCUZZ PUNK ANTHEM AMULETS FOR YOUR EARS AND HEART A BATTERY FOR YOUR CORE BE STRONG, BE HUMAN, BE LOVE”

COLORAMA ‘Chaos Wonderland’

CHRIS FORSYTH / DAVE HARRINGTON / RYAN JEWELL / SPENCER ZAHN ‘First Flight’

DICK AND STEWART ‘ Original Soundtrack by Concretism’

Banana & Louie LP/CD “From the opening shufflebeat, furry psychedelia and dirty Hammond of And, it’s a band on fire, Ellis’s vocal nestled between haunting Jeff Buckley and Neil Hannon whimsy, while fresh beats underpin everything…” **** - Mojo

Algorithm Free LP “First Flight” documents about 40 minutes of jams recorded during the third week of my September residency at Nublu last year, and, for me, this show was just about the most enjoyable hour of music I played all year.” – C.F.

Castles In Space Limited One -Sided LP Original Soundtrack by Concretism for the new series of dark, dystopian animated films from the creators of Scarfolk, narrated by Julian Barratt.

FUZZ – III

MAGICK MOUNTAIN ‘Weird Feelings’

Coming Soon

PETER BRODERICK ‘Blackberry’

Erased Tapes CD/LP/ Ltd LP The subject matter of Blackberry is wide-ranging. He touches on family and on the connection we all need as social animals. He writes about technology and whether it will save or doom us.

And of course, he writes about nature, about foraging, about the importance of engaging with the outside world in cities and in the country.

In The Red CD/LP/Ltd LP One only knows one. Two is balanced therefore stagnant. III both active and reactive.

Charles Moothart, Ty Segall and Chad Ubovich are Fuzz. Fuzz is three.

And III has returned. Songs for all, and music for one.

Magick Mountain LP/CD Released October 23rd!!!

Debut album from this Leeds based trio brings a huge slice of sun-soaked Californian style fuzz to West Yorkshire. Magick Mountain burn ears and turn heads with their incendiary tales of infinite space, otherworldly escapes and weird feelings. Their colossal riffs, entwining harmonies and fistfuls of wild, distorted energy are carving out a place for the band at the vanguard of a new movement in garage-rock.

V/A - BROWN ACID: THE ELEVENTH TRIP

CARLTON MELTON ‘Where This Leads’

KELLEY STOLTZ ‘Ah! (etc)’

Riding Easy LP/CD Make yourself comfortable and prepare for yet another deep, deep dive into the treasure trove of dank, subterranean, wild-eyed and hairy rock ’n’ roll.

Agitated Records LP/CD Brand new double epic from soundscapin’ ambient drone magick karpet travellers Carlton Melton. OUT IN OCTOBER !!!!

Agitated Records LP/CD San Francisco’s pied piper of pure pop delivers another classic opus; 12 tracks of 60s pop influenced 80s pop new waving grooves.. hummable tunes at every turn, you will not be able to resist! OUT IN NOVEMBER !!!!

info@fortedistribution.co.uk

Eartheater

Like a phoenix, by Gemma Samways Photography by Levi Mandel 12

Alexandra Drewchin had just returned to New York from Europe when the executive order to stay home was signed into law.

Unable to return to her apartment because her 70-year-old roommate was shielding, she headed straight for her mother’s in the countryside, taking only the bare minimum of belongings with her. Not an ideal situation for anyone to be in, let alone an artist as physically and creatively restless as Drewchin. And yet, it turns out that lockdown actually offered the Pennsylvaniaborn producer/vocalist her first opportunity to decompress since the beginning of the Eartheater project, just over a decade ago.

“I slept for three weeks straight,” she laughs over FaceTime, a lot less intimidating than her cerebral strain of electronic pop might suggest. Speaking from the room she’s renting in Bushwick until she can return to her usual apartment, she sighs, “Honestly, I really needed it because I was pretty exhausted after finishing Phoenix.”

Listening to the intricacies of her fourth album and absorbing its high-concept visuals, it’s easy to empathise with the fatigue Drewchin felt upon its completion. Compound that with the fact that Phoenix was begun the day after she wrapped up vocal takes for 2019 mixtape Trinity – and that the mixing of the latter took place during the recording of the former – and you’re beginning to grasp the 31-year-old’s drive.

Her second solo album for Berlin-based label PAN, Phoenix finds Drewchin eschewing pre-recorded samples and creating every sound from scratch, alongside arranging for and conducting a seven-piece string ensemble. It was written and recorded in just 10 weeks during her artist residency for FUGA, which was based at the ETOPIA Centre for Art and Technology, “this giant, angular, sci-fi mass of stainless steel and glistening glass” in Zaragoza, at the foot of the Spanish Pyrenees. Drewchin was recommended for the residency by former recipient Colin Self – who is perhaps most famous for his work on ‘Unequal’ from Holly Herndon’s 2015 album Platform – and describes the entire experience today as “a dream come true.”

“In New York I’m constantly fighting and scrounging for the right type of space to do what I want to do, and I’ve always had to just figure out money, by working at a bar or selling weed and putting every single penny of it into making music... [At ETOPIA] I had 24-hour access to the studio, and I lived in the building above.

“So there were some days where my sleep patterns would just dissolve completely. I was basically driven by these periods of obsession where I would squeeze every last drop from the impetus. And in my downtime I befriended a lot of the locals and started hanging out in the countryside on this one farm in particular with a lot of baby goats, and riding a Kawasaki motorcycle up the Spanish hills that look like cayenne peppers. It was completely unbelievable.”

— Personal mythologies — There’s a palpable sense of wonder throughout Phoenix, present in the powerful geological imagery and in the choice of palette, which is largely acoustic and rooted in delicate, fingerpicked guitar, serene strings and intricately-layered vocal experimentation. In this respect, there’s a sense of an artist coming full circle to return to their folk roots, a reading that delights Drewchin.

“Absolutely. This record has been building inside me for 10 years. I’ve felt this egg growing. And I think that’s why I gravitated towards geological terms and the sort of the tension between these extremely slow-building and bubbling things that all of a sudden erupt.

“When I was 15 I fell in love with playing guitar, but I had to abandon it to scratch quite a lot of other itches because I knew I wasn’t wise enough to do what I really wanted to do [with it].

Coming back to guitar, I’m transported back to that point in my life where I would discover so much joy and peace in just mastering an instrument, and allowing the lucidity of that peace to open up all of these really lush personal mythologies.”

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“It’s really nice to be reminded every time I look at the cover that I feel really powerful. I had to fight to get to the point where I’m standing at the top of the volcano, having it shoot up my coochie”

This idea of growth is further explored through the symbol of the phoenix. “Looking back on the last decade, I can see very clear past lives within that period,” she says. “As you can tell from my work, I’ve been constantly reinventing myself, destroying myself and reinventing myself again. Now I think I’m coming more in touch with my pure essence. And this record feels less exploratory and more direct.”

Drewchin plays the titular phoenix in both the album artwork and the video for ‘How To Fight’, defiant, seductive and powerful as sparks fly from her. There was zero CGI for the shoot, an experience Drewchin describes with a laugh as “painful but totally worth it.”

“I definitely am a very sexual person,” she says when asked about her intentions for the artwork. “I love feeling the conjunction between my physicality and my music. When I feel sexy and strong, that’s when my voice sounds good. And I know that maybe sounds obvious but it hasn’t been that obvious to me, actually. I’ve had family members and controlling ex-boyfriends really try to bevel my edges, and it’s taken its toll on my creativity and my energy and my ability to do my best. So it’s really nice to be reminded every time I look at the cover that I feel really powerful, but it’s important to know that I haven’t always felt like that. I had to fight to get to the point where I’m standing at the top of the volcano, having it shoot up my coochie.”

Fight is the operative word. Raised within the rigour of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Drewchin recalls an “extremely strict” childhood, characterised by conservative dress, fasting, all-night vigils, prostration, and studying iconography with nuns, in an environment where men were prioritised above women. To break free took courage and she still marvels today at how long it takes to truly dislodge learned behaviour.

“If I were to psychologically analyse myself, I think my intense loneliness as a home-schooled child who did very little socialising, living in the woods, was significant. I remember being lonely but in this really deep melancholic way, and hungry for connection while still being aware of the romance of it. But I think for a long time my albums were like smoke signals, like, ‘Hey, I’m over here! This is what I’m trying to say – does anyone else get it?’ And now I feel so deeply nourished by friends and family and community that I feel at peace.”

“I’ve definitely had those thoughts where you’re like, why am I doing this?” she continues. “Those very dark but essential conversations that I think everyone has with themselves at some point. I’ve felt very lost at times and I’ve found it to be very useful to kill of parts of myself that don’t serve me anymore, just allowing there to be violence, poetically and imaginatively. There’ll be this cathartic moment where I’ll be wrestling with myself

14

deeply and then just cut out the succubus that’s been driving the car for a little bit too long, and the character I feel I am in those moments is this fiery phoenix.”

— Hunger is the best spice — Beneath the mythological imagery and experimental sonics, Phoenix preaches a deeply relatable message of mankind’s ability to rebuild and thrive in the face of trauma, a fact further conveyed by the album’s subtitle, Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin, and by the words “Poetry” and “Warrior” which Eartheater has tattooed on each wrist. This universality is important to Drewchin. “These are simple ideas,” she insists.

“They’re love songs and songs about breaking through to find your ultimate essence. These ideas are for everyone. Whereas I think in the past my intentions were different.

“The final track on the album is called ‘Faith Consuming Hope’ and I feel like that duality of faith and hope is interesting. Hope allows there to be space for doubt. Hope is giving into the fact that it might not work out, or it might not happen. But faith is the strength that is always there for you to access, even if you might not know how to get to it. Faith represents something bigger to me and beyond my lifetime. So when I sing, ‘I hope to die beyond hope’, it means that when I do die, I really hope I have that faith in me, and peace in my heart.”

For now, Drewchin’s focus is pushing the Eartheater project even further, including executing her vision for Phoenix live, a prospect that’s been sustaining her throughout this time of confinement. “When we go back to live shows it’s going to be a whole new thing,” she beams. “The type of magic in the air. People are so starved of connection and starved of those vibrations that they’re gonna honour it with every cell in their body. You know hunger is the best spice, and people are deeply hungry.” She adds with a laugh: “So yeah, maybe my mom was onto something making me fast all the time.”

Interview

bdrmm Bedroom

Andy Bell The View From Halfway Down

bdrmm The Bedroom Tapes

Vinyl/CD/tape/digital Out now

Vinyl/CD/digital Out now

Vinyl/tape/digital Out October 23

15

Benjamin Woods and Vogues are unlocking new worlds together, by Ian Roebuck. Photography by Jody Evans

The Golden Dregs ‘Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly,’ writes Raymond Carver in his aptly titled poem Happiness; a line I’m reminded of time after time in my discussion with Benjamin Woods, the driving force behind The Golden Dregs. Not just because Carver is a huge inspiration to Benjamin, although he clearly is. “I like short stories and poems, particularly Carver,” says Benjamin with a wide smile over the internet. “I don’t have the attention span for reading full novels,” he laughs. There’s another reason Carver is conjured up in our conversation: because Happiness is about appreciating the simple things in life, something that Benjamin, along with the entire world, has been trying to do more of in 2020.

It could have been so different. The Golden Dregs were about to embark on a year of touring off the back of their remarkable 2019 record Hope is for the Hopeless, an observational storybook of songs Carver would have been proud to pen.

But you know what happened and everything changed. “In all honesty, I feel like we will be better off for it,” says Benjamin, brightly. “I was able to reset and I think now we will benefit from having time to practice and get tighter. Looking for a silver lining, everything can be a bit more deliberate for us now and we can get back to basics.”

— Vogues — Deliberation was key to Benjamin’s time indoors this summer, as he focussed on finishing a project not many artists are brave enough to take on: reshaping his just-released album to give it a fresh voice. “We had started rolling with it before lockdown happened,” he says, “and that pushed us to finish it, reimaging the album, appreciating the directions these songs could go in and pushing them to extremes a little bit more.” The finished project is an EP called Sorry for Your Loss – a collaboration between The Golden Dregs and London based artist Vogues. It’s a record that warps the warm Americana of Hope is for the Hopeless into something sleazier (‘Hope is for the Hopeless’), more akin to Lynchian noir pop (‘Nancy and Lee’), danceable (‘Just Another Rock’) and endlessly strange (the closing dirge of ‘Clarksdale’).

Benjamin unlocked these sounds by substituting his own baritone vocals for those of guest singers like Anna B Savage,

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Issie Armstrong and Michael Clark, who helped transform ‘Back Down the Mountain’ into the early chillwave of Small Black. For his part, Vogues provided electronic beds and impulsive grooves to transform the feel of Benjamin’s short stories. “It’s been so nice to welcome in different vocalists,” says Benjamin, “which have opened up these personal songs to different audiences, but it’s also messed with my ego a little bit!” A grin creeps across his face. “You know, everyone prefers Issie Armstrong’s version of ‘Nancy and Lee’ to mine now.”

— To tell a story — Benjamin’s found his happy place but he’s certainly fidgeted around to get there. The Golden Dregs has manifested under many guises, through piano-man, bar-band and karaoke-crooner to its current iteration as an all-singing, all-dancing seven piece.

Don’t forget this new remixed beat-heavy collaboration as well.

“They’re quite drastically different aren’t they. The first record was done in two days in a studio with an old live band in Falmouth.

Then for Hope is for The Hopeless I kind of approached it as a solo record and did everything myself and had no intention of releasing it as I thought it was a bit too personal a record.”

The one consistency has been Benjamin’s love of storytelling, although he’s not always been comfortable in that role.

“I was a drummer for years and years and found it very difficult to acknowledge that I was writing songs – I would always shy away from that. A change of scenery, moving to London and getting things rolling with The Golden Dregs made me feel comfortable in my own skin and calling myself a songwriter, but now, after Hope is for the Hopeless, I feel that album has guided this project even more and I am way more comfortable working in that style.”

Throughout all of The Golden Dregs’ different forms, it’s been Benjamin’s lyrical turn of phrase that’s cut through. Like other gravel-voiced crooners that have come before him (Bill Callahan and Leonard Cohen two prime examples) he has a way with words. “I really like story-telling,” he says. “It’s something that I admire and respect, and it directly influences my music making process more so than listening to music. It is lovely if someone can say that they can detect an influence of Raymond Carver. ‘Wow, you have really listened to that, it means a lot to me!’ The last record was a break-up album basically – it was experiences surrounding that and my own actions afterwards. I found it quite easy to be frank and write about that because I was emotionally exhausted, which is a good place to be for writing.

I felt very insecure about being another guy doing a heartfelt break up album, it’s a bit gross I think, so unnecessary!”

He might find it gross but that feeling of loss ignited a creative spark in Benjamin. Inspiration never seems to be far away, but in 2020 it’s manifested in different ways. “I have written loads of music in the last year, I guess, mostly in the lockdown… I haven’t written much of the lyrics, I have been doing the music first, which is quite new to me. I have felt uninspired lately with lyrics because I have been indoors like everyone else. I just lost my job so now is a good time to get on with it. I was working at the Tate, so I was one of the redundancies there. It’s alright as it’s happening a lot, but it was a really great job with some fantastic people around me. I am now at the mercy of universal credit so we will see how that goes.”

There is a light at the end of the tunnel for Benjamin. He’s out on tour again with the new seven-piece band, a successful streaming show for End of the Road festival a real delight for those who caught it, although it wasn’t without its own drama.

“We had a virus scare amongst the band where myself and Issie were isolating waiting for test results and there was a big delay.

We couldn’t practice and we thought we might have to pull out.

In the end it was all good but it scared me about starting to take bookings on social distancing shows. How careful you have to be not to jeopardise that performance, it’s such a weird way to live but we carry on.”

So is hope really for the hopeless, or, like Carver said, does happiness come on unexpectedly? Benjamin seems to be opting for Carver’s mindset, finding optimism in everyday life even within a pandemic. “I am genuinely very excited,” he says.

“I make the mistake of dipping into the news or reading Twitter and it’s people telling stories about all the doom in the music industry with the virus, but you have to be hopeful with things.

It’s going to take a bit of time but then it’s going to be fine. You’ll see. Trust me… until the next problem.”

17

Hen Ogledd Four sentient blobs go on a pop adventure, by Dominic Haley Photography by Math Roberts and band

18

“You’ve got to admit there’s something about ABBA,” says Sally Pilkington in between bites of her toast and jam.

“I wouldn’t say I was a serious fan or anything like that, but I’ve always thought they had this weirdness and darkness in their spirit; the way they often buried the sadness underneath layers of joy.”

The reason I’m talking to a group of bearded, laid-back looking folk musicians about Sweden’s premier besequined pop legends is that Hen Ogledd name drop ABBA a lot. Not only are there mentioned littered throughout the promotional literature for their new record Free Humans, some of the album was even recorded in Atlantis Studio – the very same studio that brought us ABBA’s debut. At first glance, it might just seem like a bunch of musicians being deliberately obtuse, but when you stop and really think about it, you realise that both acts are actually kindred spirits. Just as ABBA’s sound took pop melodies and propelled them into weird, celestial places using a combination of disco and Bach, Hen Ogledd are doing the same thing. Except with more hedgerow electronica and lo-fi psychedelia.

For singer Richard Dawson, there’s another, more profound reason for the band’s ABBA worship, who’s name is, in fact, a kind of meta-commentary on the whole concept behind Hen Ogledd’s new album, Free Humans. “It felt right mention-

ing them because their name is also a palindrome,” he says. “It’s really apt for this album as there’s a lot of time shifts on this record. I mean, we start with the last song for one thing.”

The faces that make up the core of Hen Ogledd are no strangers to most Loud And Quiet readers. Beginning in 2013 as the pairing of Dawson and harp-touting sound artist Rhodri Davies – both successful musicians in their own right – initially the group was more of a jam band than a fully-formed musical project. Over the years, they have grown by adding fellow multiinstrumentalists Sally Pilkington and Dawn Bothwell alongside a couple of other on-and-off collaborators. By the time 2018 rolled around, they had morphed into a democratic arts collective, dialing down the improv and concentrating more on a community-orientated approach to songwriting.

“I almost don’t want to dwell too much on the beginnings of the band as I don’t think we really clicked without Dawn and Sally,” Dawson tells me when I ask about the early days. “We started pretty much as soon as Rhodri moved to Newcastle, but the music we made back then was really, really bad. A few years later Rhodri played on my Glass Trunk album. That was really going to be it until Lee Etherington of Tusk Festival suggested that we played a gig as part of his festival, and that’s when Dawn joined us. It’s been all down hill from there, basically.”

19

— Saffron and carbohydrates — Alongside Dawson’s traditional folk back catalogue, the name Hen Ogledd (a Brythonic term for ‘The Old North’, referring to an area that roughly matches up to modern Cumbria and Northumberland), suggests that this band would have a rootsy sound. In fact, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

If you manage to hunt down the band’s first couple of recordings, the solemn Dawson-Davies and the live album Bronze, you’ll find a free-form improv noise act that is closer to Amon Duul than it is to Pentangle. It made the band’s sharp left turn on 2018’s Mogic all the more surprising. Like a mist rolling back to reveal a figure beneath, the band kept the experimental blend of playful electronics and woodland folktronica, but gave the songs more structure and shape, effectively turning weird psychedelic explorations into well-formed wonky pop songs.

“I think the change came because suddenly we were all coming from very different places, but each had an area of crossover,” explains Dawson, showing how the evolution in style is really just the product of new perspectives. “For me and Rhodri we’ve always connected over a lot of Sun Ra, but adding Sally and Dawn brought a lot of different viewpoints. It takes me some time to get around it all. A lot of the time I might be going, ‘wow,

20

that’s a bit of a strange angle,’ but then, that’s what makes it so great.”

Hen Ogledd’s move to the poppier end of the spectrum could be considered more of an evolution than a revolution.

Even though the new direction has resulted in brilliantly meandering pop songs, the band go out of their way to stress that they remain improvisers at heart. However, the puzzle lies in how they actually make it work. How can four people who are all fiercely independent and prodigiously creative actually get together and combine all these visions without someone’s view eventually taking over? Our Zoom call suddenly falls ominously silent and some nervous glances are exchanged before Dawson starts to grin. “Y’know what,” he says, “I’ve been wondering the same thing too. It’s not really something that you can easily explain.”

“It’s hard because there’s really not any formula to how we come up with songs,” says Pilkington, beginning to flesh out the group’s answer. “Everyone is quite different in their approach.

Some might be like ten per cent there when we start working on them, and others might be closer to ninety per cent of the way there, but they all take different ways to be finished.”

“I’m not sure if I really agree with this idea of completeness,” says Davies. “I’m not sure we ever end up finishing a song.

“This was a strange album, really.

Not that it’s a bad thing – instead this feels more like a whole ecosystem of things I love. Like sewers. And plant life”

To me, that feels a bit too like there’s a formula behind it. I feel that if you get too caught up with figuring out a method, you tend to end up getting a little bit stuck. So it’s good to make sure your footing is unsure a little bit. Maybe cooking is a better analogy, only because we all bring our own ingredients to the mix. Some people might bring more significant sort of carbohydrates.

Others might be really incredible saffron, you know – stuff that will alter the flavour.”

“In that case, I generally just do the washing up,” deadpans Dawson.

— Free Humans — In line with everyone else on the planet, 2020 has been a strange year for the members of Hen Ogledd. The last time the band managed to see one another was back in February when they played their one and only gig of the year, to a crowd of children at MAPS Festival. Somehow though, not only have they manage to move from Weird World Records to its big brother label, Domino, they’ve also put out Free Humans; a glorious, ambitious follow up to Mogic. It’s a record that not only builds on the wild inventiveness of its predecessor but also takes itself into some very weird sonic territory. I mean, to illustrate the point,

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“I was also keen to rethink things and offer new possibilities of how things can be done,” says Davies. “I wanted to look at different ways of doing things and look at old technology with fresh eyes. You have these unfashionable things, like, say, the vocoder, which actually has this incredible history. I mean, it’s been ridiculed for years, but did you know the original one was first demonstrated in 1939? At the time it was this incredible, futuristic thing and yet now everyone’s laughing at it. In some way it was almost funny to include these artefacts from a future we never had.”

— Back to earth —

“A lot of the things we quarrel about are all so pointless. I honestly think people will look back on this era and wonder how we just let it all happen.”

as well as the ABBA references, the press release comes across more like a university reading list than a pop promo: influences cited include the twelfth century mystic composer Hildegard von Bingen, avant-garde filmmaker Werner Herzog and PC Music star Hannah Diamond.

Initially, Bothwell lets out a comically long sigh when I ask her about the themes on the new album. “Oh, god. It’s as confusing a question to answer as to how these songs came about in the first place. I guess we were all thinking quite disparate things at the time of writing the album and we sort of ended up smashing them together when we met up. It’s like we had all these seeds of ideas and just went, ‘let’s see what characters we can create with this.’”

“This was a strange album, really,” agrees Pilkington. “I think maybe it was because we all brought songs to this album that were kind of semi-written, so it feels more of a random mix of ideas than Mogic. Not that it’s a bad thing – instead this feels more like a whole ecosystem of things I love. Like sewers. And plant life.”

“At the time, I think the school strikes and the kind of environmental concerns were at the forefront of our minds, as they were for so many people,” adds Dawson. “So I think that played a big part in the record, but at the same time, and I don’t want to speak for the others, I didn’t want to make a polemic record. Right now though, it just feels kind of apt. The original idea was to get people thinking about our place on this planet as part of our ecosystem, but this led me down another rabbit hole.

I started thinking about what kind of environments might exist on other planets, and then on to the idea of space travel, and then on to time travel. The whole thing was kind of a slippery slope.”

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Even though its filled with moments of psychedelic hyperspace and flights of fantasy, Free Humans somehow feels like Hen Ogledd’s most earthbound album yet. It includes Welsh ghost stories and ancient, nine-foot-tall marsh monsters, and the use of Lee Patterson’s field recordings of sphagnum bogs to create an album that feels very much rooted to the land. With its bizarre energy and darker undertones, it could almost be a portrait of these isles themselves; inhabited by a people who are with one hand reaching out to an unknown technological future, and yet are stuck in a rose-tinted past.

“I think quite a few of the songs deal with our relationship with space,” explains Bothwell when I ask her about the record’s more rural feel. “I think it’s really a record that speaks about the land in terms of collective experience rather than who owns what. A good example is ‘Skinny Dippers’, which Sally wrote about skinny dipping in the North Sea, and how it was this brilliant collective experience. I think it flirts with the idea that you can’t really claim a place. Spaces are where people collect, connect and do things together and create these positive experiences. I guess that’s an essential part of making music as well. It’s as much of a collective experience as it is an individual one.”

“I think it’s also something that comes across by just looking about the span of time that we deal with,” says Pilkington. “Y’know, the way we look way back into history and then imagine futures out in space. I think it’s a perspective that only really zooms in on the ridiculousness of our present. If you take the long view, a lot of the things we quarrel about are all so pointless. I honestly think people will look back on this era and wonder how we just let it all happen.”

“I’ve always been kind of puzzled by the idea that we are the centre of the universe,” adds Dawson after a little more thought. “It’s like somehow it arranged it’s molecules to create these sentient blobs who are all walking around struggling to figure out why they’ve been arranged in these blobs. To see ourselves as separate to that is not necessarily mystic, but it’s also only looking at half the picture. We are all individuals, but we also belong to a collective. We’re all basically walking contradictions.”

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Dorcha It’s not ‘experimental’, it’s ‘a bit off’, by Ollie Rankine Photography by Sam Wood

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Rarely considered as easy listening, to describe music as ‘experimental’ conjures an intimidating image. “It’s a shit word really,” shrugs Anna Palmer, bassist and lead singer of Birmingham’s Dorcha. “It’s easy to make negative assumptions on what experimental music sounds like before you’ve even heard it. I’d much rather just say we sound ‘a bit ‘off ’.” Perhaps she’s being modest, but such a throwaway description falls considerably short.

Exploring a maze of multidimensional capabilities, Dorcha’s entirely genre-fluid approach to making music is determined to remain uncategorised by any usual convention. “We use genre as expression more than anything,” she continues. “We just throw a lot of shit into a blender and see what comes out.”

For a band of self-confessed introverts, Dorcha seem like a chipper bunch. Even confined to the tiny webcam squares on my computer screen, Anna and fellow bandmates are struggling to keep straight faces with one another as they ridicule their shared social awkwardness. “This is nothing new for us,” jokes Anna nodding at lockdown restrictions. “We’ve all been social distancing for years,” she says laughing. Though it’s taken the best part of three years, the band’s imminent debut album,

Honey Badger, celebrates those of us on the outside looking in.

The anxious oddballs whose restless minds race and trip over themselves to flee unfamiliar surroundings. “It’s about capturing the chaos and introverted mayhem that transpires from being a weird insular person in social situations, but also how these circumstances might help you go on to develop and grow,” explains Anna. Clearly, Dorcha know this all too well. Each of them nodding, the band’s violist, Beth Bellis agrees: “We definitely blag it quite well, but in reality, we’re just a bunch of weirdos who are all equally insular and anxious a lot of the time.”

These twitching insecurities seep through the album’s conceptual backdrop. Loosely described as a coming together of people, Honey Badger imagines a minefield of conflicting personalities all too resembling of real-life situations. Whether it’s awkward party introductions or sterile office small talk, it’s a scene made purposefully uncomfortable with no clear route of escape. Each track forms a steppingstone or the next phase of a precariously laid-out path. As impatient hands usher you further along, sheepish encounters develop into wilder, more adventurous outbreaks. As Anna puts it, “the Honey Badger is the creeping presence within our psyches that unleashes the weird, socially unacceptable side.” However, conscious not to give too much away, she’s quick to elaborate: “I don’t necessarily agree with what everything is meant to mean. I want people to take away their own interpretations. We don’t want anyone thinking we’re taking this too seriously. Some of the lyrics are total fucking nonsense. It’s more about embracing the joyful, chaotic side of things.”

— Always different, never the same — For a while, the band reminisce over their child-like excitement at first being introduced to the monster synthesisers inside Geoff Barrow’s Invada Studios. Having been offered the space to record the album, their first encounter with the acclaimed Portishead and BEAK> musician had gone down far smoother than expected, despite the fact no one actually recognised him. “I was completely oblivious the entire time, laughs Beth. “I had a huge chat with him and just thought he was some really lovely sound tech guy.” Adamant being blissfully unaware had prevented any obsessive fangirling, the look of awe on each face is enough to appreciate the high level of regard the band hold him in.

Such a kitted-out space as Invada allowed Dorcha a chance to flourish and really reinforce the foundations of everything they’d worked so tirelessly to create. “All the music felt really different at the beginning,” recalls drummer Euan Palmer.

“But eventually one track started to inform another until something entirely new was born. That’s a good enough reason not to have a genre fixated in your head.” He’s referring to Dorcha’s no holds barred mantra of stylistic free-for-all. Impossibly difficult to place, the band’s refusal to be pigeonholed is a pastiche of everything. It’s sort of paradoxical that so many reference points can culminate to such extremes of authenticity. “Anyone who’s heard our music knows that each thing we’ve put out has sounded quite different,” says Beth. “To be so unpredictable is an

advantage, rather than being tied down any fixed expectations.”

It’s a fearless sentiment and with no two tracks on Honey Badger remotely the same, it’s a pledge Dorcha make with considerable intent. Hoping to challenge listeners, Anna speculates, “On the album, there’s quite a bit people can latch onto that might only be exclusive to one song. We like that the breadth of what we do can cause somebody to really love one track but might not be totally into the rest of it.”

— A live alternative — Combining music with other mediums has always filled the centre of Dorcha’s creative process, and whilst the prospect of returning to gig venues remains depressingly unlikely, visual art has evolved to recreate the live experience through other, more inventive means. A piercing live energy thrives within Honey Badger, and despite weeks of preparation to road test the album, the band were left stranded by pandemic restrictions, unsure of where to redirect their efforts. “With live shows suddenly not possible, we twisted our plans into a visual representation of the album instead, so we have something interesting to show off without the gigs to back it up,” explains Anna. She’s referring to a feature length film Dorcha are putting out concurrently with the album’s release next month on Box Records. A free flow of visuals to compliment the music’s wider composition, it’s a resourceful showcase to replace what could’ve been a defining inaugural performance.

“We didn’t want to influence anyone’s judgement or vision for what the album should feel like,” says Beth. “We were interested in people’s natural reaction to it rather than dictating the ideas ourselves.” With the help of a few independent collaborators, the film captures a host of candid interpretations, each seized and patchworked together to fill in a more complete picture. “It’s interesting because although each visual artist we worked with brings their own style and ideas to the table, it’s easy to spot certain aspects that are consistent throughout,” says Anna. “It’s funny how different minds working separately from one another can end up feeling so coherent.”

For bands like Dorcha, getting back to live music couldn’t come soon enough. Having not played together since November of last year, to crave the thrill of a live audience seems almost trivial after being deprived of jamming with friends for so long.

Even through the faint crackle of my computer microphone the longing in Euan’s voice is palpable. “I think when that does happen, it’s going to be majorly special. Music changes when you hear it live. It’s never quite the same as on the record. For bands like us, it’s how we’ve built our music. By responding to the audience or our own energy levels, we create new shapes every time we play. It’s deeply personal and an integral part of socialising for a musician. I just can’t wait to play again.”

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Yard Act

Punk beyond what we already know â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that the Tories are bad,

by Jenessa Williams. Photography by Oliver Halstead 26

At the risk of being cynical, when a band draws national press off the back of only two songs, it normally means one of two things – they’re a nepotistic industry plant, or they’ve been pushed too far too soon, another one-to-watch that soon falls down the back of the proverbial sofa. Occasionally – just occasionally – they happen to be really bloody good, really bloody early.

In a year where gigs have faded away to non-existence, it would have been easy for a band like Yard Act to slip through the cracks. Fortunately, this Leeds outfit have all the ingredients for lasting intrigue: a whip-smart take on current affairs, a line-up that reads like something of a West Yorkshire supergroup, and a bulging back pocket of infectious-yet-unpredictable songs that satisfy both brain and feet. 2020 might be a write-off for most, but in the Leeds suburb of Meanwood, things are only just getting going.

“It has all happened pretty fast, but I suppose we’re not totally out of the blue,” explains James Smith, the band’s vocalist. “Me and Ryan [Needham, bass] have been passing friends for years – he played in Menace Beach while I was in a local band called Post War Glamour Girls, and we ended up on a split seveninch together through Jumbo Records. Bumping into each other all the time turned into intentionally meeting up down the pub – we kept saying we were going to start this band, but just never got round to doing it.”

With Needham moving into Smith’s spare room last September, housemate status allowed a productivity that meant early demos could be racked up at speed, finally turning those pub chats into reality. Pinching two extra members from Leeds group Treeboy & Arc, the now four-piece laid down their debut single ‘The Trapper’s Pelts’ with Bill Ryder Jones; a slice of strutting post-punk that manages to recall Nick Cave and Franz Ferdinand while sounding distinctly of the moment. Industry interest was piqued, but a mere three gigs in, everything came to an unexpected halt.

“We came straight out of the gates in January, then headed right into lockdown,” says Smith. “We wanted to keep everything going, so we got Ross Orton to remix this live demo we had as the second single, ‘Fixer Upper’. In the process, Sammy, our original guitarist, actually left. It was all amicable, he just wasn’t really feeling the vibe. Now we’ve got a new guitarist called Sam in, so very little difference there! And that’s pretty much the potted history of Yard Act – the tiniest pot available.”

— The Piers Morgan effect — While ‘Fixer Upper’ might have only been intended as a momentum bid, it’s ended up becoming something of a calling card. A satirical character exercise in the same vein as The Streets’s ‘The Irony of it All’, it’s portrayal of neoliberal Britain puts Smith’s spoken word background to fine use, equal parts

dark and comedic. ‘Graham’, as he introduces himself in the song, is a very 2020 type of law-abiding citizen, casually racist and gleefully unaware of his own privileges. Although the song was written pre-pandemic, it’s not difficult to imagine that this pseudo-patriotic character would have more than a few opinions on the last few months of political events.

“Graham, for 99% certain, is an ‘All Lives Matter’ kind of guy,” says a wryly-smiling Smith. “I’m pretty certain there are two ways he could go on the pandemic; it’s the Piers Morgan effect. If he’s been personally affected, he’ll be completely against the government who are not doing enough. If he’s not known anyone hurt by it, he’ll definitely be all like, ‘I won’t wear a mask, it’s just the flu,’ because at his core, he’s only interested in himself.

“I’ve actually been writing a follow-up to it, about the people who move into the house after Graham, but I’m not going to try to milk it too much. I’m really glad people have clicked with the character, or I should say, clicked with the portrayal of it as an antagonist in their life. Imagine – ‘Finally, this guy’s singing about what really matters – I’m glad someone’s saying it!’ I hope that’s not it.”

Without signalling themselves as an inherently political band (“I don’t want to tell people what to think”), Smith hopes that each Yard Act song is the start of a conversation, allowing listeners to conclude their own meanings.

“Music in politics is very prominent at the moment, but it’s all very much like ‘Tories are bad’, and we already know that,” he reasons. “If we’re going to say something, let’s say something interesting. What was important to me with a song like ‘Fixer Upper’ was that I’m going to do the impression, but I’m not gonna explicitly say that that person is wrong. Everyone came to that conclusion for themselves. I don’t just want to pat everyone else on the back and be like, ‘aren’t we all left-wing’, but equally I don’t just want to say something outlandish and ridiculous just to challenge opinions. I don’t feel it’s my responsibility to make any statements but I definitely feel that if I did say anything out of line, I should be held to account for it. I feel I could deal with that. I think if you remain empathic and openminded, you can pretty much work your way through anything.”

Like the politically outspoken IDLES or Sports Team, it is undoubtedly true that as Yard Act’s star begins to rise, there will be people waiting in the wings to take a pop at their presumed performativity. A recent Facebook comment from a fan who took umbrage at the band’s post in support of Black Lives Matter was a teaching opportunity for Smith, who had perhaps naively assumed that he would be preaching to a progressive choir. “I was really surprised at that response, but then that’s what happens when you sound like a punk band from the ’80s,” he deadpans.

“Some of that older generation still hasn’t moved on, but I suppose the whole point is that it’s good to have the conversa-

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tion. I’ve seen other bands have it where right-wing fans have questioned their politics, and they’ve basically just said, ‘fuck off then, don’t listen to my music.’ I don’t think I always agree with that. I have that strange advantage as a relatively middle-ofthe-road white man where I can Trojan horse into conversations with working-class men a little bit faster than the people that they see as different from themselves and will cause them to put their guard up. So I think it’s important that I don’t wage war on them if I could maybe help them understand. You plant seeds; no one changes their mind in the heat of an argument.”

— The world’s most famous whistler —

“I don’t just want to pat everyone else on the back and be like, ‘aren’t we all left-wing’”

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Coincidentally, it’s the planting and harvesting of musical seeds that have brought Yard Act to their exact place of eclecticism. The ’80s punk rock sound that Smith mentions is certainly audible, but it is filtered through all kinds of other retro touchpoints that he carries from childhood – ’90s hip-hop, ’70s ItaloDisco, even a touch of ’00s indie’s more cerebral moments.

Seldom suffering from writers’ block, Smith estimates that the band have at least 60 demos on lock: “Whether it’s any good or not is another thing, but I’m not too precious about stuff until it gets to the final stages.”

Listening to the tracks that have reached sign-off status, a groovier approach is quickly apparent, driven by the electronic elements that the band have experimented with during lockdown. ‘Dark Days’ is an instant stomper, a funky slice of art-rock that references A Tribe Called Quest to reflect on the self-punishment of news media doom-scrolling: “That whole pit of despair where you start feeding your own misery.” The other new track, ‘Peanuts’, is an off-kilter murder poem with hints of Alex Turner swagger, made all the menacingly-weirder by its cheerful wild-west whistle.

“That was a joke that just got more and more out of hand,” says Smith. “Sam who plays guitar, his granddad was the world’s most famous whistler, this big showbiz entertainer. His name is Ronnie Ronalde; he just put the ‘e’ on the end to make it sound more mysterious and exotic. Known for his bird whistles, he did this cover of a classical piece called ‘In A Monastery Garden’, and that’s the sample that’s underneath. It’s out of copyright but completely renowned – don’t step to his throne!”

Bird-calling productivity aside, the promise of a full Yard Act album is still a solid work in progress. “We›re still such a young band that I›m happy to let it find its feet,” Smith reasons.

“But writing-wise, I’m thinking more character studies, more abstract stuff, maybe a few throwaway fast songs as well, ’cos I don’t just want it to be me just going on constantly. I don’t know if I feel confident calling it poetry, but the spoken word stuff... actually, maybe I will call it poetry, just to annoy poets! There’s been an elitism around it for a long time, and it’d be good to challenge that.”

By way of final thought, he ponders for a moment. When the words find him, they are suitably Yorkshire, a phrase that a certain Sheffield band would be proud of. “If people think they know what we sound like based on those two tracks, they’re definitely wrong.”

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A collection of rare and unreleased music by the pioneering synth wizard Mort Garson (‘Mother Earth’s Plantasia’), all taken from original master tapes discovered in Garson’s archive. The album plays like an ultimate playlist of the best of his wild and woolly catalogue.

Brownswood Recordings present the new album from Mexico’s most established and prolific jazz musician, Tino Contreras, ‘La Noche de los Dioses’.

MARY LATTIMORE SILVER LADDERS

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The Wytches return with their third album ‘Three Mile Ditch’, a record bursting at the seams with hard rock screamers, hooks and riffs so infectious they burrow deep into the brain, and also other more nuanced elements at play. Kristian Bell’s love of classic songwriting from Bob Dylan to Elliott Smith via Big Star’s Alex Chilton can be heard reverberating throughout the record; the result is a blend between his honed and subtle knack for songcraft and crunchy, eruptive bursts of noise.

MOURN have grown up and that’s evident on ‘Self Worth’, their fourth and most focused album to date. Serving up vivid melodies while retaining MOURN’s defiant punk ethos and sound, they deliver a rewarding balance of cathartic escape and confrontation. It’s an impulsive rescue of the riot grrrl, a raucous reclamation of self-empowerment in the face of toxic patriarchal society.

Los Angeles-based harpist Mary Lattimore returns with ‘Silver Ladders’, the full-length follow-up to acclaimed album ‘Hundreds of Days’. Lattimore met Slowdive’s Neil Halstead on tour which led to the addition of Halstead as a producer and collaborator which leaves a profound trace this time around.

RED RUM CLUB THE HOLLOW OF HUMDRUM

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PLANTS AND ANIMALS THE JUNGLE

TOBACCO HOT WET & SASSY

Recorded with producer Chris Taylor (Blossoms, The Coral) at Parr Street Studios in the band’s home city of Liverpool, the follow up to ‘Matador’ was written during the hectic touring period of their maiden campaign. While in airports, vans or hotel rooms, the band took advantage of the on-theroad euphoria, an impenetrable sense of brotherhood and a palpable creative streak to write their masterpiece.

The mighty Sun Ra Arkestra return with their first studio album in over 20 years, under the direction of the ageless Marshall Allen.

Eartheater’s most accessible album yet, renewing her focus on guitar / voice songwriting.

An utterly compelling work that bridges forward-looking territories and universal emotional power. Eartheater’s voice glows brighter than ever at the center of Phoenix’s arrangements, cresting to operatic highs, settling into melancholic murmurs, or tumbling in animated cadences down the scale.

‘The Jungle’ is the fifth studio album by the iconic Montreal band Plants and Animals, released on Secret City Records.

It starts with electronic drums that sound like insects at night.

A whole universe comes alive in the dark. It’s beautiful, complex and unsettling. Systematic and chaotic. All instinct, no plan.

Pennsylvanian experimentalist TOBACCO returns with ‘Hot Wet & Sassy’, a full-length album oozing with his most playful and approachable songs to date, which, conversely, express notions of anti-love, self-hate, and disappointment in others. The album includes a collaboration with Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor.

Modern Sky

Strut Records

Limited ‘Dinked Edition’ vinyl available at www.dinkededition.co.uk

Pan

Includes new versions of Ra classics Angels And Demons At Play, and Rocket No. 9, plus the first ever recording of Allen’s composition Swirling.

The album is a full-blooded celebration of Sun Ra’s legacy.

Contreras presents a sonic gift; a kaleidoscope of evolving and shifting spiritual rumination about life and humanity.

Following the release of ‘Musica Infinita’ on Brownswood’s sister label Arc Records, this new work features seven new recordings, with contemporary jazz themes.

Secret City

Includes the singles Le Queens, and House on Fire.

Support Your Local Independent Retailer www.republicofmusic.com

Ghostly International

Available on limited coloured vinyl at all good independent record stores.

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Loraine James New year, new meh, by Dafydd Jenkins.

Photography by Sophie Barloc

You get the sense that, were it not for the global pandemic jeopardising the live music industry by making it practically impossible to stand next to one another in a crowded venue, 2020 would’ve been the year of Loraine James. Never mind the fact that her breakthrough second LP For You And I offered a forward-facing amalgam of electronica, drill ‘n’ bass and grime with a free-flowing jazz momentum and none of the grandiose trappings; it became the sleeper hit of 2019, earning critical praise from each corner of the electronic music sphere, and topping year-end lists in the process.

But Loraine James will be avenged, even as she plays down the LP’s success. “I didn’t really listen to the album after I put it out,” she tells me via Zoom, fatigued by the heatwave hitting London today. “Once I put something out I don’t really listen to it anymore, it kind of goes away. I don’t really want to think about what critics think. I just wanna make music. But yeah, I’m surprised and grateful for the praise that [For You And I] got.”

Any artist would strain under the pressure of an unexpected hit, and while James wouldn’t exactly compare her position to imposter syndrome, certain insecurities still prevail. Having been picked up by Hyperdub, due in part to a recommendation from DJ and producer object blue after appearing on her Rinse FM show, James would cycle through the label’s roster: “I’d compare myself to people who don’t even sound like me anyway.

I just wasn’t expecting to get picked up.” What’s more, as much as she doesn’t try to overthink her own music, For You And I felt like a remarkably personal album to have been suddenly pushed into the limelight. It’s partly dedicated to the Enfield tower blocks on the LP’s cover, where James spent most of her life. It’s where she started playing music, and where she first came out to her mother. It also represents yet another community teetering on the precipice of gentrification’s gaping maw.

The task of presenting the LP in a live setting properly for the first time in a long time is as daunting as it is exciting, in no small part because James has been prolifically self-releasing music via her Bandcamp all year; so much so that it’s difficult to know where to begin with rehearsals. “I’m just stressing because I’ve made so much music this year,” she says. Judging by the

short work-in-progress song clip she posted to Twitter an hour before our conversation, she’s not slowing down. Beats seem to come to James as organically as breathing, even if talking about her music isn’t something that comes as easily. There is a sense that words like ‘glitch’ and ‘electronic’ don’t really do her justice, and her hesitant pause before using any of them is testimony to the fact.

— Summer is a traitor — Still, James is refreshingly open about showing her sonic progression. Among her “random” 2020 Bandcamp releases, like Hmm, Bangers and Mash and New Year’s Substitution 2 (“With all this free time, I thought, why not?” she says), there’s a shelved album project of her ‘glitched’ ‘electronica’ laid out in a markedly more minimalist style than her other work, informed by her appreciation for Japanese electronic artists such as those on the Progressive Form label. Most notable among the expanded universe of Loraine James releases is her use of samples, a facet largely absent in any obvious sense from her mainline output. James is always surprising in this regard, and whether she knows it or not, profoundly funny. Her choice of The Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’, which plainly crops up in an early demo version of ‘My Future’, and the scrambled rendition of Khia’s foul-mouthed anthem ‘My Neck, My Back’, which fills the jagged gaps of ‘New Year New Meh’, feel revelatory and – dare I say – hauntological; deeply felt expropriations of kitsch pop in an age driven by instantaneous nostalgia. She explains that the application is practical as well as artistic: “I really like putting acapellas in contexts they wouldn’t usually be put in, just to hear how it sounds. Other times I’d throw an acapella in to see if vocals would suit it. It gives me inspiration in some way.”

Despite the wealth of stuff she’s put out – largely paywhat-you-want, no less – she’s still self-effacing: “I should probably concentrate on the proper releases.” We’re ostensibly here today to talk about one of those “proper releases”. Directly after the release of For You And I, James uploaded unfinished songs onto a private Soundcloud account with the idea of reach-

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ing out to potential collaborators via Twitter, who would later sift through the available tracks for anything that captured their interest. The resulting EP, Nothing, sounds like a greatest hits sampler, containing sonic elements and preoccupations of James’ past work condensed into a single disc. This isn’t to say she was convinced of each track’s potential at first. “I wasn’t feeling the instrumental to ‘Don’t You See It’ at all,” she says. “I wasn’t really into it at the time and wouldn’t have recommended it to anyone.” Luckily, Jonnine Standish of dynastic Australian group HTRK took the gauntlet anyway. “Jonnine sent me her vocals and we reworked the song a bit. Everything started falling into place.” Curiously, with its gut-punching piano, choral pads and sputtering beat, paired with Standish’s R&B-inflected vocal and lyrical melancholia (“Summer is a traitor / ’cos Summer’s moving on”), James hasn’t sounded this tenderly accessible since ‘Sensual’. “I’ve definitely heard a few people call [‘Don’t You See It’] kind-of-pop. I get where they’re coming from, it’s definitely one of the more straightforward songs I’ve done.”

When I ask whether or not she’s aware of a softer edge creeping into her music, she leaves things tentatively openended: “My music’s ever-changing, and even if it’s something

straightforward I still like to keep things interesting, whether it’s by panning things a certain way, etcetera.”

— Keep it simple — Despite largely dwelling on a maximalist sound at present, her methodology of simplicity rings true across her music, as she’ll occasionally chop and splice her own demos through Ableton in order to complete the final mix of a song. At a glance, her live set up is also bare-bones: a standard table with a couple of samplers, a micro keyboard and a laptop, all of which she’s been using the past four or five years. “I just kind of think like that,” she says. “A lot of stuff can obviously be heavy to carry, so even if I did buy a fancy new keyboard or whatever I’d still have to compress everything down to this live set up anyway.”

With the notable exception of ‘The Starting Point’, a stalwart solo James track complete with time signature slashes and an unexpected left turn from a bilious beat to a plaintive keyboard progression (improvised, I’m told), it may be fairly said of Nothing that it is deceptively straightforward to the untrained ear, especially when contrasted with the wily textural switches

“I started listening to electronic music when I was about 15 or 16.

I listened to a lot of Death Cab For Cutie at the time”

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and aggressive impasses of For You And I. The blunt, windowbreaking noise-meets-grime abrasiveness of her track ‘London Ting // Dark As Fuck’ is recalled to explore the realities of mental health and the migrant experience on ‘Marg’, as iterated by Liverpool-based, Farsi-language MC Tardast, who delivers lines like “Haji we are all dead, into the death corridors, maybe we all get lost” over synthesised horror score strings. Other traces of a declining nation lie all across Nothing. “It’s only in the past couple of years I’ve been into clubbier things,” says James in relation to the EP’s title track, which is headed up with thick synth tones best suited for a laser light show. The key to the track’s ironic intonation is twofold: James sends a junglist rhythm through an exhaustive footwork-out, as Uruguayan guest vocalist Lila Tirando a Violeta trades rave’s hooky utopianism for a nihilistic refrain: “I feel nothing / we don’t feel nothing.” “That track was supposed to be trance-y,” says James. “It’s definitely a song I’m looking forward to playing but” – she gestures with her eyes at the general state of things – “you know.”

education came as she studied for a degree in Commercial Music at University of Westminster, but her entry into electronic music came in the same way it did for many people who didn’t necessarily frequent the clubs. She spent her early teens as an indie rock kid, getting in from school to watch Kerrang! TV and MTV Rocks. She’s seen Paramore twice (2013’s self-titled album is one of her favourites). “I started properly listening to electronic music when I was about 15 or 16,” she says. “I listened to a lot of Death Cab For Cutie at the time, and I remember checking their associated acts.” While she commits a cardinal sin of American emo fandom in not liking Benjamin Gibbard and Jimmy Tombarello’s indie pop project The Postal Service (“I know, I’m sorry”), the bigger draw would be Tombarello’s first LP as Dntel, Life Is Full of Possibilities, and later his 2011 album, Aimlessness. It’s easy to see why in the case of Aimlessness – largely dismissed by a mixed reception at the time, Tombarello nonetheless sounds like proto-Loraine, blemished drones gradually becoming sliced up by syrupy techno babbles across the runtime, offering the element of surprise that James consistently revels in with her work. From there she found the music of Baths, Squarepusher and Telefon Tel Aviv. “But yeah,” she laughs. “It all started with Death Cab For Cutie, I guess.”

James’ mother is also to be credited for her eclectic listening, if not her cross-genre approach to her own music, having played everything from Calypso to Metallica in the home. As such, you can’t click on any of James’ YouTube videos without seeing a top comment from an ‘S James’: “Loving this from my daughter,” they tend to read, followed by two flame emojis. “She doesn’t listen to electronic music or anything,” laughs L James, “but I’m grateful that she checks out my stuff. I’d sometimes get embarrassed if she’d come down to gigs but it’s fine, and obviously my last few gigs have been clubbier ones that run until one or two o’clock so she’d be in bed anyway.”

As for the foreseeable future, James has a socially distanced gig alongside Glor1a and Demigosh lined up at London’s Cafe OTO as part of Gaika’s Between The Lies night, as well as a slew of livestream events, while cancelled dates here and abroad are still being rethought. As much as discussions of the pandemic are dully pervasive in music writing in 2020, it can’t be denied that it casts a long shadow for artists like James. “A weird time,” she says, for lack of a better phrase. “It might be worse in two years, who knows.” I suppose if things do get worse, and many of us are once again relegated to our homes indefinitely, there’ll surely be more ‘random’ Loraine James EPs to tide us over.

— It started with Death Cab — If she seems a little bit hesitant to talk about her own music – and why wouldn’t you be when every interviewer who crosses your path wants you to define it – she’s a sight more comfortable discussing the music of others. Her technical

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12 hours of your favourite females. #foundationfm

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Reviews Albums

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Albums

Clipping – Visions of Bodies Being Burned (sub pop) More so than any other genre, horror has a shared history of sequels upon sequels, wherein whole franchises grow from singular baddies.

Anyone can be scary for the duration of one film, but it’s the fiends that remain terrifying after multiple sequels that live longest in the imagination. Often, it is the sequels that are the key to the legacies of the screens’ greatest monsters.

A prime example is Nightmare on Elm Street’s very own melted Paolo Nutini antagonist, Freddy Krueger. Amidst the fog and analogue synth soundtrack of the original, glimpses of him are stark and terrifying, but it’s as he’s fleshed out in the second and third installments that Krueger really comes into his own.

In Freddy’s Revenge and Dream Warriors, the besweatered dream assassin flaunts a razor-sharp wit to match his talons, cackling away as he indulges in increasingly nonsensical murders. All mystique vanishes, but it’s replaced with something far better; fleeting murderers are scary, but there’s something far scarier about a serial killer with a lavish grin on his face. In the especially schlocky third film, Krueger murders a nurse by reaching out of a TV; as his cyborg arms smash her into the glass, Freddy duly cackles “Welcome to prime time, bitch!”

Indeed, the list of horror sequels that develop their respective mythos is vast and insurmountable. For me, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is another one that sees the schlock ramped up, but after one viewing the protagonist seems even scarier than in the ultra-tense original. Leatherface gets even more terrifying as his gormless fleshy chops have more chance to hog the camera.

Wes Craven’s Scream 2 fills this mould even more willingly. In fact, it’s

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cited by LA hip-hop experimentalists Clipping as a vital part of the ethos that fuels their own follow-up horror. The second Scream film gets sickeningly meta, as Randy, the movie’s laborious plot-explaining film bro, explains the rules of the sequel. “There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to create a successful sequel,” he explains.

“Number one: the body count is always bigger. Number two: the death scenes are always much more elaborate – more blood, more gore. Carnage candy. And number three: never, ever, under any circumstances, assume the killer is dead.”

Whilst startlingly on-the-nose, this hypothesis is nonetheless often applicable. As Clipping ready their very own vital horror sequel, it’s clear from the outset that there will be far more of everything than before. Starring a Grammy- and Tony award-winning lead alongside an all-star ensemble of features and cameos, Visions of Bodies Being Burned fits perfectly into this lineage of essential part twos.

The most important thing for a classic sequel is that it follows a classic original, and 2019’s There Existed an Addiction to Blood is just that. Daveed Diggs, perhaps most notable to a wider audience for his lightning fast-rapping in the original production of Hamilton, leads his indomitable trio through a series of vignettes that evoke classic horror films effortlessly. Diggs finds his calling as a storyteller with his eternally novel second-person bars mangling the industrial beats of Jonathon Snipes and William Hutson. There Existed an Addiction to Blood saw Clipping draw a black line in Sharpie between noise music and horror films, where before there were only pencil marks.

On that albums, Clipping laid the groundwork for a distinctly avant-garde take on hip-hop that has the rich history of horror cinema running through it: their videos paid homage to films like Halloween and Diggs’ breathless flow vividly described scenes akin to horror flicks. It was wholly fresh, and the misty pictures became clearer with every listen. But this isn’t the first time that horror and

hip-hop have shared space on wax. The two media have always had more than just a working relationship. In the 1980s and ’90s, select hardcore MCs melded their murky rhymes with grindhouse subject matter, horror film samples and occasional Wilhelm screams to create the genre horrorcore. Whilst Kool Keith claims to have created the genre, with his Dr Dooom and Dr Octagon monikers, as well as with frequent spooky forays with Ultramagnetic MCs, the ‘horrorcore’ term envelops artists from Scarface right up to the Insane Clown Posse. Notably, whilst the RZA was reshaping hip-hop to the tune of Shaw Brothers Kung Fu flicks in the Wu-Tang Clan, his other outfit, Gravediggaz, released the epochal Six Feet Deep, which does the very same thing with slasher flicks.

Visions of Bodies Being Burned is the fourth Sub Pop album by Clipping, and in true horror sequel fashion it arrives less than 12 months after There Existed an Addiction to Blood. It places the group clearly in a lineage of horrorcore groups, albeit with their own entirely novel sonic tropes and attitudes. The industrial hip-hop group fully embraces this aesthetic, creating a postmodern horrorcore aesthetic and finishing what they started last year. More of a planned diptych than a rushed sequel, admittedly, Visions of Bodies Being Burned follows up what was the group’s best album to date with something even better.

The calling card of most horror series – the Nightmare on Elm Street films particularly – is that they’re driven by showy and dramatic set-pieces rather than a gripping overarching plot. The same can be said of Visions of Bodies: ever cinematic, the instantaneous feelings evoked by Diggs’ breathy rapping take precedence above a consistent concept.

Lead single ‘Say the Name’ is the foremost of these; a magnificent setpiece employed to devastating effect.

Following a tense intro track that sounds like someone escaping a killer, ‘Say the Name’ is the most instantly gratifying of any Clipping song. It revolves around a slinking synth bassline and a repeated low frequency manipulated vocal sample,

Albums working as a freaked-out theme tune to the proceedings.

The sample takes centre stage, an homage of its own – Diggs’ own rerecording of horrorcore pioneers Geto Boys – and rumbles through the night as the track makes its way to its heady climax.

Daveed Diggs is known worldwide for his fast delivery. His lines in Hamilton are faster than Eminem’s indecipherable ‘Rap God’ verse (‘Body for the Pile’, on which the LA MC sounds more tommy gun than human, is the best example of this on the album), but his ultra-laidback flow on ‘Say the Name’ adds malevolence to a number that already screams evil.

He brings to life the Candyman here, the first character to rear their head on the album, starting each verse with “The hook gon’ be”, and increasing in venom every time. Conceived in Hellraiser creator Clive Barker’s Books of Blood vol. 5, The Candyman has all the tropes of the playground-conceived urban legend: he has the ability to appear when his name is repeated five times into the mirror, and he has hooks for hands.

Hooks for hands!

The homages to the group’s collection of scary movies continues with ‘96 Neve Campbell’, featuring Cam & China, the record’s first supporting actors. Here, the LA twins steal the spotlight from Diggs. A vocal motif of “this bitch boss” refers unflinchingly to Neve Campbell, of the Scream films, delivered with ice-cold irreverence. Clipping’s production duo make use of door-knocking samples on a track that recalls the terror and malevolence of a classic slasher.

The most notable feature, though, comes from New Jersey cybercore outfit Ho99o9, on ‘Looking Like Meat’. The track itself recalls the industrial music that Hutson and Snipes’ production is best known for: real scorched Earth noise echoing Throbbing Gristle, whilst the sonic field is entirely populated by invasive malfunctioning synthesisers.

“No-one cares about your bars,” utters Diggs ‘neath the miasma, “their screams are what they wanna hear.”

The trio’s most successful attempt at creating a hybrid of horrorcore and

industrial terror, ‘Looking Like Meat’ is a real highlight, whilst ‘Eaten Alive’, featuring Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, combines this sound with scratchy scattergun jazz freedom. Throughout, Clipping stun and shock with their most complete work to date, and Visions of Bodies Being Burned proves the group to be as dynamic as they are devastating. Many genres are taken in, but the end product always has Clipping’s fingerprints all over it. Indeed, with this postmodern horrorcore record, the LA trio have achieved something that hasn’t been done since Nightmare On Elm Street – a sequel that is not just better than the original, but a standalone classic in its own right. 9/10 Cal Cashin

Frankie Reyes – Originalitos (stones throw) L.A.-based electronic artist and producer Gabriel Reyes-Whittaker has more aliases than any one man should, having released music over the past decade as Gifted & Blessed, The Abstract Eye, The Reflektor, Julian Abelar and one half of the duo The Steoples.

However, Originalitos, his newest album and second under the nom-deplume Frankie Reyes, is a decidedly different kettle of fish. In his other projects, Reyes-Whittaker typically generates mind-expanding and futuristic up-tempo or ambient electronic, but the music released under Frankie Reyes is more sacred – less an expansion of sound, more a concentration of it. It’s the answer to Reye-Whittaker’s question: “How might I use the synthesiser to explore my [Puerto Rican] heritage?”

Like Boleros Valses y Mas, his first album as Frankie Reyes, the set-up is deliberately restricted with only an Oberheim synth, MIDI sequencer and an effects pedal utilised on Originalitos.

The resulting sound is both mechanic and

organic, oddly captivating and haunting, but cyclical, like an operational yet abandoned carousel.

Limited by the project’s narrow scope, each of the eight instrumental songs treads similar ground; the entire record carried along by Reyes-Whittaker’s hazy reimagining of bolero, a slow and romantic Latin tempo, using contemporary technology, the album reaching its most affecting during ‘Alma De La Palma’.

While only just over 20 minutes long, the simple and unwavering pace of the songs can become repetitive and calls to mind Vivian Mercier’s infamous review of Waiting for Godot: “nothing happens, twice” (only here it’s eight times).

While a unique and evocative sound, what is calming and coaxing on track one may wear thin by track eight. 5/10 Robert Davidson

Delmer Darion – Morning Pageants (practise) This is probably the album I’ve been most excited to write about in 2020. I rarely return to records I’ve covered for L&Q, but since my interview with Delmer Darion earlier in the year I’ve found myself repeatedly returning to the early mix they sent me. This isn’t the duo’s first project – they have been floating around between Exeter and Bath for a couple of years and have circulated material in that time – but it’s still remarkable how fully formed their debut LP Morning Pageants is.

The album uses IDM as a medium to retell the story of Satan as a cultural figure, from early modern terror through to the prosaic-by-comparison suburban paranoia of the 1980s American Midwest.

Both ends of the record work well, but it’s in the first half where the duo really push into the most odd, exciting parts of

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Albums their sound. ‘Darkening’, for example, feels like a straightforward homage to the small coterie of ’90s bands that fused shoegaze and IDM – think Seefeel, Boards of Canada, Flying Saucer Attack. Its synth intro haunts as much as anything on Geogaddi, and when the track freaks out into full shoegaze it’s as satisfying as anything I’ve heard this year.

‘Lacuna’, meanwhile, finds the band exploring ambient. Biosphere is a clear influence – the watery field recordings lurking in the background could have come straight off last year’s The Senja Recordings – but the band never settles into a full drone section. The duo is frequently this restless throughout Morning Pageants, and occasionally it’s to the album’s detriment. For example, the noise interjections on the second half of ‘St Louis’ trouble the song so effectively I found myself wishing the idea was more fully explored. But then, it hardly feels fair to criticise the band for throwing away ideas that lesser acts would milk dry. I am extremely excited to see where Delmer Darion go from here. 9/10 Alex Francis

Luke Abbott – Translate (border community) It’s been six years since Luke Abbott’s last solo release: the weird and wonderful Wysing Forest, a project which showed the Norwich-based experimental musician and composer at his most abstract. Having spent the best part of the past decade focusing on collaborative work, be it soundtracks (for 2014’s The Goob and Jessica Hynes’ project The Flight), or as part of the electronic jazz group Szun Waves (along with Portico Quartet’s Jack Wyllie and Australian drummer Laurence Pike), Translate sees Abbott on his own again.

Recorded after a turbulent period in the artist’s personal life, he has

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described the process of making it as “like a psychedelic process of realigning your mind with the world.” It makes sense then, that Translate should feel both introspective, and cosmic – a delve inside the musician’s mind but at the same time an exploration of what lies far beyond. Abbott’s aptitude for constructing grand, cinematic soundscapes means parts of the record – ‘Luna’ and ‘Earthship’ in particular – feel like a sci-fi score, but the emotion at the crux of the project brings it back down to earth.

Like Holkham Drones, the masterful 2011 album which garnered Abbott global recognition, Translate is meditative, vital, and expertly crafted electronic music. 8/10 Jess Wrigglesworth

Oneohtrix Point Never – Magic Oneohtrix Point Never (warp) With a discography that proves almost impossible to pin to any one specific genre, there’s really no guessing where producer Daniel Lopatin’s experimental solo project Oneohtrix Point Never could venture with each new release. From EDM to new age, chamber pop and pulse-rattling film scores, Lopatin’s output over the last decade has been consistently surprising and a joy to behold for fans of the leftfield. Each record envelops the listener in a concept and style that has been devised by the 38-year-old with auteur-like attention, which is part of the reason that his new album is worth setting aside some time for.

Titled after the misheard name of a soft rock radio station called Magic 106.7 that inspired his original alias, Magic Oneohtrix Point Never finds the New York artist indulging in his long-time fascination of transmitting radio signals over the airwaves and the aleatory listening style of the medium. The results in an absorb-

ing 47 minutes that reveals new layers with each sitting, as Lopatin further explores the plunderphonics that he used so well on albums such as 2011’s Replica.

The album has something of a mixtape feel about it – each song’s end is woven into the beginning of the next, making it quite a dense listening experience initially, but also extremely holistic.

He splices warped samples of DJ signoffs alongside ads for self-help mantras amidst his glitchy beats and percussion, acting as darkly comic intermissions, as if you’re hearing lost transmissions from some sort of twilight zone.

Though there are some eerie moments, the album is still surprisingly soothing to listen to, with the reverbcoated melodies of tracks like ‘Long Road Home’, ‘I Don’t Love You Anymore’ and ‘Nothing’s Special’ having a comforting atmosphere to them. It’s also one of the most collaborative OPN projects to date, with Arca, Caroline Polachek and Nolanberollin making appearances throughout. However it’s The Weeknd-featuring ‘No Nightmares’ that is most memorable, where the RnB star’s voice marries with Lopatin’s spacey synths in a nocturnal, blissful fashion.

Magic Oneohtrix Point Never ultimately feels more abstract than 2018’s dystopian Age Of and last year’s breathtaking score for Uncut Gems, yet it sacrifices none of the unorthodox qualities that have always made him stand out.

It’s a thoroughly kaleidoscopic affair that proves to be one of the most imaginative and genre-defying records this end of 2020. 8/10 Woody Delaney

Tiña – Positive Mental Health Music (speedy wunderground) In a world without gigs, listening to Tiña is like peering through the lens of a virtual

Albums reality headset. A captivating live act and an ingrained staple inside South London’s indie Mecca, the Brixton Windmill, the band’s intimate mix of psychedelic keys and analogue-recorded guitars act as a sensory portal to times jammed inside sticky basement venues, overspilling plastic pint cups clenched tightly in hand.

Being a significant milestone for both band and label – Positive Mental Health Music arrives as the first fulllength release to come out of Dan Carey’s Speedy Wunderground – Josh Loftin’s signature fluorescent pink cowboy-hatted getup is emblematic of his band’s eccentric outlook. As his lyrics portray him working through a mental breakdown, his nasal, sometimes childlike vocal offers a poetic and self-mocking account of his own personsal struggles with anxiety and depression.

Detailing images of “dicks in the sky, vaginas in my mind” (‘I Feel Fine’), Loftin addresses his issues with considerable levity. On ‘Closest Shave’, between the sad snapshots of youth and abstract narration, he and his bandmates unanimously howl at the moon like a pack of wolves united in solidarity. Making no secret of his struggles facing adulthood, ‘Rosalina’’s wistful melancholy eventually boils over a precipice of despair on ‘It’s No Use’. The cloud eventually lifts on the final track to reveal a new era of clarity and togetherness. 7/10 Oliver Rankine

William Basinski – Lamentations (temporary residence) Spend enough time in the world of William Basinski and night begins to look an awful lot like day. Viewed from one angle, something like the elegant ‘O, My Daughter, O, My Sorrow’ can sound like a cavern of decay, sonic matter crumbling from sonic matter. At other vantage points, at

another time of the day, it sounds like a yawning burst of light: is this disintegrating or is this accumulating?

Lamentations continues a prolific half-decade for Basinski, whose role in 21st century music history is now assured.

Though his Disintegration Loops will forever be indelibly tied to 9/11, it’s worth reflecting on the extent to which his work shaped a generation of musicians thereafter, wrestling ambient from both new age and, increasingly, the commercial imperatives of having something that fits the confines of streaming service ‘chillout’ playlists.

Many of the works on Lamentations have a longer gestation period than on previous Basinski records, many of the samples having been in his archives since the late 1970s. As ever, the passage of time is the process. Grief too becomes more central to this work, particularly in its use of emotive female vocal samples. The high-water mark of this is ‘All These Too, I Love’, where a looping opera sample accumulates dusty clicks that, when repeated, when echoed, become like a heartbeat and have an almost crushing emotional impact. There are sonic surprises too, such as the whirlpool electronic gurgling of ‘Punch and Judy’. Paint peels, bodies age, Basinski’s thrilling loops fracture and fall. 8/10 Fergal Kinney

Adianne Lenker – songs + instrumentals (4ad) When their tour was cut short in March, Big Thief ’s Adrianne Lenker drove out to the Massachusetts mountains and rented a one-room cabin. Isolated at the height of lockdown, Lenker began to feel a connection with the cabin itself; the way sound reverberated within its walls like the inside of an acoustic guitar. It was there that she penned and recorded songs and instrumentals, a duo of tender,

meandering solo creations that capture the feeling of their birthplace. songs comprises eleven melodic ballads crafted of just Lenker’s vocals and an acoustic guitar, while instrumentals is a collage of the ritualistic improvisation that took place during the recording process to mark the end of each day.

The lyrics conjure fragmented memories that seem to flicker past like an old photo slideshow – a vicious dog bite, a rusty swing, a lifeless horse in a barn. Lenker keeps the music grounded in that cabin, turning the comfort and healing she found in that space into music.

Her songs feel age-old, with a haunting serenity. The talent she possesses is something so special and rare that it feels wrong to reduce it to a simple review. On these latest releases, Lenker’s songs seem to effortlessly flow out of her, suggesting even better things are yet to come. 9/10 Katie Cutforth

Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou – May Our Chambers Be Full (sacred bones) In an oblique kind of way, May Our Chambers Be Full, the debut collaborative LP by lower-case-s singer-songwriter Emma Ruth Rundle and sludge dreamers Thou, brings to mind The Flaming Lips’ brief stint as Beck’s backing band during a 2002 tour. Both contemporaries on the road less travelled, they eluded each other for over a decade, even though their musical chemistry illuminated how they’d been singing from the same hymn sheet the whole time. Likewise, May Our Chambers Be Full isn’t the dramatic cultural exchange it appears to be on paper. Instead, what it serves is to highlight each individual acts’ overlooked or under-appreciated strengths.

In Thou’s case, their outsider status within the sealed fortress of metal shows

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Albums on ‘Killing Floor’ better than on most of their solo releases, and it’s in most part due to the melodic sloping of Rundle’s vocals. It recalls My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Only Shallow’ fed through a punishing filter of heaviness, and waltzes to the rhythm of something from Cocteau Twins’ Heaven Or Las Vegas. At the tail end of the album, on the epic ‘The Valley’, Thou steep Rundle’s simmering vocal (“Just another fucked up thing I can’t save”, she sings) in mournful violins and a tom-heavy march. While Rundle’s usual style isn’t heavy in any metal sense, the general sense of foreboding in her finest work – and count this among them – serves as a reminder of how weighty her music can be.

The whole LP would be a great release for either artist, but it’s the brilliant convergence of sensibilities that sets it apart in the landscape of alternative metal. The tonal see-sawing on ‘Ancestral Recall’ and ‘Magickal Cost’, which sets Rundle and Funck’s respective vocals against soaring and descending riffs, slots neatly alongside the melodic posthardcore of a group like Architects and Converge. When their styles blend on ‘Into Being’, the sound is nothing short of beautiful. What might’ve been a headsonly release turns out to be an excellent entry point for any would-be Thou fans, and a potential game-changer for Rundle ones. 8/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Eartheater – Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin (pan) To title a record Phoenix suggests reinvention, but instead, this fourth full-length from Queens experimentalist Eartheater feels like a culmination of everything that’s led her to this point, both musically and spiritually. The record, which comes with the dramatic subtitle Flames Are Dew

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Upon My Skin, is scored through with echoes of Eartheater past. The icy electronics that defined 2015’s RIP Chrysalis are in evidence, especially on the glitchy, daring ‘Kiss of the Phoenix’, whilst the claustrophobic atmospherics of her last album, Irisiri, hang heavy also, particularly on the standout ‘Volcano’, which has her channeling long-time influence Kate Bush more directly than ever before.

Elsewhere, though, there are signs of new creative avenues opening themselves up – for all its eccentric accoutrements, ‘How to Fight’ is a stirring acoustic ballad at its heart, and the moody ‘Fantasy Collision’ takes a similarly strippedback approach to the guitar. They allow Eartheater – real name Alexandra Drewchin – to present an emotional vulnerability that past albums had only ever hinted at, tantalisingly dangling the prospect of honest introspection before cloaking it in layers of reverb and effects. Phoenix, on the other hand, feels minimalist, perhaps thanks to the fact that it came together over the course of a ten-week art retreat that Drewchin attended in Zaragoza.

Whether it’s on the anxious voiceand-effects exercise of ‘Mercurial Nerve’ or the towering alt-pop dramatics of ‘Goodbye Diamond’, Phoenix is a record that justifies its stylistic restlessness by remaining incisively personal from start to finish. If past Eartheater albums felt too chilly or obscure, then this bracingly open group of songs demands an overall reassessment. 7/10 Joe Goggins

Landshapes – Contact (bella union) You know what you need right now?

Uncertainty. Landshapes’ brilliant new album Contact reminds you how fun it is to listen to a project when you have no idea where it’s going next. The London band’s first release in five years captures

the kinetic energy of their live shows and wrings it out for all it’s worth as they to-and-fro between vocalists and boldly explore multiple genres, resulting in this collage of beautiful ideas. There are drum rolls that abruptly stop and give way to psychedelic guitar grooves, followed by expansive pads that war with clanging bells interrupted by crunching distorted drums – and then there’s nine other songs. It’s genuinely impressive that an album with this many ideas doesn’t feel overstuffed or spread too thin.

The album’s title is its north star, as it considers every aspect of connection and intimacy in a way that feels rather prescient, with well-worn tropes approached in refreshing ways. Lead single ‘The Ring’ explores how landmarks in our friends’ lives make us ruminate upon why we’re falling short in our own; but instead of sinking you into despair, it makes you want to dance through it. ‘Drama’ is a breakup song, but it’s about the growing need to have The Talk rather than pretending you’re okay, the weightlessness of the spacey instrumentation contrasting with the despond of the lyrics, and that dissonance between appearance and reality returns in ‘Real Love Is Dead’ as the lyrical cynicism and drone of the guitars give way to a fluttering harp. It’s the kind of sound that’s used to signify a dream in a movie, begging the question of whether this is the band’s truth, what they really think. That’s Contact in a nutshell. How do we know what we mean to each other? We don’t.

Good album. 9/10 Sam Reid

Beabadoobee – Fake It Flowers (dirty hit) “A record for girls to cry to and dance to and get angry to,” is how Bea Kristi (aka Beabadoobee) describes her debut.

The Filipino-British musician has already

Albums become something of a Gen-Z spokesperson for them, with lyrics detailing teenage anguish with an open hand. Fake It Flowers certainly won’t disappoint.

Best known for worldwide hit ‘Death Bed’, on which she was sampled by Powfu, her bread and butter is the fuzzy, grungy indie rock that dominated the tailend of the ’90s. She’s widely acknowledged the influence of Pavement, but while that band’s crooked guitars can be heard on ‘Sorry’, there’s plenty more on offer.

The loud/quiet dynamics throughout are indebted to the Pixies, although her bittersweet voice, which has shadows of Juliana Hatfield, lends material such as ‘Care’ a fresh energy. There are also echoes of Giant Drag and King-era Belly on ‘Emo Song’ and ‘Dye It Red’.

Kristi’s ability to switch from heavier rock on ‘Charlie Brown’ to lo-fi bedroom recording ‘How Was Your Day?’, on which a dog can be heard barking in the background, show the breadth of her writing ability. The sound may be nothing new but she reinvigorates it with irresistible joie de vivre. 8/10 Susan Darlington

Katy J Pearson – Return (heavenly) A double denim-wearing West Country outlaw, Katy J Pearson is a fearless music industry gunslinger.

She first scraped success almost four years ago as one half of her previous band alongside her brother, but corporate contracts and mounting commercial pressure forced her to part ways with a major label deal and altogether forfeit the prospect of a ‘dream come true’ debut album.

Credit where credit’s due: her refusal to sacrifice integrity at the expense of another’s profit takes serious guts. Unwilling to compromise at the beck-and-call of others, she’s a true indie hero unafraid to stick it to the suits. Now back and with a

point to prove, her success restores faith in the idea of an artist free to pursue their own vision.

Having been picked up by London indie powerhouse Heavenly Recordings, years of navigating Bristol’s bustling arts and music scene have landed her a second chance at a debut album. An intimate reflection of her past and present, the aptly named Return is a body of work defined by its own stubborn determination to one day exist.

Like a scene from a traditional swing-doored, spit-and-sawdust saloon bar, talk of lovelorn hearts and finding needles in haystacks make up the backdrop for Return’s quaint interior. Sliding seamlessly between old fashioned country heartbreak and life-affirming indie pop, sweet-talking tales of girl-meets-boy ring out over rhythmic, upbeat arrangements on ‘Tonight’. Paying homage to just how far she’s come, the title track’s gently plucked strings bleed into rousing calls for substance on ‘Something Real’.

Each track feels defining for Pearson and hammers home her resilience as an artist.

Dug up from her days contending with major label demands, rockier hooks light up lead single ‘Fix Me Up’. Searching for salvation, it’s a stark contrast against the triumphant ‘Take Back the Radio’, where Pearson celebrates being back and blaring across the airwaves. It all comes to an emotional head on the stripped back, ‘Waiting For The Day’. Conjured by the quiet tenderness of her naked vocal, it’s a beautiful testament to previous yearnings for the achievements of today. 8/10 Oliver Rankine

Fatima Yamaha – Spontaneous Order (magnetron) Generally, when an act has one track on Spotify whose stream-count outnumbers everything

else combined, there’s a worry that once you’ve heard it, you’ve heard the lot.

Fatima Yamaha is one such artist whose huge hit (‘What’s A Girl To Do’, 21 million plays and counting) dwarfs the rest of his catalogue, but thankfully with Spontaneous Order, his first outing since he blew up, he bucks the received wisdom: here, across a tight 45-minute record of strutting retro electro nerd-funk, sad computer-game music, and the kind of euphoric/melancholic vocodered disco that sounds perfect at sundown pouring out over a Balearic beach bar, Yamaha shows that he’s got far more range than one monster smash might suggest.

Accordingly, while lashings of deliciously earwormy keyboard flourishes abound (the title track and ‘Day We Met’ in particular), Yamaha also leans into clubbier, more heads-down territory from time to time and to great effect, and when he combines his uber-melodic approach with the more banging one on ‘Unwashed’, it produces the album’s highlight – undeniable hooks, filter-swept synths and big disco string stings ricochet off pleasingly meaty beats. There’s complexity, too: alongside the sheeny futurism of the instrumentation, Yamaha demonstrates a impressively nuanced understanding of the interplay between harmony and melody, which carries a lot of the album beyond just being fun party electro. Add in nicely atmospheric interstitial pieces of post-rave ambience recalling 16-bit video games, and Spontaneous Order becomes something with real depth: moreish, unpretentiously sophisticated, and rich with possibility. 9/10 Sam Walton

Helena Deland – Someone New (luminelle) Back in the 1990s, before her rise to TV stardom, Gwen Stefani was a

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Albums pioneer of female empowerment, writing incisive lyrics for her band No Doubt about her position as a young woman in a patriarchal world and about the difficulties of romantic relationships with an unprecedented sincerity, especially within the So-Cal alternative music community.

With her debut album Someone New, Helena Deland follows in Stefani’s footsteps, moulding a record filled with inner turmoil and exquisite sounds. She not only shares the No Doubt singer’s taste for sophisticated pop songwriting – which Deland pushes even further away from everyday subject matter and towards something more self-consciously “artsy” – but also a mellifluous and enthralling voice. She’s able to make lines like “I am stuck ‘til I get a hold of / A stranger to remind me I don’t contain the world / It is outside can’t I see, and in it I’m this lucky girl / And how to play my role ‘til I get too old” sound sweet and confessional.

Addressing themes like ageism and the impossible beauty standards women have to face every day, Deland gets incredibly close to penning the perfect pop album for the current moment. 8/10 Guia Cortessa

The Bug and Dis Fig – In Blue (hyperdub) As The Bug, producer Kevin Martin has not only been responsible for much of the murkiest, most oppressive bass music of the last 20 years, but has managed to lure some stellar collaborators into the fog with him along the way.

Two of the most recent shared projects he’s been involved with, 2018’s one-two of his Miss Red collab K.O. and the link-up with Burial as Flame 1, represent the two ends of his distinctly grubby, suffocating sonic range: the former a fiery cocktail of dancehall and dub with massive hooks to match Martin’s thunderous production; the latter an uncompromising trudge,

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rich with Burial’s trademark atmosphere.

In Blue, Martin’s new collaboration with Berlin producer and vocalist Dis Fig (aka Felicia Chen), lies somewhere between these two poles. Chen’s vocals melt down the flanks of Martin’s hulking instrumentals elegantly, managing the impressive feat of maintaining an artfully glazedeyed detachment without crumbling into disinterest or ineffectuality. Deep in the mix and bathed in subtle dabs of reverb and modulation, her melodies serve to bring the contours of each track into sharper relief as opposed to dominate them entirely, her voice a timbral detail rather than a leading light. Over a full album, this does occasionally wear a little thin, although one is tempted to reserve too much judgement until this stuff can be heard in its proper context – a small club with a big soundsystem – post-pandemic.

For now, this is a worthy addition to The Bug’s constantly-evolving canon. 6/10 Luke Cartledge

This Is The Kit – Off Off On (rough trade) “You won’t make this change by slagging things off,” warns Kate Stables to herself as much as anyone on ‘Carry Us Please’. “Go get some ideas, now what have you got?”

By the release of 2017’s careerbest Moonshine Freeze, Paris-based Stables had been steering her This Is The Kit project across four albums, developing as an intimate and crisp songwriter but deviating little from her sparse, though gorgeously arranged, new folk template. On Off Off On, whilst the emotional range of its predecessor may be slightly narrowed, there’s a commitment to broadening the sonic palette that frames Stables’ writing.

Working with producer Josh Kaufman, together they’ve crafted

something that gives life to an alwaysdormant Robert Wyatt influence – jazz trumpet is used less as an ornament, as on previous records, and pushed further to the centre. On tracks like the soothing ‘Starting Again’, it adds heart and enigma to Stables’ writing. And as a writer she remains a novelistic marker of the internal life. “This is what they want, why are you still here? This is what they said, this is what you get,” she sings on the excellent ‘This is What You Did’, flitting between anxiety attack and self-help mantra. ‘Coming to Get You Nowhere’ is similarly redemptive, its nursery rhyme vocal and glitchy drumming even evoking Stereolab. When it swerves the wheel from a tendency towards widescreen but gutless National-style indie, Stables remains an engaging voice on this intimate record. 6/10 Fergal Kinney

Open Mike Eagle – Anime, Trauma and Divorce (autoreverse) A decade ago, Open Mike Eagle and Hannibal Buress were asking ‘WTF is Art Rap’, on Eagle’s characteristically candid and inventive debut. “Whoever wins this art rap battle gets a lifetime supply of hummus!” they joked. Now, his new album Anime, Trauma and Divorce asks, ‘WTF is Self-Care?’. “It’s like seeing what my body needs / Maybe that’s a lot of weed?” he raps, his cadence somewhere between stand-up, spoken word and therapy session. In the decade between these two albums, Eagle has become a standout artist in leftfield hip-hop. His wit and varied artistic sides gave albums like Brick Body Kids Still Daydream immense staying power.

Where that record had city-wide scope, Anime, Trauma and Divorce is his most vulnerable, diving into personal shortcomings and messy life events. He

Albums raps with his son twice. There’s a song about Black Mirror ruining his marriage.

‘Headass (Idiot Shinji)’ is basically Eagle roasting himself for three minutes without taking a break. Highlight ‘Sweatpant Spiderman’ is a midlife crisis anthem balancing positivity and panic.

Eagle doesn’t think he’s doing so great, but this collection reflects clear artistic growth. The eerie hip-house of ‘Bucarati’ relies on a barebones hypnotic flow to grip it together. ‘Edge of New Clothes’ is the most knotted and meditative thing he’s written. He’s working at the height of his abilities.

Like his friend Thundercat, he finds hope in nerdy interests on ‘I’m A Joestar’, a weirdly uplifting tribute to anime fandom.

This record will earn the cultish acclaim coming its way. 8/10 Skye Butchard

Paddy Hanna – The Hill (strange brew) Paddy Hanna’s third album The Hill rotates magnanimously between soothing, ethereal instrumental tracks and jilting folk songs chock-full of clanging percussion and bouncing grooves.

With this in mind, it becomes a very binary project, but one that is deliberately so. Each of aforementioned instrumentals, like ‘Last of Their Kind’ or ‘The Hill’, does its bit in neutralising the brooding evil of tracks like ‘Cannibals’ or ‘Sinatra’, which both sound like the result of ferrying the dead across the sea, the mythologised Charon singing shanties on the journey.

In collaboration with the rhythm section of his compatriots Girl Band, Hanna cultivates a sound that pieces together elements of folk with tenets of punk spirit. From one track to the next, mantras of airy wails flicker in and out of each other, submerging themselves in the intimate twiddling of nylon string guitars

and droning cellos, before re-emerging a track or two later to bolster a singalong chorus.

The Hill has moments of exhilarating glory but others of drawling lull.

It’s the sort of project that may fulfil the greatest needs of one listener yet slip by unnoticed, through perceived banality, to the next. 6/10 Jo Higgs

Pink Siifu & Fly Anakin – Fly Siifu’s (lex) Respectively, Pink Siifu and Fly Anakin are quietly need-to-know names in US underground rap, each of them having released two fascinating projects in the past year. Alabama-born MC, singer and producer Siifu put out the laidback but enigmatic Bag Talk with LA rapper YUNGMORPHEUS at the tail-end of 2019, a contemporary take on classic, smooth hip-hop. This was followed by the gloriously visceral and seething NEGRO back in April – melding punk, jazz and hip-hop. Meanwhile, Virginia rapper Fly Anakin is one of the founding members of Richmond hip-hop collective Mutant Academy, known for its gritty output. His two 2020 releases, At The End of the Day and The 8’s (2015-2018), both showcased his potent, distinctive delivery over lush instrumentals.

The concept of the pair’s collaborative record finds them running a fictitious record store together, Fly Siifu’s. This lends the release something fun and endearing – like shopowners conversing and playing each other tracks they’re into, the record slips comfortably between getting ready to open up for the day, discussions of family, fear, death, systemic failures, Blackness, whiteness and the alt-right, all peppered with comical voicemails from disgruntled customers annoyed with their terrible service. These are played by peers, with

a particularly enjoyable cameo coming from the lilting tones of Chattanooga MC BbyMutha on ‘Black Bitches Matter Hoe’.

The record store conceit gives the project a cohesiveness that resists being overwrought or corny because of both rappers’ slick chemistry throughout: the precise, subtle intensity of Fly Anakin cuts through against Siifu’s gentler but deft intonations. Production-wise, there’s an overarching sense of soft-focus as the songs scuzzily, cosily bleed into each other. It feels telling that Madlib guests as beatmaker on ‘Time Up’; the sonic vibe of the whole record has a soulful warmth, albeit married with more forward-facing, explorative free jazz: think wailing sax, liquid percussion and rich smatterings of brass.

Following on from NEGRO, it feels a shame things don’t get a little more raw and leftfield from Pink Siifu on this – nonetheless, Fly Siifu’s is undoubtedly an accomplished collaboration from two of the most solid, interesting names rising through alternative hip-hop right now.

7/10 Tara Joshi

Kevin Morby – Sundowner (dead oceans) When Kevin Morby jarringly moved from Los Angeles to his hometown of Kansas City, he expected the isolation and simplicity of his new house to help him work creatively, and he was right: the widening days and heaving, breathing sunsets inspired his newest album Sundowner. This introspective folk album records the divine of the everyday. “[Sundowner] is a depiction of the nervous feeling that comes with the sky’s proud announcement that another day will be soon coming to a close as the pink light recedes and the street lamps and house lights suddenly click on,” Morby says.

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Albums From the very start, the record lulls listeners into a quiet solitude, with Morby inviting you into his shed-turned-studio where it’s not hard to imagine the tottering insects of summer and dripping icicles of winter as evolving companions. The best of the album is the title track, whose quiet power is a perfect demonstration of Morby’s strengthening talent and humility. From there, he builds emotional, swelling movements.

Instrumental ‘Velvet Highway’ and the final ‘Provisions’ show that Morby’s skill comes from making himself one with simplicity, not pushing or pulling, but writing songs that evoke homecoming to listeners, that make it feel like they are there with him back home, walking familiar roads, but noticing the landscape with new eyes.

8/10 Isabel Crabtree

ties by attaching a rare melodic depth to their expansive sound.

With titles like ‘Metaz form8’ and ‘sch.mefd 2’, the typically cryptic tracklist sounds like specimens used in a classified laboratory experiment. Everything feels distinctly open to possibility, powered by a non-human lifeblood pulsating through the veins of each track. An autonomous being, it sits somewhere between mechanical and organic, programmed to communicate coded textures and language patterns too complex for ordinary comprehension. Though transitions are often harsh and standoffish, the intricate programming is rich and tangible behind the music’s constantly revolving backdrop. Something of a mental bear trap, it’s easy to get stuck in its vice-like grasp. 7/10 Oliver Rankine

Autechre – SIGN (warp) Autechre are the sort of group you a need roadmap to navigate. Veteran purveyors of experimental dance music, the Manchester duo first came to prominence alongside the likes of Aphex Twin (then under a previous alias, The Dice Man) and The Orb’s Alex Paterson on Warp’s pioneering 1992 IDM compilation album, Artificial Intelligence. Having remained an ever-present force on that label’s legendary roster, thirty years on and a trip through their back catalogue is a stretch to say the least.

The band’s fourteen albums and extensive list of EPs – some clocking in at nearly 70 minutes – are labyrinthine wanderings beyond convention and exclusive to those with time on their hands. Paradoxically, Autechre manage to be deep and profoundly emotive as they batter you relentlessly to the point of exhaustion. Dialling back some of their more dissonant tendencies, their new album SIGN reaps the duo’s sensory quali-

Oliver Coates – skins n slime (rvng intl) British cellist and producer Oliver Coates has been developing a distinctive approach to experimental dance and drone, all through the initial prism of his first instrument, for some time now. 2016’s Upstepping, arguably a breakthrough moment for him, channelled drum and bass, jungle and 2-step into a rich, fibrous kind of inverse club music, intricate details providing him with entry points into new avenues of texture and rhythm that he’s been following ever since. skins n slime is his boldest evolution of these now-familiar ideas yet: with conventional percussion largely shunned, and pulsating, processed beams of strings suggesting rather than insisting on meter, the record at once feels more liberated and more oppressive than anything he’s done before. The skippy delicacy of much of Coates’ previous work is traded in for an amorphous weight, disorientating and harsh, yet not without nuance.

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Gone are the days when his work could sit comfortably alongside the indie-friendly electronica of Four Tet, Floating Points et al; skins n slime is a different and ultimately more satisfying beast, far more akin to the work of Ian William Craig, Leyland Kirby, or even Double Negativeera Low. 8/10 Luke Cartledge

Dorian Electra – My Agenda (selfrelease) “We’re born naked, and the rest is drag,” said one icon in the world of fracking. Dorian Electra pushes the performance of gender to wonderfully silly extremes in their music, which borders art, novelty song, and meme.

Their debut Flamboyant was an alt-pop revelation, mining gold out of a deeply human response we don’t talk about enough – cringe factor. Songs like ‘Daddy Like’ and ‘Career Boy’ were catchy, layered songs about absurd machismo and power fantasies, delivered with a deadpan stare.

Their follow-up, My Agenda, is even more intense. There are character studies of r/gamer stereotypes, features from Rebecca Black and Village People, crushingly obvious metaphors about melted plastic hearts, and songs that feel somehow way too honest and completely irony-poisoned. Buckle in. This is a Very Online album. Your enjoyment is going to depend largely on how quickly you got tired of ‘Money Machine’. For a project under thirty minutes, it’s a lot.

Musically, Electra sources the most dated and tacky sounds to work with. If you’re embarrassed about having it on your iPod, My Agenda has gobbled it up with a side of Baja Blast. Much of the album sounds like waltzer music dipped in magnesium and dubstep. If you’ve been following what PC Music have been doing even tangentially, you’ve heard it before,

Albums which works for music meant for an audience desensitised from going on /b/ too many times. The beats service more as a continuation of the joke. Electra uses trap, hardstyle and shock rock the same way Weird Al used polka.

But what makes the songs here so replayable, what pushes them beyond novelty, is the glorious fixation on emotional extremes. Embarrassing and uncomfortable thoughts are its lifeblood. Its characters are people that are often the butt of the joke. ‘M’lady’ is a fedora-tipping dom who’s literally mouth-breathing at the breakdown. ‘My Agenda’s protagonists are the crazed SJWs turning the frogs gay with witchcraft. ‘Edgelord’ lives in a society. ‘Sorry Bro (I Love You)’ is an extended no-homo joke that has genuine sweetness lurking under its smirk.

Closer ‘Give Thanks to You’ might be the funniest, darkest thing Electra has penned so far. Who else is writing ballads with lines like “As you f *** my face, for a hundred days…”? (Taylor Swift mondegreens notwithstanding.) There’s something deeply entertaining about a skilled pop musician making something so dumb so unbelievably polished. But then again, there are hardly any memers more dedicated to the bit than Dorian Electra. 7/10 Skye Butchard

Mammút – Ride The Fire (kankari) For a country with a population of a few hundred thousand people, Iceland’s musical output is prolific: there’s Bjork, of course, Sigur Rós, and most recently indie darling JFDR—not to mention the country’s viral entry for this year’s Eurovision. Yet Mammút have remained relatively unknown outside their native country, despite releasing four excellent albums over the past 14 years.

Their fifth, Ride The Fire, will hopefully change that: it’s an epic indie pop opus which sees the five piece soften their guitar laden sound, whilst losing none of the impact.

Recorded between London and Iceland (and produced by Arni Hjorvar of The Vaccines), their second Englishlanguage release is rich in texture and symbolism, with singer Katrina Mogensen’s breathy, faceted vocals enveloped by layers of synths and electric guitars. The lyrics are ambiguous, and Mogensen admits to writing songs without necessarily knowing what they mean, but a clever use of harmonies provides a sense of narrative – particularly on the brilliant, theatrical single ‘Prince’.

Unsurprisingly, given its birthplace, Ride The Fire is full of nature-inspired visual imagery, but it’s not just the lyrics that evoke the dramatic Icelandic landscape.

Throughout the album, Mammút build a dense, atmospheric sound which captures all the ethereal beauty of their homeland, but will resonate far beyond it. 7/10 Jess Wrigglesworth

Girlhood – Girlhood (team talk) In 2018 London duo Girlhood released their debut EP on Team Talk Records.

Tessa Cavanna and Christian Pinchbeck recorded and produced the record on Pinchbeck’s narrowboat, then moored at Regent’s Canal. On this inspired debut, the pair created a sound at once a pastiche of ’80s hip hop and ’90s neo-soul, while sounding totally contemporary.

After plaudits from the likes of Radio One and Lauren Laverne, Cavanna and Pinchbeck took a hiatus from Girlhood, returning in 2019 to begin work on their self-titled debut album. This time around, Cavanna has taken the lyrical reins. The songs are persistently preoc-

cupied with the concept of womanhood, and are wedded together by themes of unity and understanding. As Cavanna explains: :I want us all to see the love we need and be aware of how to share that love with others.”

Album opener ‘Queendom’ is both enchanting and timely. On the track, Cavanna channels Fugees-era Lauryn Hill as she promotes womxn’s supportive relationships. Layered vocals and minimalistic instrumentalism hark back to soulful gospel choirs, yet dolce synthesisers and a feminist bent ground the duo’s sound in a distinctly modern setting.

Sixth track, ‘Bad Decision’, is arguably the album’s best, though competition is fierce. Cavanna’s tones are simultaneously honeyed and sharp, and the song is ultimately a hard-to-shake hook-laden ode to the pain of broken relationships.

Girlhood diagnose contemporary issues of disharmony and division, and, within one debut album, offer an emancipatory musical corrective. They provide a fresh, unmistakably British take on their myriad diverse influences, combining well-worn sounds and new technology to make, in the words of Pinchbeck, music ‘seem alien again.’ 8/10 Rosie Ramsden

Krust – The Edge of Everything (crosstown rebels) Back in the 1990s, Krust’s work alongside Roni Size and others in the underground scene not only helped to establish the rising ‘Bristol Sound’ of the ’90s, it also pushed drum and bass to a new generation.

In the late ’00s, he retreated from the industry, and took some to time study neurolinguistic programming, created a lifestyle coaching consultancy and also launched a CBD oil company.

There have been flickers of a comeback since 2010, and a few sporadic

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Albums releases over the last decade, but The Edge of Everything is his first full studio album in 14 years. Here, he synthesises some of the suspended, Blade Runner dystopia that’s always given his music an austere basement darkness, weaving between satisfying donks and harsh mechanical beats where you can hear the industrial gears grind.

‘Negative Returns’ is all horror movie dynamics with Krust playing an Ableton Hitchcock, pushing menacing beats into film noir atmospherics for a jilted generation. ‘Deep Fields of Liars’ hits with breaks and sonar blips to create a lurking cranium-batterer that hunts you down, and ‘Only God Can Tell’ shifts into an interstellar space jam of hypnotic frequencies that roll into infinity before suddenly ending on the sounds of trains and the UK high street.

It’s an album that feels like it’s been 14 years in the making – one of tension, intensity, patience and frustration – but also one of release. Whether it marks a powerful parting shot or a fresh salvo of more to come, it’s been worth the wait.

8/10 Reef Younis

Actress – Karma & Desire (ninja tune) Karma & Desire follows on swiftly from the mixtape 88, which was recently cryptically dumped online as a 48-minutelong track. Everything from the style of release to music enclosed within perfectly fits with the enigmatic persona that had been constructed over the course of his career. This veil of distant uncertainty has been a key element across Actress’ most intriguing projects; namely the cohesive immersion of R.I.P. or the wary, impenetrable sprawl of Ghettoville. The air of an unresolved question looms overhead long after the runtime has played out.

Alongside ambient and sound art sensi-

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bilities, club music tropes are wrestled with, compressed and dissected, before being reused as further materials for building otherworldly, often structurally unsound sonic sculptures. Rather than traditionally-structured songs, tracks often feel like fragments; experiments that are allowed to evolve and devolve on their own terms, sometimes cut abruptly short, sometimes slightly overstaying their welcome, but often resulting in a larger body of work that is oddly intimate in its aloofness.

These ideas and approaches are continued on Karma & Desire, though notable stylistic differences are clear: guest vocalists are prominent throughout the tracklisting, live piano recordings are used extensively, and there is a clarity to the overall sound that contrasts with the compressed, worn sonics of 88 and Ghettoville.

The inclusion of live piano is perhaps the most welcome new addition, supplying some of the most thoughtful and beautiful moments on the record.

Opener ‘Fire and Light’ is a perfect example; a gorgeous, yet faint, piano motif, paired with only textural static hiss and a subtle string arrangement.

The following tracks, ‘Angels Pharmacy’ and ‘Remembrance’, feature vocalist Zsela, and jar slightly in contrast to the opener, working well as a pair, but stunting the flow of the album slightly.

This is an album that fades in and out of focus. Some tracks meander and attention drifts, but then something comes to the foreground that resonates.

Take the cautious dystopian pads midway through ‘Reverend’, the collapsing piano arpeggios of ‘Save’, or the pensive solo plucks of ‘Gliding Squares’: these moments are prime examples of what Actress does best, isolated details that seem to wistfully yearn for something long forgotten.

Unfortunately, these moments of intrigue are limited, and the later half of the album is especially flawed. ‘Many Seas, Many Rivers’, one of three tracks featuring esteemed vocalist Sampha, certainly outstays its welcome, wandering aimlessly across a morose piano loop, the

singer’s distinctive vocal perhaps breaking with the auteurist allure of the album.

His appearance on album closer ‘Walking Flames’ is a more succinct and successful collaborative effort.

As a whole, the album is neither satisfyingly cohesive nor intriguingly drawn-out. While housing some of the most fascinating and, at times, outright beautiful moments of his career, the overall impact of Karma & Desire fails to leave the lasting impression of past projects. 6/10 Oskar Jeff

Ela Minus – acts of rebellion (domino) Ela Minus’ own slogan for herself is “bright music for dark times”, and though the Colombia-born, Brooklyn-based musician aims for Fourth of July fireworks on her debut album acts of rebellion, she achieves something more like modest sparklers. Minus promises a lot that the album doesn’t really live up to.

That said, she’s undeniably good at a synth-pop banger. ‘they told us it was hard, but they were wrong’ builds with a sonar-like pulsing synth, broken up by Minus’ half-spoken, half-sung rhythmic intonation. Similarly, ‘megapunk’ pays homage to the punk strand of electronic music’s origins with a defiant refrain of “You won’t make us stop”, repeated over sharp, swelling synths that crescendos to an abrupt end. However, after a few songs of very similar material, it’s hard to get excited about Minus’ whisper-vocals with melodies that are contained within a two, maximum three, note range.

In contrast, she shines on her quieter moments of reflection. ‘pocket piano’ is a welcome moment of reprieve, a quiet conversation between two simple synth lines that’s left open-ended. Album closer ‘close’, featuring Heraldo Negro, has all the glitchy cuteness of a ’90s video

Albums game soundtrack, and feels like an imagined conversation between two people stood right next to each other. ‘dominique’ is the depressed and confused lockdown banger that we all needed – with its reverberating vocals, slower beat and confessional lyrics (“I’m afraid I’ve forgotten how to talk to anyone else that’s not myself ”), it’s the highlight of the entire album. acts of rebellion certainly boasts some excellent moments, but the individual tracks don’t feel drawn together enough as an album. There’s something there, a few kernels of brilliance, but it’s going to take a little more to draw them out into full bloom. 6/10 Jemima Skala

Headie One – Edna (relentless) UK drill has, since its inception, ignited reactionary embers, with videos being routinely removed from YouTube, police pre-emptively shutting down gigs, and West London group 1011 even being banned from making music without police permission. But on Edna, as on so much of the best music from the scene, the story is not one of glorification or provocation, but of articulation and explanation. Across 20 tracks, Headie One weaves a tale of self-examination and personal growth, using his own life to assemble a fable that hinges on an individual’s capacity to overcome.

In April, he was released after three months inside – his fourth prison term – having been stopped and searched by police and found to be in possession of a lock knife. His relationship with the justice system is profoundly connected to every facet of this new record – indeed, as he himself has said: “If I hadn’t gone [to prison], I wouldn’t have ended up trying to do music.” Tracks like ‘Psalm 35’ and ‘Mainstream Rapper’ tackle his

prison experiences head-on, the dayto-day learning and interactions that comprised the early months of his 2020, while ‘The Light’ details the subsequent period of leaving the darkness behind, its surging drama enhanced with crying violin strings. There is no condescending feelgood narrative here; this is an honest account, an attempt to depict the societal circumstances that can so easily lead anyone down the wrong path.

Echoey production dominates Edna, ghostly voices drifting almost imperceptibly in and out of earshot and a low-end bass fog filling the air with unease. The pace is slow and chilly, true to the form’s Chicago ancestry. But for the first time, Headie also pushes out beyond the drill boundaries on the chartbound single ‘Ain’t It Different’, with a beat courtesy of Fred Again that is much closer in spirit to Atlanta trap, albeit infused with London history thanks to a sample of M-Dubs’ UK garage classic ‘Bump ‘N’ Grind’. The Drake collaboration ‘Only You Freestyle’ sticks surprisingly close to the drill template, whereas ‘Everything Nice’ pushes Headie into more commercial trap territory, retaining little of the distinctiveness that defines the best of his work so far.

But it is on ‘Teach Me’ and ‘Therapy’ that Headie’s true intentions with this album are revealed. The Edna in question is his late mother, and on the former track he tells of how her absence played a role in the regrettable life decisions of his earlier years. It would seem that Headie, above all else, wants the next generation to understand that the world is there for you if you can grasp the bigger picture that can be hard to see in a world that would rather vilify, condemn, or cast you aside.

Nowhere is this more explicitly stated than on closer ‘E.H.F.A.R.’, a recap of Headie’s life: from a football-loving, daydreaming child who was treated with suspicion by his elders, who ended up with a bounty on his head and had his fate in the hands of a hung jury. “I used to love the trap like it would love me back, I couldn’t wait for the day to say I’m done with that,” he raps, knowing that that

day has finally arrived. Headie One is at last ready to assume his place at the top table of UK music. 8/10 Max Pilley

Lambert – False (mercury kx) If you’ve tracked any of Lambert’s prolific run of work since 2014 (he’s turned out an album every year since), it’s clear that behind his Sardinian mask aesthetic, and the playful, highly technical reworks of Oasis’ ‘Wonderwall’ and Moderat’s ‘Bad Kingdom’, his proficiency as a pianist definitely isn’t po-faced.

The mockumentary brilliance of Becoming Lambert (a 10-minute film short where a group of wannabe Lamberts attend a retreat to learn Lambert’s inspirational ways) is further wry, artistic proof of his sense of humour – and, who knows, perhaps some those hopeful graduates made it onto one of this album’s 14 miscellaneous collaborations?

“False has given me the freedom to develop myself artistically in all kinds of directions,” he says. “I can now go anywhere.” And so he does: the record shifts from the quivering electronica of ‘Brack St. Twen’ to the pedal steel guitar of ‘Secrets’, to buzzing free-form jazz, to the delicate piano-led tracks of ‘Opus 23’ and ‘Bolero Azul’. It’s a compositional flair that keeps everything stitched together as disparate sounds and voices dart between collaborations, genres and lengths, where light orchestral interludes flow into laidback lounge music and breezy ambient without missing a beat.

All of it helps to create a welcome momentum that feels cohesive and connected. And for all of the endless, excitable possibilities Lambert might have envisaged, ultimately this album’s real charm lies in the sum of its enigmatic parts. 7/10 Reef Younis

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Albums Live End of the Road 2020: In the Garden of Streaming

Gestures of goodwill have never been so valuable. When the pandemic forced the 15th edition of End of the Road Festival to be postponed until 2021, the pain was real but it was just another note in this summer’s symphony of dread and cancellations. With the dramatic changes to life all around us, perhaps few people would have noticed if there had been no more news from the EOTR team until the new year, but that’s just not the Larmer Tree festival’s way.

On what would have been the final night of their 2020 outing, the organisers presented a beautiful, handcrafted gift for anyone who might have needed it.

Streamed live on the festival’s website on a pay-what-you-want basis, they unveiled a four hour EOTR-in-miniature; a whistlestop guide through the festival’s essences.

Titled In the Garden of Streaming, it evoked that woozy, scrambled sense of wandering from one state of mind to

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another as you move around the festival site, encountering mini-events that you didn’t know were happening. Footage of some of the site’s familiar imagery – something as simple as a cider bus or a sign pointing you to the woods – at first brought stinging pangs of longing, but as events unfolded and the live chat became more and more populated with the EOTR hardcores, that gently gave way to a warmer nostalgic glow.

We watched festival artist Dan Jamieson pop up with drawing classes, scribbling along live as he interviewed the artists on the bill, friendly chats and bespoke music keeping the mood convivial, before heading to the bar. But the bar walk takes us past the Piano Stage, where it just so happens that Courtney Barnett is doing an In Conversation, so we pop ourselves down for a few minutes to listen in, asking a question about her karaoke staple (it’s ‘Total Eclipse of the

Heart’, obviously). On the way back from the bar, Moses Sumney has assumed control of the Piano Stage and is performing a virtuosic, elastic version of Bjork’s ‘Come to Me’, lost in his own reverie as he perches on the back of a battered old armchair.

Of course, all of these things are just happening on a screen, but the sense of being there seems real. The Sumney and Barnett clips are from the festival’s archives, but much of the four hours of material is new, specifically curated for this streaming event. EOTR proves that its expert talent-spotting eye is as sharp as ever by the inclusion of a set from London quartet Modern Woman, a band whose hype is so fresh that they are yet to release a single. The group play a fizzing set of warped and chipped post-punk nuggets, everything slightly askew. Frontwoman Sophie Harris slips frequently from singing mode to speak-

Albums Live ing mode mid track, because that’s her choice. Distant applause meets the end of each track in the 25 minute set (from the few stage hands and crew in attendance), but a greater clamour lies ahead for them.

In the Garden of Streaming also makes good use of the eclectic nature of the Larmer Tree site. Benjamin Woods, the baritone-lunged troubadour behind The Golden Dregs, performs a solo version of ‘Pathos’ aboard the abandoned Disco Ship, invoking the spirit of Stuart A. Staples and Bill Callahan, whilst Katy J Pearson pops up unannounced in the woods, just acoustic guitar and mic in tow, with a stunning version of ‘Return’ from her forthcoming debut album. Moments like these show that it’s the secrets of a festival that you happen across that are the most treasured memories, the unplanned and unplannable instances of serendipity and wonder.

Alternative jukebox favourites fill the spaces between the various artists’ sets, in much the same way that wafts of familiar sounds float through the air from hipster pie stalls and tinny camping speakers. The kooky Singing Stage that sits mostly unused alongside the Garden Stage in normal years (aside from its trademark silent disco) becomes the headline venue for 2020, housing the biggest sets of the night. Billy Nomates, the DIY punk provocateur whose debut album came out during lockdown, blazes with her one-woman show, scowling, writhing, controlling and conducting her songs of class struggle and political revolt with a performance art style that concentrates the message. The tracks are preprogrammed, leaving Billy free to draw on a range of moves that land somewhere between Jarvis Cocker and John Lydon.

It is an eye-popping set, a sign that the streaming gig artform may be regenerating and evolving before our eyes.

Last year, Squid were THE buzz band of EOTR, playing three sets including one in a ludicrously over-stuffed Big Top Stage. Since then they have signed with Warp and have used the lockdown period to record their debut album. They now virtually headline with a confident performance that climaxes with an inter-

polation of Steve Reich’s ‘Clapping Music’, using lyrics taken from a Reich interview about the piece and with cowbell playing that deliberately falls out of phase in a wry nod to the minimalism heads out there. Further still into the wilderness, a series of improvisational pieces from drummers Kwake Bass and Black Midi’s Morgan Simpson provide the thickest, headiest trip of the night, the early hours fog descending on the brain, psychedelic visuals pairing with trance rhythms to give that “did that actually happen?” morning flashback.

There is no point pretending that any virtual streaming experience will ever be a truly satisfying analogue of the full fat festival experience. Save for the live chat box to the side of the browser, In the Garden of Streaming is no more communal an experience than any other of the countless screen watching exercises that we’ve been perfecting all year.

Those initial stings of pain as we saw familiar images of happier times had a Proustian mournfulness to begin with that was hard to shake. But the evening’s experience as a whole acted as a microcosm for the pandemic year in general: eventually, there comes a moment when the early heartache of being denied your old comforts has to give way to a more pragmatic resolve to realign your priorities and appreciate what remains. There was no need for anything to remain of

photography by sonny malhotra and sophie mronzinski

End of the Road at all this year, and yet here, as the result of a disproportionate amount of hard work and care, is a genuinely heartwarming experience. Several commenters in that chatroom admitted to wiping away a tear as the stream played out on a montage of highlights from previous years’ festivals.

This endeavour, after all, has been an exercise in remembering the best of festival going; a celebration of all that we had made routine and all that we will return to. And yet, the single most arresting image of the evening was something far more modest; a fleeting and innocuous moment. During an airing of Jeff Tweedy’s surprise acoustic performance of ‘Let’s Go Rain’ from 2018, the camera casually panned to the crowd of fifty or so in attendance, all sitting in a tight group, beaming away. The joy that animated those faces might have come from Tweedy’s self-deprecating introduction to the song, or perhaps from their love for the song itself; maybe it was a beery glow that lit up those faces, or it was the culmination of all the positive experiences of their festival so far. What it wasn’t derived from, though, was the mere fact that they were in the middle of sharing a special moment, shoulder-to-shoulder with a group of total strangers, because of course it had never occurred to them to be happy about something so simple. That will be different in 2021. Max Pilley

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FilmAlbums and Books

Apiyemiyekî? (dir. ana vaz) Part of MUBI’s New Brazilian Cinema series, Apiyemiyekî? is a 27-minute short that seeks to expose the Waimiri-Atroari genocide – a murder campaign perpetrated against an indigenous group by Brazil’s military dictatorship between 1968 and 1977 – to a wider audience. It’s a tense, unsettling work, all harsh cuts and grisly juxtaposition, opening and closing with shaky shots of the country’s purpose-built new capital accompanied by a brittle soundtrack that threatens to collapse under the weight of intermittent, monstrous bass.

In the middle part of the film, we’re transported along a seemingly endless highway through the Amazon, over which drawings made by the Waimiri-Atroari people are gradually faded in and out. This road, the BR-174, has a grim significance – it was the construction of the highway that gave the government the impetus to confront the inhabitants of the surrounding area.

We meet Egydio Schwade, a researcher and activist who conducted much of the investigative work into the genocide with the Waimiri-Atroari. The drawings come from his research, and the harrowing details of the events they depict are read by him from the shaky translation of the indigenous language into Portuguese. Data pertaining to what happened to the Waimiri-Atroari people isn’t contested, but reliable estimates suggest that the group’s population of around 3000 was reduced to around 1000 by the actions of the state, whose weapons including napalm and aerial bombardment.

It doesn’t take a history scholar to note the significance of a film like this being released in 2020. The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, doesn’t hide his disdain for indigenous people: “Where there is indigenous land,” he has said, “there is wealth

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underneath it”, and his policies in the area – the removal of fines for illegal mining, the green-lighting of various projects which necessitate the violation of indigenous land – show he means what he says.

As bleak as this year has been in so many ways, the degree of reflection on the history of colonialism, environmental exploitation, and the abuse of state power that its events have necessitated has been welcome; whether in connection to the Black Lives Matter movement, the unexpected success of a book like Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method (which discusses the horrifying extent of US-backed violence against leftist and Third World movements throughout the 20th century), or the devastating wildfires that have consumed the Amazon, Australia and California over the past 12 months. Apiyemiyekî? (‘why?’ in English) should be understood in that context: a bold, challenging piece of work that seeks to reckon with recent history, questioning received wisdom around notions of ‘expansion’ and ‘civilisation’. Luke Cartledge

Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit) — Dhanveer Singh Brar (the 87) The fact that there was no place whatsoever for a Black female artist on this year’s Mercury Prize shortlist is, at best, a terrible reflection of British music’s rich output last year, and at worst, a vivid example of gross systemic and cultural bias.

A shortlist that omitted last year’s releases from Loraine James, FKA Twigs, J Hus, SAULT, Rina Sawayama, Ms Banks, Nazar and Shabaka Hutchings, but makes room for Sports Team, throws up an uncomfortable but necessary question: why is the country’s most lauded institution for promoting British music overlooking so many essential British

releases? Dhanveer Singh Brar, professor in Visual Cultures at London’s Goldsmiths University, inadvertently answers this in his thought-provoking new book Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit), published by South London’s independent, evolving collective The 87.

Using a flowing but academic writing style reminiscent of the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, Singh Brar deconstructs problematic approaches to assessing Blackness within British culture using two oddly fitting artistic parallels: the 1981 Brixton-set film Babylon and the work of Dean Blunt, in particular his 2016 album BFF Hosted by DJ Escrow as Babyfather. Both artworks involve a character trying to assimilate their own Black British culture into a reluctant and prejudiced White Britain.

Singh Brar argues that Blunt’s attempt to communicate his Black Britain is hampered by an institutional evaluation that Blunt is an irreverent figure; a joker seeking to cause confusion, not communicate anything meaningful. It’s a corrosive narrative that decapitates his artistic voice and reflects how Black British experimental music is treated in general – as a joke or a mere dalliance.

Singh Brar dissects Babyfather’s dense and dissociative BFF to show that beneath the record’s surface-level distortions and intermittent repetition of the caustic mantra “this makes me proud to be British”, there is a genuine pain. As Singh Brar puts it, in Blunt’s work there is “a dream of Black Britain that did exist but was never permitted to be realised”.

The defanging of experimental Black British music to protect the integrity of an outdated Britishness creates a cultural duplicity in meaning, always giving critics and industry a way-out of taking experimental Black British music seriously, creating the ever-present question: “Are we on the outside of a tragicomedy looking in, or are we trapped within it?”. A neurotic industry and xenophobic culture will always choose to believe the former. Beefy’s Tune is a powerful book that attempts to answer now-glaring questions within British music. Robert Davidson

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Into

the woods Big Thief were mid-tour when the pandemic hit and they were forced to return home. Their nomadic leader, Adrianne Lenker, made for the foothills of Western Massachusetts, built a recording studio in a hut and emerged with two albums of her most personal folk music, by Tristan Gatward. Photography

by C. Misha Handschumacher 53

It’s

a Sunday morning in upstate New York and Adrianne Lenker is waking up. “Generally not really an early riser,” she says, each word slowly punctuated with the elongated effort not to yawn, grinning as she fails to stop the end of her sentence tailing off into a squeak. “Well, I’ve been getting up,” she yawns again, “sorry.

I’ve been getting up at various times. It just depends on the last night. Generally, it’s somewhere between eight and… eleven?”

She buries the last word embarrassedly in her sentence, like a bug going to nest. The time difference suits me on the other end of the line, complacently settling into a warm London afternoon.

The once Brooklyn-based four-piece Big Thief has found a quiet, devoted company since their debut album Masterpiece came out in 2016. It’s music that exists between full human application and fragility. In the last four years, they’ve written and recorded as many studio albums, including two end of year title contenders in 2019, alongside a couple of solo records each from vocalist/songwriter Lenker and guitarist Buck Meek.

It’s not so much the work rate that justifies the applause. The perplexity of Big Thief is that nothing feels rushed; their music sounds strangely unearthed, dissecting intimacy at a distance like a televised archaeology dig, uncovering medieval patterned kitchenware that might once have been a gift from one person to another. But it’s a brave artist who believes their own mythology; Adrianne Lenker’s debut solo album, after all, was made during a period of her life when she worked in a restaurant and photographed pigeons in her spare time.

“We had tacos last night,” she grins, telling me dotingly of the community she’s found during lockdown. She’s been staying with friends, next door to a small farm run by a couple of brothers, where the community has regular dinners together. She calls this area her little pod. “I’ve kind of been away from everywhere for a while,” she says, thinking briefly about how it feels to be back there. “I’ve basically been living on the road for the last six years, ever since Big Thief took off when I was 23. I feel like I can develop a relationship with places now, no place more or less than anywhere else, so long as there are natural elements around.”

Given her prolificacy, the September announcement of two new Adrianne Lenker solo albums was an inevitability of slowing into a global lockdown. The only surprise, perhaps, that it was only two. Tentatively titled songs and instrumentals, they began when Lenker’s nomadic lifestyle took her to isolating in the foothills of mountains, Western Massachusetts.

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“I was just in the forest, surrounded by streams and springs,” she says. “The main presence was birds, you know. I feel like I get tired of most places that comprises mainly of humans; I fatigue a lot sooner than being in a place where it’s just… I don’t know, it feels like it’s such a deep world to get to know a certain part of the land. Like, after some time here, I was slowly starting to understand, okay, the red oak trees are the last to…” The phone signal trails off, reconnecting some minutes later with Adrianne still describing the sensory details of the forest, unaware that I’d left. “You know, the beech leaves look like this, these are the different type of birch trees and these little creatures live here.

You know that kind of stuff is just endless.

“I felt like I was really just getting to know the place when I left,” she says, frustratedly. “There was a woman, an older woman called Patricia, she taught me some stuff. She’d been living there for 40 years, and living in any one place for that long I guess you’d just start getting to recognise all these things. All these subtle things. I started to feel like my eyes adjusted. You know, we were pulled out of our tour very abruptly, and I went straight there and it was such a jarring switch from all these city centers around Europe, going straight to the woods. At first I felt all this anxiety, my eyes took a while to adjust to the forest and everything I was seeing kind of blurred together. Only slowly over time did my eyes start adjusting to all the details: individual trees and plants, starting to recognize all these different parts of the forest. Different shades of colour that I hadn’t been able to see. That transformation started happening and I feel like I could’ve been there for years.”

THERE’S ALWAYS A PILE OF SONGS The songs started coming after a couple of weeks of being in the mountains, she says. They’re in good supply at present; there are plenty more demos in reserve, too, unrecorded sketches and ideas not voiced in these collections. “There’s always a pile of songs,” she assures me. You can hear the room in these ones, though, in a way that her previous recordings haven’t let others in. Moments of static crackle make way as rain hits the wood cabin walls, bedding Lenker’s finger pick and strum. Channels drop in and out mid-recording (“Oh that’s cool,” you can hear her say in the distance). The room, she said, felt like the inside of an acoustic guitar.

“It was this little pine cabin – it was very simple. One room, essentially, with a big wooden stove which I used for heat and cooking on in the colder months. Well, weeks.” She laughs. “When I was first there it was winter and everything was completely covered in snow. I was sledding down the hills in my sister’s house, and then everything turned to Spring slowly. We were in the foothills of mountains, there was a little elevation, so it was a lot cooler than down in town. And there was no running water so I was carrying water everyday. Classic – chopping wood, getting water. Really basic things.” She imitates carrying water and chopping wood, aware of the stereotype she’s drifting towards. “Then there was the main house,” she says, “built by the woman who owned the land or, you know, was tending to the land. And then my sister’s cabin was probably like a kilometer into the forest.

There was crystal quartz everywhere, these big giant chunks of stone. And yeah, like I said, these big red oaks, a lot of beech trees and birch trees, maple trees, hemlocks and white pine.”

As you can imagine, building a studio in this place was a challenge. “Oh my gosh,” she reels back. “It was fun but it was a puzzle. I was kinda worried about the power out there. I mean, we had power but it was really just an extension chord that we’d trailed all the way through the woods. Phil [Weinrobe] was the mastermind behind this. We’re really good friends; we’d spent some time living together on the road when he was doing sound for Big Thief. He’s just an incredible recording engineer, producer and record maker, and I was just imagining him coming out here because he feels like family.”

At this time, Phil was in New York and he wanted to get away for a break, she explains, almost dutifully. “We had to be really safe about it as the pandemic was breaking out, but he gathered all this gear through friends. I drove out to the city, directly to him; he had been quarantined. We had to be super safe, wearing gloves and masks, our friend Shahzad [Ismaily] had put some gear down in this little corridor entrance area, said hello from his window, we picked it up and went on to our friend Eli [Crews]’s, then drove back to the cabin and started setting up. It took us about two and a half weeks. The first thing that happened was the power blew our tape machines up. Like, all four of the tape machines we’d brought out had died just by turning them on. All we had at that point was just this portable handheld Walkman cassette recorder. That’s what we recorded

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‘come’ and ‘not a lot, just forever’ on. Just on what we had – just vocals and guitars. We weren’t discouraged because, like, even if everything we could do was going to be recorded on this then that’s cool, so be it. And Phil’s so optimistic, we both just worked on setting it up and the solution was just having to order this wild power converter thing.

“We were hanging out with my sister a lot. Then Brian, my sister’s partner, he built the desks and a makeshift studio really fast. Within a day he’d built these desks around the room from big slabs of wood that he had lying around…” She pauses a little at my silence. “Oh, he’s an arborist, and he also has a wood mill. He screwed them into the wall and we just had this customized wooden area for all the tape machines and stuff.”

ALL OF THE MUSIC COMES FROM THE SAME PLACE The clarity with which Lenker describes her environment makes sense. Her songwriting is so specified to her, so founded in her own poetic, nomadic experience. There’s only so much universality that can be found in stories about carrying water on your head, tripping over the crystal quartz, blowing up a tape machine and being stuck in the wilderness with no kit, an album to record and an arborist in-law. The fondness and the eye with which Lenker writes is what lets these songs belong to other people, rather than the subject. Take the flawless opening couplets of ‘anything’ that traffics nostalgia (“Staring down the

barrel of the hot sun / Shining with the sheen of a shotgun”), and then compare it to the surreal dream of ‘zombie girl’ (“I almost couldn’t wake / because I was frozen in bed with a zombie girl”).

“I feel like, since I was little, all of the music comes from the same place,” she says. “Like, I almost feel like I’m trying to describe this same thing that I’ve had since I was like, eight. And it just keeps getting more refined and I’m just weaving through it and hopefully growing as a person. I feel like I’ve grown so much since Hours Were the Birds when I was 21. I’d just moved to New York City and hadn’t put the band together. I hadn’t even started doing duo stuff with Buck yet. I was seeking and searching for this resonance and connection, an intangible thing that I’m still moving towards and searching for.

“I remember one, actually,” she says, when I ask what kind of things her eight-year-old self was writing about. “‘So Little Life’, it was called.” She corrects herself, “I think I was actually nine. It went, ‘Leaves are blowing, summer’s fading, I’m not even hesitating, so little life to live, so many words to say, when I stop and try to say them everything fades away.’” She’s almost shy of its completeness, recalling its melody and its mindfulness to life’s sanctity, you know, at a time when everyone else was collecting football stickers. I tell her that, in contrast at that age, I’d written a poem about a magic box, found in Egypt, filled with marshmallows and a thousand free wishes, still pinned to my Grandma’s fridge. “Jheez, that’s profound,” she says, without a trace of irony or humouring me. “I mean, I worked on that song for like a year. I think I finished it when I was ten. ‘When I drift out of this dream world, it’s usually just in time to realise everything will be fine.’”

In her own published discography, a lot of her music is candidly directed towards people. The tracklisting of 2014’s a-sides was almost exclusively people’s names. Big Thief ’s list is even more comprehensive, with a veritable yearbook of fan favourites – ‘Lorraine’, ‘Paul’, ‘Randy’, ‘Haley’, ‘Betsy’, ‘Jenni’, and the quiet hit ‘Mary’. More than ever, though, songs sounds rooted in geography and location. Even ‘dragon eyes’, the penultimate ballad of heartache, written about a will to be and belong – “I just want a place with you” – is a world away from its fanatic pop equivalents that will gladly be anywhere, so long as they’ve got that one person. It feels like the importance of love and relationships for Lenker is becoming rounded.

“I think,” she pauses, cautious to phrase it truthfully.

“Maybe I used fewer names, but in a way I feel it links more

directly to actual people than anything I’ve made before. It’s probably the most personal thing that I’ve made. I noticed one thing: in the past I’ve been quite hesitant to use…” she stops again. “I don’t know, I’ve just been conscious of saying, ‘I this’ or ‘I that’. You know, ‘I feel this.’ I’ve always wanted to maintain a poetic distance from stating things as simply as that, being aware of pronouns – of ‘I’s and ‘you’s, like ‘I’ feel this, and not wanting to be indulgent. I’ve wanted to maintain a frame of an emptiness that people can fill in. But I didn’t care about that, this time, I didn’t care. I needed to express things in a more utilitarian way. These songs emerged from feeling a lot of pain and a lot of grief internally, acknowledging a lot of feelings… and it felt really brutal.

“I was waking up in the morning, and writing on my guitar was helping me get through it all. I don’t know how I was writing; I was barely even eating. It was a really hard time. So yeah, I wasn’t too concerned with poetry, I feel like I just wrote the things and a lot of it just came out in one go. A song would come out in the morning and I would play it and sing it and I didn’t care; like, maybe this record’s never going to come out.

I’m not trying to make something cool, you know. There was so little thought, and it just resulted in this language.”

COMFORT IN MOTION The analog, relational tenderness of Adrianne Lenker’s writing clashes with most people’s new routine of structural and digitised distance. It’s like trying to translate the core mystery of friendship, while breaking up with all of them. “It brings about this whole other world,” she says, on the other hand. “I mean, for me, my closest relationships, I find, and am finding, transcend space and time, and it’s okay not to be in close proximity when I can feel the solemnness of the friendships, or the solemnness of family, which is something this [lockdown] has brought to light.

“On the other hand, I’ve been separated from the person who was my partner. When the pandemic hit, we’d already been apart for three or four months, just basically from tour and the fact that she was living across the world. But then, we went through a whole break-up and it really hit when I started recording that album, and a lot of it, yeah… It was fucking brutal.

Going through anything meaningful with someone you love and care about when you only have this screen and these words, you know. There are so many other forms of language we have as

“I don’t know how I was writing; I was barely even eating. It was a really hard time. So yeah, I wasn’t too concerned with poetry”

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“The small cozy room is important for us humans.

Having a place that feels good is a privilege… it shouldn’t be. It’s wild to think about”

humans. Words start feeling very thin very fast. And, you know, people have gone through deaths and the passing of loved ones over Zoom. Virtually saying goodbye is happening everywhere.

It’s all well and good going about life with FaceTime, having some amount of distance from people, but there’s nothing like that feeling of ‘I need to be physically with you right now.’”

In March, the physical distractions Lenker was afforded by virtue of Big Thief ’s European tour abruptly ended. Despite their projections as introverts, where the thralls of performance can be awkward, leaving a tour is just as jarring as preparing for the adoration of one. “Oh my gosh, yeah. I mean, it’s harder,” she says. “For me it’s more challenging to readjust to not touring and not having that pace. I mean, maybe because we’ve been doing it so much and for so long, this time I’d felt more comfortable in motion. I’d felt more comfortable in that rhythm of waking up and loading and sound check and eating and playing the show and travelling. Like, you know what you’re supposed to do in routine and rhythm – there’s a modality that you adjust to so hard and so heavily that when it stopped I didn’t really know what to do with myself. There’s the first week which is notably challenging, then there’s this trick week that’s like, ‘oh I’m fine, I’m good, I’m great, I’m adjusting. The woods, nature, it feels so good to relax.’ And then when it’s a month, it sets in that you’re actually not so good.” She coughs a little, suppressing a laugh.

“And yeah, all of the things that you’d been able to repress over the course of travels and not having any solitude and not having a sort of reflective space… Suddenly your real stuff comes up, and you have to get to know your real self again.”

This process of self-rediscovery is one that would have been impossible to undergo within a routine, and the same idiosyncrasies become a facet of the creativity, too. “For instance, it’s not that we don’t like recording in studios,” says Adrianne, “but for the most part I think we’re finding that a living space that has its own limitations… it sparks creativity in a different way. You have to react against all these different factors. I feel like houses breathe more. I’ve learnt that I don’t like to be in a vacuum sealed highly-controlled studio space. It can feel kinda dead. There’s so much life in spaces that aren’t built specifically to be creative in.

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“The small cozy room is important for us humans. I mean, seemingly,” she qualifies. “We could just sleep out under the stars, but to have a reasonable shelter where you can simultaneously venture out – it’s very gentle. As much as I want to be totally wild and live off the land, be nomadic and sleep out on a mat, it’s a romantic idea. The idea of not having a home or a shelter is actually a brutal reality that so many people involuntarily face.

And what one wouldn’t give for a small, but, like, nurturing place that feels safe to sleep and eat, and do the basic things that you need to feel able to do to enjoy the world that is everywhere.

Having a place that feels good is a privilege… it shouldn’t be. It’s wild to think about.

“I’m soul searching on this one level,” she says, tangentially flying through hours of deep conversation, “wanting to feel a sense of home, not knowing where my home is, but I’m privileged to be able to choose and to have enough energy to explore.

That’s a facet of this time, of course, too; I think in addition to the pandemic there’s starting to understand what that means.

I’ve dealt with a lot of issues surrounding womanhood and being a woman, or being a queer person, I’ve dealt with that in my writing and in my own way, but really facing the fact that I’m a white person was this new layer – we’re being called to unpack our own selves and understand what that means. There are so many things that can escape awareness when you don’t have to think of politics, or live it.”

A GIFT FROM THE TREES A childish curiosity permeates songs. Words are seen as structures and buildings rather than necessary vehicles for meaning.

The outro for ‘heavy focus’, for example, just spirals away – “focus, focus focus, kiss, focus, fokiss”. “Oh, that’s cool,” she says, visibly pleased when I point it out. “I feel like children are just profound. Like, we start out pretty good, and then all the world happens and we spend the rest of it unweaving, unwinding, unravelling. We’ve just basically got to undo everything for the rest of our lives. I mean, we’re so highly absorbent as children; it’s dangerous. It’s what weirds me out about children being on iPads or iPhones at such an early age, because you’re so absorbent. And you become what you fill yourself with. It just makes me nervous when I see four year olds watching the screen.”

I ask if having Candy Crush on her phone would have stopped her writing ‘So Little Life’, as an eight-by-nine-by-tenyear-old. “Probably. And especially if I was playing it in the time I was really little. There were so many moments where I didn’t have anything to reach for, so I reached for the guitar. And it has given back to me throughout my whole life. But the phone can’t give back to you in that way. I’m not saying there aren’t beautiful things that can come from children learning, like… these genius little kids with their heads filled with so much information, who knows, I can’t say there’s no benefit to that. But it’s not just children. We’re all children. We’re only really alive for a blink of an eye, and what we spend this precious and short and transient time doing, like, I don’t know, where should we pour our focus in that time? There are things that swallow time and things that expand it.”

A guitar, for all of music’s digital potential, is still an endless excitement to Adrianne; it’s an example of that thing that, she says, can expand time. As the companion release to songs, instrumentals is the first time her craft has really been explored and recorded as a separate entity to her voice. Two pieces of music, ‘music for indigo’ and ‘mostly chimes’, were created amid the ritual of starting and closing the days with improvised acoustic guitar. “Really, it’s been a part of my musicality since I was really little,” she says. “Even before singing, guitar has always been this place of comfort for me, and I think it’s easy to place a lot of significance on a part of yourself – like, ‘this is my expertise, this is my craft’. Writing songs has been something I’ve worked on and tried to refine over the course of many years, so much of my thoughts and my brain is in it, but playing guitar, noodling around and not choosing a direction, and not judging it or putting weight on it – that in a way has been a part of me that I wouldn’t have ever chosen to capture or present before, because I wasn’t bringing any significance to it.” Even now there’s a little focus on it, she doesn’t want these songs to be anything more than white noise, pieces to warmly accompany you in a room, whenever you’d like them to.

“The guitar is a really a deep world that, certainly I will die having not explored nearly everything there is to explore in it. The subtleties and the options, all the different roads you can take and it’s all in your fingers, it’s all in your hands. I love the wood, it’s like a gift given by these trees. Or, it’s taken from the trees, really,” she laughs. “Like, the guitar I play on the record, I got when I was 14 and it was my only instrument up until I got my first electric guitar that I play with Big Thief. I’ve had it for 15 years, and it’s changed shape all through those years, moving and contracting. Like, what will that thing feel like in another 15 years? What will my relationship with it be? Also, you play a chord and put your ear up to the side, it just fills your whole body with vibration and resonance. I like that you can kind of do anything on there without consequence. Like, if you’re sitting by yourself, you can put your finger on any string, on any fret, play any note, and there’s no negative consequence.

“Think of that feeling when you’re falling in something,” she says, returning to her earlier sentiment. “You’re falling in love, or you’re just completely absorbed in a sensation or moment or instrument, similar to when you’re taking a camera to focus on something. You see it first, and then take the time to see it. Falling in love is this involuntary jolt of presence, but presence is generally so hard to exercise on things. You can do that with yourself in nature and your own internal world, but it’s a lot harder. Whereas when someone else triggers it, with that person you can bring this part of yourself to attention that otherwise is sleeping. That focus and that power of attention… like when you’re a child,” she laughs, “or if you’re a dog. You can see that one thing is all they want.

“You just need to witness something rather than change it,” she says, “rather than alter it or integrate it into yourself.”

Her voice trails off again in thought, similar in all but sound to that slow squeak when you first wake up and try to calibrate yourself. “Sorry,” she says, “I forgot the question. I was focused on something.”

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Bumpkins in LA Inside music’s most derided genre, with the author of Nothin’ But A Good Time: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Glam Metal, by Dafydd Jenkins

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performs to a backing track of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on Top of the Pops. Few care to recall that Guns N’ Roses’ ornate, bloated Use Your Illusion I sold well over twice as many copies as Nevermind in its first week. Even fewer are willing to admit that they stood in line to buy it. “You never hear anybody saying, ‘you know what, I was massively into Helloween,’” Justin says. But the numbers don’t lie: “there’s a week in the American Billboard charts where U2’s The Joshua Tree is at number one, and numbers two through ten are all glam metal albums.”

True enough, Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet and Poison’s Look What the Cat Dragged In were snapping at the heels of Bono’s pre-kinky boots in 1987. It becomes even more astonishing once you realise how little publicity went on for such groups. “These bands were selling out Wembley stadium. Aside from the odd Bon Jovi song, they were never played on daytime radio, they weren’t on TV outside of MTV or specialist late night shows,” Justin says. Really, glam metal’s meteoric rise throughout the ’80s is due in part to the fans on the ground and those who wrote for the lively subculture of metal mags – Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, Raw Power – who doggedly cultivated their audience.

“Where did all these people go?” is the question Quirk asks.

— Give the people what they want —

Head into any pub with a pool table and a jukebox worth its salt in South West Wales and you’re likely to hear a Guns N’ Roses tune before the first break. Growing up in this sleepy corner of the UK, even the most provincial pub felt like a metal bar; places of debauchery – sonic, if not actual – that thundered from behind closed doors. More curious than the prevalence of Metallica, KoЯn or Slipknot in these towns was the underlying influence of glam metal. Mostly disregarded by critics as a blip in popular music, the belt/spandex combos, health and safety-defying pyrotechnics and acrobatic riffs of Poison and Def Leppard were nonetheless a gateway drug to the heavier stuff for many a stroppy pre-teen here. The first proper gig I can recall was seeing a GnR tribute act in Narberth’s Queen’s Hall (“Pembrokeshires [sic] number 1 hall and conference venue,” the site reads). “I bet they were a sight better than the real thing,” says journalist and writer Justin Quirk.

Despite having spent his early teens listening to the likes of Ratt and Dokken in metropolitan West London, Quirk nevertheless understands the appeal, and is likewise baffled at the wider culture’s oversight. “Glam metal was way bigger than you think,” he says. As much as his book Nothin’ But A Good Time: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Glam Metal contains traces of his own affection for the genre taste forgot, it primarily serves as a deep dive into its history from the scrappy days of British glam to the supersized stadium juggernauts of its heyday, and a critical overhaul thereof. He continues: “Under all the rebel outsider trappings, this was 100%, down the line, nailed-on, mainstream pop music.”

Seismic shifts in early ’90s rock music are largely remembered as the sole reserve of the grunge vanguard; Kurt Cobain warbling a faux-operatic whale song as he begrudgingly

Quirk had a similar proselytising mission with his book.

Frustrated by the competitive strain of the publishing industry, he went with crowd-funding site Unbound, impressed by their track record of publishing books “that the mainstream don’t really get, but that there’s a big audience for.” Sure enough, the book received almost three-quarters of its funding within two weeks.

So, if the glam metal was as bloated and vacuous as it might appear, why write about it at all? “People will look at any form of culture or music, no matter how moronic, and ask, ‘why did this happen, and what’s the story?” he says, adding that, despite the emergence of critical reassessment of many forgotten “bargain bin” phenomena – from commercial house to gabber to Oi – there’s been little insight into his chosen subject.

“For some reason, glam metal is the one genre that is apparently immune,” says Quirk, “but what I discovered while researching this book was that you can’t really tell the story of America in the ’80s without looking at that music, in the same way you’d struggle to tell the story of New York and LA in the ’80s without including hip-hop.”

Like hip-hop, Quirk calls glam metal a “vector” for the tumultuousness of ’80s USA; a genre that absorbed the cultural milieu as much as any genre does at any given time, only with the added dimension of immense popularity. The growth of cable TV, political optimism under Reagan, the AIDS and crack epidemics and enormous rates in poverty and unemployment were allied with the gradual halting of the Cold War. “It was possibly one of the final periods where anyone took the American Dream seriously,” Quirk says. If nothing else, glam metal was a continuation of a much longer story within American culture. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine a group of musicians as musically unremarkable as Mötley Crüe finding fame anywhere else in the world. Additionally, take Poison: “Basically pretty

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thick, not good looking, not original, not especially talented, but pretty good at being a band,” Quirk says. “You could be an ugly, unqualified bloke from Indiana, move to LA and essentially reinvent yourself. The story America always tells itself is of bootstrapping optimism. You start off as Paul Newman’s pool cleaner and 10 years later, you’re the highest paid star in Hollywood. But equally, the real story is that it all goes off the rails and you become part of the Manson family.”

— Welcome to the jungle — In hindsight, the excess of glam metal was a heightened parody of this dichotomy; big cars, big hair, limos, champagne.

As the ’80s progressed, the scene curdled into unpleasantness.

In the book, Quirk retells a particularly horrifying anecdote from 1984. Crüe vocalist Vince Neil who, while drunk-driving with members of tourmates Hanoi Rocks, lost control of his car and hit an oncoming vehicle, seriously injuring two of his passengers and killing drummer Nicholas Dingley. The book is full of such occurrences of excess gone awry.

Guns N’ Roses were certainly not exempt. One infamous 1992 show at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, beset by long delays and technical issues, resulted in audience riots, injuries and at least a dozen arrests. But Quirk in part credits their staying power to their willingness to “hold a mirror up to the whole scene”, revealing its squalidness as well as living within it. Nowhere is this position better presented than in the music video – the bread and butter of glam metal acts – of their breakthrough single ‘Welcome To The Jungle’. Axl Rose, dressed by all accounts as a country bumpkin down to the stalk of grain held between his teeth, alights from a bus onto the grimy streets of LA much in the way you could imagine Vince Neil doing years prior. Interspersed with scenes of ultra-violence and torture as seen on the TVs in a shop window, Rose appears performing with the rest of the band, hair tousled to the ceiling and spandex-clad like a member of Poison. By the end of the video, Rose walks away from the scenes as if to say, “this is disgusting, and it will chew you up and spit you out.”

Who else endures? While Quirk is a staunch defender of Skid Row’s 1989 debut, Def Leppard’s studio prowess (“Their best songwriting basically sounds like late ABBA to me”) and the foundational, proto-glam metal solo LPs of Ozzy Osbourne, he is adamant that Appetite for Destruction, Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 debut, is “largely untouchable. If you play someone who has no interest in glam metal Back for the Attack by Dokken, it’s not gonna mean anything. There’s a real malevolence to Appetite for Destruction. They were really horribly damaged people.

A lot had gone wrong in those people’s lives to make that kind of music.” He continues: “I wouldn’t over-stress the case too much, but I think it’s not too dissimilar to what NWA or The Geto Boys down in Houston were doing with hip-hop at the time.

It’s really horrible and abusive and misogynistic and violent and bleak. Is it glorifying the culture or is it just documenting it in a very dispassionate way?” As an 11-year-old, it’s hard to tell, and that’s probably the main draw, Quirk says. “In both cases, I think now they were chroniclers rather than celebrants.”

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Final Third: Cold Take

Storm in a conference centre The very silly launch of TIDAL, five years on, by Stuart Stubbs

It was actually an old train station in the middle of Manhattan, but with enough money you can turn any space into a corporate awards evening that employees are forced to attend to cheer them up a bit. The crowd that attended the launch of streaming service TIDAL on 30 March 2015 were not an enthusiastic bunch, despite what they would see that night, or perhaps because of it.

It was a confusing spectacle that hasn’t mellowed over the last 5 years. You don’t look back at the launch of TIDAL and think, ‘at the time this seemed full-tilt Tom Cruise, but y’know what, they were totally right; they called it; fair play’; you think, ‘do they know this video is still online?’.

Although you’ve still never met anyone who uses TIDAL, in 2015 everyone had an opinion on it. There were two camps to choose from: those who felt that Jay-Z buying a Norwegian streaming service for $56.2 million and asking his millionaire mates to chip in as co-owners to create “THE WORLD’S FIRST ARTIST OWNED STREAMING SERVICE” was nothing to be sad about. Capitalism is capitalism, and why should Jay-Z, Kanye and deadmau5 get more shit than a group of tech guys for making mountains of cash this way, beyond the obvious reason that deadmau5 was involved? I mean, hey, at least this music platform was owned by musicians… and deadmau5.

And then there was the other camp, who probably would have backed TIDAL’s plight against the unfair payouts that artists were receiving from streaming (and continue to receive), although not when it was coming from Alicia Keys, Arcade Fire, Beyoncé, Calvin Harris, Chris Martin, Daft Punk, Jack White, Jason Aldean, J Cole, Jay-Z, Kanye West, deadmau5, Madonna, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna and Usher. Too many millionaires spoiled the broth. A lone Jay-Z fronting a campaign to get artists paid fairly – we could have almost bought that he was doing that for

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Thee Oh Sees as much as himself. But flanked by the biggest selling artists in the world not getting paid enough, it looked a bit greedy guts, didn’t it?

— The trailer — To double down on the disingenuousness, the TIDAL owners couldn’t stop talking about the high fidelity audio that their platform offered. Yes, TIDAL was going to cost more than other streaming services ($19.95 compared to Spotify’s $9.99 premium subscription), but that wasn’t only in order to pay the artists more; it was to deliver greater sound quality – essentially that of CDs rather than MP3s. Never mind that the difference between the two is hardly audible without premium speakers or headphones – that hardly lined up with the #TIDALforAll narrative, so the team bravely stuck to the script regardless.

The “lossless audio” sales pitch was most passionately delivered in a moody trailer that played at the end of the launch ceremony and was subsequently shared online afterwards, as all moments of cavalier delusion should be. It’s an incredible short that goes toe-to-toe with the live launch, one ridiculous moment at a time. “The Avengers of Music”, as one of Daft Punk put it in the clip’s only moment of intentional comedy, passed a mic around a table and took turns to say what they loved about “this historic day”. Calvin Harris got the ‘sound quality’ ball rolling, but it was Jack White who fully leaned into it before he was cut off just as he was saying, “The average person on the street has no idea…”. Later, White is seen at a drinks reception boring Jay-Z, Beyonće and Kanye about it; trapped at a wedding by ‘Uncle Jack’ who only likes to talk about sound. Kanye said it was about “owning our oil”; Madonna – always good for a riddle – said,

Final Third: Cold Take “Not technology art, human art.” There was a lot of nodding.

With Jay-Z, Beyonće and Kanye (now free from White, having pretended they needed to check their coats), Daft Punk clinked champagne flutes while their helmets were on. “I’m inspired,” said someone. “It’s VERY inspiring,” confirmed Beyonće.

One line really popped though, also from B: “This collaboration feels so ego-less.” Madonna must have heard that, because during the live launch, where one by one the owners signed their ‘declaration’ (no further information given or, by that point, expected), she took a dump on Beyonće’s words as she hoisted her right leg onto the table while signing. All other owners managed to sign their names with both feet on the ground, like you may have seen happen in a bank, although to give Madonna some credit, we were watching people sign a piece of paper, and I applaud her for trying something different. It didn’t really work, but you don’t know until you know.

— The live launch — Madonna’s leg did juice up the clap-o-meter a little, by which I mean it caused one person to shout “yeaaaah”. That doesn’t sound like success, but when I say that the crowd were not an enthusiastic bunch, I’m not kidding. At the very top of the show, no more than two people clapped, and the audible, solo “bravo”, although well meant, sounded inadvertently sarcastic.

You can always tell how dead a room is when you can hear one person clapping too close to a microphone, every hand-slap a deafening amplification of how few people are either there or interested. Once the ego-less TIDAL owners had all been introduced one-by-one to a reception of apathy that almost felt staged (I mean, where did they find this rarified crowd of people who really don’t give a shit about these superstars? Were they told not to clap?), Alicia Keys was left to pick up the pieces. In a USA Today article the following day, entitled 3 Reasons why Jay-Z’s new Tidal streaming service is stupid, the writer commented that in Keys’s opening speech she, “mostly explained music to us as though we’d never heard it.” She tried though, saying, “It’s come up a couple of times about this feeling like a graduation, but in actuality it is a graduation.” I’ve stood at massive gigs before where stars have said things that make no sense whatsoever but cheered regardless because they’ve then left a pause, but at the ghostly TIDAL launch, no one took the bait.

Other moments of unbridled awkwardness included Madonna missing a hand shake with deadmau5, the presence of deadmau5, Calvin Harris popping up on a wheeled-in television, Chris Martin popping up on a wheeled-in television, deadmau5 appearing like an inappropriate football mascot during a 1-minute silence as the camera panned the team line while Keys asked “how much do you love this thing called music?”, the signing of the declaration (obviously), the unrehearsed ending where the Avengers stared into the abyss and privately considered which of their assistants dropped a bollock on this whole thing, Madonna’s leg, and the horrific, humbling silence. But as Keys had said, today was just the start of the journey.

— And then — The days that followed the TIDAL launch were full of the easy laughs I’ve just dug up, and ever since people have rubbed their legs at the next TIDAL gaff. All the talk of the service being “run by the artists” began to give off the impression that they’d found a WeWork in Brooklyn where J Cole was going to build playlists while Rhianna headed up the new business team ( Jack White was interested in Head of Sound). Since then, there’s been plenty to suggest that that’s exactly what they did.

2016 was particularly lively, when TIDAL accidently leaked Rihanna’s album ANTI and botched the launch of Kanye’s The Life of Pablo, admitting that its streaming version might not be the finished album after all. King of the swerve Kanye styled that out by dubbing Pablo the world’s “first living album”, but later in the year Prince’s estate sued TIDAL for exploiting his music, despite the service securing the rights to his catalogue.

People liked these misfortunes and fuckups so much because of the megalomania of the TIDAL launch (although this being a project of the world’s most famous Black entrepreneur no doubt added an ugly glee of a different kind for some). But new companies make mistakes, and 2016 did at least deliver Lemonade via the service. What people couldn’t get on board with was summed up in the launch motto: “TIDAL puts the power back into the artist’s hands.” Cynics joked that rather than all artists, it applied to 16 names in particular – the owners of TIDAL. Moves like Kanye releasing The Life of Pablo “exclusively” on the platform only for it to appear on Spotify and Apple Music two months later (in order to benefit from their much larger audiences) supported the suspicion while shitting on the hard fought high fidelity angle – maybe MP3 quality will do after all. But it’s an ongoing investigation into falsified streaming numbers that’s completely torpedoed the good ship we’re-all-in-this-together.

In 2018, Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv published a report accusing TIDAL of intentionally inflating streams of The Life of Pablo and Lemonade. The company denies any wrongdoing, but the numbers run by Variety don’t look good. As they reported in November 2018, TIDAL had, “claimed that West’s album had been streamed 250 million times in its first 10 days of release in February of 2016, while claiming it had just 3 million subscribers – a claim that would have meant every subscriber played the album an average of eight times per day; and that Beyonce’s album was streamed 306 million times in its first 15 days of release in April of 2016.” Lemonade probably should have been streamed that many times, but I’ve heard The Life of Pablo and I don’t believe that anyone has listened to it eight times over, even with it having been out for four years.

Of course, these numbers don’t merely serve to inflate the egos of the artists – they’re converted into revenue, which is what caused Dagens Næringsliv to start their investigation: if their accusations are true, not only would inflated royalties have been paid out to certain record labels, the remaining artists on TIDAL would have received a smaller cut from the platform’s subscription revenue because of it. Avengers, disassemble.

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Final Third: In Conversation A long talk with William Basinski and Preston Wendell about their collaboration as Sparkle Division,

by Daniel Dylan Wray. Photography by Emily Malan

The spectacle we’re living through William Basinski is a refreshingly antithetical character in the world of ambient music. A genre more associated with a stilted and studious aesthetic, Basinski brings a little glamour and flamboyance to the world. With his long flowing blonde hair, sunglasses, leather jacket and dazzling rings, he often looks more like he’s stepping off set from a gloriously kitsch, trashy and sleazy 1980s b-movie rather than off stage after a set of trance-inducing drone music.

Speaking from his home in LA, he sips on a lunchtime bottle of beer and drains endless cigarettes, creating a swirling cloud of smoke over the artworks that hang in the background.

Originally from Houston, Texas, before moving to Florida as a child – where he already knew he was gay from a young age, describing himself as “a very flamboyant little hot mess of a kid, getting beat up” – before landing in New York in the late 1970s.

He did so slap bang in the middle of the minimalism boom that took place in the downtown music scene and the music of Reich, Glass, Eno and co. seeped into his musical consciousness. Whilst he played in a variety of bands, including a rockabilly outfit that once supported David Bowie, it was through his solo instrumental explorations where Basinki came alive.

Today he still retains a southern twang that, coupled with his extensive time spent in North America, leaves him somewhere in the middle ground of American accents and oddly sounding a lot like John Malkovich throughout our conversation. Sitting beside him is his assistant and collaborator Preston Wendell, also sucking down a cold one and blazing his way through a pack of smokes.

The pair have formed a new project called Sparkle Division and for anyone familiar with Basinski’s work, this will be a rather surprising direction. The album (which landed 10/10 here at L&Q) is a loose, fun, wonky and sleazy album that blends exotica, lounge, jazz and disco, almost giving off a by-the-beach

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afternoon cocktail vibe. It sounds a bit like the record someone would make whilst going through their heavy cocaine phase in the 1980s, except way less shit than that sounds.

Prior to this, Basinski has long been a pioneer in the world of ambient music, his approach often being archive-based, digging through his own deep vaults of music (both that he’s recorded himself and the muzak he liked to record onto tape) and forming something new from those old tapes. Many of his works have been profound and poignant explorations of time, decay and loss, exploring that hazy middle ground between what is gained and depleted over time – operating in a strange timeless universe.

Most notably this was captured on his landmark fouralbum release The Disintegration Loops. While digitising some old tape loops of his from the ’80s, Basinski noticed the old tape was literally crumbling as the process unfurled. Having sat decaying for years, his compositions were disintegrating in front of him in real time. This process was captured on record and the development starkly changed the texture and feel of the music, resulting in an exploratory duality and deep dichotomy around the simultaneous death and birth of music. Factor in that some of this was made as Basinski watched the Twin Towers collapse and his city turn to dust, and you have an overpoweringly elegiac creation that stands alone and unique in its own timeframe and world.

Countless other releases followed over the years – from the vignette-like Melancholia to a tribute to his hero David Bowie on 2017’s A Shadow in Time – and now Basinski has both a Sparke Division record out and another solo album coming in the form of Lamentations. The dark, brooding and engulfing record is described as a record that transforms “operatic tragedy into abyssal beauty”. It’s an album that plugs into the unravelling chaos and uncertainty of our current times.

Final Third: In Conversation

DDW: How’s LA right now?

WB: Not too hot, we’re not burning up like everyone else. Although it was 120 last weekend. So there’s that and just dealing with all the crazy.

DDW: Are you feeling hopeful about that and the upcoming election?

WB: That’s a hard call.

PW: As hopeful as we can be.

WB: There’s so much cheating and shit going on that you never know. Plus all the bullshit fearmongering, but let’s see.

We’re hoping for the best.

DDW: I wish you all the best. I’m sure your sanity levels are being tested.

WB: We’re all losing our fucking minds, yeah.

DDW: William, you had a giant Williamsburg loft that was home to so much of your music and creations for years, how come you made the switch to LA? WB: I had my Arcadia loft from 1989 to 2008 and it had just gotten more and more expensive every year. It was a commercial lease and we paid the taxes and we paid outrageous commercial

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gas and electricity bills and it just got to be too much. By August 2008 I had like five people living there and I was staying out in California with Jamie [Basinski’s partner] and would just come back to New York every now and then to do some work in my big studio and scare everybody and clean. Every year the rent went up and I had to tell the kids. There was this one little asshole that was sort of running things for me there and everyone left because by then they could get their own room somewhere for that kind of money. But he kept all their money and then put two other people in my loft and kept their money. So here I was without $10,000 rent and two people I didn’t know thinking that they had a place that was going to be okay for them to live in for a while. So it was a big fucking nightmare. I had to garner all my troops and friends to help me pack up all the art. We had a huge sale and sold everything we could sell, including a lot of my analogue equipment.

DDW: How did you guys meet?

WB: My old assistant Brian left for graduate school.

That’s what happens sometimes with a really smart assistant. I was without someone and getting ready to go on tour and I like

Final Third: In Conversation “‘Girl, that boy has got a crush on you, honey – look at that shit-eating grin.’

I was like, ‘Oh shut up!’” to keep on top of my mail order. I went to see a friend’s dance performance in Venice Beach and before we went in there’s a little coffee shop on the main drag there and my friend Ed wanted a coffee so I got a pack of cigarettes at the corner store and he went into the coffee shop.

PW: This is the one time I’ve ever seen William in a coffee shop. Of course I knew who he was.

WB: Ed looked at me in this crazy way and he was like, “Girl, that boy has got a crush on you, honey – look at that shit eating grin.” I was like, “Oh shut up!”.

PW: I had a big ambient crush on him I guess.

WB: So he was like, “Is your name William and do you do tape loops?” I was like, “Get outta here!” We left, we went to the show, and afterwards, I said, let’s go back by that coffee shop, I have a good feeling about that kid. I want to see if he’s still there.

I need an assistant.

PW: It was the luckiest day of my life. My mind was blown.

WB: He’s now been with me for about seven or eight years.

PW: About a year or two into it, Billy asked me if I wanted to start working on his records with him. I was like, yeah! And then gradually we started doing stuff.

WB: On my album Cascade he helped me invaluably by recording a live tape loop into Ableton. So then it was like, “Oh god, this guy knows what he’s doing.” Now I can’t do anything

without him. He’s made himself indispensable. I knew he made music and everything so I said why don’t you show me what you do. So he started playing me some of these killer beats and I’m like, “Oh wow, that’s cool.” I reached and pulled out my sax he’s like, “Oh yeah.” I haven’t played in years; my chops are shot but I can be sort of a one hit wonder in the studio. I’ve got a good read and I’m feeling it so you get the first take. That’s pretty much what happened with the Sparkle Division tracks. He would turn drums into beats and this just really blew my mind, so we just got really excited and we just went from one track to the next and worked on it for about a year and then got a little stalled.

DDW: You had this finished back in 2016 and decided to hold it because a quite upbeat album seemed to go against the climate at the time. I guess you hoped things would get better?

WB: Yeah, exactly and things just got worse so we thought fuck it, let’s get it out for summer. It has to be summer because it’s a summer record. Which we did digitally but the physical was delayed because all the process is still fucked up because of Covid.

DDW: And so this was a collaboration from the off? Rather than the primary work of one of you?

WB: This work is neither his nor mine really, it’s just something that happened when we got together so it’s a different thing.

PW: We had some tough feelings about the record.

WB: Yeah, we fought about certain tracks. He didn’t like certain tracks and I loved them but I paid for it so I was like, “get over it, this is going on the record”.

PW: I can be a bitch.

WB: And I’m the boss.

DDW: Was this project given its own time and space or was it done alongside others?

PW: We recorded at random times. One of the songs

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Final Third: In Conversation “One of the songs Billy and I actually recorded at 3am and both of us were totally tanked”

Billy and I actually recorded at 3am and both of us were totally tanked. It was after he played a huge show and we got home.

WB: Yeah, I had done a show at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery Masonic Lodge with The Bug and Grouper. Kevin had every subwoofer in town. So we had a real fun show and then we got back home and then just started going crazy, getting this really dirty saxophone sound.

PW: So basically whenever the inspiration was hitting we would get in the studio and mess around. It was very random.

Some songs we spent six months on, day in day out, and others came together in like 20 minutes.

DDW: Was there a plan for this to be a live project?

WB: No. I would have to practice for months to get to be able to do a one-hour show, which I used to do no problem in the ’80s and ’90s when I was playing in bands all the time. But I’m not prepared to be able to do that. This is for DJs to play and that sort of thing. Maybe next year if I can get my horn out and try to practice like I should be doing instead of doom scrolling all day.

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PW: It can be really hard to get him to play saxophone sometimes.

WB: I’m just lazy. I should be playing it instead of smoking cigarettes.

DDW: Is there the typical inclusion of your tape loop drones in here as well?

PW: Some of it was fucking around and making some beats or whatever, and then I took one of his random drones, just like an audio file with drones sitting there, and made two chords with it. You know just playing them and looping.

WB: That drone came from the planes that come from LAX. By the time they went over our house they were reaching altitude and you’d get drones every three minutes. Not super loud, it wasn’t like we were living right near the airport or anything, but I would listen for these things and that’s what he started playing with.

DDW: The background sound of New York often seeped into your work a lot. So is it the same now you’re in LA? WB: Sure, yeah. I mean, I don’t use lots of field recordings but I do pay attention. I don’t always have music playing and I like to see what’s going on. We have new neighbours in the house behind us and they had a whole new lawn put in. They have a new-fangled push mower that doesn’t have a motor on it and it has the most beautiful sound when he’s doing it, so I want to try to get that too.

DDW: Preston, were you involved in William’s upcoming solo album too?

PW: Yes and I gotta say, while I very much love all Billy’s records, I’m very, very fucking honoured to be a part of this one.

Most of the record is older source material but the last three songs are like a 17-minute suite and I had the privilege to actually record Billy doing two tape machines – like he was DJing two tape machines. And then he did two performances and we spliced those performances together.

DDW: Is it an opera?

WB: In a way. I mean opera means spectacle and we’re certainly living through a spectacle right now. And even though this was all done last year it’s talking about these things that have just been going on and on and building for centuries: the patriarchy, metastatic capitalism, the greed, the misogyny and the hatred.

DDW: Will there be more Sparkle Division stuff too?

PW: We’re very slowly but surely gonna start working on some new stuff. It’ll probably be headed a little more in the disco/funk kind of direction.

WB: He’s really into funky disco, like really old school kind of stuff – which we’ll see about. But I just let him do what he does and we’ll see what happens.

Final Third: Infinite Login

One nation under a roof YouTube comments as cultural memory, and the Twitter accounts that celebrate them,

by Fergal Kinney

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Bored during the early stages of lockdown, George – a twentyfive-year-old on furlough from his office job – had a problem filling the long days of April and May. He began greedily devouring anything he could find on YouTube linked to UK acid house – a keen electronic music head, something in the simplicity and energy of that white-hot cultural moment resonated at a time of confusion and stress. Videos of individual tracks, documentaries, lingering home camcorder footage from inside clubs – anything really. Like a lot of people, George was missing the club – in his case, this was Hope Works, the 500-capacity Sheffield warehouse that he would frequent most weekends.

In the yawning hours spent on YouTube, George began to notice that he wasn’t alone in missing the club. The comments underneath these tracks – some recent, referencing the current lockdown situation, others more historic – all burned with a similar nostalgia; nostalgia for the 1988-91 UK acid house moment in particular, but really a nostalgia for their youth, their hopes, the best days of their lives.

“I was listening to a lot of music to cheer me up and I really started digging into this music, and in the comments sections, well it’s a real treasure trove of all these just great anecdotes,” explains George. “I started very specifically going through the mixes and tapes from Fantasia, Helter Skelter, those kind of things.”

One of George’s favourite Twitter accounts was @DiscoComments: an anonymous but popular Twitter account that curates and posts comments originally from below the line on Italo and disco entries on YouTube. What if somebody tried the same thing with the videos that George was watching? With over 17,000 followers and counting, @UKRaveComments has grown into a hugely popular and widely loved account that’s something of a cultural memory project, archiving and legitimising the strange – often highly idiosyncratic – reflections of former ravers. That George had a bit of distance from the subject matter, having not been alive at the time, helped rather than hindered his curatorial gaze.

There’s music I like, music I love, and music that I listen to on YouTube in the early hours of a weekend morning. Internet comments are almost never good, but there’s something in these strange missives that demand to be taken seriously.

In their unfiltered quality, not to mention their erratic syntax, @UKRaveComments have the unmistakable scent of the boomer at the keyboard. The messages are a bit like a text from

Final Third: Infinite Login

your mum, except it’s your mum talking about hanging around an aircraft hanger in the summer of ’89 gurning on cheap pills.

There’s an everyday surrealism too – “the powers that be don’t want you to know about happy hardcore”, “going mental in Gregg’s ta this” – but the most striking is when the comments seem to touch upon the passage of time, and those strange things we all have called memories.

“These people don’t go to therapy,” laughs George, “they just put it all in the comments section!” Who could fail to be moved by lines like, “Made me feel so happy back then, makes me feel a bit sad now... everything’s changed so much.”

— Partying by myself — Earlier in the year, there were giddy predictions that 2020 would be a summer of illegal raves. Though parties occurred, this didn’t come to pass. Instead, we have seen a growth in rave nostalgia – there’s even a new BBC Sounds podcast called Ecstasy – and why wouldn’t there be? When you’re at home on your own, confined to your bubble perhaps, the idea of seeking chemical oblivion in repetitive beats with thousands of sweaty strangers is obviously going to hold huge pull. Jarvis Cocker’s ‘House Music All Night Long’, released in March just as the virus spread to the UK, seemed a portent of the phenomena that @UKRaveComments celebrates. The song imagined a middle-aged former raver making sense of endless weekends stuck in the house, and reflecting on his wild past: “Saturday night, cabin fever in house nation / This is one nation under a roof ”.

For George, the experience has been one of learning too – part of the thrill has been in digging deeper into the social history that acid house intersects with. “My favourite one was a submission, an original anecdote that this guy called Carlos sent – it was about him bailing out his mate for the non-payment of poll tax, and paying the funds to get him out of jail. Because of my age I had to google Poll Tax.” @DiscoComments, however, is an entirely different beast. Marked by a panache and flair that’s largely absent from UK Rave’s geezer chat, @DiscoComments is no less funny, no less idiosyncratic. The drugs are different – “wow this is the song that should play every time i do cocaine” – and there’s an oftenfunny emphasis on the carnal – “All Girl’s Are Very Sexy And VERY Beautiful.”

The person who runs the Disco Comments account wishes to remain anonymous “for a variety of reasons” but would confirm that they were a millennial from the US, and was happy to answer my questions about the account.

“I’ve been interested in dance music forever, but around that time was getting into Italo in particular,” they explain, “I would also cruise the algorithm on YouTube, watching performances from long forgotten TOTP-style shows from around the world. I noticed the user comments on these clips were often very funny, sometimes touching, or achingly nostalgic, with older folks from all over the world reminiscing in a really unfiltered way, reliving their youth.” They point out that because many of the comments are from people whose English is a second language, a unique grammar and sensibility to disco fans begins to emerge.”

For @DiscoComments, the archetypical comment for them is something like this one: “first time i heard this song I was 15 in my uncles Porsche and he was ripping down a highway like in 2004. Lets just say my life changed permanently from that and i became who I was meant to be, I became sweet.” Why? “This music really spoke to so many people all around the world, and there’s a common vocabulary and even grammar to an extent, despite many of the comments being from people who clearly speak English as a second language. It is the internet and YouTube so there are some bigoted and hateful comments I mostly filter out, but overall there’s a universalism and egalitarianism, like a shared disco utopia where everyone can just dance and have a good time, leave the bullshit of life behind for the night (or song, or record, or whatever). There are also plenty of Zoomers who are just discovering this music, and are nostalgic for a time they didn’t even come close to living through. I’m a millennial myself, I didn’t even experience house music in its prime.”

And the good news is, this phenomenon isn’t going anywhere. There’s now a Britpop Comments account (“Grow up listen to ocean colour scene, oasis, steep phonics, David gray what a time to be alive”), a K-Pop Comments account and even one popular account for enigmatic electronic outsiders Autechre (“I love how this piece builds and builds on itself- from initial random chaotic noise quickly into an unstoppable controled cacophy of soundwaves that rush over you like a satisfying orgasm..”). As for the future, I’ll leave the last word to one anonymous late-night YouTube comment: “who wants to throw a party? I still have all my records, mxier and decks. I just party by myself now :(“

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Final Third: The Rates

A. G. Cook Each month we ask an artist to share the 3 musicians they think have gone underappreciated, and 3 new names who they hope will avoid a similar fate. PC Music mastermind, producer and artists A. G. Cook discussed his with Skye Butchard.

Photography by Alaska Read & Julian Buchan

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Final Third: The Rates A. G. Cook hasn’t stopped moving this year. You get that from just reading what he’s been up to: the production work on Charli XCX’s lockdown opus How I’m Feeling Now, collaborations with Sigur Rós’s Jónsi, constructing virtual festivals like Appleville, releasing a seven-part solo debut album called 7G, and following it up just a month later in September with Apple. But his upbeat attitude on talking about the next thing shines through in conversation. “It’s cool to go hard, do it all in one block and be immersed in it,” he says, Zooming from Montana after just finishing work on Appleville. “My head’s definitely in that space.”

The growth of the livestream concert since March has been notable, but it makes sense that it would be PC Music pushing the form to its limits. Appleville showcased many stars of Hyperpop, while giving underground talent like Astra King and GRRL the spotlight. But its many shifts in format made it a truly multi-sensory experience.

“When you see a good live show, it breaks a ceiling,” Cook says. “You know what the form is, you’ve got these people on stage but then the exciting moment is when they break that set-up and there’s another level on top of that. The answer for me has been more pre-recorded elements and less live simply so you can up the production value and break the rules. I think the technology will probably catch up. Zoom isn’t built for this. This is like the prototype version where we’re waiting for tech companies to do something interesting.”

I tell him that one of the most enjoyable things about Appleville was not being able to tell what was pre-recorded and what wasn’t. That guesswork is part of the fun.

“It’s very much in the ethos of PC Music stuff,” he says.

“It’s something I’m really interested in even with completely static music – the difference between something being raw or slick, amateur or professional, and the notion of ‘live’. It’s a great word, actually – the perfect word for it. Like, LIFE. ‘MTV: Live’.”

The traditional response to finding out footage has been pre-recorded, though, is often anger, I say – like you’ve being tricked. Like when autotune first started becoming prominent, although that’s sort of disappearing and people are appreciating it more.

“I think it’s people being more exposed to music technology in general,” says Cook. “Even lip-syncing on Tik Tok – at the most amateur level, everyone’s dabbled in these super accessible tools.”

Like this, our conversation flits from giddy thought to thought, but it’s showcasing other artists and highlighting PC Music as a communal force that prompts the most excitement from A. G. Cook, as I ask him to tell me about his selects for this month’s Rates. We started with his three new artists.

ASTRA KING A. G.: I found Astra pretty randomly. I think she left a comment on one of my posts. I don’t usually interact with that many comments. It was something technically specific and made me think this person has an insight into something. I looked at her music and it was K-Pop covers, and that’s mostly what’s still on her Spotify. She was really a BTS fan or part of that whole movement. I knew about K-pop superficially and that the fanbase have this certain rep. I really resonated listening to her covers so it opened things up for me.

S: And she covered your song ‘Silver’ at Appleville as well.

A. G.: Yeah, and that was the first song where I tried to be amusingly open in the lyrics. It’s almost too much. With Astra, it was inspired by PC stuff but not in a way that a lot of stuff has been. Not in the sound design, or the superficial elements of PC. It took the core element about weird songwriting and the sense of someone sitting on their computer.

S: Covers have been a big part of what you’ve done recently as well. What draws you to that?

A. G.: I think music has become my favourite art form simply because it’s so referential. Whenever you hear music you’re judging it based on everything you’ve heard up to that point. It’s this funny linear abstract thing that only survives because of its roots in other things.

In this world copyright is so aggressive that a one second sample can get you into all sorts of trouble, but if you cover an entire song you’re fine. I did that instrumentally with ‘Windowlicker’ because it cracked me up as a sort of exercise. If I like something I want to break it down and see how it was made.

S: The history of covers is interesting. In the early days it was mostly record labels trying to rip off their competitors by recording a hit song before it could be distributed.

A. G.: Yeah, the legal grey area has always been fascinating to me. That was an era where writing and performing music was separate. You wouldn’t have that many bands who wrote their own stuff; that wasn’t really the point. Those early vinyl pressings, they had to re-perform to get more pressings. And what could be more pop music than rerecording a popular song?

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Final Third: The Rates CECILE BELIEVE

GRRL

A. G.: Cecile is a very big part of the things she’s been on.

It’s not a casual featured vocal, it’s someone willing to push the envelope and sing and write in such a daring way. It’s huge leaps – not just virtuosic, but raw… willing to fall off a cliff if needed at that moment. I was really into her debut album. That’s also completely self-produced. She’s playing loads of roles – singer, producer, vocal engineer. When we worked together, ‘Show Me What’ came together in a day. She’s really fast with lyrics as well – she’s sort of living in it. I knew it would be an important track. I wanted to make sure it was a collaborative release, and it’s credited differently.

S: It stands out on the tracklist A. G.: Other people that I’d gotten vocals from, like Hannah Diamond, happened in an ambient way or I’d be working with them anyway. Other moments benefited from not being features as well. On a track like ‘All Right’, you know who’s singing but you don’t.

S: That guesswork is a surprise and a nice wink for people who are in the know as well.

A. G.: With this one it was so clearly living in the Cecile Believe universe. But the intensity of her vocal, I can see how it brought out a lot of the intensity in SOPHIE’s music as well. And if Cecile was living in an era where you’d have to go to a producer, it probably wouldn’t sound like that. Women especially are led away from messy elements in those scenarios, but she combines messiness and that more traditional pop elegance.

Even in her press, she’s still not been given the same level of credit as a dude who is a producer and singer. I saw this on Caroline Polachek’s album rollout too. It barely gets a mention that she’s one of the main producers of the album.

S: I remember this exact thing happening with FKA Twigs on her debut. We’ve been talking about it for so long!

A. G.: Cecile is someone who’s trying to be very overt about the tools, right? It’s almost like someone like her has to be that overt for it to get noticed. It’s ridiculous.

S: GRRL is someone I’ve been following for a while, as a reference to find club music and dive into the history. Their knowledge seems so deep.

A. G.: They did an amazing set for 7 by 7 where I just gave them the brief of “drums only, and I know that your stuff is drums only but EVEN MORE drums only than the drums only stuff ”, and they really rose to that.

They’re doing a form of world-building without trying.

It’s not imposing. It’ll have this specific vibe, so then you’ll listen to the stuff they’re referencing. It’s also mixed in with HYPEBEAST and video game stuff and done with a bit of irony thrown in, or A LOT of irony thrown in.

S: I’ve been going back to MARATHON a lot. I love how it sounds very ’90s dance but somehow also futuristic. That idea of futurism is very tied to nostalgia, and whatever the past’s idea of the future is.

A. G.: Almost nothing gets dated faster than someone trying to make a futuristic composition. That’s always fascinating. I love the sense of anachronism you get with visions of the future and the occasional accidental one that was accurate. It’s a complete lottery. I know that PC music is often labelled as being futuristic, and I’m not against that either. There’s just something innately funny about trying to be futuristic that I enjoy.

S: Yeah, you’re clearly having a joke with it.

A. G.: The endless punchline for me is that we’re doing it in the present. Everything we’re doing now is contemporary, using tools from right now. Occasionally there’s some people like Lil Data who’s doing live coding, or SOPHIE who’s pushing sound design incredibly hard. But I’m not inventing new tools.

I’m just using the tools that exist and trying to push the limits.

I would contrast that with some stuff that I equally like, like Holly Herndon’s Platform and the AI Spore – they’re creating a conceptual infrastructure to talk about media synthesis and AI. All this stuff is right here! It’s here guys! Let’s not fool ourselves by thinking that culture is any more limited than it is.

“Whenever you hear music you’re judging it based on everything you’ve heard up to that point” 76

Final Third: The Rates

GOODIEPAL S: Conceptualisation was something I was wanting to speak to you about in relation to Goodiepal. He was a hacker, an academic, made installations. It was very theory based.

A. G.: This side of the coin was a lot more difficult. The list for new acts could go on forever, but I found I had to look inward a bit more choosing these next three older acts. But, yeah that’s one of the reasons I was thinking about him. Goodiepal is an interesting artist because if people are ever like, ‘oh PC Music is so conceptual’, then I don’t know anyone who’s a more truly radical example than Goodiepal.

The philosophical and prankster level I agree with him on is that this talk of computers and the future is another classic human reflection on things. It exposes our own conservative views of ourselves. If you’re going to call out computer music as being pretentious, then you should probably call out yourself.

It’s such a feedback loop. He’s someone who’s made his life that.

He embodies it.

S: When I think of an electronic prankster, I think mysterious and not at all sharing, but his stuff is surprisingly accessible.

A. G.: At his live show, he’ll be giving a lecture and you might think it’s trolling, but he’s very earnestly going, ‘if you’re the kind of person who’s turned up to this concert, then I have something that I want to just talk to you about.’ It’s intimate with the real people he’s interacting with.

MAX TUNDRA A. G.: So, Max had this mainstream moment, but it wasn’t attached to any sort of movement. He was completely his own island. That’s sort of why it’s been obscured a bit again. Thinking about it in a self-centred way, it made me appreciate that I was part of a movement because it gave it a body. If you look retrospectively to his releases, they are incredible. It’s clearly been assembled by the person who’s singing. He’s not a trained vocalist but he’s still singing and is very musical.

S: As soon as I heard him singing, the thick British enunciated voice stuck out to me, and I realised you don’t often hear that, especially done completely straight faced.

A. G.: The whole accent thing is something that I’ve been trying to be aware of. I’m inconsistent, if anything. I’ve tried to

play with that and have different variations. I was aware growing up that my accent broke some rules, and I irritated friends with how I pronounced certain words.

S: I got that moving from Liverpool to Scotland. Certain words like ‘werds’, stick out. I did some vocal coaching as part of a journalism course and it was a mess.

A. G.: I was aware of your accent – regional hybrid British accents are super cool and sort of rare. On certain PC Music tracks I’d use friends that have these unusual accents. Max Tundra is one of the pioneers of that done so flatly. It’s not just the accent, it’s the confidence to doing it so plainly.

He’s retroactively become part of the PC-affiliated world, especially as it’s getting other terms like Hyperpop. I find it satisfying to work with people who’ve made music after PC music. It’s nice knowing you’re part of this timeline.

DJ PAYPAL A. G.: Even though the DJ name is sort of ridiculous, the DJ part is very real. I hadn’t seen tempo changes done with so much humour or personality. It’s influenced stuff I’ve done, even having other aliases, like the DJ Lifeline release.

S: I always associated ‘Sold Out’ with PC music when it came out.

A. G.: People do know that release, but I don’t know if he has quite enough credit for influencing a whole wave of Soundcloud era music. He knew how to make a Soundcloud mix feel like DJing.

S: The best mixes are when you’ve noticed something they’ve done that’s been obscured, like they’ve just winked at you. You’ve got this intimate communication with someone, and that’s something that’s thriving with PC music.

Those things become thought-provoking. We’ve had that with the Appleville Discord – these world-building games then become genuine conversations. It’s something that I’ve been trying to invest my time in because I don’t think it fully exists on Twitter or Instagram.

S: A lot of the people you’ve mentioned are people who you now work with.

A. G.: We’re very online people who are interested in how that connects to the real world. These tools are great but it gets more interesting when you bother to interact. I found SOPHIE on Soundcloud and it turned out we were living in the same city.

People who I would probably have inevitably run into, I jumped ahead about because I’d bothered to reach out. It tends to go well if you just go for it. It was maybe a motivation for making the music interesting, and gave me the confidence to do a collective.

I’m still learning a lot about Discord but I’ve been impressed by how easy it is to customise. You can go on the OPN Discord and it’s got a very particular vibe, and then you go to the Arca Discord and it’s got a Selfie Channel, and all these people showing their work, the Mutant energy. I wanted Appleguild to be a time-limited thing that’s as intense as those spaces.

77

Final Third: My Place Dan Deacon is one of those people who are synonymous with an adopted city. He was born and grew up in a small coastal town on Long Island call Babylon and remained in New York for college, studying in Purchase, just inside the state border with Connecticut. On graduating in 2004, most of his friends moved into the city, but not Deacon, who made for Baltimore and a warehouse called the Copycat Building where rent was only $180 per month.

Deacon is DIY in an enviably free, historically American sense of what that means, co-founding an arts collective at the Copycat (Wham City), performing in unofficial venues, setting up on the floor as if every show is a Boiler Room set, chowing down another tin of black beans on a Greyhound to tomorrow’s party. That’s certainly how it was when he first moved to Maryland and played no small part in Baltimore’s experimental noise boom of the mid-’00s, where Wham City artists figured it out beside bands like Animal Collective, Double Dagger, Beach House, Future Islands and Ponytail.

The Copycat Building was both home and venue space, “where we could throw shows and be maniacs,” remembers Deacon. He says that that DIY mentality is still in Baltimore but the warehouse spaces aren’t, largely due to the tighter safety restrictions that followed the Ghost Ship tragedy in 2016, where 36 people died in a fire that tore through an arts collective warehouse in Oakland, California. “But in many ways the scene is

infinitely better than it was when I first moved here,” he says.

“It used to be segregated and much like an apartheid in terms of who would get exposure, who would get press coverage, who would get grants. I’d say in the last five years, due the uprising around Freddie Gray [a Black man murdered by police officers while in custody] that the scene is much more diverse and much more reflective of the population, which is predominantly African American. It’s something that I was ignorant to when I first moved here, and you look back and kick yourself for being so sheltered, and then continuing to maintain the infrastructure of that without realising it. Freddie Gray made me and a lot of people check our many privileges, and I hope that 10 years from now we’re having the same conversation about now, and that we’ve seen 10 years of progress.”

Today Deacon and his partner live in Bolton Hill, a walk from the Copycat. Out the back is a garage that used to be an old dairy that he plans to convert into a studio. Until then, in the back of the house he has “a proper study”, where he mixed his recent album Mystic Familiar (his fifth record of electronic noise pop, and first to feature his unprocessed vocals) and his score for the HBO documentary on competitive dog grooming Well Groomed. Through my substandard computer screen, Deacon showed me some of the delights that make up his “wall of crap”.

Wall of crap A tour of Dan Deacon’s Baltimore home studio via the prying eyes of Zoom, by Stuart Stubbs

Tin of black beans I did my first full US tour in 2005, and I was dirt poor. But if I made 70 bucks per show I would be able to pay rent get to the next show. That was my goal. I don’t have a driver’s licence at this point, or a cell phone, or a computer, or a bank account. I’m as off the grid, idiot punk as you can be. So I’m on tour with this rapper called Height who’s doing all the driving, but I need to work out a way to eat every day. So I go to the cheapest grocery tour in town. It’s a 60-date tour so I bought 60 cans of beans, 60 cans of corn, 60 servings of peanut butter, and 60 rice cakes. It worked out to 20 cents per day to reach 1400 calories or something, and that’s what I ate every day. But the car died halfway, in Fresno. So Height flew home, but I didn’t have ID so I couldn’t fly. I had $420 that I’d profited on the tour – all the money I had in the world – and for $419 you could buy a Greyhound ticket that was an unlimited ride for 30 days. So I thought, I’m going to finish

78

Final Third: My Place

the tour. Because I needed to take the food to survive, I made all of these bags out of pants. I’d use rope to tie up the wastes and I made these satchels that I filled up with the corn and the beans.

I made all the shows but one. Everyone was super down – sometimes I’d have to get picked up from the bus, taken immediately to a house to place to 19 people, tops, play the show, get immediately dropped back at the bus station and be on that bus for the next 20 hours. I looked insane at the point in my life, as well, which is an important detail. But I would start my meal with the beans, because they were the worst. I’d drink the bean water first – just get that out of the way; then I’d eat the bean, followed by the driest meal on the planet – peanut butter on rice cake; and then it was dessert – the delicious corn. I’d sip the corn water and then eat all the corn and then drink all the corn water. I was that guy at the bus station for 30 days. I keep this can as a reminder that I could always go back there.

Jar Jar Binks light rail map There were no maps of the light rail anywhere around the light rail, and it drove me crazy. And I just happened to have this picture of Jar Jar Binks. I found a map of the light rail and I was going to print it out and hang it around town, and then I notice that Jar Jar’s hand fits so perfectly right here – it’s almost as if it’s Jar Jar’s skeleton or something, so I printed those up and hung them all around town the first year I lived here. I also printed some for a restaurant that I liked and they asked me to stop.

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Final Third: My Place Some guy I have no idea who this is. I found this while I was doing courtordered community service in the Baltimore City Dump. I was there because of an absurd string of events. I went to Whole Foods back when I was eating only raw food. This would have been 2006, when I was the Most Awesome Fucking Number 1 Dude. And again, I was looking a lot more insane – my glasses were covered in Duct tape and I used to wear this long sleeved, woman’s house dress that looked like a lab coat, covered in different coloured flowers. It was the one period in my life where I was skinny. I wasn’t healthy, I was skinny. I was obsessed with raw food. I took the train to get some olive oil and oysters, but I didn’t have enough money to take the train back, so I just got on the train anyway, but then they started checking tickets.

I jumped off the train but didn’t realise that the trains had now stopped. So I started walking along the track, and it was miles and miles, mostly through woods. Completely illegal. So I’m sitting on this old abandoned train stop and a train stops there, which I know it shouldn’t. I know this is bad news, and three

cops get off and start walking towards me. They’re like: “Where.

Are. Your. Friends? Who should be watching you?” And I’m like: “What?” And they’re like: “Where are your parents?” I’m like: “My friends are at home, and why do you want to know where my parents are?” And they started to realise that I wasn’t mentally impaired, so they were suddenly like: “WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU OUT HERE!!!??? WHY ARE YOU DRESSED LIKE THAT!!!???”

“This is how I dress.” Anyway, they want to arrest me, but they know they can just for being out in the woods. They can’t prove I was on the tracks. But in Maryland it’s illegal to not have ID on you at all times – it’s like an anti-poverty, racist law. And I don’t have ID, so I have to go to court. They list off a big list of names and I’m on it. They said if we do community service just for today they’ll wipe this from our records, so I’m like, fine. I’m roasting in the sun, bald as a bowling ball, shovelling garbage and then this dude’s fucking face is staring up at me. And I just needed a relic from this day to prove that I was here. Like the beans, it’s a remind of where I could go back to.

“I looked insane at the point in my life, as well, which is an important detail”

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Final Third: My Place

Cock-toed foot bottle opener All the toes are cocks. Some of them have little hats. I got this my first time in Barcelona. My sister lived there and we were roaming around and we ended up in this shop where I see these things and think, these are AMAZING. I asked my sister if she knew what it was, and she’s like, “What do you mean?”. I thought it was something, so I asked my little sister to go and ask the guy at the counter, “What is this?”. And he’s looking at her like, “You’re fucking kidding me, right?”. And she’s like, “No, no, what is it?”.

And he tells her and she comes back to me, and I say, “What is it?”, and she says, “It’s a foot with penises for toes”.

Trophy for ‘Most Awesome Fucking Number 1 Dude’ 2006 My good friend and collaborator Jimmy Joe Roche got this for me for my birthday in 2006. It blew my mind that you can just go and buy a trophy. Like, they don’t need proof that I’m the most awesome fucking number 1 dude of 2006?! The trophy features a horse and an eagle, someone doing martial arts, someone doing a wild, backflip soccer kick, and three baseball players in a grand display of athleticism. Each one represents a different part of my personality. Particularly the horse.

Devo energy dome I played with Devo at the United Center in Chicago when we both opened for Arcade Fire. Our green rooms were right down the hall and I met Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale and all of them, and I was star struck. I’d played with them before, but this was the first time we were hanging out. So after the show was over I went to their green room to see if they were still there but they had left hours ago. But they’d left all of their energy domes. There were still soaked in sweat, and me and my crew were like, ‘Oh my god!’.

And then we started to notice how crazy their rider was – like, their snacks. On our rider it was raw fruits and vegetables; Devo was Oreos, chocolate chip cookies, every type of Doritos you can imagine, Twizzlers… It looked like a 10-year-old’s sleepover dream list. I have two of these energy domes – they make good bowls for crisps.

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It’s said that Mel C originally pitched this sleeve in a brainstorming session for the Spice World album in 1998. Keen for the group to move on from their cartoonish image, her idea was that all five members of the band could walk around a white room wearing white trousers suits and avoiding eye contact. They could all be blurred or they could all be in focus. The idea didn’t go much further than that, save for one abandoned shoot day that did not go well, when Victoria Beckham kept pointing at the camera despite specifically being told not to, and Geri turned up in a scarlet red dress claiming, “I couldn’t find a white trouser suit, but I’ll be fine in this.”

Twenty-Two years later, Mel C has finally delivered her original concept for a solo album called Melanie C, although it might as well be called – and I don’t think I’m reaching here – Fuck You Spice Girls.

First of all, it’s no coincidence that there are 5 Mel Cs on the cover – the EXACT number of Spice Girls there were! Albeit in threads started by myself, fan forums are already discussing if the second Mel from the left is a notso-subtle swipe at Victoria Beckham, due to her infamous pointing arm not only being down but completely out of view as if it never existed at all. And notice how the middle Mel – the REAL Mel, if you will – is in sharp focus while the others represent “ghosts of her past”, as one fan has suggested. Those ghosts are the other Spice Girls.

A brilliantly vengeful album sleeve, I can’t wait to see what the others come back with.

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“We have to try every idea he comes up with,” says frightened Tesla worker.

illustration by kate prior

SHIT & SHINE

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